ABANDONED QUARRY
40 Miles Outside Ridgeway, New Hampshire
November 14th - 9:47 PM
The oil drum exploded.
Not shattered. Not punctured. Vaporized.
Metal atomized into superheated droplets that sprayed outward in a perfect sphere, painting the night air orange. Where they landed, stone hissed and bubbled, melting under temperatures that belonged in industrial forges, not firearms.
Zale lowered Arrogance slowly, studying the weapon in his hand.
Black metal so dark it seemed to pull light inward. Gold etchings that caught moonlight and held it. And warm—not from discharge, but from something else. Something aware.
The weapon purred.
Not sound. Vibration. Warmth spreading through his palm, up his arm, settling somewhere behind his sternum.
Recognition. Satisfaction. Hunger.
"Pretentious," Zale said quietly. "But effective."
He holstered the weapon—adaptive leather conforming instantly to his hip—and pulled out his phone to check the time.
10:03 PM.
Twelve hours ago, he'd been sitting in his office reading a manual that promised impossible things. Now he was standing in an abandoned quarry, testing a weapon that had just demonstrated those impossibilities were real.
Time to see what else you can do.
***
TWELVE HOURS EARLIER
The Akula Building - Floor 13
November 14th - 10:17 AM
The briefcase sat open on Zale's desk, Arrogance resting on red velvet like a predator in repose.
The manual lay beside it—bound in something that wasn't quite leather, pages covered in script that made his eyes water if he read too long.
But he'd forced himself through it anyway.
ARROGANCE - OPERATIONAL MANUAL
Property of Hell's Corp.
Authorized User: Zale Akula
Unauthorized use will result in immediate termination of operator.
BASIC OPERATION:
- Dual-barrel break-action design
- Infinite ammunition (self-manifesting via life-force conversion)
- Break action to reconfigure between firing modes
- Psychically bonded to operator
- Sentient. Will communicate preferences non-verbally.
WARNING: Advanced firing modes drain operator vitality. Do not exceed weapon's warnings. Disregarding safety protocols will result in severe injury or death.
FIRING MODES:
Weapon will instinctively guide operator through available configurations. Trust her judgment. Exceed her warnings at your peril.
[Detailed specifications intentionally omitted - operator will discover through use]
RECOMMENDED TRAINING PROTOCOL:
Test in secure, isolated environment. Begin with standard configuration. Advance only when comfortable with current capabilities. Monitor vitality levels closely.
And at the bottom, in elegant handwriting that seemed to have appeared after the manual was printed:
P.S.
Mr. Akula,
Arrogance is not a tool. She is a partner—older than gunpowder, designed specifically for beings who can handle her requirements.
She will judge you. Use her poorly, and shots will drift. Use her well, and she'll reward you with impossible accuracy.
The Terminal Round is not theoretical. Using it means accepting your story ends the moment you pull that trigger. But some fates are worth dying to prevent.
Men like us attract such things.
Until we meet again,
Samael
P.S. - The briefcase is warded. Customs won't notice. TSA won't detect. Convenient for travel.
P.P.S. - She prefers "Arrogance," not "the gun." Indulge her. She earned it.
Zale read the postscript twice.
Then looked at the weapon.
"Arrogance," he said quietly.
The humming intensified. Just slightly. Approval.
He closed the manual and reached for his phone. Hesitated. Then dialed.
Zale dialed the Archive.
Three rings this time. Longer than usual.
When the voice answered, it was tense. "Akula. It's the middle of the night."
"Greg Stilson. Mayor of Ridgeway, New Hampshire. Everything you can find. Twelve hours."
Long silence.
"...I don't like this."
"I'm not asking you to like it."
"Stilson's not supernatural, Akula. He's just a politician. If you're planning what I think you're planning—"
"Can you get the information or not?"
Another pause. Then, quietly: "I can. But be sure. Because if you do this, you're crossing a line."
"Twelve hours," Zale repeated. "Triple the usual rate."
"...Fine. But this is the last time I touch anything political."
The line went dead.
Zale set the phone down and looked at the Stilson file Samael had provided.
Rally scheduled: November 15th, 2:00 PM. Ridgeway Town Hall.
Thirty-six hours to decide if he trusted a demon's prophecy enough to commit murder.
He grabbed the briefcase and headed for the elevator.
Time to find out what Arrogance could actually do.
***
ABANDONED QUARRY
November 14th - 9:52 PM
Zale had set up six targets across the quarry floor. Oil drums. Concrete chunks. A rusted car frame. Various distances from thirty to seventy meters.
He drew Arrogance properly. Smooth. Natural. The weapon settled into his grip like it had always belonged there.
Aimed at the first drum. Squeezed the trigger.
The crack split the night like reality flinching.
Minimal recoil—pneumatic system in the grip absorbed most of it. The drum vaporized. Perfect.
He fired again. Second drum. Gone.
Third. Fourth. Fifth.
By the sixth shot, he noticed something.
A faint... thinness. Like breathing slightly less oxygen. Barely perceptible. Easy to ignore.
He fired three more rounds.
The thinness increased. Not weakness. Not yet. But present. Like a reservoir slowly draining.
Zale holstered the weapon and stood still, enhanced senses monitoring his body. Heart rate slightly elevated. Respiration normal. Blood chemistry... altered. Minimally, but detectably.
Nine shots had burned maybe a tenth of his reserves.
"Even standard rounds cost something", he realized. Just so little you don't notice until you've fired dozens.
He did the math. If nine rounds equaled ten percent, then forty-five or fifty would drain him completely.
Infinite ammunition. Finite stamina.
Good to know.
Time to test the interesting configuration.
***
Zale aimed at the stone wall. Seventy meters.
The manual had mentioned "advanced firing modes." Mentioned warnings. Mentioned vitality drain.
He focused inward. Not on the target. On himself. On the boundary between existence and void.
The weapon responded.
The top barrel shifted—mechanisms clicking into new configuration with sounds that were organic and mechanical simultaneously. And suddenly he understood.
This would cost something significant.
"Exceed her warnings at your peril," Samael had written.
Zale squeezed the trigger anyway.
Something inside him moved.
Not blood. Not breath. Something essential. The thing that made a body a person rather than meat.
It flowed down his arm—intimate, invasive, hungry—into the weapon, into the chamber.
The bullet that birthed itself was aware.
Blue—not painted, not glowing, but blue like something that had never existed in reality's color spectrum. The surface had texture. Organic. Flesh-like. Breathing.
The face wasn't carved. It was grown. Shark teeth set in a mouth that grinned with predatory recognition. Arms—thin, spider-like, too many joints—sprouted from its sides and waved at him.
Then it shrieked—not sound, but pressure that Zale felt in his skull, his teeth, the hollow spaces behind his eyes—and launched.
The recoil slammed into his shoulder.
Like firing a .50 caliber rifle. The pneumatic system absorbed some, but physics demanded payment. A normal human's bones would have cracked. Ligaments torn. Shoulder dislocated.
Zale's Hercules-enhanced skeleton held—bones like steel, muscles like cables—but he felt it. Stepped back. Deep bruise forming instantly. Micro-tears in muscle fiber.
Already healing. But slowly.
The bullet crossed seventy meters faster than his enhanced vision could track—leaving distorted air and the smell of ozone and copper—and punched through the stone wall like it was mist.
The hole glowed orange-hot. Perfectly circular. The bullet kept going. Impact at two hundred meters. Then silence.
Zale stumbled.
Caught himself on a boulder.
Weakness.
Not fatigue. Drain. Like someone had reached inside and carved away a piece of him. Not flesh. Not blood. Something fundamental.
His vision blurred. Heart hammered triple-time. The Hercules Method kicked in reflexively—enhanced biology compensating, redirecting resources, stabilizing cardiac rhythm.
But the emptiness remained.
One-seventh of himself. Just... gone. Consumed. Burned away like fuel.
Zale sat heavily, enhanced senses cataloging damage. Elevated pulse. Stress hormones flooding his system. Muscle tremors. Chemical imbalance slowly correcting.
Recovery would take hours. Maybe a full day.
"That," he said to no one, voice rough, "was significantly less fun than advertised."
Arrogance, holstered at his hip, radiated smug satisfaction.
"Don't get cocky," Zale muttered, rolling his bruised shoulder. "You're not the one who just lost a seventh of your soul."
The weapon pulsed once. Warm. Pleased.
Zale shook his head. "I'm arguing with a gun. Excellent. This is fine."
He sat there for twenty minutes, feeling his biology slowly knit the wound that wasn't quite physical. Feeling the echo of something carved away, healing incrementally but not quickly.
Six of those per day. Maximum.
And the recoil alone would leave him bruised and aching.
Seven would kill him.
Worth knowing.
When he could stand without swaying, Zale drew Arrogance again. Loaded a standard round. Aimed at a boulder fifty meters away—but deliberately positioned himself so concrete debris blocked the line of sight.
Fired.
Mid-flight, he reached out with his mind Telekinesis and guided it.
The bullet curved.
Impossible trajectory. Arced around the debris, adjusted elevation, corrected angle, struck the boulder dead center.
Zale's lips curved. Not the polite expression he showed clients. The other one.
"Now that," he said softly, "is interesting."
Life-force bullets under telekinetic control.
He could bend shots around cover. Make impossible angles possible. Guide death through obstacles.
His smile widened.
"Arrogance." He patted the weapon gently. "You and I are going to get along just fine."
The weapon purred.
Contentedly.
Like a predator recognizing a worthy partner.
***
RIDGEWAY, NEW HAMPSHIRE
Hotel Room - November 15th - 6:47 AM
Zale's phone buzzed.
He'd been sitting in the dark for three hours, body mostly recovered from the augmented round test, though he could still feel the faint echo of emptiness where that seventh had been carved away.
ARCHIVE:
Stilson file attached. Summary: Human. Ambitious. Dirty money, intimidation tactics, possibly complicit in opponent's "suicide." Nothing supernatural. Dangerous but mortal.
Triple payment confirmed.
Good luck. You'll probably don't need it.
Zale opened the file. Skimmed forty-seven pages of cross-referenced dirt.
Greg Stilson was a bastard. Ruthless. Connected. Willing to bend laws and break people to get what he wanted.
But human. Just a man with ambition and a talent for making people believe.
Nothing suggesting timeline collapse. Nothing hinting at metaphysical threat.
Just Samael's word. And a prophecy Zale couldn't verify.
He set the phone down.
Looked at Arrogance, resting on the nightstand.
Looked at the card from Samael beside it.
One man's life versus billions.
If Samael lied, Zale was a murderer.
If Samael told the truth, Zale was a savior.
He'd know which in three years.
Until then...
Zale stood. Pulled on his jacket. Started packing.
He had a rally to attend.
And a choice to make.
***
RIDGEWAY TOWN HALL
November 15th - 1:47 PM
Zale stood three blocks away, watching through binoculars as the crowd gathered.
Maybe two hundred people. Families. Couples. Elderly voters and young activists. The cross-section of a small town that believed in the man they'd elected.
Security was present but minimal. Two uniformed officers. Three plainclothes agents. Standard protocol for a local politician at a campaign rally.
Not enough to stop what was coming.
Zale lowered the binoculars. Checked his watch.
2:00 PM. Stilson would take the stage.
2:03 PM. The car would explode.
2:04 PM. Greg Stilson would be dead.
And Zale would either have prevented an apocalypse or committed murder for a demon's entertainment.
Simple math, he thought. Billions versus one.
Except it wasn't simple. It was murder. Premeditated. Cold.
Based on prophecy he couldn't verify and a demon's word he had no reason to trust.
But doing nothing risked everything.
Zale pulled out the detonator. Compact. Professional. Three blocks away, a campaign staffer's sedan sat packed with C4 and ball bearings, positioned precisely fifty feet from the stage.
He waited.
***
THE RALLY - 2:03 PM
Greg Stilson stood at the podium, looking out at two hundred faces.
His faces. His people. The town that had believed in him when no one else did.
"—and together," he said, voice carrying across the crowd with practiced warmth, "we'll build a Ridgeway that our children can be proud of!"
Applause. Genuine. Enthusiastic.
He saw Mrs. Henderson in the third row—the woman whose son he'd helped find work after the mill closed. Mr. Yamato near the back—the man who'd supported his infrastructure bill that had finally fixed Maple Street.
People with real belief that he could make things better.
And Greg Stilson would not—would not—let them down.
The future he envisioned was bright. Progressive. A model for small-town America.
He turned toward the crowd, raising his arms in acknowledgment—
***
The car exploded.
Fifty feet away. Sudden. Violent. A fist of sound and fire that punched across the plaza with a roar that made eardrums scream and windows shatter three blocks out.
The shockwave rolled over them. Two hundred people flinched as one, primitive instinct recognizing danger before conscious thought could process.
On stage, Greg Stilson turned toward the sound, smile freezing, hands dropping, confusion flashing across his face—
Something shrieked through the air.
Three pieces of shrapnel—superheated, accelerated, guided by invisible force.
Too fast to see. Too precise to be random.
One caught him in the throat. Punched through his trachea, severed his spine at C3, exited through the back of his neck in a spray of red mist.
One caught him in the chest. Dead center. Heart obliterated. Ribs shattered outward. Sternum cracked in half.
One caught him in the thigh. Femoral artery opened. Blood pressure dropping to zero in seconds.
Greg Stilson collapsed.
Not dramatic. Not slow. Just sudden absence of structural integrity. A puppet with cut strings.
He hit the wooden stage and didn't move. Blood sprayed—arterial, pulsing—painting the podium, the American flag, the microphone he'd been speaking into seconds ago.
His eyes stayed open. Empty. Staring at nothing.
For one perfect, crystalline moment: silence.
Then someone screamed.
Chaos.
Two hundred people moving as one. No direction. No thought. Just away.
Security rushed forward, weapons drawn, shouting into radios, scanning for threats that didn't exist.
The crowd surged. A woman tripped. Was stepped on. Screamed. Crawled forward with a shattered wrist, tears streaming, invisible in the stampede.
An old man fell. The crowd didn't see. Couldn't stop. His ribs cracked under boots. He stopped making sound after the fifth person stepped on his chest.
A child—maybe seven—was separated from his mother. Screamed for her. Was carried by the surge like driftwood in a flood, small body buffeted by adults who couldn't hear him over their own terror.
On stage, a medic reached Stilson. Pressed hands uselessly to the throat wound. Blood pulsed between his fingers. Too much. Too fast. Physics and biology declaring the obvious.
"We need an ambulance! NOW!"
But everyone could see it.
Greg Stilson's chest didn't rise. His heart didn't beat. The light in his eyes had left the moment shrapnel had found his spine.
The man who'd promised a better future was dead before he hit the ground.
Random. Tragic. Debris from a car bomb.
Wrong place. Wrong time.
An accident.
***
Three blocks away, Zale dismantled the detonator. Dropped pieces in three separate storm drains.
Walked to his car. Started the engine. Pulled onto Highway 16.
Behind him, sirens wailed.
Ahead, the road stretched dark and empty.
He drove in silence, hands steady on the wheel, Arrogance resting quietly on the passenger seat.
By 3:00 PM, he was two hundred miles away.
***
HOTEL ROOM - RURAL OHIO
November 15th - 7:43 PM
Zale sat on the edge of the bed, TV playing news coverage on low volume.
"—tragic loss for the town of Ridgeway. Mayor Greg Stilson, 34, was killed this afternoon when a car bomb exploded during a campaign rally. Two others were injured in the subsequent panic. Investigators are treating this as a terrorist attack, though no group has claimed responsibility—"
He changed the channel.
"—rising political star cut down in his prime. Colleagues and supporters are devastated. Those who knew him describe a passionate, dedicated public servant with a bright future ahead of him—"
Another channel.
"—questions about security failures. How did explosives get that close to a public official? Federal investigators are examining whether—"
Zale turned the TV off.
Sat in silence.
Arrogance rested on the nightstand, gleaming faintly in the dim light. Content. Satisfied with work well done.
The card from Samael sat beside it.
Burn once: Accept contract.
Burn once: Refuse contract.
Keep unused: Choice remains yours.
Stilson was already dead. The contract fulfilled whether he burned it or not.
But burning it felt like acceptance. Like admitting Samael had played him perfectly. Like acknowledging he'd been manipulated into murder.
And Zale didn't accept being played.
He picked up the card. Studied it.
Tomorrow, he'd drive home. Tomorrow, he'd process this. Tomorrow, he'd decide if preventing an apocalypse that might never have happened justified murdering a man who might have been innocent.
Tomorrow.
Tonight, he just sat in the dark and wondered if Samael was watching.
Somewhere, he suspected, the demon was smiling.
Somewhere, a town mourned a man they'd believed in.
And Zale wondered if three years from now, when the world didn't end, he'd know whether he'd been a savior or just another killer with better justification.
He set the card down.
Unburned.
His choice remained his own.
Outside, traffic hummed on the interstate. Headlights swept past. The endless American night rolled on, indifferent to one more death added to its ledger.
Zale closed his eyes.
And tried not to think about the look on Stilson's face in that final moment—surprise, confusion, the understanding that death had found him without warning or mercy.
Just a man.
Ambitious. Flawed. Human.
Dead.
Behind him on the nightstand, Arrogance purred softly.
Satisfied.
Because the weapon knew something Zale didn't yet.
Humans were just the beginning.
[END CHAPTER 9]