Chapter 1: The Fracture

The rain hit the dropship's windshield like shrapnel, thick and fast, blurring the lights of New Kyoto below into a streaking digital smear. Kael Draven sat strapped in, armor clinking with every jolt of turbulence. The mission briefing scrolled silently across his HUD—classified Rift breach, anomaly level: Red. No survivors reported. No radio signals. No data.

Just silence.

The kind of silence that eats soldiers alive.

Across from him, his squad prepared wordlessly. Corporal Tannis checked her grav-rifle’s calibration, its blue coils pulsing with static energy. Sergeant Ives adjusted the auto-targeting node on his shoulder harness, jaw clenched in the cold tension of a man who’d seen too many anomalies go sideways. They were Reapers—special forces trained for Rift intervention. Or at least, that's what the suits called them. Kael just called them what they were:

Ghost-chasers.

He checked his chrono one last time. 0204 hours.

"Draven," came Ives’s voice over squad comms. "No hero crap this time. We’re in and out. Scanners show high entropy flux. Stay sharp."

Kael gave a curt nod, then muttered under his breath, “No promises.”

The dropship banked hard left as they neared the epicenter. The terrain changed below—perfect grids of corporate housing blocks abruptly gave way to a blackened crater. Surrounding the impact zone were twisted buildings, warped like melted plastic, pulsing with an eerie blue glow. A shimmer of energy hung in the air like a veil, distorting everything behind it. Static buzzed through Kael’s earpiece.

"Touchdown in thirty seconds," the pilot warned. "Rift signature's unstable. We don’t linger."

The ramp dropped before the ship fully landed. Reaper boots hit the wet concrete one after another. The silence was instant. No sirens. No civilian panic. Just the hum of the Rift’s aura.

Kael stepped forward and felt it—a low thrumming through the ground, like a heartbeat in reverse. He activated his scanner.

CHRONO-ESSENCE DETECTED
WARNING: TEMPORAL DISTORTIONS PRESENT
RIFT STABILITY: CRITICAL

The crater itself was impossibly still, about a hundred meters wide, its center hosting a spiraling tear in space—bright blue and silver tendrils arcing upward into nothingness.

Kael’s gut clenched. Something was off.

"Eyes up. Tannis, flank right. Draven, with me," Ives ordered, voice tight.

They advanced cautiously, weapons raised. Debris floated near the Rift’s edge—chunks of rock suspended midair like fish in a frozen sea.

And then it happened.

A high-pitched scream tore through the silence—not from a throat, but from the fabric of the world itself. The Rift pulsed.

Then—

Boom.

Light exploded outward. Kael turned just in time to see Tannis ripped from the ground, screaming as she dissolved into glowing strands. Ives tried to fire, but his weapon bent in his hands like rubber. Kael’s legs gave out. The world slowed. Time stuttered.

He saw the Rift split further, like a flower blooming in reverse. Reality peeled open.

And then—

Everything went black.

---

He woke choking on ash and blood.

The sky above him was crimson, and New Kyoto’s skyline was gone—just broken shadows against a blood-lit fog. Kael pushed himself up, groaning as pain wracked every muscle.

He was alone.

His helmet was cracked; the HUD flickered before dying completely. His radio spat static. The crater was still there, but the Rift had changed. It no longer shimmered—it pulsed, slow and deliberate, like a heartbeat. Almost... sentient.

Kael stood. His body felt wrong—too light, yet too slow. He reached down to retrieve his rifle, but as his fingers touched the grip, it crumbled into dust.

And then, he noticed his hand. It was glowing.

Faint lines, like burning circuitry, ran up his forearm—blue and gold, shifting subtly with his pulse. As he watched, time itself seemed to skip—a bird mid-flight nearby paused, reversed, then continued forward again. Kael stumbled back.

“What... what the hell?”

He heard something—no, felt it. A whisper, right behind his ear, though there was no one there.

“Shatterborn...”

He spun, fists clenched. Nothing. Only the Rift behind him, pulsing with lazy menace.

A growl emerged from the shadows—low, inhuman. Kael turned slowly.

From the wreckage came movement. A figure crawled from beneath a collapsed vehicle. Or what had once been a figure. Its skin was translucent, glowing with the same Rift energy that now hummed inside Kael. But its face was wrong—warped, stretched, mouth split too wide.

"Reaper…" it rasped.

Kael’s instincts kicked in. He dodged as the creature lunged, swinging a broken length of rebar. It moved fast—too fast. Time warped around it, stuttering as it flickered left and right. Kael rolled under its next strike and reached instinctively outward—

Time slowed.

His vision blurred, then focused—so sharp it hurt. The creature froze mid-lunge. The world vibrated. Kael raised his hand, and a pulse of blue flame erupted from his palm.

The thing shrieked as it was lifted off the ground and imploded, collapsing into a mist of sparks.

Kael staggered back, breathing hard. The energy around him faded.

"What the—what am I?"

The whisper returned.

“Entropy… incarnate…”

---

He ran.

Through the fractured cityscape, through alleys where time glitched like bad code. He passed a car stuck in an infinite explosion loop—blowing up, rewinding, blowing up again. Street signs flickered between languages. Neon lights blinked in time to an alien rhythm.

He reached the outskirts of the crater zone, stumbling through collapsed fencing and overgrown brush. Somewhere out there, someone had to be alive.

And they’d better have answers.

A light shimmered up ahead—a flicker of movement that didn’t belong to the Rift.

Kael crept closer, stepping around fallen drones and abandoned tactical rigs. The building ahead was intact—a former communications node, half-covered in ivy.

He kicked the door open and entered.

Inside, it was dark. Dust. Old blood.

Then—a click.

“Hold it.”

A laser sight pinned him in place. A female voice, sharp, controlled.

“Drop whatever’s glowing on you, now.”

Kael raised his hands slowly. “I don’t know how.”

A pause. Then footsteps.

From the shadows stepped a woman in worn tactical armor, a hood drawn low over half her face. A small orb floated beside her, humming softly. Her eyes scanned him, then narrowed.

“You were at the Rift. And you're still breathing.”

She lowered the weapon slightly. “That shouldn't be possible.”

Kael studied her. “I could say the same to you.”

She smirked. “Name’s Asha. You just made every scanner on the Eastern Grid blow out. You're radioactive, Reaper-boy.”

Kael exhaled. “Kael. Kael Draven.”

She stepped closer, orb scanning his sigil-marked chest.

“Chrono-surge lines… That’s not tech,” she muttered. “That’s arcane.”

He blinked. “You know what this is?”

“I know it’s not supposed to exist anymore,” she said. “Which means we’ve got a problem.”

Kael stared past her, out the shattered window at the distant Rift pulsing like a star born wrong.

“I think we already do.”

End of Chapter 1