The scent of antiseptic and fear hung thick in the air beneath the commercial plaza in southern Musutafu. The underground facility had no sign, no listed owner, and no entry point visible to the public. Its walls were lined with reinforced steel, whitewashed to feign sterility, though no amount of bleach could erase what had been done within.
Inside, children whimpered behind soundproof glass chambers—eyes glazed, restraints biting into their wrists. IV drips whispered with sedatives. The hum of machines echoed in rhythm with the terrified heartbeats they monitored.
"Make sure Batch 17 is prepped for extraction by morning," one of the doctors barked. He was a short man with thinning hair and trembling fingers, though his tone lacked even a shred of mercy. "The new buyer doesn't want imperfections."
A taller man leaned against the wall, arms crossed. "You're pushing too fast. If Delta shows up again—"
"He won't. We moved facilities. Changed all routing protocols. Even if he's tracking, he'll need time."
But as the words left his mouth, the lights above them dimmed—then cut.
Darkness swallowed the lab whole.
Monitors crackled. Surveillance feeds bled into static. Emergency backups failed before they even activated.
And then came the sound.
Click. Click. Click.
A single pair of footsteps, unhurried, echoing against steel floors.
The taller man lunged for a sidearm, cursing. "It's him—!"
He never finished the sentence.
A beam of white-hot energy punched through his torso and seared the back wall behind him. The corpse didn't even fall immediately—it staggered, as if confused by its own death, before collapsing in a heap.
Panic erupted. Three guards burst from the far side of the hall, shouting as they opened fire. Muzzle flashes blinked in the dark like fireflies. But the bullets passed through smoke—no, not smoke. A shimmer. A ghost.
A blur.
The first guard crumpled with a crushed throat. The second flew backward, his chest plate split clean in half by a precise energy strike by the hand chop. The third managed a scream before a metallic heel shattered his skull against the concrete.
Silence followed.
Not a breath.
Not a word.
Only the hum—low and menacing—of the jamming field that cloaked the entire floor in digital death.
---
Jetsling Beroba stepped from the shadows, the Delta armor fully engaged. His form was sleek and black, carved from shadows and glowing silver lines. The Delta Mover in his right hand pulsed faintly, still warm from its last discharge.
"Status," he murmured.
The AI answered in its usual monotone, not mechanical but disturbingly calm.
[All electronic systems disabled. Environment stabilized. Enemy resistance: 34%. Estimated remaining threats: 5 personnel. Four subjugation candidates confirmed. Hostile experimentation confirmed. Proceed?]
"Proceed."
He walked.
Glass cracked beneath his feet as he passed through the central chamber. He didn't need to run—there was nowhere left to run to.
One of the doctors tried to escape through a hatch, screaming into a useless comm on his wrist. "Request evac! Site breached—Delta is—!"
Jetsling grabbed him by the collar and hoisted him off the ground.
"You've stolen lives."
"Please—! I was just a technician—!"
"You participated."
And then Delta's left gauntlet where he put all the five finger into the shape of the sword and drive it into the body. It then punch through forming a hole through that man body. The body dropped and limp before it even hit the ground.
---
He reached the containment sector next.
Rows of transparent holding pods lined the corridor. Children of varying ages were strapped inside. All had the same dead eyes. Some wore makeshift hospital gowns. Others had wires sewn into their skin.
Jetsling deactivated the pods with a wave of his hand. The AI bypassed the corrupted central system with ease.
[Stimulants detected in bloodstream. Neural patterns stabilizing. No fatalities. Four candidates require external support.]
Jetsling placed emergency markers on each of them—beacons that would broadcast their location once he was gone. He turned to leave when he heard a small voice.
"You're not real, just my dream." a boy whispered.
Jetsling paused.
The child had one arm. The other ended in a bandaged stump. He didn't cry. He didn't scream. He just stared.
"You're just a story. A scary one."
Jetsling kneeled down. Even cloaked in Delta fearsome armor, the movement was gentle.
"I'm real enough to end the ones who hurt you. You're safe now."
A silence passed between them before the boy eyes filled with tears. Relief as the nightmare that he had every day now has end.
Then Jetsling pressed a soft blue light against the child's neck—a temporary health beacon. The boy blinked.
"You're not a hero, are you?"
"No," Jetsling replied. "I'm the ending."
---
Ten minutes later, Delta was gone.
The lab doors had been sealed with molten metal. The security logs fried to ash. A final data wipe pulsed through the network like a virus, erasing everything but silence.
As police arrived—tipped off by an anonymous alert—the only signs of life were the rescued children huddled together in the middle of the room.
And the one-armed boy repeating the same phrase:
"He burned the monsters. All of them."
---
Far above, in the digital corridors of the Hero Commission's disaster response systems, alarms remained silent.
Watanabe stared in horror at the error logs.
"No satellite coverage. No drone footage. All city cams went dark at 21:03 for seven minutes."
"Seven minutes is enough to erase the inhabitants in that building and wipe the evidence," said Akechi.
"But this time," Watanabe added, "we're seeing traces of something new. He's begun piggybacking into local traffic systems. We found control overrides—signals used to delay response units. He's not just jamming. He's starting to redirect."
Igarashi stared at the screen, unreadable.
"And the AI?"
"Still evolving. Now it's deleting not just evidence, but alternate sources of surveillance. It's predicting our countermeasures before we apply them."
"And still no identification on the man himself?"
"No," Watanabe said quietly. "Just codenames. Just 'Delta.' And now the underground's started using another name for him."
"Which is?"
"The Hunter."
Igarashi closed the file with trembling fingers.
"Then the hunt goes both ways now."
---
Back in his shelter—hidden beneath layers of abandoned transit tunnels—Jetsling stood over a digital map.
Seven red markers were grayed out—neutralized.
Thirty-one still pulsed with red.
The Delta armor dissolved off his body in a wash of white light, the metal fragments vanishing into thin air.
[Operations complete. Emotional stress: nominal. Target priority: remains valid.]
Jetsling didn't speak at first.
He just watched the map.
Then, softly:
"There's still blood in the system."