Western Alps, Tyrol, Austria — Nexus-9 Reinforcement Team
Six figures surged through the biting winds of the Austrian Alps, a blur against the snow-veiled wilderness. They moved fast, riding currents of aether-infused wind. Their destination lay carved into the mountains ahead: the Nexus-9 alpine branch near Innsbruck.
At the forefront of the group was Arthur, a seasoned awakened with flint-gray eyes and an unwavering presence. He glanced at the device secured to his gauntlet—an encrypted tracker pulsing with their coordinates and the Nexus-9 facility's exact location.
"Four miles out," he announced sharply. "Prepare yourselves."
The rest of the squad nodded. Each was elite—handpicked not only for strength, but for loyalty. They were aerokinesis users, selected for speed are dispatched directly from the nearest standby force.
Nexus-9 had lost contact with their Austrian branch hours ago. The only signal that came through was a distress beacon—coded, high-priority. It meant one thing:
They were under attack.
And only one name came to mind: Null.
The Brazilian branch hadn't recovered. No leads, no retaliation, just security footage of a lone figure dismantling their strongest with ruthless precision. Null had slipped through their fingers.
Not again.
When the team arrived at the entrance, silence greeted them.
A pair of heads lay in the snow—Dmitriy and Felix, two of the branch's security agents. Both had been decapitated with surgical efficiency.
Arthur's gaze moved from the corpses to the steel-reinforced door behind them—meant to withstand high level awakened-tier attacks. It had been sheared clean, as if erased from existence.
No explosion.
No dent pattern.
Only a huge slash mark on the sides of the mountain.
They stepped inside.
The wide chamber reeked of scorched metal and blood. Bodies littered the floor—some burned and crushed from friendly fire, some heads were cut-off, while others had their bodies cut in halves by a blade. One look at the wounds and the state the place were in. He could tell that Null didn't go all out.
He dissected them.
They moved to the wrecked control room. Console panels shattered. Memory cores slagged. They recovered only a sliver of footage—the moment Null beheaded Dmitriy and Felix. The rest had been purged.
"He learned," one of Arthur's teammates muttered. "No evidence this time regarding his awakened power that nullify."
Arthur said nothing. His jaw clenched as they pushed deeper towards the inner sectors.
The deeper halls of the facility bore signs of retreat—and slaughter.
They found Joseph, the branch head, lying in a crimson trail, his legs severed, fingers curled in a final crawl. The blood had dried in a jagged path behind him whose death is due to severe blood loss. Null had let the man die an agonizing death.
Farther still, they reached the Inner Sectors.
What remained of Nexus-9's briliant scientists lay in tatters—white coats soaked red, their bodies mutilated with clean slashes. Dozens of glass containment tubes lined the walls, now shattered. Fluids spilled across the floor like chemical veins, and the subjects once inside… gone. Dead, from the look of the twisted remains.
"Everything's destroyed," said one of the squad members. "Look there are several containment tubes that had their hatches opened."
Arthur stood silent among the wreckage.
"He let some of the experiments escaped." He spoke in confirmation based on what they observed.
His voice dropped as he spoke again.
"…Null is gone."
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Elsewhere – A Dark Room, Somewhere in the World
In a shadowed room far from the carnage, three figures watched the events unfold via live feed projected in the air. The footage from Arthur's gauntlet played back every detail in stark clarity.
They said nothing.
The slaughter of their awakened individuals who have been trained and funded.
The slaughter of their brilliant scientists who were the backbone of their experiments.
The brutal death of their branch head.
The destruction of decades-worth of research. Billions worth of funding that were given to that branch of Nexus-9 same with their branch in Brazil – gone.
Two branches destroyed, the one who perpetrated all of this is still on the loose. Sooner or later a branch could be attacked again which would be a huge setback to their research.
Power churned in the room. Aether coiled in unseen currents, responding to the fury of its users.
After a long, cold silence, one voice finally broke the stillness.
"Clean up the site. Retrieve anything salvageable. Leave nothing behind."
Arthur's voice echoed back through the secure comm-link.
"Understood, sir."
———–———
Los Angeles, California, USA
In a quiet neighborhood nestled within the sprawl of Los Angeles, the sun began to rise over the horizon, casting soft golden hues against the windows of a modest duplex apartment.
Inside, Ren stirred awake.
His shoulder-length black hair hung in loose, disheveled strands, testament to the deep sleep he'd just emerged from. With a quiet yawn, he sat up, letting the morning silence settle around him. No alarms, no distractions—just habit and discipline guiding his motions.
He made his way to the kitchen. The kettle on the stove began to boil, steam curling up in gentle spirals. Ren retrieved a ceramic mug and a pouch of black tea. As he poured the hot water over the tea bag, the liquid darkened to a deep amber hue, and the rich, earthy aroma began to fill the air—an understated ritual he had come to appreciate since arriving in Los Angeles.
Tea in hand, he stepped out onto the small balcony.
The city stirred below in soft murmurs: early traffic, distant dog barks, the faint hum of urban life waking. Above, the sun was just beginning its slow ascent. Ren took a long sip, the warmth of the drink and the breeze of the morning air grounding him. It had become his quiet ritual. Something about the clarity of dawn and the stillness of the air gave him space to exist without conflict.
After finishing his tea, he returned indoors and began his morning stretches, each motion precise and meditative. Then, as his body loosened and breath steadied, he transitioned into cultivation—guiding his awakened energy, or aether, through the pathways of his body.
Ren was not an ordinary awakened.
Like Jiwoo Seo—whose dual awakened powers of super speed and electrokinesis came from both innate awakening and the force control passed to him by Kaiden Break—Ren was also a dual-type.
But unlike Jiwoo, Ren's second power was something far more obscure—and far more dangerous.
His first awakened ability, a physical-type, came after years of mastering an advanced force control technique that had been given to him long ago. This force control allowed him to channel aether across his entire body—through every muscle, every bone, every organ, and most critically, into his bloodstream. The result was a body that surpassed the natural limits of human strength, speed, and endurance. The aether reinforced his physical form to the level of high-ranking awakened fighters—allowing him to clash with elite opponents on sheer physical prowess alone.
His second awakened power, however, was something else entirely—a psychic-type ability that manifested in childhood.
A power so rare, its existence was unqiue, none of it is recorded in the archives of awakened lore.
Ren called it Causality Distortion.
It was the manipulation of cause and effect—a power that severed or rewrote the natural link between actions and their outcomes within a defined range and set of conditions. It allowed him to survive impossible odds, avoid fatal strikes, and bypass predictive logic in combat. Attacks that should have hit—didn't. Events that should have occurred—simply didn't unfold the way reality dictated.
It was the reason he had emerged unscathed after dismantling two Nexus-9 branches—in Brazil and Austria—organizations feared on the same level as Frame.
In combination with his unmatched physicality, Causality Distortion made Ren not just dangerous.
It made him unpredictable—a living paradox, unbound by the logic his enemies relied on.
As he cultivated the force control bound to this power, aether shimmered invisibly around him.
The feeling was unlike anything. There were no muscles to strain, no breath to steady. Instead, Ren felt as though his mind existed outside the constraints of time. Around him, the flow of possibility bent and warped. Cause no longer directly led to effect. When he focused, he could feel threads of probability, luminous and fragile, like silk caught in sunlight. They danced, twisted, and sometimes snapped at his will.
He felt like he stood at the edge of a vast, unmapped dimension—not of space, but of outcomes. To touch this force was to press a finger against the boundary of destiny and move it.
It wasn't pain or pleasure—it was alien, like speaking in a language older than thought.
And still, Ren guided the force with calm precision, training his will to tame a power that refused to obey natural law.
After nearly an hour of cultivation, Ren rose.
He walked to the bathroom, the tension of the morning melting under a hot shower. After dressing in a crisp black suit, he moved to the kitchen and took a light breakfast—oats, eggs, and sliced avocado, prepared swiftly and consumed without indulgence.
By 8 a.m., Ren had stepped outside.
He entered his black sedan, started the engine, and drove towards Solari Consortium, where he worked as a personal guard to one of the young miss of the prestigious Lancaster Family.