"I've never seen that," Commander Bhola said, his voice a low whisper as he stared at the ceramic shard in Veer's palm. He made no move to touch it, as if it were a venomous insect. "But… there's a place. An old railway yard, a few klicks north of the main ruins. We don't go there. Never have. Even before the Fall, it had a bad reputation. Now… it's worse. The air is dead. The birds don't sing. It feels… wrong."
It was the only lead he had. That night, under a moonless sky that felt like a conspirator, Veer moved. He didn't take a transport. He went on foot, a shadow among shadows, his movements silent and fluid. The kinetic energy within him was banked, a coiled spring, not a roaring fire. He was the hunter now, not the soldier.
The railway yard was a graveyard of iron giants. Skeletons of trains lay rusting on their tracks, their windows like sightless eyes. Weeds grew thick through the gravel, and the silence was indeed absolute, a suffocating blanket that smothered even the sound of his own breathing. It was the silence from the hut's doorway, magnified a thousandfold.
He used his senses, not his eyes, navigating by the subtle vibrations of the earth, the faint pressure of the air. And then he heard it—the one anomaly in the dead zone. A stifled gasp, the scuff of a boot on gravel, the rustle of cloth.
He ghosted around the corroded hull of a freight car and saw them. Three figures, clad in drab, non-descript clothing that blended into the gloom, moved with a chilling efficiency. They had a young man cornered against a stack of railway ties. The man's hands were bound, a hood was being forced over his head, but one of his palms glowed with a faint, terrified, golden light. A low-tier light-bearer.
The leader of the group, a man with a sharp, vulpine face and the calm posture of a businessman, checked a device on his wrist. "The pickup is in ten. Let's move."
Veer didn't announce himself. He simply stepped out of the shadows. "Let him go."
The three whirled around. The leader, whom Veer would later know as Rohan, showed no fear, only a flicker of profound annoyance. He had no aura. He was a non-Awakened. "Walk away, kid," he said, his voice flat. "This doesn't concern you. You're out of your depth."
"It concerns me now," Veer said, kinetic energy flaring around his fists, casting a faint, shimmering light in the oppressive dark. "Let. Him. Go."
Rohan smirked, a cold, empty expression. "Or what? You'll break something? Your kind always does. Go ahead. We're just hired help. The product is what's valuable." He gestured dismissively at the terrified captive.
The word 'product' was the final trigger. Veer moved.
It wasn't a fight; it was a brutal, efficient suppression. He didn't unleash a wave of force. He became one. He sidestepped a lunge from the thug on the left, redirecting the man's own momentum and adding a sharp, kinetic pulse. The man flew backwards as if yanked by a wire, crashing into the side of a freight car with a deafening boom of shattered rust and bent metal. The second thug came in with a knife. Veer didn't block it; he let the blade come, absorbing the kinetic energy of the thrust into his palm before releasing it back into the man's wrist. The sound of the bone snapping was like a dry twig. The man screamed, clutching his ruined arm.
In three seconds, it was over. The two thugs were down. Only Rohan remained, Veer's hand now clamped like a vice around his forearm.
"Who are you?" Veer snarled, his face inches from Rohan's.
The man winced but his eyes remained defiant, devoid of any moral light. "We're the Pale Syndicate. We're suppliers. We find the product, we get paid. That's the beginning and end of our involvement."
"Product? They're people!" Veer shook him, his rage barely contained.
"Are they?" Rohan spat, his composure cracking into sheer nihilism. "In this world? They're assets. Resources. And our buyer pays exceptionally well in energy cores, medicine, and high-grade supplies. Things that actually keep people alive. We're survivors. We've simply found the most efficient market."
"Who is the buyer?" Veer demanded, his voice dropping to a deadly whisper.
"I don't know! A voice on a encrypted comm channel. A designated drop point that changes every time. They're careful. Ghosts. They call themselves Eternal Night." The name dropped into the silence like a stone into a bottomless well. "Now, are you going to kill me? Or do you plan on staring in judgment all night? We do what we must to survive. You, in your guild fortress with your fancy powers, you have no idea what that really means."
Veer looked from Rohan's morally vacant face to the terrified, sobbing light-bearer they had been about to ship off to an unknown fate. He saw the entire, hideous supply chain laid bare: the desperate, the opportunistic, and the utterly monstrous, all connected by a name that promised endless dark. Eternal Night.
He didn't kill Rohan. The man was a symptom, not the disease. A sharp, precise kinetic tap to the temple rendered him unconscious. Veer freed the light-bearer, sending him stumbling back towards the outpost with a terse message for Bhola. As the young man's frantic footsteps faded, Veer stood alone in the silent railway yard, the cold of the ceramic shard in his pocket seeming to seep into his very bones. The storm inside him had quieted, replaced by a cold, hard, and absolute certainty. He had found the enemy. And the enemy was a system, a philosophy, a cancer. And it had a name.