Episode 10 — When the Heart Stops, the City Hears
Timeline: Same night as Episode 9. Zack is Level 10 (Steel Surge Phase 2 unlocked). Rain hasn't let up once.
⸻
The hospital at three a.m. is a church that forgot its god. Hallways whisper. Machines hum lullabies for people who won't wake. Zack stood in the doorway of Room 412, one hand on the frame, as if a door could hold him together.
His mother slept shallowly, breaths like folded paper. Moonlight seeped through cheap blinds, sketched ribs beneath the gown, made a halo of IV tubing. The HUD hung at the edge of his vision, indifferent, clinical.
LEVEL 10
EXP: 0 / 1000
STEEL SURGE: Phase 2 (Ready)
NEW: Overclock Heal (Minor) — convert surge burn into tissue repair, risk: alloy stress
"Hey," he said, because silence felt like surrender. He slid into the chair that was more confession booth than furniture. "You should see the other guy."
Her eyelids fluttered. The eyes were cloudy, then clear, then full of something heavier than pain. "You always… joke after you bleed," she whispered. "Is it funny?"
"Not even a little," he said, and the smile cracked.
Her fingers found his. Light as ash. Still her. "Tell me something true, Zack."
"Okay." He swallowed. "I'm scared. I fight monsters and the only thing that really scares me is this room."
Her eyes warmed, pride lit from the inside. "That's my boy. Brave in the only way that matters."
The monitor piped its patient music. On the TV mounted in the corner, a weather map blinked warnings for rain nobody needed a meteorologist to predict. Zack pressed his forehead to the back of her hand and breathed like he was borrowing oxygen from her lungs.
"Baby," she said. "If I go… don't chase me into the dark. Stay with the living."
"You're not going anywhere," he lied, raw. "I'm going to—"
The lights blinked. Once. Twice. The monitors hiccuped.
The nurse at the desk called down the hall, "We lost a circuit?" Another voice, thin with bad timing: "Generator's fine. Must be—"
The third blink wasn't a blink. The world tilted. Zack's metal bones rang like struck rails. He knew this sensation now the way pigeons know earthquakes.
"Marrow," he said, standing. Steel rippled under his skin like wind across tall grass.
The fluorescent light in Room 412 fractured into a hundred glittering filaments—and each filament cast a shadow. The shadows crawled down the walls, pooled on the floor, and stood up as Shades with blank faces and fingers like needles.
Zack stepped in front of the bed. "Not here."
One of the Shades turned its head slightly, as if considering the order. The silhouette of a smile formed, wrong where a mouth shouldn't be.
"Not here," Zack said again, lower, and his steel answered—a subsonic growl through the floor, a threat in a language meat shouldn't speak.
The curtain parted, not from any hand. Marrow's voice floated through the intercom speaker above the sink, sugar poured over bone dust.
"Evening, Zack. Visiting hours are over. Shall we discharge your mother?"
A red film washed over Zack's vision. "Come in person."
"Oh, I am," Marrow purred. "In all the places the hospital isn't looking."
He didn't need to announce himself. The hallway outside erupted in screams—the wrong kind for hospitals, raw and wet. The power flickered; emergency lights bathed the corridor in haunted red.
Zack turned to the nurse who had just rushed to the doorway, eyes wide. "Get everyone out of this hall. Now."
"I—who are—"
"Someone who can hold them for ninety seconds," Zack said, voice flat. "After that, nobody wins. Go."
She fled, calling codes that meant nothing to monsters. Zack faced the three Shades that had chosen to enter. The others were already moving down the corridor, slipping under doors like drafts.
He did the math. Save the whole floor or save the one person he couldn't lose. He hated the math. He chose anyway.
"Loud," he told his bones.
Steel Surge: Phase 2 bloomed without the scream of Phase 1. Not a detonation—deployment. The surge climbed his alloy veins like sunrise: clean, lethal, controlled. The room sharpened into perfect edges. When the Shades jumped, they were moving through syrup; when he moved, it was the idea of motion wearing a body.
He hit the first Shade with a triple-step combination, knuckles ringing like ball-peen hammers on empty oil drums. It unmade, smoke pouring back into the angles where light wasn't.
The second tried to go high for his eyes. He stepped through it, armor humming, and ate its arm with his steel fangs. No blood—only an absence that tasted like burnt sugar.
+150 EXP
EXP: 150 / 1000
The third had gone for the oxygen line. He tore it off the wall, flung it aside, and palmed the Shade against the window; glass spiderwebbed. He shoved harder. The pane burst, rain and night crashing in, curtain as a flag of surrender. The Shade tumbled into the dark between brick and parking lot and did not come back.
+150 EXP
EXP: 300 / 1000
"Zack," his mother breathed behind him, not afraid, aware. "Is that you shining?"
He half-turned, Surge dimming at his edges so the light on him didn't frighten her. "It's nothing," he lied. "It's me."
He heard the change in the hallway like an orchestra tightening—something heavier stepped onto the floor. Not a Shade. Something that wore them like perfume.
The doorway filled with a silhouette in a bone-white suit. Not him, just enough to pretend. Marrow's glamour smiled, teeth too many.
"Heroics in a hospital," it cooed. "How… sentimental."
Zack put his body between the bed and the doorway. Rain soaked the floor, pooling around his boots. The glamour tilted its head.
"Bring me her heart and I'll make it beat forever," Marrow said through the puppet. "You failed to consider my kindness."
"You failed to consider I don't negotiate with carrion," Zack said, and hit the glamour so hard its face inverted. It didn't bleed. It popped, skin peeling into moths that screamed as they dissolved.
Behind the glamour, four more Shades pounced. He met them in the hall. Red emergency lights painted everything like the inside of an artery. Patients cried in other rooms. A security guard raised a baton—brave, human, hopeless—and a Shade tore it from his hands as if we were made of seasons. Zack broke the Shade's spine in retaliation and shoved the guard back toward the nurses' station.
"Lock the fire doors," Zack barked. "Move!"
He needed a choke point. The hallway T-boned into a cross corridor by the elevators. He sprinted, boots splashing. Two more Shades peeled from the ceiling, claws for throats. He slammed one into the wall hard enough to paint the motivational poster ("COURAGE IS QUIET") with noise.
+150 EXP
EXP: 450 / 1000
The other dug into his shoulder, found purchase at last; steel fought steel, sparks stinging the air. He grabbed its wrists and pulled until its arms unzipped and the body sloughed like wet laundry.
+150 EXP
EXP: 600 / 1000
Elevators chimed like idiots. A Shade slipped between their doors and turned the cable smell into mourning. A different voice cut the panic: cool, bored, edged.
"Duck," Silas said.
Zack didn't ask why. He dropped. A line of silver cut the air where his head had been; the world put itself back together slower. A Shade above him realized it had been bisected and tried to decide how to feel about it before it was gone.
Silas stepped out of nowhere as if the corridor had become a page and he was a margin note. No suit tonight—black shirt, sleeves rolled, bandage gone from his shoulder. He flicked the air and a coin whistled through a Shade like a surgical rumor.
"Hospital policy," Silas said mildly, smoking without fire. "Don't bleed on the linoleum."
"It's already flooded," Zack snapped. "Get out."
"I'm not here for you," Silas said. "I'm here to keep the scale from tipping toward stupid." His eyes slid to Room 412, weighing, measuring, almost human. "You have… three minutes before this floor goes biblical."
Zack slammed a Shade's head into the elevator button panel until both stopped working. "Then help evacuate."
Silas arched an eyebrow, amused and annoyed in equal measure. "Tell Luna you conscripted me."
"Tell her yourself," said a voice from the stairwell door as it kicked open. Luna, drenched, mascara carved into war stripes, stormed in with a fire axe she had definitely not received training to use. "Where's chrome-teeth?—oh."
She stopped dead at the sight of Zack lit from the inside like a slow bomb. It stole her breath for a heartbeat. She replaced it with a snarl. "You glow pretty when you're dying."
"Help," Zack said, pointing down one wing. "Move the breathing ones. Shades don't like bright crowds. Keep them together."
Luna saluted with the axe and yanked the alarm pull. Red strobes turned the hallway into a heartbeat.
Silas flicked ash that wasn't and sighed. "Teacher's assistant, then." He blurred. The Shades that thought they were ambushers became curriculum.
Zack sprinted back toward Room 412. A stronger wrongness rolled down the hall like a blackout wave: not the petty malice of Shades, not the smug necromancy of a glamour—Marrow's Warden had learned the way. Smaller than in the yard, adapted for hospital corridors, all jagged plate and stuttering incense.
"Back for round two?" Zack muttered, setting his stance.
It ducked through the cross-corridor, shoulders scraping drywall into powder. The floor shook as it planted. The thing smelled like embalming fluid and wire.
His mother's room was six doors behind him. He couldn't let the fight reach her. He had to finish this here, fast, or die buying the seconds.
The Warden charged with a noise like a car crash that found God unsympathetic. Zack stepped into it at the last instant and torqued—judo at freight-train scale. He redirected enough to avoid being paste, not enough to avoid flying into the crash cart. It exploded, syringes and saline pinwheeling.
VITALITY: 74% → 51%
ALERT: Overclock Heal available. Risk: Alloy stress (Moderate)
The Warden wheeled, claws carving hunks from the hospital wall. It snarled—no mouth, but the sound shaped itself inside the ears of everyone still breathing on the floor. Somewhere a patient sobbed, "Please make it stop," to nobody authorized.
Zack triggered Overclock Heal. Heat roared through him; the slashes cinched, silver knitting under skin like lightning turned into thread. Pain didn't retreat; it organized. His eyes burned cold.
He sprinted—low, fast, the world stepping aside. Left feint, cut inside the guard, double-hammer to the knee. The plate dented where the leg should have learned humility.
The Warden kicked him through a rolling supply cart. Gauze snowed. He rolled, came up in a sprint, and bit—steel fangs flashing into the joint he'd softened. He tore. Something important parted with a thunk and a smell like old coins.
The Warden howled static; the leg buckled. It still had three more crimes for arms. One raked across his back; sparks fountained, the hoodie choosing oblivion. He felt skin go with it and did not slow.
VITALITY: 51% → 33%
Overclock Heal spent. Cooldown: 3 min
"Silas!" Zack barked, not looking, because to look was to lose.
Silas appeared like a footnote that became the thesis. He stepped in, palms light and precise, and struck the Warden twice in places the body only admitted to morticians. Each touch detonated pain. The Warden reeled.
"Thirty seconds," Silas said, not to Zack, to time.
"Ten," Luna countered, reappearing with two nurses and half a dozen patients behind her, herded into movement. "Elevator's jammed. Stairs only. Keep the thing here."
Zack nodded once. He let himself stop thinking.
Steel Surge deepened—Phase 2 stretching its limbs. The edges of the world crisped until he could see the individual raindrops blowing through the broken window at the end of the hall, could count the ashes falling from Luna's cigarette that wasn't lit, could watch Silas's pupils contract a fraction as the Warden learned hate.
He launched.
His fists weren't fists. They were machine presses with guilt engraved on the die. He hammered the damaged knee until it resembled a suggestion; he used the ruined joint as a lever to flip the Warden hard enough to crater the tile. The floor groaned through its teeth.
He went for the spine. He didn't know if it had one. He decided it would. Steel knuckles jackhammered along a seam of plates until rivets screamed and popped. He jammed both hands in and ripped.
Something like a marrow-slick braid tore loose in a hose of night. The Warden convulsed, flailing. Its claws raked his ribs; he saw stars, then ate them.
+500 EXP (Major Damage)
EXP: 1100 / 1000
LEVEL UP → 11
GAIN: +STR | +SPD
Adaptive Surge: Micropacing learned (±3 frames)
"Down!" Silas snapped.
Zack dropped; a silvery arc scythed where his head had been—Silas's coin, called home. It punched through the Warden's faceplate with surgical contempt. The monster spasmed, found the floor, tried to remember being dangerous, failed.
Zack took its head with his teeth.
Not clean. Not noble. Final.
The Warden fell apart by degrees, armor sloughing into inert ash, the smell mercy doesn't advertise.
+600 EXP (Boss Kill)
EXP: 600 / 1000 (L11)
Hex Cross-Tolerance +
Surge Fatigue Accruing (Moderate)
Silas clicked his tongue. "Hospital billing is going to be spirited."
"Send it to Marrow," Zack said, breath flaying his throat.
Luna shoved the last patient past, gave Zack a look that wasn't a smile. "I'll buy him the flowers."
"That all?" Silas asked the air.
Marrow answered by turning the fire sprinklers to blood for a second, a petty little miracle intended to make mortals scream. Then he stopped playing with the building and went quiet. Somewhere, the generator finally noticed it had a job and did it. The emergency lights blinked to normal.
The hall exhaled. The hospital remembered its script. The night-shift nurse from earlier appeared at the edge of vision and didn't cross the line; she recognized the invisible tape monsters lay.
"You good?" Luna asked, softer than her shoes.
"No," Zack said, already moving. "I have to—"
"Go," Silas said. "We can mop."
Zack didn't thank them. He couldn't. His boots left rust on wet tile as he ran back to Room 412. The blinds breathed rain; the curtain still swayed. The monitors…
The monitors were wrong.
The beeps had become a steady note the human ear was never meant to carry on its own.
The nurse had slipped in ahead of him, had turned the monitor's volume down, gentle, apologizing with her hands, preparing the stage for an old, terrible scene. She looked at Zack and stepped away from the bed like a priest who knows he isn't the only ceremony in the room.
"Mom?" Zack said, stepping forward on legs made of thunder. "Mom."
Her eyes were open. Not vacant—finished. The soft muscles around them relaxed into peace he didn't trust. Her mouth tilted like the very end of a joke only she understood.
Zack took her hand and it was already becoming story instead of heat.
"C'mon," he said, bargaining. "I fixed the hallway. I… it's okay now. You can—"
He put his forehead on her sternum like a kid who had lost the shape of gravity. No breath warmed his cheek.
Something tight that had been pulled through him since the day of the diagnosis finally snapped. The sound it made wasn't audible, but the city heard it anyway. Somewhere, a traffic light turned red and stayed red. Somewhere else, a pipe burst. In a third place, a man decided not to jump. Cause and effect had nothing to do with each other; grief slapped the dominoes because it could.
The HUD tried to say something. He willed it to shut up. It persisted anyway, a bureaucrat at a funeral.
VITAL SIGNAL: NIL
LIFE EVENT: Maternal Death
OPTION: Memory Archive (Lock)
OPTION: Forge Oath (Power Path)
He looked at those words until their shapes changed. Forge Oath. The cursor blinked. Invitation or trap. He couldn't tell. He didn't care.
He kissed his mother's forehead. Rain kissed the back of his neck, through the broken window, as if the night wanted to say sorry and knew it had no authority.
"Sleep," he said. "I'll carry it."
He closed her eyes with two fingers and stood up into a world that had misplaced one of its primary colors.
The nurse had tears in her eyes and did a thing with a form and a nod that meant do you want a priest? He shook his head. There wasn't a priest who spoke his dialect.
He turned toward the window because the door felt like a mouth that would eat him. Luna stood there with the axe across her shoulder like a guitar. She looked at his face and let the weapon slide down to the floor, accidentally reverent.
"You can hit me if you want," she said, not joking. "You need to hit something that bleeds."
"I need to hit everything," he said, empty as a gun on purpose.
Silas leaned in the doorway, hands in his pockets because he understood that hands are disrespectful when they don't know what to do. His voice lost every cut except the necessary one.
"There is an old way," he said. "Not a cure. Not a cheat. A way to not fall apart while you sharpen."
Zack didn't look at him. "Talk."
"An Oath," Silas said. "You already take them without words. Speak this one and the steel will etch it into you. It will hurt. It will change your paths. Some doors will close forever. Others will open that do not like to be seen."
"Terms?" Zack asked.
"You bind your leveling to something that is not yourself," Silas said. "You make your strength pay rent to meaning. It takes longer. It cuts deeper. You don't get to walk away from the fight in your head when the fight in the street ends."
Zack turned at last. The rain drummed his shoulders. "And the city?"
"Will listen," Silas said. "Cities love oaths. They are made of them and broken by them."
Luna wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, pretending it was rain. "Say it out loud, chrome-teeth. Make it ugly and true."
Zack looked down at the stillness on the bed and at his own hands and at the ink of night slicking the window. He did not compose. He did not craft. He let the sentence find him like a punch.
"I swear," he said, and his voice wasn't human or metal; it was the seam between. "On her breath and everything I used to be: I will put down whatever wears death like a crown in this city. I will break Marrow until even his name can't hold blood. I will not trade a heart for power. I will not stop at pain. I will carry the living out of the fire before I feed it bodies. If I forget this, may the steel chew me hollow."
The HUD didn't chime. It tolled.
OATH FORGED: HEARTHBREAK VOW
Effect: XP gain is linked to rescue/justice missions (bonus multiplier on saves; penalty on collateral).
Effect: Steel Surge harmonizes with oath vector (control ↑, raw burst ↓).
Effect: New Skill Path unlocked — Hearthchain (bind, drag, guard).
Warning: Leaving an innocent to die within reach will incur Oath Debt (power penalties until resolved).
For a second—one breath—the room warmed. Not temperature. Tone. The city threaded a new stitch through its skin.
Luna shivered, not from cold. "Okay," she said softly. "That was not nothing."
Silas's smile was the first honest one Zack had seen him wear. It wasn't kind, but it wasn't smug. "Now you're dangerous."
"Now I'm busy," Zack said, and something like heat returned to the edges of his words. He stepped to the broken window and pulled the curtain aside. The rain saw him and made room.
The fire alarm's stutter gave way to ambulance sirens, to news choppers deciding they could be vultures with camera lenses. Far below, the city performed its old musical: panic, rumor, denial.
Marrow arrived in the reflection instead of the window.
Not the glamour this time. Not a puppet. A face in the glass with eyes like overripe fruit and a smile that had learned too many languages to be trusted.
"You spoke an oath," he said conversationally, as if complimenting a tie. "How quaint. How… limiting."
Zack didn't turn. "Come upstairs."
"Oh, no," Marrow said. "I'm a doctor tonight. House calls only."
The whole world tilted a degree again, subtle enough for humans to attribute it to grief. Steel knew. Zack set his jaw.
"Here's mine," he said, to the window, to himself, to the part of the city that had just put his vow in its mouth like a coin. "Every hour I am breathing, I take a piece of you. When I run out of hours, the other thing I am will keep the appointment."
"Promises," Marrow sighed. "How poetic. Bring me her heart when you get bored of poetry."
The reflection lost him like a bad dream.
Luna hissed out a curse you can't say in church and reached for the axe like she hoped it could cut glass metaphors. "I'm going to find where he sleeps and salt it."
"You'll fail," Silas said, not cruel, not hopeful. "Tonight."
"Then I'll fail again tomorrow," she said. "Louder."
Zack looked at his mother one last time. The chair knew the shape of him and would be haunted by it for years after it was replaced and sent to surplus. He placed the blanket up over her chest, a ritual he would never admit to understanding.
He turned to the door. The HUD wrote new truth across his bones in handwriting that was his.
LEVEL 11
EXP: 600 / 1000
Oath Vector: Active
New Skill: Hearthchain (Rank 1) — project a bindable steel tether to yank targets out of kill zones; duration short; cost moderate
Surge Fatigue: Mod → Low (Oath alignment)
"Where?" he asked, and neither of them had to ask what he meant.
Luna checked her phone, thumbed a rune she shouldn't own. "Ambulance company reports: two rigs hijacked five blocks east. Shades in paramedic jackets. They're not taking people to ERs; they're taking them to holes."
Silas tilted his head, listening to a frequency ego invents, then nodded once. "He wants tribute to feed what you broke."
"Then we tax him," Zack said. He stepped through the door and into the ruined hall, boots making a promise with every wet clap.
The night outside grabbed him, tasted the vow in his mouth, and decided to get out of the way. He didn't take the stairs. He took the rain—hands on the sill, body a coil, mind a line—and dropped. Twenty feet of air recognized a debtor and paid in soft landing. He hit the ambulance bay like an indictment.
The city fell into him, and he fell into the city, and somewhere a meter turned over and made a record of it.
⸻
Cut: Hijacked Lights
Red and blue strobes painted the wet street with authority the night did not respect. Two ambulances idled crooked at the curb, doors yawning. One had real EMTs inside, huddled, faces white, a Shade in a jacket standing in front of them with a clipboard like it had invented bureaucracy and planned to use it as a weapon. The other had the wrong emptiness about it—metal hungry, stretcher straps twitching like they smelled wrists.
Zack walked into the scene with his hands open.
"Papers," the Shade with the clipboard said without looking up, voice through a smile no face showed.
Zack's Hearthchain woke like a new muscle. He thought mine and a tether of bright steel unrolled from his sternum and snapped onto the stretcher by itself. It sang—small, eager, merciless. He yanked.
The whole rig lurched. The Shade's head cocked a fraction too late. The tether pulled the stretcher out into the rain in a line that said no to all the wrong possible futures.
Civilians looked at the boy with the glow under his skin and did what good people do when the world gets clear: they moved. EMTs scrambled, one laughing because terror sometimes wears that mask.
The Shade with the clipboard sighed and tossed the prop aside. "Rude."
Zack smiled without humor. "I made an oath. You're a receipt."
It stepped. He vanished. Micropacing slid him three frames into tomorrow and back. The Shade's arm came off at the elbow with a sound like a packet opening. The clipboard thunked into a puddle. The Shade looked at the stump and then at him like it had misread a menu. He bit its neck.
+200 EXP
EXP: 800 / 1000
Another Shade reached for a child's father. Hearthchain snapped again—click—and the man slid across water like something in a magic show, ignorant of the mechanics, worshipful of the result. Zack shoved him into the arms of a paramedic and in the same breath kneed the Shade in the groin because some comedy never dies even when the audience almost does.
+150 EXP
EXP: 950 / 1000
Sirens grew nearer. Silas materialized on the rig's hood like an insult to gravity, hands in pockets, pleased that time had remembered to attend. Luna strode out of the dark with an axe that had found a shade of religion.
"Two blocks east," she said, pointing with her chin. "More of them loading pizza delivery cars with people. Budget cuts."
"I'll take the rig," Zack said, because saying "I'll take the ones wearing my fear like a badge" would have broken something he wanted to use later. He turned to the EMTs. "Get everyone behind the ER doors. Don't play hero. That's my job."
"You certified?" one asked, hysteria flirting with jokes.
Zack gave him a look that would have peeled paint and the EMT said, "Copy," and ran.
The last Shade on the curb tried a lie in human voice. "We're here to help."
Zack's fist disagreed. It burst into non-being with a sound like a candle giving up.
+150 EXP
EXP: 1100 / 1000
LEVEL UP → 12
+SPD | Oath Resonance ↑
Hearthchain: Range +1
The rain applauded. Somewhere high, the hospital lights steadied. Somewhere deep, Marrow smiled without enjoying it. He'd forced grief and gotten a vow instead. That's the trouble with breaking hearts; sometimes you give people tools.
Silas slid off the hood and landed without weight. He flicked that ancient coin once, caught it, held Zack's gaze.
"You're not alone, now," he said. "That's inconvenient. For me. For him. For you most of all."
"I don't care," Zack said. "He picked the wrong city to practice medicine."
Luna shouldered him with affection she would deny under torture. "Let's make house calls."
Zack turned east. The night pulled his oath across its teeth like floss and decided it liked the taste. His ribs hurt. His eyes burned. Somewhere upstairs, a nurse drew a sheet up with hands that had comforted strangers for twenty years and didn't have names for monsters.
He had a name. He yelled it into the rain so it would echo in sewers and penthouses and old churches and under bridges where promises sleep sitting up.
"Marrow!"
The city flinched, then grinned. It loves a loud one. It loves the quiet ones more, but it lets the loud ones advertise.
Zack started running. The tether at his chest hummed, already reaching for future wrists. Steel Surge paced him like a wolf that had agreed to heel until it didn't.
Behind him, the hospital was not a place of ending. It was a beginning with a cost stamped on it.
Ahead, the night was a ledger and he was a pen that liked the sound of tearing paper.
He didn't look back. He didn't need to. He had an oath, a direction, and a specific quantity of rage.
The rain finally changed keys.