Dorian wove his bike through the streets of Kowloon City, the city's usual rhythm of hustle and bustle having only fractionally returned. It seemed the inhabitants still remembered the monster surge scare and the rest of the safe zones looking to them for a solution didn't make matters any easier. It was a bad time all around for everyone in Kowloon City with the city's uncertainty on which action to take, but one thing Dorian did know was he didn't give a damn.
If the plans bouncing around in his head were to be put into action he knew he and his fellow Hunters would have the entire world as their enemy— not for any concrete reason just the fear of what Hunter's back in power would mean for the rest of the world and they were right to be afraid. Dorian didn't know how far some hunters would take their revenge and he truthfully didn't care all he cared about was his ever-growing list of people that needed killing and the decimation of the Stewards was top of the list.
Shaking his head in a bid to lose his morose thoughts, Dorian twisted the throttle on his bike and blasted through the city that caused said thoughts and when he hit the long stretch of road leading towards the lodge, he gunned it and literally flew. The Hunter watched the speedometer climb in glee and awe, felt the wind on his face and his heavy thoughts get blown away by it.
It was freedom.
He didn't know when it happened but at some point, he had closed his eyes enjoying the peace and opened it when the wind began stinging and started getting outrageously loud. The Hunter looked down at his speedometer and watched in equal parts awe and growing dread as the needle climbed higher and the bike moved ever faster.
Thinking back on it, Dorian hadn't really put the bike through its paces and the last time he really pushed the bike, he had nearly fallen off during the sudden ratkin attack. Dorian made to ease off on the speed when his enjoyment turned to immediate dread when his front wheel hit a depression in the otherwise smooth road and he was launched with his bike into the air, with his hand still tightly gripping the bike’s handle.
As Dorian flew through the air with his heart in his throat, his mind flashed back to the ever-growing list of stupid shit he kept doing and somehow his making it out of it. This time was no different, his body took over and one moment he was in mid-air and the next he was still there, suspended upside down in midair together with his bike in defiance of gravity.
The Hunter lowered himself and his bike and the instant the bike hit the asphalt and his ass hit the seat his breath exploded out of him in an explosive sigh of relief.
That was close… entirely too close.
After minutes of trying to calm his racing heart, Dorian thought back on the experience and found a few positives. A major positive of his heart-stopping accident was that the energy in his core had barely dipped while he was floating with the bike.
Which was welcome news if it meant he was more Echo efficient, what didn't make sense was his bike floating with him— his short experiment in Roberts's apartment had determined he couldn't influence an object's gravity if it was more than a metre from him but it seemed physical contact negated that. Dorian decided to find out if that was the case.
To test out his theory, Dorian slid off his bike and attempted to pick it up and nothing happened, so the miraculous machine didn't have some gravity-defying mechanism— check. He just had to be sure, next, he channelled the changed Echo in his core and attempted to lift the bike. During his heart-stopping earlier accident, Dorian hadn't noticed with all the imminent death approaching and all that but focusing on his abilities now he could feel it.
His core projected a field or a sense over the bike and with a thought he gently reversed the bike's gravity and watched slack-jawed as the bike slowly began to float. He increased the power of the reversal and floated up with his bike and with a thought equalized the gravity acting on himself and his bike (something he had learned to do while he'd been stuck in the dark place) and he stood floating in mid-air… next to his floating bike.
Dorian's laughter echoed out across the empty stretch of land and soon the sound of his barely audible bike replaced it as he blasted his way towards The Lodge and home.
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As Dorian drove up to the entrance leading up to The Lodge he found feelings of sadness and melancholy welling up in him when he spotted the dilapidated buildings and terrible conditions his people lived in. Such feelings were smothered when he saw his friends pacing at the entrance waiting for him with Leo, a killer with the bow and the one with the sharpest eyesight being the first to spot him.
Dorian pulled up before them and was met with a crushing hug from his friends. After minutes of simply hanging onto each other and finally understanding the stress he'd put his friends through from their reactions they separated and Jax their de facto leader placed his hands on Dorian's shoulders and looked deep into his eye, “Are you okay, brother?” the question nearly broke the younger Hunter and all he could do was smile and say, “ I'm fine now.”
The Hunters moved into The Lodge updating each other and generally laughing at the dumb shit each of them had gotten up to. That was when Dorian found out that Dan had had to be physically restrained by Leo and Jax when he tried to go into the city to look for Dorian which warmed his heart and made him cringe at the explosive storm that would have created. Dan was not known for his subtlety.
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They were tiptoeing around it and yet it burned first most in all their thoughts, Dorian carried the literal change of circumstances of the Hunters, the upending of the status quo, the uplifting of Hunters from 3rd class citizens in some places and barely tolerated nuisances in most other places. The instant the Hunters entered Dorian's little ramshackle house, he moved to the little coffee table and upended the bag he'd been carrying on his person and spilling sixteen brightly glowing monster cores packed to the brim with Echo from a Dragon core.
The Hunters just stood around and stared at the change made manifest before them before Dan broke them out of it by clapping his hands loudly, “How did you get and fill so many cores?”
“Oh, the extras are from the Hunters from Kowloon City. You guys are the proof of concept before those in the know do anything,” Dorian replied.
“Oh the sacrificial experiments, that's nice.” Dan deadpanned.
Jax took a deep sigh and seemed to collect himself before saying, “Well we shouldn't keep them waiting.” He followed his own advice by grabbing two cores and retreating to a corner of the room and slipping into a meditation pose to begin absorbing the Echo followed by Dan who did the same.
That left Leo standing conspicuously and staring at the pile of glowing cores. “Anything wrong buddy?” Dorian asked.
“Will tell you more if it works,” Leo replied.
Before Dorian could ask for clarification the ever-silent Hunter grabbed two cores and went to absorb them, Dorian slightly worried, shrugged and moved to lock the door. He then moved around on quiet feet and feeling bored and having no way to help his friends beyond the provided cores and careful advice about stuff he barely grasped— he lay back on his couch and planned to wait for his friends to finish. When he felt his eyelids getting heavy, the excitement of the day finally catching up to him.
Dorian shot up awake when he felt a poke in his shoulder to see his friends done and standing around him. The dregs of sleep left him in record time and he was instantly alert and waiting to hear what had happened and hopefully not what had gone wrong.
Reading his expression Jax smiled wryly and said, “We wanted to test out what abilities we got in a place where your nice stuff isn't. ”
Dorian was about to correct him about what nice stuff actually was but he wisely shut his mouth and followed his friends into to the night and back to their old haunt, the broken-down warehouse turned garage. Broken-down buildings were painfully abundant in The Lodge.
The four Hunters slipped into their old familiar spot and went about clearing out tables and chairs and then stood around staring at each other.
“So…” Dan began.
Dorian frowned till he realised they were looking at him, their resident expert on the new abilities they'd supposedly, hopefully, gained. It shocked him though he'd known it for a while but he was now an important figure in Hunter society, hell he was a trailblazer, a possible hero and saviour to the Hunters and a monster to the rest of the world. Dorian was more than okay with that.
To make sure he didn't fuck up his friend's cores as he did his for a while. Dorian closed his eyes and tried to remember the feeling of first activating his power and then he began to speak, “The most important thing straight off the bat is to start small with whatever you can do or think you can do. Focus on something around you, something small mind you and try to reach within your core and coax it to do something, mine relies on the revolution of my black hole, I think. All I'm saying is it's all mental and should come if you isolate your cores trigger. It might be easier actually to focus on yourself first or I don't know, just start small.”
Dorian cracked one eye open to see how his friends were taking his instructions only to find them staring at him confused. He shrugged sheepishly, “It's instinctual for me at this point, all I have to do is think.”
To prove his words Dorian flew straight up to the hole-ridden roof of their hideout and floated back down.
“See, easy.”
“Show off,” Dan grumbled.
“Oh, and closing your eyes really helps with the visualization,” Dorian added hurriedly.
The Hunters closed their eyes and began to gesture and move, trying out things to see what did anything. It was Leo who figured out something first. Dorian was walking around his friends when he saw Leo stiffen and a shimmer appear around the Hunter’s clenched fist. He watched with bated breath as Leo moved and delivered a straight hook with his clenched fist only for nothing to happen immediately.
An explosion of rotten wood and rusted corrugated sheets announced that something had in fact happened. Dorian rushed over to a panting Leo who was down on one knee with a beatific smile on his face.
“It worked,” was all he said.
Dorian looked up at the gaping hole in the wall of their hideout and he had to agree. Leo’s success gingered both Jax and Dan to redouble their efforts and it almost immediately bore fruit for Dan who in a fit, Dorian was sure, stamped his foot and caused a three-foot spike of stone to emerge from the ground shocking everyone. He then proceeded to collapse onto one knee panting heavily.
“Fuck yeah, that'll do,” Dan swore.
Reeling from the rapid-fire reveal of what appeared to be some sort of force projection from Leo and stone manipulation of some kind from Dan, Dorian looked at Jax expecting him to bust out something new only to be disappointed. Looking at his friend and the set of his shoulders the younger Hunter knew there was nobody more disappointed than Jax himself, the man held himself to a much higher standard and taxed himself mercilessly. It would be crushing if he couldn't figure it out.
The other Hunters noticing the same thing came together and tried to use their meagre experience to help their friend. Leo described his core as ever-shifting panes of something that never maintained a stable shape. Dan described his as a giant spinning rock, like a planet. There were raised eyebrows at that but a look at Dorian had them relaxing, that wasn't so far-fetched with a literal black hole in the mix.
Jax though described his as a blinding light in his core he couldn't focus on no matter how much he tried. After hours of trying everything they could think of and their friend only getting ever more dejected at each failure, they were prepared to pause for the night when Leo threw out a random comment.
“Maybe you should pray.”
Dorian was about to scoff at the idea when Jax shrugged and placed his palms together and stood still with his eyes closed. Jax stiffened suddenly and the other Hunters knew he’d made a breakthrough. Jax slowly pulled his clasped palms apart and such a spike of terror went through Dorian that he stumbled back. Shining between his friend's palm was an orange light almost bleeding to red that he would recognize everywhere despite the colour change, he had been bathed in it, felt it, captured it into cores and used it to power his core.
The raw Echo from a Dragon.
Unlike the one kept miles underground in Kowloon, this one had intent behind it. It was alive in a way only someone who'd seen a city razed by a Dragon's Echo breath could articulate. The energy changed shape from a beam of light from the Dragon's maw into flames that burned impossibly hot, impossibly long and seemed to seek more things to burn.
Living things.
Jax with his eyes closed held mankind's fear between his palms in a prayer pose, Dorian was sure there was some irony in there somewhere but his mind couldn't compute enough to find it.
With fear in his heart, Dorian watched as Jax with his eyes still closed aimed the shining light between his palm upwards and fired a solid beam of light that turned the roof to nothing and continued on to light the sky above The Lodge. The light of change for Hunters everywhere had been lit.
Come what may they were in it now.