Janvis ran through the wet timber with hunter's silence, the heavy case strapped across her shoulder. Rain had begun to slick the pine needles, reflecting the distant, pulsing blue lights of the university perimeter.
Through the trees, a flash of dull amber caught her eye—Bill, wrapped in a heavy, yellow oilskin raincoat, creeping through the brush with low steps. He was moving parallel to the ridge, his bloodshot eyes fixed entirely on the clearing where Quive lay groaning in the dirt. Keeping her distance and treading lightly, Janvis adjusted her path, keeping her eyes on the yellow coat while closing the gap toward the fallen officer.
She reached Quive near the shattered remains of the wooden bench. Sliding to her knees, she unlatched the steel clips of the case and pulled out the gear—a specialized three-inch combat knife and a reinforced glass syringe loaded with a glowing, pale-blue neural tranquilizer.
"Get up," she hissed, forcing the weapon and the vial into Quive's blood-soaked hand. "The grid is burning."
Up on the ridge, crouched behind the trunk of an ancient oak, Bill watched the clearing with cold, sudden dread. His knuckles whitened around his dark leather gloves, a sudden cold sweat breaking out under his oilskin coat.
He had never expected this. He had built the serum to create an unstoppable, bone-crushing apex predator, yet two kids in simple grey hoodies were holding their ground against his created humanoid without suffering a single serious injury.
Their speed was insane, their durability wasn't far behind—they were moving like spectra with their slightly small physique that defied every anatomical law he had spent decades studying.
Down in the court, Damon delivered a devastating double-palm strike straight to Caleb's mutated sternum. The shockwave sent the heavy, thrashing chimera airborne, kicking the beast backward through the mist directly toward the spot where Quive and Janvis were kneeling.
Quive didn't hesitate. Driven by pure survival, he lunged forward as the beast hit the dirt, driving the small combat knife into the base of Caleb's neck to create an opening before slamming the syringe straight into the creature's spine.
The pale-blue serum hit the nervous system instantly. The monster let out a strangled, mechanical gurgle, its hyper-extended limbs locking up in a sudden, paralyzed spasm. For few long seconds, the creature lay flat in the mud, its pale human eye rolling back in its socket.
Then, with a terrifying, primal roar, the beast's mutated physiology purged the chemical—and it sprang right back up, its claws tearing up the turf.
Janvis didn't draw her sidearm, instead launched herself straight past the beast, her eyes locked onto Lira, who was stepping out from the shadow of the brick pillar. Janvis aimed her initial attack high, her fingers clawing forward in a vicious, sweeping strike aimed entirely at pulling down the grey hood to expose Lira's face to the precinct recorders.
Lira leaned back, the material of her hood brushing past Janvis's fingernails by a hairsbreadth. She parried Janvis's follow-up wrist-lock with a lightning-fast backhand, entering a heated, intense exchange of close-quarters martial arts. The air between them popped with the sheer speed of their parries and blocks.
Lira smirked under the shadow of her hood, her dark eyes flashing through the gloom. "You should back off, officer," Lira purred softly, effortless dodging a low leg sweep. "I really don't want to kill anyone tonight."
"Save it for the judge!" Janvis spat, pivoting on her heel to drive a sharp elbow toward Lira's jaw.
A few yards away, the creature thrashed wildly. Caleb's massive, fur-draped arm caught Damon clean across the shoulder, flinging his lighter frame twenty feet through the air. Damon crashed heavily into the brick foundation of the annex, dropping into the ferns.
Watching from the tree line, Bill found the sight utterly fascinating. The monster was wearing them down by pure volume of force.
Damon pushed himself up from the dirt, his jaw set in a dark line.
Realizing that the sheer noise of the fight was drawing in a massive wave of campus backup, Damon decided he needed to critically injure the humanoid instead of trying to contain it.
Once it lost a massive volume of blood and ran out of metabolic strength, the berserk mutation would starve, forcing the body to stop its rampage and hopefully revert to human form.
His plan was clearly read by Bill, who was lurking thirty paces away. Bill couldn't allow things to go smoothly—if the boy reverted to human form right here under the police searchlights, the entire experiment would be exposed to the precinct before he could harvest the baseline.
Reaching behind the waistband of his trousers beneath his oilskin coat, Bill brought out a pistol fitted with a long, black silencer. He raised the barrel, aiming directly at Quive, intending to immobilize the officer by taking out his knee and shoulder to create complete chaos.
"Thwip"
The suppressed shot whistled through the damp fog.
In that exact split second, Quive shifted his weight to dodge another wild swing from the thrashing beast. The movement brought his head straight into the bullet's path. The round struck Quive directly in the eye with impact violently snapping his head back as he instantly plunged to the wet ground, completely motionless.
Bill stared at Quive's limp body laying flat in the mud, then at the humanoid, which was now hitting the dirt madly in its unguided, frantic frenzy.
A shadow blurred across the grass. Damon arrived at the center of the clearing a second later, his grey hoodie damp with rain. He stopped dead in his tracks, his lightless black eyes locking onto the lifeless form of Quive lying in the pool of blood, before slowly raising his head toward the shadow in the yellow oilskin coat.
Damon stood over the blood-soaked grass, his dark, lightless eyes shifting from Quive's limp frame to the roaring monstrosity. With the precinct officer down and the situation spiraling into total chaos, any lingering need to hold back vanished completely.
A cold, terrifying aura surged from Damon's frame, heavy enough to make the damp air drop several degrees in an instant. He dropped his shoulder, blurred forward, and delivered a heavy, wicked strike straight into the center of the humanoid's mutated chest.
CRACK.
The impact echoed like a localized explosion. The sheer, kinetic shockwave tore through Caleb's altered ribs and spinal column, shattering his internal organs and instantly disrupting the mutated nervous system. The beast's eyes rolled back as a violent tremor rattled through its massive body.
A thick, sickening torrent of dark blood—heavily mixed with a foul, dark-yellow experimental fluid—erupted from Caleb's gaping jaws, splashing across the wet asphalt.
The chimera's limbs gave out entirely. The massive, matted frame hit the ground with a heavy, lifeless thud, the fur slowly beginning to recede as the metabolic overload starved the mutation.
Without taking his eyes off the clearing, Damon let out sharp piercing whistle which cut through the fog, signaling to Lira that it was time to clear out before the primary precinct backup arrived.
Lira parried Janvis's final desperate strike, shoved the officer backward into the mud, and vanished into the shadows of the tree line without leaving a footprint behind.
Janvis stumbled back, her chest heaving as she raised her guard, expecting Damon to finish the fight. Instead, Damon simply stood under the dim amber light of the lamp, his hood pulled low, looking down at her with cold, merciless disdain.
"How careless," Damon spoke, his voice dropping into a low, terrifying cadence that vibrated in her ear. "To play the saviour and seek to see our faces while completely failing to cover your own partner's back."
Janvis froze, his words hitting her like a splash of ice water. Her head snapped toward the wet grass behind her. It was only then that she caught sight of Quive lying motionless beside the shattered wooden bench.
"Quive!" she gasped, scrambling across the mud on her knees.
Her shaking fingers pressed frantically against his neck.
Thankfully, he was still breathing, his sluggish pulse thrumming weakly against her glove, but the bullet wound to his eye was bleeding heavily, and his skin was already turning a deathly, translucent pale from rapid shock and blood loss.
Damon didn't offer another word. Having delivered his cold lecture, his form glitched in the mist—and he vanished from the scene at a spectral, impossible speed, leaving Janvis alone in the dark with her bleeding partner and the unconscious boy.