The kiss was a cataclysm.
It lasted only a handful of seconds, but for Elysia Wintercroft, time warped and stretched into an unnerving eternity. Her heart, a frantic drum against her ribs, hammered a rhythm that had nothing to do with the lingering fear of those goons and everything to do with the unprecedented, invasive intimacy of the act.
She shoved him back, her palm flat against his chest. The contact sent a secondary jolt of that strange, purifying warmth through her. Her face, usually a mask of pale, aristocratic composure, was a blazing scarlet. "What… what was that?" she stammered, the clipped, cultured edge of her voice fracturing for the first time.
Orion simply offered a lazy, disarming smile. "Healing. I told you." He took a half-step back, giving her space, but his eyes remained fixed on hers. A subtle glint flickered within them as the ethereal interface only he could see flooded his consciousness with data. The sensation of a new power settling into his soul was no longer foreign; it felt like coming home to a place he'd never known.
"And," he added, his smile widening, "it seems I gained something of a bonus."
Before the confused frown could fully form on Elysia's face, Orion held out his hand, palm up.
He didn't chant or focus; he simply willed it.
With a flicker of thought, the very moisture in the grimy air answered his call. It condensed, swirled, and flash-froze in a split second. An intricately detailed ice pick materialized in his hand, not cloudy and rough, but crystalline and perfect. Its edges were brutally sharp, its point impossibly fine, and the chill emanating from it was a profound, concentrated cold. It was a cold that didn't just lower the temperature; it devoured warmth.
Elysia, a high-tier Cryomancer whose entire life revolved around the mastery of ice, shivered involuntarily.
She stared, utterly gobsmacked. This was her power, her unique Aether signature, the very essence of her soul's expression. Yet he wielded it with a raw, instinctual elegance that had taken her years of grueling practice in Aegis Academies to even approach.
"How…?" she whispered, the word stolen from her lungs by the sheer impossibility of it. "That's my Talent. You can't just… copy a Talent!"
Her mind raced, sifting through every document, every lecture, every obscure text she had ever studied on Anomalous Talents. Yes, replication Talents existed, but they were pale imitations, heavily restricted and always resulting in a far weaker version of the original power. They were parlor tricks.
This… this was not a trick.
This was a theft of the soul.
Orion's response was a casual shrug that completely belied the world-shattering event that had just occurred. He let the perfect ice pick sublimate into a wisp of cold vapor, vanishing as if it had never been.
"I can," he said, his tone suggesting it was the most obvious thing in the world.
Elysia's mind reeled. This man, this boy from the Sump, was an anomaly that shattered every known law of Aether physics. Spontaneous Awakenings were one thing, a rare but documented phenomenon. This was something else entirely, a violation of nature.
In that moment, Lyra, with her ability to make a man's insides his outsides with a touch, seemed the more comprehensible of the two.
Orion… she had no framework, no definition for what he was.
Unregistered. Impossibly lethal. And holding a secret that could turn the foundations of their society to dust.
But above all else, he and his sister had saved her. She was indebted to them. More importantly, as her cold, calculating mind began to reassert control, she recognized them as a resource—an unprecedented, terrifying resource she could not afford to lose. Her eyes, the color of a winter sky, narrowed on Orion's face.
"You live here, in the Sump," she stated, her composure returning like a shield. "Unregistered. Untrained. You need a way to grow stronger, a place to hone your abilities without being captured and dissected by the Hero Association."
"Get to the point, Princess," Lyra sighed, leaning against a crumbling wall and examining her nails. "We've got places to be."
Elysia's glare could have frozen steel. "I will hire you. Both of you. As my personal security detail. Your methods are… barbaric, but they are undeniably effective."
The siblings exchanged a glance, a flicker of genuine surprise passing between them. In the Apex, killing was a taboo, a line that heroes and nobles alike refused to cross publicly. Life, they preached, was sacred. Heroes were ranked on public approval and service, not body counts. Villains killed, and were reviled for it.
This noblewoman had just witnessed them slaughter four professionals without an ounce of hesitation and was now offering them a job.
She was either incredibly desperate or dangerously pragmatic.
An idea sparked in Orion's mind, a path laid out for him by the System's silent, overarching directives.
[Objective: Establish an intimate bond to initiate fusion and acquire Talent.]
A preliminary bond had been formed. A deeper one would yield far greater results. And he had absolutely no desire to return to the rundown, mold-infested shed he and Lyra called home.
"We're not interested in being your hired muscle," Orion said, his voice shedding its casual air and taking on a new, resonant weight. "We'll offer you a different arrangement. A partnership."
Elysia's eyebrow arched. "A partnership? With… you?"
A delicate, condescending scoff escaped her lips. "I concede that you are an anomaly, but you are a penniless, unknown anomaly. That is not grounds for an equal partnership when I hold all the resources, all the connections, all the advantages."
"That kiss created a bond between us," Orion explained calmly, gesturing between them. "It allows our Aether to resonate, to harmonize. We can grow stronger, together. Far faster than any training at some gilded Aegis Academy could ever make you."
He met her skeptical gaze, his own eyes holding a profound depth that seemed to see right through her. "You have resources, yes. But those resources are finite. They can be taken, lost, or rendered obsolete. I am offering you a path to a future where resources are irrelevant. A future where S-Rank heroes and villains alike will bow their heads to you. I can teach you things about your own power that you have never dreamed of."
The sheer, unmitigated arrogance of the statement was breathtaking.
Him? A gutter rat from the Sump, teaching her, Elysia Wintercroft, about her own Talent?
The power she had painstakingly nurtured since childhood? It was ludicrous. While his brief display was impressive, she was sure his power had limits, drawbacks. It had to.
"You have possessed my power for less than a minute. What could you possibly teach me?" she retorted, her voice dripping with ice.
Orion's smile was her only answer. He didn't waste breath on words. He had been absorbing the System's data stream since the moment he acquired her power, a torrent of instinctual knowledge flooding his mind.
He closed his eyes and turned his attention to a collapsed section of the substation—a twenty-foot-wide ruin of rusted rebar and shattered concrete. Drawing upon the Progenitor's Legacy, he didn't just command his new Aether to freeze; he commanded it to conquer.
A wave of absolute zero erupted from him.
There was no sound, no explosion. Instead, all sound was stolen from the room. A deep, resonant hum vibrated in their very bones as the air itself seemed to crystallize. The ruined wall was instantly encased in a thick layer of ice, but it was not mere ice. It was a terrifying work of art. As clear and flawless as diamond, it refracted the dim light into a thousand dazzling points. It formed razor-sharp, geometrically perfect fractals and intricate, lethal lattices over the debris, sealing every crack and crevice.
The temperature plummeted so rapidly that the corpses of the thugs were flash-frozen, a thick layer of white frost blooming over their cooling skin.
He hadn't just made it cold. He had commanded the very concept of winter to manifest, an act of creation and extermination all at once. It was a display of raw, overwhelming power fused with a level of intricate, absolute control that was nothing short of divine.
Silence. Utter and complete.
Elysia stared, eyes wide, mouth agape. Her meticulously constructed pride, her entire understanding of the world, shattered. Her own Aether Core, the very source of her power, trembled within her—not from the cold, but in instinctual submission to an overwhelmingly superior authority.
He had accomplished in a single, effortless instant what would have taken her minutes of intense concentration and a catastrophic expenditure of her own Aether. More than that, the quality of the ice, its purity and density, was fundamentally superior to anything she could create.
It was as if he was born to wield her power, and she had only been borrowing it.
Orion opened his eyes, the frost on his eyelashes instantly melting away. He turned back to her and extended his hand.
"So," he said, his voice calm in the deafening silence, "what will it be, Elysia Wintercroft? Partnership?"
She looked from his outstretched hand to his confident, knowing eyes. Fear, ambition, and a strange, undeniable curiosity warred within her. He was her greatest threat and her greatest opportunity. He was the key.
Hesitantly, she placed her gloved hand in his. His skin was warm, a stark, grounding contrast to the glacial power he now commanded. Orion's smile was dazzling, and at this proximity, it almost sent her reeling.
"Where should we discuss the details of our new arrangement?" he asked.
"At… at my residence," she managed, her voice barely a whisper.
The moment their skin touched, the symbiotic bond between them flared. A pleasant, invigorating warmth spread up her arm, a comforting sensation that made her subconsciously want to draw closer to its source. She took a half-step forward, drawn into his personal space, before she froze, mortified at her own involuntary reaction.
She looked up and met his teasing gaze.
"Enjoying yourself?" he murmured.
A furious blush stained her cheeks. She snatched her hand back as if burned and spun around, her aristocratic bearing snapping back into place like a suit of armor.
"Just… keep up," she commanded, trying desperately to ignore the frantic beating of her heart. "We're leaving this cesspool. You'll be staying at my penthouse in the Apex. I trust it's an improvement over whatever hovel you crawled out of."
"So cute when she's flustered," Orion remarked quietly to his sister.
Elysia's shoulders went rigid, but she didn't retort, instead stalking towards the exit with all the dignity she could muster.
Lyra let out a loud, theatrical yawn. "Finally. Took you long enough, Princess. Should've known you'd be weak to his charms from the start."
Flustered but resolute, with two impossibly powerful shadows now bound to her fate, Elysia Wintercroft led them out of the darkness of the Sump and into the uncertain light of a brand new game.
...
The heavy iron door groaned in protest as Elysia shoved it open, revealing a narrow alley slick with grime. The air that greeted them was no fresher, thick with the smells of recycled ventilation, damp concrete, and burnt sugar from a nearby noodle stall. The oppressive weight of the Strata and Apex levels above blotted out the sky, plunging the Sump into a perpetual twilight punctuated by flickering neon signs.
"So, what's the plan, Princess?" Lyra's voice was dry as she leaned against the grimy brick. "Gonna flap your arms and fly to your ivory tower? I don't see any gilded chariots waiting for us."
Elysia shot her a withering glare, though it lacked its earlier heat. Exhaustion was setting in, a bone-deep weariness replacing the adrenaline.
She produced a sleek, impossibly thin comms device from her coat, its polished white surface a stark alien object in their surroundings. "Unlike you, I have connections that don't involve back-alley knife fights."
She tapped the screen, and a holographic interface shimmered to life. A moment later, a frantic, high-pitched voice erupted from the device, so loud that Orion could hear it clearly from several feet away.
"Elysia! Thank the First Wave! I've been trying to reach you for twenty minutes! The tracker on your coat went dead, Magnus is about to deploy a private army, and I was one second away from storming the Sump with a squad of silver guards myself! Where in the blazes are you? Are you hurt? Did those Valerian bastards finally try something? I swear, I will personally turn their corporate headquarters into a crater of molten glass!"
A weary, almost imperceptible smile touched Elysia's lips. "Lisanna, breathe," she interrupted, her tone a practiced mixture of exasperation and deep-seated affection. "Calm down. I'm fine. I ran into some… minor trouble. It's been dealt with."