The winter air outside the Gene Evaluation Hall struck Nico's face like a living thing, crisp and sharp enough to make his lungs sting, yet it carried a strange sweetness that made him want to inhale deeply and keep breathing forever. After the cold, sterilized air of the lab chamber, the city felt too alive, as though someone had turned the saturation dial on the world.
The pale sun hanging over Titan Boulevard was a burning disc of gold, every glint on the glass towers sharper than he remembered, every shadow richer and more textured.
Even the sound of the street seemed different - footsteps rang clearer, the hum of passing hovercars took on subtle tonal shifts, and the rhythm of life here felt like a background song only he could hear.
Lex walked close beside him, her boots tapping out a steady beat on the pavement, her eyes scanning the crowd as though expecting someone to jump out at them. "You okay?" she asked without looking at him.
Nico flexed his fingers, staring at them as if they might suddenly burst into light. "I think so," he said slowly, his voice still carrying the slight tremor of disbelief. "Better than okay, actually. It's like…" He searched for the words, but nothing fit. "It's like I've been running my whole life with sandbags tied to my legs, and someone just cut them loose. Everything's lighter. Faster. Clearer."
She gave him a sideways look, a single brow lifting, the corner of her mouth twitching in that way she had when she couldn't decide whether to be impressed or deeply concerned.
Titan Boulevard was already busy despite the season, its high sidewalks lined with stalls selling steaming food and bright trinkets, the traffic lanes buzzing with slow-moving maglev cabs and the occasional drone courier. Hanging above it all, strung between gleaming silver pylons, were the banners of the Twelve Tiers - bold swathes of color with a single word printed on each in clean, perfect type: Initiate, Novice, Adept, Expert, Elite, Vanguard, Apex, Dominion, Sovereign, Stellar, Cosmic, and World. Twelve levels of human capability, the ladder every gene cultivator aspired to climb.
For most people, awakening one active gene was cause for celebration. Two was rare enough to draw attention. Three was the stuff of talent scouts and government recruitment squads, often only seen once in a generation. But Nico's case wasn't just three genes - it was three that weren't supposed to exist together.
Aquila Strength, Helios Adaptation, and Nyx Sensory each carried its own powerful but incompatible resonance pattern.
When forced together in a normal human body, they destabilized, tearing at the host until one or more burned out entirely. Yet in him, they had harmonized instantly, as if they had been waiting for each other. As if they belonged.
He didn't understand it, but he could feel it in his bones - literally. Every muscle fiber, every nerve ending hummed with quiet purpose, like an engine idling beneath his skin. And it wasn't just strength.
The world itself felt… slower. Not frozen, but stretched, each detail hanging a fraction longer in his awareness.
A sharp hiss from above broke his thoughts. He looked up in time to see a delivery hover-drone dip lower than intended, its stabilizer sparking erratically.
The crowd reacted instantly, heads tilting upward, feet shuffling away. The drone wobbled hard, its cargo - a steel-banded crate - shifting in its clamps.
It dropped.
The crate hurtled downward toward a young mother struggling to free her child from a stroller caught on a curb. She looked up at the shadow falling over her, frozen in the half-second of dawning horror.
Nico moved before he realized he'd decided to. His foot struck the pavement, and the ground seemed to give way, not from weakness but from sheer compliance. The air thickened around him, yet his body slid through it with ease.
His vision sharpened so that every spinning bolt on the drone was crisp, the angle of the falling crate perfectly measurable.
One step. Two. His hands were already up, fingers spread.
When the crate hit, there was no pain, only a thud that sent a controlled shock through his arms. Aquila Strength let his muscles absorb the force without strain. Helios Adaptation shifted the structure of his joints and tendons in microseconds, bracing against injury.
Nyx Sensory tracked every subtle shift in the crate's momentum, allowing him to rebalance instantly.
He lowered it gently to the pavement, not so much as scuffing the metal.
The crowd erupted in gasps and shouts, phones rising to capture the scene. The mother clutched her child to her chest, murmuring frantic thanks, eyes wet with relief.
Lex was already at his side, her grip tight on his wrist. "We really need to get out of here," she hissed under her breath, scanning the people around them.
They slipped back into the flow of pedestrians, vanishing before the first uniformed city responders arrived.
Nico kept his head down, though part of him was still reeling. The speed, the strength - yes, those were expected. But the control… that was new. That was terrifying.
Several floors above street level, in a shaded glass-front office, a man in a charcoal suit lowered a compact binocular visor and tapped his earpiece.
"Confirmation," he said, his voice calm but edged with something close to awe. "Three active primaries, full synergy. Resonance stable even under stress."
The reply came distorted and low. "Mark him. Priority Black. If the Eighteen Threshold is real, he may be the first key."
The man's gaze lingered on the thinning crowd until Nico disappeared completely from view. Then he turned away from the window, his expression unreadable.
By the time Nico and Lex reached the quiet residential block on the east edge of Titan City, the adrenaline had faded into a strange buzzing exhaustion. His body wasn't tired exactly - his muscles felt as if they could keep going for days - but his mind was overloaded.
Every color was still too bright, every sound too sharp, every face in the crowd branded into his memory like he'd studied them for hours instead of catching them in passing.
It was exhilarating, but also exhausting, like trying to drink from a waterfall.
They stopped in front of a narrow steel-and-glass apartment tower, the kind built before the city's vertical expansion boom, its edges softened by years of wind grit and rain.
Lex pressed her wristband to the entry plate, the door giving a quiet chime before sliding open.
"You're staying here tonight," she said, her tone leaving no room for argument.