The sky over the Origin had shifted into a bruised, necrotic yellow, a color that suggested a world perpetually caught between a fever and a chill. Aegis moved through the jagged foothills of the basalt range, his body a map of healing scars and deep-seated aches.
Each step was a lesson in the physics of fatigue. His Level 0 status remained a heavy anchor, yet the fifty percent experience he had clawed out of the insect-pit felt like a spark of heat in a frozen wasteland. He was no longer the Monarch who looked down at the world; he was the man who looked through it, searching for the structural weaknesses in a reality that wanted him dead.
The sound of the struggle reached him before he saw it. It was a cacophony of panicked shouts, the rhythmic thud of heavy feet, and a roar so deep it seemed to vibrate the very stones beneath Aegis's boots. He crested a rise of slate-grey rock and looked down into a natural bowl.
