Episode 5: Sparks and Iron
The new warehouse safehouse creaked under the weight of another restless night. Kevin couldn't sleep. The Mythical Matrix's circuits traced faint glowing patterns across his arms as he paced the upper catwalk. Applehead's sugary stench still clung to his clothes, and her words echoed louder than he wanted to admit.
Peter was downstairs cleaning weapons. Nathan was passed out on a cot, shoulder freshly bandaged. Wyatt kept watch near a broken window, metal pipe resting across his knees.
"Still thinking about fruit salad?" Wyatt called up quietly.
Kevin managed a weak smile. "Among other things."
A low hum suddenly cut through the silence — the sound of electrical wiring vibrating under stress. The warehouse lights flickered. Then, with a sharp crack, every bulb in the building exploded in a shower of sparks.
Peter was on his feet instantly, Iron Tyrant mantle rippling across his skin. "Contact!"
Nathan jolted awake, already weaving defensive illusions. Kevin leaped down from the catwalk, white-blue energy crackling around his fists.
From the shadows near the loading dock stepped two figures.
The first was a man in his mid-twenties wearing a worn electrician's jumpsuit, tool belt still clipped around his waist. His short black hair was messy, and faint blue arcs of electricity danced across his fingertips. He looked as surprised as they were.
"Easy! We're not Pillar scouts," he said quickly, raising his hands. "Name's Derek Crosley. I was just… patrolling the grid. Felt a massive Glimmer spike coming from this place."
Behind him stood a far more imposing figure — a tall, broad-shouldered man clad in dark, segmented armor that looked forged from blackened iron. His face was partially hidden by a heavy helmet, but glowing red eyes burned from within. His presence felt… wrong, like he didn't quite belong in this reality.
"I am Ferrum Ironfist," the armored man rumbled, his voice carrying an unnatural metallic echo. "Pulled from a broken timeline where the Shattering consumed everything. I control iron in all its forms. Derek and I have been watching the White-Blue Heart Pillar's movements for weeks."
Kevin lowered his fists slightly but stayed ready. "You expect us to trust random superheroes who break into our safehouse?"
Derek chuckled nervously, electricity still sparking around him. "Superhero is a strong word. I'm just an electrician who got bonded with a Volt Glimmer during a bad storm two years ago. I keep the city's power from collapsing and stop small-time Wrathborn from frying civilians. Ferrum… well, he literally fell through a timeline rift during a Pillar experiment gone wrong. We've been allies ever since."
Ferrum stepped forward, the concrete floor groaning as iron rebar in the walls subtly bent toward him. "Your Rampager mantle sings across timelines, boy. It is a beacon. The Pillar is accelerating its plans. They seek to use strong Glimmers like yours to pry open the Garden Behind the Fence."
Peter narrowed his eyes. "And why the hell should we team up with timeline-hopping tin man and spark plug here?"
Before anyone could answer, the warehouse walls began to shake. Applehead's sickly-sweet scent returned — stronger this time — mixed with the acrid smell of ozone.
"She's back," Nathan growled. "And she brought friends."
The loading bay doors exploded inward in a spray of fermented pulp and apple seeds. Applehead emerged, her basketball-sized head freshly reformed but scarred with ugly cracks. Flanking her were four lesser Wrathborn — twisted hybrids with fruit-like mutations, all clearly under her control.
"Rampager!" Applehead sang, her carved smile splitting wider. "I brought playmates this time. And I smell new toys~"
Derek's eyes widened. "Holy shit, that's Applehead. I've heard the stories."
Ferrum raised one gauntleted hand. The metal beams and rebar throughout the warehouse tore free and swirled around him like living spears. "Then let us test this alliance."
The battle ignited.
Applehead hurled a barrage of explosive apples while her minions charged. Kevin met them with a destructive wave, shattering two mutants instantly. Peter barreled into another, his Iron Tyrant form clashing brutally.
Derek — Volt — moved like lightning. He thrust his hands forward and unleashed controlled arcs of electricity that chained between the fruit mutants, cooking them from the inside while sparing his new allies. "I can overload their nervous systems if they have any left!"
Ferrum was a walking arsenal. With a gesture, he ripped iron from the warehouse structure and forged it into razor-sharp blades that sliced through Applehead's pulp attacks. He then slammed his fist into the ground, causing iron spikes to erupt beneath one of the larger minions, impaling it completely.
Applehead shrieked with rage and focused on Kevin. She extended multiple vine-stems, trying to wrap and dissolve him in corrosive mash. Kevin roared and channeled the Rampager mantle, shattering the vines — but one grazed his leg, burning deep.
Wyatt rushed in to help, but Applehead swatted him aside.
Nathan hit her with another Mind Labyrinth, but Applehead had grown resistant. "Your tricks are getting boring, illusion boy!"
That was when Derek and Ferrum synchronized.
Derek supercharged the air with electricity while Ferrum manipulated the iron content in Applehead's own mutated body. The combination caused her apple head to spark violently. She convulsed as internal currents fried her from within.
Kevin saw the opening. He leaped through the chaos, circuits blazing white-blue, and delivered a devastating Rampager strike straight to her cracked head. The impact echoed like a gunshot. Applehead's head exploded in a shower of pulp and seeds, her body collapsing into a twitching heap.
The remaining minions fled or were quickly dispatched by the combined group.
Panting, the crew stood among the wreckage. Derek wiped sweat from his brow, electricity fading from his hands. "That… was intense. You guys don't pull punches."
Ferrum lowered his helmet slightly, revealing a scarred, weary face. "The timelines converge here. Your Rampager is the pivot point, Kevin Leister. We will stand with you against the Pillar."
Peter crossed his arms, still in partial metal form. "Fine. But if you two betray us, I'll rip the iron out of your blood myself."
Nathan smirked weakly. "Welcome to the crew, I guess."
Kevin looked at the new allies — the electrician superhero and the man from another timeline — and felt the weight of destiny pressing harder. The White-Blue Heart Pillar was no longer just hunting them.
It was preparing for war.
**New York City, an underpass beneath the FDR**
Elise hadn't stopped vibrating with restrained fury for three days, and Nick had made peace with the fact that she might just hit him again at any given moment, so when the ground under both their feet simply *stopped existing* — no sound, no light, just a sudden, sickening absence of weight — his first thought wasn't fear.
It was mild professional curiosity.
"Okay," Nick said, floating gently upward past a rusted support beam, tie flapping uselessly in an absence of gravity that had no business feeling this calm. "That's new."
Elise didn't share his composure. She was spinning slowly, disoriented, sound rippling uncontrolled off her skin in short sonic bursts that cracked concrete wherever they landed. "Nick — Nick, what is *happening*—"
"No idea. Which is rare for me." He caught a beam, anchored himself, scanning the dark underpass. "Someone's playing with the room."
A voice answered, calm, almost bored, echoing from everywhere and nowhere. "Not the room. Just you two. Isolated field, about forty feet across. Nothing outside it's affected."
A figure dropped from the shadows above — not fell, *descended*, slow and controlled, like he was riding an invisible elevator down through open air. He was young, maybe early twenties, lean, dressed like he'd walked out of a warehouse shift rather than a fight, hands in his jacket pockets, entirely unbothered by the fact that he was hovering three feet off the ground.
"Eli," he said. "Some people call me Gravitox, which I never asked for and don't especially like, but it stuck." He tilted his head at Elise, still spinning slow and furious in the null-weight bubble. "You're loud. Sonically. I felt your resonance from six blocks out — thought you were a threat. Then I felt *him.*" His eyes cut to Nick. "And now I'm a lot more interested than I was a minute ago."
"You floated us into the air to have a conversation?" Elise snapped, voice cracking a support beam somewhere above with the force of it.
"I floated you into the air because power like yours gets noticed, and I wanted the first look before the Pillar got theirs." Eli's expression didn't change, easy and unbothered, but his eyes were sharp, cataloguing. "Relax the gravity's not hostile. I can flip it, kill it, multiply it, redirect it in any direction I want within this field. Right now I'm just... holding you still. Politely."
"Let. Us. Down."
"In a second." Eli glanced at Nick again, and something like genuine respect crossed his face. "You're the Curse. I didn't believe the stories. Man who dies for a hobby and comes back rude every time." A faint, dry smile. "I've got a proposal, and I wanted you both weightless for it, because people posture less when they can't plant their feet."
"Charming technique," Nick said. "Get on with it."
"There's a war coming. White-Blue Heart Pillar's mobilizing harder than they have in a decade — something out west triggered it, some Rampager kid who's apparently strong enough to matter. They're going to need bodies. Strong Glimmers, especially unaligned ones like you two, are going to get either recruited or erased. I'd rather it be neither." Eli spread his hands slightly, and the pressure in the bubble shifted, a slow building weight that made both their bones ache faintly, a demonstration more than a threat. "I'm building something. A crew that survives what's coming instead of getting harvested by it. I want you both in it."
"You always recruit people by making them weightless first?" Elise ground out.
"No," Eli admitted. "Usually it's the opposite — I make people very, very heavy, until they agree to talk. You two get the polite version because I actually like what I'm seeing."
Nick studied him for a long moment — the calm, the casual command of a force most Glimmers spent years failing to master, the total absence of fear in a man currently holding a walking sonic weapon and a resurrection-abuser in the palm of his hand, metaphorically and otherwise.
"Put us down," Nick said, "and I'll hear you out properly. Float me one more minute and I start finding out if you're immune to a curse said in zero gravity."
Something almost like delight flickered across Eli's face. "Fair."
Gravity returned all at once, gentle, controlled, setting them both down on their feet like the whole event had been a courtesy rather than a threat. Elise stumbled once, sound cracking involuntarily off her palms, and Eli didn't flinch, just watched the crack spiderweb harmlessly past him like he'd already calculated exactly where it would land.
"Talk fast," Nick said, arms crossed. "And talk good. I've heard a lot of recruitment pitches from a lot of afterlives. Yours better beat purgatory's."
Eli almost smiled. "Purgatory's pitch was probably better organized than mine. But mine comes with fewer bureaucrats."
Elise let out a short, disbelieving laugh despite herself. "Okay. Fine. You've got five minutes, Gravitox."
"Eli," he corrected, gentle but firm. "Gravitox is the name people scream right before I drop something on them. I'd rather you use the one my mother gave me."
---
**Kurogane Academy, two days later — departures gate, Narita**
The expulsion paperwork had taken four hours, two translators, and one very long silence from Ignis's stepmother that he'd chosen not to interpret as anything at all.
Now he sat in a cracked plastic airport chair beside Lancelot, both of them still faintly singed at the collar, waiting for a flight to a country neither of them had ever heard of a month ago.
"Willowbrook," Lancelot said, reading the ticket with the same flat unbothered tone he read everything. "East Hollow. Sounds like somewhere they'd film a documentary about urban decay."
"You say that like it's a bad thing."
"I say it like it's a *fact.*" Lancelot's blue flame flickered faintly at his knuckles, cold and quiet, a habit he hadn't fully learned to suppress yet. "My parents made it sound like a punishment. A place they send Glimmers too troublesome for civilized schools."
"Guess that's us now."
"Guess so." For once, there wasn't any real venom in it. Just the tired acknowledgment of two boys who'd burned down a piece of their old lives together and hadn't figured out yet whether that made them enemies or something stranger.
Neither of them noticed the birds until they were boarding.
Two shapes circled high above the tarmac, riding the heat off the jet exhaust — one black as an oil slick, one bone white, both far too large and far too patient to be ordinary gulls. They didn't caw. They didn't scatter when ground crew waved orange batons beneath them. They simply watched, heads tilting in perfect unison, tracking Ignis and Lancelot up the boarding stairs with an attention that felt less like animal curiosity and more like surveillance.
"Ignis." Lancelot's voice had gone quiet, flat in a different way than usual. "Don't look up right away. Just — feel that?"
Ignis felt it. A pressure behind his eyes, faint and cold, like something ancient had just filed him away in a ledger somewhere far beyond the airport.
He glanced up anyway, couldn't help it. The black bird met his eyes first — and for one impossible second its stare didn't feel like a bird's at all, depthless and old, like looking into a well that led somewhere that had never seen sunlight.
Then both birds peeled off in perfect mirrored arcs and vanished into the gray sky.
"What was that," Ignis said, more statement than question, stepping into the jet bridge with his skin crawling.
"I don't know." Lancelot glanced back once more at the empty sky before the door sealed behind them. "But I don't think it was random. Things like that don't watch people by accident."
---
Somewhere over the Pacific, six hours into the flight, Ignis woke from a shallow doze to find Lancelot wide awake beside him, forehead against the window, watching the clouds with an expression Ignis had never seen on him before — not boredom, not superiority.
Something closer to unease.
"They're still out there," Lancelot said quietly, without turning. "Following the plane. I can feel them. Same cold. Same weight behind the eyes."
Ignis followed his gaze out the window. Far off in the moonlit cloud bank, two small shapes kept perfect, silent pace with the aircraft — one black, one white, wingtips catching starlight in a way no ordinary bird's ever could.
"Huginn and Muninn," Ignis murmured, the names arriving in his skull the same unbidden way *Psoglav* once had, ancient knowledge surfacing from somewhere beneath conscious memory. "Thought and Memory."
Lancelot finally looked at him, blue flame ghosting faint and cold along his knuckles in the dark cabin. "Whose thought. Whose memory."
Neither of them had an answer. Outside the window, the two ravens flew on in perfect silence, patient as gravediggers, all the way to East Hollow.
---
End of Episode 5