Something was wrong with Nana.
Zayne noticed it three days after that night in her frost-covered apartment. The way she smiled had changed—still there, still present, but hollow. Like a painting of a smile rather than the real thing.
She still showed up at the hospital. Still bounced through the doors with that familiar energy, still reached into his breast pocket for the strawberry candy he kept waiting for her.
But the bounce was slower now. The reach was less enthusiastic. And the candy sat in her mouth without the little hum of contentment she always made.
"How are you doing?" he asked during one of her visits, watching her carefully as she unwrapped the candy.
"Fine," she said. The word came out flat. Rehearsed.
"Nana."
"I'm fine, Zayne. Really."
She wasn't fine. And they both knew it.
By Thursday, Zayne couldn't take it anymore.
His shift ended at 6 PM—early for once, because the ER had been unusually quiet. He didn't go home. Didn't stop to pick up groceries or check his emails or do any of the normal post-shift routines.
He drove straight to the Hunter Association headquarters.
The building was large and imposing—all reinforced concrete and security checkpoints designed to house some of the most dangerous people in the country. Zayne had visited before, usually to pick Nana up after missions. The security team knew him by now. Waved him through with knowing smiles and the occasional comment about how lucky he was.
He found her in the main waiting area.
Nana was sitting alone on one of the metal benches that lined the corridor outside the briefing rooms. Her hunter gear was on—boots, jacket, twin guns holstered at her sides—but she wasn't suited up for a mission. She was just... sitting there. Waiting for something. Or maybe waiting for nothing at all.
Around her, other hunters moved through the space. Talking, laughing, planning missions in small groups. Normal activity for a Thursday evening.
But none of them were sitting with Nana.
Zayne had noticed this before—the way hunters avoided her in recent weeks. Not aggressively, not with malice. More like quiet discomfort. The kind of distance people kept from someone they didn't know how to talk to anymore.
Because everyone knew Nana had been having episodes. Everyone had heard the whispers about mental breakdowns and therapy recommendations and the S-class hunter who'd started talking about portals to other dimensions.
They didn't avoid her out of cruelty.
They avoided her because they didn't know what to say.
Zayne's chest tightened at the sight. His brilliant, fierce, impossible girlfriend—the strongest hunter in Linkon—sitting alone on a bench with untied shoelaces and a bruise on her chin that she probably hadn't even noticed getting.
He crossed the space quietly and crouched down in front of her.
Nana looked up, and for a moment surprise flickered across her face before she schooled it back into that hollow expression. "Hey. What are you doing here? Your shift—"
"Ended early." He didn't look at her face yet. His attention was on her feet, where one shoelace had come undone and was dragging slightly on the ground. "Hold still."
He reached for the lace and began tying it—carefully, methodically, the way he did everything. Making sure it was secure enough to hold during a fight but not so tight it would cut off circulation.
Then he shifted his attention to the bruise on her chin. Small. Recent. She'd gotten hit during a mission, probably, and hadn't bothered to report it.
He examined it gently with his fingertips, turning her face toward the overhead light to check the discoloration. Minor. No fracture. Just impact damage.
"You didn't report this," he said quietly.
"It's nothing."
"It's not nothing if you didn't report it."
She looked away. And then, because Zayne was holding her hands and looking at her with those hazel eyes that saw too much, she couldn't keep the silence anymore.
"I found a hidden camera," she said.
The words came out small. Tentative. Like she was expecting him to flinch, to pull away, to give her that look she'd been dreading.
Zayne didn't flinch. "Where?"
"Last week. During my solo patrol in the outskirts forest. The one near the hiking trails." Nana's fingers tightened around his. "It was hidden in the branches. Professional equipment—not a regular security camera. The kind used for military surveillance. Pointed directly at where I was fighting Wanderers."
"And you took photos."
"Yes. Before I could think too much about it. I took photos from multiple angles." She paused, swallowing hard. "But I didn't tell you right away. Because..."
"Because you were afraid I'd think you made it up."
The accuracy of it made her wince. "Who puts a camera in the middle of a forest, Zayne? It sounds insane. Everything about my life sounds insane right now and I just..." Her voice wavered. "I'm tired of being the person who sees things nobody else believes."
Zayne was quiet for a moment. Then he stood, pulling her up with him. "Show me."
"What?"
"The forest. Take me there. Show me exactly where you found it."
"Zayne, it might not even be there anymore—"
"Then we'll see that too. Come on." He held out his car keys. "You drive. I want to see everything."
The drive to the outskirts forest took forty minutes. Nana navigated Zayne's sedan with the same casual confidence she brought to everything—slightly too fast on the turns, too comfortable in the driver's seat for someone who usually rode a motorcycle.
She didn't talk much during the drive. Just gripped the steering wheel and stared at the road, occasionally glancing at Zayne like she was checking whether he'd changed his mind about coming.
He hadn't. He sat in the passenger seat with his arms crossed, his expression calm and focused. Thinking mode. Doctor-investigating-a-case mode.
They parked at the forest edge where Nana had left her motorcycle last week. The same trail. The same dense canopy that blocked the sun. The same eerie quiet that had unsettled her before.
"It was right here," Nana said, leading him down the path. "About two hundred meters in. Near the cluster of fallen trees where I fought the low-level Wanderers."
She walked with purpose, her hunter instincts on high alert despite the familiar territory. Zayne followed close behind, his eyes scanning the trees with an intensity that surprised her.
They reached the spot.
Nana stopped and pointed to the specific branch where she'd found the camera. The one angled to capture a perfect view of the fighting area below.
The branch was bare.
No camera. No mounting hardware. No sign that anything had ever been attached there at all.
Nana's stomach dropped. She stepped closer, examining the branch carefully. The bark was smooth, undamaged. No scratches from mounting equipment. No residue from adhesive or clamps.
It was like the camera had never existed.
"It was here," she said, her voice tight. "Right here. Exactly this branch. I took photos—I can show you—"
She turned to look at Zayne and found his expression completely neutral. That carefully controlled doctor's face that gave nothing away.
The sight of it made something crack inside her chest. Not again. Please, not the look. Not the concerned professional assessment that said he was evaluating her mental state rather than believing what she was telling him.
"Zayne, I really saw it. It was really there. I have the photos, I—"
"Show me the photos," he said simply.
Nana pulled out her phone with shaking hands and opened her camera roll. There—the photos she'd taken last week. Multiple angles of the camera nestled in the branches, its lens pointed downward. Clear, detailed, undeniable.
Zayne took the phone and studied each photo carefully. His neutral expression shifted—first surprise, then something sharper. Recognition of what he was looking at.
"This isn't a standard security camera," he said, zooming in on one of the images. "This is military-grade surveillance equipment. The housing alone costs more than most people's cars."
"I know," Nana said. "I know what it is. That's why I—"
"And it's pointed exactly at the coordinates where you were fighting." Zayne swiped between photos, comparing angles. "Someone knew you'd be here. Knew exactly where you'd fight and when."
"Yes."
He handed the phone back, his jaw tight. "You said it was here when you took these photos."
"Yes. And now it's gone. Vanished. Like it was never here."
Zayne studied the branch again, then the surrounding trees, then the ground below. His analytical mind was working—she could see it in the way his eyes moved, cataloguing details, forming hypotheses.
"Whoever installed this removed it after you photographed it," he said. "Which means they knew you'd seen it. They were monitoring whether you'd noticed."
"They were watching me watch them watching me."
"Yes."
The implications settled over them like a cold fog. Someone had known Nana would be in that specific location. Had set up surveillance to observe her. And had removed the evidence the moment she'd discovered it.
"Come on," Nana said, grabbing his hand. "There's more."
She pulled him deeper into the forest. Not back toward the trails—deeper, past the areas where civilian hikers ever ventured. Into the dense, ancient part where the trees grew so close together that sunlight barely filtered through.
Nana moved on instinct here, following a feeling she couldn't quite explain. Something about this forest had always been wrong. Even before Avalon. Even before the portal. A persistent sense of being watched that she'd dismissed as hunter paranoia.
"Nana, how deep are we going?" Zayne asked after ten minutes of walking through increasingly dense undergrowth.
"I don't know. I just..." She paused, scanning the canopy. "Something feels off. This whole area feels monitored."
Zayne opened his mouth—probably to suggest they turn back—when he stopped.
"There," he said.
Nana followed his gaze to a tree about thirty meters ahead. At first she saw nothing unusual. Just bark and branches and leaves.
Then she saw it. A tiny lens, barely visible, camouflaged to match the tree's surface perfectly. If Zayne hadn't been looking specifically for surveillance equipment, neither of them would have noticed it.
They approached carefully, not touching it. Zayne pulled out his phone and photographed it from multiple angles—mirroring what Nana had done last week.
"Same type," he confirmed quietly. "Military grade. Professional installation. This one's still active—see the indicator light? It's almost invisible, but it's there."
Nana felt ice crawl up her spine that had nothing to do with Zayne's evol.
"How many do you think there are?" she whispered.
Zayne didn't answer immediately. He was already moving, his eyes scanning the surrounding trees with new urgency. Nana watched as he found another one. Then another. Each one hidden with increasing sophistication—tucked into hollows, disguised as natural growths, positioned at angles that created overlapping fields of coverage.
"At least six in this immediate area," he said, his voice carefully controlled but his ears slightly pale—the way they got when he was genuinely unsettled rather than simply flustered. "Possibly more. This is a comprehensive surveillance network, Nana. Someone has been monitoring this entire section of the forest."
They looked at each other in the dappled half-light, surrounded by trees that were watching them back.
"What kind of world do we live in," Nana said quietly, "where someone builds a surveillance network this sophisticated in the middle of a forest? What are they watching for?"
Zayne's hazel eyes met hers, and she saw something shift in them. The doctor who studied evidence. The man who'd promised to believe her. The boyfriend who'd held her through a breakdown and covered her bedroom in frost.
All of those people were processing the same information at the same time.
"Not what," he said slowly. "Who."
Before Nana could respond, her hunter watch beeped.
The sharp, urgent tone cut through the quiet like a blade. Both of them tensed immediately—Nana's hand dropping to her holster, every hunter instinct she had snapping to high alert.
"Wanderers," she said, reading the warning on her watch display. "Close. Moving fast."
She drew both guns in one fluid motion—one in each hand, the hunter's dual-wield stance that she'd perfected over years of training and months of survival in Avalon.
Zayne stepped back, giving her space. He'd seen her fight before, but watching it up close—really watching, without the chaos of a larger battle to distract from the details—was something different entirely.
Nana moved like water. Like something that had been engineered for exactly this purpose. Two Wanderers emerged from the undergrowth—medium-sized, faster than the ones she'd encountered last week—and she was already firing before they'd fully materialized.
First shot. Clean hit. The Wanderer dissolved mid-stride.
Second shot. The other creature dodged—barely—and Nana adjusted her aim in the same breath, her body compensating for the movement before her conscious mind had fully registered it.
Third shot. Direct hit. Dissolution.
Four seconds. Two Wanderers. Both eliminated with surgical precision.
A third creature appeared from behind a tree. Nana didn't even look—just adjusted her left gun by feel and fired. Another clean hit.
Total time: six seconds. Three Wanderers. Not a single wasted movement.
Zayne watched, utterly still, his medical mind cataloguing every detail.
The speed of her reactions. The impossible accuracy of her aim—dual-wielding, moving targets, adjusting without conscious calculation. The way her aether core pulsed with each shot, visible as a faint blue glow beneath her skin that no normal hunter exhibited.
The way she fought like a machine. Efficient. Deadly. Inhuman in its perfection.
He was a cardiologist. He understood the human body better than almost anyone. And what Nana was doing right now was not something a human body should be capable of.
Her aether core. The energy source at the center of her chest that powered her abilities. Every hunter had some form of evol—latent abilities that could be awakened and trained. But the aether core was different. Zayne had read about it in medical literature—theoretical papers mostly, speculative research.
He'd never seen one in person before Nana.
And he was starting to understand that maybe he never would again. Because the more he watched her fight, the more convinced he became that what Nana had wasn't natural.
It was engineered.
The thought settled into his mind with the quiet certainty of a diagnosis confirmed by lab results.
Nana holstered her guns and turned back to him, barely out of breath, not a hair out of place. "All clear. Sorry about that—forest Wanderers can be territorial."
"You're incredible," Zayne said, and meant it entirely.
"Thanks." A ghost of her real smile flickered across her face. "Did I scare you?"
"Terrified," he admitted honestly. "But not because of the Wanderers."
She tilted her head. "Then what?"
Zayne looked at her—really looked—at the woman who could kill three creatures in six seconds while dual-wielding guns that were almost as big as she was. The woman whose aether core glowed with energy that shouldn't exist in a normal human. The woman who had survived nine months in a death realm and come back stronger than anything the Hunter Association had ever produced.
"I want to study your aether core," he said quietly.
Nana blinked. "What?"
"Medically. Scientifically. With your full consent and complete transparency about what we find." He held her gaze steadily. "You're the only person I've ever encountered with that kind of power source. The way it responds—to your emotions, to combat, to me. It's not standard. It's not normal hunter evol development."
Something flickered in Nana's expression. Not offense. Not suspicion. Something more complicated—a recognition that maybe she'd been asking herself the same question for a long time.
"You think something is different about me," she said. Not a question.
"I think something is very different about you. And I think figuring out what—and why—might be connected to everything else. To Avalon. To the surveillance. To whatever is happening in this forest."
Nana looked down at her hands. The hands that had kicked Wanderers and wielded guns and held Zayne through deaths and rebirths and impossible circumstances.
"Okay," she said simply. "Let's figure it out."
They walked back through the forest together, hand in hand, the surveillance cameras watching them from every direction.
Neither of them looked up at the cameras as they passed. But both of them knew they were there.
And both of them felt the weight of unseen eyes following their every step back to the car, back to the road, back to the city where normal life waited for them like a costume they weren't sure fit anymore.
The drive home was quiet. Not the comfortable silence of two people who didn't need to fill the space. The tense quiet of two people processing the same disturbing conclusion.
Someone was watching Nana. Had been watching her. In the forest. Possibly elsewhere.
Someone knew about her aether core. About what made her different.
And Zayne was starting to suspect that whoever that someone was, they hadn't just been watching.
They'd been waiting.
.
.
.
.
.
To be continued.