"Levi! You wanna give me a hand over here?"
The voice came from across the factory floor, cutting through the steady noise of machinery and the low hum of the overhead lights that flickered slightly every time the heavy press activated on the east side of the building.
Levi was already moving before the sentence finished. "Yeah sure." He crossed the floor in a few strides and got his hands under the iron beam beside his colleague, taking the weight onto his shoulder in one smooth motion. They walked it to the rack together and set it down.
The man beside him exhaled hard. "Thanks man. That one always gets me."
"Don't mention it." Levi rolled his shoulder once and checked the clock on the wall. "My hours are up anyway. See you tomorrow."
He walked toward the exit, pulling his jacket off the hook by the door. At the front desk, the cashier was already sliding the envelope across the counter before he reached it.
"Time's up Levi."
"Yeah yeah." He picked it up, opened the flap, and counted quickly, thumbing through the notes with practiced speed. One week. Right amount. He tucked it into his jacket pocket. "Thanks. See you next week."
He raised one hand over his shoulder as he pushed through the door and didn't look back at the chorus of goodbyes that followed him out.
The night air of the Republic City of Eden hit him immediately cool, carrying the distant sounds of the city settling into its evening rhythm. Traffic somewhere nearby. Music from a window above the street. The ordinary sounds of a place that didn't know or care that his feet hurt and his shoulders ached and he had been on his feet since six in the morning.
He unhooked his bike from the rack outside and stood there for a moment with his helmet in his hands. Then he remembered.
"Ella's ice cream."
He pulled the helmet on and swung onto the bike.
My name is Levi. Seventeen years old. No parents they've been gone long enough that the absence has become its own kind of normal, the way a missing tooth eventually stops being something your tongue searches for. No school either. Not because he couldn't sit in a classroom, but because classrooms don't pay and work does, and someone has to keep the lights on and food in the refrigerator. That someone turned out to be him.
In a world where one third of humanity carries a Talent where the streets of Eden are full of people who can manipulate fire or bend metal or move faster than the eye can track Levi has nothing. No ability. No awakening. No sign that anything supernatural has ever considered him worth visiting. Just two hands, a factory job, and a sister who deserves better than the life they ended up with.
He rolled the bike to a stop in front of the truck parked on the corner of Fifth and Render white sides, blue lettering, the small generator on the back humming quietly.
The man inside looked up and grinned immediately. "Levi. You're back."
"When have I ever missed a week?"
"Never. Same as always?"
"Same as always."
"That sister of yours is lucky you know that?"
Levi leaned on the counter. "She'd disagree. She thinks I'm annoying."
The man laughed. "I've got three of my own. I know exactly that feeling." He set the finished cup on the counter. "Vanilla. Extra on the sides."
"You're the best." Levi paid, pocketed the change, and tucked the cup carefully inside his jacket against his chest where the warmth of his body would keep it from losing too much cold on the ride home.
He pulled away from the curb and headed south.
The neighbourhood Levi lived in didn't have a formal name on any city planning document that anyone used in polite conversation. People who lived there called it the Bottom not with bitterness exactly, just with the specific accuracy of people who had stopped expecting the description to change anytime soon. The buildings were old. The streets were narrow. The lights on the corners worked approximately half the time. It was the kind of place the rest of the Republic City of Eden preferred not to think about too carefully, existing at the edge of the map the way inconvenient truths exist at the edge of conversations.
Levi had grown up here. He knew every crack in every pavement, every shortcut between the buildings, every neighbour who left their window open at night and every one who didn't.
He parked the bike at its usual spot in front of the building entrance, locking it to the drainpipe the way he always did. He pulled his helmet off and hung it on the handlebar, then looked up at the building. Three floors. Their apartment on the second. The light in the window was on, which meant Ella was awake, which meant she had probably already eaten whatever was left in the refrigerator and was now watching something on the small television he had bought secondhand six months ago and fixed himself over the course of three evenings.
He smiled slightly. "What a day." He looked down at the ice cream tucked against his jacket. "At least I got you this."
He took the stairs.
"Ella I'm home"
The kitchen knife hit the floor.
The sound reached him before he finished the sentence sharp, metallic, the specific sound of something dropped rather than set down and his feet stopped moving on the landing without him consciously deciding to stop.
"Ella?"
Silence there was no response.He moved.
He hit the door at speed and it swung open hard, and what he found on the other side of it stopped him completely for one terrible frozen second.
Two men. Both masked. One had Ella from behind, his arm locked across her chest, one hand pressed over her mouth so hard her head was tilted back at an angle that looked wrong. Her eyes were wide and fixed on Levi with an expression that shifted the moment she saw him fear giving way briefly to something like relief before the situation reasserted itself and the relief disappeared.
The second man was standing in front of her. His right arm had transformed the skin and muscle replaced entirely by something dark and metallic, sharpened to a blade edge that caught the apartment light as he held it steady against Ella's stomach. Not touching. Just there. Just making the situation absolutely clear.
Levi's brain processed all of it in under a second.
"NOOO….What are you DOING…."
He moved forward.The blade man turned, smooth and fast, completely unbothered, and his left leg swung in a clean arc that caught Levi directly in the stomach before he covered half the distance. The impact lifted him off his feet and sent him backward across the room. He hit the wooden chair behind him and went through it, the structure splintering under the impact, and landed on the floor in the wreckage with all the air gone from his body at once.
He lay there, trying to move. His arms pushed against the floor and his body didn't respond the way it was supposed to.
Get up. GET UP.
He turned his head.
The blade man had already turned back to Ella.The metal arm drew back once, then drove forward.
The sound it made going into her chest was something Levi knew he would never stop hearing for the rest of his life.
Ella didn't scream. She couldn't the hand was still over her mouth. Her body just changed, the way things change when something fundamental has been altered. The man holding her lowered her to the floor slowly, almost carefully, which made it worse.
Blood spread across the floor beneath her.
"We Can't let you manifest that thing," the blade man said, his voice completely level. "Boss's orders."
Levi's arms were stretched forward across the floor. His hands were shaking. His legs weren't responding, and he didn't understand why, but his body was simply refusing and he had nothing to fight that refusal with except his voice.
"Why…" The word came out broken. "Why are you doing this to us? What did we do? What did I do?" His voice cracked completely on the last word. "That girl is all I've got."
The blade man glanced at his colleague. "Kill him too?"
The other man shook his head. "Boss only asked for the girl. Job's done. We leave."
He stepped toward the door, stepping over Levi's outstretched hand without acknowledging it, then paused and looked down. "Unfortunate timing. Coming home when you did."
Levi grabbed his ankle with both hands, everything he had left. "Tomorrow is her birthday. She turns fifteen tomorrow. She's never done anything to anyone. She just wanted, Why did you do this to me?"
The kick came from above, slamming into Levi's face. The world went sideways. He hit the wall and slid down it, blood running warm from somewhere above his ear.
"I said we should kill him from the start," the blade man muttered.
"Boss didn't ask"
"Things happen during missions. Besides… their bloodline doesn't deserve to exist. They're a disease."
The second man's palm opened upward, and an eye appeared in the center of it, blinking once. From it, a small bottle rose, and he closed his fingers around it.
"Poison Talent," the blade man said. "Why not just use the blade?"
"This is painless," the man replied, crouching in front of Levi. "Least I can do."
He grabbed Levi's throat and lifted him effortlessly. Levi's hands clawed at his wrist, useless. The cap came off the bottle.
"There's no point," the man said quietly, forcing Levi's jaw open. The green liquid went down.
Levi dropped.For two seconds, nothing happened.Then it started.
The burning began in his stomach and spread outward, flooding his system like something had been lit inside him. The green showed through his veins, crawling up his arms, across his chest.
He screamed.Then something else answered.The green didn't just spread it was pushed back. Burned from within.Light.It rose beneath his skin, warm at first, then hotter, then unbearable his entire body beginning to glow with the color of something ancient and alive.
The pain multiplied.
"Let's go," the blade man said sharply. "Now."
"We should"
"NOW."
They moved.
"NOOO—!"
Levi's hand stretched forward.And then there was only light.The explosion didn't build. It simply existed instant, overwhelming, absolute. White-gold force erupted from Levi's body in every direction, tearing through walls, buildings, streets. The night lit up like a second sun.
One of the men vanished completely destroyed and burn to pieces. The other escaped, barely.When the light faded, Levi was on his knees in the wreckage of what had been his apartment.
Thirty kilometres of the Republic City of Eden the street of his house had been destroyed.
Sirens were already rising. Helicopters cutting through the sky.Levi didn't move. He didn't speak. He didn't look back.He just knelt there, hands pressed to the broken floor, the fading light still flickering across his skin as the world closed in around him.