Chapter 3 – The Weight of Stone
The market still echoed with coughing when I stood up straight and let the stone ripple back over my skin. The air was thick—tainted, heavy with sickness—and the people looked to me as if I could sweep it all away with a single strike. But I couldn't cure disease. I could only stop the man who spread it.
Alex.
I clenched my fists, feeling the rock grind and shift along my knuckles. My joints ached beneath it, human bones protesting against the weight. Every time I wore this form too long, the curse reminded me that strength has a price. Still, the faces staring at me didn't want Marcus Veylan, broken soldier and tired man—they wanted Mega Stone. The hero. The wall.
I took one heavy step through the sickened crowd. The ground trembled faintly beneath me, a reminder of what I was and what I carried. People shrank back, their coughing turning ragged. A fruit vendor lay across his ruined stall, eyes watering, body trembling as the sickness tore through him. A child clung to his arm, begging me with tear-streaked eyes.
I didn't stop. If I stayed, if I tried to help, Alex would slip deeper into the city's veins. And every second he moved unchecked meant more bodies on the ground.
Duty demanded the chase. Mercy would have to wait.
---
They called people like Alex "Risks." The word made it easier. Easier for the public to imagine them as problems to solve, not people to mourn. Easier for me to raise a stone fist and bring it down without thinking about who the person was before their curse took hold.
The truth was harsher. Nine out of ten people who awakened powers found balance—blessings that made them stronger, faster, smarter, paired with curses that tested them but didn't break them. A man who could fly but felt pain in his bones with every landing. A woman who healed wounds but carried scars of every injury she closed. They were blessings and curses in equal measure.
But the tenth—the unlucky tenth—they weren't just cursed. They were born wrong. Their powers grew like tumors, wild, unchecked. We didn't call them people anymore. We called them Risks. Alex was one of them.
And I was the one sent to bury him.
---
I let the stone recede just enough for me to breathe easier. Immediately, the pain set in. My knees screamed. My spine cracked as if a hammer had struck it. My hands trembled, weak flesh exposed beneath the shell. Every time I shed the stone, I was reminded of how fragile Marcus Veylan was.
I had been young once. Light on my feet. Quick with a laugh. Before the power. Before the weight. Now, without the armor, I felt twice my age, my body groaning under burdens it was never meant to carry.
And yet, I reached for it again. The stone swept back over me like a tide. Numbness returned. No pain, no weakness—just heaviness. The mask of strength the city needed.
Always the mask.
---
The trail wasn't hard to follow. Alex never could hide the wake of his curse. Rats dead in the gutter, their bellies bloated. Water puddles shining with a strange oily sheen, bubbles rising where no heat stirred them. Mildew spreading fresh and fast across a brick wall as if it had been there for years.
Every step I took, I saw his passage. He was running, always running, but leaving a map carved in sickness behind him.
I pressed on, deeper into the veins of Sane City. The alleys narrowed, buildings leaning in like conspirators whispering their secrets. The city never slept, not truly. Even in decay, it pulsed with a kind of twisted life. Alex saw the city as something alive, they said—as if the bricks and steel shared in his sickness. Maybe he wasn't wrong. Sometimes I swore the city whispered to me too, though not in words. Just in silence. A silence that begged for order.
---
I remembered the first time I'd seen Alex's file. A thin folder. A picture of a man who looked too tired for his years, eyes already haunted. Reports of "attempted help." That was the cruel part. He hadn't started as a killer. He had tried to heal, once. To use his gift in small ways—burn fevers out of children, cull infestations from apartments, fight the rot that clung to Sane City's bones.
But every time he tried, it spread further. He left graveyards where he meant to leave gardens. And people started whispering his name like a curse.
So the order had come down: Alex was a Risk. And Risks had only one fate.
I told myself that when I found him, when I ended him, it wouldn't be execution—it would be mercy.
But in moments like this, watching mothers cradle coughing children, I wasn't so sure.
---
The alleys twisted, and I slowed my pace. He was close—I could feel it. The sickness clung stronger here, as if the air itself recoiled.
My stone feet crushed glass bottles left to rot in the gutters. I passed walls covered in graffiti: prayers, curses, half-mad ramblings. "THE CITY SEES." "NO MORE RISKS." "GODS BLESS OUR CURSES." Sane City never stopped talking, even when its people had no voice left.
I wanted to believe the city still had hope. That heroes like me weren't just buying time in a place already lost. But every time I looked into the gray skies, every time I smelled the rot in the air, I wondered if we were fighting for a corpse.
And if that was true, then what did that make me? The stone that sealed the tomb?
---
I stopped at an alley mouth, the shadows thick. My hand went to my side, brushing against the worn fabric beneath the stone armor. I carried no weapon. I was the weapon. That was what they drilled into us during training. Heroes weren't soldiers with guns or blades—we were symbols. Living walls. Proof that order still had shape.
But walls could crumble. And symbols could rot.
"Alex," I called, my voice booming down the alley. The stone carried it, made it thunder. "You can't keep running. You know how this ends."
My words echoed, but there was no answer. Only silence, heavy and suffocating. The kind of silence that meant he was near.
---
I stepped forward, each footfall a drumbeat. My body ached beneath the stone, but I forced it down. Pain didn't matter. Fatigue didn't matter. All that mattered was finishing the hunt.
Because if I failed, if Alex slipped away again, more would die.
And if I was honest, I wasn't sure if I was hunting Alex… or if I was chasing down my own fading belief that I was still a hero.
---
The alley ended at a crumbling brick wall. Fresh mildew clung to it, pulsing faintly like veins. I touched it with a stone hand, felt the damp crawl up my skin. He had passed through here. Recently.
I tightened my fists.
"This city won't survive much longer," I whispered, voice low so only the wall could hear. "If he doesn't die here, neither of us will."
The words hung in the gray air. For a moment, I thought I heard the city whisper back. Or maybe it was just the sickness breathing in the dark.
Either way, I pressed on. The weight of stone dragging me forward, step by weary step.