The door swung wide, and night pressed its cheek to the threshold. A man in a stamped-metal mask filled the frame, visor slit reflecting the small green eye of the breaker panel behind Ethan. Two more stood on the porch boards with batons humming angry blue, the hum that says pain has been domesticated and put on a leash. Boots thumped. The first man's voice came out filtered and confident, the way confidence sounds when it's used to winning.
"By order of the Interim Authority at Sunset Station, occupants will vacate for transport and processing. Hands visible. Any awakened will present themselves for evaluation." He lifted the baton with lazy authority. "Cooperate, and your families will be safe."
Ethan stood with one hand lowered and one palm half-raised, as if he had been caught halfway through a gesture that meant Welcome and might also mean Don't. The house behind him was dark, except for a thin strip of green from the panel and the deeper breaths of the people he had gathered. His voice carried without effort; the electricity rode it.
"You came to take us," he said. "And you brought sticks."
The visor turned, weighing him like an animal you don't yet know if you have enough rope for. "This is for your safety."
"Whose safety?" Ethan asked, as if the word had flavors he wanted named.
"Everyone's." The baton clicked. "Step aside."
Ethan's fingers curled and uncurled once. He had wired the porch rail with Arlo half an hour ago, fast and dirty, copper braided through rebar, screws biting into wood like teeth. The Storm Battery readout sat in his head as clearly as the men before him: twelve percent and willing. The arc fuse he had improvised was worth asking about. He tested the house's pulse with his shoulder blades, felt it answer, and kept his eyes on the mask.
"Before we cooperate," he said, "tell me where you're taking the women."
The lead man didn't hesitate. That was almost worse. "To safety."
"Do you sell that word by the pound?" Ethan asked softly.
One of the men on the porch chuckled, a short, dry sound. The leader's baton rose higher. "Last warning," he said, bored now, "or I classify this residence as noncompliant and apply correction."
Zee's whisper slid down from the roof: "Two trucks, six in the beds, five on foot, more in the street: masks, batons, pistols at hips. Three rifles slung. They smell like they think they own the block."
Noah's breath warmed Ethan's shoulder blade. Riley's hand tightened on Maya's shoulder. Duke's chain made its small speech against his wrist. Loretta stood in the kitchen doorway with a knife held in a way that would embarrass any man who laughed at a grandmother holding steel.
"Correction," Ethan repeated, as if learning the word for the first time. "You know what happens when you correct a live wire?"
He lifted his palm.
The porch rail spat white fire.
The arc crawled across the metal like a living rope, and the two men on the boards stiffened in the same twitch, batons jerking up involuntarily as their bodies learned a new language in a single sentence. The leader jumped, fast, a professional who had been shocked before and hated learning. He swung the baton in, aiming at Ethan's forearm, blue light spraying a fan through the door.
Chain Lightning slid down Ethan's bones like a dog he had called. He didn't think about it; he thought of three points in a line, and the bolt obeyed.
[Chain Lightning I — Cast][Targets: 3][Cost: 8%][Cooldown: 12s]
It leapt into the leader's chest and forked to the two already caught in the porch rail's bite. Their masks popped white at the edges; the smell of hot plastic and burned skin tried to push through the doorway. Down in the yard, someone shouted, "Move!" and someone else forgot how to decide which leg went first.
"Inside!" the leader barked from reflex more than command; his right hand went to his hip for the pistol. Duke stepped, and the chain sang, a silver snake that wrapped wrist and gun and yanked it sideways so the muzzle chewed up the doorframe instead of a person. The first bullet shredded wood; the second went into the roof beam and made the house cough dust; the third smacked into the porch post and made Arlo swear from the pantry without knowing he had.
Noah moved when Ethan's shoulder moved. The boy's bat came up from below with the cruel patience Ethan had taught him ten minutes ago. It rode the angle of the leader's wrist and snapped it back with a sound that made even men outside suck their teeth. The pistol clattered. The leader's elbow came forward in the same motion to smash Noah's nose and would have if Duke's chain hadn't shortened with a mean jerk that pulled the elbow off target and made the blow glance off the jaw instead of the bone.
Zee's air rifle coughed from the roof. The pellet snapped into the eye slit of a mask on the sidewalk with surgical spite. The man reeled, one hand up, credibility stripped away in an instant.
"Take their feet," Loretta snapped from behind, and when an old woman says it that way, men lower their center of gravity without asking why. Ethan dropped his palm to the porch boards and stroked the current along the railing again, not as a blast this time but as a skin, a carpet of bite that made the surface treacherous to anyone whose boots thought they owned it.
Three more masked men slammed up the steps. The first two hit the rail and danced against their will; the third jumped the last two boards with athletic arrogance, baton slashing toward Ethan's temple. The blow would have painted thunder across the wall if Ethan had not slid half a step to the right. Sliding wasn't the right word; the floor seemed to carry him, as if the charge he kept in his bones could make his feet and the world agree to not lock together for the length of a step.
[Storm Step — Microdash (latent)][Trigger: Electric Field Alignment][Cost: negligible]
He entered the man's inside and pressed his palm against the breastplate. "No," he said, and sent a short, ugly pulse that announced its business and did it. The man's back arched; the baton clattered; his throat made a dry click; he folded to his knees and did not get up fast.
Gunfire erupted from the street, angry and clumsy. Zee rolled to the chimney and flattened herself. "They're shooting at the roof like it insulted their mothers," she hissed. "Two with rifles behind the truck. One switching mags like he's never done it in the dark."
"Don't get hit," Ethan said, without looking up.
"Solid plan," Zee said.
Riley dragged one of the stunned mask-men by his collar into the hallway and kicked his baton behind the couch with a decisiveness that said she had kicked worse under worse roofs.
A young man in the yard, mask slightly crooked, raised his baton and took two quick steps toward the porch with a courage that looked borrowed. Potential Insight flickered above his head, not gold, not gray, but an uncertain blue that pulsed like a question.
[Owen Park — Future Class Trajectory: Scout — Potential: B — Latent Node: Situational Awareness — Moral Vector: Unstable]
Ethan's bolt had already formed in his hand. He could feel the path to the boy's shoulder, the one that would drop him without killing him, the one that would tell him to go home and choose a different life tomorrow. He hesitated long enough to see the boy's eyes behind the slip of a mask. They were not empty. They were scared in the way of someone who knows what he's doing is wrong, and does it anyway for a reason that does not make him feel noble.
"Don't," Ethan said, and Owen stopped with a slight full-body flinch, orders meeting the first voice all day that had asked him what he wanted to be.
"Sergeant!" someone shouted. "He's a live wire!"
The leader—Sergeant by accusation—gasped, clutching his twisted wrist. He glared at Owen, then at Ethan. "You just leveled up the charge. Harboring and assault."
"You brought the assault," Ethan said flatly. Then the night beyond the porch lifted its lip and showed teeth he had not counted.
Lights washed the street in harsh white. Two pickup trucks idled with men in the beds, rifles now trained, confusion shaken off. The gate at the intersection two blocks over split with a noise that crawled under fingernails and up into teeth. The opening was not big, not yet, a black gash in the air like a wound in the sky, but the air pouring from it stank of wet stone and mushrooms and something hungry.
[Dungeon Gate — Goblin Burrow (Tier I) — Opening 00:01:12][Warning: Local Infected agitation + First Wave Spillover][Sub-Event: Herald — Lesser Wyrm (Storm-Drinker Variant) — Synchronizing]
The men on the trucks turned, swearing, attention seesawing. The streetlights flickered, brightened, then drained toward the intersection as if being sipped by something thirsty. Owen's eyes widened. "What is that?" he whispered, not to the Sergeant.
"Your boss's new god," Duke growled, chain tightening with a sound like a promise.
The Sergeant's jaw clenched. He looked from the forming gate to Ethan and did his own math: fight a lightning-blooded awakened through a doorway into a trap while your rear grows teeth, or turn and control the street, take the rich harvest of panicked people running toward any voice that shouted orders. He decided that his mask had been built for.
"Fall back!" he barked, voice finding strength where there had been only arrogance. "Control the perimeter! Nobody moves without our say!" He left two masks on the porch, struggling to regain dignity. The rest poured a stream of black down the yard and into the street's channel, boots drumming, rifles swinging toward the new light.
Owen hesitated half a beat longer, baton halfway lowered, as if waiting to be told something by someone worth listening to. Ethan met his eyes.
"You can stay and help, or you can go and be what they ask," he said. "Choose now. You only get two or three moments like this in a life."
Owen's throat moved. He looked at the gate, at the trucks, at the porch where an old woman's knife looked more honest than anything on his belt. "If I stay, they'll mark me as defected," he whispered, naked fear making the words shine.
"If you go," Ethan said, "you'll help them chain my neighbors."
Owen swallowed once more and did not look away this time. He let the baton drop and stepped inside the threshold, small as a prayer. "I stay."
[Owen Park — Moral Vector stabilized — Trajectory shift: +][Class Hint: Scout — Node pressure +9%]
"Close the door," Loretta told him as if he were her grandson. He did, hands shaking hard enough to rattle the hinges.
Gunfire cracked again, sharp and drawn thin by the distance to the intersection. The gate split a little wider. A shape like a tongue of shadow slid against the edge and tasted the neighborhood. The hair on Ethan's arms prickled so hard it hurt. The Storm Engine in his chest flared with a hunger it couldn't explain, like an organ craving a nutrient it had never seen and somehow recognized anyway.
"We can let the patrol and the gate tear each other apart," Riley said, voice very controlled. "We have ten people, a battery, and a plan we found under the couch. We can be wise."
"Wise will get us seven days," Noah blurted. "Firs,t clear will get us a life. The System's showing it to us because it wants kings."
"We are not kings," Loretta said briskly. "We are beans."
"Beans need land," Duke murmured, not disagreeing, just saying the part under the part.
Ethan stood still as the wall and listened to his own breathing, which sounded to him like water poured into a metal bowl, steady, not yet boiling. He looked at the panel. He looked at the green eye. He looked at each face he had chosen, as well as those who had chosen him. He had lit the porch rail and taught the lightning to jump. He had nine adults, a child, a dog, and a house to buy, which took him hours. The gate would not ask hours. It would ask for a signature.
He moved before the thought finished. "Duke, Noah, Zee—gear up," he said. "Arlo, wire the front steps the way we talked, and if they come for the door, you make them think the house bites. Riley, you're captain until I'm back. Owen, you're with Arlo. Yvette, keep harvester hands off the pantry; you have the inventory sense, use it. Loretta, if someone panics, take their hand and talk about that hurricane of yours until they remember the line of their spine."
"What about me?" Maya whispered into the dog's neck.
"You keep the dog brave," Ethan said without missing a beat. "It will help."
Arlo's eyes sparkled at the word captain and settled again at the word wire. He grasped what Ethan wanted without anyone needing to praise him for it: run the copper under the porch lip, coil it around rebar teeth, connect to the panel through the fuse that would spit only when he told it, hide everything in shadow so boots find it before eyes do.
Owen hovered unsurely until Arlo thrust a coil of wire into his hands. "Hold this," Arlo said shortly. "And if anyone with a mask as ugly as yours used to be comes close, you tell the wire your side of the story."
In the trucks out on the street, men shouted, and the engines revved, and something not human answered from the new mouth in the world with a sound like iron drinking lightning. The night's smell deepened: wet loam, old fire, the metallic aftertaste of a sky before it rains.
"Wait," Owen blurted as Ethan grabbed for the door. "There's a bow."
"A what?" Noah said, heartbeat jumping.
"In the truck bed," Owen said, words tripping in his rush to bvalidul. "Tommy hunted out by Lake Mead. He… he kept a compound in the bed. He bragged. Always bragged. Said arrows don't jam."
Noah turned his face to Ethan like a sunflower finds the sun in a ruined lot. Ethan flashed Potential Insight at him without meaning to; the gold above the boy's head pulsed as if hearing its name.
[Noah Reyes — Node Pressure: 81% — Awakening Threshold: near]
"Zee, you see a bow?" Ethan called up.
"I see a lot of bad choices," Zee whispered. Then, a second later, sharper: "Left truck bed, under a tarp. I can get there if somebody annoys everyone with fireworks."
Ethan smiled despite the fear clawing his ribs. "I have fireworks," he said, and pushed out the door with Noah on his shoulder and Duke a step ahead like a shield with legs.
Street. Heat. The trucks threw long shadows like harpoons. Patrolmen with rifles swinging between the gate and houses, discipline ragged now that the sky had decided to speak. Ethan slipped off the porch and into the darkness that seemed to bend slightly toward him, as if the night had learned his name. He didn't rush. He didn't saunter. He moved the way a storm front moves when it decides a town has not been honest enough.
A masked man noticed them and took one step toward raising his rifle. Ethan raised his hand and stung the man's wrist with a thumb-sized snake of light that persuaded the fingers to open. The gun clattered. Duke's chain wrapped the stock and yanked it back like a misplaced toy. Zee slid off the roof like a rumor and ghosted low along the hedges, eyes on the truck. Noah kept his shoulders tucked behind Ethan's shadow and breathed like he was remembering how.
The gate at Sunset and Arroyo Grande split a rib wider. Air blew out, damp and fungal, with a line of sound in it like a flute played underwater. From the mouth, small shapes scuttled and peered and sniffed: jutting noses, long ears, teeth too white in faces too gray-green. Rusty knives winked. Eyes glowed a coward's red.
[Goblin Burrow — Spillover: 6–12][Mob Composition: Slashers (Small), Slinkers (Skirmish), Dribbler (Sapper?)][First Clear Bonus: +++]
Zee reached the truck bed and flipped the tarp with one hand. "Got it," she whispered like a woman lifting a crown from a thief's pillow. "Six arrows. String's good. Needs hands that don't lie."
Noah's hands didn't lie. They shook a little, but they settled when the bow sat in them, as if the weight had been measured against his bones long ago. He looked impossibly young with it, yet older than the boy who had swung a bat, which was what a boy was expected to do.
[Noah Reyes — Node Awakening: Wind-Pulse Tendon — Active][Class Seed: Storm Archer — Sprouted][Passive: Draw Stability +][Technique Hint: Pulse-Release I]
Noah blinked hard. "I can feel… the air," he said, and then didn't talk anymore because the mouth was for the string now. He drew. The bow hummed a note that matched the low hum in Ethan's bones. He loosed. The arrow flew slightly left of straight, then corrected in the breath of its own flight as if remembering how wind thinks, and took a goblin in the eye. The small creature fell with a sound like a toy cracking. Two more scuttled back and hissed at the night.
Ethan laughed once, bright and very brief. "Good," he said, and meant the word like a blessing.
The patrol finally decided they were tired of being interrupted by neighbors who had stopped behaving. Three rifles rose as one. Ethan saw the path of three bullets into three chests he loved and closed his fist around that future as if it were a wasp. He shoved the charge into his lungs and into his palm, dragging the nearest streetlight's last breath into the same fist. The world dimmed for two seconds. He hurled the fist at the asphalt between the rifles.
The thunderclap shoved the air outward. It wasn't elegant. It was a hand slamming a table so hard the plates jumped. The rifles jerked high and went off into the sky instead of lungs. Windows up the block rang like cheap bells.
[Technique: Thunderclap (improvised)][Effect: Cone knock-up, disorientation][Cost: 9%][Storm Engine: 11%]
He had enough for one more chain, maybe, if he wanted the house to sit dark as a pit with men outside who had learned and adjusted. The gate blew out a colder breath, and the shadow that had been sliding along its lip pressed harder, as if impatient.
Zee scrambled back beside them, bow stringed around her shoulder now, empty hands quick. "The Herald's head is at the lip," she whispered. "Long as a car. Scales like beer bottles. It's… sniffing the lightning."
Storm-Drinker. The word rearranged Ethan's idea of the fight. If it could drink lightning and pull current from air, flesh, and wire, then anything careless he cast would go into its mouth and come out as hunger.
"What drinks lightning chokes on thunder," he said without knowing where the certainty came from. He turned to Noah. "Eyes on the small ones. Don't admire shots you haven't taken yet. Duke—if it comes our way, you tie it up a breath at a time. Zee—left and low. If its eye shows, blind it."
"Love when a plan is a sentence," Zee muttered.
Owen's voice cracked behind them. "They'll call for backup. Sunset's got a wagon with a box on it—great ugly thing. It eats power when it hums. You go near it and your hands go cold. They'll roll it here if you start looking like a story."
"Then we end the story before they write a second page," Ethan said. He breathed in the smell of wet tunnel and hot metal and new fear. He breathed out and let the Storm Engine grind at his ribs, pumping current through nerves that had learned to flex for it.
He stepped toward the intersection.
The world became narrower with each stride, as if the houses and cars tilted in to listen. The goblins saw them and squealed, rusty blades twitching with insultable pride. Noah's first arrow took the first Slinker in the throat, the second shaved a SSlasher's ear, the third went in under the tongue and pinned the little creature to the street with its own shock. Duke's chain sang again and tripped a Dribbler with a sack of stink; the sack burst and spread a gleam on the asphalt that hissed when it met air. Zee put a pellet into the nearest goblin's hip and laughed when it tumbled into the stink and vanished with a bubble.
[Infected Agitation +][Spillover: 10 → 18][Kill Tally: +7][XP: +62][Noah Reyes — Microlevel +1]
The rifles in the trucks swung back from the gate to Ethan and his people. The men with batons lowered their heads, committed to the old idea that running at a problem faster might change its shape. Ethan let a chain go at the one closest to Noah and turned the second strike, not at the second man but at the truck's hood.
Electricity loves a path. The hood had one. The current sprinted along the seam, into the battery, through the frame, into the bed. Three men in the back convulsed and fell like dolls thrown from a shelf. The driver cursed and tried to turn the wheel. The wheel shocked him for daring to touch it, and he stopped trying to be brave.
The gate ripened. The shadow behind it decided the neighborhood's residents agreed with it. It pushed its head through.
It was not large, the way stories lie. It was large in the way real things are: too long for the road to hold without looking wrong. Its scales shimmered slick black-blue, each edged with a pale glow, as if lightning lived in the seam of every plate. Horns curved back along the skull, simple and cruel as crowbars. Its eyes were not red and not yellow; they were the color of storms when you look at them through thick glass, the color of the river when turbines take their due.
The streetlights flared once and died, threads of light unspooling toward the thing's narrow nostrils. It inhaled as if enjoying a broth. The Storm Engine in Ethan's chest tugged hard enough to hurt, as if some part of him wanted to leap out and be finished being hungry. Cold sweat ran down his ribs.
[Herald: Lesser Wyrm (Storm-Drinker) — Feeding][Warning: Energy Drain Field — 15m radius][Effect: Reduces charge rate; pulls ambient and cast current][Recommendation: Kinetic/sonic damage priority; Subjugation possible via Binding Sigil + Dominance Shock]
"Dominance, what?" Zee hissed.
"Later," Ethan said. "Noah—eyes for goblins only. Duke—ready to break its rhythm. Zee—if you see a soft place, make it softer."
"And you?" Duke asked, chain tightening across his palm until it bit.
"I'm going to teach it thunder," Ethan said, and stepped into the Drain Field on purpose.
It felt like walking into the river under the dam and trying to breathe. The Wyrm tasted him. Its head tilted. Lightning hissed from the corner of its mouth like a man with a toothpick. It swayed forward, curious, then pleased. Ethan felt the charge leech from his forearms, a theft of warmth and will. He grinned despite the fear because a good thief teaches you where your pockets are.
He bled a tiny stream of current into his left hand, let it show, let the Wyrm see the candy. Its nostrils flared; its head dipped. With his right hand, he drew his own blood with a thumbnail and smeared it across the length of rebar Duke had shoved into his palm without being asked. He closed a fist and drew a sigil in the iron with smeared red, the shape arriving in his mind entirely made: a spiral with three teeth, a line through its heart, the mark of a storm that owns itself.
[Binding Sigil — Improvised (Valid)][Chance of Subjugation on first contact: Low; improves with Dominance Shock][Cost: Blood — negligible; Charge — moderate]
The Wyrm lunged as if bored with pleasantries. It did not lurch. It flowed, smooth as poured oil and twice as fast. Its jaws opened and the musk of wet stone and metal rolled over Ethan. It did not want to bite him. It tried to drink him.
He let his left hand flare to hold its attention and went low with his right.
The rebar spear met the thing's lower jaw with a hollow drum note. The Binding Sigil flared ugly and defiant. Ethan shoved the charge into his chest, not as a bolt, but as a weight of sound —a slab of pressure that made the air snap. Thunder clapped point-blank into the Wyrm's mouth.
[Thunderclap — Focused][Effect: Inner-ear rupture, cognitive stun, feeding flow disruption][Herald: staggered — 0.7s]
It reeled half a palm's width. That was enough not to die. Duke's chain whipped around the nearest street sign and caught a horn, not to hold, only to be a reminder that men were here. Zee's pellet found the seam under the Wyrm's jaw hinge, causing it to blink as if it had forgotten how. Noah's arrow pinned a goblin to a mailbox with a noise like a letter being taken too seriously.
The patrol finally did something innovative. One rifleman took a knee and aimed for Ethan's back. Owen saw him first. He didn't shout. He ran, shoulder lowered, and struck the kneeling man. It knocked the plan out of him and the breath with it. They tumbled; the rifle went skittering. Owen's mask had been torn off; his face looked like a decision.
Ethan stepped in again because stepping out would be death by a nicer name. He wanted Dominance Shock and didn't have it as a skill… until he did.
[Skill Unlocked (latent): Dominance Shock I][Effect: Short-range high-voltage discharge synchronized with Binding Sigil; asserts Control vector; Chance to Brand on subjugation attempt][Cost: 14%][Cooldown: 30s]
He laughed aloud, wild and delighted and a little frightened by how the System rose to meet intention. "Shut your mouth," he told the dragon that was not a dragon, and jammed the rebar upward under the jaw while he drove current through the sigil not as food but as command.
The world jumped. The Wyrm's body bowed, muscles clenching like a bridge cable suffering a tantrum. The sigil flared and burned itself deeper into the iron. Ethan smelled his own blood singe and didn't mind. The Storm Engine howled and dropped a bar.
[Storm Engine: 3%][Binding Chance: +][Herald Status: Stunned (minor), Enraged]
The Wyrm screamed, a sound like tearing sheet metal in a hurricane, and the field around it pulled harder, drinking streetlight guts and the last brave spark in porch bulbs up and down the block. It coiled and struck sideways, a body blow. Ethan went off his feet and into a car door hard enough to make the alarm think about starting and then remember alarms had retired. Pain lit up his ribs in a white stripe.
"Boss!" Zee's voice cracked. "Pick a direction to live!"
"Working on it," he coughed, staggering, rebar still in hand. The Wyrm's head swung back to him as if insulted that he had not died as a gentleman.
Goblins swarmed, emboldened by the big cousin in the yard. Noah's arrows ran low, and he switched without needing to be told to aim for ankles, tendons, stringing one slasher to the asphalt and clotheslining another so Duke's chain could kiss its throat. The patrol started to fall back, the Sergeant shouting not orders but complaints. "Cover the retreat! Back to Sunset! Get the box!"
"Box?" Zee hissed.
"Nullifier," Owen panted, blood at his lip, eyes hot with a new kind of anger. "I told you—they hum it and you feel like you never woke up."
"Then we end this before they plug in their apology for a god," Ethan said through his teeth.
The Wyrm gathered itself for another drink. Ethan had one shock left in him and not enough charge to be proud. He could pull from the battery, but removing the house's darkness would reveal to anyone left inside the kind of fear that changes long bones. He could ask the neighborhood. He could ask the sky.
He asked the sky.
He tore his eyes from the Wyrm and looked up into the bruise of cloud the System had pulled over Henderson. He lifted his empty right hand and, very politely, asked.
It answered.
Not as a bolt. Not as a spectacle. As a pressure difference, as a promise. The storm did not spend itself; it lent. His palm filled, warm and cold at the same time, the way the last sip of coffee tastes when you don't deserve it and drink it anyway.
[Storm Lend — microcharge acquired][Storm Engine: 11%][Warning: Storm will collect later]
"Collect," Ethan murmured, amused and not. "Fine. Send me the bill."
He went in again, straight at the mouth that wanted to be his grave. The Wyrm inhaled. Ethan shoved the rebar upward, Binding Sigil bright as a curse, and let Dominance Shock crawl down his arm like a crown he wasn't ready to wear.
The Wyrm bit.
He drove the sigil into the soft just behind the top fang.
The world exploded.
Sound folded. Light went low and then bruised blue. Ethan's teeth rang with a note he would hear in his sleep ten years from now. The Wyrm's body convulsed around the current and tried to swallow the command like it swallowed everything—a symbol burned on the inside of its mouth, a three-toothed spiral, and a line. For a heartbeat, the Drain Field flickered. The streetlight above them brightened like a held breath released.
[Dominance Shock — Applied][Binding: 37%][Herald Status: Stagger + Branding Pain][Counterpull: High]
The Wyrm screamed not with anger but with insult. It slammed its head down and sideways, flinging Ethan against the asphalt like a child's toy in a tantrum. He rolled, bones counting themselves, vision sparking, breath a knife. The rebar skittered away, ringing. The Wyrm's head loomed, jaws open to finish and fix the insult by drinking the man who had dared.
Noah's last arrow hit the soft inside of the mouth and stuck, quivering. Zee's pellet smacked the eye, not blinding it, but causing the lid to clamp shut. Duke's chain wrapped once around the lower jaw and held for a brilliant, ridiculous half-second as if trying to anchor a storm to a mailbox.
"Owen!" Ethan wheezed.
The young man did not ask what. He dove, shoulder smashing into the Wyrm's snout as if shoving a car stuck in the sand. It was nothing and everything. The Wyrm's head twitched the wrong direction for a breath. Ethan crawled, grabbed the rebar, tasted blood that tasted like copper coins in a thunderstorm, and shoved himself to his feet on legs that had filed formal complaints and had been ignored.
He drew the sigil in the air this time, not on iron. He pulled it with his finger and his blood and the bit of charge the storm had loaned him and stamped it in the space between his palm and the Wyrm's eye.
[Binding Sigil — Air Inscription (unstable)][Dominance Shock — ReadyBrandance to Brand on contact: +]
He saw, very clearly and with unreasonable calm, two futures. In one, he failed to brand. The Wyrm drank him dry, and Storm Haven became a little story everyone forgot because it did not make a good speech. In the Brand, the brand, just barely, and the Wyrm would hate him forever in a way that made it obey.
He smiled at the beast because that is what you do when you meet an enemy worthy of your future.
The Wyrm reared back, jaws opening around the arrow shaft, inside of its mouth a cathedral of wet light. It sucked. The night pulled toward it, sparks, breath, the little green eye in Ethan's panel two blocks back like a lover hearing its name.
Ethan planted his feet in a puddle of someone's spilled poison, felt it sting his calves, and didn't care, thrusting his palm forward into the pull. He knew he could not outdrink a storm-drinker. He could only feed it the one thing that would make it choke.
"Eat this," he said, and detonated the thunder he had been saving behind his teeth.
The shock slammed into the air inscription, and the sigil flared, an ugly crown of light, and then the Wyrm's mouth was full of command and pain and Ethan's name. The street shuddered. The gate's edges quivered like a cut lip. The patrolmen stumbled toward the trucks, toppling like pins under a lazy bowling ball.
[Dominance Shock — Executed][Branding Vector: Penetrated][Binding: 61% → 74% → …][Warning: Counterpull escalating — Energy Deficit][Storm Engine: 0%][Battery: Draining]
From behind Ethan, deep in the house he had named, the Storm Battery's green eye blinked once, twice, and went out as Arlo's hurried wiring bled the last held light into a trap that spat at a mask trying to climb the steps. In the sudden dark, the only brand, the brand, the brand, inside the Wyrm's mouth and the white commas of Noah's eyes and the slight bold glow of Maya's hands against the dog's ears as if she had understood that animals deserve witness in the moments that choose us.
The Wyrm's scream ripped the night in a shape that would still be heard in this intersection fifty years from now, when children chased each other playing at dragons and their grandparents told them to be home before the lights, Brandon. The branBrandsed. Ethan felt something like a hook set deep, somewhere between the Wyrm's hunger and his own stubbornness. He felt the System lean, interested for the first time like a dealer at a table where a farmer had just doubled down with his last bills.
[Subjugation Attempt: In Progress][Contest of Will: Initiated][Risk: Lethal][Reward: Domain Seed — Storm Herald]
The Wyrm drove forward, mouth opening to crush him against the asphalt and end the insult with a bite. Ethan did not have a bolt left, not a spark, not a clever sentence. He had his hand, his name, and the taste of thunder.
He lifted his palm not to block but to greet.
The Wyrm fell.
And as it fell, beyond it at the edge of the gate where the street met the split in the world, something else moved in the darkness—taller than the Wyrm, thinner, crowned not with horns but with a halo of clicking steel—and it leaned through like a curious priest craning to see who had taken his sermon and set it on fire.
Ethan's breath is branded—the branBrandckered. The trucks' engines choked. The men with masks remembered they were men and began to scream like men do when the world stops pretending for their benefit.
Red text wrote itself across the dark, slow, implacable, the System choosing the speed for drama or maybe mercy.
[Architect's Proxy: Observation Node — Online][Evaluation: Local Sovereign Candidate Detected][Clause: Interference Reduced]
The Wyrm's jaws clamped, and the brand red a color no one had ever named for a human throat.
Ethan shoved.
The world chose a side.
And the chapter ends here, with the thunder still rolling.