The world was a red haze. The only thing that existed in it was Ace, lying still on the ground, the lifeblood still pooling around his neck. The distance between Vel and his brother was an impossible chasm, and the only thing that mattered was crossing it.
He took a step. Then another. His own blood dripped from a dozen wounds, painting a trail of grief on the cracked asphalt. Each drop was a ticking clock, counting down the seconds since his brother's last breath.
Two figures moved to block his path. The executives. The ones who had done it. The one with the thin blade—the Murder Blade—still wet with Ace's life, and his partner, a hulking brute with a spiked maul.
They saw the emptiness in Vel's eyes, the single-minded focus on the body behind them, and they misread it for vulnerability. They launched themselves at him, a coordinated pincer attack.
The one with the Murder Blade lunged low, aiming for Vel's thigh, to cripple him, to make him kneel.
Vel didn't break his stride. He didn't even seem to see the blade. As the man came within range, Vel's left hand shot out with the speed of a piston. It wasn't a punch. It was a claw. His fingers, hardened by a lifetime of struggle, slammed into the man's throat and closed.
There was a wet, tearing sound, grotesquely intimate. Vel didn't just crush the windpipe; his thumb and forefinger hooked under the jawline and he pulled, ripping muscle and cartilage in a spray of crimson. The man's attack turned into a spasmodic dance, his eyes bulging with the impossibility of the pain, a wet, gurgling scream trapped in his ruined throat. Vel shoved the convulsing body aside, not even watching it fall.
The second executive, the brute with the maul, was already in mid-swing, a powerful, two-handed arc aimed to crush Vel's skull. The spiked head of the weapon whistled through the air.
Vel didn't dodge. He dropped his center of gravity and moved forward, inside the arc of the swing. As the maul passed harmlessly over his back, he rose like a spring uncoiling. His right knee drove upward, not into the man's groin, but higher, with the force of a battering ram.
It connected with the brute's chin. The impact was sickeningly loud, a nauseating crack of shattering jawbone and splintering teeth. The force traveled upward, rattling the man's brain in his skull. His eyes rolled back into his head, showing only white, before he collapsed like a sack of stones, his head lolling at an impossible angle.
The entire, brutal exchange had taken less than three seconds. Two high-ranking executives, dead by hand and knee alone. Not with skill, but with raw, annihilating force.
The path was clear.
Vel staggered the final steps and fell to his knees beside Ace. The feral rage evaporated, leaving a void so vast and cold it threatened to stop his own heart. He gathered his brother's body, pulling the still-warm form onto his lap. Ace's head fell back, the deep stab wound in his neck a dark, accusing mouth.
"No… no, no, no…" The word was a whisper, a prayer to a god that had long ago abandoned this street. Vel pressed his forehead against Ace's, his broad shoulders trembling. He rocked slightly, the world narrowing to this one, terrible point of failure.
From the corner of his eye, he saw the remaining executives, the ones still fighting Rez and Mikaze, freeze. They saw the two corpses—one with a throat torn out, the other with a skull shattered by a single knee—and they saw the grieving demon kneeling between them. Their will to fight broke. They turned and fled into the night, their footsteps echoing their sheer, pants-wetting terror.
Mikaze, his leg bleeding badly, limped toward Vel, his face a portrait of shared agony. Rez had sunk down, leaning against a wall, his hand clamped over a stab wound in his gut, his skin ghostly white. He was fading fast.
"Vel…" Mikaze's voice was raw, but the word was cut off.
The world exploded.
The sound was not heard; it was felt. A deep, subterranean whump that came from the heart of their warehouse, followed by an instantaneous, consuming roar. The building seemed to breathe in, then vomit out a sun.
A stinging, giant fireball, tinged with the chemical yellow of accelerants, bloomed outwards, swallowing the structure whole. The shockwave hit them, a physical wall of heat and force that threw Mikaze to the ground and made the very street tremble. Shrapnel—splintered wood, twisted metal, fragments of their home—screamed through the air.
And in the heart of this cataclysm, as Vel stared into the inferno that had been their sanctuary, the tattoo on his back, arms, and thighs awoke.
It was no longer a glow. It was a conflagration. A deep, violent purple light blazed from the ink, so intense it shone through his torn clothing, casting eerie, dancing shadows around him. The intricate thorns seemed to twist like living things, and the obscured faces within the design seemed to scream in silent unison with the roaring fire.
A pain, infinitely worse than any physical wound, detonated in his mind. It was a universe of agony, a door being blown off its hinges. Flashes of a life not his own—sterile white rooms, the taste of ozone, the cold grip of metal restraints, a woman's voice screaming a name he'd never known—screamed through his consciousness.
He threw his head back, his body rigid, every muscle locked. The physical world—the fire, the blood, his dead brother in his arms—faded into a distant hum. He was lost in the explosion within, a ghost from a fabricated past rising from its grave to claim him.
He was broken on the altar of his own ruin, kneeling between his dead and his dying, as the flames of his present and the fire of his past conspired to consume him whole.
The blinding purple luminescence died as suddenly as it had ignited, leaving only the ordinary, hellish glow of the burning warehouse. The psychic scream in Vel's mind faded to a resonant hum, a new and terrible frequency now permanently tuned in his soul.
He lowered his head from its agonized arch. His shoulders, which had been racked with sobs, were now still. Perfectly, unnaturally still.
He gently, almost reverently, laid Ace's body back down on the blood-soaked asphalt. The motion was slow, deliberate, devoid of the frantic grief of moments before.
Mikaze, struggling to push himself up from the ground, saw it happen. He saw Vel rise to his feet. The movement wasn't the pained lurch of a wounded man. It was smooth. Effortless. The deep stab wound in his back, the gashes on his arms—they might as well have been on another person. The blood still dripped, but it seemed like an afterthought.
"Vel?" Mikaze whispered, his voice choked with smoke and dread.
Vel turned his head, and Mikaze's blood ran cold.
His eyes were not the eyes of his brother. The fiery rage was gone. The calculating intelligence was gone. What remained was a flat, obsidian calm, a depthless void that reflected the flames but held no warmth. He looked at Mikaze, but there was no recognition. No connection. It was the gaze of a predator looking at a piece of the landscape.
He didn't speak. Not a word.
Then, he was simply… gone.
He didn't run. There was no blur of motion. One second he was there, a solid, bleeding figure in the firelight. The next, the space he occupied was empty, leaving only a faint shimmer in the air, like heat haze off summer asphalt.
Mikaze stared, stunned, at the empty space. "VEL!" The scream was ripped from him, raw and helpless.
---
He wasn't running. One moment he was in the street of ruin, the next, he was standing before the neon-lit entrance of the Titan Arcade. The garish lights played over his blood-soaked clothes and the deadness in his eyes. The transition was instantaneous, a jump-cut in reality.
The security outside, a new, heavily armed detail posted after the previous night's incident, saw him. They saw the blood, the wounds, the expressionless face, and they drew their firearms.
"Halt! Stop right there!"
Vel didn't halt. He didn't even look at them. He took a step forward.
A shot rang out, a warning shot that cracked the pavement near his feet.
He kept walking.
"Take him down!"
Gunfire erupted. But Vel was no longer entirely solid. He moved through the hail of bullets not like a man dodging, but like a ghost phasing through rain. His form seemed to flicker, his outline blurring as he advanced.
And then the chain moved.
It was a length of heavy, black-linked chain he'd seemingly acquired from the battlefield, coiled now in his hand. It unspooled not with a throw, but with a thought. It became a living, metallic serpent.
It whipped through the air with a sound like a dozen souls screaming. It didn't just block bullets; it caught them, deflected them, wrapped around a guard's rifle and ripped it from his hands, then snapped back to crush his wrist. It was an extension of his will. It lashed out, wrapping around a man's neck and yanking him off his feet with a sickening crack. It swept the legs out from under another, then descended like a hammer onto his chest.
It was a massacre, but a silent one. There were no battle cries, no grunts of effort from Vel. Only the deafening gunfire, the screams of the guards, and the relentless, whip-crack song of the black chain. In less than ten seconds, the entrance was cleared, a tableau of broken bodies and scattered weapons.
He walked through the shattered glass doors, his footsteps silent on the polished floor.
He didn't search. He knew. He moved through the empty, blinking casino floor like a shark through deep water, straight toward the manager's office.
He didn't knock. The reinforced door splintered inward off its hinges as if hit by a wrecking ball.
Inside, Manager Henderson was leaning over his desk, a smarmy, relieved smile on his face. And there, sitting in the guest chair, her face pale and uncomfortable, was Daisy Brown. She held a small gift bag on her lap—a "congratulations" gesture that now felt horribly out of place.
Henderson was in the middle of a sentence. "...and once this unpleasantness with those street rats is settled, I'm sure we can find a place for you in our community outreach—"
The explosion of the door made them both jump. Henderson stumbled back, his face draining of all color. Daisy let out a sharp cry, her hands flying to her mouth.
What stood in the doorway was not the intense young man from graduation. It was a nightmare clad in blood and shadow. His clothes were torn and dark with gore, fresh blood still dripping from wounds that should have crippled him. In one hand, he held a length of black chain, its links dripping onto the pristine carpet. And his eyes… his eyes were the eyes of something that had looked upon the end of the world and decided to become its architect.
Henderson's bravado evaporated into pure, pants-wetting terror. He fumbled for a panic button under his desk.
Daisy could only stare, her mind refusing to process the image. This wasn't the Vel who had quietly thanked her at the party. This was a force of nature. A demon.
Vel's void-like eyes moved from Henderson's terrified face to Daisy's horrified one. There was no flicker of surprise, no recognition. She was merely an object in the room.
The black chain in his hand slithered across the floor like a viper, its links clinking softly.
They had bargained for a payoff, for a bit of political maneuvering. They had not bargained for this. They had not bargained for the vengeance that walked in, silent and absolute, from the world they thought they had crushed.
The air in the shattered office froze solid.
Manager Henderson's finger stabbed for the panic button.
The black chain became a blur. It didn't travel; it simply existed through Henderson's palm, pinning it to the desk with a brutal crunch of bone and wood.
Vel took a single step into the room. The chain retracted, yanking Henderson forward onto the desk edge. A second length of chain snapped out, a black viper, and shattered both his kneecaps. The screams were raw, animal.
Daisy Brown sat frozen, her gift bag a forgotten lump on the floor. Her eyes were wide, her mind refusing to compile the data: the blood, the chain, the void in the eyes of the boy from graduation.
Vel's head turned. No recognition. No calculation. Only target acquisition.
Henderson, sobbing and broken, was the primary target. Vel's free hand rose. The chain links coiled into a dense, metallic fist. He drove it forward, not in a swing, but a piston-strike. It connected with Henderson's forehead. The sound was a wet, final crack, like a melon dropped on stone. Henderson's body slumped, a marionette with cut strings.
The chain uncoiled from the corpse.
Daisy opened her mouth. A plea, a denial, a scream—it never formed.
The chain was a black line in the air. It did not lash or whip. It executed.
It moved with the sterile,efficient brutality of a guillotine blade. The pointed end struck the center of Daisy's chest. The impact didn't throw her back; it absorbed her. The sound was a dull, internal thud, the rupture of a heart and the splintering of the sternum that caged it. Her body jolted once, violently, in the chair, then went perfectly still. A trickle of blood escaped the corner of her lip, tracing a path down her chin.
Two bodies. One broken, one deceptively intact. Both equally, utterly ended.
The chain slithered back into a loose coil in Vel's hand, the links dark and clean.
He turned. The sirens wailed outside, a distant, irrelevant noise. He was already gone, a phantom of vengeance dissolving into the city's shadows. The King was a ghost. The Chain was his scepter. And the city had just become his hunting ground.
The world snapped back into focus with the nauseating lurch of a bad cut in a film. One moment, the scent of Daisy's blood and the arcade's stale air filled his senses. The next, the acrid, choking stench of smoke and burning memories assaulted him. He stood once more in the street of ruin, the heat from the inferno that was his home washing over him in a blistering wave.
The transition was instantaneous. There was no journey, only a change of scenery from one hell to another.
His obsidian eyes, which had held no emotion during the slaughter, now scanned the devastation. Bodies of friends and foes alike lay where they had fallen. Ace was still there, a dark, still shape on the ground. Rez had bled out against the wall, his head lolled to the side. And there, a few yards from the collapsing building, was Mikaze. He had dragged himself toward Vel's last position before the smoke had finally stolen his consciousness.
Vel moved to him. There was no urgency in his steps, only a grim, inevitable purpose. He knelt, the chain in his hand vanishing as if it had never been, and gathered Mikaze's limp form into his arms. He stood, turning his back on the pyre of his past life.
He didn't get far.
Three steps. That was all the distance he could manage.
The massive tattoo across his back, arms, and thighs—the silent, mysterious passenger he had carried for years—erupted one final time. It was not the violent purple of before, but a deep, throbbing crimson, the color of a dying star or a heart's final beat. It blazed with an intensity that stole the breath from his lungs, a light that screamed of a system overloading, a power source detonating from within.
The psychic backlash was a silent supernova in his mind. The stolen strength, the preternatural calm, the void that had shielded him—it all shattered.
His legs gave way. He collapsed to his knees, clutching Mikaze to his chest, a final, failed act of protection. The momentum carried him forward, and he rolled onto his side, his brother's body cradled against him, his own back to the raging fire.
The crimson glow from the tattoo faded, leaving only the ordinary, hellish orange of the flames dancing on his skin. The adrenaline was gone. The vengeance was spent. All that was left was the man.
And the man was broken.
He lay there in the grime and blood, the heat of the fire searing his back, the weight of Mikaze a heavy anchor. He stared at the inferno, watching the last physical remnants of his life, his family, his future, turn to ash and smoke. Ace was in there. Rez. Riot. Pip and Lira. All of them. The cake, the diploma, the laughter—all consumed.
A tremor ran through him. Then another.
A single, hot tear welled in the corner of his eye, cutting a clean path through the soot and dried blood on his cheek. It was followed by another, and then a silent, relentless stream. They were not the sobs of a boy, but the quiet, devastating tears of a king who had lost his entire kingdom in one night. There was no sound, just the crackle of the fire and the slow, rhythmic drip of his tears onto the arm wrapped around his last living brother.
His grip on Mikaze tightened, a final, desperate clutch at a world that was already gone. Then, his eyes, still fixed on the burning warehouse, fluttered shut. The darkness that took him was not the void of vengeance, but the numb, exhausted oblivion of total loss. The Chain was still. The Ghost was gone. All that remained in the street were two brothers, one breathing, one not, lying together in the ashes of everything they had ever been.
And The Tattoo wheel on his neck rotates Signaling....