"I didn't fail—I didn't! I can try again, please—please!" Ray's voice cracked, raw from shouting, but the guards didn't care. Their gauntlets bit into his arms as they dragged him along the uneven concrete, boots thudding with mechanical precision.
Rain hadn't fallen in weeks, yet the streets of Sector Twelve were slick with oil runoff and the fetid seepage of too many bodies packed into too small a space. Neon signs blinked half-lit, advertising services no one could afford, flickering like the twitch of dying eyes.
Faces stared out from shattered doorways and broken windows, their features sunken, gray, hollow. No one moved to help. No one even spoke. This was routine now. Another Failed One. Another experiment discarded as usual.
It was brutal, yet understandable.
The guards wore matte black armor, smooth and faceless except for a single vertical red slit across their helmets. Identical. Empty. Efficient. One of them adjusted his grip, twisting Ray's arm higher until something deep in his shoulder popped with a sound like wet sticks breaking. Ray screamed, his knees giving way.
"Walk," the guard growled through the helmet's voice modulator.
"I can do better—I can learn!" Ray shouted back. But the only response was the wet drag of his bare feet against the cracked pavement.
Above them, the skeletal remains of high rises leaned at impossible angles, their steel bones exposed like corpses gnawed to the marrow. Somewhere in the distance, a siren moaned and failed.
Ahead loomed the Wall.
Two hundred meters of reinforced titanium alloy mixed with reclaimed concrete, black as coal, rising high enough to block the low-hanging clouds. It surrounded the heart of the City Ui like a clenched fist. A single entrance marked its face, shaped like a cathedral door scaled for monsters, adorned only by corrosion and old war markings.
And the gate was opening as soon as they approached it.
The grinding sound of gears older than most of the inhabitants screeched across the silence. It echoed through the slums, making small children clap their hands over their ears and dogs whimper under collapsed vehicles.
The inside of the Wall pulsed with red floodlights, casting long, skeletal shadows onto the ground. Armed drones hovered lazily along the top of the Wall, their optics focusing in on Ray as if already calculating his obituary.
Beyond the widening gap: the Wasteland.
Dead fields stretched outward like a graveyard of civilization. Burnt husks of once thriving buildings. Vehicles corroded into shapeless masses of rust. The occasional, unmistakable pile of bones, sometimes human, sometimes not.
Ray dug his heels into the cracks of the road, but the guards yanked him forward.
"No—No! You can't do this! I'm not finished! I'm not broken!"
Another twist of his arm silenced him. The guards didn't respond, didn't even seem to hear his words.
At the threshold, one of them finally spoke. "You have failed like the rest of the others. For those like you, only one thing awaits you; death."
The second one shoved him. Ray stumbled, legs giving out entirely, falling forward and sliding through the grime. His palms left twin streaks of blood on the concrete.
"Please—" His voice barely a whisper now. "Please don't do this..."
The last thing he saw before the gates began to grind closed was the slight shift of the first guard's helmet.
They all left, leaving him to his death.
Silence followed next, except for the gentle grind of metal on metal as the gates sealed, locking him outside.
Ray tried to crawl back, dragging his broken hands across the ground, but the massive door was already closed. The slums were gone, hidden behind the black wall. His home—if it had ever been that.
Breath came ragged. The blood from his palms mixed with the gray ash that clung to everything. His ribs felt cracked. Maybe broken.
He sat up slowly, shoulders hunched, shivering though no wind blew.
The smell hit him next.
Death. Not just rot. A smell that made the air thick, like breathing through spoiled meat. Flies buzzed lazily around distant piles of bones. Some of the remains still wore the tattered remnants of the same gray garments Ray wore.
The Failed Ones. Left here. Left to rot.
Ray turned to the side and vomited bile and blood onto the ashen ground.
Somewhere far off, a sound broke the stillness.
A howl.
With a trembling crawl, Ray moved toward a leaning slab of rusted metal standing like a crooked gravestone near the Wall.
There were scratches across its surface. Names, dozens of them, carved by fingernails or shards of metal. Some written clearly. Some illegible, scrawled in panic. One was written in what looked like old blood.
LEON.
MARA.
SORRY.
One read simply: "THEY LIED."
Ray lifted a shaking hand to the surface, ready to scratch his own name.
Only—what was his name?
"Ray," he whispered. But it didn't feel complete. There was more. Another name behind it. Like seeing something under the ice, blurred and unreachable.
The howl echoed again, closer this time. A different sound underneath it, like heavy limbs dragging over broken asphalt.
Ray pressed his head against the slab, eyes closed.
Something was coming and it was coming towards him.
Soon after, the first one came. The creatures stepped into view as twilight painted the sky in dying embers.
It was huge. Taller than a man but crawling low on limbs like bent spears. Its exoskeleton shimmered faintly with oily reflections of red and green. Where its head should have been was a cluster of twitching, glassy orbs, and below them, mandibles flexed like skeletal fingers.
It clicked softly, tasting the air, the way spiders might before lunging.
Ray stood on unsteady feet, blood running from his lip, legs shaking. No weapon. No hope. Just meat on a battlefield.
The thing tilted its head, curious. Predators could sense hopelessness.
Ray could barely whisper: "I don't want to die."
But the world didn't care.
As he stood there, staring at the creature, a soft, wet skittering sound came from behind him.
Ray flinched and glanced over his shoulder, expecting another monster. But instead, a small, translucent creature—no larger than a cat—crawled from the wreckage of a twisted shopping cart.
It glimmered faintly, almost like jellyfish tissue, with veins of faintly pulsing blue light. Tiny clawed limbs carried it awkwardly forward until it reached Ray's foot.
"No," he croaked. He kicked at it weakly. "Get away—"
But it crawled up his leg, gripping with fine, needle-like claws that didn't break his skin. Up his waist. Over his chest. Across his shoulder.
Ray tried to slap at it, but his arms were too slow, too weak.
The creature climbed to his head and rested there, wrapping soft tendrils into his hair like lazy ivy.
Then something happened.
A shift behind his eyes. Like a lens adjusting. Like a door opening in a part of his mind he didn't know existed.
Color returned to the world. Sound sharpened. The trembling in his limbs vanished.
The Illumis scout's clicking stopped. It sensed something too.
Ray's hand flexed, curling into a fist.
His lips peeled back into something between a smile and a snarl.
And then he lunged.