Delhi woke up to silence.
Not the peaceful kind. The kind that settles over a place after something has screamed too loudly for too long. Block 19 was sealed with black barricades stamped with ARA sigils. Drones hovered like insects that fed on secrets. Power crews worked under armed escort, repairing what reality itself had torn.
Zero had become a word you didn't say out loud.
Aarav watched the city from the roof of a half-burnt textile mill near the Yamuna. Smoke curled from chimneys that hadn't known legal work in decades. He'd been here all night, sitting where Mira used to sit, staring at a skyline that refused to care.
There was no body to burn.
The ARA had taken her.
Containment Protocol Theta didn't just seal streets—it erased people from the story. Anyone caught inside was logged as "relocated for debriefing." The truth was uglier. The truth was that Mira's body had become evidence.
Aarav's hands were steady now.
That scared him more than the shaking had.
A comm chirped in his ear—an encrypted frequency Mira had set up years ago, keyed to ghosts and last resorts. He hadn't expected it to still work.
A voice filtered through static. "If you're hearing this, it means you broke Rule Zero."
Aarav closed his eyes.
Mira.
Not alive. Not really. A dead-drop recording she'd prepared for the version of him she was afraid he might become.
"You're going to want to burn everything," her voice said softly. "The ARA. The Hunters. The world that lets people like Sameer breathe. Don't."
His jaw clenched.
"Grief lies," the recording continued. "It tells you that the fire will warm you. It won't. It just leaves ash in your lungs."
The city hummed below, unaware it was being lectured by a dead woman.
"I don't believe in your rules because they're perfect," Mira's voice said. "I believe in them because they're the only thing that makes you different from the things behind your power."
The transmission cut.
Aarav stayed still until the silence stopped feeling like pressure on his chest and started feeling like something he could move inside.
His burner phone buzzed.
A single message from a number he didn't recognize:
ARA INTERNAL BULLETIN – LEAK
TARGET: ZERO (REAL NAME UNKNOWN)
STATUS: CLASS-OMEGA ANOMALY
Bounty Authorized. Dead or Contained.
Hunters Cleared to Lethal Force.
The city shifted.
You could feel it when the money hit the street. Brokers woke up hungry. Hunters sharpened their blades. Low-ranks who'd never dreamed of touching a Class-Omega target started imagining their names on a list that mattered.
Aarav crushed the phone in his palm.
Below, a group of street kids kicked a punctured football through an alley. They laughed too loud, too bright, the way people did when they didn't know the rules had changed overnight.
Aarav stood.
He stepped into a fold of space—and the rooftop vanished.
He reappeared in a basement lit by flickering tube lights. The air smelled of oil and desperation. Three Awakened sat around a crate of black-market artifacts—two C-ranks and a D-rank kid who couldn't be older than sixteen. His hands shook as he held a shard of glowing crystal.
The men laughed at him. "Relax, it only burns the weak parts first."
Aarav felt something cold move behind his eyes.
He didn't step forward.
He let the space between them compress.
The crate split. The artifacts scattered, their energies bleeding harmlessly into the concrete as Aarav flattened the rules that let unstable power exist uncontained.
The men scrambled back.
"Zero—" one of them whispered.
Aarav looked at the kid. "Drop it."
The boy obeyed instantly, the crystal clattering to the floor. Tears streaked his face. "I didn't know. They said I could help my sister—"
Aarav knelt and pushed the crystal away with his shoe, careful not to touch it. "You don't owe anyone your body to fix their world."
He turned to the men.
"Rule three," he said quietly. "If you sell power to children, you lose the power to stand."
The floor beneath them forgot how to be solid.
They fell into a shallow distortion pocket—no deeper than a grave, no tighter than a coffin. Enough to trap them. Enough to leave them breathing and screaming until someone official came to explain consequences.
Aarav took the kid's jacket and draped it over his shoulders. "Go home. Now."
The boy ran.
Aarav stood alone in the basement as sirens grew louder—ARA patrols drawn by the artifact flare.
He stepped out of reality before they arrived.
By evening, the city's underbelly knew two things:
Zero was still alive.
And Zero had started enforcing new rules.
Not against the ARA.
Not against Hunters.
Against anyone who tried to replace the city's cruelty with a cheaper version of it.
Somewhere deep in the architecture of the world, something old listened—and smiled without a mouth.
The bounty changed the way people looked at shadows.
Aarav felt eyes on him even when he moved between spaces. The city had learned his rhythm—where distortions folded easiest, where the rules thinned. Hunters followed those scars like trackers following footprints in snow.
He let them follow.
The old metro tunnel beneath Kashmere Gate was dead infrastructure—collapsed platforms, rusted rails, the kind of place the city forgot until it needed to hide something ugly. Aarav stepped into the tunnel and waited.
Footsteps echoed.
Not rushed. Controlled.
Three presences entered the dark, their auras sharp with intent. Professionals. Not the low-rank idiots chasing bounty fantasies.
A woman's voice cut through the gloom. "You're loud for someone who hates being seen."
Aarav didn't turn. "You're quiet for someone who brought friends."
Laughter—soft, almost fond. "Fair."
They stepped into the spill of Aarav's dim light.
The first was a broad-shouldered man with skin etched in stone-like sigils—Rank-B Earth Shaper, defensive tank. The second moved like a blade finding its shadow—Rank-A kinetic striker, eyes too calm for someone who enjoyed violence.
The third… made the air feel wrong.
She wore simple clothes, hair tied back, eyes reflecting nothing. No visible awakened marks. No aura spike. Just a pressure, subtle as gravity.
"I'm Isha," she said. "I don't work for ARA. I work for outcomes."
Aarav finally turned. The tunnel walls shivered faintly, reacting to the thing behind his gaze.
"Outcomes cost money," he said. "Who paid you?"
Isha smiled. "No one paid me to find you. I paid to find myself."
The kinetic striker lunged without warning.
Aarav folded space—and felt resistance.
The blow clipped his shoulder, driving him into a pillar. Pain flared, real and sharp.
The earth shaper slammed the ground, stone rippling up in a wave meant to pin Aarav's legs.
Aarav twisted reality sideways. The stone wave bent into a useless arc, crashing into empty air.
Isha raised a hand.
The pressure in the tunnel deepened.
Aarav's power hesitated.
Not suppressed.
Observed.
"You feel it, don't you?" Isha said softly. "The thing behind you. The layer of the world that watches when you push too hard."
Aarav's breath caught. "You're lying."
She shook her head. "I'm listening."
The kinetic striker came again. Aarav slipped past him, compressed space around the man's joints—enough to lock him mid-motion without breaking bone.
The earth shaper charged. Aarav stepped aside, let gravity misbehave just long enough to send the man crashing into a wall.
Isha didn't move.
She watched.
The tunnel quieted, dust settling in slow spirals.
"You don't kill," she said. "You cripple systems. You leave people alive to carry consequences. That's not mercy. That's control."
Aarav's eyes narrowed. "You here to lecture me or collect a bounty?"
"Neither," Isha replied. "I'm here to warn you."
She stepped closer.
The world leaned in with her.
"There are beings," she said, voice low, "that aren't gods and aren't concepts. They're… permissions. Old rules the universe wrote for itself when it didn't know how to stay consistent. You've been touching one."
Aarav felt the door behind his eyes stir.
"Stop," he said.
Isha's gaze softened. "If you keep forcing reality to bend, that permission will start bending you. It will offer help when you're weakest. It will make your rules feel small."
Sirens wailed faintly in the distance—ARA patrols triangulating the energy spikes.
The kinetic striker struggled against the invisible lock on his joints. "Boss, ARA's coming."
Isha nodded. "We're leaving."
She looked at Aarav one last time. "If you want to survive what's waking up behind you, stop hunting alone. Find the ones who study the old permissions. They call themselves the Archivists of the Thin."
She turned to go—then paused. "And Zero? The bounty isn't the dangerous part. The people who don't want to kill you… are."
The three hunters melted back into the tunnel shadows, moving like they'd never been there.
Aarav released the distortions holding the men. They bolted, not looking back.
Alone again, Aarav pressed his palm to the cold stone wall.
Behind his eyes, something ancient shifted—curious.
For the first time since Mira died, Aarav felt fear that had nothing to do with loss.
The Archivists found Aarav the way storms find coastlines.
Not by chance.
By pressure.
He felt it in the alleys near Jama Masjid—an absence where sound should have been, a thinning of crowds where space forgot how to hold people close. The city made room for them before they arrived.
Three figures waited beneath a torn awning.
No armor. No weapons. Just sigils stitched into old fabric, eyes that had learned to look at places most people didn't believe existed.
"You're late," said the one in front—a man with silver-threaded hair and a voice like worn paper. "We've been tracking your distortions since Block 19."
Aarav didn't slow. "Then you're bad at hiding."
A woman beside the man smiled faintly. "Hiding is for things that want to be missed. We want to be understood."
Sirens wailed somewhere far off. The bounty hunters were close. The city was breathing faster.
"We don't have time," the silver-haired man said. "You've brushed an old permission. We catalogue those. We contain the ones that can't be reasoned with."
Aarav stopped.
"Containment looks a lot like cages," he said.
"Sometimes," the woman replied. "Sometimes it looks like boundaries."
The world twitched.
A presence moved at the edge of Aarav's perception—the door behind his eyes easing open, the invitation of easy answers.
The silver-haired man felt it. His gaze sharpened. "It's curious about us. That's bad."
The bounty hunters arrived like a flood—five of them, high-tier, sigils blazing, powers tearing the night open with heat and gravity and hungry light.
"Zero!" someone shouted. "On your knees!"
The Archivists moved as one.
Not with power.
With placement.
They stepped into precise positions around Aarav, their sigils lighting the thin places in the air. The street narrowed, reality bracing itself like ribs around a lung.
"Do not answer it," the silver-haired man warned Aarav. "Do not let it finish a thought through you."
The first Hunter struck—a beam of condensed plasma tearing through the awning.
An Archivist lifted two fingers.
The beam curved. Not bent—forgot its direction.
It tore a glowing trench into empty street.
The Hunters adapted fast. Gravity wells bloomed. Kinetic waves stacked. A net of force descended.
The Archivists held the line—but they weren't built for siege.
Aarav felt the door open wider.
He could end this in a breath.
He could let the permission behind his power write the solution.
"Don't," the woman Archivist said, blood at the corner of her mouth. "If you let it help now, it will help forever."
A Hunter's strike slipped through—a needle of compressed sound that punched into the silver-haired man's chest.
He staggered.
The formation broke.
The city screamed as reality loosened its grip.
Aarav moved without deciding to.
The door behind his eyes opened.
The permission leaned through him.
Space didn't bend.
It complied.
The Hunters froze in place—not trapped by force, but by the sudden agreement of the world that they were done moving. Powers guttered. Light died. Gravity went quiet.
For a heartbeat, Delhi held its breath.
Then the permission tried to finish the thought.
Not just the Hunters.
The street.
The buildings.
The people hiding behind walls.
Aarav felt the scope widen—and tore himself back.
He slammed the door.
The world snapped into place with a sound like breaking glass.
The Hunters collapsed, unconscious, blood seeping from ears and noses. The street was scarred, but standing.
The silver-haired Archivist lay dying.
Aarav knelt, hands shaking. "I didn't mean—"
The man smiled, tired and kind. "You meant to save. That's how it gets you."
His eyes flicked to the thin air around Aarav's face. "It will speak to you now. Softly. Like a friend who remembers what you need."
The man's breath stilled.
The woman Archivist bowed her head once, grief disciplined into something sharp. "You broke your rule," she said to Aarav. Not accusation. Statement.
Aarav looked at the unconscious Hunters, the ruined street, the dead man at his knees.
"Yes," he said.
She met his gaze. "Then you'll need new ones."
ARA transports roared overhead, floodlights carving the night into white scars.
The Archivists melted into the city, carrying their dead with them.
Aarav stood alone again.
Behind his eyes, something smiled without a mouth.
You did well, it whispered, in a voice that felt like relief.
Aarav turned away from the sound.
By morning, the bounty had a body to count.
Not Zero's.
An Archivist's.
And the underworld learned that Zero's rules could break.