The city stank of ozone and rust.
Cam sat alone in his lab, light from a dozen cracked monitors washing over his exhausted face. He hadn't slept. E's scans flickered across the screen—spikes in toxin levels, nerve inflammation, the slow breakdown of his liver. The stabilizers were working, but only just.
He leaned back, rubbing his eyes.
"You're not a bomb, E," he muttered.
"You're not. But they want you to be."
A chime broke the silence. Cam tapped a monitor. A security feed rolled in—Nocturnia's old cemetery gates creaking open under the weight of strangers in bone-white robes.
The Black Parade.
Cam watched in grim silence. The cult hadn't made a move in months. Not publicly. But now, under the harvest moon, they returned. Marching in a line of uneven steps, faces hidden beneath stitched hoods. Some limped. Some floated. All hummed in low, guttural tones that didn't belong to any language Cam recognized.
"Finally showing yourselves," he whispered.
On the other side of the city, John Holloway watched the same footage from a hidden safehouse, tucked behind a collapsed bell tower.
He didn't flinch. He didn't blink.
His fingers curled around the edge of the desk. Not out of fear—but recognition. The chanting echoed too deeply in his ears. It was familiar. Not from a past life, but from blood. From inheritance.
John shut the laptop slowly. "It's starting."
In the garden of the cemetery, the Parade stopped beneath a hanging arch of dried marrow and copper piping. At their center stood a woman with her arms bare to the cold—her skin sewn with old language, her eyes milk-white.
The Mother of Chains.
She held a jar filled with soot-black fluid. At her feet, a corpse lay twitching: freshly exhumed, limbs gnarled, throat stitched shut. A former enforcer. One of Hawkins' men, identified only by the jagged peacekeeper badge still nailed into his chest.
The ritual began.
"From rust, from ash, from theft, we return..." the Parade chanted.
The Mother uncorked the jar and poured the fluid over the corpse. It steamed and hissed, sizzling through skin and bone. The body arched violently, eyes snapping open with a guttural scream.
It didn't just wake up. It remembered.
Twitching, clawing, weeping. The man scrambled to his knees, mouth sewn, blood weeping through the threads. The Parade only watched. One cultist stepped forward and removed their mask—revealing a face burned nearly beyond recognition.
"You serve again," they said softly, placing a black shard into the reborn man's hand.
He clutched it like a relic.
E was across town, chasing a lead on a missing child in the rot districts. He didn't know about the resurrection yet. But the effect was already rippling.
As he passed through alleys, old vendors scowled. People turned away. A drunk threw a bottle at him. It shattered across his shoulder.
"Freak!" someone shouted. "Where's your leash?"
He didn't respond. Just kept walking. But the words stayed. Every step weighed more.
He found the missing kid eventually—trapped in a duct, terrified. No one cheered. No reporters arrived. Just silence. One mother, trembling, took her daughter and ran without thanking him.
Later, back at Cam's lab, E sat in silence as Cam injected another stabilizer into his shoulder.
"You did good," Cam said.
"No one thinks so."
"I do."
E managed a smile, but it didn't reach his eyes. "They still think I'm gonna snap."
Cam didn't answer right away. "You haven't. That's what matters."
"Yet."
That same night, in an underground speakeasy deep in the Splinter District, whispers passed like poison.
"You hear about the Black Parade?"
"They brought someone back. An old enforcer."
"No one escapes death anymore."
"They say it's not resurrection. It's recycling."
"And E? He's just the warm-up. The real war's starting."
John sat alone with an old journal—his father's. One he was never meant to read. Pages brittle with age. Covered in sigils that matched the ones sewn into the Parade's skin.
He stared at the final entry:
"If the Holloway blood is stirred, the Door will open. I've locked it in John. May he never turn the key."
He closed the book. Outside, the wind howled like a child in mourning.
Cam's lab flickered again. An alert.
Video footage. Someone had leaked a doctored clip online—grainy, spliced with overlays. It showed E snarling, shaking, slamming his fist into a wall during a past seizure. The stabilizer hadn't kicked in yet.
In the fake version, the footage looped. E's eyes were edited to glow. Civilians were digitally inserted, screaming and running.
The headline:
"UNSTABLE HERO MELTS DOWN. GOVERNMENT COVER-UP?"
Cam swore under his breath. "They're framing him. Again."
Somewhere far beneath the city, where the light didn't reach, the Mother of Chains stood before a vast iron door. A relic of Hawkins' early rule—sealed by sacrifice, buried by history.
The reborn enforcer stood beside her, silent.
She touched the door with bleeding fingers. The symbols on her arms pulsed.
"Two keys remain. One breaks the gate," she said, almost lovingly. "And one...is already inside."
She turned her face toward the shadows.
"Hello, Holloway."
But no one was there.
And yet... the door began to hum.