The world ended in a silent, white flash, followed by a roar that felt less like sound and more like the air itself being torn apart.
Gideon, already half-conscious from the gravitational strain, was thrown backward as if by a giant's hand.
His vision swam with searing afterimages.
He never saw Bricks move.
He only felt the massive, solid weight of the man slam into him and Mara, driving them both down behind the fractured stump of a support column.
Bricks made a barricade, of flesh and loyalty.
Then the heat arrived.
The Firestorm Blast was more than a simple explosion.
It was a volumetric furnace, a sphere of annihilation that filled the hallway.
The column Bricks had chosen shielded them from the direct, vaporizing core of the blast.
But it couldn't stop the superheated shockwave, the shrapnel of melting concrete, or the radiant fury that cooked the air.
Mara, pinned beneath Bricks's bulk, heard a sound she would never forget—a deep, wet hiss, like water on a red-hot stove, cut through the roar.
It was the sound of Bricks's back taking the full thermal wash.
His leathers blackened and fused.
The smell was immediate and horrific.
As quickly as it came, the inferno collapsed inward on itself, leaving a deafening silence choked with smoke and the sickly-sweet smell of charred meat.
The column was gone, vaporized from the side facing the blast.
Bricks lay across them, unmoving, a smoldering shield.
Mara shoved at his weight with a raw, guttural cry, her hands coming away slick.
Gideon blinked up through swimming vision, seeing only the dark, still mass above him and Mara's ash-streaked, horror-stricken face.
Across the newly carved, glassy crater of the hallway, another figure stirred.
Ash slammed into a buckled wall, the last shimmer of his personal barrier flickering out with a pathetic spark.
It had held just enough to keep him from being flash-fried, but not from the concussive force.
Every inch of him screamed in protest.
The air was blisteringly hot, thick with embers and the eye-watering stench of a forge.
He pushed himself up on trembling arms, coughing.
The corridor was a vision of hell—walls glowing dull red in patches, rubble reduced to slag, everything painted in stark, dancing orange from lingering fires.
And for a terrifying, disjointed second, it wasn't the Red Dogs base.
It was a memory, raw and vivid, crashing over him with the force of the blast.
***
A different corridor, deeper in the Junkyard's underbelly.
Also burning.
Ash was running.
Not with the calculated cruelty of a predator, but with the frantic, desperate speed of prey.
Behind him, laughter echoed—a warm, delighted sound that was utterly wrong amidst the crackle of flames.
He'd scammed the wrong man.
The thief he'd set up, the one who should have been a stain in a Crimson Velvet alley, hadn't died.
He'd changed.
He'd come back with fire in his hands and a smile on his face.
Blaze.
No longer just a hungry ghost with quick fingers.
He moved with a new, terrifying certainty.
The conduit in his hand—the one Ash had indirectly led him to—was no longer a tool.
It was an extension of his will.
"Ash!" The call was sing-song, almost friendly, carrying over the roar of a burning storage unit Blaze had ignited just to cut off an escape route. "Come out, come out! I just want to thank you!"
Ash ducked behind a corroded generator, heart hammering.
He peeked out.
Blaze stood in the center of the corridor, surrounded by fire.
He wasn't fighting.
He was performing.
With a flick of his wrist, he sent a ribbon of fire coiling up a wall like a glowing serpent, just to watch the paint blister.
He'd corner a fleeing scavenger, not to kill, but to force them to crawl through a ring of fire he'd drawn on the ground, laughing at their screams.
The power wasn't just a weapon to him anymore.
It was a language.
A way to paint the world in his newfound glory.
And he was using it to write a very specific, very painful epilogue to their old deal.
"You showed me the door, Ash!" Blaze shouted, his voice brimming with genuine, manic amusement. "Let me show you what's on the other side!"
A jet of concentrated flame, hotter and brighter than any natural fire, lanced past Ash's hiding spot, shearing through the generator's casing.
The metal glowed orange.
Ash scrambled away, the heat searing his back.
That was the lesson branded into him that night: the man he'd betrayed had not sought quiet vengeance.
He'd embraced a new, theatrical kind of cruelty.
He hunted not just to kill, but to demonstrate.
To make his revenge a spectacle.
He's not going to just kill me, Ash realized, the truth colder than the flames were hot.
He's going to play with me until there's nothing left to burn.
Trembling, Ash's hand closed around a shard of reflective glass from a shattered gauge nearby.
He held it up, angling it to see the corridor behind him, to track Blaze's reflection without exposing himself.
He saw the empty, fiery corridor.
He shifted the glass.
Nothing.
Panic spiked.
Where had he—
"Boo."
The whisper was right in his ear, warm breath against his sweat-slicked neck.
Ash startled violently, spinning around.
Blaze stood less than a foot away, leaning casually against the generator Ash had just been hiding behind.
He hadn't come around the side.
He'd simply… stepped through the curtain of fire clinging to it, the flames parting for him like a respectful curtain.
Not a speck of soot on him.
His eyes glinted with merry hellfire.
"Looking for me?" Blaze asked, his smile wide and terrible.
Ash's mind went blank.
Every slick excuse, every silver-tongued lie he'd ever spun, dried up and blew away as ash.
All that was left was the primal understanding that he was about to die in the most creative, painful way this newly made monster could devise.
Blaze raised his conduit, not with anger, but with the serene focus of an artist selecting a brush. "Let's start with the lying tongue, shall we?"
He slammed his forearm into Ash's throat.
A small, precise glyph, white-hot and cruel, began to form at the tip of the conduit in his other hand.
But before the spark could fly, the world didn't explode with fire.
It stopped.
The roaring flames around them didn't die.
They froze in place, becoming silent, motionless sculptures of orange and yellow light.
The crackle of burning plastics ceased.
The very air grew still and heavy, the heat becoming a static, trapped thing.
From the far end of the frozen inferno, a figure walked.
She moved without sound, her boots making no impression in the ash.
She wore practical, dark tactical gear, her hair pulled back in a severe tail.
Her face was impassive, but her eyes… her eyes were the pale, calculating grey of a winter sky just before a blizzard.
They scanned the scene—the terrified Ash, the theatrical Blaze, the frozen fire—with the detached interest of a scientist observing a particularly volatile chemical reaction.
Blaze's smile didn't fade, but it stiffened, his head tilting in curiosity. "And who are you? Party crashers usually bring a gift."
The woman didn't answer immediately.
She took another step, her silhouette crossing the flames.
The orange light glinted off the long, sleek, matte-black barrel of a rifle slung across her back.
It was a tool of professional, precise violence.
"A bounty hunter," she said, her voice as flat and dry as desert stone.
No threat.
No boast.
A statement of occupation.
Her gaze, those frost-grey eyes, pinned Blaze.
"Both of you have prices on your heads. Nimbrix wants their stolen prototype conduit returned, and the thief made an example of."
A slight, almost imperceptible nod toward Ash.
"And the Crimson Velvet Consortium wants their middleman found. For the bad intel that cost them a very expensive honeypot operation."
She paused, letting the twin death sentences hang in the chilling air.
"But the pricier one," she continued, her focus returning to Blaze, "is you. Alive, if possible. The conduit's operational data is more valuable than your corpse. But the corpse still pays."
Blaze's smirk widened, a flash of genuine amusement cutting through the tension.
He gestured lazily with his still-glowing conduit toward Ash, who was pressed against the generator, frozen in fear.
"Can't you come back later? As you can see, I have prior business."
His tone was light, conversational, as if negotiating a delay for a dinner reservation, not a bounty collection.
"It's a bit of a private matter. Unfinished, you understand."
Ash's throat worked against the crushing pressure of Blaze's forearm.
His vision was beginning to spot at the edges, the world narrowing to the manic light in Blaze's eyes and the searing heat of the conduit held inches from his face.
With a desperate, wheezing effort, he forced a single, choked word past the constriction.
"Ci—Cinder."
Blaze's head tilted, his theatrical menace pausing for a beat of genuine curiosity.
"What?" he asked, his voice deceptively light.
He didn't release Ash, but the pressure on his windpipe lessened just enough to allow ragged, burning breaths.
Ash gasped, sucking in the smoky, superheated air.
His eyes, wide with a fear that was now split between the immediate pyromaniac and the new, glacial threat, flickered toward the woman standing in the moonlight.
"That woman…," Ash rasped, each word a scrape of pain. "Is Cinder."
He saw the name land in Blaze's expression.
Not recognition, but the dawning understanding of a reputation.
You didn't survive in the Junkyard's underworld without hearing the whispers.
"A… bounty hunter," Ash continued, his voice gaining a shred of strength, clinging to this new variable as a lifeline. "Not a street-level thug. She's… famous. Or infamous. She collects. And from the information I've gathered she never, ever misses her mark."
Blaze's eyes narrowed, the manic gleam in them sharpening into something more calculating.
The name Cinder now hung between them, a third presence in the smoky air.
"Why are you telling me this?" Blaze asked, his voice low, the playful lilt gone.
It was a genuine question.
In this moment, Ash had no reason to help him.
Ash coughed, a wet, painful sound. "…Would you release me if I asked for forgiveness?"
Blaze's laugh was a short, harsh bark. "F*ck no."
"Then," Ash rasped, a strange, pragmatic clarity cutting through his terror, "I'm just presenting my usefulness to you. A down payment on staying alive for the next five minutes."
He glanced again at Cinder, who was watching their exchange with that same unnerving, analytical stillness.
"You heard her. She wants you alive for the data. That gives you a sliver of leverage. Me? I'm just the 'bad intel.' I'm corpse-price to her." He met Blaze's gaze, desperation forging a brittle cunning. "Didn't you get more from the gig I told you about? The job itself was a trap, but the access… the mark I gave you was real. He had that conduit. You got it because of me."
Blaze was silent, his grip on Ash's throat loosening another fraction as he thought.
It was true.
The job had been a lethal setup, but the target—the executive—had been genuine.
Without Ash's initial, treacherous tip, Blaze would never have been in that suite, never have grabbed the prototype conduit as he fled.
Without that conduit, he'd be a smear in that alley.
Ash had given him the key to his own transformation, even if the door had been rigged to blow.
"I need more than that," Blaze finally said, his voice a quiet rumble.
The fire in his hand didn't extinguish, but its searing intensity dialed back from 'incinerate' to 'severe cauterization.'
"A past favor, even an accidental one, doesn't buy your future. It just explains why you're not already charcoal. Give me a reason for the next five minutes. Then we'll talk about the five after that."
Ash watched the enthralling, contained inferno dancing in Blaze's palm.
It was more than just a weapon; it was a spectacle.
The way the flames obeyed, curling and licking with a sentient hunger, yet bound by an invisible will—it was hypnotic.
Like a moth helplessly drawn to a candle's flame, Ash felt a treacherous, awe-struck part of himself being pulled in.
He wasn't just seeing power.
He was seeing a new language of power, one written in light and heat and terrible, beautiful control.
He'd spent his life navigating with lies, sharp smiles, and cold calculations.
Blaze had transcended that.
He turned fear into fuel and theater into a weapon.
For a heartbeat, despite the terror, despite the crushing grip on his throat, Ash was touched by it.
Not with gratitude, but with a dark, covetous recognition.
***
Mesmerized by the flames now spreading with hungry, crackling joy through the ruined hallway, a smirk—thin, pained, and utterly defiant—suddenly plastered itself across Ash's face.
The memory of that night, of being trapped between two monsters.
He endured the deep, aching protest of his body, every muscle screaming from the blast and the impact.
With a sharp, stinging motion, he slapped his own cheek, the pain a bright, clean anchor in the swimming haze.
Stay conscious.
You've been here before.
The fucking puppet—Jessa—needed to be disposed of.
That was non-negotiable.
The anomaly was too dangerous, too uncontrolled.
Even his burning curiosity about the puppeteer's identity was a luxury he couldn't afford now.
What he hadn't expected was for the puppeteer to simply… show up.
His eyes, adjusting to the dancing firelight, landed on a new figure in the devastation.
A person stood between him and the crumpled form of Jessa, utterly unfazed by the spreading flames that licked at the edges of their silhouette.
The fire seemed to shy away from them, creating a small, serene circle of untouched space.
Even more bizarre than their calm was their appearance.
It held an open pink umbrella, its cheerful, candy-colored fabric a violently incongruous splash in the hellscape of greys, blacks, and furious orange.
It shouldn't have survived the blast.
The figure wasn't looking at Ash, or at the fires, or at the corpses.
It was looking down at the unconscious Jessa with a tilted head, an expression of mild, curious inspection on a face that was pale and oddly placid.
A cold that had nothing to do with the inferno raced down Ash's spine.
Goosebumps erupted across his skin, every primal instinct he possessed screaming in silent, harmonized alarm.
Danger.
Not the explosive, theatrical danger of Blaze.
Not the cold, surgical danger of Cinder.
This was something else.
A presence that made the air feel thinner, reality itself feeling slightly warped around the edges of that pink umbrella.
This was someone he couldn't possibly win against.
"It's good that I made it on time," the figure in the pink dress murmured, her voice light, almost sing-song.
She was still looking down at the unscathed but unconscious Jessa, her head tilted as if examining a fallen doll.
She continued without even glancing toward Ash. "You people really don't have a bit of mercy toward this child, do you? So messy. So… forceful."
"What the f*ck are you talking about?" Ash snarled, pushing himself up onto his elbows.
The intricate lines of his Scorcher tattoos pulsed with a deep orange glow beneath his ruined sleeves, knitting broken tissue and soothing burns in a slow, painful crawl.
His mind raced through the shortlist of entities with the audacity and power to interfere.
"Did WhiteRoot send you? To sabotage us?" His eyes narrowed. "Or was it Nimbrix? Cleaning up loose ends?"
The Pink Dress let out a soft, airy snicker, the sound utterly devoid of mirth.
It was the noise of someone hearing a joke in a language only they understood.
The questions were so quaint, so linear.
She wasn't part of any corporation.
Her allegiance was to a far bizarre and more capricious ledger.
But it wasn't bad to let them think she was.
Watching them scramble, pointing fingers at the wrong shadows, trying to apply their small, mortal logic to her… it would make for such an interesting show.
"Your group never sent an invitation," she said, finally turning her gaze from Jessa to sweep it over the smoldering corridor, the corpses, the lingering flames.
Her milky-white eyes held a spark of delighted mischief. "So I let myself in."
With a graceful, casual motion, she bent down and plucked the pristine white conduit from Jessa's limp fingers.
She held it up, examining its sterile glow against the hellish backdrop, as if comparing a diamond to mud.
"You can keep playing with your fire," she said, her attention drifting back to Ash, her smile widening into something unnervingly genuine. "But the interesting toys? Those, I'll be taking."
A faint, intricate violet glyph—smaller but infinitely more complex than any Jessa had formed—flickered into existence above the Pink Dress's forefinger.
It spun once, a silent command.
Jessa's unconscious body, lying limp on the scorched concrete, suddenly lifted.
Not with a jerk or a strain, but with a smooth, weightless levitation, as if the very concept of gravity had politely decided to ignore her.
She hovered a foot above the ground, perfectly still.
Ash's eyebrows knitted together, his mind scrambling to categorize this new data point.
The glyph.
The effortless, wordless cast.
The raw, unshielded power humming in the air around her, dense and sweet as poisoned honey.
A rawcaster?
The thought was a silent thunderclap in his head.
But that made no sense.
Rawcasters were unstable, self-destructive, rare as comets.
They usually didn't work for corporations, they burned out in forgotten labs or gutter alleys.
And they certainly didn't wield this level of calm, surgical control.
Another question formed, cold and heavy: Which corporation has a rawcaster of this caliber on payroll, and why weren't we warned?
He didn't voice it this time.
The instinct for self-preservation, honed in back-alley burns and corporate training yards, screamed at him to be still, to observe, to survive.
He'd received no memo, no contingency brief about hostile corporate intervention at this level.
Their mission was a clean-up, a field test for their new prototypes.
This… this was an otherworldly-level variable.
Should he stop her?
The thought was almost laughable.
Fighting the puppet had nearly turned him into a wet stain on the floor.
Fighting the puppeteer, who clearly regarded gravity as a mild suggestion and raw power as a parlor trick, would be less a fight and more a form of rapid, molecular disassembly.
He watched as the Pink Dress, holding her pink umbrella aloft with one hand and Jessa's conduit in the other, began to float backward down the ruined hallway, the unconscious girl drifting along beside her like a balloon on a string.
The fires seemed to part for them, the heat bowing away.
Ash gritted his teeth, the sound loud in his own skull.
Annoyance—a hot, prickling, profoundly human fury—burned through the pain and the fear.
It wasn't just the humiliation of being so utterly outclassed.
It was the violation.
This was their operation.
Their chaos.
Their carefully cultivated theater of terror.
And this… this entity in a pink dress had just walked in, taken a central prop, and was leaving without so much as a curtain call.
He was a Scorcher.
He was meant to be the wildfire others feared.
For the first time in years, staring at the retreating, impossible figure, Ash felt what it was like to be the kindling again.
***
The person in the pink dress lowered Jessa's levitating form with delicate care onto the cold, grit-strewn concrete of a secluded rooftop, far from the echoing booms and chemical stink of the base.
The cheerful umbrella was tucked under her arm, the pristine white conduit now held loosely in her other hand like a curious souvenir.
She stood for a moment, looking down at the unconscious girl, her head tilted.
A faint, thoughtful pout touched her lips.
She was contemplating the breach of their rules.
The rule she and her twin sister in the gray hoodie had declared was simple: no direct intervention.
They were observers.
Curators of chaos.
Bettors on the outcomes.
Giving Jessa the conduit in the first place had already danced along the grayest edge of that rule—arming a piece on the board was arguably just… enhancing the game.
But pulling the piece off the board?
Physically extracting her from an active annihilation?
That was direct.
That was messy.
That was… involved.
A slight frown, more aesthetic disapproval than moral concern, touched her features.
She couldn't possibly let the toy become carbonized.
It was a matter of principle, not sentiment.
Even with her emotions sanded down to a smooth, detached curiosity, a fundamental rule of her existence remained: you don't let a fascinating toy get smashed just because you couldn't be bothered to move.
It was poor stewardship.
It was wasteful.
And most of all, it was… inelegant.
The conduit was a work of art.
The girl's rage had been a fascinating, volatile pigment.
To let such a unique combination be reduced to ash in some grimy hallway because a few corporate attack dogs were overzealous?
Unthinkable.
It would be like watching a rare, beautiful moth incinerate itself on a porch light and doing nothing but noting the color of the flame.
No.
Some interventions were simply a matter of good taste.
She looked down at Jessa's still face, then at the conduit in her own hand.
The equation was simple: the toy had proven its interesting potential.
Therefore, it merited preservation.
The fact that this preservation violated a self-imposed rule with her sister was a secondary consideration—one that would undoubtedly lead to a thrilling, whispered argument later.
"Would Zero disagree if I brought her with us?" she asked the silent, uncaring air.
Her milky eyes held a genuine flicker of contemplation.
Zero's rules were stricter, and far less forgiving than her own playful pacts.
Bringing an active, volatile human variable into their sphere… that could be seen as more than just intervention.
It could be seen as recruitment.
She couldn't ask her twin.
The one in the gray hoodie had already darted off toward the other interesting spot lighting up the Junkyard—the rally point spectacle with the crimson armor.
They were dividing their attention, as was their way.
A small, secret smile played on her lips.
Someone saw me, she recalled.
That guy named Ash.
He thinks I'm corporate.
The misunderstanding was delicious.
Let the little Scorchers and their corporate handlers waste energy suspecting their rivals.
It layered the confusion so nicely.
The cleanup, therefore, probably wouldn't be that bad.
No one would come looking for a ghost they'd mislabeled.
Her gaze, sharp and omnivorous, swept across the ruined landscape below.
Movement caught her eye—two figures, small and desperate, scrambling away from the blasted main entrance of the Red Dogs base, ducking into a labyrinth of collapsed infrastructure.
Her smile widened.
Was that Arden and Tenn?
she wondered internally, the names plucked from the swirling data-stream of the ongoing conflict.
They are escaping.
How… convenient.
One rescued puppet on the roof.
Two fleeing pieces on the board.
And a whole city burning with beautiful, chaotic potential.
The night was still young, and the story was delightfully refusing to end.