"...Kidding"
Kael didn’t reply, his smirk fading into sothing quieter, unreadable.
The elevator chid, announcing the fourth basent level.
Clara’s focus snapped back, her voice cool and professional again.
"She’s stable, but just barely. We’ll see if she holds up through surgery."
They wheeled Kitty off the lift and through a double-reinforced door into a sealed surgical bay, its walls devoid of caras or windows—a room built for secrets.
Clara gestured for Kael to wait outside, her expression leaving no room for argunt.
The wait stretched into nearly an hour.
Kael sat on a tal bench in the hallway, elbows on his knees, staring at the cracked linoleum floor.
The fluorescent lights buzzed above, a static lullaby that did little to quiet his thoughts.
The waiting area was empty, no nurses, no patients—just him, the hum of the hospital, and the blood caked under his nails, drying to a dull rust.
Finally, the doors hissed open.
Clara stepped out, her surgical mask pulled down to her chin, gloves gone, her white hair now a glorious ss, strands curling loosely around her face.
She looked exhausted but composed, her green eyes softened by relief.
"She’ll live," she said simply.
Kael exhaled, the knot in his chest unraveling. "Good."
Clara crossed the room and sank onto the bench beside him, her sigh heavy as she leaned back against the cold wall.
Her shoulder brushed his, just for a mont, and neither of them moved away.
Silence settled between them, comfortable but charged, like the air before a storm.
Then Clara turned her head, her green eyes narrowing as they t his.
Her voice was soft, almost hesitant, but carried a weight that pinned him in place. "What happened this ti, Kael?"
He didn’t answer right away.
His gaze drifted to the blood under his nails, then back to her.
For a mont, he saw her not as the sharp-edged doctor who patched him up, but as Clara—tangled hair, fierce eyes, the woman who kept pulling him back from the edge, even when he didn’t ask.
"Sa as always," he said finally, his voice low. "Just another ss I couldn’t walk away from, this ti it ca knocking at my door."
__________
The turbines groaned, a low, mournful wail as unnatural winds howled through the skeletal remains of the abandoned wind energy warehouse.
Rust flaked from the decaying steel beams, carried away by gusts that seed to pulse with a life of their own.
Rhea crouched behind a collapsed girder, her breath fogging the air despite the heat radiating from her body, a furnace barely contained beneath her sleek black bodysuit.
Her crimson hair was hidden beneath a full-face mask, its matte surface swallowing the dim light, leaving only the faint glow of her amber eyes visible through the reinforced glass.
Across the cavernous space, Freya perched on a jagged ledge, still as a statue carved from ice.
Her platinum-cyan hair was tied into a ponytail, her mask covering everything below her piercing blue eyes, which glinted with cold calculation.
In the warehouse’s heart, above the humming generator core—a salvaged jet engine jury-rigged to spin—two figures floated, naked and entwined.
The Gale couple, GaleM and GaleF, twin A-Class wind manipulators, clung to each other like lovers lost in a dream.
Their skin glistened with condensation, eyes shut in a trance, bodies glowing faintly with siphoned kinetic energy.
Threads of wind currents spiraled around their limbs, feeding into the generator below, which thrumd as it drank the fractured structure’s air.
"Showti?" Rhea whispered through her comms, her voice a low, eager growl.
"Quietly," Freya replied, her tone sharp and cool as frost. "They’re charging. Vulnerable."
Rhea’s lips curled beneath her mask. "Let’s crash their honeymoon, then."
She rose from her cover, and in a single breath, she ignited.
The warehouse’s temperature spiked, a wave of heat that made tal creak and paint blister.
Oxygen thinned as fire erupted across Rhea’s form, her bodysuit flaring with a molten pulse that danced like liquid fla.
The air shimred around her, warped by the inferno she carried like a battle armor.
Freya moved in the sa heartbeat, dropping from her perch in a silent blur.
Ice shards materialized around her, spinning like a jagged crown, each one glinting with lethal precision as she descended.
The wind scread the mont they were spotted.
GaleF’s eyes snapped open—green, with pupils swirling like miniature tempests.
Her scream unleashed a wall of compressed air that roared toward Rhea, strong enough to shred steel.
Rhea dove through it, trailing a cyclone of fire that devoured the gust’s oxygen.
"Bitch, I eat air!" she roared, twisting mid-flight to unleash a molten arc that seared through the warehouse like napalm, leaving a trail of scorched concrete in its wake.
GaleM reacted to Freya’s descent, summoning a spinning gust laced with razor-sharp air currents.
Freya countered with a single, fluid spin, forming an ice spear in mid-air.
She hurled it with surgical accuracy, the weapon piercing the wind stream and slamming into GaleM’s shoulder.
Blood sprayed, freezing into crimson crystals as it hit the frigid floor.
"Don’t let them separate!" Freya shouted, her voice cutting through the chaos.
"On it!" Rhea called back, landing hard enough to crack the concrete beneath her boots.
A whip of fla coiled around her arm, and she lashed it toward GaleF, snaring the woman’s ankle with a sizzling grip.
"Gotcha!"
But GaleF twisted, her scream summoning a gust that tore her free, sending her flying back to her partner.
GaleM caught her, blood still dripping from his wound, and their hands clasped with desperate strength.
Their bodies began to spin—together, faster, a blur of flesh and wind.
A piercing whistle filled the air, sharp enough to rattle Rhea’s teeth.
"Oh, shit," Freya muttered, dread creeping into her voice. "They’re fusing—"
Rhea’s eyes widened behind her mask. "Oh shit. Not again"
"SuperGale," Freya confird, her tone grim.
The wind exploded outward, a shockwave that shook the warehouse’s bones.
A pillar of rotating air and crackling lightning surged upward as the Gale couple rged into a single, glowing figure.
Androgynous, towering, with long silver hair flowing like a storm cloud, their body was clad in vibrating wind-plated armor that shimred with kinetic energy.
Their eyes opened—twin voids of swirling green—and when they spoke, their voice thundered like a hurricane’s edge.
"YOU INTERRUPT THE RISE OF ASCENSION. NOW YOU FACE IT’S WRATH"
Updat𝒆d fr𝒐m freew𝒆bnov𝒆l.c(o)m
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