Chapter 36: LIGHTS GO OUT
The transition was not a gradual fading of twilight, nor was it the gentle settling of an urban evening. It was a violent, absolute execution of the city’s power grid.
Across Sentinel City’s seventy-two sprawling districts, hundreds of thousands of high-yield mana conduits blasted simultaneously. The five-hundred-meter holographic billboards that painted the high sectors in artificial gold flickered once, emitted an unbearable, high-pitched electrical screech, and died.
In the lower market sector of District 7, the transformation was catastrophic.
The neon haze that masked the grime, rust, and poverty of the slums vanished in a single second. Then pitch-black darkness swallowed the wet thoroughfares. The automated security turret guns were mounted along the sector boundaries as their magnetic mounts seized up, dropping their dead barrels toward the mud.
Immediate, chaotic screams came from the crowded market stalls.
"The grid! The primary conduit just died!"
"My wrist terminal isn’t connecting! The Association signal is gone!"
"Is it a monster raid?! Where is the sector vanguard guard?!"
"Look at the sky! What in God’s name is happening to the sky?!"
High above the lower residential blocks, the sky was no longer merely storm-gray in color. It had transformed into a hollow, light-devouring void. The rainfall that had been washing over District 7 stopped abruptly, replaced by a suffocating, freezing wind that carried no moisture.
BOOM.
Far up in the sky-lanes, a massive, silver-plated corporate transport airship lost it’s stability. Its glowing mana propulsion thrusters died out completely, leaving thousands of tons of high-density alloy to drift helplessly through the pitch-black air. Emergency sirens started ringing frantically from its upper hull, sounding like desperate wails of an iron beast plunging straight into the lower sector containment walls.
CRASH!
The airship clipped the upper steel girder of a secondary transit bridge two miles away, sending a shower of orange sparks cascading through the black void like a dying firework before grinding to a catastrophic halt against the concrete support pillars.
Noah Kurtz didn’t panic. He didn’t even look up at the distant cloud of smoke rising from the crash site.
He stood near the mouth of a narrow, damp alleyway, his hands resting casually inside the deep pockets of his dark coat. His slouching posture remained entirely unbothered by the rising wave of hysteria echoing through the blacked-out market square. His steel-gray eyes, sharpened by the baseline sensory pathways of his integrated archives, adjusted effortlessly to the total absence of light. To Noah, the pitch-black darkness was not an obstacle—it was a familiar shroud he had navigated across fourteen extinct eras.
Beside him, Jiho Park lazily slapped his broad, thick palm against the side of an automated beverage vending machine that had just gone completely dark.
Thump.
"Man," Jiho mumbled sleepily, his deep, gravelly voice carrying its usual lackadaisical rumble through the dark. "It ate my two hundred credits. I pressed the button for the sweet canned coffee, the light flickered, and then the coin slot locked up. That was my last physical chip, Master."
"The System grid is offline, Jiho," Noah replied softly, his voice a steady, absolute pool of calm in the pitch black. "The electronic banking servers are dead. The machines aren’t taking currency anymore, and those credits don’t exist until someone manually cranks an emergency generator."
Jiho blinked his droopy eyes, looking past Noah’s shoulder toward the center of the market square where a group of lower-tier Hunters were panicking.
"Hey, Master... look at those guys," Jiho nudged Noah with his massive elbow, pointing a thick finger at a party of five C-rank mercenaries clad in gleaming, high-grade mana-infused alloy plate armor.
The mercenaries were desperately slamming their expensive catalyst broadswords against the pavement, screaming spell incantations at the top of their lungs. They were trying to ignite basic illumination spells or ignite their blades with elemental flame to light up the street.
Clang! Clang!
No elemental light responded. The magic circuit crystals embedded in their high-tier weapons stayed completely dull, matte-gray, and lifeless.
"Why isn’t the blade igniting?!" the mercenary leader yelled, his voice cracking with rising terror as he frantically shook his ten-thousand-credit enchanted sword. "My mana pool is full! I’m channeling my meridians! Why isn’t the weapon drawing the charge?!"
Noah observed the panicking Hunters with a dry, clinical gaze.
DING.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
[Global Systemic Breakdown Verified]
[Environmental Mana Density: 0.00%]
[Systemic Conduit Response: Failed]
[Modern Catalyst Efficiency: Null]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
The silver system windows flickered once across Noah’s field of vision before disintegrating into tiny, static light particles.
"Their weapons run on atmospheric mana conversion," Noah spoke dryly, his quiet voice slicing cleanly through the screaming crowd. "Modern Hunter equipment is designed with open-circuit catalysts. They don’t generate energy internally; they take the Hunter’s small spark and amplify it using the dense mana floating in the surrounding air. When the Black Sky manifests, the atmosphere starves the catalyst instantly. Their ten-thousand-credit swords are nothing more than heavy, awkward pieces of cold iron now."
"Glad I don’t use flashy swords," Jiho yawned, stretching his massive shoulders until the fabric of his oversized yellow t-shirt strained at the seams. He casually adjusted his battered canvas duffel bag over his shoulder. "So... what now, Master? The high sectors look pretty chaotic."
Noah turned his head slowly toward the north.
Far beyond the residential blocks of District 7, the towering glass spires of the corporate elite—the majestic skyscrapers belonging to the Vance Clan, the Harrington Syndicate, and the International Hunter Association’s executive board—stood shrouded in absolute darkness.
Without their glowing defensive barriers, their climate-controlled atmospheric domes, and their blinding holographic displays, those pristine glass towers no longer looked like symbols of supreme human ambition. They looked like giant black gravestones standing silently against a dead sky.
Evelyn Vance and her clan elders were up in those high towers right now. The prideful legacy prodigy who had stood on the rain-slicked transit platform hours earlier, throwing a twenty-thousand-credit chip into a dirty puddle and branding Noah an "F-rank dead end," was currently sitting in total darkness. Her absolute-zero cryomancy, her high-grade catalyst rod, and her family’s endless financial reserves were completely useless in an environment where atmospheric mana had ceased to exist.
Noah reached beneath the lining of his dark coat. His steady, gloved fingers lightly brushed against the wrapped leather hilt of his twin obsidian-alloy daggers, resting snugly in their double sheath at his belt. Beside them, the two triangular obsidian relics—Record Fragment #014 and Record Fragment #015—hummed with a quiet, dormant warmth against his ribs.
He didn’t rely on System mana. He didn’t rely on corporate power grids, Association server networks, or modern catalyst formulas.
Deep within his lower spine, the microscopic thread of cultivated Ki moved smoothly through his meridians, flowing in a self-contained, closed loop that was completely independent of the world’s ruined atmosphere. His Ashen Step, his Silent Blade forms, and the vast blueprints contained within his Memory Cabinet were born from eras that existed long before modern humanity ever discovered how to weaponize mana cores.
"Master?" Jiho asked, casually resting his massive hands on his hips as he looked down at Noah. "Where are we headed first?"
Noah’s steel-gray eyes glinted with an ancient, terrifyingly cold depth in the pitch black.
"Alistair’s black-market laboratory," Noah replied softly, his voice carrying an unshakeable weight. "His server arrays run on isolated chemical battery backups. If anyone in this district has a localized radar interface that survived the initial blackout, it’s him."
"And after that?"
"After that," Noah murmured, stepping out from the shadow of the alleyway onto the dark, chaotic thoroughfare, "we head toward the central transit line. The primary anchor node for the Bronze-Tier archive is going to trigger beneath the high sectors as the Black Sky deepens."
His boots touched the wet pavement, making absolute zero sound as he activated the baseline circulation of the Ashen Step. Around them, civilian crowds were screaming, mercenaries were dropping their dead magical gear in despair, and emergency warning horns continued to wail across the dark megacity.
Noah Kurtz didn’t turn back to look at the panic. He shoved his hands deep into his dark coat pockets, his slouching posture remaining perfectly relaxed as he walked smoothly into the darkness alongside his invincible human wall.
"The modern world just lost its rules, Jiho," Noah whispered into the freezing, ash-laden wind, a thin, sharp smile touching his lips. "It’s time to show them how we survived before they ever built a city."