The boss didn't wait for Jayden to figure anything out.
He came in fast, way too fast. He sent the first punch clean across Jayden's cheek before the younger teen could even register that the fight started. His head snapped to the side, balance gone, and he stumbled into a folding table. The laptop skidded off, clattering to the floor. He barely caught himself before going down with it.
Somewhere below, the noise dipped. People were noticing.
"You gonna use that thing," the boss called, light on his feet, "or just hold it?"
Jayden blinked, still half-dazed, and looked at the umbrella in his hand that he really had no clue what he was supposed to do with.
"Not a clue" he muttered to himself, low enough that the older teen couldn't hear him. He was mainly planning to figure out what this thing did during the fight. But against a guy like this, he couldn't let himself get caught off guard, so he'd have to just figure it out mid fight or something.
He rushed forward and swung the umbrella like a bat. It was a rather sloppy swing but that makes sense since he's never used a bat before. Though thanks to his sloppy swing, chase could dodge it and then land three simultaneous jabs to put him down. A shot to the ribs, A blow to the jaw, and another blow to the ribs. That was the combination he'd been hit with.
Jayden staggered back, gasping.
It hurt. A lot.
And weirdly, that didn't bother him as much as it should have.
"There it is," the boss said, watching him closely now, grin widening. "You feel that?"
"Shut up," Jayden rasped, and pushed himself forward again.
He swung in a wide arc, a little bit faster this time, trying from a different angle.
The boss ducked again, came up close, and worked his body, three clean hits before Jayden managed to shove him back hard enough to create space. It was the same three hits as before, one to the ribs, one to the jaw and one to the ribs.
For a second, they paused.
The boss steadied himself, then smiled like he was enjoying this more than anything else that day.
Jayden didn't smile back. He just swung again.
The boss dodged it once again, but then Jayden opened the umbrella, hitting the boss in his face and blocking his vision,
The boss pushed the umbrella out of his way, just to be met with a leg, slamming him across the face, throwing him about 5 meters across the room.
As he got off the ground, he got slammed in the face by a flying kick delivered by Jayden, pushing him right back down.
Adam watched in amusement, two teenagers slugging it out? That was top quality entertainment so he'd savor every second of it.
Jayden attempted to stomp on the boss's stomach to put him down quickly, but the boss had other plans, kicking out Jaydens legs to give himself an opportunity to get right back up, then he hit him with the same combination as before. A punch to the rib, a punch to the jaw and a punch to the rib.
Except this time it was way more effective than before, actually breaking multiple of Jaydens ribs.
what the hell? He's landed that same combination on me three times, even despite my trying to dodge, and not only that, it hurts way more every time. What exactly is this guy
He didn't have much more time to think about it as the boss man was already in front of him as he landed on the ground.
The boss aimed to hit at Jaydens ribs, so the younger teen had to make sure he couldn't even start the combination.
So he slammed the tip of his umbrella right into the older boys sternum, and with the amount of force he put in, he could almost feel the bone crack, tho that didn't stop the older teen as he landed the exact same combination once more, knocking Jayden on his ass and breaking most of his ribs, tho he found it weird, how he wasn't actually in anymore pain from this combo than any of the others.
"Yo, what the fuck is that ability of yours." Jayden thought he figured it out, "Everytime you land those three attacks you deal more damage to me overall, so it's an ability that makes your punches stronger the more you hit. Am I right?"
"Wrong!"
"Huh?"
"You were pretty close, but your off the mark. My ability, doubles the effectiveness of every action I make. But the punches don't actually get any stronger." The teen boy stated, plain and simply.
"Thats- that's actually a pretty strong ability." Jayden said outwardly. However, inwardly he'd been analyzing what this meant.
Every attack doubles in effectiveness, What exactly does that mean? Does it read the intent behind the punch or the action of the punch itself? How do you put a number on the effectiveness of something, after all it's a subjective concept. Does he have to do the same action to get the boost or can he just become more efficient as the fight goes? Is there a timer or something? There was simply too many variables, so for now he'd simply have to operate under the assumption that the ability had no weaknesses.
"The names chase by the way. I don't think I told you before." The older boy said extending his hand to his opponent for him to shake.
"Huh?" He said, looking at the outstretched hand with suspicioun. But he reached out and grabbed it anyway. Shaking his hand. "Jayden. Jayden Mcullen"
The younger boy introduced himself, only to feel his hand being crushed in Chase's grip. "Did you forget? You're still in the middle of a fight idiot?"
The boy was then slammed by a high kick in the face sending him high up into the air, only to be dragged right back down by chase, who's kept his grip on his hand, and then he slammed into the older boys knee, cracking open his skull and leaving pieces of his cranium lodged in his brain.
Tho before the older teen could start gloating, the umbrella landed on his chest and closed on him instantly. Jayden had let go of the umbrella when he was in the sky, and now that he did that he he had a chance, as the boy couldn't escape from the regalia, this gave him the perfect chance to get up, and nail him right between the legs.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Untill chase was the one on the floor now.
He opened the umbrella and picked it up to see chase on the floor tired, and even more so, he looked kinda like jelly, like the bones in his body were crushed.
Jayden then felt his head, his skull was cracked open and his brain was killing him. But he was still alive somehow. He had no clue why.
He looked to Adam for an explanation,
The goldette smiled like he was a kid picked by the teacher in class. "Since forgers don't have souls in their body, they're fully and completely immortal. The only way to 'kill' a forger is to destroy their regalia and even then that'd just leave them catatonic. That immortality is why you're so strong. The body doesn't have to worry about those things that threatened it anymore so it can go all out, and tap into hysterical strength constantly."
"Huh,"
Chase sat back up
Chase sat up slowly, rolling his neck until something cracked. He looked down at himself, at the general state of his body, he was more or less okay, though the air pressure inside that umbrella made it feel like he'd be crushed into a red mist, must've had something to do with the things ability.
"Okay," he said. "That was good."
Jayden was still holding the umbrella. His skull had mostly stopped being a problem, which was a sentence he was still getting used to the implications of. He lowered the umbrella slowly.
Chase looked at him for a moment, then tilted his head. "So what actually brought you here. Aside from being full. And don't say you just beat up my guys for the fun of it."
"Your guys showed up to my school eleven deep looking for some girl with orange hair and glasses." Jayden said it plainly. "And they did the same thing earlier at five in the morning. When school wasn't even in session yet."
Chase turned his head.
The guys from the school run were standing at the top of the stairs, some of them still nursing bruises from earlier. A few had the decency to look at the floor. One of them was very interested in the wall.
Chase stared at them for a long moment without saying anything.
That silence had some weight to it.
"Really guys? Eleven? I thought that like two of you left, maximum."
The leader from the alley, the one with the jawline, opened his mouth.
Chase looked at him.
He closed it.
Chase exhaled slowly through his nose, turned back to Jayden, and said, with the exhaustion of someone who had this problem regularly, "I'm sorry about them. They're not great at being non-threatening. That's sort of an ongoing issue."
"I noticed."
"They're working on it."
Chase was quiet for a second, turning something over. Then he looked back at Jayden with a different kind of attention. Less fighter to fighter. More like he was deciding something.
"The girl they were looking for," he said. "Orange hair, glasses, yeah?"
"Yeah."
"I need to find her." He paused. "There's a reason. You want to hear it?"
Jayden looked at him for a second, as if trying to figure out wether this would be worth it or not. " Y'know what? I've got literally nothing better to do, go ahead."
---
The first time Illyssa met Chase, she was six years old and hiding under the slide.
It was a Tuesday, or maybe a Wednesday, it didn't matter, what mattered was that it was raining lightly and the rest of the kids from the after-school program were inside and she was not, because inside was loud and she didn't know how to be in loud places for very long without running out of something she couldn't name at the time.
The slide was in the corner of the small yard behind the building. It was plastic, faded red, and the space underneath it was just barely big enough for a six year old to sit with her knees pulled up. She had her raincoat on. She was watching a worm move across the wet concrete with the focused attention of someone who had found the most interesting thing in the yard.
Footsteps came across the grass and stopped near her, she didn't hear notice it until the person spoke.
"What are you doing?"
She looked up.
It was a boy, roughly her age, buzz cut, dark eyes, a smear of chocolate on his chin. He was standing in the rain without a jacket and not seeming to notice.
"Watching a worm," she said.
He crouched down and looked at the worm. He studied it with complete seriousness for a moment.
"It's going the wrong way," he said.
"How do you know which way is right?"
He thought about it. "I just do. This is just… something I can tell."
He sat down next to her under the slide without asking. There wasn't quite enough room but he made it work, pulling his knees up the same way she had. The rain came down on the edge of the slide above them and ran off in a thin stream.
They watched the worm for a while.
"I'm Chase," he said.
"Illyssa."
"That's a weird name."
"Chase is also a weird name."
He thought for a second " not really. My mom says it sounds cool."
"Yeah. It does" after that, the two had become friends, after just that one conversation.
---
He was the kind of kid who collected things to care about.
Stray cats that wandered into the yard. A broken bicycle he spent two weeks trying to fix with tools he didn't have. A boy two years younger who got picked on at the bus stop, who Chase started walking to school with every day without ever explaining why. That's just who he was.
Illyssa watched him do all of this and she found it a little weird at first, but overtime she was finding it less and less weird Everytime, until eventually she just came to accept it, and didn't find it weird at all.
He was one of those kids who got in trouble alot. He didn't listen to teachers, he constantly broke things and whenever someone was getting bullied, he always fought for them.
Difficulty understanding social boundaries. Good-natured. Impulsive. That was what his teachers always said about him during pta meetings. She knew because he would always go out of his way to tell her
---
When she was eight, illyssa's parents got her a bike for her birthday, it was rather easy to tell she enjoyed the gift based off the face she was making. But when she left, a boy two years older than her, came by to steal the bike.
Everyone else just did nothing, but chase ran around the whole block trying to get it back for her.
And he ended up getting it right back to her without her having even noticed it was gone.
It was actually one of the kids who came to the party that told her the story
---
By the time they were around ten and eleven respectively, they were pretty much glued to the hip. They walked home the same direction three days a week. They sat at the same table in the after-school program. She drew in her sketchbook and he watched over her shoulder and asoccasionally said words of encouragement, and sometimes gave constructive criticism.
He never really had a filter, he wore his heart on his sleeve and never put it away. If he was tired he looked tired. If something was funny he laughed at it. If something was wrong with him he'd say it flat. That was actually the thing she loved the most about him.
"My dad left" he told her one afternoon, it was a weird way to start a conversation, but he was just kinda like that.
"My mom said it's because he was seeing another woman. But I don't really get why she's so mad at him since she was seeing another man." He'd explained to her
"oh.. are you alright? That sounds like it stinks" she said, looking down at him with clear worry in her expression.
"Yeah, I'm fine. This is just one of those things that'll keep me hungry for a while" he said
"Hungry?" The girl looked at him in confusion, not exactly sure what that meant.
"Y'know. Like when you're... Gah, I have no idea how to explain it... Look, this is just one of those things that I've gotta deal with on my own. This won't change how we hang out at all so you shouldn't worry about it"
Illyssa could never quite be sure if he was actually genuinely alright or if he was holding something in. She wasn't old enough to be able to do that yet. Plus chase was just that unusual.
---
The boy's name was Preston.
He was twelve, same as them, and he went to the private school three blocks over whose uniform involved a blazer. Illyssa had seen him around before. She didn't know much about him except that he moved to the neighborhood rather recently and that his parents were kinda rich.
He also happened to be a jerk. And she'd been one of his victims on more than one occasion. Tho she dealt with it the same way she handled most other bullying scenarios. She ignored it and just kept moving.
One day, she was waiting for chase to get out of school. She had been waiting outside, visible to anyone who decided to look at her. That's when he showed up.
He tried to make conversation, but she simply refused to engage with him. It was pretty clear that he was very quickly losing his patience and didn't like how she was ignoring him.
So he said something, something that she could really never forget.
"You know why nobody likes you, right?" Preston leaned in a little too close, his voice low and mean like he was sharing a secret instead of spitting venom.
"It's because you're a total loser. You sit under slides and look at stupid words and act like you're better than everyone else by never talking. But you're not. You're just a loser. Chase only hangs around you because he feels sorry for you. Once he gets bored, he'll leave you. And then what huh? You'll be a total nobody."
Illyssa felt the words land somewhere behind her ribs. She didn't cry she almost never cried where people could see but her fingers tightened around the strap of her backpack until the canvas bit into her palm. She kept her eyes on the cracked sidewalk and said nothing, the way
Preston laughed, short and ugly. "See? Even now you can't say anything back. Pathetic."
She hadn't heard Chase come around the corner.
She found out what happened secondhand, from three different people, and all three accounts agreed on the important parts. Chase had seen Preston's expression first, before he'd even heard what was being said. He saw the look on her face. And after that the boys fate was sealed
Preston ended up with a split lip, broken bones and a bloody nose, and a very expensive blazer with a tear in the sleeve, and Chase ended up waiting for her on the steps afterward with blood on his knuckles and the same simple expression he always had when something had been a clear and obvious correct action.
She'd looked at his knuckles and then at his face.
"Chase."
"He had it coming."
"You can't just-"
"He had it coming," he said again, not louder, just the same. Final. He held the certainty of it the way he held everything he believed, without apology and without requiring her agreement.
She didn't agree. She also knew that arguing was useless, and that underneath the uselessness of arguing was something she didn't want to look at too directly, which was that no one had ever moved across a street for her before.
---
They told him three days later.
She found out the same afternoon he did, because he came and found her first.
She remembered the color of the sky. That particular dark gray, too dark for gray, not dark enough for black.
She remembered the way neither of them said anything for a long time.
She remembered him finding out the distance on the rec room computer, forty minutes by bus, and telling her like it was useful information, like it was something that helped.
She remembered his dopey smile when he promised.
She held onto the promise in her heart, believing it with her very soul.
---
The years that followed were quieter. Of course they were. He wasn't in her life anymore. Which made everything worse.
When he left, he took all her motivation with her too. Knowing that he wouldn't be around for her anymore made her lose all the motivation she had left.
She stopped talking to the few friends she did have left, mainly because it became difficult to talk to people.
She started failing tests, being absent more often. She was constantly less put together than all the other students around her
Her parents who'd showed her so much love and affection during her early years suddenly stopped. If course they did, she could barely be considered a daughter anymore, she had no achievements, no friends, didn't leave her room most of the time, didn't do the best in school but didn't do bad enough that a conversation needed to be had. there was nothing for them to hang onto with her. She was invisible.
---
What she didn't know, what she wouldn't know for a long time, was that he'd kept his promise.
He got out at thirteen.
He didn't really have a plan, or anyone waiting on him, or anyone checking on him. His mom totally moved on from him and didn't come for him. Tho he guessed he wasn't the most upset at that. He didn't really like her anyway.
But that also meant he was alone. in a big city. as a thirteen year old boy.
He slept on a bench his first night. Didn't have the money to sleep anywhere else. Tho he'd barely call it sleep. He slept maybe an hour at most because he was scared. Of course he was, he was in a park, in the middle of the night, where anybody could come along and he wouldn't be able to do a damn thing about it
On the second night he ran into this kid named Marcus.
Marcus was fourteen, he looked quite emaciated, like he had to stretch every meal past the point where they should be stretched.
There were two other kids with him. They shared food without making it a thing. He liked them and he was pretty sure they liked him, so there weren't any issues.
He may not have been the oldest but they all kinda started looking to him like he was their big brother or something.
Though he guessed he understood why, he often went out of his way to steal food for them. He was the only one able to do it since he was the only one in running shape.
Eventually those guys started becoming like more of a family to him than his actual family.
Chase never figured out how it started, not really. It just… happened. One turned into three, three into six. They just kept multiplying.
Hell most of them weren't even street kids, some came from broken homes, some were friendly with others who were already here and others were just here because they liked the vibe.
Tho, even when they didn't need him, they stuck around. Why? Because they were full, and being around him made them hungry. He was just the kinda person that could rally a crowd.
By the time anyone really thought about it, there were too many of them.
He'd had to find his own abandoned warehouse, one where all of them could hangout.
Obviously there were a lot of hard times, guys would come around to bully some of the kids, and there were a couple gangs that screwed with him and his friends. Tho he always dealt with them.
He'd had to get a lot tougher to survive, and a lot stronger mentally.
He developed the ability to see spirits at about the age of 14, tho he never had a clue what they were, still doesn't honestly.
At 15, he tried messing with his soul and trying to make something with it. That was the worst experience of his life, forging was an incredibly painful process that took about 3 full days of him experiencing possibly the worst pain he had ever felt... And at the end of the day, he made it out with golden boxing gloves.
He knew these were things unique to him, so he kept them to himself mostly.
---
She didn't go to her room.
She stood in the hallway for a moment, the noise from downstairs coming up through the floor as a low vibration, and looked at the door at the end of the hall.
No light under it.
She knocked anyway. "Hey."
A pause. "Hey."
"You good?"
Another pause, slightly longer. "Yeah."
Renae stood there with her hand still raised from the knock, looking at the door, thinking about opening it and going in and sitting on the end of the bed the way she sometimes did. She thought about what she would say if she did that.
She didn't have anything to say.
She lowered her hand. "Okay. Night."
"Night."
She went to her room.
---
She sat on her bed with her homework open in front of her and did not do it.
The house settled into its later rhythms around her, the younger ones being told to go to bed, her father's television show, her mother's phone call that was apparently not going to end tonight.
She was thinking about Illyssa.
She often was thinking of illyssa. Right now she was trying to figure out exactly what was wrong with illyssa. She already knew what the biggest problem was, that was kinda obvious... But she wanted to know the smaller problem. The problem that she could actually solve.
She got to it eventually, the way she always did.
The alley had been fine. She'd handled it. She'd put herself between Illyssa and seven boys and she'd held her ground and she'd been ready to do whatever came after that if something came after that. That part she was at peace with.
The east field was the part she couldn't leave alone.
She hadn't been there.
She'd been inside, arguing with her teacher about an assignment extension, and Illyssa had taken a football to the head on an empty field and the person who'd been there was him. The stranger with the dead eyes, who had run over and pulled her sister up off the ground before Renae had even known anything had happened.
She replayed it the way she'd been replaying it all day.
He'd helped her, he'd helped her while she didn't do a damn thing. This guy, with the deadest eyes she'd ever seen, similar to illyssa's eyes in a way, this guy who had absolutely no reason whatsoever to help them, this guy who neither of them know, helped her sister more than her.
That weighed heavy on her mind
---
She'd decided to be that person because of Chase.
She hadn't known him the way Illyssa had known him she'd known him only through the reputation he'd left and through what Illyssa said about him on the rare occasions she said anything, which wasn't often but it did happen.
Renae had built her own image of him out of those pieces given to her. How he made her sister happy, how he spoke, how he acted... She wanted to be that for her sister.. because it was clear that she still needed that in her life. Some people were just born like that, born to stick to fit together like puzzle pieces.
She thought about getting up and knocking on Illyssa's door again.
She thought about what she'd say this time.
She still didn't have anything to say but she got up anyway.
She walked down the hall and knocked, quiet enough not to wake anyone else up.
A pause.
"Yeah?"
"Can I come in?"
"Sure."
She opened the door.
Illyssa was on her side facing the wall, the room dark except for the thin light from the hallway. She didn't turn over. Renae came in anyway, closed the door behind her, and sat on the end of the bed the way she'd thought about doing earlier.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
"How's your head," Renae said.
"Fine. It barely hurts now."
"Good."
Silence. The house breathing around them.
"I'm sorry I wasn't there," Renae said. She said it flat, without buildup, because she'd learned from somewhere that the longer you took to say a thing like that the more it started to sound like something else.
Illyssa was quiet for a second.
"It's okay," she said.
"It's not, really."
"But it is tho. I got hurt sure but it's not like anything would have changed if you were there."
Renae didn't like it, but she had to admit, her sister was right. How would anything be different had she been there?
"I notice that you've been really protective.. Renae"
That surprised her sister.
"Yeah," Renae said. "I know."
"Why though." It wasn't accusatory. Illyssa said it the way she said most things, quiet and honest, like she was genuinely trying to understand rather than make a point.
Renae looked at the dark shape of her sister's back. The bandage was hidden under her hair now.
"There was a kid," she said finally. "Before we moved here. I don't think I ever told you about him."
Illyssa didn't say anything, which was her way of saying go on.
"He was in my class. He was quiet, kind of like you. The kind of kid nobody really clocked unless something was happening to him." She paused. "And something was always happening to him."
The house ticked and settled around them.
"I saw it every day and I just..." She stopped. Started again. "I kept thinking someone else would do something. Teacher, another kid, whoever. Someone with more to say about it than me." She exhaled slowly. "Nobody did."
"What happened to him?"
"I don't know," Renae said. "He just stopped coming to school one day. And that was it."
Illyssa had turned over at some point without Renae noticing. She was looking at her now in the dark, her glasses off, her eyes quiet.
"That's why," Renae said. It came out smaller than she meant.
Illyssa looked at her for a moment.
"You're doing a good job," she said.
"I wasn't there today."
"You're here now."
Renae didn't have anything to say to that, so she just sat there at the end of the bed, in the dark, while the house finished settling into its nighttime quiet around them.
Eventually Illyssa turned back toward the wall.
Renae stayed a little longer anyway.
Then she went back to her room, lay down, and stared at the ceiling for a long time.
Not long after though, she heard something. A knock on her door.
That must've been one of her siblings, but why were they up at this hour?
She opened the door and looked out to see who it was. But what greeted her wasn't one of her siblings, but instead, a man much older than her, looking down at her like she was what he was looking for.
"Found ya"
"Aa-" before she had the chance to scream, the man covered her mouth with a cloth that must've had chloroform on it, cause it wasn't long before she fell totally unconscious, falling limp in the man's arms.
---
Jayden sat in the living room of his home, on his phone, thinking about the whole life story chase had told him.
He was rather out of it after all the events of the day, still thinking about everything. He couldn't be sure if this guy was really telling the truth or not. But at the same time why would he lie to someone like him? He saw no reason why chase would go out of his way to lie like that, plus he didn't seem like he was lying. But at the same time why go and tell him his business like that in the first place?
Maybe it's because they fought? He did feel a bit more inclined to believe the boy after they fought, so maybe that guy felt the same.
Before he could really get his chance to think about it, he heard something out his door, it sounded like... Yelling?
Jayden stepped outside without a jacket.
The rain was coming down in sheets, the kind that didn't care about umbrellas but at least gave them something to do. He'd heard the yelling from inside and come out expecting a fight or a car accident or something that had a clear shape to it.
Instead there was Illyssa, standing in the middle of the sidewalk, soaked through, glasses fogged, talking very fast at nobody.
He jogged down the steps of his motel style apartment building "Hey. The hell s going on down here"
The sudden sound caused the girl to jump, frightened untill she spun around to see him. Even though she seemed... Not as anxious, she still backed up away from him. "D-Do you know- do you know where t-the police station is from here? I really don't know where it is but I need to get to the police and I can't get any signal to call them and I really need the police and-
"Hey hey hey, calm down" He said confused by her frantic ranting. "Why don't you explain what happened? From the top"
She stopped.
"I woke up after hearing a sound outside my room, I left and I saw my sisters door open and she wasn't in there and the room was a mess and I didn't what to do so I tried to call the police but the signal got cut off so I ran to find the nearest station but I don't where it is and I don't know what to do and I think she's in serious trouble."
"Panicking doesn't do anything for anybody," he said. "If you've got time to panic, you've got time to find a solution. Is there anything worthy of note I need to know? Any information that'll help?
"Um, well, there's this gang that shows up a lot, they do all kinds of things at night. I think they have something to do with it, maybe."
"Oh, I see"
He went back inside for thirty seconds and came back with the umbrella.
He opened it over both of them as they started walking, which was somewhat effective and somewhat performative given the state of the rain, but it was something.
"Where are we going?" Illyssa asked.
"you said that you think a gangs behind this right? Well I know the perfect guy to ask."
She didn't ask how. She just walked beside him, arms wrapped around herself, her sneakers dark with water.
They were half a block from the warehouse when Illyssa slowed slightly.
Something had landed on her shoulder.
She looked sideways at it.
A small paper bird, wings folded flat, perfectly dry despite the rain coming down around them. It turned its head and looked at her.
She stared at it for one second.
Then she looked back up at the street ahead and kept walking, because she did not have the bandwidth for that right now.
Jayden had noticed the tiny thing, tho he was very sure illyssa hadn't noticed so he didn't comment on it.
---
Inside the warehouse, the noise level was roughly what it always was, which was to say chaotic. Someone had started a card game that had attracted too many spectators. The kid who was always kicking a ball around was still kicking a ball around, having transferred the operation indoors now that it was raining.
Chase was standing at the center of a loose semicircle of about eight of his guys, arms crossed, expression patient, which meant he was slightly less patient than he looked.
"Okay," he said. "Let's go over this again."
The guy with the jawline, whose name was Deon, shifted his weight. "We were just looking for the girl."
"Eleven people."
"We thought more was better."
"More is not better. eleven people showing up to an empty school is weird and stupid and I say this with love." Chase looked at the rest of them. "What is the number of people you send to locate one person."
Silence.
"Two," someone offered from the back.
"Two," Chase confirmed. "Maybe three. Three if it's a weird situation. Not eleven. Never eleven." He pinched the bridge of his nose. "And the five AM thing. Whose idea was that."
Several people looked at Deon.
Deon looked at the floor.
"Who stays at school at five AM?" Chase asked. "If the school is empty, the person you're looking for is not there. This is a sequence of logic available to anyone who thinks for four consecutive seconds." He exhaled. "Okay. We're going to talk about how to approach people without it looking like we're about to-"
The doors came off.
Not opened. Off. Both of them, kicked inward simultaneously with enough force that one skidded halfway across the floor and the card game scattered.
The warehouse went quiet.
a group came in, there was quite a few guys there, at least fifty, they filtered into the room like water flowing in through a leak.
At the front, a boy about Chase's age with blue highlights swept back through his hair, he had a smile that most of the people there would call insane.
"Chase," the boy said, spreading his arms like he was welcoming him somewhere. "Bro. I have been waiting to do this for so long."
Chase looked at him. "Eli."
"You know what tonight is?"
"Tuesday."
Eli's smile flickered slightly. "Tonight is the night everything changes. Tonight is the night I've finally got you." He paused for dramatic effect, which was slightly undercut by someone in his group dropping something metal and having to pick it up. "You spend so much time on top, Chase. Looking down at everyone. Acting like you can't be touched." He stepped aside and reached back, pulling someone forward by the arm. "But now I've got your girl."
He turned the girl to face Chase, one hand on her shoulder.
Chase looked at her.
He looked at her for a long moment.
Then he looked back at Eli.
"Who is that."
Eli's smile held. "Your girlfriend."
"I don't have a girlfriend."
"Stop playing."
"I'm genuinely not playing. I have never seen this person before in my life."
The girl, looked at the boy in front of her, chase huh? This guy must've been THAT chase. He fit her mental profile pretty well so it must be him.
"Alright now listen here you asshole, stop acting or we'll actually kill this bitch"
"Im not acting I genuinely don't know who this is," Chase said, as clearly as possible.
Eli pointed at her. "This is Illyssa."
"It's not," the girl said flatly. "My name is Renae."
The warehouse was very quiet.
Eli looked at Renae. Then at Chase. Then back at Renae.
"You said your name was Illyssa."
"I said I wouldn't tell you shit," Renae said. "You just assumed."
Eli turned back to his group with the expression of a man betrayed. Several of them were looking in various directions. One of them was examining the ceiling with great interest.
Chase exhaled slowly through his nose.
"So," he said. "You kidnapped a random girl."
"I thought-"
"A random girl, Eli. Who has nothing to do with anything."
"In my defense-"
"I'd really like to hear this defense."
Eli opened his mouth. "You know what? Fuck the hostage plan just waste these assholes!" He yelled as his men ran in, even more were coming in than the 50 who were already there.
The side door opened.
Jayden walked in, umbrella still open, Illyssa beside him, both of them dripping on the warehouse floor.
Jayden would've said something about arriving, but he immediately noticed the chaos of a fight breaking out.
"...Did I miss something?"
Jayden had maybe three seconds to process the scene before a guy with a pipe decided he was part of it.
The pipe came down in a wide, graceless arc aimed at his skull. Jayden sidestepped, felt the wind of it, and drove the tip of the umbrella into the guy's solar plexus. The man folded. Jayden brought the handle down on the back of his head and he stopped being a problem.
Two more were already coming.
"I didn't come here to fight!" he shouted, which was technically true and also completely irrelevant.
Chase was somewhere in the chaos ahead, golden boxing gloves flashing, each punch landing with that strange doubled effectiveness. Jayden caught glimpses of him between bodies ducking a wild swing, putting a guy into a crate hard enough to splinter wood, moving like someone who'd been doing this for years.
A fist caught Jayden across the jaw. His head snapped sideways. He stumbled, caught himself on a table, and used the momentum to swing the umbrella backward into someone's ribs. The canopy snapped open inside the guy's chest area and he went down gagging.
"Adam!" Jayden shouted.
"Yes?" The goldette was floating about ten feet up, legs crossed, watching the chaos like it was a particularly good episode of something.
"What does this thing do?!"
"You have the regalia in your hand."
"I noticed!"
"Then figure it out."
Jayden blocked a wild swing from a kid who looked maybe fifteen and scared out of his mind. He didn't hit back. He shoved the kid away instead, hard enough to send him stumbling into a stack of crates, and moved past him.
How exactly were you supposed to use an umbrella? Sure you simply help held it over your head, but what would count as "activating it"? It was this same line of thinking he had when it came to the scissors.
He closed it.
The umbrella snapped shut with a sound that cut through the noise of the warehouse, sharp and clean. And then
Everyone within ten feet of him started to suffocate it was like the air just... vanished. Sucked inward toward the closed umbrella like water down a drain. The guys nearest to him grabbed at their throats, eyes wide, chests heaving against nothing. One dropped to his knees. Another stumbled backward out of the radius, gasping.
Jayden felt it too, the sudden vacuum in his lungs, but it didn't hurt him the way it hurt them. Immortality seemed to have its perks
The handle grew warm in his grip. Warmer. Hot.
The pressure was building inside the closed canopy, he could feel it straining against the fabric, against the ribs, against whatever physics the thing operated on. All that pressure wanted out
He pointed the tip at the nearest cluster of Eli's guys and let it.
The umbrella kicked in his hands like a living thing. A blast of compressed air, visible only as a rippling distortion, slammed into the group and sent four of them flying backward into the wall. They hit hard and didn't get up immediately.
"Huh," Adam said from above. "That's new."
Jayden didn't have time to respond. He was already turning, opening the umbrella again to let it breathe feeling it drink the air around him, then snapping it shut and firing another blast into a group trying to flank Chase.
The kick was easier the second time. He was starting to understand the rhythm. Open to reset. Close to build. Aim and release. Like breathing, if breathing could launch grown men across a room.
He worked his way toward Chase, umbrella opening and closing, clearing a path through the chaos.
So this was it's ability. When he closed it, it built up pressure on the inside and after the pressure is built, he can shoot it off. This must be why Chase's bone were broken inside of it. The incredible pressure totally crushed him
---
Illyssa pressed herself against the wall near the side door and tried to make herself as small as possible.
The warehouse had become something unrecognizable. Bodies moved in every direction, shouting, swinging, falling. The card table was in pieces. Someone's shoe had landed near her foot and she didn't know whose it was. The noise was a physical thing, pressing against her ears.
She should run. She should find Renae and run. That was the smart thing, the obvious thing, the thing any reasonable person would do.
But she couldn't find Renae in the chaos, and she couldn't make her legs move, and somewhere in the middle of all of it she'd seen him
Chase.
He was way older, way taller, almost unrecognizable, but still he was recognizable enough. Recognizable enough that at just a glance she could recognize him.
She didn't realize she'd stepped away from the wall. She didn't realize she was moving toward him, drawn forward by some strange feeling she couldn't name.
A hand closed around her arm and yanked her backward.
She hit the ground hard, the impact jarring up through her shoulder. A man she didn't recognize was standing over her, face twisted into something between a grin and a snarl, one hand still gripping her arm.
"Where you think you're going, little thing?"
She tried to pull away. His grip tightened.
"I said-"
She didn't hear the rest. Her heart was pounding too loud. The noise of the warehouse faded to a dull roar, distant and unimportant. All she could see was his face, too close, and his hand, too tight.
---
Renae saw it happen.
She was still near the center of the warehouse, still in Eli's grip, still trying to figure out how to get free without getting herself killed in the process. The fight had erupted around her and she'd been mostly ignored, a forgotten piece on a board that had suddenly gotten very crowded.
Then she saw Illyssa step away from the wall.
Then she saw the man grab her.
Then she saw her sister hit the ground.
And she couldn't do anything.
Eli's hand was still on her shoulder, firm but distracted, his attention on the chaos of his collapsing assault. She could probably break free. She could probably run. But by the time she got there-by the time she crossed the warehouse floor-it would be too late. Again.
Again.
The word hit her harder than any punch could have.
She'd promised herself. After the kid in her class, after he disappeared, after she'd done nothing- she'd promised herself she would never just watch again. She'd built herself into someone who never just sat back and did nothing, but right now, in all this chaos and whatever the hell was going on, she was totally useless.
Illyssa was on the ground and some man was standing over her and Renae was too far away
"Do you want to save her?"
The voice was not her own.
It came from everywhere and nowhere, from inside her skull and outside it simultaneously, a sound like wind through old trees, like stone rubbing against stone.
Renae's breath caught. "What?"
"I said do you want to save her?"
She didn't know what was speaking. She didn't know where it came from or what it wanted or what it would cost. She didn't know anything except that her sister was on the ground and a man was standing over her and she was out of time.
"Yes," she said. Out loud. Without hesitation. "Whatever it takes."
"Good answer."
The thing entered her.
And before eli could know what was going on, he was grabbed by the arm and tossed like a basketball against the warehouse floor. Bouncing off it like a rock bouncing off water
She stepped and launched herself towards her sister, tackling everyone else out of her way like a line backer before finally making it to her sister.
---
Across the warehouse, Jayden had just cleared another group with a blast from the umbrella when Adam's voice cut through the noise, sharper than usual.
"Well. That's interesting."
Jayden followed his gaze, to see Renae standing over her sister protectively.
"Looks like you're not the only one making contracts tonight," Adam said, and there was something in his voice Jayden hadn't heard before.
It sounded almost like respect.
The last of Eli's guys went down not too long later, what with all of Chase's guys fighting back, and two guys with actual supernatural powers, it was kind of a no brainer who'd win. A few of Chase's people were moving through the wreckage, checking on their own, nudging Eli's crew toward the door with varying degrees of gentleness.
Jayden stood in the center of it, umbrella still in hand, breathing hard. The thing was warm against his palm.
He looked at it for a moment.
Then he pressed it against his chest.
The umbrella dissolved, folding back into him with that same strange ripping Velcro sensation, except now it felt less like tearing something out and more like putting something back where it belonged. The warmth settled behind his ribs and stayed there.
Adam floated down to stand beside him. "Not bad."
"I figured it out."
"You did."
"Without your help."
"I noticed." Adam's smile was unreadable. "That was the point."
Jayden didn't have time to unpack that.
---
Illyssa was already moving.
She stumbled across the warehouse floor, half running and half tripping, weaving around bodies on the ground and scattered junk that had been knocked over in the fight. Her glasses had fogged up and her hair was a complete disaster and her heart was beating so hard she could feel it in her throat, that thick panicked rhythm that makes it hard to swallow. None of it mattered. Not the fight she'd barely survived, not the impossible things she'd seen, not the golden weapons or the blasts of air that came from nowhere or whatever had happened to Renae's eyes, that thing where they stopped being just eyes and became something else entirely.
All of that could wait.
Because he was here.
Chase saw her coming. His face changed. The hard focus of the fight drained away, all that combat tension just melting off him, and what was left underneath was something softer. Something younger. Something that looked almost exactly like the boy she remembered from all those years ago. He took a step toward her, then another, and then they crashed into each other, her arms going around his neck, his around her back, both of them squeezing tight like they could make up for all the lost time through sheer physical pressure.
"You're here," she said into his shoulder. Her voice cracked right down the middle on the second word.
"I told you I would be." His voice was rougher than she remembered. Older. But the certainty in it hadn't changed at all. "I promised."
"I know."
She pulled back just enough to really look at him. Properly look. He was taller. Broader across the shoulders. There was a scar near his jaw that hadn't been there before, a thin pale line that caught the light, and his eyes had a weight to them now, the kind of heaviness that comes from seeing things you can't unsee. But underneath all of it, underneath the years and the changes and whatever he'd been through, he was still Chase. Still the boy who used to sit under the slide with her during recess when everyone else was running around screaming. Still the boy who once spent fifteen minutes watching a worm make its way across a patch of wet concrete, totally transfixed, like it was the most important thing he'd ever seen.
"I looked for you," he said. His voice was quiet, almost urgent, like he needed her to understand this part. "I was going to come find you. I just had to make sure I had somewhere to bring you first. Somewhere safe."
"You built all this?" She looked around at the warehouse, at the kids who were clearly his, at this strange makeshift family he'd assembled out of nothing and no one.
"Most of it." He rubbed the back of his head, a gesture she remembered from when they were kids, something he always did when he was embarrassed. "It's not much."
"It's everything."
He smiled. .
Renae was standing a few feet away, watching them with an expression that was trying very hard to be neutral and failing completely.
She looked different. Not on the surface. Her hair was still the same, her clothes were still the same, the physical details were all exactly what they'd been an hour ago.
Jayden had been watching the reunion from a careful distance. Not eavesdropping, exactly. Just observing. He was good at that.
He'd seen the way Illyssa's face changed when she recognized Chase, the shock and the hope and something desperate all fighting for space in her expression. He'd seen the way she ran to him without hesitation, the way they held each other, the way years of separation collapsed into a single moment of contact. It was the kind of thing that happened in movies, the kind of embrace he'd always assumed was exaggerated for dramatic effect.
Apparently not.
Maybe one day he'd experience something like that. Maybe that would be another way to make him hungry.
He quietly made his way up to Renae who was surprised to see him.
"Huh? Oh it's you dead eyes."
"So... I'm betting you're really confused what happened. Am I right?" The teenage boy asked.
"Um, yeah. I really have no idea whats going on. This has been a weird night"
"Well.. if you need some answers, the detectives club knows a lot about this stuff. If you join up you can get your answers"
"The detectives club? What the hell is that? I've never heard of it before"
"It's pretty new"
"The detectives club," she repeated. Flat. Testing the words.
"We solve problems no one else can." He shrugged. "That's the mission statement."
"That's stupid."
"Probably. Still need two more signatures by twelve o clock today."
She stared at him. He stared back. Neither of them blinked.
"That is the dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard I'll give it some thought"
After Jayden got that confirmation he began walking out. He really didn't care about whatever else was going on, he did something and now he was about to head home
Or at least he was, negeone grabbed him by the leg it was eli.
"The hell?"
"You're Jayden mcullen right? I've got a message for you... From some guy. Said he'd kill me if I didn't deliver it he's the guy who told me about Chase's little girlfriend. He told me to give you this message 'Your future is not set in stone. Enjoy it while you still have it.'
The words landed in Jayden's chest like stones dropped into still water.
"While I still have it," he repeated. "... Wait how'd you know who I was?"
"I was told to look for the most generic guy I see"
That kind of annoyed Jayden but he said nothing of it. "While I still have it huh?"