Lio was restocking supplies in the back storage when he heard it—the sharp, unmistakable sound of the back entrance lock shattering.
His hands froze mid-motion, a jar of powdered moonstone suspended in the air. The shop was closed. All the apprentices had left hours ago. Niamh was upstairs doing accounting, her muttered curses about expenses drifting down through the floorboards. And Jade was in the clinic room, confined and isolated, struggling with pre-heat symptoms that had everyone on edge.
No one should be breaking in. No one would dare.
Lio's C-rank wind manipulation flared instinctively as he set down the jar with trembling fingers and moved toward the sound. He wasn't a fighter—not really. His talent was decent for utility work, but he'd never been in serious combat. Still, he had enough awakened ability to defend himself if needed.
He rounded the corner into the workshop and found the intruder immediately.
The man was gaunt, his frame so thin it bordered on skeletal. Hollow eyes burned with a feverish intensity, bloodshot and wild. His clothes hung loose on his body, stained and worn from months—maybe years—of living rough. But what made Lio's blood run cold was the aura radiating from him in aggressive, predatory waves.
An awakened and completely unstable.
Shadows writhed around the combat staff he held like living serpents, coiling and uncoiling with restless energy. The darkness moved wrong—not natural shadow manipulation, but something enhanced, aggressive, twitching with barely-contained violence.
"Who the hell are you?" Lio demanded, calling wind to spiral around his hands defensively. The air currents formed visible vortexes, ready to deflect or strike.
Varen's head snapped toward him, and for a moment confusion flickered across his bloodshot eyes—as if he'd expected to find something else, someone else. His gaze swept the workshop: the workbenches covered in alchemical equipment, the shelves lined with ingredients, the forge in the corner still warm from the day's work.
No sign of Jade.
His confusion hardened into frustration, then rage.
"Where is he?" Varen's voice was rough, barely controlled, each word scraped raw. "The boy. Jade. Where is he?"
Lio's stance shifted, his feet finding better balance on the workshop floor. This wasn't a random burglar looking for valuables. This was someone hunting Jade specifically. Someone who'd broken in with purpose and desperation.
"Out of my way," Varen snarled, moving forward with jerky, uncoordinated steps. The shadows around his staff lashed outward like whips testing distance.
"You're breaking into a private business," Lio said, keeping his distance and his wind barriers active. "That makes you my problem."
Varen's shadows struck—testing, probing—and Lio threw up a compressed wind barrier. The shadows dissipated against it with a hiss, but Varen was already moving, his desperation making him aggressive and reckless. He closed the distance faster than expected, his enhanced strength from the drug pushing his broken body beyond its limits.
Footsteps thundered from upstairs. Niamh appeared in the workshop doorway, taking in the scene in one swift, trained glance—the shattered lock, the gaunt stranger radiating aggressive alpha pheromones, Lio defending with wind barriers, shadows crawling across every surface.
Her eyes went cold and sharp. This was a woman who'd survivedl War, who'd fought and bled and lost everything before finding Jade. The maternal warmth vanished, replaced by a cold look.
"Lio, step back!" she called, moving toward them with purpose.
Varen pivoted toward her, shadows gathering around him like storm clouds preparing to strike. But he didn't attack. Instead, his hand moved to a small canister at his belt—something he'd been saving, prepared as insurance.
He uncapped it while simultaneously placing a mask on his face.
The effect was instantaneous.
A thin, colorless vapor erupted from the canister, spreading through the workshop with terrifying speed. It moved like it had intent, flooding every corner, every gap, every breath of air. Lio's wind manipulation tried desperately to disperse it, his barriers shifting to push the gas away, but he was already choking. His vision swam as the chemical compounds invaded his lungs, his nervous system, his brain.
"No—" Lio gasped, his wind barrier collapsing as his concentration shattered like glass. His knees buckled.
Niamh staggered, her hand reaching out for support that wasn't there. She tried to fight it—tried to stay conscious through sheer willpower—but her body refused to obey. The workshop tilted sideways, and then she was falling, her last conscious thought a desperate prayer that Jade would somehow sense the danger and avoid it.
She hit the ground hard, her body going limp. Lio followed seconds later, crumpling beside one of the workbenches with a soft thud that seemed too quiet for how much it meant.
Varen stood over their unconscious forms, breathing heavily, his chest heaving with exertion. The drug in his system screamed for violence, for action, but he forced himself to pause. To think.
He stepped over their bodies and moved deeper into the shop, searching.
...
The sound reached the clinic room as a distant commotion—muffled by the sound-dampening runes carved into the walls and door but still audible if you were listening. Voices raised in confrontation. The unmistakable crash of movement, of struggle, of combat.
Jade's eyes snapped open.
He'd been resting on the narrow cot, his body already struggling with the approaching heat that had everyone in a panic. Every nerve ending felt oversensitized, raw, like his skin was too tight. His temperature fluctuated between fever-hot and normal in unpredictable waves. The dampening effect on his senses was maddening—like trying to see through thick fog when he was used to perfect clarity.
But the moment he heard that sound, instinct overrode everything else.
He pushed open the clinic room door and moved into the corridor, his senses stretching outward despite the interference. His Void Sense, weakened though it was, reached toward the workshop like fingers searching through darkness—
And felt it. A presence. A writhing shadow trying desperately to minimize its existence, to hide, to remain undetected.
But that was impossible.
Not against someone with god-tier Void bloodline flowing through their veins. Not against someone who could sense disturbances in darkness itself. The presence might as well have been screaming its location.
Jade moved faster, his footsteps silent on the wooden floors as he crossed the distance to the workshop. His heart was already pounding—not from exertion, but from a deep, instinctive knowledge that something was wrong.
He entered the workshop, and the world crystallized into a moment of perfect, terrible clarity.
Niamh lay crumpled near the storage shelves, her silver-streaked green hair spilled across the floor, her body completely limp. Lio was a few feet away, collapsed beside a workbench, his chest rising and falling in shallow, regular breaths that at least confirmed he was alive. A thin haze of chemical scent lingered in the air—something designed to incapacitate, to render them helpless without killing them.
For a moment, Jade couldn't move. Couldn't breathe.
His entire body went cold, a bone-deep chill of absolute horror.
Niamh.
His Niamh, the woman who meant everything to him.
She was lying on the floor. Unconscious. Vulnerable.
Because he'd let down his guard.
The guilt crashed over him like a tidal wave—a weight so heavy it nearly dragged him to his knees. He'd been so focused on managing his approaching heat, so confident in his reputation as a person not to be trifled with in the slums, that he'd let his guard down. His Void Sense, usually a constant presence wrapping around the entire shop in layers of protective awareness, had been dampened by his oncoming heat.
He'd assumed no one would dare attack. Assumed his presence alone was enough protection. Assumed his reputation would keep them safe.
He'd been wrong.
And Niamh and Lio were paying the price for his arrogance, his complacency, his failure!.
Jade dropped to his knees beside Niamh, his hands shaking as he reached for her. His fingers found her throat, pressing gently against her pulse point. The beat was there—steady, strong, regular. Relief crashed through him so intensely it made his vision blur.
Alive. She's alive.
He checked her breathing next, his ear close to her mouth. His eyes almost spinning tracing every nook and cranny of her body and internal workings. Normal respiratory rhythm. No signs of distress or damage. Whatever gas had been used, it was designed to incapacitate, not kill.
"Niamh," he whispered, his voice cracking despite his efforts to control it. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
His hands hovered over her, wanting to move her somewhere safer, somewhere comfortable, then he saw it.
A flicker of movement in his peripheral vision.
Instinct screamed a warning half a second before shadows exploded from behind one of the larger workbenches. They came at him like spears, fast and aggressive, aimed directly at his back while he was vulnerable and distracted.
Jade moved.
There was no thought involved—just pure reflex honed by years of training and combat and surviving situations that should have killed him. He twisted, his body responding with the fluidity of someone who'd long since transcended normal human limitations.
A figure emerged from concealment—the gaunt man with hollow eyes and aggressive aura pouring off him in waves. His combat staff was wreathed in shadows, and he swung it with desperate strength toward Jade's head.
Jade didn't even stand up fully. He just struck.
His fist drove forward from his kneeling position, all his strength and speed compressed into a single point of impact aimed at the man's solar plexus.
The result was absolute devastation.
Time seemed to slow as Jade's fist connected. The man's entire body seized, every muscle locking simultaneously as the force transferred through flesh and bone. The air exploded from his lungs in a sound like a dying gasp. His ribs shattered under the impact, multiple fractures spreading like spiderwebs across his torso. His organs compressed under force that shouldn't have existed in hands so small, so young.
His body lifted off the ground.
For a heartbeat, he was airborne, suspended by the momentum of a single punch. Then gravity reasserted itself and he crashed backward into the workshop wall hard enough that stone cracked. The impact made a sound like thunder, and dust rained down from the ceiling.
He hit the floor and lay there, unable to breathe, unable to move, completely incapacitated by a single strike.
Jade stood slowly, his breathing steady and controlled, his silver eyes cold and utterly merciless as he looked down at the broken man on his floor. His fist wasn't even bruised. He hadn't even tried.
Varen stared up at him through pain-blurred vision, and in that moment, the full weight of his miscalculation crashed down on him.
The drug. The months of preparation. The enhanced strength flowing through his veins from Berserker's Blood. None of it mattered.
This boy—this child who isn't more than fourteen years old—had just destroyed him with a casual punch. Not even a serious attack. Not even a try.
The power gap wasn't a gap. It was an abyss. And Varen had just thrown himself into it thinking he could fly.
"Who are you?" Jade asked quietly, his voice carrying no emotion. Just cold, clinical assessment. "Why did you attack them?"
Varen gasped for air, his broken ribs making every breath agony. His vision swam from the pain, from the force of impact that had nearly torn his body apart. Blood filled his mouth—internal bleeding, probably. His organs were shutting down.
But beneath the pain, beneath the realization of how utterly he'd been outmatched, something else burned with desperate, frantic energy.
He had to talk. Had to keep Jade focused on him, distracted, engaged. Had to buy time for his last desperate gamble.
His hand moved slowly, carefully, toward his thigh. The movement was hidden by his body's position on the floor, by the angle of his collapse, by the shadows still writhing weakly around him.
Jade saw the subtle movements but wasn't fazed. Because the man lying in front of him was simply not a threat no matter what he tried. Or so he thought.
"My name..." Varen gasped out, his voice raw and shaking, blood flecking his lips. "Varen... Kellis. Does that... mean anything to you?"
...