They left at sunrise.

  The road out of the settlement had once been a highway. Now it was a cracked ribbon of stone and dust, lined with rusted barriers, abandoned vehicles, and skeletal watchtowers from patrol routes that no longer existed.

  Elias walked ahead with a traveler’s caution rather than a fighter’s.

  Raiden noticed immediately.

  “He’s not lying,” he muttered to Tsukito. “He really is just a courier.”

  Tsukito glanced at the wrapped bundle tied carefully to Elias’s pack.

  “Then somebody trusted the wrong man with the wrong thing.”

  Or the right man with the wrong secret, he thought, but kept that part to himself.

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  The farther they traveled, the more Elias explained.

  The world had been carved into layers of danger.

  Zone One lay closest to the city edges.

  Zone Two stretched farther out.

  Zone Three was where massive beasts nested.

  And in Zone Four, reality itself sometimes felt unstable.

  Zone Five?

  “Don’t go there,” Elias said simply.

  Raiden grinned.

  “That’s not a real explanation.”

  “It’s the only one you need.”

  They found crystals on the road before noon—small dark fragments embedded in the cracked stone. Elias knelt, pried one loose, and held it up so they could see the faint, star-speckled shimmer trapped inside.

  “City power,” he said. “Or part of it, anyway.”

  Raiden squinted.

  “That little thing?”

  “Enough to light a room,” Elias said. “A lot more if it’s refined properly.”

  Raiden looked disappointed.

  “I was hoping for something richer.”

  “That,” Tsukito said, “is because you think every shiny object should make us rich.”

  Raiden glanced at him.

  “That’s called ambition.”

  They continued on until midday, when they stopped near an old milestone marker worn so badly the numbers had become impossible to read.

  While they rested in the shade of a broken concrete barrier, Elias asked a question that shifted something invisible in the air.

  “You boys ever hear about the rare gene?”

  Raiden shook his head immediately.

  Tsukito frowned.

  “Should we have?”

  Elias hesitated for only a second.

  “No,” he said. “Not really. Just something people mention on the roads sometimes.”

  But after that, he looked at them differently.

  Not with fear.

  With attention.

  Because the night before, he had seen monsters do something he did not understand.

  They had hesitated.