The rising sun was veiled behind a sickly haze as Shadow Requiem rolled out of the city. Their convoy—a pair of armored grav-rigs and a single scout cycle—cut through the skeletal remains of Celestria's outskirts, where nature and decay waged a silent war over rusted metal and broken glass.

  No one spoke much.

  The air was filled with the low hum of anti-grav engines and the subtle clicks of weapon checks and recalibrated scanners. Mason sat at the wheel of the lead rig, stone-faced, his gauntlets gripping the controls like they were an extension of his own bones. Aerin perched atop the vehicle, her hair tied back, visor down, scanning the horizon. Jenna monitored their rear, riding the scout bike, never too far behind.

  Inside the second rig, Silas sat at the front bench, hands wrapped in fingerless gloves, arms crossed, jaw tight. The red scarf from Jace still hung from his forearm, a silent vow wrapped in wool. Elena sat beside him, reviewing encrypted files on her data deck, her eyes flickering with interface code.

  Kai knelt near the medkit, packing and repacking supplies, occasionally glancing up at Silas with quiet concern.

  “Signal’s narrowing,” Elena said suddenly. “We’re close. Maybe five clicks out. Coordinates match the last Dominion drop relay before Ashfall turned into a dead zone.”

  Silas nodded but said nothing.

  The Ashfall Wastes came into view minutes later.

  They looked like a sea of grey and black—ashen fields, broken towers, and rivers of glass twisted by ancient fires. The sky above crackled with arcane static, remnants of the war that had once raged here. The land reeked of old death, and worse, memory.

  They parked the rigs just outside the relay station.

  The building was half-buried beneath collapsed rubble, its spire snapped like a broken bone. Elena led the infiltration, Kai and Mason following close behind. They pushed through rusted security doors and descended into a subterranean vault where Dominion tech still flickered dimly, pulsing with forgotten data.

  “I’ll need five minutes,” Elena said, fingers flying across her deck.

  “Make it two,” Silas said. “This place is humming with aftershocks. Feels like ghosts breathing down my neck.”

  Elena didn’t argue. She worked faster.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  A click. A whir. A pulse.

  The core lit up.

  Dozens of fragmented files streamed into Elena’s display. She filtered through them rapidly—logs, coordinates, encrypted orders. Then she froze.

  “Silas…”

  He was already beside her, eyes narrowing.

  “What is it?”

  She played the footage.

  A grainy hologram projected into the room. It was Sunspire. The garden. Children laughing—Lily among them. The footage shifted, glitching as cloaked figures emerged from the treeline. Not Dominion soldiers. No insignia. Masked, like shadows made flesh.

  One of them paused… and stared directly at the surveillance node, like they knew it was there.

  “They weren’t just attacking a civilian center,” Elena whispered. “They were targeting someone specific.”

  She zoomed in. One of the figures held a scanner, showing a profile—Lily’s. Her name. Her energy signature. Marked in red.

  Target: Confirmed.

  Silas’s heart stopped.

  “Lily wasn’t collateral,” Elena said, voice breaking. “She was the objective.”

  Silas turned away from the projection. His fists clenched so tight, blood beaded from reopened scars.

  “They knew,” he growled. “They knew who she was. What she meant to me.”

  Kai stepped forward. “It’s worse than that. This signature… it’s old Dominion tech. But the encryption? That’s Iron Dominion protocol. Someone high up authorized this.”

  Jenna spoke from the shadows. “Betrayal from within. The kind that rots nations.”

  Silas didn’t speak. He stormed from the relay chamber, out into the ash-choked air.

  The ground trembled beneath his feet. Energy flickered along his arms. Purple smoke began to hiss from his skin, coiling like serpents. Kai chased after him.

  “Silas! Not here!”

  But it was too late.

  Silas let out a roar that cracked the air. Lightning—cyan and vicious—snapped through the cloud. The very earth shook. A surge of magic warped the air around him.

  Kai tackled him into a makeshift barrier of debris. “You want to collapse the whole zone? Control it!”

  Silas slammed his fists into the earth. The smoke retreated. His breath came in heaves.

  “I saw her face again,” he whispered. “When the smoke came. Her hologram. Like before.”

  Kai looked shaken. “You’re changing, Silas. Evolving. This isn’t just grief—it’s awakening. We need to be ready for what that means.”

  Silas stood slowly.

  “No more running. No more mourning. We go into the Ashfall. We find who ordered this. And we end it.”

  The rest of Shadow Requiem regrouped outside.

  “We move east,” Elena said. “Into the heart of the Wastes. There’s an old black market hub. If anyone knows where these masked bastards came from, it’s there.”

  “And if they don’t?” Jenna asked.

  “Then we burn it down and move to the next.”

  Silas’s voice cut through the fog.

  “We don’t stop. Not until every last one of them is dust.”

  The team nodded. The wind howled. And together, they disappeared into the smoke.

  To be continued...