Chapter 24: The Teams Trust

 The Monday morning air inside Jefferson High smelled exactly the same as it did every week: floor wax, stale lockers, and the anxiety of six hundred kids trying to survive the first period. Stepping through those double doors felt like crossing an international border. Just forty-eight hours ago, they were standing in a glass boardroom overlooking Manhattan, staring down the director of Iron veil and signing a hero sub-contract. Now, they were just three underclassmen trying not to get marked tardy.

Neiry pulled at his black hoodie, shifting easily through the crowded hallway. Mia walked a half-step behind him, her curly brown pigtails bouncing against her backpack, while Kaleb kept his eyes glued to his phone, to check a schedule he probably should've already memorized.

"I still don't get how we're supposed to sit through Earth Science after this weekend," Mia muttered, her voice low as a group of seniors pushed past them. "My brain is literally still processing the sheer amount of zeroes on that Iron veil contract. Don't get me wrong Neiry, I'm excited to get paid, but now I have to remember the rock cycle?"

"Keep your voice down," Neiry said softly. He didn't look back, his eyes scanning the lockers ahead. "The contract doesn't matter if we get detention and my aunt starts asking why the school called home again. We just gotta play normal. That was the deal."

"Easy for you to say, Mr. Composure," Kaleb chimed in, leaning closer as they navigated around the trophy case. He tapped his screen, pulling up a local forum feed. "Look at this. The entire neighborhood is losing its mind over the dock fight from Friday. 'Dark and Beacon wipe out an entire Apex scouting unit.' People are putting up fan art already."

Mia peeked over his shoulder, a small smile breaking through her exhaustion. "Ooh, let me see. Wow, they really got my pigtails right in that drawing."

"Yeah, well, look at the comments," Kaleb said, his thumb scrolling down. "They're all asking about me. 'Who's the kid in the vest? Is he a sidekick? Does he even have a superpower?' The only reason they even know I exist is because of that one grainy news clip from the mayor's award ceremony last month. Otherwise, I'm just there."

Neiry stopped by his locker, spinning the combination dial with practiced ease. "Being a ghost is safer, Kaleb. You don't want these people looking too close at you."

Kaleb leaned against the adjacent locker, lowering his voice until it was barely a whisper. "Speaking of looking close... Neiry, I've been meaning to ask you this since we got the new suits. Those domino masks we wear? They're tiny. If someone takes a picture from the right angle, or if the lighting hits Mia's face during a flash, it shouldn't work. How haven't our parents or the teachers recognized us on the news?"

Neiry paused, a textbook balanced in his palm. He looked around the bustling hallway before leaning in slightly. "It's not just fabric. When I made our gear, I tied a minor concealment spell into the mesh using magic. To anyone who doesn't already know, our civilian identities and facial features register as a blur in their working memory. They see a mask, but their brain refuses to connect the dots to Neiry, Mia, or Kaleb."

Kaleb's eyes widened. "A spell? Like, actual mystical programming? How many layers of magic can you even—"

"Not here," Neiry cut him off, his tone sharpening as he shoved the book into his bag. He seemed miles away, his gaze drifting toward the high windows at the end of the hall. He'd been like this since the encounter with Apex—distracted, hyper-vigilant, like he was constantly waiting for the roof to cave in.

"Neiry, you're doing it again," Kaleb said, crossing his arms. "You've been checking out all morning. If we're an independent team now, we need to talk about what's next. What's the plan for the Iron Veil thing? What really happened back before you met us? You never talk about—"

"Kaleb, stop, hold on now." Neiry said, his voice dropping into a dangerous, quiet register that made both of them freeze. "We are in the middle of a public school. We don't talk about what's going on. We don't talk about the past. Just get to class."

He slammed his locker shut and walked away without looking back.

Mia sighed, adjusting her backpack strap. "Give him a break, Kaleb. He's just stressed. We all are."

"He's hiding something," Kaleb muttered, watching Neiry vanish into the crowd. "And I'm the one who has to figure everything out and at least lighten the load so he doesn't have to hold it all on his own."

The siren went off right at the end of fourth period, but it wasn't the standard fire alarm. It was the three-pulse low-frequency tone that signaled a localized containment breach in the surrounding district.

Through the second-story windows of the math wing, the trio saw a plume of grey smoke rising from the intersection just outside the school gates. An Iron Veil armored transport vehicle was flipped completely on its side, its reinforced titanium doors torn off their hinges. From the wreckage, a towering, metal-skinned brawler—a low-tier enforcer from one of the local syndicates—was pulling himself out, roaring as he shattered a streetlamp.

"It's a Class-3 escape, no one that's too strong," Kaleb whispered, his wrist terminal already buzzing under his sleeve. "The guards were transferring him to the lower holding cells. Backup heroes are at least eight minutes away."

"We can go now," Neiry said, his eyes instantly locking onto Mia.

They ducked into the dark, narrow confines of the janitor's supply closet near the rear exit, the smell of bleach and old mops suffocatingly thick. In the cramped space, trying to pull on tactical gear without hitting each other was an awkward mess of tangled limbs.

"Move your elbow, Neiry!" Mia hissed, her face flushing as she tried to fasten the gold shoulder plates of her white suit while pinned against a shelf of detergent. "You're stepping on my boot!"

"I'm trying to clear the door," Neiry muttered, his hands moving with rapid efficiency as he pulled his black mesh mask over his face. He turned to Kaleb, who was already reaching for his utility pack. "Kaleb. You stay inside the school building."

Kaleb froze, his hand hovering over his tech vest. "What? No way. I could be out there and tell you two the transport's internal data, I can override the local street cameras from the perimeter and give you guys—"

"No," Neiry said, his voice flat and unyielding. "You don't have powers, Kaleb. You haven't even been trained. Why would I want you on the field? If that enforcer throws a piece of the road anywhere near or at you, you can't dodge it. Stay in the School, keep your head down, and monitor the feeds from a safe place. That's an order."

Before Kaleb could argue, Neiry pushed the door open, slipping into the shadows of the stairwell with Mia right behind him. Kaleb stood alone in the dark closet, his fist clenching around his useless data cable until his knuckles turned white. "Unbelievable," he whispered to the empty room.

Outside, the street was a warzone of shattered glass. The metal-skinned villain was lunging toward an abandoned civilian vehicle when a blinding beam of concentrated thermal light struck him square in the chest.

BOOM

❖ VILLAIN CARD: IRON SKIN❖ 

Real Name: Unknown

Classification: Low-Tier Enforcer (Syndicate Muscle)

Threat Level: Class-3

Abilities: Organic Iron Transmutation — Can turn his entire body into solid, reinforced steel, granting him immense durability and superhuman strength.

Weaknesses: Extreme thermal shifts and reduced mobility due to metal weight.

slamming a heavy, metallic fist into the hood of an abandoned civilian sedan, crumpling the engine block instantly. His voice sounded like grinding gears as he spat blood onto the asphalt.

"Stupid HEROES think locks can hold me down?" Iron Skin growled, his jaw locking with a harsh, metallic click as he looked down the street. "Takes more than a moving cage to keep me down! I'm taking this block!"

He was lunging toward another vehicle when a blinding beam of concentrated thermal light struck him square in the chest.

"Step away from the transport!" Mia shouted, landing on the hood of a stalled truck, her palms crackling with golden solar energy.

Iron Skin stumbled back, his metallic chest smoking from the blast. He threw his arms wide, a deep, resonant laugh rattling through his iron ribs. "That's all you got, little lady? It's gonna take a hell of a lot more heat than that to melt through this!"

He roared, charging her with his heavy fists raised. Before he could cover half the distance, Neiry jumped down from a building. Moving with absolute speed, he blurred past the villain's guard, delivering three precise, forceful, powerful strikes to the joints of the man's metallic knees.

"What the—" Iron Skin choked out, his eyes widening as Dark's speed carried with his momentum each punch bypassed his armor, locking up his joints. "Get off me, you little—"

The enforcer buckled, his massive weight crashing heavily into the asphalt with a metallic thud.

Mia leapt down, preparing to deliver a finishing thermal flash to blind him, but Neiry suddenly tackled her out of the way, dragging her behind an overturned concrete barrier just as the villain swung a wild, desperate backhand that shattered the air where she had been standing.

"What are you doing?!" Mia yelled, shoving Neiry off her as Iron Skin groaned on the ground, his metal armor losing its luster as his stamina gave out, leaving him completely incapacitated from the knee strikes. "I had him completely open! Why did you pull me back?"

"He could've still swung at you," Neiry snapped, his voice sharp beneath his mask. "If that fist hit you, your armor wouldn't have absorbed all the impact. You're being too reckless, Mia. You aren't watching your sides."

"I was perfectly fine!" Mia stood up, her pigtails shaking with anger as she gestured to the smoking street. "He's down! The fight is over! You don't need to treat me like I'm made of glass every single time someone swings at us!"

By the time the medical and rescue teams arrived, along with two low-ranking licensed heroes, the threat was entirely neutralized. But instead of a victorious squad, the responders found Dark and Beacon standing in the center of the intersection, actively arguing over a piece of wreckage.

"Look, kids," one of the older rescue medics said, walking up with a clipboard and shaking his head at them. "Whatever you two are bickering about, do it somewhere else. You did the job, but you're acting like children out here. Clear the zone before the media trucks arrive."

Neiry didn't reply. He just cast a cold glare through his mask, creating a tendril to grab onto a ledge into the shadows, and vanished, leaving Mia standing alone in the middle of the street, her fists trembling with frustration.

The school day ended in a heavy, uncomfortable silence. Kaleb spent the final two periods completely ignoring his phone, refusing to look at the online updates. When the final bell rang, he didn't wait for the others. He walked straight to their base.

He expected the room to be empty. Instead, as he pushed the heavy metal door open, the sound of raised voices cut through the damp air.

"You don't understand the scale of what we're dealing with!" Neiry's voice echoed against the concrete pillars. He had his mask off, his dark face tight with an intensity Kaleb had never seen before. "Mia, you're looking at this like a game. You think because we signed a piece of paper with Vance, we're safe?"

"I don't think it's a game!" Mia shouted back, her white tactical suit half-unzipped, her hair a messy tangle around her shoulders. "But you're suffocating me! You're trying to force me into five hours of training a day on top of school, and for what? Because of one fight with Apex? How likely is it that we're even going to run into someone that strong again anytime soon?"

Neiry stepped closer, his dark eyes wide with a raw, cold fear that made Mia step back. "We barely survived, Mia. You think we won that fight? We didn't win. I had to use every single ounce of my strength just to pull us out of that alley alive. If they come back with a full squad, and you're still missing your timing by two seconds because you're tired, you are going to die. Do you get that? You will die."

The room went completely dead silent. Mia stared at him, her breath hitching, the reality of his words hitting her like a physical blow.

Kaleb let the heavy metal door slam shut behind him, the loud CLANG breaking the tension. He walked into the light of the overhead halogen bulb, tossing his backpack onto the metal table.

"Oh, good, you're both here," Kaleb said, his voice dripping with sarcasm as he looked between them. "I'm glad you guys had time to come down here and have a massive dramatic meltdown without even telling me. I was just the guy sitting in the library pretending to study while you two were out there playing heroes."

Mia looked away, rubbing her arm. "Kaleb, not now. We're in the middle of something."

"No, we're always in the middle of something," Kaleb said, his voice rising as he stepped up to the table, looking directly at Neiry. "You told me to stay in the building today. You told me I can't help because I don't have a power. Then you two come back here and start screaming about how you're both going to die anyway. If I'm part of this team, then treat me like it. Stop leaving me in the dark because my hands don't glow!"

Mia sighed, the anger completely draining out of her, replaced by absolute exhaustion. She looked at the digital clock on the wall and shook her head. "Look... I can't do this right now. Neiry's right about one thing—we barely got away from Apex. But I can't train today. My mom expects me home in like an hour max for dinner, and if I miss it again after the weekend, I'm grounded for a month. So if its alright with you guys, I'm gonna relax before I have to go in that house."

She walked over to the worn couch in the corner of the base, tossing her jacket aside and sinking into the cushions with a tired groan, closing her eyes.

The room fell quiet for a moment before Kaleb stepped closer to the map table, his eyes locked on Neiry.

"Look, Neiry," Kaleb began, his tone dropping the sarcasm from earlier, replaced by a quiet, heavy sincerity. "I get why you're stressed. I want to make sure you don't have to carry the weight all on your shoulders. But how can you expect Mia and me to completely trust you if you won't tell us everything?"

Neiry didn't look up immediately, his fingers still resting on the edge of the table.

"Now that we're at the base all together and things have calmed down," Kaleb pressed on, his voice softening just a bit. "Can we talk, Neiry? I still have questions. Sorry."

Neiry stood still for a long beat, the silence stretching out between them until he finally let out a slow, heavy breath. He pulled his hands away from the table, looking across at Kaleb with an exhausted expression.

"Yeah," Neiry said quietly. "That's fine."

Mia shifted on the worn couch, her eyes cracking open as she pushed past the heavy fog of her exhaustion. The silence that had filled the underground base was gone, replaced by a low, suffocating tension that made it impossible to rest. She sat up, pulling her knees tightly to her chest, her gaze cutting sharply between Kaleb's hyper-focused stance and Neiry's guarded posture.

"If we're finally stopping the secrets," Mia chimed in, her voice still a little raspy but completely serious, "then I'm not sitting this out. You don't get to gatekeep the truth just to protect our feelings, Neiry. We're a team. If we're putting our lives on the line against villains and hell the way you make it sound even monsters out there, we deserve to know what we're actually standing next to."

Kaleb nodded in agreement, leaning his weight against the edge of one of their metal tables. His usual sarcastic demeanor was entirely gone, replaced by a quiet, heavy sincerity as he stared directly at Neiry.

"She's right," Kaleb said, dropping his pen onto the coffee table. "I'm tired of guessing, Neiry. I want to know exactly who you are and how your powers or magic work. I've looked at your energy spikes, and they don't follow the biological laws of standard superpower mutations.You describe it to be older, spiritual. And what about the things you drop in arguments? You talk about the 'Demon Realm' but never completely explain it. After all this is the craziest thing possible to ever hear about. What was your life like inside it? What are the other races—the Angels, the Fairies, the Giants—that they're even real you keep implying are tied to this ancient history?"

Neiry stood frozen by the table, his fingers digging into the worn edge. For a long beat. He let out a slow, sharp breath that seemed to turn the basement air ice-cold.

"You want to know how the magic works?" Neiry whispered, extending his right hand, palm up, as a tiny swirl of midnight-purple energy drifted from the middle of it. "It isn't a superpower mutation, Kaleb. This is mana—the raw, spiritual material of reality. Humans on Earth used to have it but partially lost the ability to use or even perceive it centuries ago after a boundary called the Partition was sealed causing all of the races to be sealed off. But where I come from, it's as natural as breathing."

Neiry leaned forward slightly, the purple glow casting deep, sharp across his face.

"Superpowers—the genetic mutations Hero organization classifies and licenses every day—are purely biological," Neiry explained, his voice dropping to a low, gravelly resonance. "They're like a hardwired evolutionary mutated trait in a human's DNA. Because of that, a superpower runs entirely off your physical stamina. If a speedster runs too long, they suffer muscle fatigue; if a pyrokinetic overuses their flames, they burn their own skin. When your body gets tired, your power fails. It has strict biological limits."

He tilted his hand, the midnight-purple swirl expanding into a tiny, perfect sphere that didn't emit any warmth, but instead made the gravity in the room feel profoundly heavy.

"But magic? Magic runs entirely off mana—your spiritual reserves. It doesn't care about human biology, and it certainly doesn't care about physics. Superpowers are also incredibly strict on what you can actually do with them. If your power is throwing ice, you throw ice. You can't suddenly decide to turn that ice into water. But with magic, it's entirely different. It's about intent. It's about what you can put your mind to, how you visualize it, and what you think about. Hmm well look at it like this. If you have the mana and your affinity for water you'd be able to turn that water into steam or ice as long as you have the mental focus to conceptualize bending it, then reality will bend to match your thoughts. Superpowers are a localized control. Magic is the entire operating system."

Kaleb adjusted his glasses, his fingers flying across his keyboard as his diagnostic screen frantically tried to catalog the midnight-purple energy. "So that's why the Iron Veil tech completely glitches when it scans you. It's trying to read a cellular mutation, but it's hitting a completely different dimension of energy. It can't map the data because the data doesn't belong to this universe's physics."

He closed his fist, snapping the dark mist out of existence, and looked Kaleb dead in the eye.

"And you asked about the Demon Realm," Neiry continued, his throat tightening. "I didn't just stumble into it. I was born there. Five hundred years ago so technically I'd be 515, I was the Demon Prince." Mia gasped softly, her fingers tightening against her knees as an odd, unexplainable ripple of familiarity passed through her mind.

"My father was the Demon King," Neiry said, his expression hardening with a lifetime of deep, unhealed wounds. "He arranged my birth in Perganon—the most brutal, dangerous forest in Purgatory—purely to forge the strongest possible heir. He raised me through physical punishment, isolation, even abuse and a brutal training regime to turn me into an elite general. Life in the Demon Realm isn't built on human morality; and contrary to popular belief most of us aren't just animals, there's families, lives, buildings and structure. But of course some live in older ways driven by raw instinct, immense mana reserves, and an absolute necessity to survive. And because of this we fought a centuries-long Holy War that tore across Earth, the Celestial Realms, and alien worlds."

Kaleb stared at him, his analyst brain working furiously to compute a five-hundred-year-old interdimensional war. "A Holy War? With who?"

"WellI i mean who else Kaleb dont be stupid" Mia remarks.

Kaleb snickers "HEY, I was just saying".

"The retched Angel Alliance," Neiry answered, casting a brief, guarded glance toward Mia. "Our alliance had demons, vampires, even rogue factions of the other races and monsters. Their alliance fought with angels, human nations, and majestic groups like the giants and fairies—magical beings with extraordinary talent and the highest mana sensitivity in existence. I spent centuries as a weapon of destruction in that war until I was labeled a traitor. I tried getting away but they caught me and I was killed, forced to spend years living in a realm not my own feeling ostracized and living like a ticking time bomb here on earth. I guess the demon king didn't suspect the realm to be closed off." 

Neiry gripped his fists tight, slumping back against a storage crate with an exhausted sigh. "But being the prince isn't the only reason they let me live; it's my fathers sick game to try and pull me back into his grasp. It's possible based on the artifact the real reason Apex was looking for it was because they must've heard of or even know about demons which is why we need to figure out how much they know."

"Well yeah and we can get back to Apex but why would your father keep you alive" kaleb spoke

Neiry looked between Mia and Kaleb, his voice dropping into a low, gravelly resonance.

"Something called Infinity."

The name seemed to hang in the damp air of the base, carrying an overwhelming cosmic weight.

"Infinity isn't a power, and it isn't a weapon," Neiry explained, his dark eyes serious. "It is a living, sentient cosmic entity created by some GOD named Fate from what I've heard. It itself represents absolute choice, freedom, and the infinite branching of all possible futures simultaneously. When it communicates with me, it takes me to a separate dimension inside my mind and manifests as a featureless, pure white silhouette—an exact copy of my own body."

Kaleb looked down at his terminal, his fingers hovering frozen over the keys. "If it's inside you... how does it affect us?"

"I'm not sure yet but it's been calling and waiting for something . It's the exact reason Mia accidentally received and awakened her powers, Mia. Infinity didn't assign your power at random—it read your deepest identity, your soul, and manifested the ability that is most authentically you. 

A heavy silence returned to the room, the scientific fascination and absolute terror completely clear on Kaleb's and Mia's face as the true magnitude of Neiry's "demon life" finally sank in.