2025-07-29 22:36:59Morning rays filtered lazily through the tinted windows of the Electric Viper nightclub, now a silent shell of the chaos it had witnessed the night before. The scent of stale alcohol and disinfectant hung heavy in the air, mingling with the iron tang of blood.
Mela, the head waitress, paced the club’s wide interior, her eyes sharp and instructive. She barked orders at her younger colleagues as they scrubbed down tables and mopped the sticky, stained floor. Despite the club’s near-pristine design, a trail of red marked where Cobra and his men had bled. Broken glasses crunched under shoes. A shattered bottle of whiskey sat like a grave marker near the bar.
Mela had been in this business for years. She’d seen fights. She’d seen gunmen. She’d even seen some street-level mafia bosses lose their temper. But last night… last night was something else entirely.
“Move faster!” she ordered sharply. But even as she tried to focus, her ears couldn’t help catching the buzzing whispers of the staff around her.
“That guy last night,” a petite brunette said, scrubbing a blood smear, “looked like he couldn’t take a breeze, but he dropped Cobra’s men like they were nothing.”
A redhead with a mop nodded, eyes wide. “I swear, he didn’t even move—those punches landed like lightning. A god of war, maybe?”
A third, still pale from witnessing the fight, clutched her broom. “How’d he throw five guys twenty-five feet without touching them? Like a damn whirlwind!”
The gossip swirled, each tale wilder than the last.
“He’s gotta be supernatural,” the brunette whispered, “magic or something.”
The redhead scoffed, “Nah, a martial arts grandmaster—knows all the ancient secrets, controls the elements.”
Another chimed in, “Bet he’s one of the country’s four Gods of War, undercover.”
Mela’s lips tightened, her clipboard lowering. She’d spoken to him—Ethan, the lanky stranger with the shy face—and dismissed him as soft, a pampered kid.
Now, her stomach twisted with regret. ‘If only I’d known.’
Mela marched over and clapped her hands. “Enough! This isn’t a marketplace. Get back to work!” she snapped.
The group scattered, but the tension stayed. Mela paused, gripping a rag as her thoughts pulled her inward. She remembered his calm voice, his focused eyes, his unassuming appearance—and how she had, like a fool, judged him before even hearing him speak.
Now, she wished she had asked him more. Where he came from. Who he was. What he was.
Then—
BOOM.
The club doors slammed open with a deafening force. The sound echoed across the hall like thunder.
A dozen heads snapped toward the entrance. Hearts skipped beats.
Twenty men walked in like they owned the world—armed to the teeth with machetes, batons, and automatic pistols under leather jackets. Their footsteps were heavy. Deliberate.
They were led by a man whose name alone could silence entire streets.
King Locust.
Cobra’s uncle. The Third Man of the Red Serpent Fraternity.
He was broad-shouldered and draped in black and red—traditional gang colors. His skin was inked with serpentine tattoos that snaked across his neck and into his shirt. His stare was cold—the kind that made men forget how to breathe.
The club froze.
No one moved.
Even the music speakers seemed to go mute.
Locust didn’t speak as his men stormed in and rounded up everyone, dragging the workers to the center of the floor. Mela stepped back, her instincts telling her danger had just taken on a new form.
Locust finally spoke.
“What happened to my nephew?”
The silence was loud.
No one dared to speak.
Locust’s eyes narrowed. He turned to one of his men and flicked his chin.
WHACK!
The first blow landed on a bartender’s back.
WHACK!
Another to a dishwasher. Cries of pain echoed.
Mela stepped forward. “Enough!” she shouted.
All eyes turned to her. The bold waitress who didn’t cower like the rest.
Locust tilted his head. “You have something to say?”
She nodded. “I’ll tell you what happened. But leave them out of it. They know nothing.”
Locust raised a brow. “Bring her forward.”
Two men grabbed her roughly and pulled her to the center. She stood firm.
“Speak,” Locust ordered.
Mela swallowed, her words steady. “Last night, Cobra and his men were harassing a drunk woman—new in town, red dress. A guy, also new, stepped in. Cobra wouldn’t back off, so the guy… destroyed them.”
Locust’s face darkened, his ringed hand twitching. “Destroyed? Cobra’s my blood—he rules this town. Who dares touch him?”
Mela’s voice wavered but held. “Just one man. No one else.”
Locust laughed, a harsh bark that echoed off the club’s walls. “One man? Impossible—unless he’s a God of War.”
His men snickered, but Mela pressed on, reckless now. “Cobra picked the wrong night. A new sheriff was in town, and he checked him.”
The words hung, bold and dangerous, the staff gasping behind her.
Locust’s men surged, one shouting, “Burn this place down!”
Another gripped his bat, eyes blazing. “No one’ll question us!”
Locust raised a hand, silencing them. “No,” he said, his voice cold. “This club’s ours—money laundering, product deals. It stays.”
He turned to Mela, his eyes slits.
“You said he’s new in town?”
“Yes.”
“And he took the girl with him?”
“He did.”
Locust’s eyes gleamed with hate.
“Find this man. I want him alive—to suffer.”
His men nodded, their weapons glinting with purpose.
“CCTV footage,” Locust demanded.
Mela hesitated, then led them to the security room, her hands shaking as she pulled up last night’s feed.
The screens flickered, showing the club’s chaos—Ethan’s slim figure, the woman in red, Cobra’s booth.
But the key moments—Ethan’s strikes, the whirlwind—were blank.
Cobra had long demanded his corner be a black zone, cameras off.
Still, the footage caught Ethan’s face, his shy features stark, and the woman’s, her auburn hair framing a defiant glare.
“That’s her,” Mela confirmed. “That’s the girl Cobra tried to take.”
Locust leaned close, memorizing them, his fist clenching the ruby ring.
“I’ll have him,” he vowed, his voice a low snarl. “And that woman—she’s Cobra’s toy when he wakes.”
Cobra lay in a hospital, critical, his chest pierced by his own knife, and Locust’s rage burned for them both.
He turned to his men. “Spread out. Comb the city. Pay off who you must, kill who you must. But bring them to me. This week will not end until I taste vengeance.”
The staff shrank back, Mela’s heart racing—she’d seen Ethan’s power, and Locust’s vengeance was a storm about to break.
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Chapter 207: Visions like memories
Ethan lowered himself onto the woven mat, the coarse fibers a tactile anchor in the surreal chamber. He crossed his legs, rested his hands on his knees, and closed his eyes. The weight of the stone room, the scent of earth, the profound silence—it all pressed in, not as an assault, but as an invitation to dissolve.This was the same thing he had run away from back then that he was now finding himself performing again.But what choice had he got? He needed to complete this before he could think of facing Nathan for the sake of Emma and his unborn baby.“Breathe into the stillness,” the Grand Physician’s voice murmured, not from across the room, but seemingly from within the stillness itself. “The Quieting is not an erasure. It is a re-ordering. You will see the tapestry of your life. The threads of joy, of pain, of choice and consequence. Do not cling to them. Observe them as patterns in the weave. You will have visions. Keep an open mind. The mind that judges is the mind that suffers
Chapter 206: The sanctuary of stillness
They passed through corridors Ethan vaguely remembered, places of instruction and meditation. But the Grand Physician led him deeper than he had ever gone before, to a part of the compound that felt less like a building and more like a natural cave system that had been gently shaped. The air grew cooler, the scent of stone and damp earth replacing the incense.Finally, they entered a circular chamber. The ceiling was a natural dome of rock, with a single shaft of muted light falling from a hidden opening far above, illuminating the center of the room. In that pool of light was a simple mat of woven reeds. Around the perimeter, in deep shadow, stood nine smooth stone pillars, each carved with a single, complex symbol that seemed to shift in the low light.This was the Sanctuary of Stillness. The air itself felt thick, heavy with intention, as if sound went to die here.The Grand Physician gestured to the mat. "The place of unraveling."Ethan moved toward it, the gravity of the room pre
Chapter 205: The ‘Quieting’ Ritual
As Ethan drove to the Grand Physician’s the following morning, his hands tight on the wheel, his mind was a million miles away—or rather, decades.He wasn't navigating by GPS, but by muscle memory of a journey taken in a different life. The towering pines blurred into a green-grey wall, and with them, the present dissolved.“The focus is not to feel nothing, Ethan. That is the crude aim of a brute. The aim is to feel everything… and choose which sensation becomes action. The rest, you relegate to a silent room and lock the door.”The Grand Physician’s voice, dry as ancient parchment, echoed in his mind. He could see the austere training hall, the smell of sandalwood and cold stone. He’d been young, arrogant, flush with the early successes of the skills he’d already learned. The ‘Quieting’ had been presented as the final masterwork, the capstone. Not a new weapon, but the forging of an impregnable armory for the mind itself.And he’d walked away just before he could even get to underst
Chapter 204: Back To The Grand Physician
Ethan didn’t answer for a long moment. He pushed back from the desk, the chair rolling soundlessly on the thick rug. He walked to the floor-to-ceiling window, his back to the room, his silhouette tense against the glittering, indifferent cityscape.“I know my brother,” Ethan said, his voice hollow, stripped of all its usual command. “I know that Elizabeth Robbins would swallow broken glass before calling me for help. The fact that she did…” He bowed his head, a hand coming up to press against the cold glass. “It means she has exhausted every other option.”Ethan gave a single, jerky nod. The weight of it—the dual loss, the compounded violation—seemed to press him physically into the floor. “My brother understands currency. He understands leverage. He has just acquired the only two things in this universe I would trade the crown for. Not that I would ever be given the choice.”He strode back to the desk, not with purpose, but with a frantic, caged energy. He picked up the dead phone, s
Chapter 203: What do we do now?
Elizabeth’s phone slipped from her nerveless fingers, thudding softly onto the carpet. She didn’t hear it. All she heard was the roaring silence of a timeline that ended at seven o’clock.She was leaving.Four hours ago.The chill from the balcony was nothing compared to the glacial fear freezing her from the inside out. Every terrible possibility—the kind she’d spent years as a corporate wife learning to suppress—flooded her mind. An accident on the winding coastal road. A mugging in the city garage. Or worse, something deliberate, something linked to the crown, to the viper’s nest Emma had just been thrust into.Her gaze swept the room, landing on the family portrait from a decade ago—Richard’s arm around her, a young, smiling Emma between them. A perfect, painful lie. She was alone. Utterly alone with this terror.And then, unbidden, the most complicated, infuriating face of all surfaced in her mind: Ethan.She recoiled from the thought. Emma’s fury at him had been absolute, scorch
Chapter 202: Four hours ago
"You're operating under the assumption that Ethan and I are still connected. That I am leverage." Emma's voice was cold and sharp. "You're wrong. What happened with my grandfather severed that tie completely. I am done with Ethan. There is no loyalty to exploit, no affection to manipulate. Keeping me here is a pointless risk. Your quarrel is with him. Let me go, and you eliminate a complication. He will still come for you, for the crown. But you won't have an angry, resourceful hostage who has zero stake in his survival cluttering your operation."She delivered the speech with icy precision, every word a calculated move on this new, horrifying board. She was a redundant asset. A liability. She painted the picture with clear, logical strokes.And of course, that was what she thought. There was no point in dragging her into a sibling rivalry that she had no stakes in, and much worse, dragging her unborn child into it as well.Nathan listened, his head tilted. When she finished, he didn'
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