Kai didn't wait for the Vanguards to adjust their sensors.
He fell through the neon-choked sky, his Vanta-Mesh suit silent, a black hole in a city of light. Below him, the three Vanguards hovered on their gold-plated jet-boots, scanning the rooftops for a "thermal ghost." They were looking for heat. Kai wasn't heat; he was the absence of it.
[ULTIMATE READY: BLACKOUT]
[TARGETS LOCKED: 3 VANGUARD OPERATIVES]
"Target lost! Where did the shadow go?" the leader shouted into his comms.
"He's above you," Kai whispered, though his vocal cords didn't move. The suit projected the sound directly into their encrypted frequency, a hollow, scraping noise that made the lead Vanguard's HUD glitch.
Kai slammed into the center of their formation.
"Blackout," Kai hissed.
He didn't hit them with a fist. He hit them with an event horizon. Kai snapped his fingers, and a sphere of absolute, light-eating darkness expanded outward in a three-block radius. It wasn't just "turning off the lights." It was a vacuum of information.
Neon signs died. The glowing visors of the Vanguards went pitch black. Even the sound of the city's rain was swallowed by the silence of the Void.
In the total dark, Kai was the only thing that could "see." His Vanta-Mesh felt the displacement of air, the frantic heartbeat of the heroes, and the heat of their desperate palm-cannons.
"I can't see! My HUD is dead!" one Vanguard screamed. He fired blindly, a bolt of blue energy that traveled three feet before the darkness simply... ate it.
Kai moved like liquid. He appeared behind the first operative.
[TECHNIQUE: VOID-STRAND]
Kai's hand passed through the Vanguard's gold-plated armor as if it were smoke. He didn't draw blood; he drew energy. The jet-boots flickered and died. The "hero" fell into the abyss of the Sub-Levels, his screams muffled by the Null-Void.
"Marcus, we need backup! The ghost is—"
Kai caught the second Vanguard by the throat. The purple-black mist from Kai's fingers began to dissolve the high-tech alloy of the helmet.
"Marcus isn't coming," Kai's hollow voice echoed inside the man's head. "He sent you here to die so he could measure my output. You aren't heroes. You're telemetry."
Kai threw him into the third operative, the impact sending both tumbling through the air. He didn't finish them. He didn't have to. The Blackout was his message to the Board: Neo-Veridia belongs to the shadows now.
As the darkness finally began to recede, Kai was already gone. He was a smudge on the horizon, a ghost in the machine, heading toward the one place the Vanguards feared to go: The Dead Zones.