Sophie looked almost exactly the same as he'd remembered her, with long brown hair and brown eyes. She was tall for a woman, around five foot six, but that amounted to very little in front of Dei now.

For a moment he'd forgotten that he was currently closing in on eight feet tall, but remembered quickly when he saw his sister from his current perspective.

'I must look terrifying to her, a literal giant. The fact that she just readily accepted it also confirms my other suspicion- something odd, perhaps magic-based, is happening at Emily's house. If something supernatural happened there, and HAS been happening there for the past year, a large man isn't particularly outlandish.'

When she sat down, he saw that she did her best to avoid eye contact, simply looking at the table. He didn't delay any longer, jumping into his explanation. He'd probably need her help to explain it to his mom anyway, so it would be best to get her on board tonight, before they woke up their mother.

"Well, I'm not really sure where to start, so I'll tell you right away. When Leven, your brother, passed away, he was reborn as me."

Her reaction was… much calmer than he expected it to be. She finally looked up at him, more confused than disbelieving. When she didn't interject, he continued.

"It starts far before Leven's death. I'll assume you don't know anything about supposed magic on Earth because you didn't last time we spoke, but when Leven was a child, he was in a perpetual battle with containing his Wrath affinity. He did this by forming a special container in…"

* * *

"...And just when Leven was about to exhaust all the mana in his Pandora's Box, he finally broke through to the other side of the veil. I believe the process was subconscious, something innate to the soul, but Leven had been moving towards his new body the entire time. Once through the veil, his soul was pushed into the fetus of his new identity, to be reborn and start a new life. That new life is me. A lot happened after that, and it's been an absolutely wild ride, but yea I'm back. Nice to meet you, my name is Dei."

"Aren't you…? Didn't that happen a year ago?"

"Yea?"

"You're an adult."

"Teenager in my new race, technically. But yea. Like I said, a wild ride. Call it magic, I grew supernaturally fast."

"Okay… Can I take a moment to think?"

"Go for it."

* * *

"Okay," Sophie finally said with new resolution in her eyes. "So you're my brother."

"I'm not Leven, and that's an important distinction. It's hard to explain, but I really am a new person. That doesn't mean I don't care about you and mom though. See me more as a half brother. I am, after all, half your brother."

He said half-brother rather than step-brother just to make the pun, but he was much happier with that analogy instead, he realized. They were family, he just had another family too.

Sophie rolled her eyes and laughed, then started tearing up.

Putting her head in her hands, she cried quietly. With how quickly she silenced her sobs, he could see she had experience. Perhaps too much.

He wasn't sure how to comfort her, so he moved around the table and pulled her into a hug.

* * *

"You need to help dad…" she said between sniffles

"What? What happened to dad? I saw what he did to Taj… I don't know if breaking him out of jail would be good enough, but I can."

"No, he's not in jail. I don't think so at least. A lot has happened since you… since Leven passed away. I can't say for sure everything that happened, but I can tell you what I know."

* * *

POV: Sophia Moore, hours after Leven's death

Sophia sat in her chair crocheting when she got a call from her mother.

"Hey mom!" she answered happily

"Sophie," her mother responded, the tone grave. "I don't know what's happening, but I need you here. Your father answered the door and… He took the car. Said he was going to Leven's house. I saw him speeding down the street right as two people in suits got in their own car to go after him. I know the two people that came to see him, they were some of his military friends. Your father left his phone and I have no way to get to Leven's house."

Sophie was out of her chair after the first word and already halfway out of the driveway by the last. "I'm on my way."

* * *

Half an hour after her father, Sophie and her mom arrived at the scene. There was yellow tape around the house, and her dad towered over a blonde man in a black suit, whispering something to him with a furious look on his face. The man responded, calmly, but a flicker of fear in his eyes. Her dad stormed over to his car, got in and slammed the door shut.

Sophie started to pull over, perhaps to get answers from the person, when her mother spoke up.

"Don't get out, follow your father."

"Something happened to Leven! We need to know what!" Sophie said, half hysteric.

"Your father is about to do something, and we need to be there for him." Sophie glanced over at her mother and saw her dire expression. "Whatever happened to Leven is over now. We can only stop your father from doing something he will regret."

Through tears, Sophie nodded. All she could do was hope Leven was alright.

When her father took off down the street, she briefly saw the blonde man breathe out in relief before running to his own car as well, his partner driving as he jumped in the passenger seat. Sophie sped after her dad, and saw the two suits were behind them shortly after.

* * *

Sophie fought to not fall behind, and mostly succeeded. Her father was dangerously reckless as he wove in and out of traffic, but at the end of the day he was still in a minivan while Sophie had taken the convertible. Her car could turn more easily, but her father wasn't afraid to floor it.

She still would have fallen behind, if the two suits weren't adamantly harassing her father's driving, continuously trying to pit maneuver him, get in front of him and slow down, or otherwise make him miss turns he tried taking. Sophie was shocked at just how nimble her dad was in his car though, dodging every attempt.

'Where the hell are the police?!'

She almost missed it when her father stopped making any attempts to turn, driving straight ahead and accelerating. A building blocked his way, but he didn't seem to care, making no attempts to slow down

"What is he doing?!" Sophie screamed to her mom.

"That's the police department…" her mother responded.

The suits were forced to slow down before they crashed, but her father didn't care. She guessed he was going a hundred and fifty miles per hour when the car went through the front doors, shearing the top off the minivan completely and collapsing part of the walls.

"DAD!" Sophie screamed in despair. There was no way he'd survived such a collision.

"He's fine," her mother assured her, almost uncaring. "Park, we need to get in there."

As their car came to a stop near the entrance, the two suits were already jumping through the hole their father had left. They followed through shortly after, not seeing where they went. It wasn't hard to follow though, a trail of shattered glass and plastic doors ripped off their hinges leading deeper in.

As Sophie and her mom stepped around the fragments they could, Sophie slowly heard voices from the back coming into focus.

"Don't answer that!" she heard an unfamiliar male voice say.

What sounded like her father growled something in response.

"Do NOT answer that!" a female voice said as well.

"What's happening?!" Sophie heard Emily yell.

Turning the corner, she saw her father holding Taj by the shoulder, bearing down on him. Taj looked at her father's feet, and her dad's face was hardly an inch from Taj's ear.

In the back corner, behind the bars of a holding cell, was a visibly pregnant Emily cowering.

"Don't move from that corner," the black-suited male responded to Emily's question. "Oscar, please, back away from the man!" Sophie heard the blonde suit call out to her father, getting ignored.

"Oscar!" her mom called out as well, getting her father's head to twitch their direction briefly before he focused back on Taj again, asking his question one more time, now for Sophie to hear as well.

"What did you do to my son?"

"Taj. Do! Not! Answer!" her mom yelled out this time.

Despite every warning though, Taj fearfully mumbled "...I'm sorry…"

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"NO!" the two suits and her mom yelled out at the same time.

Taking the apology as admission, Sophie briefly saw her father's knuckles on Taj's shoulder turn white with exertion before her mother covered Sophie's eyes before she could see what happened. That didn't stop Sophie from hearing a wet tearing followed by Taj's scream. Sophie quickly tried to move away from her mother's hand, but felt two other pairs of hands grab her and pull her backwards to the door.

Her imagination filled in the scene as she was dragged back around the corner, the loud cracks, tears, and screams more than enough to tell her of Taj's fate.

When they were finally out of sight of her dad, her mother's hand finally came down and she could see both the suits helping her mother pull her away. The brunette woman quickly let go and returned to the room.

"What…" Sophie squeaked out. She wasn't sure anyone would hear it over the noise, but the unknown man responded.

"Loretta will keep Taj alive long enough for… a team to get here. There's not much else we can do for him."

"Emily?"

"She's fine," Sophia's mom assured her. "Oscar will never hurt a woman or child."

"Leven?"

Both Sophie and her mom looked to the blonde man, but he could only return a sad shake of his head. "Best if I don't say, your father might overhear and it'll make it worse… I'm sorry."

'Leven is dead.'

* * *

Five masked people in military gear came marching down the hallway at a run. The blonde man shouted "Neutralize, not kill! Anger based! Full powered! Targeted!"

They didn't acknowledge his words, but several clicks from their oddly-shaped guns told her they'd changed plans accordingly. Her heart stopped when their guns came up, pointing at her father, but no gunshots rang out. Instead, a hiss of air sounded out as several darts flew through the doorway into a target she couldn't see.

Her dad let out a pained scream and she heard him stomp towards them. He took three footsteps before releasing a pained wheeze, and she heard him go quiet, then thud against the ground.

The five moved into the room and Sophie continued to sit on the ground, stunned and waiting for whatever would happen next.

A minute later, her unconscious father was carried out by two of the people on a stretcher she hadn't seen before. Taj was carried by two others on a different stretcher, and the last person walked up to Sophie, her mother, and the blonde man in a suit.

"I got these two from here, they're Oscar's wife and kid. The woman in the cell will have to go with you though, Loretta will take her and follow behind."

When the blonde man said that, Loretta walked out with a traumatized Emily. Loretta nodded to the blonde man and masked agent, then guided Emily away.

The masked agent nodded to their group then followed behind Loretta.

Sophie and her mom both looked at the blonde man for what to do next, and he looked just as confused as them for a second before realizing he was the one in charge.

"Let's get you two home and I'll explain everything. Kaylee, I'm sure you know some, but it would be best if we started from the beginning."

* * *

The drive back to Sophie's house was as awkward as it was silent with the blonde man sitting in the back seat.

* * *

When they sat down on the couch, Sophie was still in shock, but her mother seemed to have accepted everything enough to start asking questions.

"Matthew," her mom said, addressing the blonde man. "What happened to Leven?"

For his part, Matthew seemed like he was getting choked up as well. "I'm sorry ma'am… he passed away earlier. Around three o'clock, after getting off work. The details are still a bit fuzzy but… We think that his wife was cheating on him with his best friend and he found out somehow, then sped home. A cop saw him speeding and tried to get him to pull over. Leven ignored her. When he broke into his own house, she thought she was about to witness a man break into someone's home then kill the people inside, so she shot him. One of the bullets pierced his heart."

None of them spoke, each crying at the loss of someone close.

* * *

An hour later, there was a knock at the door, which Matthew answered, letting Loretta in.

With her to break up their mourning, a new round of answers were given.

Oscar, Sophie's father, served in a mostly-unknown branch of the military specialized in taking down supernatural threats. Oscar was one of their strongest agents, literally and metaphorically.

There were two kinds of agents: Those who embodied their power, and those who fought against it. Those who embodied their power would slowly, but surely, lose more and more of themselves to their abilities, but they would grow more powerful in turn. Those who fought against their powers would stay sane for much longer, if not their entire lives.

Oscar stayed sane longer than most who leaned into their abilities, for good reason. He leaned into his powerset, but quickly found that he was able to impose rules on himself that worked as chains. Two rules that always allowed him to be reigned in were: "I will never harm a fellow operative" and "I will never harm a woman or child." He'd occasionally lose his mind, but would always quickly snap out of it when he was close to breaking one of those two rules.

Still, after only three years, he was retired. His power grew too quickly, and each time he was stopped, he got just a little closer to breaking one of his own rules. The government demanded that he never purposefully use his abilities again.

Sophie sat in the background, soaking in everyone's words as her mother continued to take the lead in the conversation.

"He always told me that he'd build in power when someone close to him was threatened, and he had to be violent, or it wouldn't relieve the pressure fully," Kaylee said. "He made another rule when he retired. 'I will never hurt Kaylee,'" her mother smiled sadly. "He made that vow on our wedding day, and never even came close to breaking it. It helped me stop him several times from going too far."

Loretta nodded. "We have reason to believe that the more specific the vow, the harder it is to break."

"But what happens to him now?" Kaylee asked. "He's just hurt a civilian, hasn't he?"

"Well, that is the good news out of this" Loretta told her. "Those afflicted have a… special set of laws and regulations, off the books of course. Oscar hurt Taj, and only Taj, after the man was responsible for his son's death. Because of the mental aspects of his power, it's been ruled self-defense, even if Oscar purposefully sought out Taj to put him in the ground. Taj enacted an indirect attack on Oscar, even if he didn't know it, in a way that wasn't possible against a regular human."

"So he's innocent? He walks away fine?" Kaylee asked, hopeful.

"With any luck, yes, but there are a few complications to this. For one… he's never lost a family member in such a way, and his outbursts were already becoming worse. Sadly, we are not hopeful for him to regain consciousness again. There will, of course, be tests and attempts, but they will all be experimental. The only 'maybe' way of bringing Oscar back from his madness would be to give him Taj and allow Oscar to finish the man off."

Sophie leaned forward now, face contorting as she readied herself to argue for that exact situation, but Matthew held up his hand first. "If we think it'll work, that's exactly what will happen."

Sophie's jaw dropped. 'They'd sacrifice a civilian? Just like that?'

"It's not so easy with people like Oscar, and frankly, there aren't enough people who can use magic that we can disregard a single one. In this city, do you know how many there are that are capable of wielding supernatural abilities?"

Sophie shook her head.

"Two. You're looking at both of them right now. Me and Loretta are it, and we aren't particularly deadly. I can send my mind outside my body to scout around, a sort of clairvoyant ability, and Loretta can make things scar quickly. Not exactly healing, and the scar tissue will be worse than if it'd healed naturally, but it's a bandaid if the person is dying."

"That's how I kept Taj alive," Loretta told her. "I put myself between Oscar and Taj when possible, then patched Taj up when not."

"But why," Sophie couldn't help but ask, "Why save the bastard? Shouldn't that have calmed dad down?"

"If only it were that simple. You remember those people in the military gear that took your father down?" Sophie nodded. "They were outside the building the entire time. They could've stepped in before your father ever touched Taj, but didn't because there is a process to this. Two people Oscar trusted broke the news to him, news we knew would set him off. We tried talking him out of it when possible, then we let him release that pent-up rage for a specific amount of time. Oscar hadn't calmed down even slightly by that point, so the call was made to contain him. Based on his actions, we didn't think he'd stop at Taj, and likely would've moved on to Emily next.

"Excluding the moral qualms with allowing a pregnant woman to die, because the moral aspects disappear when describing battle-ready superhumans, it was decided that this outcome was to 'not be allowed under any circumstances.' It would've violated two of his biggest rules: no harming women, and no harming children- according to his own political view of course. Based on others with similar powers who'd done the same thing, this would have one of two different- yet both terrible- outcomes. First, his abilities would've doubled down and he would've become a supernatural threat to be put down by other teams of superhumans. The second option was if he was permanently crippled, unable to ever use his magic again. Both bad, but honestly, we hope it would be the second one.

"We can't say for sure what the outcome would be, so it's been decided that Taj will stay alive to serve as a buffer against Oscar harming Emily, to give us some time to step in if Taj is not enough to fully sate his anger. That's also why there were no police in the department, and why none followed in the chase against Oscar, they were intentionally called away to allow Oscar to confront Taj alone, perhaps with little or no collateral."

Her mother seemed to take this all in stride. She didn't care about dad's dangerous tendencies, as she'd known about them for a long time. Since before they were ever married. The hardest part to her was Leven's death, but she was clearly distracting herself by focusing on the task at hand.

Sophie fared much worse at accepting all of this. The clinical way with which they discussed the death of a pregnant woman made her sick. Emily was simply a statistic to them.

"How can this be fine? How can we weigh the lives of people with value versus those without? He's my father, I love him, and I would choose him over Taj and Emily in a heartbeat… but the government as a whole? Isn't that… illegal? Cruel?"

Loretta gave her a piteous look. "Yes, you're correct, it is. But Oscar is undeniably more valuable than any one civilian. You don't know the kinds of threats that may appear, and Oscar is the only one tough enough to handle them. He's in official retirement, and has been for close to thirty years. Despite that, Oscar, Matthew, and I have all been called into combat together four times since that retirement started. Matthew and I are far more active with our duties and still serve, but your father is the unofficial guardian of your city; if any threats appear in it and mundane forces aren't enough, he has to come help, or hundreds, potentially thousands, die. What is one person compared to that?

"At least, that's the official reason."

"What… What's the unofficial reason?"

"Can't say," Loretta responded, but got a sour look on her face. Whatever it was, Sophie guessed it was not very noble.

They continued to talk. Eventually, Sophie's husband Jack joined them, far after the sun had gone down. He, too, was stunned by all the revelations, but she knew it would be best to explain it now, before Matthew and Loretta left.

They continued to talk, deep into the night. By unspoken mutual agreement, none wanted to go to bed. They wouldn't be able to sleep. Sophie continued to hear tidbits about her father's abilities and what it spelled for his fate, but only time would tell if he eventually came down from his fury.

When dawn broke, Jack called out of work and they stayed over at her moms house that day. Sophie couldn't find it in her to leave her mom alone, and she had to admit that she was comforted here as well.

Curling up in her old bed wrapped in the arms of her husband, she was finally forced to think about the one thing she'd avoided all night.

'Leven is dead.'

She cried into Jack's chest until she fell into a restless sleep hours later.

* * *

That night, Loretta called her mom to say she would plan Leven's funeral and to not worry about it

* * *

Their family was small, but Leven had many friends. He'd always been a likeable guy, and they had dozens of people giving their condolences. Halfway through the funeral, Emily decided to go home after nobody would speak to her.

'Good fucking riddance.'

Taj was still hospitalized, waiting for a different magical medical specialist to further stabilize his condition.

* * *

Two weeks after the wake, the morning after Taj returned home, Sophie heard a knock at the door. Her and Jack decided to stay with her mom until her dad got better and returned home. Her mom was in no state to take care of herself, and Sophia worried about her every day.

When she answered the door, Matthew greeted her with a serious look on his face.

"It seems your father isn't the only one out for cheater's blood. Leven left Taj a gift."

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