Long before Paris knew the names Ladybug or Cat Noir, before the Miraculous became rumors buried beneath centuries of forgotten history, there had been jewels shaped by magic and entrusted to those deemed capable of carrying what they represented. Nooroo hovered in the darkness of the hidden chamber, his tiny lavender body giving off a faint light that barely touched the walls around him. He had told this story many times over the centuries, usually as a lesson rather than a warning, yet the circumstances surrounding him now made every familiar word feel heavier. "Many centuries ago, magic jewels bestowing extraordinary powers were created. These were the Miraculous. Throughout history, heroes have used these jewels for the good of the human race." His gaze lowered toward the brooch resting nearby, the jewel through which his own existence was bound. "Two of these Miraculous are more powerful than the others: the earrings of the Ladybug, which provide the power of creation, and the ring of the Black Cat, which grants the power of destruction. According to legend, whoever controls both these jewels at the same time will achieve absolute power."
The man standing beyond the dim light did not react with wonder. There was hunger instead, carefully controlled but unmistakable, and Nooroo felt it long before the stranger stepped closer. "I want that absolute power, Nooroo. I must have those Miraculous!" The declaration echoed faintly through the chamber, stripped of any hesitation that might have suggested the thought had only just occurred to him. Nooroo's wings slowed. He knew what ambition sounded like when it had already begun turning into obsession, and although his own nature compelled him to aid the bearer of his jewel, nothing prevented him from understanding what that bearer intended.
"But nobody knows where these Miraculous are!" Nooroo protested. His small hands came together against his chest as if the gesture might somehow make the warning more persuasive. The Ladybug and Black Cat Miraculouses had vanished from ordinary knowledge for good reason; their powers were not prizes to be collected, much less tools to satisfy a single person's desire. Yet the man merely regarded him with the quiet satisfaction of someone who had already accomplished one impossible thing and therefore saw little reason another should remain impossible.
"I found you though, my little Nooroo." The softness of his voice made the words more unsettling rather than less. His attention shifted toward the Moth Miraculous, and when he spoke again there was almost idle curiosity in his tone. "Your Miraculous... remind me of its powers again."
Nooroo hesitated. He could have delayed for only a moment, but even that felt like a small act of resistance. Eventually he answered, because the bond between Kwami and Miraculous holder was not built to permit easy defiance. "The Moth Brooch allows you to give someone their own superpowers and to make that person your devoted follower!" It was a power meant for elevation, for finding someone whose heart burned strongly enough to act and giving them the strength necessary to do what they otherwise could not. Used properly, Nooroo could create champions. The man before him, however, had already begun considering another application.
"And when it comes to luring superheroes, what could be better than creating supervillains?" he asked. There was no need for Nooroo to answer. The idea had already arranged itself inside the man's mind with cold simplicity: create a threat, force hidden heroes to reveal themselves, and then take what he wanted once they appeared.
Nooroo recoiled despite himself. "But master, the Miraculous are not meant to be used for evil purposes!" His voice carried more desperation now. Kwamis had watched human beings misuse extraordinary gifts before, and the damage rarely ended where the person responsible expected it to. Powers were shaped by concepts older than nations and dynasties; reducing them to instruments of obsession was dangerous even when the wielder believed himself clever enough to control the consequences.
"I must have this absolute power!" The man's restraint finally cracked. He stepped toward Nooroo and raised one hand, directing it toward the Kwami with the authority granted by possession of his Miraculous. "Your Miraculous is in my control! I am your master now, and you must obey me."
The command struck Nooroo like an invisible current. His tiny body stiffened in midair, violet sparks shivering briefly around him as the magical bond tightened. There was no physical hand around his throat, no chain visible between them, but the result was no less real. Nooroo's wings faltered before carrying him lower, and the resistance in his expression slowly gave way to resignation. When he finally lowered his head, sadness settled across his face with an age that his tiny form could never show. "Yes, master."
The man picked up the Moth Brooch and fastened it to his clothing. Its metal caught the chamber's weak light for only an instant before the jewel responded, magic stirring through it as Nooroo felt the transformation command approaching. The man straightened, satisfaction overtaking his features. "Nooroo, dark wings rise!"
A storm of butterflies erupted around him.
They came from shadow and magic together, dozens becoming hundreds as they spiraled upward in a dense vortex, their wings briefly obscuring his body. Nooroo was pulled toward the brooch, his small form dissolving into violet light before vanishing inside the jewel. The transformation swept upward immediately afterward. Dark fabric formed over the man's body while the butterflies crawled across him like living fragments of night, replacing ordinary clothing with the severe silhouette of his transformed persona. A mask sealed itself over his face, hiding the man beneath the identity he intended the world to fear.
When the final butterflies scattered, the chamber fell quiet again.
The transformed man remained motionless for a moment, testing the sensation of power settling throughout his body. He flexed one gloved hand, feeling Nooroo's magic answer him from within the brooch. His eyes remained closed until he spoke, savoring the birth of the identity as much as the power itself. "From this day on, I shall be known as..." His eyes opened sharply beneath the mask. "Hawk Moth!"
His laughter followed him through the chamber, carrying farther than Nooroo's warnings had.
Far across Paris, something answered.
Inside a small massage shop tucked away from the noise of the street, Wayzz awoke with such abruptness that for a moment he forgot the human lying only a few feet away. His green eyes widened as the sensation reached him again, faint but unmistakable—a ripple through the invisible network connecting the ancient Miraculouses and the beings bound to them. It was not merely another active jewel. He recognized the presence beneath it.
Nooroo.
Wayzz shot upward. "Master, Master!"
The customer lying on the massage table stirred at the unexpected voice and began turning his head toward the sound. Wang Fu reacted before suspicion could properly form. The old Guardian had spent long enough protecting secrets to recognize danger even while pretending there was none. He immediately raised his voice into an exaggerated chant, waving one hand as though Wayzz's cry had been part of the treatment all along. "Master, master. Chanting, it's all part of the treatment. Master, master."
The customer stared at him.
Fu smiled with the practiced calm of a man who had survived far stranger situations than an awkward lie inside his own shop. Before the customer could begin asking questions, Fu guided him upright and toward the entrance with gentle but determined pressure. "Thank you for coming, see you again next week!" The door closed behind the bewildered man, leaving the shop suddenly quiet.
Wayzz wasted no time. He descended beside Fu, his expression far more troubled than before. "Master, the Moth Miraculous. I felt its aura."
The pleasant expression Fu had maintained for his customer vanished. For several seconds he stood perfectly still, as though refusing to move might somehow change what he had heard. The Moth Miraculous had been absent for so long that its disappearance had ceased feeling like an immediate danger and become something closer to an old wound—one of several failures history had simply carried forward. "I thought it had been lost forever!"
"So did I." Wayzz hovered closer, his voice quieter now that there was no one left to overhear them. The sensation troubling him had not been merely Nooroo awakening. Kwamis could feel something of the intent with which Miraculous magic was being bent, and what had touched him from across Paris carried none of the warmth he would have expected from Nooroo freely empowering someone. "But Master, it's a negative aura. I fear it may have gotten into the hands of a dark power!"
Fu's face tightened.
Age had done little to dull his memory of what the Miraculouses were capable of in the wrong hands. The Moth was not considered among the two supreme jewels, yet its ability to empower ordinary people made it uniquely dangerous in a populated city. A single malicious holder would not need an army if he could manufacture one person at a time from anger, desperation, grief, jealousy, or fear. Worse still, the emergence of the Moth might not be an isolated event. Someone willing to misuse Nooroo's power could very easily be searching for the jewels whose combined authority dwarfed all others.
"We must find Nooroo and his Miraculous," Fu said. His hand disappeared beneath his clothing and emerged holding the bracelet through which Wayzz's power could be invoked. "If it has gotten into the wrong hands, there's no telling what evil will come upon the world!"
Wayzz watched his master fasten the Miraculous and immediately understood what Fu intended.
Fu closed his fingers around it. Old instinct rose faster than old pain, and for a heartbeat he looked less like the quiet owner of a massage shop and more like the Guardian who had spent most of his life protecting objects capable of changing civilization. "Time to transform! Wayzz..." The command never came.
Pain seized his back before he could finish.
Fu doubled over with a sharp breath, one hand shooting toward his lower spine while the other caught the edge of a nearby table. Whatever heroic image had briefly returned disappeared beneath the considerably less glorious reality of one hundred and eighty-six years of accumulated wear. Wayzz drifted beside him with an expression that mixed concern and an almost painfully familiar patience.
"Please, Master. Be reasonable. You are—"
"Still young!" Fu interrupted before Wayzz could finish the sentence. He straightened with considerable effort and an offended dignity that would have been more convincing if one hand were not still pressed firmly against his back. "I'm only 186."
Wayzz said nothing. He did not need to.
Fu held his expression for several seconds before releasing a resigned breath. His gaze traveled toward the far side of the room, where an apparently ordinary gramophone rested among the harmless clutter of his shop. Pride had its place, but there were moments when responsibility demanded something more useful. "But you're right, Wayzz. I can no longer do it alone." He crossed the room carefully, each step restoring some of the seriousness the interruption had stolen. "We'll need some help."
His hand settled against the gramophone.
A hidden mechanism answered.
The ordinary exterior separated with a soft mechanical click, panels folding away from one another as the disguised object opened. Beneath them rested something Fu had guarded through years of secrecy and regret: the Miracle Box. Its compartments gleamed faintly in the dim room, each holding a jewel connected to a Kwami, a concept, and a responsibility far greater than whoever wore it.
Wayzz descended beside his master as Fu looked over the collection.
Somewhere in Paris, Nooroo had already been forced into service.
That meant the age of keeping the Miraculouses hidden had ended.
Fu's fingers hovered over the box as he considered the impossible choice that now rested before him—not simply which jewels should leave his protection, but which people could be trusted to carry them.
Morning light had already begun pushing through the skylight above Marinette Dupain-Cheng's room when the alarm on her phone started ringing for what had to be the hundredth time. The cheerful electronic melody had long since stopped sounding helpful and had become part of the room itself, vibrating against the desk while Marinette remained buried beneath her blankets as though sufficient determination might convince morning to leave without her. From somewhere below came the warm smells of butter, sugar, chocolate, and freshly baked bread from the family bakery, followed shortly afterward by a voice powerful enough to penetrate both floorboards and sleep.
"Marinette! Your alarm's been going off for fifteen minutes! You're going to be late for your first day back at school!" Sabine called from downstairs. That finally did what the alarm had failed to accomplish. The blankets shifted violently before Marinette crawled out from beneath them, hair disheveled and eyes barely open, then nearly tangled herself in her own bedding in the process of getting upright.
"Got it, Mom!" she shouted, trying to sound far more awake than she actually was. Clothing, bag, shoes, stairs—everything became part of one hurried blur until she came down into the apartment above the bakery, still adjusting herself as she moved. "Coming! I bet you anything, Chloé will be in my class again."
Sabine had already prepared breakfast and looked considerably less worried by that possibility than her daughter did. "Four years in a row, is that possible?" she asked, carrying herself with the patient optimism of someone who had heard more than enough Chloé Bourgeois stories over the years to know exactly why Marinette sounded so resigned.
"Definitely. Lucky me!" Marinette dropped into her chair with a sigh that suggested destiny itself had personally conspired to keep Chloé in her orbit. She reached for her cocoa, still moving with the uncertain coordination of someone whose brain had not entirely caught up with her body.
"Don't say that! It's the start of a new year, I'm sure everything will be just fine!" Sabine insisted. Marinette gave her a small smile and nodded, wanting to believe it if only because her mother did, then set the cocoa down with a little too much confidence. Her elbow clipped one thing, which struck another, and within seconds the peaceful breakfast table became a miniature catastrophe of shifting dishes and spilled cocoa. Marinette stared at what she had done and let out a miserable groan, while Sabine only steadied what could still be saved and gave her daughter the reassuring look of a woman for whom this was nowhere near an unprecedented event.
Below them, the bakery was already alive.
Tom Dupain worked behind the counter with flour across his apron and the energy of someone who considered dawn a perfectly reasonable time to be enthusiastic. He sang La Marseillaise loudly while arranging the morning's pastries, his voice echoing through the bakery as Marinette came downstairs. Waiting for her was a carefully packed box of macarons, each one decorated according to the designs she had prepared herself.
Marinette's sleepy expression disappeared almost immediately. "Dad, these are so awesome!" she said, leaning closer to inspect the rows of bright pastries. They were neat, colorful, and almost too perfect to eat, though knowing her classmates, Marinette suspected that particular problem would solve itself quickly.
"Glad you like them," Tom replied, visibly pleased by her reaction. He had taken her designs seriously, as he always did, translating the little details she had imagined into something edible without losing what made them hers.
"Thank you Dad, my class will love them! You're the best!" Marinette wrapped both arms around him before he could answer. Tom laughed and returned the embrace, enormous beside her even when bending down.
"We're the best, thanks to your amazing designs," he corrected her. Marinette pulled back with the box in her hands, only for it to immediately slip from her grip. Her eyes widened in horror, but Tom caught the falling box against the top of his foot with the casual reflexes of someone who had apparently spent years training specifically for his daughter's accidents, flicked it upward, and caught it safely in both hands before offering it back to her.
Marinette stared at him for a second before a laugh escaped her. "Thanks." She took the box much more carefully this time. Sabine appeared beside her with her school bag, helping settle it onto Marinette's shoulder before Marinette kissed her cheek, then Tom bent down expectantly until she kissed his as well. "See you tonight!" she called, already moving toward the front door.
She vanished through it before either parent could remind her to slow down.
Outside, Paris had already settled into the rhythm of morning traffic. Marinette hurried from the bakery with her backpack bouncing against her shoulders and the macaron box held carefully in both hands, only to misjudge her own momentum the instant she reached the sidewalk. She stumbled forward, one foot coming dangerously close to carrying her directly into the road as a car swept past.
"Aah..." Marinette breathed once she managed to jerk herself backward. For a second she remained frozen there, the box pressed against her chest, relief spreading through her as she realized just how close that had been.
Then she noticed the old man.
Wang Fu was halfway across the street, moving slowly with the assistance of his cane. His pace was steady but nowhere near fast enough for the car approaching from the opposite direction, and Marinette's relief disappeared instantly. "Uuuhhaawh?" She looked toward the other pedestrians gathered at the crossing, expecting someone else to notice, but almost every face was lowered toward a phone. Nobody moved.
Marinette did.
She ran directly into the road, no thought left for school bells, macarons, or how dangerously close she herself had just come to traffic. Reaching Fu, she caught his wrist and hurried him toward the opposite sidewalk as fast as his legs could manage. The approaching car seemed to become louder with every step until they finally reached the curb, but Marinette's foot caught the edge while she tried to pull herself out of its path.
She went down face-first.
"Bleh." Her complaint came muffled against the pavement. The macaron box struck beside her, flipped partly open, and scattered several of its contents across the sidewalk in a colorful ruin of cracked shells and filling.
Fu looked from Marinette to the pastries, his expression filling with immediate concern. "Thank you, Miss." Then his gaze dropped toward the open box. At least seven macarons had escaped, while another had broken apart completely across the concrete. He covered his mouth with one hand. "Oh! What a disaster."
Marinette pushed herself upright just as the pedestrian signal changed. People began crossing around her, still barely paying attention to anything beyond their screens, and she spotted one intact macaron lying directly in the path of an approaching shoe. "No—" She reached toward it too late. The pedestrian stepped directly onto the pastry without ever looking down, reducing it to crumbs beneath his shoe.
Marinette's shoulders sagged.
For half a second, the morning seemed determined to prove every pessimistic thought she had entertained over breakfast.
Then she gathered what dignity she had left, picked up the box, and stood. "Don't worry, I'm no stranger to disasters. Besides, there are still a few left." She inspected what remained, found several survivors tucked safely in their compartments, and tilted the box toward Fu rather than clutching them protectively to herself. "Here."
Fu studied her for the briefest moment before accepting one of the remaining macarons. He bit into it, and whatever he had been looking for in her appeared to satisfy him even before the taste did. "Mmmh. Delicious!" he said, smiling with genuine warmth.
Marinette smiled back and closed the damaged box.
A school bell rang somewhere across the street.
Her face changed immediately. "Oh no, I'm gonna be late!" She turned toward the school, took two hurried steps, then caught herself and looked back at Fu. Despite her panic, she straightened and gave the elderly stranger a small respectful bow. "Ah, have a nice day, sir!"
Then she ran.
Fu remained on the sidewalk and watched Marinette race through the entrance of Collège Françoise Dupont. Only once she was far enough away did his attention fall toward the small object concealed in his hand: a compact black box decorated with red markings across its lid.
The Ladybug Miraculous.
"Thank you very much, young lady," Fu murmured, no longer speaking only about the macaron or the rescue. He slipped the box safely away and continued past the bakery, his cane tucked behind his back as he walked. Wayzz had been right; Fu could no longer shoulder everything alone. At least now, one choice seemed considerably less uncertain than it had that morning.
By the time Marinette reached the school, whatever grace she possessed had been completely sacrificed to speed.
She sprinted through the open doors, flew past the janitor, and raced down the corridor toward her classroom. The room had already begun filling when she reached it, and Marinette stumbled through the doorway hard enough that several students looked toward her. She immediately converted the stumble into something vaguely resembling an intentional step, straightened, and behaved as though nothing whatsoever had happened.
At the front of the classroom, Caline Bustier was organizing the opening chaos of a new school year. "Nino, why don't you have a seat in the front row this year?" she suggested while students shuffled bags and chairs around one another. Marinette took advantage of the distraction to make for the familiar seat she had occupied before.
She almost reached it.
"Marinette Dupain-Cheng."
Marinette stopped.
There were voices a person could recognize before consciously processing them. Chloé Bourgeois's was unfortunately one of those voices. Marinette closed her eyes for a moment and muttered, "Ugh. Here we go again," before turning around.
Chloé sat nearby with Sabrina at her side, looking entirely too satisfied for someone who had only just arrived at school. "That's my seat."
Marinette frowned. "But Chloé, this has always been my seat." It was less an argument than a statement of exhausted fact. Four years of dealing with Chloé had taught her that facts rarely mattered when Chloé had already decided reality should arrange itself differently.
"Not anymore! New school, new year, new seats!" Sabrina announced from beside her, backing Chloé with the automatic loyalty that had long since become second nature.
Chloé gestured dismissively toward another part of the classroom. "So why don't you just go and sit beside that new girl over there?" She pointed toward a girl with glasses seated a short distance away, someone Marinette had never seen before.
"But..." Marinette began.
Chloé leaned forward before she could build enough confidence to continue. "Listen. Adrien and Jinx are arriving today, and since that's going to be their seats, this is going to be my seat. Get it?"
That stopped Marinette for an entirely different reason. The irritation on her face gave way to blank confusion. "Who's Adrien and Jinx?"
Chloé and Sabrina stared at her.
Then both started laughing.
"Can you believe she doesn't know who Adrien and Jinx are?" Chloé asked Sabrina, with the delighted disbelief of someone who had just discovered Marinette had never heard of gravity. "What rock have you been living under?"
Sabrina straightened, apparently thrilled to possess information Marinette did not. "Adrien is one of the most famous models in all of Paris, and Jinx is his childhood best friend and part owner of Carnaval de Minuit, the greatest and largest carnival theme park in the world!" The last portion came out with the breathless certainty of something she had probably read repeatedly online rather than knowledge she had acquired personally.
Chloé smiled as though both boys' accomplishments somehow reflected upon her. "And I am their best friend. They adore me." She made another impatient motion toward the back of the room. "Go on, move!"
"Hey! Who elected you Queen of Seats?"
The interruption came from the girl Chloé had pointed toward earlier.
Alya had been watching long enough to understand exactly what was happening, and unlike Marinette, she carried herself as though the idea of Chloé Bourgeois intimidating her had not even occurred to her. Chloé turned toward the newcomer and looked her over from glasses to shoes, apparently offended that someone she did not know had already chosen not to be impressed.
"Oh. Look, Sabrina! We've got a little do-gooder in our class this year." Chloé's mouth curled into a mocking smile. "What are you gonna do, super newbie? Shoot beams at me with your glasses?"
Alya pushed her glasses slightly higher on her nose without giving Chloé the satisfaction of looking embarrassed. "Wouldn't you like to know?" She did not remain there to trade insults. Instead she walked over to Marinette, caught her by the hand, and simply pulled her away from the situation. "Come on."
Marinette followed with considerably less success.
Her shoe caught awkwardly against the floor, and she pitched forward with the battered macaron box still in her hands. The lid opened. Nearly every remaining macaron escaped.
Marinette stared at the floor in horror. "Sorry, sorry, sorry." She crouched immediately, gathering what little had survived while wishing the earth would briefly open beneath her desk and accept her.
"Alright, has everyone found a seat?" Miss Bustier asked from the front, apparently choosing mercy by not drawing further attention to the disaster.
Alya crouched long enough to help Marinette recover the box. "Chillax, girl. No biggie." There was no mockery in it, which somehow made Marinette feel more embarrassed and more comfortable at exactly the same time.
They finally settled beside one another. Marinette glanced toward Chloé, who had already returned to talking with Sabrina as though the entire confrontation had been beneath her notice. "I so wish I can handle Chloé the way you do."
"You mean the way Majestia does it." Alya immediately pulled out her phone and brought up a picture of the famous American superhero, turning the screen toward Marinette with something approaching reverence. "She says all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good people do nothing." Alya tipped the phone slightly aside and pointed toward Chloé. "Well, that girl over there is evil, and we are the good people. We can't let her get away with it."
Marinette looked between Alya and Chloé. The theory sounded excellent when expressed by superheroes who presumably did not have to sit several feet away from Chloé Bourgeois for an entire school year. "Well, that's easier said than done. She likes to make my life miserable."
"That's cause you let her, girl! You just need more confidence!" Alya replied. She said it without cruelty, as though confidence were something Marinette could learn rather than something she had somehow failed to possess.
Marinette looked down at the macaron box. Of the beautiful collection her father had prepared that morning, exactly one intact macaron remained. She picked it up, broke it carefully in half, and offered one piece to the girl who had known her for perhaps three minutes and had already stood up for her more readily than Marinette usually stood up for herself. "Marinette."
Alya accepted the half with a grin. "Alya."
At the front of the classroom, Miss Bustier waited until the room had quieted enough to begin. "For those of you who don't yet know me, I'm Miss Bustier. I'll be your teacher this year." Her introduction brought the scattered conversations down to whispers as students finally started settling into the first morning of classes.
Chloé, however, was barely listening.
Her attention kept wandering toward the classroom door.
"Ugh, he should have been here by now," she complained under her breath, checking the entrance again. Whether she meant Adrien alone or had already decided both Adrien and Jinx should have arranged their entire morning around arriving when she expected them remained unclear, but the empty seats beside her were apparently far more important than anything Miss Bustier had begun saying.
Across the room, Marinette noticed the glance but did not yet think much of it. Adrien and Jinx were still only names to her—one a model she somehow had never paid attention to, the other apparently connected to a world-famous carnival she knew mostly through advertisements and distant conversation.
That would not remain true for very long.
Outside Collège Françoise Dupont, the morning traffic had thickened into the usual Parisian crawl, engines murmuring beneath the voices of students gathering beyond the gates. Adrien Agreste barely noticed any of it. He was already halfway across the pavement and moving toward the school entrance at a hurried jog, his school bag slung over one shoulder and an excitement in his face that would have been difficult to hide even if he had tried. For once there was no photographer telling him where to stand, no carefully arranged schedule, no private tutor waiting behind the walls of his father's mansion. The open doors ahead of him belonged to an ordinary school, filled with ordinary students, and for the first time in a long while Adrien could almost imagine himself being one of them.
"Adrien, please reconsider! You know what your father wants!" Nathalie Sancoeur's voice cut across the street before he could reach those doors. She stood beside the sleek black car parked along the curb, its polished body conspicuous even among the wealthier vehicles passing through the neighborhood. Normally Nathalie barely needed to raise her voice to command attention, which made the fact that she had done so at all enough to stop Adrien in his tracks.
He turned with frustration already gathering in his expression. "But this is what I wanna do!" There was more desperation beneath the protest than anger. Adrien had spent too much of his life having every choice made for him—what he wore, where he went, what he learned, when he trained, when he smiled for cameras—and the school behind him represented something painfully simple that he had somehow never been allowed to possess.
Before Nathalie could answer, movement near the curb caught Adrien's attention. An elderly Chinese man had stumbled while crossing near the entrance, his cane slipping awkwardly as he tried to regain his balance. Adrien's argument vanished from his mind immediately. He crossed the remaining distance without hesitation, caught Wang Fu carefully beneath the arm, and helped steady him before his knees could reach the pavement.
"Thank you, young man," Fu said once he had regained his footing. He gave Adrien a quiet, appreciative smile while settling both hands around his cane again, although his eyes remained on the teenager a little longer than gratitude alone required. It was another small kindness offered without reward or calculation, and Fu filed it away beside another he had witnessed earlier that morning.
Adrien smiled and released him once he was certain the older man was steady. "Of course." He was already turning back toward Nathalie, ready to resume the argument, when something beside her made him stop so abruptly that the hopeful expression on his face collapsed into outright betrayal.
Standing near the car was another boy Adrien's age, although almost anyone seeing him for the first time would have confidently insisted otherwise. Jinx Sancoeur had spent his entire life being mistaken for a girl and, rather than being irritated by it, had long ago begun finding the confusion entertaining. There was nothing particularly ambiguous about his appearance in the conventional sense; he simply looked overwhelmingly feminine. His face was fine-boned and almost unfairly pretty, violet eyes framed by long lashes beneath waves of ink-black hair that spilled well past his waist. The dark clothes he wore did little to correct anyone's assumptions: a fitted black turtleneck beneath an elaborate black-and-purple coat patterned with harlequin diamonds and fine gold ornamentation, narrow black trousers, chains and small charms hanging from his waist, and polished boots that gave him the air of someone who had dressed for an elegant midnight carnival rather than the first morning of school.
None of that was what horrified Adrien.
It was what Jinx had in his mouth.
A cookies-and-cream chocolate bar rested between his teeth while he watched Adrien with absolutely no shame. The pale chocolate was studded with dark cookie pieces, one of Jinx's embarrassingly reliable weaknesses, and Adrien only needed one look at it to understand precisely how Nathalie had discovered their plan. He had prepared for this. He had planned around Jinx. He had even provided what he had believed to be an adequate quantity of chocolate specifically to secure his silence.
Adrien pointed at him as outrage overwhelmed any concern about maintaining his usual polite image. "THE HELL, JINX! WE AGREED, AND I EVEN GAVE YOU A PILE OF CHOCOLATE!"
Jinx bit cleanly through the piece in his mouth and took his time chewing before answering, entirely unconcerned by the accusation being hurled at him from across the pavement. "Yeaaaaaaaa, but Auntie made these by hand, and the love in them will always be better than store-bought, soooooo... skill issue, Adrien." He held up the remaining cookies-and-cream bar as though the evidence supported his defense rather than proving his betrayal, the slightest curve at the corner of his mouth making it obvious that he was enjoying every second of Adrien's outrage.
Nathalie gave her nephew a sidelong look that suggested she had already decided not to involve herself in whatever strange system of bribery the two boys had established between them. Jinx merely took another bite. Adrien stared at him with the wounded disbelief of someone discovering that friendship apparently had a market value and that he had been foolish enough to underestimate the current price of homemade chocolate.
Jinx Sancoeur had been part of Adrien's life for almost as long as either boy could remember. Nathalie was Jinx's aunt as well as one of Gabriel Agreste's oldest friends and his indispensable assistant, and with their families tangled so closely together, the two boys becoming one another's first real friends had been nearly inevitable. They had learned to walk through the same enormous rooms, endured formal dinners together, hidden from adults together, and eventually developed the kind of friendship where elaborate escape plans and confectionery-based bribery required little explanation.
According to Jinx, however, the description first friends was unnecessarily generous toward everyone else. As far as he was concerned, he and Adrien were each other's only actual friends. Chloé Bourgeois did not qualify, regardless of how often she loudly announced otherwise, and Sabrina Raincomprix ranked even lower in his private assessment. Jinx had once described Sabrina with merciless indifference as a "homeless stray Chloé accidentally started feeding," a judgment that had produced one of the rare occasions when Adrien had been unsure whether he should laugh or tell him he was being horrible. He had eventually attempted both.
There was, technically, an exception to Jinx's rule—an old childhood friend he had known since they were small—but she had always gravitated more toward Jinx than Adrien, and in Adrien's mind that alone disqualified her from being considered his friend at all. She was simply someone he knew through Jinx, nothing more.
And even Jinx himself did not fully escape Adrien's personal classification system. In Adrien's eyes, Jinx did not quite count as a friend either. He was something closer, something more constant—more like a brother than anything else. They had been born on the very same day, in the very same hospital room, with Adrien arriving only thirteen minutes earlier. That fact alone had always felt strangely important to Adrien, as if it explained the way their lives had been tangled together from the very beginning.
So, in Adrien Agreste's private, unspoken logic, he did not really have any actual friends at all—only people who were simply there, in one form or another, because they had always been there.
Adrien's anger with Jinx did not survive long enough to matter. He looked beyond him toward Nathalie and then back toward the school entrance, where students continued disappearing through doors that suddenly seemed much farther away than they had a minute earlier. The indignation drained from his face and left something quieter behind. "I just wanna go to school like everybody else. What's so wrong with that?" His voice had lost its earlier heat. When he looked at Nathalie again, there was nothing rebellious in his expression now, only the tired hope of someone asking for one ordinary thing. "Please don't tell my father about all this."
Nathalie's posture softened almost imperceptibly. She understood more than she allowed herself to say, but understanding Gabriel's son and disobeying Gabriel Agreste were very different things. Her eyes flicked toward the waiting car, giving Adrien the answer before she spoke it aloud. There would be no school today—not unless his father changed his mind.
Jinx watched his friend's shoulders lower and, for once, did not make a joke. The remaining chocolate disappeared into his coat pocket rather than his mouth. Whatever amusement he had taken from exposing Adrien's escape attempt had never meant that he wanted to see him miserable; the problem was that Jinx had been raised close enough to Nathalie to know exactly how thoroughly Adrien's father could close every door once he decided one should stay shut.
Adrien finally climbed into the car, frustration contained behind the practiced composure expected of him. Jinx followed after him without needing to be told, sliding into the seat nearby while Nathalie entered last. The door closed, briefly separating the boys from the noise of the schoolyard, and the luxury car pulled away from the curb. Adrien looked through the window as Collège Françoise Dupont began receding behind them, watching students his own age disappear inside to begin a school year he had come painfully close to joining.
Fu remained where Adrien had left him.
He watched the car disappear into Paris traffic, the expression on his face thoughtful rather than disappointed. First Marinette Dupain-Cheng had abandoned her own rush to school to drag a stranger from the path of an approaching car, sacrificing almost all of the macarons she had meant for her classmates in the process. Now Adrien Agreste had interrupted an argument concerning something clearly precious to him simply because an elderly man appeared to need help.
Two tests. Two choices made before either child knew anyone was watching.
A small smile touched Fu's face.
Then, once the car was well out of sight, the frailty seemed to leave him almost comically quickly. He lifted the cane from the pavement and rested it casually across one shoulder, his stride becoming considerably easier as he turned away from the school. He had never truly needed it to walk in the first place. Whistling softly to himself, Wang Fu disappeared down the Paris street with the unhurried satisfaction of a man whose search had just become considerably easier.
The first morning back at Collège Françoise Dupont eventually settled into something resembling an ordinary school day. The arguments over seats had quieted, notebooks had appeared across desks, and Miss Bustier had moved through the necessary beginning-of-year announcements with the patient familiarity of someone accustomed to managing a room full of teenagers who were far more interested in one another than anything written on the board. Marinette had finally stopped thinking about the ruined macarons every thirty seconds, though the empty box tucked inside her bag remained a painful reminder of how spectacularly the morning had gone off course.
Miss Bustier glanced down at her schedule before addressing the class. "Those of you who have P.E., Mr. D'Argencourt is expecting you at the stadium. The rest of you can head over to the library." Chairs immediately began scraping against the floor as students gathered their belongings, conversations springing back to life before she had completely finished speaking. Some were already discussing what D'Argencourt might make them do, while others seized upon the prospect of the library as an excuse to continue whatever conversation class had interrupted.
A chair suddenly struck the floor hard enough to cut through the noise.
"Kim!"
Ivan's voice rolled across the classroom with enough force to turn nearly every head. The broad-shouldered boy had risen from his desk, one hand clenched around a piece of paper so tightly that his knuckles had begun whitening. Whatever had been written there had transformed his usual withdrawn discomfort into something much hotter, and his attention was locked across the classroom on Kim, who needed only one look at Ivan's expression to understand exactly which note had finally been read.
Miss Bustier moved before the confrontation could become physical. "Ivan, what is going on?" Her tone remained calm, but there was authority beneath it now. She positioned herself where Ivan would have to acknowledge her rather than simply crossing the room toward Kim.
"It's Kim! I'm so gonna get..." Ivan stopped himself before finishing, his fingers crushing the note even further. His face had gone red beneath his dark hair, humiliation feeding the anger faster than he could swallow it. Around him, the room had gone uncomfortable in that peculiar way classrooms did when everyone knew something personal had happened but nobody wanted to admit how interested they were in seeing what came next.
Miss Bustier did not demand that Ivan explain himself in front of the class. Whatever Kim had written could be dealt with later, once Ivan was no longer standing in the middle of the room looking ready to put his fist through something. "Ivan, go to the principal's office." Her voice softened slightly at the end, enough to make it clear that she was removing him from the situation rather than simply punishing him.
Ivan stared toward Kim for another moment. The crumpled paper crackled inside his fist as he compressed it into a rough ball, then shoved away from his desk and headed for the door. He said nothing else. The force with which he closed the classroom door behind himself, however, communicated enough.
Marinette watched him disappear into the corridor with a small crease between her brows. She had never known Ivan especially well, but there had been something beneath the anger that bothered her more than the outburst itself. It had looked almost like hurt. Beside her, Alya followed the closed door with equal interest, though her expression carried the curiosity of someone instinctively convinced there was a story hiding behind every strange event.
Neither girl could have known that someone else had felt Ivan's anger far more clearly.
Far beneath the city, behind enormous windows shaped like the wings of a butterfly, Hawk Moth stood alone in the chamber he had chosen as his lair. Paris spread beyond the glass in distant fragments of roofs, streets and lives, none of its citizens aware that something had begun searching through them for weakness. The newly awakened Moth Miraculous rested against his chest, Nooroo's power humming beneath his transformation as emotions brushed against his awareness like distant heat.
Then one burned brighter than the rest.
Hawk Moth's head lifted.
"Negative emotions." Satisfaction entered his voice as the great window before him slowly opened, admitting cold air into the chamber. What had been an indistinct pulse sharpened as he concentrated upon it: anger tangled around humiliation, sadness buried beneath wounded pride, resentment seeking somewhere to go. "This is perfect. Just what I need."
A white butterfly fluttered near him, fragile and ordinary until Hawk Moth extended a gloved hand. Dark energy gathered around his fingers before sinking into the insect. Its pale wings darkened to a corrupted purple-black, a glowing symbol appearing across them as Nooroo's power was twisted into something it had never been intended to create.
"Anger, sadness..." Hawk Moth murmured, savoring the emotional mixture he could feel somewhere above him. There was vulnerability in it, an opening large enough for his influence to enter. He raised the newly created akuma toward the open window. "Burn a hole into his heart, my horrible akuma."
The butterfly stirred upon his hand.
"Fly away, my little akuma, and evilize him!"
The akuma launched itself into the air. It passed through the opening and vanished into Paris, carried not by ordinary instinct but by the connection Hawk Moth had established with the emotion he wanted. Streets and buildings meant nothing to it. Somewhere in the city, Ivan's anger remained bright enough to serve as a beacon.
By then Ivan had reached Principal Damoclès's office.
His irritation had not cooled during the walk. If anything, every step had given him more time to replay Kim's note and imagine the humiliation behind it, until the crumpled paper in his fist felt like something far heavier than a cheap scrap from a notebook. He reached the principal's door and pushed it open without knocking.
Denis Damoclès looked up immediately from behind his desk. Whatever concern he might have shown at Ivan's condition was temporarily overwhelmed by outrage at the violation of one of civilization's most basic administrative rituals. "Excuse me, young man. Hasn't anyone ever taught you to knock?" He pointed firmly back toward the hallway, apparently deciding that proper door etiquette had to be established before any emotional crisis could be addressed. "Go on. Out you go, try it again! Go on, knock."
Ivan stared at him, jaw clenched, then reluctantly stepped backward into the corridor.
Neither of them noticed the butterfly slipping inside.
The akuma fluttered through the office and found the emotion it had followed. Ivan still held Kim's note compressed inside his fist, all of his anger concentrated around the same object that had caused it. The corrupted butterfly disappeared directly into the wad of paper.
Ivan stopped breathing for a moment.
Dark energy pulsed from his hand.
Hawk Moth's voice entered his mind with impossible clarity. The principal's office seemed to fall away around him as the connection between villain and victim locked into place. "Stoneheart, I am Hawk Moth. I give you the power to seek revenge on those who have wronged you."
Ivan looked down at his fist. Something inside the crumpled note beat with an unfamiliar power, feeding upon every ugly thought he had tried and failed to contain. The humiliation no longer felt like something he had to endure. For the first time since reading Kim's words, it felt like something he could answer.
"Okay, Hawk Moth."
Magic erupted around him.
His body expanded violently, clothing disappearing beneath rapidly forming layers of rough gray stone. His arms thickened until they resembled enormous pillars, his shoulders widened, and his hands swelled into fists capable of crushing concrete. The narrow school corridor suddenly seemed absurdly small around him. Where Ivan had stood only seconds earlier, Stoneheart now towered over the office doorway, his anger given weight, armor, and enough physical power to make the building itself seem fragile.
Inside the office, Principal Damoclès remained oblivious to the transformation for exactly long enough to make his continued insistence upon etiquette unfortunate. He arranged himself behind the desk again and waited expectantly for the knock he had demanded. "Well, come on in."
Stoneheart kicked the door.
Wood exploded inward.
The door tore from its hinges and crashed into the office amid a spray of splinters, forcing Damoclès backward in his chair. Papers scattered across the floor as Stoneheart ducked beneath what remained of the doorway and entered, his enormous shoulders grinding against the frame.
"KIMMM!!!"
The roar traveled through the school.
Students in nearby rooms froze. Several teachers looked toward their doors. Somewhere farther away, a stack of books trembled against a shelf from the vibration alone.
In the library, Marinette and Alya discovered the problem considerably more directly.
A violent impact somewhere in the building jolted both girls from their feet. Marinette struck the floor first, catching herself awkwardly on her hands, while Alya landed beside her among displaced books and bags. Around them, students shouted in confusion as chairs scraped backward and several people rushed toward the security monitor mounted nearby.
Alya recovered before Marinette. She pushed herself upright with one hand, eyes already fixed on the screen. "Come on!" There was alarm in her voice, but curiosity was rapidly overtaking it.
"Did you hear that?" another student asked, though nobody needed clarification when the sound came again.
"KIMMM!!!"
The security camera showed something enormous moving through the school grounds.
Principal Damoclès had apparently abandoned any remaining concern about knocking. Somewhere on another camera feed, he scrambled for a phone while debris from his office still littered the floor behind him. "Hello? Is this the police? Get me the army!"
Marinette stared at the monitor.
Stoneheart was difficult to reconcile with anything she understood. He moved like a person, but his body had become an enormous mass of stone, each step landing with enough weight to make nearby students scatter. Yet beneath the distortion of that massive body, beneath the depth and violence of the voice, there had been something painfully recognizable.
"Wh-what's going on?" Marinette whispered. She looked toward Alya, uncertainty turning into realization as another roar came through the speakers. "He had Ivan's voice?"
Alya's expression changed in almost the opposite direction. Where Marinette saw something impossible and wanted an explanation, Alya saw something impossible and immediately wanted to get closer. Her hands went for her phone as she checked it with startling efficiency. "It's as if he's been transformed into a real-life supervillain! GPS, check. Battery, check." She shoved the device securely into her hand, already moving toward the library exit. "I am so outta here!"
Marinette stared after her. "Hey! Where are you going!" She had known Alya for barely part of a morning and was beginning to suspect that her new friend's sense of self-preservation operated according to rules Marinette had never encountered before.
Alya glanced back only briefly, walking faster instead of slowing. "Where there's a supervillain, there's always a superhero close behind! No way I'm missing this!" The possibility that no superhero had actually appeared yet did not seem to trouble her nearly as much as the possibility that one might appear without her there to record it.
"Alya—!" Marinette started after her, then movement on the security screen pulled her attention back.
Stoneheart had reached the street.
People fled in every direction around him while abandoned cars clogged the road. Stoneheart seized one of them with both hands, lifting the vehicle with horrifying ease. Marinette's mouth fell open as the car rose over his head, its alarm shrieking uselessly while its wheels continued spinning.
Stoneheart threw it.
For a fraction of a second the security feed became a blur of metal rushing toward the camera.
The screen exploded into static.
A harsh electronic crackle filled the library before the image collapsed into warped bands of color, eventually settling on a bright rainbow error screen. Marinette flinched backward from the monitor as though the car might somehow continue through it.
Then Stoneheart's voice came faintly through another speaker somewhere in the building, still pursuing the same person around whom all of his anger had crystallized.
"KIMMM!"
Marinette winced.
Until that morning, her greatest concerns had been getting to school on time, surviving another year with Chloé Bourgeois, and mourning a box of crushed macarons. Now one of her classmates had somehow become a stone giant strong enough to throw cars, Alya was actively running toward him, and nobody seemed to have the faintest idea how any of it had happened.
For the first time that day, Marinette found herself wishing desperately that her mother had been right when she promised everything would be just fine.
The Agreste mansion had always seemed too large for the number of people who actually lived inside it. Its high ceilings, immaculate stone, and carefully chosen furniture gave every room the polished stillness of a museum after closing, and the dining room was no exception. Morning light spilled through the enormous windows in pale rectangular bands, reaching a table large enough to seat a family several times the size of the one that actually used it. Beyond the front gates, hidden from the security cameras by the angle of the outer wall and the practiced discretion of someone who had spent most of his life avoiding notice, Wang Fu stood with his cane in one hand and a small Miraculous box concealed in the other. He had followed the car from a distance after leaving the school, and now he waited, quietly considering the second young person whose character he had tested that morning.
Inside, Adrien sat through the education his father insisted provided everything a conventional school supposedly could. Nathalie stood opposite him with her tablet held neatly against one arm, moving through the day's material with the efficient precision Adrien had known for most of his life. A few seats away, Jinx had claimed enough of the enormous table to establish what looked less like a study space and more like a miniature engineering department. His tablet lay flat beneath one hand while a stylus moved quickly beneath the other, filling the screen with layered sketches, mechanical notes, rotation diagrams, and little annotations concerning servos and facial plates. He was designing another attraction for Carnaval de Minuit, this time a robotic jack-in-the-box called Jacky—a lanky jester automaton intended to emerge from an oversized music box, entertain guests, and, according to several increasingly questionable notes in Jinx's margins, possibly chase people if they tried to steal the crank.
Jinx himself looked as though he had wandered out of the visual language of his own park. Ink-black hair fell in an almost absurdly long curtain behind him, while his dark clothes carried small touches of purple, gold, and harlequin patterning that made even casual clothing look faintly theatrical. A homemade lollipop rested between his lips, one Nathalie had made herself, and he occasionally shifted it from one side of his mouth to the other without ever looking away from Jacky's internal skeleton. Adrien had long since accepted that asking whether Jinx was paying attention was pointless. He could be drawing three things, eating something, and apparently ignoring the entire room while still remembering a conversation word for word afterward.
Nathalie glanced at Adrien's lesson before posing the next question. "Who was the first president of the Fifth French Republic?" Adrien barely needed time to consider it. History was one of the subjects his private education had drilled into him thoroughly enough that questions like this had become almost reflexive.
"Everyone thinks it was de Gaulle, but it was actually René Coty before the first elections," Adrien answered. The response earned the smallest approving movement from Nathalie, which by her standards was practically applause.
"Excellent, Adrien." She was preparing to move to the next question when footsteps entered the room behind her. The change in Adrien was immediate; his shoulders became a little straighter before he even turned around.
Gabriel Agreste had arrived.
He did not need to raise his voice to alter the atmosphere of a room. His presence had a way of making everything around him feel arranged according to rules no one else had been consulted about, and Nathalie stopped the lesson almost instinctively when he approached. Gabriel's eyes passed briefly over her tablet, Adrien, and Jinx's rapidly developing mechanical jester before settling on his assistant. "Give me a minute, would you, Nathalie?"
"Yes, sir." Nathalie lowered the tablet and stepped aside, though she did not leave entirely. Jinx's stylus continued scratching across glass, but one violet eye flicked upward for half a second before returning to Jacky's spring-loaded torso.
Gabriel faced his son. He already knew about the attempt to attend school; whether Nathalie had told him directly or the mansion's security had filled in the missing pieces hardly mattered. His expression contained none of the uncertainty Adrien had been hoping for. "You are not going to school. I've already told you."
"But Father..." Adrien began, and the words carried the exhaustion of an argument he had made in a dozen different forms without ever being allowed to finish.
"Everything you need is right here where I can keep an eye on you and Jinx." Gabriel's gaze briefly included the boy at the table, who did not react beyond dragging another line through Jacky's shoulder assembly. "I will not have you outside in that dangerous world."
Adrien's frustration finally broke through the politeness that had been trained into him. "It's not dangerous, Father. I'm always stuck in here by myself. Why can't I go out and make friends just like everybody else?" His voice climbed despite his efforts to keep it controlled, because this was the part Gabriel never seemed to understand. Adrien did not want another tutor, another activity, another carefully screened acquaintance brought into the mansion. He wanted to meet people who had not already been selected for him.
The stylus stopped.
Jinx slowly lifted his head.
The homemade lollipop remained between his lips, but the pleasant vacancy with which he had been designing Jacky vanished. His violet eyes settled squarely upon Adrien, and Adrien felt the stare before he consciously turned toward it. A small shiver passed through him. There were many varieties of Jinx's silence, and this particular one communicated quite clearly that Adrien had just said something personally offensive within stabbing distance.
Adrien's expression immediately became apologetic. "You know I see you as a brother, so you don't count." He gave Jinx a look that was meant to communicate please do not make this worse, although the fact that he had effectively responded to an accusation Jinx had not actually voiced probably made his guilt considerably more obvious.
Jinx pulled the lollipop from his mouth, leaning back in his chair as if preparing to conduct a formal cross-examination. "What about Alix? You've known her for years." There was no teasing in the question so much as an inconvenient insistence upon accuracy. He had known Alix long enough that excluding her from Adrien's claim required explanation.
Adrien hesitated, because that answer was less likely to provoke violence but no more flattering. "She's more your friend than mine." Which was true, at least in the peculiar categories Adrien maintained in his own head. Alix had been around for years, but she and Jinx possessed the closer relationship; Adrien had always felt like the third point of that connection rather than one of its foundations.
Gabriel's patience ended before Jinx could produce another name. "Enough." The single word struck the room hard enough to silence both boys. His attention returned entirely to Adrien. "Because you are not like everyone else! You are my son!" To Gabriel, that seemed to resolve the argument rather than expose the problem at its center. He looked toward Nathalie with finality. "Continue."
Adrien sat there for another moment, his jaw tightening. Nathalie had already recognized that the lesson was beyond salvaging and tried to offer him the smallest escape available. "We can leave it there for today if you have—" She never finished. Adrien pushed away from the table and left, crossing the room fast enough that his chair rocked behind him before settling.
Silence followed him through the doorway.
Nathalie looked at her nephew.
Jinx looked at his aunt.
Neither seemed surprised. After a moment, both gave almost identical shrugs—the quiet, synchronized surrender of two people who had spent enough time around the Agreste family to know that chasing Adrien immediately would accomplish nothing. Jinx put the lollipop back in his mouth, lowered his eyes to his tablet, and resumed drawing Jacky's mechanical grin as though the interruption had simply been another scheduled inconvenience.
Outside the mansion, Fu watched one of the upper windows for a while longer before closing his fingers around the little box in his palm. The argument itself had been none of his concern, but what he had seen at the school still mattered. Adrien had wanted something badly enough to disobey his father for it, yet the moment a stranger appeared to need assistance, he had forgotten his own struggle and helped without hesitation. Fu had spent too many years as Guardian to confuse obedience with goodness. Sometimes character revealed itself most clearly in the choice someone made when nobody had given them permission to make it.
By the time Adrien reached his bedroom, anger had curdled into the familiar helplessness that came whenever an argument with his father ended exactly where it had begun. He dropped onto his bed and stared upward, surrounded by more things than most teenagers could dream of owning and wanting none of them nearly as much as the school he had watched disappear through the car window. The room was enormous, fitted with a climbing wall, arcade machines, computers, expensive furniture, and enough entertainment to make confinement look luxurious. It was still confinement.
A heavy impact outside made him sit upright.
Another followed.
Adrien crossed the room toward the windows overlooking the street and found half the road below sealed behind police vehicles. Officers had spread into firing positions with pistols raised toward something farther down the avenue, civilians being driven behind barricades as hurried commands carried upward between the buildings. At the center of it all stood the stone giant Adrien had not yet seen except in the fragmented reports beginning to spread across Paris.
Officer Roger Raincomprix raised his arm. "Ready?" The officers steadied their aim, and his hand came down. "Fire!"
Gunshots cracked through the street.
The bullets struck Stoneheart's rocky body and accomplished precisely the opposite of what the police intended. The impacts disappeared into his stone hide as though being swallowed, and then his enormous frame began expanding. Shoulders broadened, arms thickened, and his already massive body gained another layer of bulk with every attack. Confusion spread through the police line a second before survival instinct did.
Stoneheart roared the same name he had been roaring since leaving the school. "KIM!"
The formation broke. Officers scattered as Stoneheart reached down, seized a police van, and lifted it from the road with terrifying ease. Roger looked over his shoulder just in time to see several tons of vehicle coming toward him and sprinted aside while the van crashed down where he had been standing seconds before, metal folding against asphalt with a violent shriek.
Adrien recoiled from the window and moved back toward the room, adrenaline replacing his earlier frustration. He vaulted over the back of the sofa rather than walking around it, landed beside the television, snatched up the remote, and turned on the news. Every major station seemed to have abandoned regular programming for live coverage of the same impossible event.
Mayor André Bourgeois appeared before a cluster of microphones, attempting to project a confidence the footage behind him did not support. "I'm asking all Parisians to stay home until this situation is under control." Reporters immediately shouted over one another once he finished, voices calling "Mr. Bourgeois! Mr. Bourgeois!" while cameras shifted toward images of damaged streets, smashed vehicles, and civilians fleeing the stone giant's path.
Nadja Chamack's report replaced the mayor moments later, her professional composure strained by the absurdity of what she was having to say on live television. "As incredible as it seems, it's been confirmed that Paris is indeed being attacked by a supervillain. The police have been struggling to keep the situation under control." The broadcast cut briefly to Roger, who had apparently been found for comment after narrowly avoiding the flying van.
"Be confident, the strong arm of the law will come crashing down on the..." Roger began, only for his eyes to drift toward the destruction occurring behind the camera. His certainty faltered visibly. "I mean, the other arm."
Adrien stared at the screen.
A supervillain. An actual one. Not a fictional character, not something from a comic or one of Jinx's increasingly deranged park concepts, but a giant made of stone rampaging through Paris while armed police proved incapable of stopping him. Somewhere in the back of Adrien's mind, the argument with his father acquired an irritating new complication. Gabriel had called the outside world dangerous, and the outside world had responded by producing a superpowered rock monster before lunch.
Across Paris, Marinette was handling the same revelation considerably less calmly.
She sat hunched in the chair beneath her loft bed, knees pulled close while coverage of Stoneheart played nearby. The first day of school had already delivered Chloé, humiliation, crushed macarons, a new friend who enthusiastically ran toward supervillains, and now the possibility that Paris might simply contain supervillains from this point forward. Marinette sank lower in her seat. "I hate first days back at school."
Something unfamiliar caught the edge of her vision.
A small box sat where no small box had been before.
Marinette slowly straightened. "Huh?" She looked around the room as though whoever had placed it there might still be hiding behind a sewing mannequin. Nobody appeared. She reached toward it with the caution normally reserved for objects that might explode.
At almost exactly the same moment, Adrien turned away from his television and noticed a small box waiting among his belongings.
His eyebrows drew together. "Huh?"
Separated by several kilometers of Paris and with neither aware of the other's existence as anything more than a name, both teenagers picked up their mysterious gifts and voiced the same bewildered thought.
"What's this doing here?"
The lids opened.
Light flooded both rooms.
Marinette yelped and nearly dropped hers as brilliant red radiance poured from the box, gathering above it into a tiny shape. The glow contracted, revealing something round-headed, red, black-spotted, and very definitely alive floating directly in front of her face. Marinette's mind attempted to categorize it and failed spectacularly.
"Ahh! Help! It's a giant bug!" She scrambled backward so quickly that the chair protested beneath her. Tikki blinked at her. Marinette reconsidered the taxonomy with increasing panic. "A... a mouse! A... a bug-mouse!"
"Everything's okay! Don't be scared!" Tikki tried, hovering with both little paws lifted in what she evidently believed was a calming gesture. Unfortunately, hearing the impossible creature speak only moved Marinette's panic into an entirely new category.
"Ahh! Bug-mouse talks!" Marinette grabbed the nearest harmless object and threw it.
Tikki dodged.
A second object followed.
Tikki dodged that too, quickly realizing that being chosen by the Guardian did not necessarily mean the chosen person would react gracefully to finding a magical creature in her bedroom.
In Adrien's room, the corresponding introduction was considerably quieter.
Black-green light dissolved above the open box, and Plagg emerged from it already yawning as though centuries-old magical destiny had interrupted a particularly satisfying nap. Adrien stared at him with open astonishment. Unlike Marinette, his first impulse was not to throw something. He leaned closer instead and slowly raised a hand toward the floating creature.
"No way. Like the genie in the lamp!"
Plagg immediately caught Adrien's finger before it reached him and pushed it aside. "I met him once. So he grants wishes. Big deal! I'm way more personable!" He released Adrien and planted both paws against himself with immense self-satisfaction. "Plagg. Nice to meet you." His attention then wandered past Adrien to the bedroom beyond, and the significance of meeting his new holder vanished almost instantly. "Ooh, swanky."
He flew away.
Adrien blinked. "No! Don't touch that! Hey, come back here!"
Plagg had already begun examining whatever caught his attention, which was nearly everything. He brushed his paws over decorative objects, peered behind electronics, and eventually reached the arcade setup with an expression of culinary curiosity that should have alarmed Adrien sooner. "Ooh! So shiny! Can you eat this?" Plagg opened his mouth around the arcade joystick and bit down.
The resulting noise was deeply disappointed.
"Argh, no, you can't!" Plagg released it with disgust and immediately looked toward something else. "Ooh, what about this?"
Adrien chased after him.
Several kilometers away, Tikki's situation had deteriorated into siege warfare.
Marinette had exhausted several throwable objects without landing a hit and was now holding a drinking glass like someone who had finally developed a proper strategy. Tikki hovered at a cautious distance, watching her holder's eyes track every movement. "Listen, Marinette. I know everything may seem a bit strange to you." She moved slightly closer while speaking.
Marinette lunged.
The glass came down over Tikki against the desk.
"Okay," Tikki continued from inside it, her voice becoming muffled by the glass, "if that makes you feel safer."
Marinette leaned close enough to inspect her captive without approaching within biting distance. The creature did not appear particularly monstrous from this angle. If anything, she was almost annoyingly cute, which Marinette refused to consider reassuring until she had several answers. "What are you? And how do you know my name?"
Tikki placed her paws against the inside of the glass. "I am a kwami, and my name is Tikki. Now just let me explain."
Back at the Agreste mansion, Plagg had managed to turn the enormous bedroom into a chase course.
Adrien finally abandoned any attempt to follow him normally and headed for the climbing wall. He caught one grip, then another, moving upward with the practiced ease built from years of fencing and physical training while Plagg floated below, still investigating the room as though nothing unusual was happening. Adrien reached the highest point, waited until the Kwami drifted beneath him, then pushed away from the wall.
He dropped directly onto Plagg.
"Agh!" Plagg's offended yell disappeared between Adrien's hands as the teenager caught him midair and landed in a crouch. Plagg squirmed furiously while Adrien straightened, now holding him with both hands and looking far more satisfied than someone who had just tackled a magical cat spirit had any right to be.
"I still don't know what you're doing here."
Plagg stopped struggling long enough to look at him. Apparently deciding that explanation might be faster than escape, he sighed. "Look, I'm a kwami. I grant powers. Yours is the power of destruction, got it?"
Adrien stared.
Then he slowly shook his head. "Uh-uh."
"Good." Plagg accepted this complete lack of understanding without concern and immediately began looking around again. "Now, got anything to eat? I'm starving."
Adrien rose while still holding him, studying the creature from several angles as the strangest possibility finally occurred to him. "My dad's pranking me, right?" He considered the idea for perhaps half a second before his own knowledge of Gabriel destroyed it. "Wait, he couldn't be. He has no sense of humor."
Plagg wriggled free and floated upward. "Your father must never know that I exist! Or anyone for that matter." For once there was enough seriousness in his voice to make Adrien stop joking. Whatever Plagg was, whatever the ring inside that box meant, this was clearly not something intended for public knowledge.
Elsewhere, Marinette had reached the exact opposite conclusion.
She had backed toward the trapdoor leading downstairs, one hand already working at it while panic overcame whatever curiosity Tikki's explanation might have inspired. Magical creature or not, Marinette had parents, and parents were what one summoned when inexplicable talking animals appeared from glowing boxes in bedrooms. "Mom! Dad!"
"No, no, no! Shh! No!" Tikki slipped free the moment Marinette's attention moved away, squeezing from beneath the glass and flying toward her. Marinette spun around, startled all over again, but Tikki did not retreat this time. There was urgency in the Kwami's enormous blue eyes now, something that cut through the absurdity of the situation. "I'm your friend, Marinette! You must trust me."
Marinette's hand remained on the trapdoor.
Tikki hovered before her, small enough to fit between Marinette's palms and yet speaking with the certainty of someone who understood exactly what was happening outside. "You're the only one who can stop Stoneheart!"
For several seconds Marinette simply stared at her.
Outside, sirens continued crossing Paris. Stoneheart was still growing stronger every time the authorities attacked him, civilians were still running, and nobody yet knew that two ancient jewels had just awakened in the bedrooms of teenagers who had never asked for them.
In one room, Adrien Agreste held the power of Destruction without understanding what it would require of him.
In another, Marinette Dupain-Cheng stood before the power of Creation and looked as though she would very much prefer to return it.
And somewhere beyond both of them, Wang Fu walked through Paris knowing that the next choices could no longer be his to make.