Part III — The Lunar Fire
They hunted him across the undercity.
Alpha scouts. Syndicate operatives. Both convinced that what he carried was too dangerous to exist unclaimed.
He no longer ran to hide.
He ran to test.
Every echo in the tunnels, every pulse of sound through metal — he bent them, shaped them, tuned them.
It started small: a hum that made walls vibrate, a tone that bent bullets mid-flight.
Then — a chord that could shatter light.
The lunar fire answered.
Blue-white arcs snaked from his fingertips, not burning but resonating — cleansing static, rewriting the noise.
Lira found him on a rooftop overlooking the city's black river. Her face was lit by the glow of the towers.
"They're calling you a heretic now," she said. "Both sides."
He grinned through exhaustion. "Guess that means I'm finally honest."
She tossed him his guitar — scuffed, cracked, salvaged from the ruins of the club where it all began.
"You're bleeding again," she murmured.
He strummed once. The string hummed like the world's oldest heartbeat.
"Good," he said. "It means I'm still alive."
The sound rippled across the skyline — and for a moment, every light in the city dimmed in rhythm.
Somewhere far above, in orbit or memory, the Moon pulsed once in answer.
Kai Moon — fugitive, anomaly, wolf of sound — looked out at the horizon of towers and lies.
And whispered to the wind,
> "Let them build their thrones.
I'll burn the crown."
---
> "Divinity was never about obedience.
It was about volume."
— Echo, live transmission: The Fire Sermons