The resources I’d carried out of the Rift converted to liquid capital faster than I expected.

The black market for gate resources operated on its own economy — supply controlled almost entirely by guild extraction, demand constant and growing as Melnos-powered technology became more sophisticated and the compounds required to fuel it became more valuable.

I didn’t sell through any channel that could be traced.

I didn’t need to. 

Six months in a dimension that nobody survived had given me resources in qualities and quantities that made discretion easy — buyers came to me, quietly, through intermediaries, with no questions and full payment.

Within three months I had more money than I knew what to do with.

I First took my mother out of that run down grave yard.

Gave her a proper burial. And made sure she is treated right, even in death.

After that, I focused on other things.

I established a mega organization in Eurova which I named, ‘MERIDIAN CONSOLIDATED’.

Under that name, I owned Hospitals, Tech Companies, The Transportation Market and several refineries for gate resources that even the guild and government uses -- in just four months, after taking care of my mother. The hospitals were in honor of my mother. 

Her name was what I called every hospital I owned, to signify that fact. And I was discreet enough to not let it be traceable. Everyone were welcomed at any of the hospitals, it was my mother’s not the government.
 
[“Vireon capacity: fully restored.”]

[“All abilities: Stage 3, Forged.”]

[“System status: stable.”]

The system kept its counsel while I worked. 

I had come to think of it less as a tool and more as a presence — something that had been written into me along with the abilities, that watched and catalogued and announced without judgment or agenda. 

It noted my Vireon levels. 

It tracked my ability usage. 

It told me when I was approaching limits and let me decide whether those limits applied to me.

Usually I decided they didn’t.

Finding the crew wasn’t difficult.

The criminal underworld of Eurova operated on a structure that looked like chaos from the outside and functioned like a hierarchy from the inside — the same as most human institutions, only without the pretense. 

Dres ran a mid-tier operation out of the Calveth district. 

I knew his contacts. 

I knew his methods. 

I had six months of nothing but time to think about everything I’d observed in the weeks before the gate raid, and what I’d observed had been thorough because I had never known how not to observe thoroughly.

I didn’t go to Dres first.

I went above him.

⸻

The man who ran the Eurovan criminal underworld at that time was called Maren Roso.

He was fifty-three, ability unknown publicly, though the people who worked for him knew it was something in the defensive category, and he had been in his position long enough that most of Eurova’s criminal infrastructure had calcified around him the way institutions calcify around people who have survived long enough to become load-bearing.

I requested a meeting through three intermediaries.

He agreed because the person requesting was the anonymous seller responsible for flooding the black market with gate resources of unprecedented quality and quantity for three months straight, and Maren Roso had not survived fifty-three years by ignoring people with leverage.

We met in the back room of a restaurant in the Aldenmere district — the wealthy district, because Maren Roso had long since graduated from pretending he belonged anywhere else.

He looked at me across the table and said nothing for a long moment.

“You’re a child,” he said finally.

“I’m the person who’s been supplying sixty percent of Eurova’s black market resource demand for ninety days,” I said. “The age is less relevant than that.”

He looked at me for another moment. 

Then he almost smiled. “What do you want?”

“Everything you have,” I said. “I’m taking over.”

The smile didn’t quite arrive. 

Something else did — the particular stillness of a man recalculating. 

“do you understand what you’re saying.”

“I understand exactly what I’m saying.”

“People who want what I have—”

“Don’t have what I have,” I said. 

“You’ve been selling my resources for three months. You know what I pulled out of a single gate. You’ve been in this business long enough to know that’s not possible — not for a guild team, not for anyone. You’ve been wondering what I am since the first delivery.”

Silence.

“I’ll tell you what I am,” I said.

“I’m the person who spent six months alone in a Class Five Rift dimension and came out with more capital than your entire operation generates in two years. I’m the person who opened a gate from the inside — something your researchers will tell you is physically impossible. And I’m sixteen years old, which means whatever I become in the next ten years is something you have never seen before and cannot prepare for.”

I leaned forward slightly.

“You have two options. You step aside and you keep your life and a generous retirement from the organization you built. Or you don’t, and we find out together what happens next.”

Maren Roso looked at me for a very long time.

Then he nodded.

It was that simple. 

The most anticlimactic moment of everything I’d built toward — not a fight, not a power struggle, just a man old enough to recognize something he couldn’t outrun and pragmatic enough not to try.

[“Vireon System: no ability usage detected.”]

I hadn’t needed abilities. 

I’d needed the truth, delivered plainly, to someone capable of hearing it.

Three days later I was running the Eurovan criminal underworld.

⸻

I gave it two weeks before I called a meeting.

The system had been tracking them for me since I took over — Verdict reaching through the organization’s structure, cataloguing everyone Dres had worked with, mapping the connections until I had what I needed.

By the end of the first week I knew exactly where all of them were.

The force field woman.

The water movement girl. 

Dres.

And Cael.

I sent the summons through the standard organizational channels — new leadership requesting attendance from all senior operational staff. 

Routine. Unremarkable.

The kind of message that got complied with because not complying with the new boss two weeks into his tenure was not a calculation most people made.

They came to the Calveth district location — the restaurant above which Dres had first interviewed me, which I had chosen deliberately — and they sat around a table in the back room and they did not know yet who had called them there.

I let them wait twenty minutes.

Then I walked in.

The silence was immediate and total.

Dres went still in the particular way of someone whose threat assessment has just been catastrophically revised. 

The force field woman’s hand moved toward an activation stance before she caught herself. 

The water movement girl stood up from her chair — not aggressively, instinctively, the way prey stands when it recognizes a predator.

Cael didn’t move at all.

He sat at the table and he looked at me and whatever he saw in my face told him everything the twenty minutes of waiting hadn’t.

“You’re alive,” Dres said. 

His voice was steady at first — the professional reflex, the mask that had served him his entire career snapping into place. “We thought—”

“I know what you thought,” I said. 

I remained standing. 

“You thought the gate would do what you couldn’t. It didn’t.”

The mask held for approximately three more seconds.

Then Dres looked at the others around the table and something shifted in his eyes — the calculation running, the arithmetic changing, the professional assessing his options and arriving at the oldest one available.

“It wasn’t my call,” he said. “Leaving you. I want you to understand that.”

The force field woman looked at him.

“The decision was made before I could intervene,” Dres continued.

His voice had found a new register — not steady anymore, but urgent, the specific urgency of a man building an argument he believes in because he has to.

“In a situation like that, with creatures of that classification, the protocol is clear — you secure the exit, you preserve the team. I was following standard operational—”

“Dres,” I said.

He stopped.

“I was there,” I said.

Silence.

“I saw who made which decisions,” I said.

“I saw who ran first. I saw who didn’t look back. I saw everything, and I have an ability now that means I will remember it with complete accuracy for the rest of my life.”

I let that sit for a moment. 

“So you can stop.”

Dres stopped.

Then he started again because that was what Dres did.

“The kid—” he gestured at me, caught himself, re-calibrated. 

“You. You had no ability. No training. In a Class Five misclassification scenario, an unemerged—”

“My mother died,” I said.

That stopped him.

“While I was in that gate,” I said. 

“Six months alone. She went looking for me. The exertion killed her.” I looked at him directly. “She died three months ago. I have been standing at her grave. And now I am standing here.”

Dres looked at the table. 

Then at the others. 

Then back at me.

 The calculation was running continuously behind his eyes — I could see it, the way I could see most things now — and I watched him arrive at the conclusion that the calculation wasn’t going to save him and decide to try anyway.

“The girl,” he said, nodding toward the water movement girl. 

“She was the one who said go. At the gate. You want someone to blame for the timing, it was her call—”

“Don’t,” the water movement girl said sharply.

“I’m telling him what happened—”

“You ran first,” she said. “Everyone here knows you ran first.”

“That’s not—”

“You didn’t even check the gate classification before we went in,” the force field woman said.

 Her voice was flat. 

Whatever fear she had of me had apparently been temporarily redirected. 

“You told us it was a Three. You were wrong and someone got left behind and his mother is dead and now you’re sitting there pointing fingers—”

“I am trying to find a resolution that works for everyone—”

“There isn’t one,” I said.

The room went quiet again.

Dres looked at me. 

The mask was gone now — fully, completely, the professional stripped back to whatever was underneath, which turned out to be a man who was very afraid and not particularly dignified about it.

“I have resources,” he said. “Contacts. Information on every major criminal operation in Eurova, names of guild officials on the take, government connections that could be worth—”

“I already have all of that,” I said. “I’ve been running your organization for two weeks.”

His mouth closed.

“I know every contact. Every account. Every name on every list you kept.” I opened the gate. 

The bio-luminescent green of the Rift spilled through into the back room — that particular quality of light, that air that wasn’t quite oxygen, the soft ground visible through the tear. 

“I don’t need anything you have. I haven’t needed it since day three.”

Dres stared at the gate.

Something left his face that I don’t think had ever left it before — the last calculation, the final arithmetic, the professional’s belief that there was always an angle. Gone.

What replaced it was just fear. Plain and unadorned.

“Please,” he said.

The word sat in the room like something dropped.

I looked at him for a moment. 

At the man who had recruited a sixteen year old with no ability and no options and used him as bait and called it operational protocol.

“You first,” I said.

He didn’t move.

Gravity at Stage Three closed around him — not violently, not crushingly, just the firm and absolute pressure of something that doesn’t negotiate. 

He slid from his chair. 

His feet found the floor.

 He moved toward the gate one step at a time with his hands out and his head turned back toward me and his mouth still forming words that weren’t coming out anymore.

He went through.

The force field woman activated her barrier the moment she saw Dres go — a reflex, professional and immediate.

I closed my hand and Gravity compressed it steadily inward until it shattered. 

She looked at me with an expression that had moved past fear into something exhausted. 

Like she’d known, somewhere, that this was always how it ended.

She went through without speaking.

The water movement girl was already at the door when Speed put me in front of her.

She stopped.

Looked at me.

Looked at the gate.

Looked at me again.

“I didn’t vote to leave you,” she said. “I want you to know that.”

I looked at her for a moment. 

Verdict running beneath the surface, reading the truth of what she was saying.

She wasn’t lying.

“I know,” I said.

She went through the gate anyway, cause I pushed her in using gravity.

That left Cael.

He hadn’t moved. 

Hadn’t tried to fight or run or negotiate. 

He sat at the table with his hands flat on the surface and he looked at me with the expression he’d been wearing since I walked in — the one that had been there, I suspected, every night for six months when the name he couldn’t unhear wouldn’t let him sleep.

CAEL.

“I thought about coming back,” he said. “In the moment. I want you to know that.”

I said nothing.

He nodded slowly. “I’m sorry about your mother.”

I looked at him for a long moment.

“She smiled,” I said. “When she smiled at you it reached her eyes. And she hugged people like she meant it. Like it cost her nothing. Because for her it didn’t.”

Cael looked at the table.

“She went out looking for me,” I said. “Sick. Alone. In a city that had never helped her. She went out looking because that’s what she did — she kept showing up for people who weren’t there. She kept showing up until she couldn’t anymore.”

Silence.

“That’s what you took from me,” I said. “Not my life. Hers.”

Cael didn’t say anything.

He stood up.

He walked to the gate.

At the threshold he stopped — and I thought for one moment he was going to turn, the way he’d turned at the original gate, the way some part of him always seemed to turn too late. 

But he didn’t. He stepped through without looking back.

The gate closed behind him.

[“Space and Time — Stage 2, Kindled: usage 1 of 2 today.”]

[“Vireon capacity: 61%.”]

I stood alone in the back room of the restaurant and the silence settled around me the way it had settled in the cemetery, and I let it.

They wouldn’t survive in there. 

I knew that.

They weren’t built for six months alone in a Class Five Rift.

They didn’t have Vireon. 

They didn’t have a mother to get home to.

I didn’t feel the satisfaction I’d expected.

I felt the cold thing in my chest acknowledge that a debt had been partially paid and that partially was not completely and that there were others.

The hospital. The system. Harven’s policies.

 Calder’s ideology. 

Every guild official and government bureaucrat who had signed the documents and set the policies and made the decisions that had determined my mother’s life was worth less than the administrative inconvenience of saving it.

The criminal underworld was mine now.

It was a start.

[“Vireon System: standing by.”]

[“All abilities: Stage 3, Forged.”]

[“Next objective: undefined.”]

I looked at the gate residue dispersing in the air where the tear had been.

“Define it,” I said to no one.

Then I went to work.