**Chapter 96: "Blood Brothers, Diamond Skin, and a Missile Named Dixon"**
*Volume 5 – Exodus*
*Log Date: March 19, 2079*
**Kruger National Park – The Riverbed Beyond the Dry Ground**
The dust hadn't settled since Girho fell. Nathan Moya stood over the wreckage of his own secret, breathing hard, blood tracing a slow line from his hairline to his jaw.
"Say it again," Thembinkosi said. His voice was low, dangerous, the voice of a man holding a grenade with the pin already gone. "Say it so I know I heard you right."
"I closed the gate to hell with my own body," Nathan said. "Those years ago. Every scar you've seen on me since then—that's the seal trying to reopen. That's me holding it shut every single day."
"Uje mara." Thembinkosi's hands were shaking. "You were supposed to tell me this, Natie! You think I wouldn't have— you think I don't—" His voice cracked down the middle. "I love you, you idiot! Why lie to me for nineteen years?!"
"Because if you knew, you'd have tried to carry half of it," Nathan said quietly. "And it would've killed you."
"So instead you let me watch you rot from the inside and call it *fine*?!"
Thembinkosi moved first. He always moved first—that was the family curse, hot blood before cold thought—and his fist caught Nathan across the jaw hard enough to spin him. Nathan didn't block the second one either. He let his brother hit him three, four times, like taking the punishment was easier than taking the truth back.
Then Thembinkosi's grief turned into technique. He dropped low, caught Nathan's leg, swept him down into the sand, and locked a triangle around his throat before Nathan's illusions could even flicker. Nathan clawed at the hold for six seconds, seven, eyes bulging—then went limp.
Thembinkosi held the choke five seconds past unconscious, tears cutting clean lines through the dirt on his face.
"I won't let my little brother die in front of me," he whispered. "Not again. Not ever."
He laid Nathan gently in the sand, stood, and picked up the AK-57 lying discarded near Jabari's dice-scarred crater.
"Triangle chokes are illegal, big bro."
He didn't turn around. "Sasha. Go home."
"I'm coming with you." Sasha stepped out from behind a shattered boulder, hands raised, palms open, the picture of someone trying to talk a man off a ledge.
Thembinkosi shot her in the leg without breaking stride.
Sasha screamed and dropped, clutching the wound, more furious than afraid. "You absolute—"
"I'm going to kill him myself," Thembinkosi said, already walking into the smoke toward the deepest black in the sky. "Mal' eit good."
**Somewhere in the Redfern Ridge– Leister Residence**
The bus outside Kevin's house looked like a small hotel had been flattened, wheeled, and given a paint job. Matthew Manchester stood beside it in a jacket that cost more than the house.
"Kruger National Park," Wyatt said flatly. "You bought a *bus* to drive us to *South Africa*."
"Technically it's amphibious," Matthew said. "And it flies a little. Don't worry about the details."
A shape dropped out of the sky and landed on the roof hard enough to dent it.
"NAHH WE NEED YOUR DUMBASSES!" Dixon Damme announced through the sunroof, upside down, grinning like a man who had never once regretted a decision. "Bitches, get off your stinky periods and dick hairs, let's GO, mother dickers!"
Diego crossed his arms. "You're disgustingly rude."
"And you're holding my hostage wrong," Dixon said, dropping through the sunroof and landing on Bennett, who was zip-tied to a seat and looking, for once in his unhinged life, genuinely nervous. "Hi, dream-eater. I'm the guy who blows things up. We're gonna get along great."
The bus rolled out. Wyatt found a seat beside Matthew as the city thinned into highway.
"Why are you actually doing this?" Wyatt asked. "The bus, the money, all of it. You don't even know Bandile that well."
Matthew's easy smile softened into something older than his face. "My father and Bandile's father fought a war together, back when Wrathborn units still bled the old-fashioned way. Manchester money kept that unit alive more than once. I'm not doing this for Bandile." He looked out the window. "I'm doing it because my dad would've."
Two rows back, Ignis's flame-wreathed arm crackled dangerously close to Lancelot's face.
"You'll die first," Ignis said. "Guaranteed. Fire doesn't wait around for chivalry."
"Water doesn't wait around for competence," Lancelot shot back, "and neither will I, watching you die."
"Bet your armor melts before we land."
"Bet your ego does."
Dixon cranked the bus stereo to a volume that violated at least four international laws, and *We Are Family* thundered through the cabin as the bus crossed the first border checkpoint without slowing down at all.
**Guardians of Destiny Society – Airfield**
Eight transport planes lined the tarmac, engines already screaming.
Cody Diamond flexed his hand and watched his skin crystalize, joint by joint, into hard blue-white diamond. "Let's see Tiger Boy top *this* entrance."
In the third plane, Khaos Hyde sat very still, staring at a small blinking dot on his wrist-tracker. The signal pulsed in time with something only he cared about.
Garfield noticed the look on his face and went cold. "Don't do anything stupid."
Khaos smiled instead of answering, which was worse.
He stood, cradling Poison's still-golden, statue-heavy body against his chest, and walked to the hatch.
"THE HELL are you doing, Khaos Hyde?!" Dilles roared over the comms.
Khaos opened the hatch to screaming wind and stepped out into open air with the woman he loved turned to gold in his arms.
From the next plane over, Gideon watched him fall and laughed, delighted and horrified in equal measure. "Hahaha—he really does love her, huh."
"That," Ryan said flatly, watching the two shapes shrink toward the jungle canopy, "is the definition of true chaos."
The formation pressed on toward the black-glass veil, where Red Pigeon's helicopter waited, rotors already glowing with anti-veil energy.
"Punching through now!" Red Pigeon called—and fired.
The veil didn't open so much as *scream*. The crack spread sideways, fast, hungry, swallowing more sky than anyone had planned for. All eight planes lost power at once, engines dying mid-air like candles pinched between fingers.
They fell.
**The Bus – Near the Border**
The bus was almost across when it happened.
No warning. No sound. The wheels simply stopped touching the road, and the entire vehicle rose into the air as pink sand poured through the roof like reversed rain, gathering, thickening, folding itself into a shape with a face.
"Don't worry," the Sandman said, voice like dry wind through an hourglass. "I'm here to help take down Hades." His eyes—twin grains of endless pink—slid toward the back seat. "And deal with him."
Bennett swallowed hard enough to be heard three rows away.
The bus settled back onto the road and kept moving.
**Kruger National Park – The Black Heart of the Veil**
Thembinkosi walked until the trees stopped being trees and the ground stopped being ground, until the air itself tasted like old copper and older sin.
Something vast uncurled in the darkness ahead of him, wreathed in chains that were not chains, wearing a crown that was not a crown.
Two eyes opened, each one a small dying sun.
"Another little brother," Hades said, and the earth cracked where his voice landed, "come to bleed for family."
Thembinkosi racked the AK-57 and didn't slow his walk.
"No," he said. "Come to kill you."
*End of Chapter 96*