Smoke curled up the face of a shattered office block, turning the midnight sky the color of old bruises. Ethan kept to the shadows, shoulder brushing cracked brick as he moved. A digital billboard on the corner glitched between perfume ads and static, strobing the world in sickly light.
He heard the fight before he saw it.
A metallic clang. A grunt cut short. A wet, tearing sound that prickled the skin at the back of his neck. Then a voice—tight, controlled—calling out, "Left! Two steps—now!"
He edged forward and peered through the windshield of a taxicab crushed against a hydrant. In the intersection beyond, three people battled a mutant.
The thing lurched like a busted marionette, head cocked too far to one side, jaw cracked and drooling threads of foam. Bones jutted from forearms like white, uneven blades. Each time it swiped, those bones rasped asphalt and threw sparks.
The survivors were a study in desperation.
The first—broad-shouldered, late thirties—wielded a bent crowbar in both hands. He stepped in and hammered the mutant's ribs; the metal rang as if he were hitting iron, and the crowbar bounced, but the man didn't flinch. He absorbed the recoil through legs like poured concrete and swung again with a roar.
The second was a woman in a torn track jacket. She moved like a blur—too fast—knifing in under a swipe, slashing the mutant's thigh with a kitchen blade, then vanishing back outside its reach. For a heartbeat her outline smeared, like heat-haze. Then she snapped back solid, chest heaving.
The third was a wiry guy in glasses with a length of steel pipe. He didn't waste a motion. Every strike landed on a tendon, a joint, the knuckles of the bone-blades. "Now!" he barked, and the big man pivoted exactly as a claw came in, letting it skid off his forearm instead of his throat.
Path signatures, Ethan realized. He could feel them the way a medic feels fever across a room.
Crowbar: Titan-Blood. Skin denser. Muscles coiled like cable.
Knife: Phase-Strider. That flicker wasn't imagination.
Pipe: Neural Savant. Timing like chess played at knife-point.
A feral moan answered from a side street. Another mutant, maybe more. Not a pack—just noise pulling noise.
Ethan swallowed, fingers closing on his pocketknife. He could turn and slip away. Keep his essence. Save it for Lena and Ellie.
The Titan-Blood stepped in again—hard—crowbar smacking the mutant's elbow. Bone cracked. The creature's arm hung crooked. It shrieked and lunged anyway, other claw cocked.
The track-jacket woman flickered and mistimed the dodge. The claw clipped her shoulder, spun her into a fender. She righted herself with a gasp. Blood darkened nylon.
"Marcus!" the guy with the pipe snapped. "Anchor left!"
The big man—Marcus—shifted onto the mutant's blind side, putting himself between it and the woman without blinking. He grinned, lips bloody. "Come on then."
Ethan moved.
He didn't think it through. He just broke from cover and sprinted. When the mutant reared to rake Marcus open, Ethan hit it from the side, shoulder driving beneath its ribcage. They tumbled across the asphalt in a clatter of bone and metal.
Hot rot breath hit his face. The claw came up, jagged and white.
His hands moved before thought. He thrust his palms out and willed the new fire forward.
Green light flared and hit the mutant's chest with a hiss. Flesh bubbled. The creature screamed—metal on glass—jerked back, and rolled to its knees smoking.
Ethan scrambled upright, breath sawing. The glow beneath his skin pulsed, hungry, answering. Numbers ticked on his forearm:
96 → 91 Essence
(–5 EP | Bio-Light Burst)
The head-rush hit like standing too fast. Not collapse. A warning. He shook it off.
"Who the hell are you?" Marcus grunted, crowbar ready.
"Help," Ethan said, voice thin. "For now."
The mutant snapped its jaws and came again. This time the woman was ready—she blurred sideways and the claw found empty air. She reappeared behind it, panting, and buried her knife in the side of its neck to the hilt. Shock flashed across her face at the effort. She wrenched the blade free and swayed.
"Don't flicker again!" the guy with the pipe barked. "You're burning too much!"
She bared her teeth. "Noted, Ravi!"
Marcus stepped in while the thing reeled; the crowbar arced. Impact rang. Bone splintered. The mutant staggered, listed, then hurled itself at Ethan again—as if the green offended it more than pain.
"Left hip," Ravi shouted. "Joint is compromised—now, now!"
Ethan pivoted and drove his foot into the torn hamstring where her knife had opened it. Something snapped like dry wood. The mutant dropped to one knee, flailing.
Marcus took the opening, crowbar falling like a gavel. Once. Twice. The skull caved with a wet crunch.
For a heartbeat nothing moved except drifting ash and the tremor in Ethan's hands.
Then the mutant exhaled like steam—and collapsed into black mist.
Ethan jerked back. The mist curled around their ankles, thin fingers searching. Where the body had fallen, a shard of light hovered, walnut-sized, faceted like a gemstone but beating like a heart.
Marcus stared. "Still not used to that."
Ravi wiped his pipe on his jeans. His glasses were cracked but his eyes were sharp. "You take it," he told the woman gently. "You're low."
She hesitated, then nodded. She reached with shaking fingers. The shard snapped to her palm like a magnetized coin and melted into her skin. A faint bar under her wrist brightened by a notch.
She exhaled. "Back to 31/100. That's one more flicker. Maybe two if I don't get stupid."
Ethan blinked. If she'd phased again at twenty-something…
Ravi turned to Ethan. "You're new."
"Yeah," Ethan managed. His forearm shimmered: 91/100.
Marcus eyed Ethan's hands, the glow ghosting under skin. "Not Titan-Blood. What's the green?"
Ethan opened his mouth, closed it. A dozen answers lined up and fell apart. The truth won anyway. "Gene-Warden."
Ravi's brows rose. "Healer."
The woman—short hair plastered to her forehead—studied him. "No one we've met closes wounds like that. On themselves, maybe. On others? Not at all."
Marcus grunted. "Show me."
He followed his gaze to her shoulder. Not arterial, but deep. She held her knife like she'd keep fighting until gravity disagreed.
"Hold still," Ethan said softly.
She snorted. "Kira. I don't do 'still.'"
"Do it anyway," Ravi muttered. "You're dripping."
Kira rolled her eyes but turned. Ethan hovered his glowing hand over the cut. Heat bloomed in bone more than skin; he imagined pulling threads together, tying the body closed.
Warmth washed palm to flesh. Blood slowed. Skin knit. The gash sealed to an angry pink line, then smoothed under an invisible hand.
Kira sucked in a breath. "Oh."
Ethan's vision swam.
91 → 81 Essence
(–10 EP | Heal Other—deep cut)
The head-rush hit harder—cold prickles across his scalp. He fought the sway. Not now.
Marcus whistled low. "That's… new."
Ravi went analytical. "Costs you more to heal others than yourself?"
"About twice," Ethan said.
Kira flexed her shoulder, awe and wariness in equal measure. "Felt clean. Like you ironed time flat."
"I'll take 'ironed' over 'stitched in an alley,'" Ethan said.
A feral moan drifted from the far mouth of the intersection. Another answered off-beat. The city coughed, threw sparks. Glass popped somewhere overhead.
Not a pack. Not coordinated. But noise bled into noise. The world was a guitar left howling in feedback.
Marcus rolled his shoulders. "We move. This crossroads is a bell."
"East two blocks," Ravi said. "Narrow streets. Fewer sightlines."
Kira wiped her knife and shot Ethan a look. "You coming, Greenlight?"
He almost said no. He had family to find. Every minute here—
Then he looked at Kira's shoulder—whole. Marcus's crowbar—bent from strikes that would shatter bones if his skin weren't stone. Ravi's steady eyes in a broken city.
"I'll come for a while," he said. "Then I have to go."
"Family?" Ravi asked, already reading the lines in his face.
"My sister. Lena. Her kid."
Marcus nodded once. "Then we move fast. Names: Marcus."
"Kira."
"Ravi."
"Ethan."
They started east. Buildings leaned like old men conferring. Ethan kept the middle—the medic's place—close enough to reach anyone who fell.
Footfalls scuffed. Fires popped. Once, a mutant stumbled from a laundromat and blinked up at street lights as if personally offended. They froze behind a delivery truck until it shambled on, muttering in a voice that wasn't words.
At the end of the block, they paused in the lee of a newsstand ripped nearly in half. Ravi peered around the corner, calculating. "Three cars, one overturned. Sightline from the left alley. We cut between the sedan and the—"
"Wait," Kira said, frowning at Ethan's arm. "What's your bar?"
He checked. 81/100. The glow had steadied, but there was still a float behind the eyes—like a post-double-shift fog. Manageable.
"Eighty-one."
"Good. Don't drop below fifty unless you have to. I dipped to twenty-eight and woke up hugging a mailbox with teeth."
Marcus snorted. "Mailbox started it."
Ethan huffed—a sound almost like a laugh, torn at the edges. It died when a memory surged: Lena laughing—real and bright—and Ellie ducking behind a couch cushion as if it could stop a tickle attack. He swallowed.
"What did you choose?" he asked, voice low. "When the voice came."
"Titan-Blood," Marcus said. "Felt like breathing. Skin got heavy. Punches got true."
"Phase-Strider," Kira said. "I run. I always have. Now I sometimes… don't get where I meant to."
"Neural Savant," Ravi said, almost apologetic. "I don't move right, I think right. The world slows in chunks. It hurts if I push. Headaches. Nosebleeds once."
His gaze tipped to Ethan. "How many choices did you see?"
Ethan hesitated. The god-voice slid like a knife behind his ribs: Few are offered the Fifth Path. Fewer endure it.
"Five," he said.
Kira blinked. "Five?"
Marcus's mouth quirked. "I got two."
"I had four," Ravi murmured. "Kira?"
"Three," she said, quiet now, like the number mattered.
Ravi nodded slowly, puzzle pieces shifting. "Rarity, then."
Ethan looked away. He didn't want to be rare. He wanted his sister's voice at the end of a call that wouldn't connect.
"Move," Marcus said gently, reading something on Ethan's face and sparing him the answer. "We talk when the street isn't hungry."
They flowed through the gap Ravi chose, passing in a hush broken only by Kira's quick breaths and the soft slap of rubber soles. A block later they slipped into a narrow side street where vines crawled up brick as if the city remembered being wild.
Movement flickered at the far end. They sank into shadow.
A mutant leaned out of a doorway, sniffed, and shambled across the street. Another lurched into view behind it, claws dragging. They wandered at angles to each other, eyes glassed, hunger like static. When one bumped the other, they clawed without fury, then lost interest.
Kira's knuckles paled on her knife. "We could take them," she whispered.
"We don't need to," Ravi murmured.
"Essence shards," Marcus said. "We're not flush."
Ethan's forearm pulsed faintly, numbers cool as a dashboard at night. 81. He thought of Kira's bar climbing to thirty-one, the looseness in her shoulders. Essence as fuel; refills only at risk. A new math wrote itself: spend now to stay alive long enough to spend later.
"We pick clean fights," Ravi decided. "Not loud ones. Hit and hush."
"Copy," Kira said, wolfish.
They waited. The closer mutant drifted toward a stack of pallets. Kira timed her breath to its halting steps. One, two—now.
She slipped from shadow, a smear becoming a woman again, and cut the hamstring. The leg folded with a pop. It toppled, keening.
Before it could roll, Marcus was there, crowbar answering in silent, economical arcs. Bone caved; the keening shredded and died.
The second mutant twitched toward the sound, paused, confused. Ravi stepped into its blind spot, swung twice—wrist joint, temple. It overbalanced, and Ethan's palm found its sternum. He didn't flare bright; he pushed a thread of green instead, like cautery.
The smell was acrid, quieter than before. Flesh sizzled. The mouth opened in a dumb O. It sank sideways and didn't rise.
Two bodies melted to mist. Two shards hung trembling.
"Yours," Marcus told Ethan, chin-flicking at the nearer. "You're running the tab."
Ethan reached. The shard kissed his palm and shot up his forearm like whiskey. Numbers ticked:
81 → 88 Essence
(+7 EP | Lesser Shard)
Heat unfurled behind his sternum, pleasant and alarming both. "I felt that."
"Good," Kira said, collecting the second shard with reluctance. "Trust me, you'll want to feel more before sunrise."
Ravi swiped his forehead, left a soot smear. "We can't farm all night. We need a quiet roof or a room with one door."
"Pharmacy," Marcus said. "Dane and Third. Metal gate. Back door."
They threaded the block and found it where he promised: iron grate pulled halfway down, display window spider-webbed but intact. Marcus lifted the grate with a strained grunt; Kira ducked under, then Ethan, then Ravi. The scrape hissed into the street.
Inside smelled of alcohol and cardboard. Shelves listing in rows made an obstacle course for loud mistakes. They left the front dark and wound toward the back through a canyon of vitamins.
In the storeroom, Marcus shouldered a mop bucket against the door and wedged a desk under the handle. Windowless. Mercifully quiet. Fluorescent lights flickered once and died. They didn't try again.
They sat on boxes of paper towels like pilgrims around a fire that didn't exist.
For a minute no one spoke.
"Thank you," Ethan said to the room, to the three, to this brief second that wasn't running.
"You jumped a bone-porcupine for strangers," Marcus said. "We're square."
Kira checked her shoulder—smooth. "How long does your ironing last?"
"Forever, I hope," Ethan said. "Long enough."
Ravi's eyes reflected ghost-light. "Where were you headed?"
"Across town," Ethan said. "My sister. Lena. Her kid."
Kira's knife stilled. "You think kids get a choice?"
"I don't know," Ethan said, voice rough.
Silence thickened. Even the city outside seemed to pause, catching a breath it didn't have.
Then the System's voice slid through the storeroom like cold smoke.
> "Mortals. Your choices carve your fates. Your essence fuels your oaths. Spend it. Hoard it. We will watch."
Marcus's knuckles whitened on the crowbar. "I hate that voice."
"Same," Kira said, a quiet, shaken laugh.
Ravi's gaze went distant, following patterns only he could see. "If it's watching, it's measuring. If it's measuring, there are thresholds. Rewards. Traps." He scrubbed a hand over his face. "We need rules. House rules. Essence minimums. Noise discipline. Watch rotation. And we decide now whether we help strangers tomorrow or don't. Otherwise that question kills us mid-swing."
Kira looked at Ethan like the answer lived in his bones. "You're going to say help them."
"If we can," Ethan said. "If it doesn't drop us to zero."
"Forty is a head-rush," Marcus said. "Thirty is blur. Twenty is floor time. No point kissing concrete because we got noble."
"A kid bleeding out doesn't care about thresholds," Ethan shot back.
Marcus held the stare, then looked away first. "Doesn't mean I'm wrong."
"Case-by-case," Ravi said. "If the numbers make sense, we help. If not, we don't. Nobody burns to single digits unless it's their family." A beat. "Or mine."
Kira exhaled. "Fine. But if I face-plant flickering for some idiot who screamed at the wrong time, I'm haunting all of you."
"Noted," Marcus said.
Ethan stared at his bar. 88/100. He could feel the new math sitting on his skin, the way minutes used to sit on his watch during night shifts—only now the minutes bled.
He pictured Lena's living room—the plant she always forgot to water, the blanket Ellie dragged everywhere like a comet tail. He pictured belts cinched around door handles, crackers doled like gold.
He shut the other picture—a timer over a child's head—behind a door in his mind.
"Sleep," Ravi said, pulling them back from edges. "I'll take first watch. Kira, you need it most—you dipped too low. Marcus, second. Ethan, third—if you're conscious."
"I will be," Ethan said.
"You will try," Ravi corrected. "Close counts."
Kira slid down the wall until she was a folded shadow, knife across her lap. Marcus stretched with a hiss and shut his eyes the way men sleep in trucks—ready to wake as a punch. Ravi settled by the door, ear angled to the crack, pipe across his thighs.
"Ethan," he said, still watching the dark. "You jumped into a fight and spent ten points on someone you didn't know."
"I didn't do the math before I moved," Ethan murmured.
"That's both your greatest strength," Ravi said, "and why we're making rules."
A wry breath escaped Ethan. "Understood."
The city murmured beyond concrete: crashes, solitary screams, the low chew of fire. Somewhere to the east a siren tried and failed again.
His essence pulsed steady against his wrist. 88.
When his eyes finally closed, he dreamed of a hallway washed in green light. He was running and not running; doors blurred past with names he couldn't read. Ellie's laugh echoed from the far end—bright, scared, brave. He reached, fingers glowing, but the hall slid longer like a trick of perspective, and every step he took stitched the floor behind him closed.
He jolted awake to Ravi's hand on his shoulder and the wet paper smell of dawn.
"Third watch," Ravi whispered. "You're up."
Ethan sat, bones creaking, and checked his bar on instinct.
87/100.
No miracle regen, then. Just the quiet drop of a body paying for adrenaline with exhaustion. He took the pipe, nodded to Ravi, and settled by the door to listen to a city learning its new rules.
When the first true light crept under the threshold, Marcus was already awake, Kira rolling her shoulder, Ravi scrawling on the back of a receipt with a pharmacist's pen.
Ethan stood and tightened his jacket. "We go," he said. "Lena's place is west, twenty-five blocks."
Marcus hefted the crowbar. "Then we make a path."
Kira flashed a quick, sharp grin. "Try not to iron me again. I like the scar stories."
Ravi tapped his temple. "Noise discipline. Watch our bars. Case-by-case."
They lifted the desk, unwedged the door, and slipped into the pale morning.
The street outside was a long breath held.
Somewhere above them, the System watched.
Ethan flexed his fingers and felt the green answer. "Hang on," he whispered to the day, to the city, to two names he wouldn't let the world take. "I'm coming."
And they went to war with the distance.