Cyrus was walking back from the campus café, iced coffee in hand, listening to Ethan complain about protein prices while Kaito judged everyone who breathed too loudly.
Normal.
Completely normal.
Then the world blinked.
That was the only word that made sense afterward.
Blink.
A momentary pressure—like the air suddenly thickened, weightless yet crushing, a soundless shockwave that wasn't sound at all. An invisible ripple tearing through reality with the gentleness of a whisper and the violence of an earthquake.
Cyrus didn't fall.
He didn't scream.
He simply froze as the ground trembled beneath him.
The tremor ran through the pavement like a spine snapping. Buildings groaned. A car alarm went off across the street, then another, then ten more. People staggered, confused, grabbing at anything solid.
"What the hell—?!" Ethan gasped, arms out to steady the both of them.
Kaito braced against a lamppost. "Earthquake? Here?"
"No," Cyrus said—too sharply, too certain.
He felt it.
Deep.
Wrong.
The city wasn't shaking.
The air was.
It lasted only three seconds.
Three.
The rumble faded.
The pressure vanished.
And everything went eerily still.
People stumbled around, laughing nervously, calling loved ones, checking phones for news.
Ethan exhaled. "Damn. That was one angry tectonic plate."
Kaito wiped his forehead. "We should get inside. Cyrus? You good?"
Cyrus didn't answer.
He was staring at his hand.
He didn't know why.
He didn't know what he expected.
But something inside him felt… rearranged.
A switch flipped.
An engine humming low beneath his skin.
Like a shockwave had reached into him and tapped a locked door he never knew he had.
"Cyrus?" Kaito repeated, nudging him.
He blinked. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine."
But he wasn't.
Not even close.
---
The City Reacts
Within minutes, the sirens began.
Not police sirens.
Not fire trucks.
The deep, warbling, hard-to-ignore government emergency siren—the kind most citizens only knew from historical documentaries.
Phones buzzed with alerts:
> EARTHQUAKE REPORTED. REMAIN CALM.
STAY INDOORS UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
Ethan snorted. "They typed that too fast. No way they didn't know something."
Kaito shot him a look. "Don't start with conspiracies."
"It's not a conspiracy," Ethan insisted. "It didn't feel like an earthquake. It felt like—"
He stopped.
Not because he lost the words, but because on the rooftop across the street, a woman collapsed.
Not fainted.
Collapsed.
Before anyone could reach her, she gasped—eyes wide, terrified—and then a burst of wind exploded outward from her body, like she had detonated a miniature storm.
Cyrus, Kaito, and Ethan staggered back from the sudden gust.
Students screamed.
Bags flew.
Umbrellas flipped inside out.
The woman herself scrambled backward, horrified by her own outburst.
"What… what did I just—?!"
Her voice was lost under the incoming roar of government vans skidding into the street.
Black paint.
No insignia.
Full armor teams.
They moved with purpose.
They weren't responding.
They were expecting this.
Ethan grabbed Cyrus's arm. "Dude. We need to get out of here."
But Cyrus couldn't move.
He watched as agents rushed the rooftop, tranquilizing the woman before she could even speak, carrying her away like a specimen in a containment bag.
People panicked.
Phones flew up.
Agents confiscated them on sight.
Kaito hissed, "This is bad. This is really, really bad."
Cyrus swallowed hard.
Something clicked in his mind.
Not fear.
Recognition.
And whatever had just awakened in that woman…
…he felt it in himself too.
A quiet tremor of power under his skin, waiting.
Waiting for the moment he stopped lying to himself and acknowledged it.
The moment he listened.
---
"Let's go," Cyrus finally said.
His voice was steady.
Too steady.
Ethan and Kaito didn't question it—they just followed him through the chaos, weaving through crowds, avoiding agents, sticking to side streets where fear turned into whispers and whispers into rumors.
Some claimed they saw a boy lift a parked motorcycle.
Some said a girl set her backpack on fire by screaming.
Cyrus didn't join the speculation.
He just clenched his fists quietly.
Because deep down, beneath the confusion, beneath the fear, beneath the instinct to run…
…a single thought kept repeating itself in his mind:
"Something has changed.
And I don't know if I'm supposed to fear it…
or use it."