Nathan had only been a district captain for three years when the fear finally wore off. It took that long for the officers of the 1008th district to stop flinching every time his hair caught fire mid-sentence and start treating him like just another captain who happened to occasionally combust. Those three years had been good. The years after had been better.
It was in the third year that the district had gotten an alert — something dangerous was in the sewers beneath the city. Mutated rats. Mutated insects. Mutated lizards, of all things, each one twisted into something that didn't belong in any biology textbook. Clearing them out had been easy enough. What bothered him was the number if was as though something down there had turned every living thing in those tunnels into a monster, all at once, all the same way.
That was the first time Nathan had ever encountered void essence.
It was also the first time he'd met Lukas.
"Funny, thinking about it now — I never did figure out how he got into that sewer. No record of entry at any of the outposts." Nathan exhaled slowly, watching his own reflection ripple faintly in the polished metal wall of the small room he sat in. "Makes sense now, if he could open portals whenever he wanted. That chill I felt from that spatial door he tore open outside the 1008th — that was void essence. Same as the sewer. Whatever dropped him down there must have corrupted the vermin along with him. But the portal that opened beneath him... what was that?"
He sat back, letting the thought settle.
"Eight years later, and this is the closest I've ever come to knowing who you actually are"
He was seated in a cramped room crowded with equipment he didn't recognize — cables, humming panels, a chair with restraints. Ever since Noah had announced his promotion, Nathan had been swept aboard the Tower's ship and run through a battery of tests, each stranger than the last.
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The door slid open with a hiss. Noah stepped through, trailed by a humanoid robot in a lab coat carrying a tablet.
"You're clean. Come with me."
"Those tests," Nathan said, falling into step beside him. "What were they for?"
"Some checked for illness. Some checked your equipment. Most of them checked for void essence. You've spent a long time around Lukas. There's a chance you've been corrupted."
"Well? Have I?"
"No. You're clean."
"Wait, If there was a chance I'd been exposed, shouldn't everyone in my district get checked too?"
"The odds are low," Noah said, already turning down a corridor. "And we don't have the time or the materials to screen an entire district."
The corridor opened into a hall so vast Nathan's first instinct was to call it a stadium. A cockpit, he corrected himself a beat later, taking in the scale of it — a massive circular command desk sat at the center, ringed by dozens of Tower enforcers moving in constant, practiced motion: pulling levers, sweeping fingers across floating screens, murmuring into earpieces in overlapping streams of half-finished sentences. The far wall functioned as one continuous screen, displaying an aerial feed of the collapsed 1008th district far below.
Every enforcer they passed straightened and saluted. Noah didn't slow for any of them, weaving through a gap in the circular desk toward its center, where a single seat sat apart from the rest, surrounded by its own ring of shifting holographic displays. A yellow-haired woman slouched in it, entirely unmoved by the chaos around her, eyes fixed on the screens in front of her.
"Whis. Status," Noah said, stopping behind her chair.
The chair spun around.
"Same as before. We can't determine where he portalled to. Void essence scrambles everything. The time breach is completely sealed." Her eyes slid past Noah, landing on Nathan. "Who's this?"
"New recruit. He was the captain of the district that just got levelled. HQ wants him brought in."
"Huh," Whis said, and turned back to her screens as if that settled the matter entirely.
"Wait — you're taking me along? Now?" Nathan asked. "I thought there'd at least be paperwork. A letter. Something."
"Didn't I already tell you you're getting promoted?"
"You told me that. You didn't mention I wouldn't be going home first."
"As of right now, you're no longer district captain," Noah said, matter-of-fact, like he was reading off a form. "You're Tower Enforcer Nathan Burnz."
"Just like that? You have the authority to just — don't tell me you're actually—"
Noah reached past him and pressed a switch on the control deck. A short burst of feedback crackled through the hall, and the noise of two hundred enforcers dropped to nothing almost instantly. Heads turned. Bodies drifted, unhurried but attentive, toward the center of the room.
"Listen up, people. This is your Commander speaking."
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"What's your name?"
'Urgh. Why does every single person in this cosmos suddenly care so much about names,' Lukas muttered.
"Ha. Funny guy. You think you're funny?" the voice pressed.
"Not really. I've just been told I'm very sarcastic, though." Lukas said.
'I was just thinking the Appellation didn't drop me straight into the mouth of a titan this time. Guess I spoke too soon.'
He sat in a windowless room, wrists cuffed, a thin line of blood drying somewhere in his hair, surrounded by a loose ring of men built like industrial equipment.
"What's the holdup?" a thick, wet voice echoed from somewhere beyond the ring, followed by the slow, deliberate weight of footsteps.
A large man in an expensive suit stepped out of the dark — except where a head should have been, an octopus sat instead, its mantle draped loosely over the collar of the suit like it had simply been sewn there. Its tentacles curled and uncurled in slow, idle patterns.
'This guy is enormous,' was the only thought Lukas could manage.
Behind the octopus-headed man trailed the short, green-haired space wanderer girl from the port — Vel, one of the others had called her — along with a handful of men who'd spent the last several minutes pretending very badly to be her crew.
Lukas had followed her to her to her crew only to get ambushed. One of them had already tried knocking Lukas out with a metal rod from behind. It hadn't worked.
They'd all gone quiet after that, staring at him with the particular confusion of men who'd just watched a plan fail in a way they didn't understand. Lukas looked back at them and offered the only honest reaction he had.
"Ouch."
They tried to jump him a second time.
"Whoa, whoa — put the rods down. I'm not even fighting back. Just cuff me properly or something." Lukas sighed. "I haven't been out in centuries and somehow everyone in the entire cosmos got more aggressive while I was gone."
Bewildered and not entirely sure why they were listening to him, they cuffed him and hauled him here.
"This is it?" the octopus asked. "You confirmed who he is?"
"He's a nobody, just pay us our money Baron" one of the men said.
"Hm.." The octopus slowly walked towards Lukas. His controlled movement showed _ He was in charge here.
"He doesn't look like nobody to me." The octopus's eyes — small, glassy, set too far apart in that bulbous head — narrowed at Lukas. " My men found a gold watch and compass on him. Both antique. Both made from something a good deal rarer than gold usually is."
"What?" One of the kidnappers asked.
The Baron pulled out Lukas's gold compass. "Phoenix gold."
A flicker of greed passed between the men, quick and unmistakable.
"You checked him and missed that?" the leader kidnapper hissed at one of his own.
"I saw the glasses. I figured they were fake, so I didn't bother with the rest—"
"You figured. You absolute—" The leader turned on Vel instead. "This is exactly why I told you to actually watch them."
"I'm the one who brought him in," Vel snapped back. "If none of you can tell real gold from fake, that's not on me."
The octopus let out a low, wet chuckle that seemed to come from somewhere below his suit rather than his mouth.
"Tell me. Does someone carrying this really strike you as nobody?"
They all looked at Lukas. He was looking back at them with that same blank expression.
"So what, then?" Vel asked. "We send him back?"
"Send him back? If he really does have someone backing him, they could trace us. It won't take long before the Tower finds this whole operation. The pit included." One of the men said.
'The pit,' Lukas thought. 'Where have I heard that before? The Pit games — those old betting rings the Tower shut down years ago.'
'Should I just leave now? I let myself get caught because I was bored and curious, and this has clearly turned into something bigger than I expected. None of these men could actually stop me — the octopus seems strong though. . But the second I use even the tiniest bit of essence, it won't be long before the enforcers pick up my trail again.' Lukas exhaled quietly through his nose. 'Being a fugitive is exhausting.'
"I overheard him talking to the men at the port terminal," Vel said. "He's not registered."
"Not registered." The octopus's grin widened, slow and delighted, showing teeth that didn't belong to any octopus Lukas had ever seen. "That's a genuine surprise. A man carrying that much value, and nobody's ever bothered to put a name on him."
He lowered his massive head until it hovered inches from Lukas's face, studying him the way a jeweler studies a stone he isn't sure is real.
"Your eyes," he said slowly. "They're fake?"
A pressure dropped over the room — sudden, crushing, the kind of weight that made the air itself feel thicker. Every man behind the octopus staggered, hands flying to their chests as though something had reached inside and squeezed.
"Baron — Baron! Mr. Bane!!" one of them managed to gasp out.
The pressure vanished as quickly as it had come.
"Ah. My apologies. I got a little excited." Baron Bane straightened, glancing almost fondly at his men still catching their breath, before turning that same gaze back on Lukas. "And yet — you weren't affected at all."
"When you say the pit," Lukas said, unbothered, "you mean the Pit games. Right?"
"You know the Pit games?" Baron Bane's grin stretched wider. "You intrigue me more by the second, Mr. Nobody."
"Wasn't that banned by the Tower?"
'If I remember correctly. Corrupt powers in the universe often kidnapped low level planet residents and drop them off in unhabitable planets where they are forced to partake in life threatening games for entertainment. The tower put an end to it back then. Alot of powerful families in the cosmos were dismantled by the tower then. I remember even I was disgusted by it at the time. Was I part of the campaign? I can't remember. I can tell I hated it though.'
"Hm? I can tell you're annoyed with me," Baron Bane mused, tilting his head. "And yet your eyes stay perfectly blank.. Fake eyes. It's almost like you can't even manage to look angry."
Lukas studied him for a long moment, silent, before finally answering.
"I don't like you."
*Boom!*
The room went black — not dim, not shadowed, but entirely, absolutely black, as if the lights hadn't merely gone out but had never existed at all. When Baron Bane's vision cleared, he was standing alone. The walls, the men, the room itself — all of it gone. Beneath his feet, a floor of dark crystalline glass stretched out in every direction, reflecting a starry sky that hung where a ceiling should have been.
A sound like tearing paper split the sky above him.
Through the glass beneath his own feet, reflected back up at him from somewhere impossibly far below, Baron Bane watched the stars part down the middle — and something opened. Not a mouth. Not a hand. An eye, vast and lidless, fixed entirely on him, seeing him the way a man sees an insect he hasn't decided yet whether to crush.
"Argh—!!"
Baron Bane stumbled backward, one massive hand flying up to shield his face.
"Baron?"
The room reassembled around him exactly as it had been — the men, the walls, the dim light — as if nothing had happened at all. His men stared at him with open confusion. Lukas stood exactly where he'd been standing the entire time, cuffed hands loose in front of him, watching Baron Bane with the same flat, unreadable eyes.
Those fake eyes.
Baron Bane straightened his suit with slow, deliberate care, giving himself a moment before he spoke again. When he finally turned to his men, his voice had lost none of its warmth — if anything, it had gained something hungrier underneath it.
"Add him to the pit." He said almost excitedly.
"But sir. You said he might be someone important."
"Add him anyway"
"Under… what name, sir?" one of the men asked, pen already hovering over a data-slate.
"Register him as Mr. Nobody." Baron Bane turned back to Lukas, tongue running once across his teeth, the taste of something — anticipation, maybe, or blood, or both — clearly on his mind. "And put my money on him."
"I'm betting on you, Mr. Nobody."