The vanguard did not wait for the sun.
Long before the first dawn light could pierce the toxic smog of the sector, Ambo, Jahek, and Zaiden slipped past the iron gates of the guild.
By the time the midday sun hung directly overhead, baking the concrete ruins into a suffocating oven, they had reached the desolate wasteland of the Eastern Sector.
The silence here was absolute, broken only by the skeletal remnants of collapsed highway overpasses and the heavy, structural groans of a dead city.
“Keep your eyes sharp, rookie,” Jahek muttered, though his usual energetic tone sounded forced.
He adjusted the silver daggers at his thighs, nervously glancing left and right.
Jahek was a contradiction.
To bullies like Leeroy Jenkins, he was a loudmouthed prankster who bragged about his talents.
But out here in the dirt, he was a self-admitted coward.
He had forced himself to become Zaiden’s sidekick solely because Zaiden’s shadow was the only thing keeping Leeroy from snapping him in half.
Jahek possessed an immensely powerful unique ability, but his deep terror of real combat kept it permanently locked away.
He preferred to use his endless words to prolong a confrontation, waiting for someone stronger to fight in his stead.
“They’re already here,” Zaiden said, his voice flat and dangerous.
Before Ambo or Jahek could react, the rubble around them erupted.
A dozen armed cartel thugs tore through the fog, their veins bulging with the luminous purple glow of the stolen Walibu booster drug.
From the top of a collapsed steel crane, Braxley the Slaver descended, his eyes glowing with an intense, translucent telekinetic light.
“Zaiden!” Braxley bellowed, a vicious sneer twisting his face.
“You poked the wrong hornets’ nest!
Today, I take my revenge and strip the meat from your bones!” Braxley completely underestimated the captain.
Before the slaver could even wave his hands to activate his telekinesis, Zaiden blurred.
The stoic warrior moved with terrifying, concrete-cracking velocity.
With pure, unrefined physical force, Zaiden slammed his fist into the lead grunt’s chest, shattering the armor and sending three men skyrocketing down into the dirt in a single, brutal second.
On the sidelines, Jahek and Ambo didn’t even flinch.
They simply backed away into the safety of a rusted shipping container.
“Let the captain handle the heavy lifting, kid!” Jahek whispered loudly, his eyes darting around.
True to his cowardly nature, Jahek began scooping up handfuls of sharp, abrasive sand from the ground.
“If any of them get close, we fight dirty!
Throw sand in their eyes, run like hell, and strike when they aren’t looking!
That’s how you survive!” Ambo didn’t argue.
His heart hammered violently as a rogue grunt charged their corner.
Ambo had no offensive training, but as the grunt’s blade swung toward his neck, Ambo thrust his fist forward.
He didn’t want to just defend this time—he wanted to land his first real punch.
But instead of an explosive strike, a thick whorl of his mysterious Black Goo coated his knuckles like a blunt, oily boxing glove.
The punch landed heavily against the grunt’s shoulder, absorbing the shock but failing to knock the man down.
Ambo scrambled back, his mind reeling at the ominous, heavy sensation of the fluid.
Suddenly, the screaming of Braxley’s men stopped.
A cold, suffocating silence choked the canyon.
Out of the deep fog stepped a new group of individuals.
To Ambo, they looked like a squad of regular power civilians, entirely devoid of any glowing Astral signatures.
But the sheer, primal violence of their movements was unholy.
Within seconds, this new group threw themselves into the crossfire, brutally tearing Braxley’s drug-enhanced thugs limb from limb with their bare, unarmored hands.
“What…
what are you monsters?!” Braxley shrieked, his telekinetic grip flaring as he managed to seize two of the incoming strangers, pinning them in mid-air.
But Braxley never got an answer.
A massive, blurring shadow erupted from the dust behind him.
With a sickening thud, a creature with the towering, muscular torso of a man but the elongated, powerful head and hooves of a terrifying horse plummeted down from the sky, slamming Braxley directly into the concrete bedrock.
The horse-hybrid stepped over the groaning slaver, its crimson eyes shifting away from the cartel and locking directly onto the three Cullers.
The new group formed a semi-circle, their focus narrowing.
They actively kept a wide, cautious distance from Zaiden, whose striking half-white, half-black hair and calm demeanor gave off an incredibly bad, oppressive aura.
Sensing danger from the captain, the strangers shifted their predatory gaze toward the two teenagers in the corner.
As they focused on Ambo, the black, muddy fluid still sizzling over the boy’s knuckles caught their attention.
The group went completely rigid.
Standing at the back, Von Raj Agnas narrowed his crimson eyes, his highly intelligent mind instantly analyzing the physical texture of the defensive barrier.
He couldn’t sense the raw internal energy frequencies of the construct—no Gen Z possessed the biological capability to read the invisible flow of human Astral Energy—but his eyes could easily read the physical results of the wild.
He had spent months buying Walibu’s booster drugs and feeding the chemical shortcuts to his own hidden Abnormal assets, desperately trying to study how the humans’ strange power operated before the test ended in a total failure, his asset completely incinerated into ash by Phyrus.
Yet, the boy standing in the corner completely baffled his calculations.
There is no glowing physical hardness like compressed obsidian, and it carries no smell of standard dark sludge, Von Raj calculated silently, his calm expression hiding a deep, clinical intrigue.
This stray possesses absolutely zero human light, yet his skin can physically generate an unmapped, dense organic mass that ripples like living grease.
What kind of anomaly is he?
Intrigued by the sheer mechanical strangeness of the black slime, but keeping his thoughts tightly guarded, the gentleman stepped into the clear light.
One of the tall, muscular black men in the group took a heavy, aggressive step toward Ambo.
Without breaking his stride against the remaining cartel thugs, Zaiden casually snatched a rusted iron rod from the debris and hurled it with pinpoint, lethal velocity.
SPURT.
The iron rod tore through the air, stabbing the tall black man directly through the center of his neck.
Blood spattered across the concrete.
It was an absolute, undisputed lethal wound.
But the man didn’t drop.
With a slow, rhythmic movement, the tall man gripped the iron rod and violently pulled it free from his throat.
Before the eyes of the stunned Cullers, the flesh inside his neck began to bubble, stitch, and perfectly close up within a matter of seconds, leaving nothing but smooth, unblemished skin.
Jahek gasped, his jaw dropping.
“No human…
no human can regenerate a fatal wound that fast.
That’s…
that’s like them.” The remaining three figures step into the clear light, revealing the infamous trinity running this sector.
The first was the horse-man hybrid, its chest heaving with dense, bestial power.
The second was a towering, shirtless Black man with a thick, unkempt beard and dark hair covering his entire body.
He smoked a crude pipe, walking completely barefoot, but his most terrifying features were his eyes—his sclera were pitch-black, and his pupils glowed with a feral, luminous crimson.
A circular, intricate tattoo ran directly under and around his eyes, framing his cheeks like a dark mask.
But the one who stood at the back, anchoring the group, was a sleek, gentlemanly figure.
He wore an elegant, old-era suit, his dark hair slicked back perfectly, save for a stark, distinct white hairline running along the side of his temple.
His sharp mustache and manicured goatee made him look exactly like the ancient illustrations of vampires found in the fairy tales of the older generations.
The gentleman stepped forward, raising a gloved hand to signal his beasts to stand down.
He offered a polite, chillingly elegant bow.
“Forgive the crude entrance,” the gentleman spoke, his voice smooth, cultured, and entirely human.
“I am Von Raj Agnas, the leader of the assembly I have forged.
We call ourselves Encanto.” He gestured lazily to the towering, smoking black man beside him, and then to the horse-hybrid.
“This gentleman of the ash is Kapre,” Von Raj introduced, his crimson pupils flashing with an intelligent, human-like gleam.
“And our swift friend here is Tikbalang.
They are my most trusted compatriots.
And I believe, little Cullers…
we have much to discuss regarding the abnormal sightings in our territory.” High above the canyon, hidden safely behind the rusted skeletal frame of a collapsed billboard, Phyrus leaned back against the iron girders.
He didn’t intervene.
His dark eye-slits tracked every movement of Von Raj, Kapre, and Tikbalang, his gloved fingers absorbing the data.
Evolved Gen Z, Phyrus thought, a grim, knowing smile forming beneath his unyielding dark mask.
They’ve learned to speak.
They’ve learned to wear clothes.
And they are already walking among us.
Having gathered enough intel on this terrifying new infiltration faction, Phyrus let his tattered cloak catch the wind, vanishing silently into the smog to continue his pursuit of the true abnormal walker, leaving Ambo to face the sovereigns of the disguised wild.