Toric stood on the back of a rusted supply truck at the edge of the plaza, hands gloved, coat buttoned tight despite the heavy heat rising off the cracked asphalt.

Below, the square swelled with bodies. Civilians held up homemade banners scrawled in angry red markers and paint. Their faces were gaunt from rationing, and their shoulders stuck out sharply under threadbare shirts. They shouted until their voices broke, until the words blurred into one long roar.

It wasn’t just anger that had dragged them here. It was exhausting. They were beyond caring about retaliation. The weight of empty cupboards and children crying through curfew hung heavily on their shoulders—in the sharp lines of their faces. They came because starving to death would be more agonizing than a bullet. Because dying for something was better than dying for nothing.

Toric looked the part of a commander. He held himself stern, spine straight. Sharp-edged and alert even under sweat and sun. At twenty-four, he was younger than most in the square, but no one here outranked him.

His wavy hair was dark and a little too long, slipping into his eyes when the wind stirred up the dust. It wasn’t sloppiness, it was just one of the few things he didn’t bother trying to conform to Unifed standards anymore.

The coat he wore had once belonged to a soldier. A muddy black — heavy and worn — repurposed like everything else. Rebel red stitched into the collar. A bright crimson shemagh to match wrapped loose around his neck, unmistakable. It was the kind of piece he’d use to obscure his features if necessary, or to keep out the sun. But today, he showed his face. Defiant and bold. If the people had the courage to defy, he’d be a face they could recognize.

Out here, a splash of red said everything you needed to know.

There was a wild glint to his eyes as he scanned the crowd. They were intense and unflinching — the color of fresh-dug earth and low firelight. Something feral that didn’t belong in the city.

When he spoke, it was through the comm clipped to his shoulder. “Front lines holding?”

“Solid,” Kael replied in his earpiece. “Crowd’s louder than we thought. They might actually push through today.”

“That’s the idea.”

Beneath him, the crowd moved like pressure building in a sealed room — restless, loud, and ready to blow. Thousands packed into the open square between the crumbling facade, shoulder to shoulder, heat rising off their bodies like steam off asphalt.

A few carried real weapons, but not many. Toric had made that clear. They needed enough to make a point. Not so many that United Forces overreacted, mowing them down before the first push even made contact.

Rebel fighters scattered through the alleys, crouched behind broken windows, with a few snipers flat against rooftops with scopes trained on the Spire’s upper decks. They weren’t part of the protest. They were the answer to what came next.

This was the move to take Sector Nine’s central ward and hold it.

The goal was simple. Breach the Capitol Spire, kill the Castellan — the regime’s bloated name for a Governor  — and replace him with someone who answered to the rebellion, not the Unified Government.

This wasn’t about optics anymore. This sector controlled trade routes, fuel distribution, and the civilians bled for the sparrows. It was time the sparrows liberated them.

“The Castellan’s still locked inside the Spire,” Kael said. “But he’s not getting evac’d. They think this is just noise.”

“Good.”

He adjusted his earpiece, then dropped from the truck bed, landing light on the pavement. A few of the protestors flinched as he passed through, but others looked at him and nodded. 

People didn’t cheer when they saw rebels anymore. Not out loud, anyway. When being seen near a rebel meant death.

The regime had made the price of loyalty to the Bloodsparrows crystal fucking clear. They’s conduct public executions, erasing entire families. Turning housing blocks into rubble for the crime of simply hiding them—or in their words—harboring terrorists.

Toric didn’t blame people for keeping their heads down. But today, he wasn’t offering them that luxury.

Either you’re with us, or you’re waiting your turn in the dirt. 

And that was the truth. There was no polite middle ground left to stand on. Death could come either way—through slow hunger or a bullet—but at least you could choose the shape of it now: to die anonymous and hollow, or die with your soul still intact.

He pushed through the edge of the crowd toward the perimeter, where shipping crates and broken fencing had been stacked into makeshift barricades.

From here, he could see the Spire. It loomed at the end of the boulevard, clean and sharp against the rot around it. Tall and polished, like it didn’t know the city was dying.

Riot police lined the steps. Drones buzzed in fixed formation. Two armored transports idled nearby, with their engines purring like beasts waiting to be unleashed.

The crowd had found a rhythm. Their chanting rose in uneven waves, voices rasped raw with heat and hope. They didn’t chant like protestors — they chanted like survivors. Tired, they were calling out for freedom, for food, and for the right to live without collars.

Toric stood still amid the noise, earpiece tight against his temple. “This goes loud in ten,” he said into the comm, voice low but firm. “Tell our people on the south flank to move in when the sirens start. When the crowd surges, we open fire on the upper balconies. The Castellan dies today.”

Just as those words left his mouth, something moved in the corner of his eye, breaking his attention away.

At first, it didn’t register as threat. Just a flicker in the corner of his eye, some movement that didn’t match the rhythm of the square. 

A ripple of acknowledgement passed through the bodies closest to the eastern barricade. It didn’t cause a stampede, but the air went tense. Like the kind of shift animals noticed before a storm.

Voices started dropping off, one by one, as if pulled under, flattening into murmurs, and uncertain sounds. The kind that came from people holding their breath.

Toric scanned the line instinctively, looking for armed units, but didn’t see any change. The pressure in his chest climbed anyway, slow and cold and without a name.

Then Kael’s voice crackled through his earpiece, just above a whisper. “...You seeing that?”

He turned toward the east, just as the light shifted again.

Then came a voice from somewhere in the crowd, sharp with disbelief.

“The man from Sector Eight—!”

It sliced through the tension like a wire snapping.

Toric heard a swell of murmurs rising from every side, carried not by volume but by desperation. Words passed from mouth to mouth with a kind of frantic reverence.

“He stopped an armored convoy.”

“They said bullets didn’t touch him.”

“He’s not with the rebels.”

“A metahuman.”

And then, that name again, whispered like a secret.

“Vox.”

It landed in Toric’s chest heavier than he expected. That awful sinking certainty that this moment wasn’t going to belong to him. Even though he’d fought for it. Been burned and bled for it.

He didn’t believe in ghosts or saviors. And yet, there he was— a man hovering above the clouds, looking down on them like judgment waiting to be executed.

Suspended above the pavement at the far end of the plaza, just beyond the shattered edge of the government barricade. All pale with a long green cloak that moved like smoke in the rising wind, frayed at the hem and caught in slow, weightless motion.

Lightning crawled in threads across his arms, drawn to him like the air itself couldn’t bear to let go.

Everyone around him had stopped, even the Unified soldiers. They stood frozen, mid-command, shields half-raised. Even the drones hung in place, their usual jittering corrections gone still.

Vox didn’t need to announce himself. It was as if the city had been built around him, and no one noticed until now. As if he’d always been part of the steel and glass and heat, buried beneath it, waiting to be seen.

And for one unbearable moment, he looked directly at Toric.

The plaza, the shouting, the protest — all of it blurred into that one, heated moment.

Vox’s gaze was level, unreadable, impossible to hold and somehow harder to look away from. Like he knew Toric. Like he’d been waiting for him.

For the first time in a long, long time, Toric didn’t know what the next move was.

His stomach turned, unsettled.

A rifle hit the ground with a crack — metal against concrete, sparks blooming out like tiny flowers.

The officer who dropped it stood stiff, like a specter had passed through him, leaving him rattled and emptied. Around him, the others held their positions, but their lines had loosened. Obvious in the way their shields had sagged. Fingers hovering just shy of triggers.

Vox hovered with effortless stillness, cape twisting lazily in the heat-thick wind, lightning crawling slow along the length of his arms. He kept his eyes still, locked onto Toric.

It was the kind of gaze that didn’t look at you so much as through you. Like being remembered by something you hadn’t met yet.

Toric's pulse slammed into his ears, and something inside him reeled back at the weight of his gaze.

Then someone shouted out a desperate command, booming through the silence.

“Open fire!”

A line of muzzles rose in perfect sync. The sound cracked, splitting the air. A deafening chorus of gunfire erupted in the open square, sharp flashes of muzzle light breaking against the air like their own kind of lightning.

Vox didn’t blink, but his eyes finally dropped from Toric, flicking over to the line of raised firearms, He slowly lifted his right hand. He looked almost bored. 

Without warning, the bullets stopped midair.

Every single one.

They hung in place, still spinning from the force behind them, suspended like flies caught in thick, sticky sap. Then, one by one, they dropped from the air. A soft, metallic patter against the stone.

Gasps rippled through the crowd like a wave. The stillness was taut enough to hear breath. 

Then, Vox flexed his fingers, a quiet flick, and the guns jerked themselves free.

The sleek black weapons ripped out of hands, out of holsters, pulled like metal to a magnet. Rifles, pistols, stun batons, grenades still clipped to belts all tugged themselves free. Then came the riot gear: chest plates, helmets, shields. Straps tore open, screws popped loose from the force. 

The air filled with debris, spinning and clattering midair like a cyclone of broken authority.

Some of the soldiers staggered back. Others fell outright, unarmed and half-stripped, their bodies bare beneath the weightless ruin of what had once made them dangerous.

Toric held his breath, heart hammering.

Vox held the gear aloft for one short moment, just to let the reality of it set it, before he lowered his hand. The gear hitting the ground, the sound of it echoing as loud as a gong. 

In that second, the crowd suddenly surged forward, like it had just remembered what it came here to do. People poured forward, breaking through the last line of defense like floodwater breaching a dam.

Toric snapped back into himself, yelling into the comm strapped to his shoulder. 

“Go!” His voice boomed, sharper than the gunfire echoing off the plaza.  “Move now — now!”

Rebel squads peeled off from the flanks, armed, fast and full of adrenaline. They wouldn’t get another window like this. Kael was already pushing toward the central stairwell with a team of five soldiers. Sniper cover lit up from the rooftops, clearing the balconies. Blood spraying across clear glass panels as the now defenseless guards scrambled to hide behind the railings.

The Unified troops were poorly placed, scattered by the crowd and the speed of the breach. Those who still managed to retain their pistols fired without aim. A few got lucky and clipped passing bodies, but the flood didn’t slow. One reached for a panic switch, and Toric shot him in the throat before he even touched it.

There wasn’t time to think. Just move. 

Toric led a small squad, sweeping through wide corridors and across elevated walkways, floor by floor, until every hallway echoed with rebel boots, instead of the polished conformity of the Unified ranks. High-pitched whines blared from the enemy’s comms, disrupted and jammed to static.

The inner offices were ransacked. Any tech rooms his squad discovered were disabled. They didn’t want to deal with reinforcements. The spire’s communications center was already on halfway fire when Toric passed it.

By the time they reached the executive floor, Sector Nine’s inner circle had begun to scatter. Cabinet members and corporate lobbyists were all clawing at the security doors, hiding behind columns, shoving each other into closets and behind filing cabinets like the walls would save them. They wouldn’t.

Toric didn’t slow down even for a second. His men broke off in formation, sniping trembling bodies with surgical precision. 

Toric moved forward, rifle at the ready. Already knowing where the head of the serpent would be.

The Castellan’s office sat at the end of a long, cold corridor — all echo and shine, with ceilings too high for comfort and lights too bright to feel real. It was a hallway built for intimidation, lined with portraits of the dead and the powerful, now darkened by smoke curling in from the floors below.

Two guards flanked the doors—the Castellan’s personal men. The kind of men who clearly bought their way into power. You could see it in their stance. They weren’t ready to bleed for him.

They panicked. Didn’t even raise their weapons in time.