Adrian pulled in a slow breath, letting it steady him after the scream that had just torn out of him, grateful, distantly, that whatever Mike had done earlier meant none of the other patrons around them had so much as glanced over.
Eric watched him for a moment before speaking again, letting the silence stretch just long enough for the panic to fully drain out of the boy's shoulders. "So," he said eventually, "what's your Aura called? You should already have the knowledge sitting in your head somewhere."
Adrian blinked at him, the question taking a second too long to land. Right. The awakening had left something behind, hadn't it, some kind of imprint, though he hadn't thought to check for it, too consumed by the visions themselves and, if he was honest, by how difficult it still was to think clearly with Mike sitting directly across from him.
He closed his eyes and looked inward.
Words hung there, waiting, written in a script he'd never seen before in his life and yet somehow understood perfectly, the way you understand your own name without ever having to sound it out. He read them aloud, slow and careful, as though speaking them might make them more real.
"Destruction Aura." He paused. "Allows the user to destroy anything they want to."
He waited for more. Some footnote, some elaboration, anything that might soften how blunt that sounded. Nothing came. That was, apparently, the whole of it.
Eric went quiet for a moment, processing. "Then you're an Aura user of the Apocalypse Pathway."
"Apocalypse Pathway?" Something in Adrian brightened immediately, curiosity briefly outrunning everything else he'd been feeling. "That sounds pretty badass, honestly. What's it about?"
Eric let out a small breath, something between amusement and resignation. "The Apocalypse Pathway covers thirty different Auras total, all of them tied to chaos in some form. Destruction, calamity, catastrophe. Chance and possibility too, oddly enough, though that side of it tends to get less attention."
Adrian turned that over slowly, and the excitement that had just lit up his face began dimming just as fast. "So it's basically... random destruction, then."
He didn't wait for confirmation before his thoughts kept spiraling. Destruction had never meant anything good, not in any story he'd ever grown up with. Villains destroyed things. Heroes stopped them. He tried to picture himself in ten years, in five, in one bad moment, and the image that surfaced uninvited was ugly: buildings collapsing, people screaming, and somewhere in the middle of it, him. He shook his head hard, trying to physically dislodge the thought before it could root any deeper.
Eric caught the shift in his expression easily enough, and something behind his own calm gaze softened.
"You don't need to spiral over this," he said, gentler now. "You got this Aura because you and the Apocalypse region share a genuine affinity. Out of everything that region could have offered, Destruction was the one that actually matched who you are, at your core. No one gets handed an Aura at random. It reflects something true about you, whether that feels comforting right now or not." He paused, letting that settle before adding, almost lightly, "And having a destruction-based ability doesn't automatically make you the villain of the story, you know. Cat Noir's entire power is destruction, and last I checked, he's still out there saving Paris every week."
Something loosened in Adrian's chest at the mention of Cat Noir, the tight, spiraling dread easing back just enough for him to breathe properly again. Right. Cat Noir. Destruction incarnate, technically, walking around with a power that could unmake anything he touched, and somehow that had never once stopped him from being the goofy, charming disaster of a hero everyone in Paris still adored.
Maybe destruction didn't have to mean what he'd always assumed it meant.
He let out a small, private laugh at the thought, something almost giddy creeping back into his chest, before Eric's cough pulled his attention back across the table.
"Right." Eric straightened slightly, tapping two fingers once against the table's edge like he was resetting the conversation. "Let's leave the less urgent stuff for later and focus on what actually matters right now. You're going to have questions, plenty of them, I imagine. Ask away, and I'll do my best to answer as we go."
Oh, I've got questions, Adrian thought, already feeling a dozen of them crowding forward at once, jostling for which one deserved to go first.
"There are thirty Pathways total right now," Eric said, before Adrian could pick one. "More get added over time, though that's rare. You have to be at least sixteen before your Aura can awaken at all. There are two ways it happens. Some people awaken naturally, though that's genuinely rare; it usually only happens to people the Pathway itself already favors somehow, whose mindset lines up with it before they've even discovered it exists. The far more common route is what happened to you. An awakening relic." He nodded toward Adrian's hand, where the ring had briefly rested. "That ring's whole purpose was to connect you to something called the Layer of Natural Aura. If any region took interest in you once that connection formed, it would bond with you and hand you whatever Aura best matched who you already were. Which, apparently, it did."
Adrian glanced down at his own hand, half expecting to still feel some trace of the ring's weight there, though it had been absorbed entirely by now.
"There's a ranking system too," Eric continued. "Six tiers, total, that every Aura user climbs through over their lifetime, assuming they survive long enough to. Everyone starts at the bottom. Nova. The weakest rank there is." A faint, wry smile touched his mouth. "Which, no offense, is exactly where you're currently sitting. Nothing to be embarrassed about; you only just woke up an hour ago."
"Rude," Adrian muttered, though there wasn't any real heat behind it.
Eric huffed something close to a laugh. "After Nova comes Auri Nova, that's rank five. Then Lysi Nova, rank four, which is where I currently am. After that, Hypernova, rank three. Supernova, rank two. And at the very top, True Supernova, rank one." He held up a hand before Adrian could ask. "You don't need to memorize the whole ladder right now. It'll come naturally the longer you're part of this world."
Adrian nodded slowly, though his mind was already snagging on something else entirely, something that had been sitting at the edge of his thoughts since Eric first mentioned the age requirement.
"Has anyone ever awakened before sixteen?" he asked, leaning forward slightly, his hands curling into loose fists against his knees. Some part of him still couldn't quite believe any of this was real, that an entire hidden world had apparently been sitting alongside his own this whole time, invisible, waiting.
Eric nodded. "Plenty of people have, actually. It's rare, but it happens. Usually to the kind of individual who ends up leading whole factions eventually. There's one you'd probably hear about no matter where you went, Sasaki Alberich, from Lumenia."
"Sasaki what?"
"Alberich. He naturally awakened his Aura at four years old."
Adrian blinked. "Four?"
"Four," Eric confirmed. "He's seventeen now. Already sitting at Supernova."
Adrian's mouth actually fell open a little. "Wait, hold on, that's rank two, right? Out of six? At seventeen?"
"At seventeen," Eric said again, letting that sit. "He's defeated every living Supernova at this point. Every single one. If a Supernova's died recently, odds are decent it was him who did it. Word is he can even hold his own against a True Supernova for a few minutes before he has to pull back. People talk about him in the same breath as the nine Meditation Masters. That's the kind of company he's already keeping, at seventeen."
Adrian sat back slightly, something cold crawling up the back of his neck despite the warmth of the afternoon around them. His pulse had picked up without his permission, thudding hard and fast against his ribs, and he found himself swallowing against a throat gone suddenly dry.
"Okay," he said slowly, "so he's basically the chosen one. Like, actual main-character energy. Prophecy, destiny, tragic backstory, the works. There's gotta be a prophecy, right? Please tell me there's a prophecy."
"There isn't a prophecy," Eric said, deadpan.
"There has to be. Nobody gets that strong that fast without some old guy in a robe showing up and going, 'Ah, the chosen one has arrived.'"
"No robes. No chosen one. Just raw talent and, presumably, a truly terrifying training regimen."
"That's almost worse," Adrian muttered, only half joking now. Whatever levity he'd been reaching for kept slipping, replaced by something heavier settling in underneath it. Four years old. Supernova by seventeen. He tried to picture what kind of person that actually made someone, someone capable of ending every rival of his own rank without apparent difficulty, someone spoken about the same way people spoke about literal legends, and the picture his mind produced wasn't comforting in the slightest.
He really, sincerely hoped their paths never crossed.
Eric let the silence stretch a moment, watching Adrian's earlier fear settle into something quieter before continuing.
"There's something else you need to understand, and it matters more than anything else I've told you today." His tone shifted, losing some of its earlier ease. "At every rank, you have to maintain what's called your rate of control. Every Aura carries its own subconscious. Not yours. Something else, something that comes bundled with the power itself, and its entire goal is to take over. Your body. Your mind. Everything that makes you you."
Adrian's stomach dropped slightly. "Take over how?"
"Completely, if it succeeds. You'd stop being a person at that point. Just a mindless thing that kills whatever's in front of it." Eric let that land before continuing. "It's the single fate every Aura user fears more than death itself. The stronger you get, the more real that threat becomes, not less. Stress makes you vulnerable to it. Prolonged negative emotion does too. That's not superstition, that's just how it works."
Adrian's hands had curled slightly against his knees, some of the earlier wonder in his expression giving way to something more sober.
"So how do you stop it?" he asked. "From taking over, I mean."
"Every rank has its own method of control and a series of steps you follow to keep your Aura in check, to keep pushing your control higher instead of letting it slip. Once you hit a hundred percent control at your current rank, the subconscious itself tells you what you need, resources, and a ritual to advance further."
"Rituals?" Adrian's brow furrowed. "Like, actual rituals? Candles and chanting?"
Despite himself, Eric huffed a short laugh. "Nothing like that, don't worry. Rituals, also called Trials, are just the specific process you follow while absorbing your resources during advancement. And you don't need to think about any of that yet. Up until Hypernova, resources alone are enough to advance. No ritual required."
Adrian nodded slowly, filing that away, then leaned forward slightly, curiosity briefly overtaking the heavier weight of everything else he'd just absorbed. "Okay, your turn. What is your Pathway? Aura name? Ability? You've gotten plenty out of me; I want something back."
Something in Eric's expression eased, genuine amusement flickering behind his eyes at the boy's sudden boldness. He rested both hands flat against the table.
"Fair enough. I'm an Aura user of the Energy Pathway. My Aura's called the Gravitation Aura." He tilted his head slightly. "I can basically control gravity, more or less."
Adrian's mouth fell open slightly. "Wait, gravity? Like, actual gravity? You can just... turn it off?"
"On, off, redirect it, increase it. Depends on what I need at the time."
"That's insane." Adrian leaned forward, genuinely delighted now, some of the heaviness from a moment ago briefly forgotten. "Okay, so could you, like, make someone float? Could you make yourself heavier so nobody could punch you? Could you drop a building on someone by just, I don't know, turning their gravity up?"
"In theory, yes to all three, though the building thing takes considerably more control than I currently have."
"That's still insane." Adrian shook his head, half laughing. "So what, is Gravitation part of the Energy Pathway because it's like, physics-based? Are there other Auras like that? Can you—"
He didn't get to finish.
Eric's posture hadn't visibly changed, his expression staying exactly as warm and unbothered as it had been a second earlier, but something behind his eyes had gone very still. A thin, cold thread traced down his spine, sharp and unmistakable, the particular kind of chill that came from being watched by someone who knew exactly what they were looking at.
He didn't turn his head. He didn't let his smile falter even slightly. Several people nearby had glanced their way over the course of the conversation already, ordinary curiosity, nothing more, drawn by nothing but Mike Jackson's face doing what it always did to strangers. This was different. This gaze had weight to it, deliberate, searching, the kind only another Aura user's attention carried. That was always the first thing worth confirming. Everything else could wait.
Adrian's question trailed off mid-sentence as he noticed it too, some shift in the air around Eric that he couldn't name but felt instantly, a prickling unease crawling up the back of his neck that had nothing to do with goosebumps. His body seemed to understand something his mind hadn't caught up to yet, some old, buried instinct quietly screaming that whatever this feeling was, it meant danger.
"Mike?" he said quietly. "You okay?"
Eric rose from his seat without any particular urgency, his smile settling back into place as easily as it had ever been there. "Perhaps," he said lightly, "we should continue this conversation somewhere a little more private."
Adrian swallowed and nodded, pushing his chair back to stand as well.
Eric left a few bills on the table for the coffee, unhurried, and the two of them stepped out onto the footpath together, Eric's stride easy and unbothered on the surface, every instinct beneath it fully alert.