If the world hadn’t already ended, Warren Smith would’ve become a serial killer. He was built for it cold, precise, methodical. Not driven by rage or trauma, but by a hunger for control. A creature of discipline and detachment. In the old world, he would’ve been studied. Hunted. Locked away. But the old world is long gone. Centuries ago, something broke, everything broke. Civilization collapsed under its own weight, swallowed by unchecked ambition, mass failure, and rot. The cities fell. The satellites died. People learned to fear silence because silence meant they’d been forgotten. And then, hundreds of years later, came the System. Sold as a cure. Marketed as salvation. A new architecture to stitch the ruins back together. Embedded in human minds through chips and fragments, it offered power, skills, survival. It promised to lift the desperate into something more than just broken survivors. It lied. The System was never built to save anyone. It was a leash. A filter. A machine designed to manage what was left not fix it. It turned people into data. Into stats. Into expendable roles with preset fates. But Warren wasn’t part of that design. He’s what the System missed. What it couldn’t see. An Aberrant unregistered, unreadable, ungovernable. He moves through the shattered world not as a man, but as something becoming legend. A ghost in the mist. The silence before the violence. He doesn’t crave recognition. He doesn’t ask for power. He takes it quietly, completely, and without permission. Because Warren doesn’t survive the System. He dissects it. And what he builds from its broken parts is entirely his own. Even in a world of collapse and cruelty he’s the one thing still coming for you Vaeliyan and Class One of the 93rd have already shaken the foundations of the Citadel. What should have been a single year of blood and trials has already turned into a legend whispered through the halls. But that was only the beginning. Four more descents into the Ninth Layer lie ahead. Each one pulls him closer to the truth about Lord Barcus, the shadow who set the board long before Vaeliyan ever arrived. Those descents will not just test his class, they will strip them bare, revealing who can endure and who will be left behind. Beyond the Citadel’s walls, forces stir. Friends move with uncertain loyalty. Foes gather, sharpening their blades against his name. And above it all, the gods themselves tilt their gaze, choosing this moment to act, weaving their hands into the threads of mortals. The Shatterlight Trial looms on the horizon, a crucible of violence and revelation. Vaeliyan must prepare as he has never prepared before, for if he falters, it will not only consume him, but everything he has managed to hold together. And if all of that were not enough. Winter comes. And with it, the Red Widow rises.
You can also read this novel here: Read free novels online