Exalibar lay sprawled on the couch in his hotel room, a damp towel draped over his eyes like a surrender flag. The sterile ceiling was no more interesting than watching paint dry.
"It's been three weeks, bro," he groaned to the empty air. "Three weeks, and we've found nothing."
Sky, equally frustrated, was pacing a trench in the expensive carpet. "It's like we came here for nothing but a really intense couples' retreat. I can't keep going on 'dates,' Exalibar. My conscience is starting to feel guilty for using Jane as cover."
"Yeah, yeah," Exalibar muttered, not moving. "But you're complaining to the wrong person about your dating life." He finally sat up, slinging the towel aside. "I'm calling Valery. We're calling this mission off. There's nothing here but weird vibes and good food."
"For real," Sky agreed, running a hand through his silver hair. "Other than that energy issue—which might just be shitty genetics or something—there's nothing. No labs, no secret meetings, no whispers. Nothing."
A sharp knock at the door cut through their wallowing.
"Come in!" they both called out, expecting room service or a frustrated teammate.
Aisha opened the door but didn't cross the threshold, her expression bored. "We're heading to the Three Valleys Dam. Want to tag along?"
Exalibar's perpetual frown deepened. "Who's 'we'?"
"Me, Dylan, Jack, and your girlfriends."
A spark of interest. "No Ethan?"
"Ethan flew back yesterday," Aisha said with a dismissive wave. "Got called for some official hero mission. Part of his public debut or something."
Exalibar's mood instantly lifted. "As long as that sanctimonious saint isn't here, count me in!" He was on his feet now, a genuine smile breaking through. "The Three Valleys Dam is the largest hydroelectric dam in the world! I've written essays about that damn dam. Hell, my final engineering project last year was a stress-analysis model of its spillway design—"
"Look at you, nerding out," Aisha said, a faint smile touching her own lips.
Exalibar composed himself with a cough. "Well, yes. It's a legitimate spectacle of human engineering. Something to truly marvel at."
The drive to the dam, nestled in the mountainous region outside the capital, was filled with what Sky would later describe as "an audiobook narrated by a hyper-caffeinated engineer." Exalibar rattled off facts about concrete density, turbine capacity, and reservoir volume with passionate, relentless detail. Sky fell asleep within twenty minutes. Jane, in the back of the seven-seater, soon followed. Dylan and Jack took turns driving in stoic silence. Aisha was absorbed in reading her novels on her tablet, and Chloe simply listened, a soft smile on her face as she watched Exalibar illuminate with pure, unguarded enthusiasm.
They arrived just as the last tour group was leaving the visitor centre. A uniformed attendant was locking the gates to the main power station.
"Closed for the day," the man said, not unkindly.
Exalibar's face fell so dramatically it was almost comical. "You've got to be kidding me. The power station…"
Chloe slipped her hand into his, giving it a reassuring squeeze. "Maybe another time, right? We can still walk the top of the dam wall. The view is supposed to be incredible."
Exalibar sighed, the wind taken out of his sails. "Yeah. I guess. At the very least, let's take some pictures. Document the failure of my dreams." He managed a wry smile.
"Oh, that sounds like fun!" Jane said, perking up. "A group photo!"
They assembled at a scenic overlook, the staggering, curved wall of concrete plunging down to the river below, the vast reservoir stretching to the horizon behind them. Exalibar set up his phone on a small tripod.
"Okay, everyone!" he called, framing the shot. "Big smiles! Three… two… one…"
BOOOM!!!
The sound was loud and was total. A deep, visceral thump that they felt in their bones more than heard with their ears. The ground beneath their feet shuddered violently.
A colossal fireball erupted from the heart of the power station they had just been denied entry to, followed by a series of secondary explosions that tore the structure apart from the inside. Chunks of concrete and twisted metal were hurled into the sky like confetti. A terrible, groaning crack echoed across the valley—a sound of structural failure.
The dam was breaking.
Chaos erupted. Tourists and workers screamed, a wave of pure panic surging as the dam wall began to shudder and crumble, a waterfall starting to spill from a growing breach.
The world snapped into hyper-clarity for Sky. Time seemed to thicken and slow. He was a blur of motion, appearing beside his brother, who had already flared his own mana into a pale imitation of speed.
"We need to get everyone out of here now!" Sky yelled, his voice strained with the effort of speaking at normal speed while his mind processed a thousand scenarios per second. "The wall is going to go!"
"You don't have to tell me twice!" Exalibar shouted back, his own enhanced perception taking in the nightmare. They became twin streaks of motion, darting through the frozen tableau of terror. They grabbed elderly tourists, crying children, stunned workers, and wisped them back to the high ground near the parking lot, far from the crumbling edge.
Exalibar's eyes caught a new horror. A young mother, clutching a toddler, had tripped. Above her, a refrigerator-sized chunk of debris, dislodged by another explosion, was plummeting directly toward them. He pushed his stolen speed to its limit draining the greater portion of his mana, but the physics of the situation were brutal and clear. The math in his head screamed that he wouldn't make it.
A blast of vibrant purple energy seared past his vision. It struck the falling debris head-on, vaporizing it into harmless dust and gravel. Chloe stood braced further up the slope, her hands outstretched, her purple eyes blazing with power. The path was clear. Exalibar shot forward, grabbed the mother and child, and blurred to safety.
On the dam wall itself, a different battle was being waged. Jane stood with her arms outstretched, her face a mask of utter concentration. A shimmering telekinetic field enveloped the massive section of cracking concrete, her will the only thing holding it together against the unimaginable pressure of millions of tons of water. Beside her, Aisha was on her knees, hands pressed to the structure. Vibrant green alchemic energy flowed from her into the dam, trying desperately to command the fractured concrete to re-knit, to hold.
But the scale was apocalyptic. A trickle of blood began to seep from Jane's nose. Her knees buckled, but she held. Her eyes were bloodshot, veins standing out on her temples and neck as Aisha poured every ounce of her being into a futile repair job against a dam giving its own effort to be destroyed.
It was too much.
With a final, gasped breath, Jane's telekinetic field shattered. She collapsed, unconscious. She slumped forward, hitting the wet concrete, the last hope of preventing a cataclysm falling with her.
The dam, breaking faster than it was being repaired, with a sound like the end of the world, began to fail in earnest.