Chapter 82 Where’s My Friend?
October 7, 2025. Tuesday. 11:12 a.m.
The road cracked beneath my tires, the vibration rattling through the fra of the bike and into my bones. Asphalt split into jagged veins, weeds prying out from scars left decades ago. Empty stretches rolled on forever, punctuated by the husks of buildings leaning at odd angles, trees crooked as if even nature hadn’t forgiven this place. The Lawless. Civilization’s afterbirth.
I’d never driven this path before. Hell, I’d never even been this far off from a town when exploring the Lawless. The Hesperian Continent on paper were owned by the Council of City-States. In truth, it was more like a patchwork quilt. So seams were stitched neat, others fraying, and in the torn parts, things leaked out. Brigands. Cults. Forgotten armies. Secret societies like the Monarchy slithering between the cracks of the City-States themselves.
Six months. That’s how long I’d been wandering. Riding highways to nowhere. Delivering parcels, ferrying the desperate, sotis spilling blood. Call it soul-searching, if I even had one left to find. I’d tried on the hero mask once or twice. Helped when it was easy. But heroics were cheap and rotten on . I missed the violence. The raw, clean edge of it. Violence didn’t lie.
The bike rumbled as I stomped the brakes. A barricade of rusted cars lood ahead, stacked sloppily across the road. Smoke stains clung to them like old fingerprints. I killed the engine, listening to the silence spread.
From my jacket, I pulled out a folded scrap of paper, a map I’d stolen off a brigand after a long, slow hour of questioning and torture. The drawing was almost childish, rail lines sketched as crooked lines, landmarks noted with doodles. No ntion of a barricade here. Which ant it was fresh.
I raised my eyes. To the left, half-buried in weeds, stood a statue. A naked woman in stone, her features weathered away until she was faceless and anonymous. That crude drawing on the map had her too. A marker. I was on the right path.
I traced the inked rail lines, then lifted my head at the sound of tal screaming faintly on tal. A train. Modern, fast, cutting through the heart of this wasteland. It glided past the trees and ruins like it didn’t belong here, its steel skin catching the weak sunlight. A city-state-class passenger train, humming with order in the middle of chaos.
Above it, capes flew in formation. Guardians of the rail. Bright costus, spandex stretched over muscle and pride. They were peacocks, but dangerous ones. Even the scum out here knew better than to touch those trains. The Council treated attacks on the rail like sacrilege.
I lingered on the bike, map still in hand, when a shadow broke formation. One of the fliers peeled off, wings of air carrying him down toward .
He hovered, steady, his silhouette clear against the dying light. No mask, no cape, just spandex fitted around a body built by years of work, not youth. His hair was graying, his face a lattice of lines carved by ti. A veteran. Soone who’d lived too long in this business and hadn’t yet died for it.
His eyes locked onto with unnerving precision. When he spoke, his voice carried the weight of command.
“Na’s Tom,” he said. “Stay where you are.”
His glare was the kind that stripped you bare, the kind that asured weight and found you lacking. I kept my hands loose on the handlebars, but the itch was there, the instinct to phase him, gut him, and take apart the arrogant man staring down.
Then she arrived.
Onyx slid into the seat behind , black hair brushing my neck. She was a ghost I couldn’t shake, and a hallucination becoming more solid by the day. She leaned close, her lips curling in delight.
“You know,” she whispered, voice like silk cutting glass, “it probably would be fun to phase his skin off. Peel it layer by layer, like you did to that Alpha freak in the Wolf Pack.”
I murmured back, almost reflexively. “That’s a long ti ago already, Onyx.”
Her laughter was cruel, low, and hungry.
Then, to my right, Silver appeared. Pouting, arms folded, the counterweight to Onyx’s mania. My illusion, my conscience, or just another shade of madness… I wasn’t sure anymore.
“Co on, don’t always talk about murder…” she huffed. “And Nick, I thought you wanted to lie low. Fighting a Council-backed cape is not lying low!”
I smirked faintly. “I know, I know… I will behave.”
But the words rang hollow even to . They were just illusions, threads of my empathic power weaving into shape, whispering back my own fractured wants. And yet, I couldn’t help but talk to them. They were all I had left that listened.
The train thundered by, shaking the earth until its steel carcass shrank into the horizon. Order moving on, leaving chaos behind.
Tom gave one last look. His lips curled in sothing like disdain.
“Lunatic wastelander…” he muttered, then blasted off in a streak, chasing the train with flight-speed only a veteran could carry. A Flight-Speedster. Efficient, brutal combo.
I exhaled slowly, the silence swallowing him whole.
Onyx broke it first. “If the barrier of vehicles wasn’t for them…”
Silver’s voice sharpened. “It’s an ambush, Nick!”
Onyx grinned, eyes sparkling. “Yeah. Murder.”
The barricade groaned. Figures spilled out from the husks of cars and twisted tal, their silhouettes jagged against the dim light. Raiders. ssy, rag-wrapped, dirt sared like war paint. Their weapons were a collection of rust and desperation. But my threads spread like a web, probing, prying, and tasting minds.
Three stood out.
The bald brute in front, his presence heavy and dull as stone.
The eyepatch lurking in back, his paranoia a steady drumbeat.
And the clean one, the anomaly. A man in a pristine white tux, spotless against the filth, as if the dust and gri dared not touch him.
He smiled, voice clear as glass cutting through the rabble.
“Now,” he said smoothly, “let’s talk business. But first, what about introductions?”
“The na’s Courier,” I said plainly. “I’m looking for a friend.”
“And my na’s White. I know, I know… creative bankruptcy, right? Now, Courier. I’ve heard of you. The Wolf Pack were my clients once. Bought a large load of my supply.” He spread his hands as if showing off a ledger only he could read. “You here for drugs? Weapons? A fine ride? We sell all the comforts out here. If it’s a friend you want, we can provide that, too. Slaves, if that’s your fancy, the Monarchy’s finest, though they cost extra.”
Silver’s voice was hot and imdiate in my eardrum. “Kill him, Nick. Slavers are the worst.”
Onyx wrapped herself around my thoughts like a serpent, affectionate and cruel. She pecked in the cheek as she added. “Nick, if you slaughter them all, we’ll show you sothing fun.”
Silver snapped at the idea, flushing. “But that would be kind of weird—”
Onyx laughed, sharp and gleeful. “Oh, you have a dirty mind. I like weird, especially if Nick’s in it. Do ya catch my drift?”
White’s grin never left. “I hope you don’t mind my n milling about. Soone’s been poking at our routes. Soone started a fight we didn’t ask for. I have to be careful… After all, I’m the face of the business.” His henchn shifted behind him of scraps of leather, mismatched armor, and the kind of n who thought fear was currency.
I let my fingers drift to the side of the bike. The paintball gun I’d tucked beneath the seat felt light and criminal in my hand. It wasn’t paint. The chemist who owed a favor had given a cartridge full of sothing that ate from the inside out, a solvent made to liquefy organs and stop lungs like a switch. He’d called it a surgical solution; I called it insurance. Swift and clean and full of regret.
Silver hissed. “Nick—”
Onyx clapped, delighted. “Do it. Do it now.”
White’s eyes flashed. “So, what is it gonna be?”
I didn’t answer him. I raised the gun and took aim. The gun’s barrel was warm, a promise in polyr. I thumbed the safety off, and then I squeezed the trigger.
Three projectiles spat, bright spheres that scread as they flew. But they weren’t normal rounds. I phased them. For a breath, they were sothing between state and nonstate… part matter, part thought… and the laws that held at together gave way. The beads blurred through leather and cloth and bone like ghosts through walls, then decided to beco real again just inside flesh.
n doubled, then crumpled as if their skeletons forgot to hold them up. Muscles clenched and then surrendered. Their faces unfolded into silence. Their mouths filled with a wet, futile sound of pain as they frothed to death. It was fast, and it was final.
White hit the deck behind a scavenged hatchback and barked a command. “Barrier!” A ripple of light shimred around him, the kind of translucent do SRC tech had laced into private hands. It buckled like a bubble, a last-minute sanctum that left him oddly serene as the chaos around him bled away. The barrier threw back the deadliness of my little chemistry for all it could, its tech humming, keeping him whole inside his self-made egg.
Behind the cover, the eyepatch man’s brain scrambled. He shoved himself behind a stack of junk tal, avoiding the worst of my paintball.
As for Baldy, he phased through the ground.
The paintball gun clicked empty, and then silence pressed in like a fist. Most of the goons were down and slumped where they'd stood, twitching, or already gone quiet. I kicked the bike’s stand up with the heel of my boot and swung a crowbar off the mount. The tal felt good in my hands.
Sothing grabbed from below. A hand clamped under my foot through the cracked asphalt and tried to drag down with intangibility. The world pitched, and for one second, I felt the predictable rush of being taken.
I threaded my empathic lines like a hunter’s string, feeling for the empty spaces in his mind, tugging until his intangibility wavered. I leaned into the mute throb of his fear and forced a gap, my own phasing answering his. Fingers found his face where the skin was thinnest, aid at his eyes, and I pulled.
The ground gave way like a bad promise, and then I was yanking him back up through the torn seam of earth. He ca out of the soil like a ragdoll, half-sucked into the dirt for a breath, then fully on the surface and not ready. I used the crowbar to spin him into White’s direction and launched him like a thrown sack. He hit the barrier with enough force to rattle the do; White’s composure crumpled into sothing small and very animal.
“Boon! Boon! Fucking do sothing!” White scread through the barrier, voice high and brittle. He must’ve been calling the eyepatch. Panicked nas leaked out like the rest of him.
Silver hissed in my head. “He’s about to do sothing.”
Onyx, eager as a blade, urged, “Dodge!”
A searing line of energy cut the air. It was an ocular laser, narrow and precise, so close it singed my helt visor and rocked the bike. The shock of it sent my chest drums pounding. My head snapped back on instinct, and a chunk of the bike exploded outward in a spray of tal and sparks.
Pissed was too small a word. I tasted anger like tal. I unzipped my leather, felt for the grenade stowed under the lining and pulled it free. It was the last grenade I had, so I am going to make it count.
Silver’s voice softened, almost sisterly. “You still have trouble with energy-class attacks. Be careful. That laser could fuck you up.”
Onyx snarled, “Shut up, Silver. Don’t be a downer. We’re too aweso for that.”
I didn’t argue. This wasn’t the ti for discussions between ghosts and halves. I tracked the laser-thrower with my empathic threads, feeling the tremor of movent under his anger. He was shifting position behind a barricade, trying to stay unpredictable. I tid the toss.
The grenade left my hand, intangible for a heartbeat as I phased it through a sliver of world to match the target’s new position, then rematerialized in the space he’d just stepped into. It hit the ground and detonated, not a cinematic bloom but a screaming shock that flattened the air and pushed shards of the road into ragged little stars. When the cloud cleared, the raider who’d fired the laser was a motionless shape among the wreckage.
White stayed tucked inside his translucent do, voice cracking as he repeated, “Boon, you still there? Boon!” He banged his hands against the asphalt, pleading to a man behind cover.
I walked over to where White crouched, and the barrier humd, the tech keeping him mirrored and small. He looked like a man who’d always relied on other people’s cruelty and didn't know how to survive without it. He was shaking. “P-Please…” he cried, “Don’t hurt …”
“Now, tell . Where’s Bunny?” I watched his mouth work like a puppet. “Hmmm… or I guess you might know him as George?”
“Please… please, you don’t have to do this.” He babbled, words tumbling over each other. “I’ll give you anything. Weapons… high-grade stuff, stunners that’ll put down a street full of capes. I can get you a cache by first light. Cash, safehouses, forged papers. Nas… networks. I can sell you people off the Monarchy’s list… elite girls, n, whatever you want. I can get you an actress… best in the business, Alina Vale… clones of her even, top-line, not the cheap shit. You want proof?” His voice scraped as if he’d swallowed sand.
Silver hissed in my ear with an animal noise of disgust. Onyx squealed in anticipation. I let my empathy comb his fear; it tasted of slick oil and counting. He was bargaining like a man who thought money could buy an answer.
“I will ask you one last ti,” I said, letting the threat hang like a noose. “Where’s my friend?”
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