That night,

Blackwood Spire,

Author

The simulation room was dark.

Aria sat cross-legged on the reinforced floor, her interface crystal glowing in front of her, casting blue shadows across her face.

She wore combat gear, stripped down to the essentials—tunic, trousers, the obsidian dagger at her hip. The children were asleep. The safe house was quiet. The city beyond hummed with its own rhythms, unaware that a woman who had once been a weapon was now trying to become something else.

She activated the dungeon simulation.

The crystal projected a three-dimensional maze around her—corridors of stone and shadow, the familiar architecture of the Labyrinth where she had died and been...