Above the blast zone, high above the heat shimmer and the blood-wet trenches, Vox hovered, unmoving. His cape snapped behind him. 

Smoke spiraled upwards in long, lazy plumes. He watched as the chaos beneath him thrashed on. He saw metal twisting, bodies dropping like flies. A muscle under his eye twitched as he tilted his head.

Crouched at his flanks were five of the newest metahumans, silent and expressionless. Their matte white armor held a dull sheen that caught the sunlight. All had lightweight cloaks that mirrored Vox draped over their shoulders, slick and fluid; elegant. 

His soldiers stayed crouched behind him, calm but ready. No one would move until Vox gave the signal. 

The Bloodsparrow battalion wasn’t meant to survive this. At least, not wholly. They were a flash of crimson at the edge of his larger design. They had enough fire to trigger the government’s response, and draw their best tech and armor to the preferred entrypoint. Away from the emergency corridor Quillan’s deep-planted operatives had mapped out. One they’d deliberately left off from the schematic that they’d given to Toric.

The Bloodsparrows were pawns. A necessary sacrifice. 

Just a little longer.

Vox’s comm clicked on, coming to life through a hiss of static. The voice on the other end was curt but decisive. One of the scouts he’d seeded underground, before the operation, currently embedded beneath the active chaos. He was a metahuman who could phase through solid objects—steel, stone, even organic structures—like bodies. 

“Sparrows have cracked the inner casing. The north panel’s exposed. Bunker nearly clear of hostiles.”

“Toric?” Vox asked.

Silence cracked on the other end of the line. “I have no visual on him.”

A bloom of heat surged in Vox’s chest, climbing up his neck. It was the feeling of his heart sinking—something like panic taking root. The fire below illuminated nothing of value. He couldn’t see him. Couldn’t even sense him.

He surged through the air, moving closer to the carnage, but still kept a healthy distance. Mist colored eyes darted back and forth across the chaos of limbs and warped metal. Still nothing.

He dropped to the wreckage with a shift of gravity, landing softly with his cloak peeling behind him like a trailing shadow.

He hadn’t seen Toric in months. But in that time, his world had started shifting — because of him. 

Because of what Toric had shown him.

In the husk of a collapsed District of Sector Seven, Vox had begun his resurrection. The same collapsed cathedral where he’d first brought him, was now a fortress of wires and steel. The bones of the building were still there, with marble walls like ribs, and a gaping skylight at the center, but now, new skeletons rose inside. Scaffolding stood tall. Cranes shifted reinforced glass repurposed from sector ruins. Vox’s Metahumans made the work easier, using their powers to help bend the steel, reforge the conduits. The build had become a  command terminal. Even as it stood, still half-exposed to rain, it hissed with life.

It wasn’t finished.. but it would be soon. A monument. A sharp structure that cut through the skyline like a blade. The old world would know what was coming just by looking up.

Everywhere Vox went, whispers followed. Some knelt. Some fled. Some cried. It was no longer clear whether it was fear, awe, or faith driving it.

But It didn’t matter. All that mattered was the path ahead. And Toric was supposed to be part of it.

Vox’s eyes scanned the scene, one elegant hand shielding his face from ash and debris. 

Through the haze, he made out a limp body, crumpled and caked in soot, with ribs rising slow, eyes barely fluttering. It was Toric, half-buried from a collapsed roof. Blood slicked up one side of his torso. He had a steel beam running through his lower flank.

Something in Vox went rigid. His movements didn’t look like that of a man, but of something colder, more primeval. A fury running under his skin like poison. 

He sent a barely controlled message across the comms, “Go.” and his metas peeled off, making way for the upper passage of the relay, just as planned.

He veered right into the burn and black of it. Stalking past still-smoking bodies and ruptured body armor. Past a rebel’s eye hanging loose from its socket, leaking viscera down his cheek. Past a torso twitching where the legs used to be. 

He reached the wreckage and dropped beside him, one knee bracing.

Toric’s mouth was slack, but his chest was still fluttering. His skin was grey under the ash, except where the blood had painted him red. His jacket had half-melted into his side from the blow.

The beam was thick, and too dangerous to lift. Doing so could cause the whole building to collapse on top of him. So Vox didn’t. He raised a hand, and willed the beam to bend, snapping off just enough to pry him from under it.

The sound of it cracked through the air like bone, and Toric seized, choking from the white hot burst of pain. Blood foamed at the corner of his mouth.

Vox hauled him up like a corpse over his shoulder, arm tight around his thighs. Every breath Toric took now was wet and rattling. Every second he wasted was one closer to permanence. 

Vox didn’t really care whether his operation burned. There would be others. Ultimately, he would be victorious. 

The rebels didn’t matter—none of them. They were bodies to be spent. Broken and replaced. There were always more willing to die.

But not this one. 

Toric wasn’t a resource. Or even good leverage. He’d never been obedient, or useful in the way most men were. But Vox wanted him. Even now, bleeding out on a field he should’ve never survived, there was something unyielding at the core. A flame that still hadn’t burned out. He had the kind of thing you couldn’t engineer or create by force. 

Not Something easy to control.

Something human.

There was no word in his vocabulary for what that meant. Love? No. Vox doubted that even existed. He couldn't even pretend to understand the shape of it. But no other term came to him that didn’t sound like attachment. And he wasn’t naive enough to believe it was that simple. Why would he be attached? He didn’t need Toric.

And yet, he’d crossed a field of bodies to lift him from the rubble.

What an irrational display.

Toric was conviction incarnate. Stupid, pure, reckless conviction. It infuriated Vox, it made no sense. And yet—in a world where most people twisted into whatever shape survival required, Toric hadn’t. Even when it cost him.

He represented something Vox had stopped believing in: honesty. That fire didn’t always need to be weaponized. That a man could remain unbroken.

And maybe… maybe if Toric lived.

If he survived—he could become more than just a thorn in the system. More than some misguided martyr. Vox could cut him open and extract the root of his fear, his repression, and shame.

Toric feared his own desire. He still thought wanting made him weak.

But that could change.

Vox would free him from it. Strip him bare and show him what he was hiding from, and why it wasn’t weakness.

No. Toric wasn’t weak.

He just didn’t know what he was yet.

But Vox could show him.