Neglect isn't always loud.Sometimes it rots in silence — slowly, methodically — until it eats through the psyche and leaves behind something brittle. Unstable. Something easily misunderstood and just as easily discarded. That's when society slaps on a label. Villain. Monster. Threat.Even if all it ever was… was pain.
Such was the case of Inger Holter.A child of Corvezant South — one of its forgotten zones. Her augment name: Payload.One mistake.One accident.One tragedy swept under the rug.
She was fifteen when it happened.
Reports called her unstable. Born wrong. A hazard in the making. But eyewitness accounts told a different story — one where her powers barely manifested, if at all. A dud, they said. Payload. A word that usually meant purpose, delivery, transformation. Yet hers was a name coated in ambiguity — a function without activation, a title without context.
Because of that, she became a target.
She wasn't striking. Average-looking, quiet, unassuming.That made her easy.Easy to ridicule.Easy to isolate.Easy to hurt.
At school, she wore pain like a second skin — her limbs wrapped in gauze, her arms dotted with band-aids. Not from battle. From survival. She came from a place no child should — a crumbling apartment in the lower slums, raised by a single mother whose priorities drifted wherever the next bottle or man appeared. Cheap perfume mixed with cheaper liquor. Her home was not a home, just a holding cell for disappointment.
They were happy once, or at least her mother pretended they could be. There was a night, a man — a hero — and fleeting hope. A dream of being chosen. Being saved. But it didn't last. It never does. Her mother tried to turn that night into leverage. A baby trap. She thought a child might lock down a future. Instead, she got a living reminder of a moment that meant more to her than it ever did to him.
And so Inger became two things at once: a financial claim and a resented burden.
That resentment seeped into everything.Until, one day, Payload finally activated.
It was an average afternoon.Warm air. Quiet courtyard.
Inger Holter sat on a cracked bench, hunched over a small, battered notebook she had bought herself — not with gifts or allowance, but through stolen coins and bills, swiped from the wallets of her mother's drunken flings. They never noticed. If they did, they never cared.
The notebook was sacred to her. It held sketches, designs, thoughts — dreams.Things she'd never dare speak aloud.
But dreams had no place in South Corvezant, especially for someone like her.
She didn't see them coming. The school alley was always empty after final period — no cameras, no eyes. Just cracked concrete and shadows. Perfect for cruelty.
They surrounded her. Five of them — kids from the top social rung. Flashy hair, perfect skin, glowing augments. Leading them was Ummah, a girl with forest-green hair that shimmered under the dying sun. Her fingers hissed softly as acidic liquid bubbled from her skin — her augment, an oxidizing secretion that melted through most materials.
They tore into Inger.The boy with the mild strength enhancement pinned her down, his knee crushing her chest.The others laughed. Hit. Mocked.Her notebook was ripped from her arms like it was never hers to begin with.
Ummah's voice was cold and gleeful.She flipped through the pages — dreams, equations, sketchy costume designs. She sneered, spat a slur, and melted it with her acid fingers, page by page, until it disintegrated into bubbling goo.
Tears streamed down Inger's face.Not just for the pain, but for the certainty of what would come later — the punishment at home. Her mother would see the scarring, the broken glasses, the missing belongings and scream. Maybe hit her. Maybe worse.
But the final blow came when Ummah tried to push her face into the acidic puddle, laughing as she bent down, the others holding Inger's body taut.
Inger screamed.
Something inside her cracked — or maybe clicked.
Her eyes flashed: molten orange and gold.Time stuttered.Everything slowed.
And then it detonated.
Sparks surged from her spine to her fingertips. The world howled. A shockwave of sound, heat, and pressure ripped through the alley. Car alarms shattered the quiet. Glass burst. Walls cracked. Metal twisted. Blood painted the bricks.
Ummah's body hit the wall with a wet, violent crunch — the flesh on her face burnt raw, her left arm and legs missing, reduced to ash and vapor.
Three other students lay mangled nearby, embedded in rubble and rebar.The strength-enhanced boy screamed on his knees, his arms gone, burnt clean to the shoulders.
And in the center of it all was Inger.
Her arms were gone — vaporized in the blast.Her legs scorched and barely intact.A corrosive burn festered on her cheek.Her left eye, stabbed mid-surge, hung dim and unseeing.
And yet, in the middle of all that ruin, she didn't scream. She didn't cry.She just breathed, slow and shaking.She had finally activated.
Payload had detonated.
They arrived within minutes.
Black vans. No sirens. No lights.
The Syndicate Cleaners — operatives in matte grey hazard suits — poured into the alley like a shadow flood. Their boots crunched over charred rubble and scorched concrete as they formed a perimeter around the crater. Drones buzzed overhead, scanning heat signatures and lingering traces of unfiltered energy.
Inger was unconscious. Barely breathing.What was left of her body twitched involuntarily, scorched nerves still firing.
One of the agents knelt beside her, checked vitals, and looked to the lead operative."Level 6 Detonation. Emotional-triggered augmentation confirmed."
"Payload?" the leader asked.
The agent nodded. "Payload confirmed. Spontaneous override. Likely untrained."
The lead operative turned to a small black sphere hovering near his shoulder."Dispatch to Corvezant Control. We have a Wildcard. Estimated casualties: four dead, one critical. All students. No civilian witnesses."
The sphere blinked once.
"Orders?" he asked.
A pause.
Then: "Wipe it. All of it."
By the next day, no one remembered Inger Holter.
The school records were altered. Surveillance feeds deleted.Local media aired a "gas line explosion." A tragic accident. A small memorial was erected — brief, performative — with no mention of names.
Her mother?Given compensation and a firm gag order. She took the cash. Didn't ask questions.
Those who suspected otherwise learned quickly that silence was safety.
The children who survived — what was left of them — were moved, sedated, rewritten. Their memories scrambled through neural obfuscation. The Syndicate had done this before.
Many times.
And Inger?
She vanished from public records, deemed a Class-S Incident, her augment labeled "volatile, uncontrolled, and unrecoverable." Another black mark buried ins deep files, locked under Citadel-tier encryption.
But that's not where her story ended.
Somewhere Else: The Below
Inger woke weeks later.
Barely alive, floating in a tank of emerald fluid.Scars lined her skin. Machines pulsed and blinked around her. Her arms had been replaced — crude cybernetic replacements with exposed wirings and arcane runes glowing beneath synthetic flesh and Metal panels
She couldn't move. Not yet.
A shadow stood beyond the glass, arms crossed. Masked. Watching.
"Payload," he said quietly, his voice distorted.
"You don't know it yet," he continued, "but you're going to change everything."
Behind him, on the concrete wall, was a single sigil, etched in deep black:
ᚾ Nauthiz