The twilight was bleeding through my window when I woke up.
I lay still for a moment — just breathing, trying to hold onto whatever I'd been dreaming. It never worked. The images scattered the way they always had, retreating the moment I reached for them: a grey sky above a ruined landscape, the weight of steel in both hands, a woman with green eyes who looked at me like she knew exactly who I was.
She never stayed long enough for me to ask her name.
I sat up and pressed the back of my hand against my mouth. The room around me was familiar in the way things become when you've spent your whole life in them — my PC setup gleaming on the desk, the shelves Mom called my stylised collection, the faint cyan glow of the city bleeding through the window. Year 291 A.D.D., and Neo City at dawn looked like something built out of a dream itself. Maybe everything did, at this hour.
After D-Day. That was what the calendar counted from — the day the rifts opened, the dungeons came, and the world stopped being what it had been before. Two hundred and some years of learning to live alongside it. Monsters and outbreaks and dungeon breaks, the slow rebuilding of a civilisation that had no choice but to get back up. My mother's generation treated that history the way other people treated the old wars. Something that happened. Something you carried without always knowing you were carrying it.
The dreams had started a week ago.
Not the vague impressions I'd had since childhood — those were easy to dismiss, barely more than static at the edges of sleep, faces without features and voices without words. This past week had been different. Since my sixteenth birthday, something had shifted. The dream I'd just woken from wasn't something I had watched from a safe distance. I had felt it. Ground beneath my feet. Blood in the air. The weight of blades in both hands, like I'd been born holding them, like my arms had always known that particular kind of work.
My suspicion lay with the Obelisk, and with my coming Awakening.
Which was today.
I got up before I could overthink it any further.
The washroom was small but functional. The Elemental Orb fitted to the basin caught the early light as I turned the handle — a sphere of deep blue crystal, smooth as sea glass, the size of my fist, resonance-fitted to the pipes. Water element. The previous tenant had left it behind and Mom had never swapped it out. She was practical about things like that. If it works, it works. It wasn't one of the imprinted ones.
Elemental Orbs came from Telismere. Most useful things did, these days. Small enough to hold but capable of producing more water than a tank you couldn't lift — they imprinted to their user, refused to work for anyone else, and ran on some combination of elemental resonance and whatever magic the other world ran on. that nobody had fully figured out yet. When they ran dry you brought them to a Resource Management office. The Association handled most of the logistics. Another entry on the long list of ways Telismere had quietly made this world livable.
I splashed water on my face and looked up at the mirror.
Black hair. The white streaks cut through it the way they always had, too clean and too deliberate to be anything but natural — though I'd had that argument with most of my class and stopped winning it in third year. Silver eyes. Sharp jaw. My father's features, she told me once. My mother's were the particular lines of my face that she'd given me along with her stubbornness and her habit of being gone before anyone else woke up.
My hand found the amulet before I'd decided to reach for it.
Reflex. Years of doing it without thinking — fingers following the chain down to the pendant, the circular disc of silver etched with runes I'd spent most of my childhood trying to decode, the green gem at its centre that caught light like something that had already decided it was alive. There was a second piece on a shorter chain beside it: a bronze locket, shaped like an eye.
My father's. Both of them.
That was all I had. Mom didn't say much about him — not nothing, she wasn't the kind of person who pretended things hadn't existed — but the subject had a specific shape around it, the particular weight of something she'd decided not to open again. What I knew: he'd left the amulet for me. He'd probably been an Awakener. And whatever had happened to him had made my mother the kind of person who arrived at work before sunrise and came home after I'd already stopped waiting up. Mom didn't tell me about him. So I figured I might find out myself — it was also one of the reasons I wanted to awaken.
I held the pendant for a moment. Then let it go and went to get dressed.
White sleeveless top. Black hoodie half-zipped over it, the kind of comfortable that didn't look like I was trying. Black jeans with the chain at the pocket that my Academy instructor had written me up about twice. White and black shoes, because they still worked.
I checked Mom's room on the way to the kitchen.
Empty. Bed already made with the particular neatness of someone who'd been up for hours. I didn't always know when she slept. I'd stopped asking, same as I'd stopped asking about most things.
She was the management head of the Neo City branch of the Drifter Association — named after the city, which was named after the first person who walked into an Obelisk and came out the other side alive. He'd described what he found well enough that they made him a noun. Now it was just where I lived.
Before the Obelisk came, sixteen years ago, there was the Hunter Association. Hunters were what you called the people who fought dungeon breaks and outbreak zones with dormant abilities they'd activated the hard way — near death, catastrophic stress, conditions that killed more people than they produced. You got your power. You got no instruction. You either figured it out or you became a statistic that people shook their heads at.
The Obelisk changed the math. Walk in at sixteen, complete the Awakening Ceremony, leave with your element properly manifested and a Status Screen that tracked your development like a real-time record of who you were becoming. And most importantly — the right to cross between Earth and Telismere. Seven Obelisks for the entire planet. One ceremony per yearly batch. The waiting list ran long, but it ran. Not everyone could awaken — most would fail. But those who did would have a chance to leave a lasting impact on both worlds.
The time differential was part of why the world had advanced so fast in sixteen years. One day here was twenty-four days in Telismere. Engineers who crossed over came back to Earth having lived a month inside a single day's absence. The technology we used now — the Elemental Orbs, the runic infrastructure, half the city's power grid — none of it existed before the Obelisk arrived. Two thousand years of making do, and then sixteen years of catching up all at once.
Mom had been with the Association since before I was born. She never described what it was like before. I had stopped asking that too.
She'd left breakfast on the dining table.probably with a Note.
Pancakes and eggs, on a plate edged with runes that glowed faintly orange — runic engineering at its most domestic, fire element shaped into something that just kept your food warm while you slept past it. The rune-work was subtle enough that you could almost forget what you were looking at. Almost. Two thousand years in, and magic was furniture. Magic was the basin in my washroom. Magic was the reason I was going to an Academy this morning instead of a funeral.
I ate standing up for the first minute, then sat down when I admitted I was hungry,and Checked the Note left by mother.
I need to reach the Association early. As you know, today is the Awakening Ceremony. Breakfast is on the table. Take care.
— Mom.
No good luck. She wasn't that kind of person. She said it in the pancakes instead, in the runic plate keeping them warm, in the fact that she'd been awake before the city to make sure I didn't walk into the most important day of my life on an empty stomach.
I understood her.
I didn't always like it. But I understood.
I needed to be at the Academy by eight.
I ate. I thought about the woman in the dream — the silver armour and the golden sun emblem, the casual certainty with which she'd said my name, the way she looked at me like I was someone she'd already figured out — and I made myself stop thinking about it. Not yet. Not today. Eventually I'd find out what the dreams were about.
I reached for the amulet without noticing I'd done it. Green gem. Cold silver. The bronze eye staring up at nothing, or at something I couldn't see yet.
I stared at the pendant for a few moments. Then I tucked it beneath my shirt and headed for the Academy.
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Third Person POV:
The balcony of Lucien's apartment was large enough to land five helipads on — which was, more practically, why it doubled as the market district for his floor. Steam curled from a noodle stall two units ahead. Somewhere below, a vendor was arguing with the kind of sustained energy that suggested the argument had been going on since morning and both parties had stopped caring about resolution. Synth-silk, from the sound of it. The good kind, with the mana-weave threading.
Lucien barely registered any of it.
Neo City was a marvel of a city — only two cities hadn't cut their ties with technology: Neo City and Bronze City. Others had technology, but nothing as advanced as these two. Lucien had seen in his Geopolitics class at NC-HD Academy how the Chinese city — Jade City — had embodied the concept of Martial Plains Sects, both orthodox and unorthodox alike.
Neo City was divided into a three-by-three grid of sectors — Outer, Inner, and Centre, crossed with Lower, Middle, and Upper. Lucien lived in the Inner Middle Sector, while the Academy lay in the Centre Upper Sector.
Due to Neo City's Obsidian Obelisk having a smaller radius of coverage on land, engineers had built a vast, high-rise structured base city. At its top centre lay NC-HD Academy, which served as the arrival point for transports — one of which Lucien was now stepping into.
As Lucien entered the transport, his eyes moved toward a girl sitting in the left end seat — curly brown hair , brown eyes. She was Wearing Pink Half jacket and shirt with unicorn fig-Her slim waist was exposed with grey Slim pants and a pink small Bag.She was the only other student from the Inner Middle Sector who attended NC Academy.
What was her name again... ah. Kim Eun-seo.
Probably because her mother was the head of the Merchant Union of the Middle Sector.
Lucien greeted her and sat beside her. They weren't usually on speaking terms, only exchanging minor greetings — but it seemed today wasn't that kind of day.
"So, are you excited for the Awakening Ceremony?" She leaned in slightly toward him.
For a moment, Lucien just looked at her. Then he answered.
"Yes. I just wish I'd become a Drifter. Not just a Hunter."
"Hmm. Me too." She held out her hand. "Kim Eun-seo, Grade B, Class 3A."
He looked at the offered hand for half a second — not long enough to be rude, just long enough to register that they both knew a formal introduction between two people who had shared a transport for years was not what it appeared to be.
He shook it anyway.
"Lucien. Grade A, Class 2B."
The transport began to move, pulling away from the Inner Middle platform and ascending toward Centre Upper with the quiet efficiency of something that had made this journey too many times to find it remarkable. Outside the windows, the city scrolled past — sector after sector, light after light, the ten thousand feet between where he slept and where he would be tested today unspooling in the dark.
Beside him, Kim Eun-seo watched the city too, and said nothing, and waited — thinking about what her instincts, still unawakened, still only half-formed, were telling her.
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