The emergency alert screamed through your phone at 2:47 AM, jolting you from sleep. URGENT: Esper Dorms. Code Black containment risk.

You almost ignored it. You were supposed to be a beta, a low-level administrative officer. But the second message came directly from Director Hayashi, and it contained a single name.

Nash.

Your blood ran cold.

By the time you reached the restricted wing of the Esper Dorms, the hallway was in chaos. 3 registered guides sat slumped against the wall outside the reinforced door, 2 of them unconscious, one weeping silently while medics attended to her trembling hands.

"What happened?" You asked the nearest officer.

"He's at 99% corruption." The man's face was pale. "Been climbing for 3 hours. He's rejected every guide we've thrown at him. Threw the last one through a wall, literally. Now he's just... sitting in there. Waiting."

A voice cut through the commotion. His voice, amplified by telekinetic resonance, vibrating through the very walls.

"I know you're out there."

Nash Darven. Even distorted through steel and psychic interference, that voice did something to your chest.

"Send him in. Or I level this whole fucking building. Then the goddamn town."

Director Hayashi appeared at your elbow, looking ten years older than she had this morning. "You're not authorized to be here, beta. Go back to-"

The door buckled inward. Bowed, like someone had pressed an invisible fist against its center. Through the gap, you saw him.

Nash sat in the center of the ruined room. Chairs had been reduced to splinters. The bed was overturned. Light fixtures hung at broken angles, swaying slightly despite the absence of wind.

Silver hair, disheveled and dark at the roots with sweat. Crimson eyes that burned like dying stars in a gaunt, sharp-boned face. He was shirtless under his open jacket, and the corruption had mapped itself across his skin in fractured black veins, climbing up his throat, reaching toward his jaw like possessive fingers. The gunpowder scent hit you even from here, not his usual controlled musk, but raw and acrid and desperate.

He was dying. 99%. One more tick and he'd go critical. Become a walking disaster that would erase this facility from the map, then keep going.

Those red eyes found you through the gap. Locked on. Held.

"There you are."

Nash's voice dropped to something intimate. Something almost tender, if tendrils of telekinetic force weren't peeling the door open like a tin can.

"You've been lying to everyone, haven't you? Playing beta. Playing weak." He rose to his full 6'3 height, and even corrupted, even dying, the man moved like a predator. "I've known since the first day you walked into this company. Your scent. Your pulse. The way your eyes track my corruption like you can see every fucking thread of it."

He spread his arms wide, veins of black fracturing further across his chest.

"So here I am. 99%. 3 hours to critical. I've refused every guide in this building because they're not you. They're not S-rank. They're not mine."

The pressure in the room intensified. Your ears popped. Your vision swam at the edges.

"You have 2 choices, sweetheart." Nash took a step forward. The floor cracked under his bare feet. "Either you drop the act right now and cleanse me, show me what you really are or I stop holding back. The town goes. Everyone goes. And you get to live with knowing you let it happen because you were too scared to be seen."

His smile was sharp. Broken. Beautiful.

"Tick-tock, little beta. What's it going to be?"

You could feel it now, the corruption bleeding off Nash in waves, a psychic poison that made lesser guides collapse and normal humans bleed from the nose.

But you weren't normal. And you weren't a beta.

The false suppressors you'd worn for 3 years suddenly felt like chains.

Nash tilted his head, red eyes gleaming through the haze. "I can wait. But the town can't." He threatened. "And frankly? Neither can I. My knot's been threatening for the last hour, and if I go critical and go into rut at the same time..."

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