No alliances.
No conversations.
No names spoken aloud.
After the third day, something changed. Or maybe it died.
Whatever flicker of camaraderie existed among the twenty-two remaining in the North Gate—it had rotted. Buried beneath the corpse of the boy whose screams still echoed off the walls like the haunted whisper of a dying god.
No one claimed his body.
No one asked for his name.
No one wept.
They simply moved away from the blood, like ants from poisoned sugar.
Even Rin. Especially Rin.
He walked alone now—eyes half-lidded, cold, not like ice but like a sword waiting in a scabbard. Watching. Listening. Breathing only when necessary.
No one trusted each other. They were no longer people—they were possibilities. Risks. Shadows at the edge of your vision that might be the last thing you see before your throat opens like a second mouth.
And yet, beneath all this silence, something stirred. Not in the sky. Not in the walls.
In them.
In Rin
They had all felt it that morning.
Like a thread snapping inside their bones.
A storm of light beneath their skin, rising like molten silver through their nerves. A scream buried in the marrow. Not pain. Not power.
Something older.
A man tried to tear open another's chest with his bare hands, shrieking about how he could feel the wind inside his fingers. Another started running up the wall and broke both his legs. A girl opened her mouth and metal poured out instead of blood.
Abilities.
The Rite had entered its next phase.
Rin didn't understand what it was yet.
Only that something inside him was trying to **wake up**.
It started when he looked at someone and saw their face glitch—just for a second—like reality forgot how it was supposed to look. Their features blurred, replaced by something else. A memory? A death? He blinked, and it was gone.
The Advocate had told him, in his own poetic horror:
"The truth sleeps beneath your ribs, Rin. But truth is a violent thing."
"And when it rises, it does not knock. It tears the door off its hinges."
He avoided people the rest of that day.
Until the dusk began to fall like dying embers.
He turned a corner.
And met him.
A figure crouched over a corpse with both hands buried in its chest like it was clay.
The Butcher.
He was no longer hiding in shadows.
He didn't need to.
His upper body was bare—muscles coiled like ropes drenched in blood. His face was streaked with black paint or old ash, it was hard to tell. His eyes didn't blink. They stared straight through Rin, smiling as if they'd met in another life. Or a hundred.
And Rin couldn't move.
Something inside the Butcher cracked reality just by being near it. The world bent slightly. The floor pulsed like it had veins. Rin's knees wanted to buckle—not out of fear. But out of some unnatural submission.
"You look like you dream when you sleep," the Butcher said, voice soft.
"I like that. Makes it better when I take the head off."
He stood.
And then charged on like a Bull.
Rin's thoughts collapsed. He didn't have time to panic.
He reacted.
And that's when it happened.
The world around him slowed—not like a dream, but like glass catching fire. The very air began to crystallize. The motion of the Butcher—so fluid, so fast—became like thick oil caught in the grip of something larger.
Time...
had broken.
He wasn't moving through time.
Time was moving around him.
Rin's eyes glowed for a fraction of a second, the left a cold pale bloom—white flame.
He dodged. Barely.
And the moment shattered like a mirror.
The Butcher missed.
His blade cleaved the air, taking with it the skin of the wall behind.
He turned. Not surprised.
Just... intrigued.
"Ohhh... you're one of them."
"Interesting."
"I was hoping someone would be."
He didn't attack again.
He just vanished.
Back into the maze of concrete and smoke, leaving Rin trembling, breath caught in his throat like it had nowhere to go.
He had survived.
Only just.
And he had used something,
He didn't know what.
But the Butcher did.
The next morning, the North Gate awoke with a sound worse than screams.
Laughter.
One of them had lost their mind. Or maybe found it.
It didn't matter. By then, four more were dead.
Three bodies mutilated. One burned beyond recognition.
The count was now 17.
But it wasn't the death that disturbed Rin.
It was how silent it all was.
No one asked questions.
No one even stepped near the corpses anymore.
Death had become... familiar.
Expected.
And high above it all—on a broken balcony made of whispering stone—
The Red Advocate watched.
His crimson robes fluttered like spilled ink in the breeze. His hands were clasped behind his back, and his mouth moved without sound—reciting some ancient poem to the ghosts.
He watched Rin.
Not with pity.
But with expectation.
That night, Rin curled in a hollow between two walls. It was cold. His stomach ached. Not from hunger. From the memories.
Of the Butcher's eyes.
Of his own power.
Of how it had felt to see time lose its grip.
He didn't sleep.
He couldn't,
Not when the shadows around him moved even when the wind was still.
And sometime between one breath and the next, he felt something near him.
A shape.
A hum.
A man standing upside-down above him, cloak dragging like a curtain of blood.
The Advocate.
Rin blinked, and he was upright again, hands folded like a priest delivering a sermon.
"You saw the Butcher," he said.
"And he saw you."
"Good. You will need each other."
Rin didn't reply. He didn't trust the words in his mouth not to tremble.
"You wonder if you're still the boy from before," the Advocate whispered.
"You're not."
"You were a lamb in a lion's game."
"Now you are the first crack in the mirror."
He bent closer.
"But cracks aren't enough."
"The world only changes when something breaks."
And just like that—he was gone again.
No footfall. No trace. No sound.
Only a torn scrap of red cloth, caught on the edge of a nail.
Rin didn't sleep that night.
But in the moments where silence crept too close—
He whispered to himself:
"When the tower burns… run."
And for the first time, he thought maybe it wasn't a warning.
Maybe it was a promise.