Chapter 129 Cost of Defiance [Light]

I was furious in a way that made lightning taste sweet in my mouth. Half the goddamn Council of City-States had just been a stop on a treasure hunt I never volunteered for. Every pile of ash, every dead cape, every bureaucrat screaming into a comms line had been one more irritation stacked on the altar of my patience. I told myself it was for the future that every brutal calculus, every sacrifice, bought us another day, but you don’t build a salvation out of favors and murder without becoming bitter as well.

Eclipse had done what needed doing, even if he was a stubborn, infuriating child about it. I couldn’t afford disobedience. He was integral to the plan, a blunt instrument that could be sharpened into something useful for what came next. Still, I hated to be thwarted, especially when the world was already a mess of angles and waiting.

“Mother? Missive?” I called. My voice didn’t try to hide the contempt. “I don’t give a damn which one of you answers. If you cut this short and off yourself, I’ll just go through the motion again. I’ll find the prophet, and I’ll come back. I’ll pay the cost again. I always do. Of course, you might not understand what I mean exactly, but the point is, this is futile…”

There were consequences to returning back in time, things that I really didn’t care much about. Still, for some, the cost was too much. I knew that. I also knew the man who’d sent me back in time was not someone I liked owing favors to. If I had to go to him again, if I had to swallow his price a second time, it would cost more than coin. It would cost leverage I couldn’t spare.

A voice cut through the smoke of my irritation, calm enough to be an insult. “Apologies,” Guesswork said, dry and almost amused, “but you look like you could use a drink.”

He wanted to bait me. Classic move. The man was harmlessly dangerous by reputation, a gambler and an arms broker who’d learned how to read a room and clip its margins. Still, I’d never been patient with people who treated outcomes like markets. I’d been patient with whole wars. I didn’t intend to be patient with him.

Tigress shifted at the edge of my sight, her flesh rearranging with lazy grace into something feline, claws catching the dim light. Harmless posturing. Harmless until it wasn’t. I ignored her. Guesswork, though… the man didn’t seem so harmless to me, no matter how trifling his powers were.

“Apologies?” I repeated. My voice sharpened. The storm folded inward like a fist. “Drink? What? A beer? You are a funny man…”

That was enough. I let the storm do what I’d promised it could. I gathered a lance of pure, concentrated lightning between my palms, a spear of white so bright it nearly erased the shack for a heartbeat. It tasted like ozone and everything I’d swallowed to get here.

“Watch this, then,” I said. I hurled the lance.

The arc cracked, a clean white seam through the air, and it hit Guesswork in the chest like a verdict. His body seared, contorted, and then imploded into a spray of blackened clothes and ash. He didn’t get the chance to scream. He just wasn’t, the way a candle goes out when you snuff it. The silence that followed was sharp.

The impossible happened.

Missive… no, Mother… moved first in the only way that mattered. She dragged something cold and raw across her throat. The blade flashed. Blood arced like a comet as she killed herself from where she stood.

However, that was not the end.

The world hiccupped.

For a shuddering second, I felt all the angles of probability recoil, like the universe drawing breath. I watched their small, gruesome deaths as if I were observing a cheap repeat on a flickering screen, and my irritation curdled into something darker: annoyance.

When I opened my eyes, I was back in the same room again. The stench of ozone and blood still hung thick in the air. Healtouch and Wormhole were right where I had first found them, tending to a cluster of half-broken SRC soldiers. Everything was identical. The overturned table, the faint hum of dying lights, even the scorched air from my last tantrum.

I exhaled slowly, letting the storm inside me settle. This loop was mocking me now.

Healtouch turned to face me, startled but still composed enough to try something stupidly noble. Her power worked through the heel of her feet, a detail I remembered because of how utterly tacky it was. “Stay back,” she warned, already crouching beside a soldier whose arm was half-gone.

I smiled thinly. “I will.”

The next second, electricity arced through the air, and her legs blackened from the knees down. The scream she released was almost melodic. I didn’t need to kill her yet, but I needed Wormhole’s attention.

He fought. God, he fought.

Wormhole didn’t go limp and beg like the others, not at first. He spat curses through broken teeth as he zipped around me with his portals. He kicked, gripped the edge of a table, shoved a chair at me like a man flailing at ghosts. It was messy and pathetic and, briefly, almost admirable. The little worm of defiance in his throat kept him moving when every sensible part of him should have stopped. Of course, he tried to run away, but I didn’t let him. He thought raw panic could flip the scale. He thought if he could open that hole fast enough, he could bring friends through, trade a life for a dozen. Human math. Stupid, sentimental math.

I didn’t have time to waste, so I made quick work of him. I threaded currents into muscles, teased at ligaments, let the arcs creep like a cold infection under the skin. When he screamed, it was the wrong kind of sound: a wet, internal tearing that made the air taste of metal. He convulsed, eyes rolling white, fingers clawing at his temples as if he could scratch the feeling out.

“Stop,” he begged, voice a rattle. “Please—please—”

Words looked pathetic on him. I tuned the current, letting it learn the cadence of his reflexes, finding the seconds between thought and movement.

I didn’t burn him to dust. That would have been pointless. I ate the parts that did the thinking. I roasted the junctions where mind met muscle until they blistered and failed. His body continued to jerk after the will inside it had been gutted, like an automated machine running on leftover momentum. I heard his breath rattle as if he were trying to cough out the last of his breath.

When the sparks smoked away and my hands felt cold, Wormhole was still breathing. He was attached to his meat still, eyes unfocused, pupils blown wide and glassy. He made sound without meaning. His legs twitched. His arms curled.

I lifted Healtouch’s limp body by her burnt legs and whispered to Wormhole.

“Bring me to your friends,” I told him evenly, “and Healtouch lives.”

It was a lie, of course. She was already dead the moment I touched her. But people on the edge of death, people who’ve seen their skin peel, their nerves cook, will believe anything. That was human nature. Once they cracked, hope became their leash.

He nodded shakily and opened a wormhole. The shimmering disc unfolded in front of us like an oily tear in reality. I stepped through, dragging him by the collar.

The shack we emerged into was empty. Dust, old cots, a broken radio, and silence. I could feel Missive’s trail, but she wasn’t here. She was clever. Of course, she was.

I clenched my jaw. “Missive!” I shouted. “Where are you!?”

My answer came as a bullet.

Something hot and heavy tore through my right shoulder, exploding it into arcs of white plasma. I hissed, teeth gritting as I forced the atoms of my arm to coalesce again. Pain was a nuisance, nothing more.

Wormhole collapsed beside me, barely breathing. Another shot followed, cleaner, sharper, right through my skull. My head jerked back, vision fracturing into electric static. For a brief moment, the world dissolved into sound and light.

Still, I didn’t die. I couldn’t. My thoughts ran faster than the speed of sound.

Sniper. Precision. Nullifier rounds. I’d read this play before.

Hover.

I analyzed the bullet’s angle, traced the shot back through probability, and unleashed a lightning strike at the origin point. The air cracked with power as the bolt left my hand, flattening a row of walls and sending shards of wood flying.

Huh? It felt like I didn’t hit my mark…

My right eye rematerialized with a hiss of flesh knitting back into place. I blinked twice, scanning the room. Tigress was dragging Wormhole away, her claws half-formed, expression set in fear and desperation.

Pathetic. They all were.

Then the air shifted beside me, no sound, no warning, and Missive was suddenly there to my left with perfect timing.  “I’m going to kill myself for real this time,” she said. “So you better back off!”

I turned to her. “Don’t be stupid, Missive. You think I’ll let you?”

She smiled faintly, blood on her lips and madness in her eyes. “You won’t have to.”

Before I could move, before I could discharge even a spark, she raised a gun to her temple.

“Watch.”

The trigger clicked, and the gun went off.

She didn’t reset.

For a moment, I thought time would twist again, that her little trick would pull me back to that same damned moment where Healtouch and Wormhole were still breathing. But no… Missive lay still this time. Her body slackened, her head tilted awkwardly, eyes dull and glassy. The silence that followed was absolute.

I stared at her corpse for several seconds, not in grief but disbelief. I felt… stuck, like my mind refused to register what I was seeing. Then, the shock gave way to something far more familiar.

Annoyance.

And then, rage.

“You—” I hissed, but the word died as I spun around. The air behind me distorted, shimmering with the familiar warping shimmer of a portal. Wormhole.

He was dragging Tigress through it, Guesswork behind them. My fury boiled over as I lunged forward, lightning snapping around my body. The wormhole flickered, and vanished just as I reached it.

All that momentum slammed me into the sand outside the shack. The desert wind hit me like a furnace blast as I buried my hand into the dunes, halting myself in an explosion of grit and thunder. My body glowed white-blue, arcs of electricity dancing across my skin.

“This was your plan?!” I roared into the empty night. “This pathetic, petty game?!”

I stood there, chest heaving, the storm screaming around me. Every nerve in my body was electric with fury. My power surged so high that the grains of sand around me began to vitrify into glass.

I clenched my jaw. “Fine. I’ll just try again.” I clicked my tongue, irritation burning hotter than my plasma. That was when I saw movement.

Through the shattered window of the shack, Missive was watching me. Her face was pale but alive. No gunshot wound. No blood. Her eyes… the same cold clarity of a woman who’d already died too many times.

A grin crept across my lips. “I see,” I muttered. “So, you didn’t kill yourself for real. I was right. You don’t have it in you.” In other words, she merely did that to upset me, maybe to buy time for her friends.

I rose into the air, the sand rippling from the pressure of my aura.

“Your friends got lucky!” I shouted. “If they had stayed for another second, they’d be dead!”

Missive looked out from the cracked window. “But they aren’t.”

I flashed forward, reappearing right before her. My hand closed around her throat before she could blink.

“This is going to hurt.”

She didn’t even flinch.

I grabbed her waist, carried her like a sack of potatoes, and then we shot upward, the air screaming as we broke through the sound barrier. Clouds exploded around us as lightning wrapped my body in a blinding halo. Missive’s skin blackened and peeled as the voltage poured into her.

She was a Regenerator-10. She’d survive. That was the point.

We broke through the sky, rising above the Tenfold Keep. I hovered there, holding her charred body like a broken doll.

Then I let go.

She dropped, lifeless, trailing smoke, and hit the stone courtyard below with a sickening crack. A few seconds later, she stirred again. Her body spasmed, bones snapping back into place, flesh knitting together as she gasped for air, only to die again when the residual electricity in her cells overwhelmed her nervous system.

Another minute passed. She revived again, crawled a few inches, and then collapsed. I floated above her, calm now. The fury had ebbed into satisfaction.

“That ought to teach you,” I said softly, “to never go against me ever again.”

Lightning flared once more in the clouds above, and the desert wind carried the faint scent of ozone and ash.