The world was dissolving at the edges, bleeding into a blur of smoke, pain, and flickering orange light.
This was it.
The final moments.
The life Blaze had lived—a frantic, vicious cycle of stealing from others and having everything stolen from him in turn—spun through his fading mind like a broken tape.
No glory.
No legacy.
Just the empty-handed scramble of a rat in a metal maze.
His gaze, growing cloudy, managed to fix on the figure standing over him.
Nex.
The King of the Junkyard himself.
A strange, grim peace settled over Blaze's ruin of a body.
At least it was him.
At least the person who hunted him to the very end, who would deliver the final stamp of failure, was a legend.
His death would be a footnote in Nex's story.
It was a pitiful kind of proof, but proof nonetheless, that he had existed.
That he had been enough of a threat, enough of a nuisance, for the king to personally put him down.
His notoriety would be his tombstone.
Nex's voice cut through the roar of the flames, flat and final.
"I'd ask for any last words, but—" He stopped mid-sentence, his head tilting as a groan of tortured metal echoed through the burning warehouse.
A support beam overhead buckled with a shriek, spraying sparks.
The ceiling was coming down.
They had seconds, not minutes.
Blaze tried to speak, to spit one last curse or crack one final, bloody joke.
Nothing came.
Only a wet, bubbling sound escaped his lips, lost in the inferno's roar.
A strange dissonance gripped him: his own body was growing cold, a deep, draining chill as his life bled out onto the grimy floor.
Yet the air around him was getting hotter, thicker, pressing in like a heavy fist.
The fire wasn't just around them anymore, it was consuming the very structure of their tomb.
He heard the heavy, unmistakable pumping of Nex working the pump-action on his shotgun.
One last shell, chambered with deliberate, efficient calm.
No ceremony.
Just business.
Blaze's vision tunneled.
The swirling smoke, the collapsing ceiling, the towering figure of Nex—all of it faded into a gray haze, until the only thing left, sharp and clear at the center of the dying world, was the dark, circular mouth of the shotgun barrel.
Aimed directly at his heart.
In those last, smoke-choked seconds, with the shotgun's mouth a black sun in his vision, Blaze felt something he had never known in his chaotic, grasping life: a grim, cold contentment.
Not satisfaction—who could be satisfied with this? —but a cessation of the struggle.
The running was over.
The constant, gnawing need to take, to burn, to outpace the void behind him, was finally, blessedly, being silenced by the king of the junkyard himself.
It was a kind of peace.
He had never thought, not in his most fevered or cynical dreams, that his story would have a second page.
He could never have conceived of a mind so steeped in its own form of madness that it would see his smoldering corpse not as an end, but as a fascinating beginning.
That someone would toy with the finality of his death, claw him back from the brink not for mercy, but for an experiment.
That he would be resurrected not into life, but into this… this god-forsaken puppet of a body.
A cage of polished alloy and corporate glyphs where his own fire now burned on a corporate leash.
When his consciousness returned.
It was a drowning resurgence into a cold, sterile light.
And the face that swam into view above him, the one to welcome him to his new damnation, was not the horned king of hell he had always imagined.
It was the calm, clinical gaze of a man in a white coat, taking notes.
They explained what they had done.
How they had salvaged him.
Repurposed him.
His body was gone.
What remained was something else—a conduit.
A living battery housed in alloy and synthetic muscle.
His nerves were now aetheric pathways.
His heartbeat was a regulator hum.
His rage, his fire, his very will to burn—all of it had been quantified, calibrated, and plugged into a system.
He could feel it.
Not with the raw, aching sensitivity of flesh, but with the distant, processed feedback of a machine.
Heat levels.
Energy output.
Glyph stability.
He was a weapon that could feel its own trigger.
He felt no gratitude to the man in the white coat.
Not even the hollow, transactional kind.
Gratitude required a debt, and a debt required a self that still owned something.
He owned nothing.
Not even his own end.
They had given him a second chance, they said.
A new purpose.
A higher calling.
All he felt was the utter, complete disregard for what he had been.
They hadn't saved a man.
What they retrieved was a specimen.
And now he burned, clean and cold and perfect, in a cage he was meant to call a body.
A second page had been torn from someone else's book and stapled onto his ruin.
***
But this time—this time it might truly end in the blaze of glory he deserved.
He watched Lucent across the shattered street, the boy's conduits humming in their anxious orbit, his breath steaming in the cold air.
There was something there.
Not just power.
Not just borrowed glyphs and tripartite tricks.
There was a core in him—that same raw, desperate will to survive that Blaze had felt in himself, years ago, before the white coats and the cold light.
But survival wasn't enough.
Survival was what rats did.
What gutter trash did.
Blaze wanted meaning.
A finale.
The plan was brutally simple.
Push the rawcaster to his utmost limit.
Strip him of every trick, every borrowed spell, every crutch.
Corner him so completely that the only thing left was the instinct to burn it all down.
And when Lucent did—when he reached into whatever well of chaos he'd tapped in that ruined lab, when he became something more than a caster, more than a man—that would be the moment.
That would be the crescendo.
Blaze would meet it.
Not with a corporate barrier.
Not with a copied glyph.
But with everything he had, everything the alloy body and the hollow heart could still muster.
They would collide in a storm of light and ruin so absolute it would scorch the memory into the bones of this junkyard forever.
It didn't matter that he was the villain in the story.
It didn't matter that they'd write him as a monster, a corporate weapon, a thing to be feared and forgotten.
They would remember this.
They would remember the night the sky turned to fire because a king of scrap fought a ghost in crimson, and neither walked away.
All he needed was for Lucent to become magnificent, just for a moment.
Just long enough to burn them both into history.
He could almost taste it—the heat of a final, un-caged flame.
The silence after the thunder.
The beautiful, perfect end.
As the pulse rifle's blue-white annihilation beam struck his barrier, the world dissolved into a silent, searing whiteness—a perfect, contained apocalypse that should have erased him from existence.
But inside, there was only data.
Numbers flickered across his vision, cold and precise.
A deep, resonant hum vibrated through the alloy of his bones—the barrier dissipating the energy, redirecting the force, holding.
Just barely.
A split second later, the beam vanished, leaving a crater of glassy earth at his feet and steam rising in ghostly spirals toward the bruised sky.
And then, AiM's voice—flat, synthetic, devoid of anything resembling concern—cut through the ringing aftermath inside his mind.
<
A pause, almost imperceptible.
<
Another pause, this one pointed.
<
The barrier's orange shimmer finally faded, leaving the air tasting of dust and scorched asphalt.
Blaze didn't move.
His eyes remained fixed on the source of the blast—the rooftop of a building, the glint of heavy machinery on a figure too small to wield it.
He answered AiM, his voice a low, calm murmur only the system could hear.
"I know."
<
"Both."
<
AiM's tone didn't change, but the subtext was clear: You are wasting power. You are being inefficient. You are behaving like a human, not a weapon.
Blaze's lips curved, not in a smile, but in something colder.
A private acknowledgement.
"No need for assistance," he said, the words final.
He wasn't testing the barrier's limits.
He wasn't measuring the rifle's power.
He was measuring the shooter's resolve.
He was letting them see their best shot fail.
He was letting the hope curdle into dread in their throats.
He was writing the first line of their despair, in light and heat and undeniable, immovable fact.
AiM fell silent, processing the contradiction: a weapon choosing to be hit, choosing to burn energy, choosing theater over efficiency.
But Blaze was no longer just a weapon as he plans to be the director of this show.
And the scene required him to stand unmoved, in the center of the light, so that when he finally did move—it would feel like the world breaking.
AiM's voice returned, a needle of sterile logic threading through the heat of his anticipation.
<
A brief flicker of data—casualty estimates, structural damage assessments—scrolled in the periphery of his vision before dissolving into the feed.
Numbers.
Names.
Burned into statistics.
<
The system paused, as if recalibrating its assessment of the current tableau—the scorched earth, the hovering conduits, Lucent standing defiant in the rubble.
<
Another beat of silence, colder than the first.
<
Blaze's gaze remained fixed on Lucent, but his jaw tightened minutely behind the mask of his composure.
AiM wasn't wrong.
It couldn't be wrong.
They'd "gifted" AiM to him as a tactical assistant—a co-pilot for the weapon they'd built.
But Blaze knew, in the way one knows the taste of poison, that its true function was oversight.
A leash woven from logic and live data, wrapped around his will.
Every calculation was a reminder.
Every suggestion was a command in soft clothing.
Adjust aggression calibration.
Suppress, don't destroy.
Preserve the asset.
Blaze felt the weight of it—not just the suit, but the purpose.
The cold, clean, corporate purpose that had no room for glory, only results.
But this—this moment, this raw, scrap-metal defiance in front of him—was his last chance.
His only chance.
To burn on his own terms.
To make a memory so bright even the white-coated ghosts who owned him couldn't erase it.
Vector Atheron had given him a long leash.
Playful, almost.
Encouraged his "theatrics."
But Blaze had seen the labs.
He'd seen what happened to those who outlived their usefulness.
The Dolls in their frozen pods weren't sleeping.
They were waiting.
For repurposing.
For recycling.
If he went back now—if he let AiM steer him to a clean, corporate victory—what waited for him?
Not praise.
Not freedom.
A debriefing.
A scan.
A calibration.
And then, maybe, a pod of his own.
Or worse—a new directive.
Another cage.
His fingers curled slowly at his sides.
The air around him grew heavy, charged with the promise of heat yet unspent.
Lucent stood ready, breath ragged but eyes sharp.
He was a tool, too—blunt and desperate but still have his own freedom right now.
AiM waited.
The system expected compliance.
Rationality.
Preservation.
Blaze's lips parted, his voice a low, private signal across the internal channel—not defiance, not agreement.
A statement of fact only he could understand.
"Noted," he murmured with shallow conviction.
And then he took a step forward, not toward a tactical advantage, but toward the only freedom left to him.
The freedom to choose how he burned out.
"Is that all you've got?"
Blaze's voice cut through the settling dust, calm and carrying. It wasn't a shout. It was a dismissal.
He wasn't just speaking to Lucent, a dozen paces away with his conduits humming—he was addressing the unseen shooter, the one who had dared to paint him in that searing, blue-white light.
Twice.
A flicker in his vision, internal and cold:
Aether Reserve: 83%
A cold, pragmatic thread of thought cut through the performance: Two shots. Seventeen percent gone.
It stung more than he'd let the system calculate.
That wasn't nothing.
That was a real cost, a tangible depletion of the very thing that kept him standing, kept him him in this alloy cage.
But the stage was set.
The audience was watching.
If he wanted to break them—not just their bodies, but their will—he couldn't flinch.
He couldn't show the strain.
The barrier had to seem infinite.
His endurance had to feel absolute.
He had to make them believe their best shot was a sigh against a mountain
Karen braced against the wall, her breath coming in ragged hitches.
The world smelled of melted concrete and her own burning fear.
The pulse rifle augment on her shoulder was a dead, hot weight.
Servos whined in protest, and a visible, shimmering heat-haze vented from its overheated core, blowing a fine, acrid mist into the cold air.
Her eyes were wide, fixed on the spot where the beam—her beam—had struck.
Where the man in the jacket still stood, untouched, brushing imaginary dust from his sleeve.
A numb, hollow feeling opened in her chest.
"Is that guy really invincible?" she whispered, the words swallowed by the groan of settling rubble.
It wasn't a question for the others.
It was the sound of a paradigm shattering.
She'd seen Nex take hits.
She'd seen barriers crack.
She'd never seen something look at total annihilation and smile.
A diagnostic glyph flickered weakly on the augment's internal display, projected against her retina.
Cooldown cycle crawling.
Core stress at 89%.
Her mind did the grim math, cold and automatic.
Two, maybe three more shots.
Max.
And that was if she wanted to risk the housing melting, the conduits fusing, the whole brutal piece of machinery cooking itself—and her arm with it—into a permanent, smoldering sculpture.
She had pulled the trigger on their best weapon.
And all it had done was show her how deep the ocean of his power really was.
Cale was positioned a few paces behind Karen, crouched low behind a fractured concrete column.
His grip was tight on his borrowed carbine, but his eyes weren't on the sights—they were locked on Karen, and on the open space between her and Blaze.
He'd heard her whispered despair.
"Maybe he's just enduring it," Cale murmured back, his voice low and tense.
"That barrier… it didn't even flicker. But the energy's got to come from somewhere. He's definitely not a god." He shifted, his mind trying to patch logic over the gaping hole of what they'd just witnessed. "The guy probably just wants to see us in despair. To make us think we've got nothing that can touch him."
He didn't know his guess was the nearest thing to the truth.
He was just being sarcastic—but he did not saw the soul-deep performance for an audience of one, staged by a man chasing his own funeral pyre.
On the rooftop's jagged edge, Kai lay prone, the chill of dusk seeping through his jacket.
He watched Blaze through the scope of his will alone, his conduit held loosely but ready at his side.
His brow was furrowed in deep, uneasy thought.
He saw no conduit in Blaze's hands.
No device, no focus, no telltale glow of an aether battery.
The man's hands were empty, his posture almost casual.
Yet spells ignited in the air around him like casual thoughts—complex glyphs woven from nothing, burning with that same controlled, corporate orange.
And the barrier… it was the most chilling part.
It shimmered into existence not with a cast, not with a gesture, but with a seeming thought.
Instinctive.
Automatic.
Just like Ember's crimson armor before as it reacted to threats.
A cold suspicion crystallized in Kai's gut.
"Is he rawcasting?" he murmured to the uncaring wind.
But the evidence didn't fit.
Lucent's rawcasting in the Myriad Lab had been a violent, self-destructive act.
Kai had seen the aftermath—the blood, the shaking, the way Lucent's very body seemed to rebel against the power.
It left a mark.
A cost.
Blaze showed none of that.
No strain.
No bleeding eyes or trembling hands.
No visible toll at all.
He stood relaxed, breathing steady, as if conjuring siege-level glyphs and shrugging off pulse rifle beams was as effortless as blinking.
It doesn't add up, Kai thought, a seed of cold dread taking root.
Either he's so powerful the strain is meaningless… or the strain isn't happening where we can see it.
Then he remembered.
The memory was stark, unnerving in its clarity: the aftermath in the Myriad Lab.
Lucent's body trembling, veins dark with aetheric corruption—a death sentence written beneath the skin.
And then Zero.
With a cold touch, all those black, crawling blemishes had moved.
They'd slithered across Lucent's flesh like living shadows, gathering at the point of contact before being siphoned away into nothing.
It hadn't looked like healing.
It had looked like… a transaction.
A collector taking what was owed.
The possibility that gnawed at him, but he dismisses it as the idea seems crazy enough.
But the truth was something he couldn't possibly imagine.
That Blaze was already more machine than flesh, and the power came from a reservoir deep within a body that was no longer entirely human.
Blaze's gaze never wavered from Lucent.
The rawcaster was breathing harder now, the three floating conduits orbiting him like anxious moons.
Good.
Fear was a useful spice.
But it wasn't the main course.
"Are you still conserving your strength?" Blaze asked, his voice light, almost conversational, as if commenting on the weather. "Or are you waiting for a better invitation?"
He didn't raise a hand.
He didn't gesture.
A thought—clean, direct, and utterly effortless—was parsed by the system nestled in his spine.
A command flickered from will.
In the air between them, ten compact orbs of searing orange light blinked into existence.
Rank 2—Fire Darts.
They formed in perfect unison, hovering for a fraction of a heartbeat before streaking toward Lucent in a tight, controlled spread.
Lucent reacted instantly, throwing himself into a lateral dive.
He'd learned.
He wouldn't be a static target.
But Blaze had learned, too.
A micro-calculation, faster than synaptic.
The lead fire dart shivered mid-flight. The one beside it veered sharply right.
Two others dipped and rose.
Their trajectories weren't just aimed, they were corrected.
Lucent's eyes widened as the darts adjusted, cutting off his escape lanes with terrifying precision.
He was in the air, committed to the dive, with nowhere left to go.
No time for a complex counter.
No time for a tripartite marvel.
Instinct took over.
His mind fractured into three desperate, simultaneous commands—one to each conduit.
Rank 1—Kinetic Shield.
Not one, but three shimmering, faintly blue hexagonal planes snapped into existence around him, layered and overlapping.
They materialized almost instantly—the pathetic virtue of low-rank spells: speed over substance.
The fire darts struck.
The first shield shattered on impact with a sound like cracking ice, dissipating into nothing.
The second held for a millisecond longer before buckling under two more darts, its energy scattering in a burst of blue sparks.
The third absorbed the final impacts with a deep, shuddering thump that vibrated through Lucent's bones, but it held.
He landed hard, rolling on the broken asphalt, the remains of his hasty defense flickering out around him.
He was unscathed.
For now.
But the message was carved in fire and failure: Blaze wasn't just throwing spells.
He was sculpting them.
And Lucent was burning through his energy and focus on cheap, disposable shields just to stay alive.
Blaze took a slow, deliberate step forward.
Then another.
The shattered stone under his boot was the only sound beyond the low, seething hum of his own internal systems.
As he walked, the air around him began to twinkle.
Not with light, but with heat.
One by one, then in silent, synchronized clusters, three distinct sets of Fire Darts bloomed into existence.
They didn't hover in front of him.
They fell into formation behind him, trailing in his wake like a coronet of captive stars—thirty points of searing orange light, drifting lazily, awaiting command.
He was a man taking a stroll with his own personal, floating armory.
His eyes remained locked on Lucent, who was pushing himself back to his feet, the three conduits around him whirling faster now, their hum pitched higher with strain.
"What will make you get serious?" Blaze asked.
His voice was not a taunt.
It was a genuine, almost clinical inquiry.
He needed to know the threshold.
The breaking point.
"I know what you are, Lucent. I've seen what you've done in that lab."
He let the title hang in the charged air between them.
Rawcaster.
The word was a curse and a legend wrapped in one.
Their numbers were vanishingly few, for obvious reasons.
To the common Junkyard thug, they were myths—stories of casters who blew themselves apart trying to play god.
A suicidal bunch, everyone agreed.
A dead-end path.
But to those who knew glyphs—truly knew them, who understood the precise, harmonic architecture of spell-forms, the delicate balance of intent and aether—the rawcaster was not a fool.
They were a force of nature.
A demi-god.
To bend reality without a conduit, to draw power directly through the fragile filter of one's own flesh and will… it was terrifying.
It was power in its purest, most volatile, and most temporary form.
A god with an expiration date.
And that was why Blaze watched Lucent with something beyond tactical interest.
It was a deep, unsettling alarm.
The footage from the Myriad Lab had been fragmented, glitchy, but the evidence was undeniable.
Lucent had rawcasted.
More than once.
He had faced an abomination that adapted and learned, and he had fought it not with polished corporate apps, but with the raw, screaming fury of his own unraveling biology.
He should be dead.
The thought was a cold constant in Blaze's mind.
His blood should have crystallized.
His nerves should have burned out.
He should be a statue of cracked meat and aetheric glass in a frozen lab.
But here he stood.
Breathing.
Fighting.
His eyes clear, his hands steady.
Blaze had scoured the corrupted data, but the final moments of that battle—the climactic, chaotic seconds before the feed died completely—had been lost to encryption or sheer destruction.
He saw the buildup, the catastrophic release of power… and then static.
He never saw the pale hand emerge from nothing.
He never saw the touch that siphoned corruption like drawing venom from a wound.
He never saw Zero.
All Blaze saw was the impossible: a rawcaster who had danced with annihilation and lived to tell the tale.
And that unknown variable—how Lucent survived—was a flaw in the beautiful, tragic ending Blaze was trying to orchestrate.
It was a thread of hope he needed to sever.
"You've cheated the only ending your kind gets," Blaze said, his voice dropping, the playful lilt gone.
The thirty fire darts behind Blaze pulsed in unison, their malevolent orange light casting long, grasping shadows that seemed to claw at the ruins around them.
The air grew thick with the darts' heat.
A slow, knowing smile touched Blaze's lips, but it didn't reach his eyes.
They were sharp, analytical.
He was done testing Lucent's personal defenses.
Now, he would test his priorities.
"Would it make you serious," Blaze asked, his voice deceptively soft, "if I did this?"
His gaze—and the focus of his will—shifted.
Not toward Lucent, but upward and to the left, fixing on the blown-out second-story window of the abandoned apartment complex.
The source of the pulse rifle beam.
The hidden nest.
One by one, with a sound like tearing silk, the fire darts shot forward.
But not in a barrage.
Not in a scatter.
They launched in a precise, relentless line, one after another, stitching a seam of searing annihilation across the entire facade of the building's second floor.
It was a systematic, surgical eradication.
Each dart aimed not at a person, but at a square meter of structure—windows, support beams, crumbling walls.
He wasn't trying to hit the shooter.
He was deleting the floor she was standing on.
Lucent's breath hitched.
In a flash of cold dread, he understood.
This wasn't an attack on him.
It was an attack on his team.
On the people who had just tried to save him.
Blaze was shifting the battlefield from a duel to a massacre, and making Lucent choose: save himself, or save them.
There was no time for a tripartite construct.
No time for elegance.
"KAI! COVER!" Lucent shouted, the raw fear in his voice stripping it of all calm.
At the same time, his mind screamed a single, desperate command to his three orbiting conduits.
Not to defend himself, but to project.
Rank 3—Deflection Matrix.
A complex, interlocking lattice of pale blue energy erupted from his position, but it didn't form around him.
It expanded, shooting outward like a crashing wave, stretching and thinning as it raced to cover the entire face of the targeted building.
It was a desperate, brute-force application—using a high-rank defensive glyph as an area shield, a move that violated every principle of efficient spellcraft.
The aether cost was instantaneous and monstrous.
He felt it in the violent shudder of the conduits orbiting him—their harmonious hum fracturing into a discordant, grinding shriek.
The Deflection Matrix he'd stretched across the building's face wasn't just draining power, it was violating the glyph's fundamental architecture, forcing a focused barrier spell to behave like an area shield.
One conduit sparked violently, its light stuttering from blue to a sickly white before settling into an unstable flicker.
Another emitted a sharp, ceramic ping as its heat sinks failed to dissipate the overload, the metal casing glowing dull red at the seams.
The third simply whined, a high-pitched keen of stressed components pushed far beyond their rated thresholds.
Lucent's face was a mask of pure concentration, his knuckles white where he gripped nothing, his entire being focused on maintaining the fraying digital tether to all three devices at once.
He was orchestrating a cascade failure in real time.
The matrix shuddered visibly with each impacting fire dart, its elegant lattice of light distorting, warping like heat haze over asphalt.
It was holding—but it was a brittle, desperate hold, maintained through sheer willpower and the imminent sacrifice of three pieces of hardware.
Blaze watched, his head tilted.
Not with malice, but with profound, chilling interest.
Finally, he thought.
There it is.
The anchor.
The thing he values more than his own power.
He had found Lucent's limit.
And it was his friends.