Chapter 74

  Mr. Rinaldi P.O.V.

  The boy stands there, floating in the air.

  I’ve seen some shit recently but this is new…and why does he look at ease standing there with a dozen guns pointed at him?

  “Mister Rinaldi,” he replied. “I’m Raffaele, Alessandro’ son.”

  Holy fuck, he did it. And by the missing pieces it must have not been easy despite learning a few tricks. But I’ve seen what power do to men… I really hope you’re one of the good ones boy, God know I had to put down too many recently.

  “So you manage to get back from that portal… good, good, but you still didn’t say why are you here.”

  At that Raffaele smiled slightly, “I’m just here to take out the lizards. Thought I’d handle the infestation before lunch.”

  Alarm bells ringed into my head, the way Raffaele said those words, the certainty, his relaxed posture, the boy at least believed he could do it. In both case it will still be dangerous.

  Raffaele’s gaze drifted over the hundreds of salamanders, then back to the humans without a flicker of concern.

  “Give me five minutes.”

  “Hold there a second son, while your intentions are good, I can’t let you endanger everyone in the belief that you could just pull that off. There are nearly a thousant of the light blue shits. If you can’t manage them, every people in the town will be at risk, for now they are mostly ust amassing there and sending out few groups, but if you rouse them and they start running in the streets, many innocents will die. I hope you understand that I cannot allow you to do as you please, instead work with us, we are rallying to deal with them. What do you say?”

  The boy stayed maddeningly calm. Then he spoke:

  “You won’t defeat them by yourselves,” he said, voice steady, matter-of-fact. “You’re not strong enough.”

  His bluntness made a few people bristle. A man with a spear muttered something under his breath.

  Raffaele continued, still level:

  “But I can. And I understand your worries—I do. If I was you, I’d question me too. But I’m not going to waste hours or days waiting for reinforcements, meetings, logistics chains, or whatever else you’ve got planned.”

  I felt irritation crawling up my spine. “Son—”

  He raised his remaining hand slightly, not in a threatening way, just drawing attention back to the riverbank.

  “Look,” he said. “There are only two actual exits leading from the river up into the town. You’ve already built barricades there. Good work, by the way—layered, fallback-friendly. So here’s my offer: you station your people on both chokepoints. If anything breaks away from me, you kill it. If I fail, they’ll come running up here anyway, so you’ll be defending the same barricades you were planning to defend. Nothing changes.”

  He glanced at the churning mass of salamanders below—hundreds upon hundreds—and didn’t so much as flinch.

  “If I’m wrong,” he added, “I die first. If I’m right, the threat is over.”

  A heavy silence fell.

  The woman next to me—Elena, a retired nurse turned combat medic—stepped forward, jaw tight.

  “This isn’t just about the river,” she snapped. “We need a plan. We need the teams from the plaza, the healers, the runners, the ammo stockpile—you think we can just start a war with a thousand monsters with whoever happened to be standing here right now?”

  Her voice shook not with fear, but with frustration.

  I felt it too.

  I rubbed my temple and tried to keep my voice level. “Listen, Raffale—power or not, you don’t get to make decisions for the whole town. This is a big operation. Bigger than anything we’ve done. We wait for everyone to gather. We coordinate. If we charge in blindly, you’re going to scatter those damned things, and—”

  He cut me off.

  And for the first time, the polite, distant expression disappeared.

  His face tightened—cold, sharp, dangerous. Not angry. Something worse.

  Resolved.

  “If you want to help,” he said quietly, “you are more than welcome. Stand at the exits. Do your part.”

  The air around him… shifted. Not visibly, but I felt something in my bones, like a pressure drop before a storm.

  “But this threat is endangering the town,” he continued. “It’s endangering my family. I can fix it in minutes. I will fix it. I’m not waiting a day, or even an hour, for committees and logistics.”

  His gaze was distant iron. Unshakable.

  “I have other things to do.”

  That last line hit harder than anything else.

  Some of my people raised weapons again—one too eager idiot even clicked the safety off.

  Raffaele didn’t look at them. Didn’t acknowledge the threat at all.

  “You don’t want to do that,” he said softly. “You can’t stop me.”

  That tone—flat, almost bored—sent a chill through the group.

  Through me.

  I raised my hand sharply.

  “Lower your weapons!” I barked.

  A few hesitated. My voice hardened.

  “Now!”

  The guns lowered.

  Not because they trusted the boy.

  Because they trusted me.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  I exhaled, long and slow. Every instinct I had—every scar, every loss—whispered the same warning:

  Don’t fight this one.

  My skill—Danger Sense—had been buzzing the whole damn time, building pressure behind my ribs like a tightening vise. It wasn’t screaming danger at the river.

  It was screaming if you fight him you’re dead.

  God help us.

  I forced my voice steady. “Fine. I’ll call for reinforcements from the plaza. We’ll man the barricades. But if someone dies or get injured, I’ll be on you boy. And you will be held accountable.”

  Raffaele didn’t gloat. Didn’t smirk.

  He just gave a small nod, as if this was the expected outcome.

  “Fair,” he said.

  I hated the situation. Hated that I was letting a twenty-something-year-old kid dictate the pace. Hated that he might be right.

  But more than that…

  …I hated how certain my instincts were that stopping him would get people killed.

  I turned to my group. “Positions! Half to the north barricade, half to the east! Elena, get to the plaza and call everyone—they’re to come armed, fast as possible!”

  People scrambled. Some wanted to argue but knew better.

  A couple cast nervous glances at Raffaele as they ran.

  He drifted forward toward the riverbank, expression unreadable.

  I watched the boy descend toward the river like he had all the time in the world.

  No—not a boy. Not anymore.

  The way he moved… that wasn’t the Raffaele I remembered from years ago. The timid kid who helped his dad carry grocery bags up the stairs. The one who always offered to shovel the snow of our courtyard without being asked. That bot was gone. What came back was something carved, tempered, sharpened into a new shape—by what, I couldn’t even begin to guess.

  He floated down the riverbank, the light of morning bending oddly around him, like he was walking through heat haze.

  And the salamanders noticed.

  A few blue heads peeked from the reeds. A cluster in the water hissed. More slithered out from behind the concrete supports of the collapsed walkway. Their numbers swelled by the second—tens becoming dozens, dozens becoming hundreds. All clustered around that damned portal like parasites around a wound.

  Weapons glittered among them. Harpoons, bone tridents, lengths of jagged metal. Ugly, vicious things.

  And he kept moving.

  Slow, steady. Inexorable.

  A soft glow pulsed around him—barely anything at first. A few floating motes, drifting lazily like dust in a sunbeam.

  Then more appeared.

  And more.

  And suddenly the air above the river was full of them—white-gold lights orbiting him like a constellation given shape.

  “Mary mother of God…” one of the men beside me whispered.

  The salamanders surged forward.

  They were not that fast, or durable. Not even smart.

  But they were relentless, vicious. They were just too many.

  Fifty of them broke from the main mass, charging toward him in a wave of hissing blue flesh.

  One of the lights near Raffaele flashed—bright, white-gold, like a tiny newborn sun.

  A ray of light screamed outward, sweeping from right to left.

  Twenty salamanders were cut clean in half before I even understood what happened.

  Gasps erupted behind me. Someone shouted “Holy shit!”

  But the boy did not stop.

  The lights around him flared again.

  A second ray blasted forward. Thinner, more concentrated. It carved through the remaining thirty like they were wet paper. Limbs and bodies fell into the water with soft splashes and curls of steam.

  “Can he really do it…?” I muttered, throat dry.

  He just kept descending, slow and implacable, as the rest of the monsters shrieked and began to swarm.

  The air exploded into brilliance.

  A blinding flash erupted from him—pure, scorching light that spread in a cone for meters in front of him. I slapped a hand over my eyes on instinct. Even behind my eyelids, red and white flared like lightning.

  When I looked again, half the salamanders were cooked alive—smoking piles of charred flesh collapsing in the mud. Others clawed at their own faces, blind and screaming. The rest scattered into confused formations, but the light had left them stumbling, disoriented, and terrified.

  Raffaele shook his head, almost disappointed.

  Then an orb of light—glowing the same bright hue—formed above his palm, but this time it was as large as an orange.

  “Cover your eyes!” I yelled, barely a heartbeat before the orb flew into the densest cluster of monsters.

  It detonated silently.

  No sound. Just light so bright it seared through bone. Even crouching with my face buried in the crook of my arm, I saw light through my eyelids.

  When I looked again…

  A circular patch of the riverbank—nearly ten meters wide—was simply gone. Grass vaporized. Earth burned black. Ash settling like snow. The salamanders nearest the epicenter were missing chunks of their bodies—halved, flayed, flensed. Those farther out were once again cooked in place, smoking heaps of bubbling fat.

  The boy frowned at the destruction.

  Frowned.

  Then he began to reshape the lights around him.

  And the massacre truly began.

  Rays, blades, crescents, flares—dozens of shapes of light burst forth.

  Some cut.

  Some exploded.

  Some sliced through multiple monsters like guillotines.

  Others punched holes clean through flesh and stone.

  Salamanders died faster than I could track.

  Dozens per second.

  Hundreds per minute.

  His energy didn’t wane.

  His aim didn’t falter.

  Nothing resisted the light—not the water, not the stone, and for sure not the monsters.

  A few smarter salamanders tried to flee.

  Tried.

  Thin lances of light—barely visible—shot from Raffaele’s orbiting motes and pierced their skulls in perfect, silent lines. They dropped instantly. Every single one.

  Men and women on the barricades muttered, shocked.

  “What class is that?”

  “He’s not human.”

  “I want to become that powerful too…”

  “Should we even let him back in the city after this?”

  But beneath the fear…

  Excitement.

  Hope.

  Raffaele was almost done.

  Maybe a hundred monsters remained, scattered and shrieking.

  Eventually he lowered toward the river.

  His boots touched mud for the first time.

  He dismissed most of the lights orbiting him, leaving just a few glowing motes.

  Then he walked into the swarm.

  Walked.

  With his one remaining arm.

  A salamander lunged. He vanished—reappearing beside it in a blur of white trails—and slapped his open palm on its skull. The thing’s head burst like a rotten fruit.

  He stared at his hand. Evaluating.

  Then tried again on another monster—this time the head only caved in.

  He nodded, satisfied.

  And kept going.

  He began fighting them barehanded—kicking one through the air, crushing another’s throat, swatting aside tridents and harpoons like they were bothersome flies.

  Yet he wasn’t only testing strength.

  He tested his defenses, too.

  Sheets of light appeared, thin as paper. Salamander spears hit them and the wood burned to ash instantly.

  He frowned. Dissolved that spell.

  A second barrier—this one turned the metal tips of the weapons passing through it into molten sludge before it even touched him.

  He shook his head.

  A third—completely invisible—deflected a spear with a soft clink, like glass.

  That one made him smile faintly.

  “What the hell…” a woman beside me whispered. “Is he… training?”

  Yes.

  Yes he was.

  With a battlefield as his playground.

  Something terrible happened to him on the other side, I thought, stomach twisting. Something that broke and rebuilt him.

  Forty or so salamanders remained, scattered and half-crazed, when—

  BANG!

  The gunshot cracked beside me like a thunderclap.

  I spun.

  Elia.

  That stupid moron, barely twenty, standing on the barricade with his rifle pointed at Raffaele. His face was pale but rigid with determination.

  Everyone froze.

  No one spoke.

  My body moved before my mind did. I lunged, smacked the rifle aside, stripped it from his hands in a single motion.

  I shoved it behind me and barked, “What the fuck are you doing!?”

  His mouth worked soundlessly. I didn’t care. Two men grabbed him under the arms, pinning him in place. The boy looked like he was about to throw up. From the fear or from the guilt I don’t know. Why the hell did you do it? No, I can understand why, but all the good reasons in the world reasons won’t be enough… it doesn’t matter in the end.

  I turned toward the river—

  And my blood ran cold.

  Raffaele was standing completely unharmed, and still.

  All the remaining salamanders—every last one—were frozen mid-motion around him. Some mid-crawl, mid-lunge, mid-swing… impossible poses no creature could hold.

  It was like time had crystallized.

  Raffaele’s expression…

  God help me.

  For one heartbeat he looked… scary.

  Pure, controlled rage.

  Then it shifted—hardening into something colder.

  Sharper.

  Every salamander’s neck snapped at once.

  A sound like a field of dry branches breaking underfoot.

  Dozens of bodies hit the ground.

  Raffaele rose into the air again, drifting toward us.

  My pulse pounded. My mouth was dry.

  His eye—no longer glowing wildly, but bright enough to make your skin crawl—fixed on one person only.

  Elia.

  The kid shook so hard his knees buckled. The two men holding him weren’t doing much better.

  I tried to speak. “Before anyo—”

  But he was already in front of us, Raffaele’s voice cut through mine.

  Deep. Cold. Controlled in the most terrifying way possible.

  “Did you just shoot me?”