Zeke sprinted, rooftops drumming beneath his boots as he hopped from ledge to ledge toward Artificial Love. Wind combed his shroud flat; rain threatened, a gray film over the city's teeth. Ahead, on a skeletal radio tower, he spotted Fredric—standing like a dark weather vane against the clouds. Zeke poured on speed, vaulted the gap between two buildings—

—something clamped his right ankle and yanked.

He dropped hard into a narrow alley, air crushed from his lungs. Two figures waited below as if the fall had delivered him by appointment.

The first—Dalas—was nearly two meters, thick through the chest, a round face set on a jaw that could carry a door. Bald, clean-shaven, black suit and tie; a heavy suitcase in each hand like twin verdicts.

The second—Viktor—average height, long black hair, a face carved with two crossing scars. Black combat rig. He knelt by a grappling head buried clean into the concrete, cable shivering taut from Zeke's boot.

"Come to papa," Dalas grinned.

The wind picked up, flicking grit along the alley's ribs, as Viktor rose to his feet and squared to engage.

Dalas shrugged off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. One suitcase irised open—panels unfolding with clockwork grace into a plated harness of pale, half-translucent energy shields. An exoskeleton traced his limbs on the inside, bracing muscle with servo and spring until his shadow looked heavier by a factor of ten.

"Viktor to base, requesting reinforcements," Viktor said, badge to mouth.

Static hissed and crackled back. He lowered the dead badge, eyes narrowing.

"Dalas," Viktor stated, dropping his badge on the ground.

"I know," Dalas replied, snapping the second suitcase wide. It flowered into a greatsword nearly his own height, a blade of alloy and light. "Our communications are being jammed."

Zeke broke left, sprinting up the wall into a grab for the roof's lip.

Viktor fired a second grappling head; the hook bit, the cable screamed, and Zeke was ripped down again. He hit, rolled, and the second head planted like a piton. Viktor thumbed a stud; current surged along the lines, blue-white. Pain ripped through Zeke's nerves; his jaw locked around a groan. Dalas hauled on the first cable, reeling him in hand over hand like a catch.

Viktor charged, twin energy blades unsheathing with a harmonic buzz, slashing for tendon.

Zeke tumbled back in a reverse barrel roll, boots sliding. He pushed to his feet, eyes flinting.

"Desire," he called his weapon in a bestial growl—and then drove forward, point angling for Viktor's centerline.

Viktor slipped the thrust and counter-cut, the riposte quick and pitiless, forcing Zeke to give ground beneath the sighing lines.

Zeke snarled and tore the cables free—ripping the prongs out of his own flesh. Blood slicked his calves; he didn't slow. A sudden heat bled up his spine, a bright, racing thrum that bent the world's edges.

"Fredric," Zeke remarked.

Time thinned like stretched glass. In the hush between beats, he feinted a stab to Viktor's left, then pistoned a kick into his gut. The knight folded, armor whining.

Zeke followed, forearm-smash to Viktor's jaw, bouncing him off the alley wall. He cocked to finish him—

—but Dalas's greatsword blurred in, a wall of edge, and Zeke had to slip back fast or be halved.

The two knights tightened their net. They moved like a rehearsed phrase: Viktor cutting low where Dalas cut high, Dalas guarding Viktor's flank without looking. Zeke stayed low, hunting angles, leveraging brutal bursts of strength and impossible turns. The alley rang with steel and energy; sparks stitched brief constellations along the brick. Bit by bit the pair drove him backward, slashes landing—one nicking his bicep, another gouging his thigh, another painting a red stripe across his forearm.

He bled, breath harsh in the rain-salted air, the alley narrowing to a throat, the sky a slit of iron above—storm-light waiting like a held judgment.

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Zeke lunged at the opening he'd read in Viktor's guard—an exposed angle in the knight's arm that, if taken, could flip the entire fight. He sprang off the wet brick, body a taut line, closing in a blur. But just as he was about to land the strike, Dalas's greatsword arced across the alley and clipped Zeke's forehead with the flat, a bell-note of pain ringing through his skull. In a last-ditch reflex Zeke triggered a demon art, phasing a sliver sideways through the blow and skidding out of range, breath knifing in his chest like cold iron.

They'd already mapped his intent. The two knights moved with the easy courage of men who knew their opponent wasn't aiming to kill; none of Zeke's cuts had hunted vitals. With that risk muted, Viktor and Dalas pressed harder—bold, rhythmic, efficient—turning him into the easier animal to pen.

"You should give up," Viktor sighed.

Zeke stood with his back to them, both hands clamped to his face. Half his mask lay in the alley mud at their feet, sheared clean. Blood poured from his brow and cheek, pattering to the ground, curving away in rain-slick rivulets—a red metronome in the gutter's gray.

"We're gonna have a fun time having you tell us everything about your little operation down in the undercity," Dalas firmly stated.

"NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!" Zeke shouted, embedding his fingers into his face.

"Enough!" Viktor shouted, tossing handcuffs on to the ground beside Zeke. "Turn yourself in."

"Do I have to kill them?!" Zeke screamed, crying psychotically.

Zeke opened his eyes to somewhere else.

Above him a black sun expanded, vast and wrong. The longer he stared, the more it became a single titanic eye, its iris dilating on him until all he could feel was being seen. Around him rose a cage of bars he hadn't noticed until he tested his breath against them. Beyond the cage: an unbearable churn of forms, a chaos of unrestrained creation—everything and nothing, every shape his mind could design unspooling at once like thread from the dark.

Farther out, another cage—this one forged of chains. Behind it burned a blue flame, bright as a noon-star, hot as a furnace—the surface of the sun transposed into azure, expanding forever behind the links, patient as a tide.

"Boy," A monstrous voice spoke from the distance. "You are on the verge of the death." The voice explained.

Zeke couldn't move. Fear and a vast, clean dread locked his joints; his heart beat small in a room too large.

"At this rate you will not be able to complete the contract," the voice spoke once again, somehow feeling eerily closer than last time. "And you are yet to make a descendant. At this rate we will both die."

"You, you're my demon aren't you?" Zeke asked.

"Hmmmm, in a way, I am," the voice explained.

"If so then give me power," Zeke pleaded. "I wish to have enough power to become a hero!"

"A hero," the voice laughed. "I can grant you power but the price will be steep," the voice explained.

"Anything!" Zeke shouted, falling to his knees. "I will sacrifice anything!"

The blue fire surged. The black sun's iris flashed sapphire, the great eye bucking wide in something like alarm. Flames sluiced through the chain-forged cage and rushed the bars of the first, licking the floor, spilling up his legs. They ate the world in a hush.

"It's warm," he thought to himself, feeling the fire dance in his hand.

Two glowing blue eyes opened in the far dark. A celestial beast strode forward—outline shifting like constellations under water, edges fluid, purpose fixed.

"From this moment forward, you will feel an unbearable hunger. At first you will wish to quell it, then you will beg for it to be gone, and eventually you will come to accept the beast you have become." The creature spoke.

Heat rolled through him like a second heartbeat. Zeke stood; blue fire crawled out from his skin and flowed over him. His hair lifted and tingled, the roots lighting; the color washed out to a pale, lunar white. He groaned, breath sawing, a sensation blooming that he'd never known before—an iron, singing wholeness, as if every hinge in his body had seated true at last. He turned, and through the veil of rain and smoke he looked back at the two knights with an unblinking blue gaze.

Viktor charged, blades lifted to cut the distance—but before steel could bite, Zeke's knife was already inside his abdomen, a cold decision delivered without ornament. Zeke's free hand clamped Viktor's throat; where fingers met skin, pale sigils burned, branding him with chill.

"I will swallow you whole!" Zeke screamed.

Blue fire took them both. Viktor's hair flashed white in an instant; his skin blanched; the fight went out of him like a wick pinched between wet fingers. He sagged to the pavement, eyes floating shut, falling into an endless sleep so gentle it felt like a mercy—an exit most knights never earn.

"What did you do?" Dalas stumbled.

"I- I Killed him," Zeke stumbled.

Dalas roared forward, greatsword cocked, servos in his frame whining. Zeke moved too fast to track. The soul he'd just consumed thrummed through him, re-threading his nerves; the world sharpened at the edges, rain slowing to threads. He met Dalas in the lunge and drove his blade into the knight's plated chest.

"Pierce!" Zeke screamed.

The knife flared, blue energy spearing outward. The light bored through the armor like a drill through soft wood, punching a clean tunnel. Dalas staggered, trying to raise the sword again, but Zeke was already on him—climbing the bulk, pinning the shoulders, teeth at the throat.

Blue fire blossomed and folded over them. For a heartbeat the alley held a second little dawn; then it shuttered out. Zeke lifted his head, panting, as the first fat drops of rain tapped his face—cold counting beads against feverish skin.

"I can't do it," tears rolled down his cheeks, as the fire extinguished and Zeke returned back to his original state.

The rain thickened, a gray curtain drawing across the city, drowning his ragged sobs in its steady roar. It was the kind of rain that cleans nothing—only presses the dirt deeper, and leaves the night smelling like iron and smoke.

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