A streak of violet light—faster than any human eye could track—tore across the arena. Daniel appeared as if he had been blinked into existence, his abyssal red eyes fixed on Argon's throat with predatory intent. He didn't say a word. He reached across his back, his hand blurring as he gripped the hilt of his blade.
The steel sang as it left the scabbard, a silver flash aimed directly at the gap in Argon's guard for a decapitating strike.
Clink.
The blade stopped an inch from Argon's skin.
"Slow," a bored voice whispered.
Blitz had appeared out of thin air, his hand clamped firmly around the flat of Daniel's blade. He hadn't just moved; he had anticipated the strike. With a flick of his wrist, Blitz diverted the sword's momentum, sending the vibration back up Daniel's arm.
"You've got the serum in you, don't you? Pity," Blitz sneered, his eyes narrow and lethal.
Before Daniel could pull back for a second strike, Blitz's leg snapped out in a high, blindingly fast counter-kick aimed straight for Daniel's chest.
Haru and Matthew crested the final rise of the stone arena, their boots skidding on the unnatural marble. They weren't coming empty-handed. Slung across their backs were the "equalizers"—heavy, matte-black firearms Haru had spent years perfecting in secret, chambered with experimental rounds designed specifically to punch through the reinforced hides of superhuman threats.
"Get your hands off him!" Haru roared, the cigar clamped in his teeth glowing a furious cherry-red.
They opened fire simultaneously. The air was filled with the deafening, metallic thud-thud-thud of the heavy-caliber weapons. Tracers cut through the violet gloom like streaks of white fire, converging on the space where Argon held Brakus and Blitz pinned Daniel.
Blitz didn't even break his sneer. He moved with a liquid, sickening grace, his body blurring into a series of afterimages. He danced between the incoming rounds, his hands behind his back, swaying his torso just inches away from the whistling projectiles like it was a child's game of tag.
"Is that the best the old guard has to offer?" Blitz mocked, his voice heard clearly even over the roar of gunfire.
A dozen rounds zipped toward Argon's exposed back, but they never hit. With a casual flick of her wrist from the gallery, Glint hummed a discordant note. The bullets didn't ricochet; they simply stopped. Hundreds of glowing slugs froze in mid-air, suspended in a shimmering web of violet stasis, forming a halo of dead lead around the officers.
Glint threw her head back, her laughter echoing off the high spires like breaking glass.
"Look at you! Ants with stingers!" she screamed down at them. "You think lead matters here? You're standing in my world now! We are the architects of the new age, and you're just the rubble we're clearing away to build a throne for a King who doesn't even know his own name!"
Inside Argon's crushing embrace, something in Brakus finally snapped.
The air around him turned cold—deadly cold. A sound like a thousand dry branches snapping echoed from his chest. His skin didn't just pale; it seemed to recede, turning translucent and tight as his veins turned a calcified, bone-white. His eyes vanished into pits of hollow, spectral light. It wasn't just a power surge; it was an evolutionary scream.
Argon's eyes widened. For the first time, the giant felt his grip slipping.
"What...?" Argon gasped, but he didn't get to finish.
Brakus didn't punch; he exploded. A shockwave of raw, skeletal energy erupted from his frame, shattering the stone beneath them. He grabbed Argon's massive wrists with hands that felt like iron vices and, with a guttural roar, heaved the five-hundred-pound man off the ground.
With a violent, snapping motion, Brakus launched Argon like a cannonball. The giant hurtled through the air, a blur of muscle and shadow, slamming directly into the base of the spire where Glint stood.
The impact was cataclysmic. The gothic pillar groaned and then disintegrated, stone and shadow raining down in a deafening cascade.
Glint didn't fall. She drifted upward, her purple hair unfurling like wings as she floated to a neighboring spire. She looked down at the wreckage, her mocking sneer softening into a look of genuine, predatory intrigue.
"Oh," she whispered, a dark flush of excitement crossing her face. "Maybe Eris wasn't dreaming after all."
The dust of the shattered spire began to settle, but the ground didn't stop shaking. From the center of the debris, a massive hand punched through a slab of fallen stone. Argon rose from the rubble, his shirt torn away, his skin bruised but his eyes burning with a new, terrifying joy. He cracked his neck, the sound echoing like a gunshot.
"Good," Argon rumbled, his voice shaking the very floor. "Finally. Something that doesn't break on the first hit."
The arena descended into a symphony of mechanical thunder and arcane shrieks. Haru and Matthew split up, flanking the perimeter. They weren't just spraying lead; they were suppressing the battlefield. The experimental rounds from Haru's rifles didn't just whistle—they screamed, creating a wall of kinetic pressure that forced even the Shadow Company officers to pay attention.
"Keep 'em moving!" Haru barked, the cigar in his teeth showering sparks as he braced his shoulder against the recoil of his light machine gun. "Don't give 'em a second to breathe!"
Blitz moved like a ghost through the hail of fire, his silhouette flickering in and out of reality. He was focused on the tracers, weaving through the gaps with a smirk, confident that he was the fastest thing in the room.
He was wrong.
Daniel watched the rhythm of the gunfire. He didn't just see the bullets; he felt the displacement of air they caused. With a sudden, violent surge of violet light, Daniel didn't run—he simply ceased to be in one spot and reappeared in another. He used the chaos of Haru's suppressive fire as a smokescreen. Every time Blitz leaned back to avoid a bullet, Daniel was there.
CRACK.
Daniel's fist caught Blitz squarely in the jaw, the impact echoing like a hammer on an anvil. Before Blitz could even register the pain, Daniel flickered again, appearing behind him and driving a knee into the small of his back.
Blitz stumbled, his composure shattering as he nearly fell into the path of Matthew's assault rifle fire. He recovered in a blur of motion, his face twisted in a snarl of disbelief, but as he turned to strike back, Daniel was already ten feet away, leaning casually against a stone pillar.
Daniel wiped a smudge of Blitz's blood from his knuckles, a jagged, predatory grin spreading across his face.
"Who's slow now?" Daniel asked, his voice echoing with a slight, multi-tonal glitch. "I'm just getting started, 'Pest.'"
Meanwhile, the "Mountain" was meeting a nightmare.
Brakus was no longer just a boy. A thick, viscous aura of dark red energy had erupted from his skin, swirling around him like a cloak of living blood. It wasn't just light; it was dense, heavy, and smelled of iron. As he stepped toward Argon, the blood-red mist condensed into jagged, floating blades and whipping tendrils that lashed out at anything that came close.
Argon swung a fist that could level a house, but as it entered Brakus's aura, the movement slowed as if traveling through deep water. Brakus didn't even flinch. He reached out, and the red aura surged forward, manifesting as a massive, spectral hand made of pressurized blood that gripped Argon's throat.
"Is that all?" Brakus roared, his voice sounding like grinding stone. With a flick of his wrist, he manipulated the blood-aura to slam Argon into the ground, the impact creating a crater ten feet deep.
High above, Glint was busy. She danced through the air, her fingers weaving frantically as she swatted away the high-caliber rounds Matthew was sending her way. She looked down at the chaos, her initial boredom completely evaporated as she saw the sheer, unstoppable nature of the red tide surrounding Brakus.
"Argon! Blitz!" she shrieked, her voice high and laced with a manic edge. "Stop playing with your food! They're bleeding into the grid! They're drawing too much power!"
Argon laughed, a deep, booming sound as he surged out of the crater, his skin bruised and bleeding—only for the blood from his own wounds to rise into the air, caught in the pull of Brakus's terrifying new gravity.
"Let them draw it," Argon rumbled, his muscles bulging as he tried to fight through the red pressure. "I want to see how much they can hold before they pop."
The air in the colosseum became a pressurized vacuum of ozone, iron, and ash. Glint, no longer sneering, was a blur of frantic motion atop the spires. She raised her hands, and the gothic architecture answered her call. One moment, a wave of liquid fire roared across the arena floor; the next, jagged pillars of ice erupted from the stone to intercept Haru's heavy-caliber rounds.
"Die! Just die already!" she screamed, raining down bolts of black lightning that turned the stone floor into glass.
In the center of the storm, Brakus was a god of carnage. The dark red aura around him had deepened into a swirling vortex of crimson. Every time he drew blood from Argon—or every time his own was spilled—the liquid didn't fall. It hovered, sharpening into crystalline needles that orbited him like a lethal crown. He moved with a terrifying, unstoppable momentum, lashing out with whips of pressurized blood that cracked Argon's reinforced skin like dry parchment.
Daniel watched this from the periphery, his mind racing even as his body flickered in and out of the physical plane. He ducked a blast of Glint's frost, his red eyes wide. It doesn't make sense, he thought, his lungs burning. Haru said he just Awakened. This level of output... this refinement... it should take years. He saw Brakus roar, a shockwave of red energy leveling a nearby row of stone seats. It's too much, too fast. Something is feeding him. There has to be a catalyst—something pushing his cells past the breaking point.
The realization hit him mid-stride: the frequency. The "Siren's Song" Glint was casting wasn't just a lure; it was a forced overclock. They weren't just fighting the boys; they were cooking them from the inside out to see what happened when they reached a boiling point.
"Eyes on the prize, ghost!"
The voice hissed in Daniel's ear. Blitz had stopped playing. The officer reached into the folds of his robes and drew a slender, jet-black wakizashi. He didn't just move this time; he ignited. A trail of white-hot kinetic energy followed him as he jolted toward Daniel.
The world vanished into a blur of sparks and steel. To Haru and Matthew, the two fighters were gone—replaced by erratic flashes of violet and white light that zig-zagged across the arena. The sound was a constant, metallic screech, a thousand parries happening in the span of a heartbeat. Daniel's perception slowed to a crawl. He saw the black blade of Blitz's sword inches from his throat. He parried, the force of the blow vibrating through his marrow.
He's faster than before, Daniel realized, his teeth gritting. But I'm not the one being pushed. I'm the one evolving.
"Is this the best you can do?" Daniel rasped, his voice vibrating with a new, dangerous frequency.
He didn't just teleport; he fractured. Blitz swung through a shadow, only for Daniel to appear behind him, then to his left, then above him—all in the same microsecond. A series of brutal, high-speed strikes rained down on Blitz's guard, the sheer speed of the impact heating the metal until the scent of scorched oxygen filled the arena.
Below them, Haru and Matthew were a two-man firing line, their light machine guns barking rhythmically.
"They're distracting us!" Haru yelled over the roar, swapping a fresh drum into his weapon. "Something's not right! Look at the boy, Matthew! He's burning up!"
He was right. Small plumes of steam were beginning to rise from Brakus's skin as the red aura grew brighter and more violent. The ground beneath Brakus was beginning to liquefy into a pool of bubbling, dark red energy, and the "image" of Brock in the sky began to flicker, its violet light pulsing in sync with Brakus's racing heart.
The air in the arena didn't just vibrate; it began to scream.
The steam rising from Brakus's skin turned from a faint mist into a boiling crimson vapor. His eyes, once bright with youthful defiance, were now twin voids of pressurized blood. With a sound like a physical rupture, Brakus let out a roar that shattered the remaining frozen bullets in the air.
He moved.
It wasn't a teleport, and it wasn't a blur. It was a localized collapse of space. One moment he was standing in a crater; the next, he was buried elbow-deep in Argon's gut. The massive officer was lifted off his feet and launched across the arena with such force that he skipped across the stone floor like a pebble.
Blitz hissed, his kinetic energy flaring as he attempted to intercept the boy. He tapped into his maximum velocity, his body becoming a streak of white light meant to be untouchable. But to Brakus, Blitz was moving through molasses.
Brakus didn't even turn his head. He reached out and caught Blitz by the throat mid-dash. The speed of the catch was so violent it nearly snapped Blitz's neck. The officer's eyes widened in genuine, primal terror as he stared into the face of a boy who had become a vessel for something ancient and hungry.
"Brakus, stop!" Daniel screamed, dodging a falling slab of stone. He saw the veins in Brakus's neck pulsing with a sickly, artificial light. "He's overloading! He's going to burn out!"
Daniel flickered toward Haru and Matthew, grabbing them by their tactical vests to pull them behind a heavy pillar.
"Listen to me!" Daniel rasped, his breath coming in jagged bursts. "The magic Glint is using—it's not just a trap. It's a battery. She's pumping him full of raw frequency to see how much he can take before he detonates. If you don't find the source of that pulse and kill it, there won't be enough of Brakus left to bury!"
Haru spat his cigar out, but his eyes were fixed on the sky. "Daniel... look at the kid. Look at the boy in the chains."
Daniel followed Haru's gaze up to the center of the colosseum. As Brakus's red aura flared, the violet light of the "Siren's Song" began to glitch. The image of Brock flickered, his face distorting like a corrupted video file. For a split second, the boy in the air vanished entirely, replaced by a swirling mass of violet smoke and jagged geometry, before snapping back into the form of the child.
"It's a fake," Daniel whispered, a new kind of horror chilling his blood. "The signal... the image... it was all a lure. He isn't even here."
"Which means they're killing Brakus for a ghost," Haru growled. "Matthew, with me. We search the substructure. Anything that looks like a ley-line or a generator, we melt it."
"Go!" Daniel commanded. He turned his gaze upward, the violet energy of his own power crackling around his blade. "I'll handle the witch."
He vanished, reappearing on the high gallery directly in front of Glint.
The witch didn't flinch. She watched the carnage below, where Brakus was currently slamming Blitz's head into the floor with rhythmic force.
"I doubted it," Glint whispered, her purple hair waving like kelp in a dark tide. She finally turned to look at Daniel, her eyes humming with cold realization. "I thought Eris was just another dreamer chasing ghosts. I thought she was a fool for obsessing over a pair of street rats. But that witch was right."
"Eris?" Daniel growled, his hand tightening on the hilt of his sword. "Is that who's behind this? Another monster in a lab coat?"
"A monster?..A bit" Glint laughed. "She's the architect of your evolution. You think this is a kidnapping? This is a harvest. Look at him, Daniel. He's finally shedding the skin of a human. He's beautiful."
"He's a kid, you psychopath! And that thing in the sky—it's an illusion! Where is he?"
"He's exactly where he needs to be," Glint retorted, her fingers beginning to glow with a catastrophic elemental light. "And you? You're just the static in his frequency. You think you're saving him, but you're just trying to put a wildfire back into a matchbox. You're the only one here who doesn't belong."
"I belong wherever I need to be to kill you," Daniel whispered, the abyssal red in his eyes bleeding into a dark, lethal violet. "And I think I've heard enough."
"Try it, ghost," Glint sneered. "Let's see if the serum gave you a soul, or just a faster way to die."
Below, a terrifying shockwave of red energy erupted as Brakus unleashed a tidal wave of blood that swallowed the center of the arena. High above, Daniel and Glint stood on the precipice of a collision that would decide the fate of the city.
The hunt was over. The massacre had begun.