Episode 2: Safehouse Reckoning
The safehouse was a rotting three-story building tucked behind a derelict meatpacking plant on the industrial outskirts of East Hollow. It smelled of mildew, gun oil, and old blood. Peter Shotstock had chosen it precisely because no one with half a brain would want to live there.
Peter was waiting when Kevin and Wyatt burst through the reinforced back door. The ex-soldier was in his late thirties, built like a brick wall that had been hit by several other brick walls, with a scarred face and a permanent scowl. A half-smoked cigar hung from his lips.
"About fucking time," Peter growled, slamming the door shut and dropping three heavy deadbolts. "Nathan's already here. Bleeding on my couch like a goddamn amateur."
Nathan sat in the corner of the dimly lit main room, shirt off, pressing a blood-soaked rag against his shoulder. His face was pale but his eyes were sharp. He gave Kevin and Wyatt a weak smirk.
"Orange tried to turn me into pulp. I returned the favor. Permanently."
Kevin's glowing white-blue circuits had faded to faint lines across his chest and arms, but the Rampager mantle still hummed under his skin like a live wire. He helped Wyatt to a chair, then collapsed onto an old crate.
"We killed Quake," Kevin said quietly. "Or… I did. He's buried under half a construction site."
Peter let out a low whistle. "Two Pillar scouts in one night. That's gonna make some very powerful assholes angry." He tossed Nathan a fresh bandage and a bottle of cheap whiskey. "Drink. disinfect. I don't give a shit which first."
Wyatt wiped concrete dust from his face. "They knew about Kevin. Called him the Rampager. Said the Pillar would claim him eventually. What the hell does that mean?"
Nathan took a long pull from the bottle, wincing as he poured some over his wound. "The White-Blue Heart Pillar isn't just some ancient relic. It's… conscious. Or at least the thing inside it is. The scouts we killed tonight were low-level collectors. They hunt newly awakened Glimmers like us. Especially strong ones."
He looked directly at Kevin.
"Especially ones that feel like you."
Kevin's hands tightened into fists. The circuits flared brighter for a moment. "I didn't ask for this. I was just trying to get home from the arcade when the Matrix bonded with me. One second I'm a scared kid, the next I'm… this."
Peter snorted. "Welcome to the club, kid. None of us asked. The Shattering doesn't give a fuck about consent. It just shits out Glimmers when it feels like it."
A heavy silence fell over the room, broken only by distant sirens. Wyatt finally spoke up.
"So what now? We can't just keep running and killing scouts forever."
Peter walked over to a battered metal table and unrolled a large, hand-drawn map covered in red marks and notes. "We can't. But we've got something they don't. Four different Glimmers working together. Most Wrathborn are lone wolves or join cults. We're a crew."
He jabbed a finger at a circled location on the map.
"There's a rumor of a Glimmer dealer operating out of the old subway tunnels. Goes by the name 'Archivist.' Supposedly he's got information about the Garden Behind the Fence and how the Pillar actually works. If we can reach him before the Pillar's real enforcers show up, we might get actual answers instead of just bleeding in alleys."
Nathan leaned forward, eyes narrowing. "And if it's a trap?"
"Then we spring it," Peter said with a savage grin. "I've been waiting for a proper fight since I woke up with this mantle. My Glimmer doesn't do fancy illusions or earthquakes. It just makes me very, very hard to kill."
Kevin looked at his trembling hands. The destructive power inside him felt hungry after the fight with Quake. It wanted more. That scared him almost as much as the Pillar did.
"I'll go," he said. "But I need to get better at controlling this thing. I almost collapsed the whole block tonight."
Peter nodded. "Good. We move at dawn. Nathan, you're on lookout. Wyatt, you're with me scavenging supplies. Kevin… you're training with me in the basement. Time to see what the Supernatural Rampager can really do without an audience."
Two hours later, in the damp, concrete basement beneath the safehouse.
The room shook violently.
Kevin stood in the center, chest heaving, white-blue energy crackling across his entire body. Peter circled him like a predator, bleeding from a cut on his forehead but grinning like a madman.
"Again!" Peter barked. "Don't hold back, you little shit!"
Kevin roared and slammed his palms together. A focused wave of pure destructive force exploded forward. Peter met it head-on. His own mantle activated — Iron Tyrant, the ability to turn his flesh and bones temporarily into living metal while amplifying raw durability and strength.
The collision sent Peter skidding back ten feet, carving grooves into the floor, but he stayed standing.
"Not bad," he laughed, spitting blood. "But you're still thinking like a scared kid. The Rampager isn't a gun. It's a fucking apocalypse in a bottle. Stop aiming it. Become it."
Kevin closed his eyes. Memories of the arcade, of the terror when the Matrix first bonded with him, flooded back. Fear. Rage. The need to protect Wyatt. He stopped fighting the mantle.
When he opened his eyes, the circuits blazed like molten starlight. The air around him warped. He took one step and the entire basement floor cracked in a perfect circle around him.
He moved like a storm.
Peter barely had time to reinforce his Iron Tyrant form before Kevin was on him. The punches weren't just strong — they carried the weight of pure kinetic annihilation. Each hit landed with the force of a wrecking ball concentrated into a fist-sized point.
Peter was laughing even as he was driven into the wall hard enough to embed himself halfway into the concrete.
"THERE it is!" he roared. "That's the monster they're scared of!"
Kevin finally pulled back, breathing hard, the destructive aura fading. He looked at the devastation around him and felt a strange mix of horror… and exhilaration.
Upstairs, Wyatt and Nathan watched the ceiling crack and dust fall.
"Should we be worried?" Wyatt asked.
Nathan smirked despite the pain in his shoulder. "Only if the building collapses on us before we get answers."
Dawn broke gray and ugly over East Hollow.
The crew moved out, armed and ready. But as they approached the entrance to the old subway tunnels, Nathan suddenly froze.
"Shit," he whispered, weaving a quick illusion to hide them behind a crumbling wall. "We've got company."
Emerging from the tunnel mouth were three figures in pristine white-and-blue tactical gear, each marked with the Pillar's sigil. Leading them was a woman with silver hair and eyes that glowed with cold intelligence.
Her voice carried unnaturally across the ruined street.
"Rampager. We know you're here. The Heart Pillar offers you a choice. Join us… or we'll take your Glimmer by force and leave your friends as stains on the pavement."
Kevin felt the Mythical Matrix burn against his chest.
The war had officially begun.
---
**Hong Kong, three days later**
The rooftop of the Lau apartment building had become Ignis's testing ground, mostly because it was the one place his grandfather couldn't yell at him for setting things on fire that mattered.
"Again," Grandfather Lau said, arms crossed, standing a careful ten feet back with a garden hose coiled at his feet like a loaded gun. "Small this time. A candle, not a bonfire."
Ignis exhaled. Since the noodle shop, his skin had settled into something new — not burned, not healed, just *changed*, faint hairline cracks along his knuckles and forearms that glowed like embers when he was angry, or scared, or both.
He opened his palm. Called the thread of heat up from somewhere under his sternum.
The flame that answered was the size of a fist, orange curling into blue at the core, and it hovered there obediently for almost four full seconds before it doubled in size without being asked and singed a black handprint into the water tank behind him.
"Ai-yah." His grandfather didn't even reach for the hose. Just sighed, the way he'd been sighing for three days straight. "Your control is a dog that has not been walked. It runs where it wants."
"I'm *trying*."
"Trying is not the same as training." The old man crossed the rooftop and crouched by the scorch mark, running a thumb over it, thoughtful. "Fire does not respect trying. It respects discipline. And discipline is not something you learn from an old man who fixes air conditioners for a living."
Ignis let the flame gutter out between his fingers. "So what, we're just supposed to hope I don't burn down the building?"
"No." His grandfather stood, and something in his voice changed — steadier, like he'd rehearsed this part. "I have been making calls. There is a school in Japan. Special school, for children like you. Ones the Shattering touched. They teach control there — real control, not a grandfather with a garden hose."
Ignis's jaw tightened. "I don't need a special school. I need—" He stopped himself before he said it. *I need Ma.* He didn't say it. He never said it anymore.
His grandfather heard it anyway. He always did.
"If Japan does not work," he said quietly, "there is a place in this weird country called Willowbrook.it's capital city East Hollow. Rougher place. Less structure. But people there who understand what it is to become something new and violent overnight." He put a hand on Ignis's shoulder, careful of the cracked, warm skin. "I would rather send you somewhere with rules first."
Ignis stared at the black handprint on the water tank for a long moment.
"Okay," he said finally. "Japan first."
---
**Thirty-one thousand feet, somewhere over the East China Sea**
The turbulence started normal enough — a little shudder, seatbelt light, a flight attendant's rehearsed calm over the intercom. Ignis had his forehead against the window, watching moonlit clouds slide by, when the shudder became a *lurch*, and the lurch became the sound of metal screaming somewhere it shouldn't.
Then the thing was on the wing.
It looked like it had crawled wrong out of an old story — a dog's skull stretched too long, iron-plated and rust-black, with a single burning eye sunk in the center of its forehead where a snout should have split in two. Its body was smoke and muscle, flickering in and out of the wind like it wasn't sure which reality it belonged to. Claws the length of kitchen knives raked a groove down the fuselage, and somewhere behind him a woman started screaming, and the oxygen masks dropped in a yellow rain.
*Psoglav.* He didn't know how he knew the word. It just arrived in his skull the way the fire had, fully formed, ancient, hungry.
"Everyone down!" Ignis didn't know who he was shouting to — himself, mostly — as he shoved out of his seat belt and pressed both palms against the window.
The glass didn't melt so much as it *surrendered*, softening at the edges of his handprint, and Ignis went through the gap into screaming wind with fire wrapped around both fists like gauntlets, because falling scared him less right now than what would happen to a plane full of people if that thing got inside.
The cold hit first. Then the Psoglav's eye found him, swiveling with a wet mechanical click, and it *shrieked* — a sound like a hinge dragged across a chalkboard the size of a cathedral — and launched off the wing straight at him.
Ignis didn't dodge. He'd learned three days ago that fire didn't like being dodged with. It liked being *thrown*.
He caught the creature's first claw-swipe on a forearm wreathed in flame, and it should have taken his arm off at the elbow — but the iron plating along its claw hissed and warped instead, glowing cherry-red where his fire touched it, and the Psoglav recoiled with a scream that cracked the air.
*It's not smoke. It's metal wearing smoke like a coat.*
Fire ate metal if you fed it long enough.
He grabbed on — both hands into the ruff of black smoke at its throat, ignoring the claws raking furrows down his back — and *poured* everything he had into his palms, every ounce of fear and grief and three days of barely-controlled burning, until the Psoglav's skull-plating went from cherry-red to white-hot to *liquid*, dripping molten iron into the black nothing below them.
It didn't die quietly. It thrashed, wailed, tried to drag him down with it into the dark — and for one long, freezing second Ignis thought it would win, thought this was how it ended, sixteen thousand feet above the ocean with fire in his hands and nothing beneath his feet.
Then the burning eye guttered out like a snuffed candle, and the creature came apart into embers and ash that scattered into the slipstream, and Ignis was falling alone through empty night with his whole body screaming and no plane in sight.
The last thing he did, before his grandfather's training or lack of it caught up with him, was wrap fire around his own legs and back like a cushion, like a controlled burn, and hope it was enough.
It was enough.
He hit the water outside Naha Harbor forty minutes later, alive, smoking faintly, fished out by a stunned fishing boat crew who would swear for the rest of their lives that the boy had been glowing like a coal when they pulled him from the sea.
---
**Naha Airport arrivals, the next afternoon**
Ignis walked out through the sliding doors with a hospital bracelet still on his wrist and a story nobody at customs had believed, scanning the crowd for a face he already knew he didn't want to see.
She was easy to spot. Neat, composed, holding a small paper sign with his name on it like he was a stranger she'd been hired to collect — which, in every way that mattered to Ignis, she was.
"Ignis." His stepmother's smile was careful, the kind built for cameras. "I'm so glad you're safe. When we heard about the flight—"
"I'm fine," he said flatly, walking past her toward the doors.
"Ignis—"
"I said I'm fine."
He didn't look back to see her face fall. He just kept walking, hands shoved in his pockets, embers still cooling somewhere behind his ribs, thinking that the woman calling his name had never once been his mother, and never would be, no matter how many signs she held up at airports.
---
**New York City, six years ago**
The gunfire hadn't stopped being loud in Nick Parklands' head. Not once, not in six years, not for a single quiet night since.
It had been a Tuesday. That was the detail that stuck, stupidly, more than the blood — it had been a *Tuesday*, nothing special, and his sister Reyna had been walking him home from the corner store four blocks from a gang line nobody in the neighborhood was supposed to cross after dark.
The car hadn't even slowed down. Just windows, then muzzle flash, then Reyna's hand shoving him down behind a mailbox a half-second before three rounds went through her chest instead of his.
Nick was twelve. He remembered every second of it in perfect, merciless detail, the way you remember things that break something in you permanently.
He remembered less clearly what came after. Group homes that didn't take. A system that lost track of one more grieving kid. By fourteen he was sleeping in subway stations and church doorways, and somewhere in those cold, hungry years, he discovered he had a gift for one specific, ugly thing.
Words.
Not kind ones. Nick found, almost by accident, that when he said the right cruel thing to the right person at the right moment — aimed it, like a blade, straight at the soft rotten part of someone's life — it *landed* different than normal cruelty did. A dealer who mocked him once went home and couldn't stop crying for eleven hours. A group-home supervisor who slapped him lost his voice for a week after Nick, shaking with rage, spat out four words he barely remembered saying.
He didn't understand it. He just knew his mouth had become something to be afraid of, and in a city that had never once been kind to him, that felt like the first useful thing he'd ever owned.
He got good at it. Too good. He cursed men who deserved it and men who didn't, because by sixteen the line between the two had gone blurry in a way that scared him, on the rare nights he let himself feel anything at all.
Then, one night behind a bodega on 149th, a man he'd cursed three weeks earlier found him first.
The knife went in fast — one motion, ear to ear, and Nick didn't even have time to make a sound before he was on his back on wet concrete, staring up at a sky he couldn't feel anymore, blood running warm and endless down both sides of his neck.
He should have died there. Everyone would agree, later, that he should have died there.
But underneath the bodega, deep in the sewer runoff where the city's forgotten things collected, something ancient and radiant had been sleeping for longer than the city itself had existed. A shard of something that used to hold the world together. It felt the wound-note of a boy's death ring out above it, felt the shape of the gift already living in his throat, and it rose.
It didn't heal him. It *rewrote* him.
Nick's throat closed around the shard like a wound closing around a bullet it decided to keep. When he opened his eyes again he was still on the concrete, still bleeding, except the blood had stopped, and his voice — when it came back — didn't sound entirely like his anymore. Older. Layered. Like more than one throat was speaking through his.
He stood up a different kind of dangerous.
The years after that stopped making sense to anyone who tried to track him. Nick started dying. Not permanently — just often, and on purpose, chasing the edges of his new gift into places living men weren't supposed to go. He walked into Hell owing nothing and left owing less. He bargained his way through Heaven's front gates on a technicality he still wouldn't explain. He'd been thrown out of Purgatory twice for arguing with something that called itself a judge. He'd had tea, once, in a realm called the Sky Blue with beings who didn't have mouths and still somehow understood every word he said.
Every realm of the afterlife, sooner or later, learned the same lesson.
You did not want Nick Parklands to say your name in anger.
By the time he came back to New York for good, the streets didn't call him Nick anymore.
They called him the Curse.
---
End of Episode 2