I remember hiding.
I was under the floorboards of my father's workshop, trying to breathe through the smell of old wood. Outside, the sky was no longer blue; it was the color of a bruised lung, a pulsating purple that swallowed the sun.
I watched through the cracks. My neighbor, a man I'd known for years, simply... unraveled. He turned into a cloud of static and was gone.
Then, I looked at my hands.
The skin was peeling back, but there was no blood. Underneath, my flesh was turning into jagged, translucent glass. My fingers were lengthening, sharpening into serrated limbs that didn't belong to a man.
I tried to scream—I opened my mouth to beg for help, for mercy, for anything—but the sound that came out wasn't a voice.
It was the screech of a dying world. It was high-pitched, digital, and terrifying. That was the moment I realized I wasn't being saved. I was being archived into a monster.
I was so scared. And in that fear, I made a choice. I chose to be selfish.
***
Sola moved with practiced grace, laying Sarina's limp body on a sheltered stone bench away from the immediate debris. Sarina's face was pale, her breathing shallow, finally claimed by total exhaustion and energy depletion. Sola looked at her for a moment, her earlier words ringing in her ears: "Why did they send him here!?"
"It's because they know what's truly hiding under his skin, Sarina," Sola whispered, her voice a mixture of pity and resentment. She brushed a stray hair from Sarina's forehead. "They didn't see a boy. They saw a weapon that needed to be tamed."
Sola stood up, her fingers tightening around the handle of her Lunar Axe. She didn't look back as she spoke to the empty air. "Their greed has cost the life of a boy I never even got to meet. But if Sarina cared for him this much... he must have been a good person." She closed her eyes for a second. "May you finally find some rest."
Sola turned, her white scarf snapping as she blurred toward the business building. She didn't walk; she moved like a shadow cast by a moving light.
"Stop hiding," Sola commanded, her voice booming through the empty plaza. "What happened to all that energy you were flaunting earlier?"
The Weaver flickered. It flashed to her left, then her right, then directly behind her neck, its glass limbs poised to strike. But Sola was Rank 4 for a reason.
With a movement too fast for the human eye to track, she spun her axe in a perfect circle.
CRACK.
The blunt side of the blade connected squarely with the Weaver's head. The force of the density sent the monster spiraling through the air, crashing into the asphalt with enough force to bounce.
Sola walked toward it, her boots clicking rhythmically. "So, you've made it to the Core? You've fed on this city's stability. What is your goal now? To stitch us all into your void?"
The Weaver scrambled back, letting out a high-pitched, ear-piercing screech. It was a sound of pure, unadulterated malice.
"Is that all you have to say?" Sola's eyes glowed with a cold light. "Then I won't allow you to take another breath of this reality."
She leaped into the air, the sun catching the black-and-blue energy swirling around her axe. She brought it down with the weight of freight train, a strike meant to end the fight. But at the last microsecond, the Weaver flickered. It vanished, leaving Sola to strike the ground, her power creating a massive crater where the monster had been.
"No!" Pulling her blade from the rubble.
The Weaver appeared a few feet away, its glass body shivering. But it wasn't preparing to counter-attack. It was... backing away. Its multi-faceted eyes weren't on Sola anymore. It was staring past her, toward the alleyway.
Sola froze. The hair on her neck stood up. What? Am I sensing another Remnant? No... this feels different.
***
The "corpse" of Kenzo was no longer still.
The silence was broken by the sickening sound of snapping bone. His ribs, shattered by the Weaver's blast, were grinding against each other, forced back into place by a violent, swirling vortex of dark purple static. The jagged gash on his chest didn't heal; it was stitched shut by threads of pure energy.
"Kenzo... allow me to take over. Let the hunger feed the will."
Kenzo's eyes shot open. There was no white left in them—only a burning, pulsating purple aura.
***
A deafening boom rocked the entire district, a burst of energy so bright and jagged that it turned the world into a negative-color image. The shockwave shattered every window for five blocks and sent a pillar of purple energy into the sky.
"What is that?!" Sola shouted, ducking behind a car as debris rained down.
She looked up into the center of the energy plume. A silhouette was plummeting from the sky—not falling, but driving downward like a meteor.
BOOM.
The impact at the center of the intersection was cataclysmic. A cloud of black dust and purple static billowed outward, masking the sun. As the dust slowly cleared, a figure stood in the center of a fresh, steaming crater.
It was Kenzo.
His body was rigid, his clothes tattered and stained with dried blood. But as he looked up, his face began to stutter. One second, he looked like the student she had seen in files; the next, his skin turned to jagged glass, and his eyes became hollow voids of purple static.
The boy was gone. The Remnant was gone. Standing in the crater was something that shouldn't exist—a Living Distortion.
He didn't look at Sola. He didn't look at the shattered city. He stared directly at the Weaver, his arm slowly rising to point a finger at the creature.
"Charge."
As he spoke, Kenzo's right arm began to liquefy and reform, the flesh hardening into the same jagged, glass structure as a Remnant. He lunged. He didn't just run; he tore through the air, leaving a streaking trail of violet static in his wake against the asphalt.
The Weaver turned and bolted. For the first time, the predator was the prey. It didn't screech; it didn't fight. It scrambled, flashing in and out of reality in a desperate attempt to lose him. But to Kenzo's new eyes, the invisibility was a joke. He could see the creature's "heat signature"—a jagged outline even when it wasn't physically there.
Kenzo caught up in a heartbeat. He swung his glass-encrusted fist, a blow meant to shatter the world, but the Weaver flickered at the last microsecond. Miss. He swung again, the force of his strike creating a concussive boom that leveled a nearby bus stop. Miss.
The chase spilled out and into the heart of District 4. The transition was jarring. Thousands of civilians, who had only heard the distant sounds of battle, were suddenly faced with a nightmare. They stopped in their tracks, grocery bags dropping, phones falling to the pavement as they watched two monsters tear through their streets.
The Weaver was heading straight for a crowded plaza, looking for a shield of human bodies.
"No," Kenzo thought, but his body was moving faster than his conscious mind could process.
Suddenly, a streak of blinding blue-black light ignited on his right. Commander Sola blurred past him, her white scarf snapping like a whip. She didn't hesitate. She swung her axe in a massive vertical cleave, the blade slamming into the Weaver and pinning it momentarily against a fountain.
Sola skidded to a halt, her eyes fixed on the boy beside her.
So this is you, Kenzo, she thought, her pulse racing. Name: Kenzo. Age: 17. Evo: Distorted. But this... this breaks every law of energy physics the High Command ever wrote. He isn't just a user. He's a hybrid.
They stood side-by-side for a fraction of a second amidst the screaming, scrambling crowds.
Kenzo turned his head toward her. His voice was a dual-layered nightmare, a resonance of his own voice and something ancient and hungry. "You must be Commander Sola."
Sola didn't answer. She couldn't find the words. She was a Rank 4 Commander, a veteran of a hundred sector breaches, and she was staring at a boy who had been clinically dead five minutes ago.
Before she could speak, Kenzo's body jerked. Without his permission, his legs coiled and launched him back toward the recovering Weaver.
"What's going on?!" Kenzo yelled internally, his mind clawing for control of his own limbs.
The voice filled his skull.
"Neutralizing the target, Kenzo... You gave me your 'Will,' remember? I am simply executing the command."
Kenzo's glass arm retracted and then fired forward like a piston.
CRACK.
This time, he didn't miss. He caught the Weaver square in its head. The sound of the impact wasn't a thud; it was the sound of reality breaking.
"Now... let me fill my hunger."
***
"Oh! Oh my! Look at that reading!" Faris said, tapping frantically at a wrist-mounted scanner that was currently emitting a high-pitched smoke-alarm shriek. "The energy levels are absolutely delicious! It's like the universe is trying to sneeze and can't quite finish the job!"
He took a skipping step toward the chaos, ignoring the hundreds of terrified civilians sprinting in the opposite direction. A man ran past him, screaming about monsters, and Faris simply waved.
"Yes, yes! Very scary! Move along, citizen, science is happening!"