The alarm screamed at 5 AM.
Arin's hand slapped it blind. For a moment he just lay there, listening to his mother cough in the next room. The same cough she had for three years and they couldn't afford to cure it.
He got up.
The room was small, one cot, one chair, one window that looked out at another wall. His sister Lina slept on a mat in the corner, her thin blanket rising and falling with each breath. She was sixteen. She dreamed of becoming a crystal-weaver. Arin dreamed of making enough money to pay for her classes.
He pulled on his work clothes stained coveralls, scuffed boots, a jacket that had belonged to his father and slipped out before either of them woke.
The streets of the lower city were already alive.
Food carts hissed steam. Workers shuffled toward factories. A massive hologram flickered above a noodle shop, showing a handsome man in glowing armor surrounded by lightning.
"IGNATIUS REX! S-RANK LUMINARY! WATCH HIM BATTLE TONIGHT ONLY ON AURA-SPHERE!"
Arin ignored it. He'd seen Rex's face a million times. Everyone had. The Hunters were celebrities, athletes, gods. They lived in the floating cities above, in towers of crystal and light. They killed monsters. They got rich. They never looked down at the people below.
Arin looked up once. Through the haze and the smog, he could just see them the Shard-Cities. Huge chunks of rock and metal and glass hanging in the sky like upside-down mountains. Some were small. Some were so big they blocked out the sun. All of them belonged to people who'd never stood in a ration line.
He looked back down and kept walking.
GOLIATH SALVAGE was a squat, ugly building built under one of the giant pillars that held up the upper city. It smelled like blood and chemicals and burnt meat. Inside, the noise was constant—grinding, hissing, shouting.
Arin punched his code into the clock.
LATE: 7 MINUTES. FINE: 5 CREDITS.
He cursed under his breath. Five credits was breakfast for a week.
His foreman, Drav, waved him over without looking up from his tablet. Drav was an M3—just powerful enough to throw a man across a room, not powerful enough to leave this job. He made sure everyone remembered it.
"Bay 4. Graniteback forelimb. Cut out the soft parts before they harden. Don't screw up."
Arin nodded and walked to his station.
The forelimb was huge—bigger than a person, covered in thick grey skin that had already been stripped by the higher-level workers. Arin's job was the messy part: cutting into the joints, pulling out cartilage and tissue that could be sold for medicine.
His saw whined. He started cutting.
Just keep working. Don't think. Cut. Haul. Get paid.
His mother needed medicine. Lina needed school fees. The rent was due in a week.
Cut. Haul. Get paid.
At noon, his wrist buzzed.
EMERGENCY: BAY 9. DOUBLE PAY. REPORT NOW.
Double pay. That could cover Lina's fees for a month.
He went.
Bay 9 was behind heavy doors at the end of a long hallway. Warning signs flashed on the walls.
DANGER: HIGH VOLTAGE
M4+ ONLY
ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK
Arin pushed through.
The room was huge. In the center, hanging from chains, was a body. Not a Graniteback. Something bigger. Something that still crackled with blue light even in death.
Storm-Razor Avian. Arin had seen pictures. They were A-Rank—city-killers. One of these could tear through a neighborhood in minutes.
Someone had already cut out its main core. The chest was a gaping hole. But the body still hummed with leftover energy. That was Arin's job now. Cut out the rest. Make it safe. Make it into product.
He grabbed his harness and climbed up the beast's side.
The lightning sac was near the wing. A football-sized organ that stored electricity. If he cut right, he could pull it out whole. If he cut wrong, he'd fry.
He'd been cutting wrong his whole life. He knew how to be careful.
The saw touched flesh.
*PING. *
Something hard. Something that shouldn't be there.
Arin pulled back the tissue and froze.
A crystal. The size of his fist. Purple. Glowing. Pulsing like a heartbeat.
A core fragment. Sometimes a tiny piece of the main core got left behind. Sometimes it was stable. Sometimes it wasn't.
This one wasn't.
The pulsing got faster. The light got brighter. Alarms started blaring somewhere far away.
Arin looked down. Four other workers were below him, still cutting, still working, still alive. They didn't see. They couldn't run fast enough.
The crystal pulsed again. Violet light leaked through his fingers.
Arin made a choice.
He slammed his body against it.
The world went white.
He was somewhere else. A city of crystal towers under a purple sky. People with four arms moved gracefully between buildings made of light. Music played—strange and beautiful, like nothing on Earth. A voice spoke in his mind, calm and sad.
"It must hold. For those who come after. For the strangers beyond the sky."
Then pain. Then nothing.
Arin woke on his back.
The room was destroyed. The beast was gone. The ceiling had a hole in it, and through that hole he could see the distant lights of the upper city, cold and far away.
He tried to move. Pain shot through him—but not the pain of burns. A different pain. A full pain, like he'd swallowed lightning.
He looked down.
Crystals stuck out of his chest. Dozens of them. Purple and gold, sharp and beautiful, growing from his skin like they'd always been there.
Then they started to melt.
Not melting—sinking. Sinking into him, into his flesh, into his blood, into something deeper. The wounds closed behind them. The skin smoothed over. When it was done, there was nothing left but—
A hum.
Deep in his chest, where his heart should be, something hummed. Something warm. Something alive. Something that felt like it had always been there, waiting.
He touched his sternum. Warm. Steady. Hungry.
---
The medics came. They scanned him. They poked him. They told him he was lucky. The blast had been contained. The shards had been superficial. He'd be fine.
They sent him home with painkillers and a warning to rest.
Arin walked through streets that looked the same but felt completely different. Every light seemed brighter. Every sound seemed sharper. He could feel things now—energy flowing through power lines, through people, through the air itself. It was like hearing a song that had been playing his whole life, but he'd only just now tuned in.
His mother was asleep when he got home. Lina's room was dark.
He lay on his cot and stared at the ceiling until sleep took him.
Morning came too fast.
Arin sat up and knew immediately that something had changed. His body felt heavy. Not tired strong. Dense. Like he'd been filled with lead.
He stood. The floor creaked under him in a way it never had before.
He looked at his hands. Same hands. But when he flexed them, a faint golden glow flickered under the skin.
He needed to know.
he feels... different. Stronger. He can sense things—the energy in the walls, the faint pulse of the city above.
He goes to Mahajan. The scan flickers.
M-SCALE: 2.1
Mahajan raises an eyebrow. "Well. You're not a Null anymore, boy. Congratulations. You're officially the weakest Powered person in the city."
Kai stares at the number. M2. Barely anything.
But something in his chest hums. And he knows—somehow, he knows—this is just the beginning.
He walks home through streets that look the same but feel different. His mother is cooking. Lina is studying. Life goes on.
But Kai is no longer just Arin the Cutter.
He's something else now.
He just doesn't know how far he'll go.