Chapter 11 Dead Name
Helgard wasn't a city. Helgard was an open wound on the border of a world pretending everything was fine.
Ren saw it from beneath the hood of a shabby cloak he'd bought off a traveling merchant two kilometers before the gate. Buildings stood crooked like drunks who'd forgotten how to stay upright. The streets were caked in mud mixed with something he didn't care to identify. On every corner, eyes watched — not out of suspicion, but because in Helgard, everyone had something worth being suspicious about.
"This place reeks," Kael muttered, wrinkling his nose.
"This place is perfect," Aela replied.
Her stride was different here — lighter, more assured, like someone who'd walked alleys like these before. Ren noticed. Commander Voss's daughter, it seemed, hadn't grown up solely behind the walls of a military compound.
Aela caught his stare.
"My father didn't always operate from behind a desk. There was a time when cities like this were his office."
Ren didn't press further. Everyone had a version of themselves they didn't show.
"Focus, Ren."
Lyra's voice flowed through his mind — clear, but layered with something underneath. Tension, maybe.
"The registration office is in the eastern block. We don't have much time. The longer you stay here without an identity, the bigger the risk."
"Walk me through the process again,"
Ren whispered, his lips barely moving.
"The Awakening Scanner will read your Core. Normally, a Void Core would be flagged immediately — and in under a minute, every Enforcer within a fifty-kilometer radius would know your location." A brief pause. "But I can cloak it. Make the scanner read something else. The result will come out as D-Rank, Class: Fighter. Low enough not to draw attention, valid enough to give you access to the system."
"Sounds easy."
"It's not." Lyra's tone shifted — sharper, almost defensive. "Every time you get rescanned, the cloak weakens. First scan, I can guarantee it. Second scan, the risk jumps to twenty percent. Third scan..." She didn't finish the sentence.
Ren understood. Lyra wasn't a goddess. Her power had limits, and those limits were closer than he would've liked.
"One shot," Ren murmured. "That's what we've got."
"One good shot. Don't waste it."
The Helgard registration office was a square room with peeling paint and the smell of cheap disinfectant. There was only one clerk behind the desk — a thin man with thinning hair and glasses too large for his face. The nameplate on his chest read: MILO.
"New registration?" Milo asked without looking up from the holographic screen on his desk.
"Yes."
"Name?"
Ren swallowed something that felt like a stone in his throat. A name. The simplest thing in the world, and now the heaviest decision he'd ever had to make.
"Eren Valk."
Milo typed it in without expression. "Place your hand on the scanner."
Ren glanced at the glass door behind him. Outside, Kael stood with his arms folded across his chest — face taut as a rope about to snap. Beside him, Aela leaned against the wall with a casual air that was trying too hard.
Ren placed his hand on the scanner panel.
Blue light swept across his palm. One second. Two seconds. The holographic screen above the scanner flickered —
Glitch.
For a fraction of a second — 0.3 seconds, maybe less — the screen displayed something that wasn't D-Rank. Something darker. Deeper. Characters that had no business existing in any database.
Then it was gone.
\[SCAN RESULT\]
Name: Eren Valk
Rank: D
Class: Fighter Status: Active
Milo stared at the screen. His eyes narrowed for one second — one second that felt like an entire hour to Ren.
Then the clerk tapped the screen twice and printed the ID card.
"Done." Milo handed over the card without looking up. "Welcome to the system, Eren."
Outside, Kael let out a breath he seemed to have been holding since Ren walked in.
"It worked?" he whispered.
Ren held up the card. Thin plastic with a standard security hologram. The name Eren Valk printed in white letters on a black background. D-Rank. Fighter.
The card was so light in his hand. But the weight — the weight of what he'd just done — felt like a new gravity strapped to his body.
Ren Ashford was dead.
Not literally. But in the system, in identity, in every way that existence was measured in this world — that name now belonged only to criminal records and wanted lists. The person holding this card wasn't Ren. This person was Eren Valk, a D-Rank Fighter with no history, no past, and no one looking for him.
"Ren..." Kael started, then stopped. There was something in his eyes — not fear, but a deeper unease. "We're getting further and further from the right path."
"The right path was never there for us, Kael." Ren slipped the card into his inner pocket. "There's only the path that keeps us alive long enough to find the truth."
Kael didn't answer. But Ren saw it — a hairline crack in his friend's conviction. A conflict just beginning to grow, and Ren knew that someday, that crack would demand answers he couldn't give.
Aela patted Kael's shoulder gently. "Helgard has decent enough lodgings in the southern district. Clean — relatively." She started walking, and the way she navigated the narrow streets of this city without hesitation made Ren realize once again that Aela knew far more about this world than she'd ever let on.
"First step done," Lyra said inside his head. "But don't let your guard down. A false identity is a double-edged blade — it protects you, but it'll cut you just as quick if someone looks too close."
"I know."
"Good. Because I can't save you twice with the same trick."
Milo didn't go home when his shift ended.
He sat in his cramped office, fingers tapping the desk in an uneven rhythm. In front of him, the holographic screen displayed the scanner footage from an hour ago — slowed down, magnified, replayed.
0.3 seconds.
For 0.3 seconds, the scanner had read something that shouldn't exist. Not a standard error. Not signal interference. The reading had structure — something far too complex to be an accident.
Milo pulled up old archives from his database. Files that had gathered digital dust, untouched for years. He matched the anomaly's pattern against historical records.
A match was found. Ten years ago.
"That's impossible..." he whispered, his glasses catching the flicker of blue holographic light.
The last anomaly with a matching pattern had been logged under a single operation whose name had been scrubbed from nearly every official database.
Project Rebirth.
Milo saved the file into a private encrypted folder. He wouldn't report it — not yet. Information was the most valuable currency in Helgard, and Milo never spent his money without knowing what he was buying.
He killed the screen and walked out into the dark Helgard night.
Somewhere in the same city, a young man named Eren Valk lay on the bed of a cheap inn, staring up at a cracked ceiling, trying to remember what it felt like to be Ren Ashford.