The moon was full tonight.

It hung high and pale above the city, untouched by the tension spreading below.

No matter how much destruction unfolded beneath it, everything seemed small and meaningless before its presence.

Below it, the converted skate park was busy — engines idling, radios crackling, boots moving across concrete in disciplined patterns

One of the soldiers on outer perimeter duty glanced up.

Not for any particular reason. Just the way tired eyes drifted to the sky when the mind needed somewhere to rest.

He saw the moon.

And on the face of it, a dot.

Small. Dark. Almost nothing.

He squinted.

The dot was growing.

"Hey." He tapped the man beside him without looking away. "Hey — what is that?"

The second soldier followed his gaze.

For a moment, neither of them spoke.

The dot continued to expand, slow at first, then faster, gaining definition the way a calamity announces itself — by the time they understood what they were seeing, it was already far too late to move.

A shape formed inside it.

Arms. A silhouette.

Something that was curled tightly in the air and was now opening outward, one fist extended downward like the head of a falling hammer.

"INCOMING —"

BOOM!

It hit the concrete between two armored vehicles and the ground came apart.

The shockwave didn’t spread like a normal explosion. It hit like a flat wall of force, striking everything within fifty meters of the impact point at once.

Soldiers left the ground. They were thrown — horizontally, cleanly, several of them colliding with tanks before the vehicles themselves began to shift.

The nearest armored vehicle rocked onto two wheels and held there for a full second before slamming back down.

Six of the floodlights tore free of their mounts and spun sideways.

The portable command unit near the east entrance flipped entirely, its radio equipment scattering across the pavement in a long dark streak.

Dust swallowed everything.

Then the screaming started.

Francis moved before the debris finished settling.

The first man he reached was still on his back, struggling to understand what happened. He never got the chance before his midsection was torn apart.

He did not waste time pausing and immediately moved on to the next target.

The dust worked in his favor. They could not see him, but he could see them through his infrared vision.

He tore through the camp like a tiger moving through a group of rabbits. Each target became the next man’s warning, and the warnings came so fast they lost all meaning.

From somewhere deep, a voice screamed for order.

"FALL BACK — TAKE COVER — TAKE COVER NOW—"

The dust began to thin.

And with it came the first real look at what had descended upon them.

Francis stood still, grey-skinned, hunched at the shoulders, four eyes open and moving independently. Its elongated arms hung at its sides, fingers curled, the tips already filled with blood.

They regrouped the way trained soldiers did — not in formation, but in function. Cover first. Weapons up. Find their nearest man and establish a line.

To their credit, they were fast.

To their misfortune, it did not matter.

The moment the first rifle cracked, Francis was no longer where they were aiming.

He closed ten meters in the time it took the shooter’s round to find empty air. By the time the next man adjusted his sights, the first soldier was already gone from the line.

They escalated.

Two soldiers broke cover with a mounted gun between them, dragging it into position with the desperation of men who had been trained to believe that enough firepower was always the answer.

They swung the barrel toward the movement. One braced. The other opened up.

RATATATATATATAT —

The stream of fire tore across the camp in a wide sweeping arc.

Francis ran straight into it and roared. The shockwave stopped the line of fire just long enough for him to destroy it along with its gunner.

More incoming fire followed, but it was no match for Francis, who had already memorized the layout of the camp.

He began targeting the heavy-caliber units first and used the tanks as cover.

At times, he even grabbed corpses and threw them at others. The sheer brutality of it shattered the morale of the remaining troops before he could even reach them.

The radio crackled from the ruins of the command unit.

A voice — younger than it should have been, shaking — spoke into it from behind the overturned wall of a concrete planter.

"This is Bravo Sector — this is Bravo Sector requesting immediate backup — we have a Category five or six beast in the perimeter, repeat, Category five or six, we have men down, we have — "

A burst of static.

"Multiple men down. It’s not slowing. It is NOT slowing — we cannot contain this, requesting all available units, requesting —"

He pressed himself lower as something hit the vehicle beside him hard enough to send it spinning across the lot.

His voice dropped to almost nothing.

"Please. Someone respond. We can’t hold this. We can’t —"

Across what remained of the camp, the floodlights that had not been torn free flickered once.

Then two of them died.

Then the third.

Darkness took the rest of the camp in pieces, swallowing the sound until only the crunch of something moving through wreckage remained.

The soldier stopped talking.

He pressed his back against the planter, pulled his knees to his chest, and stared at the dark.

And prayed that he could survive another day.

DRIP

Something wet landed on his head.

At first, he thought it was rain.

Slowly, his shaking hand reached up and touched it. The second his fingers came down, he saw dark blood smeared across them.

His eyes widened as he slowly raised his head.

Above him, a massive jaw hung open. Crimson stains coated the rows of teeth while thick saliva dripped between them.

"No—"

His head vanished in a spray of blood before the rest of his body even slumped forward.

’That should be enough to get the Defense Force to come,’

The silence that followed did not last.

It was broken first by the distant sounds of rotors.

The helicopters arrived in a tight formation, four of them flying low across the skyline and holding position over the camp’s ruins.

No descent rope was released.

Five figures dropped from different points in the same breath, each one landing in a different corner, completely surrounding him.

Francis didn’t move yet.

The first thing he noticed was that none of them were running toward him. They kept enough distance to react to his speed.

Just as he expected, they already studied his previous fight and built a strategy against it.

The second thing he noticed was the one who had not landed at all in the skate park.

She was still airborne — barely — perched on the lip of a rooftop two buildings out.

Lightweight suit, almost skeletal in its construction, the frame hugging her body without bulk. She raised a rifle and didn’t fire.

Just watched him through the scope.

BANG!

A bullet tore through the air, but Francis dodged it easily by watching the muzzle flash. Another shot followed, aimed at where he moved, and it grazed him.

’Oh, she can also predict my movements, huh,’ he smiled inwardly.

A cognitive ability user like her was always a welcome meal for him.

’Time to m—’ he was unable to finish as the world started to spin.

’What’s happening?’

His vision blurred and bent out of shape. He looked down at his bullet wound. The skin around it had started turning darker.

’Shit,’

He quickly used Parashift to push out the contaminated blood. Only then did the effect wear off a little.

’So they’re relying on toxic bullets now.’

The others looked unsettled that he did not fall as they expected, but they did not panic and began attacking. With their numerical advantage, it gave them a sense of confidence.

A heavy-suited figure raised two launcher tubes and opened fire.

BOOM!

The first grenade tore through the space Francis had quickly vacated.

BOOM!

The second detonated against the burned frame of an armored vehicle, hurling molten shrapnel in different direction.

He accelerated toward the grenade launchers. He looked the slowest, but then the man’s legs coiled and he launched into the air, fifty feet straight up.

Francis’s claw hit nothing but empty air.

Looking up, he saw the figure hanging at the air for one second, barrels already leveled down, before it opened fire again.

Explosion after explosion thundered.

Francis scattered, reading the fall patterns, weaving between the blast zones. The explosions stitched a line through the ground, not trying to hit him directly but forcing him away to the other agents.

He ran left to break the formation pattern.

’What?’

Something caught his ankle.

Thin. Near-invisible. He felt the tension before he saw it — a wire, high-tensile, already singing under the strain of holding him.

He snapped it without slowing, but two more replaced it instantly, looping across his forearm and torso.

He scanned for the source and found nothing.

The grenade user in the air shifted mid-descent — not naturally, not the way a falling body moved. Something caught him from below and redirected his arc, swinging him to the east like a pendulum.

He kept firing the whole way.

Francis was forced to keep moving as invisible threads slowed him down and lifted the grenade user into the air.

’This is why it’s always complicated to deal with coordinated attacks,’ he thought, already forming a counterattack in his mind.