Chapter Text
The golden gauntlet was heavier than it looked.
Jesse felt every ounce of its weight as she drove her fist into Romeo's chest again and again, the metal ringing with each impact. White light burst from the seams of the gauntlet, and with every strike Romeo flickered. For a while he could simply face-tank the hits, but it started to weigh on him with each strike ripping away more of his energy.
Romeo staggered backward, clutching at his chest. The glow in his eyes pulsed erratically, then dimmed. His horns twisted and cracked away into fragments of light. His tail quickly followed, contorting until it completely vanished, as if it had never existed. For the first time since Jesse had met him, he looked… human.
One final strike sent him crashing to the floor.
Romeo lay there, staring up at Jesse with wide, frightened eyes. The arrogance was gone. The godlike confidence was gone. All that remained was just a regular man shaking on the cold stone.
Jesse's breath came in ragged pulls as she lowered her arm.
She felt pity twisting in her chest as she stared him down.
After everything he had done, she still couldn't bring herself to hate him completely. He had been wrong—terribly, catastrophically wrong—but Jesse believed people could change.
“It doesn't have to end like this,” she said softly, slowly offering Romeo her hand.
Romeo blinked, staring at her hand as though it might disappear. His own trembling fingers began to rise.
Just then, the gauntlet clicked.
The ominous sound echoed through the chamber like a gunshot.
Before Jesse could make much sense of it, a sharp jolt shot through her arm.
“Agh—!”
She jerked back instinctively as pain exploded beneath her skin, like a thousand burning needles digging into her veins all at once. The white markings along the gauntlet flared brighter, pulsing violently.
“Jesse?”
Petra's voice cut through the haze, laced with panic and worry.
Jesse opened her mouth to say something, but her attention was ripped away from Petra as the gauntlet seemed to tighten around her hand, metal shifting and locking into place with another heavy click. She grunted, grabbing at it with her free hand and trying to rip it off, but it wouldn't budge.
Then the chamber lurched, and the sound of stone creaking beneath Jesse’s feet reverberated through her body.
Jesse's head snapped up just as a massive section of the ceiling collapsed somewhere behind Petra, causing her to stumble forward.
Right… This was Romeo's tower. Without his power, it was falling apart.
“Jesse, we have to go!” Petra shouted, sprinting toward her. “Now!”
“I'm trying—”
The pain hit again, cutting off her reply.
It wasn’t just in her arm this time. Molten heat surged into her veins, spreading across her body so fast it ripped the air from her lungs. Jesse gasped and dropped to one knee as gold light pulsed beneath her skin.
Jesse’s vision blurred as the world dissolved into smears of gold and white, crumbling beneath the weight of the gauntlet. Her thoughts slipped through her fingers, scattered and impossible to grasp.
Pain consumed everything. Not just her arm, not just her hand.
Everything.
It tore through her bones. Flooded her veins. Crawled beneath her skin like molten metal searching for somewhere to escape.
Jesse screamed.
The sound barely registered in her own ears as her body arched against the stone floor, muscles seizing and twisting erratically. She tried to move. Tried to breathe. Tried to tear the gauntlet from her hand.
But nothing listened.
Somewhere beyond the agony, she vaguely heard Petra shouting her name.
Then the groaning collapse of the tower around them.
The world fractured into incoherent noise.
Romeo's face flashed briefly through her haze of vision. His eyes were wide, unmistakably terrified. He was trying to get away, scrambling backward across the stone floor with shaking hands.
—————————
When Jesse finally became aware of herself again, the pain had dulled to a distant throb.
But it wasn’t gone. It had only receded just enough for her thoughts to clear.
She blinked slowly, vision swimming as the world around her came back into focus.
Where she thought she’d feel rough stone, wet grass instead brushed against her hands. Open air filled her lungs. Voices clattered all around her. Way too many voices, all overlapping and loud.
Jesse’s breath slowed. She wasn’t in the tower anymore. The crumbling chamber, the falling debris, the suffocating dust drifting around the collapsing structure—it was all gone. In its place was the familiar center of Beacontown, lit by the pale spill of portal light and the horrified faces gathering around her.
People were staring.
Some stood frozen where they’d been walking moments before. Others had started toward her, only to stop short. She could hear someone saying her name, though it sounded distant, muffled beneath the incessant pounding in her ears.
They had made it through the portal; Petra. Jack. Her.
But… Where was Romeo?
Jesse’s gaze darted wildly across the square, searching for any sign of him, some trace that he’d come through too.
Nothing.
He wasn’t there.
It was then that she finally looked down.
Her hands—
Her hands were covered in blood.
It was dark and fresh, dripping steadily onto the grass below. For one horrible second, Jesse could only stare at it, her mind almost refusing to make sense of what she was seeing.
There was way too much blood.
A sick, twisting nausea rose to her throat.
No.
No, no, no—
The blood wasn’t hers. It couldn’t be. The pain wracking her body was blinding, yes, but she didn’t feel any blood loss…
Her breathing turned sharp and shallow. Around her, the murmuring crowd seemed to grow louder, their voices bleeding together into one shapeless wall of noise.
Where was Romeo?
A fresh wave of horror crashed over her, cold and suffocating. Her hands began to shake.
The blood staining her hands had to belong to someone.
Somehow, deep down, she already knew. Nobody else had been close enough.
Romeo was dead.
And somehow—she had killed him.
The next few minutes only grew more disorienting.
Jesse tried to push herself upright, but the moment she moved, her balance pitched strangely beneath her. Her limbs felt wrong—too heavy and too light all at once, as though her body no longer quite fit together the way it was supposed to. Her legs felt too long. Her center of gravity had shifted. Her skull throbbed with a sharp, splitting ache that pulsed behind her eyes.
And then something swept across the grass in front of her.
Jesse froze.
The tail was long, lined with a strip of fur along the top, the tip ending in a thin plume that twitched faintly against the ground.
Her stomach dropped.
Surely that wasn’t—
Slowly, Jesse twisted just enough to follow it to its base.
The tail moved with her.
A horrified silence followed.
People weren’t just staring at the blood anymore.
They were staring at her.
At the horns now pressing through her hairline. At the gold veins pulsing faintly beneath her skin. At the tail curled stiffly beside her like it had always belonged there.
Jesse stopped breathing for a second.
No. No, this wasn’t happening.
Then Petra was there. Her rough hands cupped Jesse’s face, warm and grounding despite the cold panic racing through Jesse’s veins. Petra’s brows were drawn tight, green eyes darting over every inch of her like she was trying to make sense of a disaster she couldn’t fix by sheer force of will.
“Jesse,” she said, voice low and urgent, “look at me. Are you okay?”
Jesse opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
Was she okay?
Her hand hurt. Her head hurt. Her entire body felt like it had been stitched together wrong. Romeo was dead. There was blood on her hands, and a tail behind her, and Petra was looking at her like she might shatter if breathed on too hard.
She didn’t know.
Still, despite the terror clawing up her throat, Jesse found herself leaning instinctively into Petra’s touch, chasing the brief comfort of it.
It lasted all of three seconds.
Then the crowd seemed to force itself back into Jesse’s focus. all at once the square filled with voices, questions colliding over one another so fast Jesse couldn’t tell where one ended and the next began.
“Jesse, what happened—?”
“Whose blood is that?”
“Where’s Romeo?”
“Is she hurt?”
“Why does she look—?”
“Back up!” Petra snapped, stepping in front of Jesse. She threw an arm out, holding the nearest people back. “Give her some space!”
But there were too many voices. Too many eyes. Too much blood.
Jesse’s breath hitched as she clutched at her head, fingers tangling in her hair as pain lanced behind her eyes. It felt like the world was pressing inward from all sides—Petra shouting, people staring, the pulse of the gauntlet still burning under her skin like molten metal in her veins.
Her tail lashed sharply against the ground. Petra turned back to Jesse with a worried look.
“Jesse?” Petra’s voice cut through the noise, closer now. Alarmed. “Jesse, wait—”
Something in Jesse’s chest lurched as the air around her warped sickeningly.
And then the world vanished.
Silence crashed down so suddenly it made her ears ring.
Jesse blinked. The square was gone. The crowd was gone. Petra was gone.
Jesse was in her room.
Her knees hit polished wood instead of grass, and for one dizzying second all Jesse could do was stare at the familiar walls around her, her own ragged breathing filling the sudden quiet.
Did she… teleport?
How did she do that?
Jesse stayed planted in the middle of her room, trying to make sense of everything.
She killed Romeo, and she… felt different.
Her body felt strangely foreign now, like it wasn’t truly hers anymore. Her tail swished anxiously behind her. And apparently she had the ability to teleport now? What could this all possibly—
Oh.
Oh no.
Jesse peered down at the golden gauntlet still clinging to her hand, brushing her fingers across it.
This. This thing changed her.
It had turned her into an admin.