Free Web NovelChapter 20: Meal
Mercy is a thing you spend on people who would have given it back.
...
The five boys stared at Aidan.
Then, in the air around them, the world had gone strange.
A faint shimmer wrapped the entire warehouse, like heat off summer asphalt, except it curved over the broken roof and down the walls and sealed shut at the cracked concrete floor. Outside that shimmer, the abandoned factory district sat silent under the burning afternoon sun.
Inside it, no sound would leave. No signal. No wave. Nothing.
Arthur had sealed it tight.
’Master.’ Arthur’s voice rumbled in his head, pleased. ’Nothing goes out. Nothing comes in. Their little devices are screaming for help to no one.’
’Perfect.’
One of the boys, the silky brown-haired one who’d been licking his lips a second ago, fumbled at his wrist. A glowing panel flickered up from his bracer, blinked an error, and died.
"What the. My comm’s dead."
"Mine too."
"The emergency beacon isn’t, it’s not."
The blond one with the slave collar in his hand spun in a slow circle, his arrogance curdling into something uglier as he took in the shimmer.
"Who the hell are you?!"
Aidan cracked his neck and walked forward, slow, hands loose at his sides.
"Me?" He smiled. "I’m the guy who showed up to vent."
Mira hadn’t moved. She stood off to the side where Aidan had stepped in front of her, her cold fury frozen on her face, her plan, her one final terrible plan, taken clean out of her hands.
"You." The brown-haired one pointed at her, voice climbing. "You brought a Hunter? You think this changes anything? Do you have any idea who we are?"
"I was hoping you’d tell me." Aidan tilted his head. "Go on. Impress me."
"My mother is Vice-Leader of Blazing Wings!" the boy snarled. "Vivienne Halewood! You touch me, and she’ll wipe out your whole guild, your whole family, everyone you’ve ever—"
"Cool." Aidan flicked a finger.
A single blood thread shot out, wrapped the boy’s ankle, and yanked.
He went down hard on the concrete with a yelp.
"Next."
"You’re insane!" the blond shrieked, backpedaling. "My father is an Epic-rank Captain! All four of our parents are! You’re dead, you’re so dead, you don’t even—"
"Epic-rank parents." Aidan nodded thoughtfully, like a man pricing fruit. "All four. That’s a lot of important people who raised a lot of garbage."
He glanced at Mira.
She was staring at him.
"They killed your parents to scare you into line," Aidan said. It wasn’t a question. "And these five were the ones who came to collect."
Mira’s jaw worked. She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.
The hum of her despair pressed against his chest, dense and bottomless, and underneath it, Aidan felt the other thing, the Minion, riding her grief like a parasite, waiting for the moment she gave the last of herself away.
’Not today,’ Aidan thought. ’She’s not giving you anything today.’
He turned back to the boys.
"Here’s the thing." He rolled his shoulders. "I’ve got a lot of anger in me. More than you could fit in this building. And the program keeps telling me I need to let some out, slow and steady."
He smiled, and it didn’t reach his eyes at all.
"You five just volunteered."
...
What followed was, by Aidan’s own private assessment, educational.
He started with the brown-haired one, the loud one, the one with the powerful mother.
"You like collars, right?" Aidan plucked the slave collar out of the blond’s frozen hands and turned it over. "Bummer. This one’s illegal junk. But I make my own toys."
Blood threads wove in his palm, fast and intricate, knitting into a band of dark crimson that pulsed with a slow, living beat. He’d built it the way he built everything now, layering aspects, Blood Energy for the structure, Bleed threaded through it just enough to itch, a whisper of Break so it groaned against the skin without ever quite letting go.
He clasped it around the boy’s neck.
"There. Mood ring. It goes tighter when you lie." Aidan grinned. "So. Want to apologize to her?"
"Screw you, you’ll regret—" The band cinched. The boy gagged.
"See? Lie." Aidan tutted. "Try the truth. The truth feels great. I’d know, I’ve got a whole title about it."
The boy clawed at the band, wheezing.
"S-sorry! I’m sorry!"
It loosened.
"Was that true?" Aidan asked.
The band stayed loose.
"Huh." Aidan blinked, mildly impressed. "Closer than I expected. Terror got desperate in there. Keep him."
He moved to the next.
For the blond, he made wind.
Not a blast. A breeze. A small, persistent, idiotic breeze that followed the boy wherever he scrambled, tugging his hair, flipping his collar, blowing grit into his eyes, a gyroscoped little spiral of Spiral Flow and Spin no bigger than a housecat, tuned to do nothing but annoy.
"Stop it! Stop it! Make it stop!"
He gave the third boy gravity.
A thin sphere of Attraction, Blitzer Burst stripped down to its quietest aspect, anchored to the floor under the boy’s feet so that every step felt like wading through wet cement, his own body suddenly four times too heavy, dragging him to his knees no matter how he strained.
"Walk it off," Aidan suggested.
The fourth, he simply made cold. Not Bella’s killing frost, just a clinging, miserable chill woven from leeched wind, the kind that gets into the joints, the kind that doesn’t stop.
By then, the warehouse was full of noise no one outside would ever hear.
Threats. Names. The Vice-Leader’s name again, sobbed this time. The Epic-rank fathers, invoked over and over like prayers to gods who weren’t picking up. Bargaining. Money. Anything. Everything.
Aidan listened to none of it.
He stood in the middle of it with his hands in his pockets, watching five young men who had decided, somewhere along the way, that other people existed to be taken, find out for the first time in their pampered lives what it felt like to be on the other side of that.
And the noise in his skull got quieter.
One notch at a time.
’There it is.’ He breathed it in. ’The quiet.’
[Your translated anger has decreased by another 0.4%, Player Aidan.]
’I’ll take it.’
He glanced back at Mira.
She hadn’t looked away from him once. The frozen fury on her face had cracked, just slightly, into something he couldn’t name yet. Not joy. She was too far down for that. But the still water had moved.
"You wanted to take all five of them with you," Aidan said quietly. "Trade your one life for theirs. Make sure they couldn’t do this to the next girl whose parents were in someone’s way."
Mira’s lips parted.
"You don’t have to spend your life on garbage," Aidan said. "That’s a terrible exchange rate. Trust me. I made that trade once."
He turned back to the five.
The humor went out of his face.
It didn’t get replaced with rage. That was the strange part, the part the boys would never understand. In the last seconds, they had to understand anything. There was no heat left in him at all. Just a flat, finished calm, the calm of a man closing a door.
"You four with the famous parents." Aidan’s voice was almost gentle. "Here’s the thing they never taught you. Power isn’t the name you inherit. It’s whether the person standing in front of you decides you get to keep breathing."
The brown-haired one, the band still loose at his throat, found his voice.
"W-wait. Wait. My mother, she’ll, she can give you anything, anything you want, a guild, a rank, money, I swear—"
"I want the noise to stop," Aidan said. "And you’re the noise."
He felt Arthur stir in the sealed dark above them, vast and patient and so, so hungry.
’Buddy.’
’Yes, Master?’ Arthur’s voice came eager, almost trembling.
’Remember the trash I promised you?’
A low, vibrating hum rolled through the shimmer, felt in the teeth more than heard.
’You said real pieces of trash this world doesn’t need.’
’That’s right.’ Aidan looked at the five boys, at the collars and the comms and the illegal slaver tech scattered across the warehouse floor, at every tool they’d brought to break a grieving girl. ’These ones. And everything they brought with them.’ freeωebnovēl.c૦m
’Leave nothing.’
The five boys looked up.
For one moment, in the shimmering dark above them, two enormous eyes opened like twin suns.
"Enjoy the meal." Aidan grinned.
