CHAPTER 91: CLIP (1)

The door to his apartment closed with that same tired click it always made, metal latching against a frame two millimeters off-center, a sound he could recognize even half-asleep.

Lucen stepped inside and didn’t move for a moment.

He just stood in the dark.

Boots on the entry mat. Hands still in his coat pockets. The distant hum of mana converters in the walls buzzing like a fridge with too many old spells in it.

The air smelled faintly of soldered threadwire and ozone, leftover from last week’s failed spark glyph he hadn’t bothered cleaning.

It was home.

Sort of.

Lucen shrugged off his coat and let it drop on the armrest of the couch. Didn’t hang it. Didn’t unlace the gloves either.

He crossed the small room, two steps to the fridge, one to the counter, and pulled out something cold, not to drink, just to hold. A bottle with condensation slicking over his fingers.

His system pinged softly.

[Mana: 52 / 148]

[Recovery: 2.6/sec]

[Draft Spell Slot: 1/3 Filled]

[Pending Allocation: 2]

He dropped onto the floor, back against the couch, bottle balanced between his knees.

Then pulled out the notebook again.

No distractions this time. No footsteps. No watchers. Just white light from the corner lamp and the hollow quiet that only lived in small apartments after 11 p.m.

Lucen turned the page.

And started the second.

He knew what Varik had said.

"Force a miscast. Not block. Not counter. Just scramble."

And Lucen had been thinking about it ever since.

It wouldn’t be a shield. Wouldn’t be a reflect. Wouldn’t be a trap. It would be something worse.

Something that broke the logic of a spell mid-flow.

So he started with a disruption root.

That meant layered glyphs.

He drew three small circles, nested, outer spin, mid-collapse, inner jagged loop. He called that the echo interruptor. It would look like a flaw in the air. An imperfection in mana threads. A noise that didn’t belong.

Then came the timing glyph.

This was key.

He didn’t want the spell to always trigger on contact. That was reactive. Slow.

He wanted to cast it proactively, drop it into the air like a silent threat. Let the caster build their spell. Let them draw the sigils. Let them get excited.

And then hit them with a reversal spike one glyph before finish.

He sketched the timer logic: a sequence fork, conditional delay, visual fuse that wouldn’t trigger until it read a nearby spell pass 85% of cast completion.

Then came the real work.

The misfire vector.

This wasn’t just interruption.

It was corruption.

He drew lines backward, looped sigils that reversed internal flow. Like tying a knot inside someone’s spellcast. It would turn triangles into feedback rings, compression glyphs into burst flares.

If it worked, it wouldn’t just ruin their cast. It would make them hurt themselves if they didn’t cancel fast enough.

It was mean.

It was dirty.

It was Lucen.

He grinned.

Wrote the name in the corner of the page:

[Burn Logic]

System pinged.

[New Spell Created: Burn Logic]

[Type: Cast Disruption / Glyph Scramble]

[Effect Radius: 4.5m]

[Trigger: Enemy Cast Completion 80–95%]

[Mana Cost: 32]

[Cooldown: 11s]

[Slot Bound: #10]

Lucen leaned back against the couch, head tilted.

He breathed slow.

Half-dead.

But done.

He closed the notebook.

One more slot.

He flipped to the last page.

Didn’t even think.

He just wrote.

Big loops. Wide arcs. No symmetry. Just violence. Compression logic spun out of order. Directional fire. High-output vectors smashed together like drunk theory.

A spell that wouldn’t just kill.

It would break a room.

It didn’t have to be clean. Didn’t have to be smart.

It just had to hit everyone.

He wasn’t designing it for today.

He was designing it for the next time Varik said: "Survive."

He didn’t name it.

Not yet.

But the system whispered anyway.

[Warning: Slot 11 Spell Complexity Exceeds Recommend Thread Capacity]

[Override? Y/N]

Lucen tapped Yes.

[Draft Bound]

[Classification: Anomalous]

[Mana Cost: 62]

[Status: Final Spell Slot Allocated]

He closed the book.

And smiled.

Not because he was happy.

Just because now?

He was ready for what came next.

—

Lucen woke to his phone vibrating on the edge of the desk.

Not a message ping.

A direct call.

He opened one eye.

Didn’t move yet.

The mana clock across the room blinked 9:47. Late by his standards. His limbs were still heavy, and the low ache across his shoulders felt like leftover training bruises had decided to unionize.

The phone buzzed again.

He rolled halfway off the mattress, single, unmade, a little too short for someone who had to sprawl after spellburn, and caught it mid-ring.

The name on the screen lit soft orange:

Gen

Lucen exhaled, rubbed his eyes once, and answered.

"Did I miss something or are you just bored?"

Gen’s voice came in easy, a little too chipper for the hour.

"Hey, rockstar. You’re trending."

Lucen blinked.

"...What?"

"Oh yeah," Gen continued, tone smooth, like he was giving weather updates. "Clip went up last night. Some girl with a half-decent following. Street-level channel. Nothing citywide yet. Just buzz circuit. But you? You’re the guy who made Halren walk off like a kicked mascot."

Lucen sat up slowly, spine cracking.

"Zey."

"You know her?"

"She followed me. Filmed it."

Gen made a soft sound. "Wasn’t subtle. She added light editing—slow-mo flare trigger, background synth. Honestly? Pretty tasteful."

Lucen groaned and rubbed his face. "You called to rate the cinematography?"

"No," Gen said. "I called because people are tagging it with names like Black Thread and Ghost Ranker."

Lucen winced. "God."

"Some of them think you’re just high-B faking C-class records. Others think you’re ex-guild. A couple idiots said you were probably a failed clone with unstable mana."

Lucen said flatly, "I’m not a clone."

"Yeah," Gen replied. "But that’s exactly what a clone would say."

Lucen pulled himself off the bed and walked toward the sink. His boots thudded faintly over mana-threaded flooring, dust still in his hair.

"Is it serious?" he asked.

Gen paused.

Then: "Not yet. Not by the letter."

Lucen turned the faucet on. Let cold water run over his hands. "But?"

"But your face is in five separate drift-thread forums. A couple auto-detect search bots already flagged your movements in public spaces over the last week."