Chapter 2: The Veteran's Contempt

Chapter 2: The Veteran's Contempt

Kaelen’s breath hitched as he stared at the angry red symbol on Lyra Thorne’s scanner. The chaotic, pulsing image felt like a personal affront to everything he’d learned at the academy, where magic was presented as a science of clean lines, predictable formulas, and systematic order. This was none of those things. This was a festering wound bleeding into the city’s Mana Grid.

"Leaking?" Kaelen managed, his voice still shaky. "But the building's systemic wards should have detected an unregistered source of this magnitude."

Lyra shot him a look of pure, unadulterated pity, as if he’d just asked her if water was wet. "Systemic wards are designed to catch idiots enchanting their toasters, kid. Not this." She holstered the scanner with a decisive snap. "Whatever's down there was built to be invisible. The Glimmers were just the overflow, the sewer rats drawn to the filth."

Her disdain was a physical force, pressing down on him. His perfect test scores, his encyclopedic knowledge of arcane regulations—all of it felt like useless trivia in her presence. He was a scholar who had just met a barbarian, and the barbarian was clearly unimpressed.

As if on cue, both their tablets chimed with an identical, intrusive alert. Kaelen glanced down at his screen.

[PRIORITY DIRECTIVE: INCIDENT 734-G ESCALATED] [CLASSIFICATION: TIER 3 - UNREGISTERED NEXUS EVENT] [OPERATIVES ASSIGNED: ENFORCER L. THORNE (LEAD), TECHNICIAN K. VANCE (SUPPORT)] [OBJECTIVE: IDENTIFY, CONTAIN, AND REPORT. LETHAL FORCE AUTHORIZED.]

Support. The word stung. He was officially her glorified assistant. Lyra barely spared her tablet a glance before scoffing. "Great. Management wants me to babysit." She fixed him with a glare. "Stay behind me. Don't touch anything. And for the love of the Founders, try not to get yourself drained again."

With that, she turned and strode out of the apartment, not waiting to see if he followed. Kaelen scrambled to his feet, his desire to prove himself curdling into a desperate need to simply survive this encounter without further humiliation. The obstacle wasn't just the pulsating nexus in the basement; it was the walking storm of an Enforcer he was now tethered to.

Their journey to the sub-basement was a masterclass in their conflicting methodologies. Lyra moved with brutal efficiency. When they reached a heavy steel door marked 'MAINTENANCE - NO ACCESS,' Kaelen instinctively raised his tablet, preparing to interface with the electronic lock and input the universal access glyphs.

Before he could even find the right submenu, Lyra’s boot connected with the door just beside the lock. The sound was like a thunderclap. The metal frame groaned, warped, and the lock mechanism shattered internally. She shouldered it open and proceeded into the darkness without breaking stride.

Kaelen stared at the ruined door. "That was a department-regulated Class-4 mag-lock," he said, mostly to himself. "The fine for unauthorized destruction is five hundred credits."

"Put it on my tab," her voice echoed back from the stairwell.

He hurried to catch up, fumbling to cast a simple Illumination spell. A soft, steady orb of white light bloomed above his head, casting clean, predictable shadows. A moment later, Lyra’s hand crackled, and a sphere of raw, barely contained lightning sizzled to life in her palm. It cast frantic, dancing shadows that made the damp concrete walls look like they were alive. Her light was violent, chaotic, and ten times brighter than his.

"Cute," she muttered, not looking back. "You gonna make balloon animals with that thing, too?"

They reached the sub-basement, a cavernous space of concrete and weeping pipes. The air was frigid, humming with a dissonant energy that made the hairs on Kaelen’s arms stand up. In the center of the room, he saw it.

It wasn't a neatly constructed mana battery or a regulated converter. It was a tumor. A pulsating orb of utter blackness, about the size of a car, suspended between three massive, crudely-etched copper pylons. Veins of violet and crimson energy writhed across its surface, occasionally lashing out to scorch the nearby concrete. This was the Void-Touched Nexus, an illegal construct designed to draw power not from the city Grid, but from somewhere else. Somewhere cold and wrong.

"Founders' Beard," Kaelen breathed, his interface flickering wildly as it failed to classify the chaotic energies. [ANALYSIS FAILED: UNKNOWN MANA TYPE. CORRUPTION LEVEL: CATASTROPHIC.]

"Looks like someone got their hands on a pre-System design," Lyra said, her cynical tone replaced by a grim focus. "Ambitious. And stupid."

As if summoned by her words, the shadows around the Nexus coalesced. A shape began to form, pulling corrupted mana into itself. It was like the Glimmers from the apartment, but hideously magnified. It stood easily nine feet tall, its body a vaguely humanoid mass of glistening, unstable energy, with too many limbs that ended in crackling tendrils. Its head was a single, glowing violet eye that fixed on them with malevolent intelligence.

"So that's the guard dog," Lyra stated, cracking her knuckles. "You analyze. I'll handle the introductions."

She moved before Kaelen could even protest. She was a blur of motion, lightning arcing from her fists as she closed the distance. Her first blow, a concentrated bolt of raw power, slammed into the Glimmer Hulk’s chest. The creature roared, a sound like grinding static, and was thrown back, its form flickering.

But Lyra’s attack had a secondary, disastrous effect. A wave of feedback washed over the Nexus, and one of the crimson veins on its surface flared violently. A high-pitched alarm screamed in Kaelen’s ears.

[WARNING: NEXUS CONTAINMENT FIELD COMPROMISED. INTEGRITY AT 47%.]

"Enforcer, wait!" Kaelen shouted. "Your power output is destabilizing the Nexus! A direct assault could trigger a full breach!"

Lyra ignored him, preparing another strike. "The faster it's dead, the less it matters!"

The creature recovered, lashing out with a tendril of void energy. Lyra sidestepped it easily, the tendril melting a two-foot-deep trench in the concrete floor where she’d been standing. She retaliated with a whip of lightning that severed the limb. But again, the Nexus pulsed, weaker this time.

[CONTAINMENT FIELD INTEGRITY AT 31%. CATASTROPHIC BREACH IMMINENT.]

This was it. The moment of failure. Lyra’s brute force, the very thing that made her so effective, was going to get them both killed. His textbook knowledge, his understanding of systems and regulations, was their only hope. His mind raced, sifting through hundreds of arcane engineering protocols. There was a failsafe. There was always a failsafe.

His eyes darted around the room and locked onto a series of thick, shielded cables running along the ceiling—an emergency mana-shunting conduit, designed to vent overloaded city Grid junctions. It was a long shot.

"Thorne!" he yelled, his voice cracking but firm. "Stop attacking the creature! Hit the primary shunting conduit on the ceiling! Overload it!"

For the first time, she hesitated, glancing from him to the conduit and back. Her face was a mask of disbelief. "You want me to blow the building’s power regulator? Are you insane?"

"The creature is a mana parasite! It’s drawn to concentrated energy sources!" he explained, frantically manipulating his tablet, pulling up schematics and bypassing safety protocols. "If you create a surge big enough, it won't be able to resist! It will act as a directed path for the discharge, away from the Nexus!"

It was pure theory, a desperate gamble based on a footnote in a safety manual. But it was better than letting her blow the Nexus sky-high.

The Glimmer Hulk roared and charged at her. She had a split second to decide. Trust the rookie's crazy theory or rely on her own overwhelming power.

With a curse that echoed through the chamber, Lyra changed her stance. She looked up, aimed, and unleashed the full fury of her storm. It wasn't a bolt this time; it was a torrent. A river of white-hot lightning slammed into the ceiling conduit.

The effect was instantaneous. Metal screamed and melted. The lights in the sub-basement exploded in a shower of sparks. But Kaelen was right. The Glimmer Hulk, irresistibly drawn to the catastrophic energy surge, forgot all about Lyra. It shrieked and leaped, its entire body latching onto the super-heated conduit.

For a moment, it seemed to swell, gorging itself on the raw power. Then, with a deafening implosion that sucked the air from Kaelen's lungs, the creature and a ten-foot section of the conduit vaporized into nothing but fine black dust and the smell of burnt ozone.

Silence descended, broken only by the hum of the now-stable Nexus and the frantic pounding of Kaelen's own heart. He leaned against a pillar, his legs threatening to give out.

Lyra stood in the center of the room, breathing heavily. The ambient lightning around her slowly faded. She turned and walked over to him, her expression unreadable in the dim light cast by the Nexus. She stopped a few feet away, her sharp eyes scanning him from head to toe.

Kaelen braced himself for another insult, for a tirade about his reckless, insane idea. Instead, the hard lines of her face softened by an almost imperceptible degree.

"Not bad, kid," she said, her voice a low rumble. "For a bookworm."