The world didn't just slow after he vanished—it went hollow.
It had been three days since the beam of light swallowed Hasphien whole in the center of his own home. Three days of silence, of questions clawing at the inside of my skull like trapped birds. Three days of a dry, suffocating guilt that ate at my insides like a charcoal fire—one I couldn't put out, no matter how much ambient wind I channeled to try and blow the heat away from my lungs.
While the rest of the Upper Iris district seemed completely unaffected by the sudden disappearance of The Artificer—and the reality-bending light that had swallowed his son whole—I had been summoned directly into the GRID.
Following the assessment, I had thrown myself completely into Sector Alpha's elite training track—using my high scores less like an achievement and more like an escape pod. Here, under the blinding, clinical hum of the high-fidelity simulators, I found my only reprieve. Focus wasn't just required; it was a lifeline. Moving through the brutal, high-output tactical drills, I forced my mind to sharpen into a cold, defensive razor. The punishing rhythm of combat action became my only sanctuary, because as long as my body was breaking, there was no room for the dull, heavy ache of Hasphien's absence.
Weakness wasn't tolerated within the perimeter of the installation. The GRID didn't care about your grief; it only calculated your metrics.
"Again!"
The voice didn't just carry across the platform; it commanded the very air density of the arena. The Iron Proctor, Instructor Reznor Zerro, stood at the lip of the observation deck, his arms folded behind his back like iron rods.
He was a man built entirely of sharp angles and unyielding lessons. His charcoal-grey GRID uniform was pressed with a military precision that bordered on lethal, the fabric stiff against the frame of his magitech-fueled armor suit. A jagged, pale scar traced a path from his jawline up to the edge of the leather eyepatch covering his left eye—a grim relic of a high-tier Breach that should have torn him apart. His remaining eye, a piercing, cold amber, never left my silhouette. It didn't track my movements; it judged them. To Reznor, we weren't students to be nurtured. We were raw materials being dumped into a forge, and he was the hammer meant to break our imperfections.
My knuckles were raw, the skin across my wrists aching from the repeated, violent channeling of high-velocity atmospheric currents. Sweat dripped into my eyes, stinging the lids; my throat burned as if I had swallowed dry ash.
High above the central ring, the tactical core pulsed with rhythmic arcs of raw mana, measuring each cadet's spell force with an indifferent, digital precision. Its low, magnetic hum thrummed through the reinforced floorboards, synchronizing uncomfortably with my own racing pulse.
"Better. Faster on the pivot. Again!"
Reznor didn't even blink as the sonic boom of my last gale-blast rattled the reinforced observation glass. He stood there, a shadow cast in steel, his single amber eye tracking the minute, microscopic tremors in my fingers.
My chest heaved, each breath a jagged blade of air sliding down my trachea. My vision blurred at the margins, the edges of the simulation arena dissolving into a grey, static-filled haze. Every nerve in my body was screaming—begging for a single second of stillness, a drop of water, a heartbeat of rest.
But I didn't slow down. I couldn't.
Every time my muscles threatened to give out, I saw that vertical beam of light again. I felt the cold phantom of Hasphien's hand slipping through my reach, the weight of his absence pulling him into a vacuum I couldn't see. The GRID demanded perfection for the sake of the district's defense, but I was demanding a miracle from my own blood. I wasn't training to be a soldier anymore; I was training to be a crowbar that could pry open the boundaries between worlds.
I dug my boots into the reinforced floor, absorbing the vibrations of the core. If I collapsed now, I would be leaving him in the dark. If I stayed weak, the silence won.
"Tempest Serpent..." I rasped, the incantation tasting like copper on my tongue.
I twisted the wind currents violently around my right forearm, forcing the atmospheric pressure to compress until it formed a coiling, serpentine blade of condensed kinetic force. The air shrieked in protest. I drove the strike forward, the serpent lunging across the ring and slicing through the reinforced iron-oak dummy with a roar like a localized hurricane. The impact scattered shards of enchanted wood and splintered steel into the observation screens.
When the final target finally shredded into gray dust, I staggered back half a step, my knees locking as I tried to keep my equilibrium from shattering.
The arena fell into a sudden, pressurized silence. The ambient murmurs of the observing cadets died out completely. My teammates stared from the benches, their eyes wide, their own focus broken by the raw violence of the discharge.
At the edge of the platform, the Iron Proctor's stern expression cracked into a microscopic, single-degree nod of approval.
"Well done, Wallev," Reznor said, his voice low but carrying across the training ground without the aid of a microphone. "The compression was... sufficient. Dismissed."
Before, I had coasted through the academy's requirements on a cloud of easy, systematic arrogance. My natural talent didn't just carry me; it insulated me from the friction of hard work. Precision was my personal trademark—a sharp, effortless set of tools that set me apart from the "grinders" who had to sweat for their achievements. I was the best in the class, and I made sure GRID knew it, smirking while the other cadets drenched the mats in sweat, lazily excelling while they bled for an inch of structural progress.
Now, the smirk was gone.
I was the first shadow to arrive on the training grounds, waking before the morning bells even shivered in their iron towers. I stayed longer than the instructors, my silhouette the last thing the security drones scanned before the installation entered its midnight power cycle. I ran until my legs collapsed into the gravel pits outside the barracks. I cast until the skin on my palms blistered, split, and wept clear fluid, my own wind friction searing the flesh it was supposed to protect.
Every calorie, every breath, and every drop of salt was a down payment on a debt I couldn't yet calculate.
And when the deep night finally fell over the GRID dormitories—when the silence of the walls began to push in like a physical weight against my temples—I lay perfectly awake. I stared at the sterile ceiling grids, or the cold, indifferent stars beyond the glass, and whispered a single question into the dark:
"Where are you, Hashy?"
----------
The next afternoon, the routine didn't change. After the final combat simulation had concluded, I dragged my body into the locker room, my hands unsteady as I peeled back the blood-stained linen bandages around my wrists. The thin, white cuts from the wind-friction were raw, still bleeding slightly where the skin had split during the final sequence.
"Hey, Wallev," Elyx called out from across the iron benches, his voice gentle but edged with that annoying, cautious concern they all had now. "Aren't you pushing yourself too hard... are you even sleeping?"
"I'm fine," I muttered, keeping my eyes locked on the floorboards, refusing to let him see the state of my pupils.
He walked over, sitting on the bench beside me, his eyes lingering on the raw skin of my forearms. "You sure? You've been redlining your output higher than anyone in Sector Alpha. It's only been three days of intensive training, and no one's even within twenty percent of your score. Give yourself a break before you collapse."
I just nodded, my jaw clenched until it ached. He stood up with a small, defeated sigh and headed toward the shower stalls, leaving me alone with the low, hydraulic hum of the drainage pipes.
To them, it looked like a drive. Hunger. The natural determination of an elite cadet preparing for the front lines.
But I knew better.
It wasn't grit. It was a parasite. It was a living, breathing guilt that nested in the hollow of my chest, feeding on every clean breath I took while my friend was stranded in a vacuum. If only I hadn't sulked that afternoon. If I hadn't let my stupid, fragile pride get in the way. If only I'd felt the shift in the ambient mana sooner—if the wind had answered my call one second earlier, before the light closed and took him.
The thoughts didn't just pass through my mind; they gnawed at the bone. They were a constant, merciless static behind every spell I cast, a reminder that no matter how many practice targets I shattered, I was still the boy who hadn't been fast enough to hold the door open.
----------
Later that evening, I hauled my body down the endless, sterile corridors of the Upper Iris GRID Headquarters. The air was never truly still within the facility; muffled detonations from the lower ballistic wings constantly reverberated through the metallic floorboards, vibrating up through my boots.
Holographic glyphs pulsed along the walls in glowing streams of cerulean light, displaying real-time spell metrics and mana-output graphs for the upper-tier cadets. Below the glass walkways, the Wing Alpha dormitories overlooked the central practice arena—a massive, sunken theater of war buzzing with the distant, rhythmic training of an army being manufactured under Reznor's eye.
But my mind wasn't in the installation. It was stuck in the quiet living room of Hashy's home.
The memory played on a continuous, broken loop behind my eyes. Hashy had never glowed. Not during the Celestial Weave, when the rest of our peers were vibrating with the birth of their Arkan Threads.
And yet, he had vanished with more pure, blinding radiance than any high-tier mage I had ever seen.
The realization sat like lead in my stomach. It wasn't a freak surge of local mana. It felt precise. Intentionally timed. As if his entire life—the silence, the missing years of his power, the lack of an Arkan—was an elaborate script written by a hand we couldn't see.
I stopped in front of the massive viewing glass, watching a group of first-years struggle with a basic gravity field. I wasn't just looking for a lost friend anymore. I was looking for whoever had engineered the lie.
----------
By midnight, I found myself on the roof of the dormitory wing. The wind coiled around my ankles, sharp, biting, and aggressive, as though urging me to jump into the current. I hugged my arms tight against my uniform coat and stared at the city lights below, then up at the stars.
"I don't care if you're across the world, Hashy," I murmured, my voice raw and cracking against the dry air of the skyline. "I'll find the path. No matter what metrics I have to break to get there."
The wind stirred at my command, a sudden, firm pressure that lifted my hair and carried the vow out into the black expanse of the Upper Iris skyline.
For one single heartbeat, the atmosphere high above the spires seemed to glitch.
Something flickered against the stars—a sharp, microscopic glimmer of blue static, like a broken thread of cerulean light struggling to stitch itself into the heavens. It was gone before my lungs could expand again, leaving nothing but an afterimage against my retinas.
My breath froze in my throat. My eyes narrowed, tracking the exact vector where the reality of the sky had just blinked.
"...You better not be making new friends," I whispered, a ghost of my old, arrogant smirk tugging at the corner of my mouth before the weight of the silence pulled it back down.
----------
A few more days passed before the proctors finally granted us a twenty-four-hour leave outside the facility perimeter.
The moment the security gates cleared my profile, I didn't head to the commercial sectors. I went straight to Hashy's house, half-hoping, half-praying that the whole thing had been a simulation error and he would be sitting on his bed.
The front gate groaned in protest as I pushed it open. A faint, cold metallic tang hung in the air—the smell of old tools and kitchenware left untouched for too long.
Nothing inside had changed. A thin layer of grey dust lay thick over the dining room table, where a single ceramic cup still sat near the edge, as if he had simply stepped into the other room for a second. Time itself seemed to have paused within the walls, freezing the space in the exact shape of his departure.
I caught a sudden, vivid flicker of memory—us laughing around that very table, savoring the heavy, roasted dishes Sir Thiago used to prepare after our long sessions, the warmth of those afternoons now completely suspended in the damp chill of the house.
I didn't stay long. Just long enough to let the ache in my chest solidify. I locked the iron gate behind me, as though closing the door on a vault, and walked back toward my own quarters.
I had lived alone for most of my life. My parents' work kept them detached from the central district, and I had never minded the isolation before—it was quiet, predictable, and easy to manage. But without Hashy, I realized just how loud silence could actually be. I hadn't known it was possible for a house to feel so empty that the sound of my own uniform boots against the floorboards felt hollow.
I stepped into my living room, the air thick with the scent of old parchment and the distant, mechanical hum of the city's power grid. My eyes drifted automatically to the family portrait hanging above the main shelf.
It was a window into a life that felt a century away. My parents stood on either side of my younger self, their smiles bright, genuine, and completely unburdened by the specific secrets I was now carrying. They were wearing their formal ARCHIVE suits, the heavy, scholarly navy fabric immaculate under the studio lights. The embroidered symbol patches on their shoulders—the stylized compass overlapping a data-stream—glinted sharply.
ARCHIVE: Advanced Rovers Collecting Hyperdata Intelligence Via Exploration.
It was more than just a title to them. It was a lifestyle. They weren't front-line combat units like Reznor; they were the analytical bedrock of the district, elite seekers tasked with tracking down structural anomalies for Upper Iris itself. Every byte of hyperdata they retrieved was funneled straight back into the central command grid to fortify the city's intel. They believed that every data had a history, and that every shadow held a piece of missing information essential to keeping our world stable.
They had been gone for three years now, stationed in the deep wastes of Shasta to investigate the lost-in-sand empire. I used to think their work was the farthest thing from my reality, always buried in ancient logs and geological expeditions... but now, standing in the quiet of my own room, I understood.
Distance hurts, whether it's measured in miles or memories.
RINGGGGG!
The violent vibration of my comm-device broke the silence, the screen flashing with an incoming encrypted link. I swiped the interface open.
"Hey, son! How are you holding up? General Atticus and Instructor Reznor both mentioned your baseline scores are breaking records in the GRID!" My mother's voice bubbled through the speaker, high-energy but laced with that instinctive maternal scan.
"That's fantastic to hear, kid," my father's voice chimed in from somewhere behind her terminal, his tone light and proud. "Finally, an efficiency report I can actually brag about to the junior staff here at the excavation site!"
"It was just a standard drill," I muttered, rubbing the back of my neck, the uniform collar chafing against my skin. Compliments always felt misplaced now unless they were delivered in Hashy's dry, unimpressed tone.
"Wait—what is that on your forearm? Are you bleeding?!" My mother's voice pitched higher, her holographic image shifting as she tried to get a better angle on the lens.
"Huh? Where?" My dad's voice dropped its humor, his face appearing near the margin of the screen.
"It's nothing," I said quickly, pulling the dark sleeve of my coat down over the fresh linen wraps. "Just a protective bandage from yesterday's high-output compression training. Reznor's drills are... thorough."
A brief pause hung over the link. My mother let out a sharp, exhaled sigh, her shoulders relaxing slightly. "I see... Well, it is your scheduled rest cycle, so make sure you're utilizing the downtime properly."
"And keep your calorie intake high, alright?" my father added, his energy bouncing back as he gestured toward something off-screen. "Oh—wait until you see the data streams we pulled from the third quadrant today! There's a localized spatial anomaly buried under the sand that looks exactly like—"
"Oh, hush, Filbert!" my mother interrupted, her tone practical but affectionate as she nudged him away from the main transmitter. "We'll be back within the sub-cycle anyway. Save the research logs for when we're sitting in the kitchen. Let our son rest."
"Fine, fine. Get some sleep, son," my father laughed, his image waving.
"We love you, bye!"
The connection cut out with a clean digital click.
The silence that followed the transmission was heavier than the sonic booms in Wing Alpha's arena. It was a dense, physical weight that settled over the polished furniture and pressed hard against my sternum.
I set the device down on the scarred wood of the coffee table—the dull clatter sounding too loud in the empty flat—and collapsed backward onto the sofa. I threw my right forearm over my eyes, trying to force the room to go black, trying to pretend for one single heartbeat that I was just a normal student exhausted from a normal day of classes.
Then the guilt crept back in—slow, cold, and perfectly systematic, like a rising tide in a locked cellar. It started in my gut and wound its way up to my throat until I could taste the copper of my own physical exhaustion all over again.
"I just hope that when I open my eyes..." I whispered into the dark curve of my elbow, my voice disappearing into the fabric of my coat, "...you're already standing there."
The empty room swallowed the words like a secret it had no intention of keeping. Outside, the distant towers of the Upper Iris power grid continued their mechanical, rhythmic pulse, completely indifferent to the fact that the house felt half-empty, and I was the only one left to notice the light was gone.