Soon the sheriffs joined Donald, coming in from the parking lot side in a loose line. At their front walked an older woman, maybe late forties, hair pulled back in a tight, practical tail. Her face was bare—no makeup, no extra polish—just clear eyes and the tired, steady look of someone used to getting things done. Her name tag read A. HOLLIS, but people were calling her Sheriff Ann.
There were seven sheriffs total, counting her. All of them wore dark body armour over their uniforms, plates bulking out vests across chest and shoulders. Pistol holsters rode on their hips, the grips worn smooth in spots. Two of them carried pump shotguns at a low ready, barrels angled toward the ground. Gear creaked and clicked softly as they moved—radio clips, buckles, the faint clink of loose rounds. A hint of leather, gun oil, and sweat hung around them. Sheriff Ann was the only one without a shotgun; her hands stayed free as she joined Donald at the edge of the small stage and swept her eyes across the crowd.
Once she got involved, the defence stopped being a vague idea and started to take shape. Short, direct orders passed between her and Donald. People were pointed instead of argued with. Karen tried to start up again, voice edging sharp, but one of the sheriffs told her to "put a sock in it," and the way it was said made her lips press together hard. Her feathers were definitely ruffled, but she settled for glaring and muttering instead of shouting.
The work moved toward the arena.
The injured were helped along first—arms over shoulders, feet dragging, shoes leaving smeared grooves in the dirt. Groans and hissed breaths mixed with the scrape of boots on the concrete ramp as they were brought inside. The very old and the very young were guided to the center of the small arena floor. People spread blankets, laid down jackets, shifted benches. Kids clutched stuffed animals or empty drink cups, eyes wide. Older folks lowered themselves carefully to sit, knees cracking, hands braced on thighs. The air there smelled like packed dirt and old fuel from past tractor pulls, overlaid now with sweat, fear, and the fading tang of fried food from the nearby trucks.
From the entrance, Elias could clearly see who had relics. About one in ten people in the growing crowd wore a bright red bracelet on a wrist or ankle, the glow standing out even in the open daylight—steady rings of light that matched exactly what the System had claimed.
Elias helped direct the flow at the entrance ramp, crowbar in his hand and backpack bumping against his shoulder. He pointed people where Sheriff Ann and Donald indicated, sometimes raising his voice to cut through the noise. A few times he looked into the arena at the cluster of kids and elders in the middle and the people already moving into the stands. He thought about stepping through the gate himself, letting someone else take the crowbar and responsibility. Each time he hesitated on the idea, something in him said not to. He stayed where he was.
His ribs were actually feeling better. The sharp stabbing pain from the Ferris wheel impact had dulled, and now, when he twisted or lifted his arm, the ache came and went instead of grinding with every breath. He didn't know at the time that the thick presence of Ki in the air—and the fact humanity's bodies were freshly adapting to it—meant simple breaks and injuries healed abnormally fast. Cuts closed quicker, bruises faded sooner. The benefits of Ki were many. People with cancer would start improving, tumour growth slowing and shrinking. Older people would find their joints less stiff, their backs looser, stamina returning in ways they hadn't felt in years. Plenty of things were trying to kill them, but Ki wasn't all bad.
Sheriff Ann made another pass down the ramp, checking positions at the entrance. As she and another deputy shifted a group of parents and kids closer to the inner rail, her gaze landed on Elias. She took in his height, the crowbar, the blood-smeared polo, and the backpack strap crossing his chest.
"Aren't you going in?" she asked, chin tilting toward the stands. "How old are you?"
The question caught him off guard. His nerves jumped; for a moment he almost folded and walked inside without saying anything, just another body disappearing into the stands. That old lack of confidence tried to push him through the gate. Instead he forced words out.
"I am… am… eighteen," Elias stammered.
The lie sat a few months ahead of reality.
Sheriff Ann studied his face for a long second, eyes narrowing just slightly. Her expression said she knew he was full of shit, but before she responded, a shift rolled through every relic in sight.
The timer hit the five-minute mark.
Bracelets flared all at once. The kid from earlier stared down at his wrist as the red band burned bright, light washing up his fingers and splashing across his shirt. On the stage, Donald's bracelet did the same, turning his forearm into a vivid red bar. Around the arena, scattered through the stands and along the rail, other bands glowed like small beacons in the thickening dusk.
Then the light drew inward.
The bands thinned into hard, bright lines, then sank into skin. The glow vanished as the relics were absorbed, leaving bare wrists and ankles where the bracelets had been only seconds before.
In that moment, in a dusty county fair arena that smelled of dirt, fuel, and sweat, humanity got its first superpowered people.
Powers were strange, but simple enough in how they worked.
They drew on you in three ways at once: mentally, physically, and spiritually. Using a power cost focus, strength, and soul together. If you pushed it too far, your head felt foggy, your body ran out of gas, and you hit a limit you couldn't push through just by gritting your teeth. Most people figured out quickly that one power was usually enough to manage.
You could collect more than one over time, but it wasn't efficient. A single power could be improved as you grew stronger and understood it better. Later, people found out that if your Enlightenment matched the same law or idea that sat behind your power, that power could "wake up" in stages—doing more, hitting harder, and working cleaner. Those who managed to push a power into that awakened state were considered ascended for that ability. Matching your power and Enlightenment mattered more than stacking extra abilities.
Some people just didn't fit well with what they got. Powers could be small, awkward, or very narrow. Others were practical from day one.
The kid in the crowd—the first one yelling that he'd won—got an ability the System labeled Shocker. He could fire small bolts of lightning from his fingertips. Little arcs jumped from skin, white-blue light flickered in the air, and a faint ozone smell followed wherever it struck. Against humans or anything soft-bodied, it could lock muscles and drop someone. Against what was on the way, it wouldn't be nearly as impressive.
Another man, older, ended up with sharpened hearing. The System called it Soundgate. He could pick individual cries and footsteps out of the general noise, follow the sound of a tool hitting the ground across the arena, and track direction and distance better than anyone else nearby. With effort, he could also force his hearing to dull, shutting out most sound when the noise got too intense. It took concentration and left him tired, but it meant he could switch between hearing almost everything and hearing almost nothing as needed.
One more person discovered he could heat his hands. His skin reddened, and the air just above his palms wavered slightly. It wasn't a fireball, but it could burn on contact or do damage in a grapple. The System called that one Overheat.
Donald's ability was different.
His power settled into his voice and his eyes. The System named it Command. He could pack intent and power into a single word and push it out—"FIGHT," "STOP," "RUN," whatever he chose. Used on allies, that word landed like a clean order and a boost at the same time, tightening focus and lifting morale. Used on enemies, if his will was stronger than theirs, the same word could hit like a shove, forcing hesitation, a flinch, or outright compliance. Command could be aimed at a single target or thrown over a group, depending on how he shaped it. At its core it worked on the spiritual and mental level, grabbing hold of attention and nudging it where he wanted it to go. As his will and understanding grew, Command grew with him, but even in the beginning it was enough to make it feel natural for people to treat him as the one in charge.
Most people carried one power. Two was uncommon. Three was rare. There was one man born with an unusual constitution who ended up with four; on paper he looked wrong by every standard chart, and in practice he was simply far beyond the norm.
Nobody there understood much of anything yet. Powers, Ki, bonds, cultivation—those were future words. Right now all anyone really had was a countdown.
Two minutes to the apocalypse.
For their defense they'd done what they could with what they had.
The small arena—the same dirt oval they used for tractor pulls and demolition derbies—became their fort. There was one main entrance, a wide gate of pipe rail and chain, now dragged mostly shut with pickup trucks angled in front of it for extra cover. The stands wrapped around three sides in rough tiers of metal bleachers, paint flaking, handrails sticky with old dust and spilled soda.
The old, the injured, and the kids were moved down into the center of the arena floor. Camp chairs, coolers, and folding tables got dragged in to form rough lanes and pockets, something like order in the middle. A few parents clutched toddlers close, shirts already streaked with dirt and dried tears. Teenagers without weapons hovered near the rail, half in, half out, not sure which side they belonged on.
Armed adults formed a loose ring along the inside of the fence and at the blocked gate. Donald stood near the main opening with Sheriff Ann and her deputies, shotguns and pistols checked and rechecked, the glint of badges and black body armor breaking up the dust-colored scene. People with relic bracelets—glowing faintly before they were absorbed—were spread among the front, more by accident than design, but everyone could see them.
The old man drifted naturally toward that same line: metal bat resting against his shoulder, pistol riding steady at his hip. Elias, with his crowbar and too-thin shirt, ended up a few paces back from that first rank, close enough to step in, far enough that no one had told him to move up.
Elias remembered standing near the arena entrance, crowbar in hand, watching people bunch tighter in the stands and along the rail. The dust in the air tasted dry and chalky on his tongue. Somewhere behind him a baby kept hiccup-crying, the sound catching and breaking. The scoreboard over the arena sat dead, black screen reflecting the scattered crowd.
"First time, kid?"
The voice came from his right. Elias turned and saw the old man.
He had to be around seventy, maybe a touch older. About six feet tall, he stood straighter than most men his age, shoulders still squared under a faded plaid shirt. The fabric, washed thin, lay flat over a frame that hadn't gone soft yet—lean instead of frail, with forearms that still held some shape when he shifted his grip.
In his right hand he carried a metal baseball bat, the aluminum kind you saw at little league fields. The barrel was scuffed and dull, with a couple of shallow dings near the sweet spot. His fingers wrapped around the taped handle like he'd held one most of his life. At his hip, threaded through an old leather belt, rode a worn holster with a compact pistol in it. The black of the grip stood out against the faded brown leather, the edge of the slide visible when he turned.
The top of his head was mostly bald, skin pale and a little shiny in the slanting light. A ring of white hair clung to the sides and back, cropped short, ears sticking out just enough to notice. Deep lines cut from his nose down to the corners of his mouth and fanned out from the corners of his eyes, the kind that came from squinting into sun and wind for years. His jaw carried rough stubble, white and gray, shadowing a chin that had seen its share of clenched teeth.
His eyes were what Elias noticed last—blue-gray, steady, the color of worn denim or an overcast sky reflected in water. Calm-looking, even here.
Elias blinked, not sure he heard right. His face must have shown the question, because the man's mouth twitched.
"First time you went to war?" the man asked.
"Uh…" Elias stalled, fingers tightening a little on the crowbar. He didn't actually know how to answer that. Everything in him was screaming this wasn't supposed to be his problem. He ended up just nodding once.
The old man looked him over from head to toe—bloody polo, backpack strap, crowbar, the way Elias kept one shoulder turned to protect his ribs. Then their gazes met again, blue-gray eyes holding him for a brief, flat moment.
"Try not to die, kid," the man said. "But if you do, it's a fine day to die."
He didn't wait for a response. He just turned away with a small shift of his shoulders and walked forward, boots scuffing dirt as he moved closer toward the front of the gathered fighters, near Donald and the sheriffs, metal bat hanging easy at his side.
Elias watched him go, the back of that bald head and the straight line of his spine standing out against the milling crowd.
That was his first encounter with the weird old man.
There would be more.