LEGACY OF THE FORBIDDEN ARCHMAGE

6

The humming of the medical equipment didn't just stop; it died with a choked metallic rasp.

Michael stood in the absolute dark, the silence of the corridor pressing against his eardrums like deep water. The Mana Pulse hadn't been a blast of light; it was a vacuum, an invisible scythe that had ripped the digital soul out of every device in a fifty-meter radius. Emergency strobes, biometric locks, even the tactical HUDs of the guards—all rendered into useless scrap in a single heartbeat.

A few feet away, Kaelen Reign let out a sound that wasn't quite a scream. It was the grunt of a man who had suddenly become a prisoner inside his own skin. His exoskeleton armor, a multi-million credit marvel of Oakhaven technology, had become a tomb. Without power, the hydraulic joints locked, pinning Kaelen’s limbs in a rigid, frozen stance. His mechanical eye, once a glowing red threat, was now just a dull piece of glass staring at nothing.

Michael didn't wait for them to adjust. He didn't have a speech ready.

He stepped over the glass shards of the shattered observation window, the crunching sound the only thing breaking the stillness. His heart, the one he had just re-engineered in a dark cell, beat with a heavy, rhythmic thud. It wasn't racing. It was working.

"Stay back... Dorian, I’m warning you..." Lucien Osiris’s voice was a pathetic whimper coming from the floor.

The bureaucrat was scrambling blindly, his expensive silk suit tearing as he crawled through the debris. His hand brushed against a kinetic pistol that had slid across the floor. He tried to grab it, but a boot—caked in dried blood and concrete dust—slammed down on his fingers.

The sound of bones snapping was dry, like twigs breaking in winter.

Lucien’s voice hit a frequency that made Michael’s teeth ache. He didn't pull back. He pressed harder, feeling the delicate structure of the bureaucrat’s hand flatten against the marble.

"You talked a lot about assets, Lucien," Michael said. His voice was flat, devoid of the theatricality of a villain, which made it ten times worse. "You talked about cleaning up the trash."

Michael knelt, his face inches away from Lucien’s. In the pitch black, the faint purple flicker in Michael’s pupils made him look less like a man and more like a malfunctioning piece of hardware.

"Tell me," Michael whispered. "What’s the market value of a bureaucrat who can’t even hold a spoon?"

With a clinical precision that Michael Dorian had learned in anatomy class and Ignatius Valerist had mastered on the battlefield, he grabbed Lucien’s other wrist. A swift, calculated jerk. A sickening pop.

Lucien didn't scream this time. He just choked on his own breath and went limp, his body's nervous system shutting down from the sheer shock of the trauma.

"Consider that a tuition refund," Michael muttered.

He stood up and turned toward Kaelen, who was still struggling against the dead weight of his armor. Michael ignored him. He didn't have the mana to waste on a man who was already a statue. He walked to the edge of the shattered window. Below him, Oakhaven was a vertical abyss of neon smog and steel.

He didn't hesitate. He stepped into the void.

He didn't fly. He fell, but he fell with intent. He used the last dregs of the Ichor energy to sharpen his perception, timing the air resistance against the ragged fabric of his lab coat. He caught a protruding ventilation duct three floors down, swung himself inward, and plummeted another twenty feet onto a hovering trash-hauler.

The impact sent a jolt through his new heart that felt like a hot needle.

Synchronization: 0.005%. Core temperature critical.

The adrenaline was fading, leaving behind the cold reality of a body that was still ninety percent human and ninety percent broken. He rolled off the hauler as it moved through a low-level transit tunnel, landing hard on the wet pavement of a dark alleyway.

He dragged himself toward a stack of rusted crates, his vision swimming with purple static. The bitter taste of copper filled his mouth. He was starving. His cells were screaming for calories, for glucose, for anything that could be converted into the fuel his soul demanded.

A surveillance drone drifted into the mouth of the alley, its spotlight cutting through the smog. The whirring of its motor sounded like a death sentence.

Michael reached into his pocket and pulled out a tactical flare he’d lifted from a guard. He didn't ignite it normally. He crushed the magnesium core with a surge of mana, creating a localized flare of white heat that blinded the drone’s optical sensors and fried its proximity logic.

The drone drifted aimlessly into a wall and crashed. Michael didn't stay to watch.

He crawled through a drainage grate, his consciousness flickering like a dying bulb. He needed to reach the lower levels. He needed to find the man Silas had mentioned. But as the cold sludge of the city’s sewers began to soak into his clothes, his strength finally hit a wall.

He collapsed near a service exit, his forehead resting on the cold, damp metal of a ladder.

"Michael?"

The voice was a whisper, but it cut through the fog in his brain like a blade. It carried a resonance he recognized—not from Michael Dorian’s life, but from a memory five centuries old.

"Lyra..."

He looked up. In the dim light of a flickering streetlamp, he saw her. She wasn't wearing a lab coat or a student's uniform. She looked like a ghost of the slums, her eyes wide with a terror that she didn't seem to understand.

As Michael’s world turned to black, he felt her arms catch him. They were warm. They smelled of lilies and ozone.

Inside the Tower, Kaelen Reign finally managed to trip the manual emergency release on his zirah. He stumbled out of the suit, gasping for air, his one organic eye fixed on the shattered window. He looked at Lucien, who was being loaded onto a stretcher, his hands looking like mangled meat.

Kaelen didn't call for reinforcements. He just stood there. He’d seen "mages" before—frauds with illegal implants and cheap tricks. But the man who had just walked out of that window wasn't a mage.

He was a predator that had been sleeping for five hundred years, and the Ivory Tower had just made the mistake of waking him up.