She walked barefoot through wet grass

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Rain followed her out of the Old City like a final warning, but Kaelis didn’t look back. The moon hovered above the hills, pale and watchful, while the machines’ dying echoes faded beneath her.

She walked barefoot through wet grass, the metallic stench of coolant slowly giving way to the scent of soil and night-blooming flowers. Every step felt unfamiliar, as if her body needed to relearn what open air was. The Old City had been a maze of humming corridors and predatory cables, a place where silence never meant safety. Out here, silence was simply silence.

Somewhere far below, the system she had shut down was cooling into oblivion. Its lights would never wake again. For the first time, she let herself breathe without listening for the twitch of machinery behind the walls.

A distant rumble echoed through the valley, the low growl of failing infrastructure collapsing under its own age. Kaelis watched the hills darken as the power grid flickered out for good.

She murmured to the night, letting her voice dissolve into the falling rain:

"If the world wants to start over, it can start with me."

And she kept walking, not toward civilization but toward the quiet spaces where broken worlds wait for someone brave enough to imagine them differently.