CHAPTER 46: RECLAIMER ZONE STATUS

The air carried the screams. They weren’t the panicked shrieks of civilians but the truncated, guttural cries of trained Reclaimers cut down mid-motion.

Ning saw a four-man squad, shields of crackling energy held high, advancing down a parallel corridor. They moved with textbook precision, covering angles, their voices sharp bursts of tactical jargon.

Then the creatures came.

They didn’t swarm. They flowed. One darted from a side passage, low to the ground. A Reclaimer pivoted, unleashing a torrent of fire. The creature didn’t try to break through it; it planted its clawed feet, reversed direction with impossible agility, and used the wall as a springboard, launching itself over the flames.

As the Reclaimer tracked upward, another creature exploded from the shadows behind him, its movements a blur of obsidian limbs. It didn’t aim for the chest or head. It struck the Reclaimer’s knee, shattering it, then plunged a bladed appendage through the back of his neck.

A third creature faked a lunge, drawing a blast of concentrated light from the squad leader. The beam struck nothing but air. The creature had already sidestepped, its head cocked as if analyzing the attack.

Ning raised his hand, a spear of pure light coalescing at his fingertips. He flung it, the bolt screaming through the ruin-choked hall. It struck one of the creatures square in the torso. For a split second, it sizzled, divine energy eating at corrupted flesh. But then the effect dampened.

The creature’s hide shimmered, hardening into a crystalline lattice that refracted the light, rendering it harmless. It shook itself, hissed, and turned its multi-faceted eyes toward him. It had learned. It had adapted.

"Ning!" Goro’s voice was a gravelly roar. The hulking Reclaimer slid to a halt beside him, his massive shield scarred and glowing with residual heat. "Leadership’s gone dark! We’re getting torn apart out here! Every squad is reporting the same thing: they’re not fighting like dungeon-born, they’re fighting like us!"

Viera was right behind him, her breath coming in ragged gasps, one of her arms encased in a sheath of pulsing ice to stave off some unseen injury.

"My ice traps only worked once per group," she said, her voice tight with disbelief. "The second they see one trigger, the rest avoid them. They’re coordinating."

Ning’s gaze swept over the carnage, the flickering lights, the distant, rhythmic thrumming that was the source of it all. Waiting for orders was suicide. Fighting a defensive battle was a slow, grinding death.

"We can’t win a war of attrition," Ning said, his voice cutting through the noise. It wasn’t a suggestion; it was a command. "They’re pouring from a single point. We cut to the heart of it. We end this at the source."

He turned to Goro.

"You and Viera. Get everyone who can still walk and clear a path to the surface. Civilians, wounded, anyone. We’re evacuating Yundao. Now."

Goro’s eyes widened.

"Evacuate... Ning, this is Guild HQ. This is the safest place on the continent."

"Not anymore," Ning stated flatly. "Go. That’s an order."

Goro hesitated for a fraction of a second, then gave a sharp, affirmative nod. He knew a battlefield command when he heard one. He and Viera peeled off, their shouts already rallying the scattered, terrified survivors.

As they left, a shadow detached itself from a nearby doorway. Lian Zhen stood there, her glaive held loosely in one hand, her face a pale, grim mask. Her return had been a quiet bombshell, and the suspicion still clung to her like a shroud.

"You’re going to the vault," she said. It wasn’t a question.

Ning’s jaw tightened. He didn’t have time for this, for the interrogations, for the distrust.

"You shouldn’t be here, Lian."

"And where else would I be?" she shot back, taking a step forward. The defiance in her eyes was a fire. "Hiding? Waiting for you to decide if I’m a traitor? All the talk, all the suspicion... It’s dust now. None of it matters." She hefted her glaive, the movement fluid and deadly. "Let me fight. I need to prove where I stand, and words are useless. Let my actions speak."

He looked at her, at the raw, desperate sincerity etched onto her face. He saw the warrior she was, not the potential enemy others saw. He gave a single, hard nod.

That was all the answer she needed.

They moved together, a two-person strike team descending into the guts of the collapsing Guild. The polished metal corridors gave way to raw, groaning infrastructure. The rhythmic thrum grew louder, a nauseating bass note that vibrated in their bones. Reality began to fray at the edges.

A solid wall shimmered, turning translucent for a moment, revealing the screaming chaos of a monster-filled dungeon on the other side before snapping back into place. The air grew thick and heavy, charged with an unstable, corrupted mana that made Ning’s skin crawl.

His System, his ever-present anchor, began to shake. Red alerts flooded his vision, the text glitching and distorting.

[SYSTEM GLI####: CORRUPTI## THRESHOLD BREA##HED. Y## ARE ENTERING UNSUPPORTED TERRITORY.]

The message flickered, then stabilized into a new, terrifying clarity.

[NO NETWORK SUPPORT. NO BACKUP. YOU ARE ALONE.]

Lian glanced at him, her face tight.

"You feel that? It’s like the world is... thin, here."

"The dungeon is bleeding into our reality," Ning grunted, pushing forward. "The vault is the epicenter."

They reached the final blast doors, now warped and bent outward as if from some immense, internal pressure. They squeezed through the gap and into the generator chamber.

The sight stole the air from their lungs. The rift was no longer a simple tear in space. It was a pulsating, organic heart of raw mana, veins of purple and black energy spreading from it like a cancer.

They had wrapped around Linx’s machinery, fusing technology with grotesque, fleshy growths. Cables snaked into pulsating sacs, and metal pylons were coated in a layer of twitching, biomechanical tissue. The entire chamber hummed with a life that was both alien and horribly familiar.

Slithering from the base of the rift was a monstrosity. It was nearly twenty feet long, a horrifying fusion of segmented armor plating, exposed wiring that sparked and fizzled, and slick, organic muscle.

Its head was a nightmarish blend of a machine sensor array and a fanged, draconic maw. It stirred, its multiple glowing optics focusing on him, and a voice rasped from a speaker grill set in its throat, a voice of static and corrupted System code.

[Reclaimer... Prime. Target... acquired.]

Ning’s blood ran cold. It didn’t just see a human. It saw him. It recognized him.

"What are you?" Ning demanded, his blade glowing with a soft, cautious light.

[The... next... step,] the creature hissed, its voice glitching. [This world... outdated. Flawed. You... you understand. The potential. You are the fulcrum. The key that turns. You are the leak in the dam... a flaw that allows for the... upgrade.]

The words were a twisted parody of the System’s own ethos of advancement. This thing wasn’t just a monster; it was an ideology given form.

With a wordless roar, Ning launched himself forward, blade screaming through the air, aimed to decapitate the beast. But just as the edge was about to connect, the creature glitched. It didn’t dodge. It dissolved into a cascade of static and pixels, reappearing ten feet to the left, its form solidifying instantly.

Before Ning could reorient, it struck. A limb of braided cable and sharpened bone shot out like a spear. It wasn’t aimed at him. It was aimed at Lian.

She tried to bring her glaive around, but it was too fast. The spearhead slammed into her side with a sickening crack. She cried out, stumbling back, clutching her ribs.

Rage, pure and absolute, flared in her eyes.

"You feed on mana?" she roared, spitting blood. "Then choke on it!"

Ignoring the white-hot pain, she surged forward, not at the creature, but at the corrupted reactor core it was tethered to. With a final, desperate heave, she slammed the heavy blade of her glaive deep into a junction box where organic matter and Guild technology met.

The effect was instantaneous. Electricity, raw and untamed, arced across the chamber in brilliant white-blue flashes. The creature, hardwired into the system, convulsed.

A shriek of digital feedback and organic agony tore from its speaker, its movements seizing as the feedback surge overloaded its corrupted systems.

It was stunned. It was a window of maybe two seconds.

For Ning, it was an eternity.

He didn’t think. He didn’t plan. He reached deeper, past the skills, past the training, to the very foundation of his power, the System itself, now untethered and unbound. He pushed against its limits, demanding more.

And something broke. Or perhaps, something was unsealed.

[SYSTEM CONDITIONING EXPANDED. ABILITY UNSEALED – VOIDWALK]

The world dissolved.

It wasn’t a teleport. It wasn’t a blur of speed. For Ning, reality flattened into a grayscale schematic of frozen moments. The arcs of electricity were motionless ribbons of light. Lian was a statue of pain and defiance.

The creature was a sculpture of silent agony. He wasn’t moving fast; he was stepping between the ticks of the clock, walking through the cracks in broken time.

He took a single step.

The world crashed back into color and sound.

He was behind the biomechanical monstrosity, his body flush against its back. His blade, now burning with a cold, black-tinged light, was already plunged through its chest, severing the connection to its power core.

The creature’s shriek cut off. Its optical sensors flickered, then died. It convulsed once, violently, before its body dissolved, not into gore, but into a shower of decaying static and corrupted code that faded into nothingness.

The chamber groaned, the immense pressure of the rift suddenly lessening. The pulsing heart of mana sputtered, constricted, and then sealed itself into a thin, weakly glowing line. The growth of flesh began to wither and crumble.

They had done it. They were alive.

Lian sagged against a pylon, breathing heavily, one hand pressed to her shattered ribs.

"Did you just...?"

"I don’t know," Ning said, his own breath ragged, the phantom sensation of walking outside of time still tingling in his nerves. He helped her up, and together they dragged themselves out of the collapsing vault and up toward the wounded sky.

They emerged onto a rooftop, the wind cold against their faces. Below them, Yundao was a broken thing. Fires burned unchecked, and the sounds of distant fighting still echoed. The heart of the invasion was silenced, but the body was still thrashing. Yundao was scarred, perhaps fatally.

As Ning’s gaze swept across the panorama of destruction, his eyes caught something on the face of a nearby skyscraper.

A symbol. Painted in fresh, dark blood.

A single, intricate glyph, stark against the gray concrete. A swirling vortex pulling inward toward a central point. He knew it instantly. It was a mark he’d only ever seen in the deepest, most forbidden archives of the System.

The mark of the Eternal Ascent.

A cold dread, far deeper and more terrifying than the one he’d felt in the vault, settled in his gut. This wasn’t a random dungeon break. This wasn’t an accident. This was an attack.

Someone else had activated a System.

And they were coming...