The air tasted of rusted iron and damp, pulverized concrete—a smell Arthur knew too well. It was the scent of a bombed-out city, indistinguishable from the war zones he had photographed in his past life, only here, the cold was deeper, the silence more suffocating. The ruin of the city was the skeletal remains of a gargantuan beast, its rebar bones thrusting jaggedly towards a bruised, grey sky. Acidic rain sizzled lightly on the visor of his goggles. Arthur instinctively raised his right hand, the reflex wanting to adjust the focus ring of a camera lens, but his fingers met only the coarse, cold wood of a rifle stock.
He was no longer the photographer who documented death; he was Arthur, a "Cleaner" scrambling for survival in a world consumed by the monstrous tide.
"Don't drift off, newbie."
A massive, calloused hand clapped down on his shoulder plating, the force of the blow nearly sending him stumbling. Arthur turned, meeting the rough, good-natured smile of Captain Vance. Vance carried a greatsword that dwarfed even his broad frame—the mark of a Heavy Swordsman and the main anchor for their small team, Dawn Spark.
"I'm studying the geometry, Captain," Arthur's voice was dry, the sound of disuse. He scanned through the scope of his antique rifle—a relic he had acquired from the black market with every scrap of currency he'd earned. "The light refraction from that collapsed department store two hundred meters out is wrong. There's something lurking in the shadows that shouldn't be there."
"Ha! Listen to the professional," Tank, the team's Shield user, laughed loudly, wiping down the face of his massive tower shield with a grubby cloth. "Arthur, your talent might be the lowest-tier Gunpowder Mastery on the roster, but those eyes are razor-sharp. What were you before? A cartographer?"
"Something like that," Arthur dismissed the question with a wave, his focus already returning to the ruins. He maintained the professional habit ingrained from his past life: Observation. In his eyes, the world wasn't just scenery; it was a complex composition of lines, angles, and vanishing points. Before, he used those lines to find the most evocative shot. Now, he used them to find a clean bullet trajectory and, more importantly, an escape route.
This was not a game. He glanced down at the back of his hand. There, a faint, pale white pattern lay beneath the skin, like a fragment of complex wiring or an incomplete, ancient circuit board. This was the physical manifestation of his Talent. When he concentrated, the pattern would heat up, drawing the ambient Aether into his nerves and muscle fibers, briefly enhancing his visual acuity and finger dexterity to achieve impossible shots. But his marks were still too shallow, faint, and sporadic—the pattern of a novice, little more than an ill-healed scar.
"Alright, enough chatter," Vance's smile vanished, his eyes hardening. "The mission is D-4 Sector, subsurface parking garage. Intelligence suggests a nest of Carrion Scuttlers. Low-grade vermin, but in numbers, they'll chew us down to the marrow. Becca, you ready with the medic bag?"
"As ready as I'll ever be, Captain," the girl at the back, their Healer, gripped her staff tightly. She was Tank's younger sister, and her anxiety always spiked during these outer sector runs.
The squad resumed its silent, tense advance through the desolation. Arthur took the flank, the proper position for the ranged asset. Though he carried a sheathed, rusted longsword—the secondary, barely-used mark of his Swordplay Rudiment talent—he never deployed it. In an age where distance meant life, only a lunatic would give up the advantage of firearms to meet the monstrosities in close quarters. His sword talent was so weak the lines barely registered on his skin.
As they approached the mouth of the parking garage ramp, the remnants of daylight were swallowed instantly by shadow. The air became thick, humid, and laced with the cloying, sickly sweet stench of decay.
Arthur's heart rate spiked, not from panic, but from an aggressive, primal alarm. His heightened dynamic vision activated involuntarily. The scene shifted into a slow-motion, monochrome capture: the falling dust particles, the direction of a slow, stagnant breeze, the path of a tiny droplet of water tracing down the concrete.
"Stop," Arthur whispered, the single word sharp enough to pierce the silence.
Vance's fist shot up. The team froze, veterans of the ruined landscape.
"What is it?" Tank murmured, his voice tight, his shield already braced.
"There's no noise," Arthur's breathing hitched, his eyes locked onto the black void of the ramp. "Carrion Scuttlers are pack hunters; their movement generates constant, frantic scraping sounds as their claws drag the ground. But down there… it's too quiet. It's the quiet of an open grave."
Vance frowned, his massive sword already half-drawn, the weapon's etching glowing faintly crimson. "Maybe they're dormant? Or the recon was wrong?"
"No," Arthur felt the pattern on his hand begin to burn violently, a signal more urgent than any fire alarm. It was his primal instinct screaming. "Abort. Captain, we need to abort now. The scent in here is wrong, and this isn't a rat's nest—"
Before he could finish the warning, two points of blazing scarlet light erupted from the darkness.
No, not light. Eyes.
An instant later, a wave of fetid, hot wind slammed into them. There was no growl, no roar, no warning tremor—just the violent, impossible speed of a pitch-black shadow peeling itself from the void. It struck Tank, the Shield user, with a velocity that defied physics.
CRUNCH!
The sound was not an impact; it was the sickening, high-pitched shriek of structural collapse, followed by the dull, heavy thud of bone being splintered by sheer force.
Tank, the big man who always talked about saving money to open a bakery, didn't even have time to scream. He and his massive tower shield—a shield that had saved their lives countless times—were flung backward nearly twenty meters, slamming into the concrete wall with a terrible finality. Blood instantly soaked the concrete, and the steel of the shield was warped into unusable scrap.
"Brother!" Becca let out a raw, desperate wail.
"HOLD! FORMATION!" Vance roared, his body bursting into an angry red aura as he swung his giant sword in a devastating arc toward the retreating shadow. This was Vance's signature move, the Mountain Breaker—a move that was supposed to split anything in its path.
But the shadow merely sidestepped, a fluid, effortless motion that made it look like a dancer performing a cruel ballet. It avoided the sword by inches. Using the brief flare of light from Vance's blade, Arthur finally saw the creature clearly.
In that instant, Arthur's blood turned to ice.
It was not a Scuttler. It was a bipedal nightmare, its body covered in obsidian-black chitinous armor, its arms ending in razor-sharp bone blades that extended past its knees. The most terrifying thing was its face—it wasn't a savage, bestial maw, but a mask of eerie stillness. For a fraction of a second, Arthur was certain he saw a slight, cruel curve forming at its lips.
A Hunter. A high-intelligence Mutation only seen in nightmares and the deepest, most restricted danger zones. How could it be here, in a low-level clean-up sector?
"FIRE! ARTHUR! FIRE!" Vance was screaming, desperately parrying the Hunter's lightning-fast bone blades. Each block sent a shockwave up his arms, splitting the skin of his palms. Vance's strength was legendary, enough to cleave solid rock, yet against this creature, he was losing ground rapidly, his momentum shattered.
Arthur snapped out of his paralysis, raising his rifle. The world slowed again, but this time, the geometry was useless.
Wind speed zero. Distance fifteen meters. Target trajectory… utterly chaotic.
Damn it! The monster moved without any pattern, a living, unpredictable storm. Arthur gritted his teeth, forcing the Aether to flow. The skin on his hand felt like it was ripping apart from the sheer pain of the activation, but he didn't care.
It has to hit!
He pulled the trigger the moment the monster lifted its arm to deliver the killing blow to Vance's exposed chest.
CRACK!
Blue fire spat from the muzzle. The Aether-enhanced bullet, spinning with ferocious power, drilled straight toward the Hunter's left eye.
Hit!
A wave of relief surged through Arthur, only to be instantly crushed by icy despair.
In the microsecond before impact, the creature's eyelid—a thick, plated membrane—slammed shut with impossible speed. The bullet struck the eyelid, scoring a thin white scratch, sparked uselessly, and ricocheted into the concrete wall.
The Hunter didn't even flinch. It slowly opened its eye, the unmarred scarlet pupil fixing itself not on Vance, but past his shoulder, directly on Arthur.
It was mocking him. It was relishing the desperate struggle of its prey.
"Run…" Vance's voice was broken, laced with utter defeat and finality. His grip was failing, blood coating the sword hilt. "Take Becca… and run!"
"Captain!"
"GO!"
Vance let out an animalistic roar, his body erupting with a blinding crimson light—Overload. Burning his life force for a momentary surge of power, he abandoned his defense and tackled the monster like a cannonball, desperately slamming it against the wall.
"Arthur! Get her out of here!"
Arthur was trembling, but logic took over. This was the chance Vance was buying with his life. He grabbed the sobbing, paralyzed Becca and dragged her roughly from behind the car where she'd collapsed.
"Go! Don't look back!" Arthur screamed, the raw grief evident in his voice.
He hauled Becca toward the ramp exit. Behind them, there was a sound of shattering—the sickening crunch of heavy bone snapping—followed by a wet, heavy thud.
Vance's roar cut off instantly.
Arthur didn't look. His heart felt like it was exploding, each breath sharp as swallowing shattered glass.
Too weak.
The thought screamed in his mind.
Even with the knowledge of my past life, even with the so-called Dual Talent, I am nothing against absolute power. Just like before, I am only capable of watching the horror unfold, powerless to intervene.
"No… no…" Becca fought against his grip, tears mixing with the grime on her face. "My brother… the Captain…"
"Shut up and move!" Arthur bit back, shoving her violently up the ramp.
Just as they were about to burst free into the light, a streak of black shadow, silent and swift as a ghost, zipped overhead and landed lightly in the center of the exit, blocking their only escape.
The Hunter stood there. Fresh, warm blood dripped from its bone blade—Vance's blood. It tilted its head, observing the two terrified creatures before it, and from its throat came a low, grating sound.
It wasn't a howl.
It was a distorted, imitation of human speech, as if human vocal cords had been brutally stretched and rearranged.
"…More…"
Arthur stopped. He released Becca, shoving her behind a derelict delivery van.
The sudden finality of the moment brought a terrifying calm.
Arthur slowly lowered the ineffective rifle. He knew the gun was useless. He took a deep, shuddering breath, the air still thick with the metallic scent of his comrade's sacrifice.
His hand drifted to his back, gripping the handle of the rusted, never-truly-used longsword.
He had no chance. He would likely be shredded in seconds.
But…
Arthur stared at the drop of Vance's blood clinging to the monster's blade. The soul of the former war photographer, who used to distance himself by placing a lens between himself and death, was suddenly consumed by a blinding, desperate fury.
If he was going to die, he would at least carve a permanent mark onto this creature. He would use his teeth if he had to.
"Becca," Arthur's voice was unnervingly level. He didn't turn around, his eyes locked on the monster's exposed throat. "Whatever happens, when you see an opening, you run."
"Arth—Arthur?"
Arthur didn't reply. He lowered his center of gravity, adopting a deeply flawed, untrained sword stance. On the back of his right hand, the faint, nascent pattern of his Swordplay Rudiment—driven by the extremity of his rage and adrenaline—began to glow with a sharp, painful, incandescent heat he had never experienced before.
In the despairing rain, in what might be the final moment of his second life, Arthur ceased to be an observer.
He became a weapon.