Lance staggered through empty streets, each step automatic. Blood and ash coated his tongue. His memories splintered and reformed—destruction, running, more destruction—but he couldn't piece them together. His body kind of knew where to go even if his mind didn't. Or maybe not.
Where am I going? he asked his brainwashed self as if it would suddenly provide the answer.
Silence was his only response.
He knew only that he had to keep moving, had to reach his target—whatever it was.
Pedestrians gave him a wide berth, eyeing his disheveled appearance and blood-stained clothes with a mix of unease and concern. Their fear meant nothing to him. His sights had narrowed to a pinpoint, fixed on the mysterious destination tugging at the edges of his consciousness.
Left here. Now right. Straight ahead.
He obeyed his gut, weaving through alleys and side streets he'd never seen before, but remembered feeling ‘right.’ The city flew past him, streets melting into an urban maze. His senses caught fragments - whispered conversations, exhaust fumes, rumbling subways that had just reopened beneath his feet. The world was hollow, empty except for his mission.
How long have I been walking?
Minutes? Hours? Time had lost all meaning. [8:20 AM] Light spilled over rooftops, carving the city into light and dark. His legs ached, his lungs burned from lingering smoke, and his system displayed: 'arma reserves at 50%'. But he couldn't stop. He wouldn’t stop. He would find him.
Finally, he rounded a corner and froze.
Like a monolith, his destination rose before him while his vision cleared into sudden recognition.
The Durview Hotel.
This... this is where I woke up?
Soft sheets. The smell of room service coffee. A view of the city skyline from high above. The events of this morning became clearer each second.
Vicky! Lance crashed through the entrance, shoulder-first through shattering glass. The automatic doors hadn't opened fast enough.
His momentum carried him into the vast lobby, his half-burned boots sliding on marble. The chandeliers hung dark overhead—maintenance must have forgotten them—leaving the space wrongly dim.
The concierge stiffened as Lance drew near. To his credit, the woman's professional demeanor held firm.
"Welcome back, Mr. Lawthorn," she said with a slight bow. "I trust you had a... productive morning?"
"You know me?" Lance asked, wary of his surroundings.
"Of course, sir. You've been our guest since last night."
Last night…
Lance turned to stone. His mind stumbled over missing hours, missing memories. How much had the killer taken? And why did this woman act like he belonged?
He made his way to the front desk. The concierge looked up.
"Mr. Lawthorn, how may I assist you today?"
"I..." Lance's throat felt dry, his tongue leaden. "I need to get into my room."
“I’m afraid that’s not possible. You’re not supposed to be here.”
The woman made no sense. Before Lance could question her—
‘Ding’
The elevator doors slid open.
Movement caught in his periphery. A glimpse of striking hair. Disheveled. Blonde. Pink-tipped. Vicky stepped out.
"Lance?" Her voice wavered. "You shouldn't be here."
“Yeah, I was just told that.” He took a step towards her, but she flinched back. "Vicky, what's going on? Are you okay?"
Her neck twisted—left, right, up, searching the lobby’s shadows. "You were supposed to follow The Manager's instructions.”
The Manager? Lance's mind raced, trying to piece together the fragments of his memory. He'd never heard of anyone called The Manager before. Could this be the killer he'd been hunting? But Rick had said Frank was the killer. Unless... Frank was the Manager. Or maybe just another psycho inside Zack, like all the others.
"What instructions?" he demanded. "Vicky, I don't remember anything. I woke up here this morning, and then—"
"Stop!" she hissed, her eyes wide with fear. "Don't say another word. They're listening."
Lance's instincts kicked into overdrive. Everything in the lobby became a threat. The cameras in the corner, the concierge's too-steady gaze, the woman whose mop kept scrubbing the same spot over and over.
He needed to get Vicky out of here, to somewhere they could talk freely. He had to get her to safety. Had to fix this. Had to—
Force himself to study the situation. To look closer. Pulse points, micro-expressions, whatever experts looked for, but who was he kidding? Just because one had source code didn't mean one could understand the program. Or maybe... wait.
Her eyes were unfocused. The fog behind them. The emptiness.
"Vicky, look at me. Really look at me."
When she met his gaze, the truth hit with brutal clarity. That vacant expression. He'd seen it before. In his own reflection, hours ago. Whoever this ‘Manager’ was, his fingerprints were all over her mind just like they'd been all over his.
Something broke loose inside him. A dark, vicious thing that had been building since he'd first realized his memories were missing. The Manager hadn't just taken his mind—he'd taken Vicky's too.
No more games.
Lance knew he'd lost control. Good.
The Manager, the killer, Frank - the name didn't matter anymore. If he'd caused so much destruction while holding himself back, what would happen now that he meant to inflict pain? If this was what they wanted him to become—this thing of rage and revenge—then fine. He'd show them exactly what they'd created. The mask would come off.
But first, Vicky. She needs me clear-headed.
His hypothesis, his analysis, his experimentation—it had all paid off. This Manager had no control over him anymore. But what worked for him wouldn't work for others. Still, he'd found ways to break people free before. He wondered if the same technique he'd used at the church would work here. Those invisible threads of control he'd severed between the priest and his congregation... would he find similar strings wrapped around Vicky's mind?
For weeks they'd trained together, shared meals, talked about nothing and everything. How much of that had been real? How much had been someone else pulling strings? None of that mattered. Not here.
Lance raised his hand, aiming for the strip of shoulder visible where her sweater had slipped. His movements slow, deliberate, and nonthreatening.
His fingertips neared her skin, and he felt the arma streams. His own, familiar as breathing. Vicky's fierce fire beneath the surface. Then the Manager's. It didn't belong there, but it had dug itself in deep, wrapped in barbed wire.
‘PAIN’
Everything went white. His hand jerked back, and he clutched it to his chest. Red welts rose on his palm, blisters forming as he watched. But the pain… that was different. His nullification should have handled the burns. No, this was burning his arma itself.
Her eyes narrowed. “I see what you tried to do, Lance.” Vicky said.
“I didn’t…”
The energy burn scattered his awareness. When his senses steadied, the woman had abandoned her mop, the concierge had stepped from behind her desk. Both moved toward him with synchronized steps.
Lance backed away. Two opponents he could handle, but Vicky was the real threat. She moved better than Diego now—never wasting a single motion. Ready.
He kept his distance. These were arma wielders too. Weak, untrained, nothing like Vicky's fire. But even weak arma users would shatter if he used too much force. One wrong move and he'd snap bones.
The concierge lunged. Lance shifted, caught her arm, careful not to squeeze. The other woman circled behind him. His nullification blocked the pain as expected, but he felt the impact tear at the burns from earlier.
Vicky struck. Fast. Clean. Professional. He barely blocked her fist, felt the impact rattle up his arm. Her Krav Maga had advanced years in minutes, but that wasn't it. She'd learned Lance’s patterns, knew exactly how he'd move before he did.
Look for openings, he reminded himself.
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Two seconds. That's all he needed. Just two seconds of contact to break the Manager's hold. But Vicky kept her distance, letting the others press in. Using them as shields.
Their attacks came in waves. Lance dodged, blocked, retreated. His burned skin cracked at each impact. The two women crept forward, their weak arma signatures rippling at the edge of his awareness. Vicky waited behind them.
The concierge dashed from the left. The cleaner lunged from the right, mop back in hand. He measured distances, calculated angles. Each heartbeat stretched into the next.
His hands shot out. Left caught the concierge's throat. Right found the cleaner's neck. They thrashed against his grip, legs kicking air. The mop handle slammed into his already broken nose, and boots hammered his ribs, and nails raked his arms, and fists pounded his forearms. Dark Resonance snaked through his palms.
One. Two. He counted in his head.
The women sagged in his grasp. He let go. They stumbled back, eyes wide and searching.
"How long?" The concierge pressed her hands to her face. "The dream... how long was I..."
"Weeks," the cleaner whispered. "I've been dreaming for how many weeks?"
"Get out. Now—"
Vicky catapulted forward, a blur. Lance caught glimpses between blocks. Her strikes coming quicker, sharper. Her fist cracked against his jaw. A second strike came before he could recover. Then a third, a fourth, each faster than the last. Five. Six. Seven. The impacts themselves meant nothing without pain, but they were pushing him back, forcing him to give ground.
He saw Vicky now. Teeth gritted, eyes squeezed almost shut with effort, veins standing out from her neck, blonde strands dancing wild and free. The heat radiating from her skin, the way her arma cycled through her body. She'd learned to accelerate it, push it beyond her usual limits. Her muscles were burning through energy like jet fuel, turning excess heat into raw speed. She'd found a way to match him—doing with one power what he could only do with three.
Lance's guard slipped. Her knee drove into his sternum, launched him backward. The floor cracked under his impact. He tried to stand, to find his center, but Vicky was already there.
Her face loomed above him, eyes vacant and cold. "You're making this harder than it needs to be."
“Hard?” A bitter smile crept across his face. “Says the woman who can't even tell she's being controlled.”
He surged upward, twisted beneath her guard, fluid as mercury over glass, driving his shoulder into her chest. It knocked her weight off-center and shifted her balance backward, carried her past him as he pivoted to his feet. She stumbled onto one knee, caught off-guard by the sudden reversal, pink ends sweeping forward. His fingertips brushed her cheek as she turned, just for a heartbeat.
The softness of her skin registered first, but there was no comfort in it. It was a warning. A message his arma could read, that spoke of what they'd done to her. He pulled back as her heat pulsed through his fingers, fierce and beautiful and devastating. It tore into his arma pathways, twisted through his system, sent shockwaves of burning force through his arm. The power rippled up to his shoulder and left his hand trembling with residual energy.
Morphoplasm twitched, hissing, digging deeper into Lance’s shoulder and blocking Vicky’s zelous energy. That’s it!
Her fire-charged attacks came faster now. She was learning, adapting with each exchange. A dangerous development. Lance watched her movements. She lashed out again, fist trailing heat through the air. Another strike followed, scorched the marble wall. He slid past her guard and charged forward.
She countered his first attempt to grab her, then his second. Swift and precise calculations, until they weren't. The third time he caught her wrist. A temporary hold. Just a moment. It gave him enough leverage to twist her off balance and send her stumbling sideways. The follow-through worked better, a sweeping leg strike that caught behind her knee and dropped her hard against the floor, sending cracks through the tiles beneath. Lance seized the opening and moved in close, ignoring the searing heat on his skin as his arma clashed with hers.
He shifted and flowed around her counter-attack, like frost across glass, rolling with her momentum. She lunged up, trying to break his hold with a surge of accelerated arma. Before she could complete the movement, Lance was there, arms locking around her shoulders. She thrashed and fought, but it wasn't enough. Lance's grip was steady as bedrock, inevitable as sunrise. "I'm getting you back." He forced her down against the cracked marble behind the hotel’s front desk and held firm, fighting the burning waves of her defensive arma. "Just hold still for two seconds."
She bucked underneath him, clawed at him with her nails, but his weight pinned her and the strikes lacked force. They panted and grappled each other, raw sounds, faces almost touching. A drop of blood from his broken nose slid down, fell inside her mouth. “That’s fucking disgusting,” she spat. Her hand shot up and pressed against his face, trying to force him back. Her palm seared his skin with that impossible heat.
Every point where their bodies met burned with more than heat. His arma leaked away through each contact. Shoulders, chest, legs, everywhere he had to maintain to keep her pinned. Then the message flashed across his mind:
[Warning: Arma Energy Low. Energy Reserves at 25%.]
His breath came in ragged gasps. Not from the struggle—Vicky was still fighting, but he didn't register her movements now. This was different. Her arma had grown exponentially since their last encounter, but that wasn't what made this fight brutal. Every motion required precise control, each hold carefully measured to avoid causing harm. His arma cycled faster and faster within his system, trying to outpace the drain. Sweat beaded on his forehead, dripped down his face despite the burning air around them.
This ended here. His hand trembled as he lifted it toward her face. Just before his fingers could touch her cheek, Morphoplasm slid down his arm, instinct as natural as breathing. The black mass flowed over his palm, hardened into a protective shell between his arma and her heat.
This second. With the pain blocked, Dark Resonance could begin its work.
[Dark Resonance detected hostile arma signature]
└─Invasive control signals identified in [Human Elementalist (1st Evolution)]
└──Initiating disruption sequence...
Dark Resonance disruption in progress…
Foreign arma influence separated
[Warning: Disruption sequence incomplete]
└─99.1% of intrusive signals nullified
└──Residual foreign influence detected
Not enough. Never enough. The thought cut deeper than any of her strikes had. After everything - the burns, the fighting, draining his reserves - he still couldn't pull her completely free. That last 0.9% might as well have been a chasm.
Lance's grip loosened as Vicky's struggles weakened. He saw the world come back to her in fragments. Her gaze found and pieced together a crack in the ceiling, a window's edge, a potted plant's shadow. One, two, three blinks. Time stretched between each one. Four, five, six. Each flutter of her eyelids brought the lobby into sharper focus, washing away the last ten minutes, each detail compiling in sequential order.
"Lance? What... what happened?"
"You're okay now. You're safe."
Vicky pushed herself up on trembling arms. Her gaze moved across the wreckage beneath her until she found herself touching the jagged edges of a broken table leg among shattered furniture and scattered ferns ripped from their planters before her brow furrowed in concentration as she reconstructed the missing time.
"I was... we were..." She swallowed hard, adam's apple bobbing. "Oh god."
Lance reached out, hesitated, then let his hand fall back to his side. "Take it slow. It's a lot to process."
Her shoulders began to shake, subtle at first, then with increasing intensity. A choked sob escaped her lips, quickly followed by another. Tears splashed onto the broken floor, leaving dark spots on the pale stone.
Lance knew this moment intimately. The sickening realization as your own actions replay in your mind. Actions that felt right, felt good even, while under someone else's control. But now each memory twisted like a knife as you understood just how powerless you'd been, watching yourself dance to someone else's code.
"I couldn't stop it," she gasped between sobs. "I tried, but he was everywhere, in every thought..." Her throat closed around the truth. "I remember... everything. Everything I did. Everything he made me..." She wrapped her arms around herself, fingers digging into her shoulders. "I thought I wanted... he made me think I..." Another sob cut her off.
Lance's lungs forgot their rhythm, stumbling over each breath. He'd been there, trapped in his own mind while someone else governed his will. But seeing Vicky break down, her usual fire extinguished by the weight of what had been done to her... it set his blood boiling.
Shatter.
The sound of breaking glass echoed through the lobby. Lance's body coiled for another threat. But it was Vicky who had moved, her fist buried in the mirrored wall behind the concierge desk. Cracks forked outward from the impact point, distorting their reflections.
"That bastard," she snarled, yanking her hand free. Blood carved thin rivers between her knuckles, dripping onto the polished counter. "He made me... made us...for three weeks, Lance. Three. Fucking. Weeks."
Her eyes met Lance's, and the raw fury he saw there made him take an involuntary step back. This wasn't the controlled anger of their sparring sessions or the frustration that sometimes bubbled up during group meetings. This was something primal, something that burned hotter than any fire she could conjure.
Lance recognized that rage, saw himself reflected in it. They were the same now—both violated, both made to do things against their will. And like him, she wouldn't rest until she collected her debt in pain. The need for vengeance had rewritten her base code, just as it had rewritten his.
"I'll kill him," Vicky spat, her words laced with venom. "I don't care what it takes. I'll find that son of a bitch and make him pay for every second he was in my head."
But they weren't the same, not really. Vicky's words carried a conviction he'd never managed to voice aloud. His own promises of revenge stayed locked behind clenched teeth, hidden even from Diego and the others. He'd survived half a day of that hell. She'd endured weeks. Her fury screamed for blood. His rotted in silence.
He tried to find the right words to calm her down. But part of him—a darker part he'd been trying to ignore—resonated with her fury. Hadn't he felt the same way, wanting to hurt the one who'd taken from him?
Vicky's hands clenched into fists, tendons standing out like cords along her forearms. The surrounding air shimmered with heat, distorting the lobby behind her. Small objects on the concierge desk - pens, paperclips, a stapler - began to smoke and curl.
"Vicky, wait," Lance started, but she had already abandoned the front desk.
She stormed toward the entrance, each step leaving a scorched footprint in her wake. The automatic doors, still damaged from Lance's earlier break-in, sparked and groaned as she approached.
"Where are you going?" Lance called after her, jogging to catch up.
No response.
“Do you know where he is?”
No response. But he saw her hands. They opened and closed in a steady rhythm. Her arma signature pulsed with each movement, stronger than he'd ever felt it. She was pure instinct now, an animal locked on her objective. All he could do was follow.
Vicky went around the building. Past the glass facade. Behind delivery trucks. Down concrete stairs. Lance continued behind her, his steps heavy with fatigue.
She knew. She knew exactly where to go.
The service door opened without resistance. Underground passages stretched ahead, splitting three ways. His energy cycling sputtered, failing to replenish what he'd lost. But Vicky didn't hesitate. Left turn. Right turn. Another left.
Water leaked through cracks in the ceiling, dripping in patterns as Vicky charged ahead. After the morning's fights, what remained of his boots let in water with each step. Ancient maintenance panels hung crooked from the walls, their rusted edges reflecting the dim emergency lighting. His muscles had gone past exhaustion into a deeper kind of weakness, the kind that came from pushing arma limits too far.
[Warning: Arma Energy Critical. Energy Reserves at 15%]
He matched her pace despite his fatigue. His remaining energy refused to cycle. Each superpowered step drained more arma than his failing system could recover. But Vicky marched on, her determined stride carried through the underground maze, marking time like a metronome. Following a map only she could see.
A sound carried through the tunnels. Human voices.
Vicky stopped at a large door covered in rust. Light spilled from underneath. Lance steadied himself against the wall, his vision swimming. He'd used too much energy fighting Diego, fighting her, freeing her. Had nothing left for whatever waited on the other side.
Metal groaned as the door slammed open. Lance followed her into a concrete room lit by a single bulb. Three women huddled in the corner with their clothing reduced to dirt-stained tatters in muted browns and grays. A woman stood between them and the door, her gun already aimed at the newcomers.
Through his fatigue, Lance recognized her. The detective.
Was she tracking the Manager too? It didn't matter. The police couldn't handle this kind of threat, not when it could turn their own people against them. He'd explain later, if there was a later.
The three women stared at them with hollow eyes. One kept touching her face, her arms, her knees - never still. Another shrank against the wall as if trying to sink into it. The third just watched, her gaze empty. Lance's arma sensors picked up four signatures—the three malnourished women. But the fourth signature didn't come from Mitsuki. It came from behind them, somewhere in the tunnel. And it pulsed with enough raw power to make his depleted system recoil.
'Click-clack.' 'Click-clack.'
Heavy steps carried through the walls. Slow. Controlled. Coming closer. Lance's Energy Classification picked up a familiar resonance.
There was someone there—but it wasn't Frank, nor Mack. Not even Preston.