Silas screamed, a sound that tore through his throat as the black veins on his neck bulged, threatening to burst. He thrust his hands forward, and the golden energy siphoned from Aryan roared out like a captive star released from its cage.
The beam of raw biological power slammed into Iskandar's violet singularity.
It wasn't an explosion, not in the traditional sense. It was the screech of physics breaking. A shockwave of inverted pressure flattened the rain, creating a vacuum dome that expanded instantly. The singularity collapsed, unable to digest the sheer density of the life force fed into it. The backlash hit the ground with the force of a tectonic shift.
"Move," the Masked Man said.
He didn't yell. He didn't panic. He simply adjusted his position relative to the collapsing gravity, stepping sideways as a shipping container to his left crumpled into rust dust, toppling exactly where he had been standing a second before.
As he slid behind the cover of a concrete barrier, his boots skidding through the oily sludge, his hand swept over the body of a fallen mercenary—one of the men Silas had crushed earlier. The Masked Man didn't look down. His fingers simply found what they were looking for on the dead man's tactical vest.
Cold, spherical steel. A fragmentation grenade.
He ripped it free from the corpse's webbing and clipped it to his own belt in one fluid motion.
Iskandar emerged from the dust cloud, his coat shredded, his face a mask of bleeding fury. The feedback hadn't killed him; it had only stripped away his composure. He wasn't a king anymore. He was a predator.
"I will unmake you!" Iskandar roared, charging forward.
He didn't cast from a distance this time. He closed the gap with terrifying speed, his boots rotting the asphalt with every step, leaving a trail of smoking sludge.
"Scatter," the Masked Man commanded.
Silas broke left, dragging a stumbling Aryan into the shadows of a crane. The Masked Man stood his ground.
Iskandar swept his hand in a vicious arc. The air hissed as the entropy wave lashed out. The range was wide, the lethality absolute. Anything the violet light touched aged a thousand years in a second.
The Masked Man didn't dive. He didn't roll. He halted his momentum on a dime, leaning his upper body backward. The violet wave passed horizontally over his chest. The air pressure from the wave ruffled the fabric of his black T-shirt, yet not a single thread was touched.
Iskandar snarled, following up with a downward strike intended to crush the human into dust.
The Masked Man sidestepped. A shift of six inches.
The Warlord's fist hit the concrete. The ground turned to gray ash instantly, a crater forming where the Masked Man's boots had been a fraction of a second prior.
"Aryan, intercept!" The Masked Man's voice cut through the noise, calm and devoid of exertion.
From the darkness, a grey blur smashed into Iskandar.
Aryan didn't hesitate. He didn't look for an exit. He hit the Warlord with the force of a freight train, his skin fully hardened into metallic scales. He tackled Iskandar into a stack of oil drums, crumpling the steel and spilling black sludge into the rain.
Iskandar snarled, grabbing Aryan's throat. "Filth!"
Smoke erupted from Aryan's neck. The decay ate through the armored skin, sizzling into the meat beneath. But Aryan didn't scream. He gritted his teeth, his eyes burning with a newfound, cold rage. He clamped his hands over Iskandar's wrists, forcing the Warlord to focus on him, buying the one second of distraction the Masked Man required.
"Silas! Now!"
Silas, nose bleeding, slammed his palms onto the wet concrete. "Up!"
Shadows erupted beneath the brawl, launching both Iskandar and Aryan into the air. Aryan kicked off the Warlord's chest, flipping backward and landing in a crouch, his throat already knitting itself back together in a gruesome display of steam and bone.
Iskandar landed on top of a container, looking down like a dark god. His entire body was glowing with violet instability. The air around him rippled. The rain didn't even touch him anymore; the droplets rotted into hydrogen vapor before they could wet his skin.
He looked at the Masked Man.
"You are just a man," Iskandar whispered, his voice amplified by the static in the air. "No magic. No biology. Just meat waiting to spoil. You cannot dodge the atmosphere itself."
Iskandar raised both hands. The violet aura expanded, forming a sphere of death nearly ten feet wide. He leaped.
He didn't aim to land near the Masked Man. He aimed to swallow him whole. The spread was too wide to sidestep, too fast to escape. It was a checkmate.
The Masked Man didn't run.
He tracked the descent. His eyes, visible through the slit of his mask, narrowed slightly. He wasn't seeing a monster—he was reading motion. Angle. Speed. The rate at which the decay field was blooming outward.
He reached to his belt.
As Iskandar came down, the Masked Man moved. It wasn't fast enough to look unreal—just exact. He stepped forward into the Warlord's path, slipping beneath the expanding edge of the violet sphere as it descended.
For the blink of an eye, the Masked Man stood in the only place the field couldn't reach—pressed tight against Iskandar's chest, inside the radius of his own power.
Iskandar's eyes went wide. He opened his mouth to scream, to unleash a torrent of pure entropy that would erase this insect at point-blank range.
The Masked Man jammed the grenade into Iskandar's open mouth.
He didn't pull the pin. He didn't flick the spoon.
He simply shoved the sphere of serrated steel into the violet void of the Warlord's scream.
And then, with a shove that utilized every ounce of kinetic chain in his body, the Masked Man pushed off Iskandar's chest and backflipped away.
Iskandar gagged. His power, reactive and uncontrollable, did exactly what it was designed to do.
The entropy field sensed the foreign object. It attacked the metal.
In a microsecond, the steel casing of the grenade rusted, pitted, and crumbled into dust. The safety lever disintegrated. The spring, aged to brittle nothingness, snapped.
The explosive core was suddenly exposed, the detonator triggered not by mechanics, but by the collapse of the structure holding it back.
There was no click. There was no fuse delay.
BOOM.
The sound was wet, muffled, and final.
Iskandar's head didn't just explode; it vanished in a pink mist of superheated vapor. The blast was contained almost entirely within his skull and upper torso. The headless body stood for a fraction of a second, the violet energy flickering wildly, confused, searching for a mind to command it.
Then, the body collapsed.
The violet light snapped out.
The Masked Man landed on his feet in a crouch, ten feet away. He stood up slowly.
He brushed a speck of dust from his shoulder. He checked his gloves. Pristine. He checked his torso. Unmarked.
The rain fell around him, washing over him, but he stood amidst the carnage as if he existed on a different plane of reality—one where he could not be touched.
Silence rushed back into the shipyard, heavy and suffocating.
Silas and Aryan stood over the corpse of the Warlord. Aryan looked at the headless body, then at the Masked Man. The boy wasn't shaking. He stood tall, the grey scales receding into his skin, revealing a jaw set with granite determination.
"He's dead," Aryan said flatly. Not a question. A confirmation.
Silas didn't look at the body. He looked at the Masked Man, his usual smirk replaced by a pale, shaken look. He watched the Masked Man adjust his watch, checking the time as if he had just finished a routine errand.
"You didn't pull the pin," Silas said softly, the cigarette in his hand forgotten. "I saw you. You just... shoved it in."
The Masked Man looked at him. "The pin is steel. The spoon is steel. His power rots metal instantly."
"So you bet your life that his magic would arm the grenade for you?" Silas shook his head, a nervous laugh bubbling up. "That's not tactics. That's insanity."
"It's physics," the Masked Man replied. "Steel rusts. Fire doesn't."
He walked toward Aryan.
The boy met his gaze. There was no fear in Aryan's eyes anymore. The fire in the temple, the torture in the basement, the battle in the rain—it had burned the fear out of him, leaving only a cold, hard slag of resolve.
"The list ended with him," the Masked Man said, his voice level. "But the war doesn't."
He gestured to the open gate of the shipyard, leading out into the city, and then to the dark, blood-soaked ground they stood on.
"You have a choice, Aryan. You can walk out that gate. Disappear. Find a quiet corner of the world and pretend you are normal. You can have a life."
The Masked Man paused, his eyes locking onto the boy's.
"Or, you can stay. You can learn to control the weapon you are. You can use that power to ensure that no one else ends up in a basement like you did. You can stand between the innocent and the dark."
Aryan looked at the gate. It was wide open. The city lights flickered in the distance, promising anonymity. Then he looked at his own hands—hands that had turned to steel, hands that had held a Warlord in place.
He looked back at the Masked Man.
"I don't have a home," Aryan said, his voice raspy but steady. "I don't have a father. I don't have anyone waiting for me out there."
He stepped closer, closing the distance between himself and the terrifying soldier.
"I'm not running anymore. I'm with you."
The Masked Man nodded once. It was a small movement, but it carried the weight of an oath.
He turned to Silas.
"He's yours," the Masked Man said.
Silas blinked, nearly dropping his lighter. "Excuse me? I'm not a babysitter. I deal with ghosts, not teenagers with anger issues."
"You deal with the unnatural," the Masked Man corrected, checking the magazine of his pistol before holstering it. "He is a biological impossibility. Teach him control. Teach him how to integrate the physics of his body with the environment. If he burns out, it's on you."
"And what are you going to do?" Silas asked, exasperated.
"I have a schedule to keep."
The Masked Man turned and began to walk away, his silhouette merging with the shadows of the scrapyard. He moved with that same steady, unhurried pace—the walk of a man who had walked through hell and hadn't let the flames touch him.
Silas watched him go, then looked at Aryan, who was waiting expectantly. Silas sighed, rubbing his temples.
"Great. Just great," Silas muttered, flicking his lighter open. The flame turned blue for a split second.
"He likes us," the raspy, double-toned voice whispered from the back of Silas's mind, sounding amused. "Shut up," Silas murmured to himself, lighting a cigarette. He exhaled a cloud of smoke. "Yeah. He definitely likes us."