The next time, he sent a monster.
A special rift opened inside a high-rise tower during a thunderstorm. Not a random rift. A shaped one, held open by stolen crystal engines. The tower belonged to a luxury media company that had been spreading Damian's rumors all month. Now its employees were trapped above the fiftieth floor while a creature made of black glass climbed the outside of the building, absorbing lightning from the sky.
The whole city watched. Damian appeared on a nearby rooftop with cameras around him, claiming he would save everyone. Then he looked directly into one camera and said some people should stay away before their recklessness made things worse.
That was definitely about me.
So naturally, I arrived by falling out of the clouds. Harper launched me from the Stormhouse roof using a magnetic rail cannon she insisted was technically not a cannon because it did not explode. I disagreed during the entire three-second flight.
I hit the tower halfway up, turned into lightning before impact, traveled through the building's exterior lights, and emerged inside a conference room where terrified employees were hiding under a table. One asked if I was with maintenance.
"Extremely," I said.
The black glass creature punched through the window. It was shaped like a spider with too many human hands, each finger ending in a shard that hummed with storm energy. Normal lightning would feed it. Damian knew that. He wanted the city to watch me fail against something designed to make my power useless.
He forgot I was not just lightning. I was electricity. I was signals. And the tower was a broadcasting machine.
I led the employees toward the stairwell while the creature crawled through walls and ceilings, drawn to my power. It ate the lights behind me. Every bolt I threw made it bigger. Every surge from the storm outside strengthened it.
So I stopped feeding it power. I fed it noise.
Every server room in the tower spun up. Every broadcast antenna screamed invisible static. Every office computer opened useless files, played videos, and blasted corrupted signals through the wiring. The creature absorbed it all, because it could not tell power from poison. Its glass body flickered with images, weather reports, cooking shows, bad commercials, and a hundred thousand unfinished emails. Its many hands twitched as the junk signals scrambled whatever passed for its brain.
Harper saw what I was doing and joined from outside. The entire media tower became a weapon of nonsense. Screens flashed rubber ducks, dancing noodles, and a slow motion clip of the thug from my first tunnel fight getting shocked by his own shoes. The creature staggered like a drunk mirror. I laughed so hard I almost got stabbed.
Then Damian made his move.
His team entered from the roof, not to help, but to claim the kill. They fired crystal anchors into the creature, trying to bind it for Damian's final strike. The anchors pierced it, and for a second, the crowd below cheered.
Then the creature absorbed the anchor energy and doubled in size.
Damian's smile cracked. The spider smashed through five floors, sending glass raining over the street. I caught the falling shards with magnetism and suspended them in the air like a glittering storm. Riley drove below, weaving through traffic, catching civilians behind her car's shield field. Grace coordinated evacuations from the lobby. Owen somehow convinced a food truck to help block a street.
I stood on the edge of the broken tower, facing the giant glass spider as it climbed toward the roof. Damian shouted that I could not shock it.
"I know," I shouted back.
Then I reached into the tower's elevators. All twelve elevator cars dropped at once. Not falling, but controlled, their motors screaming as I turned their cables into a colossal magnetic sling. I wrapped the suspended glass shards around the elevator cables, forming a spinning drill of reflected light.
The spider lunged. I launched the drill sideways through the building's hollow core. It tore through the creature, not with lightning, but with motion, magnetism, and several million dollars of corporate architecture.
The spider shattered into black rain. Its core tried to flee upward, riding the storm current toward Damian.
I followed.
For the first time, I turned my whole body into lightning in front of the entire city. I shot through the broken roof, caught the core above Damian's head, and crushed it in my hand. Black sparks fell around us. Damian's cameras captured everything.
He stepped close, still smiling for the public. Quietly, he said, "You think they love you because you saved them. They love you because you entertain them. The moment you scare them, they will beg me to put you down."
He wanted me angry. He wanted me to hit him while cameras rolled.
I looked at his hidden ring, his pulse needle, his perfect coat, his hungry eyes. Then I leaned toward the nearest camera and said, "Does anyone know a good window repair guy?"
The crowd below erupted in laughter and cheers. Damian's jaw tightened. I walked away.
That victory changed my life again. The top raider crews stopped mocking me openly. Companies that had ignored us sent gifts. Restaurants offered free meals. Strangers asked for photos. Little kids ran around wearing toy lightning gloves that Harper swore she had not designed, then admitted she had designed, then claimed it was research.
The Stormhouse became more than a base. It became a symbol. People came when they were scared. Small awakened trained on our roof. Mechanics brought broken rescue drones to Harper. Injured raiders came to Grace. Drivers challenged Riley and left humbled. Owen fed everyone and somehow became the most beloved person in the building.
And me, I became rich. Not quietly rich. Ridiculously rich.
I bought an electric motorcycle that could climb walls, then immediately crashed it into a billboard, because wall climbing is harder than it looks. I bought the laundromat under Harper's workshop just so the owner could retire and Harper could stop complaining about the noise. I bought a whole warehouse of dead batteries and turned it into a lightning garden where blue flowers made of current bloomed at night.
I also bought my old alley. The one where Ryan had died.
I did not build a statue. Statues are for people who want pigeons to judge them. I installed lights, cameras, emergency chargers, heated benches, food lockers, and a tiny free clinic booth connected to Grace's floor. Anyone being chased could run into that alley, hit a button, and the whole place would lock down like a thunder bunker.
People called it the safe spark. I pretended that name was not adorable.
That would have been a good time for me to relax. Obviously, I did the opposite.
The moment the safe spark opened, every small criminal in the district treated it like a personal insult. They hated that people had somewhere to run. They hated that cameras watched the alley. They hated that the benches stayed warm during cold rain and that the food lockers refilled faster than their threats could empty them. Mostly they hated that the weakest man they remembered had turned the place where he died into a place where their victims survived.
Hate makes people predictable.
For three nights, petty crews tested the alley. One tried to cut the cameras. The cutters shocked themselves gently, and the crew spent ten minutes apologizing to a trash can, because Harper had installed a little speaker inside it that sounded like an angry old woman. Another group tried to smash the food lockers. Riley arrived so fast their leader dropped his hammer and pretended he had only come to check the soup temperature. A third crew sprayed a threat on the wall, and by morning the paint had rearranged itself into a badly drawn picture of their leader crying under a raincloud.
That last one was my favorite.