"Thank you," Liam said simply.He walked across the warehouse floor toward the little girl.She saw him coming and her whole face changed.Not dramatically—not with the loud, uncomplicated relief of a child in a film. But in the specific, quiet way of a child who has been genuinely frightened for hours and has been holding herself together through sheer will, and who has just seen the one thing that makes holding herself together feel possible."You came," she said softly, as he crouched down to her level."I came," he said."You're going to save us, aren't you?" she said. Her voice was barely above a whisper, but there was nothing uncertain in it. It was not really a question—it was the statement of someone who has already decided what they believe and is simply saying it out loud. "Me and my grandpa. You are going to get us out of here."Liam looked at her face."My father is at the mining site right now," she continued, and her voice carried the particular brightness of someone rea

He looked at his men.His voice dropped into a different register—lower, with a weight to it that had not been there before."Beast mode," he said. "All of you. Now."The response was immediate.Hands went to pockets—all of them, simultaneously—and emerged with small pills, dark-colored, uniform. Each man looked at what he was holding for exactly no time at all before placing it on his tongue and swallowing.The effect was not slow.It moved through the room like a current—eyes changing first, the whites bleeding out as something dark and hot flooded in to replace them, turning every gaze in the circle the deep, uniform red of something that is no longer entirely operating on the same logic as before. Bodies followed—postures shifting, the grinding of knuckles against knuckles, the sound of teeth pressing together, the physical language of human beings stepping back from the threshold of restraint and crossing deliberately to the other side of it.They were no longer simply large, sca

The blue faded from his eyes slowly—like a light being dimmed by a careful hand rather than switched off—and Liam stood in the emptied warehouse and allowed himself exactly three seconds.Three seconds to acknowledge what had just happened. What he had become. The weight of level three settling into his body like a foundation being poured—solid, permanent, restructuring everything it touched.Three seconds.Then he moved.This was not the time. Not for celebration, not for assessment, not for sitting with the enormity of what the ring and the bracelet had built inside him over the course of one brutal, compressed morning. People were underground. The little girl's father was underground. And time—the specific, irreplaceable currency of people running out of oxygen in a collapsed shaft—was moving in one direction only.He was out of the warehouse before the thought had fully finished forming.---Twenty minutes.The mining site appeared through the taxi window looking exactly like what

The co-worker's words hit the air and just sat there, and something in Liam snapped.His jaw locked up so tight it could have cracked. His fists were shaking at his sides, not because he was scared, but because the image of that little girl's face kept flashing in his head over and over again. Her eyes, so full of trust when she looked at him. Her voice, so sure, so innocent, talking about her birthday cake, talking about her father coming home. And right beside that image was the old man's face, that tired, guilty face that had already been carrying too much, and now this, now he was going to have to hear that his son was gone.And these people, the management, the ones who had the power to prevent all of this, were sitting in an office right now. Not crying. Not panicking. Not even rushing. Just sitting, talking, probably watching their backs and making sure their money was safe while men who had families and birthdays and reasons to come home were lying dead underground.Liam start

The room went still again, but this time it was a different kind of stillness.Benjamin's hand was shaking when he pointed at Liam, his voice coming out tight and confused and full of something that looked a lot like fear.“How the hell did you get here?” he said, the words stumbling over each other. “How did you even find yourself in this building? And how... how did you survive that?”Liam didn't answer.He just reached behind him and shut the door, the sound of it clicking into place echoing through the office like a period at the end of a sentence nobody wanted to hear.The recruitment boss's head snapped toward Benjamin, his eyebrows pulling together.“Sir,” he said, his voice polite but tight with confusion, “do you know this man? Have you had dealings with him recently? Apart from the incident where he assaulted you?”Benjamin's face had gone pale.“Yes,” he said quickly, nodding like he was trying to convince himself as much as anyone else. “Yes, this man, he should not be h