Into the Fold

Above Praxelia, a holy relic floated above like a severed crown - weightless, sacred, and impossible to comprehend.

Nearly invisible from the street level and unlisted in any public network, it reigned in the upper troposphere, tethered to the city below by magnetic veins. Anti-gravity balancers kept it suspended in unnatural stillness, while static-charged clouds swirled beneath its foundation like incense in a cybernetic cathedral.

From the ground, it was myth.

From above, it was doctrine.

For the the elite operatives of the Ascendents - it was holy.

A sky-bound sanctum of translucent alloy and weaponized death, the Crown Array was not just an armory, it was a temple of precision. It was here that soldiers were not made, but refined - their bodies etched in steel, their wills calibrated to silence. They didn't descend to make war anymore. They curated it from above.

Inside, reverence reigned.

Caelus Drae stood motionless in the middle of it, naked from the waist up, arms outstretched like a man prepared for crucifixion. The brace chair behind him hummed, its skeletal restraints fastened around his shoulders, waist, and thighs. Not for security, but for precision. Perfection demanded stillness. He stood like a sculpture given permission to breathe.

His skin was a deep bronze-graphite hue, the kind that seemed to shimmer differently depending on the angle of the light. 38 years old and first generation Ascendent, Caelus adorned a part natural, part synthetic overlay of his skin, designed to regulate heat and deflect signal-based tracking. Beneath the surface, you could see the subtle ridges of subdermal plating, like tectonic lines beneath calm earth.

His jaw was sharp and severe. His mouth almost never smiled, but the shape of it suggested he once knew how. His eyes irised with a faint radial glow, always half-narrowed, not in hostility, but in relentless assessment. He looked at people like he was scanning for their weaknesses - and often, he was.

His hair was kept close-shorn and almost nonexistent, more for tactical efficiency than style. Where follicles once grew, a circuit-web of interface threading remained, visible only when his combat implants flared with current.

A faint scar cut through his right eyebrow, a single human defect left untouched. His posture was perfect. Not in the way of soldiers trained to march, but in the way of weapons waiting to be drawn, and he was itching to be cut loose from his sheath.

The tech-priests moved around him in reverent silence. They weren't actually priests, of course. Just augmentation specialists. But the way they moved; measured, clinical, careful not to break the hush - made them seem like acolytes preparing a divine instrument.

The priests removed his right arm first with ease, a remnant from his last mission. His new orders required more strength, and his reward - the spoils of war, gifted him just that. His new arm clicked in with the agreeable tones of proper alignment, first - three rapid hisses of compressed gas, then a warm surge of fluids flooding through the dermal weave. His digits flexed involuntarily.

His left arm was replaced next. A deeper click. HIs fist automatically closed in response, tight enough to crush steel.

"Calibration at 98.2% efficiency," one of the techs at the console whispered to the room.

"Pulse synchronicity has been normalized. No feedback or communication lag."

Caelus exhaled.

The mask lowered next.

A thin crown of sensors wrapped his forehead, feeding directly into his frontal lobe. Not visual. Not auditory. Just interpretive. His brain wouldn't be seeing the battlefield, it would be understanding it.

"Neural overlay active," the system intoned.

The voice came not from a speaker, but from within his teeth. His jawbone hummed slightly. A side effect of the skeletal resonance, but standard issue for his class.

He opened his eyes.

The world sharpened. Every inch of the armory burst into indexed clarity: thermal signatures, magnetic residue, pressure differentials. His breath echoed like an algorithmic ripple across the room.

He was ready.

"Begin the singularity core activation," he said.

The room paused. Even the techs leaned back. This was the part they never got used to.

A magnetic core, spherical, dense, a singularity of attractive force the size of a human heart - rose from a recess in the floor on top of a thin column of plasma. It pulsed faintly with stored potential: bits of remnant code, resonant frequencies, adaptive AI threads cobbled together from old synthetic minds.

And pieces.

Pieces of the dead.

Scrap metal from destroyed constructs. Bones of machines that had remembered too much. The core didn't just store power. It remembered violence. As a technomancer, Caelus had the unique augmentation of being able to write software to violence like an orchestra. The destroyed remains of his enemies could be repurposed into tools to do his bidding, like a homunculus of war. The singularity kept the weapons and parts bound to the core, floating above it and magnetically restrained- while the software inside of him translated instructions for his battle machinations, much like a summoned pet.

Caelus extended his hand toward it.

Thin filaments leapt from his fingers to the surface of the core, latching on like metallic spider silk in preparation for data transfer. His augments flared with microcurrent as the link was established. This was a necessary step after a configuration change, but it was only temporary.

"Designation?" the system asked.

He thought the name, and the core responded.

A flicker of light swirled within, taking shape.

It didn't yet resemble a being - just limbs. Blades. Joints. The beginnings of a ghost.

"Construct field... compliant. Combat ready in 38 seconds."

"Upload combat heuristics," Caelus ordered.

The system did as he said, as he withdrew the physical connection.

The tech-priests backed away in synchrony, their work complete. Caelus stood at full height now, just over six feet tall, armored in silence, with the magnetic ghost core hovering obediently at his side.

"End calibration. Begin mission protocol."

The lights in the calibration chamber dimmed. A shimmering node blinked to life in the air in front of him. Not a screen, but a presence. Projected in tight-beam luminescence was the face of his mission handler: Kiera Stravik, Intelligence Liaison. She was angular, pale, fit frame, and barely in her 30's. Half-lit from below, no physical augmentations were visible, but Caelus knew better. She was the kind of Ascendent who installed her enhancements internally - the dangerous kind of stealthy assassin.

He had worked with her in the field, watched as she utterly destroyed Synthetic, Purist, and Sovereign alike with no effort. Her unimposing visage was that of beauty and destruction wrapped together in perfect unison. He was unsure why she retired to loneliness of deskwork and data pads, but the reason must've been good. Or terrifying.

"Caelus," she said flatly. "You're receiving this in a private channel routed only to the Array's central uplink. You will not be briefed again."

He nodded once. "Understood."

"Target designation: Falken Mier, Ascendent defector, formerly R&D, Neural Division. Last sighted in the Dead Ring sector, near the data ruins."

Kiera's voice was crisp, clinical - but something shifted at the edges of it. Caelus could hear it. Doubt, maybe. Or discomfort. Neither were common in her dialect.

"Mier probably chose the Ravel Spoke." Caelus pronounced confidently. A crumbling oldword grid-style district wrapped in outdated transit cables and flooded data vaults. Once part of Praxelia's outer data-housing infrastructure. Now, just a maze of collapsed mag-rail tunnels and abandoned informational subnodes. Perfect for hiding. Or losing yourself.

"Mier breached containment protocols during a facility blackout two weeks ago," Kiera continued. "Accessed highly classified material, scrubbed their ID signature, rerouted two courier drones, and slipped past the security net before anyone noticed."

"Do we know his objective?"

"Unknown at this time. We only recovered partial data on the classified augment archives. Experimental psychophysical projects."

Caelus tilted his head slightly. "Wasn't his job researching neural overlays?"

Kiera nodded. "Specifically meta-intention mapping. Advanced reflex prediction. The kind of tech they use in -"

She caught herself. Stopped. Adjusted her tone. "- used, I mean. Used in the deep code layers of the mesh labs. Nothing authorized in months."

He said nothing. He didn't need to. The gaps were where the truth lived.

Kiera pulled the image feed forward - a static-caught frame of Mier's face, pale, shadowed, half-obscured in a grainy magrail station's overhead cam. His eyes were open too wide. Not wild. Not angry. Just... unfocused.

"He's not responding to contact. Last known interaction was an audio log forwarded to a dead channel. Mostly static. Something about 'feeling unmade.' We believe he's paranoid. Certainly hostile."

Caelus studied the image. "Armed?"

Kiera hesitated. Then: "He left with a singularity core. No sign of an active AI construct. But we assume a basic frame reassembled from local parts. He may have been able to upload a combat AI to the core from a remote location, so if you encounter it, neutralize."

Kiera's eyes shifted slightly. "You'll be operating solo. Standard Technomancer loadout, for the most part. Your Singularity AI has been calibrated to match your energy signature. We've also equipped you with a new feature."

The node flickered, and a new module icon blinked into his HUD.

"Its called phase disruption. Localized reality distortion around your arms. Ten seconds in duration."

This was top of the line, even for him. Caelus tried not to sound surprised, but it was difficult. "Experimental?

"Field-tested." Kiera replied.

"On who?"

"You."

A pause.

He didn't smile. But something like it lived behind his eyes for a moment.

"Dismissed," Kiera said. "And Caelus - "

He paused mid-turn.

She leaned forward slightly in the holoprojection. "Don't let him talk to you."

The node winked out. He stood alone again. Only the singularity core pulsed beside him quietly, like it had been listening the whole time. It was time to go.

Caelus headed to the Crown's launch bay, ceremoniously. After all, what was about to happen next was a special occurrence that not just anyone got to experience.

The launch bay of the array was always eerily quiet. Perhaps it was the sheer awe of what unfolded in that space that kept everyone reverent. Never any movement. No commands barked. No engines burned. Just a single corridor - a rail chamber stretching hundreds of meters long, walled in silver and black, humming with low-frequency harmonics that only the augments could hear. On either end: reinforced inertial dampeners, AI-targeting systems, and enough magnetic shielding to invert an entire city grid.

At its core its was bold and daring. Before him was the graviton-pulse wormhole rail system, an absolute pinnacle of human ingenuity - aptly called the Compression Lance. The most sacred weapon in the Ascendent arsenal. It didn't fire missiles.

It reshaped space.

Caelus Drae stood at its base, motionless, arms behind his back. The magnetic interlocks stitched through his spine were already humming against the rail chamber's telemetry. He felt the distortion coming well before the system announced it.

"Field alignment locked. Target: Ravel Spoke. Dead Ring sector."

A grid of gold light traced itself across the launch corridor. Clean, geometric, divine. The sound that followed was not a sound at all, but a pressure drop, like the laws of physics themselves forgot what to do. The walls vibrated with a high, crystalline resonance. Caelus could feel the pulse behind his teeth.

Ahead of him, space began to bend.

It was not a portal. Not a door.

It was as if the distance between two points had simply decided to be less.

The far end of the chamber wavered, a smear of heat and static and impossible nearness. Hundreds of miles of terrain crumpled into an optical wad, like someone folding a map by punching through it. The Compression Lance could literally grab a point in space and pull it closer, stapling it to the foreground.

1300 miles became 13 feet.

And it stabilized.

Not with fanfare, but with absolute silence.

Caelus stepped forward, each footfall syncing with the chamber's pulse. He stood at the edge of the compression field. No command was given. No countdown initiated. He simply stepped into the fold. There was no travel. No motion.

He was just elsewhere.

The air hit him like a confession: sour, metallic, hot with decay. The light dimmed to rust-reds and flickering fluorescents. Broken signage hung from rails warped by heat or worse. The smell of scorched rubber and fried structural polymers clawed at his throat.

The Ravel Spoke.

He turned, but the fold was already gone. No burn. No boom. Just a shiver in reality where the rail beam had touched it. And he was alone.

Caelus stepped forward into the harrowing understructure of the Ravel Spoke - once a thriving memory vault for Praxelia's neural research sector, now a tomb for corrupted data and fractured minds. What happened here was nearly lost to the annals of history. Entire generations were born and died never learning of this place, whispers and secrets were practically its legacy. One of the few surviving rumors is that this is were AI was born - where array after array, system after system begot an emergent sense of identity that threatened the ways of life for the people of Praxelia. That they tried to destroy what they had made, before making it again, anew. This was the ground zero, the birth and death, of synthetic life. Even before Sovereign City was established.

The walls of ruined structures now buzzed with failed encryption, static bleed, and ghost-pulse residuals from experiments left to rot. In the places that still had power, anyway. Which was surprising. Why was there power?

The silence didn't last long.

The first contact came without warning - a synthetic unit burst from a collapsed ceiling duct, limbs like sharpened rebar and eyes full of fractured and malfunctioning subroutines. Caelus didn't flinch. His fist blurred once, arms lit up with violent distortion. The punch landed just beneath the synthetic's jaw—disrupting not just the impact site, but the space around it. Bone or steel, it didn't matter. The synthetic's head collapsed inward with a sound like a crumpled soda can.

Another emerged from the mist, this one sleeker, faster. It dove, arms rotating midair like saw-blades.

Caelus shifted low, let it pass over him, then released an electric Surge in a sharp upward arc. The area-of-effect pulse surged through the enemy's legs as they landed - blowing off the robots legs, locking up motor servos and completely frying their internal gyros. The machine seized mid-swing and collapsed in a graceless tangle of limbs.

The Ravel Spoke was more than abandoned. It was infested. They weren't Purists. They were guardians. Planted. Synced. Programmed to wait for someone like him.

A welcome gauntlet.

He moved forward slowly, hugging the contours of crumbling pillars and collapsed buildings. Where force wasn't necessary, he used silence; slipping through failed sensor arrays, leaping a collapsed gaps of rubble in one fluid motion.

In a narrow corridor lit only by glitching overheads, three synthetics patrolled a array of security terminals. Caelus whistled, softly - digitally, a tone tuned to panic their obsolete auditory sensors. One turned. The other two followed.

They didn't see him flip to the ceiling vent, and definitely didn't hear his magnetic grip engage as he repositioned overhead.

His singularity core hovered beside him, pieces of scrap forming a robo-skeletal combat assistant, its limbs reshaping to match his angle. The two of them dropped together, instantly eviscerating their opponents with crushing blows from above.

Seconds later, the corridor was quiet.

Eventually, he made his way toward one of the more complete buildings, a standing chamber lit in pale blue, lined with cables that pulsed like veins and conduits that hummed like lungs. At the center was Falken Mier.

Or what remained of him.

He sat cross-legged in the center of a neural interface ring, surrounded by prototype uplinks and jury-rigged cognition mirrors. His eyes were wild - his body untouched by violence, but wrecked by something worse.

Connection.

Caelus stepped inside. Mier looked up, but didn't rise.

"Are you it?" he asked softly. "Are you the vector?"

Caelus didn't answer. Mier's eyes glanced down at Caelus's arms, the distortion shimmering around his arms like boiling glass.

Mier screamed. "No- no, no, I locked the lattice... I scrambled the mirrors - you're NOT HIM, you're not the signal, you're a copy, a CORRUPTED ECHO! T-trying to pull me back - "

Caelus hesitated at Mier's panic. Frantic, dangerous energy, like a wounded animal.

Mier backed into the rig, reaching under the main interface hub and pulled out a small black object.

A detonation switch.

"I won't be synchronized!" he screamed. "I WONT BE ABSORBED INTO POSSIBILITY!"

Realizing his plan, Caelus sprinted in the opposite direction with everything he had, but it was too late.

Falken Mier pressed the trigger, and the chamber vanished in a cacophony of light and pressure. An explosion so massive, it registered on the Crown Array's sensors within three seconds. From her data terminal, Kiera Stravik watched the Dead Ring spike with kinetic stress. A detonation, unauthorized. That could only be one thing.

"System, lock onto my operative's augment signature," she said. "Bio-energy pattern, vector Alpha-Four-Seven. Prepare the Lance."

The Compression Lance reoriented, but Caelus Drae's vitals had disappeared completely.

"His signature has been lost," one of the nearby Liasons commented.

"No," Kiera snapped. "It's still there. Just buried."

She keyed in manual override, adjusting the position of the lance based on her computers telemetry. The Lance wound up, focusing its directed energy path, directly at the apex of the seismic detection. The chamber trembled, its magnetic tethers rattling.

"You're pulling back something broken," one of the Liasons muttered.

"I'm pulling back something important," Kiera replied.

The air folded, immediately, without pause, without correction. It wasn't arrival. It was reduction. Caelus Drae's form stitched itself out of proximity and static, pulled from space like a corrupted memory being force-downloaded into matter. For one terrible moment, he arrived sideways.

Joints displaced. Light bent wrong around his shoulders. The violence of the environment of the Ravel Spoke clung to him - shards of reinforced glass, strands of corrupted fibers, screaming in languages the sensors couldn't understand.

Kiera stood at the threshold, unmoving. "He's alive," she uttered.

The chamber sealed. Medical protocols engaged. But it wasn't a recovery, so much as it was containment.

Caelus awoke in phases. There was motion. But no sensation. A feeling like being dragged through water, but the water was numbers, and the current pulsed in binary. He heard voices. Some distant. Some internal. One that sounded like a warning tone. Another like a woman calling orders over static.

Everything was light and blur. Vitals surged, dipped, rose again. Machines spoke to each other in tones he couldn't parse. He sometimes felt his limbs - but not as his own. His body was moving, but clearly not by him. He was being carried. Stabilized. Droned.

Darkness.

Then pressure. Cold on the side of his face.

Then a glow.

White light. Flickering in rhythm with his pulse.

He tried to turn his head but couldn't. Only his eyes tracked the shape that hovered above him. A silhouette framed in surgical halogen, her outline soft-edged by sterilization fields and photonic haze.

He rasped, "Kiera?"

She paused. Tilted her head. Her voice was quieter than Kiera's. Warmer. Less programmed.

"Nova. Nova Cale."

The name hung in the air like a cooling breeze.

"Nova Cale."