Nineteen.Alencia stared at the number on the screen until her eyes burned. The shadow chains had dissolved. The stun gun sat on the metal table beside Jason like a tool that had finished its job."Say that again," she whispered."Your body absorbed the electrical charge," Jason said. He picked up the stun gun and placed it back into the case. "And converted it directly into magic power. The reader jumped from eight to nineteen. A gain of eleven from a single burst.""That's not possible." Her voice came out thin. "The Hunter Association has tested over two million awakeners worldwide. Nobody absorbs electricity.""Nobody else does," Jason agreed. "That's the point."He said it without pride. Without excitement. Like he was reading from a file he had already written. Like this result was something he had expected, and the test was just the formality.Vivie unwrapped a fresh lollipop. She didn't look surprised. She didn't look anything. Her face was as flat and still as a photograph."

The earliest memory Alencia had of her mother was a voice in the dark.Not singing. Talking. Low and steady. The way someone speaks when they are telling a story they have told a hundred times and will tell a hundred more because the telling is what keeps it alive."The Saintess didn't know what she was at first," her mother said. The rocking chair creaked. The apartment was small and cold and the heating had been broken for two weeks. "Everyone thought she was ordinary. Even she thought she was ordinary. But the Guide saw something in her that nobody else could see."Four year old Alencia lay in bed with the blanket pulled to her chin. The ceiling had a crack that looked like a river on a map."What did he see?" she asked."Light," her mother said. "Hidden inside her. Like a fire buried under sand. The tests couldn't detect it. The scholars couldn't explain it. But the Guide knew. He always knew."Her mother's name was Catherine. Catherine Price before she married James Walker. She w

The stun gun clip went viral in eleven hours.The USBC making-of team had embedded a camera crew on the Minerva to capture behind the scenes footage for their promotional series. They filmed everything. Training montages. Cast interviews. The scenery rolling past the observation deck.Nobody expected the clip of Jason Ward pressing a stun gun to a girl's arm while black chains held her in place to become the most watched video on HunterTube that week.Fourteen million views in the first day. Twenty two million by the second. The comment section split into two camps immediately.One side called it groundbreaking. A new training method. A revolution in awakener development. They pointed at the magic power reader jumping from eight to nineteen and called it the beginning of something the Hunter Association had never seen before.The other side called it abuse. A grown man restraining a young woman with shadow chains and shocking her with a weapon. They tagged the Hunter Ethics Board. The

The Minerva pulled into Denver on a Tuesday morning under a sky so blue it looked painted.The Challengers testing venue was a converted warehouse on the east side of the city. Three stories of reinforced concrete and steel plating. The kind of building designed to absorb damage from the inside out. Banners hung from the entrance advertising the upcoming season of Challengers, the combat sport league for registered awakeners.Alencia stood outside the building with her bag over one shoulder and a knot in her stomach that wouldn't untie."You'll be fine," Vivie said beside her. The girl was eating a candy bar with the calm indifference of someone walking into a grocery store instead of a combat qualification facility."Easy for you to say. You're A rank.""Twenty four hundred," Vivie confirmed. She took another bite. "But rank doesn't matter in Challengers qualifications. They test combat readiness. Reaction speed. Power application under pressure. You could be F rank and still pass if

Jason felt it the same moment Alencia did.He was in a production meeting on the second floor of the Denver hotel when the demonic energy pulse moved through the city. It passed through the walls like water through cloth. The producers didn't notice. Vivie, sitting in the corner pretending to play a game on her tablet, looked up instantly.Their eyes met across the room.Jason stood. "Excuse me. Something came up."Producer Sutton frowned. "We're in the middle of scheduling the broadcast slots.""It'll have to wait." Jason was already at the door. Vivie was right behind him, the tablet abandoned on her chair.They hit the street and moved east. Jason walked fast but didn't run. Running attracted attention. The pulse had come from somewhere in the central district. A single burst. Controlled. Deliberate.Not an accident. An announcement."Demon King lineage," Vivie said beside him. Her voice was low and flat. "That signature is too clean for a lesser demon. Too refined.""I know.""Cou