The rain over New Avalon never falls clean. It sluices off the hero-corp billboards, drags soot from the smokestacks, and lands on the tongue like pennies soaked in battery acid. Ray Kings learned that the night the sky turned the color of fresh liver.
He was twelve. Wedged between a radiator and his mother's body. Counting the seconds between her breaths. The hero in white armor stepped over the threshold without knocking. Helios sigil on the chestplate. Judgment Flame licking at his fingertips like a loyal dog. Arion Drake. S+ rank. The man who sold justice by the kilowatt.
"Elior Kings," Drake said, voice smooth as sponsored silk. "You've been experimenting on children." Ray's father knelt in the kitchen, data shard clutched to his heart. "It's not what you think." Flame answered. The shard cracked. The lab notes scattered. Ray's mother lunged, useless, and took the boot meant for his skull. Her spine folded with a sound Ray still hears in elevators.
Drake never looked at the boy. He smiled for the drones outside, told the world he'd neutralized a Catalyst terrorist cell. The bodies were bagged before the rain started. Ray crawled out a window, shard fragment cutting his palm, and vanished into the gutters. Ten years later, the scar still itches when storms roll in.
Helios Hero Academy squats above the slums like a cathedral built from credit cards and corpses. Ray stands at the gates, forged admission letter trembling in a fist gone bloodless. The paper cost him three months of cage fights, one broken rib, and a favor from a fixer who laughed through gold teeth. "Powerless in paradise," the fixer said. "They'll smell the street on you and spit you out." Ray doesn't plan to be spit out. He plans to bite.
A proctor drone hovers, iris dilating. Name: Ray Kings. Catalyst: Unregistered. Status: Probationary E-Rank. The gate peels open like a wound. Cadets stream past in jumpsuits stitched from sponsorship logos. Their powers flicker: gravity wells, photon blades, telekinetic coffee cups. They smell of ozone and entitlement. Ray smells of rain and rust.
He keeps his head down. Counts heartbeats. Catalogs exits. The Predator System is only a pressure behind his eyes yet, a hunger without a mouth. But it's waking. He feels it the way a dog feels thunder in its teeth.
Orientation fills the Grand Atrium, a dome of smart-glass cycling through heroic holograms: Arion Drake shaking presidential hands, Luna Vale flash-freezing a tsunami into a sculpture of mercy. The new cadets cheer like it's scripture. Ray's stomach knots.
Headmaster Helios glides to the podium, silver hair, voice like velvet dragged over razors. "We are the shield of humanity," he says. His gaze snags on Ray for half a heartbeat. Recognition? Calculation? Ray files it under later.
Dorm assignments flash. Block D: charity cases, psych risks, and kids who bite. Ray's bunk neighbor is a pyrokinetic who snores embers. Across the aisle, a teleporter keeps phasing through the wall to raid the vending machine.
Night one, Ray climbs to the roof. The city sprawls below, neon veins pulsing. He pulls the shard fragment from his pocket, jagged, warm, useless to anyone else. Etched on the surface: Project Predator – Subject Zero. He presses it to his temple. Nothing. Just the old ache.
Four stories down, a girl trains alone. Ice spirals from her palms, shaping a wolf that paces, snarls, dissolves into snow. Luna Vale. Her power is clean, surgical, beautiful. She looks up. Their eyes lock through the dark. The wolf explodes into mist. Ray's pulse stutters. The hunger sharpens, teeth scraping bone. He crushes it. Not yet.
Dawn exam: live combat sim. Drones with tasers, blades, net launchers. Cadets pair off. Ray draws Rian Cross, C-rank gravity, Council subsidiary heir. Rian cracks his knuckles. "Try not to bleed on the floor, charity."
The arena is a maze of shifting steel. Drones deploy. Rian lifts a hand; gravity folds, drones crumple. He never looks away from Ray. "Powerless trash." Ray runs. Not away. Toward.
Years in underground pits taught him how to fight without magic. He slips under the gravity field, drives a stolen shock-baton into Rian's ribs. Bone cracks. Rian roars, slams Ray into concrete. Breath explodes. Vision tunnels. Pain is an old friend.
Ray rolls, comes up inside the guard, baton to the soft spot under the jaw. "Yield." Rian spits blood. "You're nothing." Cadet Cross, stand down. Cadet Kings advances. Rian's eyes promise murder. Ray smiles with split lips. First blood tastes like ignition.
That night the dorm is quiet. Ray showers off arena dust, watches pink water spiral down the drain. In the mirror his reflection is hollow, cheekbones sharp, eyes ancient. He traces the scar across his throat, souvenir from the night everything burned.
The whisper returns, clearer. Host identified. Trauma threshold met. Initializing Predator Seed. His knees buckle. The world inverts. Memories not his own flash: mother's lullaby, father's equations, Drake's smile as the flames rose. Something vast and cold unfolds in his chest, petals of black glass.
When he surfaces, the mirror is spider-webbed. Blood drips from his knuckles. On the glass, written in crimson: CONSUME. Ray stares until the word loses meaning. Then he cleans the mess, wraps his hand, and lies awake counting heartbeats that aren't all his.
Tomorrow the hunt begins for real.