ENTER INFERNO

The night was heavy with a stillness that belied the chaos of earlier hours. In a vast, empty field—once the epicenter of a titanic storm that had blanketed the country—shattered remnants of energy still danced along the ground. A few scorched patches and lingering wisps of charged air testified to the storm's passing. The public had been told it was nothing more than a freak weather anomaly, yet here, in this desolate place, something extraordinary had taken root.

Somewhere along a narrow dirt road bordering the field, Ikazuchi walked alone, his thoughts as scattered as the remnants of the storm. Ever since the lightning had struck him, he had felt an indescribable change—a mix of fear, power, and utter confusion. The field, bathed in the eerie glow of the dissipating storm, called to him with a magnetic pull he could neither understand nor resist.

Every step he took was heavy with the weight of unanswered questions. What had that energy done to him? Why did his skin feel as if it were still humming with electricity? His heart pounded in his chest, a reminder of the night's violent transformation. Lost in thought and with his senses on high alert, he reached the center of the field—the exact spot where the storm had converged its fury.

The wind had long since died down. The clouds that had once blackened the skies were gone, leaving only a quiet, sun-soaked field behind. But Ikazuchi stood there, alone, his mind a whirlwind of storm and static. The charred grass beneath his feet crackled faintly as he stepped forward, boots sinking slightly into scorched earth.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

"We got something," came a gruff voice through a comm-link, breaking the silence not far from him.

Three figures in matte-black gear crouched on the outskirts of the field, scanning the ground with compact readers and spark sensors that blinked orange and red. They were Inferno operatives, 4th squad. Sent to investigate the aftermath of a storm that had no business being real.

"Residuals are spiking here," another operative said, adjusting the sensor's lens. "This has to be the place."

"Tch. I told them it didn't just disappear. There's still a trace of that energy somewhere in the ground. Keep scanning. HQ wants it contained."

Then, they spotted him.

"Wait... you see that?" One of them pointed. "Someone's here."

They didn't expect Ikazuchi. They didn't even recognize him. But he was in the wrong place, at the worst time.

"He might've seen something. Or worse—been part of it. Grab him."

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It was then that the quiet was shattered by a sudden, deliberate rustling. Out of the darkness, the infernal footsteps of the Inferno operatives echoed across the barren land. Their presence was a cold, calculated intrusion into his private moment of bewilderment.

Before Ikazuchi could react, rough hands gripped his arms and shoulders, pulling him to the ground. His startled cry was quickly stifled by a coarse fabric wrapped around his mouth. He struggled, disoriented, as shadows moved with predatory precision. Confusion and terror welled within him as he was dragged roughly away from the open field—a field that had borne the signature of a cataclysmic force, now the stage for his capture.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

Darkness.

...

The next moments blurred together in a haze of noise and pain. Ikazuchi's body was thrown roughly into a makeshift holding cell—a cold, metallic chamber lit by harsh fluorescent lights. The Inferno operatives secured him with heavy restraints and injected him with a sedative designed to keep him docile. All the while, he could sense that something within him was fighting—a dark, intrusive presence that churned like an unspoken storm.

In a narrow observation room, two operatives spoke in hushed tones over a live feed of Ikazuchi's inert form.

"Looks like he absorbed everything," one whispered. "All of the storm's energy… it's as if his body is a battery. We need to extract it."

Another operative replied, voice low and measured, "He's barely conscious. We'll start with a stimulation protocol—electro-pulse the neural nodes. It should trigger a response."

Without hesitation, they prepared a series of electrodes and high-voltage apparatuses. The chamber's interior was clinical and stark—a room filled with metallic panels, blinking monitors, and a table where Ikazuchi lay, unmoving yet radiating a strange, residual glow. The air hummed with impending violence as they calibrated their devices.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sometime later, Ikazuchi's eyes snapped open.

He gasped.

The ceiling was unfamiliar. The restraints were real.

Metal bars framed his view to the left—he was in a cell.

He struggled upright, body aching, muscles still heavy with whatever they had dosed him with. Panic clawed at his throat. He didn't know where he was, only that something was wrong. His skin still crackled faintly with that unnatural energy.

Footsteps echoed. A shadow appeared at the bars.

With a rough hand, the operative roughly prodded Ikazuchi's face, trying to elicit a response. "Awake yet, kid?" he muttered to himself, clearly perplexed by Ikazuchi's rapid, unnatural recovery. "You weren't supposed to wake so soon… what the hell is going on?"

No answer came from Ikazuchi as he lay, his breathing shallow and uneven. The operative's eyes narrowed as he left the cell, leaving the door ajar. Moments later, another figure—one with an air of authority—entered the cell. The man's voice was low and menacing as he addressed a barely coherent Ikazuchi.

"You will come with me," he commanded. "There's someone who wants to see you."

Weak and still under the lingering influence of the sedative, Ikazuchi was forced from his cell and led down a corridor lined with stark, industrial lights. Each step felt like an eternity, every echo of his restrained footsteps a reminder that he was no longer in control. The operative's grip was firm, unyielding.

They moved down a corridor lined with flickering lights until they reached a dark chamber. Inside stood a tall man—stoic, powerful. His presence alone ignited the air around him.

He didn't introduce himself.

""You've got something that doesn't belong to you," the man said, his voice a low flame, burning with restrained fury. He took a slow step forward, eyes scanning Ikazuchi with calculating intensity. "You walked out of a storm that swallowed half the sky and left nothing behind but silence. People died in that storm. Cities blacked out."

He folded his arms behind his back, pacing slowly around Ikazuchi. "That energy should only go to those who know what to do with it, not some random kid. We're going to fix that."

Ikazuchi opened his mouth to speak, to protest—but he was too tired, too confused.

A jolt of electricity surged through his body from the baton.

He screamed.

"You're going to give it up," the man said. "One way or another."

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The chamber where they brought him next looked like something out of a nightmare.

Circular. Walls of pulsing metal. Needles descending from above, tubes coiled like serpents around a glowing core. Runes etched into the floor hummed faintly. Monitors beeped and chirped as energy levels were calibrated.

The air in the chamber was heavy, charged with a palpable menace. Sparks of energy danced along the floor, illuminating the faces of several Inferno fighters clad in dark, menacing uniforms. They exchanged curt nods as they took their positions around the platform.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

The procedure began with a series of high-voltage shocks delivered directly to Ikazuchi's exposed skin. Electrodes pressed against him, their cold metal biting into his flesh as energy surged through his body. His eyes fluttered, and a look of agonizing concentration marred his face. He tried to speak, to cry out, but the drugs rendered him nearly mute.

Pain.

It started in his spine. Like something was being peeled away from his bones. Light bled from his mouth, his eyes.

Then everything went wrong.

The machines began to scream.

His body arched.

For a heartbeat, the machinery's hum deepened, the sparks dancing wildly as if in protest. A sudden surge of energy erupted from within Ikazuchi—a violent, internal storm that disrupted the extraction process.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

"Sir—we've lost containment!" a technician yelled over the alarm klaxons. Screens blinked red, casting the entire control room in a flickering crimson hue.

In the observation bay overlooking the chamber, Inferno scientists scrambled to stabilize the extraction process. Sparks burst from the consoles. Runes on the chamber floor glowed erratically, pulsing like a frantic heartbeat.

"Shut it down! Now!" another shouted, slamming his palm on a control panel.

"We can't! It's overriding our commands—something's rewriting the entire energy grid."

Panic set in. Operatives drew weapons, unsure whether to flee or fight. One stepped back from the glass as a thunderous boom echoed from below.

"This isn't possible," whispered one of the senior analysts. "No one should be able to survive that much energy, let alone change it."

Then came the silence.

And the scream.

In the chamber, Captain Ryo had arrived moments earlier, eyes locked on the trembling form in the center of the storm.

He hadn't said a word at first. Just watched. Studied. Waited.

But as the spark-killers were torn apart—his soldiers, his people—his composure cracked.

He stepped forward, heat rising from his skin in waves.

--- The golden energy turned dark, jagged. The air warped. Sparks danced across the walls as something shifted.

A voice that wasn't his snarled in the back of his mind.

And he opened his eyes.

But they weren't Ikazuchi's anymore.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

The first squad of guards burst in, weapons ready.

The first soldier lunged—his spark crackling into twin serrated whips of lightning. He struck with practiced precision.

Ikazuchi didn't move.

He twitched.

The soldier exploded.

The moment the first soldier fell—body ruptured mid-air in a crackling bloom of electric fire—the lab descended into chaos.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

Inside the control room, warning klaxons screamed through the steel corridors. Red lights pulsed in rhythm with the tremors rattling the floor, each jolt echoing from the energy convulsing in the extraction chamber below.

"That was Yurei!" a young technician shouted, eyes wide with disbelief as the vitals monitor flatlined. "He's dead! He's—!"

"He's not just dead," another interrupted, pale and shaking. "He was erased. There's nothing left!"

The room erupted into a frenzy. Gloves slapped keyboards, hands flew over controls, but nothing responded. Override commands failed. Emergency lockdowns were ignored. Every order fed into the system was met with the same silent rejection.

"No response from the suppressor array!" someone cried. "The extraction chamber's internal grid is offline! Runes are rejecting containment! Something—someone—has hijacked the interface!"

A senior engineer, face streaked with sweat, slammed his fists against the glass.

The chamber below had transformed into a nightmare of flickering sparks and spiralling death. Operatives who had trained for years to fight Spark users were being torn apart in seconds. Flesh against lightning. Stone against whatever monstrous thing now wore Ikazuchi's skin.

And the captain was watching.

His jaw clenched, eyes narrowing with each soul-crushing defeat his squad suffered.

One operative—a twin-Spark wielder, earth and kinetic force—crashed into the chamber through the ceiling, riding a collapsing chunk of debris. He roared as he slammed his gauntlets into the ground, sending up jagged spires of stone, piercing toward the entity like spears.

A ripple of gold and black energy flared around Ikazuchi—then vanished.

The spires shattered mid-air, turned to dust.

The twin-Spark wielder barely had time to gasp before the figure appeared in front of him, hand outstretched.

A pulse.

The soldier's entire body contorted, sucked inward as if the air itself had collapsed into a single point. Blood sprayed against the walls in a wide arc. A ruin of flesh landed in the corner, twitching once.

Screams filled the comms.

"Zero-Five and Zero-Six are down! We've lost—"

crkkk—

Static.

The line went dead.

In the control room above, every operative had backed away from the glass. Even the senior command staff, men and women who had been in the organization for decades, stood frozen in a stunned silence.

Only the captain remained calm.

Too calm.

He stepped forward, eyes locked on the figure below—Ikazuchi's body now moving like smoke and fire, every motion laced with unnatural precision, no wasted energy, no hesitation.

"He's changing," Ryo muttered, voice barely above a whisper. "No… that's not it. That's not him."

He clenched his fists.

"Send a kill command to all remaining soldiers. No more capture. No more restraint."

"But sir—"

"I said SEND IT."

But it was already too late.

Ikazuchi's—the thing's—movements became a blur. Operatives with sparks of wind, stone, and shadow converged on him from multiple angles. One opened with a torrent of pressurized wind blades, slicing the air in a spiraling death-dance.

Ikazuchi stepped sideways.

Just sideways.

Each blade missed.

A moment later, his hand shot forward, fingers curled like a claw—and the wind Spark-Killer's body inverted mid-spin, bones snapping inward as his lungs collapsed. He dropped with a gargled screech.

Another leapt from behind, cloaked in a veil of shadow, twin daggers gleaming with venom sparks.

Ikazuchi spun, kicked upward, and the assassin's ribcage caved inward. He was flung across the chamber like a toy, crashing into a support beam and leaving a red smear on impact.

Inside the control room, a young woman vomited into a corner.

"What IS he!?" someone yelled.

An analyst with trembling fingers slammed his fist onto the control console. "He's not a Spark. He's something else entirely. It's like there's… there's another consciousness overriding his own. It's rewriting the energy signature!"

The fear in his voice was contagious.

Another man—one of the chamber design leads—took several steps back, slamming his back against the wall.

"We tried to pull the energy out of him," he said, more to himself than anyone else. "Not THIS!!!."

Then, silence fell as the feed from the chamber crackled and twisted—

And they heard the voice.

But it wasn't Ikazuchi's. Deeper. Cold

One word whispered through every speaker in the lab:

"Weaklings."

In a single, devastating moment, the extraction backfired. The energy that was meant to be siphoned from him instead exploded outward. Inferno operatives were caught in the blast—a cacophony of violent impacts as bodies were thrown against cold, hard walls. One soldier, whose Spark flared in a cascade of brilliant crimson fire, was thrown backward and lay still. Another, attempting to harness ice from his Spark, found his powers overwhelmed by a torrent of raw, uncontrolled energy.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

Amidst the chaos, Ikazuchi's form convulsed violently. The energy inside him—his absorbed power—seemed to twist and writhe as if caught in a battle for control. His eyes, wide open now and filled with an unfathomable darkness, burned with a furious intensity. Every sinew of his being vibrated with a tortured force that even the operatives couldn't begin to comprehend.

The chamber turned into a battlefield of sparks and violence. Inferno fighters fell one by one under the relentless, brutal onslaught emanating from Ikazuchi's body. His strikes were savage and precise, a blur of movements that shattered the organized defense of the extraction chamber. Each combatant who dared approach him was met with a torrent of energy—a display of raw, unfiltered power that left nothing but ruin in its wake.

As the carnage escalated, one figure stepped forward from the fallen ranks—a man whose presence exuded authority and menace. His eyes flared with the heat of his own power, and the air around him shimmered with flames. Without uttering a name, he moved with deliberate intent toward Ikazuchi, challenging the uncontrolled energy force before him.

The captain.

For a moment, time seemed to slow. The inferno of sparks and shattered bodies paused as the two forces squared off. The captain's fiery power clashed against the raw energy surging within Ikazuchi. Their battle was a dance of destruction—flames crashing against surges of energy, each strike sending ripples of power that reverberated through the chamber.

This time, Ikazuchi responded.

"Ryo, Captain of the sixth fleet of the Inferno. Considerable power from a flame spark awakening, despite being a measly twenty-five years old"

The fight was brutal—flashes of energy, screams of metal, the chamber cracking apart. Ryo was skilled. Powerful. But even he was losing ground.

Then, Ikazuchi leaned close and whispered something. Ryo's eyes widened.

"How do you know that?" he demanded.

The answer never came.

Ryo's anger escalated, and he threw a crushing blow, body and flame colliding with Ikazuchi's form. The impact was titanic, leaving the captain staggering, bloodied, and reeling as he realized that the foe before him was something far beyond his expectations.

As the fight wore on, the balance shifted abruptly. In a surge of overwhelming energy, an internal resistance—an almost desperate, pained struggle—broke through. The body convulsed violently, and for a harrowing moment, the chamber was filled with the sound of ragged, anguished breaths and screams.

Then, with an agonizing lurch, silence fell. The captain's form crumpled, and the remaining operatives paused, their eyes wide in disbelief. In that moment of chaos, Ikazuchi's form stilled, the wild energy receding into a fragile equilibrium.

But the cost was immense. His body was battered, drained, and he lay motionless on the cold floor of the extraction chamber—a fallen vessel with fragments of uncontrolled power still smoldering beneath his skin.

Ryo rose, battered and bloodied. He approached slowly, rage and confusion etched into every step.

"What the hell are you?"

He staggered over Ikazuchi's weak body. Ryo's left hand burst into a red-hot flame. "You're not human. I don't know what the hell you are, but i don't want one bit of it in any world I'm in. Fuck the energy, it's better off gone anyway." He raised his hand.

Then the wall exploded.

Figures in dark gear burst through, sparks of all colors illuminating the smoke.

Spark Syndicate.

They surrounded Ikazuchi, shielding him as Ryo staggered back. A brief clash ensued—blinding and chaotic. They grabbed Ikazuchi and left.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

When Ikazuchi opened his eyes, it was to a soft bed, sterile lights, and the murmurs of unfamiliar voices.

He jolted upright, chest heaving.

"Relax," came a calm voice. A woman stood beside him, clipboard in hand. The tag on her chest said 'Yamato'. With gentle persistence, she checked his vitals, marveled at the anomalous glow that still clung to his skin, and offered quiet reassurances that belied her own astonishment. Their interactions were tender and filled with unspoken questions; she couldn't help but be drawn to the enigma before her—a young man who, despite his injuries, radiated an energy that was both dangerous and strangely magnetic. Another man stood near the door, arms crossed.

"You're safe now," she murmured, brushing a stray lock of hair from his forehead. "I don't know what happened to you out there, but you're going to be alright."

Ikazuchi stared at his hands.

"What... what happened?"

"You don't remember?"

He shook his head.

They exchanged looks.

"You were being used," Yamato said. "You have something powerful inside you. And you've seen what kind of people will try to take it."

The man stepped forward. "You're a part of this world now. Whether you like it or not."

In those moments, as Ikazuchi's mind slowly began to piece together the shards of a shattered memory, he felt a mix of fear, confusion, and a growing sense of destiny. The horrors of the extraction, the brutal encounter with the Inferno operatives, and that unnameable force battling inside him—all converged into a single, haunting realization: his life would never be the same again.

A beat passed.

"So," he said. "Do you want to join us?"

Ikazuchi looked at them. Then at himself.

He nodded.