The city did not sleep, for it had never been awake. It was a corpse, slowly being digested by a new world. Steel skeletons of skyscrapers were now the trellises for vast, bioluminescent fungi that pulsed with a soft, sickly green light. Asphalt streets were cracked meadows of razor-edged silver grass and blood-red moss. The air, once thick with smog and industry, now hummed with the chirps of six-winged insects and carried the cloying sweetness of alien pollen. This was not a reclamation by nature; it was a grotesque, vibrant infection.
Wolfen Welfric moved through this graveyard of a forgotten civilization with the detached air of a tourist visiting a mildly interesting ruin. His boots, the same simple ones he'd worn in the Laboratory, made no sound on the spongy, living carpet underfoot. He felt neither the wonder nor the dread that such a place should inspire. To him, it was just a set of new variables. The Umbralite beneath his skin, that strange, cold fire, was quiet. Bored.
His path took him under the husk of a colossal suspension bridge. Its cables were thick, ropy vines now, and its concrete pillars were encased in crystalline growths that shimmered in the dim light. It was here, in the deep shadow of the bridge, that the scene unfolded.
Three men, scavengers by the look of their patched-together armor and desperate eyes, had cornered a fourth. The victim was on his knees, and the largest of the scavengers, a brute with a rusted pipe fused to his forearm, had him by the collar, shaking him like a ragdoll.
"Think you're better than us, pretty boy?" the brute snarled. "Think 'cause you move quiet you get to keep the good stuff for yourself?"
The man on his knees did not struggle. He did not plead. He was calculating. Wolfen recognized the posture, the utter lack of wasted energy. It was Jordan. His grey Laboratory uniform was torn and stained, but his face was the same mask of dispassionate analysis. He was assessing the threat vectors, the structural integrity of the pipe-arm, the footing of the other two men. His conclusion was likely grim; unarmed, against three, the probabilities were not in his favor.
Wolfen didn't sigh. He didn't announce his presence. He simply walked forward, the shadows seeming to cling to him, deepening around his form.
The scavengers noticed him too late. The one holding Jordan spun around, his eyes wide. "Back off! This is ours!"
Wolfen ignored him. His gaze was fixed on Jordan. He saw the optimized killer, the living weapon the Architects had spent eighty years forging. He saw the emptiness where a soul should have been. And in that moment, Wolfen, the eternal bystander, made a decision. Not out of compassion, but out of a desire to see the weapon used. To introduce a variable into the stagnant equation of this struggle.
He stopped a few feet away. He raised his right hand, palm open. There was no flash of light, no roar of flame. The air itself seemed to freeze and condense. Particles of dust, moisture, and the very light around his hand were drawn into a vortex of impossible physics. They compressed, fused, and blackened, transforming in the space of a single heartbeat. From nothing, he forged a blade.
It was a katana, but unlike any that had ever been forged by man. It was made entirely of Umbralite, a long, single-edged curve of pure, light-devouring blackness. Its surface was not smooth, but seemed to swirl with captured nebulae and dying stars. It was cold to the touch, a void given form. It made no reflection. It was the absolute negation of the vibrant, noisy life that choked the city.
Wolfen held it out, offering the hilt to Jordan.
The scavengers stared, their bravado replaced by primal fear. This was beyond their understanding.
Jordan's analytical eyes flickered from Wolfen's face to the blade. He did not question it. He did not wonder at the impossibility. It was a tool. An optimal solution to his problem. His probabilities just shifted dramatically. He reached out and took the hilt. The moment his fingers closed around it, his posture changed. The final variable had been entered. The equation was solved.
The brute, sensing the shift, roared and swung his pipe-arm.
Jordan moved. It was not a dodge; it was an erasure. He flowed under the swing, the Umbralite katana a blur of absolute black. There was no metallic clang. There was a soft, whispering shhh-thump. The pipe-arm, along with the flesh and bone holding it, was severed cleanly at the elbow. The brute stared in dumb shock at the stump, a geyser of blood now painting the silver grass.
Before the severed limb had even hit the ground, Jordan was already turning. The second scavenger fumbled for a pistol. The black katana moved in a short, efficient horizontal arc. The man's head tilted, then slid from his shoulders, his expression frozen in surprise. The body stood for a moment before collapsing.
The third scavenger, a younger man with wide, terrified eyes, dropped his weapon. He fell to his knees, hands clasped together.
"Please! Please, no! We were just hungry! We didn't know! I have a family! A daughter!" he begged, sobs wracking his body.
It was at that moment that two more figures emerged from the top of the bridge, sliding down the vine-cables. Derek and Leo landed softly on the spongy ground, their enhanced bodies absorbing the impact with ease. They took in the scene: the two dead scavengers, the one-armed brute bleeding out, the kneeling, begging man, and Jordan, standing over him with a sword of pure darkness that seemed to suck the very color from the air around it.
"Jordan…" Derek said, his voice rough. His mercury-sheened eyes were wide with a confusion that went beyond the immediate violence.
Leo's gaze was fixed on the Umbralite katana, his own biopolymer-enhanced fists clenching. "Where did you get that?"
Derek's attention turned to the sobbing scavenger. He took a step forward, his voice laced with a desperate hope that had long since curdled into need. "Hey. You. Have you seen two girls? One… one with black hair and black eyes now. The other… strong, quiet. Her name is Eva."
The scavenger, trembling, looked up, tears and snot streaking his face. "No! No, I swear! I haven't seen anyone! Just us! Please, just let me go! I won't tell anyone! I'll just disappear!"
Jordan's face showed no reaction to Derek's question or the man's pleading. He had assessed the variable: a potential witness, a potential future threat. The emotional appeal was irrelevant data. The optimal path was clear.
"Jordan, don't—" Leo started.
The Umbralite blade moved. It was not a savage blow. It was a precise, almost gentle thrust. The black point entered the begging man's chest, just below the sternum. There was no scream, only a soft, choked exhalation. The man's eyes widened, then the light in them was extinguished, seemingly absorbed by the dark blade. Jordan withdrew the katana, and the body slumped forward, a small, neat hole marking the end of his life.
A heavy silence fell, broken only by the drip of blood and the distant, alien sounds of the city.
Leo turned his fury on Wolfen. "You. Where did you get that sword? And have you seen—"
He never finished the question.
A new sound tore through the city's ambient hum. It wasn't a roar of an animal, or the crash of collapsing masonry. It was the sound of reality itself being unmade. A deep, grinding, shrieking groan of tortured matter, coming from a half-collapsed office building a block away. The structure, already a shell, began to tremble. Then, it began to fray.
The concrete didn't just crack; it dissolved into a fine, black dust at the edges. The bioluminescent fungi crawling up its side withered and turned to ash in an instant, as if a wave of absolute entropy was washing over it. The very color was being leeched from the building, turning it a monochrome grey before it crumbled.
A roaring, like a hurricane confined to a single space, mixed with the sound. And through it, another sound—a violent, repetitive thrashing and thrusting, the sound of something immense and powerful moving with frantic, destructive purpose.
Then, a flash of motion from the building's corpse. A figure, moving with impossible speed, was flung out from a gaping hole where a window had been. It wasn't thrown; it was propelling itself, flying backwards through the air as if launched from a cannon. It was Eva.
She arced through the air, her body contorting to control the flight, and slammed hard into the sludge-filled, stagnant water of what was once a city canal. The impact sent a plume of foul water and neon-green algae into the air.
Without a word, Leo was moving. He sprinted to the canal's edge and plunged in, his dense, powerful body cutting through the murk. He reached Eva, who was already struggling to her feet, coughing up brackish water. A long, deep gash ran from her shoulder to her elbow, but even as he helped her onto the bank, the flesh was knitting itself back together, the Prime biology working with terrifying speed.
Her face, however, was pale with a shock that was more than physical.
"What happened? What is in there?" Derek demanded, rushing to her side, his enhanced senses overwhelmed by the cacophony of destruction.
Eva looked back at the disintegrating building, her strange eyes wide with a horror they had never seen in her before. She wasn't just afraid. She was awestruck.
"I found her," Eva breathed, her voice trembling. "I found Maya."
She pointed a shaking finger at the building, which was now visibly shaking, great chunks of it turning to black powder and falling away.
"I tracked her… her energy signature is… unique. A void. I went inside. She was… different. Calm. Too calm. She said the world was too loud. She said she was going to fix it."
Eva swallowed hard, the memory vivid in her eyes. "She asked me if I could hear the screaming. The screaming of the rocks, the lies of the water… I tried to reason with her, to pull her out of there. And then… she changed."
The roaring from the building reached a fever pitch. A whole section of the outer wall burst outward, not with an explosion, but with a silent, swift dissolution into nothingness.
"She transformed," Eva whispered, the words barely audible over the din. "That… that thing in there… that monster… is Maya."