The crowd screamed. Harper definitely screamed. Riley looked up, and even she seemed worried.
I reached out to every car around me. Their engines hummed, their batteries sang, their magnetic tires pulled against the road. I made the electricity between them into steps. Blue platforms flashed under my shoes one after another, and I ran through the air over the racetrack like the storm itself had built me a staircase.
I landed on Riley's hood. She did not crash. That was when I decided I liked her.
She glared through the windshield and shouted something I could not hear over the rain. I pointed forward.
A rift tore open on the final curve. This was not part of the race. The air split, and a massive centipede made of black metal crawled onto the highway, blocking every lane. Cars swerved. People screamed. The announcer choked on his own hype. The cheating drivers panicked and nearly slammed into the barriers.
Riley did not slow down. I did not either.
She drove straight at the centipede. I stood on her hood, raised both hands, and pulled power from every vehicle in the race. Headlights dimmed, engines coughed, batteries drained. The stolen current gathered above me into a rotating spear of lightning so bright the rain turned silver.
The centipede opened its jaws. I threw the spear. It punched through the monster, split it from head to tail, and nailed it to the highway with a thunderclap that rattled every window for three blocks. Riley drove through the falling pieces without blinking and crossed the finish line first.
Technically, she won. The crowd did not care. They were chanting my name.
Riley stopped the car, stepped out, looked at the destroyed scooter, the dead monster, the stunned drivers, and me standing on her hood like an idiot. Then she said, "You owe me a car wash."
"You owe me half the prize," I said.
She smiled.
That night, Riley became the second person to stand beside me. Not because she was impressed by strength. She had seen plenty of strong people. She joined because I made danger fun and made cheaters look stupid. Riley hated people who rigged the road and still called themselves winners. I hated them too.
With Harper's machines, Riley's speed, and my lightning, we started clearing rifts faster than teams with ten times our resources. We did not wait for perfect conditions. We made conditions. If a monster hid in darkness, I turned the wiring in the walls into a sun. If a beast moved too fast, Riley drove circles around it until it chased her into my traps. If a rift had no electricity nearby, Harper launched battery drones that carried enough charge to wake a building.
The money started coming in. Not old life money, where you work all week and wonder if groceries count as luxury. Real money. Core money, reward money, viral money from Harper's videos. Riley's racing fans bought anything with a lightning logo on it. People paid just to watch me charge an entire parking lot full of dead cars by walking through it with my hands in my pockets.
I bought shoes first. Then I bought a coat that did not look stolen from a flood victim. Then I bought Harper a proper drone bench and Riley a replacement car, because the first one had developed a permanent smell of fried centipede.
Then we bought the top three floors of an old hotel near the Rift District. I named it the Stormhouse, because I had no talent for subtlety.
The Stormhouse became our base. Harper turned one floor into a workshop. Riley turned the roof into a landing pad and illegal practice track. I turned the basement into a charging chamber where lightning crawled across the walls like living vines. The hotel signs had been dead for years, but when I walked in, every letter lit up blue.
People started showing up. Some wanted protection, some wanted work, some wanted to worship me, which was awkward because I still sometimes forgot to buy laundry detergent. I did not want a cult. Cults are just group projects with worse fashion. I wanted loyal people who could think, run, fight, and laugh when everything went sideways.
That was how Owen entered my life.
He was not strong. He was not stylish. He was a nervous rift porter with a talent for finding food stands in dangerous neighborhoods. He came to the Stormhouse carrying three bags of snacks and a stolen map of Damian's street crews. He said he had been forced to work for them, hated every second, and wanted out before they fed him to a monster.
Harper thought it was a trap. Riley thought we should scare him until the truth fell out. I asked Owen if he had brought dumplings.
He had. That was enough for a conversation.
Owen knew the alleys, tunnels, rooftops, and little hidden doors of Aster better than any raider I had met. He knew where criminals stored stolen cores, where rifts opened quietly, where people disappeared, and which noodle shop served broth strong enough to revive a dead man emotionally. He was terrified of everything, which made him extremely useful, because brave idiots missed traps that scared people noticed from two blocks away.
He became my first side man, though he insisted on calling himself a logistics specialist, because it sounded less like he might get punched.