The moment Cleon handed me that jacket, something shifted inside me.
The weight of it wasn't just physical—it was heavy with meaning. Power. Commitment.
Black and gold. It felt like I was being wrapped in something ancient, something earned. A uniform, a banner, a second skin. The Scythe Scourge jacket settled on my shoulders like armor—no, like it had always been a part of me, waiting for this moment to return. It wasn't just clothing. It moved with intention.
My fingers brushed the emblem on the shoulder: a grinning bear clutching a wicked scythe, its eyes twin rubies locked in an eternal stare. It radiated threat. And invitation.
I slid it on slowly. The fit was uncanny. As if the fabric had studied me in my sleep. The lining felt like silk forged from steel—no stiffness, no drag. Just fluid movement. Like motion already anticipated.
"It fits," Cleon said, eyes scanning over me—not with admiration, but calculation. Every breath I took, every twitch of muscle. He took it all in like data to be analyzed.
"That lining is Flogistium A," he continued. "Refined until it's wearable. Still holds the properties of metal. Every jacket is embedded with a different jewel, shaved and bonded on a molecular level. Yours…" He paused, letting it settle. "Yours is embedded with space-mined Black Diamond."
"Reactive?" I asked, rolling the sleeve between my fingers.
He nodded. "Touch it to another material of the same signature, and it can attract—or repel. Think polarity. Think… intent."
Around us, the others were still. Silent as statues. But I felt their attention like heat on my back.
"Come," Cleon said. "Time to show you what you've joined."
—
He led me from the glass-walled chamber down a narrow corridor, hidden behind a false panel. The hallway lit with motion—pale white strips following our steps. Steel-lined walls bristled with tech: retina scanners, pulse readers, scent analyzers. Military-grade, possibly beyond.
We passed through two fortified doors before stepping into something I didn't expect.
Lined shelves stretched from floor to ceiling. Books. Journals. Stacks of annotated texts with worn bindings and handwritten notes in every margin. Psychology. Neuroscience. Trauma theory. Works by Jung, Freud, Skinner, van der Kolk. Not the kind of material I expected from a gang's inner sanctum.
I stopped short.
"You weren't expecting that," Cleon said, tone casual, eyes razor-sharp.
"Didn't think a gang leader would read psychiatry," I muttered.
"I'm not a gang leader," he said, smoothing the sleeve of his coat. "I'm a behaviorist. A mind-builder. I hold a doctorate in psychiatry, another in chemistry. Degrees in anatomy and biomedical engineering, too."
He said it with no pride. Just fact. Like listing chemical components in a weapon.
"I don't recruit killers, Radahn. I shape purpose."
His gaze drilled into me.
"Can you give me an example?" I asked.
"You're not afraid of death," he began, circling slowly. "But you're not suicidal either. You're deliberate, not reckless. Violence doesn't thrill you—it clarifies you. You feel more alive afterward than you do in any other moment. Am I close?"
I didn't answer.
"I watched the footage. Several times," he said. "At the light. The gun. The kill. You didn't flinch. You moved like your rage needed a target. You weren't reacting—you were executing."
He stepped closer, voice low and clinical.
"You've been drifting. School. Home. The routine. It all feels… disconnected. Like you're floating in a shell. Numbness dressed as discipline."
He circled behind me.
"You didn't kill him because he threatened you. You killed him because no one else would. Because the justice system made you wait three hours while he walked free. That wasn't an impulse—it was a verdict."
—
We descended a spiral staircase into the third sublevel. The air turned colder, heavy like a vault.
At the bottom: the war room.
Digital maps pulsed across the walls. Heat zones. Surveillance feeds. Red-tagged buildings lit like arteries. Along one side, a wall of black-market weapons gleamed behind locked glass, fingerprint-coded.
"This is the Den," Cleon said. "Everything above is theater. This… this is where we sharpen the Scythe."
He tapped a glowing panel. A hologram flickered to life—my encounter replayed frame by frame. Me at the red light. Him with the gun. My movements—clean, final.
"You're not here because you killed," Cleon said, never looking away. "You're here because of how you killed. No wasted motion. No panic. Just willingness. And the willingness to lose everything for one moment of clarity."
"I didn't make peace with death," I said quietly. "I just didn't care."
"Worse," Cleon replied, sipping from a black glass. "Means you had nothing left to lose."
He turned, voice sharpening.
"I helped design trauma-response programs after the Riots. I know what breaks people—and what remakes them. You're not broken, Radahn. You're misaligned. And unchanneled energy? It's volatile."
"Sit," he said.
I sat.
The door hissed open. Lokasenna stepped in.
She moved like an artisan—precise, graceful, grounded. Her skin was dark bronze, hair buzzed on one side, cascading down the other in tight coils. A black bottle in her hand shimmered with golden flecks inside.
"This," she said, holding it up, "is the rest of your Black Diamond. Shaved down. Bonded with a neural conductor. It'll live under your skin now."
She unrolled her tools: precision needles, magnetic inks, a sterile bandage kit.
I extended my arms without a word.
She began.
The pain was immediate—sharp, deliberate, rhythmic. Chains climbed from both wrists, winding up my forearms, wrapping around muscle and tendon like serpents of ink and fire. Each link bore symbols—Scythe runes etched in the Scourge's dialect. They weren't just for show; they pulsed faintly, reacting to my heartbeat.
As she worked, sweat slicked my back. My body ached, but I didn't flinch.
This was my first tattoo.
She worked in silence, save for the hum of the tattoo gun and my shallow breathing. The pain was grounding. A contract signed in nerve endings.
The final touch: the Scythe Scourge emblem on my upper back—black ink gleaming under gold tracer lines. The bear's red eyes now lived between my shoulder blades.
When she was done, she pressed a cool cloth over the ink, then looked me in the eye. No smile. Just approval.
"Welcome to the Scourge," she said softly.
—
Lokasenna led me through a reinforced door into the training level.
Mats. Octagon cages. Free weights stacked with near-military precision. No mirrors. No music. Just sweat and precision.
Every movement was sharp, clean, disciplined. Members trained like monks in combat form. No showboating. No ego. Just efficiency.
"Every Scythe trains before they wear the patch," Cleon said. "Not because we worship violence. But because we respect it."
A massive figure passed us—bare-chested, tattoos scarred and layered.
A roaring bear sprawled across his back, its eyes crimson with fury.
"Who's that?"
"Ganon," Cleon said. "Five underground prisons. Left each one quieter than he found it."
I watched him hit a heavy bag—each strike final, like punctuation on a sentence no one dared interrupt.
"Violence is a language," Cleon said. "You're fluent. But fluency isn't mastery."
He opened a sealed case. Inside: twin weapons.
Scythes, short and curved, connected by a flexible chain that shimmered with latent energy. One glinted silver-blue, the other was jet-black, veins of light pulsing under its surface.
"These are yours. Custom-linked to your jacket. Magnetized. Vanish when you're not holding them. Undetectable. Only you can pull them."
I reached for one.
The tattoo on my arm glowed faintly, and like magic, one blade slid from my jacket's lining into my hand. The chain curled what seemed like on my back where the scythe scourge logo was then seamlessly moved down to my waist leaving a piece hanging down. The other vanished into my sleeve. Ready.
—
Later, I sat alone in a silent room buried deep beneath the Den. No windows. No sound, save the low hum of surveillance systems.
In the corner: a faint neon glow.
Across from me sat Skull Kid.
Not a kid. Not a man.
She wore a sleek chrome-black helmet with a neon skull etched on the faceplate. Data flickered across the skull eye sockets like thought turned to code. She sat cross-legged, fingers tapping rhythmically on a glowing violet ring.
"You ever wonder what kind of person you are now?" she asked. Her voice was modulated—soft, metallic, unmistakably female.
"I didn't have to wonder," I said. "I know what I did."
"But did you enjoy it?"
I hesitated.
"I don't know."
"That's a lie," she said calmly. "But a safe one."
She let the silence settle. Then she asked, almost gently, "What do you remember before the gun?"
My jaw clenched.
"Radahn," she said, softer now, "you can't move forward unless you know what made you shoot."
I breathed out.
"My dad used to say nothing good happens after midnight. But the worst thing that ever happened to me? Three in the afternoon. Broad daylight."
I stared at the floor.
"They never found who did it. Barely looked. Just… moved on. And so did I. But that day? That's when I felt it. Like gravity vanished. Like the world had no rules anymore. Just drift."
Skull Kid tilted her head.
"That's not numbness. That's detachment. When the brain stops trying to feel safe, it lets go. And you did."
I looked up. "So what does that make me?"
"Honestly," she said. "dangerous."
She rose and walked to the door, pausing before she left.
"One more thing," she added. "You didn't kill to survive, Radahn. You killed to make the world different. And it did."
She disappeared into the dark like smoke.
Cleon stepped into the space she left behind.
"You're not numb," he said. "You're disconnected. The world raises kids on injustice, then punishes them for reacting to it."
He lifted his glass.
"To Radahn," he said, voice echoing in the chamber. "The newest Reaper of the Scythe Scourge."
Around the lounge, others raised their glasses. Even Skull Kid gave a subtle nod from the shadows.
That night, I lay in a cot in a private chamber below the Den. No windows. No sound.
Just the slow, steady beat of my heart.
And for once, I wasn't drifting.