Chapter 394: CHAOS Is Coming!!!!

Maya had seen Phei do a lot of objectively insane shit in the last three weeks.

She’d watched him charm an entire room without opening his mouth. Seen him casually stroll on air thirty feet above twenty thousand screaming fans like he was late for homeroom. Watched him stare down Legacy boys and make them flinch like

scolded puppies.

But she had

never

seen him shiver.

Not from fear. Not from anything.

And yet here he was—sprawled across her lap on a private terrace behind the most exclusive club on the planet—staring at a phone like it had personally insulted him, his entire body doing that tiny, involuntary full-contact

tremble

usually reserved for small animals who just realised the hawk circling overhead has their name on the menu.

The Ice Prince had left the building and the boy underneath peeked out.

One text message. One glowing line of doom.

And whatever cold composure he’d been wearing like designer armour simply

evacuated

.

What remained was a seventeen-year-old boy who looked like he’d just been told the

boogeyman

1

was real, had his address, and was currently en route with snacks and bad intentions.

"Who is that?" Maya asked, voice soft but operational.

Phei looked up at her. Amethyst eyes—fully human again, warm, panicked, and so sincerely

terrified

that even the

One Above’s colossal sword

hadn’t managed to put that expression on his face.

"Do you know any place I can hide?" he asked. "Like.

Forever

?"

Maya blinked once.

Then her brain activated like a poorly programmed war machine that had been told "solve problem" and forgot the part about "within reason."

"Define forever,"

she said immediately. "Because there’s a off-grid safe house in Montana, but the plumbing’s reportedly medieval and the nearest town is forty miles away.

"There’s also a submarine research station in the Pacific—deep-sea, classified—but you’d need clearance, a SCUBA cert, and the ability to not lose your mind in a metal tube the size of a walk-in closet, which, judging by how much you pace your penthouse, is a hard no. Okay, what about a place in

Sicily?

It’s basically a fortress, might still be

in

the foundation as structural reinforcement—no, that’s worse. Okay, scratch

Sicily.

What about—"

Phei laughed.

A real laughter—sharp and helpless—ripped out of him at the sheer velocity of Maya verbally

speedrunning

every bolt-hole on three continents while refusing to acknowledge that none of them were remotely viable.

She was still going. Hands gesturing wildly. Silver hair swinging like a

metronome

on meth, eyes darting through mental maps of black-site properties with the frantic energy of a mission planner who’d just been told the exfil window was closing in thirty seconds.

"—the château in Provence? It’s been empty since my great-aunt’s funeral, but there’s an ongoing probate dispute with my cousin who claims half the east wing and also maybe poisoned the wine cellar—no, bad idea. Okay, what about—"

"Maya."

She stopped. Mid-sentence. Mouth still open.

"There’s nowhere, is there?"

She deflated. Just a fraction. The operational freight train finally hitting the buffers of brutal honesty.

"No," she admitted. "Probably not."

His rambling disaster. That’s what she was.

Phei sat up slowly.

Reluctant. Like leaving her lap cost him actual physical currency he didn’t have enough of.

He glanced over at the bench ten feet away—Sierra, Maddie, Delilah—three sets of eyes that hadn’t blinked since he’d been carried out here like a wounded prince.

He gave them a small, casual wave. The kind you give when you’re just heading to the bathroom, not the kind you give when your entire nervous system has just been rebooted by existential dread.

"I’ll be back soon."

He stood. Walked away before any of them could form the question.

The corridor behind the terrace was dim. Empty. Bass from the main floor reduced to a muffled heartbeat through concrete.

Phei pulled the phone back out.

Dialled the only number that could make him feel like a guilty

five-year-old

again.

One ring. Two.

The line connected.

Before the other end could even draw breath—before the inevitable cocktail of family fury and disappointment, and

I’m going to end you

energy could deploy—Phei started talking.

Fast. Breathless. Desperate.

"I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I know—I

know

—I messed up. It won’t happen again. I promise. I’ll be good. I’ll be

so

good. I’ll be the best—I won’t cause any more problems, I won’t fight anyone, I won’t freeze anything, I’ll eat my vegetables, I’ll do my homework, I’ll—I’ll call you every Sunday, I

swear—"

The words spilled out in a panicked avalanche—zero dignity, zero Ice Prince composure, zero dragon swagger. Just a boy caught red-handed with both fists in the cosmic cookie jar while the jar was on fire and the country it belonged to was actively sinking.

"—and I’ll go to bed early, and I won’t skip meals, and I’ll call more often, and I’ll—"

The line went dead.

Click.

Silence.

Phei stared at the phone like it had personally betrayed him in a very specific, very intimate way.

"Chaos."

Nothing.

"Chaos?"

The screen stared back. Call ended. Zero seconds of actual response. They’d listened to roughly eleven seconds of grovelling—eleven seconds of him offering to become the

model citizen

of the universe—and decided it wasn’t worth the breath to reply.

"

CHAOS!

"

He shouted it at the dead phone. At the empty corridor. At the dim lights and the muffled bass and the absolute, bone-deep certainty that no quantity of apologies was going to

reroute

what was already inbound.

"

CHAOS! CHAOS! CHAOS!

"

A boy could hope.

A boy was wrong.

He leaned against the wall. Slid down it—slowly, spine scraping plaster—until he sat on the cold floor with knees drawn up, dead phone cradled in both hands, head tilted back against the wall like a man waiting for sentence to be carried out.

He made a sound.

Not crying. Not exactly. No tears—his eyes had been dry since the Void-Ice woke up, as though the thing in his blood had cauterised the ducts and decided grief was inefficient.

But the voice was

crying.

The noise tearing out of his throat was every bit as broken, as desperate, as absurdly theatrical as actual

sobbing—just

without the wet evidence.

A dry wail.

A ghost of grief.

The sound of a boy who was genuinely,

catastrophically undone

about something and couldn’t even produce the proof.

Dramatic?

Yes.

Embarrassingly, theatrically, roll-on-the-floor dramatic.

But real.

Back on the terrace, Sierra, Maddie, Delilah and Maya heard him.

The repetition of that single word, followed by the unmistakable audio signature of someone having a complete emotional collapse in a hallway.

The four girls looked at each other.

Whoever was coming was either someone Phei

dreaded

more than anything they’d ever seen him face—more than Legacy, probably more than any ancient entities, more than the thing inside his own skin—or someone whose arrival would shatter whatever fragile balance they’d spent all night trying to hold together.

They turned to Delilah.

Delilah shrugged.

"Don’t look at me. I don’t know

either."

But they were all thinking the same thing. All four of them. Watching the corridor where the boy who walked on air was currently sitting on filthy club flooring having a tearless meltdown over a text message.

They should have been worried.

They were worried.

But underneath the worry—quiet, guilty, impossible to suppress—was something else.

Because whatever was coming, whoever

"Chaos"

was, that single text had done what none of them could manage tonight.

It had peeled away the

Ice Prince

, the dragon, the void, the ancient frozen thing that had been squatting in the driver’s seat since the awakening—and underneath was just a boy.

A dramatic, deeply human boy crying without tears in a hallway because someone he loved was angry at him.

They were glad.

Even if they didn’t know exactly what they were thankful to.

Is boogeyman real?