We had not even finished leaving Rivas’s workshop when the low district decided to remind me that important conversations in my life rarely ended with a peaceful goodbye. Sometimes they ended with an alarm.

Sometimes with a villainess turned into a crow. And, apparently, other times they ended with a guy screaming in the middle of the street while several people ran in the opposite direction.

The workshop shutter stayed half-closed behind us. Rivas muttered something that sounded way too much like “it started again” and Nora raised her head as if she had heard a wrong note in a song. Vanessa disappeared before I could say anything to her.

Literally. One second she was on my left and the next the air occupied her place, because of course, some people could leave uncomfortable conversations by turning invisible. I had fire, yes, but I still did not have the power to avoid responsibilities with that much elegance.

“Movement on the corner” Nora said, pointing toward a narrow street where a motorcycle was lying on its side and a group of civilians was moving away fast. “It does not look like an explosion. It looks like a fight.”

I looked over there and felt my watch vibrate with a basic zone alert. Nothing from the Fireman System yet. Just New Kroy telling me with very polite technology that I was about to get into another problem.

We ran toward the corner, although “ran” was a generous way to describe what happened with me trying not to trip over boxes, cables, and people coming out of the shops. The low district was not designed for clean chases by famous heroes.

There were no wide streets, nice cameras, or dramatic space to pose. There were vendors pulling back merchandise, neighbors looking from rusty balconies, children hiding behind adults, and a dog barking as if it also wanted to file a formal complaint against the agencies.

In the middle of everything was the cause of the chaos: a young man, maybe my age or a little older, with a sweaty face, eyes too wide open, and an arm shaking in an unnatural way. He wore a cheap jacket torn at the shoulder and some kind of metallic bracelet embedded around his right forearm.

It was not elegant. It did not look like hero equipment, agency technology, or anything anyone would want attached to their skin. His arm swelled at times, not in a monstrous way, but as if something under the muscles pushed suddenly and then regretted it.

He had a knife in his left hand, but he held it more like a scared animal than someone ready to attack. That was the first thing I noticed. He was not hunting. He was trapped.

“Back!” the man shouted, moving his altered arm and hitting a traffic sign that bent with a dry sound. Several people stepped back. A vendor fell sitting next to a box of fruit.

Nora reached my side and clicked her tongue. “Irregular physical increase. Smaller than the previous case.”

“Great” I said, raising a hand and letting a low line of fire appear near the ground, not in front of the guy, but to the side, marking a limit between him and the civilians. “I love it when the menu of misfortunes comes in sizes.”

Nora looked at me for a second. “Do not joke if you are going to focus.”

“The jokes are part of my concentration.”

“That explains many things.”

I did not have time to answer because the man took a sudden step toward a woman trying to pick up a child. His right arm shook and hit a wall without meaning to, tearing off pieces of concrete. The woman screamed.

I moved my hand and extended the line of fire like a low barrier, a bright arc that did not touch anyone but forced the man to stop by instinct. It was not a big flame. It did not need to be. If I had learned anything from Nora, it was that fire did not always have to hit. Sometimes it only had to say: not this way.

“Do not come closer!” the man shouted. The knife trembled in his hand. He had tears mixed with sweat on his face, and that made everything feel more uncomfortable. A villain with an evil laugh was easy to hate. A desperate idiot with an illegal device stuck to his arm was something else.

“I am not going to come closer” I said, keeping my voice firm. Before I might have talked too fast, tried to sound heroic, and failed with style. This time no. This time I let my fire stay low, stable, like a line of warning and not like a threat.

“But you are not going to get close to them either.” I pointed with my chin at the woman and the child. “Let them leave.”

The man swallowed. “You are going to lock me up!”

“If you keep hitting walls with that arm, you probably will” I answered. “But if you lower the knife and let them check you, you have more chances of getting out of this with all your bones where they should be.”

Nora snorted beside me. “That was almost reassuring.”

“I am working on my heroic tone.”

“Keep working.”

Despite the comment, she moved carefully to the right, generating small blue sparks between her fingers to keep people away without scaring them too much.

Vanessa was still invisible, but I saw a box move by itself behind the man, clearing an exit for the civilians. Good. Team working. I hated to admit it, but when no one was trying to save my life by force, working as a team felt pretty good.

The man looked around as if the walls were closing in on him. The bracelet on his right arm emitted a low, unpleasant hum, and his skin tensed again. I saw the exact moment he lost part of his control.

His shoulder moved first, then the elbow, then the fist shot out toward a metal pole, not because he wanted to break it, but because the arm decided to do it for him. If that pole fell toward the people, we were going to have a real problem.

I extended my hand and drew a second line of fire on the ground, faster, narrower, pushing the heat toward the base of the pole to mark a danger zone and make the civilians step back without thinking.

“Behind the line!” I shouted. And this time they obeyed. Not all with confidence, but with enough smart fear. Nora shot a short discharge at the pole to stabilize it before it fell, and I moved the line of fire toward the man’s feet, cutting off his path forward.

He jumped back, breathing hard. “I did not want this!” he shouted. “I just wanted it to work!”

That sentence hit harder than the hit on the pole. Because I understood it. Not the device. Not the knife. Not the chaos. But yes, that part. Wanting something to work for once.

“Who sold it to you?” I asked.

The man shook his head several times. “I do not know. I do not know his name.”

“Then tell me what he promised you.”

The bracelet hummed again and the man clenched his teeth. He took another step, this time toward me. Good.

If he had to move toward someone, better toward the guy with fire than toward civilians without heroic medical insurance. I raised my left hand and lit a flash in front of his eyes, not enough to blind him, just to make him turn his face.

At the same time, I dragged a line of fire across the ground to his left side. He reacted by instinct, moving away from the heat, right toward where Nora had already left a small containment zone with low electricity. It did not hit him directly. It only made him lose balance.

The knife flew out of his hand when Vanessa, invisible, twisted his wrist at the exact moment. The weapon fell to the ground and I surrounded it with a small circle of fire so no one would accidentally kick it. The man fell to his knees, gasping. His right arm hit the ground one more time, opening a short crack, but he no longer had direction. He no longer had an audience nearby. He no longer had anyone to hurt except himself.

I approached slowly, keeping the fire between us, but low. I did not want him to think I was going to burn him. I did not want people to think that my solution for everything was turning human problems into charcoal.

“Listen to me” I said. “The device is using you, not the other way around.”

The man raised his gaze. He had a red face and eyes full of anger, shame, and fear.

“They said it was safe.”

“They lied.”

“They said I could become useful.”

That word bothered me more than necessary. Useful. As if someone’s life had to justify its existence on a performance chart. As if a low gift was a debt.

As if not being strong enough turned you into available material for any trash with promises.

“Being useful is worth nothing if you end up dead in the street” I said. Maybe it sounded harsher than planned, but he stopped struggling for a second.

Nora approached from behind with containment handcuffs, although she did not put them on immediately. Vanessa reappeared a few steps away, holding the knife with a cloth, as if she had stolen it from the scene without anyone being able to say when.

Some people started recording from the doors. Others just watched. This time I did not feel the same pressure as before. I did not have to show off. I had to finish well.

The bracelet emitted one last click and the man’s arm relaxed suddenly. He let out a groan and almost fell to the side, but I grabbed him by the shoulder before he hit the ground. His skin was hot, too hot, but not like a burn.

It was internal heat, machine fever and power mixed in a disgusting way. The Fireman System did not appear, but my body reacted the same with a mild discomfort in the chest, as if my fire recognized something my head still could not name.

Nora placed the containment handcuffs and Vanessa requested medical assistance through the communicator. The man was breathing with difficulty. Before they took him away, he grabbed my sleeve with his left hand.

“I am not a villain” he murmured.

I looked at him. “I know.”

“I just wanted to join an agency. Any agency.”

His voice broke. “They told me they could turn trash powers into hero powers.”

The phrase fell on the street like a stone.

I felt several people heard it. Nora stayed still for a second. Vanessa lowered her gaze toward the bracelet. I did not say anything right away because there was no joke good enough to cover that. In the end I only carefully moved his hand away from my sleeve and answered:

“Then we are going to find who sold you that lie.”

When the basic New Kroy medical team arrived, the street was no longer looking at us the same way. It was not complete admiration. It was not trust. The low district was not going to hand us their faith for a well-handled scene and two pretty lines of fire. But something had changed.

The fruit seller who had fallen to the ground earlier gave me a short nod while picking up his boxes. The woman with the child looked at me without smiling, but she also did not step back when I passed nearby. A boy from a door murmured “that is the flame boy” and this time no one pulled him back.

How horrible. The nickname was still terrible, but it was starting to produce results.

Vanessa came to my side while Nora checked the bracelet with a portable scanner. “You handled it well” she said.

That almost made me look at the sky to check if a meteorite was coming to collect the compliment.

“Was that a compliment?”

“Do not ruin it.”

“Too late, I am already saving it for my self-esteem.”

Vanessa shook her head, but she did not seem annoyed.

Nora lifted the scanner and her expression turned serious again. “The bracelet has residual energy similar to the previous case, but weaker. This was not the complete model.”

“Complete model?” I asked.

She looked at the man being lifted onto the stretcher. “Or a cheap version. Or a test.”

Neither of the two options pleased me.

I took out my watch to send the report to Sarah, but before writing, I looked at the street again. Poor shops. Tired people. Weak superhumans wanting to buy an opportunity. And someone selling them borrowed power with the promise of turning them into heroes.

You did not need to be a genius to see the business. You also did not need to be a good person to take advantage of it.

I wrote the report with the main data and added the exact phrase the man had said. “Turn trash powers into hero powers.”

Sarah was going to hate that phrase.

I did too. Because it sounded too good for someone desperate. And because, in a city where heroes were also brands, rankings, and contracts, maybe that lie did not need to hide as much as it should.