POV: Ryuu Takeda
Location: Sector 27 — Outer Rung Access → Bone Market Descent
Time: 05:31 Local
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"You don't walk into the Bone Market. You vanish into it. And if you're lucky—you come back with scars. If not? You don't come back at all. Just your echo, screaming under the grid."
— Anonymous Node Whisper, Red Null Sector Log 77.6.A (erased from record)
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The Bone Market was the city's worst-kept myth. Everyone in the underlevels of Sector 27 whispered about it—but no one ever confirmed it out loud. Not to officials. Not to MIRAGE. Not even to each other.
Because confirming it meant the system might hear you.
And the Bone Market didn't fear the system.
It was the system—stripped bare, teeth-first, sanctioned in silence.
It thrived beneath the "Thermal Recycling Annex," a condemned vent-and-core silo listed as decommissioned after the 3rd Aura Surge Collapse. According to the Federation zoning registry, the grid node didn't exist anymore.
But Ryuu Takeda knew better now.
Aura didn't flicker in the Bone Market. It choked.
Red Null—buried inside the Bone Market's foundation—functioned like a kill-switch for resonance. Vowlines, core signatures, even passive recursion pulses—all of it died on entry. Flares suffocated. Power vanished. Memory twisted sideways.
It wasn't a battlefield. It was ritualized erasure.
Fights weren't broadcast. No biometric telemetry. No trauma fields.
You entered the pit with your name.
You left with scars.
If you left at all.
The arena was layered into a failed cooling shaft, lined with obsolete Knight-tech: cracked anchor plates, salvaged recursion dampeners, half-melted hollowblade cores now used to power betting uplinks. You bled on legacy tech.
Above the pit, one phrase was scratched in mirrored steel:
"Only what breaks can rise."
No crowd roared here—only the silence of deep wagers and the quiet scratching of digital tablets placing bets that decided fates. Spectators sat in broken scaffold rings and watched through polarized visors, their auras dampened by silent-field projectors.
And beneath the pit floor?
Red Null.
A failsafe abyss.
If a fighter lost control, fell into full vow flare, or violated any clause?
They weren't subdued.
They were dropped.
Straight into Red Null, where the city's forgotten tech burned aura signatures into meaningless static. Where no vow was recognized, and no identity was remembered.
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"The Federation files names under 'missing.' The Bone Market files them under 'useful.'"
— Subnet Broadcast, Echo Repeater Node // Source: Unknown
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The entrance wasn't marked.
Because real erasure never needed signs.
Ryuu Takeda stood at the edge of the Outer Rung. The metal underfoot was warped, its rail lines fused with heat scars and time. The grate ahead hung open, half-torn, one bolt still clinging. He could feel it—the shift in pressure, the hum in his bones.
A glyph-tagged arrow—barely visible—absorbed the light instead of reflecting it. Null-reactive ink. Federation-designed, probably. Now repurposed to hide something beneath the law.
He stepped through.
The Bone Market waited below.
---
It wasn't a market. Not really.
Not anymore.
Not since the Red Howl syndicates had turned it into an arena of silence, a brutal-flared blood pit where names burned out and were replaced by alias tags like Crimson Drift or Glassjaw. No Core registration. No MIRAGE audit. Just sweat, teeth, and debt.
The Bone Market was beneath the Thermal Annex—but that was only the top skin. Beneath that was Red Null, a fighting zone layered into the old coolant silos and heat-sink columns of an abandoned reactor grid.
And under that?
No one mapped it.
Because everyone who tried became a match roster entry.
---
The stairwell narrowed.
Graffiti bled into itself on the walls—curse tags, death names, oaths scratched in rust and dried blood.
One line caught his eye:
"They thought I wouldn't return. They were right—I'm still down here."
Another. Below it:
"Sector 8's last clean fighter. Kaito."
Ryuu froze.
That name wasn't new.
But he didn't remember seeing it here.
His breath came slower now.
Not from fear. From memory.
From something stirring.
---
The tunnel ended in silence.
Then: sound.
But not music.
Not cheering.
A pulse. Rhythmic. Low. Mechanical. Like the city breathing from beneath its own grave.
Somewhere, a chant started. Not language—just syllables. Hype. Ritual.
A fight.
---
Two pit-guards stood ahead. Augments in black-market rig. No IDs. One with a bloodline scanner, the other with a headcount slate.
"Name?" the taller one asked.
Ryuu didn't answer.
He held up Haruki's courier watch.
The guard stared at it for a beat too long. "...He yours?"
Ryuu didn't speak. Didn't need to.
The shorter one tapped something into the tablet. "No pit roster. No match history. Off-cycle maybe. No death tag."
Another pause.
"Flagged ghost."
He glanced up.
"You want in?"
Ryuu nodded once.
The bloodline scanner pulsed red.
[AURA CODE: NULL COMPATIBLE]
[VOW SIGNATURE: UNREGISTERED // THREADLINE ACTIVE]
[TEMP ENTRY GRANTED — CLASS: PROSPECT]
The grate opened.
The Bone Market waited.
---
Imagine a stadium built from metal ribs. Chained scaffolding, slag-iron seating, heat mist rising from coolant vents no one serviced anymore. Floodlights flickered above old drainage towers, each carved with recursive glyphs too old to decode.
The arena wasn't a circle. It wasn't clean.
Every part of it had been salvaged, not constructed. Rail plates for flooring. Burnt elevator doors repurposed as barriers. Ventilation towers funneled recycled air into fogged corridors.
Above, an array of hanging monitors flickered names that weren't real. Aliases. Tags.
GHOSTFIRE vs. HOUND UNIT-3
THRESHER vs. SCALD
CRIMSON DRIFT — MIA
Ryuu stopped.
That wasn't Haruki's alias.
It was Kaito's.
Seven years gone.
Buried after a match that was supposed to be off the record.
Why was it flickering now?
Why here? Why now?
---
He passed through the lower ring. Bare light overhead. Too many faces watching from behind visors.
A medic whispered to someone nearby:
"Heard the last courier they dropped in didn't even ignite. Just... folded. Like he knew it wouldn't matter."
Another voice:
"Red Howl's testing thread pressure. Injecting ghostline data. They're pushing for something.
Not sport. Not anymore."
Ryuu kept walking.
Not because he didn't hear them.
Because he did.
And the silence between those voices told him more than the words ever could.
Each step downward felt heavier than the last—not from fear, but from gravity that wasn't entirely physical. It pressed inward, not just from the atmosphere, but from something older. Watching.
Then his comm buzzed.
No ping. No name. Just static.
Then:
[ERROR: DATA INTEGRITY COMPROMISED
01101000 01101111 01110111 01101100
INTERCEPTED: FRACTURED-SKIES-ECHOESLUNAR-BLOOD-BINDING. ANCIENT-VOICES-STIR.
SYSTEM NOTE: CORE-UNSYNCED. SUBJECT_11 UNSTABLE
ASH-WARDEN PROTOCOL: BURNING NULLGODBANE_SIGNAL: NOT YET RECOGNIZED
WARNING:IRON-MOON-RISES. PATTERN-SHIFT-DETECTED]
The screen glitched. Then went dark.
But in the dark, one message remained—The fragmented warning echoed in his skull, more felt than heard, pulling something deep from within memory—or myth, though it never appeared again:
"The beast with a brother's blood shall howl beneath the iron moon."
Ryuu didn't breathe for a moment.
Didn't need to.
His body already knew what came next.
---
Section B–18.
A pit locker.
Then he saw it.
HARUKI T.
Haruki's initials—scratched into the lower panel. Not engraved. Not tagged.
Scratched.
With a key or a nail. Quiet. Deliberate.
He opened it.
Nothing inside.
Except a courier card. Punch-worn. Laminated with old sweat and duct sealant.
[Courier ID – HARUKI T.
Job: Emergency Relay
Status: Non-Combatant]
On the back, in shaky pen:
"Tried to deliver truth. They answered with fists."
---
The Core inside Ryuu surged.
His hand clenched.
He didn't flare. Didn't roar.
But something in the Bone Market flinched.
The glyphs above the entry gate blinked.
Something—some system left behind by an engineer long since buried—detected him.
And called it:
[NEW ENTRANT LOGGED]
[THREADSIGNATURE: FRACTURED VOW // INHERITANCE PENDING]
[MATCH TYPE: INDUCTION]
---
The Federation once tried to measure him like they measured everyone.They ran his blood through vowline readers. Fed his reflex data into think tanks. But every scan failed. Every file flagged him as "resonance-unstable."
He didn't know what that meant.
Only that normal aura users started with Spark—the first ignition, a flicker of light in the dark. From there, most moved to Flare, where their pressure could punch walls or deflect blows. And if they were lucky—or broken enough—they reached Ember, where the aura chose a shape and carved it into the body.
Ryuu never followed that track.
Because something inside him didn't ask permission to burn.And whatever the system couldn't name, it tried to suppress.
Ryuu didn't understand the diagnostics.He only knew this: the fire in his blood didn't come from training.It came from inheritance.And whatever his body had buried, the system couldn't anchor it without burning itself apart.
---
Didn't ask what came next.
Didn't care.
But Ryuu stepped forward.
Because they had used his brother like a message.
And now Ryuu Takeda was going to answer.
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"When the fight finds you… you don't ask who built the arena. You ask who remembers the last scream."
> — Hollow Line Codex, Line 9F
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