Chapter 33: Subtle
Cole departed Hawthorne the next morning.
He didn’t leave in a rush. He’d learned the hard way that skipping the small things always came back to bite you later.
He checked on the kids.
Six of them, crammed into a room that wasn’t meant for that many, sitting on blankets and borrowed pillows. They looked smaller in daylight. Children who should’ve been worried about scraped knees and cartoons, not demons and cages.
They stared at him when he came in. Some with fear, some with curiosity, one with a kind of hard-eyed watchfulness that made Cole’s stomach tighten.
Daniel was there too, sitting close to the others without actually touching anyone.
Alina was with them, hands gentle, voice low. She was doing what she could. Cole didn’t linger long. He didn’t know how to be comforting in a room full of kids who’d watched the world end. He didn’t want to say the wrong thing and make it worse.
He just made sure they had water, food, and someone watching them.
Then he updated the settlement leaders.
He told them what had happened in the garage. Veritus. The runes. The kids as anchors. Caleb.
The moment he said small skeletons, the room went quiet.
They were planning a vigil for Caleb.
Cole wasn’t sure he’d be there, but he was going to try and make it.
He got some rest after that, the kind where you close your eyes and your body collapses, but your mind never really stops. He woke up with the taste of dust in his throat and the echo of a collapsing building in his ears.
So he kept moving. Because stillness was dangerous. Stillness meant thinking too much.
He made potions.
The cauldron he had been rewarded when he had cleared the rift with Falen was self-heating and self-cleaning. It took him a minute to figure it out, but all he had to do was will it and the cauldron began to heat up.
He was even able to control the heat. After, it simply cleaned itself.
It was incredibly convenient, almost insulting in how easy it made things.
Cole made several batches of Mend potions with the rest of his ingredients.
He didn’t lose himself in the process. He didn’t have the luxury. Still, the rhythm helped. Measuring, stirring, watching the surface shift when the heat hit the right point. The smell that rose when the mixture changed, sharp at first, then clean.
He lined the finished bottles up on the table and stared at them for a moment, trying not to think about what they represented.
Bandages for a world that had been ripped open.
Hawthorne’s scouts and scavenging teams hadn’t found any of the ingredients he’d needed, but that was mostly because he’d forgotten to ask them to look for them.
That was on him.
He wrote the list out in plain handwriting, not trusting his memory anymore, and found Naomi. She was already buried in her own work, clipboard in hand, hair frizzed, eyes darting.
Cole waited until she actually saw him. It took longer than it should’ve.
“I need you to pass this to your teams,” Cole said, holding the paper out.
Naomi took it, scanned it, then glanced up at him with a look that said, of course you do. She didn’t say it out loud, but Cole appreciated her restraint.
“What’s this?” she asked anyway.
“Ingredients. If they see any of it, I want it brought back,” Cole replied.
He set four Mend potions on the table in front of her. The bottles clinked softly.
“These are for the settlement.”
Naomi stared at them. Then her mouth tightened, and she nodded once.
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“Okay. I’ll log it.”
Cole pocketed the other four.
A notification blinked.
600 Profession Experience Gained.
Profession Advanced: Black Halo Alchemy Novice Rank 1 to Black Halo Alchemy Novice Rank 2
Cole wiped it away almost as soon as it appeared, out of habit. Habit from weeks of swiping away experience. But a few seconds later he brought it back up, just to confirm what he’d thought he saw.
It was nice to make some progress there, but it didn’t feel like a huge gain.
He was still making Mend potions.
He knew there were likely other recipes out there. Other things he could do. Better things. Things that would matter more than sewing wounds shut after the fact.
He’d find them. He had to.
He gripped his staff.
It flickered in his consciousness, an eagerness to be about their goals. The Crozier wasn’t a normal object. Cole didn’t even know if it counted as a weapon in the way the old world would’ve defined it. But he felt it anyway, the subtle presence of it, always waiting.
Cole left through the gates.
No one stopped him. He was able to come and go as he pleased at this point. That kind of trust was its own weight. It meant people assumed he’d come back. It meant people assumed he’d keep helping.
Cole wasn’t sure if he deserved that assumption.
The air outside Hawthorne was cold and sharp. The streets looked the same as always, abandoned cars, broken glass, debris, the bones of a normal life left to rot.
The difference was the quiet.
He was somewhat surprised to see that nothing attacked him.
No husks shuffling out from side alleys. No demon-things crawling from broken storefronts. No sudden wave of claws and teeth.
Just wind, rattling a loose street sign somewhere down the block.
Perhaps it had something to do with closing the rift.
Something else to thank Caleb for.
The thought sat in Cole’s chest.
He walked anyway, staff tapping lightly against the pavement now and then. The sound grounded him. He passed buildings he’d seen before, places that used to mean something to someone. A diner with a cracked window. A pawn shop with a smashed sign. A gas station that smelled faintly of spilled fuel and old oil.
The farther he went, the more the city changed
More spray paint.
More signs of people.
A scrawled symbol on a wall. A crude arrow pointing down a street. A smear of red paint.
Wrath had been here.
After some time, he arrived at a checkpoint.
It was built from stacked cars, twisted rebar, wood, and metal trash bins. Like a child’s fort.
Three people stood in front of the only opening that led further down the street.
Clearly thugs with that patch Cole had seen on what’s-his name.
He dug through his mind for a moment.
Rorick.
Red demon skull with horns, sewn on the shoulder. Crude, but unmistakable.
On top of the checkpoint, on some makeshift ramparts, were three more thugs. All of them had guns.
Rifles.
They had better weapons than the men on the ground. They had better positioning too. A choke point, cover, elevation. Whoever built this wasn’t a genius, but they understood the basics of controlling a street.
Cole slowed to a stop several yards away. It was stupid to walk into gunfire.
One of the thugs in front stepped forward.
He was thin, face pocked, eyes jittery. His beady brown eyes sized Cole up and his grip tightened on his gun.
“Stop!” the man snapped. “This is Wrath territory. Pay the toll, or get lost.”
Cole didn’t answer immediately.
He looked at them. Really looked.
These were predators. He could see it in the way they stood, in the way their eyes flicked, in the casual confidence of men who’d done this before and expected it to work again.
Behind the checkpoint, Cole heard movement. Voices. More bodies shifting. The place had depth. This wasn’t three men and a barricade. This was an organized problem.
Now, Cole had a choice.
He could try deception. Say he wanted to join up, or maybe that he had information for Devin. Any number of lies would probably be effective. Would get him past the checkpoint.
One would probably argue that it was smarter to do it that way.
Take out the leader, the rest would likely crumble.
Cole leaned on his staff slightly, staring at the thugs.
The three on the bottom raised their weapons.
The ones up top adjusted their stances. One of them spit down onto the pavement.
“Hear me, asswipe?” the man in front barked again. “Get the fuck outta here!”
Cole stared at him, expression calm.
His authority stat didn’t scream a warning. Cole could feel the danger on his own. Six rifles pointed at you did not require a system to interpret.
He thought about the garage.
He thought about the bones.
Small skeletons.
He thought about the way the kids had looked when the runes pulsed.
He thought about Caleb standing on those runes, light burning him hollow so other people could live.
He thought about Veritus’s grin.
Cole’s favorite trilogy to read was Lord of The Rings, and it was his favorite movie trilogy as well.
His class was Wizard, and Wizards were supposed to be subtle and quick to anger.
Cole’s mouth twitched, but it wasn’t a smile.
“Fuck being subtle,” Cole said, utterly calm.
The Crozier hummed.
A low, eager vibration that ran up his arm.
Shadows sharpened.
He didn’t raise his voice.
“Black Halo Lance.”
Dark light lanced out from their shadows.
It erupted from the black beneath their boots and behind their legs.
The three on the top didn’t even have time to shout.
Seraphic black light speared through them and they turned into ash where they stood. Their rifles clattered down onto the wood planks a split-second later, then slid off and dropped to the street, bouncing and spinning.
Ash drifted down.
One of the thugs on the bottom died too, his shadow becoming his executioner, and he went down in a puff of gray and black that left nothing but a smudge on the pavement.
The other two did something.
Their patches flared.
Red light burst across their shoulders. It crawled over their torsos in a quick, ugly sheen, and the lances that should have gutted them broke apart, the dark light scattering.
The two men stumbled backward, eyes wide, gasping.
For a second, they just stared at Cole, not understanding what had happened.
Then the shock snapped into panic.
Somewhere behind the checkpoint, Cole heard shouts.
Movement.
Feet pounding.
Guns came up.
More muzzles appeared through gaps in the barricade. Someone yelled an order. Someone else cursed. A magazine clicked into place.
The two surviving thugs in front recovered enough to raise their rifles again, hands shaking now.
Muzzles flashed.
The first bullets tore toward Cole.
The fight had begun.
