The thin, grey light of dawn broke over the Ilian Grid, but it brought no real warmth.
The thick toxic smog merely shifted from pitch black to a heavy, slate-grey wool that clung to the cold iron tracks.
Ambo stepped out of the rusted oil silo first, his white clogs crunching against centuries of calcified ash.
He adjusted his layered upper gear, pulling the frayed collar of his tattered black oversized cave shirt down over the vibrant purple jacket underneath.
The lingering static hummed against his skin, a strange phantom weight that seemed to throb whenever the freezing morning air hit his chest.
Behind him, Jahek was forcefully rubbing his upper arms to kickstart his physical circulation, his single missing tooth clicking as he yawned.
“No manifestations today, rookies,” Asher’s voice sliced through the cold fog before they could even adjust to the light.
The captain stepped out from the silo’s shadow, his high-heeled boots silent against the industrial rubble.
His dark green, sleek side-hair was perfectly in place, the silver earrings glinting lazily against the dull horizon.
The wavy snake-sword remained strapped tightly to his back, entirely unbothered by the frost.
“Aw, come on, Captain!” Jahek complained, immediately dropping his arms.
“The fog is freezing.
My internal pool is practically screaming just trying to keep my fingers from turning blue.
If we can’t even coat our hands in raw energy for warmth, we’re gonna freeze to death out here.” “A Culler who relies on their Astral energy to shield them from a simple breeze is an amateur who will run completely dry the second a real fight breaks out,” Asher stated while smiling.
He stopped on a massive concrete train platform overlooking a sunken yard filled with hundreds of rusted, derailed cargo cars.
“Today, you learn to track and survive without your eyes.
Tie these around your faces.” With a fluid flick of his wrist, Asher tossed two long, thick strips of opaque black cloth straight at them.
Ambo caught his fabric, his dark eyes narrowing in confusion.
“A blindfold training?” “A sensory reality check,” Asher corrected, his posture shifting into a terrifyingly balanced stance.
“Out in the deep dead zones, high-tier anomalies or rogue dark operators won’t advertise their presence with flashing light or loud signatures.
Dangerous opponents know how to mask their aura completely before striking.
If you only rely on your eyes to look for a shimmery glow in the dirt, you are already dead.
You have to learn to read the atmospheric displacement—the minute changes in pressure, the sudden drop in temperature, and the exact physical vibration of the air before a blade ever leaves its sheath.” Asher’s hand drifted slowly toward the hilt of his snake-sword.
“Put them on.
Until you can predict my positioning without looking, we don’t move another purok toward the depot.” Ambo didn’t hesitate.
He pulled the thick black cloth tightly over his eyes, knotting it behind his curly black hair.
Instantly, the grey, rotted structures of Bembaran vanished.
The world became a vacuum of absolute, pitch-black silence, broken only by the rhythmic, nervous breathing of Jahek right beside him.
“Alright, Captain, I’m blind!” Jahek yelled nervously, his voice bouncing awkwardly off the metal train cars.
“But how are we supposed to feel anything when our skin is completely numb from the—” SWISH.
A sudden, sharp rush of air sliced directly past Ambo’s left ear.
It carried no heat, no crackling lightning, and absolutely zero Astral aura.
It was a purely mechanical, peak-human movement.
Ambo’s survival instincts instantly spiked, a deep, malicious chill vibrating through his bone marrow as the slumbering entity inside him reacted to the immediate threat.
He didn’t pull back out of fear; instead, driven by pure reflex, he tried to focus that thick, oily black fluid beneath his skin locally into his ears, attempting to force his sensory organs to expand.
Thump-thump.
Thump-thump.
The black fluid inside his skull didn’t use an Astral pool, but it functioned like a terrifying vacuum.
Suddenly, the silence in his ears fractured.
He couldn’t see Asher, but his enhanced auditory nerves caught the microscopic scraping of a high-heeled boot shifting weight against loose gravel three feet to his right.
Ambo threw his left arm up, his forearm instantly bubbling into a localized, dense black mud shield.
CLANG!
The flat of Asher’s unyielding snake-sword slammed violently against Ambo’s materialized fluid block.
The impact resonated with a heavy, dull vibration that traveled straight up Ambo’s shoulder, but the dense goo absorbed the blunt kinetic force completely, preventing his bones from shattering under the immense peak-human pressure.
“Impressive reflexes, stray,” Asher’s voice whispered from the dark, completely unbothered that his initial strike had been predicted.
“You didn’t look for an energy flare.
You listened to the friction of my boots.
But you’re still relying too much on raw panic to manifest that defense.” Before Ambo could reset his stance, the air displacement shifted violently above his head.
Asher had already pivoted, his unmanifested physical velocity effortlessly breaking standard human limits as he launched a rapid, fluid sequence of training strikes to push both rookies to their absolute limits.
SWOOSH!
The next strike was aimed straight for Jahek.
Unlike Ambo, who was anchored by raw survival instincts, Jahek’s nerves completely hijacked his senses.
Hearing the sudden tear of wind through the fog, Jahek panicked.
His heart hammered like a trapped bird, and instead of listening to the atmospheric shift, his mind scrambled to force raw Astral energy into his silver daggers.
“I can’t feel it!
I can’t feel where you are!” Jahek shouted, blindly slashing his daggers in a wide, desperate arc.
TAP.
Asher didn’t even use his sword hilt.
He simply stepped inside Jahek’s overextended guard, his high-heeled boot executing a swift, unmanifested kick directly into the back of Jahek’s knee.
“Ah!” Jahek yelped, his balance instantly breaking as he crashed knee-first into the cold gravel of the railway platform.
“You’re relying on your weapons to tell you where the enemy is,” Asher chided coldly, his voice echoing from a completely different position now.
“Your fear is making too much noise inside your own skull, rookie.
If you are constantly panicking about the cold or the distance, you miss the tiny whistle of the air.
When the sword moves, it displaces the fog.
Listen to the wind, not your heart.” Ambo stood perfectly still in the darkness, absorbing the lesson.
He didn’t let his own breathing break his concentration.
He realized that every time he allowed his mind to fill with panic, the black fluid under his skin would erupt in an explosive, unchecked wave—just like it did during his fight with Leeroy Jenkins.
It drained him, leaving him exhausted.
To survive past the perimeter, he needed to refine his control over the black goo.
He needed precision, not a massive outburst.
Closing his eyes tighter behind the blindfold, Ambo focused on the cold.
He allowed the numbness to act as an anchor, settling his racing pulse.
Instead of forcing the black fluid to form a giant boxing glove or a massive wall, he willed the liquid to remain dormant, resting just beneath the surface of his skin like a razor-thin layer of protective film.
He didn’t manifest it outwardly; he kept it tightly compressed within his biology, locally mapping it along his forearms and shins to act as internal kinetic dampeners.
Step.
There it was again.
A microscopic vibration through the rusted iron railway line beneath his clogs.
Asher lunged from the blind spot, the snake-sword executing a swift, horizontal sweep toward Ambo’s waist.
Ambo didn’t throw his hands up this time.
He simply twisted his torso, the movement incredibly sharp as his refined control allowed his body to slip past the blade’s edge by a single centimeter.
He felt the cold steel glide over the frayed edges of his tattered black shirt, but his skin remained untouched.
Asher uses the blindfold training as a supportive, compassionate exercise.
When he strikes Ambo’s shield or taps Jahek’s guard, he offers warm encouragement “Better!
Filter the noise, kid!”.
But before Ambo could reset his stance, or before Jahek could struggle back up to his feet, the rhythmic, peaceful vibrations of their training ground violently died.
From the deep, dark gaps between the hundreds of derailed, rusted cargo trains stretching across the sunken yard, a new sound emerged.
It wasn’t the fluid, calculated friction of a human boot, nor was it the gentle groan of old infrastructure against the wind.
It was a sharp, rapid, and coordinated clicking sound—like hundreds of fingernails aggressively tapping against rusted iron sheets.
Ambo’s ears, still hyper-sensitized by the black fluid vacuum inside his skull, twitched violently under the black cloth.
The clicking was growing louder, accelerating down the tracks at a terrifying velocity.
The air pressure around the platform suddenly plummeted, thick with the sharp, acidic stench of rotting copper and ancient decay.
Asher’s posture went instantly rigid.
He didn’t order the rookies to strike, but his hand gripped the hilt of his snake-sword with an intensity they hadn’t felt all morning.
“Rip them off.
Right now,” Asher commanded, his flat voice dropping all traces of a training exercise.
“The noise is over.” Ambo and Jahek violently tore the black blindfolds from their faces.
The grey dawn light rushed back into their eyes, but the sight waiting for them down on the rusted railway lines made Jahek’s bubble gum freeze solid in his throat.
Emerging from the fog, their deformed white bodies blending perfectly with the grey ash of the Ilian Grid, was a massive, coordinated pack of Gen Z infected.
But these weren’t the slow, wandering White Walkers they had encountered yesterday.
Their hairless white skin was stretched tightly over lean, elongated muscles, and their black veins throbbed with a frantic, pulsating rhythm.
They didn’t wander.
They didn’t pause.
The moment their flat, smooth white faces caught the movement on the platform, their skin violently ripped open into razor-toothed maws, and they launched themselves forward at an incredible, blinding velocity—their claws tearing into the iron tracks as they sprinted on all fours like a pack of apex predators.
“Runners…” Jahek whispered, his face turning completely pale as his daggers trembled in his hands.
“They’re too fast!
Captain, there’s too many of them!” “Form a defensive line behind the sedan chassis!” Asher barked, his snake-sword sliding from his back with a silent, lethal ring.
“Rookies, get your hands ready.
The real test starts right now.”