The wind up here smelled like lilies.
Neither of them had spoken for a long while.
Below them, Sector 135 passed the afternoon as if all was perfectly well with the world.
Shopkeepers argued loudly over wholesale prices.
Commercial surveillance drones floated lazily above the rooftops with a dull buzz.
A young kid laughed somewhere further down the concrete street.
Kai gripped the rusted metal railing tightly, his knuckles turning white.
He gazed out at the sprawling, low-tier district where he had spent his entire life.
“We need to leave, Grandpa.” His grandfather kept his calm eyes fixed on the distant borders of the district, his hands resting heavily on the railing.
Weathered, scarred, and completely still, he had been a permanent part of this place for decades.
“Why?” “I’ve been seeing things on the frontier lines.
Regular Hunters suddenly going quiet.
Patrol routes changing overnight without notice.
RESCU movements that just don’t make any tactical sense.” His grandfather simply waited, letting the silence prompt his grandson for more.
Kai leaned his weight forward.
“Lucy was leading our vanguard mission, Before our unit left the barracks, she pulled me aside.
She warned me that specialized inspection teams were already being deployed across the nearby residential districts.” “Inspection teams?” “They’re calling them routine public health checkups,” Kai said, his voice dropping low.
“But the health checks are just a legal cover.
A.R.C is the one actually running the operation.
They’re hunting for Helios patients.” Kai let out a slow, heavy breath into the wind.
“House-to-house examinations.
Mandatory identity scans.
Deep medical records checks.
No one in the public is questioning it yet because it sounds entirely official.” Grandpa’s stern expression hardened into stone.
“And Sector 135?” Kai was quiet for a long moment, the wind rustling his dark coat.
“It’s on the deployment list.” His grandfather’s eyes narrowed.
“How bad is it?” “Honest answer?
I don’t know.” “Normally, when something serious happens, word gets around the city.
Hunters talk in the bars.
Logistics workers talk.
Someone always knows something.
But this time…
everyone’s keeping their mouths shut.” “What concerns me the most…” His eyes drifted away from the streets, looking straight down toward the hidden basement below.
“…is Lucen.” Grandpa went entirely quiet.
Kai knew the old man had lived through sudden rift activity, violent hunter disputes, and strict district lockdowns, but this complete silence from the authorities clearly unsettled him.
“I’ll think about it,” Grandpa said softly.
Kai’s gaze shifted instantly to his grandfather.
That single admission was far more than he had expected to get out of him.
Neither of them spoke after that.
The cold wind blew steadily between them, bringing up the sweet scent of lilies from the display cases below.
The city continued its daily routine, entirely unaware of the two figures standing on the roof, trying to understand what terrible storm was coming next.
Eventually, Grandpa waved a heavy, calloused hand toward the rusted rooftop door.
“Enough.
Go see your brother.” Kai blinked.
“What?” “Lucen’s been asking about your return for weeks.
If you stay up here any longer, he’ll likely dig his way up through the floorboards himself.” The absurd image landed in Kai’s mind before he could stop it.
A genuine smile finally broke across his tired face.
“Yeah, that’s for sure.
Guess I’ll go see him.” He turned toward the stairs.
“I’ll be back.” “No, you won’t.” “Why not?” “Because Lucen talks significantly more than I do,” Grandpa grunted.
Kai opened his mouth to argue, then closed it just as fast.
“…Fair.” “Go.” Kai pushed open the heavy door and glanced back one last time.
His grandfather was still staring out at the city skyline.
He hadn’t moved an inch.
His weathered face was as stubborn as ever, but Kai wasn’t fooled.
He had seen that look before.
Whenever things went completely wrong, Grandpa always knew exactly what to do.
For a brief moment, Kai lingered at the open doorway.
Then, he closed it, leaving his grandfather completely alone on the rooftop.
*** A familiar, sharp creak cut through the basement’s damp air as the heavy wooden door swung wide open.
Lucen sat up immediately on his mattress, his eyes widening.
“Kai.” “Still alive?” Kai’s eyes softened instantly.
He dragged the old wooden chair across the concrete floor, the harsh scrape echoing loudly in the small space.
Then, he dropped onto it backward, resting his arms over the backrest and gazing at Lucen with a relaxed ease he rarely showed anyone else.
Lucen studied his older brother closely, scanning for injuries.
Kai looked significantly thinner.
The raw scratch on his neck looked much worse up close than it did from afar.
New, jagged scars lined his knuckles, three, or maybe four of them, still pink and fresh at the edges.
“Looks painful,” Lucen muttered, pointing at his hand.
“How did you get these?” Kai’s gaze flicked down to his own hands.
Instead of answering, he simply tugged his long sleeves down over his wrists, hiding the pink skin completely from view.
“Nothing special.” Lucen rolled his eyes, letting out a deep, frustrated sigh.
“Forget it.” He stared at his brother, his mind racing with a hundred different questions.
But the silence revealed a frustrating, permanent truth: Kai would never share the brutal details of the front lines.
Finally, Lucen broke the quiet himself.
“So.” Kai immediately frowned, knowing what was coming.
“What did you do out there this time?” “Work.” “Three months?” “Yes.” “You disappeared for three whole months and your entire answer is just ‘work’?” “That’s usually how jobs work, Lucen.” Lucen grabbed the small pillow off his bed and launched it straight at his head.
Kai caught it smoothly with one hand, without missing a single beat as the fabric landed perfectly in his palm.
“At least tell me half of it,” Lucen pleaded.
“There wasn’t anything interesting.” “Liar.” Kai looked up at the ceiling boards, a helpless, defeated expression crossing his face.
Lucen knew he had him trapped.
Kai could never hide the truth from him for very long when pushed this hard.
He knew these stories were Lucen’s only real glimpse of the outside world.
“Do you want the official vanguard version, or the interesting version?” Lucen pointed a thin finger at him instantly.
“Interesting.” Kai turned the pillow over in his hands, tracing the rough, split seam.
“A few weeks ago, the linux Guild got assigned to the extreme north.
It was a joint support operation involving one Sentinel team and two regular Hunter companies.
Around two hundred people total.” Lucen leaned forward, his eyebrows shooting up toward his hairline.
Those were serious military numbers.
“What happened?” “…We caught a Riftborn.” The words hung like heavy ice in the damp air.
Lucen stared, his breath catching.
Kai simply stared straight back.
“A live one?” “A live one.” The basement fell into an absolute, dead silence.
The sudden hush made the small room feel freezing.
Lucen practically vibrated out of his own skin with excitement.
“A live Riftborn?!” His loud voice bounced violently off every concrete wall.
Something rattled and crashed on the floor upstairs.
A brief moment later, Raina’s high-pitched voice came straight through the ceiling boards: “What was that noise down there?” Kai buried his face in his hands, groaning.
“That’s exactly why I didn’t want to tell you earlier.” To Lucen, it felt like he was witnessing history.
Every book, every technical report, and every radio broadcast he had ever studied always ended the exact same way: dead Riftborn, dead hunters, and a massive biological mess left to clean up.
Nobody ever captured them alive.
And here Kai was, sitting on a wooden chair acting like he had just mentioned the daily weather.
“What did it look like?” Kai leaned forward, his fingers tightening heavily against the pillow fabric.
“Ugly.” “That’s not a real description.” “Six eyes.” Kai’s gaze dropped back down to the floorboards, his expression darkening.
“Too many teeth.” “…How many teeth?” “More teeth than there should be in a living jaw.
Claws.
Heavy scales.
Jagged crystal growths running all the way along its spine.
And it could think.” The grim memory seemed to completely drain the light from his brother’s features.
The playful energy vanished out of Lucen’s chest.
Kai wasn’t smiling anymore either.
“It watched people,” Kai continued softly.
“Specifically, it knew exactly who was carrying the heavy weapons.
It knew which ones among us were the Sentinels.” To Lucen, the basement suddenly seemed much smaller and colder than it had just five minutes earlier.
The concrete walls felt like they were actively closing in on him, heavy with the terrifying weight of his brother’s revelation.
Then, Kai leaned back into the wooden chair, stretching his long arms over his head with a casual, forced shrug.
“Anyway.” Lucen stared at him, completely thrown off by the sudden shift.
“It didn’t manage to eat me.” “That’s your only conclusion?!” Kai let out a sudden, booming laugh.
It was genuine and loud.
The heavy, suffocating tension in the small room shattered instantly.
Kai reached deep into his backpack once again.
“I almost forgot.” He pulled out a short, heavy metal baton and tossed it casually toward the bed.
Lucen fumbled it in his weak hands, nearly dropping it onto the floor before hugging it tightly against his bare chest.
“It’s my old plasma baton.” Lucen stared down at the cold metal.
“…Really?” Kai grinned broadly.
“The internal battery’s down, and it’ll only ever activate for a registered Hunter anyway.” Lucen turned it over in his thin hands anyway.
It didn’t matter if it was broken.
It didn’t matter if it was dead.
It was his.
His very first real weapon.
Kai leaned back against the chair with a soft laugh.
The sun slowly set over the edge of Sector 135 as the two brothers continued their quiet conversation late into the evening.
*** Far away from the small streets of Sector 135, a stark, blindingly white room hummed with clinical electricity.
Three human bodies lay side by side on stainless steel examination tables.
The exact same black, corrupted veins spread like a grotesque web beneath their pale, unmoving skin.
A lone researcher in a clean white coat slowly lowered a glowing handheld medical scanner.
“…Another complete failure.” He turned his head, looking toward a dark figure standing completely motionless in the shadows of the laboratory.
“The genetic reaction lasted less than a single second before systemic collapse.” A heavy silence filled the laboratory.
“Continue,” the cold voice from the shadows commanded.
“There aren’t many localized patients left in the sector registries,” the researcher countered nervously.
“Then find more.” The white room fell completely quiet once more.