CHAPTER 1061: SEEKING ELYSIUM (1).

The four descended into the lower streets, where dawn’s light never reached. Windows above rattled with early trade, but below, silence clung like mold. Trash heaps festered, rats gnawed, and further still, echoes of something larger reverberated—the faint growl of a predator too patient to reveal itself.

Roselle appeared at the end of a narrowing corridor, twin blades gleaming faint in the dark. She fell into step without a word, eyes sharp, presence grounding. The circle was whole again.

Steve’s voice cracked through the gloom. "One block ahead. Signal’s thick enough I can taste it."

They turned a corner. And there it was.

Bodies—eight of them—piled like discarded refuse, blood pooled black under the dim glow of rusted lamps. But it wasn’t the carnage that stopped them. It was the markings burned into the walls: jagged, spiraled sigils, pulsing faintly as if the stone itself bled light.

Hunter stepped closer, nostrils flaring. "Not human craft."

"No," Cain said. His voice was quiet, but it carried an edge like steel. "This is intrusion. This is declaration."

Susan crouched by the nearest corpse, brushing her fingers across skin still warm. "Whatever did this, it wanted us to see."

Cain stared at the spirals, at the faint throb of alien geometry crawling across ruined walls. His eyes narrowed, a storm gathering within them.

"Then we’ll answer."

The silence swallowed his words, but the city itself seemed to shift—like something listening, waiting.

The hunt was no longer theirs alone. Something else had entered the game.

Cain stood at the lip of a broken balcony, the city sprawled beneath him like a carcass half-picked clean. City Z never truly slept; it only shifted masks. In the daylight, commerce festered—markets reopening, bargains shouted, coin exchanged with the frantic energy of survival. But in the veins beneath, in the cracks no sun ever touched, the other City Z crawled. That was where Cain’s war lived.

Hunter adjusted his crossbow as he emerged from the stairwell behind him. His steps were soundless, measured, a shadow’s discipline. "Movement near the southern wards. Reports say a caravan was torn apart. No survivors."

Susan joined them, her cloak dragging dust from the stone. "Not the phantom. Too messy. This was blunt force."

Cain’s jaw flexed, silent calculation grinding in his mind. "Messy or not, it’s the same hand. They’re testing boundaries. Finding where we watch—and where we don’t."

From the far end of the balcony, Steve crouched over a flickering tablet of salvaged circuitry. Wires hummed in the quiet, feeding fractured data through broken city channels. His eyes were tired, but alive with manic focus. "Grid’s screaming in fragments. Same anomaly trails we’ve been tracing for three nights, only thicker this time. They’re moving faster."

Cain turned his gaze from the city’s bones to the faces of his people. His voice was quiet, heavy with something unspoken. "Then we move faster still."

Susan tilted her head, reading him. "You mean to strike before they root deeper."

"Not strike," Cain corrected, stepping down from the ledge. His blade whispered from its sheath with calm inevitability. "We cut out infection. We don’t let it spread."

The four descended into the lower streets, where dawn’s light never reached. Windows above rattled with early trade, but below, silence clung like mold. Trash heaps festered, rats gnawed, and further still, echoes of something larger reverberated—the faint growl of a predator too patient to reveal itself.

Roselle appeared at the end of a narrowing corridor, twin blades gleaming faint in the dark. She fell into step without a word, eyes sharp, presence grounding. The circle was whole again.

Steve’s voice cracked through the gloom. "One block ahead. Signal’s thick enough I can taste it."

They turned a corner. And there it was.

Bodies—eight of them—piled like discarded refuse, blood pooled black under the dim glow of rusted lamps. But it wasn’t the carnage that stopped them. It was the markings burned into the walls: jagged, spiraled sigils, pulsing faintly as if the stone itself bled light.

Hunter stepped closer, nostrils flaring. "Not human craft."

"No," Cain said. His voice was quiet, but it carried an edge like steel. "This is intrusion. This is declaration."

Susan crouched by the nearest corpse, brushing her fingers across skin still warm. "Whatever did this, it wanted us to see."

Cain stared at the spirals, at the faint throb of alien geometry crawling across ruined walls. His eyes narrowed, a storm gathering within them.

Steve shifted uneasily, his fingers twitching over his device. "Grid’s picking up distortions. Not just heat. The walls themselves are... vibrating."

Roselle touched her blade to the stone, listening. Her expression did not change, but her knuckles whitened on the hilt. "This isn’t paint. This isn’t carved. The marks are alive."

The realization rippled through them, silent and heavy. Whatever message the phantom had left, it wasn’t just a warning. It was an infection, pressed into the city’s bones.

Hunter broke the silence first. "We destroy the walls. Burn them. Collapse the alley."

Cain shook his head. "We don’t waste effort killing what we don’t yet understand. Information first. Then eradication."

He stepped into the blood, crouching before the nearest sigil. The light shivered, bending as if acknowledging his presence. For a breath, he felt the pull—like a whisper crawling along the edges of his mind. A voice without words, ancient and patient.

Cain’s hand hovered above the mark, close enough to feel heat without touching. His vision blurred, streets tilting, air thick with the weight of something vast. For an instant, he saw not City Z but another city, broken and blackened, its towers melted to slag. Shapes moved in its ruins—tall, skeletal things with no faces. They walked as if sleepwalking, each step tearing the ground open.

Then it was gone.

Cain exhaled, steadying himself. His companions had not moved, but they saw the change in his eyes.

"What did it show you?" Susan asked.

"Not what," Cain said, standing. His grip tightened on the hilt at his side. "Where."

Steve’s voice cracked. "Where what?"

Cain’s answer was a whisper, barely audible against the humming stone. "Where this all leads."

Silence pressed closer, broken only by the faint pulse of the sigils. The city above bustled in ignorance, but down here, in the dark veins of its body, something new had taken root.

Cain wiped the blood from his boot and turned back to his people. His tone held no triumph, only the inevitability of war. "We’re not hunters anymore. We’re witnesses. And what we’ve seen—" His eyes cut to the spirals still throbbing against the wall. "—is only the first step."