Robert was right.
It wasn’t.
The boy pulled out something small and dark, too clean for a schoolyard fight.
It fit over the back of his hand and curled around two fingers like the skeleton of a glove, with thin metal bands locking across his knuckles and a crystal socket no larger than a coin sitting at the center.
The moment his thumb pressed against the side, electric lines crawled through the device like veins waking under skin.
Jup’s stomach dropped.
That was military.
Another boy pulled one from inside his sleeve, then another near the utility crates.
Three devices came alive in uneven pulses, each one giving off a rough electrical whine that had no place in a school lot.
Robert’s eyes widened.
“Are those—”
The first device snapped bright.
A compressed blast of air hit the pavement beside Jup and tore a line through loose gravel, hard enough to sting his cheek with flying grit.
The second boy swung his arm, and a ribbon of heat flashed across the space between them, bending the air in a wavering line.
The third device spat a jagged arc of violet-white light that snapped against the truck and made the alarm scream before shorting it out entirely.
Everything in the fight changed.
The boys with the devices looked startled by their own power for half a breath, but excitement swallowed the surprise almost immediately.
Marcus’s expression shifted from anger into something uglier.
“Still want to act tough?” he said.
Jup stared at the devices.
“Military-grade Ether Conductors,” Triōhnah said.
Jup froze.
What?
“Civilians should not have them. Publicly, they amplify Ether. Actually, they route refined mana through unstable mechanical channels.”
Jup had no time to process that.
One of the boys swung again.
An electric arc tore toward him.
Jup moved too late.
The discharge struck the pavement at his feet and exploded upward in a hard flash that threw him backward into the truck.
His shoulders hit metal, his breath left him, and static crawled over his skin and through his teeth.
Awareness hit at the edge of his vision, too fast to become anything solid.
Level Two held, but barely.
His Ki was low, his Mana tolerance unstable, his Essenz still sealed beneath something Triōhnah would not open, and Ki Reinforcement remained active only because his body kept dragging it up by instinct.
The awareness vanished before he could hold it.
Robert shouted his name.
The boy with the heat device laughed, though fear lived inside the sound.
“You see that?”
The device on his hand flickered orange, then brightened.
“Calibration unstable,” Triōhnah said.
Jup pushed away from the truck, vision swimming.
“Robert will not survive a direct hit.” His attention snapped to Robert.
The boy with the heat device turned too.
Robert was still half on the ground, one hand braced under him, trying to get up.
“Don’t,” Jup said.
Nobody listened.
The heat burst went wide, uncontrolled and ugly.
It tore across the pavement toward Robert, too messy to be a beam and too aimed to miss by accident.
It was the kind of attack thrown by someone who didn’t understand the weapon in his hand and wouldn’t care until after the damage was done.
Jup moved.
No thought.
No plan.
He crossed the space faster than his body should have allowed, grabbed Robert by the back of his shirt, and yanked him away as the blast struck the ground where his arm had been.
The pavement blackened.
The edge of Robert’s sleeve smoked.
Heat washed over Jup’s hand.
Then something pulled.
From him.
The orange flare at the edge of the blast thinned for a fraction of a second, stretching toward his fingers like light dragged through water.
A thread of heat slipped beneath his skin, and at first, it felt cold.
Jup’s hand seized.
Pain shot up his arm so sharply his fingers locked around Robert’s shirt.
The veins beneath his wrist flashed faintly, first amber, then ember-orange, then a thin silver-green that vanished under his skin like something had crawled deeper before he could throw it away.
His stomach clenched.
The hunger under his ribs stopped twisting.
It opened.
Jup staggered, almost dropping to one knee.
“Unregistered skill response detected,” Triōhnah said.
Jup stared at his hand.
The boy wearing the device stared too as the glow inside the Ether Conductor flickered, dimmed, then surged back unstable and angry.
He flinched like the machine had bitten him.
“What did you do?” he asked.
Jup had no answer.
Awareness stuttered through him in pieces, raw and half-formed.
Mana Drain had not unlocked; it had cracked open for a breath, reacting to refined mana output before his body knew how to survive the intake.
Ether, the word the surface used, sat over the truth like a label pasted on the wrong machine.
Mana?
“Surface Ether output is refined mana routed through Ethereal Crystal cores,” Triōhnah said.
Jup’s attention snapped back to the device.
The crystal socket at the center of the handpiece pulsed like a small, trapped heart.
That crystal holds mana?
“Public term: Ethereal Crystal. Accurate classification: condensed mana.”
Darnell’s eyes narrowed, fixed on Jup’s reaction instead of the device.
The cold inside Jup’s arm twisted.
Then it spread.
Only a little.
Only enough to make his shoulder spasm and his chest tighten like his body had swallowed something with edges.
His heartbeat stumbled once, then came back too fast.
His Ki recoiled around the foreign energy, tightening through his muscles in amber pulses that fought the mana instead of blending with it.
Jup sucked in a breath through his teeth.
Robert looked up at him.
“Bro?”
Jup couldn’t answer.
His vision split.
The service lot doubled, one version bright and sharp, the other washed in pale lines crawling over the ground, the truck, the devices, the fence, and the bodies around him.
Every crystal socket burned brighter than everything else, its light trapped in glass and forced through channels it didn’t choose.
Then the second sight snapped shut.
“Mana intake unstable,” Triōhnah said.
“Ki flow disruption detected.”
I didn’t mean to do that.
“You did it anyway.”
Then stop it.
“I cannot. Your body initiated the drain response.”
The boy with the Ether Conductor cursed and shook his hand again.
Electric lines crawled through the metal bands, brighter now and uneven.
The socket sparked once.
Darnell saw it.
So did Marcus.
So did Robert.
Darnell’s mouth parted slightly.
Recognition moved across his face, small and fast.
For an instant, his eyes seemed too dark for the daylight.
Then his expression tightened, as if he were forcing himself back behind his own face.
Another pulse hit Jup’s arm.
His fingers twitched open and closed without permission.
“Continued absorption may damage your nerves, disrupt your Ki, or tear the channel open.”
Normal words.
You cannot drain that much mana yet.
“Safely.”
That landed.
Jup looked at his shaking hand.
For a second, the hunger inside him changed shape.
It felt like his body had tasted a storm and wanted more, even while every other part of him tried to reject it.
The boy with the Ether Conductor raised his hand again.
Jup moved first.
He didn’t know how.
The energy inside him answered before thought could shape it, not as aim or control, but release, and release didn’t care what it damaged on the way out.
His arm snapped forward, and the stolen heat tore out of his palm in a broken burst.
Fire and lightning tangled together in the same unstable discharge.
The blast struck the attacker’s device and blew the metal bands apart in a shower of sparks.
The boy screamed and fell backward, clutching his hand as the crystal socket popped free and rolled smoking across the pavement.
For a heartbeat, everyone froze.
Then one of the older boys looked at Jup’s hand: bare skin, no metal bands, no crystal socket, no military frame.
People didn’t project Ether barehanded.
Everyone knew that.
“What the hell?” someone whispered.
Marcus’s face changed.
Darnell’s did too, but slower and more carefully.
For the first time, something beneath Darnell’s calm seemed to hesitate, like even he hadn’t expected that.
Robert stared at Jup like his mouth had forgotten how to close.
“Bro…”
The boy on the ground scrambled backward, still clutching his ruined handpiece.
“He doesn’t have one.”
Nobody answered.
They were all looking now.
At Jup’s hand.
At the broken Ether Conductor.
At the space between them where the attack had come from.
“He doesn’t have one,” the boy said again, louder this time.
That was when real fear entered the lot.
The thinking kind.
Then Jup’s arm went dead.
His fingers dropped open, his shoulder sagged, and pain arrived a moment later, deep and white, crawling backward through the bones like the blast had taken part of him with it on the way out.
Jup stumbled.
“You released it,” Triōhnah said.
That sounded like a good thing.
“It was not.”
His knees threatened to buckle.
“Your channels are unstable. Your Ki flow is disrupted, and your arm is not responding correctly.”
Jup tried to close his fist.
His fingers twitched once.
Nothing else happened.
“Repeated discharge could leave permanent damage.”
Jup stared at his hand.
The mana had left.
The cost had stayed.
His gaze moved from the broken device to the boy wearing what remained of it.
The hunger under Jup’s ribs folded inward, then opened wider.
This was not food hunger.
This was not pain.
It felt like something inside him had found a door in the dark and placed its hand against it.
Something secondary formed beneath the strain, not cleanly and not safely.
His Ki was nearly gone, the mana he had taken in refused to settle, and the restraint holding the deeper thing inside him had begun to slip.
Triōhnah’s voice sharpened.
“Secondary pathway forming. Your restraint is failing.”
A pause followed, and when it spoke again, its voice sounded less like warning and more like something trying to name a disaster while standing inside it.
“Secondary pathway active.”
The hunger stopped pulling at him.
It started listening.
Jup gave no answer.
Something in him went quiet — not calm.
Just quiet.