Without wasting a fraction of a second on theatrics, Darius launched forward in a straight dash, descending upon Kye as he remained pinned to his knees. Across the smoking crater, Ravik and Kaizen watched with predatory anticipation, waiting for the execution.
Darius drove the tip of his massive executioner's broadsword straight into Kye's back, forcing the heavy steel through flesh and spinal muscle.
Tears of dark crimson dripped from Kye's eyes. His physical frame had exceeded its absolute biological breaking point, every vein beneath his skin bulging violent red, visible like scorched wire.
Yet Kye refused to die.
[ Divine Pressure ]
SLAM!
An invisible, catastrophic gravity slammed down over the entire street.
Kaizen and Ravik were instantly driven face-first into the asphalt once more, their bones groaning under the suffocating weight. Their nervous systems screeched in agony—the overwhelming atmospheric force felt as if their blood vessels and internal organs would rupture from the inside out.
Darius alone remained upright, shaking violently under the crushing atmospheric load. Fueled by raw, vengeful grief for his slaughtered brother, he refused to collapse.
"I am going to end your miserable life right here, Kye! Even if I rot in hell for it, you will not leave this street breathing!"
The pressure expanded, crushing the asphalt beneath their boots into fine powder. Darius could no longer shift his stance an inch. His right knee buckled, smashing violently into the stone—yet his fingers remained locked around the hilt, wrenching the heavy blade deeper into Kye's back with agonizing momentum.
CRACK!
With every ticking second, the relentless gravitational surge tore through Darius's internal organs. The localized, invincible space-time fabric around his frame finally disintegrated completely—the artificial continuum shattered beyond recovery.
"Ugh... damn you! Why won't you just die, Kye?! In all my years, this has never happened... is our link severed because Veyron is dead?! Or are you something else entirely?!"
From behind the shattered barrier, Saito screamed through ragged breaths.
"Elena! Fire now! This is our only window!"
Gathering every remaining drop of her adrenaline, Elena propped up her heavy assault frame. She loaded a fresh cylinder of high-yield biochemical rounds and opened full automatic fire on the paralyzed figures of Ravik and Kaizen.
"Cowardly vermin!" Ravik spat blood, his jaw pinned to the ground. "You only know how to strike when a man is cornered! Without Kye, you insects are nothing—"
SHOT! SHOT! SHOT!
A torrential hail of corrosive, flesh-dissolving biochemical slugs ripped through their unarmored flanks.
In a final, desperate burst of strength, Kaizen threw his mutated, bloodied bulk over Ravik, using his own broad torso as an organic shield to absorb the lethal volley.
"Kaizen, you brain-dead idiot... what are you doing?!" Ravik choked, tears cutting tracks through the grime on his bruised face. "You're going to die! Get off me, Kaizen! Move!"
Kaizen couldn't answer. His breathing grew shallow under the relentless gunfire, his mutated fibers tearing apart. Within seconds, both men fell dead silent beneath the smoke.
The sudden loss broke Darius's concentration, his head snapping toward the bodies in rabid fury.
"Worthless, incompetent bastards! All of you were dead weight! You arrogant parasites... Veyron and I should have butchered you ourselves before this raid! We would have won this effortlessly, but you useless trash—"
PIERCE! SPLASH!
A jagged tangle of reinforced underground tree roots erupted violently through the asphalt, guided by the last dying dregs of Kye's elemental resonance.
The hardened timber impaled Darius straight through the front of the neck, erupting out the back of his cervical spine in an explosion of dark gore.
Darius's jaw dropped open. Not a single word or breath managed to escape his severed windpipe.
The Undefeated Brother died on his knees.
His grip went slack, and the massive broadsword clattered harmlessly against the stone.
Kye's vision turned completely black, his body toppling forward into the blood-soaked rubble as unconsciousness finally claimed him.
After hours of unrelenting slaughter, the battle of Grayson had reached its final, silent conclusion.
The entire commercial zone had transformed into a smoking graveyard.
Headquarters, storefronts, asphalt boulevards, and ancient trees were pulverized into ash and jagged concrete. The cost in human life was devastating—several civilians had been erased in the initial shockwaves, while dozens of panicked innocents were crushed beneath collapsing facades or mangled in secondary vehicle collisions.
Every single Special Executive of Bansho's elite squad lay dead across the rubble, save for Ravik and Kaizen, who were wheezing through their final dying heartbeats.
Across the cratered avenue, the Alliance was broken. Four bodies lay motionless, but Saito ignored his own screaming injuries, his trembling fingers locked onto Arisa's wrist.
"I don't know if this will stabilize your cellular collapse... but this is our absolute last gamble."
Saito uncapped a reinforced glass vial labeled [ Synthetic Biomimetic Blood: Type-O Core ], tilting the crimson fluid past Arisa's bloodstained lips.
"I triggered the electronic countermeasures and localized frequency jammers, but the grid won't hold forever. We have to extract immediately. What makes no sense is the local enforcement... why hasn't a single police cruiser or municipal defense unit breached the perimeter? Did the higher-ups quarantine this entire zone beforehand?"
Cough... hack!
Saito doubled over, vomiting dark blood onto his knees.
"How am I supposed to move all of them alone? I can barely keep myself upright. I only stayed on my feet out of sheer desperation to keep Arisa from flatlining... but my vision is fading. I'm hitting the wall..."
Dozens of yards away, Kaizen and Ravik lay side-by-side in the shattered dust, their gazes fixed on the smog-choked evening sky.
Ravik let out a wet, raspy chuckle.
"You sentimental idiot... why the hell did you dive over me like that? You could have dragged yourself out of the line of fire."
"To tell you the truth..." Kaizen wheezed, dark foam bubbling at the corners of his mouth, "...I was envious. Those two brothers... those two twisted sisters... they were bound by blood, willing to burn the world for each other. We weren't siblings, Ravik. But at the end of all this... we were at least brothers-in-arms, weren't we?"
"You really are a moron, Kaizen," Ravik smiled weakly, staring upward. "If we were such great comrades... why didn't you ever drag me out for a drink? You knew how much I hated this endless syndicate grind."
Fragmented memories drifted through Kaizen's fading consciousness—sterile fluorescent bulbs, surgical clamps, and the cold metal restraints of black-site operating theaters.
"What can I even say? You remember me from our days in the covert military ops, right? You knew better than anyone how terrified I was of dying. And in the end, fate gave me exactly what I feared. My unit abandoned me in a ditch to bleed out. By all rights, I died that afternoon."
He took a shallow, rattling breath.
"When I opened my eyes inside that syndicate laboratory... I realized everything was orchestrated from the start. Those scientists rebuilt my shattered body. They gave me this beast form, this second lease on life. Deep down, I wanted to walk away from the killing... but how could I betray the very hands that pulled me out of the dirt?"
Ravik rolled his heavy head to the side, his dimming eyes catching the amber glow of the setting sun breaking through the smoke.
A peaceful smile touched his scarred face.
"Let's hope... we cross paths again in whatever comes after this. Somewhere far away from blood and orders. We'll live a life a thousand times better than this wretched, broken existence..."
With the last trace of his strength, Kaizen reached over, his bloodied fingers locking around Ravik's palm.
"Yeah... sounds like a plan..."
Their hands rested together in the quiet dust. Their chests went still, and the final two executives drifted into eternal silence.
The sun had completely dipped beneath the horizon.
The catastrophic battlefield fell into a chilling, hollow stillness. The smoke was beginning to thin, settling over miles of pulverised concrete, severed iron, and shattered glass. Every enemy had drawn their final breath. The entire Bansho strike force lay dead across the scorched boulevard.
Yet as night encroached and cold shadows swallowed the ruins, the silence felt unnerving. Not a single municipal responder, emergency vehicle, or city security cruiser had breached the perimeter. The entire district had been abandoned to the dark.
Amid the stillness, Kye's eyelids fluttered open.
A sharp, searing agony shot through every nerve in his spine. Forcing his throbbing head upward, his blurred vision caught the grim reality around him: a desolate graveyard of ash and corpses. His internal organs burned from the rebound of his divine pressure, and his limbs felt like leaden weights.
Staggering against the crushed stone, he dragged himself forward step by agonizing step toward the silhouettes of his fallen allies.
Reaching the crater's edge, he looked down. Elena lay unconscious, her arms instinctively curled around Hollow's limp, bloodied frame. Beside them, Saito lay face-down in the grit, his gloved hand still pressed firmly over Arisa's sealed wound, guarding her dying pulse even as blackness took him.
Kye dropped to one knee, sweeping the perimeter with a sharp, guarded scan. His crimson eyes had faded back to their dull gray, tracking the dark alleyways and cracked rooftops for secondary ambushes.
Nothing moved.
Wasting no time, Kye forced his trembling legs to hold his weight once more. He began limping away from the epicenter of the blast, searching through the outer perimeter where the structural devastation was less severe, hunting for any viable means of extraction.
After several agonizing minutes of scouring the shadowed avenue, his eyes locked onto a vehicle parked haphazardly across a cracked curb—an intact four-door sedan, its driver-side door swung wide open with the keys still resting inside the ignition console.
"Someone must have abandoned this in the middle of the panic," Kye muttered, coughing past the dried blood on his teeth. "Good news: we have transport. Bad news: I have never driven a manual car a single day in my life. Hilarious... surviving six elite Special Executives just to wipe out my entire squad in a low-speed collision. Well, at least those virtual sim rigs have to count for something."
Kye threw himself into the driver's seat, wrangled the ignition, and forced the sputtering sedan into reverse. With gears grinding and tires screeching over loose gravel, he maneuvered the vehicle back to the epicenter of the battle.
Stepping out, he began the brutal task of loading his squad. One by one, biting through the pain in his fractured ribs, he lifted Elena, Arisa, and Hollow, carefully positioning them across the cramped rear bench.
"Just my luck," he muttered, adjusting Arisa's head so her breathing remained clear. "Compact civilian frame. They barely fit. Saito is riding shotgun."
Lifting Saito under the shoulders, Kye placed the tech specialist into the front passenger seat, pulling the harness tight across his cracked chest armor.
Kye slammed the door shut, slid behind the steering wheel, and stomped on the accelerator.
The sedan lurched forward with a violent shudder, kicking up a cloud of ash and broken glass before steadying onto the empty, dark boulevard. The vehicle's red taillights flickered through the gloom, slowly disappearing into the distant city night—leaving behind the shattered district, the silent dead, and the ruins of Grayson.
The narrative jumped forty-eight hours ahead to the 9th of September—the eve of the ominous date.
The setting was instantly recognizable: the monolithic, obsidian headquarters of SS PARTNERS.
Standing by the towering floor-to-ceiling panoramic glass was the massive, imposing silhouette of Bansho himself. Below him, the metropolitan skyline glittered in cold, orderly silence.
"Huh... I find myself completely out of words. Truly impressive. Who would have thought those children were capable of wiping out my entire front-line division?"
"I warned you from the start, didn't I, Bansho?"
Sitting casually across the expansive lounge was Null, leaning back into the leather sofa while swirling an amber liquid in a crystal tumbler.
"Even my top-tier assets—Grimm and Cipher—failed to survive an encounter with that unit. You underestimated the anomaly."
"Perhaps you're right, Null." Bansho sank his colossal frame into an armchair, folding his massive, scarred hands as his mind drifted back.
"There was a time when I first crossed paths with those two brothers. Veyron and Darius. Two feral boys brimming with raw ambition and an unnatural grasp of applied theoretical physics. Natural-born combatants, certainly... but children nonetheless. Were they among the experimental subjects from that trafficking syndicate? My memory fails me."
Null chuckled, taking a slow sip.
"They were. And when they resurfaced seven or eight years later, fully grown and altered, you had already established yourself as a feared Chief. That was around the time I was securing my appointment as the 4th Chief, wasn't it?"
"Indeed," Null continued, his eyes gleaming with callous amusement. "Years before taking the Chief's mantle, back when I was still operating as an executive in the field, I personally slaughtered Grimm and Cipher's entire bloodline. Standard protocol—higher-ups demanded their biological lineage be harvested and synthesized for future projects. Or did I do it simply under strict orders from the top brass? Who remembers anymore?"
Bansho scowled, his deep voice carrying a razor-sharp edge. "You're a disgusting piece of work, Null. Drop the coy theatrics. Speak plainly or keep your mouth shut."
Null grinned, entirely unbothered. "Touchy, aren't we? My point is, eight or nine years ago when I introduced Cipher and Grimm into the program, I wasn't wearing the Chief's coat yet either. Times change, hierarchies shift. But you, Bansho... you've held the seat of Chief far longer than any of us."
"True," Bansho muttered, staring at the faint smoke curling from his cigar. "In the beginning, I lacked the absolute supremacy I wield today. But years refine an edge. When those brothers completed their biological conditioning and stood before me, their arrogance was almost breathtaking. And when both Grimm and I dismantled them in the trials, their shattered egos were an absolute sight to behold."
Bansho let out a deep, rumbling laugh.
"Everyone on the outside assumed Darius and Veyron were my personal pets—that I favored them above all others. And I did appreciate their utility. But deep down? Those two despises me. And how could they not? I was the man who carved their insignificance into their bones."
The room faded into a stark memory.
Years earlier, a younger Darius had stood in an underground training ring, radiating an impenetrable, shimmering spatial distortion around his frame, his teeth bared in rabid defiance.
"You can't touch me anymore, Bansho! My kinetic barrier has reached absolute perfection! There is no counter to this—what... what are you doing?!"
Bansho had walked up to the roaring spatial shield without drawing a weapon. With casual indifference, he extended a single forefinger, pressing the tip directly against the center of
Darius's chest.
Then—a flick.
BLAST!
A catastrophic concussive rupture exploded from the pad of Bansho's single finger.
The localized space-time barrier disintegrated into glittering shards like fragile porcelain. The sheer, unaccounted kinetic force tore through Darius's skeletal frame, launching his massive bulk straight across the facility until he embedded into the reinforced blast wall, knocked instantly into a coma.
The memory dissolved back into the penthouse lounge.
"Those were good times," Bansho mused, a cruel smirk playing on his scarred jaw. "Putting arrogant runts in their place... it keeps a man young."
The double doors hissed open. A frantic operative in an SS tactical uniform entered, dropping into a crisp, rigid salute.
"Sir! The national transmission feeds have officially been locked into priority override across all networks! The Directorate has concluded the summit, and all protocols are aligned. The High Council requests your presence in the Primary Command Chamber immediately!"
Bansho set his glass down on the table, rising to his full, towering height. The air in the penthouse grew heavy with cold intent.
"Understood."
[ END OF CHAPTER 37 ]