System, please just shut up

The flames had died down. The screaming had stopped. But the silence that replaced it was far worse.

Kael sat on the steps of a crumbled fountain, his forearms resting on his knees, his hands stained with dust, sweat, and faint streaks of dried mana-burn.

The plaza around them—once a kaleidoscope of festival colors and life—was now a graveyard of broken stone and shattered relics. The air, thick with the scent of ozone and fear, still hummed with residual, corrupted magic.

He wasn't physically injured, but he felt bruised on a deeper level, his mind replaying the sight of ordinary people turning into mindless, feral monsters.

Theo stood nearby, tossing a faintly glowing mana stone between his hands, his expression as unreadable as ever, his eyes scanning the aftermath.

Jarik leaned against a shattered lamppost, arms crossed, his usual cocky grin nowhere to be found.

The girl—still unnamed—sat upside down on the edge of a ruined canopy, one leg dangling, her hood pushed back. She looked utterly unbothered, but her eyes, sharp and calculating, tracked every movement, every flickering shadow.

Commander Nyra, her black armor scratched but gleaming, paced silently in front of a line of stretchers, her presence a silent testament to the gravity of the situation.

"He's here," she said simply, her voice low.

Just then, a ripple of restrained energy pulsed at the edge of the square, and the air around them seemed to grow unnaturally still.

A man approached, walking calmly through the ruin and around the restraint teams. He was tall, robed in layered garments of pale violet and iron gray, marked with sigils that shimmered faintly beneath his breath. Slender and composed, his eyes were completely white—not from blindness, but from a saturation of mana.

Around him, the air felt different, as if everything nearby had paused just to listen to him.

"Who?" Jarik murmured, his voice laced with confusion.

"Answers," Nyra confirmed, her gaze locked on the approaching figure.

The man stopped a few paces from them and offered a polite nod to Nyra. Then his gaze, unreadable and heavy, turned toward Kael and the others. "I've seen enough," he said, his voice low and calm.

Nyra gestured subtly. "And?"

He exhaled slowly through his nose. "They weren't possessed by individual entities… it was a linked intrusion. A swarm of corrupted echoes feeding off a central anchor."

Kael frowned, the words feeling heavy and dark. "What's an echo?"

"A memory without a soul," the man explained, his white eyes never leaving Kael's. "A fragment of thought or pain that should have faded with the body. But these ones didn't. They were preserved, harvested… twisted." His gaze shifted toward the cracked stones beneath their feet. "And they're being directed."

Jarik straightened, his bravado returning in the face of a concrete enemy. "By what?"

The man's gaze turned cold. "That's what I intend to find out."

He walked to the center of the plaza, where mana stains still clung to the stone like oil. Drawing in a slow breath, he raised a small shard of spirit glass and pressed it to the ground.

The glass hummed, and a second later, a cold wind—unnatural, sharp, and heavy with pressure—blew through the square. Kael felt the hair on his neck rise. Even the city lights flickered briefly. Then the ground pulsed beneath their feet.

"There's something wrong with the foundation," the man said, frowning. "A gap in the weave… no, a puncture." He turned sharply to Nyra.

"There's an underground site not far from here. Sealed, or at least it used to be. I'm detecting heavy residual corruption—enough to suggest active ritual use in the last twenty-four hours."

Nyra didn't hesitate. "Take us there."

The man gave a small nod and turned, walking without another word. The group followed, the air growing colder with each step as they descended a back alley path, past an abandoned smithy and toward an unmarked drainage corridor chiseled into the city's deeper levels. The deeper they went, the more unnatural the silence became.

No dripping water, no scuttling rats, no distant city hum—just a profound, dead quiet that swallowed all sound. They moved in a single, tense file, the only light coming from Theo's rune orb, which cast long, dancing shadows on the grimy walls. Kael's hand instinctively went to the empty space on his hip where his sword should have been, the absence a fresh, frustrating ache.

Finally, the man stopped before a sealed grate—massive, old, covered in rust and forgotten glyphs. He didn't touch it.

He simply stepped aside and whispered, "You'll want to see this for yourselves."

Nyra moved forward slowly, pushing the gate open with a grunt. The rusted hinges shrieked in protest, a sound that felt deafening in the silence.

The air that rushed out smelled of rot and metal and something else—something sour and wrong, like burning blood. The tunnel beyond was dark, but not empty. Faint, flickering light from Theo's rune orb illuminated the chamber just ahead.

And on the walls—dozens of bodies.

They all froze.

The corpses were upright, as if glued into place by some organic, black resin that webbed across the stone like veins. Some had faces still visible, frozen in silent screams. Others had none at all—hollowed clean, as if something had crawled inside and worn them like a mask. No blood. No wounds.

Just emptiness. A horrifying, hollowed-out stillness that was far more disturbing than a scene of carnage.

Jarik cursed under his breath, a choked, guttural sound.

The girl who'd stolen Kael's sword—even she looked uncomfortable now, her usual smirk gone, replaced by a deep frown as she stared at the macabre display.

"They're empty," the spirit mage said, his voice quiet but echoing in the tomb-like space. "Drained of all spiritual essence. Used as amplifiers."

Kael's voice was barely a whisper. "For what?"

The spirit mage looked at him with a grim, quiet finality. "A gate," he said, pointing toward the far end of the chamber—where a circle of obsidian spikes ringed a cracked ritual platform, still humming faintly with pulsing, corrupted light.

"The Choir has been here," he finished, his voice somber. "And it looks like they've only just begun."