Witch of Envy: Riftwalker

Neo-Lumina was a city of silence and static.Not because it was quiet—far from it—but because nothing here was alive in the way Elaria remembered.

No hum of mana.No resonance from stone or sky.No breath of gods in the air.

Only synthetic order.

That made the spark she had created in the bunker feel even more sacred.A reminder that she still existed—not as a relic, but as a force.

And she was done hiding.

Maris wasn't thrilled about the plan.

"You want to cast in public?"

"Not cast," Elaria corrected. "Demonstrate."

They stood in a worn industrial sector where repair drones drifted between shuttered warehouses. At the center was a long-dead power grid node—useless, according to Maris. But to Elaria, it was dormant.

The glyphs she'd drawn from memory were now fused with Maris's tech array, etched into a scavenged plate from the bunker's forge. The flux crystal pulsed in its socket, connected to a capacitor salvaged from an old security unit.

Elaria placed her hand on it, breathing slowly.

"Syncing," she whispered. "Not forcing. I'm not pushing magic through tech—I'm letting them meet."

Maris stood guard, nervously scanning the alley. "This is a bad idea…"

Then—the plate flared green.

A pulse of light surged through the dead grid, igniting long-cold panels and awakening a nearby drone. The ground vibrated faintly as systems rebooted that hadn't responded in decades.

And for a moment—just a breath—the entire block glowed.

Elaria smiled. "The spell worked."

It lasted less than a minute.

But it was enough.

A siren blared from above. A red beam scanned the alleyway. Maris cursed.

"You pinged the chrono-net!"

From the rooftops, small drones shot out like hornets, scanning the zone. Elaria grabbed the array, powering it down, but the trace was done.

"Run!"

They sprinted through side streets as alerts flashed across every terminal:

 Unauthorized Aether Surge Detected – Origin: Sector 9A 

 Suspected Magic-Linked Device Activation 

 All Enforcement Units Mobilize

They ducked into a tunnel beneath a mag-rail station. Elaria could barely catch her breath.

"That was barely a spell," she said.

"Yeah, well," Maris huffed, "this city's allergic to 'barely.' We just painted a target on our backs."

Footsteps above. The distinct low thrum of armored boots.

The Chrome Fangs again.

"Scan confirms signature match. She's here."

"Pull the district map. Lock the tunnels."

Maris's eyes widened. "They've got us boxed in."

Elaria closed her eyes. She could feel the crystal shard still warm in her pocket. Not much power left, but enough for one burst.

"One shot," she whispered.

Maris glanced at her. "You sure?"

"No." She drew a quick glyph across the concrete with her finger, pulling the charge from the shard into the mark. "But I've always been good under pressure."

The trap sprung just as the Fangs reached the tunnel mouth.

A wave of kinetic force exploded from the rune, slamming into the nearest pursuer. The others staggered back, stunned.

Elaria grabbed Maris's hand and they ran, hearts hammering.

Back in the bunker that night, everything felt heavier.

They had been spotted. Identified. Tracked.

But even with danger close behind them, Elaria's hand trembled—not from fear, but excitement.

"I felt it," she murmured. "For a moment… the city responded. Not just the machine. The world."

"You woke something," Maris said. "But I don't know if that's a good thing."

Elaria didn't answer. Her eyes were fixed on the compass. For the first time since arriving, its needle had stopped spinning.

It was pointing—somewhere. South. Far beyond Neo-Lumina's walls.

"A fragment," she whispered. "There's something out there. A piece of what was lost."

Far above them, inside a ChronaTech surveillance chamber, agents reviewed the footage from Sector 9A.

"This shouldn't be possible," one said. "There's no known interface that fuses pre-collapse glyph systems with active tech arrays."

Another voice responded coldly.

"Tag her. WITCH-1 is now classified as a temporal threat."