The ash of the Raven's message had not yet cooled when Nexus rearranged itself around rumor. Markets hummed softer, vendors kept their wares shielded under quick hands; grav-taxis rerouted their bright tails a block over; comm-stations blinked with extra traffic as agents traded tiny packages of intelligence. The city was a living mesh tuned to whispers — when one node screamed, the rest adjusted their frequency.
Inside the shop, where frost still chased the edges of broken glass, Jade moved without hurry. He cleaned a shard of crystalline ice from the floor with the same slow, methodical fingers he'd used to grind herbs. Each motion betrayed nothing; the boy-calmer façade was chosen and deliberate. He'd learned how much advantage could be bought by appearing weaker than you were.
Gorvoth stood with his broad back against the counter, pipe stub dark in his fingers, eyes like flint watching the street. The old man's hands were callused maps of a life built on metal and contracts. He had seen men fall for far less than what the city was now whispering about Jade. He did not pretend to understand everything the boy was, but he knew the smell of danger and the weight of blades in the night.
Niamh moved more in gesture than in stride. She closed shutters and bolted doors with the kind of efficient panic that showed she'd spent years defending against smaller, human terrors — drunken fights, slum thieves, the occasional guild auditor. She spoke to neighbors in low, urgent phrases, offering tea, favors, a watchful eye. Her talent ranking didn't matter where fear was concerned; she could mobilize gossip and shelter until the world's teeth had passed.
"Are you certain they'll come back?" she asked once, voice frayed with the kind of tremor that belied her fear. Niamh's shield was maternal; her fists, sentimental.
Jade placed his palm on the counter and felt the subtle hum under the wood: distant trains, far-off grav lines, the city's heart. "They will," he said simply. "They don't leave unanswered questions. Not when something can change the balance of so many pockets and guild contracts."
Gorvoth exhaled smoke. "You fought shadows and froze things the size of men and the city still asks you to show receipts. Next thing, they'll want a signature." He gave a humorless bark that was half laugh, half warning. "Keep her away from the windows," he added, looking at Niamh. "She scares well enough without seeing men in the dark."
Niamh bristled and then set about doing as told — she was not a fighter. She was a fortress of small, human comforts, and she would hold that line because she had to. That made her useful; it made her dangerous in the way mothers are dangerous—implacable in their refusal to lose what they'd rescued from the gutter years ago.
Outside, things accelerated. The Ash Rats' humiliation had been a spark; the Silent Ravens were a hand bringing oil. In the Spire, fingers moved to tie strings tighter. The Spire's message boards pinged with cryptic summons; a masked figure in a high tower ordered probes to be sharpened. The Guild arranged clandestine meetings, lists of reputed talents compared in whispered tones. The Merchant Consortium considered offers and counteroffers beneath vein-bright holo ledgers. Everyone surveyed the artifact of advantage and asked how to own it.
Talents were ranked and people computed. Rumor spread that a certain mid-tier merc—Level 12, B-rank electro-kinetic—had been approached and turned down a contract because his employer hadn't expected a child to be that strong , one who would make low-level mercs look like weak children. These little measures of relative force mattered; in Nexus, every spreadsheet could become a war-plan. You could be Level 20 with F-rank talent and still not be half as dangerous as Level 10 with a D-rank. People with ranking sense recalibrated like compasses.
Jade did not want those compasses pointing toward him.
[DING!]
Quest Updated: Prepare for escalation.
Reward: +1 all stats
The system's nudges came like a cool breath. It did not demand he leap into showy, conspicuous demonstrations. It merely suggested survival with the sterile efficiency of a ledger.
He listened.
Gorvoth moved silently toward the backroom and returned with a satchel heavy with metal and a compact coil of field-weave. The old smith unrolled a thin lattice that hummed faintly — not high tech as in the Spire's labs, but practical, patched with the kind of field dampeners used on frontier mining rigs. He worked with the economy of a man who knew his hands would be needed more than any frantic speech.
"We'll rig the shutters with damp coils," he said. "Muffle the sensors, trip the hunt-steels if anything larger than a rat tries to come through. I don't have Spire-grade shielding, but I have muscle and old tricks. Enough to slow a nice, quiet assassin—which is what those Ravens prefer."
"That's good," Jade said, feeling the benefit more than the explanation. "And the neighbors? The people on this block?"
Niamh had already begun her circuit. She knocked on doors and left offerings. In Nexus, debts were currency; kindness was investment. She reassured cradled children and leaned on stooped elders until the neighborhood's watchful eyes multiplied. Word would flow fast: this shop was watched tonight. The cost of grim courage was small for many; the cost of being found tangential to the boy—a different matter.
By dusk, the shop had been fortified in small, sensible ways: damp coils hugging shutters, a low arc of frost-laced wards running beneath the floorboards that would trigger on unauthorized mana signatures, and a web of mirrors and smashed holo lenses that could trick cheap scanners into thinking the shop was a nonentity. None of it was elegant. None of it was Spire craft. It was enough.
Jade ran the drills quietly. He moved through teleport arcs twenty times in a row, each jump shorter than the last, until the motion burned into his muscles. He practiced snatching a vial from a shelf and reappearing behind a wall, conjuring blades into his palms and dismissing them until the motion felt like breathing.
Outside, Raven probes spread. Not all were live assassins; some were feathers of black alloy—micro-drones shaped like slick quills that skimmed over market booths, testing the latticeworks, measuring thermal profiles. Others were human, slipped into the city as beggars, merchants, and sky-cart vendors. They traded tiny glances and left small tokens behind: a smear on a doorstep, a scraped rune in the mortar, a note that said nothing but belonged to a name. The hunt widened, and the city felt it.
At midnight a vessel thick with black paint and no identifiers drifted low above the southern docks; its shadow washed across stacked crates and sleeping workers. In a corner of a warehouse, a Raven supervisor watched the feeds and tapped a message into a palm-display: Curate. Isolate. Flush.
Jade felt the reach of those words as if they'd brushed his sleeve. He tasted copper on his tongue—the sense of metal and blood and very old hunger. He didn't like it.
"Can't you leave?" Niamh had asked once, the question impossible only by emotional logic.
Gorvoth grunted. "If you go, where to? The Ash Rats' alleys will spit you out for breakfast. This city's walls have ears. If they want you, their teeth are sharp. Best to be ready where you stand."
So they prepared. They watched. They traded glances that spoke of more fear than words would manage. Niamh worried and knit and brewed tea. Gorvoth strengthened doors and checked coils. Jade trained and folded his power tight like origami, ever-preparing to spring open.
None of them noticed the small black feather that slipped through a cracked vent in the back room like a sinuous thought.
It perched on the counter, a quill of alloy no larger than a thumb, and it opened like a camera, slivering a single, fierce lens toward Jade's hand.
The lens blinked.
The air shivered.
Jade felt it — not through sight or sound but as the tiniest wrongness in the cadence of the room. It was a mechanical heartbeat now, not a human one. Precision without hesitation.
He reached.
Before his hand closed, the quill unfolded its wings and leapt — an explosive, clean motion that blasted through the air, a black streak aiming straight for the place Jade had been touching a moment earlier.
Gorvoth whirled. Niamh yelped. Jade did not move with panic. He moved like water finding a seam.
Teleportation snapped him halfway across the shop in a whisper. The quill struck the counter where he had stood; the impact split wood and sent a spray of black particles like ash across the room. The quill detonated into a spray of nano-scrapers, a humming cloud that tasted of static and acid.
It would have cut through hide and metal alike.
Jade felt the shards brush his ankle where he had been and tasted a thread of metal on his skin—a near miss.
He shut his eyes, and in the dim behind his lids he saw movement: a Raven on a rooftop, a hand closing on a module, a signal sent and answered.
From the street outside came a laugh that wasn't human—high, metallic, and hollow—then silence.
Gorvoth spat and swore in a language he'd used in the docks when men had meant worse than wounds. Niamh clutched at Jade's sleeve, her habitual fortress showing cracks. "We need to leave," she whispered, and for the first time her voice carried real fear of a thing she could not move with tea and stern words.
Jade's lips thinned. He understood what the quill meant. The Ravens were picking tools now, not just bodies. They were calibrating lethal things to his distance and his movement. They had decided that tests would yield greater returns if the boy bled a little.
He drew himself tall in the ruined shop, frost spreading beneath feet like a halo. "No," he said, soft and final. "We don't run. We prepare. We answer."
Outside, a grav-car blipped low and then tiled, pausing over the empty market block two lanes down. Lights swept across the shipping crates like searching eyes. A new order was in the air: escalate.
And somewhere, in a darker, colder room than any of them could see, a voice whispered into a modulator and said one word into the quiet.
"Begin."
The city collected itself and braced.