Episode 6: Sour Harvest
The warehouse still smelled of ozone and burnt pulp when the real attack came.
It started with a low, mocking chorus of fruity giggles echoing through the broken walls. Applehead slithered back in first — her basketball-sized head freshly regrown but lopsided, scarred from the previous fight. Her arms ended in jagged stumps where new growth was already sprouting.
"You took my favorite head," she hissed, voice dripping with acid sweetness. "So I brought the whole orchard."
Behind her stepped the Fruit Wrathborn — six twisted siblings bonded by the same sick branch of the Shattering.
Sour Squeeze, a lanky woman with yellow-veined skin, whose fingers dripped corrosive lemon acid. Bahan, a squat, slippery man who left banana peels wherever he walked, turning the floor into death traps. Cher-Cheery, a hyperactive girl with cherry-red hair and bombs made of explosive pitted cherries. Mano-Mana, a bulky brute whose mango constructs were heavy, sticky, and smelled sickeningly ripe. Straw, a wiry speedster covered in tiny strawberry seeds that she could fire like buckshot. Blue, a cold-eyed sniper whose blueberry orbs floated around her like homing grenades.
Applehead raised her regenerating hands. "Kill the Rampager's friends. Bring me the boy alive. I want to bite his power."
The Fruit Wrathborn attacked as one.
Lemon acid sprayed across the room in pressurized jets. Banana peels multiplied underfoot, sending Wyatt and Nathan sliding. Explosive cherries rained down like grenades. Mango mash slammed into Ferrum like wrecking balls. Strawberry seeds shredded the air, and blueberry orbs detonated with blue bursts.
Kevin activated the Rampager mantle immediately. White-blue circuits blazed as he shattered a wave of lemon acid mid-air. "Not today!"
Derek (Volt) lit up the battlefield, chaining electricity through the wet fruit constructs, electrocuting several at once. Ferrum Ironfist tore iron beams from the ceiling and forged them into spinning shields, protecting the group while launching iron spikes at the attackers.
Peter Shotstock stood at the front like a wall.
A barrage of strawberry seeds and cherry bombs hammered into his chest. He didn't flinch. His Iron Tyrant mantle surged — but this time something deeper revealed itself. The metal sheen on his skin wasn't just armor.
It was super durability pushed to an insane extreme.
Bullets of fruit, acid sprays, explosions — nothing broke his skin. He laughed darkly as cherry shrapnel bounced off him and lemon acid sizzled harmlessly on his shoulders.
"So that's what you've been hiding, old man," Nathan shouted while weaving illusions.
Peter grinned savagely. "Iron Tyrant lets me turn hard. But the real gift the Shattering gave me? I just don't fucking break."
He charged straight through the chaos like a living tank.
Bahan tried to trip him with banana peels. Peter stomped through them without slipping, grabbed the slippery man by the throat, and crushed his windpipe with one squeeze. Bahan's body went limp.
Sour Squeeze unleashed a concentrated torrent of lemon acid directly into Peter's face. He walked through it, eyes burning but unblinking, and drove his fist through her chest. Lemon pulp exploded outward as she died gurgling.
Cher-Cheery screamed and pelted him with dozens of cherry bombs. The explosions lit up the warehouse, but when the smoke cleared Peter was still standing, scorched but unbroken. He hurled a chunk of rebar like a spear, impaling her through the heart.
Mano-Mana tried to crush him with a giant mango fist construct. Peter caught it, crushed the mango in his grip, then ripped the brute's arm off and beat him to death with it.
Straw tried to run circles around him, peppering him with seed fire. Peter simply stood there, absorbing everything, then snatched her out of the air mid-sprint and snapped her neck with brutal efficiency.
Blue attempted to stay back and snipe with blueberry orbs. Derek and Ferrum teamed up — Volt supercharging the orbs while Ironfist redirected them straight back at her. She was blown apart by her own power.
Only Applehead remained.
She shrieked in fury and lunged at Kevin with newly grown vine-arms. Peter intercepted her. With a roar, he activated his full mantle. His hands hardened into living metal blades.
"You like playing with your hands, fruit freak?"
Peter moved faster than his bulk suggested. He slashed both of Applehead's arms clean off at the elbows in two brutal strokes. Juice and pulp sprayed violently as she screamed, her severed limbs twitching on the ground.
Applehead staggered back, apple head cracking wider in agony. Kevin didn't give her time to recover. The Rampager mantle surged violently. He slammed both glowing fists into her torso, then unleashed a focused destructive wave at point-blank range.
Applehead's body exploded into pulp and seeds, scattering across the warehouse floor. This time, nothing regenerated.
The Fruit Wrathborn were wiped out.
Silence fell over the devastated warehouse. Peter stood in the middle of the carnage, breathing heavily, blood and fruit juice dripping from his metallic skin. The super durability slowly faded back to normal flesh, but the revelation hung in the air.
Kevin stared at him. "You… you really are unbreakable."
Peter spat out a chunk of cherry pit. "Not unbreakable. Just too stubborn to die. Comes in handy when you've got a crew of kids with god-powers and a death cult chasing you."
Wyatt helped Nathan to his feet. Derek and Ferrum surveyed the mess.
Ferrum's deep voice rumbled. "This was no random attack. The Pillar is sending its pets to soften you up. The real force is coming."
Nathan wiped pulp from his face. "Then we hit them first. The Garden Behind the Fence… we need to find it before they do."
Kevin looked down at his glowing hands. The Mythical Matrix felt heavier than ever.
The war was no longer about survival.
It was about choosing what kind of monster he would become.
---
**New York City, a rooftop water tower, two nights after the recruitment**
"So what exactly am I looking for," Elise asked, perched on the tower's rusted ladder, sound humming low and restless under her skin, "because you said 'anomaly' and 'anomaly' is not a location, Eli."
"Anomaly's accurate." Eli stood at the tower's edge, hands in his pockets, entirely unbothered by the sixty-foot drop beneath his heels — gravity was, after all, a suggestion he happened to disagree with. "Grid's been reporting a dead zone three blocks wide. No signal, no birds, no rats. Something's sitting in it that the city doesn't want to acknowledge exists."
Nick lit a cigarette he had no intention of finishing, purely for the theater of it. "Something ancient?"
"Something *wrong*," Eli corrected. "There's a difference."
The difference introduced itself forty feet below, climbing out of a subway grate like it had all the time in the world.
It looked like a dog's skull stretched too long and wearing smoke as a coat — iron-black plating fused to a body that flickered between solid and vapor, one burning eye set dead-center where a snout should have split. It didn't walk so much as *arrive*, each footstep landing in two places at once, like reality hadn't fully decided where the thing actually was.
"Okay," Elise said, sound cracking involuntarily off her palms in pure startled reflex. "That is not a dog."
"Psoglav," Nick said, the word surfacing in his throat from somewhere he didn't remember filing it, old and certain, the way afterlife-knowledge always arrived — uninvited, absolute. "I've met its cousins. Purgatory keeps a few on a leash for parts of the border nobody wants to guard themselves."
Eli's easy calm finally cracked, just slightly. "That thing isn't from this Earth. It's not from *any* Earth I've cataloged." He dropped off the tower's edge without hesitation, gravity bending obediently around him on the way down, cushioning his landing into something closer to a held breath than a fall. "Which means it came through a tear. Which means the Shattering's still *active* somewhere close."
The Psoglav's burning eye rotated toward them with a wet mechanical click, and it screamed — a sound like a hinge dragged the length of a cathedral — and launched.
Elise met it first. She opened her mouth and let out a single, sustained note, pure focused sound turned into a physical wall, and the Psoglav's charge crumpled against it like hitting a car at highway speed. It skidded back, smoking, iron plating cracked along one flank.
"That's new," she said, breathless, delighted despite herself. "I didn't know I could *do* that."
"Now you do." Nick was already moving, curses building low in his throat, words he'd learned in realms that didn't have names humans could pronounce. He spat one out — three syllables, ancient and ugly — and the Psoglav's remaining eye split open in a shower of black ichor, the creature shrieking as something inside its skull simply *stopped working*.
Eli finished it. He raised one hand, and the Psoglav's own weight betrayed it — gravity around its body multiplying in a silent, crushing wave, folding the creature down into itself with a sound like a car compactor eating a tin can, iron plating buckling, smoke-flesh collapsing into a dense, ugly knot of matter that hit the pavement and did not get back up.
Silence, except for distant traffic and Elise's ragged breathing.
"Okay," she said finally. "Somebody explain what the hell that thing *was*, and don't say Psoglav again, because that's a name, not an explanation."
Eli crouched by the smoking husk, studying it with the same careful attention he gave everything, more scientist than soldier in that moment. "You know what a Glimmer actually is? Not the power — the *shard* itself."
"Piece of the dead thing that held the world together. Falling star nonsense." Nick shrugged. "Standard bedtime story."
"Standard bedtime story's missing a chapter." Eli stood, wiping ichor off his fingers with visible distaste. "The Shards aren't clean. When the Primordial Pillar died, it didn't just shatter into pretty radiant fragments — it shattered *infected.* Something was living in it. Something that came apart with everything else and got scattered across a billion pieces of light." He nodded down at the husk. "We call it the X virus, in the circles that actually study this instead of just profiting off it. It's in every shard, every bonding. Most of the time it just... rides along quiet. Gives someone strange eyes, sharper teeth, skin that doesn't quite look human anymore under fluorescent light. Cosmetic. Ignorable."
"And the other times?" Elise asked, already knowing she wasn't going to like the answer.
"The other times, the virus wins the argument with whoever it's bonded to." Eli looked at the collapsed Psoglav husk, something bleak passing behind his eyes. "You get things like this. Bodies the shard didn't just empower — it *rewrote*, until there's nothing recognizably human, or animal, or anything left underneath. Just X, wearing a shape it found convenient." He looked up at them both, grim. "Every monster you've fought that didn't used to be a person? That's not a mutation. That's a virus that finished the job."
Nick flicked ash off his cigarette, quiet for a long moment. "And the Pillar? Seraphine's people?"
"Harvest the strong ones before the virus wins," Eli said. "That's the sales pitch, anyway. Whether that's mercy or just better bookkeeping for their own war depends who you ask." He turned, already walking, gravity rippling faint and unconscious around his footsteps like a held threat. "Come on. If there's a tear active in this city, I want eyes on it before the Pillar gets there first."
---
**East Hollow, Willowbrook — arrivals gate, four hours after landing**
The airport smelled like fried food and diesel, and East Hollow's skyline through the terminal windows looked exactly like what Lancelot had promised: gray, tired, honestly built.
"Charming," Lancelot said, unbothered as ever, watching a pigeon fight another pigeon over a dropped fry outside the window. "This is where destiny sent us."
"Destiny sent us here because we got expelled for setting a courtyard on fire," Ignis said. "Let's not dress it up."
They were still arguing about whose fault the courtyard actually was when a shadow passed low and fast over the parking lot outside — too fast, too controlled to be a plane, low enough that a startled shuttle driver actually ducked.
"The hell was that," Ignis muttered, and then the automatic doors hissed open and a boy came skidding in sideways at a dead sprint, sneakers smoking faintly at the soles, arms windmilling for balance he clearly hadn't planned for.
"OKAY THAT WAS NOT MY BEST LANDING," the boy announced to the entire terminal, to nobody in particular, apparently completely unbothered by the fact that half the arrivals lounge was now staring at him. He straightened up, grinning, lanky and sunburnt with wind-wrecked hair that stuck up in six directions, looking maybe sixteen and entirely delighted with his own existence. "Sorry! Sorry, everyone, false alarm, no crime happened, I'm just — testing something. Aerodynamics. It's a whole thing."
Lancelot stared at him with the flat, deeply unimpressed expression he usually reserved specifically for Ignis. "Did you just fly into an airport."
"Did I—" The boy blinked, then laughed, delighted, jabbing a thumb at his own chest. "Okay, yeah, technically, but in my defense the airspace laws are *super* unclear on personal flight, nobody's actually updated them since like, the Shattering, so honestly this is a gray area and I stand by my gray area." He stuck out a hand toward them both, grinning ear to ear. "Theseus Wing. Everyone just calls me Wing, 'cause obviously." He wiggled his fingers meaningfully, and for half a second faint shimmering lines of pressurized air curled visibly off his knuckles like heat haze. "You two look extremely 'just got expelled and flown across an ocean,' which, big same, honestly, welcome to East Hollow."
"How do you know we got expelled," Ignis said, wary.
"Lucky guess! Everyone who lands here looks exactly like that." Wing was already walking backward toward the exit, waving for them to follow with the easy confidence of someone who'd never once considered that people might not want to be led somewhere by a stranger. "Also I was kind of, uh, sent to get you? Long story, very boring, involves a guy named Peter who scares me a normal amount, and also possibly a crew that's gonna want to meet the new fire kid and the — " he squinted at Lancelot's still-faintly-smoking knuckles, delighted " — oh sick, is that *blue* fire, that's so much cooler than regular fire, no offense," he added quickly to Ignis, not sounding sorry at all.
"None taken," Ignis said flatly, already regretting every decision that led here.
Lancelot, for the first time since the lake, looked almost entertained. "I like him. He's an idiot."
"I get that a lot," Wing said cheerfully, shouldering open the terminal's exit doors, East Hollow's gray sky and rust-colored skyline spreading out beyond him. "C'mon. Car's this way. Well — car's *near* here, I kind of just flew ahead of it because sitting in traffic is a war crime and I refuse to participate."
Outside, past the tired concrete and the smell of jet fuel, the East Hollow skyline waited under a bruised evening sky — cranes frozen mid-motion over half-built towers, faint blue-white light pulsing somewhere deep in the city's industrial heart like a heartbeat nobody had asked to hear.
Ignis felt it before he understood it: the same cold, watching pressure he'd felt at the airport back in Tokyo, patient and ancient, settling now over an entire city instead of two boys on a jet bridge.
Somewhere above the rooftops, unseen, two shapes — one black, one white — banked silently into the smog and were gone.
"Welcome to East Hollow," Wing said again, grinning, utterly oblivious to the weight pressing down on the skyline behind him. "Try not to die on your first week. Statistically it happens *a lot.*"
--
End of Episode 6