POV: Ryuu Takeda
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"Some names are forged. Others are taken by the ones no one remembers. The worst kind? You inherit them when there's no one left to carry it but you."
— Bone Market Wall Etching, Tier-3 Barracks
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BONE MARKET – TIER 3 BARRACKS
The walls sweated rust and regret.
It was always damp down here. Steam seeped from cracks that no one fixed, and heat pooled near the base of every vent like the Market itself was breathing just beneath the floor.
Ryuu sat with his back to the far locker wall. Elbows on his knees. Shirt tossed aside. The glyph across his palm had cooled to a dull red bruise.
But it hadn't gone quiet.
Not really.
It pulsed—subtle, steady—as if waiting for something else to bleed. A reminder.
I didn't make a vow.
It made me.
He turned his wrist, watching the way the glow refused to leave. His Aura had flared during the fight. Not forced. Not unlocked.
It had simply remembered him.
He exhaled. No sound. Just motion.
He didn't need to speak to know what the Market saw in him now.
They still called him Crimson.
He'd chosen it once—back in the lower pits, when the Market needed something to stamp on a file.
But now, it wasn't just an alias.
It was a signature etched in Aura residue, fractured knuckles, fight logs, and every system that still couldn't classify what he was.
It wasn't a title.It was a warning the Market hadn't learned to read yet.
They whispered it like a curse.Like a rumor that knew how to walk.
He'd taken the name the moment Haruki's watch pulsed warm in his hand—when silence had stretched so long it started to feel like guilt.
Now?
Now the Market didn't speak it with curiosity.
They spoke it with caution.
Because Crimson wasn't the name he wanted.
It was the one the Market gave to the shape of his grief.
Not a fighter's rank.Not a symbol.
A signal.A thread stitched through every fracture, every mistake he hadn't gotten to bury.A name etched in the way he moved when the Aura began to rise.The sound of a Vowline trying to stabilize and failing—again and again.
They didn't see him.They saw the burn he left behind.
You bleed long enough, someone's going to name it for you.
He never corrected them.
Because down here?
Correction never made anything real.
Only consequence did.
---
The aftermath of the Gravedog fight hadn't worn off.
Not physically—his ribs were bandaged. His knuckles scrubbed raw. But the glyph…
That was different.
Even now, it pulsed when his thoughts slid back into the fight. The moment his vow surged—not declared, but realized.
"I don't fight to be remembered. I fight because I still do."
Those weren't just words.
They were recognition.
The glyph had burned like a promise forged on the edge of silence.
And then?
The Flame had ignited.
Flare-tier.
His body didn't move like it used to. His awareness had widened—tightened—focused in terrifying ways. It wasn't speed or power that had shifted.
It was meaning.
[FEDERATION SYSTEM — SCAN ATTEMPT: FAILED]
Across the undergrid, Bone Market terminals tried to classify him.
CLASSIFICATION:UNDEFINED
GLYPHSIGNAL:INCONSISTENT—UNREADABLE
FLAGSTATUS:MIRAGESCANRETURNEDNULL
The system didn't know what to do with him. And the display buzzed.
[TIER 3 – CARRIER CLASS]
[VOWSTATUS: FRACTURE−BORN]
[AURATIER:FLARE]
[SPONSOR OFFER: TARN, AVELIUS — PENDING]
Because his glyph didn't follow expected pattern pathways. His Aura wasn't unstable—it was untypeable.
And unknowns didn't make sponsors comfortable.
They made them interested.
SPONSOR REQUEST – AVELIUS TARN
Ryuu stared at the name.
Avelius Tarn.
He knew that name.
Resistance Army, outer ring commander. Known in whispers. Fought in the war that never made it to the archive terminals. The kind of man whose presence alone made Market handlers step carefully.
But the offer wasn't public.
Just a soft ping inside his private log feed.
No speech. No demand. No terms.
Just the name.
But it wasn't the name that gave Ryuu pause.
It was the feeling.
A pull. Like his glyph recognized something.
And hated it.
Ryuu didn't open it.
Didn't decline it either.
He just let it blink.
He wasn't here for someone else's offers.
He was here to find something he hadn't even named yet.
And also because something in his spine told him the sponsor already knew him.
Ryuu thought, "I don't trust names given by strangers—especially ones that sound like they've said mine before."
---
POV SHIFT — AVELIUS TARN, OBSERVER NODE
Tarn stood alone in an old reinforcement shell, far above Sector 9's data spine. No comms. Just a glitched threadline feed sparking from his wristband.
He didn't blink as Ryuu's glyph replayed in the projection.
Burnline flare. Fracture-borne, anchored by something far older than the pit.
A vow forged around someone else's silence.
Haruki.
The watch.
The fight.
He doesn't know yet, Tarn thought.
But the glyph remembers deeper than the systems ever will.
---
Ryuu stood.
Watch in one hand. Jacket over his shoulder. Blood still caked under one eye.
The Bone Market had granted him Tier 3. Offered him a sponsor.
But it wasn't enough.
Because what he needed couldn't be bought.
Couldn't be given.
It had to be burnedthrough.
Step by step.
Like a name you didn't want, but couldn't give back.
He walked toward the pit again.
No one stopped him.
The Ring still smelled like blood and heat.
He stepped into it again—not to fight.
To remember.
To feel if the weight still pressed the same way.
The glyph answered him with a faint shimmer through his fingers.
You're not done yet.
You just remembered where it hurts.
Ryuu knelt in the center of the ring and closed his eyes.
No formal stance.
Just breath.
He exhaled into the glyph. Not to trigger it. Just to let it speak.
It shimmered in response. Aura flared faintly, Flare-tier sparklets drifting off his skin like red snow in a vacuum.
For a moment, there was no Market.
No noise.
Just the pulse.
And the pressure.
CONTRACT NOTIFICATION
OFF−CYCLE CONTRACT—ACCEPTED AUTOMATICALLY
DESTINATION: BURIEDRING ZONE3
OBJECTIVE: SIGNAL INTERFERENCERECOVERY
DANGERCLASS: B−UNREGISTERED,GHOSTLINE THREAT
He read it twice.
Then smiled.
Not because it was funny.
Because it was obvious.
Of course they'd send him to the one place the dead still scream.
The Buried Ring was where failed routes collapsed.
Transit lines erased by error. Smuggling nodes burned and sealed.
Where the Market sent fighters they didn't want to come back.
A countdown pulse blinked in the lower corner of the slab-terminal.
[TIER EVENT: THREAD TRIAL – ZONE3 MATCH]
[STATUS: 72 HOURS UNTIL COMMENCEMENT]
[NOTE: REGISTRATION AUTO-BINDED — FIGHTER "CRIMSON"]
Three days. The Market never gave you prep time unless it expected you to crack before then
Ryuu didn't react.
He didn't need three days to be ready.
He needed three seconds to stop pretending he wasn't.
"Perfect", Ryuu thought.
He adjusted his gloves.
Checked the shard of Haruki's watch, still wrapped in gauze.
The glyph flickered once.
Then settled.
Because it knew.
---
POV SHIFT — SEREN
She'd been watching him since the first scan blinked red.
Ryuu Takeda. Crimson.The boy who shouldn't have lit the scanner in the outer pit corridor—but did.
A broken pad.A ghost glyph.A pulse that didn't match any registry the Federation had cleared for the Bone Market.
Seren had leaned in then—just like she leaned in now.
From her static-veiled relay chamber above the arena—an old observation cradle wired into abandoned MIRAGE lines—she'd been watching for weeks.
This wasn't new.
But the glyph's response tonight was.
Not subtle. Not suppressed.
Flare-tier spike. No crash lag. No Anchor recoil.The glyph hadn't just lit—it spoke back.
[ERROR: AURA TYPE — NOT CLASSIFIABLE]
[ERROR: CORE TRACE — UNSTABLE]
The screen buzzed. Once. Then again.
No new data.No corruption flags.
Just... absence.Unreadable.
As if the system saw something—and then immediately refused to admit it.
A gap.
Brief. Barely a heartbeat.
But Seren caught it. A flicker behind the glyph pattern—like someone had lifted the veil just enough to whisper a warning, then slammed it shut again.
This wasn't a natural fracture.
She'd seen natural ones.
This was scripted. Buried. Burned. Then reawakened.
Kaelen had told her once—
"It doesn't have to be full memory to make you move. Sometimes all you need is a trace. A pattern that doesn't want to be seen."
And now Ryuu's Aura?
It echoed in places it shouldn't.
Residual trails bleeding into dreamspace threads. Memory sectors reacting to unregistered pressure.
That—That disturbed her.
Kaelen had told her to find the anomalies. Observe. Never interfere.But what happens when the anomalies start bleeding into the fabric?
She opened a soft log. Typed slowly. Deliberately.
[OBSERVATION ONLY — SUBJECT: CRIMSON]
[NOTE: HE DOESN'T KNOW WHAT HE IS.]
She didn't add anything else.
Not yet.
Because some glyphs don't glitch by accident.
Some glyphs remember things you're not supposed to survive.
And Crimson?
He was starting to make the system remember.
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"You don't choose the name when no one's listening. You choose it when the world whispers it back to you in blood."
— Fragment Note, Resistance Node Echo-15 (Redacted)
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