Silas screamed. It wasn't a battle cry; it was a purge.
The veins on his neck stood out like wet ropes, pulsing black against his skin. He threw his hands out, retching the power up from his gut. The golden energy didn't flow; it erupted. A violent, pressurized stream of light that felt like bile leaving his throat.
It slammed into Iskandar's violet void.
The sound wasn't an explosion. It was the sickening thwump of air being sucked out of a room.
Pressure inverted. The rain stopped falling, caught in a vacuum that pulled the water sideways. Iskandar's singularity choked, unable to swallow the density of the energy Silas had force-fed it. Then, the rejection. The backlash hit the shipyard with a tremor that rattled teeth.
"Move."
The Masked Man didn't shout. The word was flat, almost bored.
He stepped to the left. Just a shift of weight, really. A split second later, a shipping container crumpled into a heap of oxidized rust and dust, collapsing exactly where he'd been standing.
He slid behind a concrete barrier, boots churning through oily mud. He didn't look back at the destruction. His hand swept over a corpse in the muck—one of the mercenaries Silas had broken earlier. He wasn't looking for a pulse.
His fingers brushed wet nylon. Found it.
Cold, round, heavy.
He ripped the frag grenade free from the dead man's vest and clipped it to his belt.
Iskandar tore through the dust cloud. His coat was shreds. His face was a ruin of blood and entitlement. The backlash hadn't killed him, but it had stripped the regal veneer right off. He looked feral.
"I will unmake you!" Iskandar howled.
He didn't cast from afar. He ran. Every step he took rotted the asphalt, turning the ground into smoking tar.
"Scatter," the Masked Man said.
Silas lurched left, grabbing Aryan by the collar and hauling the stumbling kid toward the skeletal legs of a crane. The Masked Man stayed put.
Iskandar swung his arm. A backhand meant to decapitate. The air hissed like a punctured tire as the entropy wave lashed out.
The Masked Man didn't dive. He didn't roll. He just stopped.
He leaned back, heels digging into the sludge. The violet wave slashed horizontally, missing his chest by the width of a breath. The air pressure snapped the fabric of his black tee, but the skin beneath remained whole.
Iskandar snarled, bringing a fist down.
The Masked Man stepped sideways.
The Warlord's fist hit concrete. The ground turned to grey ash instantly, a knee-deep crater forming where the Masked Man had been a heartbeat ago.
"Aryan. Hit him."
The command was quiet, cutting through the ringing in everyone's ears.
From the shadows, a grey blur launched itself.
Aryan didn't hesitate. He hit Iskandar with the grace of a falling safe. His skin was a mosaic of metallic scales, hard and ugly. He drove the Warlord into a stack of oil drums, flattening the steel and sending black sludge spilling into the rainwater.
Iskandar gagged, grabbing Aryan's throat. "Filth!"
Smoke curled up from Aryan's neck. The decay ate the armored skin, sizzling into the meat underneath. The smell of cooking pork filled the air. Aryan squeezed his eyes shut, teeth grinding together, but he didn't let go. He clamped his hands onto Iskandar's wrists, forcing the Warlord to look at him.
Buying time. One second. Two.
"Silas. Now."
Silas, blood streaming from both nostrils, slapped his palms onto the wet concrete. "Up!"
Shadows erupted from the ground like geysers, launching both Iskandar and Aryan into the air. Aryan kicked off the Warlord's chest, scrambling backward, landing in a crouch. His throat was already knitting itself back together—a gruesome display of steam, snapping bone, and stretching skin.
Iskandar landed on a container. He looked down, chest heaving. The violet light around him was flickering now, unstable. Raindrops died before they could touch him, turning into hiss of hydrogen vapor.
He stared at the Masked Man.
"You're just meat," Iskandar whispered, the static in the air carrying his voice. "No magic. No biology. Just meat waiting to rot."
Iskandar raised both hands. The violet aura bloomed, a sphere of absolute death ten feet wide. He jumped.
He didn't aim to land near the Masked Man. He aimed to land on him. To swallow him whole. The spread was too wide to dodge.
The Masked Man didn't run.
He watched the Warlord fall. Through the slit in his mask, his eyes were narrow, tracking the speed. The angle. The rate of decay.
His hand went to his belt.
As Iskandar crashed down, the Masked Man moved. Not away. In.
He stepped forward, slipping under the expanding rim of the violet sphere. It was suicide. It was madness.
For a fraction of a second, they were intimate. Chest to chest. The Masked Man stood inside the Warlord's guard, in the only inch of space the death field hadn't reached yet.
Iskandar's eyes widened. He opened his mouth to scream, to unleash a point-blank torrent of erasure.
The Masked Man jammed the grenade into his mouth.
He didn't pull the pin. He didn't touch the safety.
He just shoved the serrated steel sphere into the violet void of the Warlord's throat.
Then, he pushed. A violent, two-handed shove against Iskandar's chest, sending himself into a backflip.
Iskandar gagged. His power, reactive and stupid, did exactly what it was meant to do.
It attacked the foreign object.
In a microsecond, the steel casing of the grenade rusted. Pitted. Crumbled to dust. The safety lever disintegrated. The spring, aged a thousand years in a blink, snapped into powder.
The explosive core was suddenly naked. The detonator wasn't triggered by a mechanism. It was triggered because the structure holding it back simply ceased to exist.
No click. No fuse.
Thud.
It was a wet, muffled sound.
Iskandar's head didn't explode so much as it vanished. A pink mist of superheated vapor replaced his skull. The blast was contained entirely within his upper torso. The headless body stood there for a terrible second, the violet energy sputtering, confused, searching for a brain that was now painted across the shipping container.
Then, the body folded.
The light snapped out.
The Masked Man landed on his feet in a crouch. He stood up slowly, rolling his neck.
He brushed a speck of grey dust from his shoulder. Checked his gloves. Checked his ribs.
The rain fell on him. He stood in the carnage, breathing steady, as if he'd just finished filing paperwork.
Silence rushed back into the shipyard. Heavy. Wet.
Silas and Aryan walked over to the corpse. Aryan stared at the headless stump, then at the Masked Man. The boy wasn't shaking anymore. He stood tall, the grey scales receding into his skin, leaving him looking pale and young.
"He's dead," Aryan said. Flat.
Silas looked at the Masked Man, his face pale. He watched the soldier adjust his watch.
"You didn't pull the pin," Silas said. His voice was quiet. "I saw you. You just… fed it to him."
The Masked Man looked up. "Pin is steel. Spoon is steel. His power rots metal."
"You bet your life that his magic would arm the grenade?" Silas let out a breathless, jagged laugh. "That's not tactics. That's insane."
"Physics," the Masked Man said. "Steel rusts. Explosives don't."
He walked toward Aryan.
The boy met his gaze. The fear was gone, burned out by the basement and the adrenaline. What was left was something harder. Cold slag.
"The list ended with him," the Masked Man said. "The war doesn't."
He pointed to the open gate. City lights flickered in the distance.
"You have a choice, Aryan. Walk out. Disappear. Go be a ghost somewhere quiet."
He paused…
"Or stay. Learn to control the weapon you are. Ensure no one else ends up in a basement."
Aryan looked at the gate. It was open. He looked at his hands—hands that had just turned to steel. Hands that had killed.
He looked back at the Masked Man.
"I don't have a home," Aryan rasped. "I don't have anyone waiting."
He stepped closer.
"I'm not running. I'm with you…"
The Masked Man nodded. Once.
He turned to Silas.
"He's yours."
Silas blinked, nearly dropping his lighter into a puddle. "Excuse me? I'm not a babysitter. I deal with ghosts, not hormonal teenagers."
"You deal with the unnatural," the Masked Man said, checking the mag on his pistol before sliding it back into the holster. "He is a biological impossibility. Teach him control. If he burns out, it's on you."
"And what are you going to do?" Silas asked, voice rising.
"I have a schedule."
The Masked Man turned and walked away. He merged with the shadows of the scrapyard, moving with that same unhurried, terrifying pace.
Silas watched him go. He looked at Aryan, who was staring back, waiting. Silas sighed, rubbing his temples where the headache was starting to bloom.
"Great. Just great," Silas muttered. He flicked his lighter. The flame turned blue for a second.
He likes us, the double-toned voice whispered in the back of Silas's skull. It sounded amused.
"Shut up," Silas murmured, inhaling a lungful of smoke. He exhaled into the rain. "Yeah. He definately likes us."