Chapter 9: Awakening

  Kyle stood at the edge of their elevated sanctuary, honey-brown eyes sweeping across what two weeks of blood and sweat had transformed from mere stone outcropping into something approaching home—if home meant safety purchased with monster parts and sharpened stakes. The raised sleeping platform they'd lashed together with sinew harvested from three-toed beasts rose above the smooth stone floor, keeping them dry when rain hammered down from skies too blue to belong to Earth. Bone and vine storage racks lined the back wall of their shelter, organized with the care of men who understood that in this place, survival hung on having the right materials within arm's reach.

  Not bad for street kids from the Five-Eight, Kyle thought, pride warming his chest

  His gaze lingered on their crafting area—flat stones arranged meticulously, tools laid out ready for use, scraps sorted by potential. Their perimeter defenses had grown more elaborate with each passing day: sharpened stakes now pointed outward at angles calculated to discourage anything with enough brain matter to recognize a trap. The fire pit—their first true victory against the jungle—had evolved into a masterwork of heat reflection, stones positioned to direct warmth back toward their shelter while minimizing visible light from below.

  Behind him, Dex and Marcus slept on. "Who'd have thought we'd become fucking jungle lords," he whispered to himself, allowing a rare smile to crack the constant vigilance his face had settled into.

  The camp bore marks of their personalities: Dex's area a calculated mess of half-finished weapons, Marcus's space ordered with almost religious devotion, Kyle's own belongings balanced between utility and the growing aesthetic sense this place had somehow nurtured in him. Hidden caches of weapons and supplies dotted their territory now—insurance against the disasters they'd learned to expect.

  Sunrise painted everything in shades of cobalt and indigo, the strange blue star that served as this world's sun crawling above the horizon. Two days of relative peace—time spent reinforcing, crafting, preparing for whatever nightmare the jungle would birth next. Kyle's muscles ached pleasantly, the soreness of labor rather than the knife-sharp pain of wounds.

  Movement behind him signaled Marcus awakening. "Morning," came his voice, roughened by sleep and the constant humidity.

  "Check this out," Kyle said, gesturing toward the twin spears leaning against the stone wall. "System finally recognized my babies."

  Marcus crossed to him, rubbing sleep from his eyes. "About time."

  "Spear—The Spine, basic, no enchantment," Kyle recited, tapping the first weapon. "And this one's The Fang. Same deal, basic with no enchantment."

  "That why you been repeating those names like a crazy person?" Dex called from his sleeping mat, apparently awake and listening. "I thought you were having conversations with your weapons."

  "Says the man who named his knife 'Soul Drinker,'" Marcus countered with a rare smirk.

  Dex sat up, hair wild from sleep, chest criss-crossed with scars that hadn't existed two weeks ago. "Hey, system recognized it, didn't it? Soul Drinker, basic, no enchantment." His voice carried the pride of a child showing off a crayon drawing. "Plus my arm guards—Bloodfist Bracers."

  Kyle rolled his shoulders, feeling the weight of his own arm guards. "Reaper's Clasp for mine. Not sure where that came from, just sounded right." His eyes fell to his shin guards. "And Stonefang Greaves for the legs."

  "Think the enchantment part means something?" Marcus asked, already moving to check his own gear—methodical even in curiosity.

  "Has to," Kyle replied. "Why mention 'no enchantment' unless enchantment is possible?"

  They fell into the easy rhythm of morning routine—checking weapons, consuming preserved meat from previous hunts, planning the day's activities. Kyle watched his brothers move around the camp, noting how differently they carried themselves now. The swagger of Spanish Harlem had evolved into something more primal, more efficient—backs straighter, movements economical, eyes constantly scanning.

  "I'm gonna work on that hide," Dex announced, gesturing toward the massive sheet of leather. "Need better armor if we're gonna take down bigger game."

  Kyle nodded, turning his attention to resharpening his blades. Marcus settled by the fire pit, starting the process of crafting more water skins.

  The morning stretched into afternoon, each focused on their tasks with the single-minded concentration of men who understood that carelessness meant death. Kyle found comfort in the rhythm—sharpen, test edge, adjust, repeat. His mind wandered to memories of his mother teaching him to slice onions paper-thin without crying, her hands guiding his on the kitchen knife. "It's all about respect for the tool, mi hijo," she'd said. "Respect what it can do, good and bad."

  A frustrated curse from Dex broke his reverie. Kyle looked up to see his friend hunched over the hide, hands deep in a mixture of brain matter and water, face twisted in disgust.

  "Fucking brain-tanning," Dex muttered, working the mixture into the leather with circular motions. "Takes forever and smells like death's asshole."

  "Better than half-assing it and having the armor rot off mid-hunt," Marcus replied without looking up from his own work.

  Dex's jaw worked side to side—the tell that preceded violence back in the Five-Eight—but here merely signaled mounting frustration. "I know that, genius. Doesn't make it less miserable."

  Kyle watched as Dex continued, noting the unusual care with which his normally impatient friend worked the hide. His hands—once used primarily for dealing drugs and breaking faces—now moved with the deliberate motions of a craftsman. The contradiction would have been funny if it wasn't so necessary for their survival.

  "When I catch the fucker that dropped us here," Dex continued, voice dropping lower, "I'm gonna skin him just like this. Nice and slow. See how he likes having his hide worked."

  Kyle was about to respond when Dex suddenly stiffened, his entire body going rigid. The mixture-coated hide slipped from his fingers, falling to the stone with a wet slap.

  "Dex?" Kyle straightened, knife forgotten as Dex's eyes rolled back, showing whites.

  Marcus's head snapped up at Kyle's tone, instantly alert. They both moved toward Dex simultaneously, but froze when light erupted from their friend's chest—not the familiar white motes of leveling, but something different. Red light traced through Dex's veins like molten metal poured into a mold, spreading from his heart outward through his arms, up his neck, down his torso.

  "What the fuck?" Kyle breathed, instinctively reaching for a weapon before forcing his hand to still.

  Dex remained frozen, suspended between heartbeats, the red light beneath his skin illuminating him from within. His lips moved without sound, forming words neither of them could interpret. The air around him wavered with heat haze, though the morning remained cool.

  "Should we—" Marcus began, but cut himself off as Dex abruptly collapsed backward, hitting the stone floor hard enough that Kyle winced.

  They rushed forward then, but before they could reach him, Dex inhaled sharply and sat upright. His eyes snapped open—normal again except for a faint reddish tint that faded even as they watched.

  "Dex? You good?" Kyle crouched beside him, one hand hovering near but not touching.

  Dex blinked several times, then broke into a grin so fierce it bordered on feral. "Oh, I'm better than good." He looked down at his hands, turning them palm up, then palm down. "I'm fucking lit."

  "What happened?" Marcus pressed, more direct. "You went rigid, then that red light—"

  "I saw..." Dex paused, seeming to search for words. "Another place. Not here, not Earth. Somewhere else. And there was... something. Called itself an echo."

  Kyle and Marcus exchanged looks. "An echo of what?" Kyle asked.

  "Didn't say." Dex rose to his feet in a single fluid motion, energy radiating from him in waves they could almost see. "But whatever it was, it woke something up." He thumped his chest with a closed fist. "In here."

  Kyle watched as Dex paced the perimeter of their camp, movements fluid yet somehow more aggressive than before. He seemed to vibrate with barely contained energy, like a shaken soda ready to explode.

  "You feel different?" Marcus asked, voice careful, scientific.

  "Like I could run for literal days," Dex replied, grinning. "Like my blood's on fire but in a good way. Like I'm finally fully awake."

  He stopped suddenly, extending one hand palm up. His face contorted in concentration, brow furrowing so deeply Kyle could count each line. For several seconds, nothing happened. Then, slowly, a tiny bead of red light coalesced above Dex's palm—no larger than a hazelnut, its surface swirling with what looked like liquid fire.

  "The fuck?" Kyle stepped closer, drawn by the impossibility floating above his friend's hand.

  The bead collapsed almost immediately, dissipating into sparks that faded before touching skin. Dex cursed, but his smile never faltered.

  "Try again," Marcus urged, all scientific curiosity now.

  Dex complied, extending his hand once more. This time, the bead formed more quickly but remained just as unstable, lasting only seconds before collapsing.

  "It's there," Dex insisted, "just need to figure out how to hold it together." His next attempt lasted nearly ten seconds before dissolving, progress evident with each trial.

  They spent the remainder of the day watching Dex alternate between manic energy bursts and intense concentration as he worked to master whatever had awakened within him. By sunset, he'd managed to create a bead that held its form for nearly a minute—a perfect sphere of red energy that hummed with power they could feel across the camp.

  "It's rage," Dex explained, studying his creation. "Pure rage, but controlled. Focused."

  "How do you know?" Kyle asked.

  "Just do." Dex's expression turned distant for a moment. "The echo told me. Spirit Core, Rage Affinity.”

  When night fell, they gathered around the fire, the strange event reshaping their understanding of this world once again. Dex continued practicing, producing beads with growing consistency, though the effort clearly drained him.

  "Takes so much time," he complained after his twelfth attempt. "Could be doing something useful instead of making pretty light shows."

  "Might be more useful than you think," Marcus replied, eyes tracking the red sphere hovering above Dex's palm. "System wouldn't give us this for no reason."

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Kyle nodded, watching the firelight play across their faces. "Whatever's happening, it's changing us. Adapting us to this place."

  None of them voiced the question hanging in the air: adapting them for what purpose?

  The next morning dawned clear and hot, the blue sun already scorching by the time Kyle emerged from their shelter. Marcus had risen before either of them, already seated at their crafting area, methodically working on water skins. His movements were precise as always, each stitch placed with mathematical certainty.

  Dex remained asleep—exhausted from yesterday's discovery and subsequent hours of practice. He'd finally managed to create a bead that lasted over an hour, though each attempt left him more drained than the last.

  Kyle approached Marcus, carrying dried meat for them both. "How's it coming?"

  "Almost done with this set," Marcus replied without looking up. "Should double our carrying capacity for water."

  Kyle settled beside him, watching his friend work. Where Dex attacked tasks with hardly contained aggression, Marcus approached everything with measured calm, treating each movement as a puzzle to be solved. It had always been so, even back in the Five-Eight—Dex the hammer, Marcus the scalpel, and Kyle somewhere between.

  "You think whatever happened to Dex will happen to us?" Kyle asked after several minutes of comfortable silence.

  Marcus tied off a stitch before answering. "Statistically probable. Three of us, three similar builds, three similar progressions through the levels." His eyes finally lifted from his work. "Question is when, not if."

  As though the universe had been waiting for the question, Marcus suddenly stiffened, the water skin slipping from his fingers. His eyes widened, then rolled back just as Dex's had the previous day.

  "Marcus?" Kyle reached out instinctively, then hesitated, remembering Dex's transformation.

  Blue light erupted from Marcus's chest, threading through his veins in intricate patterns. Unlike Dex's aggressive red glow, this light pulsed with cool regularity, spreading with ordered purpose through Marcus's body. His skin frosted over where the light ran closest to the surface, tiny ice crystals forming and then sublimating into vapor.

  Kyle backed away slightly, giving the transformation space. He glanced toward Dex, still sleeping, and considered waking him—but some instinct held him back. This was Marcus's moment, just as yesterday had been Dex's.

  Minutes passed, though they felt like hours. Marcus remained suspended in whatever trance had claimed him, blue light ebbing and flowing beneath his skin like tides. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the light receded. Marcus collapsed forward, catching himself on his palms before his face could strike stone.

  "Marcus? You with me?" Kyle moved closer, careful not to touch.

  Marcus drew a deep breath, then exhaled a cloud of vapor despite the day's heat. "Yeah." His voice sounded different—deeper, with a strange resonance. "I'm here."

  "What happened?" Kyle settled cross-legged before him, giving him space to recover.

  "I was... somewhere else." Marcus's eyes focused on middle distance, remembering. "A mirror plane, everything ice. I saw myself but made of frost, cracking whenever I moved." He shuddered. "Then something huge. Watching me. Judging me."

  Kyle waited, letting him find the words at his own pace.

  "It didn't speak. Not like Dex's echo. Just... evaluated me." Marcus finally met Kyle's gaze. "Then it was over, and I was back, but..." He extended his hand.

  Blue light gathered in his palm, coalescing more quickly than Dex's had on his first attempts. The orb that formed pulsed gently, its surface rippling like disturbed water. Frost formed on Marcus's fingertips where they came closest to the sphere.

  "Elemental Core, Frost Affinity," he said simply, as if reading from an invisible text.

  The commotion finally roused Dex, who sat up with a grunt. "Your turn, huh?" He rubbed sleep from his eyes, then focused on the blue orb hovering above Marcus's palm. "Welcome to the magic circle."

  They spent the day watching Marcus explore his new abilities, his approach methodical where Dex's had been instinctive. By mid-afternoon, he'd managed to manipulate the orb's size and intensity with careful concentration. By sunset, he'd begun attempting to form the same kind of beads Dex had mastered—perfect spheres that contained the essence of his power.

  "Harder than it looks," Marcus admitted after his ninth failed attempt. "Has to be perfect or it just... dissolves."

  "Keep at it," Dex encouraged, demonstrating with his own red bead, now stable enough to roll between his fingers like a marble. "Took me hours to get the hang of it."

  Kyle watched them both, wondering when—or if—his turn would come. Something deep in his chest had shifted since yesterday, a warmth that hadn't been there before, centered just below his sternum. He kept the sensation to himself, uncertain what it signified.

  That night, as the others slept, Kyle remained awake, staring at the unfamiliar stars scattered across the midnight-blue sky. His thoughts drifted to Earth, to Spanish Harlem, to his mother who had probably buried him by now—a closed-casket funeral for a son riddled with bullets. Had she cried? Had she cursed him for his choices? Had she understood that in his world, those choices had barely been choices at all?

  Stars wheeled overhead, patterns he'd slowly begun to recognize despite their alienness. Here, even the constellations were predators—twisted beasts and hunters immortalized in light. Kyle traced them with his gaze, finding the one he'd named The Spear—six bright stars in a line with a cluster at one end like a deadly point.

  We're so far from home, he thought, the vastness above him emphasizing their isolation. Maybe this is all there is now. Maybe we're never going back.

  The thought should have destroyed him, but somehow it didn't. Perhaps because here, despite the constant danger, they were building something of their own. Back in the Five-Eight, they'd existed in a system designed to grind them down—police, poverty, prejudice working in concert to ensure boys like them stayed in their place. Here, at least, the jungle's brutality was honest. Kill or be killed, grow stronger or die. Simple. Clean. Fair, in its own terrible way.

  Kyle's contemplation stretched into the late hours, his mind drifting between past and present, Earth and Cosmore, the boy he'd been and the man he was becoming. Sleep eluded him, his body restless despite physical exhaustion.

  When it finally happened, two days after Marcus's transformation, Kyle was alone at the edge of camp, stargazing again. The others had retired hours ago, leaving him to his thoughts and the distant howls of jungle predators.

  The first sensation was loss—not of something physical, but of orientation. Up became meaningless. Down became theory. Kyle tried to gasp but found no air to draw, his lungs expanding into nothingness.

  Before panic could take hold, the void became everything. Not darkness, not light, but absence itself—an endless expanse of nothing that somehow contained everything. Kyle felt his body imploding, compressing down to an infinitesimal point, then exploding outward across distances his mind couldn't comprehend.

  Stars rushed toward him, through him—entire galaxies collapsing into his consciousness. Planets whirled past at impossible speeds, their surfaces blurring into streaks of color and texture. Time stretched and compressed like taffy pulled thin then snapped back, each moment both eternal and instantaneous.

  When sensation returned, Kyle found himself floating in a sea of stars, his body translucent and shimmering with light that shifted between colors—silver, black, purple-silver, yellow-silver. Each color pulsed with its own rhythm, its own meaning, its own connection to forces he could name but not yet understand.

  Void. Spatial. Gravity. Time.

  The words appeared in his mind without being spoken, knowledge imprinted directly onto his consciousness. Unlike Dex's echo or Marcus's frost judge, Kyle perceived no entity, no presence evaluating him. Only vastness and the certainty that he was both insignificant and essential within it.

  Cosmic Core, came the knowledge. Four affinities where others have one.

  Kyle tried to ask why, but found no voice, no way to form questions in this place beyond places. Instead, understanding simply unfolded within him—not answers, but potential. Pathways. Possibilities stretching across dimensions his human mind could barely grasp the edges of.

  The return hit like a meteor strike. Kyle gasped, air filling lungs that felt new and ancient simultaneously. He collapsed onto the stone floor of their camp, body convulsing as four different colors of light raced through his veins in complex, interweaving patterns. Silver, black, purple-silver, yellow-silver—each claiming territory within him, each settling into place like puzzle pieces finding their homes.

  "Kyle!" Marcus's voice reached him as if through water, distant and distorted.

  Hands hovered near him—Marcus and Dex, awakened by his fall, uncertain whether to touch him during the transformation. Kyle wanted to reassure them but couldn't find words, his mind still half-lost in cosmic vastness.

  When the lights finally settled, retreating beneath his skin to pool in his core, Kyle pushed himself to sitting position. His friends' faces swam into focus, concern etched across features that had grown harder, sharper in their time here.

  "You okay?" Dex asked, uncharacteristic worry in his voice.

  Kyle nodded slowly. "Yeah." His own voice sounded strange to his ears, resonant in ways it hadn't been before. "I'm back."

  "What happened?" Marcus pressed, eyes cataloging Kyle's condition with clinical precision.

  "Cosmic Core," Kyle replied, the words feeling right on his tongue. "Four affinities."

  Their expressions shifted from concern to confusion, then to a blend of awe and uncertainty. Kyle extended his hand, palm up, focusing on the silver light he'd felt coursing through him.

  A small distortion appeared above his palm—not light exactly, but a bending of space itself. The air warped, expanded, creating a bubble of altered reality that shimmered with silver highlights. Kyle's concentration wavered, and the distortion collapsed.

  His second attempt focused on the black energy. This manifestation absorbed the firelight around it, creating a small sphere of darkness that seemed to drink in illumination without releasing it. The third brought forth purple-silver strands that exerted the faintest pull on nearby objects, dust motes and small pebbles drifting toward them as if caught in gentle current.

  The fourth, drawing on yellow-silver energy, proved most difficult. When it finally formed, the effect was subtle—a sphere within which tiny particles of dust moved with painful slowness, trapped in a bubble of altered time.

  "Spatial, Void, Gravity, Time," Kyle explained, naming each manifestation. The effort left him lightheaded but exhilarated. "All part of the same thing. Cosmic energy."

  Dex whistled low. "Show-off," he said, but the admiration in his voice undercut any real criticism. "Four where we each got one?"

  "Leave it to Kyle to overachieve," Marcus added, the rare joke revealing his relief.

  They stayed awake until dawn, Kyle demonstrating each aspect of his awakened power—still weak, still barely controlled, but growing stronger with each attempt. Like the others, he found that creating perfect beads required immense concentration and time, each affinity demanding its own approach.

  The silver spatial beads came easiest, formed by visualizing expansion and contraction. Void beads required emptying his mind completely, creating a mental blank space for the power to fill. Gravity manifested through feeling weight and mass, the pull between objects. Time—the most difficult—demanded holding multiple moments in his awareness simultaneously, past and present overlaid like transparencies.

  By sunrise, Kyle had managed to create one bead of each type—silver, black, purple-silver, and yellow-silver—each the size of a tiny marvel that hummed with potential. The effort had drained him completely, leaving him with barely enough energy to drag himself to their sleeping platform.

  "Worth it," he mumbled as exhaustion claimed him. "So worth it."

  "So what exactly can these things do?" Dex asked three days later, rolling a red bead between his fingers. They'd each created small collections of their respective affinities—Dex's red rage beads, Marcus's blue frost beads, and Kyle's four varieties.

  "Not sure yet," Kyle admitted, studying his own creations spread before him. "But they're important. Has to be a reason the system guides us to make them."

  They'd spent the days since Kyle's awakening experimenting with their new abilities, discovering strengths and limitations. Dex could enhance his physical attacks with bursts of rage energy, making his strikes faster and more devastating—though the effort tired him quickly. Marcus found he could create patches of frost on surfaces, even lower the temperature of water to near-freezing with concentration.

  Kyle's abilities proved more varied but also more difficult to control. He could create small distortions in space, tiny gravity wells that pulled objects toward them, pockets of accelerated or slowed time, and areas where light itself seemed to vanish. Each use drained him severely, but their energy values were slowly climbing—43 out of 553 for Kyle now, distinctly higher numbers than the others.

  "Can you feel it?" Marcus asked, eyes closed in concentration as he manipulated a small orb of frost energy. "The energy around us?"

  Kyle nodded, having noticed the same thing. "It's thin here. Back home—Earth—I bet there'd be more to draw on."

  Dex grunted agreement. "Like this place is starved. Empty." His eyes scanned the jungle beyond their camp. "Guess that's why everything's so eager to kill everything else. Fighting over scraps."

  They'd discovered they could sense each other's energies now—Dex's a heated pressure like standing too close to a bonfire, Marcus's a cool breeze that raised goosebumps on exposed skin, Kyle's a subtle push-pull that distorted perception slightly.

  "You think this could get us home?" Dex asked, voicing the question they'd all considered privately.

  Kyle turned the black void bead in his palm, feeling its weight. "Maybe. Someday. If we get strong enough."

  They fell silent at that. Kyle stared at the bead in his hand—a perfect sphere of compressed void energy, black as the space between stars. Four affinities where the others had one. The uneven distribution bothered him, not from pride but from strategy—imbalance suggested purpose, design.

  "Either way," Kyle said finally, "we keep practicing. Keep hunting. Keep leveling up." His eyes met theirs across the fire. "Whatever's coming, we'll be ready."

  The others nodded, the silent agreement of men who'd survived streets designed to kill them, then survived a jungle with the same intent. Kyle closed his fingers around the bead, feeling its cool weight against his palm.

  Whatever game the Cosmore was making, they were ready to play.