The walls curved in a perfect oval, armored with plates of blackened alloy and threaded with veins of dim blue light. A round table occupied the center, its surface alive with shifting projections: maps, schematics, supply routes. Seats circled it like a war council, each one waiting for a storm.
The Ampers filled them one by one, the faint hiss of doors and the whisper of cloaks echoing in the silence. Their faces carried different masks—curiosity, doubt, anger—but all eyes eventually fell on one seat: the one occupied by Rook.
Acuent stood rather than sat. Her presence made the chamber feel smaller.
Her armor shimmered—black and gold veins pulsing with light, cape rippling in unseen winds. Sparks arced faintly from the tiara crowning her head, lightning caught and caged. Her eyes glowed with golden fire, each word that left her mouth weighted with command.
"Explain yourself, Rook."
The words cracked like thunder in the room, sharp but measured.
"You brought the boy here. You risked exposure, strained our supplies, tested our defenses. For what?"
The others shifted in their seats. Some nodded, others kept silent, but none spoke against her.
Rook sat slouched in his chair, a shadowed figure against her radiance. His armor was matte-black, scarred with years of use, its design decades ahead of the time but worn like a second skin. A long, armored trench coat draped from his shoulders, concealing pockets of jury-rigged gear and forensic tools. On his chest, a faded ampers symbol lingered, half-hidden beneath the scarring of battle and years—a ghost of the man he once was.
He leaned forward, gloved hands resting on the table's edge. The faint blue projections flickered against the angular scars of his armor.
"I didn't bring him here for your approval," Rook said, voice low, gravel threaded with restraint.
Acuent tilted her head, sparks crawling faintly across her tiara. "Then for what?"
The chamber went still. Only the faint hum of the table's projections remained, casting shifting maps across their faces.
Rook did not answer immediately. His shadowed form sat in contrast to Acuent's stormborn radiance—a soldier from a dead future staring down a queen forged of lightning.
Astegger leaned forward first, her dark hair spilling over one shoulder, violet leather clinging like armor made for style as much as function. She rested a hand on the table, and a thin blade of violet energy hissed into being at her fingertips, slicing through the projection of a city grid. The image shimmered, distorting where the rift cut through it.
"He's a liability," she said flatly, her voice low and cold. "A child screaming in the dark while the world hunts us. I say we cut him loose before he cuts us open."
Colon gave a lazy laugh from his chair, boots propped carelessly on the table's edge. A long coat hung off his shoulders, and when he spoke, his voice shifted—subtly echoing Rook's gravel for just a moment before rolling back into his smooth drawl.
"Cher, every piece on the board's got value if you know how to play it. Maybe the boy's a pawn. Maybe he's a queen in disguise. Throwing him away before we know?" He tapped his temple. "That ain't strategy. That's waste."
Kudin said nothing at first, standing like a sentinel near the chamber's edge. The clock-face patterns on his gauntlets ticked with a slow, steady rhythm, light pulsing like a heartbeat. When he finally spoke, his voice carried a weight that silenced even Astegger.
"I touched the boy's soul," Kudin said. "It is fractured. Burning. But it still endures. That alone is worth guarding."
Slha had been half-buried in a holographic console she'd pulled from thin air, fingers flicking through streams of code like water. She popped her head up, hair wild, eyes flashing with the light of a dozen projections.
"Uh, yeah, hi? You all arguing like this is about logistics, but guess what? Every system out there is already sniffing for him—satellites, drones, bounty channels. You think dumping him makes us invisible again?" She snorted, waving her hand; the holograms around her warped, pixelating into static before reforming. "Newsflash: too late. He's already in the grid."
Aldus, calm as ever, sat with a book balanced across his lap, untouched tea cooling by his elbow. He didn't raise his voice, but his words threaded through the clamor like steel wire.
"Children do not survive raids like the one he endured. Not by chance. The weave of his being is… different. Mark me—this boy carries something the world has not seen before."
A low growl rolled from Brakkon, who sat apart, arms crossed, a heavy coat pulled tight over his frame. His eyes burned with an old soldier's suspicion.
"The boy should've died," he muttered. His jaw worked, and for an instant, white bone knifed from the back of his hand before sliding back into flesh with a wet crack. "Yet here he is. That ain't fate. That's trouble."
The chamber's light flickered against the varied faces, the table awash in spectral maps and the heated tension of too many powers in one room. Each voice clashed, each flare of ability carving Grant's place among them sharper than words alone.
The room's arguments bled into silence. The hum of Slha's holograms, the tick of Kudin's gauntlets, even the low growl in Brakkon's chest—all of it ebbed when Rook finally pushed back his chair.
His armored coat dragged across the floor as he stood, shoulders heavy under the scars of black plating. He didn't meet their eyes. Instead, his gloved fingers traced the faded Ampers emblem on his chest—half gone, half ghost.
"You want the truth?" His voice came low, ground down by years. "Fine. You'll choke on it."
The chamber waited, taut as wire.
"I'm not from here. Not… from now." He lifted his head, the pale light catching the hard lines of his mask. "I was born in 2054. Fought my last war in 2085. A war we lost."
Astegger scoffed under her breath, but no blade came to her hand this time.
"We called it the Juggernaut Protocol," Rook said, gravel cutting through the chamber. "Not a weapon. Not a man. A machine built to erase everything Gifted."
Sparks danced across Acuent's tiara as she leaned forward, voice sharp.
"A future war?" she scoffed, golden eyes narrowing. "You expect us to swallow this fantasy?"
Rook's fists tightened against the table. "You think I'd invent the nightmare that slaughtered my world?"
"We threw armies at it. Teams. My unit. One by one, I watched them burn."
Astegger's blade flickered, her sneer faltering, though she said nothing.
"Then—he appeared. A man in black. A supersuit like no design I've ever seen. He stepped between me and the beam. Took it. The full force."
Gasps rippled through the chamber. Slha froze mid-gesture, her code collapsing into static.
"And he survived. Fire, light, destruction all around him, and he didn't fall. He looked back at me… and said, 'Find me earlier. I will be the only one who can stop it. All Gifteds will live.'"
Rook drew a sharp breath, his voice breaking under the weight.
"Then he struck me. One palm to my chest. Next thing I knew, I was here, thirty years too early, half-dead, and staring into Aldus' library."
He leaned back, armor groaning softly.
"And now I know who he meant. The boy. Grant. He's the one I was sent to find."
Acuent's golden eyes burned through him, but she said nothing—only a slow curl of her lips, daring him to prove it.
The rest of the Ampers sat in heavy silence, caught between disbelief, dread, and the faintest spark of hope.
****
A corridor, dim and humming with hidden machinery. Grant awakened in his bunk, sweat still drying on his skin. The silence of the safehouse pressed on him, but something else pulled at him… a pulse, faint but insistent.
He followed it.
Voltair's armor waits inside, bathed in faint light.
Sleek, angular plates. Electric-blue veins running through the suit, pulsing faintly like a heartbeat. The gauntlets, reinforced and storm-forged, seemed to hum with stored lightning. The mask, visor glowing narrow and cold, watched silently from where it rested atop the breastplate.
The gauntlet's glow sharpens the closer he gets.
His fingers hover over the storm-forged glove, and the moment he touches it, the room explodes in light.
A surge arcs through him. His body convulses. Lightning cracks across his skin, his regeneration failing to keep up. His scream cuts short as he collapses, eyes rolling back.
The gauntlet's glow fades to stillness.
****
Lights flicker. The blue veins in the walls stutter, dimming before stabilizing. Several Ampers look up, uneasy.
Rook's last words echo like prophecy across the table:
"He is that Messiah."