The world was quiet, far too quiet for a place drenched in blood.
Above the obsidian execution platform, the twin moons hung low in the sky—one crimson, one silver—casting an ethereal glow over the capital. Rain drizzled in thin, silent veils, softening the jagged spires of the noble courts and dulling the torches that lined the plaza. Thousands gathered below, but no one dared to speak.
Because tonight, they were about to kill a ghost.
"Harvey." A voice echoed across the plaza, amplified through magical speakers. It belonged to High Inquisitor Mordrath, a mountain of a man clad in enchanted silver armor, his voice like cold steel scraping stone. "You are charged with Code Corruption, System Hacking, and Heresy against the High Nobility. How do you plead?"
Harvey stood motionless, shackled in spell-dampening cuffs that glowed faintly around his wrists and ankles. His once-immaculate academy robes were torn, burned in places, stained with soot and dried blood. His raven-black hair clung to his forehead, rain trickling down his sharp, expressionless face.
He looked like a corpse that refused to lie down.
"I plead..." Harvey raised his head, voice calm and eerily unshaken, "...bored."
A gasp rippled through the crowd.
The inquisitor's lips curled. "You show no remorse. Typical of your kind—rogue spellcasters who think themselves above structure."
"No," Harvey replied, his gaze sweeping across the nobles watching from gilded balconies. "I show no remorse because I regret nothing."
His eyes met Seraphine Aetherhold's—the only one who didn't flinch.
Noble daughter. Ice mage prodigy. The one who turned her back on him.
Harvey smiled faintly. "You think you're executing a criminal. But this is just a system reset."
Mordrath scowled. "Enough. Begin the erasure."
White-robed mages stepped forward, surrounding Harvey in a hexagonal formation. Each carried a spell disk—discs inscribed with anti-soul runes and deletion protocols. Above, a crystal the size of a carriage pulsed ominously, charged with the power to erase a soul from existence. Not just kill—but unmake.
This wasn't punishment. It was censorship.
The crystal activated with a low hum that turned into a screech.
Runes flared. Magic coalesced. The spell to erase Harvey's very essence began.
And still, he did not scream.
Instead, he whispered something no one could hear:
"Cipher Protocol: Activate."
A pulse—no, a glitch—rippled through reality.
It happened in an instant. One moment, Harvey stood beneath the execution crystal, eyes glowing unnaturally bright. The next, the spell backfired.
The crystal shattered into a thousand shards, its light swallowed by a pitch-black vortex that opened at Harvey's feet. Time warped. The air distorted. Every spell in the plaza fizzled out.
Then—nothing.
When the vortex closed, Harvey was gone.
---
Three Years Earlier
The rain fell harder in the slums of Arcadia's Lower Quarter, soaking the cobblestones and leaking through the cracked ceiling of a run-down dormitory.
A teenage boy bolted upright in bed, gasping, drenched in cold sweat. He looked around, heart racing. Everything was too vivid. Too real.
His hands trembled. His mind spun.
This wasn't a dream.
"...I'm alive," he muttered, touching his chest.
His reflection in the dusty mirror across the room stared back—familiar, yet younger. No scars. No blood. Just a sharp-eyed seventeen-year-old with too much hate buried behind a calm expression.
Memories flooded in—his execution, the betrayal, the Cipher Protocol he'd designed in secret. A failsafe that no one had believed existed.
He had regressed.
Harvey leaned back against the bedpost, staring at the flickering lights above him. The cheap dorm smelled like mildew and rust. Outside, sirens wailed in the distance. In a few hours, he'd be walking into Zenith Academy's entrance trial—a nobody with no noble blood and no resources.
Again.
But this time, he knew every trap, every code, every betrayal.
This time, he would not climb the ladder.
He would tear it down.
---