June 20, 442 A.R. – Evening (Past Timeline)
The figure moved with practiced anonymity through the darkening streets, maintaining just enough distance to seem coincidental, just close enough to keep Mira's school in sight.
Rei followed from three blocks back, keeping to the shadows between streetlamps, controlling his breathing the way Darius had taught him. Move like you belong. Don't rush. Don't hesitate. Be part of the scenery.
The figure turned down Merchant's Way, then cut through an alley toward the warehouse district, away from residential areas, away from witnesses.
Wrong direction. They're not watching Mira anymore. They're...
Rei's stomach dropped.
They're leading me.
He stopped at the alley's entrance, every instinct screaming danger. The narrow passage stretched ahead into darkness, buildings pressing close on either side, the kind of place where screams went unheard.
Turn back. This is a trap. You know it's a trap.
But if someone was targeting his family, he needed to know who. Needed to understand the threat.
Small moves don't work if you don't know what game you're playing.
Rei stepped into the alley.
The temperature dropped immediately, not physically, but perceptually. The city sounds faded to distant murmurs. His footsteps echoed too loud against wet cobblestones.
Twenty feet in, the figure stopped.
Thirty feet in, Rei stopped.
The figure didn't turn around. Just stood there, shoulders relaxed, waiting.
"I know you're following me," a voice called back, male, familiar in a way that made Rei's blood freeze.
The figure turned slowly, deliberately.
Marcus Vrell stepped into a shaft of lamplight bleeding from a window above, his expression a mixture of rage and satisfaction.
"Did you really think," Marcus said softly, "that I'd just let you walk away after what you did? After you threatened me? After you humiliated me in front of the whole gambling house?"
Rei's mind raced. He wasn't Order surveillance. He was,
"There was no figure watching your family," Marcus continued, reading his expression. "Just me. Standing where you'd see me. Waiting for you to do exactly what paranoid people do, follow the threat away from the people they're trying to protect."
Bait. It was all bait.
"What do you want, Marcus?" Rei kept his voice steady, assessing distances, exit routes, variables.
"What do I want?" Marcus laughed, harsh, bitter. "I want my life back. The life you threatened to destroy with your blackmail. Elira's father started asking questions yesterday. About my finances. About my 'prospects.' Because someone" his voice turned venomous, "planted doubts in the right ears."
"I didn't"
"YOU DID!" Marcus's composure cracked. "I don't know how, I don't know why, but ever since you walked into The Gilded Serpent, everything started falling apart. My debts got called in early. My creditors stopped being patient. Elira's father suddenly decided to investigate me."
He stepped closer, and Rei saw the knife glinting in his hand.
"So here's what's going to happen," Marcus said, his voice dropping to something cold and final. "You're going to disappear. Just another kid who got in over his head in the wrong part of town. No body to find. No questions to answer. And all those secrets you threatened me with? They die with you."
Rei backed up a step, his hand moving instinctively toward the prototype concealed beneath his jacket. "You don't want to do this."
"I really do." Marcus lunged.
The attack came fast, street-fighter brutal, no technique, just rage and desperation channeled through steel.
Rei dodged left, Darius' training taking over. Economy of motion, don't just evade, reposition.
The knife whistled past his ribs, close enough to feel the displaced air.
Marcus recovered quickly, circling, eyes wild. "You're faster than you look. Doesn't matter. I'm stronger. I'm angrier. And I've got nothing left to lose."
He attacked again, high slash, low thrust, combination that would have gutted anyone without training.
Rei deflected with his forearm, redirecting force rather than blocking, but the impact still sent pain shooting up to his shoulder. He's right. Technique only goes so far against size and strength.
Thunder rumbled overhead.
Then the rain started.
Not the gentle drizzle of a summer shower, but the violent downpour that turned streets into rivers, the same kind of rain that had been falling the night Rei drowned in his previous life.
The alley transformed into a nightmare of shadow and reflection, water streaming down walls, turning cobblestones into slick death traps.
Marcus smiled, a broken, terrible expression. "Even the weather's on my side."
He pressed the attack with renewed fury. Rei gave ground, slipping on wet stone, his training barely enough to keep the blade from finding flesh.
I'm losing. He's bigger, stronger, more desperate. And desperation makes people dangerous.
A wild swing caught Rei's guard wrong. He stumbled backward, crashed against a wall, and Marcus was on him immediately, one hand pinning his throat, the other raising the knife.
"I'm sorry," Marcus said, and might have even meant it. "But you should have left me alone."
The knife descended.
Rei's vision tunneled. Rain hammered down. Thunder masked the sounds of struggle.
This is how I die. Again. In the rain. Because I was stupid enough to follow
NO.
His hand found the prototype beneath his jacket, fingers wrapping around the modified hilt. The weight felt different than before, heavier, more substantial. The modifications he'd made yesterday based on insights from both timelines had transformed it.
"I didn't want to use this," Rei gasped, his free hand still pinned against the wall. "But you leave me no choice."
He activated it.
The sound was different, not the unstable whine from before but a focused hum that resonated in his bones. The blade that emerged wasn't the flickering, uncertain filament he'd first created.
This was something else entirely.
The plasma condensed into a coherent edge, brilliant blue-white, dense enough to distort the air around it, stable in a way that defied the chaotic energy contained within. It didn't flicker. It burned with controlled fury, as if Rei had somehow captured lightning and taught it patience.
Marcus's eyes went wide, the knife frozen mid-descent.
"What the"
He lunged anyway, too committed to stop, too desperate to care.
Rei didn't slash. Didn't thrust. Just moved the blade up, barely six inches, letting Marcus's own momentum do the work.
The plasma edge touched Marcus's chest.
For one crystalline moment, nothing happened.
Then reality remembered what plasma could do to matter.
The effect was instantaneous and absolute. Where the blade made contact, Marcus's body didn't burn, it unmade. Molecular bonds severed at the atomic level. Flesh, bone, clothing, everything within the blade's field simply ceased to exist in any recognizable form.
The disintegration spread outward in a perfect sphere from the point of contact, not explosion, but erasure. Silent except for a sound like glass singing at frequencies that shouldn't exist. Marcus's scream cut off before it could form as his lungs ceased to be.
Three seconds.
That's how long it took for a human being to become nothing.
No blood. No gore. No body.
Just displaced air rushing in to fill the sudden vacuum, carrying the faintest scent of ozone and something else, something that might have been Marcus Vrell but now was just dispersed atoms scattered across the alley like ash that never was.
The rain fell through empty space where a man had stood.
Rei stood there, plasma blade still humming in his shaking hand, staring at the nothing that remained.
He'd known the weapon was dangerous. Had calculated its theoretical destructive capacity. Had modified it specifically to increase power density and field coherence.
But knowing and seeing were galaxies apart.
"I killed him," Rei whispered. "I just... he's gone. Completely gone."
The blade flickered, power cell depleting rapidly after that massive discharge. He deactivated it with trembling fingers, the sudden absence of its hum making the rain sound deafening.
His legs gave out.
He collapsed against the wet cobblestones, the prototype clattering beside him, his entire body shaking with shock and adrenaline crash.
I killed someone. Erased them. Made them stop existing.
The guilt hit like a physical blow, crushing, suffocating, absolute.
"He was going to kill me," Rei said to the empty alley, needing to hear the justification spoken aloud. "It was self-defense. He attacked first. I didn't have a choice."
But the words felt hollow against the weight of what he'd done.
Marcus was gone. Not dead in the way that left a body, a funeral, closure. Just gone, as if he'd never existed in that moment at all.
What have I become? Three days ago I was terrified of confrontation. Now I'm carrying a weapon that can erase people from existence.
Thunder rumbled overhead, and the rain intensified, washing away any trace that someone had died here. Washing away evidence. Washing away everything except the knowledge that Rei Ashborne had just crossed a line that couldn't be uncrossed.
He forced himself to stand, legs shaking, and retrieved the prototype. It felt heavier now, weighted with more than just physical mass.
I built this to protect Mira. To protect my family. And I just used it to kill someone.
But he would have killed me. He would have made me disappear. This was survival.
The rationalizations spiraled, but none of them made the guilt lighter.
Rei stumbled out of the alley into the rain-soaked street, trying to look like just another person caught in the downpour, trying to ignore the fact that his hands wouldn't stop shaking.
He made it three blocks before he had to stop and vomit into a gutter, his body's belated rebellion against what his mind had forced it to do.
When he finally made it home, soaked and shivering, his mother took one look at him and immediately went into nurse mode.
"You're freezing. What were you thinking, going out in this weather?"
"Lost track of time," Rei mumbled. "Sorry."
She wrapped him in blankets, made him tea, fussed over him with the particular intensity of someone who sensed something wrong but couldn't quite identify it.
Mira watched from the doorway, her bright eyes seeing more than he wanted them to.
"You look like you've seen a ghost," she observed quietly.
Worse. I became one.
"Just got caught in the rain," Rei said, forcing a smile that felt like broken glass. "I'm fine."
But he wasn't fine.
And as he lay in bed that night, waiting for sleep to drag him forward to a future where his body was broken but his conscience might be clearer, one thought circled endlessly:
I have the power to unmake people now. To erase them from existence with a touch.
What does that make me?
And what will I become by the time I'm done using it?
Outside, the rain continued falling.
Inside, Rei Ashborne stared at the ceiling and tried not to think about how Marcus Vrell's last expression had looked, surprised, terrified, and then simply gone.
The weapon that would save his family had just claimed its first victim.
And Rei suspected, with cold certainty, that it wouldn't be the last.