Six Years Later
He walked like someone who had seen hell and survived it.
The hair was longer now, tied back. A stubble beard framed a sharp jaw. His build looked carved from stone—lean, tall, hard. Not gym-trained. Battle-shaped.
He dressed simple. Shirt. Slacks. Sometimes a jacket. No flash. Just presence.
People at the office called him Mister Calm.
They didn't know he'd once burned half a city.
Lucen worked at a civil planning firm. Entry-level. Paperwork. A salary that barely scraped the month.
"You're too smart for this," his boss once told him.
Her name was Aria Vane. Sharp-eyed. Smart-mouthed. Ten years older. Brilliant. Divorced. Wounded.
She didn't see strength in Lucen.
She saw the silence.
"You ever gonna flirt back, Mr. Calm?"
"I don't flirt," he said. "I behave."
She laughed.
It was the first time Lucen smiled in months.
He bought a house on the quiet edge of the city. Stone path. Overgrown lawn. A cracked mailbox that still had someone else's name on it.
Inside, it was clean. But empty.
No TV. No mirrors.
Only a shrine.
A candle burned there every night.
For Tariq.
When the sun went down, Lucen opened the hidden cabinet behind the hallway wall.
Inside:
A half-mask, black, forged from old temple metal and carbon.
Fingerless gloves.
A jacket with reinforced lining across the shoulders and spine.
A rope-wrapped charm, left by Eshun long ago.
Let darkness fear you.
When Lucen wore the mask, his eyes looked colder.
When he moved, it was like a shadow slicing through wind.
He didn't go out every night. Only when the air shifted. When the silence of the city felt too heavy.
One night, he followed that weight.
He found a girl—fifteen, maybe—being pulled into a van behind an abandoned gas station.
He stopped them in five moves.
That's when he heard the name for the first time.
Vice.
A whisper on the street. A myth in alley corners.
No powers.
Just a chemical genius with a voice that cut through minds.
He wore a mirrored suit that fractured his face into dozens of twisted versions.
He didn't sell drugs.
He sold sins.
Bottled lust. Greed pills. Guilt sprays.
A black market of human cravings.
Lucen tracked him through rooftops, air vents, dirty clubs.
They met in a crumbling nightclub half-lit by dying neon.
Vice smiled when he saw him.
"I know you, Demon Boy. I bottle men like you."
Lucen didn't speak.
The air around him tightened. Heated. Like it remembered the fire.
The fight was brutal.
Vice used illusions, gas, chemistry.
Lucen used form. Movement. Stillness. His martial arts weren't textbook—they were survival. Monk precision fused with street rage.
At one point, he inhaled a Wrath Shot.
His hands twitched. Veins burned. The eldritch stirred under his ribs.
But Lucen held it down.
Breathe.
You are not fire.
You are the flame's master.
He knocked Vice out cold.
Tied him in lotus position.
Left him at the police station door.
The media woke up screaming.
Some called him a threat. Others, a myth.
But one name started floating through headlines.
The Whisper.
No one knew who he was.
Not the cops. Not the city.
But Aria watched the news.
And when Lucen walked into work the next day, she looked at him differently.
She didn't ask.
Not yet.
But her eyes said it all.
She had a suspicion.
Next Chapter:- CHAPTER 6: MIRRORS LIE TOO