The world didn't just break; it shredded.
A shard of glass, vibrating with the frequency of a dying star, spun through the stagnant air of the city. It moved in slow motion, a razor-edged comet slicing a jagged red line across Arush's cheek. The pain was distant, a dull hum beneath the roar of something much older waking up in his marrow. Amidst a crowd of thousands—salarymen, students, lovers—not a single soul heard the scream of reality as it fractured. To them, there were scared of death praying for life or a chance to live. Arush, it was the end of his humanity.
Arush felt himself submerging. It wasn't a fall; it was an invitation. His knuckles turned bone-white, the skin pulling taut over the joints as the pavement beneath his boots dissolved into a bottomless abyss of liquid shadow. He didn't struggle. He let the darkness take him, a stone dropping into a well of ink.
When his feet finally touched the floor, it wasn't stone or soil. He stood upon a lake of dark, frozen water that didn't ripple, even as he moved. Above him, the sky had been replaced by a shimmering tapestry of Nakshatras. These weren't the stars seen through a telescope; they were ancient, pulsing entities burning with ultraviolet and crimson hues—colors that the human eye was never meant to process.
Ignoring the towering silhouette standing in the center of this void, Arush looked up. His own eyes began to bleed a deep, predatory red, reflecting the terrifying beauty of the nothingness. Dark flames, cold as the void itself, began to lick at the surface of the black water around his shoes.
"Sun..." kurozaro voice didn't sound like human but something far more terrifying. It was a tectonic shift, a calm weight stable enough to crush a mountain range into dust. "Can see the beauty... because he himself is beauty."
Arush hearing the voice dropped into a predatory stance. His vision was a chaotic blur of heat signatures and shifting shadows, but he could feel the presence in front of him—a raging, silent flow of dark fire that defied the laws of physics. Arush chuckled softly, a sound that carried no mirth. Every cell in his body, every strand of DNA programmed over millions of years, screamed at him to run.
He did the opposite. He relaxed. He let his grip on his sanity loosen, turning from an attack posture to a state of total, fluid grace.
"Who are you?"
"I am Kurozaro," the voice didn't come from a mouth; it vibrated through the very molecules of the dark water.
"So... why have you called me?"
"To witness something so brilliant," Kurozaro replied, the darkness around him swirling into the shape of a grin, "that thirteen point eight billion years of evolution failed to show me. You are the anomaly, Arush."
Arush took a single step back, the words echoing in the hollows of his skull like a death knell. "Why choose me? Why make me your vessel?"
The dark flames widened, consuming the horizon. "Because you're interesting. Most men beg for life. You... you look at the end and laugh."
A sudden splash. A wave of darkness reached Arush's shins, numbing his legs with a cold so absolute it felt like his nerves were being cauterized.
"I'm the one—" Kurozaro started, his voice growing arrogant.
"I own your power," Arush cut him off. His tone had shifted. The student was gone. The "failed boy" was dead. In his place stood a Dealer who had just realized he held all the cards.
Kurozaro stopped. A dry, raspy laugh tore from his throat, reflecting off the walls of the nothingness. "You think you own it? Let me tell you, boy... I owe you. I am the debt, but you are the reason the debt exists."
Arush opened his eyes. He exhaled a breath of pure heat, and red flames erupted from the crown of his head, dousing the darkness in the color of a fresh slaughter. A tail—raw, muscular, and wreathed in a corona of fire—tore through the fabric of his jeans at the base of his spine. It wasn't a limb; it was a weapon, skipping a trillion years of biological evolution to manifest a form that belonged in the heart of a sun.
"Then let me dive into your depth," Arush hissed, the Makar within him fully surfacing. "As one who knows your nothingness better than you do."
Kurozaro's eyes widened, his body dissolving into liquid as Arush took a step forward. The stars above cracked. The glass sky shattered.
Reality came back with the force of a train wreck.
Arush was back in the concrete bunker, the air thick with the metallic tang of blood and the choking scent of gunpowder. Before his human brain could even process the shift, the stars he had just seen cracking manifested as physical shards in the air.
Through the rift stepped a nightmare. A massive Sinner—a crocodile-beast the size of a tank—lunged through the space where reality had thinned. Its scales were interlocking plates of obsidian, and its teeth were jagged spikes of solid gold, stained with the remnants of the last man it had eaten.
Arush didn't blink. He didn't breathe. He smiled.
As the beast lunged, its massive jaws wide enough to bisect him, Arush moved. He didn't just dodge; he flowed around the attack like smoke. The crocodile's jaws snapped shut on thin air with a bone-jarring CRACK that sent a shockwave through the room.
As the beast stumbled, Arush reached out. His hands, wreathed in that impossible red heat, clamped onto the crocodile's snout. With a guttural roar, he heaved. He didn't just lift the beast; he slammed its multi-ton body into the reinforced concrete floor. The ground shattered, rebar snapping like toothpicks as the monster's head was driven a foot deep into the foundation.
The "nothingness" dissolved completely, revealing the chaos of the room. Vaidere and Sanvi were already fighting for their lives. A squad of NSEA soldiers was backed into a corner, their rifles barking in frantic bursts. The bullets sparked harmlessly off the sinners' scales, falling to the floor like useless pebbles.
"JAI BHAVANI!"
The roar erupted from Arush's throat, a sound so primal it made the soldiers freeze.
He leaped into the air, the heat around his hand condensing, compressing, and hardening until it birthed a spear of white-hot plasma. He brought the point down with the weight of a falling star, driving it directly between the obsidian scales of the crocodile-beast.
The sound was horrifying—a wet, screeching hiss as the spear melted through flesh and bone alike. The spear didn't just kill the beast; it bypassed its very existence, erupting out of the underbelly and cauterizing the floor beneath it. The monster didn't even have time to roar before its insides were turned to ash.
Sanvi glanced at him, her face pale, her ice staff glowing with a freezing blue light. She moved like a winter gale, freezing the joints of the smaller Sinners so Vaidere could finish them.
Vaidere was a blur of silver. He didn't have Arush's raw power, but he had the precision of a surgeon. He slid between two Sinners, his dual blades singing a high-pitched note of death. With two fluid strokes, he bypassed their armor, his blades sliding through their necks. Two heads hit the floor simultaneously, the bodies collapsing into heaps of grey meat.
Arush didn't stop. He was a whirlwind of red fire. Every strike he landed caused a Sinner to explode into dust. He landed in the center of the bunker, his eyes fixed on a Sinner whose jaw was dripping with the blood of a fallen soldier.
"Weight of the Core," Arush whispered.
He pointed his palm downward. The air in a ten-foot radius became heavy—impossibly heavy. The Sinner didn't just fall; it was moulded into the earth. The sound of its skeleton collapsing was like a bag of dry sticks being crushed. Its golden teeth were forced through its own skull as the atmospheric pressure of the entire planet's core seemed to focus on its back.
In a heartbeat, the room went silent. The monsters were gone, turned to grey ash that swirled in the vents.
The adrenaline began to recede, leaving Arush's body trembling. He turned, looking for Sanvi, but a spark of lightning flickered in his peripheral vision.
Cold steel pressed against his jugular. Two blades, vibrating with a lethal energy, held him in place.
"Finally," Vaidere's voice was a jagged edge. "Found the unofficial judge of justice. You've grown too loud, Arush."
Soldiers moved in, their boots crunching on the debris. Dozens of rifles, loaded with specialized piercing rounds, were leveled at Arush's chest.
"If you touch him," a voice cut through the tension like a razor, "it's my promise that I will make you behead yourself, Vaidere."
Maya stepped from the shadows of a collapsed pillar, the orange cherry of her tobacco pipe glowing in the dark. She looked at Arush not as a hero, but as a piece of property. "I was right about you. You're the key."
She snapped her fingers. "Handcuff him. Now."
Arush's flames flickered and died. The red heat vanished, replaced by the cold, damp air of the bunker. His tail withered, the fire receding back into his bone marrow, leaving him feeling hollow and fragile. He looked at Sanvi. She held her ice staff tight, her eyes brimming with tears, but she didn't move. She only gave him a slow, heartbroken nod.
Arush didn't fight. He held out his shaking hands. The heavy, anti-supernatural steel of the cuffs snapped shut, the sigils on the metal burning into his skin to suppress his energy. A soldier stepped up behind him and drove a thick needle into the side of his neck.
The sedative was a chemical wall. Arush didn't even have time to gasp. His knees hit the concrete first, then his vision began to tunnel into grey.
Sanvi rushed forward, catching his head before it hit the floor, her hands trembling as the soldiers hauled his limp body toward a black transport truck.
"What was your damn plan, Maya?!" Vaidere screamed, his blades sparking with uncontrolled rage. "You used us! You used him!"
Maya exhaled a long, thin stream of smoke. Her eyes were cold as she watched the truck doors slam shut. "I knew the boy had a connection to the girl. I used that connection to draw out the Makar. Now, he belongs to the NSEA. He is the first of a new legion."
Sanvi stared at Maya, her face twisting in a mask of shock and betrayal. The woman she had looked up to as a mentor had just sold Arush into a cage.
"Vaidere. Sanvi. You're coming to headquarters. Now," Maya said, her voice leaving no room for argument.
Rage finally overcame Vaidere. With a roar, he blurred across the room, his blades toring through the air. He didn't hesitate. His steel sheared through Maya's neck, her head spinning away into the darkness, blood spraying across the grey walls.
The room froze. But as the head hit the floor, it dissolved into grey smoke. The body followed.
"You're still too small to go against your elder sister, Vaidere," Maya's voice came from directly behind him.
Vaidere spun, but the cold muzzle of a handgun was already pressed against the base of his skull. Maya stood there, her eyes glowing with a terrifying, predatory purple light.
"I'm letting you go this time because we're blood," she whispered, her finger tightening on the trigger until the click of the safety echoed in the silence. "But next time? I won't hesitate to pull the trigger. Welcome to the new world order."
She turned and walked toward the light of the exit, leaving the smell of tobacco and the wreckage of a broken family behind. Maya hadn't just captured Arush; she had captured all of them. By threatening the ones they loved, she had forced the predatory warriors to follow the rules of the very society they outgrew.
"Move," Maya commanded, the click of her safety a final punctuation mark.
As the truck pulled away, the red flames were gone, replaced by the flickering, cold fluorescent lights of the NSEA's world order. The Makar was in a cage, and the hunt was officially over.
- ARUSH SALUNKE