Aegis learned early that silence was safer than resistance.
By the time the morning bell rang, he had already been shoved once, tripped twice, and reminded—subtly, casually, efficiently—that seventeen years without an awakening made him an anomaly best kept in his place.
Halcyon District High was not cruel in the way old stories described cruelty. No lockers slammed his head. No one stole his food outright. This was a modern cruelty, sharpened by tiers and metrics and future prospects.
"Still nothing?" someone asked behind him as he took his seat.
The question wasn't meant to be answered.
Aegis stared at his desk as a faint shimmer of energy passed over the classroom—another diagnostic scan from the school's passive monitors. They ran every morning now, measuring fluctuations in genetic output, cataloging growth. The results appeared on the teacher's wrist display.
Names scrolled.
Tiers updated.
Aegis's row remained unchanged.
UNAWAKENED
STATUS: BASELINE
A few students snickered.
Others didn't bother reacting at all. That was worse.
People like to imagine bullying as loud, obvious, confrontational. But in a world where power could be quantified, exclusion did most of the work on its own. Group projects formed without him. Combat theory exercises paired him with assistants instead of peers. Even teachers—careful, well-meaning—spoke to him with softened expectations.
"As long as you understand the concepts," one of them had said, not unkindly, "you'll still pass."
Still.
As if survival itself were an accommodation.
At lunch, he sat near the edge of the courtyard where the shielding fields hummed faintly overhead. Two second-years practiced controlled ability drills nearby—one manipulating localized gravity, the other hardening his skin into translucent crystal. Applause followed every clean execution.
Aegis ate quietly.
Someone passed behind him and flicked his ear.
"Careful," another voice said. "If he dies, he might awaken."
Laughter.
Aegis didn't look up.
He told himself it didn't matter. That the world had already decided what he was worth. That it was easier not to fight a verdict handed down by biology itself.
By the final bell, he felt hollowed out—not angry, not sad. Just tired in a way that sleep never fixed.
He took the long way out of school, avoiding the main gates where recruiters waited with polished insignias and scanning lenses. The bus stop sat three blocks down, past the old transit strip where the city hadn't bothered updating the infrastructure since the Neon Age stabilized.
That was when the shouting started.
A crowd had already formed by the time Aegis turned the corner.
A single shifter—young, frantic, barely contained—stood at the center of the street, his ability warping the air around him in rippling distortions. Spatial compression. Low-tier, but volatile. Every movement twisted pressure into invisible blades.
Police units had him surrounded.
Aegis slowed.
He should have turned around.
Instead, he watched.
The shifter screamed something about being cornered, about the system rigging itself against people like him. His power surged erratically, cracking pavement, shattering windows.
An officer raised a containment field.
Another stepped forward.
That was when the blast slipped.
It wasn't aimed.
It wasn't intentional.
It didn't even look like anything at all.
Aegis felt it before he saw the effect.
The pressure passed through him.
Then his body failed.
His vision locked. His knees hit the ground. Blood filled his mouth, warm and metallic. Inside him, something catastrophic unfolded—organs collapsing, structures unraveling, systems disconnecting faster than pain could register.
He understood, distantly, that this was death.
Then death stalled.
The Living Law activated.
Not as a miracle.
As a correction.
The ability that had killed him did not simply vanish—it was taken. Dissected. Integrated. His body rewrote itself in response, not just resisting spatial compression, but claiming its rules.
Cells reinforced themselves against distortion. Tissue learned how to occupy space more absolutely. His biology rejected the concept of being torn apart by that force ever again.
And because adaptation required continuity—
He regenerated.
Bones knitted. Organs reformed. Blood reversed course.
Aegis gasped as his body reassembled itself from the inside out.
Screams erupted.
Phones lifted.
Officers froze.
The shifter stared, horror eclipsing rage.
Aegis stood unsteadily, space around him subtly wrong—not warped, but stabilized, as if reality itself preferred him intact.
The attacker fled.
His next blast collapsed before reaching Aegis, crushed by a counterpressure Aegis hadn't known he could exert. The rebound tore through the man's own body instead.
Restraints snapped closed moments later.
Questions came all at once.
"What tier are you?"
"Who trained you?"
"What relic is that?"
"Are you synthetic?"
Aegis didn't answer.
He couldn't.
Inside him, the stolen ability churned—unstable, unfamiliar, powerful. His thoughts fragmented as his body struggled to integrate something it had never been meant to hold so early.
He collapsed again—not dead this time, just overwhelmed.
As medics rushed forward, as law enforcement sealed the perimeter, as the city's sensors flagged something they could not classify—
Three relics stirred.
Far from the street.
Far from human hands.
Bound not to kings or tombs, but to principles.