That was fine. Doubters were useful. If people underestimated me, they walked closer.
That afternoon, I met Harper. She was sitting on top of a broken battle drone with a wrench in one hand and a snack in the other, watching me like she had just found a rare animal in a parking lot. She had sharp eyes, messy hair, and the energy of someone who would absolutely press a red button just to see why it was red.
Unlike everyone else, she did not ask my rank. She asked if I could make her drone dance.
"Depends," I said. "Does it know any good moves?"
I snapped my fingers, and the busted drone sprang up, spun on one rotor, flashed its lights, and played an old pop song through its damaged speaker. Harper almost fell off the bench laughing.
After that, she decided I was interesting. More importantly, she knew how Aster worked. She told me rifts opened all over the city, and raiders made money by clearing them. Strong teams got rich. Weak awakened got used as bait. Crime crews hunted low-rank people because crystal cores were worth more than human decency. The famous raiders lived in penthouses while failures slept under train stations.
Then she told me Ryan had been at the bottom of the bottom.
I asked who had left him in that alley. Harper's smile faded. She said most street crews answered to Damian.
The name made the people nearby lower their voices. Damian was a celebrity raider, a lightning-resistant brawler, a rich smiling monster with underground crews everywhere. He ran illegal rift raids, sold stolen cores, and challenged anyone who threatened his image. He did not wear armor or wave a sword around like some fantasy clown. He wore designer coats, smiled for cameras, and broke people where nobody important could see.
Apparently, Ryan had annoyed one of his crews by refusing to hand over a tiny crystal core. That was why Ryan died.
I looked at the storm crack glowing in the sky and felt something inside me hum. In my old life, people like Damian always won. They had money, friends, influence, and enough confidence to make cruelty look normal. In this life, I had lightning in my bones.
So I made a plan. Not a noble plan. Not a patient plan. A fun plan.
I asked Harper where Damian's crews liked to rob beginners. She pointed at a little rift market under the train bridge, then asked what I was going to do.
"I'm going shopping," I said.
By sunset, I was walking through the market with a cheap cloth bag, pretending to be exactly what everyone thought I was. Weak, lost, alone. Stalls sold monster teeth, cracked cores, fake healing drinks, secondhand armor, illegal stun rings, and noodles that smelled powerful enough to awaken their own magic. I bought the noodles first, because revenge is important, but hunger is undefeated.
Then I bought the brightest little crystal core on the cheapest table and held it up like an idiot with no survival instinct.
It worked instantly. Three men followed me into a service tunnel. One had a shock baton. One had a drone jammer. One had a grin so confident I almost felt bad for him. Almost.
They told me to hand over the core. I asked if this was a robbery or a group discount. They did not appreciate the joke. The one with the baton stepped forward and swung at my ribs.
I let him hit me. The baton discharged into my body and vanished like a raindrop falling into the ocean. The man stared at his empty battery gauge. I stared back.
Then I breathed out, and the tunnel lights became stars. Every bulb burst into blue flame. The rails overhead rang like temple bells. Their jammer sparked, turned on its owner, and played a cheerful warning jingle while shocking him in tiny embarrassing pulses. The baton melted into a glowing noodle. The third man tried to call for backup, but his phone crawled out of his pocket, floated in front of his face, unlocked itself, and started recording.
I smiled at the camera. "Please explain why you attacked me first," I said.
They attacked harder. Perfect.
I did not throw them through walls. That would have been satisfying, but messy. Instead, I used the service tunnel like a piano. The security shutters dropped behind them. The turnstile arms spun and smacked their knees. Lights flashed in patterns that blinded them without hurting their eyes. Then I sent a current through the floor just strong enough to make every muscle in their legs give up at the same time. They fell like stacked furniture.
By the time the city guards arrived, the video was already on every public screen in the market. Harper had somehow hijacked the ad boards from a nearby noodle stall, because apparently she also believed revenge should have production value. The crowd watched the whole attack from three angles, including one slow motion replay where the thug's hair stood up like a frightened broom.
The guards dragged them away. People stared at me differently after that. Not with respect yet. Respect takes time. They stared with confusion, which was better. Confusion means the old story is cracking.
Harper walked up with two bowls of noodles and said, "You're insane."
"I prefer educational," I said.
She became my first ally that night. Not because I begged. Not because I promised anything. Harper liked clever chaos, and I was apparently a walking thunderstorm with a talent for humiliating criminals in public. She offered to help me learn the city if I helped her rebuild machines no one else could fix. I agreed, because she had a workshop, snacks, and enough broken gadgets to teach me what my power could really do.
Her workshop was above a laundromat that never closed. The place smelled like detergent, motor oil, and fried noodles. Broken drones hung from the ceiling. Batteries sat on shelves like sleeping animals. Old arcade cabinets lined one wall, and every one of them turned on when I walked in, welcoming me with eight-bit music.
For the next week, I trained there. By trained, I mean I broke reality in increasingly stupid ways until Harper stopped screaming and started taking notes.
I learned I could drain batteries without touching them. I could charge a dead phone by pointing at it. I could read data as tiny pulses if I focused hard enough. Not words exactly, more like feeling the shape of information moving through wires. I could lock doors, unlock doors, scramble cameras, erase a stun trap, fly on magnetic rails for six terrifying seconds, and make every toaster in the building launch bread at the same time.
The toaster thing was an accident. Mostly.
The more I used my power, the more something deep inside me woke up. It was not a voice. It was not a menu. It was like an ocean behind my ribs, a storm with no sky, telling me that lightning was only the surface. Electricity was motion, signals, heat, magnetism, nerves, thought. The little spark that made muscles move. The invisible language of every machine.
I was not just throwing lightning. I was learning the alphabet of the world.