Chapter 45: Registration [1]

Rael kept the throttle open, following the thickening column of smoke until the source came into view. A crowd had already formed a rough circle on the street. He slowed the bike and stopped a short distance away.

A half-burned green sign lay on the ground. The same sign that had hung above the mobile shop the day before. The entire storefront was blackened and collapsed. Firefighter drones hovered overhead, still spraying residual flames with targeted streams of water. Human firefighters moved through the wreckage, pulling the last of the survivors clear. After a few more minutes the fire died completely, leaving only a dark, smoking shell. Every appliance inside had been reduced to twisted metal and ash.

Two firefighters emerged carrying a body. Rael recognized the bald head and heavy build even through the damage. The shop owner’s face was half-burned away. A clean hole punched through the center of his chest. This was no accident. Someone had killed him and set the fire to cover it.

Murders in this part of the city were common enough. Most were local disputes that the authorities handled—or failed to handle—depending on how much money changed hands. But the timing sat wrong in Rael’s mind. He had used his old phone here yesterday to transfer the credits. This was the last place that phone had connected to anything. The list of people who might still be looking for him was long: Aurelia, his own family, rival houses and guilds that had hated him simply for outperforming their children. Any one of them could have tracked the signal.

An older woman pushed through the crowd, her face already streaked with tears. Two teenage children followed close behind her—a boy and a girl, both pale and shaking. When she saw the body she dropped to her knees beside it.

"You can’t leave us," she cried, voice breaking. "Not like this. We just moved here so you wouldn’t have to travel so far. You promised we’d be fine..."

The boy grabbed his father’s burned sleeve. "Papa—Papa, wake up—"

The girl stood frozen for a second, then began sobbing openly, repeating the same word over and over. "Papa... Papa..."

The woman’s hands pressed against the ruined chest as if she could somehow close the hole. "We need you. The children need you. You can’t leave us alone..."

Rael’s chest tightened. The family had lived only a few doors away so the man could walk to work each morning. They had lost everything in a single night because someone decided the shop owner was a convenient lead. The people who did this treated human lives like obstacles. The man on the ground had known almost nothing—only that a customer had bought a phone. That had been enough to kill him.

Anger settled cold and clear in Rael’s mind. He refused to carry the blame for their cruelty. The only answer was strength. The only reliable path to that strength ran through the Dream Realm.

He pulled the helmet back on, started the bike, and left the scene behind. But his mind was still on the old man’s death he didn’t know what he could do now. He also guess who could it be who initiated this attack many answers came up but can’t be sure in one answer. Half an hour of steady riding brought him to the Awakener Authority Association.

The building dominated the skyline. Even from kilometers away it had been visible, a black monolith rising far above the surrounding towers. Up close the difference was absolute. Where the rest of Bloomingdale mixed neon, aging concrete, and patched magitech, the Association headquarters was pure advanced infrastructure. Seamless dark alloy walls reflected the sky without a single visible joint. Soft blue light ran in clean lines along the structure, marking security fields and internal power conduits. Floating platforms moved in controlled paths around the upper levels. The air itself felt different—filtered, denser with regulated mana. This place did not belong to the ordinary city. It stood apart, a fortress of authority that non-awakeners would never fully understand.

Rael stopped at Gate 7 and removed his helmet. He made only small adjustments with Conceal: hair shifted to dark brown, eyes to a matching brown, skin tone from pale to ordinary. Subtle changes were easier to maintain than a full rewrite of his face. Even someone who had known him before would see only a close resemblance, nothing definite.

A guard stepped forward. The man’s presence was heavy—clearly high-level, working the gate for reasons of his own.

"Business?"

"My name is Rael Ashborne. I have come for the New awakener registration."

The guard nodded and then handed him a form and pointed toward a processing line beneath a wide overhang. He told Rael that’s where he could start the registration process. Rael filled the paper with the false details he had prepared, listing his class as Infernomancer and noting the skills he officially possessed. He still had not tested any of the new fire abilities in the real world. The thought stayed with him as he joined the queue.

The clerk behind the counter worked without an AI assistant, entering every line by hand the way people in this world still preferred. Rael had always found the refusal of automation strange, but it was simply how things were done. The clerk finished, stamped the form, and returned a printed page.

It was a complete roadmap of every step required to obtain an official Awakener ID. The list was long.

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