The Tower's underbelly was a different organism. The polished synth-stone gave way to naked, sweating concrete. Glowing wall panels were replaced by flickering, fault-ridden conduits that spat blue sparks into the damp air. The hum of commerce became the groan of ancient infrastructure, a chorus of strained pumps and faulty lev-tracks.
Kaelen ran, his boots splashing through opaque puddles that smelled of rust and rot. The flyer was a crumpled wad of desperation in his fist. Sector 7. The old storm drain junction. He knew the general direction—the deep, unmapped service layers where even Null maintenance crews went in pairs with hazard pay. He'd never been. No reason to.
Behind him, the distorted echo of amplified voices bounced off the tunnel walls.
"—last seen heading for the tertiary waste-conduit network.Activate mag-lock on Bulkhead Delta."
A deep,metallic THOOM resonated through the grime underfoot, followed by two more in rapid succession. They were sealing the exits, turning the under-levels into a rat maze. Their rat maze.
A new sound joined the chase: a high-frequency whine, getting closer. He glanced back. A security orb, no bigger than a fist, its polished chrome shell streaked with grime, zipped around a corner. A single red photoreceptor lens swiveled, locking onto him.
<< HALT. SUBJECT KAELEN-774. YOU ARE DIRECTED FOR EVALUATION. HALT. >>
Its voice was a soulless, digital chirp. It accelerated.
Panic shot through Kaelen's veins. He skidded around a corner, into a narrower tunnel lined with dripping, moss-furred pipes. The orb followed, relentless. A blue targeting laser danced on the back of his overalls.
He couldn't outrun it. The thought was a cold stone in his gut. It would track him, herd him, keep him visible until the enforcers in their padded armor arrived.
The whine was directly behind him now. The laser settled between his shoulder blades.
<< COMPLY. ANOMALOUS POWER MANIFESTATION REQUIRES STAR-CHAMBER PROTOCOL. >>
Anomalous. The word from Iris's mouth, now spat by this machine. It wasn't a person. It was just a tool of the system. A tool that saw him as a malfunction.
Rage, clean and sharp, cut through the panic. He wasn't a malfunction. He was the error.
He spun, a clumsy, graceless turn in the tight space. The orb adjusted instantly, hovering six feet away. Its lens whirred, focusing.
Kaelen didn't think. He raised his right hand, not in a fist, but palm-out, as if to push the air. The Porcelain Finger led, pointing directly at the smooth chrome sphere.
The deep thrum answered, vibrating up from his core. This time, he didn't just feel it; he pushed it. He focused every ounce of his fury, his terror, his newfound, hateful difference down the length of that pale, wrong finger and shoved it at the machine.
There was no projectile. No beam of light.
The air between his fingertip and the orb shimmered, like heat haze over a furnace. A concentric wave of distorting force, visible only as a ripple in the grime-laden air, shot forward.
It struck the orb not with an impact, but with an instant, profound change.
ZZZT-CRUNCH.
The high-pitched whine died in a stutter of static. The smooth chrome shell didn't dent. It corroded, its surface erupting into a fractal bloom of white, crystalline rust that spread across its surface in a heartbeat. The red lens darkened, then milky cracks veined across it. The orb listed sideways, its anti-grav emitters sputtering, and hit the tunnel wall with a dull, chalky thud. It didn't shatter. It disintegrated, crumbling into a pile of coarse, metallic sand and brittle, porcelain-like shards.
Silence, save for the drip of water and Kaelen's ragged gasps.
He stared at the pile of dust. His hand trembled. The thrum was subsiding, leaving a deep, hollow ache in his bones, a psychic bruise. He hadn't just broken it. He had unmade its solidity.
<< ...subject… displays… category four… matter-decoherence… >> a garbled, dying whisper emitted from the dust pile before falling silent forever.
Category four. The words meant nothing to him, but their clinical tone was a fresh wave of ice. They were classifying him in real-time.
He ran again, faster, driven by a new fuel: the horrified exhilaration of the power, and the utter certainty of what would happen if he stopped.
---
After an eternity of turns, descending ramps, and squeezing through gaps where maintenance had long since ceased, the tunnel opened up.
The old storm drain junction wasn't a place; it was a cavity. A vast, cylindrical cathedral of forgotten urban geology. Ribs of rusted rebar thrust from curved concrete walls where the lining had collapsed. A slurry of oily water, glowing with strange bioluminescent fungus, flowed sluggishly down a central channel. The air was a solid thing—thick with the smells of stagnant water, ozone from illicit power use, hot metal, sweat, and blood.
And the noise. A roar that was half crowd, half machine. It came from the center of the space, where a ring of makeshift stadium lighting, powered by throbbing, jury-rigged generators, illuminated The Pit.
It was a sunken circle twenty yards across, its floor a mixture of packed dirt, sand, and dark, old stains. Around it, on tiers of broken concrete and shipping containers, a crowd of maybe two hundred people roared. They were a tapestry of the unseen: low-star enforcers in scarred tactical gear, nulls with augment-glimmer eyes, ghoul-thin chem-peddlers, and grim-faced men and women whose powers hung around them like visible auras of distortion or flickering energy. This was where the system's cast-offs came to watch its rejects fight.
In the Pit, two figures clashed. One, a woman whose skin was living bark, grappled with a man whose fists were sheathed in cracking spheres of kinetic force. A bone broke with a wet snap lost under the crowd's cheer. No referees. No rules. Just a primal economy of pain and power.
Kaelen shrank into the shadows near a collapsed inlet pipe, his heart hammering against his ribs. This was insanity. He scanned the chaotic edges of the chamber, looking for anyone who might be "Mender."
He saw her near a makeshift medical station—a stained tarp laid out with grimy instruments and glowing hypoguns. A woman of indeterminate age, her hair shaved on one side, the other a cascade of dark braids woven with slender wires. Her hands, currently gloved in thin, synth-leather, were deep in the abdomen of a groaning man on the tarp, whose skin crackled with residual electricity. She worked with a terrifying, casual speed, not healing with light or biokinesis, but with brutal, physical pragmatism—clamps, sutures, and a hypo of something that made the man's muscles lock rigid. She was a 2-Star, he guessed, but her power wasn't healing. It was field stabilization. She kept you alive long enough to suffer more.
That had to be her.
A heavy hand landed on Kaelen's shoulder. He jerked around.
A man filled his vision. Not just tall, but dense. He wore the scarred poly-plate armor of private security, but without any corporate insignia. His face was a roadmap of old violence, and one eye was a pulsing red cybernetic. The other eye held the flat, professional disinterest of a hunter.
"Lost, Null?" the man grunted. His voice was the sound of gravel in a drum. "This ain't a sightseeing tour."
Behind him, two others fanned out, blocking retreat. They had the look of freelance bag-men, the kind hired to retrieve "anomalous assets" off the books.
Iris. She hadn't just called Tower security. She'd put out a private bounty. Fast.
"I'm… I'm here to see Mender," Kaelen stammered, clutching the flyer like a talisman.
The cyborg eye whirred, focusing. "Mender don't see trash. She patches fighters. You don't look like a fighter." His hand tightened, fingers digging into the nerve cluster above Kaelen's collarbone with expert, agonizing precision. "You look like a package. Quiet now. The lady wants you delivered awake, but silence is optional."
Pain blinded Kaelen. The bag-man's other hand came up, a chrome injector filled with milky sedative glinting.
This was it. They would take him back to a white room, to scanners and probes and Iris's fascinated, cruel gaze.
No.
The hollow ache in his bones flared into the familiar, terrifying thrum. It wasn't just in his finger now. It was in his blood. The pain from the grip became a focal point. He didn't have control. He had instinct.
He slammed his back against the tunnel wall, not to break free, but to trap the man's crushing hand between his body and the concrete. At the same moment, he brought his own left hand up—his normal hand—and grabbed the man's wrist, the one holding the injector.
The thrum shot from his core, down both arms. A twin imperative: HARDEN. DECAY.
Into the wall at his back, through his own flesh, he pushed the command of absolute Solidity.
Into the man's wrist under his left hand, he pushed the opposite: Fragility. Dust.
CRUNCH-SHRIEK.
The concrete behind him didn't change. The man's armored forearm, pressed between Kaelen and it, did. The poly-plate armor fused instantly to the wall's surface in a seamless, ceramic weld, trapping him. At the same instant, the man's wrist within Kaelen's grip turned a sickly grey. The tendons and bones didn't break; they desiccated, crumbling into a dry, porous chalk-structure that could no longer hold weight.
The injector clattered to the ground. The man's scream was raw, animal, cut short as his other two companions lunged.
Kaelen was already moving, ducking under a wild grab. His Porcelain Finger slashed out in a blind arc, not aiming to hit flesh, but to intercept the swing of a stun-baton.
He made contact.
The baton, a rod of reinforced polymer and charged circuitry, didn't just stop. The entire length of it, from the point of contact to the tip, transformed. The matte black polymer became glossy, transparent, and brittle. Glass. The contained electrical charge inside surged against its new, non-conductive prison and exploded outward in a shower of harmless, glittering shards and spent sparks.
The second bag-man stared, stunned, at the useless handle in his grip.
"HE'S THE PACKAGE! TAKE HIM DOWN!" the trapped first man roared, cradling his crumbling wrist.
The third man, smarter than the others, didn't reach for a tool. He raised his hand, and the air around it distorted with a deep, sub-audible thump. A Sonic Pulsar. A concussive blast that would turn Kaelen's internal organs to jelly.
He had nowhere to go. The blast was area-wide.
In that fraction of a second, Kaelen's survival brain did not choose fight or flight. It chose both. The thrum inside him, agitated to a screaming pitch by the violence, split.
One thread of it yanked downwards, through his feet into the damp, filthy ground of the cavern floor. SOLIDIFY. SHIELD.
The other, hotter, wilder thread erupted inwards, into the very marrow of his bones, a primal scream against annihilation. SURVIVE. DESTROY.
The sonic pulse hit.
A slab of the earth—oily water, packed dirt, and rust—erupted vertically between Kaelen and the blast, hardening instantaneously into a dense, ragged wall of composite stone. The pulse slammed into it, cracking its surface but not penetrating.
But the pulse was omnidirectional. The overpressure wave washed around the makeshift shield and hammered into Kaelen's side.
He felt his ribs—the old, crooked ones, the new ones—splinter. A lung collapsed. Something ruptured in his abdomen. He was lifted off his feet and thrown against the hardened wall he'd just created.
The world went grey, then black at the edges. Agony was a universe. He slid down the wall into the muck, vision swimming. He saw the third bag-man advancing, powering up for another, closer-range pulse. He saw the crowd at the Pit's edge, turning now, sensing a better, bloodier show than the one in the ring.
He was going to die. Here, in the filth, for the crime of being a mistake.
Then, the hotter, inward-focused thread of power—the one that had screamed SURVIVE—snapped.
It wasn't Solid Manipulation.
His shattered ribs knitted, not with biological precision, but with a violent, jagged urgency. The bones didn't just mend; they over-forged, fusing together into a single, grotesque plate of bony armor across his left side, the skin stretching shiny and tight over it. His collapsed lung reinflated with a searing, liquid heat. The internal bleeding… stopped, cauterized by a wave of cellular fury that felt less like healing and more like a hostile takeover of his own body.
Adaptive Resurrection. Not from death, but from its brink. And its first gift was a brutal, permanent deformity.
A guttural sound tore from his throat. Not a scream. A roar. It scraped past teeth that felt thicker, sharper.
The advancing bag-man hesitated, his eyes wide. "What in the hell—"
Kaelen pushed himself up. His movements were wrong. Stiff on his left side, powered by a terrible, jerking strength on his right. He looked at the man. He didn't see a person. He saw a threat. A pressure on the live wire in his chest.
The thrum was gone. Replaced by a silent, white-hot frequency of pure rage. The Berserker Form wasn't a transformation. It was an unveiling.
He didn't run. He erupted from the ground.
The bag-man fired his point-blank sonic pulse.
Kaelen's new, bony-armored side took the brunt of it. The fused ribs rang like a cracked bell, transmitting shockwaves that would have killed him moments before. Now, they just fed the fury.
He crossed the distance before the man could recalibrate. His right hand, the Porcelain Finger now crackling with a hairline network of angry red energy, shot out. Not to manipulate. To kill.
He didn't touch the man's body. He slapped his palm against the man's still-humming sonic emitter gauntlet.
And he issued a new command, simple and absolute: CONDUCT.
The complex alloys and circuitry of the gauntlet didn't crumble. They became a perfect, hyper-conductive medium. The sonic energy still building within the weapon, denied its blast-front, backlashed. It traveled instantly through the transformed metal, into the man's arm, and through his nervous system.
The man didn't scream. He vibrated. A high-speed tremor locked every muscle. His eyes rolled back, and he dropped like a puppet with its strings cut, smoke curling from the joints of his armor.
Silence, sudden and profound, fell over the section of the cavern. The fight in the Pit had stopped. Two hundred pairs of eyes were now fixed on Kaelen, standing over three broken men, his body visibly twisted, one side grotesquely armored in his own bone, his right hand glowing with a malevolent light.
Then, a slow, deliberate clapping cut through the quiet.
From the medical tarp, Mender finished wiping blood on her thighs and walked forward, her wire-threaded braids clicking softly. She stopped a few paces away, her professional gaze taking in the trapped, whimpering first man, the unconscious second, the twitching third, and finally, Kaelen.
Her eyes weren't afraid. They were appraising. Calculating salvage value and risk.
"Well," she said, her voice a dry rustle. "You're not a Null. And you're definitely a problem." She jerked a thumb over her shoulder, towards a dark opening in the cavern wall that smelled of chem-lights and stale smoke. "The Lady who runs this circus wants to see you. Seems you've got her attention."
She turned and walked away, expecting him to follow.
Kaelen stood, the awful, transforming rage bleeding away, leaving him shivering, nauseous, and in more pain than he'd ever known. He looked at his hands. One pale and wrong. The other smeared with filth and blood. He looked at the crowd, a wall of hungry, anonymous faces.
He had nowhere else to go.
Limping, each breath a rasp against his new, fused ribs, he followed Mender into the dark.