After leaving the shelter, Seyfe drifted back to the only other place he could call home.
The Dead City.
A name earned, not given—whole sections gutted by time, neglect, and the kind of violence that didn't make headlines anymore. This was where he grew up. Where everything started falling apart.
Now, returning as a graduate, a Veiler no less, the irony wasn't lost on him.
The streets hadn't changed. Cracked asphalt webbed with moss. Collapsed buildings resting like broken teeth. And hiding in plain sight were the Echoforms—faint, twitching silhouettes clinging to the shadows. Ghosts of perception. They preyed on the weak, but before a presence like his—someone who had been in the Veiler's crucible—they scattered, trembling just out of sight.
Seyfe walked through them like a breeze through ash. He found himself standing in front of the old train station, the one where he used to sleep in with his makeshift "shelter". It even smelled the same—rust, mildew, the distant ozone crackle of static-choked air.
After taking a glance of his once "home" Seyfe made a decision out of nowhere maybe his sanity is wavering?
He decided. Before chasing after lost Cellik cards and hidden relics in the wild, maybe it was time to clean house.
The gangs in this section weren't strong. Just aggressive. Unchallenged.
They wouldn't expect a return.
Let alone a purge.
This place didn't just break people.
It erased them.
And the gangs that ran it? They were the erasers.
So he made a list. Mentally at first. Then in his Cellik, tagging every gang-affiliated zone and hideout he knew. Every squatters' nest, every underground lot, every upper-floor ruin with a tattered curtain for a door. He knew them all—he had to survive around them.
Two hundred. That was the final count.
It would take time.
But he had nothing but time.
The First Ten were a warm-up. Seyfe struck at night. No warnings. No words. Like a phantom stitched from smoke and blades, he slipped through shadowed alleys and rusted walkways. They were low-tier dealers, flesh-peddlers, and extortionists with makeshift rifles and pipe bombs. He disarmed them with Veiler precision, broke bones without shattering spines, crushed joints instead of skulls.
He made sure they remembered him. He made sure they talked.
Soon, whispers spread through the ruins like wildfire.
"There's a ghost."
"He's killing everyone."
The next fifty were armed, organized. Armed to the teeth with black market weapons and makeshift traps. Seyfe learned to fight dirty from watching them for years—so he outmatched them, not by brute strength, but by anticipation. He rerouted power grids to cut lights. He shorted comms with stolen jammers. In one hideout, he flooded a basement hideaway with coolant foam and locked them in.
He wasn't a hero. He was a shadow burning its way through their empire.
By the time he reached hideout one hundred, they'd started running.
And by one-fifty?
They'd started begging.
But Seyfe didn't stop.
He wasn't driven by vengeance.
He was driven by something deeper: a reckoning.
Every single one of these places had once ignored his cries for help. Laughed as he bled. Stole the little he had. In the worst of them, kids like him were still shackled—starving, beaten, forced to run errands until they broke.
So, Seyfe did what no Veiler or lawman ever bothered to do:
He cleansed the sector.
The final fifty were the heads of the networks. Gang leaders with satellite feeds and their own militia. By then, the sector was on fire, literally. Dozens of buildings collapsed from sabotage. Warehouses ignited in flame. The skyline bled red with smoke and sparks.
And through it all, Seyfe didn't stop.
He didn't speak.
He simply moved.
At hideout 200, where a scumlord named Izzac ran the last stronghold from an old comms tower, Seyfe dragged him out of the broadcast room, threw him from the fourth floor, and set the transmitter ablaze.
The fire that followed would be seen for kilometers.
The city's emergency response didn't even bother to intervene.
Not here.
Not anymore.
By the end of it, the entire district was dead silent.
No gangs.
No smugglers.
No more cries in the night.
Just ashes.
Seyfe stood amidst the smoldering sector. His cadet uniform now scorched, torn at the sleeves, streaked with soot and dried blood.
This was no longer the place that raised him.
This was no longer the place that broke him.
This was a tombstone.
He turned his back to it all and opened his Cellik one last time, eyes scanning through Garuda Hinikaya's archived recordings. Behind one of the old videos, he paused at a moment he'd replayed dozens of times—Garuda pinning a small marker on a worn-out map in the background.
Zone T-97.
Unregistered terrain. Unmapped by current systems.
Lost to most.
But not to Seyfe.
He stared at it for a long second, then whispered to himself:
"Time to get rich off a dead man's wallet."
Seyfe didn't head for the horizon just yet.
After wiping out two hundred hideouts, reducing the whole sector to smoke and cinders, and watching the flames reflect off shattered glass, he didn't walk into the sunset like some hero.
No.
He turned around and went back to Aki Varess's office.
Not out of duty.
Out of necessity.
The Overseer HQ was as sterile and suffocating as ever. The scent of ozone clung to the walls, the hum of distant processors never ceased. Seyfe walked through it like a ghost — burned uniform, boots caked in black ash, bandaged forearm still fresh from the last gang skirmish.
He pushed open the frosted door to Aki's office, and without even waiting for permission, dropped into the metal chair across her desk.
She didn't look up at first.
Then she did.
Then she blinked.
Then, finally, she sighed.
"...You look like a war crime."
"Been a busy few days," Seyfe muttered, brushing a smear of soot from his shoulder.
Aki pinched the bridge of her nose. "Don't tell me."
"I need field rations," he said plainly. "Power packs. A portable shelter unit. Maybe a reinforced knife. If you've got a Zone-Aware datapad, I won't say no either."
A beat passed.
She leaned forward, steepling her fingers. "You realize all of that will go on your record."
"I'm aware."
"Your debt will spike into a bracket so deep, millionaires cry when they hear the interest rate."
Seyfe shrugged. "Then I guess I'll just have to stay alive long enough to pay it off."
She stared at him. Not in pity. Not in admiration.
Just that same neutral, calculated analysis she always gave.
Then she leaned back, keyed a few commands into her console, and tapped a small locker key onto the table between them.
"Locker C-12. Supplies are pre-loaded. GPS is limited past regulation zones — you're on your own in the deep."
He nodded and stood to leave, grabbing the key.
But before he stepped out the door, she added:
"Seyfe… whatever you're about to walk into — make sure you walk out. We're done losing good ones."
He didn't look back.
But he did pause long enough to mutter, just loud enough for her to hear:
"Too late for that."
And with that, he left — carrying only his Cellik, a borrowed survival kit, and the crushing weight of a debt ledger thick enough to bury a city.
Next stop: Zone T-97.
[End of Volume 1: Prologue]