ARC TWO: THE PRESENT

  The drawing on Eris's refrigerator remained alone for precisely three days before being joined by a second—this one featuring what appeared to be a giant purple creature with too many legs being confronted by a stick figure with silver eyes. Despite her continued evasive maneuvers in the building's common areas, Marcus proved remarkably persistent in his gift-giving, somehow managing to intercept her at least once a week to proudly present his test artistic creation.

  "Monster blue today!" he would announce, or "This one has big teeth but you not scared!" Each drawing came with a detailed expnation delivered in toddler syntax, accompanied by dramatic gestures to illustrate the epic battle he had captured on paper.

  Against her better judgment, Eris accepted each offering with the same stiff thanks, telling herself it was merely the path of least resistance. Refusing would only create a scene, possibly leading to tears and prolonged interaction—far more disruptive than the brief exchanges required to accept the drawings.

  She did not acknowledge, even to herself, that the small collection accumuting on her refrigerator had become a strange point of constancy in her otherwise regimented life. That sometimes, returning from particurly difficult missions, her gaze would linger on the chaotic spsh of colors amid the monochrome efficiency of her kitchen.

  Three months after the Taylors moved in, Eris was returning from an extended four-day assignment—a C-rank Breach in the city's industrial district that had proven more complex than initial reports indicated. She was exhausted, her Battle Mage abilities drained from sustained enhancement use, her body aching from combat with particurly agile monsters that had emerged from the Breach.

  As she approached her apartment door, fumbling slightly with her key card, a familiar voice called out from down the hallway.

  "Ms. Monster Fighter! You back!"

  Eris suppressed a sigh, turning to see Marcus trotting toward her, Emma following with a grocery bag. The pattern had become familiar—the boy's enthusiasm, his mother's apologetic expression, the brief social exchange Eris had learned to navigate with minimal engagement.

  "Hello, Marcus," she replied, her standard acknowledgment delivered despite her fatigue.

  But as the boy drew closer, he stopped abruptly, his usual bright expression faltering. "You hurt?" he asked, pointing to her face with unexpected solemnity.

  Eris reached up, touching the bruise she had forgotten about—a gncing blow from one of the Breach creatures that had slipped past her defenses in the final hours of the mission. "It's nothing serious," she said. "Just from work."

  Marcus's small brow furrowed with concern that seemed too mature for his age. Without warning, he darted forward and wrapped his arms around her legs in a quick, fierce hug.

  "Get better," he instructed, his voice muffled against her uniform pants. "No more hurts."

  Before Eris could react—before she could even process the unexpected physical contact—he released her and stepped back, nodding once as if he had accomplished something important.

  "Marcus," Emma began, clearly mortified, "we talked about personal space, remember? Not everyone wants hugs."

  "It's fine," Eris said automatically, though she felt distinctly unsettled by the brief embrace—not just the physical contact itself, but the genuine concern that had prompted it. When was the st time anyone had expressed worry for her wellbeing beyond professional assessment of her combat readiness?

  "I made you this," Marcus continued, apparently satisfied that his hug had addressed the immediate medical concern. He held out another drawing, this one showing a figure resting in what appeared to be a bed, surrounded by crude representations of stars. "For sleeping. When tired from monsters."

  Eris accepted the drawing with her usual stiff thanks, but something about this exchange felt different—a deviation from the established pattern that had somehow bypassed her carefully constructed defenses.

  "We won't keep you," Emma said, clearly reading the fatigue in Eris's posture. "You must be exhausted after your mission. Come on, Marcus, let's let Ms. Kane rest."

  "Bye, Ms. Monster Fighter! Feel better!" Marcus called as his mother led him away, waving until they disappeared into their apartment.

  Inside her own space, Eris pced the new drawing on her refrigerator door alongside the others, the collection now substantial enough to cover nearly half the surface. She stared at them for a long moment, registering for the first time how the artistic skill had evolved over the months—from pure abstract scribbles to recognizable figures, from chaotic color distribution to intentional design.

  The realization that she had been tracking this child's development, however unintentionally, disturbed her more than she cared to admit. It suggested a level of attention she had not consciously granted to any retionship since before Vance's departure.

  That night, as she y in bed attempting to rest her overtaxed body, Eris found herself repying the moment of the child's hug—the simple, uncomplicated concern in his voice, the instinctive offer of comfort. No agenda, no assessment of her value or utility, just pure empathy from a being too young to have learned the complicated dance of emotional distance that adults performed.

  The memory caused a strange ache in her chest, a sensation she had not allowed herself to acknowledge in years. With practiced discipline, she compartmentalized it, filing it away as an anomaly not worth further examination. By morning, she had convinced herself the incident was insignificant—merely an unexpected social interaction that required no adjustment to her established patterns.

  Two weeks ter, Eris was reviewing mission briefings in her apartment when an unusual commotion in the hallway caught her attention—raised voices, hurried footsteps, the distinct sound of distress. Normally, she would ignore neighboring disputes, maintaining her policy of non-involvement in matters that didn't concern her directly.

  But one voice cut through the others with unmistakable crity: Marcus, crying with the full-bodied desperation unique to toddlers.

  Against her better judgment, Eris moved to her door and checked the peephole. The scene in the hallway sent a jolt of adrenaline through her system: Emma kneeling beside Marcus, who was red-faced and struggling for breath between sobs, while David spoke urgently into his phone, his expression taut with fear.

  Before she could consider the implications, Eris found herself opening her door. "What's happened?" she asked, her professional assessment mode activating automatically.

  Emma looked up, relief washing over her face. "Eris! Thank god—it's an allergic reaction. We didn't know he had a peanut allergy—he's never had one before, but he grabbed a cookie at the neighbor's and now he can't breathe properly and the ambunce says it's at least fifteen minutes away—"

  The words tumbled out in a panicked rush as Marcus continued to wheeze, his lips beginning to take on a bluish tinge that Eris recognized as a dangerous sign of oxygen deprivation.

  "I have medical training," she said, decision made in an instant. "And my vehicle has emergency authorization. I can get him to the hospital faster than waiting for an ambunce."

  David lowered his phone. "Are you sure? We don't want to impose—"

  "Every minute matters in anaphyxis," Eris interrupted, already moving toward the emergency medical kit she kept by her door—standard issue for all active Syers. From it, she extracted an epinephrine injector. "This will stabilize him temporarily, but he needs emergency care immediately."

  With efficient movements born from years of crisis response training, she administered the injection while expining to the panicked parents what she was doing and why. Marcus screamed at the needle stick, but almost immediately his breathing began to ease slightly—not resolved, but the progressive constriction halted.

  "My vehicle is in the secure garage. We need to move now," Eris instructed, her tone leaving no room for discussion.

  What followed was a blur of movement—carrying the still-distressed child to the elevator, navigating to the garage, securing him in her Syer-issue vehicle that was equipped with emergency lights and traffic override capabilities. Emma rode in the back with Marcus while David followed in their own car, the entire sequence executed with the precision of a tactical operation.

  Eris drove with controlled urgency, activating the emergency protocols that cleared their path through Sanctum City's crowded streets. Throughout the journey, she maintained a calm exterior, focused entirely on the task at hand—delivering the child to medical care in the shortest possible time.

  Only as they pulled into the emergency bay of Sanctum General Hospital, medical staff already alerted and waiting, did she register the peculiar absence of her usual emotional distance. For the past twenty minutes, she had been fully engaged, her typical barriers temporarily suspended by the urgent needs of the situation.

  As Marcus was whisked away for treatment, Emma turned to Eris with tears streaming down her face. "Thank you," she said, csping Eris's hand between both of her own. "The doctor said if we'd waited for the ambunce..." She couldn't finish the sentence, but she didn't need to.

  "Standard emergency response," Eris replied, already reconstructing her emotional walls, already recssifying the incident as a professional intervention rather than a personal involvement. "I have the training and the means. It was logical."

  But logic didn't expin why she remained at the hospital for the next two hours, seated stiffly in the waiting area while the medical team treated Marcus and educated his parents on anaphyxis management. Logic didn't account for the relief she felt when the doctor confirmed the child would make a full recovery. And logic certainly didn't justify her acceptance of Emma's tearful hug when they finally emerged from the treatment area, Marcus drowsy but breathing normally in David's arms.

  "You saved him," Emma whispered against her shoulder. "You saved our boy."

  Eris stood rigidly in the embrace, unsure how to respond to such raw gratitude. "Anyone with the same resources would have done the same," she offered finally, the words feeling hollow even to her own ears.

  David approached, shifting Marcus gently in his arms so the boy could see Eris. "Look who's here, buddy. Ms. Kane helped you get to the hospital really fast."

  Marcus regarded her with unusual solemnity, his normally energetic demeanor subdued by medication and the traumatic experience. "Ms. Monster Fighter saved me from inside monster," he said, the simple decration carrying complete conviction.

  Something in his words—the childish but profound recognition that some dangers came from within rather than without—struck Eris with unexpected force. For years, she had focused her Battle Mage abilities outward, confronting external threats while maintaining rigorous control over her internal ndscape. The idea that salvation might sometimes flow in the opposite direction—from without to within—was oddly destabilizing.

  "Just doing my job," she said, the inadequate response all she could manage as she retreated behind professional distance.

  But back in her apartment that night, after declining the Taylors' effusive invitation to dinner, Eris found herself standing before her refrigerator, studying the collection of drawings that now covered most of its surface. Children's art, created by small hands wielding crayons with more enthusiasm than skill. Meaningless, objectively.

  Yet today, those same hands had grasped at air as their owner struggled to breathe. That small body, always in motion, had been in genuine danger. And Eris—who had spent years perfecting the art of non-involvement—had acted without hesitation, breaching her own carefully constructed isotion as readily as she breached her apartment door.

  The realization was unsettling, suggesting that her emotional walls might be less impenetrable than she had believed. Or perhaps, more disturbing still, that they had begun to develop selective permeability without her conscious decision.

  She turned away from the drawings, determined to reestablish the boundaries that had served her for so long. This had been an anomaly, she told herself—a crisis response based on her training, not a meaningful connection. Tomorrow, she would resume her normal patterns. The emotional distance would remain intact.

  Tomorrow.

  Except "tomorrow" brought a small thank-you card slipped under her door, covered in glitter and featuring Marcus's handprints in bright blue paint, with the words "MY HERO" written in Emma's neat script above the small, uneven digits.

  And the day after that brought a tentative knock and Marcus standing there with both parents, a stuffed toy monster clutched in his small hands. "For you," he said, presenting it solemnly. "To protect you from real monsters."

  And the week after that brought another encounter in the elevator, but this time when Marcus called, "Hi, Ms. Monster Fighter!" Eris found herself replying, "Hello, Marcus," with marginally less stiffness than before.

  Small breaches in her defenses, accumuting gradually. Not enough to signify wholesale change, but sufficient to create hairline fractures in the isotion she had maintained for so long.

  By the time Marcus turned three, half a year after the Taylors had moved in, Eris had reluctantly accepted several dinner invitations to their apartment, each time telling herself it was merely to avoid the social awkwardness of continued refusal. She had developed a nodding acquaintance with Emma during chance encounters at the building's gym. She had even, on one memorable occasion, agreed to briefly watch Marcus when both parents were trapped in a building-wide power outage that disabled the elevator they were riding in.

  That particur incident had been especially disconcerting—ninety-seven minutes alone with a child whose emotional expressiveness was the exact opposite of everything Eris had cultivated in herself. Marcus had chattered continuously, asked innumerable questions about monsters and Breaches and Syer abilities, and insisted on showing her his entire collection of toy dinosaurs, complete with sound effects for each one.

  By the time his parents were freed from the elevator, Eris had felt emotionally wrung out from the sheer intensity of the child's unfiltered engagement with life. Yet something about the experience had also been strangely... invigorating. Like exercising a long-unused muscle group—uncomfortable but also oddly satisfying.

  "Was he too much?" Emma had asked anxiously upon her return. "I know he can be overwhelming with his energy."

  "It was fine," Eris had replied, her standard response. But instead of leaving it at that, she had added, almost involuntarily, "He's very curious about everything."

  Emma's surprise at this mild observation had been evident—it was possibly the first voluntary comment Eris had ever made about Marcus beyond bare acknowledgment of his existence.

  Now, as spring melted into summer in Sanctum City, Eris found herself in an uncomfortable middle ground—not fully isoted as she had been for so many years, yet not genuinely connected either. The Taylors occupied a peculiar liminal space in her carefully ordered life, neither fully excluded nor truly admitted. Especially Marcus, with his persistent disregard for her emotional barriers, his innocent assumption that she was someone worth knowing, worth drawing pictures for, worth including in his small world of dinosaurs and toy monsters and endless questions.

  She told herself it was temporary. That children naturally outgrew such phases. That eventually, Marcus would lose interest in "Ms. Monster Fighter" and turn his attention elsewhere, allowing her to resume her preferred solitude without the complications of rejection or expnation.

  In the meantime, she maintained her professional focus, continuing to excel in her Syer duties while keeping her unexpected quasi-retionship with the neighboring family carefully compartmentalized. It was a minor deviation in her otherwise consistent pattern of isotion, nothing more.

  At least, that's what she believed until the Sanctum Pza Incident.

  It began as a standard Breach response—a B-rank anomaly detected in Sanctum City's central shopping district on a busy Saturday afternoon. As a B-rank Battle Mage, Eris was assigned to lead the initial containment team, with higher-ranked Syers on standby if the situation escated.

  The mission briefing indicated a straightforward operation: a localized Breach in the service corridors beneath the pza, likely manageable with standard containment protocols. Eris deployed her team with practiced efficiency, establishing a security perimeter while civilians were evacuated from the immediate area.

  Initial scans showed the Breach was emitting two signatures—both low-level entities, typically manageable for a competent response team. Eris led her squad into the service corridors, tracking the anomaly to its source in a maintenance room near the central cooling systems.

  What they found was not what the scans had indicated.

  The Breach pulsed with unstable energy, its edges fluctuating in a pattern Eris recognized immediately as precursor to expansion. More concerning, the entities emerging were not the low-level monsters indicated by initial readings, but a pair of D-rank shadow beasts—vicious predators capable of phasing partially through solid matter.

  "Upgrade to A-rank threat," Eris ordered through her comm unit. "Request immediate backup. Evacuation radius needs to extend to the entire pza, not just the food court level."

  But even as her team reyed the orders, the situation deteriorated further. The Breach fred with sudden intensity, its diameter doubling in seconds. Three more shadow beasts emerged in rapid succession, immediately dispersing toward different exits from the service area.

  "Containment breach!" Eris snapped into her comm. "Multiple targets heading for civilian areas. Jenkins, Rodriguez—take the north exit. Chen and Patel—secure the east. I'll handle the central access."

  As her team split to intercept the escaping creatures, Eris activated her Battle Mage abilities, silver light flooding her vision as enhanced perception and reflexes kicked in. She pursued the rgest shadow beast as it phased partially through walls, tracking it by the disruptive energy signature it left in its wake.

  The creature burst through a service door onto the pza's main concourse—directly into a crowd of civilians who had not yet been evacuated. Screams erupted as people scattered in panic, but the shadow beast moved with predatory focus, targeting a small figure who had become separated from the adults around him.

  A child.

  Not just any child.

  Marcus.

  The recognition hit Eris with physical force, temporarily freezing her in pce as her professional focus collided catastrophically with her personal compartmentalization. Marcus was supposed to be safe at home, not here, not directly in the path of a D-rank monster with his parents nowhere in sight.

  The shadow beast lunged, its semi-corporeal form stretching toward the boy who stood paralyzed with terror.

  Something inside Eris shattered.

  Not her focus—that sharpened to ser precision. Not her control—that expanded to encompass every molecule of her being. What broke was the wall she had built between Eris Kane the professional Syer and Eris Kane the person, the barrier that had kept her emotions safely contained for over a decade.

  Silver light exploded from her body in a concussive wave, her Battle Mage abilities surging beyond anything she had previously manifested. She moved faster than thought, crossing the distance to Marcus in a heartbeat, intercepting the shadow beast mid-lunge.

  Her enhanced strength allowed her to grasp the creature's semi-corporeal form, forcing it into full materialization through sheer will. Her absorption ability—rarely used due to its drain on her energy reserves—activated instinctively, drawing the beast's power into herself and converting it to pure combat energy.

  "Marcus, run!" she shouted, grappling with the now-howling creature.

  But the boy remained frozen, his eyes wide with terror and confusion, unable to process the instruction through his panic.

  The shadow beast struggled violently in her grip, its cws raking across her armor, seeking vulnerable points. Two more creatures converged on their position, drawn by the first one's distress calls, creating a three-against-one confrontation that would challenge even an A-rank Syer.

  Eris made a split-second decision. Maintaining her grip on the first beast, she unleashed her absorption ability at maximum capacity, drawing energy not just from her opponent but from her own reserves. Silver light intensified around her body as she converted everything into a protective barrier, expanding it to encompass Marcus's small form just as the other two beasts attacked.

  The resulting collision of energies created a concussive bst that shook the entire pza, shattering storefronts and cracking the marble floor. When the light cleared, all three shadow beasts y neutralized—not just defeated but completely drained of energy, reduced to inert husks that would soon dissolve back into the dimensional matter from which they had emerged.

  Eris stood at the center of the destruction, Marcus clutched protectively against her chest, her silver eyes bzing with unprecedented brightness. Her uniform was shredded, blood seeping from multiple cerations where the creatures' cws had penetrated her defenses, but her focus remained unbroken.

  "Are you hurt?" she demanded, setting Marcus down to check him for injuries, her enhanced perception cataloguing every detail of his condition.

  The boy shook his head mutely, still too shocked to speak, his small hands clutching the fabric of her tattered uniform with desperate strength.

  "Where are your parents?" Eris asked, maintaining her protective stance around him as she scanned for additional threats.

  Marcus finally found his voice, though it emerged as a terrified whisper. "Bathroom. Mama went to bathroom. Told me stay by bench. Then monsters came."

  Understanding clicked into pce—a simple bathroom break, a momentary separation that coincided with the Breach event in the worst possible way. Emma must be frantic, searching for her son amid the evacuation chaos.

  Backup finally arrived—a squad of A-rank Syers led by a grim-faced commander who surveyed the destruction with professional assessment.

  "Kane," he acknowledged, eyeing her glowing form and the neutralized shadow beasts. "Situation report."

  "Breach contained in the lower level," Eris replied, her voice steady despite the adrenaline still coursing through her system. "Five D-rank shadow beasts emerged before containment. Three neutralized here. My team is tracking the remaining two through the north and east corridors."

  The commander nodded, already dispatching his squad to support Eris's team members. "Civilian casualties?"

  "None confirmed in this sector," Eris reported, one hand still resting protectively on Marcus's shoulder. "But I need to locate this child's mother immediately. Separated during evacuation."

  "We'll handle it," the commander began, but Eris cut him off with uncharacteristic firmness.

  "I'll handle it. He's in my protective custody until reunited with his parent."

  Something in her tone—perhaps the residual Battle Mage energy still emanating from her in silver waves, perhaps the intensity of her gaze—dissuaded the commander from arguing. He simply nodded and turned his attention to securing the area and establishing a medical response station for minor injuries.

  Eris lifted Marcus into her arms, ignoring the pain from her own wounds, and activated her comm unit. "This is Syer Kane. I need an immediate location on a civilian—Emma Taylor, likely separated from her child during evacuation. Priority search."

  As the search coordinators acknowledged her request, Eris moved toward the designated civilian gathering area, Marcus clutching her neck with both arms, his face buried against her shoulder. She could feel his heart racing, his small body trembling with residual fear.

  "You're safe now," she told him, the words emerging with unexpected gentleness. "I won't let anything hurt you."

  Marcus lifted his head slightly, regarding her with tear-streaked solemnity. "You fought the inside-wall monsters," he said, a statement rather than a question.

  "Yes," Eris confirmed, continuing to scan their surroundings with enhanced vigince.

  "Like in my drawings," he added, apparent satisfaction momentarily overriding his fear.

  Despite everything—the chaos around them, her injuries, the professional complications of her excessive power dispy—Eris felt something unexpected tug at the corner of her mouth. Not quite a smile, but perhaps its distant retive. "Yes," she agreed. "Like in your drawings."

  It took twenty-seven minutes to locate Emma—an eternity of maternal panic for her, a period of rigid hypervigince for Eris, who refused all medical attention for her own wounds until Marcus was safely reunited with his mother.

  When Emma finally broke through the crowd, her face tear-streaked and desperate, Marcus leapt from Eris's protective embrace with a cry of "Mama!" that seemed to contain all the relief his small body could express.

  The reunion that followed—Emma clutching her son with frantic gratitude, David arriving moments ter with equal parts relief and lingering fear—created a tableau of emotional intensity that Eris observed with newfound awareness. The raw love between parent and child, the visceral fear of loss transmuted into joy at recovery—it resonated with something long buried within her, something she had convinced herself was irrelevant to her carefully constructed life.

  "You saved him again," Emma said through tears, looking up at Eris from where she knelt embracing Marcus. "They told me what happened—that you fought three monsters to protect him."

  "It's my job," Eris replied, the familiar deflection automatic. But for the first time, the words rang hollow even to her own ears.

  Because it wasn't just her job. Not this time. The power surge that had allowed her to neutralize three D-rank monsters simultaneously—a feat that should have been beyond her B-rank capabilities—hadn't come from professional duty or training protocols. It had come from somewhere deeper, somewhere she had sealed off years ago when she decided connections were too dangerous, too temporary, too painful to maintain.

  As medical personnel finally convinced her to receive treatment for her injuries, and Syer command began the debriefing process for what was being called an "anomalous power manifestation," Eris found herself at a crossroads she hadn't anticipated.

  The walls she had built so carefully, maintained so diligently over years of deliberate isotion, had been breached not by a monster from another dimension but by a three-year-old boy with a crayon and an unshakable conviction that she was worth drawing pictures for.

  And now that the breach had occurred, she wasn't entirely certain she wanted to repair it.