Chapter 95: "Koala Fists, Dream Eaters, and the Boy Who Woke Wrong"
Volume 5 – Exodus
Guardians of Destiny Society – Headquarters No. 4, United States
The briefing hall smelled of recycled air, gun oil, and the faint ozone that always clung to newly bonded Glimmers. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead like they were trying not to listen.
Sergeant Dilles—now Commander Dilles—stood at the front of the room with his boots planted wide and his voice already rising. The former military man had the kind of face that looked like it had been carved out of leftover concrete and then left out in the rain. His superpower sat quiet behind his eyes: the ability to step into another mind the way most people stepped into a room. He rarely used it in front of recruits. He preferred shouting first.
"Listen up, you half-trained disasters!" Dilles barked. "Kruger National Park is under active invasion. The black-glass veil is thinning. Nathan Moya and the primary strike groups are inside. We are not here to look pretty. We are here to keep the All-Tree from catching fire. If any of you think this is still training, get out now before I throw you out."
A small figure stepped forward from the second row.
She was ten years old. Short dark hair, oversized tactical jacket that almost reached her knees, and the stubborn set of shoulders that said she had already decided the universe would have to move around her. The other recruits shifted. Someone muttered.
Cody Diamond, eighteen and already wearing the smirk of someone who had never been punched hard enough, leaned over.
"Aww, they let the kindergarten class in. You lost, little girl? Want me to call your mommy?"
The girl looked up at him without blinking.
Then her body folded inward with a soft, wet crack of reshaping bone and muscle. Fur exploded across her skin in a rush of grey and white. In less than two seconds she was no longer a child in a jacket. She was a compact, furious koala with oversized claws and eyes that still held human intelligence.
She launched.
The koala fist—more like a dense, furry wrecking ball—caught Cody square in the chest. The sound was a satisfying whump. Cody flew backward over two rows of chairs and hit the floor hard enough to knock the air out of him.
Silence held for half a heartbeat.
Then the room erupted in laughter.
Dynamitas, a lanky recruit with faint scorch marks already permanently etched into the sleeves of his uniform, hurried over and offered Cody a hand.
"You okay, bro?"
Cody slapped the hand away, face red with more than just impact.
"Fuck off, loser."
Tiger Fang stepped into the space between them before the argument could grow teeth. His Glimmer Manifestation had given him a literal inner tiger; the result was a permanent tiger-like mask of bone and striped fur that covered the upper half of his face. Only his human mouth and jaw remained visible. When he spoke, the sound carried a low sub-vocal growl that made the fillings of nearby teeth ache.
"Stand in position," Tiger Fang said. "Kruger National Park has been invaded. We need to go and assist our Leader Nathan Moya so—"
The intercom crackled.
Red Pigeon's voice cut through, cheerful and slightly manic, the way only helicopter pilots who regularly flew into things that should not exist could sound.
"—so we need to bypass the veil. That's where I come in. My bird is powered by concentrated anti-veil energy. It'll punch a temporary hole big enough for the whole unit. But the main goal—"
Tiger Fang and Red Pigeon finished the sentence in perfect unison, voices overlapping across the room and the intercom:
"—find the gate to Purgatory."
Commander Dilles folded his arms. The concrete-carved face almost smiled.
"And that is where I come in. Former military. Current headache. My power lets me walk into minds. Once we're through the hole, I will locate every friendly still breathing inside that park and every hostile that needs removing. You will follow the map I put in your heads. You will not improvise. You will not become a story about how bravely you died. Clear?"
A chorus of "Yes, Commander" rolled through the hall. Even Cody Diamond, still rubbing his chest, muttered it.
Outside the reinforced windows, Red Pigeon's helicopter waited on the pad. Faint runes of anti-veil energy glowed along its rotors like blue veins. The machine hummed with the promise of punching a temporary wound in reality itself.
The recruits began moving.
Somewhere far away, the All-Tree trembled on a branch no one liked to look at for long.
Kruger National Park – Thinning Veil
The black-glass dome pulsed slower now, cracks spreading like patient lightning. Golden light and absolute darkness warred across the sky in silence.
In a dry riverbed littered with the remains of earlier fights, Jabari the Gambler adjusted the glowing dice that orbited his wrists. Each die was carved from something that had once been alive and still resented the fact. Opposite him stood Girho the Giraffe—eight meters of elongated nightmare, neck too long, eyes too knowing, hooves that left smoking prints in the dirt.
Jabari grinned, all teeth and bad decisions.
"Double or nothing on who walks away, long-neck?"
Girho's voice came out like grinding tectonic plates.
"I do not gamble with insects."
Jabari flicked one die into the air. It spun, trailing probability like smoke.
"Then I'll just take everything."
The die landed. Reality hiccupped. Girho's next step landed on ground that was suddenly three meters lower than it should have been. The giraffe stumbled. Jabari was already moving, dice multiplying mid-air into a storm of weighted chances. One die forced Girho's long neck to twist at an angle that should have snapped vertebrae. Another turned the sand under the giraffe's hooves into frictionless glass for exactly 1.7 seconds.
Girho roared and swept its neck like a living crane. The air cracked. Jabari rolled under the strike, laughing, already calculating the next impossible odds.
On a high ridge, Bennett the Baku watched through binoculars, expression unreadable. Further out, Bane Mugabe's mecha drones continued their slow, methodical sweep, optics hunting for the unique signature that belonged only to Hades.
The park was no longer just a battlefield.
It was becoming a crossroads.
Willowbrook High – Aftermath Courtyard
The golden statue of Poison still stood where Khaos had set it down, catching the strange light. Most of the students and remaining Guardians had withdrawn to safer perimeters. The air smelled of spent gunpowder, feathers, and the faint metallic tang of Glimmer residue.
Kevin Leister sat on the edge of a broken planter. The Mythical Matrix under his shirt had quieted to a low, steady heat, but it still felt like a second heartbeat that did not entirely belong to him. Wyatt Freeman stood a few paces away, ordinary hands shoved into ordinary pockets, staring at nothing.
For a long time neither of them spoke.
Then Wyatt's voice came out small and scraped raw.
"I might be the end of everyone."
Kevin looked up.
Wyatt kept staring at the cracked asphalt. "My blood turns things back. Strips Glimmers. Makes the supernatural ordinary again. What if that's not a gift? What if the Garden woke me up because it needs a reset button that deletes everything? What if the only way to stop Hades or the next thing is to erase all of us—including you?"
Kevin stood. The Matrix flared once in quiet protest, then subsided. He crossed the distance and pulled Wyatt into a hard, wordless hug. Wyatt stiffened for half a second, then sagged.
"Don't worry, brother," Kevin said against his shoulder. "We'll figure it out. We always do. You're not the end of everyone. You're the reason some of us are still here."
They stayed like that until the moment stretched thin enough to break.
Across the courtyard, Diego Ramirez of Los Jinetes Negros approached the ridge where Bennett the Baku still stood watching the distant black-glass shimmer. Diego's black jacket was torn and blood-stiff in places, but his posture remained pure predator.
"You," Diego said. "Dream-eater. You've been watching everything. Why?"
Bennett lowered the binoculars and smiled with too many teeth.
Diego continued, voice low and venomous. "My wife Brihaana—she's Lengua Asesina. One lick from her tongue and the infection sets in so deep not even the Sandman can dig it out of your dreams. You want to keep breathing long enough to eat another nightmare, you answer me straight."
Bennett's laugh started soft and climbed into something unhinged.
"Hahaha. Hahaha. You are all so gullible. You think I am just here to eat dreams? I am here to consume every single good dream left in this world. Because he is coming. The true nightmare. And when he arrives, the only dreams left will be the ones that scream."
Diego's hand drifted toward the pistol at his hip.
In the distance, the black-glass veil over Kruger gave another slow, deep pulse—as if something on the other side had just taken a very long breath.
Somewhere Far From Any Map – A Dark Castle
The laboratory reeked of ozone, old blood, and the sweet-rot smell of failed preservation fluid. Flickering emergency lights painted everything the color of dying bruises.
A scientist in a torn lab coat hung between two armed men, one eye swollen shut, blood running freely from a split lip. He still managed to smile.
"This is my son," he rasped, nodding toward the massive shape suspended in the central tank. Cables and needles pierced pale flesh. Monitors flat-lined and then spiked in irregular patterns. "And he will kill you all. Hahaha. Hahahaha—"
The lead gunman put two rounds through the scientist's chest. The body jerked and went slack.
"Secure the asset," the gunman ordered. "Command wants it intact."
Four men approached the tank. One reached out to disconnect the primary cable.
A hand shot through the reinforced glass as if it were wet paper.
Frank Stein's fingers closed around the nearest man's wrist.
The effect was immediate and obscene.
Flesh flowed like warm wax. Bones telescoped and folded. The man's arm twisted into a corkscrew of meat and splintered radius, then kept twisting until the shoulder joint popped free with a wet sound. He started screaming. Frank Stein's eyes opened—milky white at first, then clearing into something cold and delighted.
His ability unfolded in full: Body Manipulation. Any living body he touched became clay under the only limit that had ever mattered—his imagination.
He stepped out of the ruined tank, cables tearing free, and smiled with a mouth that was still learning the shape of cruelty.
The remaining men raised weapons. Frank Stein touched the closest one on the chest. Ribs bloomed outward like a grotesque flower. The next man's spine decided it preferred to be outside the body. The last two tried to run. Frank Stein caught them both by the backs of their necks and simply rearranged them until running was no longer a concept their bodies understood.
Silence returned, broken only by the drip of things that had once been people.
Frank Stein walked out of the castle barefoot, leaving red footprints that steamed in the cold air. Outside, under a sky the color of old bruises, a tall figure in a white coat waited with aristocratic patience.
Dracula the White Vampire smiled, fangs gleaming like polished ivory.
"Welcome to the world," Dracula said softly, "where you wish you were dead."
Frank Stein tilted his head, considering the words, then smiled back with his new mouth.
Somewhere across continents, Red Pigeon's anti-veil helicopter lifted off from Headquarters No. 4 with a full complement of recruits and one mind-walking commander.
The temporary hole in the black glass was about to open.
And every branch of the All-Tree felt the weight of what was coming.
End of Chapter 95