Chapter 529 | The Amber-Eyed Anomaly [CASTLE BONUS]

Chapter 529: 529 | The Amber-Eyed Anomaly [CASTLE BONUS]

The studio lights burned hot enough to make the foundation on Jett Jackson’s face feel like it was actively melting into his collar, but he kept his expression locked somewhere between grave concern and professional composure because fourteen million people were watching and three of the major networks had already cut their regular programming to go live.

The teleprompter scrolled text that his producers had written forty minutes ago, but Jett had already decided he was not reading it. The text was too clean. Too organized. Too much like something that belonged to a normal Wednesday afternoon broadcast, and this was not a normal Wednesday afternoon.

Behind him, the monitor wall displayed aerial footage from a helicopter circling the Verano Crisis Response Facility. The dome’s northwest section had a hole in it the size of a city bus. Smoke poured from three separate locations along the perimeter.

Emergency vehicles lined the access road in a parade of red and blue that stretched back toward the highway, and even from the helicopter’s altitude, the damage was visible in a way that made Jett’s stomach drop every time he glanced at the feed.

He had been a broadcast journalist for eleven years. He had covered the Eastside Cataclysm from three blocks away. He had interviewed Radiant twice.

He had reported on seventeen separate Villain incidents in the greater Los Angeles area and never once felt the particular species of dread that had settled into his chest when the first clips started hitting social media at approximately 12:47 Pacific Standard Time.

"We’re coming back from break in fifteen," his producer said through his earpiece.

Jett straightened his tie and looked directly into Camera Two.

The red light came on.

"For those just joining us, I’m Jett Jackson reporting live from outside the Verano Crisis Response Facility, where approximately three hours ago, an organized group identifying themselves as the Twilight Society launched a coordinated assault on Halloran Academy’s first-year combat evaluation."

He paused for exactly one beat because some sentences needed air around them. "Forty students, ranging in age from seventeen to nineteen, were sealed inside this facility along with two faculty members when the attack began. As of this broadcast, all forty students have been accounted for. Multiple injuries have been reported, including serious injuries to two faculty members whose names Halloran has not yet released. The academy has declined to provide a formal statement at this time, citing their immediate priority as the medical treatment and psychological welfare of their students."

He let that land.

The monitor behind him cycled through footage. The dome from above. Ambulances loading stretchers. A cluster of parents behind a police barricade with their phones out and their faces doing the thing that faces do when the people they love most in the world are behind a wall they cannot breach.

"What we know so far is limited, and I want to be transparent about that," Jett continued. "The Twilight Society, a name unfamiliar to both federal and state intelligence databases as of this morning, penetrated the facility’s security infrastructure, disabled communications, and sealed all exits before engaging students who hold provisional licenses at best and no licenses at all in most cases. These are not active Heroes. These are children in training who showed up today expecting to take a test."

He let that land too.

His producer was making frantic gestures from behind the camera, pointing at the teleprompter where the approved text still scrolled in its sanitized corporate rhythm, but Jett kept his eyes on the lens.

"Halloran is not ready to talk about what happened inside that dome. They are focused on their students, on making sure the injured receive care and the uninjured receive support, and frankly, that is exactly what they should be focused on. The questions will come later. There will be investigations, hearings, accountability reviews. The IHL will have opinions. The Hero Commission will issue statements. Ranking boards will convene. All of that machinery will start turning within the next seventy-two hours, and when it does, we will be here to cover it."

He leaned forward half an inch, the way his old mentor at Channel Four had taught him twenty years ago when delivering something that mattered.

"But right now, in this moment, the only thing that matters is that forty kids walked into a building this morning and forty kids came out."

The internet had a different definition of what mattered.

By 1:15 PM Pacific, the first cell phone video surfaced on a platform called HeroWatch, uploaded by an account with eleven followers and a bio that read "aspiring support-track, Pasadena." The footage was terrible. Shaky, dark, filmed through what appeared to be a crack in a maintenance door, with audio so distorted that the screaming sounded like it was coming through a broken speaker. The video lasted nineteen seconds and showed approximately four seconds of usable content: a burst of golden light that filled the frame, a silhouette moving through it at a speed that made the figure blur, and the sound of something heavy hitting something structural.

Within forty minutes, the video had fourteen thousand shares.

By 2:00 PM, three more clips had surfaced from different angles. One came from a body camera on one of the first Network responders to enter the dome. Another came from a security feed that someone in the Halloran IT department had either leaked or failed to lock down in the chaos. The third came from a student’s personal recording device, smuggled into the exercise despite explicit prohibition.

Each clip showed fragments of the same thing. Gold light. Speed that should not have been possible. A figure in charcoal and amber moving between a twelve-foot creature and a group of students with the kind of commitment that left scorch marks on the floor.

The student clip was the longest at thirty-one seconds. It showed the figure wreathed in electricity, golden threads crawling up forearms and across shoulders, standing between the creature and a girl with pink hair who had her hand extended like she was reaching for someone who had already made a decision she could not stop. The figure’s half-mask covered his lower face, but his eyes were visible above the matte black fabric. They were amber and they were bright and they were looking at something twelve feet tall and wrong without flinching.

The clip ended when the camera jerked sideways and the audio filled with someone screaming a name that was not quite intelligible.

HeroWatch crashed at 2:47 PM.

Twitter did not crash, but it wished it had.