Karen Briggs had many flaws, but a lack of volume wasn't one of them.
"You UNGRATEFUL ANIMAL! Kicking out your own PARENTS?! You should have been left to ROT in that orphanage!"
Ryan walked past her, into the bedroom, and started pulling things off hangers.
Dale's clothes. Karen's shoes. Tyler's gaming equipment, his posters, his collection of limited-edition sneakers that had cost more than Ryan's food budget for a year. Everything went into the hallway. Systematically. Efficiently. Without anger, without satisfaction — just the mechanical rhythm of a person clearing out space that should have been cleared out a long time ago.
Behind him, Karen's voice was a continuous, unbroken stream — ungrateful wretch, wild dog, should've left you on the street — the same five or six insults reshuffled into slightly different configurations, delivered at a volume that probably registered on seismographs.
Ryan didn't respond. There was nothing to respond to. He'd heard every one of those words before — not in this life, but through the memories, hundreds of times, delivered to a child who'd been too small and too scared and too dependent to do anything but absorb them.
That child was gone.
He was checking the closet for stragglers when a crash from the living room made him turn. Karen was at the coffee table, sweeping cups and plates onto the floor with both arms — a focused, deliberate act of destruction, ceramic exploding against tile like gunshots.
"This house is OURS!" she screamed, shards crunching under her feet. "If anyone's leaving, it's YOU! You think you're somebody now? You'll be dead in a DITCH!"
Dale, blood still trickling from his temple, had gotten vertical again. His fear had curdled into the specific brand of courage that cowards manufacture when they have an audience.
"If we hadn't kindly taken you in," he said, his voice shaking in a way that he probably thought sounded authoritative, "you'd have starved in that orphanage. Now you think you're better than us?"
Ryan stopped moving.
Kindly taken in.
He remembered the first year.
He remembered scrubbing floors at five years old while Karen supervised from the couch, eating ice cream, critiquing his technique. He remembered Dale coming home at midnight, stinking of beer, and kicking him awake because the dishes weren't done — even though Ryan had done the dishes, every dish, and Dale had pulled them back out of the cabinet and left them in the sink to have an excuse.
He remembered the winter of his eighth year. Not as a fact this time, but as a sensation — the cold of the balcony seeping through his blanket, the ice forming on the inside of the glass door, his fingers going numb, then his feet, then his thoughts, and Tyler's bedroom light glowing warm and yellow through the glass like a taunt.
He remembered going to school the next morning and a teacher asking why his lips were blue. He remembered Karen, who'd driven him to school, smiling at the teacher and saying, He loves playing outside. You know how boys are.
He remembered all of it.
"Enough." His voice didn't rise. It didn't need to. "You leave voluntarily, or I remove you. Those are your options."
"You wouldn't DARE!" Dale's chin jutted forward, his eyes flashing with something that was trying very hard to be defiance. "This house is in MY name! What right do you—"
"The house that you mortgaged to loan sharks last year?"
The blood drained from Dale's face so fast it was almost visible, like watching a glass empty. Karen's mouth snapped shut mid-word — the abrupt, mechanical silence of a machine being unplugged.
Ryan waited. Let the silence do its work.
They'd done it quietly. Mortgaged the house to fund Tyler's Awakening Evolution Serum — a prohibitively expensive treatment that was supposed to amplify his ability, launch his career, secure the family's future. They'd planned to buy the deed back once Tyler made it big.
Tyler was currently ranking in the bottom third of Normal Class Two.
"Wait." Dale's survival instincts, long atrophied, twitched back to life. "We mortgaged it. Not you. What does that have to do with—"
"Don't worry about the details." Ryan picked up his backpack. "I'll handle it. Your job is to be gone by the time I get back."
He walked out the front door and closed it behind him. The last thing he heard was Karen starting to scream again, but the sound was thinner now. Less rage, more fear. The difference between a dog barking and a dog yelping.
The old district was exactly what the name promised.
Condemned buildings crowded together like rotten teeth, their windows dark, their walls tagged with graffiti that had been layered so many times it had become abstract. The streets were cracked and buckled. The streetlights, the ones that still worked, buzzed with the dying-insect hum of old sodium vapor. The smell was wet concrete and something organic that Ryan chose not to investigate.
The loan sharks operated out of a building that had been scheduled for demolition twice and survived both attempts through a combination of bureaucratic inertia and the fact that the demolition crew's foreman owed them money.
A kid with bleached hair and a face that hadn't quite decided whether it was tough or terrified was standing guard at the entrance. He looked at Ryan. Looked at the backpack. Looked back at Ryan.
"Who are you here for?"
"I'm here about a house."
The kid processed this. Something in Ryan's expression apparently dissuaded him from the sarcastic response he'd been warming up.
"...Upstairs."
The second floor was a single room. Folding table. Four metal chairs. Four men, shirtless, tattooed, playing cards through a haze of cigarette smoke so thick it turned the single bare bulb into a smeared halo. They were large in the specific way that men who used their bodies for work were large — not gym-sculpted, but dense, functional, built for hitting things and not falling down afterward.
The bald one — clearly the boss — looked up when Ryan entered. His eyes were flat and appraising, the eyes of a man who priced everything he saw.
"You're here about the Briggs deed."
"Yeah."
"You bring money?"
Ryan dropped his backpack on the table. The bald man opened it.
Empty.
The temperature in the room dropped. Not literally — but the four men went still in a way that made the air feel colder, the walls closer, the exit further away.
"Kid." The bald man's voice was very quiet. "You have ten seconds to explain why I shouldn't break your legs."
"Because I'm not paying with money."
Ryan raised his arm. The Omnitrix materialized on his wrist.
The four men exchanged glances. The bald one stood, and the others followed — rising from their chairs with the synchronized economy of people who'd done this before.
"An Awakened, huh?" The bald man cracked his neck. "Passive, by the look of it. You think a little light show is going to scare us?"
They spread out. Four directions. Practiced. Professional.
Ryan turned the dial.
Green light.
What the four men saw next — what filled the room, floor to ceiling, wall to wall — was fire. Not the controlled column he'd used on Derek Hartwell. This was presence. A seven-foot figure wreathed in flame, radiating heat so intense that the cigarettes on the table ignited themselves and the playing cards curled and blackened.
The fight lasted less time than it takes to describe.
All four men were physical enhancers. Stronger than average, tougher than average, faster than average. Against another physical enhancer, they'd be formidable.
Against a walking furnace, they were kindling.
Ryan didn't burn them badly. Badly enough. He was precise — controlling the output, managing the temperature, delivering enough pain to eliminate resistance without causing the kind of permanent damage that turned a business negotiation into a murder investigation.
When it was over, he stood in the center of the room, still burning, and looked down at the bald man. The man was on his back, shirt scorched away, skin reddened in patterns that would hurt for weeks. His three associates were in similar condition, scattered across the floor like dropped marionettes.
"Here's the deal," Ryan said. His voice, filtered through Heatblast, sounded like a furnace talking. "The house is mine. The deed transfers to me. The debt stays on the Briggs family. You can collect from them however you want."
The bald man stared up at him. Swallowed hard. Nodded.
Ryan deactivated the transformation and picked up the deed.
When he got home, Tyler Briggs was waiting.
Dale and Karen's biological son was seventeen — a year younger than Ryan, but softer in every way that mattered. He'd grown up as the center of the household's universe, fed and praised and sheltered from every consequence. The result was a person who'd never been told no by anyone with the authority to enforce it.
He saw Ryan walk through the door and charged.
"This is YOUR fault, you bastard! You RUINED me—"
Ryan's front kick caught him in the solar plexus. Tyler folded like a paper airplane and hit the floor wheezing, his eyes bulging, his lungs trying to remember how to work.
"You little bea—"
Karen didn't finish the word. Ryan grabbed her by the collar and delivered two open-handed slaps — not with Heatblast's heat, just with the enhanced strength that the Omnitrix had permanently grafted into his baseline physiology. It was more than enough.
Her cheeks swelled. Her eyes filled. She crumpled.
Dale, who had made the brave decision to stand up, immediately made the wiser decision to fall back down when Ryan's foot connected with his midsection.
Ryan dragged all three of them to the front door — Karen first, then Tyler, then Dale — and deposited them in the hallway along with their belongings.
"I asked nicely. You didn't listen."
Karen, clutching her face, tears cutting tracks through the grime, could not — even now, even beaten and evicted and about to lose everything — stop herself.
"Ryan Blake, you MONSTER! When Tyler makes it big, the FIRST thing he'll do is—"
"Call someone." Ryan pulled out his phone. "You're going to need it."
He dialed. Waited. Spoke briefly.
Fifteen minutes later, Vinnie — the bald loan shark, now wearing bandages and a significantly humbler expression — arrived with his crew.
"These the ones?"
"All three. Them and their things. If it doesn't cover the debt..." Ryan shrugged. "Be creative."
Vinnie's eyes traveled over the Briggs family with the cold professional interest of an accountant reviewing delinquent receivables. Dale went pale. Karen started wailing. Tyler pressed himself against the wall and tried to become invisible.
Vinnie grabbed Dale by the collar and lifted. "Time to settle up."
"We'll pay! Just give us—"
"You'll pay now."
The rest was noise. Ryan stood in his doorway and watched them get dragged down the stairs — Dale first, feet barely touching the steps; Karen next, sobbing and grabbing at the railing; Tyler last, silent and shaking, his eyes fixed on Ryan with a look that was equal parts hatred and terror.
At the last moment, as the stairwell swallowed them, Karen's voice echoed back up one final time:
"Take HIM too! He's part of this family! Take the HOUSE—"