The city had never been louder.
By dawn, the hearing was already legend. Holo-boards replayed the image of frost blooming from a boy's hand. Street vendors whispered of the child who shamed the Guild. Slum families, patched with Jade's cheap remedies, called him savior. Even mercenaries who had once doubted now muttered his name with a wary respect.
"Did you hear? He froze the whole chamber without killing a soul."
"They said his ice sings when it moves."
"A child like that… even the Spire will notice."
In the market district, prices dropped overnight. Merchants who once sold herbs at inflated Guild rates now leaned close to their customers: "No need to pay Guild prices—Alchemist Jade's work is proof they're robbing us."
But in the Spire, the air curdled with shame.
Councilor Draven paced a polished chamber, his reflection distorted in the obsidian walls. Across from him sat the red-haired Alpha, her nails digging crescents into her palm.
"You promised me a trial that would bury him," Karren hissed. "Instead, you've made him untouchable in the eyes of the people."
His lips curled. "Then we bury his reputation. Slowly. Publicly. No one fears power they think they own. We'll paint him as unstable. Dangerous. A threat to the very city he pretends to save."
"And the people?" Karren asked.
"They'll beg us to chain him themselves."
His smile was sharp as glass.
...
That night, holo-feeds across Nexus flickered. Reports spread of strange frost killing crops on the edges of the city, of street fights ending in sudden bursts of unnatural cold. Witnesses swore they'd seen a child with silver hair lurking near the chaos.
Fabricated evidence. Staged attacks. The Guild's counterstrike had begun.
From his window above Gorvoth's shop, Jade watched the lies take root. His dual irises gleamed faintly as he whispered to himself:
"So they've made their move. Good."
His fingers tightened around a vial of midnight-blue liquid, cold mist curling from the glass.
"Now it's my turn."
-----------------------------------------------------
Nexus was restless.
Market stalls groaned under the weight of whispers, holo-feeds spat grainy footage of withered crops and shattered streets, and every credit that changed hands carried a question: Was it the Guild's greed—or the boy's frost—that cracked this city?
Jade felt it in the rhythm of the streets as he walked. Vendors who once met him with nods now offered hesitant smiles. A mother clutched her child closer when she noticed the faint chill that followed him. Suspicion lingered like smog, choking every corner.
The Guild's plan was working. Slowly, deliberately, they were turning his name from savior to danger.
"Little one," Niamh muttered, walking stiffly at his side, "ignore them. Let the rumors rot in their own mouths."
Jade's blindfold tilted toward her, silver-blue strands catching neon light. "No," he said simply. "This isn't rot. It's poison. And poison spreads unless you burn it out."
He turned down an alley, pace deliberate. His steps weren't hurried; they carried the certainty of someone who had already decided the next move. Niamh followed, torn between worry and awe.
By the time they reached the central plaza, the crowd was already thick—merchants, mercenaries, slum families, Guild apprentices in crisp uniforms. A holo-board pulsed with a new report: grain silos turned to ice overnight. The Guild's crest flickered faintly in the corner.
A collective murmur rolled through the plaza: The boy. The silver-haired beta. He's dangerous.
Jade stepped forward. The crowd noticed. Whispers sharpened into silence.
He raised a single vial of pale gold liquid, the glass humming faintly. "This," his voice cut through the hush, calm but unwavering, "is truth."
Without flourish, he poured it over a wilting stalk of grain brought in by a farmer. The plant shuddered, frost crackling along its veins—then steadied. Leaves unfurled, green and strong, more alive than before. Gasps tore through the crowd.
"I heal what you claim I harm," Jade said, voice cold, deliberate. "And I charge in credits you can afford—not the extortion you've endured for decades."
He didn't look at the holo-cameras, but he knew they recorded every word.
"You say I freeze fields? Then why do I spend my nights brewing antidotes for your poisons? You say I destroy? Then why do the children of the slums live because of my potions while the Guild's shelves stay locked?"
The silence snapped. Applause broke from the slum families, desperate, defiant. Merchants nodded fiercely. Even mercenaries growled their approval.
The Guild apprentices shifted nervously, their lines cracking under the weight of public fury.
And Jade smiled—not kindly, but like frost cutting glass. "If you wish to smear my name, then smear it with truth. Show them the credits you've stolen. Show them the lives you've priced. Or remain silent."
His frost curled over the plaza stones, not in violence, but in precision. The cold etched words into the ground, letters clear as glass:
THE GUILD LIES.
The crowd erupted.
For the first time, the Alchemist Guild staggered—not from his frost, but from something far more dangerous: public opinion.
And in the Spire, the red-haired Alpha slammed her hand into a table, eyes burning. "Enough of this child. If the streets won't turn on him—then we'll bring him down."
.....
The plaza's roar hadn't faded before the first blade struck.
For a heartbeat the world was simple: faces, noise, the smell of hot bread and iron. Then a man in plain trader's robes folded forward as if struck by a sudden faint. He hit the stone with a wet sound that made a hundred throats gasp. Around him, the crowd surged — some to help, some to flee. Cameras spun, drones tilted. The red-haired Alpha's eyes snapped to the motion like a hawk noticing prey.
"Guards!" someone screamed. But the guards were too slow; they were trained for riots and pickpockets, not the invisible cut of a poisoned needle.
It should have been chaos. It almost was.
Jade didn't move at first. He listened. Void Sense painted the plaza with threads: the prick of panic near the stalls, the metallic scent of blood, and underneath it all a quieter, crueler rhythm — the sure, practiced heartbeat of killers.
Three shadows peeled from the crowd with predatory slowness. They were not Ash Rats: their movements were too clean, too economical. Not Silent Ravens either — these were specialists, apprentices of darker contracts, grafted into the Guild's edgeless network. Their Talents whispered by name in the space Jade's system kept reserved for danger: Whisperblade [A], Venom Touch [B], Phase Step [A]. Each one a promise of a silent end.
Niamh's hand clamped onto his sleeve, Fast Hands [F] pulsing through her grip as old reflex translated into a mother's fear. Gorvoth was already pushing forward, hammer raised, Titan Grip [B] coiled into every joint. He moved like a barricade of old iron.
They thought the boy had only words. They thought the people would be too raw with gratitude to fight. They were wrong.
The first assassin blinked out of the crowd and sprang. Phase Step carried him between sightlines; he slashed for Jade's throat with a blade dipped in shadow-venom. He expected a child to flinch. He expected panic.
Instead, frost met his wrist. Jade's hand rose, a shard of cold catching the blade mid-arc and singing it blue. The assassin's arm froze inside the metal: shock ran across his face, not from pain but from certainty that he was—at that moment—outplayed.
[DING!]
EXP +700.
Before the second could pull a throwing-needle, Gorvoth swung. The old smith's hammer arced like a falling star, Titan Grip anchoring his weight. He didn't kill; he crushed, catching a third attacker across the ribs and sending him cartwheeling into a stack of market crates. Bread and spices spilled like color across stone.
Niamh moved in a blur — Fast Hands in full bloom — snatching the assassin's hidden vial, flinging it to the ground, and grinding it underfoot before its contents vaporized the air. Her gesture was small, furious, maternal. She shoved Jade back out of harm's way with a shove full of years.
But even as Gorvoth bled scars into a would-be killer, another man lunged from the high steps near the dais. He was up too high, too quick, a hunter who'd practiced leaps and misdirection. His blade arced downward for the Governor where the man sat shocked, his hand frozen on the rail. The crowd's scream lodged like metal in the plaza.
Time measured itself in razor slices. Jade stepped—not quickly, but with the preternatural assurance of someone who belonged to the geometry of combat. He did not move to kill. He moved to prevent.
He did not even touch the attacker. He placed a ring of cold in the air between them; it grew like glass, translucent and lethal. The man's momentum met it and folded him back without a sound. The shock slammed outward like a bell. The assassin's legs buckled; his keen Talent, Venom Touch, burned in the effort to shrug the cold off, but his veins stiffened and his muscles locked. He stared, eyes huge, and then the system chimed.
[DING!]
EXP +650.
The plaza went very, very quiet. Cameras whirred as they recorded detail: a child upright amid three felled, masked killers; an old smith with a ruined sleeve; a seamstress-mother's hands stained with the residue of an exploded vial. Councilor Draven's expression had narrowed into a knife. The red-haired judge looked both sick and incandescent with fury.
"You weren't supposed to be this loud," she hissed, voice a thread that cut the air. Her hand moved almost imperceptibly — not to strike, but to signal. Agents in the crowd shifted, earlier disguises shedding like skins. The Guild did not do inelegant things by accident; this was all a scale of choices designed to force a spectacle.
But the spectacle backfired.
The people did not scatter. Instead they swelled forward protectively, not in numbers but in conviction. Mothers pushed between broken bodies and the boy. The market vendors half-shoved the nearest guards aside and stood beside Jade as though their small pixelated lives depended on him.
"Those men were masked!" someone shouted. "They came down from the Spire!" The rumor chain leapt like flame. Where the Guild wanted fear, the crowd now had fury.
Jade's breath fogged in the air — more felt than seen. His voice was low, carrying into every recorded mic. "If the Guild sends knives while wearing law, then they've lost the right to call themselves our protectors." He did not chant. He did not incite. He simply named the wound.
Niamh's hands shook as she smoothed the collar of his coat. She had always been his tether. Fast Hands could steal a coin or stitch a wound, but it could not fix belonging — and tonight she watched a child who had no childhood turn the gutters into a pulpit.
Gorvoth cleared his throat, the old man's voice a gravelly thing. "You did what you came to do," he said to Jade, not raising his hammer, only acknowledging. "But remember who you are, boy. This city will try to sell you back your victories at a price." He looked toward the Spire. "Draven smells opportunity. He'll not be content."
Under the wide neon sky, drones looped the footage. The Guild's immediate strike had been thwarted in plain sight; the attempt to paint Jade as a scourge had failed because the whole of Nexus had seen the truth: masked killers attacking the plaza, and a child who stood between them and death.
But a wound had opened. A message had been sent. The red-haired judge pressed her teeth together and, in the dark heart of the Spire, tapped a holoslate with deliberate, cold fingers.
Phase one failed. Escalate to phase two. Isolate him from his allies. Cut off his supply lines. Make the Council act under the pretense of public safety.
She added a comma, and at the end of it a single instruction to a contact in the undercity: "Silence the markets' supplier. Do it quietly."
Jade heard none of the plotting in that moment. He felt the system's quiet thrill when it registered kills, the way it carved pathways across his mind and gave him options. He felt Niamh's palm on his shoulder. He felt Gorvoth's presence like the shape of a hammer. He felt the crowd's pulse like a living thing. He felt, too, the shadow of politics like a weather front on the horizon.
He had been tested tonight. He had passed. The kills were registered, his level had risen, his talents sharpened. But around him, the city's game had turned more dangerous. A direct strike had failed — only to invite a strategic war.
Niamh whispered, almost a prayer, almost an order: "Home. We patch. We ready. They will not come at us the same way twice."
Jade nodded. His voice, when he finally spoke, was small and careful and colder than the frost he wore. "Then we learn, and we move first."
Above them, the Spire lit up with icons of Councillors, the red-haired judge's eyes glittering like embers. Below, the plaza hummed with the name of a child who had killed to protect a city that had loved and feared him in the same breath.
It was not yet victory. But the first strike had been repelled. The true war, the one waged with favors, credits, and council votes, was about to begin.