Chapter 1: The Twelve-Fold Scar
The air was dead. It smelled of fused metal and burnt sugar—the residue of a power so immense it had caramelized the oxygen.
Kael, the Assassin, ignored the scene's chaos. Chaos was for the x1 Baselines. He needed precision. He knelt at the center of the crime scene, a crater where Mafia Boss Vittorio's secure safe had stood just hours ago.
"Report, Sam. And keep the chatter quiet," Kael ordered over his comms, his voice a low, steady rumble. His own x10 strength was a quiet, constant hum beneath his skin—a tenfold increase in every fiber, every calculation. But it felt pedestrian here.
Sam, the x2 Technician, replied, his voice thin with strained fear. "The suppression field collapsed instantly, Kael. This wasn't an explosive; it was a pure kinetic overload. The readings… they're off the chart. Far beyond the theoretical x100 limit. It's an impossible signature."
Kael reached out, placing his bare palm on the lip of the crater.
The Touch flared.
The world vanished. Kael wasn't just seeing the past; he was absorbing the pure, overwhelming force of the attack. He felt a body moving at velocities that would atomize a normal human, and a power signature that scaled with cold, inhuman control: x60... x80... x100. And then, the signature didn't stop. It clicked cleanly, brutally, to x125.
It was a single, perfect strike aimed to retrieve something from the safe. He caught only a flash of the killer's essence: a sterile, colorless force, focused entirely on the retrieval.
Kael snatched his hand back, heart pounding a controlled, rhythmic beat. His temple ached. "The signature was one hundred and twenty-five times the baseline," he stated, his eyes fixed on the ruined floor. "Someone just publicly violated the known laws of power."
"Impossible is just a poorly structured variable, Kael," Rina cut in, her voice cool and utterly professional. Rina, the x20 Economic Analyst, was the brain of their unit. "No known asset, not even the old Chinese state-sponsored veterans, can hit that number. This wasn't a standard hit. They didn't just kill the Boss; they killed the system."
Kael rose. "They killed the lie. Jax, what's your view?"
A sudden, faint shift in the air near the ceiling—too fast for a normal eye—announced the arrival of Jax, the x4 Speedster. "Exit is clean, Boss. But a wave of small fish—x2 and x4 level—are converging on the outer districts. Not chasing the x125. They're tying up Vittorio's loose ends. Cleaning the slate."
"The mafia was a distraction," Kael concluded. "Vittorio wasn't killed for territory. He was killed for what he was hunting." He walked to the corpse and retrieved a discarded journal, untouched by the devastating blast.
Kael didn't need to touch the book to know its contents. He just needed the final word of the man who died for it.
"He found a Wall. The power levels—the x10s, the x50s—they only appeared one hundred years ago. Vittorio found something that tells the story of what came before the power. The origin."
Kael clipped the journal to his belt. "Rina, the converging units. I want a profile on who is paying them. Jax, secure a transport that can breach three countries in six hours. Sam, put every ounce of your focus into building a dampener for x130."
Sam gasped. "x130? But Kael, that's just a myth, a theoretical breakdown—"
"It was," Kael finished, looking down at the empty crater. "Until someone hit x125. The mystery is not who killed Vittorio. The mystery is why this whole damn world is built on a lie that's only 100 years old."
He took one last look at the scar left on the floor.