The first thing I tried to do was breathe deeply. That was a mistake.
The second thing I tried to do was sit up and that was a disaster.
Every inch of my body screamed in protest—not loudly, but with the long, disappointed sigh of someone who knew better. My ribs twinged, My back hissed, My arms, gods help them, felt like hollow branches filled with sand and even my toes were sore. My toes….
I bit my lip and pushed myself upright inch by inch, groaning under my breath like a haunted cabinet being pried open with rusty hinges. It wasn’t the pain that got me, not really. I’d had worse. It was the sheer weight of how slow I’d become. Like gravity had grown offended by my stunt last night and doubled itself in retaliation.
[Overcast Penalty Detected: Skill Strain ×2]
[Symptoms: Mana exhaustion, muscular compression, system latency]
[Status: Cooldown overlap violation – Next skill usage strongly discouraged]
[Suggested Action: Stay still. Try tea.]
The system might as well have added a snarky “You did this to yourself” for flavor. I wasn’t surprised. I had copied and used two different high-level spells—from two different sources—within six hours. The Mirror Core wasn’t built for indulgence. It was precise. Strict even, It took what it needed and left you with the bill. But still, I’d done it. I’d saved someone. I’d held my ground against a real, guild-wanted threat. And the internet? The internet was on fire.
And Unfortunately, so was my spine.
I slid out of bed and immediately regretted it. My legs folded like wet paper, my knees buckled and my arms flailed wildly for the edge of the desk, which I missed entirely. The impact was less a fall and more of a slow-motion surrender. I hit the floor with a very dignified wheeze.
Several minutes later, I was dressed, somewhat upright, and practicing what I now referred to as “the slow noble shuffle.” Each step was measured, fluid, and carefully planned to avoid anything resembling a bend, twist, or other acts of betrayal.
I emerged into the hallway, doing my absolute best to look like I hadn’t just been steamrolled by an arcane freight train, my mother was already in the kitchen, humming softly to herself while pouring tea into two ceramic mugs—hers with little painted sunflowers, mine chipped on the handle, but reliable. She glanced up as I entered and offered a warm smile.
“Well, you’re up early,” she said brightly.
“Just… felt like it,” I replied. It came out a bit too fast, a bit too high-pitched, but I forced a smile to cover it.
She didn’t seem to notice the way I winced when I pulled the chair out. Or maybe she did, and chose not to say anything. I eased myself down slowly, silently begging the chair not to betray me with a creak or pop.
My father looked up from his news tablet, brows faintly furrowed. “Not heading to the archives today?”
“Figured I’d rest a bit,” I said carefully. “You know, realign the sleep schedule. Stretch. Hydrate.”
His eyes narrowed slightly. “You’re not limping, are you?”
“No,” I said, emphatically. “This is just… contemplative posture. Very grounded. Helps with circulation.”
He arched an eyebrow. “You look like you got trampled.”
I opened my mouth, then closed it and In the end, I just sipped my tea.
The anchor’s voice cut through breakfast like a crack in glass. Clear, Measured and Unnatural in its calm.
“We interrupt our regular programming with breaking news: Ironspire Guild, one of the continent’s three major powerhouses, was attacked last night by a single unidentified assailant. The guild headquarters has been declared a total loss. No survivors have been confirmed, yet.”
Silence fell over the kitchen—not the ordinary kind, but something deeper. Heavy. Like all the air had been sucked out of the room and replaced with the slow realization that the world had just tilted.
My mother’s hands stilled over the sink, water still running gently over a porcelain plate and my father sat frozen with his fingers curled loosely around a chipped mug, his knuckles pale where steam danced unnoticed toward the ceiling. The tea inside had grown still, its warmth no longer part of the moment.
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I turned toward the wall screen just in time to see the footage begin.
It started with a camera feed from a nearby skydrone—shaky, grainy, veiled in smoke. But what it captured was unmistakable. A column of flame, taller than a watchtower, pierced through Ironspire’s headquarters like a sword driven into the heart of the city. The rune-etched walls—walls I’d only ever seen from afar, glowing with active mana barriers and layers of reinforced spell work—buckled inward in a series of shuddering folds. They didn’t crack and they didn’t break.
They collapsed, as if someone had reached inside the building’s skeleton and crushed it from the core.
A second camera angle, pulled from interior surveillance, flickered into place. It showed a long, reinforced corridor engulfed in flickering red light. Emergency glyphs flashed across the far wall as armored guild officers scrambled to respond—dozens of them, all seasoned, trained, equipped with everything guild power and prestige could buy.
And then the shadow entered.
One figure. It was Unarmored with just a long coat, ragged from heat and wind, and a gait that held no fear. They walked forward through fire as if it wasn’t there. The officers reacted instantly—casting, charging, coordinating. But they moved like people trying to fight gravity, like they already knew it was useless.
In less than a minute, they were gone. Flattened, Cast aside, while some simply vanished in the glare of a blast too fast for the camera to follow.
There was no music. No narration. Just the ambient sound of destruction and the flickering lights trying desperately to survive the onslaught.
My breath caught but not because of the violence, or the sheer horror of it, but because the figure didn’t move with cruelty.
They moved with certainty.
They weren’t angry. They weren’t enjoying themselves, they looked like they were working.
My father leaned forward slightly. “Alone,” he said softly, like it was the only word in his vocabulary that hadn’t changed its meaning overnight. “He took them out alone.”
My mother turned slowly from the sink, eyes wide but unfocused. “Ironspire?” she whispered. “But… that’s not possible. Their eastern tower’s sealed with barrier-tier six glyphs. They’ve got mages on twenty-four-hour shift rotations,I heard also enchanted armory protocols. And wasn’t the defensive specialist from the Varnhold Siege stationed there?”
“She was,” my father said. “Was.”
He didn’t look at me when he said it, but his voice carried that strange, awful edge—the one that comes from knowing something has changed, and it’s too late to un-know it.
I held my tea without drinking. My hands had started to tremble just slightly, and I didn’t want anyone to see.
Whoever that figure was… they hadn’t just toppled a building. They’d broken the unspoken rule everyone in our city lived by—that guilds were the gods of our world. That behind their sigils and towers and ranks, they were untouchable and Beyond harm.
Until now.
And somehow, sitting there in that tiny kitchen in the second-oldest building on our block, with a burn on my arm and stolen magic humming faintly under my skin, I felt the weight of something pressing in on the space behind my heart.
What if power didn’t mean protection?
What if it meant permission?
My father broke the silence again, his voice quieter this time. “You think that rogue from last night had anything to do with it? The fire-user?”
My shoulders stiffened.
My mother shook her head, a little too quickly. “No. That was a teenager. He saved someone. This…” She trailed off, watching the flames continue to dance across the remains of the guild tower. “This was something else.”
I forced my face to stay still. Just a boy. Just a clerk. Just someone trying not to be noticed.
My father’s eyes flicked to me, thoughtful, almost concerned. But he said nothing.
“I’ll be in my room,” I said. The words felt slow and distant. I stood, my legs locking up in protest, and moved with the pace of someone twice my age. My back hurt, my knees throbbed, and my ribs hadn’t forgotten Bran’s gauntlet.
I made it to my room with the careful grace of a wounded animal pretending not to limp and shut the door with a quiet click, and stood there for a long moment, staring at nothing.
The silence pressed in harder here, as if it had followed me down the hall and now wrapped itself around my ribs. My tea had gone cold in my hand, but I didn’t notice until it began dripping down my sleeve, and by then, I didn’t care. The screen back in the kitchen still burned behind my eyes—walls collapsing, bodies falling, the impossible made real by a single nameless figure in smoke.
I hadn’t realized how small that made the room feel. How tight the world could become when someone else had stolen the air.
I needed out. Not physically—I could barely bend my knees without them staging a protest—but mentally. Emotionally. Spiritually. I needed to not be the son who kept lying to his parents. Not the boy who had to pretend he didn’t feel more alive in a mask than he ever had in his own skin.
I needed to be someone else. Even if only for a few minutes.
So I sat at my desk, let the chair swallow me with a familiar creak, and reached for my laptop. The screen flickered on, and for the first time that morning, I didn’t feel like I was drowning.
Here, I was safe. Here, I wasn’t the disappointment with stats locked at 1 or the liar barely holding it together at breakfast.Here, I was just a name no one knew—and that made me free.
Soon new message hit like a wave.
@Strixhound: RogueX is trending again. Clip got re-edited. Over 30k plays.
@ChronomancerX: Man said no guild? I say no problem.
@Firebug_87: RogueX = legend. Who even IS this guy?
I didn’t respond. Not yet. I just watched them pile up—words from strangers, people I’d never met, all caught in the gravitational pull of a single blurry clip and the idea of someone doing the impossible with nothing but nerve and a borrowed spell.
The video had been cleaned up—framed like a fight scene from a show, slowed to highlight the moment I cast Flame Crash, edited to flare right as the fire struck Bran across the chest. There was a beat of silence added for tension, then the crowd’s noise kicked in—gasps, cheering, speculation.
One of the comments had over two thousand likes : No badge. No backup. Just one guy who saw a villain hurting someone and said: not today.
That one stopped me.
I leaned back, slowly, every muscle in my shoulders crackling in protest, and let the glow of the screen bathe my face. It was late morning, but here in this room, it could’ve been midnight. Time didn’t matter, Stats didn’t matter but What mattered was this: the world didn’t know me but they believed in me.
In the mask. In the myth.
In RogueX.
And that belief, whatever it was—raw, messy, beautiful—was more than I’d ever gotten with my real name. It was more than I thought someone like me could have.
It wasn’t power, not yet. It wasn’t safety.
But it was something.
A whisper of something bigger than numbers. A flicker of purpose.
And I wasn’t ready to let it go.