Su pulled up the collar of his tactical coat and started down the half-collapsed stairwell.
By day, this abandoned air-raid shelter in the Old District looked like nothing more than construction debris the city's renewal plan should have cleared out long ago.
But once night fell and the lights went dark and a cold draft crept in, the whole underground space instantly turned into a real-life Resident Evil set, exhaling an otherworldly chill from every crack.
Water still dripped from the cracks in the concrete overhead.
Drip.
Drip.
The sound was faint, but in the deep tunnel it carried like the background score of a horror game, echoing far longer than it should have.
Su slowed his pace.
He hadn't turned his flashlight up all the way—just enough of a beam to see the path.
Broken planks and rusted sheet metal piled in the corners. Further in, shards of glass began to scatter across the floor, as if someone had knocked over a whole crate of vials in a hurry—every step crunched, the sound carrying far down the tunnel.
He crouched down.
The neck of the ampoule was thin, the cut edge perfectly clean—nothing like the crude, hand-filled vials from the black market. This looked more like standard military issue.
Su reached out and brushed his index finger lightly against the broken glass edge.
A trace of residual liquid stuck to his fingertip.
He raised it to his nose and sniffed.
His expression changed instantly.
The smell tore straight through his memory.
His fingers froze mid-air, his back gradually tensing.
He'd seen this before.
Three years ago, this exact scent had been noted in the appendix of a highly classified destruction list inside Schicksal.
That batch of drugs had been classified as military-grade contraband.
[Asura].
Fatality rate over ninety percent.
Most of those who survived would have their nervous systems burned out within hours, losing all reason and turning into something that recognized no one, not even their own kin.
The stuff had been personally signed off and sealed by Otto at the time, then destroyed entirely afterward.
At least, that was what the files said.
Su slowly stood up.
This was bad.
This wasn't some small-time black-market scheme to jack up prices on a few banned vials.
Military-grade contraband leaking out meant something far more terrifying.
The source of this batch wasn't in this run-down shelter, and it definitely wasn't with those small-time smugglers!
It meant someone inside Schicksal had had the audacity to reach into the sealed vault.
And someone was recklessly selling this lethal stuff outside for profit, without a shred of conscience!
He'd always known Schicksal wasn't a monolith, but seeing this with his own eyes left him unusually grim.
"Stick to the plan," Su ordered the Schicksal agent on the other end of the comm. "Push the gas in through the ventilation shaft. Don't rush in. Once that crowd inside smells it, they'll probably start panicking on their own."
"Understood."
At the other end of the tunnel, several plainclothes agents had already spread out against the walls.
Someone raised a hand and signaled. The blackened, rusted vent pipe overhead trembled slightly, and grayish anesthetic smoke began seeping silently down through the gaps.
At first, everything ahead went quiet.
Then a burst of cursing erupted from deep inside.
Next came the sound of tables and chairs toppling over, a scramble of footsteps, someone coughing hard, and then even fouler cursing.
"Damn it, it's an ambush!"
"Boss, something's in the vent!"
"Forget it, just inject!"
Hearing that last line, Su's heart sank.
Almost at the same moment, a sheet-metal partition ahead was kicked flat.
Several figures burst out of the smoke, moving in ways no longer human—more like monsters whose bones and flesh had been wrenched brutally together.
The man leading the charge still had a syringe dangling from his neck, unremoved. His whole face was flushed and swollen, his eyes bloodshot, capillaries bursting under the skin one after another, staining half his neck a deep purplish red.
His chest heaved violently, as if his lungs were on fire, yet his movements were absurdly fast.
An agent nearby had barely raised a tranquilizer gun before the man charged straight at him.
No dodging.
Just a straight, headlong collision.
Their heads slammed together with a crack of bone that exploded through the tunnel. The agent didn't even have time to grunt before he was flung backward, the back of his skull striking the wall, and he went still on the spot.
Meanwhile, the tranquilizer dart had gone off too.
But the needle only sank a fraction into the frenzied man's muscles, taut and glistening—like trying to hammer a nail into swollen old wood. The drug couldn't be pushed in at all.
"Fall back!"
Someone shouted into the earpiece.
But the space was too cramped—easy to say "fall back," much harder to actually do, like trying to reverse a car through a maze.
Su stepped back, grabbed an agent who nearly got knocked over, and shoved him sideways toward a side passage.
The next instant, the frenzied leader was already right in front of him, a fist swinging so close the wind of it grazed Su's ear before smashing into the wall, spraying rubble across his face.
Su blocked with his elbow; his arm went numb, the shock aching through half his shoulder.
He wasn't like Kevin, who could just barrel through anything with brute force, nor like Su Yu, who turned into an absolute monster the moment a real fight broke out.
His strengths lay in research and healing—close-quarters brawling wasn't his forte. He'd made it this far purely on reflexes and judgment.
But a human being and a beast that felt no pain were simply not the same thing.
Another frenzied man lunged at him. Su sidestepped, but his foot landed in a puddle and his sole slipped slightly.
A fist grazed his glasses in the chaos, cracking the left lens on the spot—a jagged white line now split across his vision.
Someone caught the hem of his coat too, tearing a ragged gash into the fabric.
By the time he backed against the load-bearing wall, he realized he had nowhere left to go.
Three of them in front.
One to the side.
Behind him, cold, damp concrete.
The frenzied men wheezed like broken bellows, chests heaving in and out, their eyes empty of everything but violence.
The man in front raised his fist, veins bulging across the back of his hand, blood from god-knows-who still clinging between his fingers.
The fist drew closer to Su's face.
Leaning against the wall, Su suddenly felt as if all the moisture had been sucked out of the shelter in that instant.
The footsteps, the coughing, the agents' shouts—all of it seemed to recede into the distance.
What came to mind wasn't Otto's cunning old fox of a face, nor the sterile labs, nor the mountains of cold truths.
Instead, it was an ordinary, sweltering afternoon back in college.
The concrete at the edge of the basketball court had cracked and curled from the heat.
Kevin, wearing that ice-cold "don't bother me" expression of his, leapt up in one stride and tore apart the net, which had already been hanging on by a thread.
The onlookers whooped and cheered, but Kevin didn't so much as twitch an eyebrow when he landed—just scowled and spiked the ball onto the ground, annoyed by the noise.
Su Yu was even more ridiculous.
He hadn't even bothered to play, sprawled in the shade by the vending machine like a salted fish that had given up on all its dreams.
Holding an iced cola, he took a sip and complained in that punchable way of his:
"Playing ball's way less fun than sitting in the dorm with the AC on, gaming. It's so damn hot."
"Don't act tough, Old Kev. In a bit you'll be the one begging for a sip of this cold drink."
Back then, Su himself had walked over from the other side of the court, bottled water and a towel in hand, laughing as he cursed at them both.
"You two are more trouble than each other."
The memory froze right there.
The sunlight was blinding, the ground baked pale.
Kevin took the towel and complained the water wasn't cold enough, while Su Yu dramatically pressed the whole bottle against his face, as if it could revive him on the spot.
Leaning against the wall, the corner of Su's mouth slowly twitched.
It was a bitter smile, but with a touch of relief in it.
"Thinking about it, that guy's actually doing pretty well these days."
With the roar of the frenzied man's breath right against his face, Su's mind was, strangely, at peace.
That Su Yu who used to hole up in the dorm, joking about wanting to live off a rich wife, terrified of any kind of trouble—
—had somehow, without anyone noticing, grown into someone who could turn all of Arc City upside down.
He was no longer just the shut-in who ran from everything; he'd truly moved forward.
As a brother, getting to witness that with his own eyes was already more than enough comfort.
"From the moment I joined Schicksal, I knew a day like this would come sooner or later,"
he thought to himself.
"I just didn't expect it to come so soon."
The wind of the incoming punch stung his cheek.
Su slowly closed his eyes.
There was no fear—only the relief of something finally settling into place, and the faintest of sighs.
"What a shame."
"If only I could play one more good game of ball with those two bastards."
The next instant.
BOOM——!!!
Deep at the far end of the shelter, the blast door—rusted solid who knows how many years ago—let out a shriek of tortured metal.
It was blasted clean off its hinges by a force that made absolutely no sense!
The multi-ton door burst free along with its frame, and the entire tunnel shuddered.
Dust, rust, and rubble surged inward as if slapped forward by some giant hand.
The frenzied man in front didn't even have time to react before the flying door slammed into him and sent him flying.
Someone walked in through the swirling dust.
Kevin.
His expression barely changed, as if he'd simply kicked open a stubborn old door at home.
Light from behind stretched his shadow long across the wreckage.
A frenzied man lunged at him with a roar, moving so fast he left afterimages.
Kevin didn't even lift an eyelid.
He simply reached out and caught the incoming fist without so much as flinching.
Then his five fingers closed, merciless.
"Crack."
That was the sound of bone being crushed outright.
Leaning against the wall, Su felt his scalp prickle at the sound.
Before the man could even scream, Kevin closed the distance in a single step and drove a hip-powered side kick into his ribs so hard it broke the sound barrier.
The man was sent flying outright.
That's not a figure of speech—he was literally flying through the air.
Like being hit head-on by a high-speed train, his body arced through the air before slamming into the concrete wall with a thunderous crash.
Spiderweb cracks spread across the wall, rubble clattering down. The monster's limbs still twitched, but his chest had already caved in badly.
The two remaining frenzied men clearly froze.
Not just them.
Even Su was stunned.
Before he could recover from the sight, the air beside him rippled like water.
Space itself tore open under some unknown force.
The next moment, Su Yu stepped out of the rift, one hand in his pocket, waving the other in front of his face, annoyed by all the dust in the wretched place.
"Tch."
He glanced at the shattered door on the ground, then at Kevin, who was stretching his wrist, his tone dripping with disdain.
"Kevin, that's a hell of an entrance. You think you're the demolition crew? Someone's gonna have to sweep all this dust up later."
Su looked up, staring at the same jerk who'd been bickering with him in the office not long ago, and his brain simply shut down.
But a beast was still a beast, and cornered animals always struck back.
The biggest of the frenzied men on the left, his walnut-sized brain apparently making a fatal miscalculation, decided that Su Yu—hand in pocket, not a muscle showing—was easy prey.
With a hoarse, explosive roar, he stomped through the puddled water, bared his blood-stinking claws, and lunged at Su Yu's blind spot, aiming straight for the back of his head!
"Watch out!" Su's pupils shrank, his heart leaping into his throat as he opened his mouth to warn him.
But—
Su Yu didn't even turn his head.
He slowly drew the hand out of his trouser pocket.
Barely bending at the waist, not even sparing a glance.
Like swatting away an annoying fly buzzing around a summer trash can, he swung his hand back in a wide, unadorned slap.
"SMACK——!!!"
The slap rang out so crisp and loud it seemed it would echo through the shelter for days, and Su's eardrums buzzed from the shock of it.
The frenzied man, his muscles bulging like steel cables, had his face warped grotesquely by the slap in midair, the scream knocked right back down his throat.
His body spun a full seven hundred twenty degrees in midair like a top, then crashed into a distant pile of scrap metal with a thunderous crash, like a baseball sent flying by a home run.
After a few dull clangs, the creature twitched twice, rolled its eyes back, and went completely still.
Dead silence fell over the scene.
The last remaining frenzied man looked at his comrade stuck in the wall, then at the one flattened into the scrap heap.
Even robbed of reason, some pitiful shred of survival instinct in this creature's brain finally won out over the drug.
It obediently backed against the wall and, almost pitifully, hugged its own head.
What the hell—who's the real monster here, me or you?!
Su Yu, looking disgusted, pulled a wet wipe from his pocket and cleaned his hands.
Then he turned his head and glanced at Su.
Su looked an absolute mess right now.
His coat was in tatters, his cuffs and shoulder smeared with filthy mud, a streak of grime scraped clean across his face.
But Su Yu, looking at him, wore an expression of warm, grandfatherly kindness so saccharine it made Su's scalp crawl.
Like a father who'd finally caught his unfilial son sneaking off to an all-night internet café behind his back.
"Well, well, if it isn't the great expert Su."
Su Yu eyed him teasingly.
"Sneaking off in the middle of the night, all by yourself, without telling the rest of us... What game were you playing behind our backs, hm?"
Su opened his mouth, dazed.
His throat tightened, and his eyes stung with unbidden heat.
But the embarrassing warmth had barely risen before he stubbornly forced it back down, too proud to let it show.
Ahead lay a scene of devastation.
Behind him, the cold, damp load-bearing wall.
Beside him, the miserable monsters and the shattered remains of the door.
But standing there, looking at the two tall backs before him, Su suddenly wasn't so afraid anymore.
It felt like that dizzying, sweltering afternoon from years ago had never really ended.
Only the shabby basketball court had become a dim air-raid shelter.
The bottled water and towel had become reckless fists and torn space.
And the three of them, just like before, had come together without a word.
____
Gift for Everyone: Once we hit 50 Powerstones, I'll release +1 bonus chapter
________________________________________
If you want more chapters, please consider supporting my page on (P). with 50 advanced chapters available on (P)
👻 Join the crew by searching Leanzin on (P). You know the spot! 😉