Chapter 11 Dead Name

Helgard wasn't a city. Helgard was an open wound on the edge of a world in denial of its maladies.

Ren saw it through the hood of a tattered cloak he'd bought from a traveling merchant two kilometers ahead of the gate. The buildings were bent and crooked, like drunks who had forgotten how to upright themselves. The streets were coated in mud mixed with something he had no interest in identifying. There were eyes on every corner — not out of suspicion, but because everyone in Helgard had something worth being suspicious about.

“This place stinks,” Kael muttered, scrunching his nose.

“This place is perfect,” Aela said.

Her stride here was different — lighter, more confident, like someone who had walked alleys like these before. Ren noticed. Commander Voss’s daughter, it seemed, hadn’t been raised behind the walls of a military compound.

Aela caught his stare.

“My father didn’t always work from behind a desk. “There was a time these cities were his office.”

Ren didn't press further. Everyone had part of themselves they didn’t put on display.

"Focus, Ren."

Lyra’s voice sang through his mind — clear, but with something else underneath. Tension, maybe.

This is the register office in the eastern block,” We don't have much time. The longer you’re here without an identity, the greater the risk.”

“Go through the process with me again,”

Ren said in a whisper, his lips barely moving.

“The Awakening Scanner will read your Core. Normally a Void Core would show up in an instant — and within a minute every Enforcer in a fifty-kilometer radius would know exactly where you were.” A brief pause. "But I can cloak it. Get the scanner to read something else. Would give D-Rank, Class: Fighter as output. Low enough that you won’t get flagged, valid enough to allow access to the system.”

"Sounds easy."

"It's not." Lyra’s tone changed — sharper, bordering on defensive. “Every time you get rescanned, the cloak loses power. I can promise they will scan first. If you do a second scan, the risk goes to twenty percent. Third scan...” She did not complete the thought.

Ren understood. Lyra wasn't a goddess. Her power had boundaries, and those boundaries were closer than he’d wanted.

"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 that smelled of the cheap disinfectant and had peeling paint. Only one clerk was at the desk — a skinny man with thinning hair and glasses that were too big for his face. His name tag read: MILO.

"New registration?" Milo didn’t look up from the holographic screen on his desk.

"Yes."

"Name?"

Ren swallowed something that hurt like a stone in his throat. A name. The easiest thing in the world, and the hardest decision he’d ever faced.

"Eren Valk."

Milo typed it out, expressionless. “Put your hand on the scanner.”

Ren looked back at the glass door behind him. Outside, Kael had his arms crossed and his face was tight as a taut rope. Next to him Aela was hanging against the wall in an aloof manner best described as forced.

Ren rested his palm on the scanner panel.

A wash of blue light crossed his palm. One second. Two seconds. The hologram desktop on the scanner flickered —

Glitch.

For a split second — 0.3 seconds, maybe less — something that was not D-Rank flashed on the screen. Something darker. Deeper. Characters that had no right to exist in any database.

Then it was gone.

[SCAN RESULT]

Name: Eren Valk

Rank: D

Class: Fighter Status: Active

Milo stared at the screen. Just one second his eyes narrowed — one — a second that felt to Ren like an entire hour.)

Then the clerk double-tapped the screen and printed out the ID card.

"Done." Without looking up, Milo handed the card over. "Welcome to the system, Eren."

Kael exhaled a breath that he had been holding since Ren entered.

"It worked?" he whispered.

Ren held up the card. A standard security hologram on thin plastic. Eren Valk printed in white letters over a black background. D-Rank. Fighter.

The card felt so light in his hand. But the weight — the weight of what he had just done — hit like a new gravity strapped to his body.

Ren Ashford was dead.

Not literally. But in the system, in identity, in everything that existence was quantified by in this world — that name now belonged only to rap sheets and wanted lists. Ren wasn’t the one holding this card. This individual happened to be Eren Valk, a D-Rank Fighter who had no history, past life or anyone searching for him.

"Ren..." Kael started, then stopped. Not fear, exactly, but a deeper unease in his eyes. “We’re moving further and further astray.”

Kael, “the right path was never available to us. Ren tucked the card into his inner pocket. “There’s only the way that keeps you alive long enough to discover the truth.”

Kael didn't answer. But Ren noticed it — a fine crack in his friend’s certainty. A conflict just starting to fester, and Ren knew that one day, this crack would require answers no one could provide.

Aela patted Kael's shoulder gently. “Helgard has passable accommodation in the southern district. Clean — relatively." She began walking, and as she made her way through the narrow streets of this city with confidence, Ren remembered yet again that Aela knew far more about this world than she'd ever let on.

“Step one complete,” Lyra said in his head. “But don’t let your guard down. A false identity is a double-edged sword — it shields you, but it’ll cut you just as quickly if someone looks too close.”

"I know."

"Good. Because I cannot save you twice in the same way.”

When Milo’s shift ended.

He was seated in his stuffy office, fingers drumming the tabletop in an erratic beat. Before him, the holographic screen projected the scanner footage from an hour earlier — slowed down, magnified, replayed.

0.3 seconds.

For 0.3 seconds, the scanner had scanned something that never should exist. Not a standard error.

Milo scrounged the archives of his database. Files that had accumulated digital dust, left untouched for years. He compared the anomaly’s pattern with historical records.

A match was found. Ten years ago.

"That's impossible...” he said, his glasses gleaming with a flickering blue holographic light.

The last known anomaly with a matching pattern had been recorded under a single operation, the name of which had been scrubbed from almost all official databases.

Project Rebirth.

Milo plunged the file into a private encrypted folder. He wasn’t going to report it — not yet. Information was the most lucrative currency in Helgard, and Milo never spent his money without knowing what he bought.

He killed the screen and stepped out into the dark Helgard night.

Elsewhere in the same city, in a shabby bed of an inexpensive inn room somewhere outside of all but the most basic comforts, a young man named Eren Valk stared at his cracked ceiling and tried to recall just how it felt to be Ren Ashford.