CHAPTER 41: CHAPTER 41: DUNGEON BREAK, THE ASH WARDEN WAR (1)

The world burned, and my apartment still smelled like cheap ramen.

I was still sitting against the wall when the System decided I belonged on the living side of the ledger. The window didn’t glow—it bled. Red pushed through the cracks in the glass and turned the dust in the air into floating embers. Ash drifted sideways like snow in a faulty globe, never committing to down. Gravity had taken a personal day.

The floor under me still radiated the echo of my landing. A hairline crack ran from the crater I’d made to the kitchen tile where I never learned to cook. Everything was the same shape, just wrong.

Status Feed — Live

[Recovery: 43 % → 45 %]

[Absolute Regeneration: Online (Throttled)]

[Lightning Transit — Charges Remaining Today: 1]

[City Alert Level: BLACK]

[Guild Net: Partial]

[Tower Relays: Offline / Compromised]

I leaned my head back against the wall and counted the tiny cracks in the paint like they were breaths I could own. When I blinked, the black of the Veil still hung on my eyelids. The memory of no light had weight. It pressed.

I did the math I’d been avoiding. Three names. No graves to visit, no bodies to bury. Just moments.

Elise—blue turning to hunger, her own fire inhaling her like the world had decided it liked the taste.

Lucien—smiling while he held death off me with his hands, then vanishing like a note swallowed mid-chord.

Varga—half-laugh, half-promise, standing up through a spear because standing down wasn’t in his religion.

I let the moments hurt and didn’t push them away. There were only so many things I could do right now, and refusing to forget was one of them.

Twenty unspent stat points blinked in the corner of my vision like a cheerful debt collector.

[Unassigned Points: +20]

I didn’t touch them. If the System wanted me to be something new, it could wait until I earned the right to be anything at all.

Gear check, because ritual beats grief when your hands need something sane to do. Fangpiercer lay across my thighs. The runes along its spine pulsed unevenly, a low feral hum that didn’t match the room’s heartbeat. Gloamthorn was colder than it had any right to be, drinking the room’s shadow like a sulking cat. I unrolled the pocket tab and let the Verge follow me home:

[Inventory]

-Fog Tyrant Core (A-Rank) — Trait channel fuel.

-Horn Segment (A-Rank) — Guardian drop, edged for weapon crafting.

-Mana Stone (A-Rank, Core) — Guardian drop, raw power source.

-Root-Fiber Resin (Rare) — Craft stabilizer.

-Rib-Knot Charm (Rare Component) — Tyrant drop.

-Core Fragment (Unknown Rank) — Weird coin-thing, Lot C anomaly.

-Thread Resin (Fine) ×4 — Fog Tyrant drop.

-Crystal Fog Vial (Rare) ×3 — Guardian drop.

-Swampglass Phial (Rare) ×2 — Fog Tyrant drop.

-Basalt Plate (A) — Guardian drop; heavy, mean; forgotten in a guilt pile

-District Scrip (3,800 credits) — two rums and rent anxiety

-Ember Core (S-Rank Mana Stone)

-Crucible Sinew (S-Rank)

-Slag-Plate Shard (S-Rank)

-Chainbone Fragment (A-Rank)

-Ember Ink (A-Rank)

-Chainbone Rivet (B-Rank)

-Listener Shard (B-Rank)

Souvenirs from a world that ate my friends. Useful. Ugly. Both.

The band on my wrist flared a polite blue.

MARA — CONNECTED (HELION CITY EVAC NETWORK)

I didn’t realize my hands were shaking until I hit accept and had to press the icon twice.

"Mara?"

Static chewed the first second. Then her voice cut through—breathless relief and disaster noise behind her. "Ethan? Ethan—oh thank god. You’re—are you alive?"

"For now."

"Don’t joke."

"Okay." I swallowed the reflex. "I’m here."

"Where is here? They said Arcadia was—" She stopped herself, like she’d hit a wall made of my name. "Are you in the city?"

I looked at the window. The skyline wasn’t a skyline anymore; it was a wound.

"Yeah," I said. "Rent’s paid up. Thought I’d use it."

"You sound different. Are you okay?"

"Long day."

"Ethan, you’ve seen the alerts, right?"

"Hard to miss."

"It’s all over Helion feeds. They said an S-rank gate collapsed outside Arcadia." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Four hunters went in. None came out. The dungeon broke—something about an orc shaman with a full army. They’re calling it a crimson-class breach."

I kept my eyes on the window so she couldn’t hear what that did to my face. "Yeah. Saw the smoke from here."

"Guildmaster Darius ordered half the capital guard to mobilize. They’re saying it’s thousands of A and S ranks flooding the outer districts."

"Figures. Arcadia never does small disasters."

"You shouldn’t be anywhere near that city."

"Too late," I said. "Besides, someone’s got to help hold the line."

"You?" she asked. It wasn’t doubt—just the kind of disbelief that comes with caring too much.

"Me," I said. "I can still swing something. Better than hiding in a stairwell."

"Then promise you’ll stay out of the red zones. Please."

"I’ll try."

"You sound like the you who lies when you think I’ll worry less."

"Bad habit." I pressed a thumb along Fangpiercer’s edge until it bit. "Break it," she said. "Not today. I need you to tell me one true thing."

"Okay."

"Tell me you’ll call me later tonight."

"I’ll call," I said, and the word cracked right down the middle. She heard it. She let it live anyway.

"Be careful, Ethan."

"You too."

The line went quiet. I stared at my reflection in the blacked-out screen—ash on cheekbones, hair matted, eyes too bright. The shape of a man who ran because a god pushed a button.

I pinged Selene even though the System had opinions.

[Ping: Guild HQ • Vault Sector?]

[Access Denied — Lockdown Protocol AEGIS]

Alive, then. Or important enough to bury. The Vault didn’t close for empty rooms.

The building creaked under a long-range impact. Glass chimed in the hallway like a polite rain. I stood. My knees thought about it, filed a protest, then agreed under new management. Every muscle had the personality of a pulled wire.

The hallway lights stuttered. My neighbor’s door was open. A kid stood in the threshold in superhero pajamas, clinging to a stuffed wyvern with one wing. He stared at the red outside like if he looked long enough it would be less real.

"You shouldn’t watch too much of it," I told him.

"Why?"

"Because it starts watching you back."

He looked at the stuffed wyvern, back at me. "Are we going to die?"

"Not if you go with the responders," I said, pointing down the hall. A pair of municipal jackets glowed green at the stairwell, hands raised in the universal "this way" gesture. "They’re good at their job."

"You’re bleeding."

"Occupational hazard."

"Do you have a job?"

"Trying to," I said. "Today’s a weird job interview."

He didn’t smile. Kids don’t owe you jokes. His mother appeared, face white, eyes doing inventory on me like triage—alive, dangerous, lunatic. She nodded once, the universal "thank you for not being a problem," and steered him down the stairs.

A steel fire door halfway to the stairwell had given up on the whole "door" concept and decided to be a wall. I put two fingers on the hinge, felt the metal’s mood. Old, stubborn, unhappy about heat.

Tap. Tap. Just off the note, then on.

[Pattern Recall (Minor)]

[Material Resonance → Success]

The latch exhaled. The responders didn’t thank me. They didn’t need to. Being useful beats being praised most days.

Outside, the world sounded like a radio left between channels. Sirens dopplered past without committing to a direction. Overhead, a loudspeaker drone coughed through static:

"Evacuation corridors Lambda and Mu—failing. Gate District—compromised. Containment forces—fallback to Guild Row. If you are in Sectors 4 through 6, shelter in place or proceed to designated safe stairwells."

A news crawl on my cracked TV booted itself in a burst of civic obligation. The font choices were always smug on these.

[BREAKING]

Gate S-0127 Breach — Containment Failure Confirmed

[Casualties: Severe]

[Unknown High Entity Active]

Heat rolled through the room and left the air empty in its wake. An impact far across the city made the window shiver. I opened it halfway and the ash came in like polite confetti. My apartment had never been this quiet—not even when I’d tried to make it quiet. The city noise was still there, it just wasn’t sound anymore. It was pressure. A hand on your chest. A warning in your bones.

The System came in sideways. Not trumpets. Not quests with flashing borders. Just a set of sentences that didn’t care if I had feelings.

[Quest Failed — Crimson Verge]

[Emergency Quest — Containment Collapse]

[Primary Target: Ash Warden Hierophant — Status: Active]

[Secondary Objectives: Protect / Restore Evac Lanes Σ, Κ, Λ]

[Recommendation: Re-arm • Re-organize • Return to Combat]

There it was. Forge first, war second. Tools before heroics. Even the System finally understood me.

I did a slow inventory of my body: fingers flexed, forearm cut from the chain lash, thigh deep bruise under the skin’s lie. Breathing was an effort and a ritual. The shake in my hands ebbed away, not because I was better, but because I had a list.

I strapped on the sheathes I’d dumped by the door in some other lifetime. Fangpiercer slid home and purred. Gloamthorn took its place like a sulk that could kill.

On the way down the stairwell, my building decided to try collapsing for attention. The concrete didn’t win the argument. I did.

The foyer smelled like fear, cleaning fluid, and someone’s abandoned coffee burning on a hot plate. Three responders in orange were coordinating evac with a competence that should’ve made me weep. The smallest one saw my band glow, flicked to my public flag, and decided not to make a scene. Smart.

"North stairwell clears to Seventh," she told me without being asked. "Don’t go west."

"Why?"

"Because the west doesn’t exist."

Fair.

A man in a robe that used to be a bathrobe and now thought it was armor tried to shoulder past with a box of ceramic mugs like they were family relics. I let him, because you don’t teach people what to value while the sky is falling.

Outside, the street was a map of the wrong city. The Gate District pulsed red on the horizon like a heartbeat under skin. Shards of old drones lay in glittering snowdrifts on the curb. A bus had turned itself into a sculpture at the corner. People moved the way ants do after a child kicks their hill—fast, coordinated, carrying everything, carrying nothing.

A woman shouted my name with a question mark at the end. A man hissed it like a curse. I kept walking. The last Transit charge burned in the corner of my vision like a dare.

I didn’t touch it. Not for this. Not for walking.

Across the street, an old guy had collapsed against a service door, eyes wide, hand uselessly patting his coat for something. An inhaler? Keys? A memory? I knocked the door twice in the hinge’s rhythm and pushed when it sighed. I left it propped with a brick and guided him inside to a stairwell that was trying very hard to be safe. He gripped my wrist with his good hand.

"You’re the one," he said.

"Today maybe lets see," I said.

I didn’t wait for the argument.

Back in my apartment, the red had deepened to a color the human eye wasn’t designed for. The ash fell thicker and slower. It wasn’t snow anymore. It was talc from a god’s bone.

I stood at the window with my fingers on the sill and my shoulder telling me all its secrets. The city answered with a pressure change. Somewhere out there, the Hierophant was still walking, still breathing, still turning light into an opinion.

I didn’t make a speech. I didn’t owe the room that.

"I’m done dying interesting," I said to the glass, to the knives, to the ash. The words were small and heavy.

The city didn’t clap. It kept bleeding.

"I’ll win boring."

The System slid a new line into my sight like a contract I’d already signed.

[Crafting Affinity Upgrade Detected]

[Forgewalker Resonance Rising...]

Heat bloomed under my wrist like a forge answering a knock. Fangpiercer thrummed once, long enough to make my teeth buzz. Gloamthorn shivered. The Ember Core in my inventory glowed as if it had just remembered a name.

I took one long breath that hurt in four places and opened the Forge tab. It didn’t open so much as wake up.

[Forgewalker Path — Dormant Protocols Active]

[Material Resonance Present]

I didn’t say anything poetic. I put my hand on the Ember Core and bled on it because that’s how I’ve always made things mine.

The core warmed like it liked me. Or like it recognized what I was about to ask of it.

Sirens pealed. Somewhere below, a child cried without breath. Somewhere above, a drone announced corridor failures in a voice that sounded like someone trying to apologize to a crowd.

It all fit into the same room. It all belonged to the same hour.

I didn’t pick up the hammer yet. That was Chapter Two.

Right now I did the most dangerous thing I ever do.

I made a plan.