Neo-Ilium didn't scream when the purge began.
It went silent.
Not the silence of peace, but the kind that follows an executioner into a sanctuary.
Across the city, lights flickered off in perfect synchronicity. Holo-ads stuttered. Martial academies shuttered their doors mid-lesson. The CorpNet pulsed once—an invisible wave of synchronized shutdowns that swept from the outer stacks to the gilded heights.
Then came the command.
[HYDRACORES DIRECTIVE: OMEGA-EXCISE PROTOCOL – EXECUTE][TARGET CLASS: UNLICENSED SEED PATH USERS | TERMINATION ORDER: ACTIVE][ASSET ASSIGNED: SUNBLADE, KAVIEN — INQUISITOR RANK 1]
It was not a broadcast.
It was a purge.
In the shadow of Neo-Ilium's oldest sector—Sector Null, once a monastic archive, now a data crucible—a man rose from stasis.
Kavien Sunblade had been many things.
A disciple. A duelist. A corporate prodigy groomed in the Jade Assembly.
Now he was something else.
Stripped of the ornamental robes, he wore matte-black combat cloth reinforced with hex-alloy dermal plates. His face, once engineered for elegance, was now scarred by enhancement grafts that pulsed with combat chi.
On his chest, glowing with static fury, was the seal of Hydracores.
No longer the Ouroboros.
It had split.
The tail devoured.
The glyph beneath it: DELETE.
He stepped into a preparation chamber. Inside were seven combat scrolls.
He erased them all.
And began to write his own.
Jian Lin didn't see the purge begin.
But he felt it.
When he stepped out of the Grand Forge ruins, smoke curling from his sleeves and the memory of the Chimera's scream still echoing in his bones, the sky above Iron Root was already different.
Too still.
No patrols. No surveillance swarms.
Just a signal repeating across dead bandwidth:
[ALL SEED PATHS FLAGGED – EXCISE IN PROGRESS]
Renya met him in the clearing.
Her armor was scorched. Her voice was rough.
"You broke it," she said.
"I broke myself doing it."
"We felt the aftershock. The entire Foundry grid went down."
He looked around.
Fewer rebels than before.
Too few.
"How many—?"
"Six dead. One missing. But we have a window now. You've opened a crack in their system."
A drone dropped from the sky—smoking, lens cracked.
Jian crouched beside it.
Burned into its data plate was the Inquisition glyph.
He paled.
"Sunblade," he said.
Renya's jaw tightened. "He's not a Blade Master anymore."
"I know."
She handed him a chip—Kai's key.
"The Sand Vaults are real," she said. "The coordinates are locked inside this. We decrypted part of it. It's not just a vault."
"What is it?"
"A map," she whispered. "To the origin of seed-writing."
Jian looked down at the chip. His name was written in blood and memory now.
"I'm not leaving."
"You're not running," she corrected. "You're carrying us forward. Go before they close the shield grid. I'll send you a contact."
Jian nodded.
Then ran.
In the upper city, behind titanium glass and walls built to stop orbital bombardment, Hydracores convened in digital silence.
Board members—barely human—watched the purge map update.
Each dot that disappeared confirmed containment.
But one remained.
STRAY
A pause.
"He's evolving faster than prediction."
"Then increase the pressure."
"We gave Sunblade one command."
"Terminate the story."
The purge tore through Neo-Ilium.
In the lower stacks, six unlicensed disciples were burned alive when their style vaults were detonated mid-download. In Sector 7, a dojo turned refugee camp was surrounded and its defenders overwhelmed by suppressor mechs. Their final broadcast looped twice:
"A style isn't what you learn. It's what you survive."
In the Night Market, rogue chi-binders formed a firewall around an Archive fragment. They held the line for seven hours. When they fell, the streets glowed with ruptured chi—evidence of unapproved legacy traces Hydracores would try to erase.
But none of it could stop the echo now spreading through the city.
Stray.
Stray.
The seed that wouldn't break.
Jian rode the under-rail in a stolen courier rig—its chi engine overheating, patched with broken plating, his breath ragged from radiation exposure.
[STEALTH MASK: 19% INTEGRITY][TRACE RESISTANCE: FAILING]
He hunched beneath the dashboard, blood soaked into his boots. His shoulder had torn during the last leap over a containment drone. Every muscle screamed.
But he couldn't stop.
He wouldn't.
Every movement of his limbs wrote fragments into his HUD—micro-style traces recording every improvisation.
[NEW NODE SIGNATURE: UNNAMED – SYNC PENDING]
He was no longer carrying a scroll.
He was one.
In Sector Four, Kavien stood over a dying disciple—one of Jian's old tournament rivals. Her hands had been shattered, her seed path corrupted by a forced overwrite.
She looked up at Kavien and asked, "Why?"
He didn't answer.
He didn't need to.
His orders were absolute.
He placed a hand on her heart.
Her chi flickered, then died.
Another node erased.
Another path deleted.
But he still couldn't catch up to the one that mattered.
Stray.
His HUD blinked.
A trace.
Recent.
Heading for the outer edge.
Jian collapsed beneath a broken statue in Sector 0—an ancient monument to a martial god no one remembered. His vision blurred. His implant buzzed with heat.
But the chip Kai left glowed in his palm.
He pressed it into his scroll interface.
The map unfolded.
Not in roads.
In style branches.
A journey written in motion. Coordinates embedded in techniques. Scrolls mapped to landscape. Footsteps aligned with stances.
The Sand Vaults weren't behind a door.
They were at the end of a fight only one style could finish.
His.
The comms cracked to life.
Renya's voice.
Faint. Scorched by static.
"Stray. They're inside. Kavien is hunting active nodes across the city. He's not purging scrolls—he's hunting you. He thinks if he ends your path, the rest of us forget how to walk."
"He's wrong."
"But you won't beat him alone. Get to the Vaults. Unlock what Kai left. Rewrite what they've tried to erase."
Jian stood, hands trembling.
Not from fear.
From heat.
His chi was changing again.
Adapting to threat.
Evolving.
He looked down at the cracked tile beneath him and whispered a form that hadn't been written yet:
"Ash-Step Breakpoint."
The air shifted.
A new node opened.
And in the darkness above, far across the city, Kavien Sunblade locked onto the signal.
He smiled.
And vanished into the night.