Winter caught it. Crushed it with one hand like paper. Didn’t even blink.

  “Irrelevant,” she said, turning to him. Her gaze lingered on Brad. Not recognition. Recognition would’ve been kinder. It had lasted only a fraction of a second.

  But a fraction was all Butter needed. She surged upward. Moving like a ripple through time. Three strikes landed, one-two-three. Shoulder. Hip. Knee. Barely a whisper. Barely a blur.

  Winter froze for a moment.

  “...Pointless,” she began.

  Butter stood beside Brad again, her face pale, jaw clenched. She didn’t breathe. The air between them pulsed, a delayed echo of her strikes.

  “Resound,” she whispered.

  It detonated.

  Another equation, another ripple of force.

  Winter’s body convulsed. Shoulder dislocated with a sickening pop. Her hip buckled sideways. Her knee exploded. She hit the ground like a statue hurled off a ledge, breath torn from her chest.

  Brad staggered back. He could barely process what he was seeing.

  Butter didn’t celebrate.

  She lowered Harmony, trembling. The gem at her throat now dim, spiderwebbed with fractures. She pulled a crushed sour strip from her pocket, hands trembling and bit down hard. Her eyes, dull and far away, drifted to the ruined van.

  Not the van. Please, not the van.

  Her breath hitched. The sour strip tasted like ash.

  The green one. With the little rust spot by the wheel well. She was so proud of it. Called it her ‘faithful steed’.

  The world narrowed to the crumpled metal. The fight, Winter, the pain, it all faded into a roaring static, drowned out by a single, screaming thought.

  She uses it on Tuesdays. For the food run. The bread. The fruit for the kids. Mrs. Gable’s medicine. All of it. In that van.

  A memory, sharp and cruel: Miss Williams on the stoop, holding a plate shrouded in tinfoil. “A little birdie must have fixed my sink,” she’d said to the empty street, her voice kind. “Left these out as a thank you. Hope they like oatmeal raisin.”

  She never knew it was me. She just trusted that someone was kind. And I was. I was kind that day. And now I’m this.

  She looked down at her hands. The hands that had fixed a pipe. The hands that had just shattered a woman’s entire mission of mercy.

  This is what I do. I break things. I break good things. I break things that help people. I’m a disaster in a hoodie.

  The guilt was a physical weight, crushing her lungs, more paralyzing than any of Winter’s blows. This was worse than the hospital windows. This was personal. This was a betrayal of a specific, quiet good in a world that had so little of it.

  She’s a nurse. She helps people. She’s everything I’m not. Everything I can’t be. And I broke her steed. I broke her freedom. I broke her way to be kind.

  A wet, ragged sound escaped her, half-gasp, half-sob. She finally managed to bite down on the candy, the sourness doing nothing to cut the bitterness rising in her throat.

  Her voice, when it came, was a hollow whisper, spoken to no one but herself, a verdict on her own soul.

  “Mrs. Williams just bought that van...”

  ///

  Winter laid broken on the ground for some seconds.

  Then impossibly, movement.

  Brad watched as gold light pulsed erratically from the woman’s chest. Her jaw was clenched as if stitching her body back together demanded every shred of her will.

  It was like watching a building rebuild itself one brick at a time. Her bones snapped into place. Her muscles realigned. What the hell are you? he wanted to scream. But his throat had sealed shut.

  Because the answer was suddenly obvious. Not human.

  His mind, reeling, began connecting the dots despite his terror. The power radiating from her wasn't just light; it looked and moved like liquid sunlight, thick and alive. He could see it now, not just in the pulses, but coiled deep within her core. And there was... so much more. An ocean of it. A reservoir of power that felt vast enough to blow up this entire city and more.

  The realization was a bucket of ice water. If that was true, it meant she hadn't been going full force against Butter. Not even nearly. She'd been using a fraction, a trickle. But why? To capture her? To teach her a lesson?

  He studied the energy's nature. It was warm, primal, predatory. Feline prowess. Sunlight. The combination clicked in his mind, a connection to something ancient, something Egyptian. He deduced, with a strange, detached certainty, that she most likely drew her power from Bast or Sekhmet. Or maybe both. The nurturing protector and the raging avenger, two sides of the same sun-drenched coin.

  A hysterical laugh threatened to bubble up. Gods aren't real, you fool, he thought, the old, rational part of his brain making one last, pathetic stand.

  But the thought died as quickly as it came. Fool. You just saw two "humans" disintegrate the street. He looked at the crater where they had landed, the shattered windows for blocks. In a world where this was possible, where Butter could pull a book from another dimension, Santa Claus might as well be real. The rules had not just been broken; they had been set on fire and the ashes scattered to the wind.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Winter stood. Not angry. Not hurt.

  Just... disappointed.

  “Five days, Elizabeth.”

  Butter flinched at the name like it was a slap.

  “You vanish for five days, ghosted deep enough even our most powerful satellites couldn't track you. What if they’d found you first?”

  Her tone wasn’t cold anymore.

  It was furious. But controlled. Too controlled. Like a boiling pot sealed with steel.

  Butter clenched the ruined amulet, breathing ragged. “I’m not going back.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “I have to find him, Winter. I'd risk getting killed by the Syndicate just to get a chance to see him again. I don't care anymore.” Butter rambled.

  “Killed? You'd be really lucky indeed if all they did was kill you. In your foolishness, you fled from safety, now you’re here, hiding out in-” she swept her clawed hand at the alley, “-a gutter.”

  Brad spoke before he could stop himself. “She's not hiding, she saved my life.”

  Winter’s eyes landed on him.

  And Brad froze.

  There was no rage in her expression. Just scrutiny. She looked at him like a puzzle that might be a trap. He felt it, his skin tingled with it. She didn’t move. She didn’t have to. The pressure of her gaze alone almost dropped him.

  Butter stepped in front of him, shielding him from her gaze, protective. “He’s not part of this. He’s just... helping.”

  “He looks like he sleeps under rusted piping,” Winter muttered.

  “So what if he does? Does that make him any less worthy of being my friend?” Butter said earnestly, taking advantage of the statement.

  For a moment, silence.

  Butter’s breath hitched. Her pupils dilated, black swallowing pink. She grabbed Brad’s wrist, not protectively, but like she was bracing for impact.

  “No,” she whispered. “Not yet.”

  A single, perfect snowflake landed on Brad’s cheek. Then another. He looked up, bewildered. The rain had stopped, but the air was now frigid, the temperature having plummeted in seconds. A slow, silent dance of white began to fill the alley, dusting the shattered asphalt and the wrecked van.

  "Is that... snow?" Brad asked, staring at the impossible flurry.

  No one replied him.

  Then, from the shadows, a new voice.

  “Ah. There she is.”

  The words slithered into the alley, soft as a scalpel parting skin.

  A hum cut through the air, not mechanical, not organic, but something in between. Like a dentist’s drill muffled behind velvet. Then, a soft, crystalline music began to emanate, weaving through the hum. It was Clair de Lune, the notes perfectly rendered but utterly devoid of soul, as if the very concept of moonlight had been distilled into a calculated, psychological tool. The gentle melody did nothing to soothe; instead, it draped the scene in a layer of profound, elegant wrongness, making the violence of the shattered alley feel like a grotesque art installation.

  They turned as a man drifted into the alley, floating a few inches above the shattered asphalt as if the ground were beneath his notice. His hands were clasped casually behind his back. He was flanked by a hovering white drone that shimmered like a pearl.

  His blonde hair was immaculate. His suit was a masterpiece of minimalist power: a three-piece of charcoal-grey, woven from a silk-wool blend so fine it seemed to drink the weak light, its only adornment a single, exquisitely carved tortoise brooch of polished jet and gold pinned to his lapel. A friendly, non-threatening smile played at his lips.

  And his presence landed on Brad’s consciousness like a physical blow.

  It wasn't a sound or a sight. It was a pressure, a density of being that crushed the air from Brad’s lungs and made the alley walls seem to bow inward. His vision tunneled, the edges fuzzing into static. A hot, sudden trickle of blood ran from his left nostril, tracing a warm path down his lip. His knees buckled. He was a second from blacking out, his mind simply refusing to process the wrongness of the entity before him.

  Butter’s hand shot out, not in a gentle gesture, but with the firm, bracing grip of an anchor. Her fingers clamped around his bicep, holding him upright. A sliver of her own power, a flicker of that recursive, grounding energy, flowed into him, a makeshift shield against the overwhelming tide of Lucien's aura. It was the only thing keeping him conscious.

  Winter stiffened slightly, then relaxed, rolling her amber-gold eyes. She pulled a fresh piece of gum from a small foil packet and popped it into her mouth, the slow, deliberate chewing resuming almost immediately.

  "About time, Lucien."

  Brad’s mind, reeling from the shivering reality and the floating man, scrambled for an anchor. How is he doing that? His eyes scanned for wires, for a platform, for any sign of propulsion from the drone. There was nothing. Just empty space between Lucien's polished shoes and the ground. Anti-gravity? The concept was science fiction, the stuff of theoretical physics papers. He’d never known technology that advanced was real. But if it wasn't tech... then it was magic. And that was a door his logic was still desperately trying to slam shut, even as it was being blown off its hinges.

  Lucien took in the scene, cratered asphalt, shattered amulet, wounded expressions with a practiced glance. “Did I interrupt something?” No sarcasm. No malice. Just a man asking about the weather.

  Butter didn’t look up. She didn’t move at all.

  Brad blinked at her. Why is she frozen?

  Lucien stopped beside her. The drone glowed softly as it scanned her. Humming at a frequency that couldn't be heard but felt. The hum made the fillings in Brad's teeth ache, but when Lucien spoke, Butter’s prothestic lights darkened, as if trying to hide.

  “Well then. Come along. I’ve brought you sweets.”

  Her fingers twitched toward Brad, aborted. Her hand snapped to her side like an overcorrecting puppet.

  Butter nodded. No words. No resistance. She followed him like a marionette missing its strings.

  Then Brad saw them: tears, silent and involuntary, starting to pour from her wide, unblinking eyes, tracing clean lines through the dirt and blood on her cheeks. Her shoulders, which had been held in a tense, defiant line throughout the entire fight with Winter, slumped. It was a small movement, but it was the final flag lowered. She wasn't fighting it. She wasn't being compelled by some psychic command or forced paralysis.

  And in that moment, Brad understood. This wasn't mind control.

  This was surrender.

  It was the equivalent of a mouse, having run until its heart was fit to burst, finally going still in the shadow of the dragon. It was the absolute, soul-deep acceptance of a fate too immense to fight. She had given up.

  Lucien turned to Brad, blue eyes full of gentle amusement. “You must be Bradford Whitenhall. You look like you need a place to rest.”

  Brad’s gaze, against his will, was dragged up to meet Lucien’s.

  The amusement in them was a lie. A pleasant painting on a wall of ice. Up close, they were the colour of a winter sky just before a blizzard, a pale, crystalline blue that should have been beautiful but was instead deeply wrong. They held no warmth, no curiosity, not even the predatory gleam he’d seen in Winter’s gold eyes. There was only a flat, endless calculation.

  It was like looking into the lenses of a high-powered microscope, you knew something was looking back, but it wasn’t seeing you; it was cataloging your components, assessing your structural integrity, and finding you lacking.

  A primal fear, colder than the alley’s damp, locked Brad’s muscles. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic bird trying to escape a cage. Every instinct screamed to look away, to make himself small, to not be noticed by this thing that wore a human face.

  And then he understood. The snow.

  It wasn't from a weather system. It wasn't a trick of temperature. He could feel it now, a vibration in the air, in the very bricks of the buildings around them. The environment itself was shivering. The molecules in the air were slowing, crystallizing in a sympathetic panic at Lucien's mere presence. The world was recoiling.

  Brad broke the gaze first, his eyes snapping down to the wet asphalt, focusing on a cracked piece of gum. The back of his neck prickled with a cold sweat. He had just failed some unspoken test, he was sure of it. But the alternative, holding that gaze for a second longer, was unthinkable.

  The drone tilted toward him, its single blue eye dilating like a living thing. Then it moved, not with the mechanical jerk of machinery, but with the fluid, predatory grace of something that had learned to mimic human gestures. All the while, the strains of Clair de Lune continued to spill from it, the dreamy arpeggios now feeling like a predator's lullaby. The dissonance was stomach-turning; the music of delicate moonlit dreams soundtracking the cold, analytical scrutiny of this... thing. Brad’s skin prickled. It didn’t just calculate. It watched.