[Sector 20 Devastated in Suspected Gang Clash
Sector 20 remains under restricted access this morning after a catastrophic confrontation late last night left multiple blocks structurally compromised and residents displaced.
Authorities report widespread structural collapse, scorched infrastructure, and what officials described as "localized ground liquefaction consistent with high-output aether discharge."
Preliminary findings suggest the destruction stemmed from a violent skirmish between two known local gangs: the Steel Talons and the Red Dogs.
According to anonymous enforcement sources, tensions between the two groups had been escalating over territorial disputes tied to black-market conduit trafficking and control of lower-sector supply routes.
Witnesses reported "columns of fire," "blinding white flashes," and a shockwave that shattered windows up to three blocks away shortly before midnight.
Emergency responders arrived to find a central impact zone resembling a crater, with surrounding streets fused into glass-like surfaces—an effect specialists say may indicate the use of illegal high-rank glyph weaponry.
Officials declined to confirm whether experimental or military-grade aether tech was involved but stated that "the scale of discharge exceeds typical gang-level engagements."
Casualty numbers have not yet been released.
Both the Steel Talons and Red Dogs have denied responsibility through unofficial channels, each blaming the other for initiating the escalation.
No arrests have been announced as of press time.
City officials are urging residents to avoid Sector 20 while containment and structural assessments continue.
An internal review into the proliferation of advanced aether weapons in civilian zones is reportedly underway.]
Lucent lowered the newspaper.
Spectacle Raw.
The Junkyard's most unreliable, sensationalist rag—and somehow, the only source that had come close to the truth.
The corporate outlets had buried the story under "industrial accident" and "aether main failure."
But Spectacle Raw knew their audience.
Knew that people in the lower sectors could smell a cover-up from three blocks away.
He read the article again.
Gang clash.
Territorial disputes.
Illegal high-rank glyph weaponry.
They didn't know.
Couldn't know.
The words on this page were a fiction—a comforting lie designed to make the impossible digestible.
Two gangs fighting over smuggling routes was something people could understand.
Could file away and forget.
The truth—the voids, the entities, the ancient things that had stepped out of nowhere and unmade the most powerful attacks either of them could summon—would break them.
It had been four days.
Four days since his fight with Blaze.
Four days since Zero and that... Cerulia... had stopped them like gods swatting flies.
Four days since he had watched Blaze sink into his own shadow, since Zero had ripped the entity from his chest and sealed it away.
Four days of lying in this cramped, dingy clinic, letting Rena patch together what was left of him.
His mind drifted back to Cerulia.
To the name she had formed with her mouth before the Eclipse swallowed her.
The one who had been watching, curating, playing with them all along.
Lucent felt something twist in his chest.
Not the hunger—that was gone, ripped away by Zero's palm.
Something else.
Hotter.
Sharper.
Anger.
Not at the fight.
Not at the pain.
At the manipulation.
At being a pawn in a game he hadn't known he was playing.
At having his life, his transformation, his very existence treated as entertainment by beings who saw mortals as toys.
How am I even going to ask that 'being'?
The question haunted him.
Zero had saved him—twice now.
But Zero was also part of this.
Connected to it.
Maybe even the source of it.
How did you demand answers from something that could unmake you with a thought?
"You're reading that newspaper again."
The voice cut through his spiraling thoughts like a scalpel—sharp, flat, utterly devoid of sympathy.
Rena stood at the foot of his cot, her blood-stained lab coat hanging open over a tattered shirt.
One hand—mechanical fingers whirring softly—held a datapad covered in vitals and treatment notes.
Her augmented eye glowed a pale blue, the lens clicking as it focused on him, scanning, assessing, cataloging.
"You're reaaaaally lucky."
The word was drawn out, dripping with sarcasm.
She didn't sound impressed.
She sounded exhausted.
"This is the second time you've used Q-Serin and came out alive."
She tapped the datapad with her mechanical finger, the clink of metal on glass sharp in the quiet room.
"Second time I've had to scrape you off a battlefield and piece you back together. Most people don't get one of those. You've burned through two like they're party favors."
Lucent met her gaze.
Said nothing.
Rena snorted.
"Yeah. That's what I thought."
She tossed the datapad onto a nearby table cluttered with surgical tools—real tools, old tools, the kind that predated aether medicine.
Needles.
Thread.
Bone drills.
Things that left trails the corporations couldn't track.
"Your vitals are stable. Miraculously. Against all medical logic."
She gestured vaguely at his chest, where the glyph had been.
"Whatever that thing was that Zero pulled out of you—it was keeping you alive. Without it..."
She shrugged.
"You should be dead."
Lucent's hand drifted to his chest.
To the spot where Zero had touched him.
The skin was smooth now.
Unmarked.
Like the glyph had never existed.
"I feel dead," he muttered.
Rena's mechanical eye clicked, zooming in on his face.
"You look dead. But your heart's still beating, so I guess we'll call it 'recovering.'"
She turned away, grabbing a small vial from the cluttered table and tossing it onto his cot.
"Migraine medicine. You're going to need it. The kind of aether burnout you're experiencing... your brain's going to try to kill you for the next week. Take one when the lights start hurting."
Lucent caught the vial.
Stared at it.
"...Thanks."
Rena snorted again.
"Don't thank me. That's going on your tab. Along with the stitches, the bed, the three meals you've eaten, and the fact that I haven't turned you in to the Reclamation Units prowling the upper tunnels."
She fixed him with that glowing eye—the blue light reflecting off her sharp, angular features.
"You and your friends cost me a lot of supplies. I expect payment. Credits, favors, blood—I will not be picky this time. And I will collect."
Lucent nodded.
He understood the rules.
Had known Rena long enough—three years, at least, since before his sister died—to know that her clinic ran on transactions, not charity.
"The others?" he asked.
Rena's expression flickered—just for a moment.
Something almost like... respect?
Sympathy?
It was gone before he could read it.
"Kai's fine. Concussion, exhaustion, some minor burns. He's asleep in the next room. Been asking about you every time he wakes up."
"Jack?" Lucent asked next.
"Old man's tougher than he looks. He's awake. Won't talk about what happened in that crater."
Another pause.
"The others—the Talons—they're scattered. Some made it back to their base. Some didn't. I don't keep count. It's bad for business."
Lucent absorbed the information.
Felt it settle into the hollow space where the hunger used to be.
"Blaze?"
Rena's mechanical eye clicked, focusing on him with new intensity.
"Gone. According to the rumors, anyway. Disappeared. No body, no trace, nothing."
She tilted her head.
"The thing that took him—that woman, the one in the maid's outfit—she's…"
Rena pursed her lips but she continued anyway.
"...been spotted in the upper sectors."
Cerulia.
Still here.
Still playing whatever game she was playing.
Lucent's jaw tightened.
"I need to find her."
Rena laughed—a short, sharp, humorless sound.
"You need to rest. You need to recover. You need to stay the hell away from anything that moves through voids and eats suns for breakfast."
She pointed a mechanical finger at him, the tip gleaming.
"Whatever happened out there, whatever you saw—forget it. That's not your fight anymore. You survived. That's more than most can say."
Lucent met her gaze.
"I can't."
Rena stared at him for a long moment.
Then she sighed—a deep, world-weary sound that seemed to come from somewhere older than her years.
"Yeah. I know."
She turned away, heading for the door.
"Stubborn idiot. Always have been."
She paused at the threshold.
"One more thing."
Lucent waited.
"Your sister's grave."
Rena didn't turn around.
"It's still there. Untouched. I checked last week."
The words landed like stones in still water.
"Why?" Lucent's voice was rough.
Rena shrugged—a small, almost imperceptible movement.
"Because someone had to. And you clearly weren't going to."
Lucent sat in the silence, staring at the wall, the vial of migraine medicine clutched in his hand.
Four days.
And the questions just kept piling up.
Then he heard a knock on the door.
Three soft raps—hesitant, uncertain, the kind of knock that didn't want to intrude but needed to be heard.
"May I come in now?"
Kai's voice.
Muffled through the thin metal, but unmistakable.
Lucent didn't answer immediately.
His throat felt dry.
The weight of Rena's words—about his sister's grave, about the questions he couldn't answer—still pressed down on him.
But the knock came again.
Softer this time.
"Lucent?"
"...Come in."
The door creaked open.
Kai stood in the threshold, silhouetted against the harsh fluorescent light of the clinic's main room.
When he stepped inside, Lucent saw the patches.
Small ones, mostly—on his cheek, his jaw, the back of his hand.
Surgical tape holding together wounds that Rena had sealed with old-school stitches.
A fading bruise curved under his left eye like a crescent moon.
He moved carefully, deliberately, the way people did when their bodies were still remembering how much they hurt.
But it wasn't the patches that caught Lucent's attention.
It was the face.
Kai's expression was serious.
More serious than Lucent had ever seen him.
The nervous energy, the desperate need to prove himself, the constant, anxious chatter—all of it was gone.
In its place was something quieter.
Heavier.
He looked older.
Tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.
Kai crossed the small room and lowered himself into the empty chair beside Lucent's cot.
The metal legs scraped against the concrete floor—a small, sharp sound that seemed too loud in the silence.
Neither of them spoke.
Rena, who had been leaning against the doorframe, watched them for a long moment.
Her mechanical eye clicked, adjusted, focused.
Then she straightened, brushing invisible dust from her blood-stained coat.
"...It seems there's something you want to talk about alone."
Her voice was flat, but there was something almost gentle beneath it.
"I'm going to go out for now. And you Lucent…don't bleed on my floor."
The door clicked shut behind her.
The silence grew.
One minute.
Then two.
Lucent watched Kai's face, reading the lines there, the tension in his jaw, the way his hands gripped his own knees like he was holding himself together.
When Kai finally spoke, his voice was quiet. Careful.
"...I'm going back."
Lucent took a few seconds to process the words.
To understand what back meant in this context.
"...So you found out."
It wasn't a question.
Kai's eyes snapped to his—surprised, searching.
"You knew?"
"Yeah." Lucent's voice was rough, scraped raw by days of silence and the ghost of the glyph that was no longer there. "A few days before 'that' incident."
Because what was more to say?
They were practically strangers.
Bound by a contract, not friendship.
Lucent had saved him, trained him, kept him alive—but that didn't give him the right to pry into wounds that weren't his.
At least, that was the excuse he kept telling himself.
"I see..."
Kai's voice trailed off.
He stared down at his hands — the fresh patches, the fading bruises, the jury-rigged conduit still clipped to his belt.
The same one that had saved Lucent's life when he was falling.
He didn't blame Lucent for the silence.
They weren't friends.
They were two people who had survived the same nightmare and kept each other alive long enough to sign a contract.
That didn't make them family.
But right now, sitting in this cramped clinic room with his body still aching from the fight and his mind still spinning from everything he had witnessed—
The only thing that kept circling back was his father.
Ryota Renner.
Dead.
Gone.
And Kai hadn't been there.
Hadn't been told.
Hadn't even known until he saw a memorial screen in an abandoned slum kiosk.
He needed closure.
Not reconciliation—that ship had sailed years ago, when the tablet slid across the conference table and he signed away his name.
Not forgiveness—he wasn't sure either of them deserved that.
Just... something.
A grave to visit.
A place to stand.
A moment to acknowledge that the man who had erased him was still, somehow, his father.
"I need to see it,"
Kai said quietly.
"The grave. The place they put him. I need to..."
He trailed off, searching for words that didn't exist.
Lucent understood.
He had stood at his sister's grave more times than he could count.
Had talked to dirt and stone and silence, hoping something would answer.
Nothing ever did.
But he kept going back.
"When?"
Kai shrugged—a small, helpless gesture.
"Soon. As soon as I can walk without falling over." A pause. "Rena says another day or two. Then I'll go."
Lucent nodded.
Said nothing.
Kai looked at him—really looked, for the first time since entering the room.
"Can you...?"
He didn't finish the question.
Didn't know how.
Can you go with me?
Lucent met his gaze.
"I'll be here when you're ready."
It wasn't a promise.
Just a statement of fact—simple and absolute, the way all true things were.
Kai's eyes glistened.
Just for a moment.
Then he looked away, blinking hard.
"...Thanks."
The word was barely a whisper.
The silence returned—but it was different now.
Lighter.
Shared.
Two people who understood loss without needing to name it, sitting together in the quiet of a cramped clinic room while the Junkyard churned on outside.
Kai stood up.
His movements were slow, careful—his body still remembering the fight, still healing from wounds that ran deeper than skin.
He didn't look back.
Didn't say anything else.
Just walked to the door, placed his hand on the frame, and paused for a single breath.
Then he was gone.
The door clicked shut behind him.
Lucent's eyes followed his back until the last moment.
Watched the way he moved, the way he carried himself—different now.
Then he saw it.
Faint.
Barely visible.
A thin, silvery trail that clung to Kai's form like smoke, like light, like something that shouldn't be there.
Lucent blinked.
The lines followed.
Shifted.
Moved with Kai's steps, trailing behind him like the afterimage of a dream.
"...huh?"
The sound escaped him before he could stop it—a small, confused noise that didn't belong in the mouth of a man who had seen voids open and gods walk.
He brushed his eyes with the back of his hand.
The lines were still there.
Fading now, dissolving into the harsh fluorescent light of the clinic's main room—but there.
Real.
Visible.
Aether?
The thought surfaced from somewhere deep, somewhere that still remembered the hunger, still remembered the glyph, still remembered the way the world had opened when the entity touched him.
But that was gone.
Zero had taken it.
Ripped it from his chest like pulling a weed.
Wasn't it?
Lucent stared at the empty doorway.
The lines were gone.
But the question remained.
He looked down at his hands.
Turned them over.
Flexed his fingers.
Nothing.
Just flesh.
Just bone.
Just a man who had survived something he shouldn't have.
But the image lingered—Kai's form traced in silver, moving through the world in ways Lucent's eyes shouldn't have been able to see.
What's happening to me?
The room offered no answers.
Outside, Kai's footsteps faded into the distance.
And Lucent sat alone in the silence, staring at hands that felt like his own but weren't—not anymore—and wondering if Zero had taken everything after all.
Or if something had stayed behind.
***
Back at Sector 18, the Steel Talons' main base had been transformed.
What had once been a bustling rally point—filled with the noise of planning, arguing, and the constant low-grade chaos of a gang preparing for its next move—was now a hospital.
Cots lined every available wall.
Makeshift curtains hung from jury-rigged wires, offering the illusion of privacy to those who needed it most.
The air smelled of antiseptic, old blood, and the faint, acrid tang of burnt aether.
The wounded were everywhere.
Some slept.
Some stared at ceilings with eyes that didn't blink.
Some whispered to each other in voices too quiet to carry, sharing the weight of survival in fragments and half-sentences.
In the corner, near a window that had been boarded up years ago and never reopened, Cale sat beside a cot.
He held a bowl of porridge in his hands—thin, bland, the kind of food you made when supplies were low and no one had time to cook.
The spoon hovered near Pen's lips, patient and steady.
Pen glared at it like it had personally offended her.
"...Can't you at least put some salt in it?"
Her voice was weak—thinner than it used to be, scraped raw by days of silence and the shock of waking up different.
But the irritation was pure.
Unmistakable.
"You're practically feeding me air."
Cale blinked.
Looked at the porridge.
Looked at her.
"Was it really that bland?"
He dipped the spoon into the bowl, took a small taste.
Swallowed.
Considered.
"...Tastes fine to me."
Pen stared at him.
"...I think you have a problem with your taste buds."
A small, quiet moment.
Almost normal.
Almost like the world hadn't ended four days ago.
Then Pen's expression shifted.
The irritation faded, replaced by something heavier.
"I heard Nail is in a coma."
Cale's hands stilled on the bowl.
He set it down on the bedside table—slowly, carefully, the way you handle things when you're afraid they might break.
His eyes drifted across the room, past the rows of cots, past the wounded and the dying, to a far corner where a single figure lay motionless.
Nail.
His chest rose and fell in a shallow, mechanical rhythm.
"Yeah," Cale said.
His voice was quiet.
"He still hasn't woken up."
Pen was silent for a long moment.
Her eyes—the only part of her that could still move freely—scanned the room.
Took in the cots, the wounded, the faces of people she had fought beside, bled beside, survived beside.
"So what happened?"
The question was simple.
Direct.
The kind of question you asked when you needed to understand, needed to process, needed to make sense of a world that had stopped making sense four days ago.
Cale looked at her.
At the empty space where her arms used to be.
At the bandaged stumps wrapped in clean white gauze.
At the face of a woman who had lost everything and was still asking for truth.
He told her.
Everything.
The fight.
The swarm.
Lucent's fall.
Kai's impossible save.
The moment when Jack's bullet found its mark and Karen's beam followed through.
The explosion of flame that should have killed them all.
The voids.
The beings.
The woman who wore a dead girl's face and spoke of memories she shouldn't have.
The two beings who had stepped out of nowhere and stopped gods from killing each other.
Pen listened.
Didn't interrupt.
Didn't ask questions.
Just listened, her face growing paler with each word, her eyes widening at the parts that didn't make sense—which was most of it.
When Cale finished, the silence stretched between them.
Pen's voice, when it finally came, was barely a whisper.
"...What are we supposed to do now?"
Cale didn't have an answer.
He looked at his hands.
The same hands that had run from the fight, that had come back, that had carried Nail's brass knuckles and Pen's monofilament shooter into a battle he never should have survived.
"I don't know," he admitted.
***
At the underground level of the base.
The room was cold.
Not the cold of winter or the cold of deep tunnels—something else.
Something that crept into bones and settled there, heavy and patient.
The walls were bare concrete, stained with decades of moisture and neglect.
A single overhead light swung on its cord, casting shifting shadows that made the space feel smaller than it was.
In the center of it all, Ember sat bound to a reinforced chair.
Her Aegis-frame was gone—stripped, scavenged, reduced to components scattered across the Talons' armory.
What remained was just a woman.
Tanned skin, sharp features, the kind of face that might have been handsome once, before the bruises and the exhaustion and the hollow resignation that now filled her eyes.
Her wrists were cuffed behind her back with industrial-grade restraints.
Her ankles were bound to the chair's legs with the same.
A thick leather strap across her chest pinned her to the seat—overkill, given her condition, but no one in this room was taking chances.
She hadn't spoken since waking up.
Hadn't begged.
Hadn't threatened.
Hadn't done anything except sit there, staring at nothing, waiting for whatever came next.
Around her, the room held five figures.
Karen stood near the door, her arms crossed tight across her chest.
She didn't look good.
The fight had taken more from her than she let on—not just physical wounds, but something deeper.
The memory of uselessness.
The weight of watching others bleed while she stood frozen.
She glanced at Echo, then away.
Echo's squad was the information arm of the Talons—the spies, the interrogators, the ones who knew how to make people talk.
Karen's squad was the merchants.
They traded goods, not secrets.
She had no experience with what was about to happen.
Nor any desire to gain it.
Vey stood against the far wall, his good eye fixed on Ember with an intensity that hadn't faded in four days.
His demolition squad had taken the heaviest losses in the final push.
He wanted answers.
Wanted names.
Wanted someone to pay.
Rook leaned against the doorframe, his sniper rifle conspicuously absent—a gesture, perhaps, that this wasn't about killing.
Not yet.
His face was unreadable, but his posture said everything: I'm here if you need me. I hope you don't.
And Jack.
The old man stood apart from the others, closer to Ember than anyone else dared.
In his weathered hands, he held a small syringe—the kind used for precise, measured injections.
The liquid inside was clear.
"It took a whole day," Jack said, his voice low and rough, "to decipher Gristle's notes on how to produce this neurotoxin."
The name hung in the air.
Gristle.
The Talons' chemist.
The man who could brew anything from anything—painkillers, poisons, explosives, truth serums, and Glow.
He had been with them since the beginning.
Since Nex first gathered the scraps of the Junkyard and forged them into something resembling a family.
Gristle had died the same night as Nex.
This neurotoxin was one of his legacy.
A formula written in cramped, chaotic handwriting, buried in that notebook.
Jack held it up to the light.
The syringe gleamed.
"It won't kill her," he said, matter-of-fact. "But it'll make her wish it did. Gristle designed it for information extraction. Low doses. Precise application. The subject stays conscious. Stays aware. Just loses the ability to... filter."
He looked at Ember.
She didn't react.
"Everything she knows, everything she's seen, everything she's tried to bury—it'll all come out. Whether she wants it to or not."
Echo stepped forward.
Her voice was calm.
Professional.
The voice of someone who had done this before.
"We paid extra for Rena to patch her up," she said, addressing the room more than Ember.
"Specifically because we wanted her in good enough condition for this. No point interrogating a corpse."
She glanced at Ember—a brief, clinical assessment.
"She's healthy enough. The neurotoxin won't kill her. But it'll hurt."
Karen flinched.
Just slightly.
Just enough for Rook to notice.
He didn't say anything.
Ember remained silent.
Her eyes, fixed on some middle distance none of them could see, didn't flicker.
Didn't blink.
Didn't show fear or anger or anything at all.
She knew what was coming.
Had known since the moment she woke up in this room, bound to this chair, surrounded by the faces of people whose friends she had killed.
There was no escape.
No rescue.
No last-minute intervention from the corporation that had sent her.
She was alone.
And soon, she would talk.
Jack moved closer.
The syringe caught the light.
"Any last words?" he asked—not mocking, not cruel.
Just... practical.
The question you ask before you do something that can't be undone.
Karen felt it then.
A cold, creeping fear that had nothing to do with the neurotoxin or the woman in the chair.
It rose from somewhere deep, somewhere primal, somewhere that recognized danger in forms she couldn't name.
Jack's form.
The way he stood.
The way he held the syringe.
The way his weathered face had settled into something harder than she had ever seen—not anger, not vengeance, just... resolve.
The look of a man who had crossed a line and wasn't coming back.
She had only heard bits and pieces from Kai since the crater.
His daughter.
The maid.
Same face.
Karen hadn't believed it.
Jack was Jack—gruff, practical, the kind of man who built weapons and stayed in his workshop and didn't get involved in the messy business of feelings.
But now, watching him stand over Ember with that syringe, watching the emptiness in his eyes...
She understood.
He wasn't here for the Talons.
Wasn't here for information or justice or revenge against the corporation that had sent Ember.
He was here for her.
The maid.
The thing wearing his daughter's face.
And Ember was just the first step.
The first door he needed to open.
The first voice he needed to crack before he could get to the answers he really wanted.
No words came.
Because what could she say?
Don't do this?
Too late.
Stop?
Not her place.
I'm scared of what you're becoming?
Not something you said to a man who had already lost everything.
Jack didn't notice her struggle.
Didn't notice any of them.
His eyes were fixed on Ember.
But Karen knew—knew—that he wasn't going to stop at nothing.
The needle descended.
***
At Ghost City's Central District.
The noodle stall sat wedged between a pawn shop with bars on its windows and a dingy clinic that advertised "discreet services – no glyphs, no questions."
Steam rose from the boiling pots in thick, fragrant clouds, carrying the smell of cheap broth and cheaper meat to the alleyway beyond.
Arden sat on an overturned crate, a newspaper spread across his knees.
Spectacle Raw.
The Junkyard's most unreliable source—and its most honest.
No corporate filters.
No official statements.
Just rumors, speculation, and the occasional accidental truth buried under layers of sensationalism.
He read the headline for the fifth time.
[Sector 20 Devastated in Suspected Gang Clash]
"What a BULLSHIT!"
The words exploded out of him before he could stop them, loud enough to make the stall owner glance over with narrowed eyes.
Tenn looked up from her noodles.
Jessa, sitting beside her with a bowl cradled in her small hands, did the same.
"What?" Tenn asked, her voice flat.
She'd learned, over the past four days, that Arden's outbursts were usually about one of three things: money, danger, or something he couldn't control.
This felt like the third.
Arden scratched his head aggressively, as if trying to dislodge the frustration physically.
"...Nothing."
He looked back at the paper.
Suspected gang clash.
Steel Talons and Red Dogs.
Territorial disputes.
Bullshit.
Complete, absolute, infuriating bullshit.
Yes, the Talons and Red Dogs had fought.
A skirmish, really—nothing compared to what came after.
But the real damage, the real destruction, had been the Scorchers.
Blaze and his crew.
The ones who had rolled into the Red Dogs base like they owned it, who had torn through everything Arden had spent years building, who had turned his home into a war zone.
And now the papers were blaming gangs?
Blaming him, by extension?
He wanted to scream.
But his eyes kept drifting back to the picture.
The crater.
Massive.
Unfathomable.
A wound in the earth that stretched across what had once been multiple city blocks.
The photo was grainy—taken from a drone at maximum range, probably—but the scale was unmistakable.
Whatever had happened at Sector 20 had been on another level entirely.
Arden remembered watching it from afar.
The flashes of light.
The columns of fire.
The way the ground had shaken, even miles away.
He didn't know what had happened there.
Didn't know who had fought, who had won, who had died.
But one question kept circling back, over and over, no matter how hard he tried to push it away:
Is the main base safe?
The Red Dogs' main base.
The place he had called home for years.
The people he had worked with, schemed with, survived with.
He was a bastard.
He knew that.
Would sell out anyone if the price was right and the risk was low.
Had proven it, time and again, by prioritizing his own skin over loyalty or honor.
But he was still a little bit sentimental.
The thought of Isla's terrible cooking.
The sound of Gideon's voice, barking orders across the compound.
The way Bricks would nod at him in the morning, a silent acknowledgment that they were still alive, still fighting, still here.
He didn't know if any of them were still alive.
Didn't know if the base had survived the Scorchers' attack, or the chaos that followed, or whatever had created that massive crater in Sector 20.
He wanted to go back.
To see.
To know.
But the fear was stronger.
The Scorchers might still be there.
Blaze might still be hunting.
Walking into that sector right now was gambling with odds he couldn't calculate—and Arden never gambled without knowing the house's probability.
So he waited.
Gathered information.
Read every scrap of news, every rumor, every whisper that drifted through Ghost City's endless information networks.
Piece by piece, he would build a picture of what had really happened.
And then, maybe, he would move.
His eyes drifted to Jessa.
The girl sat quietly, eating her noodles with the mechanical focus of someone who had learned that meals were scarce and not to be wasted.
Her face was blank—not with the blankness of boredom, but with something deeper.
Emptier.
She had no memory of what happened at the Red Dogs base.
No memory of the white conduit, the crushing gravity, the rage that had borrowed her body and turned her into a weapon.
And–
No memory of her past at all.
Arden had tested her, carefully, over the past four days.
Asked about parents, home, childhood.
Nothing.
Just empty stares and quiet head shakes.
The girl was a blank slate—a person who had woken up four days ago with no history, no identity, no context for the world she now inhabited.
It was convenient, in a way.
She didn't ask questions about why they were hiding, why they were running, why her hands sometimes still faintly glowed when she was scared.
But it was also wrong.
Arden wasn't a good person.
He knew that.
But even he could see that something had been taken from this girl.
Something vital.
Something she might never get back.
He looked back at the newspaper.
At the crater.
At the lies printed in bold letters.
Steel Talons and Red Dogs.
Territorial disputes.
Suspected gang clash.
"What a bullshit," he muttered again—softer this time, almost to himself.
Tenn didn't ask this time.
Jessa kept eating.
And somewhere in the distance, the echoes of that night still waited for someone brave enough to face them.
***
The office was a study in controlled luxury.
Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked the glittering spires of Sector 1, their lights reflected in the polished surface of a mahogany desk that cost more than most Junkyard residents earned in a lifetime.
Leather chairs, strategically placed, invited conversation while maintaining distance.
A decanter of amber liquid sat on a side table, untouched.
The man in the expensive leather office chair didn't look up as the footage played on the wall-mounted screen.
Grainy.
Shaky.
Taken from a drone at maximum range, probably one of the few that had survived the night.
But the images were clear enough—columns of fire, blinding white light, a crater forming in real-time as two figures tore reality apart.
He watched with the detached interest of a naturalist observing particularly aggressive insects.
"...Blaze is still alive?"
His voice was calm.
Cultured.
The kind of voice that made threats sound like dinner invitations.
The woman on the opposite side of the table didn't flinch.
Shoulder-length white hair, cut sharp and precise.
Purple tactical gear that hugged her frame—practical, expensive, designed for movement and combat.
She stood with the easy confidence of someone who had faced worse than corporate boardrooms.
"Yes." Her voice was direct.
No hesitation.
"It seems to be Blaze. The behavioral patterns match, and the physical appearance—"
She gestured at the screen, where the crimson figure had just launched another pillar of fire.
"—is consistent with our last assessment."
The man leaned back in his chair.
Steepled his fingers.
Watched the footage with renewed interest.
"Really now..."
He was handsome in the way old money was handsome—features sharp and refined, skin smooth, eyes a cool grey that held no warmth.
White hair, swept back from a high brow, caught the ambient light.
He looked young.
Fresh-faced.
The kind of man who might have been in his early thirties, if you didn't look too closely at those eyes.
If you didn't know better.
He remembered placing the contract.
Years ago now, though time moved strangely when you no longer aged.
A meeting in the shadows with Nex—the King of the Junkyard, they called him.
A blunt instrument for a delicate problem.
Blaze had become... unpredictable.
A liability.
Nex had delivered.
Or so he had believed.
Yet here Blaze was.
On his screen.
Very much alive.
Very much evolved.
The thought should have bothered him more.
Instead, it sparked something else—a cold, clinical curiosity.
How did you survive, little flame? And what did you become in the process?
"And who is this?"
He pointed at the other figure on the screen—the one wreathed in cold white light, trading blows with Blaze like an equal.
"The one fighting him?"
The woman—Vesper—stepped closer to the screen.
Her eyes, sharp and assessing, tracked the other fighter's movements.
"From the information we've gathered," she said, "his name is Lucent Argyr."
A pause.
The name hung in the air.
"Argyr." The man tasted the word.
"Not a name I recognize. Not corporate. Not military."
"He's a ghost," Vesper agreed.
"Low-level records. Nothing that explains... that."
She gestured at the screen, where Lucent had just deployed another high-rank glyph with impossible speed.
"Whoever he is, whatever he is—he's not normal."
The man's eyes narrowed.
Interest.
Real interest, for the first time since the footage started playing.
"Investigate him."
The command was soft.
Absolute.
Vesper nodded.
"And if possible..."
The man's lips curved into a smile—polite, cultured, utterly without warmth.
"...I want to recruit him."
Vesper's expression didn't change, but something flickered in her eyes.
Assessment.
Calculation.
The look of someone weighing a new variable.
"Recruit him for what, exactly?"
The man's smile widened—just slightly.
"Let's just say I have... plans. And men like Blaze are useful, but men like this Lucent?"
He gestured at the screen.
"Men who can match Blaze, who can survive whatever happened in that crater. Valuable. And I want him on my side before someone else gets the same idea."
Vesper was quiet for a long moment.
Then she nodded—a single, sharp motion.
"Understood."
She turned to leave. Her hand was on the door when the man spoke again.
"Oh, and Vesper?"
She paused.
Didn't turn.
"Be careful. If he really did what the footage suggests... he's dangerous. More dangerous than he looks."
A pause.
"That's why I'm sending you."
Vesper's lips curved into a small, sharp smile.
"Flattery will get you everywhere, Director."
She left.
The man watched the door close.
Then he turned back to the screen, to the frozen image of Lucent mid-glyph, to the questions that now burned in his mind.
Who are you, Lucent Argyr?
And what else can you do?
He reached for the decanter.
Poured himself two fingers of amber liquid.
Swirled it.
Watched the light catch the glass.
On the screen, the footage continued to loop—fire and light, destruction and rebirth, two men tearing each other apart at the edge of the world.
The man sipped his whiskey.
In the reflection of the window, he caught a glimpse of himself.
Sharp jaw.
Smooth skin.
Clear eyes.
A year ago, he had been old.
Clinging to life with desperate, aging hands.
The face in the mirror now belonged to a stranger—a younger man wearing the same name.
Project LOTUS had given him this.
Youth.
Vitality.
Time.
He still remembered the price.
The lives spent.
The sacrifices made in the name of progress.
But those memories had faded, softened by years and the comfort of success.
What remained was the work.
The plan.
The future he was building.
And men like Blaze, like Lucent—they were pieces on that board.
Tools to be used, guided, pointed at the right targets.
He took another sip.
The game was just beginning.