When Ezra climbed back to the surface, the sky had changed.
Gray clouds hung low over the jagged ruins of Midtown, casting the world in a monochrome haze. The air was dry now, charged with static. And behind his eyes, a quiet thrum pulsed with eerie calm—like the echo of drums played in a cathedral of the dead.
The Crown wasn't visible. It had fused with him.
But its presence was undeniable.
Every breath Ezra took seemed to pull whispers from the wind. Every glance made the shadows lean closer. The Hollowborn Spawn that had followed them up from the depths knelt just outside the gate, unmoving. Even in the quiet, their loyalty was suffocating.
Kael watched him with wary eyes.
"You're different," she said.
"I know."
"Not just stronger. Something else." She took a half-step back, her hand close to the hilt of her blade. "Don't make me put you down if you slip."
Ezra gave a bitter smile. "You won't need to."
She didn't return the smile.
The Crown had made its mark.
The altar deep within the Echospire—now reduced to ash—had awakened something more than power. It had acknowledged him. Not as a master. Not as a tool.
But as its heir.
[Title Gained: Grave Sovereign]Your undead now gain passive memory retention. They may speak. They may remember fragments of who they once were.Undead Evolution Unlocked: Tier 2Soulbound Unit: Initiate.Number of Summons: 15/15Hollowborn Spawn: 3 Wild Units boundNew Trait: Aura of Dread – Nearby living enemies suffer -10% morale and have a chance to flee during combat.
Ezra sat cross-legged on the roof of a broken parking garage later that night, his eyes scanning the skyline. Broken towers glimmered with half-dead lights. Gunshots cracked distantly. Somewhere, a car screamed as it exploded.
New York was still breathing. Barely.
But it wasn't just the city that haunted him.
It was the voices.
They'd started faintly. Echoes in the back of his mind. Now, they whispered clearly.
"Lena…"
"Marcus…"
"I failed…"
"…why am I still here?"
They came from his own summons.
His undead.
At first, he thought it was hallucination. A side-effect of absorbing the Crown.
But when he approached one of them—the armored knight from the Echospire—its hollow helm turned to him.
And it spoke.
"My name… was Galen," it rasped, voice like brittle leaves. "I served the Tenth Wall. I fell when the Surge took Queens."
Ezra stared. "You remember?"
"Only slivers. Names. Fire. The boy I tried to shield…"
The knight looked down at its bone-white hands.
"Am I still protecting him?"
Ezra didn't know what to say.
He simply nodded.
The knight gave a slow, hollow laugh. "Good."
And then it returned to standing guard, silent once more.
The next morning, Kael met him with a satchel of rations and an encrypted transponder.
"You're not going to like this," she said.
Ezra raised an eyebrow. "Go on."
"While you were sleeping like the dead—pun intended—I checked the comms grid. Red Flag wasn't acting alone. They were contracted by SpireCorp."
Ezra blinked.
"SpireCorp?"
Kael nodded grimly. "They're back."
Back before the Surge, SpireCorp was one of the leading private defense companies—known for their drone armies, mercenaries, and blacksite projects. After the world changed, they disappeared.
Rumors said they'd gone off-grid. That they were building something.
Apparently, the rumors were true.
"They've been buying up dungeon clearances, mapping surge sites, and testing awakening serums," Kael said. "And they've taken an interest in necromancy. Your kind."
Ezra folded his arms. "Why?"
She hesitated. "Because they're trying to manufacture Hollowborn."
He felt something cold sink into his chest.
"They can't," he said, voice flat.
"They're trying."
Ezra stood, brushing dust off his coat. "Where's their nearest outpost?"
"Upstate. Former research campus. We'd need to cross into a B-ranked territory and sneak past three patrol zones to get there."
"I'm not asking for a tourism brochure."
Kael tilted her head. "You sure you're ready for this?"
Ezra looked past her to the horizon. A storm was building. Both real and metaphorical.
"No," he said honestly. "But we're going anyway."
The journey north was brutal.
Feral beasts roamed unchecked through abandoned towns. Ezra's undead protected them through most of it, but even they were challenged by a mutated bear the size of a truck—a creature Kael later confirmed was an "Aberrant," a product of failed evolution post-Surge.
They avoided it. Barely.
But that wasn't the worst of it.
Two days out, they passed through a place once called Harriston. Ezra felt the change immediately. The soil was dead. Not corrupted—emptied.
There was no mana. No echoes.
Just silence.
Kael didn't like it either.
"Someone's been harvesting here."
"Harvesting?"
"Draining mana. Systemic. Like clearing a forest but underground."
"Why?"
Kael shook her head. "I don't know. But they left something behind."
They found it in the ruins of a church—an entire room full of corpses, laid out in a perfect circle. Each body had been carefully skinned. Their bones bleached white. Their eyes missing.
Kael vomited behind the altar.
Ezra kneeled beside the circle, touching the ground.
It was warm.
[Warning: Ritual Site Detected – Black Tier Interference][You are being watched.]
Ezra stood quickly, eyes scanning the empty pews.
But nothing moved.
Kael wiped her mouth. "We're leaving. Now."
Ezra agreed.
That night, as they camped beneath the broken shell of an overpass, Ezra found himself staring at the stars—or what little remained of them.
He thought of Galen. Of the other undead who now murmured in his dreams. He thought of the altar. The ritual. The Crown.
And he thought of why he was doing this.
Not for power.
Not for revenge.
But for the life he hadn't yet built.
For the family he hadn't met.
For the love he didn't even know he deserved.
One day, he told himself.
One day, when the world was safe enough to stop running.
But not yet.
[System Update – Soulbound Evolution Triggered]Soulbound Unit: Galen has reached Evolution ThresholdSelect Path:
Hollow Knight – Enhanced defense, AoE taunt, magic resistance
Graveblade – High-speed attacker, bleeding strikes, stealth techniques
Crypt Warden – Support-focused, undead healing, defensive auras
Ezra hovered over the second for a moment.
But his gut said otherwise.
He chose Crypt Warden.
[Crypt Warden Selected – Evolution In Progress…][Galen has remembered a name: "Theo."]
Ezra blinked.
The system hadn't done that before.
Another ripple. Another thread.
The deeper he went, the more human his dead became.
And maybe…
Just maybe…
The more he might lose himself.
But Ezra Vale, now the Grave Sovereign, wasn't planning to stop.
Not until the gods trembled.