Misha remained still while the last traces of gold disappeared behind her.
Her cloak settled around her boots, the hem brushing over a floor filmed with gray dust. Beneath it one hand rested against Twinfang’s hilt. Her other hovered near the wall without touching the stone.
She listened but nothing was heard. No voices filtered through the building and no carriage wheels rolled over the street outside.
’Something’s wrong.’ Misha drew her hood farther over the white cat mask.
Then several gray windows appeared in front of her.
『 Authorizing Observation Interface access. 』
Misha’s fingers tightened around her dagger.
’Huh? What is Caleb up to now?’
『 Enabling Personal Visibility... 』
Her brow creased behind the mask. ’Personal visibility?’
『 Observation Profile Unlocked. 』
『 Private Observation Interface: Enabled 』
『 Live Chat: Enabled 』
Then, a larger window opened before her.
「 〔OBSERVATION PROFILE〕
Tower Name: Gravekeeper
Current Floor: 11
—
Observers: 0
Favor Balance: 0 」
Misha stared at it for a few seconds. ’So this is how an Observation Profile looks like.’
There was no Outer Being subscribing to her channel yet. Good.
Caleb had apparently enabled her side of the interface, allowing her to see when someone entered the channel instead of leaving her blind to it. A private viewer count and a cat panel no one was currently using. Perhaps he thought knowing she had an audience would make her more careful.
He had known her for twenty-six years. He should have known better.
A smaller message slid across the bottom of her vision.
『 Try not to make it too obvious when you read these. Observers may notice. 』
『 Survive Shasha. 』
Misha closed her eyes and sighed inwardly. The younger-brother menace had hidden her embarrassing beginner phase from unknowable cosmic entities, and now apparently considered her ready for public release.
She dismissed the messages with a thought. ’Idiot.’
Misha finally examined the room. Narrow benches faced a plain stone pillar at the far end. A cracked iron lantern hung from the ceiling, its flame long dead. Black streaks climbed the walls above it.
A chapel, perhaps. Or something that had once served the same purpose.
There were no carved saints, no colored glass, no polished wood or gilded altar, only a faded symbol above the stone pillar... two vertical lines joined by a narrow arch. Someone had scratched away half of it.
The remaining marks looked less like a holy emblem and more like a door that had failed to open.
Misha’s gaze dropped. A body lay beneath the first row of benches.
It wore a gray uniform fastened high at the throat. A bronze badge pinned to one shoulder, though green corrosion had begun eating along its edge. One arm stretched toward the chapel doors as if the man had died trying to crawl through them. Heavy had no lower limbs.
She approached with careful steps.
The corpse had been there long enough for the skin to tighten around the face. Dark discoloration pooled along the side pressed against the floor, showing where blood had settled after the heart stopped. The lips had dried away from the teeth.
There were no visible bite wounds, no torn throat, and no blood surrounding the body. The fingers of the outstretched hand had been broken one after another. The swelling had already collapsed, leaving the joints twisted at angles no living hand would tolerate.
A sweet, stale odor clung to the uniform. It was not ordinary decay. There was rot beneath it, certainly, but also something oily. Damp soil mixed with spoiled fruit and the chemical sting of a room scrubbed with bad disinfectant.
Misha crouched several feet away. She covered the lower half of the mask with one hand out of habit, though the artifact had already dulled the strong smell of it.
A strip of paper had been tied around the dead man’s wrist. Three words were written across it in thick charcoal:
| DO NOT BURN. |
Misha studied the message.
The paper looked newer than the corpse. The edges had absorbed moisture, but the charcoal remained dark.
"Do not burn," she read aloud.
Her altered voice sounded wrong inside the chapel. The silence felt worse after hearing it.
Misha reached toward the bronze badge.
The corpse’s head turned.
Her blade cleared its sheath before the movement finished. Twinfang stopped against the man’s throat and his eyes remained shut as his jaw opened with a brittle jerk. A dry clicking sound came from somewhere behind his teeth, like two fingernails tapping beneath the tongue.
"North gate."
Misha did not move. The words had not been carried by breath. She saw no rise in the chest. The throat shifted, but only enough to shape the sound.
"North gate," the corpse repeated. "North gate. North gate."
Its arm scraped another inch toward the doors as Misha kept her blade beneath its jaw.
’He’s alive?’ The thought arrived despite everything her eyes had already told her.
Dead skin, settled blood, no breath, and still, the body had spoken.
She was not going to a man’s throat merely because the Tower had taught corpses new tricks. Not until she knew there was nothing left to save.
Misha shifted to the corpse’s side, keeping herself beyond the reach of its hands.
"Can you hear me?"
The head twitched toward her voice. "North gate."
"What’s your name?"
"North gate."
He had no comprehension and there was no change in his rhythm. The phrase was not an answer, it was more like a recording.
Misha pressed the flat of her blade against the corpse’s upper arm, pinning it to the floor. Then she reached beneath the dried jaw and placed two fingers against the carotid artery. She felt no pulse from it.
She held them there longer than necessary. Five seconds, then ten, but nothing pressed back. Her gaze settled on the neck, the muscles did not contract naturally when it spoke.
Using the tip of her free hand to lift one eyelid open, she saw the eye beneath it had clouded completely. The pupil remained wide and fixed despite the gray light falling across it. There was no response in it.
The body was dead. Whatever moved it was not.
She slowly withdrew her hand and blade. The corpse’s fingers dragged across the floor again.
"North gate."
It was a warning, perhaps. Or maybe something inside him that could only repeat patterns left in the nervous system, something that burned deeply enough into the brain that even after death, another creature could pull the remains of it out.
Misha’s grip tightened around her dagger. "I’m sorry."
The corpse lunged, its broken hand snapped toward her wrist with sudden speed.
She drew back and slashed, her blade passing through the neck, hard and deep. The head struck the floor beside the bench and rolled until the dead man’s face pointed toward the door.
No blood spilled since vessels had already collapsed. What remained inside them had thicker into darker clots that clung to the cut tissue.
The body twitched once, then something moved inside the severed neck, a thin black filament wriggled between the exposed bones.
The creature was no thicker than a strand of cord. Its segmented body slid through the spinal canal, glossy and wet, searching for another route now that the head had been separated.
She drove her dagger down and pinned it against the stone. The parasite burst with a soft pop. A smear of black fluid spread beneath the dagger. The edges immediately began producing gray smoke, though there was no heat. The vapor curled upward, carrying the same sweet, oily smell that had clung to the corpse.
Misha leaned away and held her breath.
The smoke thinned before reaching her face and vanished completely.
「 You have killed a Vestige Husk!
EXP +12 」
She looked from the System window to the body and quietly said, "Husk."
Misha rose slowly. She had seen parasites alter behavior before and fungi that controlled insects. Organisms that manipulate hunger, movement, even fear responses to improve their own chances of spreading.
This felt more like a zombie. A different kind of zombie.
She looked again at the strip of paper. Most people burned contaminated corpses to prevent disease from spreading. If the residents of Exodus had written the opposite, there had to be a reason.
Heat might cause something worse. Eggs, spores, or maybe even microscopic fragments carried with the smoke. That explained why the chapel smelled of old decay despite the blackened walls.
Someone had tried fire once and they had learned.
She suddenly remembered her initial skill that she traded with [Weapon Mastery]. If she still had it [Microscopic Examination] would probably work best on this floor.
Still, crying over spilled milk was useless. [Weapon Mastery] gave her more chances to survive.
Misha wiped Twinfang against the dead guard’s uniform, careful to keep the blade away from the black residue. Then she returned it to its sheath.
"I’ll call you Infected," she told the corpse.
The man’s severed head did not object.
The bronze badge remained pinned to his shoulder. Misha considered taking it, then stopped. The badge would identify him later, assuming anyone remained alive to care so in the end, she left it where it was.
At the front of the chapel, doors were reinforced with iron bands. Three separate locks had been broken from their brackets. All had been shattered from the outside.
Deep scratches surrounded the handle, too narrow to come from a sword and too numerous to count. Some ended in splinters stained dark at tips.
Fingernails, or maybe claws shaped closely enough to imitate them. Someone had tried very hard to enter, or something had tried to make it look that way.
Misha wrapped one hand around the handle. She paused and listened again. Hearing no one, she pulled.
The hinges resisted, damp wood dragged across stone before the gap widened enough for cold air to slip through.
Ash moved across the street like gray snow.
Misha stepped into the doorway. For the first time, she saw Exodus.
Genesis had spread beneath sunlight, broad and proud, its walls curved around a city that wanted to be seen. Exodus seemed built by people who hoped the world would overlook it. Buildings leaned close over narrow streets, their upper stories nearly touching. Iron bridges and wooden walkways connected rooftops and windows, creating a second city above the first. Some bridges had been pulled up and others hung broken with chains creaking whenever the wind moved through them.
Heavy shutters covered every window. The doors had small inspection slits at eye level and smaller ones near the wrist.
’Pulse checks’, Misha realized.
Old lanterns hung beneath black metal hoods, all angled toward the ground and none were lit. Their glass had been painted red, yellow, or white, perhaps part of a warning system she did not yet understand.
The street outside the chapel had been cleared down the middle. Furniture, carts, broken doors had been piled against the walls to create a narrow passage. White arrows had been painted over the stones, all pointing north.
Misha stepped into the street. The cold air wet soot, spoiled grain, and the sweet underlying smell she now associated with the parasite.
Her boots left shallow prints in the ash.
She had expected bodies when she saw the condition of the chapel and the guard. King has already told her the original settlement t quests had activated simultaneously. Genesis had defended itself. Exodus–
She did not know what had happened here yet. The chapel suggested nothing good. Still, there were hardly any corpses in the street.
But that did not reassure her, bodies did not simply disappear. Either someone had removed them, the residents had escaped before dying, or the dead had gotten up and gone somewhere else. Misha preferred the second possibility.
She looked along the route marked by the arrows.
Astrid, Hiiro, and Caius should have arrived somewhere in Exodus before her.
’They’re fine.’ The thought came too quickly.
Hiiro was reckless but Astrid and Caius would keep him from doing anything catastrophically stupid. Probably.
Misha’s concern tightened. "Those kids better be alive."
The altered voice behind the mask made the sentence sound colder than she intended.
She continued to follow the white arrows. Everywhere she looked, the place showed signs of interruption. An overturned handcart blocked one alley. A bowl of stew sat outside an open doorway. A child’s shoe rested beneath a shutter, too clean to have been there long.
Misha looked away before her mind invented the rest of the child.
One door had been painted red from top to bottom, with a warning carved across it:
| NO PULSE. DO NOT OPEN. |
The center of the door bulged outward as if something had struck it from the inside.
Then–
BANG!
The impact shook ash from the frame.
Misha stopped, her heart almost wanting to jump out of her chest.
Three knocks followed and silence returned.
Her gaze settled on the inspection slit. It remained closed.
"Please..." A child’s voice came through the door, thin and frightened.
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