Chapter 2 - 1 — The Son Who Never Awakened
18 Hours Earlier — 17 October 2107
Christopher POV
I stepped out of the Red Gate first.
Behind me, the other six came through one by one — the full Myrmidon raid team, all of them on their own feet. Our armor was scratched and dark with monster blood, mine most of all. None of it was ours.
The rain was light, the kind that beaded on a visor instead of soaking through. Behind the barricades, the plaza was a wall of noise. Police lines. PSB personnel. Ambulances waiting on people who wouldn’t need them. Clan vehicles, and past all of it, the reporters.
At my back, the Red Gate’s surface folded in on itself, that unstable crimson light collapsing inward like water down a drain.
I didn’t look at it. I already knew what was on the other side, and it was dead.
A PSB officer raised a hand to his earpiece, listened, then gave the signal. Clear.
The reporters surged.
They hit the security line all at once, cameras flashing hard enough to turn the rain white. The questions came over each other, half of them stepping on the other half.
How dangerous was the dungeon. What kind of boss. Did the clan recover anything. Was anyone hurt.
I stopped where the line held them and let them get their shots. That much was part of the job now.
"The Red Gate is cleared," I said. "No casualties."
One of them shouted over the rest — a younger one — asking if it was true. If this made four hundred.
"It does," an older reporter answered for me, before I could. He said it the way a man reads a date off a monument. Four hundredth clear. One of the ten highest-ranked Players alive.
I saw the number land on the younger ones. A couple of them actually stopped writing.
"The materials and items still have to be examined," I told them. "The clan will release details when we have them, not before." I paused. "And it wasn’t one man in there. Six others went through that Gate with me. This is theirs as much as mine."
That was all they were getting. It was enough.
They called out congratulations anyway. Behind the barricades, past the cameras, the civilians and the lower-ranked Players were doing something quieter — thanking us. For the Gate. For one more that wouldn’t open into their street.
I gave them a nod they probably couldn’t see, and walked to the car.
The door closed, and the world went quiet.
The plaza and its noise dropped away until there was only the rain on the windows and the low hum of the engine. Across from me, my secretary already had her tablet up and waiting. My driver pulled us out through the security cordon without a word.
I peeled off one glove. The fingers underneath were streaked with blood gone brown and dry, sunk into the creases of my knuckles. I turned my hand over and looked at it the way you’d look at someone else’s.
Four hundred Gates. I felt nothing about the four hundredth that I hadn’t felt about the fortieth.
"The Tower," I said. "Floor Five. What’s the latest."
She didn’t blink at the jump. She was used to it. The clear was already behind me; only the Tower was ever in front.
"Nothing verified," she said. "The PSB still hasn’t released anything confirmed about Floor Five. They’re studying the conditions around the entrance. There’s talk of putting together an initial scouting team — but they haven’t approved a single clan to enter."
"The fourth floor was cleared a long time ago."
"They know." She kept her voice even. "The problem is they don’t know what Five is. It could be an ordinary hunting zone. It could be a survival trial. A settlement. Or a boss the moment you step through. Sending people in blind could kill a full team of high-ranks before anyone learned which."
My jaw tightened.
I hit the door.
The reinforced panel caved inward under my fist, the metal folding like foil. In the front seat my driver went stiff, eyes locked on the road, saying nothing. Across from me the tablet jumped in my secretary’s hands. Her fingers closed hard around its edges, and I heard the small catch in her breath before she got it under control.
I didn’t look at her. I looked at the dent.
"It has been one hundred years," I said. "One hundred years since the Towers came, and we have never climbed past the fifth floor. Not once. Not anyone."
I let that sit.
"I’m not going to spend the rest of my life clearing Gates the whole world already understands. Anyone can do that now. There’s nothing left in it."
And Floor Five wasn’t only a line on my ranking. She knew it, and so did I. Whoever put a team on that floor first didn’t just move a number. They moved their entire clan over every rival that had ever stood level with them — straight to the center of the next thing humanity did.
I wanted that expedition. The first one. And I had no intention of watching another top-ten Player walk into it ahead of me.
"My source inside the PSB expects something next week," she said carefully. "They think the preliminary Floor Five report will come out together with the requirements to join the scout team."
I drew my fist back out of the door. Slowly. The metal groaned.
"Keep watching them," I said. "The moment those requirements are confirmed — I hear about it first."
"Yes, sir."
I put the glove back on over the dried blood and said nothing else. Outside the window, the city thinned and gave way, and eventually the car passed through the gates of the estate.
______
Jace POV
I brought the sword down again.
The weighted edge hit the reinforced post with a dull crack that ran straight up into my elbows, and I dragged it back into position to do it again. Same strike. Same angle. The one I’d done maybe a thousand times already tonight.
The rain had stopped being rain a while ago. It was just a thing my clothes were made of now, heavy and cold and stuck to my back. My boots had disappeared into the mud past the laces.
My breathing had gone ragged. I could hear it over the water.
I swung. My grip slipped on the wet handle and the blade landed wrong — flat, off-line — and the shock of it twisted through both wrists like something tearing. I stopped. Not for long. Just long enough to squeeze my hands shut around the leather until the shaking settled.
Then I lifted it and started again.
I was supposed to have awakened at eighteen.
Everyone was, if they were going to. The System reached into you on your eighteenth year or it never reached in at all. Mine came and went like a normal birthday.
I was twenty-four now.
Six years of nothing, and I was the only son of Christopher Nolan — the heir the Myrmidon Clan had been promised. A top-ten Player’s blood that had produced a boy the System didn’t want.
Nobody said it to my face anymore. The servants had learned. The lower clan members had learned. But I’d gotten good at reading the space between a glance and a stopped sentence, the word people swallowed the moment I turned my head.
Failure.
I knew what I was doing out here couldn’t fix it. No amount of swinging a practice sword would make the System change its mind — it doesn’t work like that, nothing works like that. I wasn’t stupid enough to think otherwise.
But there was a difference between not awakening and being helpless. If I was never going to have an Ability, then I would at least have a body that could stand in a line beside ordinary Players and not be the first thing that died.
That was all I wanted. It wasn’t much. It still felt impossible some nights.
I swung. Lost my footing in the mud and went down onto one knee, the sword catching me before my face did.
I stayed there a second, chest heaving.
Then I got up, and I swung again.
______
Christopher POV
The car stopped near the main entrance, and before I went in, I saw him.
Out past the courtyard, in the dark and the rain, my son was still swinging a practice sword at a post. Soaked to the bone. Barely upright.
I watched him for a while from under the eaves. I didn’t call out. Whatever moved across my face while I stood there, I couldn’t have named it myself, and I didn’t try.
He didn’t notice me. He swung, lost his feet in the mud, dropped to a knee, and forced himself back up to do it again.
One of the guards was waiting by the door. I spoke without turning.
"How long has he been out there?"
The man hesitated. That told me plenty before he answered.
"Several hours, sir," he said. "He wouldn’t come in when the rain started."
I said nothing for a moment. Out in the dark, Jace wound up for another strike, his whole body fighting to make the motion clean and failing.
Then I turned toward the estate.
"Tell Jace to meet me in the main chamber."