The basement was a tomb of concrete and bad light. A single bulb, caged in wire, hung over a circle of floor stained dark by more than dirt. It swung when bodies hit, throwing dizzy shadows. The air was a solid, reeking thing—sweat, blood, and the ozone-tinge of drawn power.
This was the only place David felt real. The crowd's low, tense murmur was a current that grounded him, better than any drug.
In the ring, a wiry man with a scar like cracked porcelain down his forearm raised his hand. From the scar, a shimmering, heatless white flame ignited. His opponent, overmatched, backed away and tapped out. The murmur rose to a brief, hungry roar before settling back to its tense buzz. No one cheered a name. That was for stadiums, not for this.
"Winner," grunted Golan, the ref. He was a wall of a man, his own history written in silver-keloid scars across his knuckles and throat. "Next. The Brick. And the new mark. David."
A path cleared. The Brick was a monument of muscle, his scar a glowing, fist-sized knot of volcanic rock on his shoulder. A simple, brutal link. Probably to a specific magma flow in some forgotten, fiery world.
David stepped into the sickly light. The crowd's eyes assessed him—lean, quiet—and dismissed him. Their money was on the Brick. Then David turned his head to face his opponent.
A ripple of silence moved through the basement. It started at his left temple: a jagged, vicious fissure of void-black. It wasn't a raised scar; it was a tear, slicing down across his eyelid and cheekbone, a rip in the canvas of his face showing the absolute nothing beneath. The left eye it bisected was a pale, clouded blue, forever fixed on some middle distance no one else could see.
Golan looked from David's face to the Brick's shoulder, his expression unreadable. "Rules," he announced, his voice cutting the quiet. "No weapons. No killing. Fight ends at yield, knockout, or my call." He paused, his gaze sweeping the crowd, a silent threat. It landed back on the two fighters. "What's Rule Number One?"
The basement held its breath. No one chanted. The rule wasn't a slogan; it was a law, and breaking it meant you never came back. Golan stared at David, waiting.
David kept his smile small, private. "Don't talk about fight club."
The wrench hit the pipe.
The Bell.
The Brick charged, his shoulder-scar igniting into a dull, hellish red. Waves of dry heat pulsed from him.
David didn't move. He closed his good eye and reached through the tear on his face.
He didn't search a universe. He followed a fixed, frozen tether to a single coordinate in the infinite crawl of realities. He found it: a point of crushing pressure and silent, ancient cold. And there, anchored to his soul, was the thing. Not a world, but a resident of one. The ancient, dreaming creature that inhabited a specific trench of a specific lightless sea in one forgotten corner of everything.
He hooked his will into its presence and pulled.
Agony, clean and brilliant, exploded from the scar. It was the circuit completing. The void-black line throbbed.
From the tear, shadow bled into the world. Not formless dark. These were tendrils of liquid midnight, thick as his arm, studded with faint, pulsing suckers that glowed with a sickly, wrong-color light. The air temperature plummeted. The crowd's tense murmur died, replaced by a unified, instinctive recoil. This wasn't fire or force. This was something that didn't belong here.
The tendrils lashed out with a predatory will of their own—an echo from a consciousness a universe away. One wrapped around the Brick's incandescent fist with a wet, final thwack. The sizzle of magma meeting abyssal cold filled the room, steam erupting in a hissing cloud. Another tendril snapped around his ankle.
The Brick, a man who could break stone, was lifted and slammed onto the concrete. The impact shuddered through the floor. He roared, his scar flaring as he tried to draw more searing heat. The shadow tendrils only tightened, their paralyzing cold leaching the fire from his skin, their suction unbreakable. They began to squeeze.
David took a slow step forward. This was the peak. The only point of true existence. He felt the raw, alien power flooding his system, siphoned directly from a leviathan that could dwarf mountains. He felt the faint, distant brush of its dreaming attention against his mind. The high was so intense it bordered on annihilation. He lived for it.
Through the connection, he could feel the Brick's ribs protesting. He wanted to feel them snap.
"Yield." David's voice was wrong. It was layered with a deep, resonant echo, the sound of pressure at the bottom of the world.
The Brick, his face a mask of strangled panic, slapped the concrete three times.
The wrench hit the pipe.
David severed the draw. The connection snapped shut. The glorious pain vanished, leaving a hollow, aching vacuum behind his eye. The shadow tendrils dissolved, not into smoke, but into nothing, retracting along the invisible tether back to their specific, distant point of origin. The unnatural cold lingered.
The mundane world—warm, bright, reeking of fear and sweat—rushed back in, feeling thin and false. The crowd was dead silent, staring. No chants. Just the heavy, post-draw quiet where everyone remembered what they were playing with. The high was gone. The itch was everywhere under his skin.
He collected his cash from Golan. The ref's eyes were on the fading, frost-burned marks on the Brick's arm. He counted the bills without looking at David's face. "Precise link," he muttered, his voice low.
"It gets the job done," David said, tucking the money away.
Golan finally looked at him, his gaze hard. "That's the problem. Jobs end. The link doesn't." He leaned in, his voice a gravelly whisper meant for David alone. "The rule keeps this place secret. But for a draw like yours? There's another rule. The first rule of drawing: You pull on a line, you remind the thing on the other end that the line exists."
David walked away, the words settling in the cold emptiness the power had left behind. Outside, the alley air was a tepid relief. The thrill was gone. The itch was a constant.
His fingers rose to the scar on his face. It was quiet now. Just a silent rip to a specific monster in a specific dark.
But Golan was wrong. That was the whole point. The tug was the reminder. It was the only thing that proved he, and the thing in the dark, were both still there. It was the only conversation that mattered.
He needed another fight. Another secret ring in another nameless basement. He needed the pull.
He disappeared into the city's gloom, a prisoner to the only connection that made him feel alive, already dying for the silence to break again.
The fight club's roar faded behind David like a heartbeat slowing to a stop. The city night was cool and quiet, the only sound the scuff of his boots on cracked pavement and the distant, rhythmic drip of a broken fire escape. He was riding the dull, post-fight comedown, the silence already beginning to itch at the edges of his mind.
He turned into the narrow alley that was his usual shortcut. Graffiti-tagged walls, dumpsters overflowing with black bags—it was his kind of place. Empty, but not peaceful. Full of potential violence.
"David."
The voice came from ahead. A man stepped from a shadowed doorway, blocking the alley's exit. It was the fighter from two weeks ago—the one with the silver-circle scar on his palm who'd fought him to a frustrating, technical draw. Styx.
David stopped, a slow grin spreading across his face. The itch vanished, replaced by a clean, sharp focus. "Come for a rematch without a ref? I don't need a bell."
"This isn't for a rating," Styx said. His voice was calm, flat. He wore a dark, simple jacket, no fighter's gear. His eyes were assessing, not angry. "I need to see it again. Up close. Without rules."
David didn't need another invitation. The Pull was already singing to him, a siren call he was desperate to answer. He didn't close his good eye this time. He kept it locked on Styx as he reached through the scar on his face.
He found the coordinate—the crushing, lightless pressure, the ancient thing in its specific trench. He hooked his will and pulled.
Agony, then ecstasy. The void-black scar flared. From its depth, tendrils of living shadow erupted, whipping into the alley with a sound like tearing velvet. The dumpsters around them groaned as a sudden, profound cold seized the air.
David attacked. No feints, no testing. A massive tendril, thick as a telephone pole, speared straight for Styx's chest, aiming to end it fast.
Styx didn't flinch. He raised his scarred palm. The silver circle glinted once, and the air in front of him shimmered. A disc of distorted space, barely visible, snapped into existence.
The shadow tendril hit it.
Instead of a crushing impact, there was a deafening THUMP of compressed air. The tendril didn't break or get deflected; it was stopped, dead, as if it had struck the unyielding heart of a mountain. The force of David's own lunge recoiled back through the connection, jolting his teeth.
David snarled, pushing more will through the link. Two more tendrils lashed out from the sides, scouring brickwork as they arrowed in.
Styx moved his palm in two sharp, precise arcs. Two more shimmering shields bloomed—THUMP. THUMP. The concussive discharges were staggering, kicking up grit and paper from the alley floor. The tendrils recoiled.
This wasn't like the club. There were no limits here. David let the Pull deepen. Six tendrils now, then eight, a whirling forest of midnight rage, hammering at Styx from every angle. The alley became a chaos of shuddering impacts and shockwaves, the sound echoing like cannon fire.
And Styx… just stood there.
He wasn't attacking. He was a fortress. His scarred hand moved with minimal, efficient motions, each gesture summoning a perfect, immovable shield exactly where it was needed. A tendril shot for his legs—THUMP—blocked. One tried to coil around from above—THUMP—arrested mid-air. He was reading David's intent a split-second before the strikes landed, a defense so absolute it was insulting.
David was pouring everything into the assault, drawing more and more, the cold from his scar making frost crackle on the asphalt at his feet. He was a force of nature.
And Styx was the unbreakable levee.
After a solid minute of this torrential, futile assault, David's breath was coming in ragged plumes in the cold air. The high of the Pull was still there, but it was mixed with a boiling, furious frustration. He couldn't touch him.
Styx lowered his hand. The shimmering shields vanished. The alley was suddenly, deafeningly quiet, save for the drip of water and David's heavy breathing. Not a single tendril had gotten within three feet of the man.
"You pull from a deep, dark well, David," Styx said, his voice unchanged, not a hair out of place. "A specific one. Brutal. Unstructured." He finally took a step forward. "You fight like a rabid dog. All fury, no bite. You've never faced something that couldn't be overpowered."
David let the tendrils dissolve, the cold receding. The post-fall emptiness crashed into him, harder than ever, underscored by total humiliation. "What do you want?" he spat.
"To offer you a real fight," Styx said, stopping a few paces away. "The scraps you brawl for in basements are nothing. You're addicted to the conflict, but you're sipping watered-down beer when there's pure fire waiting."
He gestured vaguely at the city around them. "The Scars are links. Doors. Most people just crack them open to steal a little power. But sometimes, a link breaks wide open. The door doesn't just let power out—it lets the specific thing on the other side in. Fully."
The image flashed in David's mind: not his tendrils, but the full, waking mass of the leviathan they were attached to, forcing its way into his world. The scale of it made his heart pound not with fear, but with a terrifying, hungry awe.
"There's an organization," Styx continued. "We find these Breaches. We contain them. We fight what comes through. Your link… it has a binding, oppressive quality. It could be useful. You want the ultimate high? The ultimate test? It's not in a pit. It's out there, holding back the things that would unmake this city while they're trying to manifest."
The battle-junky in David was transfixed. A real war. Not for points. For survival. Against manifestations. The pure, undiluted Pull that would require…
His pride, his feral independence, recoiled. "I'm not a soldier. I don't take orders."
"I'm not offering a rank," Styx said. "I'm offering a frontline." He pulled a simple, black matte card from his jacket. No name, no logo. Just ten numbers etched into the surface. He held it out.
David stared at it, then back at Styx's unreadable face. The memory of his tendrils shattering against those effortless shields burned. That power, that control… applied to a war against nightmares.
He took the card. It was cool and smooth.
"The next Breach alert in this sector comes in 36 hours," Styx said. He turned and began walking down the alley. "The call goes out at 0800. The number will work once."
He disappeared around the corner, his footsteps fading instantly.
David stood alone in the wrecked alley, under the flickering light. He looked at the black card in his hand, then up at the narrow strip of night sky between the buildings.
The silence wasn't empty anymore. It was charged. It was the silence before the storm.
For the first time, he had a time, a date, and a number for it.
END OF CHAPTER