The rocket warhead, burning hot, streaked straight toward Finn’s face. He swung his sword in a sharp diagonal slash, splitting the warhead clean in two and triggering a massive explosion at the same time.
Flames roared and thick black smoke billowed. A mountain bike tore through the haze like a spear. Finn rode one-handed, body crouched low like a diving hawk locking onto prey, charging straight at the man behind the shattered stone fortress.
The gap closed in a heartbeat. Finn could even see his own reflection in the man’s wide pupils.
“HOLY RADIANCE ABOVE!” the man roared.
Even after watching Finn slice a rocket apart with a sword, the guy didn’t look scared at all. He snatched up a rusty spear and thrust it straight at Finn.
Finn leaped into the air, stowing the mountain bike back into his storage space in one smooth motion. His first sword strike chopped the spear in half. The second slash ripped a massive gash across the man’s chest, blood spraying out like a fountain.
With the man taken care of clean and quick, Finn jumped onto the roof of the blasted-open stone fortress. The sound of rushing water grew louder and clearer in his ears.
Looking down, he saw a steep canyon with a murky river cutting through it. At the narrowest point of the canyon stood a pre-Cataclysm structure—a huge concrete dam.
And it wasn’t just a dam. Inside, huge metal turbine wheels were still slowly turning under the push of the current. This had to be some kind of old hydroelectric power station.
But it was obvious the dam no longer produced electricity. All around it, refugees and scavengers had made their homes. They’d thrown together crude shelters out of branches and rocks, and smeared strange patterns on their faces with white stone powder.
More than twenty cars sat parked every which way along the dam’s edge. Every single one had been heavily modded. Several were covered in steel spikes jutting out in all directions, making them look like giant porcupines.
More cars had machine guns bolted on and thick iron plating welded across their bodies. One of the trucks had its open bed fitted with a crude homemade beehive rocket launcher.
Plenty of spear-carrying men patrolled the riverbank. Women in headscarves squatted along the muddy shore, scrubbing clothes in the filthy water while babies strapped to their backs slept.
Finn watched for a moment before it hit him: out here in the wasteland, not everyone could make it into the relatively safe Refuge Cities.
Outside those walls, countless people scratched out a living on radiation-poisoned land, fighting mutated beasts for scraps and without a single safe place to call home.
Bang!
A brick on the stone wall right beside Finn exploded. Someone was shooting at him.
The man Finn had just killed was probably one of their sentries. Down by the dam, a whole group of armed people—guns, spears, even a few women gripping knives—were already creeping closer.
Outside the dam, several pickup trucks roared to life, engines shaking hard. They tore across the sand straight toward Finn. The men in the pickup beds cranked the machine guns around, dark barrels swinging to lock onto him from a distance.
Finn glanced down at the stone fortress beneath him. On a dusty stone chair lay a homemade rocket launcher.
He snatched it up, fumbled with it for a couple seconds until he figured out the basics, then shouldered the tube, yanked the firing cord, and fired.
The thing wasn’t exactly accurate, but the rocket still slammed into the sand and detonated in a bright orange fireball, flipping the fastest pickup truck end over end.
After launching the rocket, Finn suddenly felt bored as hell. He turned around and called out to Jimmy that it was time to leave, completely ignoring the furious vehicles swarming behind him and the raging drivers screaming from their cabs.
The off-road motorcycle and mountain bike rode side by side once more, heading deeper into the wasteland…
…
The setting sun sank in the west, bathing the Refuge City in the middle of the wasteland in the dying glow of dusk. A soft golden light coated its walls.
On a rundown street, a middle-aged woman in a red robe stopped every passerby, preaching the Radiant Path’s teachings:
“Humanity was tempted by devils and built nuclear weapons. Nuclear energy is the devil’s power, and the Cataclysm is Holy Radiance’s judgment. Only those who believe in Holy Radiance can be saved and have the nuclear radiation purged from their bodies…”
Olivia stood at the edge of the rooftop, looking down at the Refuge City under the sunset. Deep worry filled her eyes.
She said, “During the raid three days ago, we found Radiant Path ‘Holy Fire Baptism’ white phosphorus bombs in a Demon Gang hideout. They say these were weapons banned by the Columbian Imperium even before the Cataclysm. We need to be extra careful from now on.”
“Understood.” Behind her, West 1 Sector Commander Leonard stepped up to the rooftop edge. “What’s the City Lord’s attitude toward the Radiant Path? Still letting them preach freely?”
Olivia nodded. “The City Lord said a person’s faith is their own freedom. He wants to build a city where order and freedom exist together—one with plenty of clean water and food, where everyone can live freely and peacefully.”
She glanced at Leonard and noticed the West 1 Sector Commander had both fists clenched, tension written across his face. So she gave him a gentle smile and said, “I know you’re a Radiant Path believer. But in the end, we’re all part of Black Mountain. No matter what, we put the Refuge City’s interests first.”
Leonard looked up and met Olivia’s bright, reassuring smile. The tension drained out of him as he said,
“Thank you—and the City Lord—for understanding. I used to be nothing but a crude scavenger who didn’t buy any of this Radiant Path nonsense. But one day I dug up a pre-Cataclysm uranium sample by accident and got hit with a massive dose of radiation.
“I was barely breathing when the Radiant Path people found me. They purified the nuclear radiation from my body. After seeing a power like that, something straight-up miraculous, I had no choice but to believe in Holy Radiance.”
Olivia said nothing. She gazed down at the streets below, then suddenly unslung the massive sniper rifle from her back. She rested it on the rooftop railing, racked the bolt, and settled into a perfect shooting stance.
“What’s wrong?” Leonard blurted out.
Olivia tilted her head to the scope, shifting the barrel slightly to adjust her angle. Her voice stayed low and steady. “Behind those three-story buildings up ahead, there’s a grain supply store. One of the biker gang members is robbing it at gunpoint.”
“How do you even know…” Leonard started to ask, then remembered—Olivia had the “X-ray vision” ability. To her, every wall, every object in her line of sight was completely transparent.
Olivia adjusted the sniper rifle once more, angling the shot around the building’s support columns, and squeezed the trigger.
BANG!
The armor-piercing round screamed out of the barrel with unstoppable force. It punched straight through the thick brick wall, shredded the wooden cabinet inside, tore through a rusted, bone-dry water pipe, and turned a savage head covered in motorcycle tattoos into bloody mush. Blood and brains sprayed everywhere.
The grain store owner’s legs were shaking like leaves. He had been staring down the barrel of a big-bore hunting shotgun, ready to hand over the sacks of oats with both hands.
Suddenly the cocky bastard in front of him had his head blown apart. Blood and brains sprayed all over the store owner, scaring him so badly he dropped straight to the floor in a heap.
On the rooftop, Olivia waited until she was sure the store owner was safe, then slung the sniper rifle back over her shoulder. Her gaze swept across the city, still patrolling the Refuge City under the fading sunset.
To her, everything in her field of vision was crystal clear and completely see-through.
She could look straight through the wall ahead and watch the couple tumbling together on the bed behind it. She could see through their skin to the muscles underneath, and through the muscles to their bones.
When she looked down, her sight pierced the ground itself, revealing the buried pipes, the tunneling cave worms, and the mutant ants dragging cockroach corpses. Even deeper were endless layers of solid rock and dirt.
Beside the tall water tower, bathed in the last rays of sunset, a young man knelt on one knee. He held up an elegantly packaged bottle of perfume and proposed to a girl wearing a rough linen dress.
The perfume was a pre-Cataclysm treasure—rare and precious. The girl’s name was engraved on the glass bottle. She took it carefully, her face glowing with pure delight.
Olivia’s gaze passed straight through the water tower and through the young man’s coarse linen shirt. Tucked inside his chest pocket lay a second perfume bottle, this one engraved with another girl’s name.
The only thing that could ever limit Olivia was simple perspective—things up close looked big, things far away looked small. Only objects at extreme distances stayed blurry to her.
From the time she was little, Olivia had always been a good, sensible girl. She could see many things that other people could never see—or didn’t want to see—but she never spoke a word about them. She simply buried it all quietly in her heart.
Having too many secrets you could never share with anyone eventually turned a person lonely and miserable. Maybe that was the price of mutant powers.
Suddenly, in Olivia’s perfectly clear and transparent vision, a single black spot appeared—a spot she couldn’t see through no matter what.
It was a young man riding a bicycle back into Refuge City from the outside, tall and powerfully built.
He was completely impenetrable to her sight, like a thick black spike driven deep into her field of vision. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t look away. Riding beside him was another young man on an off-road motorcycle.
The young man on the bicycle pedaled along casually, looking as relaxed as an athlete coming back from a light workout.
His bike rolled smoothly over the pitted, cratered road as if it were perfectly flat pavement. When it passed straight over a deep pothole—one wider than the bicycle wheel itself—Olivia’s eyes widened.
“What kind of ability is this?” Olivia murmured, her lips parting slightly in pure shock.
“What did you see?” Leonard asked, surprised. It was the first time he had ever seen that mix of amazement, doubt, and disbelief on Olivia’s face.
“Nothing important. Just an outsider I need to check out,” Olivia replied. She tightened the sniper rifle strap across her back, vaulted over the rooftop railing, and took off after the unreadable figure.