Chapter 251

“I can’t believe we’re doing this again,” Annie said, gesturing at the doorway. “Seriously?”

Alexander raised an eyebrow. “Why not? It worked perfectly against Max and the others.”

“I don’t want to be known as the Janitor Closet Escape Crew!”

The portal inside the cleaning room finished forming.

Augustus stepped back, closing the door behind him. He nodded to Alexander. “Ready to go.” Then he turned to Annie. “And having an exfil is always a good idea.”

Alexander made for the elevator, helmet tucked under his arm. His senses stretched across the building, then beyond it, reaching through concrete and steel and dead wiring until the entire city opened up beneath his awareness.

Nothing. No electrical activity. No powered systems. No signals, no broadcasts, no hum of infrastructure. The city was dead. Every circuit cold, every grid line flat. Whatever had happened here, it had been thorough.

Six biological signatures remained, not including the four members of Grimnir. All of them clustered east of where they were.

He rounded a corner. Annie fell into step beside him. Augustus and Talia followed, their armor catching the light filtering through the building’s windows. The pieces had been specially designed for heat and fire resistance, ceramic-layered plates over insulated underweave. Talia’s was lighter, fitted for mobility. Augustus’s was heavier across the shoulders and chest, with reinforced panels that could absorb thermal shock.

Annie wore what she always wore. She was her own armor.

Alexander stopped in front of the elevator. The doors were closed. The indicator panel above them was dark.

Annie walked past him, reached out, and jabbed the call button. Once. Twice. Three times.

Something pulsed along the thread between them. Alexander felt it move, not from him but through him, flowing from somewhere deeper than his powers, and into the dead building’s wiring.

The elevator hummed. Somewhere below, machinery ground into motion. Cables tightened. The indicator above the doors flickered, then lit up. A number began to climb.

Alexander turned to the others.

“Listen. There’s something I haven’t discussed with you yet about this whole Divinity thing.” He paused. “There’s a chance Flashpoint has already crossed the threshold, even if he doesn’t know it. And if that’s the case, I need to be the one who kills him.”

Augustus and Talia exchanged a glance. Annie’s eyes narrowed.

“Why?” Augustus asked. “Is this to do with the secret you and Max are keeping?”

Alexander nodded. “Some of us have these golden threads connecting us to other people.” He held up a hand before Annie could speak. “We don’t know exactly what they are, but we have ideas. They’re definitely connected to Divinity.”

The elevator dinged and the doors opened. They stepped inside. Annie reached over and tapped the top floor button until the doors closed and the elevator began to rise.

Alexander continued. “I’m still figuring out what they do.” He glanced at Annie. “But apparently they let you call an elevator in a city that has no power.”

Annie looked at the buttons. Then back at Alexander. “I thought you were just being all Machine God-y.”

He shook his head. “The elevator answered on its own.”

Annie stepped away from the panel. “That’s kinda creepy.”

Augustus folded his arms. “You’re sharing your powers somehow? Is that what it means to be Divine?”

“I don’t know. Maybe that’s part of it.” Alexander watched the floor numbers climb. “But the Lost Prophet was doing the opposite. He was taking from everyone who feared him.” He shrugged. “That’s why I need to be the one who kills Flashpoint. If he’s crossed the threshold, then when I kill him, I’ll gain a piece of his power. And I’ll inherit some of his threads. Probably.”

The elevator hummed around them. Nobody spoke.

Talia broke the silence. “Is that what happened with the Lost Prophet?”

Alexander nodded. “Max and I both got something. And we came away with a lot more threads than we had before.”

Annie frowned. “So killing a god gives you their god-juice?”

Augustus made a face. “Let’s never call it that again.”

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“Agreed,” Talia said.

Alexander sighed. “Max, King, and I have been discussing it when we could. Our working theory is that the threads are connections between people and the Divine. Trust, aspiration, safety, fear. Positive or negative. Maybe both matter.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Still unclear on how someone becomes Divine though.”

“How did you get threads from the Lost Prophet, then?” Augustus asked.

“That’s where it gets complicated. Max and I already had our own threads. And King has proposed that worship requires a powerful emotion directed toward a Divine. My threads feel like trust. Maximilian says his feel like people aspiring to be more. King says his feel like safety.” He took a breath. “And the Lost Prophet said his felt like terror and fear.”

Talia’s voice was quiet. “You think the fear people felt for the Lost Prophet drowned out whatever connection they might have had to you, or Maximilian, or King. And when you killed him...”

“They had nowhere else to go,” Alexander said. “Maybe they went to the next Divine they believed in the most. We didn’t inherit all of them though. Most of them just… vanished.”

The elevator climbed in silence.

“What did you get?” Annie asked.

“Something that makes my blood inviolable, whatever that means.”

The elevator came to a stop with a ding, and the doors opened. Alexander stepped out and made for the stairwell leading to the rooftop. The others followed.

“What do you think happens if we kill him?” Augustus asked.

“I don’t know. It’s the not knowing that has me worried.”

“Do you really think he’s the Eternal Flame?” Annie asked.

“I’m not waiting around to find out,” Alexander said. “Maximilian likely earned his golden threads through years of being a good superhero. King’s are mostly from the people of Mars. Mine probably came from telling people the truth.”

“You think if he is a Divine, he’ll have achieved something similar with all the touring AEGIS had him doing,” Talia said.

Alexander waved his hand at the door. The locking mechanism disengaged with a thought, then the door swung open with another pulse of power. “Yes.”

Alexander stepped onto the rooftop, made his way to the edge, and stopped.

Baton Rouge spread out beneath him in every direction. A city built for a quarter million people, now holding six.

The skyline was intact. Most of the buildings still stood, windows unbroken, walls upright. From a distance, it might have looked normal. A city caught in a power outage, waiting for the lights to come back on.

Then the details registered.

The streets were scorched. Block after block of blackened asphalt, the burn patterns running in long, straight lines that followed the road grid. Sidewalks charred to the curb. Storefronts with their facades melted or peeled back where the heat had been intense enough to warp metal and glass. Cars sat where their owners had left them, paint blistered, tires fused to the road surface. Some had burned down to the frame.

Flashpoint’s work. He’d been close enough to respond when the Lost Prophet’s attack hit. Baton Rouge had needed him because one of its own heroes, a blood manipulator who went by Red Haze, had been among the infected. His powers had let him spread it across the entire city in minutes. A red haze, literally, settling over the streets and into the lungs of everyone who breathed it.

The other local heroes had put him down, with Flashpoint’s help. But the infection had already done its work. When Red Haze died, so did everyone connected to him. Some interaction between his powers and the Lost Prophet’s parasitic network. Alexander had read the reports. The clinical language hadn’t prepared him for what the aftermath looked like from thirty stories up.

Flashpoint had stayed to burn the dead. That was the official reason at the time. The real reason was the System gateway, sitting just north of the city center, pulsing in Alexander’s awareness. The local guild had been handling that, but with AEGIS dissolving around them, the chain of command had rotted. Nobody was issuing orders. Nobody was rotating assignments.

The guild remained in their compound a couple of blocks from the gateway, close enough to respond if anything came through, and that was about the extent of things now. Six signatures.

All of them Tier 2.

One noticeably stronger than the others.

Flashpoint.

Alexander’s gaze tracked across the burn patterns again. The scorched streets formed a rough boundary. Inside it, nothing was burning. Outside it, a few spot fires still smoldered in buildings and lots where the flames had spread beyond the original burn lines.

Inside the boundary, the fires obeyed. Outside it, they didn’t.

He’d suspected it from the intelligence reports. Now he was looking at the evidence. Flashpoint had a Domain. Or something close to one. An area of absolute authority over fire, where flames did exactly what he wanted and nothing more. The clean edges of the burn patterns were too precise for conventional pyrokinesis. No superhuman had that level of control over an area that large without something deeper backing it.

Which meant Flashpoint was further along than they’d hoped. But at Tier 2, not as far along as he’d worried.

Augustus stepped up beside him, arms crossing slowly as his gaze swept the city. He said nothing. The set of his jaw said enough.

Annie moved to Alexander’s other side. She glanced at Talia. “You said it was bad, but...” She trailed off. “What I imagined was nowhere near this.”

Talia’s voice was quiet. “This was one of the worst hit cities in the country. Red Haze was a real hero. But his blood manipulation combined with the Lost Prophet’s infection meant the civilian population never had a chance.”

Alexander looked out over the silent streets. A quarter million people, gone in a day. And this was just one city. The press conference had given the Panama Vampire access to people all across the world, allowing him to activate hundreds of thousands of infected, beginning with a clap.

Because that’s what had happened. The infected held within them a mote of power that activated when they witnessed the Lost Prophet clap or speak. That was it. The most brutal event in history triggered by the mocking clapping of a monster.

He frowned. Flashpoint had helped stop Red Haze. That action alone might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Not to mention what might have come through the gateway if left unguarded.

“No.”

Alexander turned to find Talia staring at him intently. “What?”

“I recognize that look. You’re wondering if he deserves to die because he helped here. Or maybe because he’s guarding the gateway.” Talia’s eyes narrowed. “Nothing changes. Flashpoint remains an egotistical, emotionally stunted, ticking firebomb. If he achieves Divinity, if he learns what you just told us, he will come for you.”

Alexander smiled. “You’re wrong. I’m not second-guessing whether or not he has to die.” He turned his gaze back to the city. “I was just thinking that he could have been an amazing superhero.”

His smile faded. “Then again, so could I.”