Leo’s POV

The shift ended at 3 AM. With the extra pay, once the system took its cut, I had enough for a partial energy payment. One thousand credits. Not enough to restore full service, but enough to keep the door functioning and basic lighting for another week.

A shuttle came to a stop at the corner platform. The doors opened in a burst of warm air. I didn’t check the fare. Even the night rate costs too much.

It pulled away before I reached the crosswalk, red lights fading into the dark. One more week. That’s all I needed. Cover the partial energy bill. Pass the exam. Move into repair work.

Shit plan, but still a plan.

I kept walking.

My boot scraped along the uneven concrete, the worn sole slipping a little on a loose seam in the corridor tile.

Public displays still pretended it was autumn somewhere, assuming they even worked, but seasons were another forgotten ghost from the ruined world outside. Down here, the corridors were cold. The heating always dropped this late. Exposed pipes dripped condensation onto the concrete floor. Another patchwork fix failing somewhere in the grid.

Rust-streaked panels lined the corridor where workers had rerouted power conduits a dozen times. You could tell which sectors the volunteers had patched and which ones had received official repairs from the authorities. The volunteers used scrap, but they cared. The Admin teams used new parts, but never came back when something cracked.

I traced the buzz of electricity with my eyes, watching it skip along a faulty line. Not enough current. Another bypass feeding power into Sector C’s filtration tower. They always prioritized filtration over lighting. Not that I blamed them, choking in the dark was worse than stumbling through it.

I used to wonder how things got so bad. I don’t anymore. Now I wonder how any of it still works at all.

An illegal street food vendor operated nearby, and the smell of hot grease triggered a painful growl from my stomach. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten something that wasn’t processed ration packs. Bad food was another shortcut to being too sick to work. I didn’t need that. You never knew what kind of “meat” those vendors were selling.

People disappeared from the domes without a trace all the time, and nobody asked questions. I stuck with synthetic protein. At least I knew what was in it. They said the Nephilim biome had contaminated animals outside the domes, mutated beyond recognition. I’d never seen a real animal to know if that was true.

By the time I reached Block D, my hands were stiff from the cold. I passed a few others along the way, trudging with their heads down, wrapped in thin coats or still wearing their work uniforms. They looked like people who didn’t have much time left.

I looked the same.

The door slid open on backup power. That much, anyway, still worked. Inside the apartment, darkness greeted me. Emergency lights stretched long shadows across the small space. The air didn’t move. It was colder than the hallway.

I needed to check the time, but didn’t want to waste my phone battery. Maya’s charger had given me enough to use tomorrow, and with no working outlets in my apartment, I had to be careful.

I fumbled through drawers until I found an old digital wristwatch. From before. Before everything. Before the curtain, before the domes, before the portals. It was one of the only possessions returned to me after Dome City Twelve fell, salvaged from the ruins of my family’s quarters by recovery teams and handed to me at the orphan housing facility when I turned fifteen.

The metal felt cool beneath my touch as I ran my fingers over the engraving. JT. My grandfather. A man I never met.

My parents said he was an engineer, too, back when that meant building bridges and communication satellites, not scraping through piles of trash, looking for the same old tech. I don’t know if that was true. People lie to kids to keep them hopeful.

The watch survived when almost nothing else did. No network, no battery. It stored kinetic energy and a design too old to fail.

Looking at the time, I calculated what little remained before the power completely shut down. A little more than eight hours left. I set the alarm for 8 AM. Four hours of sleep, then pay the partial energy bill, then another shift. After that, the engineering exam.

Something had to give. Eventually, something always gave.

I collapsed onto my bed, not bothering to undress. Sleep enveloped me immediately, bringing along the same dream I always had. Running through a sunlit field, butterflies spinning around me. Warmth on my skin. Laughter came easily—a child’s joy in a world that never existed for me.

I’d never felt real sunlight, never seen an actual butterfly, never stood in a field of flowers. Those things were gone before I was born. My mind must have conjured them from the impossible stories my parents always told, painting pictures of a world they only knew from those fragmented stories they clung to and believed in.

When I woke, the world was silent. No hum of ventilation systems, no distant voices from neighboring units, no announcements from dome authorities. A dead quiet deeper than the usual gloom, a stillness that felt wrong.

Even during energy downtimes, there was always something.

My eyes took time to adjust. The watch read 11:26 AM.

I had overslept by hours.

Shit.

My stomach dropped. The door would lock soon. The exam had started an hour ago. Torres would mark me as a no-show and had already replaced me on the shift rotation. Three months of perfect attendance gone. All those credits I’d scraped together for tuition wasted. And for what? Four hours of sleep that turned into seven?

I jumped up, panic finally breaking through my usual indifference. I scrambled through the dark apartment, grabbing my backpack, phone, student ID card, and an extra shirt.

A vibration rumbled through the floor as I stuffed my belongings into the bag. Like a heartbeat. Thump. Thump. Thump.

I recognized that pattern immediately. I’d felt it once before, ten years ago in Dome City Twelve. The rhythmic tremors of massive footfalls, followed by that unnatural silence right before death arrived.

I knew exactly what it meant. I should have stayed back. But ignoring it wouldn’t make the danger disappear.

I moved to the balcony door, my fingers trembling as I slid it open.

At first, nothing made sense. A section of the dome’s protective ceiling had caved in. The buildings I should have seen across the sector weren’t there. Empty spaces and jagged ruins where they used to stand.

Digital boards throughout the remaining structures flashed: IMMEDIATE EVACUATION.

How long had those been going? How had I missed it? The dome-wide alerts should’ve reached me. Should’ve blared through the vents or scrolled across the emergency board of the apartment. But the power cut meant I didn’t hear a thing. No warnings. Just silence. Just sleep.

An enormous shape loomed in the distance, obscured by dust and debris.

A Nephilim.

Titan-class. The six glowing eyes arranged in a circular pattern on its head confirmed it, burning through the haze like malevolent stars.

Shock held me rooted to the spot. Tried to breathe. My chest barely rose.

I didn’t even register the mech at first. A new shape in the dust, moving like it had a purpose, while the world cracked open. Then I saw the armor. Sleek. Ornamental. The shield-shaped shoulders.

The Valkyrie.

Callan Pierce’s machine.

Everyone in the domes knew Callan Pierce. His missions and battles played on public boards for morale—the hero who never lost. Blond hair, square jaw, blue eyes that always looked too calm for someone fighting monsters. Broad shoulders, lean frame, all muscle. He had to be. Not everyone could pilot an Aegis unit. It took focus, speed, and a mind that wouldn’t break under pressure. He looked like the kind of man the world wasn’t meant to keep. That’s why I hated watching him. Or why I always did.

Valkyrie ducked beneath the Nephilim’s arm, swift despite its size. It was one of the massive Aegis Units, humanity’s desperate answer after conventional weapons failed against the first wave. The machines were designed for full neural integration, the pilot becoming one with the weapon. It was a necessary evolution, born from the need to fight monsters on their own terms, with monsters of our own making.

Valkyrie spun behind the towering monster and stabbed both blades deep into its shoulder joints.

For a moment, I saw the impact ripple across gray-blue skin stretched taut over an exoskeleton of bone-like plates before the monster howled. Its secondary arms went useless. I clamped my hands over my ears, teeth clenched. The sound was like metal tearing inside my head.

I’d seen broadcasts of Pierce fighting before, but nothing compared to this. The ground shook with each step of the Aegis Unit. Valkyrie’s energy core whined as it powered up for each strike. I tasted metal on my tongue as the air ionized around us. My skin prickled with static electricity.

Valkyrie wasn’t like the other units. Where most Aegis were bulky and uniform, Pierce’s was streamlined. Its armor plates resembled ancient Norse warrior gear, complete with a helmet-shaped head module and shield-like shoulder guards. Some idiot designer thought making our last defense look like mythological figures would boost morale. Waste of resources if you asked me.

Blue energy conduits traced paths along its limbs, channeling power from the core. That core sucked energy from our last three fusion reactors, the same energy that could power entire dome sectors for a month.

People starved in the dark while the Aegis units ate power like it was infinite, but the Resistance Nations called it “a necessary sacrifice.” As if we had a choice.

The monster roared again, a sound that vibrated deep in my chest, and lunged forward. Its four primary arms swung wide, with hooked claws reaching fifteen stories above the ground, glinting in a dull manner, appendages capable of tearing through reinforced concrete as if it were paper.

Displaced air slammed against the balcony with physical force, carrying the hot, acrid stench of ozone and something alien. Instinct took hold. I dropped, pressing my back flat against the biting cold of the metal wall as debris chips of concrete and steel rained down, grit stinging my face and eyes.

Valkyrie drove one of its blades through the Nephilim’s core, the energy chamber where they housed their life force. The blade flared with blue energy, a blinding flash that seared spots into my vision even after I squeezed my eyes shut against it.

A killing blow.

The Nephilim’s massive form went rigid, a sudden, awful stillness. My breath sawing in my raw throat, I risked peeling myself from the wall and crawled back toward the railing on trembling arms, ignoring the scrape of small debris against my clothes. My hands felt distant, numb, but I gripped the railing anyway. The sharp edges of the metal bit hard into my palms, a spike of pain grounding me, proving I was still somehow here.

The creature swayed, a mountain teetering on its axis. Then, with a low groan that seemed to come from the stressed metal of the dome itself, it pitched backward, falling. It plummeted toward my sector at an incredible speed.

I stared up, jaw locked so tight my teeth ached, watching its dark shape swell, consuming the gray sky. As it fell towards me, the sheer scale and the horrifying reality of it struck me with overwhelming force: the eight-limbed body towering, the segmented plates, and the immense hooked claws promising annihilation. All that power, engineered by whatever dimension spawned it, now dead weight, hurtling down. It fell towards Block D, towards me.

A high-pitched whine drilled into my skull as its core destabilized, the sound vibrating up from the floor, through my boots. Run inside. Run. My brain screamed it, but my body refused. My legs were stone, locked solid from hip to ankle. My lungs seized, breath trapped like a rock in my chest. Even my fingers, still clamped white knuckled on the railing, felt fused to the cold metal, unable to twitch.

The whine intensified, drowning out thought, drowning out everything but the falling monster and the cold, absolute fear washing over me. It was the sound, that specific pitch of the destabilizing core, exactly like the one that had torn through Dome City Twelve.

Ten years melted away. I wasn’t on a balcony; I was twelve again, watching the ceiling fall in Dome City Twelve, unable to move then, unable to move now.

Old memories crashed into the present. The screams. The weight of debris. My parents, pushing me onto the transport, their faces disappearing into chaos.

It was happening again.

Steel and concrete rained down. Not dust, but chunks of ferroconcrete, some bigger than my head, slammed onto the balcony nearby with sickening thuds. The vibration from impacts elsewhere shook the railing with such force under my numb grip that it threatened to tear my hands away.

So much for staying numb; all these years of surviving meant nothing now. The universe had a sense of humor. I’d live through one Nephilim attack only to die in another.

Valkyrie pivoted toward my balcony. Had Pierce spotted me?

Ah, it doesn’t matter. My last thought was simple: At least I wouldn’t have to worry about that energy bill.

A wave of pressure slammed into me, stealing the last of the air. Then darkness.