Ethan woke with the taste of rain still clinging to his mouth. Twilight's mist hung like a shawl over the town; the diner's windows were fogged into soft halos, and the Terrain Awareness Module keyed the alleyways and sightlines into his head as if snapping an invisible map into place. He felt the wolf-stone in his pocket like an anchor and the private ledger under his sleeve like a second pulse.
He could have gone back. The system had made that simple—before, the panel had been strict about its cycles: spend two chapters, return; rinse, repeat. But the night on the ridge with Bella and Jacob had changed something for him: the world felt like it could be shaped by patient hands, by small choices, by the quiet application of skill. He did not want to be yanked back to the Interspace just because some invisible clock ticked down. He wanted to see the consequences of the words he'd put into the meadow, the markers he'd left at the oak, the social script that moved people instead of scaring them.
He tapped the panel only once, in the privacy he had learned to keep.
SYSTEM MENU (host-only):
Dimensional Return Mode: AUTOMATIC
[Change Mode?] — Yes / No
His thumb hovered. He pressed Yes and then selected Manual Mode — Host Controlled.
The panel answered in its unemotional way:
CONFIRMATION: Manual Return Mode enabled. The Host will determine when to resume interspace transit. System constraints converted. No forced returns will occur.
A small smile loosened his chest. The ledger was still there, the numbers unchanged, but the rhythm of his life had shifted. He would not be yanked away in the middle of a conversation, a fight, a choice. That small autonomy felt dangerous and good in equal measure.
He stepped out into the mist with a plan. There had been talk behind counters and on porches: a strange hunger at the edges of town, a rumor of a roaming predator testing lines of secrecy; whispers that a visiting crew of hunters might be watching too, feigning curiosity. Bella had been quiet but tense in the meadow; Jacob's bayed posture had been full of coiled threat. Ethan decided he would go to La Push that night — listen, not interfere unless needed, and be ready to hold a point if the script tilted toward violence.
The Terrain Module walked his feet to the beach on a soft current of suggestion: which pier would have a clear view, which dune would hide a shadow, where the wind would carry sound. He liked that the upgrade didn't do the thinking for him; it simply showed him the lanes in which his own decisions would be sharpest.
La Push at dusk was grey and solemn. The tide swooped in with a steady breath. He kept the Cullen Stealth Protocol folded beneath his sleeve — not to hide from the world but to let his approaches read as practiced rather than panicked. There were people on the shore: Quileute scouts keeping a watch, teenagers whispering by the driftwood, a small knot of humans looking toward the water with skittish eyes. Jacob stood like a sentinel near the line of surf, his posture taut, and Ethan noted him in the grid as a high-read node: guarding; rapid response; emotional intensity high.
Ethan didn't walk straight up to the pack. He let the Hunter Awareness Beacon he'd bought sit quiet in his satchel until he needed it; then, when the tide shifted and a pair of figures moved along the headlands in odd, too-smooth ways, he set it down among the driftwood with a soft press. It was almost absurd how private the activation felt: a factual flicker in his head and then a subtle current of alarm that made his skin prickle. The Beacon was not a scream; it was a whisper that said someone moved unnaturally here.
Jacob's head snapped toward the ridge. He read the coast the way a man reads a map by memory. Within moments the pack was a single organism: motion quick, silent, coordinated. Ethan let them move first, watching the choreography. The Beacon gave him a narrow readout in the privacy of his mind — a faint heat signature, footsteps that didn't belong to the usual fishermen, a scent that picked at his limbic memory like something metallic and too sweet.
From the brush stepped a figure in a dark coat: tall, still, and with teeth that caught the weak light like knives. He was not limning the world in the bright, clinical way the Cullens sometimes did; he was rawer, older, practiced in hunger. A second figure came with him — not human in the way the town understood that word. A ripple of tension ran the length of the beach.
Jacob moved like a spring. The pack unfurled — not to attack recklessly but to box and hold, to create a ring of energy that made the beach into a small stage. The two figures stilled. A voice — smooth, amused — drifted over the sand.
"You keep some interesting company," it said.
Ethan did not step into the line of motion. He let the Combat Instinct read the micro-angles of approach and felt the upgrade sing through his nerves: pre-attack vectors, a half-second lead on movement, an intuitive arc he could ride. The Beacon pulsed again — small and private — and then the pack scanned each other as if negotiating an invisible rule set.
He could have bought larger things here. The Vampiric Physiology Primer sat on his private catalog like a heavy temptation: a short burst of speed and strength that would let him do something spectacular, save someone in a way no human could. But specter-like power here would not feel like kindness. It would feel like spectacle, and spectacle in Twilight's towns led to more watchers, more rumors, more risk. He had chosen to spend his PP on ways to move quietly and think clearly, not on a miracle that would write his name in blood on the waterline.
The leader — pale, confident, hungry — moved a step into the ring and fixed his eyes on Jacob. "A show," he said without warmth. "I'll take what I came for."
Jacob's jaw lifted. The pack shifted, a low rumble walking through them. Ethan's mind was a tight line: protect life, avoid exposure, keep the town's fragile logic intact. He stepped forward, not as a warrior but as a mediator with the quiet scripts the Pack Bond Template had given him.
He spoke in a voice that carried, shaped by the template's phrasing but delivered by a man who meant it. "You don't need to take a person tonight," he said. "This place keeps fragile things. If you need to claim a meal, speak for it. Take no one's life. Let the lines stand."
For a heart-beat the beach was a held note. The vampire's mouth tilted. "You draw well for a human," he said. "Most of your kind hide under cloth."
"Because most of my kind are not stupid," Ethan answered. He had no illusions; words might not be enough if the hunter was hungry. But the pack beside him had its own history and the presence of the Cullens — distant and watchful on the dune — pushed the balance toward caution.
A low, almost contemptuous laugh answered. The vampire flicked his wrist; an object glinted and flew through the night with the precise arc of intention — a small hunter's blade meant to test, to fetch a reaction. Ethan's Combat Instinct saw its trace before the human eye could name its speed. He moved with the training and the upgrade: a sidestep that became a pivot that put him in position to block the arc with his forearm. The blade nicked him, a hot line of pain that seared, but he caught the attacker's wrist as if it were a familiar knot. The move read to the beach as practiced, not supernatural.
The vampire hissed and then retreated a step. Jacob lunged forward, furious and bright as a struck bell, but Ethan put a hand on his arm — a measured touch that spoke of control. "We don't make this town a battleground," he said quietly. "We take control without making spectacle."
Jacob's breath hitched; his teeth bared in the acute, raw warning of someone whose trust had been earned in blood. He backed down, slow. The vampire spat something about hunger and left with a curdled sneer. The pack formed a silent seal that lasted long after the pale figure vanished into the scrub.
When the adrenaline bled out and the night's sounds resumed, Bella came down from the dunes, walking as if she'd been listening to a conversation only she could hear. She crossed to where Ethan and Jacob stood and offered him a small, bewildered smile.
"You were… brave," she said, as if testing the word.
"I was careful," he corrected gently. "Nearly the same thing."
She looked at him with a gratitude that landed like weight in his chest. Edward watched from the ridge with the composure of one who always measured consequences. When he inclined his head, it was neither approval nor suspicion; it was the old, cool acknowledgment that someone had acted in a way that favored reason over force.
Later, while La Push settled back into the steady rhythm of tide and talk, Ethan opened the Panel just long enough to note the private tally. No PP had been spent; the Beacon, already owned, had done its job. He kept his hands away from the more dramatic modules. He liked the victory without spectacle. It felt less like a cheat and more like a deliverance.
He sat with Jacob for a while on a log, sharing tobacco the boy offered as if it were an ordinary thing. They did not speak of the blue glow in his sleeve. That was private. Instead they traded stories of nights that had been harder and softer than others. Jacob's voice was steady in a way that belonged to someone who had known the bitter shape of defense. In the quiet he said, "You move like someone who's learned not to show everything at once."
Ethan let the phrase settle. He had thought the manual return removal was a small, system-level tweak. In practice it meant he could stay through the slow, human work of rebuilding trust, not just the sprint of rescue. He could be there to stitch seams instead of being a flash of light that blurred lines and sowed fear.
When he walked back to the town later that night, rain had begun again — thin, anointing. He thought of Riley and the pack in Beacon Hills, of Ari's steady judgment, and of the pact he had made with the panel: to spend its gifts cautiously and with intent. He ran a quick private calculation and found, with a small flush of satisfaction, that he still had 1,070 PP in the ledger. Enough to buy a big thing if he ever needed it. Enough to heal a wound or slide a beacon into a dangerous pocket. But for now he kept it in reserve.
The town felt safer, not because violence had been erased, but because choices had been made that honored people. Only he knew how the math worked. Only he held the blue balance. He liked that truth; it made him both unnervingly powerful and, in a useful way, accountable.
Tonight he would sleep in a rented room above the diner, the ceiling close and the sound of rain a lullaby. He told himself he'd stay another full night, then decide. He would watch, listen, and only when the ledger said it was time would he consider leaving the town's stitched edges behind.
Manual Mode remained enabled. The system would not pull him away without his say-so. That simple change felt like permission to be present. He closed his eyes and let the tide's slow rhythm carry him toward dreams that were not of numbers but of people whose lives, like his, could be quietly improved without letting the world know where the levers sat.