Here is what nobody tells you about being hunted through a forest at midnight:
It's boring.
Not the fear part, the fear was fine, the fear was useful, the fear was the only reason Ethan Cross still had a functioning heartbeat. But between the sprinting and the bleeding and the thing in the trees that moved like a bad shit dream given legs, there was this awful stretch of nothing where his brain refused to shut up.
He'd been thinking about Marcus.
Specifically, he'd been cataloguing every interaction they'd had over two years, every debrief, every shared safehouse meal, every time Marcus had clapped him on the shoulder and said good work, Crossing and tagging each memory with the same label:
'Lie. Lie. Performance. Lie. Setup. Lie.'
Of course he knew, he had a gift for this. His supervisor at the Vantus Division called it pattern recognition. His mother, before she'd stopped talking to him entirely, had called it not knowing how to let anything go. Both were probably right. Either way, the skill had kept him alive through six supernatural containment operations, two demigod extractions, and one deeply unpleasant evening in a Helsinki basement that he was never going to put in a report.
Tonight, it was going to keep him alive through this.
Or he was going to die, and that would be the end of it, and he refused to give Marcus the satisfaction.
[ SYSTEM ALERT — ANOMALOUS ENERGY DETECTED ]
Source: Internal (Host: Ethan Cross)
Classification: Unknown
Bloodline activation: PENDING
[WARNING: Trigger event approaching.]
Ethan stumbled on a root, caught himself on a tree trunk, and kept moving.
He'd felt something hit him from the inside, a sharp electric pulse behind his sternum, like a second heartbeat that had been asleep his entire life and had just decided, now of all moments, to wake up. He pressed a hand to his chest. The feeling faded gradually.
He filed it under the gouge of: I will deal with this later.
The list of things he was dealing with later was getting very long.
The treeline broke open. He burst onto a rocky ledge, a sixty-foot drop to the ravine, no way down, no way back. He'd studied the topographical maps during the briefing. He'd even pointed at this exact spot and said, if anything goes wrong, don't get cornered up there.
He was extremely cornered up there.
The forest behind him went quiet.
Ethan turned around and thought 'okay. This is the part where I figure something out.'
He pressed his back to the far boulder and took stock.
Knife: lost in the ravine scramble.
Sidearm: lifted before Marcus triggered the trap ,smooth, he'd give him that.
Backup comms: freaking jammed.
Three cuts across his ribs from the creature's first pass, bleeding steadily through his shirt.
Legs shaking.
Maybe thirty seconds before whatever was in those trees remembered it was supposed to kill him.
He was twenty-three years old. He had forty-six dollars in his bank account, a studio apartment with a broken radiator, and a file in the Vantus Division's HR system that described him as promising but difficult to manage.
He was going to be so much more than this.
That had always been the thing driving him, not the monsters, not the paycheck, not even the answers he'd spent years chasing about where exactly he'd come from and why his mother refused to say his father's name. Haha, It was simpler than all of that. He'd grown up watching powerful people treat everyone around them like furniture, and he'd decided at age eleven that he was either going to become the most powerful person in the room or freaking die trying.
He hadn't anticipated die trying being quite so literal.
His hand was glowing.
Thin, pale light traced the lines of his veins like current moving through wire. It pulsed once, twice. His blood. Doing that. On its own.
He stared at it.
In two years of hunting supernatural phenomena, he'd developed a system for moments like this: observe, categorize, decide whether to be impressed or disgusted, move on. He ran through the sequence now.
Observation: his blood appeared to be generating bioluminescent electrical energy.
Category: deeply abnormal.
Impressed or disgusted?
He looked at the glow.
He thought about forty-six dollars. The broken radiator. Promising but difficult to manage.
Impressed.
Definitely impressed.
A branch snapped. The creature stepped out of the trees , tall, hairy, patient and Marcus stepped out behind it with his hands in his pockets like a man who had already won.
"Nowhere left to run, bitch," Marcus said. "Come quietly. You're valuable asset, so I won't hurt yah much."
Ethan looked at him. Really looked, the way he'd learned to look at people, past the expression they were performing to the calculation underneath it.
Marcus was nervous. Not showing it. But nervous.
'Interesting.' he thought.
"Valuable to WHO!?" Ethan asked.
"People with resources. People who know what you are." Marcus nodded at Ethan's glowing hand. "The bloodline's been dormant your whole life. It's waking up faster than anyone expected."
"This..Anyone, including you as well?"
A slight pause.
"haha…always the smart one,Yes Ethan, I too belong in that category."
"So you sold me out based on incomplete information," Ethan said. "Marcus. That's quite embarrassing, you know."
Something flickered across Marcus's face. Not quite anger. Closer to discomfort, which Ethan found much more satisfying.
"This isn't a negotiation."
"I know I know…" Ethan said. "I'm not negotiating. I'm memorizing. Your tells. The way you're standing slightly behind the creature instead of beside it, you don't fully trust it either.
The fact that you took my weapons before the trap instead of after, which means you knew I'd need to be taken alive, which means whoever sent you wants me…intact." He tilted his head. "Which means I have leverage which I didn't know about five minutes ago."
Marcus stared at him. "You're bleeding out on a cliff," he said flatly.
"I know. I'm excellent at multitasking."
The creature took a step forward. Ethan looked at the drop behind him. He looked at the creature. He thought, with complete clarity:
'Fuck no, I am NOT going to die here. I am not going to die before I find out what I am, what I'm worth, and who has been pulling strings around my life since before I was bloody born.
And I am definitely not going to die before I make Marcus regret every single one of those forty-six moments he looked me in the eye and lied.'
The creature lunged.
The sky split.
— ⚡ —
The lightning bolt didn't arc.
It landed, directly, like it had aimed.
His heart stopped, In the gap between one beat and the next, something vast pressed up from the inside of his chest. Not a voice exactly. More like a kind of recognition. Like a door that had been locked from the other side his entire life swinging open.
There you are.
Then nothing.
Then blue light slamming before his eyes.
[ DIVINE SYSTEM — INITIALIZATION COMPLETE ]
Host: Ethan Cross
Bloodline Analysis: COMPLETE
▶ BLOODLINE CONFIRMED: ZEUS, LORD OF OLYMPUS
▶ DORMANCY PERIOD: 17 years
▶ BLOODLINE PURITY: 100%
▶ COMPATIBILITY: 100%
[ 100X REWARD MULTIPLIER: ACTIVE ]
All rewards amplified x100.
System online.
[Welcome, Heir.]
Ethan floated in the dark and read those words three times.
Son of Zeus.
He thought about his mother. The way she went rigid whenever he asked about his father. The way she'd said once, in a moment she'd clearly regretted immediately: he's not someone you can find. He thought about the Vantus Division and the two years he'd spent hunting things the rest of the world didn't know existed, and how he'd always been slightly too good at it — too fast, too perceptive, healed slightly too quickly from injuries that should have sidelined him for weeks.
He thought about forty-six dollars. Then he thought: son of the king of the gods. With a hundred-times multiplier.
'haha…'
"Hahahahaha" He started laughing.
Silently, in the dark, in what might have been the space between dying and not dying. He laughed because the universe had apparently decided that if it was going to give him something, it wasn't going to do it by half measures.
The next panel appeared:
[ FIRST AWAKENING REWARD — PROCESSING ]
Base reward:
Lightning Affinity +10
Divine Constitution +5
Applying 100X Multiplier...
▶ FINAL REWARD:
Lightning Affinity +1,000
Divine Constitution +500
Storm Sense (Passive): UNLOCKED
Integration complete.
One thousand.
He'd come to this mountain as a failed operative with no weapons, three open wounds, and a partner who'd tried to have him killed. The system had just handed him more raw power than he'd seen in two years of cataloguing supernatural threats, in the first thirty seconds.
Ethan filed one thought under immediate priorities: find out what this system can actually do. And one thought under long-term goals: use it to become completely, catastrophically untouchable.
Never again.
No one would ever put him on a ledge with no options again. Not Marcus, not whoever had sent Marcus, not any god or monster or secret organization that thought Ethan Cross was something that could be managed, collected, or contained.
He'd spent twenty-three years being underestimated. He was done.
The world slammed back in.
Rain.
He gasped and sat up. The creature was fifteen feet away.
Crouched. Making a sound like something afraid.
'Good,' Ethan thought. 'Learn what that feels like.'
He stood up slowly. He didn't need to rush. That was the first thing he noticed, the frantic, animal urgency of the last hour was simply gone, replaced by something cool and wide and deep. He could feel the storm overhead the way you feel your own breathing.
Like it was Natural. Available to his bidding.
The light under his skin had gone from a faint pulse to a constant current, branching up both arms in patterns he recognized from photographs: Lichtenberg figures. The scars lightning left on people it struck.
Except his weren't scars. They were moving.
The creature snarled and lunged again.
Ethan raised one hand.
Pulled, then The bolt came