Season 2, Episode 20 — Oath Debt
Timeline: Two days after Ep 19. Zack = Level 40. The city's louder now—sirens that sound like rumors, rumors that sound like prayers. Rain's stopped; the air tastes like a coin on your tongue.
⸻
Cold Open — The Split
The alert didn't chime so much as shove him.
Zack was on a rooftop, boots on tar, watching the morning bruise into afternoon when the Hearthbreak Vow punched text across his vision:
DUAL CRISIS (WITHIN REACH):
A) Senior home — gas line rupture; sprinklers misfiring bloodfire; 14 trapped.
B) Community pool — ceiling truss failure; 12 trapped under bleachers; water rising.
OATH NOTE: Choosing one while both are within reach risks Debt for casualties at the other.
Luna, sprawled on a vent beside him, popped her gum. "Pick."
Silas flicked his coin like it had a say. "Pool collapses faster. Gas can be shut."
Zack tasted the math and hated it. "Pool."
He ran, the city bending into lanes ahead of him like it wanted him to try. He dropped to the street, cut through a deli, leapt a mailbox, cut loud and clean to a low brick building with PAINT PEELING and a mural that promised summers and safety. Sirens converged, but too far. Inside, screaming water.
He hit the doors and the heat-sweaty rush of chlorinated air shoved at him. Bleachers had pancaked at one end. Water sloshed high—six inches below the lip—lapping at aluminum like a dog turning a chair into a toy. Kids clung to twisted metal; two lifeguards tried to lever space with pure will and a kickboard.
Zack's steel veins glowed. "Back!"
Hearthchain snapped—six tethers in a strobing fan—click click click click click click—latching to hands, belts, backpack straps. He yanked, bodies slidding across the tile into air that forgave. Luna vaulted the turnstile, grabbed a kid by the pits and launched him up, swore at the bleachers like they'd done her dirty personally; Silas slid along the rail and changed the angle of a falling beam by two degrees that saved a skull.
+600 EXP (Mass rescue)
EXP: 600 / 1000 (L40)
A groan folded the air. The rest of the truss gave way. The bleacher stack tilted to drown people in a one-second window.
Zack stepped under it and held.
Steel sang up his spine, into his shoulders, out through his hands into aluminum he hated. The Anchor Lines fired—two to the remaining truss mounts, one to a diving block bolted to concrete—and the world decided to go for later instead of now.
"Move!" he barked. "MOVE!"
Bodies poured out. Luna counted threats, not breaths, chopping a bench into a wedge and jamming it in as a brace; Silas took a mother's face in his hands and said, "Now," and the word was a door she could walk through despite everything.
Last girl, last hand. Zack dragged her out by the elbow and then dropped the bleachers with a groan that said fine and thank you.
The pool exhaled. Parents sobbed. The lifeguard with a cracked lip said, "You—" and didn't finish, because language was insufficient and also because an explosion punched across town through concrete and sky.
The senior home.
Zack's vow didn't chime. It accused.
OATH DEBT (SEVERE):
Casualties at reachable site B while A prioritized.
Confirmed dead within reach: 6
Penalty: Hearthchain disabled; Surge control −; Anchor/Shield Yank locked; Oath resonance throttled
Debt to clear: 3×6 = 18 direct rescues within 24h (no collateral).
Additional: Rescue multipliers suspended until debt cleared.
He closed his eyes, and in the dark behind the lids he saw a hallway full of smoke and old photographs on the wall and six faces he'd never know because he'd chosen the pool. He opened them and the city felt heavier.
Luna stood in front of him, eyes soft in a way she used once per apocalypse. "Say nothing," she warned. "Move."
He moved.
⸻
Act I — The Lock
They ran the dozen blocks to the senior home and hit a scene already charred. FD crews flanked the entrance, one captain shouting into a radio, her mask off, soot streaked, eyes furious and hurt.
"I know," Zack said, before she could swing the grief into him. "We were at the pool."
"Two options, kid," she snapped. "You help us get the rest out, or you get out of my way."
"Help," he said.
He tried to Hearthchain a fallen beam—nothing. The tether refused like a friend with a boundary. He tried a Shield Yank to drag a rolling oxygen tank away from fire—no go; the skill text ghosted out.
"Debt," he told Luna, voice flat. "I'm locked."
"Then you pay it in cash," she said, dropping low and heaving a door aside with thighs and rage.
Silas's eyes cut sideways, measuring the building's intent. "Stairwell C will hold. D won't. Roof access jammed. We clear C and get 18 breathing bodies before your oath stops sulking."
Zack lifted. No oath assist, just steel and choice. He tore through drywall, shoulders ripping a doorway wider, lungs filling with smoke until the steel under his skin tried to filter it and hissed at the labor.
Apartment 2B: a woman strapped in a wheelchair refused to leave her feral cat. "She's mean," she coughed. "Like me."
"We don't leave mean," Zack said, and bundled cat, woman, and chair together like a miracle that scratched.
3A: a man with oxygen, asleep with his hand on a picture. Zack slung him over a shoulder gently, tucked the picture into his pajama pocket with two fingers, felt the brokenness of it like a bruise on his teeth.
4C: a nurse dragging two bodies through smoke. Luna took one, swearing at the ceiling for bad architecture.
5F: fire licking at the curtains while a woman beat them with a hot pink slipper because she refused to die in flats. Silas doused the flame by twisting the way heat traveled in the room; the slipper survived, singed and heroic.
The tally climbed, not on his HUD—locked, petty—but in his head with a click that sounded like forgiveness owed.
By the time they hit the lobby again, the captain with the rough voice stood in their path, counting with eyes. "Seventeen," she said.
"One more," Zack said.
"Basement," Silas said. "You won't like it."
They took the stairs down into a pool of smoke that stuck to the floor like guilt. A janitor lay collapsed next to the boiler, keys still in his fingers.
Zack scooped him up and ran for air that wasn't at war with lungs.
On the sidewalk, the captain grabbed the janitor's shoulders, checked breathing, swore and smiled at once. "Alive."
Zack's vow loosened its hand around his throat by one finger.
DEBT PAID: 18 / 18
Systems: Hearthchain restored; Surge control restored; Anchor/Shield unlocked
Penalty lifted.
Oath Note: Debt scars will alter future difficulty.
He sagged against the hydrant and wanted to roar, or puke, or both.
Luna pressed her forehead to his. "You don't get to break now."
He nodded once, sharp. "Now I make change."
⸻
Act II — Marrow's Push
The quiet lasted two minutes. Then the texts began: no-number, three shots:
1. A photo of the senior home burning earlier, timestamped.
2. A photo of the pool, mid-rescue, timestamped.
3. A sentence: You learned to count. Good. Count faster. — M
Silas read over his shoulder. "He's going to stack."
And he did. The city bloomed smaller horrors, ten at once:
• A daycare "safety drill" that locked children behind cage doors.
• A bus crash where none of the airbags deployed because the bags were lungs that liked to sing.
• A hospital generator failure while a storm cloud sat over ICU without rain.
• A warehouse where Shades impersonated animal control and dragged screams into vans.
• A shelter with two exits chained, sprinkled with chemicals that liked fire too much.
The vow rerouted Zack's everything toward the closest. It didn't care about optics. It only cared about reach.
He sprinted. Hearthchain sang back on line—the sound of a tool unfrozen. He yanked doors off the daycare with a fury that taught metal its place, kicked cage bars until his toes felt like news, and dragged kids into the corridor while Luna cussed out a PA system for lying to three-year-olds.
+400 EXP (mass kid-rescue; multipliers suspended)
EXP: 1000 / 1000 (L40) → (No level up while Debt flags present)
He crossed two blocks, throwing himself and the vow into a bus body, prying the windshield out with his hands as Silas quieted gas vapors with a word that sounded like mercy in a different language. He rolled unconscious commuters into waiting arms, a river of bodies that discovered they could still be carried.
He hit the hospital and found a hallway lit by emergency lights and winged by mothers holding bags of blood that had stopped being blood midway through the tube. He took a relay of bags over his shoulder like a barbarian at war with chemistry. The ICU stabilizers groaned alive as fire trucks roared up because of the radio calls he'd made between breaths.
He learned where mercy breaks and where it bends and how to carry both.
By dark he'd paid the debt again and again like interest to a bank that collected in screams. The HUD finally relented:
Debt flags cleared.
Level progression resumed.
EXP overflow applied: +900
LEVEL UP → 41
New: Hearthchain Rank 7 (micro-tethers; latch small items/locks) | Oath Ledger (R1) — see rolling save/kill ratio & forecast Oath Debt risk
"Oath Ledger?" Luna said, reading the ghost-text as it skated his eyes. "That's cute. Did your heart hire an accountant?"
"It hired a mirror," Silas said, not smiling.
Zack stared at a cracked window and saw himself: not reflected, exactly—listed. Names of saved as numbers that weren't people. The cost of still breathing written like a receipt.
"I hate this," he said.
Silas's voice gentled in its way. "Good. Only monsters love the math."
⸻
Act III — The Bridge Test
Night brought colder air and a gift. Or a trap. Those look similar.
A Staten Island Ferry stalled mid-river, electrical failure, listing slightly to starboard. The call broke across every channel with a hundred voices trying to control a situation that hated leash.
Zack stared across the water and felt the river flex like a muscle. His Oath Ledger scrolled probabilities into his head:
• Go out there without a boat: high risk, high reward, high chance of Leviathan's finger.
• Await fireboats: moderate risk, lower reward, lower immediate death.
• Ignore and chase the other pings: Debt because this is within reach.
He didn't argue. He ran for the bridge.
Halfway up the span, he jumped.
The river caught him like an enemy. He hit mid-crawl and kept moving, Hearthchain latching to pilings, to ferries, to anything that would let him throw himself forward. He was a harpoon pretending to be a man.
He hit the ferry hull and climbed.
Faces met him at the rail—fear made of expensive coats and cheap courage. "Power's out!" a deckhand shouted. "Engine's—" He didn't have a word for what the engine was doing. It sounded like humming water.
Zack slid down to the engine deck to find the Leviathan's sleeve curling around the prop like a scarf.
"Fuck," he said, old-fashioned. "You again."
He couldn't fight the river. He could insult it.
He grabbed a length of mooring line and Hearthchained it into four micro-tethers across the sleeve's surface. He hauled. It ignored him until it didn't. It twitched, tasting his vow. He hauled again.
It let go because physics plus stubbornness plus oath equals annoyance for gods.
The ferry groaned. Lights flickered, then caught—fireboats grinding up with a hymn he believed in. Cheers from above. Faces turned into people again.
+600 EXP (mass indirect save; Ledger recognizes ferry)
EXP: 500 / 1000 (L41)
He stood on the deck dripping, looking back at the black and the wake lines like veins. He felt the river looking back.
Marrow's text hit his phone with a patience that annoyed him: Your debt makes you interesting, Zack. Without it, you're just brave. With it, you're learning taxation.
Zack texted back with knuckles: Eat my ledger.
A bubble appeared, then: Soon.
⸻
Act IV — The Cheap Victory
He staggered back to land at dawn, legs rubber, lungs bright. The city smelled like wet paper and smoke that had learned to tell jokes.
Luna met him with coffee. Silas met him with nothing because he was smarter than coffee.
The HUD offered a small, mean cake:
CITY ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: Strong → Stronger (dispatch crews pre-clear lanes on your routes; crowd flow integrates Ledger)
OATHWAVE (R1): Slightly cheaper to cast for small radii
Ledger Forecast: High-risk event in next 48h — probable market or Leviathan escalation
Luna handed him the cup and smacked the side of his head with two knuckles, affectionate and corrective. "You did good. Don't you dare think about the six yet."
"I'm always thinking about the six," he said.
"Then think while moving," she replied. "We've got a new address."
Silas angled his chin toward the river. "Marrow is shifting from collection to distribution. The Blood Market you disrupted is rebuilding underground with better locks. Also—" (and here his eyes went sideways in a way that promised gossip with knives) "—my old teacher has put money on your death before Prestige."
"Sweet man," Zack said. "We collect when he loses."
"Start with his fingers," Luna advised.
He drank the coffee and tasted contempt turning into fuel.
⸻
Act V — Paying Forward
It would be pretty to end with a montage. It wouldn't be honest.
He went to the senior home at noon, when the smoke smell had softened into walls. He stood in the hall where the photographs had curled. The six had names here—taped to doors that now opened onto empty.
A nurse in scrubs registered him, flinched, then didn't. "You picked the pool," she said, not a question.
He nodded. "Yes."
She stared at him until his steel wanted to blink first. Then she shook her head slowly. "I taught my kids that heroes aren't gods. They're messy humans who keep choosing. You keep choosing."
He wanted to promise. The vow did it for him.
On the way out, he stopped at a bulletin board with Thank You cards. One crooked one had a drawing of him dragging stick people on lines that looked like spiderweb. Under it, in pencil: Don't die.
"Try not to," he said, and meant it exactly that much and no more.
⸻
Stinger — The Debt Banker
A room with windows that didn't open and air that had opinions. Marrow stood at a wall of screens showing: seniors, kids at a pool, a ferry's wake. He held a ledger—not metaphorical. Leather. Corners chewed.
A voice beside him: "He cleared it."
Marrow smiled at his reflection until it smiled back. "Good. It hurts better when they pay on time."
"You'll lose the Leviathan if he keeps insulting it," the voice said, disapproving in the way of a broker whose god was an invoice.
Marrow waved one lazy hand. "The river is a toddler. We give it toys."
He tapped one screen. A warehouse camera: cages empty, floor swept. A chalk circle drawn sloppily where the stage used to be. In the center, a bell that looked like silver and hunger.
"Open the market," Marrow said. "Raise the stakes. And tell the Tribunal: if they want to keep their floors…they should show me their keys."
He closed the ledger. It purred.