Grant stood in the wreckage, fists clenched, every nerve thrumming. His chest rose and fell, uneven, like he couldn't catch up to his own heartbeat.
The Shadow was suddenly gone. A whisper of static.
Then—blur.
Red streaks whipped around him in circles, so fast they carved phantom echoes into the air. Grant spun in place, disoriented, his own reflection flickering into a dozen versions in the glowing arcs.
The Shadow's voice boomed from every direction, sharp as thunder:
"If you don't have a plan… you will not run far."
Grant turned, desperate, searching for the source. The blur whipped past his shoulder, then his back, then his front, until it felt like he was trapped in a storm of himself.
"Don't rush. Don't waste motion. Choose your moment."
The red blur froze, just for a heartbeat, directly behind him.
Grant gritted his teeth, spun, and lunged—wild, instinctual.
CRACK.
In an instant, the Shadow shifted, faster than sight. A sweeping strike caught Grant square across the chest. His body lifted off the ground, slammed into the cracked wall, and collapsed in a heap of dust and sparks.
Air ripped from his lungs. His ribs screamed.
The Shadow loomed above him now, calm, unshaken, his black mask unreadable. Lightning traced down his arm, fading.
"You attacked because you felt threatened," the Shadow said. "Not because you knew where I would be. There is a difference."
Grant coughed, spitting grit, and pushed himself up on shaky elbows. "You… you move too fast. No one can—"
"No one?" The Shadow tilted his head. "You mean you cannot. Not yet. But you will."
Another blur. Another strike. Grant barely registered movement before he was face-first in the dirt again.
His palms burned. His body quivered. Rage began to rise.
"Patience," the Shadow said, voice steady, resonant. "If you waste your power in desperation, you will burn out before the fight even begins."
The ruined safehouse groaned under invisible weight. The static in the air thickened, humming against Grant's skin, and he realized something: every time the Shadow moved, the lightning left a faint tremor behind. A vibration. A rhythm.
He wiped dust from his lip, his eyes narrowing. His chest still heaved, but inside, something steadied.
The Shadow blurred again, streaking into motion. This time, Grant didn't lunge. He held, listening.
The red arcs cracked past him, tracing a circle. Grant focused—not on the sight, but on the hum that echoed half a breath after the Shadow passed. A delay. A pattern.
For the first time, Grant's fingers curled not out of panic, but anticipation.
The Shadow's voice cut through the storm:
"Lesson one: wait. When you choose your moment—make it matter."
Grant braced.
And when the blur slowed for just a fraction, he lunged—his hand closing on the lightning's tail.
The storm exploded around him.
the ruined safehouse humming like a cage of live wires. Dust swirled in spirals, pulled by invisible currents.
Grant staggered to his feet, shoulders aching, chest still raw from the last strike. His eyes darted, searching for the blur. Every instinct screamed move, but he held still, forcing himself to remember the Shadow's words.
The red lightning flared again. Trails snapped through the air like cracks of a whip, burning afterimages across his vision.
The Shadow's voice, calm and steady.
"In chaos… find focus."
Wind funneled past Grant's ear. He ducked just as a blur streaked overhead, smashing into a wall with seismic force before vanishing again. Rubble collapsed, but Grant barely registered it—he was watching the trails.
Each pass left a scar of red lightning, jagged and brief. At first, they felt random. Unpredictable. But then—patterns. The same angles, the same curves.
Grant slowed his breath. His pulse matched the hum in the air.
Another blur, coming fast. Instead of panicking, he tracked the arcs, not the Shadow. A slash of static bent left—Grant rolled right, the strike missing by inches.
For the first time, the Shadow's speed didn't flatten him.
He landed in a crouch, chest heaving, eyes locked on the fading lightning.
Another pass—this time low. Grant leapt, boots skimming rubble, twisting mid-air. The Shadow's strike scorched the ground beneath him, harmless.
The blur stopped. The static eased. And in the silence that followed, the Shadow's black mask tilted toward him.
Grant realized—he'd won that exchange. Clean.
The Shadow's voice echoed, deeper, resonant.
"Good. You're starting to see."
Grant wiped sweat from his brow, a small grin breaking despite his exhaustion. "So the trick is… not looking at you. It's looking at what you leave behind."
The Shadow gave the faintest nod. "Awareness is survival. If you can see the storm… you can outlast it."
****
The void folded, colors bleeding into shape. Suddenly, Grant was standing in his old living room.
The Taylor house.
Sunlight filtering through cracked blinds, the couch sagging where his father used to sit, the faint smell of dust and wood polish. Every detail was perfect, but wrong.
Grant's chest tightened. His hands curled into fists. "Why… why here?"
Shadow emerged from the kitchen doorway, calm, mask gleaming black against the soft glow of the house. "Because this memory chains you. You keep coming back here, even when you don't realize it. This place—this pain—has become your cage."
Grant's voice cracked. "This is my home."
Shadow tilted his head. "No. This is your weakness."
Before Grant could protest, a blur of red lightning streaked past. A fist connected with his ribs, sending him sprawling across the room. He crashed through the old couch, splinters and stuffing scattering like shrapnel.
The house reseted. The couch knitted back together, standing whole again, as if nothing had happened.
Grant coughed, dragging himself up. "You… you slowed down. You let me think I had a chance."
Shadow stood, unmoved. "And you still lost. That's because you're clinging to pain instead of using it."
Grant's anger flared. The image of his father's death, his mother's absence, the years of silence in a sterile bed—they pressed into his chest until something cracked. He felt the charge flicker at his fingertips, red sparks chasing along his skin.
Shadow blurred again, moving in for the strike.
But this time, Grant moved too.
His body snapped into motion, the world dragging like thick syrup around him. He felt the air whip past, the carpet fibers stretching like threads under his feet. For the first time, he chose the moment—sidestepped, let the punch slice through empty air, and countered. His fist connected, driving Shadow back into the wall.
Grant stood there, chest heaving, sparks dancing wildly across his arms. His eyes were wide with shock.
Shadow rose slowly, and beneath the mask came a low, approving laugh.
"There it is. Not weakness. Not the cage. The fire."
Grant's heart pounded, torn between rage and exhilaration. For the first time, he wasn't just surviving in the void—he was fighting back.
****
The Real World: Present Day
The infirmary was quiet, the steady hum of machines filling the sterile air. For four years, the rhythm of Grant's life had been measured in beeps and pulses—constant, unchanging.
Until now.
The first alarm shrieked like a blade across glass. Monitors spiked, wild red lines screaming irregularity. Grant's body convulsed against the bed, every muscle locking the electricity was threading through him. His small frame jolted so violently that the cot rattled against the floor.
"Kudin!" Aldus barked, already at his side.
The medic slammed his hands together, conjuring a shimmering globe of warped light—a temporal pause bubble. The air within thickened instantly, forcing Grant's seizures into sluggish motion, giving his vitals a fragile tether of stability.
Kudin's brow furrowed, sweat beading as he reinforced the stasis. "His system is fracturing between rhythms—something inside him is accelerating!"
Aldus placed her hands near Grant's temples, eyes glowing faint gold. She whispered a breathless incantation, and her gift stretched thin: Memory Manifestation. She slipped her essence toward him, brushing against the walls of his fractured consciousness.
For a heartbeat, she touched the boy's mind—white void, static, storm.
Then it hit.
Red lightning tore outward, bursting from Grant's skin in crackling arcs. It snapped against the walls, the ceiling, the very instruments keeping him alive. Aldus staggered back, her connection severed by raw force. She gasped, clutching her chest, eyes wide with pain. "No… he rejected me. That's impossible! Something pushed me out."
The room smelled of ozone. Monitors sparked, screens fracturing into static.
Slha's voice cut in over comms, urgent. "Security feeds are fried—I'm going in direct." Her body flickered, phasing through the med bay's data conduits, slipping across digital streams until she materialized at the wall panel.
Her eyes widened. Through the distortion, she caught a glimpse: Grant's body writhing, sparks of red lightning snapping through the air like veins of wildfire. The storm seemed to pulse in rhythm with his heartbeat.
She phased back, breathless. "…I saw it. He's—changing. Not dying. Changing."
Kudin's bubble held, but the strain showed—his jaw tight, hands trembling as the temporal field warped around Grant's bed. "Whatever's happening… we can't stop it. Only delay."
Outside the chamber, Anna had been pacing. When Slha emerged, pale and shaken, Anna grabbed her by the shoulders. "What did you see?!"
Slha hesitated. For once, the hacker's mouth had no clever quip. "…He's seizing. It's not normal. Not medical. Something's tearing through him."
Anna's mask slipped. Her eyes, always fierce, brimmed with fear she refused to voice. Her hands trembled, just once, before she balled them into fists.
She drew in a sharp breath, forced the terror down, and whispered with a steel edge:
"Then I'm not leaving him. Not now. Not ever."
****
Grant lost track of time inside the void. It wasn't days or months anymore. It was the rhythm of his breath, the crack of lightning, the sting of failure, the heat of pushing further.
He learned. Slowly. Painfully.
Red trails in the air stopped being chaos and became maps. He started predicting, weaving between strikes. He phased through walls of a city that didn't exist, his lightning sparking against Shadow's. And when the swarm of phantom enemies rushed him, Grant didn't panic—he moved. Dodged. Countered. Turned the fight into a storm of motion that bent to his will.
"You see now?" Shadow's voice carried approval for the first time. "Your healing isn't a shield. It's permission to risk everything."
When exhaustion pushed him to the edge, something else broke free. Rage sharpened into focus. His hand trembled, bones tearing through skin, reshaping into a jagged blade. He didn't stop it this time. He wielded it. Struck with it. And Shadow grinned like he'd been waiting for that moment all along.
Years bled together. He grew taller. Stronger. The boy who had entered this place at thirteen was gone. At eighteen, he stood across from Shadow—no longer a student, but almost an equal.
The black-suited figure lowered his mask just enough to reveal his face. Not a stranger's. Not an enemy's. His own, scarred and older.
"You're ready," Shadow said. The void shuddered, lightning cracking the endless whiteness.
"The world outside hasn't waited. The war has already begun."
Grant's chest heaved, fists tight. "So what now?"
Shadow lifted a hand, red lightning burning hot. "Now, I merge with you. I'm not separate—I am the path you will walk. Knowledge will surface when you face what haunts you."
Grant didn't flinch. "Do it."
The hand pressed against his chest. Red lightning roared through him, tearing the void apart. His scream tangled with static as everything shattered.
****
The Real World: Now
Alarms blared as every monitor in the infirmary went dark. Sparks danced across Grant's body, arcs of red lightning that defied every containment field Kudin had wrapped around him.
Then the world itself shuddered.
Beyond the base, power grids flickered. Streetlights died, traffic signals blinked into silence. Block by block, a blackout spread outward in a perfect sphere.
From the roof, Slha phased into a satellite feed, eyes widening as she read the impossible data. "Grid failure detected—origin point is…" She froze. "…us. It's Grant."
Kudin's face went pale, hands pressed hard against the med bubble. Aldus and Acuent exchanged grim looks—this wasn't just an episode. This was a beacon.
The lights across the city went dark. The horizon itself seemed to dim.