Somewhere downtown in the Eastern Cardinal, normal city life continued.

People moved about in their flying cars along the designated aerial lanes, the traffic management system keeping everything flowing in that organized way it had been rebuilt to manage after Kruel’s attack. Street vendors had their stalls open on the ground level, the smell of food mixing with the particular urban smell of a city that was still in the process of deciding what it was going to be after something catastrophic had happened to it. Kids walked in groups between the rebuilt sections and the sections still wrapped in construction scaffolding. Task force officers moved in pairs along the main thoroughfares, their uniforms distinct from the old security forces, a newer presence that had become part of the street’s normal texture over the past months.

Then a laboratory window on the fourteenth floor of the Crestway Research Building exploded outward.

Glass rained down on the pedestrians below and people scattered immediately, the city’s trauma response kicking in before anyone had finished processing what they were looking at. Something came through the gap where the window had been, multiple limbs finding purchase on the building’s exterior, and it descended the facade with the wrongness of something that had too many moving parts and no clear hierarchy among them.

An octopoid. Eight limbs, each one thick as a support column, the body behind them a dense pulsing mass that moved with the organic logic of something that had never needed to make sense to anything except itself. Its skin cycled through colors that had no business existing on a living creature, and where its limbs touched the building’s exterior they left scoring marks that went through the decorative cladding and into the structural material beneath.

It reached the street level and two people who had not cleared the area fast enough did not clear it afterward either.

The screaming started properly then.

"Okay," said a voice from the comm system of a sleek black suit descending from the aerial lane above, repulsor units keeping it stable as it dropped toward street level. "Since when did they start sending Spiderman’s villains after us?"

Kelvin’s HUD populated immediately, the suit’s sensors running classification protocols on the creature below while his stream connected automatically, the viewer count climbing from zero to forty thousand in the time it took him to complete his descent.

[Gambito307: PITHON IS ONLINE LETS GOOOO]

[TechWatcher99: what IS that thing]

[EclipseFanatic: category 4 confirmed, stay back civilians!!]

[StreamGremlin: kelvin said spiderman villain lmaooo]

"Beast surge number fourteen this month," Kelvin said to the stream, dropping to thirty feet above street level and bringing his right arm up. "I want everyone to know I am getting very tired of this."

The suit’s forearm panel opened, deploying a tri-barreled system that Kelvin had spent three weeks designing specifically for high-mass organic targets. The first two shots hit the octopoid across two of its forward limbs, the electromagnetic pulse charge disrupting the creature’s neuromuscular coordination and making those limbs fold in ways they were not attempting to fold voluntarily.

The octopoid turned toward him.

"Yeah hi," Kelvin said. "Up here."

It came at him fast, two limbs launching upward with a reach that covered the distance between street level and his hover position in a fraction of a second. Kelvin fired the repulsors and went sideways, the limbs passing through the space he had occupied, and he came around in a tight arc that brought him behind the creature’s body mass.

[SpeedrunVerified: kelvin is so clean with the movement]

[OldSchoolEDF: why isn’t there backup? where’s Lucas?]

[EclipseFanatic: Lucas is on a contract in sector four, kelvin’s got this]

[StreamGremlin: he’s literally fighting alone against a cat 4 and he’s making jokes]

The suit’s back panel opened and a second system deployed, this one requiring both arms to aim properly, and Kelvin brought them together and felt the familiar charge building through the suit’s power distribution as the Atomic Compression Ray loaded its output cycle.

He had named it himself. Kelvin believed strongly that weapons deserved names that explained exactly what they did while also sounding impressive.

"Alright," he said. "This is going to look incredible on the stream."

He fired.

The beam that came from the suit’s dual emitters was narrow, almost surgical, and it hit the octopoid’s central body mass with a sound like thunder happening in a very small space. The compression effect worked from the outside inward, the creature’s mass collapsing toward the impact point, the heat generated by the compression cycle doing the rest of the work in approximately two seconds.

The octopoid dropped.

[Gambito307: PITHON NEVER FAILS. Cool suit. Specs please?]

[TechWatcher99: THE BEAM. WHAT IS THAT BEAM]

[WatcherX: category 4 in under three minutes, someone give this man a raise]

[StreamGremlin: he said look incredible on the stream and delivered immediately]

"Atomic Compression Ray," Kelvin said, landing and retracting the weapon systems. "Patent pending. No I will not be sharing specs, Gambito, I know you’re going to ask every single time and the answer is always no."

[Gambito307: worth a shot every time]

Kelvin was already moving toward the two civilians on the ground when someone screamed from above.

He looked up.

A figure was falling from the upper floors of the Crestway building, arms out, the drop already past the point where impact was a certainty rather than a possibility. Kelvin’s repulsors fired and he went up fast, trajectory calculated, arms extending for the catch.

Then the fourteenth floor exploded outward again.

Not from the same window. From the floor below it. Another set of limbs found the building’s exterior and another mass of pulsing organic wrongness descended the facade, and this one was larger than the first, and it was not descending to the street.

It was reaching through the windows of the floors it passed, and on the third floor it reached inside and came back out with something that was a person shaped object that it was in the process of treating as food.

"Intel was wrong," Kelvin said into his comm, still climbing toward the falling figure, the math of his trajectory versus their fall rate running continuously in his HUD. "There are two. I need backup but I know you’re going to be late so I’m just registering the complaint for the record."

He caught the falling person with four seconds to spare, their weight hitting his arms and the suit absorbing the momentum through the repulsor system, and he was already looking at the second octopoid and running the calculation of whether he could get this civilian to the ground and get back up before the person in that creature’s grip ran out of time.

The math was not encouraging.

Then he heard it.

A sound. Not loud at first, more like something moving through air at a speed that compressed the sound of its own passage into a series of percussive beats.

BOOM.

BOOM.

BOOM.

The octopoid’s limb went slack.

The person it had been holding dropped six inches before the limb reclosed on instinct and then went slack again fully, and the creature’s entire body turned toward something that Kelvin’s sensors were struggling to track. His cameras, which had kept up with Lucas at full S-rank sprint and had managed clean footage of Kruel’s initial approach, were showing a blur. A single moving blur that was hitting the octopoid’s limbs in sequence faster than the image stabilization could compensate for.

"What," Kelvin said.

The octopoid shrieked.

It was a sound that had no comfortable analogy, the sound of something large registering catastrophic structural information from multiple points simultaneously, and then it fell. Not toppled, not stumbled. Fell, the limbs losing their coherence, the body mass following, and it hit the street level with the finality of something that was not going to be getting back up.

In its center mass, where the limbs had connected to the body, there was a hole.

Not a wound. A hole. The edges of it were clean in the way that matter was clean when it had been removed rather than damaged, and the space inside the hole was dark in a way that suggested it went somewhere that had no light because it had no anywhere to put light in.

Kelvin descended, got the civilian he was carrying to the ground, retracted his helmet.

Standing on the street next to the fallen octopoid, covered in enough organic matter that the color of his sweatshirt was no longer determinable, was a figure with the hood pulled up and his hands at his sides looking at the mess around him with the expression of someone who had been hoping for a quieter reentry.

Kelvin’s mouth opened.

Nothing came out.

He landed. Five feet away. Looked at the figure. Looked at the hole in the octopoid. Looked at the figure again.

"Noah?"

Noah pushed the hood back.

"Ugh," he said. "First day back and this?"

[EclipseFanatic: WAIT]

[StreamGremlin: IS THAT]

[Gambito307: NO WAY]

[TechWatcher99: NOAH ECLIPSE JUST APPEARED OUT OF NOWHERE]

[WatcherX: HE’S BACK HE’S ACTUALLY BACK]

[OldSchoolEDF: THE NULL STRIKE. HE USED VOID ERASURE ON A CAT 4]

[StreamGremlin: chat is going to break the internet right now]

Kelvin’s HUD was doing something it had never done before which was attempting to display all of the chat simultaneously and failing, the scroll rate so far beyond its design parameters that the display had started generating errors alongside the messages.

"I," Kelvin started. "You. When did. How are you." He stopped. Restarted. "I cannot believe you are standing in front of me right now."

Noah looked at him.

"Kelvin," he said. "You have a beard."

Kelvin touched his face. "I do have a beard. It grew. Time did that." He crossed the five feet between them and grabbed Noah’s shoulders and then pulled him into a hug that had been building for however long it had been building and came out with corresponding force. "You absolute nightmare of a human being, where have you been."

Noah hugged him back.

"It’s a long story," Noah said. "How long was I gone? Four months?"

Kelvin pulled back and looked at him.

"Did you get taller?" Kelvin said. "Wait, did you get older? You look older. Not old. Just. Different. Like someone who has been through something." He squinted. "And your eyes are doing the purple void thing more than usual."

"Kelvin. How long."

[StreamGremlin: kelvin said did you get taller lmaooo]

[EclipseFanatic: noah looks different though chat, look at him]

[Gambito307: SSS rank came back and immediately erased a cat 4, he is NOT the same]

[WatcherX: the way he just appeared from nowhere, no announcement, no entrance, just boom octopus dead]

---

The ship they took back was not the route Noah remembered.

He noticed it when they passed the third aerial lane marker that should have been taking them toward the Eclipse headquarters in the eastern commercial district and instead they were heading toward the harbor approach, the city giving way to water below them.

"Why are we going this way," Noah said.

"New place," Kelvin said, piloting with the ease of someone who had made this trip enough times that his hands did it independently of his attention.

"We got a new place in four months?"

Kelvin opened his mouth.

Closed it.

"I’ll let you see it first," he said.

The ship descended toward the harbor and then kept descending, the water coming up and then the ship’s configuration shifting in the way that ships shifted when they were changing what medium they were designed to move through, and the water closed over them and the city above became a rippling ceiling and then disappeared entirely.

The headquarters was underwater.

Noah saw it before they docked, the lights of it visible through the forward viewport as they approached, and the scale of it took a moment to land properly. Large, much larger than the commercial district building, the Eclipse insignia embedded in the exterior panels and lit from within in purple-black that looked like void energy but was probably just very good lighting design. Multiple docking bays along the lower section, transport ships in their housings, the whole structure sitting on the harbor floor like it had been built specifically for this location and had been here long enough for the surrounding silt to accept it.

They docked and the airlock cycled and Noah stepped through into a main common area that was large enough to make the old headquarters feel like a waiting room. The floor tiles had the Eclipse insignia worked into them, the same purple-black, running from the entrance toward the far end where the space opened into what looked like a coordination center with holographic displays running live data across multiple screens. Transport ships in their housings were visible through the bay windows to the left. The ceiling was high enough that the upper levels, three of them visible from here, had their own internal light sources rather than relying on whatever came from the main area below.

"Why," Noah said.

"The old place had some issues," Kelvin said.

"What kind of issues."

"The kind that required us to get a new place." Kelvin’s voice carried something he was not quite saying yet. "Also this one has significantly better defensive infrastructure and the harbor floor location makes certain kinds of approach and departure considerably more discreet."

Noah looked at the Eclipse insignia on the floor. At the coordination center. At the transport ships.

"You built all of this," Noah said. "In four months."

Kelvin opened his mouth again.

Then from the far end of the docking bay, from the darkness between two transport ships, came running footsteps.

Sophie hit him like someone who had been storing the force of however long at a controlled pressure and had just released all of it simultaneously. Her arms went around him and she held on with a grip that had nothing diplomatic in it, and Noah heard her breathing do the thing it did when someone was crying and had decided not to announce that they were crying.

He held her back.

"You’re here," she said, into his shoulder. "You’re actually here."

"I’m here," he said.

She pulled back and looked at his face and then hit him across the chest with her palm, not hard, just enough to register the emotion behind it.

"Idiot," she said. "You said it might take a while."

"I had no idea it would take this long," Noah said. "The quest was more complicated than the system suggested. How is everyone? Where are the others?"

"Mostly on contracts. They’ll be back." She looked at him the way she looked at things she was reassessing. "You do look different."

"Kelvin said the same thing."

"Kelvin is right." She hugged him again, shorter this time, and stepped back properly. "I have so much to tell you."

"Tell me while I find somewhere to change," Noah said, looking down at the octopoid remnants on his sweatshirt. "Because this is not a conversation I want to have smelling like whatever that thing was."

"In a minute," Kelvin said, from behind him. "I need to show you something first."

"Kelvin."

"Two minutes. It’s important. You can smell bad for two more minutes, it’s fine."

Noah looked at Sophie. Sophie’s expression said she knew what Kelvin wanted to show him and had opinions about the timing but had decided not to express them.

He followed Kelvin.

The workshop was on the second level, accessed through a corridor that had the clean purposeful design of someone who had thought carefully about workflow and storage and the specific needs of someone who built things that did not yet exist. Equipment along every wall, organized in a way that looked chaotic but was clearly indexed by a logic only Kelvin fully understood. Holographic schematics rotating above two separate workbenches. The smell of ozone and something metallic that was not quite metal.

And at the far workbench, back turned, headphones on, in the process of doing something to a piece of equipment that required both hands and most of her attention, a figure with a dark bob that caught the workshop lighting.

Noah stopped walking.

"Diana?" he said.

She turned.

Icy blue eyes. The smile that arrived before the words did, genuine and immediate and carrying the warmth of someone who was genuinely glad to see you and was not performing it.

"Hey, big guy," Diana said, pulling the headphones down around her neck.

Noah looked at her. At the bob. At the way she was standing, completely upright, completely present, doing intricate work with both hands and showing no sign of the surgical pins or the healing timeline or any of the things that had been true about her state when he left. 𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎

"Your hair," he said.

She touched it self-consciously. "Still growing out. It’s getting there."

"How," Noah said.

"Kelvin," she said, like that answered everything. Which in her experience it usually did.

Noah turned to Kelvin.

"You found a void stone," Noah said. "In four months you found a void stone."

Kelvin’s expression did something complicated.

"Well," he said. "Not exactly four months."

"What does that mean."

"It means the void stone took a bit longer to locate than four months." Kelvin said.

"How much longer."

Sophie appeared in the workshop doorway behind them.

"Noah," she said, carefully.

"How long, Kelvin."

Kelvin looked at Sophie. Sophie looked at Kelvin. Some kind of silent agreement passed between them about who was going to say it.

"You’ve been gone for two years," Sophie said. "Not four months. Two years."

Noah looked at her.

Then at Kelvin.

Then at Diana sitting at her workbench watching him with the expression of someone who had been waiting for this specific moment for a while and had thought about what it would look like.

He stood there in the middle of Kelvin’s workshop with octopoid matter on his sweatshirt and the Eclipse insignia on the floor below him and the underwater headquarters visible through the workshop’s viewport window, and he did not say anything for a long moment because there was nothing immediately useful to say.

Two years.

He had been gone for two years.