The old temple steps were quiet that afternoon, moss-slick stone worn smooth by a hundred years of pilgrims, the kind of forgotten place teenagers claimed for themselves precisely because no one else wanted it anymore.
Joshi sat with her knees pulled to her chest, staring at her own hands like she didn't recognize them.
"It started an hour ago," she said, voice tight. "Right after chem class. My skin feels too warm. Like there's a furnace under it that only I can feel."
"Maybe you're just sick," Rehan offered, sitting beside her, reaching for her hand out of habit more than diagnosis. "Fever, probably. I'll walk you home, we'll get your mom to—"
Her palm ignited.
Not with heat — with light. A thin, crimson-gold shimmer bled up through her skin like ink spreading through water, veins of impossible color threading up her forearm, and both of them stared at it in identical, wordless horror.
"Rehan," Joshi whispered, "what is happening to me—"
The temple bell, untouched by any hand, began to ring on its own.
And the sky above them cracked open.
Not the violent, apocalyptic tear Rehan would one day become intimately familiar with — this was smaller, cleaner, more clinical, three seams of white light unfolding neatly above the temple courtyard like a formal invitation being extended. Figures descended through them, robed in ceremonial white and gold, each one radiating an aura so dense the surrounding air visibly bent around their footsteps.
Aura Wielders. Sanctioned hunters of the old world order, tasked with a single, brutal mandate: locate any mortal whose body had begun manifesting a divine bloodline authority, and neutralize it before it could mature into something the world's fragile balance of power couldn't contain.
Joshi's crimson-gold light — the first stirring of what Rehan would only understand years later as a fragment of the Scarlet lineage — had been detected the moment it flickered into existence.
"Confirmed manifestation," the lead wielder said flatly, not even looking at Joshi as a person, only as a threat classification. "Scarlet-origin resonance. Termination authorized."
"Wait—" Rehan scrambled in front of her, arms spread, seventeen years old and utterly, catastrophically powerless against beings who could have erased the entire temple with a thought. "She didn't do anything! She doesn't even know what's happening to her!"
"That is precisely the danger," the wielder replied, unmoved. "An untrained Scarlet-origin vessel is a catastrophe waiting to happen. We have seen what happens when this bloodline is left to mature unsupervised. We do not intend to repeat history."
"Please," Rehan said, and there was no dignity left in his voice, none of the composed fury he would one day wear like armor — just raw, desperate begging from a boy who had nothing to offer the universe except the truth. "I'll do anything. Take me instead. Bind her powers, seal them, I don't care — just don't kill her. She's just a person. She has exams next week. She hasn't even told her mother she loves someone yet—"
Joshi's hand found his shoulder from behind, trembling.
"Rehan," she said quietly. "It's okay."
"It is not okay—"
"I'm scared," she admitted, voice cracking, "but I don't want your begging to be the last thing I remember about you. Stand up. Please."
He didn't stand up.
That was when a second seam of light split open above the first three, and a lone figure stepped through — not robed in ceremonial white like the others, but in simple dark travel clothes, an ornate blade sheathed across his back, his presence somehow both quieter and infinitely heavier than the wielders surrounding him.
The lead wielder immediately dropped into a respectful half-bow. "Soul Wielder Li Wei. We did not request reinforcement."
"You didn't need to," Li Wei said, his eyes settling on Rehan with something between pity and clinical assessment. "I felt this resonance from three provinces away. Scarlet-origin, this strong, this early — it deserves proper judgment, not a field execution by junior wielders."
He looked down at Rehan, still kneeling, still shielding a girl he had no power whatsoever to actually protect.
"You wish to save her," Li Wei said. It wasn't a question. "Then earn it. Challenge me. If you can land a single strike against me, I will personally intervene and have her bloodline sealed instead of terminated. If you cannot..."
He let the sentence finish itself in silence.
Rehan rose to his feet on legs that barely held him, fists already shaking, entirely unaware that a Sovereign's dormant authority slept somewhere deep inside his own bloodline, still years away from ever waking — leaving him, in this moment, nothing more than an ordinary, terrified boy about to fight a war he had no possible way of winning.
"Okay," Rehan said anyway. "Then I'll earn it."