The Hunter's core thrummed in my pack like a dying heartbeat, its cyan light bleeding through the leather and painting the dead glass sand beneath our boots in fragments of ghost-light. The Dead Reaches lived up to their name—not in the sense of death, but in the absence of it. Nothing decayed here because nothing had ever truly lived. The glass sand was silicon fused by a purge so thorough that even the concept of rot had been scoured from its molecular memory. My overlay couldn't identify the event's age. The damage was temporal, not thermal.
[ENVIRONMENTAL ANALYSIS: TEMPORAL SCAR]
[AGE: INDETERMINABLE (PRECEDES SYSTEM LOGS)]
[HAZARD: MEMORY BLEED - MINOR]
The memory bleed was already affecting us. Drek had stopped to argue with a rock twenty minutes ago, convinced it was his mother. The rock was quartz, but its crystalline structure had recorded a moment of grief from some long-dead traveler, and Drek's Unique Skill—Unbreakable Digestion—was so permeable to data that he'd ingested the memory along with our lunch. I'd had to physically pull him away while Mira shot the rock with an arrow, not to destroy it, but to disrupt its resonant frequency.
Callum was worse. His phase-state was fragmenting, his body existing in three places at once: here, a millisecond behind, and a millisecond ahead. The only stable part of him was his left hand, which he kept pressed against the Hunter's core, using its phase-lock to anchor himself to our timeline. The contact was painful—I'd mapped his pain receptors spiking at 7.2/10—but it was necessary. Without it, he'd echo into the Dead Reaches' memory and become another whisper in the glass.
[PARTY STATUS: CALLUM - TEMPORAL DISSOCIATION (MODERATE)]
[MITIGATION: PHASE-CORE ANCHOR (TEMPORARY)]
[RECOMMENDATION: STABILIZE WITHIN 72 HOURS]
Seventy-two hours. River's Reach was still 38 miles away, and the Architect's Hunters were hunting in waves. The first had been a scout. The next would be a pack.
We needed to hide. But the Dead Reaches offered nothing—no cover, no water, no variance. Just endless reflective plains that turned the sky into a kaleidoscope of fractured moons.
"There," Mira said, pointing to a dark spot on the horizon. My overlay calculated distance: [2.3 MILES] , bearing 332°. The spot was thermally negative—colder than the ambient glass, which meant it was absorbing heat instead of reflecting it.
"Temporal sink," Callum whispered. "A place where time moves slower. The Architect uses them as storage."
A storage locker in the desert. Perfect.
We moved toward it, our pace forced march: 4.5 mph, a speed that optimized distance versus stamina drain. Drek's digestion was processing the Hunter's core residue, granting him a buff:
[DREK: PHASIC METABOLISM (TEMPORARY)]
[EFFECT: +15% HP REGEN, +10% MOVEMENT SPEED]
He was becoming part Hunter. His Unbreakable Digestion was integrating the drone's biology. If he kept eating high-tier constructs, he'd eventually evolve. The thought was both fascinating and terrifying.
The temporal sink resolved into a crater, but not from an impact. It was a scoop, as if reality had been spooned out and the edges smoothed over. The center was a black pond, perfectly still, its surface reflecting nothing. My overlay refused to scan it, throwing [ERR: VOID POINTER].
"Don't touch the water," Callum warned. "It's raw phase-sludge. Step in it, and you'll be... elsewhere."
"Define elsewhere," Drek grunted.
"Between seconds. Forever."
We camped on the crater's rim, where the temporal distortion was weakest. I set the Hunter's core on a flat stone, its cyan light casting long shadows. The light was pulsing in a pattern. My overlay captured it:
[DATA STREAM: MORSE VARIANT]
[TRANSLATING...]
[MESSAGE: "ARCHIVE #47 - HARVESTED SKILL MATRICES - ACCESS: RESTRICTED"]
The core wasn't just a battery. It was a library. Every Worldlost the Architect had harvested was stored here, compressed into skill-data that could be implanted into new hosts. The Handler had been one such host—a Warden's body implanted with admin privileges.
"Can we extract them?" Mira asked, her voice barely above a whisper. "The people in the tanks... can we bring them back?"
My parallel analysis ran 10,000 simulations. The answer was no. The data was lossy, compressed beyond recovery. But fragments remained. Echoes. Skills that hadn't been fully integrated.
"Not back," I said. "But we can borrow. "
[ITEM: HUNTER'S CORE - SKILL EXTRACTION (EXPERIMENTAL)]
[RISK: DATA CORRUPTION, SKILL REJECTION, DEATH]
[SUCCESS: 2.1% BASE, +7% LUCK BONUS = 9.1%]
Nine percent. Terrible odds. But we had four party members. Probability of one success: 30%. Worth the risk.
"Who goes first?" Drek asked, eyeing the core like a steak.
"Me," Mira said, stepping forward. "My mother was in those tanks. If there's a piece of her left... I want it."
I couldn't argue with her math. Emotional drive increased tolerance for pain, which reduced skill rejection rates by 4%. "Lie down. This will hurt."
She did. I placed the core on her sternum, its light seeping into her skin. [RITUAL: SKILL GRAFTING (IMPROVISED)] . My overlay guided my hands: press here, channel energy here, pray .
The core hummed. Mira's back arched, her mouth open in a silent scream. The skill was resisting. Her Warden bloodline was fighting the foreign data.
Then it broke. A fragment of the Handler's admin privilege—[TERRAIN MANIPULATION (MINOR)]—merged with her Warden heritage. Her eyes snapped open, cyan, then grey, then a blended silver.
[SUCCESS! MIRA: SKILL GRAFTED]
[NEW ABILITY: WARDEN'S TOUCH (LV1)]
[EFFECT: +20% PLANT CONTROL, +10% TERRAIN AWARENESS]
The fragment was weaker than the original, but it was hers. Not harvested. Integrated.
"Mom..." she whispered, tears falling. "She's gone. But she left a key. "
She held up her hand. A cyan sigil glowed on her palm—the Handler's admin rune, but inverted. A backdoor key.
"Node #1," she said. "She knew you'd come. She left this for you."
The sigil downloaded into my system. Not as a skill. As access. A direct line to the River's source code.
[PHASE-KEY #3: WARDEN'S INHERITANCE (PARTIAL)]
[COMPATIBILITY: 67%]
[REQUIREMENT: COMPLETE INHERITANCE]
I needed the rest. The Handler's full admin key was fragmented—one piece in Mira, one piece in the mask (Key #2), one piece still buried in the River's Reach Warden's Tower (Key #1). When combined, they'd open Node #1.
But the Architect knew we'd acquired it. The Hunter's core uploaded the data the moment we accessed it.
[WARNING: ARCHITECT PURGE SQUAD DEPLOYED]
[ETA: 14 MINUTES]
The second Hunter was closer. And it wasn't alone.
"We need to move," I said. "Now."
Mira stood, her new skill already active. The crater's rim grew roots—real roots, breaking through the glass sand. Warden's Touch. She could grow cover in a dead land.
Drek shouldered the pack. "Where to?"
"River's Reach." I looked at the cyan sigil on Mira's palm. "The Warden's Tower is Key #1. We complete the inheritance there."
"And if Gorum won't let us in?" Callum asked.
"He will," I said. "Because the Architect's about to burn his petri dish to the ground."
The glass sand rippled. Not from wind. From vibration. Three Hunters, converg5)