Vahr-Nei slowly grew before us.
From a distance, the planet didn't look dead, which, frankly, would have made everything much simpler. It orbited a red dwarf in the final stages of its existence, and the star's fading light stained half the world in shades of rust while the other half remained submerged in near-total darkness.
There were no blue oceans, no vast stretches of green, no networks of cities glowing like luminous veins through the night.
But there was light.
Sparse, isolated points scattered across the surface, separated by thousands of kilometers of darkness, like embers struggling to stay alive atop the corpse of something enormous.
Tsukumo slowed beside me.
The dark coats we'd stolen in Syfles still concealed our real clothes, and we kept our auras compressed close to our bodies, reduced to the bare minimum necessary to cross space without drawing attention.
Small objects moved in and out of the atmosphere.
Ships, flying creatures, and a handful of individual signatures. Very few followed anything resembling an organized route.
I extended my senses, but found nothing beyond scattered interference, small energy fields, and several signatures far too powerful to belong to ordinary people.
None of them seemed particularly concerned with hiding.
"We'll enter from the dark side," I decided.
Tsukumo nodded, and we altered our trajectory.
Vahr-Nei's atmosphere hit us like a physical wall.
First came the heat, suffocating and oppressive.
Then the smell.
Metal. Sulfur. Stagnant moisture. And something bitter that clung to the back of my throat.
We slowed considerably before passing through the dense clouds covering that hemisphere.
The sky beneath them was even worse.
A heavy mass of gray and purple blocked almost all of the star's light, trapping the surface in permanent twilight while silent lightning flashed through distant clouds.
It wasn't raining, but the air felt too heavily charged to remain still.
We descended farther, and the landscape began to take shape.
Black forests.
Not burned.
Naturally black.
Tall, hollow trees grew in irregular clusters, some leaning at strange angles as though the ground itself had tried to reject them.
We passed over a lake whose surface was completely stagnant, without a single animal drinking along its shores.
An abandoned structure stood near the water, and along one wall, faded white letters were still barely legible.
DO NOT DRINK.
"Lovely place," I muttered as we continued flying.
Tsukumo didn't answer.
His silence said enough.
The coordinates stolen from the Syfles terminal pointed toward a region a few hundred kilometers to the north.
They didn't lead directly to a person or a military base.
Only a commercial district.
The symbol of a circle crossed by three diagonal lines had been associated with dozens of shipments ending there.
We saw the city before reaching it, if the place could even be called a city.
A massive natural depression, probably an ancient crater, tore through the landscape.
Structures made of metal, stone, and materials I couldn't even identify covered its inner walls in successive layers.
Buildings were stacked on top of one another, bridges connected structures at absurd heights, and thick pipes ran through streets and facades.
Red, green, and blue lights blinked without any discernible pattern, turning the bottom of the crater into a mess of color.
No two pieces of architecture matched.
The place hadn't been planned.
It had grown like a tumor.
We landed several kilometers away.
There was no reason to reveal our ability to fly to everyone the moment we arrived.
From there, we continued on foot, dark gravel cracking beneath our boots.
Tsukumo adjusted the stolen coat over his shoulders and gave me a warning look.
"Remember what Kânia said."
"I know."
No one greeted us when we entered.
There were no gates, no guards asking for documents, much less flags or government insignias.
The dirt road simply became a street.
And the street swallowed us whole.
The first thing I noticed was the sheer noise.
Engines growling.
Dozens of languages talking over each other.
Metal scraping across the ground.
Merchants shouting prices.
Heated arguments.
Distorted music pouring out from some underground establishment.
Vahr-Nei wasn't dead.
Quite the opposite.
It was very much alive.
It simply wasn't a kind of life I recognized.
People from countless races walked side by side, the vast majority armed.
I saw a four-armed man carrying rifles across his back and a completely white-skinned woman negotiating over small glowing vials with a creature covered in dark scales.
Two beings who looked like lesser gods crossed the street wearing heavy cloaks, their faces hidden.
No one knelt.
No one even looked at them.
A woman stood reading an advertisement while a man sat beneath the sign eating something.
To everyone there, it was perfectly ordinary.
We found the first symbol about twenty minutes later.
A circle crossed by three diagonal lines, engraved into a crate being carried by two massive mercenaries.
I discreetly touched Tsukumo's arm, but he had already noticed.
We slowed and let the two men cross the street before disappearing into a narrow passage between two buildings.
We followed from a distance.
The alley ended at an elevated loading platform where dozens of identical crates, all bearing the same seal, were being unloaded.
"So we're in the right place," I whispered.
"We're somewhere connected to the right place," Tsukumo corrected.
A man emerged from the warehouse carrying a small data terminal.
A red band was wrapped around his arm, and the workers immediately moved aside to let him pass.
He had authority.
"First, we find out who we're following."
Vahr-Nei seemed worse the deeper we went.
Not because the streets became more ruined.
Quite the opposite.
The inner districts were more organized, cleaner, and visibly wealthier.
And that was exactly what made it so repulsive.
The horror here had accounting.
We passed a contract house where holograms displayed faces and bounties.
Some were wanted alive.
Others dead.
And some were disturbingly labeled:
PROPERTY RECOVERY.
I saw cages being transported inside armored vehicles, but forced myself not to look for too long.
I needed to learn how to control myself.
I couldn't attack everyone who made me want to draw Kazekiba, or I'd ruin everything before we even began.
"HEY, YOU!"
I looked behind me.
No one was there.
"What the hell?"
"What you're looking for isn't in this miserable city."
The voice was already coming from in front of us.
It sounded muffled, like someone speaking from inside a suit of armor.
"I don't know you," Tsukumo said.
I finally looked forward and saw a man sitting there, legs crossed, wearing black armor with a bluish tint.
But what caught my attention most was the enormous red crest flowing from his helmet.
A massive spear with a green tip was planted in the ground beside him.
"And how do you know what we're looking for?" I asked.
"You just crossed the Yorm Belt, killed a few mercenaries at the terminal, and you've been here for several hours."
"Looking for the Messenger who uses this symbol."
He tossed a medallion at my feet.
It bore the exact crest we had been following.
We'd been followed from the very beginning.