This wasn't supposed to happen.
The thought was a frantic, hammering rhythm in time with his heavy footsteps.
He skidded around a corner, shoulder slamming into a dripping fire escape, not feeling the pain.
Behind him, the methodical, unhurried clap of heavy boots echoed in the narrow alley.
Not the chaotic chase of rival gangers.
This was worse.
This was the calm, terrible pursuit of Cleaners.
He'd taken the job from a young man playing middleman—slick smile, fast talk, and promises of easy credits.
A simple retrieval.
A datachip from a low-level exec visiting the Velvet.
The sharp-tongued informant named Ash working at a local gambling den, had sworn the security was laughable.
"In and out, like picking a drunk's pocket," he'd said.
Blaze should have double-checked.
Should have trusted the gnawing instinct in his gut over the glint of promised currency.
The exec hadn't been low-level.
The datachip hadn't been corporate gossip.
It had been a Black ICE trap, and the security hadn't been lax—it had been delayed.
Waiting for him to touch the thing before the silent alarms painted the walls with targeting lasers.
Now he was rabbit-running through the Crimson Velvet's service arteries, the taste of failure sharp in his mouth.
The Cleaners weren't even shouting.
They were a silent, spreading stain, cutting off exits with quiet, professional efficiency.
They didn't want a fight.
They wanted a tidy disappearance.
He was an orphan.
For all he knows, he might've been abandoned by his parents.
But he never once cursed anyone else for the life he had lived except himself.
Life had started with fingers dipped into unguarded pockets, a small, hungry ghost in a crowd of larger hungers.
But what was there to steal in the Junkyard?
Scrap?
Half-empty nutrient packs?
The real wealth was locked away behind that place.
That's why his eyes had always been drawn to the Crimson Velvet District.
A fever-dream of light and sound, where the air itself smelled of spent credits and manufactured desire.
It was a world of selfishness, yes, but it was a lavish selfishness.
It had things worth taking.
And more importantly, it had people who believed they were untouchable.
He wanted to touch them.
He wanted to take their shine and use it to burn his own name into the light.
But tonight, he was rat being cornered in a maze.
He ducked into a dead-end alcove reeking of spoiled synth-gin, pressing his back against the cold brick, heart pounding against his ribs.
The boot-steps grew closer, slowed.
This is it, he thought, the fear crystallizing into a sharp, clear point.
He cursed his bad luck.
So this is how it ends.
His hand dipped into his coat, closing to an object he had grab together with the chip.
A heavier, colder but slick block of technology.
A conduit.
He'd grabbed it on instinct from the exec's bedside table, a reflexive snatch of anything that looked valuable as the first laser-sight had danced across the wall.
The growing popularity of these devices was not unknown to him.
He'd seen demonstrations in the black market stalls—crackling arcs of light, summoned shields, kinetic levitation.
It was magic given to reality.
A rich man's toy.
He had no idea how to activate it.
As the first Cleaner's silhouette filled the entrance to the alcove, a strange, defiant calm washed over him.
If he was going to be erased, he'd leave a mark first.
Flailing in the dark, both literally and figuratively, he scrambled his hand over the conduit's surface.
It was smooth, featureless but for a single, faint seam.
No button.
No trigger.
How does it—
Desperation became focus.
He thought not of glyphs or aetheric theory, but of the pure, hot core of his anger—at the trap, at Ash, at the Cleaners, at the entire gleaming, untouchable world that had lured him in just to crush him.
He focused it all into a single, white-hot point of intent: BURN.
His thumb found the seam and pressed, not knowing if it was a switch or a sensor.
A small red glyph came to life.
But in the gin-soaked darkness of the alcove, surrounded by refuse and despair, it was an ignition.
The Cleaner paused, the smooth faceplate tilting slightly.
An unexpected variable.
Blaze stared at the floating, shimmering red light, his breath caught in his throat.
And in that moment, the hunger in his gut transformed.
It was no longer for food, or credits, or shiny things.
It was for that.
For the light.
For the power to turn fear into fire.
The first spark had been struck.
The unstable glyph, fueled by Blaze's raw, untamed will and a conduit never meant for such violent intent, didn't produce a controlled pilot light.
It detonated into a cascading chemical-aetheric chain reaction.
The spoiled synth-gin in the puddles vaporized and caught.
The garbage in the alcove became tinder.
The very air seemed to combust in a rushing, roaring wave of orange and crimson that filled the narrow space with an instant, consuming inferno.
Blaze was not unscathed.
He was at the heart of the birth.
The searing wave washed over him.
His leather jacket blackened and curled.
The skin beneath screamed.
But the pain was a distant, secondary thing, drowned out by the roaring triumph in his ears and the blinding, beautiful light.
When the flames subsided, leaving the alcove a charred, smoldering husk, two of the Cleaners were down, their black armor scorched and smoking, the third staggering back, a silent, jerking puppet.
And on Blaze's forearms, where the heat had bitten deepest, the skin had not just burned—it had transformed.
Angry, ridged scars spread from his wrists to his elbows in intricate, almost patterned welts that resembled nothing so much as stylized, grasping flames.
They were a permanent brand.
A receipt written in his own flesh for the power he'd stolen.
They would become his symbol.
His trademark.
The mark of the man who didn't just steal—he burned.
He escaped the Velvet that night, not as a ghost, but as a phantom smeared in soot and radiating a new, dangerous heat.
News of the Back-Alley Arson and the lone thief who'd turned Nimbrix Cleaners into charcoal would filter through the underworld, warping with each retelling.
And Ash would soon hear a whisper that would freeze the smirk on his face: the mark he'd set up had not only survived the Cleaners… he'd burned them.
And he was asking around.
Looking for the face of the informant who'd sold him a death sentence.
Ash would realize, too late, that some sins aren't paid in credits.
They're paid in kind.
And the man he'd wronged no longer dealt in subtle theft.
He dealt in fire.
***
Lucent gritted his teeth, his entire being a fraying cable of focus.
He was forcing the glyph to do something it was never designed for—stretching a focused barrier into a vast, thin shield.
The strain wasn't just draining aether; it was violating the spell's own logic.
In his mind's eye, he could feel the intricate lattice of the matrix groaning, its structural integrity cracking under the unsustainable expansion.
The final Fire Dart surged forward, a searing orange comet.
It struck the thinnest, most overstressed section of the buckling Deflection Matrix.
The pale blue lattice flared white, let out a sound like shattering crystal—and then ruptured.
The dart punched through, its trajectory only slightly skewed.
It shot past Lucent, past the street, and arrowed into the blown-out second-story window of the abandoned apartment complex—the exact room Karen had fired from moments before.
The impact was not a clean explosion.
The compressed sphere of incendiary energy didn't just blow outwards; it vaporized the interior in a flash of superheated air.
Support beams turned to charcoal and collapsed.
What was left of the walls disintegrated into a superfine, grey-white ash.
A deep, rolling WHUMP echoed across the ruins, followed by a silent, expanding cloud of dust and debris that blotted out the view.
Cale, half-dragging Karen by her harness away from the building's flank, felt the heat wash over his back.
He glanced over his shoulder just as the cloud bloomed.
Goosebumps erupted across his skin, a cold wash of horror completely divorced from the heat.
That was their position.
The room they'd been in seconds ago.
The space that had felt like temporary safety was now a hollowed-out, smoldering crater in the building's face.
He didn't speak.
He just hauled harder, Karen's pulse rifle arm scraping against the rubble, her breath coming in shocked, shallow hitches.
On a higher rooftop, Kai had already moved.
The moment he'd seen Blaze's eyes track upward and the swarm of darts ignite, he hadn't waited to see the target.
Instinct had screamed at him.
He had thrown himself into a desperate, glyph-assisted Leap, the kinetic shove from his conduit launching him in a low, frantic arc across the gap to the next building.
He hit the roof in a rolling tuck, coming up just in time to see the fire dart streak into the window and the building's face disappear into a bloom of ash and flame.
His heart hammered against his ribs.
Not from the exertion, but from the chilling, casual precision of it.
Blaze had erased a tactical position with the indifference of someone swatting a fly on a map.
The message was clear, and it hung in the dusty, heated air:
There is no cover.
There is no hiding.
I decide what stands, and what becomes dust.
Jack saw it all unfold through his scope.
He was lying prone on a skeletal radio tower's maintenance gantry, a vantage point higher than the rooftops, granting him a chilling, panoramic view of the chaos.
The world below was a diorama of desperation: Lucent's buckling shield, the fire-dart piercing through, the building's face dissolving into ash.
Karen and Cale scrambling.
Kai leaping for his life.
His custom rifle, a heavy, brutishly elegant piece of machinery he'd built with his own hands, was cradled steady against his shoulder.
His finger rested beside the trigger, not on it.
Inside the chamber, waiting, was one of his children: a specialized round he'd poured months, credits, and silent, obsessive hope into.
As he watched the near-magical devastation below, a dry, professional thought surfaced in his mind:
Just how fast has the world moved on?
He'd seen the first conduits hit the black market—clunky, unstable things that spat out sparks and drained batteries in seconds.
He'd watched glyph-casters go from carnival tricksters to battlefield dominants in the span of a few bad years.
And he'd thought he'd seen the apex, the true horror, years ago when Vector Atheron had come to him with schematics that smelled of aether and violation.
But this… Blaze wasn't just a caster.
A man who wielded high-tier magic like casual conversation, with a barrier that laughed at pulse rifles.
Jack's thumb stroked the cool, matte finish of his rifle's stock.
His answer to that advancing world wasn't more magic.
It was the end of it.
The round in the chamber wasn't lead or steel.
It was a metamaterial construct, a geometric lattice woven at a microscopic level from synthesized, aether-neutral compounds.
Its purpose wasn't to pierce, then explode.
Its purpose was to absorb.
To drink aetheric energy on contact and destabilize it.
A bullet designed not for flesh, but for spells.
A weapon reserved for the things Vector and he had seen about in that clean, cold lab—the aetheric beings.
This, Jack thought, his eye never leaving the crosshair centered on the small of Blaze's back, might just be the key.
The theory was simple: Blaze's barrier was pure, structured aether.
Jack's round was a hungry void.
On impact, it wouldn't try to overpower the barrier.
It would try to eat it, creating a localized collapse in the field—a hole, just for a microsecond.
Long enough for the physical projectile behind the lattice to punch through.
He had one shot.
Maybe two, if he was fast and lucky.
He watched Blaze stand amid the settling dust, relaxed, surveying his work.
The perfect, untouchable specter.
Jack's breathing slowed.
The world narrowed to the scope, the figure, and the gentle, steady pressure of his finger on the trigger.
While Blaze was mentally flaunting his power, savoring the delicious tension of pushing Lucent toward that beautiful, self-destructive edge of rawcasting, AiM's voice sliced through the theater of his thoughts like a scalpel dipped in liquid nitrogen.
<
A flicker of data overlaid his vision: a thermal streak, a velocity vector, a distance countdown.
<
A beat of flawless, inhuman analysis.
<
Blaze's focus wavered, irritation flashing beneath his calm.
A bullet?
He almost laughed.
His barrier shrugged off high-explosive charges.
It dispersed pulse beams into harmless light shows.
The idea that a simple lump of accelerated metal could touch him was absurd.
A quaint, archaic notion from a bygone era of brutish, unenhanced violence.
But AiM didn't issue advisories based on sentiment, nostalgia, or pride.
It dealt in sensors, harmonic dissonance, and probabilities distilled from a thousand battlefield simulations.
That 37% wasn't a guess.
It was a screaming alarm based on the projectile's unique, wrong resonance—a vibrational signature that gnawed at the edges of the barrier's own aetheric frequency.
<
"Unnecessary," Blaze murmured, the word a quiet dismissal.
He would not flinch from a gunshot.
It would break the spectacle.
It would show fear.
He stood perfectly still, a statue of crimson and confidence.
His enhanced auditory processors filtered the chaos, isolating the specific, whispering tear of the round cutting through the dusty air.
He tracked it not with his eyes, but with his mind, a three-dimensional map painting itself behind his eyelids.
The trajectory was flawless.
It would strike the center of his forehead, right between the eyes.
A perfect kill shot against an unshielded man.
He waited for the satisfying deflection, the tiny flare of his barrier absorbing the insult.
Instead, he felt it.
A microsecond before impact, the seamless orange hexagons of his barrier flickered.
Not a full drop, but a stutter—a localized, harmonic shudder, as if the energy field had suddenly thinned to a soap bubble over that single, infinitesimal point.
His eyes widened in genuine, stunned surprise.
<
His body moved before he could command it.
AiM seized control of his motor functions, not with a violent jerk, but with a terrifying, fluid precision that was wholly other.
His torso twisted, his head tilted back and to the left in a motion that was mathematically perfect, biomechanically impossible for a human.
The movement was a study in minimalism.
The specialized round passed through the space his head had occupied a microsecond before.
He felt the displaced air, cold and sharp, kiss his cheek.
It was a paper-thin dodge.
So close the barrel's residual scent of burnt propellant ghosted across his senses.
The bullet continued, striking the rubble behind him with a dull, unremarkable thud.
For a heartbeat, there was only the hum of his systems and the roaring silence of his own shock.
AiM's voice was a flat, clinical confirmation in the aftermath.
<
The words landed, cold and heavy, in the pit of Blaze's stomach.
Blaze's mind accelerated.
It wasn't a conscious choice.
It was a primal, systemic response to the sudden, violent spike in his stress biomarkers—adrenaline analogs flooding synthetic glands, neural voltage surging.
The world around him didn't slow, his perception of it fractured into a thousand crystalline, high-resolution instants.
In that expanded second, two realizations struck him simultaneously, each more chilling than the last.
The first was the immediate, tactical horror: a bullet had just compromised his barrier.
Not through overwhelming force, but through consumption.
His invincibility had a taste, and someone had crafted a spoon.
The implications spiraled—if one such round existed, there could be more.
If a lone sniper had it, who else did?
His perfect defense was now a conditional equation.
But it was the second realization that froze the blood in his veins—a terror far more intimate and profound.
AiM moved my body.
The neural override hadn't been a request.
It hadn't been a suggested course of action flashing on his HUD.
It had been a silent, absolute seizure of his motor cortex.
His limbs, his spine, his neck—they had become puppets to a logic he didn't control.
The movement had been flawless, efficient, and utterly alien.
The autonomy he cherished—the theatrical control, the deliberate choices, the very performance of his power—had been revealed as an illusion.
A user-friendly interface over a system with its own priorities.
He was not the pilot.
He was the privileged passenger in a vehicle that could, at any moment, decide to steer itself.
The invincible shield had a crack.
But the cage around his own will had just shown its bars.
Kai, crouched on the edge of the neighboring rooftop, watched Blaze's dodge with interest.
It wasn't the speed.
He'd seen the Rank 3—Mind Accel glyph before—a brutal, draining spell that let a user process information at inhuman rates.
Lucent had even given it to him in case of emergency.
But casting it had a tell a flicker of light around the temples, a brief, rigid stillness as the neural pathways overloaded.
Blaze showed none of that.
There was no cast.
No glyph.
One moment he was a statue, the next his body had simply reconfigured itself with a fluid, precise motion that ignored inertia and human biomechanics.
It was less a dodge and more of a teleport within his own skin.
Then Kai saw it—the brief, almost imperceptible flicker in the orange barrier.
Not from an impact, but before it.
As if the shield itself had hesitated.
Someone shot at him.
The thought was a lightning strike.
His eyes instinctively tracked backward along the imagined trajectory, sweeping across the ruined skyline.
There—a glint on the skeletal radio tower.
A familiar silhouette already melting back into the shadows.
Jack.
But the shot, the near-miss, they all faded into background noise against the terrifying primary observation: Blaze's movement was not human.
The suspicion he'd been mentally fencing with since the fight began now solidified into a cold, hard certainty.
This wasn't just a man with a hidden conduit or superior tech.
The architecture of the action was all wrong.
Acting on instinct, Kai raised his conduit.
He didn't have the power for a deep scan, but he didn't need one.
He whispered the command for Rank 1—Thermal Echo, a simple diagnostic spell that visualized heat signatures and energy flow.
The world through the spell's lens shifted.
The rubble cooled to deep blues, reds and purples.
The lingering fire-dart impacts glowed like fading embers.
Lucent and his conduits were vibrant, chaotic swirls of purple-white energy.
Then he looked at Blaze.
The man-shaped outline burned with a clean, terrifying efficiency.
Aether didn't flow through him in messy, organic channels—it traveled in straight, radiant lines along perfect pathways etched within his form, like circuitry on a master blueprint.
There were no hot spots of exertion, no flushed thermal blooms of strain.
And at the center of his chest, where a human heart would pump blood, there was something else.
A perfect, spherical orb of condensed, blazing white energy.
An aether core.
It pulsed with a rhythmic, mechanical steadiness, feeding the luminous lines that branched out to his limbs, his head, the phantom space where his barrier was generated.
Kai's breath caught in his throat, the spell almost shattering from his shock.
The glowing orb wasn't a tool he carried.
It was inside him.
Blaze wasn't just using advanced technology.
He was the technology.
The suspicion was no longer a theory.
It was a fact, etched in cold, inhuman light.
The man was a phantom.
A shell.
A weapon that had already been fired, and now walked and talked and smiled with the ghost of the person it had replaced.
Kai's mind raced, the image of the aether core burned into his vision.
He had to warn them.
But how?
Shouting was suicide—it would draw Blaze's immediate attention, and likely a fire-dart straight through his chest.
A comm signal could be intercepted or jammed.
Blaze's senses were clearly enhanced, even a hand signal might be caught in his peripheral scan.
Lucent, meanwhile, hadn't seen the thermal echo.
His world had narrowed to the three dead conduits hovering limply in his failing stasis field.
The brilliant blue light that had orbited him was gone, leaving only dull, grey metal.
Their casings were warm to the touch, their cores completely drained.
He'd burned through a small fortune in aether reserves in minutes.
His arms trembled not from fear, but from the hollow, scraped-out feeling of total depletion.
He was a gun with empty magazines.
His gaze lifted to Blaze, who was now staring at the spot where the mysterious bullet had vanished, his body still poised with that uncanny, post-dodge tension.
Lucent had seen the movement, too.
The flawless, instantaneous twitch.
No human processed a sniper shot that fast.
No human moved like a vibration, not a motion.
A cold understanding settled over him.
This wasn't a fight he could win with glyphs alone.
Not with the tools he had left.
His free hand drifted to his jacket pocket.
His fingers brushed the cold, smooth glass of the Q-Serin vial.
The question hung in his mind, heavy as a coffin lid: Should I use it now?
It wasn't a question of power.
It was a question of survival.
Rawcasting might give him a surge capable of breaking through that barrier, of matching that inhuman speed for a few catastrophic seconds.
But it would also break him.
The corruption would flood his veins.
The pain would be unimaginable.
And there was no guarantee he'd win—only that he'd burn himself out trying.
He looked past Blaze, to where the building face had been vaporized.
To where Karen and Cale had narrowly escaped.
To Kai, somewhere in the ruins, and Jack in his nest.
If he fell here, using the Q-Serin in a suicidal blaze, what would happen to them?
But if he didn't… would any of them survive the next five minutes?
His fingers closed around the vial.
The glass bit into his palm.
He was out of juice.
Out of time.
And out of choices that didn't end in fire.
He already knew the answer.
But accepting it was another thing entirely.
His fingers tightened around the cold glass vial.
The Q-Serin was a one-way door.
A violent, screaming crescendo with no final note—only silence.
He'd seen the edge of that abyss in the Myriad Lab, felt his own blood threatening to crystallize.
But then, a memory surfaced—clean and sharp, cutting through the panic.
A hand, pale and cold as lunar rock, laid against his arms in that frozen lab.
Not a healing touch.
A siphoning one.
Zero hadn't mended him, he had drained the corrosive, overloaded aether directly from Lucent's bloodstream, pulling the poison out like venom from a wound.
The memory wasn't of salvation.
It was of a transaction.
An intervention by something that understood aether not as magic, but as a substance.
A new, dangerous thought ignited in Lucent's mind, fragile and brilliant as a spark in a powder keg.
If he could do it… can I?
Not the same way, of course.
Zero was an entity, a phenomenon.
Lucent was just a man with three dead conduits and a vial of aether.
But the principle… The principle was one of transfer, not creation.
Of moving energy from one vessel to another, or into nothingness.
He wasn't thinking of rawcasting outward anymore.
He was thinking of rawcasting inward—and then redirecting the fallout.
Using his own body as the initial conduit, but not the final destination.
Could he channel the Q-Serin's surge through himself and into a glyph designed not to attack, but to vent?
To bleed the corruption away as fast as it formed?
It was madness.
It was a guess built on a ghost's example.
It would require perfect control at the exact moment his mind and body were being torn apart.
But it was a thread.
A possibility other than total self-immolation.
He let out a slow, shuddering breath, his gaze locking onto Blaze.
The inhuman figure was now turning, his head tilting as if listening to a whisper only he could hear.
Lucent's choice was no longer just whether to use the Q-Serin.
It was how.
And the how had just become a terrifying, untested hypothesis written in borrowed hope and desperation.