Looking back now I understand that the version of me that walked out of that cemetery was not the same version that had walked into the gate two nights before the raid. That person had been desperate. Motivated by love, by need, by the specific vulnerability of someone who still believed the world contained things worth asking for.

The version that walked out of the cemetery had stopped asking.

He had started taking instead.

⸻

The Eurovan criminal underworld absorbed the transition of power the way organizations always absorb such things — with a period of turbulence followed by a pragmatic acceptance of the new reality. 

Some people left. 

Some people tested the edges of what the new leadership would tolerate and discovered the edges were not where they’d expected and adjusted accordingly. A small number made the mistake of confusing youth for weakness.

The system noted each incident clinically.

[“Threat detected — neutralized.”]

[“Vireon usage: minimal.”]

[“Ability used: Presence Erasure, Gravity.”]

I was not cruel about it. Cruelty requires emotion and I had put my emotions somewhere deep and load bearing where they couldn’t interfere with what needed doing. I was simply precise. Efficient. I made the calculations and I executed them and I moved on.

Within four months the turbulence stopped.

Within six the Eurovan underworld was generating twice what it had under Maren Roso.

[“Vireon capacity: stable.”]

[“All abilities: Stage 3, Forged.”]

[“System status: optimal.”]

I reinvested everything. Didn’t really put much into comfort since my mother wasn’t around anymore. I used it in a subtle way as it was just myself and reinvested the rest. 

I lived simply, I didn’t want anything to do with the wealthy district of Eurova, and I also wanted absolute privacy, to be comfortable with running my other operations. So I got an entire island in the outskirts of Eurova from Maren Roso. He owned it, but now I do. 

It looked like nothing from the outside because looking like nothing from the outside was both a practical decision and a philosophical one. The island was around three acres, which is about twelve thousand square meters. I have my house there. The only way to get to that island was a very narrow road, which is notorious for how dangerous it is, or the ocean.

I really didn’t spend much time there, I can count how many times I actually spent the night at that island.

All my focus were on my plans and the criminal underworld.

Aside from the Meridian Consolidated Group I own, I also invested into infrastructure for the underworld. Into information networks that reached further than the organization had ever reached before. Into gate operations that were more sophisticated and more profitable than anything the criminal underworld had attempted — because I understood gates in a way nobody else did, having spent six months in one, and that understanding translated directly into operational advantage.

The gates where owned by the government, and I didn’t want the criminal underworld to operate how they used to -- stealing and sneaking -- So I got the gates the legal way, by passing through the Meridian consolidated Group, legally obtaining permits for them, and extracting the resource to fund my revenge. 

All this right under their noses.

By month eight I started expanding beyond Eurova.

⸻

It’s now been months I have been managing everything myself, it was not an easy task, but I had no choice, I trusted no one and no one was competent enough to have my trust.

Another way acquiring the gates the legal way helped is I was able to continue evolving my abilities privately. 

And the gate I was working on now was a Class Four in the Keshar mountain range — a jagged dimensional tear that the nearest guild had flagged for future extraction, then suddenly de-prioritized. 

They had the permit, and kept the gate for fourteen months, but pulled out cause a more profitable gate opened three hundred kilometers south. They abandoned it, so I came in and got the permit for it.

Abandoned gates had a specific quality I had learned to read. The Melnos residue around the edges oxidized differently when nobody had passed through recently. The air pressure near the threshold carried a staleness that fresh gates didn’t have.

This one was fourteen months stale.

I went in alone because I always went in alone. The organization had operatives by then — high ranking melnos users who handled standard extractions, capable people who did what they were told and asked the right number of questions, which was none. 

But the high level gates I kept for myself. Partly for the resources. Mostly because fighting was the only reliable way to push the abilities further and I had not yet found a substitute for the specific education of nearly dying in a place that wanted to kill me.

[“Lightning — Stage 3, Forged: progress 71%.”]

[“Wind — Stage 3, Forged: progress 68%.”]

The system tracked everything. It had become the most reliable constant in my life — always present, always accurate, never requiring anything from me except the willingness to keep moving forward.

When I stopped to replenish my vireon reserves, I heard the sound of struggle. It has just been six hours since I got in.

Not the ambient sounds of a gate dimension — those I had learned to read the way you learn to read weather, the subtle shifts that meant predators moving or territorial boundaries being tested. This was different. 

The sharp specific sound of an ability being used in short sustained bursts, punctuated by creature sounds that meant something large and persistent.

I followed it because I was curious and because curiosity was one of the few things that had survived intact from before.

I found the cause of the sound in a clearing two hundred meters east. 

A woman.

She was holding her own.

Barely.

The creature she was fighting was a Class Four variant I hadn’t encountered before — six limbs, dense plating across the upper body, moving in the specific coordinated pattern of something that had evolved to fight opponents with abilities. It had clearly been doing this for a while. She had clearly been doing this for longer than was sustainable.

Her ability was Dominion — I didn’t know it, but one of my abilities -- verdict -- picked that up easily, I just saw it working. A field of compelled stillness radiating outward from her in short controlled bursts, forcing the creature to halt mid movement, buying herself seconds to re-position, recover, attack. Sophisticated. Precise.

The technique of someone well trained pushing against a situation that had gone past what training had prepared for.

Three wounds that I could see. Left arm, right side, something across the back of her shoulder that was bleeding more than the others. Her movements were compensating — not obviously, she was too disciplined for obvious, but Verdict read the weight distribution, the microsecond delays, the places where her body was making choices her mind hadn’t consciously authorized.

She was losing.

She knew she was losing.

But she hadn’t stopped.

I watched for approximately eight seconds — long enough to complete the assessment, not long enough to be anything other than efficient about what came next.

Then I stepped into the clearing.

Lightning at Stage Three crossed the distance between me and the creature in a time-frame that didn’t leave room for the creature to register it as a threat. It hit the dense plating and the plating — designed by evolution to resist most ability-based attacks — discovered that Stage Three Forged lightning, shaped and directed, found the gaps between plates with the patience of something that had been trained on six months of harder opponents.

The creature went down.

I looked at it for a moment to confirm it wasn’t getting up.

Then I looked at her.

She was staring at me.

Not with gratitude — not yet, maybe not ever, that wasn’t the kind of person she was and I understood that immediately. With the specific expression of someone re-calibrating rapidly. Taking in what she’d just seen. Filing it somewhere.

She was maybe nineteen. Dark eyes that missed nothing. The kind of stillness, even wounded and breathing hard, that meant the stillness was a choice rather than a default.

“You’re not from the guild,” she said.

“No, am not.” I said.

“Independent?”

“Something like that. I work for the Meridian Consolidated Group.”I lied, but technically it wasn’t a lie… that was the name of my company.

She looked at the creature. At the lightning residue still crackling across the plating. At me.

“You mean the mega organization in all regions,” she said. “That was Stage Three, Minimum.”

I didn’t confirm or deny.

She looked at me for another long moment. Then she pressed her hand against the worst wound — the shoulder — with the matter-of-fact practicality of someone who had decided that bleeding was a problem to be managed rather than a crisis to react to.

“do they now hire kids,” she said.

“you look like a kid yourself, all alone in a stage four gate rift.”

She smiled, then tried to move, holding her shoulder.

“Well, thank you for your help,” she said. Looking at the distance. “I need to get out of this gate,”

“Why are you in here alone?” I asked.

But she ignored my question.

“Can you—”

“sorry, the gate is a long way back, am not sure you are fit to make that journey.” I said.“But I can help you find your way out, if you want, I know a shortcut.” I said, thinking about opening a gate for her.

“where is this shortcut?” she asked.

I stretched out my hands, activated space and time, then a gate opened.

She looked at the dimensional tear and then at me and the re-calibration happened again — faster this time, like she was getting used to updating her understanding of what was possible.

She walked through without asking how.

I followed.

[“Space and Time daily usage: 1 of 2”]

The system announced as I stepped through.

⸻

On the Eurovan side of the gate — a warehouse in the industrial district that I used for exactly this kind of arrival — she sat on a crate and let me look at the wounds properly and didn’t say anything while I used Alchemy at Stage Three to accelerate the clotting and reduce the inflammation. 

Not healing — I didn’t have that ability. But Alchemy at that stage could influence biology enough to matter.

She watched my hands work with the same expression she’d had in the clearing. Filing things away.

“Who left you in there?” I asked again. But in a different way.

A pause. 

“How do you know someone left me?”

“That gate has been inactive for fourteen months, until the Meridian Consolidated Group got the permits from the government.” I said. “You didn’t go in alone for resource extraction dressed like that. Your equipment is clearly Velmara. Apex Union standard issue. And the wound pattern suggests you’ve been in there long enough for the initial injuries to start closing on their own, which means at least three months.” I looked at her. “Someone took you in and didn’t bring you out.”

The stillness shifted slightly. Something underneath it that wasn’t quite anger — more settled than anger, more permanent.

“Yes, you're right,” she said. “It was my own people,”
 
I nodded.

“Eurovan political situation,” she said. “we were sent from Velmara as an envoy. Then I saw my people do things I am still shocked they are involved in, and then I became — an inconvenient.”

“I guess they wanted to silence me.”

She said the word with a flatness that meant she had already processed what it meant and put it somewhere it couldn’t reach her vitals. “They walked me into a gate and didn’t walk out with me.”

I said nothing.

“Apex Union,” she said, “takes care of its problems efficiently.”

“Sadly I know,” I said.

She looked at me sharply.

“You know Apex Union?”

“I know most things that affect Eurova,” I said. “It’s useful.”

Another long assessment. I had the sense of being read — not the way Verdict read people, not with that clinical precision, but with something equally thorough. The accumulated intelligence of someone who had survived long enough in a political environment to develop instincts that functioned like a system of their own.

“Who are you?” she said.

I considered the question. Considered her situation, as it was closely related to mine, and concluded even if she knew the truth she didn’t have the power or influence to use it.

“Someone who runs things,” I said. “In Eurova. Officially and Unofficially.”

“what do you mean by that,” she said. Not a question.

“I am the owner of Meridian Consolidated… and also the head of the criminal underworld.”

She looked at her hands. At the wounds I’d partially addressed. At the warehouse around us — bare, functional, revealing nothing about the person who used it.

“I see,” she didn’t have much of a reaction.

“I have nowhere to go,” she said. It wasn’t self pity. It was an inventory. “No guild. No contacts in Eurova I can trust, no way of returning back to Velmara — if my own people left me in a gate, the network I came with is compromised. No resources beyond what I’m carrying.” She looked up. “And I’m in the warehouse of the person who runs Eurova’s criminal underworld. And the biggest organization in the world too. The Meridian Consolidated.”

I said nothing.

“Is that a problem?”she asked.

“Not for me,” I said.

She almost smiled. It didn’t quite arrive — she held it back the way someone holds back something they’ve decided to keep — but it was there, briefly, in the corner of her mouth.

“I’m useful,” she said. “am not only from Velmara, I also know Apex Union’s operational structure from the inside. Their political contacts in Eurova. Their financial flows. Their guild leadership’s private positions versus their public ones.” She met my eyes directly. “I’m more useful than whatever you could extract from me by other means.”

“see that,” I said.

“Then we should talk about terms.”

“There’s only one term,” I said. “You work for me. Everything else follows from that.”

She considered it for exactly as long as it deserved — which wasn’t long, given what her alternatives were.

“Alright,” she said.

“I am Soren.”

“Calyx… thank you for having me Mr. Soren.” 

That was how I met Calyx. And together we were unstoppable.