Location: Muchachos Restaurant — Back Room — Night
The silence was a living thing.
It coiled around the tables, the crates, the glassy-eyed men and women who had stopped pretending to work. It pressed against the walls, the ceiling, the fluorescent lights that buzzed overhead. And at the center of it all, Diego stood with his hands at his sides, his soft face calm, his wide eyes innocent.
Valeria's chest heaved.
Her fists were still raised, but her knuckles were white. Her breath came in short, ragged gasps. She had thrown six punches. Six times, her fists had passed through empty air. Six times, the dishwasher had moved like smoke.
"How?" she whispered.
Diego didn't answer.
His eyes were half-closed. Not from fatigue. From something else.
---
Through his perception, the room transformed.
The workers were no longer faces. They were auras. Waves of color that pulsed and shifted with every heartbeat, every breath, every flicker of emotion. Surprise burned yellow around the edges of the crowd. Shock flared white-hot from the men who had called him pendejo. Confusion bled green from Lucia's frozen face.
And above it all, Kokoro drifted.
Not smoke. Not mist. Something thinner. Something that moved like heat shimmer over summer asphalt, but colder. It rose from the workers—from their disbelief, their awe, their sudden, unexpected fear—and flowed toward Diego.
It entered him through his chest. Through his lungs. Through the spaces between his ribs.
Shinsei, he called it. The sacred breath. The current that carried Kokoro into his flesh. It didn't burn like aetherflux. It didn't crackle like the conflux that Lucian's rings devoured.
It filled.
His skin prickled. His muscles loosened. His spine straightened. The impurities that had clung to him since the Freakshow, since the Morrecca, since the long nights of dishwashing and fake smiles—they were being pushed out. Not expelled. Replaced.
Tenryu stirred within him.
The vessel. The core. The thing that held it all together.
One unit of Tenryu was worth a hundred units of aetherflux conflux. The difference between a candle and a bonfire.
And right now, surrounded by the shock of a room full of criminals, he was drinking from a bonfire.
---
Valeria attacked again.
Her leg swept low—a kick aimed at Diego's knee. The motion was not fast. It was inevitable. Her body had learned this move in the jungles of Coprendes, in the training pits of the Maylay Bureau, in the dark places where supersoldiers were forged.
Diego's foot lifted.
Not high. Just enough. Her leg passed beneath his heel.
She spun. Her other leg came around—a hook kick aimed at his ribs.
Diego's body swayed.
Not backward. To the side. The kick passed through the space where his stomach had been.
"Stand still!"
"No."
She punched.
He wasn't there.
She punched again.
He was somewhere else.
"How are you doing this?"
Her fists were blurs. Her feet were blurs. Her whole body was a weapon, and every strike was meant to kill.
But Diego moved like he had already seen the attack before she threw it.
Kokoro, the workers would later whisper. He sees the future.
But it wasn't the future.
It was the present, stretched thin. The emotion in the room—the shock, the awe, the fear—it fed him. It sharpened his perception. It made the space between thought and action disappear.
He didn't decide to dodge.
He just did.
---
Valeria's fist stopped an inch from his nose.
Not because she wanted it to. Because she couldn't throw it. Her arm was trembling. Her shoulder was burning. Her breath was gone.
"How is this possible?"
Her voice was raw.
"Even back at the Maylay Bureau, I was among the brightest. The strongest. The fastest."
She lowered her fist.
"How are you more profound than me?"
Her eyes searched his face—the soft features, the wide eyes, the gentle mouth.
"Who are you?"
Diego's head tilted.
"I was moulded by a Cazador. A hunter. A master of the multidisciplinary arts. The kind of operative that governments keep in their back pockets for emergencies."
The workers exchanged glances.
"A Cazador," one of them whispered. "Those are the cream of the crop. The top of the top. The ones who train the supersoldiers."
"I've heard of them. They're legends."
"No wonder he's so..."
The word died in his throat.
Diego's expression didn't change.
In the outside world, he thought, a Cazador is a god. A figure of myth. The kind of operative that intelligence agencies dream of recruiting.
But in the Mysterium clan—the behemoth with its global footprint, its claws in every government, its hands in every shadow—they are cabbages.
Expendable.
Replaceable.
I was barely a teenager during the Epsilon program, and I was already at their level.
They are nothing.
Nothing at all.
---
Valeria's fist came again.
Slow. Tired. Desperate.
Diego's hand moved.
His fingers closed around her wrist. The same grip he had used on Ba. The same pressure. The same precision.
He squeezed.
Her fingers went numb.
He twisted.
Her arm bent.
He pulled.
She stumbled forward, off-balance, her shoulder dipping toward the floor.
He held her there.
Not hard. Just... final.
"Unhand her!"
Mariela's voice cracked across the room.
Diego's head turned.
His eyes—wide, brown, innocent—met hers.
"Your man?"
He pulled Valeria's arm higher.
She gasped.
"Well, I'm his pappy. That means you're my baby. So why don't you bow your head to me? Like he is."
He forced Valeria's head down.
Her chin touched her chest.
Mariela's face contorted.
"You shameless—"
"You need to chill," Diego said.
His eyes found Lucia.
"Or your grandpappy will make you submit."
Lucia's face flushed crimson.
Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
No sound came out.
---
The workers watched.
Their eyes were wide. Their mouths were open. Their breath was held.
"Did you see that?"
"See what?"
"The way he moved. I couldn't keep up with it."
"Neither could I. It was like he knew where she was going to punch before she knew herself."
"What kind of monster trained him?"
"A Cazador, he said."
"No. Something worse. Something... other."
"What do you mean?"
"Look at him. He's not even breathing hard."
They stared at Diego.
He was standing in the center of the room, Valeria's wrist still in his grip, her head still bowed. His chest was still. His face was calm. His eyes were moving—not quickly, not slowly—across the crowd.
"He's not human," someone whispered.
"He's not," another agreed.
"He's something else."
---
At the edge of the room, a figure stirred.
He had been sitting on a crate near the wall, a plate of tacos balanced on his knee. His face was hidden behind the hood of a dark jacket. His hands were covered in gloves. His posture was relaxed, almost lazy.
He was eating.
The tacos were good. He had been enjoying them.
Then Diego had started moving.
The figure's fork stopped halfway to his mouth.
His eyes—dark, sharp, ancient—lifted from his plate.
He watched.
Diego's head turned.
Not toward the figure. At the figure.
Their eyes met.
The figure's lips curled.
Not a smile. The beginning of one.
He set his fork down.
---
Diego's perception flickered.
The thermal signature was wrong. Not cold. Not hot. Dense. The kind of density that came from training, from conditioning, from years of pushing the human body past its limits.
Vein frame, he thought. Every turf faction has one. Someone who guards the corridors. Someone who answers to the families.
This one is different.
The rings on Lucian's arm were dark metal, hungry, carved with glyphs that drank panic.
This man's Vein frame is something else.
The markings were not carved. They were burned. Dark lines that wrapped around his forearms, his wrists, his fingers—like tattoos, but deeper. They pulsed with a light that was not orange, not blue, not red.
Silver, Diego thought. The color of moonlight.
The frequency spectrum of the moon itself.
Carved by something powerful. Something lower than the saints but higher than men.
Aerva. A deva of the beast bloodline.
The markings on his arms are the proof.
This is not a copy. Not a counterfeit. Not a mass-produced imitation like the rings.
This is the real thing.
The figure raised his hand.
His fingers curled.
Then he went back to eating.
---
Diego released Valeria.
She stumbled backward, caught herself on a crate, and slid to the floor. Her breath came in wet, ragged gasps. Her wrist was already swelling.
Mariela rushed to her side.
"Are you okay? Are you—"
"Don't touch me."
Valeria's voice was sharp.
"Don't."
She pushed herself to her feet.
Her eyes found Diego.
"This isn't over."
"It is for now," Diego said.
He turned.
He walked back toward Ba.
His footsteps were soft on the concrete.
No one spoke.
No one moved.
The haze drifted.
And in the corner, the figure with the moon-marked arms picked up his fork and took another bite of his taco.
---