Jahek gasped violently, his eyes snapping open as his lungs greedily sucked in the freezing, toxic air.
He violently scrambled backward, his hands clawing at his throat, expecting the cold white flesh of the Abnormal’s arm to still be wrapped around his windpipe.
But there was nothing.
The suffocating pressure was gone.
The two towering, three-meter monsters that had completely dominated their vanguard squad had completely vanished into thin air.
“What…
what happened?” Jahek stammered, his mind racing as he frantically checked his surroundings.
He was no longer laying in the exposed, bloody dirt of the dead-end alley.
Instead, he was sitting inside a heavy, reinforced old-world concrete railroad security bunker built into the side of the canyon block.
The thick iron door was shut tight, completely sealing out the roaring ash storm outside.
Jahek looked down at his body, his eyes widening.
He was severely injured, his muscles aching with an intense exhaustion, but a series of clean, professional medical bandages were meticulously wrapped around his torn thigh and various parts of his body.
He looked to his side.
Aligned perfectly next to him on the concrete floor were the unconscious, breathing forms of Captain Asher and Ambo.
Asher’s massive, lethal waist and stomach wounds had been tightly bound and stabilized, the bleeding completely stopped, while Ambo lay resting quietly beneath his dust-covered purple jacket.
Even more confusingly, all of Jahek’s scattered gear was perfectly aligned right next to his hip—his silver daggers, his pieces of bubble gum, his loose stones, and even the handfuls of abrasive sand he had thrown in desperation had been meticulously gathered and kept by his side.
“Who…
who was that guy?” Jahek whispered, his hands trembling as he remembered the tall stranger in the green shirt and khaki pants.
“Did he save us?
Then why isn’t he here?
Is he an elite member of the guild?” Frantic for answers, Jahek crawled over to Asher, vigorously shaking the captain’s shoulder.
“Captain!
Captain Asher, wake up!
Ambo, get up!” Ambo groaned, his split-tongue vein lines twitching as he slowly sat up from the rubble, rubbing his bruised temples.
Asher’s eyes flickered open next, his dark green hair messy as he tries to mask his excruciating pain with a weak, comforting smile, reassuring his terrified rookies that their captain isn’t ready to kick the bucket just yet.
As he pushed himself up against a rusted iron crate, his sharp perception immediately cataloging the bandages and the secure interior of the bunker.
“Jahek…” Asher wheezed, his voice tight but stable.
“Report.
What happened to the shifters?
Where are we?” Jahek rapidly unloaded everything, his voice shaking with a mixture of awe and absolute terror as he reported the things he remembered before backing out.
“The Abnormals were completely gone when I woke up, Captain!
We were wrapped in bandages, aligned on the floor, and all our trash was kept!
I saw a man right before I blacked out—a tall guy in a loose green shirt and khaki pants.
He said this was his territory!
Did you see him?!” Asher’s expression turned incredibly grim, his silver earrings remaining dead still as he leaned back against the concrete wall, absorbing the description.
He slowly checked the stitching on his own stabilized waist wound, a deep, bitter calculation running through his thoughts.
“I’ve been running operations and infiltrating this entire fallen city of Bembaran for a long time, Jahek,” Asher muttered, his voice dropping into a cold, hardened register born from a lifetime of surface poverty and experiencing the absolute worst, ugliest side of the metropolis.
“But I have never once encountered a man matching that description.
And there is absolutely no way someone of that caliber—someone who can effortlessly terrify two high-tier Abnormals into fleeing without using a single flash of an energy aura—just casually walks through the ash to save a bunch of lost strays out of the goodness of his heart.” Asher looked toward the narrow iron viewport of the bunker, his jaw locking tight.
“All I know is that this city is rotten down to the core, along with every single person who managed to survive within it.
If a monster of that scale is playing god in the outer puroks, he has his own dark reasons for keeping us alive.
No one does favors on the surface.” Ambo looked down at his tattered black shirt, his fingers tightening against the cloth as Asher’s words hung heavily in the air.
The mystery of the city was deepening, and the weight of what was waiting for them at the edge of the limits felt more ominous than ever.
Asher exhaled a ragged breath, pointing a gloved finger toward the center of the bunker floor.
“We can’t move until my kidney wound finishes sealing, and we can’t light a normal fire without drawing more heat.
Jahek, drive your daggers into that steel floor plate.
Force a controlled hum of your raw Astral energy into the metal just to give us a localized warm grid.
We rest here until the storm dies.” Jahek nodded silently, pulling his silver daggers and driving them into the iron plate, the metal beginning to glow with a dim, localized amber warmth that illuminated their battered faces.