I didn't have time to savor the look of pure terror on Rafe’s face. The lightning was screaming inside my veins, a wild, jagged beast trying to claw its way out of my skin. My vision was swimming in shades of electric blue."Let go of me! You’re dead! You’re a dead man!" Rafe shrieked, scrambling backward the second my grip loosened. He tripped over his own feet, falling flat on his back in the dirt. The "Golden Boy" of the Valerius family was covered in mud and trembling."Look at him!" someone in the crowd gasped. "Rafe’s blow didn't even singe his clothes!""How is that possible? That was a Tier 3 Lightning Bolt!"I ignored them, my teeth clenched so hard I thought they’d shatter. Push it down. Hide it. Kill the light."Cassian!" A sharp, cold voice sliced through the murmurs.The crowd parted like the Red Sea. An old man in charcoal robes strode toward the center of the courtyard. He carried a silver staff topped with a rotating crystal lens."The Aura Inspector," I whispered, the

The lightning was rotting me from the inside out. Every breath I took tasted like scorched copper, and my skin felt like a canvas being shredded by a thousand needles. The stolen energy from Rafe and the Pillar was too raw, too volatile. If I didn't refine it, I wouldn’t just die; I’d detonate.Midnight at the Phoenix Academy was a graveyard of shadows. I moved through the corridors not as a student, but as the ghost they had tried to create. My janitor’s uniform was gone, replaced by a tattered black cloak I’d scavenged.I reached the heavy, iron-bound doors of the Forbidden Archives."State your clearance," a mechanical voice buzzed from the wall. A red optical sensor swept over the floor.I didn't speak. I reached for the keypad hidden behind a loose stone—a secret my father had shared with me when I was six years old, back when the Thorne name meant royalty and not a death sentence.7-2-9-4-1.The gears groaned. The massive doors shivered and slid open just wide enough for me to s

The lightning wasn’t just in my veins anymore; it was in my lungs. Every breath felt like inhaling ground glass. I leaned against the cold stone of the archive corridor, my chest heaving."You’re dying, boy. And you’re doing it very loudly."The voice didn’t come from the hallway. It vibrated from the base of my skull, ancient and dripping with disdain."Who is that?" I gasped, clutching my chest.[VOICE: THE FIRST OVERLORD. SEAL AUTHORITY: AWAKENED.]"A name? I’m more of a consequence," the voice echoed, sounding like a man who had watched empires burn and found it mildly amusing. "That 'meal' you just ate? That Tier 4 shadow-scum? It’s sitting in your core like a lead weight. You’re a bucket with a hole in it, Cassian. If you don't fill yourself with high-grade Ether in the next hour, your new 'Void' is going to collapse and take your soul with it.""How much Ether?" I gritted out."A tribute," the Overlord chuckled. "The kind they keep in the Main Spirit Vault. The kind that makes

I didn’t need to kill Headmaster Valerius tonight. Death was too quick for a man who had spent ten years sleeping on a bed of stolen Thorne legacies. I wanted him to wake up. I wanted him to remember the smell of burning roses.The hallway outside the Headmaster’s sanctum was a death trap of pressure-sensitive tiles and sonic resonators. I moved through them not by dodging, but by existing in the gaps between the frequencies. The "Void" within me acted like a silencer for reality itself."The lock is a bio-signature weave," the First Overlord’s voice rasped in my head. "He’s keyed it to his own heartbeat. You touch that handle, and the whole mountain explodes.""Then I won't touch the handle," I whispered.I placed my palm against the reinforced stone wall beside the door. I didn't push. I just opened the drain. The Seal hummed, and the molecular bonds of the stone began to fail as the energy holding them together was siphoned into my marrow. The stone turned to fine white sand, pouri

The heavy steel doors of the auction hall didn't just open; they were vaporized."Target sighted! The bidder in the black cloak!"A squadron of Seven Stars secret police stormed in, their silver-and-black armor gleaming under the flickering emergency lights. They weren't like the street thugs I’d just stepped over. These were professional killers, each one a Tier 4 specialist."You’ve made a mistake, boy," the captain of the guard growled, his voice amplified by his helmet. He raised a heavy mana-cannon. "Nobody robs the Alliance and lives to spend the change."I stood over the Auctioneer’s shriveled corpse, the Void-Devouring Seal in my chest thrumming with a frequency that made the floor tiles vibrate. "I’m not here for the money," I said, my voice echoing with a double-tone that wasn't my own."He’s unarmed!" a guard shouted. "Kill him and secure the vessel!""Unarmed?" I whispered.I reached into the air. My fingers closed around a handful of nothingness, and then, I pulled. The s