The Circle hideout was already a storm when Elion dropped in from the roof.
His fists blazed, striking in arcs of flames, scattering shadows across the walls. Explosions of heat roared as crates and tables splintered under the impact of his attacks.
Men shouted. Some fought back; others fled.
One, wearing a bulky vest beneath his jacket, sprinted toward the back exit.
Elion's eyes locked on him instantly.
Suicide bomber.
The streets blurred under Elion's feet as he pursued, fire flickering in his palms. Rain hissed when it touched his skin, steam rising from every step.
The man stumbled into an alley and turned, chest heaving. His voice cracked with panic.
Bomber: "Stop! I swear—if you take one more step, I blow the building behind me!"
Elion's eyes flicked past him—a two-story structure lit faintly in the dark. He didn't recognize it in the moment.
Elion: "Do it. I dare you."
The bomber's face twisted.
Bomber: "You don't understand—"
Elion (stepping forward): "I don't care."
It all happened fast.
Elion ran quickly at him—the suicide bomber's finger slipped on the red button on the remote he held in his hand.
The click was almost too soft to hear over the rain.
Then the world erupted.
The explosion swallowed the alley in a wall of flame and shockwave. Glass shattered. Concrete screamed.
Elion's body was thrown back, but the fire licked harmlessly across his skin—his immunity sparing him from burns, not from the sight.
When the ringing in his ears faded, he looked up.
Through the settling dust and embers, his heart froze.
The building was the treatment house.
He was moving before the thought fully formed, shoving through splintered doorframes and choking on smoke.
The hallways were collapsing in on themselves, fire raging along the ceiling. He kicked aside fallen beams, calling out for his mother, for anyone.
In the common room, he saw her.
She was slumped over, eyes closed, her face eerily calm. The flames danced around her but did not touch her—a strange, cruel blessing in her last moments.
Elion's legs gave out beside her.
There was no cry, no roar of rage—just his shaking hands holding her limp one, the heat from the fire mixing with the heat in his chest until he couldn't tell the difference.
Somewhere behind him, the roof cracked, about to give way.
But he didn't move.
Elion: "M-mom?"
But there was no answer. No sign of life in his mother's body.
There was no tear, just pure pain and darkness, and then…
Something inside snapped.
He heard it from Ronnie before, a theory that inside of an Awakening, something else was slumbering.
A catalyst able to power the Awakening to a hundred percent boost. But the risk of losing control over your body and mind is so high that it merely stayed a theory.
The catalyst called "dark energy" is only achievable if you have control of all steps of your Awakening and endure pure emotional pain—losing a loved one, for example.
The fire around him faded into background noise.
Elion's arms tightened around his mother's body—still warm, but unmoving. Her face was peaceful, and that only made the reality worse.
His breath came in shallow gasps.
Something deep inside him—the same place his Awakening had always answered from—began to splinter.
In that moment, what Elion believed to be a theory turned out to be a fact. The pure emotional pain caused by his mother's death and the self-blame about it made the chains that contained the dark energy break.
It started at his boots, a faint black and fiery red liquid crust spreading up over his ankles like molten stone cooling too quickly. The air warped with heat as his fire grew unbearably bright, the red-orange shifting toward an unstable, blinding force.
His heartbeat thundered in his ears, each pulse sending another wave of that strange, suffocating energy through his body.
The crust surged higher—shins, thighs, torso—until it reached his shoulders, jagged and shifting like living obsidian. Heat radiated so intensely that the wood and plaster nearby ignited on contact.
The places that once had been his mouth and eyes were now a white light.
The snap happened then.
A soundless implosion inside him.
The flames he once controlled became an all-consuming inferno, melting the floor beneath him, vaporizing the air. His mother's body dissolved into ash in his arms before he could even react.
By the time the crust sealed over his head, there was nothing human left to see.
No eyes, no mouth—just white lights and a jagged, molten black and red shell pulsing with cracks of hot fire.
He stood, slow and deliberate, the sound of the collapsing building drowned out by a monstrous roar he let out of him.
Then he moved.
Walls exploded outward as his new form ripped through them. Flames engulfed the streets, devouring everything—friend, foe, structure, and vehicle—with equal indifference.
Each step left molten craters in the asphalt. Windows burst from the heat as he passed.
Circle safehouses ignited in the distance, though no one could see his face to know who was responsible.
The people who had once whispered the name Blazing Hollow would now speak of a fire demon, a nightmare made of heat and hate.
There was no Elion in the movements, only destruction. No words formed behind the shell—only guttural, inhuman bellows drowned by the roar of firestorms.
A hoverjet flew over his head, but its base melted in a matter of seconds, crashing into a building.
The people that were in the distance would quickly run, while those who were unlucky enough to be near it would quickly turn to ash.
Bullets from police officers would melt before even coming near it, and then it raised its hand, shooting a beam of flame, melting everything in its path.
And somewhere far away, in another part of the city, Ronnie would soon hear the reports:
"The entire district's on fire. We… we don't know what it is. But it's not human."