Witch of Envy: Riftwalker

The Dustline Sector was not on any clean map.It was a forbidden zone beyond the Rusted Borderlands—where storm-churned skies flickered with magnetic fire and ancient satellites rained from orbit like dead stars.

Few dared enter.

Fewer returned.

But Elaria had no choice.

The signal tied to WITCH-3 – Gluttony was growing weaker. If she didn't act now, the fragment could vanish forever.

They arrived at the edge of the Dustline under cover of a solar storm.

Static danced across the sky. Wind tasted of copper. Everything buzzed with dissonant energy—like the world was trying to shake off its own skin.

Maris adjusted the shielding on her helmet. "You're sure the signal came from here?"

Elaria held up her compass. The needle spun madly now, locked on one point across the storm-choked valley.

"She's here," she said. "Or part of her is."

They found shelter in a half-collapsed data refinery—a skeletal tower filled with broken server racks and cracked plasma conduits. Inside, the air shimmered. Mana sparks flickered like fireflies trapped in static.

"This place is corrupted," Maris whispered.

"No," Elaria corrected. "It's bleeding magic."

She walked to the center of the chamber where a crater had split the floor. At its core, a single blackened sphere floated—tangled in steel cables and pulsing with dull light.

It was a wild aether node—raw, unstable magical energy left over from a collapse long ago.

And it was exactly what she needed.

Maris watched nervously as Elaria sketched a circular spell array around the node, carving glyphs into the floor with a salvaged plasma cutter.

"You're going to try to synthesize from that?" Maris asked. "That's suicide."

Elaria placed three relic shards—Wrath, Envy, and one inert null-crystal—into the anchor points of the spell.

"If I want to survive what's coming," she said, "I can't rely on fragments. I need a stable core. Something new."

"A hybrid core."

Elaria nodded. "Magic that evolves."

The synthesis began.

The glyphs pulsed green, then violet, then shifted into a spectrum Maris had never seen—not light, but memory. The chamber howled. Dust lifted. Time bent.

Elaria's body arched as power flowed through her, hotter and brighter than anything she had touched since the old world. Her bones felt like glass. Her mind fractured into a thousand voices.

And in the center of it all, a new core formed:

A glowing prism of circuitry and mana, wrapped in burning sigils, pulsing to a dual rhythm.

Machine and spell. Past and present.

Witch and world.

Elaria collapsed, gasping.

Maris caught her.

"You, okay?!"

Elaria clutched the prism close. "It worked," she whispered. "It's not a crystal. Not a relic."

"It's a heart."

The new core synced with her compass instantly. The signal to Gluttony flared.

Then vanished.

"No no no—what happened?!" Maris asked.

Elaria stood, eyes wide. "Someone intercepted it. The signal just shifted."

She opened the compass's scanning lens and saw it: a second pulse. Fainter. But not gone.

"Whoever stole the signal is moving," she said.

Maris swallowed. "Then we follow?"

Elaria's voice was sharp. "We hunt."

Deep underground, beneath a decaying metro station at the Dustline's edge…

A dark figure knelt before a humming containment core. In its center floated a flickering image of a girl with hollow eyes and a brand across her chest: the sigil of Gluttony.

"Acquired essence confirmed," the figure said.

Behind him, the emblem of ChronaTech pulsed on a screen.