The convenience store's fluorescent lights hummed a discordant tune, their flickering glow painting everything in shades of artificial twilight. The air smelled of stale synthetic bread and the acrid tang of overworked circuitry from the aging refrigeration units. Lucent leaned against the magazine rack, its plastic edges digging into his elbow, as he flipped through the glossy pages of Aetherion Quarterly.
The cover boasted a silver-skinned Conduit with eyes like polished obsidian, his fingers tracing a glyph in midair that shimmered even on the cheap print. "Next-Gen Spellcasting: The Aetherion Mark VII Reads Your Intent Before You Do!" screamed the headline in aggressive, corporate-approved font. Inside, full-page spreads showed smiling executives demonstrating "ergonomic glyph-flow optimization" while pristine lab technicians in sterilized gloves monitored brainwave feedback. One particularly nauseating diagram depicted a "typical user's neural pathways" before and after using their proprietary spell-compiler, the "after" image lit up like a neon cityscape.
Lucent snorted. As if any real caster needed a tutorial on how to think.
He turned the page to find a buyer's guide for licensed utility glyphs—water purification, thermal regulation, even a "mood-stabilizing aura" for "optimal corporate productivity." Each one cost more than he made in three months. The tiny disclaimer at the bottom read: "Myriad-approved Conduits only. Unauthorized usage voids warranty and may result in Reclamation audit."
The magazine slipped from his fingers as the clerk cleared his throat, a sound like grinding gears. The man stood behind the counter, arms crossed over his stained uniform, his gaze locked onto Lucent with the intensity of a Reclamation Unit scanning for contraband.
Lucent knew that look. Loiterers pay or piss off.
With a sigh, he grabbed the nearest canned coffee—Black Out, the brand's mascot a cartoon raven mid-explosion—and slapped it onto the counter. The credit chip from the alley punks followed, its surface still smudged with the kid's sweat. The clerk picked it up between thumb and forefinger, as if it might be diseased, and slid it through the scanner.
The machine beeped. Once. Twice. Then a third time, sharp and accusatory.
Lucent's fingers twitched toward his Conduit.
But the register finally spat out a receipt, the paper fluttering between them like a surrender flag. The clerk didn't hand it to him. Just stared, waiting for him to leave.
Outside, the city breathed in the spaces between the silence. The streetlights here were older models, their glow weak compared to the Aethernet nodes further uptown. A stray cat—ribs visible beneath patchy fur—darted from the shadows to lick at a puddle of something iridescent near the gutter.
Lucent cracked open the coffee. It tasted like someone had distilled regret into liquid form and added caffeine as an afterthought.
His phone buzzed against his thigh. The screen lit up with a notification from Undernet-7, the text came with encryption artifacts:
GhostKey_Anonymous:"Myriad's new tracer doesn't just scan. It learns. If your Conduit starts auto-casting glyphs you didn't input, smash it. They're training their A.I. on pirate casts now."
Lucent flicked the message away with his thumb, but not before noticing the temperature of his own device—warm, too warm for idle. He turned it over in his palm. The casing was cracked, full of scratches, and full of smudges with his fingerprints.
But before his paranoia flared up, he shut down the thought.
The phone was old, its cooling system shot to hell from years of abuse. That's all it was. Had to be.
He shoved the device back into his pocket, ignoring the way the warmth seemed to bleed through the fabric against his thigh.
The clock on a post ticked. The second hand stuttered, catching on some internal flaw.
Midnight.
Lucent crushed the empty can in his fist, the metal buckling like a dying glyph. The Nimbrix warehouse loomed at the end of the street, its windows boarded up, its loading dock sealed with chains that hadn't rusted so much as rotted.
The green chip in his pocket weighed more than it should.
He stepped back into the night, the coffee's aftertaste bitter on his tongue.
The city watched.
And somewhere, in the dark, something watched back.
***
The alley exhaled damp, metallic breath against Lucent's neck as he moved through its shadows. His boots found purchase on the uneven concrete, avoiding the slick patches where nameless fluids pooled in the perpetual twilight between buildings. The warehouse loomed ahead, its corrugated steel walls pockmarked with rust and scarred by decades of neglect. A faded Nimbrix logo - that familiar angular 'N' inside a hexagon - still clung stubbornly to one wall, its blue paint peeling like sunburnt skin.
Lucent pressed himself against the cold brick of a neighboring building, feeling the rough texture bite through his jacket. His fingers dipped into his pocket, fishing out the AetherPhone with practiced ease. The device pulsed faintly in his palm, its cracked screen casting jagged reflections across his knuckles. He thumbed through his personal library of bootleg spells, each one a stolen fragment of corporate power reshaped by underground hands.
The Thermal Echo glyph unfolded before him, its edges flickering with unstable energy. He'd cobbled this together months ago from three different GhostKey cracks and his own modifications, rewriting the core parameters until it could see through two feet of reinforced concrete. The spell hung in the air, trembling like a live wire, before sinking into his phone's cracked display.
The world dissolved into shades of heat.
The alley became a blueprint of blues and blacks, the occasional flare of rodent warmth darting between piles of refuse. The warehouse walls shimmered like heat haze on summer asphalt before turning translucent, revealing the hollow interior. Support beams glowed dully where they connected to warmer sections of roofing. A cluster of machinery in the far corner radiated residual warmth from some long-dead industrial process.
And there, near the center - a single human silhouette, burning brighter than anything else in the building.
Lucent studied the thermal imprint with narrowed eyes. The figure stood perfectly still, arms crossed, posture relaxed. No telltale shapes of concealed weapons. No suspicious heat signatures hiding in the rafters. Just one person, exactly where they said they'd be, exactly as promised.
He let the spell unravel, the world snapping back into focus with a soft pop of displaced air. The warehouse door stood slightly ajar, a sliver of darkness beckoning. A thin line of moisture beaded along its rusted edge - someone had opened it recently enough that the night's condensation hadn't yet reformed.
Lucent's fingers twitched toward the glyph-burn scars on his left wrist. This was too clean. Too straightforward. In his experience, straight lines were just curves waiting to be revealed.
But the scan hadn't lied.
He took a slow breath, tasting the alley's cocktail of rot and decay. Lucent's footsteps vanished into the cavernous dark as soon as his boots left the ground, eaten by the yawning emptiness of the abandoned Nimbrix facility. The air hung thick with the scent of machine oil gone rancid and the electric tang of old glyphwork burned into concrete. His breath fogged slightly in the chill as he moved deeper inside, following the faint blue pulse of light at the building's heart.
***
The kid stood in a perfect circle of illumination beneath a shattered skylight, moonlight cutting through the broken glass to paint him in solemn silver. He couldn't have been older than twenty, his jacket's synthetic leather still stiff with newness, the Aetherion Conduit on his wrists gleaming with factory polish. When he turned at Lucent's approach, his eyes widened slightly - not with recognition, but with the startled look of someone who'd never had to develop street reflexes.
"You're the one Raker sent?" His voice echoed slightly, too loud for the space.
Lucent didn't answer immediately. He took his time circling the perimeter of the light, studying the way the kid's fingers twitched toward his Conduit, the way his weight shifted from foot to foot like he was counting seconds. The warehouse around them was a graveyard of Nimbrix's past - rusted server racks lined one wall, their glyph-carved panels now home to nests of wiring chewed by rodents. A half-dismantled drone lay in pieces near the entrance, its core pried open to reveal the hollow where its Aether regulator should have been.
After a long moment, Lucent stepped into the light. "You got a name, kid?"
The flush that crept up the kid's neck was almost satisfying. "Kai," he muttered, then straightened his shoulders with visible effort. "Kai Renner."
The surname clicked in Lucent's mind - Renner Tech, one of Aetherion's minor subsidiaries. Not top-tier Spire, but close enough to smell the money. This kid had probably never gone hungry a day in his life.
Kai activated his Conduit before Lucent could needle him further. The hologram that sputtered to life between them was corrupted at the edges, its once-precise lines bleeding into mesmerizing fractals. It showed what might have been a schematic once - something between a glyph matrix and a neural network - but large sections had degraded into visual noise.
"I pulled this from a decommissioned Nimbrix server," Kai said, rotating the projection with a gesture. The image stuttered, parts of it dissolving into static. "The files were tagged for immediate deletion, but the system glitched during the wipe."
Lucent stepped closer, the hair on his arms rising as the corrupted schematic pulsed. There was something wrong with the way the energy channels overlapped - they bent in ways that defied standard glyph architecture, twisting back on themselves in impossible configurations.
Then, for half a heartbeat, the image resolved.
Lucent's breath caught.
There, buried in the corrupted data like a knife in a wound, was a symbol he recognized. The same distinct mark that had flickered across his own Conduit's screen weeks ago, when he'd first dissected that corrupted health monitor app. The same shape that had appeared in it, moments before a rawcaster's own demise.
Kai was still talking, his voice tinged with the excitement of someone who didn't understand what they'd found. "I think it's some kind of experimental glyphware. The energy signature doesn't match any corporate standard, but if we could reconstruct the—"
"Shut up."
The words came out harsher than Lucent intended. He could feel his pulse in his fingertips, sudden and too fast. That symbol wasn't just a glitch. It wasn't just corrupted data.
It was a warning.
And this spoiled Spire brat had dug it up like some archeologist uncovering a cursed relic, blissfully unaware of what he'd awakened.
The warehouse seemed to grow colder around them. Somewhere in the darkness, a loose cable tapped rhythmically against metal, the sound like a slow, steady heartbeat.
Lucent forced his voice level. "Where exactly did you find this?"
Kai blinked, thrown by the shift in tone. "The old Nimbrix research annex in Sector 7. They were clearing out the servers before demolition. I was just—"
"Just snooping where you shouldn't have been," Lucent finished. He stared at the corrupted schematic, at the symbol that pulsed faintly within it. Whatever this was, it wasn't meant to be seen. Not by people like Kai.
Certainly not by people like him.
Kai shifted uncomfortably. "Look, I just need someone who can stabilize the data enough to—"
"You need to walk away," Lucent cut in. "Forget you ever saw this. Wipe your drives and pray whatever's in there didn't already sink its hooks into your system."
The kid's expression hardened. "You don't understand. This could be worth—"
"It could be worth your life."
Lucent stepped forward, the warehouse's fractured light carving his face into something jagged and dangerous. His shadow stretched long behind him, fingers of darkness brushing against the rusted carcasses of old Nimbrix machinery. When he spoke again, his voice was low—not a threat, but the quiet certainty of a man who'd seen what happens when Spire kids play with forces they don't understand.
"My advice? Never play with fire."
A beat of silence. Then—
"Especially when you can't even smell the smoke."
The words hung in the air between them, heavy with unspoken warnings. Somewhere in the darkness, a loose cable tapped against metal like a ticking clock. Kai's Conduit flickered in response, its light pulsing erratically—once, twice—before steadying.
For the first time, something like fear flickered in Kai's eyes. Good. Fear might keep him alive.
The projection between them glitched violently, the symbol flashing bright before the entire schematic collapsed into static. In the sudden darkness, Lucent could have sworn he felt something - a presence, a pressure - like the warehouse itself was holding its breath.
Then the moment passed. The tapping cable fell silent.
The warehouse air grew thick, pressing against Lucent's skin like the charged silence before a storm. He stared at Kai—this pampered Spire rat with his too-clean hands and his designer Conduit—and felt something cold coil in his gut. The kid had just kicked open a door that should have stayed sealed forever, and now he stood there blinking like a child who'd broken a vase and didn't understand why the adults were screaming.
Kai swallowed hard, his Adam's apple bobbing. "Look, I came here for help. Can't you do anything?"
Lucent didn't answer right away. His gaze drifted to the spot where the symbol had burned itself into his vision, lingering like a afterimage from a flash.
"Nothing good," he said at last, his voice rough. Then, sharper: "Did you show this to anyone else?"
Kai's pupils dilated. A microsecond of hesitation. "N-no."
Liar.
It was all over him—the way his fingers twitched toward his jacket pocket, the too-quick denial, the sheen of sweat at his temples. This kid had spilled his guts to someone, and whatever they'd promised him in return wasn't worth the hell he'd just unleashed.
Lucent's mind raced, scenarios unfolding like poisoned fractals:
If it was corporate—some rival faction looking to weaponize Eclipse—they'd already be here. Reclamation Units didn't knock.
If it was the underground—some GhostKey splinter group—they'd have taken the data and left Kai floating in the bay by now.
Which left the worst option: Kai didn't even know who he'd talked to. Some back-alley dealer, some black-market contact who'd smiled and nodded and taken the files straight to the highest bidder.
And now Lucent was standing in the fallout.
Again.
The warehouse seemed to shrink around them, the shadows pressing closer.
Lucent flexed his fingers, feeling the old glyph-burns pull tight across his knuckles. He needed to walk away. Right now. Before this spoiled brat dragged him into a fight he hadn't signed up for.
But then Kai's Conduit pulsed again, and for half a heartbeat, Lucent saw it—
—the symbol, writhing beneath the surface like something trying to get out—
—and he knew, with cold certainty, that it was already too late.
For both of them.
Before even Lucent could turn away.
The warehouse doors didn't just open—they disintegrated in a hail of shrapnel and purple lightning. The concussion wave hit Lucent first, a physical force that slammed into his chest like a sledgehammer, driving the air from his lungs. He was moving before the debris finished raining down, his body acting on instincts honed in a hundred back-alley brawls and Pit fights. His hand closed around Kai's collar, yanking him backward just as the first stun-glyphs detonated where they'd stood.
The air turned electric.
Burnt air seared Lucent's nostrils as the stun-glyphs erupted in concentric rings of violet energy, their edges crackling with contained fury. They weren't standard issue—these were tuned glyphs, military-grade suppressors designed to fry unlicensed Conduits on contact. The server racks around them sparked and smoked, their corroded frames convulsing as the energy washed over them.
Kai gasped, his Spire-soft reflexes too slow—a stun-glyph grazed his shoulder, and he jerked like a marionette with its strings cut. Lucent barely caught him before he hit the ground, hauling him behind cover as another volley lit up the darkness.
"Renner."
The voice boomed through the warehouse, warped by a vocal-glyph into something mechanical and cold. A figure stepped through the smoke, its purple armor drinking in the dim light. The Nimbrix sigil on its chest pulsed like a living thing—a hexagon bisected by a dagger, the corporate mark rendered in hateful, glowing lines.
Lucent's jaw tightened.
Not Reclamation. Not even standard corporate security.
Nimbrix Black Unit.
The company's wetwork squad—ghosts who didn't exist on any official roster, who left no witnesses, who burned the bodies before calling it in.
Kai trembled beside him, his fingers digging into Lucent's arm. "I didn't—I didn't tell them where—"
"Hand over the Conduit," the lead enforcer intoned, "and we'll make this painless."
Lucent's laugh was a razor dragged across stone. "Yeah? What's the fun in that?"
He moved.
His palm slapped against the server rack beside them, activating the crude jammer-glyph he'd carved into the metal when he was circling around Kai, its edges frayed and unstable, but loud. The glyph detonated with a shriek of feedback, and every light in the warehouse blew out in a cascade of sparks.
Darkness swallowed them whole.
For half a second, silence.
Then—
The Nimbrix squad's visors flared to life, their nightvision painting the world in gray and green.
Lucent bared his teeth.
Bad move.
He ripped Kai's Conduit from the kid's wrist, ignoring his yelp of protest. The device searing his palm with unnatural heat. The casing throbbed against his skin like a second heartbeat, its vibrations traveling up his arm in unsettling waves. Three years had passed since he'd last rawcast—three years of carefully avoiding the edge he'd nearly fallen over—but survival now demanded payment in old sins.
His fingers tightened around the device. No time for hesitation.
With a sharp exhale, he launched the Conduit toward the warehouse's deepest shadows. It tumbled through the air, its screen flashing erratic glyphs, before meeting concrete with a sound like ice cracking underfoot.
For one suspended moment—silence.
Then distorted symbol erupted from the shattered device, its rugged edges tearing through reality like claws through canvas. The darkness between the warehouse's support beams twisted, stretched, then snapped forward with predatory hunger.
The lead enforcer barely had time to raise his weapon before the shadows took him. His armor crumpled like paper, the metal screaming as it compacted inward, crushing bone and flesh alike. His squad opened fire, their aether powered rifles spitting violet fury into the dark—
—and the shadows ate it.
Lucent didn't wait to see the rest. He hauled Kai to his feet, shoving him toward the nearest exit as the warehouse came apart around them. The air itself seemed to vibrate, the walls groaning as the Eclipse symbol grew, its edges spreading like cracks in ice.
Behind them, the screaming started.
It didn't sound human.
Kai stumbled, his face bloodless. "What the hell was—"
"Run," Lucent snarled.
And they did.
The night outside was no safer—alarms wailed in the distance, and the sky burned with the reflected glow of a dozen Aethernet nodes flaring in unison.