Von Raj Agnas stood at the absolute edge of the blackened crater, his gloved fingers brushing against the still-radiating glass bedrock.
Behind him, the three Cullers were already retreating back toward the Kampilan guild, completely oblivious to the gears shifting inside the gentleman’s head.
Von Raj didn’t care about the amnesiac boy anymore, nor did he care about the stoic captain.
His entire focus was locked onto the fine, powdery white ash coating his leather boots.
A cold, long-forgotten predatory terror was clawing violently at his spine.
Before Von Raj and his inner circle had donned human clothes to infiltrate the surface settlements, they had meticulously mapped out the power structures of the dirt.
They knew exactly which surface dwellers were easy prey, and which ones had to be avoided at all costs.
At the absolute top of their avoidance list was Kaio, the Hero of the City.
The Encanto had crossed paths with Kaio once, years ago.
It was an encounter that haunts Von Raj to this day—a brutal lesson that forced them to amputate their own scorched, blackened limbs to stop the supernatural fire from eating away at their immortal cells.
They knew the terrifying truth of his power.
But according to the official human news, Kaio had died a few years ago.
The public history books claimed the hero had fallen while defending the colonies from a towering, grotesque monstrosity—a gigantic, skinless abnormal walker that possessed no nose and no ears.
It was a blank, muscular colossus with only a cavernous mouth, hollow eyes, stark white sclera, and glowing red pupils.
To the surface dwellers and regular Cullers, this nightmare was simply a freak, ultra-powerful variant of the standard mindless zombie herds.
But Von Raj knew the real history.
He knew that the creature wasn’t a natural abnormal Gen Z at all.
It was something entirely artificial, a bio-engineered weapon officially cataloged in the restricted archives under the codename Project: Bughayon.
While Von Raj couldn’t legally prove the creators, the current whispers running through the dark underbelly of the surface pointed to one absolute source: the Neomans.
According to the official news that was released to the public back then, this “abnormal Gen Z” was the catalyst for a horrific tragedy born of twisted human madness.
The reports stated that Kaio’s genius best friend, Xero, had grown deeply consumed by jealousy over Kaio’s legendary hero status.
In a desperate bid to destroy his rival, Xero had secretly manipulated everything behind the scenes, drawing the massive, mindless colossus straight into the colony.
But Xero paid a catastrophic price for his envy; in the chaotic crossfire of the attack, his own older sister, Sora, was caught in the carnage and brutally killed.
Shattered by immense regret and the weight of his sister’s death, Xero surrendered himself to the authorities and was thrown into the deepest cells of Tartarus Prison.
To bring this towering titan down during that fateful raid, Kaio had been forced to overuse his Astral limits, unlocking his catastrophic Tresera to transform the metropolitan landscape into a literal city-wide ocean of flames.
Simultaneously, he had pushed his body into his absolute peak Kwarta state, erupting into a blinding golden radiance with a divine halo of pure kinetic pressure manifesting over his head before his own biology burned away into dissolving Astral energy, fading into nothingness.
Von Raj stared into the glass crater, his breath catching in his throat.
It’s the exact same thermal signature, the gentleman realized, a cold sweat breaking out beneath his slicked-back hair.
The city-wide heatwave.
The absolute cellular erasure.
But Kaio is dead…
Xero is locked in Tartarus…
So who is this?
There’s no way a normal Culler did this.
Is there a new fire user out there who can match—or maybe even surpass—the power of Kaio?
Von Raj adjusted his tie, his crimson eyes darkening with calculation.
The Neomans were clearly planning something massive within the surface, dropping experiments like Bughayon to test the waters.
And that was precisely why another dangerous group had emerged from the shadows: Walibu.
While the general public and the Culler Guild had absolutely no idea what Walibu’s true endgame was, Von Raj had been tracking their footsteps.
The Cullers were far too busy managing the immediate threat of the mindless Gen 1 white walkers to notice, but Walibu had been secretly distributing a massive volume of a dangerous, shortcut booster drug to enhanced humans across the sectors.
Based on the sheer scale of the distribution, Von Raj could sense a brewing storm—Walibu was actively preparing for an all-out war against the sky.
But as Von Raj turned his back on the ash, a sharp, cold realization settled into his mind.
Just like the humans below, the conscious, evolved Gen Z were fundamentally fractured.
They weren’t a united front; they were an untrusting collection of dangerous anomalies, each infiltrating the human colonies entirely on their own, carefully watching one another from the shadows.
Von Raj knew his assembly wasn’t the only hidden player on the board.
Through his network, he knew the terrifying truth of Walibu’s internal dynamic.
Deep within that revolutionary group sat a highly knowledgeable, deeply entrenched evolved entity who had smoothly integrated into the human world.
Von Raj didn’t know this creature’s ultimate goal, but he kept a strict, hyper-vigilant eye on them.
Beneath whatever mask or theatrical facade they wore lay a terrifyingly sharp, ancient intellect.
This hidden ghost was the true brain behind the creation and chemical engineering of the booster drugs flooding the surface.
They had thoroughly mastered human biology to manufacture a chemical weapon so advanced that most would assume only the Neomans were capable of forging it.
They were a dangerous phantom moving silently through the revolutionary cells, pulling the strings of the coming war.