The river held its breath.
Aelira took one step forward and the dock groaned. Nails squealed in their holes. Planks bowed a finger-width lower just from her presence. The air itself felt thicker, like wading into water up to the chest.
Evan Sharp rolled his shoulders and set his feet. The Docks' new thread tugged faintly at his bones—weak, but on his side.
[DING] Hazard: Silver-tier ability-user — Aelira (Pressure/Gravity control).Threat Level: Extreme.Quest: Survive Aelira(do not leave the Docks until timer ends).Reward: +100 Speed, Technique Unlock.Timer: 04:00.
Four minutes. The panel might as well have asked him not to exhale for a season.
Aelira watched the numbers flicker across his eyes and smiled a little. "Your toy likes timers. Let's test if your lungs agree."
Invisible force pressed. The dockhands cried out and fell to their knees. Water heaped against the pilings in a dark swell and spilled back in a low, angry slap. A coil of rope snapped like a gunshot.
Evan moved first. He had learned something from Bronze: never be the second idea in a fight.
Quickstep cut across the boards, Echo Step smearing a bold ghost to his right. Aelira's head didn't turn. The weight shifted sideways—subtle, clinical—and the ghost crushed flat into a puddle of light.
Evan Burst Stepped. The planks cracked spiderwebs under his feet; he reappeared at Aelira's flank with fist cocked.
Pressure hooked his wrist and down was suddenly a direction his arm was married to. His punch hit wood so hard pain flashed white. Momentum Shift yanked at his spine like a friend begging him to leave the wrong party. He accepted. The crushing vector became a shove he borrowed, twisting out from under it—his fist snapped the other direction and clipped Aelira's shoulder with a sharp shock.
She didn't stagger. The force bled into the dock with a low thoom that rattled teeth.
"Noted," she said, eyes brightening. "You learn."
She flicked two fingers. The world went tilted.
Weight skewed forty degrees left. Dockhands slid screaming; a pile of crates broke its rope like it had been held by a joke and thundered into the river. Evan's feet hit that new "down," legs burning as they fought to rewrite what "upright" meant.
Speed Sense lit arcs everywhere—white lines bending under a law that no longer respected itself.
Micro-Objective: Maintain footing during Vector Tilt for 10 seconds.Reward: +5 Speed.
He bent his knees, let Acceleration stack action on action: micro-step, pivot, toe dig, ankle rebalance—each movement making the next easier as his body learned the new lie of the world. Ten seconds crawled by on the panel and he didn't fall.
[DING] +5 Speed.Speed: 363 → 368.Timer: 03:32.
Aelira's hand lifted. Weight spiked like a hammer. A man on his belly shrieked as boards snapped under his ribs—then the pressure there vanished, flicked aside as if Aelira had noticed a spider on a window and decided to be merciful. She was cruel in the way professionals are: no wasted harm, all intention.
"Run," she said.
"I am," Evan said, and blurred.
Velocity Veil+ spilled out of him—five Evans sprinting, then seven, then ten as his speed fed the Veil's hunger. Afterimages split, feinted, hit. Half-strength blows hammered posts, crates, air. The dock became a hive of ghosts and fists.
Aelira didn't chase bodies. She pressed space.
Circles of gravity snapped into existence where each afterimage's step landed, like traps set in footprints he hadn't yet made. Three ghosts folded to knee with a sound like ribs protesting. The real Evan felt a ring try to close around his calves and Burst Stepped up—except up was a theory with a sense of humor and the ring clung. He let Momentum Shift convert the cinch into speed, tearing free with skin-burning force.
He reappeared at Aelira's back, shoulder driving. Pressure popped like a bubble exactly where he struck; his hit met air that wasn't there. The deflection dumped him sideways into a stack of nets hard enough to see stars.
Warning: Muscle strain (left shoulder). -1 Speed (temporary).Timer: 03:06.
Hook Street would have answered his breath with its own. The Docks' bond answered like a new friend texting "you good?"—present, supportive, not strong enough to lift.
Aelira's braid swung as she turned. Her expression wasn't contempt. It was appraisal turning into interest, the way someone looks at an instrument that might finally not be out of tune.
"Silver is not Bronze," she said mildly, and stepped.
Weight walked with her. Each footfall made the boards groan a note lower. Evan tried to read her through Speed Sense and got a forest of bent arcs—everything sloped toward her like she was a hill in a flat country.
He didn't run away. He ran through.
Quickstep, Quickstep, Burst—Acceleration climbed in his bones, the Tier 1 perk making each action easier to chain as if his joints had found their own bearings in borrowed gravity. He dove between two workers pinned flat and hooked a hand under the collar of a third, hauling him onto safer planks with momentum alone.
Micro-Objective: Rescue 3 civilians during Silver Pressure.Reward: +10 Speed.Progress: 1/3.
Aelira's eyebrow rose minutely. She increased the field. Lantern posts bowed. Water heaped. A gull fell out of the air like a stone.
"Four minutes is generous," she said. "For both of us."
Evan's lungs burned. His body felt like a violin string tuned past sense, humming. He welcomed it. The hum let him hear where weight thickened before it arrived, a pressure precursor against his skin. He dragged a second man by the belt and slid him across boards that wanted to be a wall.
Progress: 2/3.
The third was a boy no older than ten, clutching a coil of rope and a dream of being brave. The vector tilted again—this time up-right—and the boy began to slide toward the river with a slow inevitability that made men shout and be useless.
Evan ran into the wrongness. Echo Step placed a ghost where the boy would be. Gravity ate the ghost happily; the real Evan reached the child and planted.
He let pressure hit. Then he told it to shove.
Momentum Shift roared down his spine like a storm going the direction he preferred. The tilt became a launch, the boy skidding to safety on a line Evan carved with his own bones.
[DING] Objective complete.+10 Speed.Speed: 367 → 377.Timer: 02:22.
Aelira clapped once. It was not mockery. "Good," she said.
Then she got serious.
Gravity wells bloomed across the dock in a hex pattern—one under Evan, six around like petals, each pulsing deeper-deeper-deeper in a heartbeat drum. The wells began to move, knitting a net that made the Netweaver's tricks look like string games.
Speed Sense screamed. Staying meant being ground into lumber.
Evan exhaled and let go.
He didn't fight down. He refused it.
Velocity Veil+ exploded to full. Ten afterimages scattered; five were crushed as the wells inhaled. The other five leapt where wells had just been—Aelira shifted the pattern effortlessly and three more ghosts were eaten, their half-echo punches smacking empty air.
The real Evan threaded the last two gaps, every step a prayer to timing he did not believe in but respected. He reached Aelira again.
"Do you ever tire of being wrong about me?" he asked, and threw a flurry—fifteen strikes fanned like cards, each from a different angle, each a draft on Acceleration's compounding interest.
Pressure flickered—there—a seam less perfect for a blink, the way a jaw loosens in surprise. Two punches landed hard enough to bruise. Aelira's breath hissed.
Her hand flattened. A plate of force slammed him sideways into a mooring post with a crack that wasn't the post.
Warning: Rib bruise. -1 Speed (temporary).Timer: 01:41.
Pain sang. So did the river.
The Docks' bond thrummed, not big, but insistent—as if the water itself pushed against the pilings to tell him where they were strongest. Speed Sense began to see their rhythm: the suck and shove, the slosh that Aelira's pressure had to respect because water has opinions too.
He grinned, feral. "You're not the only one who can lean on a place."
He ran with the tide.
Acceleration stacked—step-step-step—feet kissing boards that were about to be shored by water, timing his passes with the river's breath so each pressure spike slid an inch to impatience instead of landing. He darted in and out of the wells like a man dodging drunks in rain.
Aelira's eyes sharpened from interest to focus. She lifted both hands. The dock dipped a full foot and then rose. Men screamed as the planks bucked.
Evan didn't try to stand on a floor that had opinions. He surfed it. Momentum Shift grabbed the dip and turned it to speed; Burst Step launched him along the rising plank like a shot from a child's see-saw made by a god with mean hobbies. He struck Aelira mid-rise with a shoulder that believed in math.
She slid back three paces. It was the first time she'd given ground to anything but choice.
"Silver," she said softly to herself, like a reminder of something she wanted to remain true. "Not Gold. Not yet."
The timer burned in Evan's periphery.
Timer: 00:58.
He needed to live for less than a minute.
Aelira stopped playing. The weight multiplied. Color bled out of the world until the river looked like iron. Boards screamed. Nails fled. A skiff tore off its moorings, crushed flat without fire as if an invisible hand had decided it was an offense.
Evan's knees hit wood. His elbows locked. Every breath was a coin paid to a miser.
"Yield," Aelira said, not unkind. "Registry will collar you. You'll live. Children here will keep their names. The Docks won't sink."
Speed Sense offered him a hundred arcs. All of them ended in him getting narrower.
Evan laughed once—a sharp sound, a bad idea. "I don't do collars."
He stopped thinking about running from the weight and thought about running through time instead.
Acceleration wasn't just the body moving faster. It was choices cascading quicker than regret. He stacked micro-motions until they were a blur of intent: finger curl, wrist twist, heel scrape, knee micro-bend, breath slice, jaw set—his whole frame becoming a thousand levers all cheating in the same direction.
Velocity Veil+ unfurled and stood. Not to distract, but to share the weight. Ten afterimages took ten parts of a burden that wanted one spine to break. The Veil wasn't illusions now; it was a team he made out of himself.
"Up," he told them, and pushed.
The world grudged an inch.
Aelira's eyes widened—only a little. She pushed back, and the inch begged to reconsider.
The river answered.
The water shoved. Not much. Enough. The Docks' bond hummed in his knees—minor yet real—and for a moment the planks had reasons to live that had nothing to do with Registry math.
Timer: 00:19.
Aelira tilted her head, listening to a sound only authority hears. She frowned. "Enough," she said to herself. "Witnesses have their story. Message delivered."
She released the pressure.
The dock sprang back like a bow. Waves slapped hulls in offended applause. Men collapsed. Someone sobbed because crying after not dying is traditional.
Aelira smoothed her coat as if she'd brushed past dust. Her gaze found Evan's again and weighed him like a coin.
"Run, Evan Sharp," she said. "Train. Claim. I will come when the map has your name on more than one corner."
She took two steps and the air folded. Space pinched like fabric and when it unpinched, there was no Silver on the docks—only a faint ache in the planks where her weight had been an idea.
[DING] Quest complete: Survive Aelira.Rewards:• +100 Speed• Technique Unlocked — Vector Break (E):Briefly cancel a localized gravitational vector in a small area (1–2m radius) to create a "clean" step or strike window. Short cooldown.Speed: 377 → 477.Level: 8 → 9
The numbers hit like oxygen. Evan sagged to a sit, chest heaving, bandages darkening where the mooring post had insisted on being present earlier. The dockhands lifted their heads to look at him; awe warred with fear and then shook hands.
"Ghost," someone whispered, reverent and tired. "Our ghost."
Evan got to his feet. The world felt lighter because it was. He flexed his hands and the new technique pulsed under his skin like a tool he'd always had a place for. Vector Break—a note he could play inside a song that wasn't his.
He looked upriver. The city lay there like a dare. Hook Street hummed at his back. The Docks' thread tugged him forward.
Status — Evan SharpLevel:9Speed:477Skills: Quickstep (F), Burst Step (F), Momentum Shift (F), Echo Step (F)Techniques: Velocity Veil+ (E), Speed Sense (E), Vector Break (E)Path: Velocity — Tier 1 (Acceleration)Titles: [Uncatchable I], [Swift Claimant]Domains: Hook Street (Strong), Docks (Minor)Overflow: 10% (streak active)
A boy with rope stared at him with shiny eyes. "Did we win?"
Evan considered the broken planks, the bent posts, the people who were standing anyway.
"Yes," he said. "We're faster."
He turned, the river wind lifting the edges of his coat, and started running before the Registry changed its mind about giving him four minutes.