CHAPTER 5: THE LIGHTNING’S DEBT

The lightning didn't feel like power. It felt like being unmade.

Jorge's scream was lost in the Voidstalker's psychic shriek—a sound that shattered suspended raindrops into vapor and vibrated the warped concrete beneath him. He'd shouted the command: "Purchase Imperial Lightning!"

The Omni-Bazaar responded instantly.

No warmth. No surge of energy. Instead, a void opened inside him. An absolute, sucking coldness that hollowed out his chest, his bones, his very thoughts. It felt like his soul was being siphoned into an infinite abyss. Then, from that terrifying emptiness, the lightning erupted.

It didn't come from his hands. It tore through them.

BLUE-WHITE ANNIHILATION.

Uncontrolled. Unfocused. Raw cosmic fury given form. It ripped from his palms in jagged, blinding whips, grounding itself through the nearest conductors with apocalyptic force. A radio antenna ten stories away vaporized in a shower of molten slag that cooled in slow-motion droplets. Windows across the block exploded inward in glittering, silent cascades. The neon heart of the synth-brothel didn't just die; it imploded, sucking light into a momentary singularity before vanishing, leaving only a scar of ultraviolet afterimage on Jorge's retinas.

The rooftop became a strobing nightmare. Light and shadow fought a silent, furious war. The suspended rain flashed to steam where the bolts passed. The air crackled with ozone so thick Jorge tasted metal on his tongue.

The Voidstalker was center mass.

The bolt struck its shifting, smoke-like form not with impact, but with erasure. Where the lightning touched, the Voidstalker simply… ceased. No scream this time. No dissolution. It was a photograph held over a flame—edges curling into non-existence, its mirror-shard eyes flaring with impossible colors (infrared? ultraviolet? wrongness) before winking out. One moment a terrifying predator, the next, an outline of greasy smoke that the distorted wind slowly tore apart.

Silence.

Not true silence. The Booster still stretched time, turning the aftermath into a horrifying diorama. Molten metal dripped like luminous honey from shattered structures. Steam coiled in slow, spectral tendrils. The two remaining Veridian Vipers hung frozen mid-maneuver, their energy bolts still crawling through the air toward where Jorge no longer stood.

And the pain.

Agony beyond the shrapnel wound, beyond the Booster's neural fire. Using the lightning felt like his bones had become conduits for a collapsing star. His hands were blistered ruins, skin blackened and crackling, the smell of his own cooked flesh acrid and nauseating. Tremors wracked his body, threatening to shake him apart.

*"IMPERIAL LIGHTNING DISCHARGE COMPLETE. ENERGY SIGNATURE: EXTREME. PHYSICAL DAMAGE: SIGNIFICANT (SECOND-DEGREE BURNS, NEURAL SHOCK). SOUL FRAGMENT BALANCE: -0.5. REALITY DEBT INCURRED."*

Negative balance? Reality debt? The terms pulsed with cold finality in his mind.

The SCREECHING sound returned, louder now. Not from a creature, but from the world itself.

The reality warping intensified violently. Gravity surrendered entirely. Jorge floated free of the rooftop, chunks of concrete and twisted rebar drifting around him like asteroids. The building beneath him rippled, its geometry becoming non-Euclidean—walls bending inward at impossible angles, doorways stretching into screaming mouths of darkness. The sky fractured like broken glass, revealing glimpses of swirling, chaotic colors that hurt Jorge's eyes to perceive—The Void Between. Rain fell upwards, sideways, inwards. A parked hovercar dissolved into a cloud of crystalline butterflies that immediately caught fire.

"REALITY DEGRADATION: TEAR TIER. SPATIAL INTEGRITY COLLAPSE IMMINENT. VOID INCURSION PROBABILITY: 99.8%."

Jorge hung in the chaos, burned hands useless, the Booster's fire a fading ember in his veins, the hollow cold of the soul debt a glacier in his chest. He was adrift in a dying pocket of existence.

"Kid! HOLD STILL!"

Silas Thorne's voice, raw and strained, cut through the distorted nightmare. He stood on the edge of the adjacent, slightly less warped rooftop, silhouetted against the fractured sky. He looked like he'd fought his way through hell—coveralls torn, face smeared with grime and blood that wasn't his. In his hands, he held a device the size of a lunchbox, humming with a deep, resonant frequency that Jorge felt in his teeth. Runic symbols glowed fiercely along its casing. A Reality Anchor.

"Brace yourself!" Silas roared. "This is gonna feel like getting kicked by a god!"

He slammed the device onto the rooftop.

THOOM.

A sound deeper than thunder, a physical pressure wave that flattened the floating debris and slammed Jorge back onto the rippling concrete. The Anchor pulsed—visible waves of golden energy radiating outwards like sonar blasts. Where they passed, reality screamed.

Bending walls snapped back with bone-jarring crunches. Floating rubble crashed down. Gravity reasserted itself with brutal force, dropping Jorge onto his burned hands. He cried out. The chaotic colors in the fractured sky bled away, replaced by the familiar, bruised twilight and smog. The dissolving hovercar solidified mid-explosion, then collapsed into a heap of mangled, burning wreckage. The upward rain hesitated, then plummeted earthward again.

The healing wasn't clean. Scars remained. The building Jorge was on now had a permanent, unsettling curve to its roofline. The neon heart of the brothel was gone, replaced by a patch of seared concrete that seemed to absorb light. The air still vibrated with residual instability, smelling of ozone, burnt magic, and something vaguely… alchemical.

Silas stumbled across the now-stable gap between buildings, breathing heavily. He kicked aside a chunk of still-glowing drone wreckage and hauled Jorge upright with surprising strength. "Told you not to bend the damn world! What part of 'screaming into the void' didn't translate, you suicidal idiot?"

He shoved the humming Reality Anchor against Jorge's belt. Its deep thrum sank into Jorge's bones, a counterpoint to the Booster's fading buzz and the soul-debt's hollow ache. The worst of the spatial queasiness subsided.

"Why?" Jorge croaked, his throat raw. He cradled his blistered hands. "Why come back?"

Silas's obsidian eyes scanned the scarred rooftop, the drifting smoke, the distant Veridian spires. "Because that little light show?" He jabbed a grease-stained finger at Jorge's chest. "That wasn't just spatial affinity. That was Primordial-grade disruption. The kind that makes ancient things in deep bunkers sit up and take notice." He leaned closer, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial rasp. "And because Veridian wants you bad. That means you're valuable. Or dangerous. Usually both."

He pulled a small, unmarked injector from his pocket—a milky fluid sloshing inside. "Painkiller. Bio-stabilizer. Won't fix the burns, but it'll stop you from going into shock." He didn't wait for consent, jabbing it into Jorge's neck.

Coolness spread, muting the screaming agony in his hands to a dull, bearable throb. The tremors subsided. Clarity, cold and sharp, returned.

"Project Chimera," Silas said, watching Jorge's face intently. "That implant in your neck. It ain't just wires and code. It's soul-binding tech. Veridian's darkest toy. Grabs a piece of your essence, twists it up with machine logic and whatever magical affinity you got, and tries to make the perfect weapon." He spat. "Usually fries the subject's mind or turns 'em into a meat puppet within weeks. But you..." He tapped his own temple. "Your scrambled soul signature? It's fighting the bindings. Like two big dogs tearing each other apart inside your skull. That's why you can do... this." He gestured at the scarred rooftop, the remnants of the Voidstalker. "And why it's tearing reality a new one every time you sneeze."

Jorge stared at his ruined hands, the warped cityscape, the humming Anchor on his belt. Soul-binding. Reality debt. Primordial disruption. The words swirled in his battered mind. "What do you want, Silas?"

The older man grinned, a predatory flash of teeth in the gloom. "Same thing I always want, kid. Leverage. Information. And a front-row seat when the whole damn tower of cards comes crashing down." He clapped a heavy hand on Jorge's good shoulder, making him wince. "You're a walking, talking demolition charge. Veridian made you. I want to know why. And then? Maybe we point you at them."

He turned, heading towards the rooftop access door. "Now move. This place stinks of cooked Void and CorpSec. They'll be sending more than drones next time. And kid?" He paused, looking back, his obsidian eyes glinting in the neon gloom. "Try not to break anything else on the way down. That Anchor's borrowed. And the owner collects."

Jorge followed, the Reality Anchor humming against his hip like a captured star, the phantom cold of the soul debt nestled beside his own stolen heart. The lightning had saved him. But as he looked at his blistered hands, felt the unnatural stillness of the scarred rooftop, and tasted the metallic tang of the debt in his mouth, he understood the terrible truth Silas hadn't voiced:

Power didn't free you.

It chained you to consequences more terrifying than any enemy.