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Lot #919
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2025-07-13 11:23:20The collar dug deep against her throat, feeling heavier than it should’ve been for someone her size. Metal, not cheap scrap but reinforced with rune etching that hummed like static against her skin. A low-voltage shock, a reminder. You are property. You are prey. Mae didn’t stumble when the guard shoved her forward. Not this time. Her feet slapped against the cold, damp floor as they dragged her down a hallway lit by flickering neon strips and hologram screens that highlighted the following line of "merchandise." Bodies. Half-living, half-machine. Twisted muscle, grafted limbs. Broken things in cages, slumped, snarling, twitching.
And her. The only one without metal fused to her bones. No warped genetics visible. No extra arms. No exposed plating. Just small. Human. Mostly. Except for the collar.
Except for the words written on her wrist: “Trash-Class. Contaminated Asset.”
"Unauthorized Bio-Mage DNA: Property of Council Division 7. Dangerous. Approach with caution." It glowed on the display above her head as the guard shoved her into place. What they did not know was exactly how dangerous she was. Neither did she. The auction floor opened beyond the corridor like a corrupted cathedral, half scrap-metal ruins, half luxury. Velvet draped over rusted steel. Gilded chains hanging from the ceiling next to AI gun turrets.
Buyers sat in the observation booths stacked along the walls. Glass cages where monsters wore suits, draped themselves in silk, or fused themselves into throne-like machines. Their voices were low, but Mae felt them. Watching her. Judging her down to the breaths she took. Calculating the worth, her worth. A drone hovered above the stage, its voice was synthetic and cold. “Now presenting Lot #919. Unauthorized Bio-Mage. Female. Trash-class. Status: Defective.” The number burned red into the hologram above her. “Opening bid: fifteen thousand credits. Bounty is currently posted at sixty thousand alive. Thirty thousand dead.” At first, there was silence. Then the murmurs began.
“Sixty thousand? On her?”
“She is tiny.”
“That cannot be right. Is that a glitch?”
“No, no. Look at the file. Zone Nine fire. Killed over two hundred. Malfunction event.”
“She did that? No. It can't be. She looks breakable. Weak.”
A heavy laugh rolled through a far booth. Metal-scraped voices and bitter static followed. “She is a ticking bomb. Imagine what you could do with something like that in the right lab.” Mae looked straight ahead. Not at them. Not at anyone. Her fingers curled into fists so tightly that her nails bit into her skin. Her breathing was shallow, sharp, controlled. Do not show fear. Do not flinch. Do not fold. Her gaze drifted upward past the buyers. To the balcony tier meant for VIPs. Private booths, glass darkened, except for flickers of movement. Shadowed figures. More dangerous than the creatures below. And then she felt a presence. No, a pulse, something pulling. A shift in the air.
Her spine prickled as her eyes locked onto a figure standing at the edge of one of the upper windows. Standing tall, still. Just watching her. No glow of screens. No voice. No movement. Just a gaze that felt like claws dragging over her soul. She swallowed, a mistake. The collar buzzed, punishing her for the instinct. Her knees almost buckled, but she gritted her teeth and tightened her jaw. Still standing upright. You will not fall. Not here. Not now. Not for their pleasure.
~ VIP Booth – The Upper Deck~
Ashar’s claws clicked once, then twice, against the railing. His eyes remained fixed on the girl.
Small. Fragile-looking. Weak by any practical measure. But the scent, the pulse, something in her resonance vibrated against every buried instinct his people had carried for generations. The lore whispered it. The old stories. “A vessel of ruin. A vessel of rebirth. Hidden in flesh. Shaped as prey, but harbinger of worlds.” It could not be. But every cell in him said otherwise. “Mine.” The word was not spoken. It pulsed through his bones. “Sixty thousand-” Kaine’s voice was bored and skeptical, yet edged with the anticipation of a predator noticing prey out of place. “For that?”
Sethis grinned, teeth sharp, as his fingers flicked over his hacked data pad. “Her ID chip glitches every time I scan it. That is not normal.” Riven said nothing. His glowing core pulsed once. Twice. The girl’s presence warped the energy around her, subtle but real. Lucien’s psychic chains tightened, unseen. A ripple of static moved through the ether. He whispered, “A fracture, living, walking.” Down below, the bids started. Reluctant. Then greedy. Numbers flashing. “Seventeen thousand.”
“Nineteen.”
“Twenty-two.”
“Twenty-five. No, twenty-eight.” Faster now. Not because anyone understood what she was, but because nobody did. And that made her dangerous. Mae lifted her chin, jaw clenched. Her eyes, sharp, angry, defiant, darted back to that upper balcony. She felt them. Watching. Hunting. Choosing. “No cage holds me.” The whisper was hers alone. “Not this time.” Somewhere in the walls, the power flickered. Just a pulse. Just a warning.
And beneath the auction floor, the first explosive charge armed itself with a mechanical click. And before Mae could register what was happening. It started small at first. Just a flicker of the hologram above her head. Then everything began sending sparks across the platform. Voices roaring over the static in confusion. That's when it started. Everything flickered off one last time before the floor began to tremble.
Pinakabagong kabanata
Claimed by the Fallen Five The Last Anchors
The bridge marked with shadow and gold did not open. It trembled instead, holding its shape over the endless dark while the sealed aperture waited like a mouth refusing to speak. Mae stood before it with Sethis on one side and Kaine on the other, both men silent for once, both feeling too much to hide it well. The seventh pulse beat beyond the door with a patience that made her skin tighten. Then the entire hidden architecture screamed.The sound did not come through the air. It came through every line of light beneath the chamber, ripping across the walls in violent bursts of static and fractured signal. Lucien’s chains snapped upward, Ashar’s flames surged, and Riven’s wings opened with a sharp metallic scrape. Kaine turned first, gold burning hard beneath his skin. Sethis’s shadows wrapped around Mae before he even seemed to decide to protect her.The convergence sphere reappeared above the bridge, no longer calm, no longer elegant, and no longer waiting. Its surface fractured into
Claimed by the Fallen Five The Seventh Pulse
The seventh heartbeat changed the air. Mae felt it ripple through the architecture like a signal waking in a sealed network, too steady to be an accident and too alive to be dismissed. Sethis stood beside her, shadows trembling against his wrists as if they wanted to hide from the sound. Far below them, the newly awakened structures burned with soft gold, violet, and something colder that had no color at all. The hidden architecture no longer felt like a chamber beneath reality; it felt like a body taking its first full breath.Mae turned toward Sethis, but he was already staring into the distance. His face had gone still in that careful way men wore when something inside them was breaking, and pride refused to let it show. “That one is different,” he said, voice low. “The others feel alive, but this one feels like a door.” Mae’s chest tightened because she had felt the same thing. The first six pulses had carried warmth, distance, and recognition, but the seventh carried waiting.The
Claimed by the Fallen Five What Remains
Nobody touched the sphere after that. The words remained suspended at its center, glowing softly against the darkness of the chamber. Every few seconds, the distant heartbeats echoed through the fracture, steady and alive. The silence that followed felt heavier than any battlefield they had survived.Mae could not stop staring at the words. Parental Access Available. The phrase felt absurd and impossible, yet every instinct inside her insisted it was true. She had spent so long grieving what was lost that the possibility of something surviving felt harder to accept than death.Ashar stood beside her, saying nothing. His fire burned low beneath his skin, reduced to faint embers that glowed through the cracks of old scars. For once, he looked tired enough to let the world see it. The sight unsettled Mae more than she wanted to admit.Riven eventually broke the silence. He shifted against the crystalline wall and folded his wings tighter around himself. “We’re seriously not going to talk
Claimed by the Fallen Five Signals
The chamber stayed quiet long after the sphere dimmed. No one hurried to offer explanations or comfort. The distant pulse Mae sensed still hovered at the edge of her mind, calm and persistent, refusing to disappear. The more she concentrated on it, the more convinced she became that it had been present all along.Ashar broke the silence first. He crossed his arms and stared at the sphere as if intimidation alone might force answers from it. "I don't like unknown variables," he said. "Especially ones hiding behind reality itself." The low fire beneath his skin burned brighter in response to his frustration.Riven snorted softly and folded his wings tighter against his back. "You don't like known variables either." He leaned against one of the crystalline supports and glanced toward Mae. "The difference is these haven't tried killing us yet."Lucien ignored both comments. His chains drifted through the air around him, tracing invisible paths and collecting data only he seemed capable of
Claimed by the Fallen Five Echoes Without Source
The chamber no longer felt empty. Mae noticed it first as a subtle change in pressure, like the quiet shift in air before a storm breaks, except nothing in the environment visibly moved. The convergence sphere still rotated in its slow, deliberate rhythm, yet the light within it seemed thicker somehow, layered with faint distortions she could not fully track. Her chains warmed beneath her skin, responding to something she could not name.Ashar noticed her tension immediately, stepping closer without touching her. His flames remained controlled, a low burn that cast steady amber light along the crystalline walls. “You feel it,” he said quietly, not as a question but as confirmation. Mae nodded once, her eyes still fixed on the sphere.Lucien’s chains shifted in measured arcs, testing the air as if scanning for unseen resistance. Each movement produced faint ripples across the architecture, as though reality itself acknowledged his presence. “The structure has altered its density,” he s
Claimed by the Fallen Five Convergence Variables
The sphere did not stop rotating. It adjusted its speed in subtle increments, as if measuring the rhythm of Mae’s breathing, making her feel a deep connection to its unfolding possibilities. Each turn revealed fractured glimpses of possible futures, none fully stable, all waiting for something that had not yet happened. Mae stood motionless before it, her chains alive beneath her skin in quiet synchronization with the pulsing light.Ashar remained slightly behind her, close enough that she could feel the heat of him without contact. He did not interrupt her concentration, but she could sense the discipline it took for him to remain still. “It is showing probabilities,” he said carefully. “Not destiny.” Mae nodded faintly, though the distinction felt dangerously thin.Lucien circled the outer edge of the chamber, white chains gliding across the air like careful instruments. Every movement he made caused faint shifts in the sphere’s surface, as though structure itself responded to obser
Claimed by the Fallen Five Sacred Bond(s)
“She’s not light, somebody grab her already,” Kaine snapped, stepping forward. His hands slid under Mae’s arms, ready to haul her up like cargo. “We don’t have all day for her to wake up out here.” “No!” Riven’s shout cracked across the air like a whip. His boots scuffed as he lunged forward, hands
Claimed by the Fallen Five Waiting for the Storm
The warped silence inside the castle pressed heavier than any sound. The hum of fractured energy had quieted, but something lingered beneath it, a feeling. A shift. Like the world itself was holding its breath. None of them spoke. Not Lucien, whose usual sharp tongue was buried behind furrowed brows
Claimed by the Fallen Five Fault Lines
The doors groaned open like they had not been touched in centuries. Outside was not the dead wasteland Mae expected. It was worse. The ground twisted in ways the eye rejected. Horizon lines bent wrong. Stone spires floated, some sideways, some inverted. Clouds spun in spirals, not across the sky but
Claimed by the Fallen Five Cracks in the Foundation
It started small. A tremor in her hands. A shake in her knees. But the spiral was fast. Ruthless. Mae’s breath hitched, then broke. Her lungs wouldn’t pull enough air. Her chest constricted so tightly it hurt. Her vision tunneled, and her pulse roared so loudly in her ears she barely heard Lucien’s
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