A distant explosion was heard, as yellow-orange streaks of plasma shot out into the sky from the distance, then for a split second, what appeared like a trail materialized, snatching the Emperor’s right arm as the plasma vaporized his joint.

  The Dark Emperor looked around confused, only to get charged in again, and again, until he lost his balance.

  It was Isaac.

  Descending near the ground, he manifested two plasma wings, surrounded by dancing streaks of plasma as he atomized the remains of the Emperor’s forearm.

  Before any of them could do anything, Yosef lunged into the Dark Emperor at full force just as Emily arrived, panting.

  “And of course these guys headed right for Detroit after I caught up,” she grunted, catching her breath.

  Meanwhile at Detroit, midnight had settled like dust over the city as streetlights hummed with tired electricity, neon signs flickering as car engines still rumbled occasionally.

  Until a flash of light surged.

  And a deafening boom as both fighters descended on the concrete pavement, sending dust and rubble all over the place.

  Yosef, now healed, quickly leaped backward, wielding two spears as he got in position.

  The fight raged on: cars, debris, and dust flying all over the place as much of the neighborhood was torn apart in no time.

  Yosef charged, blurple wings slicing the midnight Detroit wind like blades through silk. The God-Matrix thrummed behind his eyes, mint fire still coursing through half-Moroccan veins. The Chronos Limiter screamed in protest, but he pushed past it anyway, whispering the old words under his breath:

  “Nethkadash shmokh… hawey tzevyonokh…”

  “Signature count: 7” Still holding. Barely. The ledger in his skull flickered with warning glyphs—those silent emanations from the Pleroma already stirring in the black between stars. One more pulse and the Hungry Ones would turn their endless gaze downward. He refused to let that happen.

  The Dark Emperor loomed larger now, a mountain of writhing shadow and crimson-veined sinew, tendrils still spearing toward the low-income towers where families huddled in panic.

  Then the Monoliths came.

  They erupted from the Emperor’s own body like pus from a wound—hundreds of them, twisted slaves from conquered worlds and his own forgotten race, now joined by the fresh dead of this very night. Reanimated humans from the collapsed buildings: a father still clutching a broken phone, eyes glowing hollow white; a teenage girl whose livestream had ended mid-scream, now crawling on all fours with jagged hexagonal limbs sprouting from her spine. Reanimated animals too—stray dogs from the alleys, their bodies stretched into upside-down crosses of black bone and red lightning, jaws elongated into impossible maws; pigeons and rats fused into swarming clusters of shifting geometry that defied every law of space. Each one bore the Emperor’s mark: the same hollow moon-socket stare, the same hunger for the void.

  They moved faster than they should. One swarm of corrupted rats surged under Yosef’s feet, burrowing into the cracked asphalt, and yanking his psychokinetic field downward. The floating civilians he’d been cradling lurched. A woman screamed as she dropped three stories before he could catch her again.

  “Shezib lan min bisho!” he snarled, seizing the entire group in a wider net of mind-matrix force. But the Monoliths were already on him.

  A dog-thing—once a pitbull, now a six-limbed abomination with tendrils for legs—leaped from a rooftop and slammed into his side, claws raking across his ribs. Blood sprayed. Another Monolith, a reanimated paramedic still wearing his torn uniform, fired a crimson beam from its mouth straight into the civilians Yosef was lowering. He twisted mid-air, taking the hit across his shoulder instead. Armor cracked. Pain flared hot and bright.

  “Nice try, kid!” the Emperor called out, voice sliding into that generic, almost tolerable villain drawl. “But my pets have been lonely. Let them play!”

  Then the deeper voice took over, wet and ancient, carved from the marrow of crushed realities:

  “…They are no pets. They are the echoes of every world I have hollowed. Their screams are the stitches that bind your little rescues into my greater tapestry. Feel them claw at your light, saint of borrowed time. Every soul you save tonight will remember the taste of their own reanimated kin tearing it away tomorrow.”

  Yosef didn’t answer with words. He answered with violence.

  He spun, psychokinesis flaring like a star gone supernova. The God-Matrix seized a cluster of pigeon-Monoliths mid-swarm and slammed them together into a single compressed orb of bone and shadow, then hurled it like a cannonball straight into the Emperor’s chest. The impact landed clean—crimson lightning spiderwebbed across the Emperor’s torso, chunks of twisted sinew exploding outward. The Emperor staggered back a full block, smashing through a row of abandoned cars.

  But the Monoliths didn’t stop.

  A human one—once a security guard from the first collapsed tower, now a towering hexagon of fused limbs and glowing red slits—charged Yosef from behind while he was mid-rescue. It drove a spear of black geometry straight through his left thigh. He roared, yanked the thing out with raw telekinesis, and used the corrupted guard’s own body as a club, swinging it into three more dog-Monoliths. Bones shattered. Reanimated flesh splattered across the street.

  “Signature count: 7” Still locked. Teeth gritted so hard he tasted blood.

  He dove again, seizing a fresh collapsing balcony where an elderly couple clung to the railing. Psychokinetic threads wove around them like gentle hands. But the Monoliths swarmed the building’s base, burrowing, undermining the foundation faster than he could stabilize it. The structure groaned.

  Yosef landed two more hits on the Emperor in quick succession—first a spear thrown from his right fish-coil, punching through the Emperor’s left shoulder and out the other side in a spray of void-stuff; second, a raw mind-matrix blast that caught the Emperor mid-laugh and sent him crashing into a distant overpass, concrete exploding in a gray cloud.

  The Emperor rose slower this time, laughing that layered cacophony, voice dripping with infinite malice:

  “Every strike you land only quenches my hunger. Your light is bright, little bearer, but it is still finite. Mine is the dark that has already won in every timeline that ever mattered. These slaves you slaughter were once like you—full of hope, full of mint-scented defiance. Now they serve the silence between heartbeats. And soon, so will you.”

  More Monoliths poured out—fresh ones, reanimated from the very civilians who had died in the last thirty seconds: a mother and child fused into a single writhing cross-shape, lunging at Yosef while he tried to lower another group to safety. He blasted them apart with a wave of blurple force, but the effort sent another warning glyph burning across his vision.

  “Signature count: 7” The ledger pulsed red. The Hungry Ones were stirring. He could feel their abstract hunger brushing the edge of the firmament like cold fingers reaching for the bait.

  Yosef hovered there, bleeding from half a dozen wounds, civilians finally safe on the ground below thanks to arriving first responders, Monoliths still swarming like locusts around him, the Emperor reforming his torn flesh with casual contempt.

  But the Emperor was already reaching for the next untouched apartment block, tendrils thickening, Monoliths howling in anticipation.

  Yosef’s “counselor,” as he liked to call him, nudged again, colder than ever.

  “Let them come. Let the cost rise.”

  He carved forward through the swarm, blurple light flaring in arcs from his fish-coiled forearms. Each spear thrown punched clean through a Monolith—rat-things bursting into wet black mist, dog-abominations crumpling into charred hexagons—but for every one he vaporized, two more poured from the shadows between buildings. They didn't just attack. They clung. They remembered.

  A single corrupted rat—once a stray, now stretched into something with too many joints and crimson slits for eyes—leapt from a shattered storefront. Its jaws clamped around Yosef's jugular before he could twist away.

  Teeth like rusted nails sank deep.

  Hot arterial spray hit the night air in a red arc. Pain detonated white-hot behind his eyes. He staggered, one hand instinctively clamping the wound, but the blood kept coming—thick, bright, pouring between his fingers like it was trying to escape him.

  Another rat-size Monolith latched onto the opposite side of his neck. Smaller, but vicious. Its bite tore cartilage with a wet pop. More blood. More red. The world tilted sideways as his knees buckled.

  He dropped hard, asphalt biting into his back. The swarm descended like a living tide.

  “Wh—what is this!?” The words came out choked, bubbling through the ruin of his throat.

  Corrupted rods erupted from the cracked pavement—black geometry veined with rust and crimson lightning. They speared upward in unison, punching through his palms, his forearms, his calves, pinning him spread-eagle to the street like a butterfly under glass. The metal (if it even was metal anymore) wept rust that mixed with his blood, pooling beneath him in oily slicks. Each rod's tip bloomed open into hollow white-moon eyes, staring up at him with the same empty hunger as the Emperor's socket.

  Yosef thrashed once—instinct, not hope—then went still as the pain sharpened into something clinical, distant. His vision tunneled. The blurple glow around his form flickered, dimmed, stuttered like a dying bulb.

  Across the block, the Dark Emperor laughed—that layered cacophony of devoured voices, now almost amused.

  He didn't even look back.

  Tendrils thicker than power lines uncoiled from his back, spearing into apartment blocks. Windows shattered in cascading waterfalls of glass. Screams rose and cut off abruptly as entire floors collapsed inward. A low-income tower two streets over groaned, tilted, then folded like wet paper—families still inside, lights winking out one by one. Cars flipped end-over-end in slow motion, trailing fire. Detroit burned in real time, neighborhood by neighborhood, and no one could stop it. Not the first responders scrambling blocks away. Not the news choppers already circling like vultures. Not the military still minutes out.

  The Emperor moved like weather: inevitable, indifferent, absolute.

  Yosef's chest heaved once, twice. Blood bubbled at his lips. The rods throbbed in time with his failing heartbeat, drinking deeper.

  One of the rat-things crawled onto his face, whiskers brushing his cheek. Its crimson eyes locked with his celestial-blue ones.

  It didn't bite again.

  It just watched.

  As if waiting for the light to go out.

  “Signature Count: 4”

  “Ngh~” Yosef rasped, the sound wet and ragged. He tried anything—psychokinetic twitch, blurple flare, even a whispered “Nethkadash shmokh…”—but the rods only pulsed harder, rust-blood seeping into his veins like poison ink. The ledger in his skull flickered dimmer. The counselor’s voice was silent now. No nudges. Just cold waiting.

  Meanwhile, local authorities, and whatever elements of the Michigan Army National Guard could scramble from nearby armories, were converging on the burning edges of the neighborhood.

  Carl—still alive, coffee long forgotten—ran with the Abdulhameeds and a ragged knot of parents from the school crowd. Mrs. Abdulhameed clutched her husband's arm, breath hitching. Mr. Abdulhameed muttered prayers under his breath, eyes scanning every shadow. A teenage girl from the earlier chaos—maybe one of the livestream kids—sobbed quietly, phone clutched like a talisman. They darted between overturned cars and collapsing porches, the air thick with smoke and the wet-metal stink of Monoliths.

  A dog-thing—stretched pitbull hide over black geometry—rounded the corner ahead. Its jaws unhinged into a hexagon maw. Behind it, rust-bleeding rods pushed up from cracked sidewalk like grave markers.

  “Back! Get back!” Carl yelled, drawing his service revolver with shaking hands. Two shots cracked—useless. The thing staggered half a step, then lunged.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Then the night split with engine roar.

  Three older M998 Humvees—sand-tan paint still scarred from Iraq rotations—screeched around the block from the direction of the old Detroit Artillery Armory. Michigan Army National Guard, quick-reaction detachment from the 1225th or Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, and 182nd Field Artillery. Local boys in pre-digital BDUs and PASGT helmets. A sergeant stood in the lead cupola, barking over the .50 cal.

  “Form a line! Civilians behind the vehicles! Engage!”

  Troops dismounted fast—M16A2s and M4s up. Tracers stitched the night. A burst from the .50 cal hammered the monstrosity; chunks flew, but it reformed in crimson light.

  The sergeant’s voice cracked: “What the hell are these things?”

  A rod erupted, spearing one soldier through the thigh. He screamed, dropped. Another opened with an M249—bullets ricocheted off hexagonal armor like hail on tin. The Abdulhameeds pressed against a Humvee hood, Mrs. Abdulhameed whispering, “Yosef… our boys…”

  The line buckled. Monoliths poured in—rats swarming low, fused crosses leaping rooftops. A Black Hawk (Michigan Guard aviation scramble) thundered low, door gunner hosing M240—then crimson tendrils snagged a rotor. The bird yawed, peeling away trailing smoke.

  Seconds. Not minutes.

  Then golden fire lit the sky.

  Ryan dropped like a comet—plasma-charged fist trailing molten yellow-gold. He slammed fist-first into the lead dog-looking Monolith mid-lunge. The impact detonated: corrupted flesh vaporized in a golden-white burst, black mist exploding outward. The thing dissolved into howling ash before it could ever touch the civilians.

  Isaac flashed in next—plasma wings flaring bright gold, streaking at blinding speed. He carved through a pack of rat-things with twin ranged beams, each shot surgical, leaving smoking craters. Emily’s strings whipped out, translucent and razor-sharp, lassoing the Abdulhameeds and the sobbing girl, yanking them clear of a collapsing wall.

  Thomas arced electricity between his fingers—blue-white chains snapping out to stun two fused crosses, buying breathing room. Joshua, face set in grim focus, summoned a storm of knives—silver blades raining down, pinning rat-Monoliths to asphalt.

  The troops spun, rifles tracking the new arrivals on instinct.

  “Freeze! Hands where we can see ’em!”

  “Drop it! Now!”

  Mr. Abdulhameed stepped forward, palms out. “These are children! They saved us! Our sons are out there fighting the same nightmare!”

  The sergeant hesitated—eyes flicking from the vaporized ash to the kids hovering/floating/fighting like something impossible. “Stand down! They’re… not the enemy.”

  But one private, young and jumpy, kept his M4 trained.

  Isaac—still breathing hard from the descent—glanced down mid-hover. Something glinted in the smoke-choked air: a nickel, still falling slowly from when he’d landed earlier, tumbling end-over-end in the golden afterglow of his wings. It caught the plasma light wrong—refracting it into faint celestial shimmer, like it had drunk a drop of his power.

  Time stretched.

  A sneaky Monolith—low-crawling hexagonal rat-cluster fused into a cross—slithered up behind the Humvee line, unseen, jaws opening for the sergeant’s back.

  Isaac’s eyes widened. No time to aim properly.

  He snapped a thin plasma beam from his fingertip—needle-thin, golden-yellow. It lanced out, struck the falling nickel dead-center while it hung suspended in the chaos.

  The coin flared like a tiny sun. Recoiled with impossible force.

  The beam bounced—perfect angle, physics-defying mirror—straight into the Monolith’s hollow moon-socket core. Crimson energy detonated inward. The thing shrieked, imploded in a vortex of black geometry, gone in a heartbeat.

  Silence rippled through the troops.

  One whispered, “Holy crap.”

  The sergeant lowered his rifle slowly. “You kids… you just saved our skins too.”

  Mrs. Abdulhameed clutched her husband tighter, tears cutting tracks through soot. “Find Yosef. Please.”

  Isaac nodded, wings flickering gold. “We will. But we need to move—now.”

  "I'm sure he'll be fine," Ryan added, "he faked his death twice back at school."

  The night still burned. Somewhere, a Signature Count ticked even lower.

  But for this pocket of hell, the light held—golden, electric, sharp, and stubborn.

  The sergeant stared at the kids for a long beat—golden plasma fading from Isaac's wings, Ryan cracking his knuckles with residual yellow sparks, Emily coiling her strings back into faint silver threads around her fingers like living tattoos. Thomas flexed his hands, faint electric arcs popping between fingertips. Joshua just stood there, a summoned knife still spinning idly in his palm like he didn't know what to do with it now that the immediate threat was ash.

  The sergeant exhaled through his teeth. "Alright. Rules 'outta the window tonight." He jerked his thumb at the Humvees. "We got spare M4s, plate carriers, mags in the back. Not enough for a platoon, but enough to keep you breathing while you do... whatever the hell it is you do."

  Ryan raised an eyebrow. "You handing guns to high-schoolers? That make us child soldiers now?"

  The sergeant snorted, half-laugh, half-grimace. "Kid, if the Geneva Convention saw this stuff here, they'd rewrite the whole damn thing. Just don't tell my CO I said that." He glanced at the Abdulhameeds. "Your boys are out there bleeding for this city and country. Least we can do is make sure their friends don't join 'em too soon."

  Mrs. Abdulhameed's eyes welled again, but she nodded fiercely. "Thank you. Just... bring them all back."

  The troops moved quick. Spare rifles passed hand-to-hand—older M16A2s mostly, a couple M4s from Iraq rotations. Plate carriers (PASGT-era vests, heavy and bulky) got tossed to Ryan and Isaac, who looked mildly amused at the sight of armor. Emily declined with a polite shake of her head—"Strings are better"—but took extra mags anyway, webbing them into quick-draw pouches with translucent threads. Joshua accepted a vest without comment, though his hands shook a little when he slung the rifle. Thomas clipped a radio to his belt, electricity arcing faintly across the antenna like static approval.

  One private—a little older than them—muttered under his breath as he handed Ryan a bandolier: "Man, back in basic they told us not to give civvies weapons. Guess eldritch apocalypse is the exception."

  Ryan smirked, plasma flickering along his knuckles. "Welcome to the club. We call it TANT, cuz This Ain't A Normal Team after all."

  The sergeant barked a laugh. "This Ain't a Normal Team? Yeah, no crap."

  They moved out in loose formation—Guard troops on the flanks with their .50 cal trucks providing covering fire (useless against most Monoliths but good for suppressing rat swarms), TANT at the center like a mobile strike team. Emily slung webs between buildings for quick aerial routes, swinging the group over collapsed streets. Isaac scouted ahead in golden streaks, plasma beams lancing hidden threats. Ryan led charges, golden fists punching through dog-things like they were wet paper. Thomas chained lightning across packs, stunning them for Joshua's knife volleys. The troops followed, M4s barking at anything that moved wrong, buying space while the kids did the impossible.

  Block by block, they cleared. A low-income tower on fire—Emily's strings hauled families from balconies while Thomas shorted out spreading crimson lightning. A street clogged with fused crosses—Ryan vaporized the front rank, Isaac picked off stragglers with ranged shots, Guard .50 cals chewing up the edges. Monoliths fell in droves, black geometry dissolving into ash and rust-blood puddles. The Abdulhameeds stayed back with Carl and a couple MPs at the hasty rally point near the intact fire station, evacuating stragglers while Mrs. Abdulhameed whispered prayers, eyes fixed on the sky where golden wings flashed.

  Miles away, Yosef's Signature Count ticked to 3. Blood loss edged toward critical, vision blurring at the edges, but rage kept him conscious. He wrenched one arm free from the rust-bleeding rod with a sickening crack, psychokinetic surge tearing the metal from concrete.

  A nearby Monolith—half-dissolved rat-cluster with crimson slits—rasped mockingly: “No strength…”

  Yosef stared back, eyes blazing celestial blurple. “I’ll show you what no strength is.”

  A blue-purple spear materialized in his free hand. He drove it through the thing’s core; it vaporized in a hiss of black mist. He assimilated the fading remains—corrupted essence flooding his veins like foul fuel—enough to stabilize, not heal.

  Chest heaving, he thrust his palm skyward. A beacon erupted: coiling blue-purple light interwoven with white fields, pulsing like a dying star calling home.

  Back in the cleared pocket, the sergeant keyed his radio mid-stride: “Command, Alpha-Three. We got augmented assets—kids with powers. They’re turning the tide. Request immediate backup: more ammo, more birds. And tell the governor this ain’t staying in Detroit.”

  Static. Then: “Copy. Reinforcements en route. Godspeed.”

  Ryan wiped black ichor from his golden-plasma fist. “Child soldiers with adult backup. Weirdest back-to-school ever.”

  Joshua—finally grinning through the fear—slung his borrowed M4. “At least we got guns now.”

  Then the beacon lit the horizon.

  “It’s Yosef!” Isaac snapped, wings flaring gold as he readied to charge.

  “Everyone—head there!” Ryan barked.

  Alpha-Three fell in behind, Humvees roaring, troops dismounting to claw through fresh swarms of blood-thirsty Monoliths. Emily slung strings ahead for ziplines over rubble; Thomas chained lightning to stun packs; Joshua’s summoned knives rained silver; Ryan and Isaac carved the path with golden fury.

  The night still burned, but pockets of light held—stubborn, defiant—and now converging on one desperate signal.

  Yosef's right arm was pinned at that cruel angle, the rod grinding bone with every breath he managed. Ankles finally free, slick with his own blood, he’d dragged himself half-upright against the shattered curb. The pain had gone past screaming — it was just a dull, endless fire now, eating him from the inside. Blood loss made the world tilt and blur at the edges, but he refused to black out. Not yet.

  “Dear Lord…” he whispered, the old Syriac prayer slipping out like a reflex. His left hand closed around the jagged rebar shrapnel. Long enough. Sharp enough. He pressed the edge to the flesh just above the elbow, looked away toward the distant golden flashes where his brothers were still fighting, and started sawing.

  Metal on meat. Back and forth. Wet sounds. His teeth sank into his lower lip until it split.

  A soft giggle drifted up from the ground beside him.

  High. Sweet. Childlike. Like a little girl who’d just found a secret toy in the dirt.

  Yosef froze mid-stroke. The giggle came again — closer, right at the edge of his blood pool, playful and wrong.

  He turned his head slowly.

  She was sitting cross-legged in the slick red puddle like it was warm bathwater. Maybe eight years old. Torn pink nightgown with little white flowers. Dark curls matted with ash. Bare feet kicking idly, splashing his blood. She looked up at him with big, innocent eyes and smiled — all gap-toothed and trusting.

  Except the eyes weren’t eyes. They were hollow white balls.

  Yosef’s breath seized. The shrapnel dropped from his trembling hand with a clatter. He snatched it up again in the same motion, swinging the jagged point in her direction and he yelled at the top of his lungs with genuine terror.

  Cut to the streets racing toward the beacon.

  The streets were a warzone of crumbling facades and crimson-veined rubble, but the team pushed forward like a blade through meat. Isaac led the aerial assault, golden wings cutting sharp arcs between rooftops—intact ones still standing defiant, ruined ones offering jagged handholds. He scooped up fistfuls of loose change from shattered storefronts and rooftops, mixed with whatever spare change he still had in his right pocket, flicking nickels, dimes, quarters into the air like deadly confetti. Twin plasma beams lanced from his eyes, striking each coin mid-tumble; the metal ignited gold and ricocheted the shots in fractal patterns that shredded swarms of rat-Monoliths below.

  He followed with orbs—compact, seething golden spheres hurled like grenades—detonating in golden-white bursts that vaporized clusters of hexagonal crosses. When a larger fused abomination lumbered into view, he formed twin plasma blades along his forearms and dove, spinning into a slashing comet that carved deep gashes across its torso.

  Thomas grounded the advance. Palms slammed to asphalt; electricity surged in blue-white conducting fields, arcing from car husk to car husk to Monolith. Flesh sizzled and popped as currents deep-fried corrupted tissue, jamming the crimson lightning threading their forms until they stuttered and collapsed. He pulsed tighter EMP ripples—limited, targeted—shorting out packs of geometry mid-charge, buying the ground team precious seconds.

  Emily moved like a ghost in the machine of chaos. Her strings—near-invisible, razor-edged—whipped out in wide nets that contracted with brutal efficiency, slicing joints and cores until Monoliths unraveled into black mist. She slung ziplines between buildings for rapid repositioning, one translucent thread even stitching a Guardsman's bleeding thigh mid-stride to keep him in the fight.

  Joshua kept pace with the Humvees, M4 barking controlled bursts while his off-hand summoned blades in relentless volleys—knives raining silver, spears hurled like javelins. Each kill honed him sharper; the cowardice that once made him whine now fueled something fiercer.

  "Come on, you ugly freaks!" he snarled, voice steadying as he drove a summoned machete through a mutated rat's heart.

  Then the big one lumbered out from a collapsed warehouse—larger than the rest, a towering humanoid abomination fused from multiple human and animal corpses. Human torsos stitched haphazardly onto dog haunches, deer antlers sprouting from a woman's ribcage, pig snouts grafted over screaming mouths, limbs mismatched and writhing like they still remembered separate lives. Blackened stitches wept rust-blood; crimson lightning pulsed through veins that weren't veins anymore. It roared—a wet, multi-layered cacophony of human sobs, animal bellows, and something older underneath.

  Ryan charged straight in. No hesitation. He was built for this—the heavy, nasty work. Golden plasma ignited along his fists as he closed the gap, M4 slung across his back for later. The thing swung a massive, mismatched arm—part human bicep fused to boar shoulder—and Ryan ducked under it, plasma-augmented uppercut slamming into its gut. Flesh parted like wet paper; golden fire spread inward, cauterizing and vaporizing in the same breath.

  The abomination staggered, multiple faces screaming in discordant agony. Ryan didn't let up. He grabbed a protruding antler like a handle, yanked himself up, and drove a plasma-charged knee into its chest. Ribs cracked audibly; stitched torsos split open, exposing writhing innards that fused into new, grotesque shapes. He followed with a brutal hook—fist trailing molten gold—that caved in one pig-snout face. Black ichor sprayed; the thing reeled.

  Ryan landed in a crouch, wiping gore from his eyes. He spat once, voice low and disgusted.

  "Goddamn nasty piece of work. You look like someone threw a morgue and a petting zoo into a blender and hit 'puree.'"

  He didn't wait for a response. Plasma flared brighter along both arms as he lunged again—gun forgotten for now, just fists and fire—tearing into the core where the fusions met. The abomination howled, limbs flailing, but Ryan was relentless: punch after plasma-augmented punch, melting stitches, vaporizing flesh, until the whole grotesque mass shuddered and collapsed into steaming black sludge.

  He stepped back, breathing hard, golden glow fading from his knuckles. "Next."

  The beacon pulsed stronger ahead.

  Isaac landed beside him mid-leap, wings flickering. "Yosef's close. Let's move."

  Back in the blood-soaked street.

  She only giggled again at his prior scream, tilting her head like he’d told a funny joke.

  The little girl never flinched at the shrapnel aimed at her face. She just looked up at Yosef with those hollow moons and spoke, voice soft and heartbreakingly sad.

  “You didn’t save me.”

  Yosef’s arm shook so hard the rebar scraped his own cheek.

  “I was in the tower with the red lightning,” she continued, lower lip trembling like any scared child. “I saw your pretty wings. I called your name, Yosef. Over and over. ‘The light boy is coming, he’ll catch me.’ Mommy held me so tight… but the floor just… fell. You were right there. You caught the lady and her baby. You caught the old man. But not me. Why didn’t you hear me?”

  Tears — real-looking, glistening — rolled down her ash-streaked cheeks.

  “I… I was only eight. I had a teddy bear with one eye missing. I wanted to be a teacher when I grew up. But you were busy carrying everyone else’s light… and you dropped mine.”

  She crawled forward through the blood, small hand reaching toward the stump he still hadn’t freed.

  “I’m not mad,” she whispered, the sweetness cracking just enough to let something ancient bleed through. “I just want the hurting to stop. For you. For your brothers. For Mommy who’s still praying your name right now. Let me hold the light for you. I’m small… I won’t drop it. I promise.”

  “Signature Count: 2”

  Yosef roared — pure, animal terror — and drove the shrapnel with increased intensity. Arterial spray painted the girl’s face, but she only smiled, licking a drop from her lip like it was strawberry syrup.

  But it wasn’t enough.

  When he looked back up, she was looking downward, standing awkwardly like a marionette.

  CRACK!

  Her skull split open down the middle with a wet, metallic snap. Grey-white light bloomed from the fissure—not fire, not plasma, but a spinning singularity, a miniature event horizon chewing reality at the edges. The air around it warped, pulling in ash, blood droplets, loose pebbles—everything screaming inward.

  Yosef could only stare, frozen for one fatal heartbeat.

  Too late.

  Her arm stretched—impossibly long, rubbery, black-veined—snaking forward and clamping around his pinned right forearm like a vice. She yanked.

  Bone and tendon tore free in a single, obscene pop. The rod finally gave way with the pull, ripping the last shreds of flesh along with it. His severed arm dangled from her grip like a trophy, blood raining from the ragged stump.

  But Yosef had one last card.