The narrow alleyway where the transmission had ended felt too small to contain what Zayn had become. He stepped out into the neon soaked streets of Metamorphia, his feet clicking against the pavement with an unnatural weight. His hair was a void-black that seemed to swallow the nearby streetlights, and his eyes—once human—were now glowing embers of a dying sun.
He wasn't headed for the main Crownstar palace. Not yet. He was headed for The Viper's Crest, a sub-faction stronghold that acted as the clan's primary military arm.
As the massive steel gates of the Viper's Crest district loomed ahead, the sirens began to wail. This wasn't just a gate; it was a 40-foot-tall barrier of reinforced titanium, guarded by the Viper Elite Guard. From the watchtowers, heavy-caliber turrets swiveled, locking onto the lone figure walking toward them.
"Halt! This is a restricted Crownstar zone!" a Commander's voice boomed over the speakers. "Identify yourself or be eliminated!"
Zayn didn't stop. He didn't even look up. He felt the Primal Rage simmering just beneath his skin, a dark ocean begging to break the shore.
"Open fire!" the Commander screamed.
A hail of lead and energy beams rained down, but as they reached within five feet of Zane, they simply vaporized. The black aura radiating from him acted like a gravitational furnace.
Ten feet from the gate, Zane stopped. He didn't pull back a fist. He didn't brace himself. He simply raised his right hand, fingers slightly curled, and made a flicking motion toward the air in front of the steel.
BOOM.
The sound wasn't a crash; it was the sound of the atmosphere being torn apart. A visible ripple of distorted air—a pure kinetic shockwave—shot from his palm. The massive titanium gates didn't just break; they turned into shrapnel. The metal groaned and disintegrated, flying backward into the fortress like a shotgun blast of twisted steel. The two watchtowers on either side crumbled instantly, their foundations turned to dust by the sheer pressure of the air.
Zayn stepped through the burning wreckage. The dust cloud parted around him as if it were afraid to touch him.
Inside, the scene was chaos. The faction's internal police force and the Viper Soldiers were scrambling. Civilians—lower-tier clan members and workers—cowered behind flipped cars and market stalls, their eyes wide with terror. They saw a monster in a man's shape.
A Regiment General stepped forward, flanked by two High Commanders. Their armor was ornate, glowing with defensive runes.
"You... you're the one from the transmission," the General stuttered, drawing a vibrating pulse-blade. "The traitor's seed."
Zayn looked at him, and for the first time, he spoke. His voice didn't sound like his own anymore; it carried a resonant vibration that made the glass in the nearby buildings crack.
"The hierarchy of this city is built on a lie," Zayn said, his red eyes locking onto the General. "I am the truth. Are you going to move, or are you going to die?"
The General, fueled by a mix of pride and pure terror, roared and charged, his blade whistling through the air. Zane didn't even raise his hands to defend himself. He simply walked forward.
Zayn isn't just fighting; he's making a statement.
The General's pulse-blade was a blur of high-frequency energy, designed to slice through tank armor like hot butter. He was a veteran of the Crownstar border wars, a man who had forgotten the meaning of fear. But as his blade swung toward Zayn's neck, the air seemed to thicken, turning into a viscous, invisible wall.
Zayn didn't dodge. He caught the blade.
Not with a weapon, not with a shield—but with his bare hand. The energy from the pulse-blade hissed and sparked against his palm, the blue light reflecting in his burning red eyes, but his skin didn't even singe.
"Is this the strength of the Viper's Crest?" Zayn asked, his voice a low, terrifying rumble.
With a slight squeeze of his fingers, the pulse-blade shattered into a thousand useless fragments. The General gasped, frozen in shock. Before he could retreat, Zayn's hand shot forward, grabbing the General's ornate chest plate. With a effortless lift, he hoisted the armored man off the ground as if he weighed nothing.
"Call off your dogs," Zayn commanded, looking past the General at the rows of terrified soldiers. "Or I'll turn this sector into a graveyard before the sun sets."
The two High Commanders charged in a desperate attempt to save their superior. One swung a heavy war-hammer glowing with gravity-magic, while the other unleashed a volley of piercing light-shards.
Zayn didn't even turn to look at them. He let the Primal Rage flare. A pulse of black energy erupted from his body in a 360-degree radius—a "Repulsion Wave." The light-shards were deflected back at the shooter, pinning him to a nearby wall by his own cape, and the hammer-wielder was sent flying backward, smashing through the stone facade of a local administrative building.
The civilians watching from the windows and doorways gasped in a collective breath of horror. They had seen "Supernaturals" before, but this was different. This was Dominance.
Zayn dropped the General, who collapsed into a heap of broken pride and dented metal. Zayn began to walk toward the center of the faction's plaza the Heart of the Crest where the main communications spire stood. Every step he took left a cracked footprint in the reinforced concrete.
"Wait!" a voice cried out.
A young girl, no older than ten, had stumbled out from a nearby shop, her eyes streaming with tears. A woman likely her mother frantically grabbed her, pulling her back, shielding the child's eyes from the "demon" in the street.
Zayn stopped. The red glow in his eyes flickered for a fraction of a second. The "shunned prejudice" he had felt his whole life bubbled up the way people looked at him like he was a curse. But now, he didn't feel sadness. He felt a cold, dark clarity.
He looked at the crowd of civilians—the bakers, the mechanics, the low-level clerks of the Crownstar hierarchy.
"Go home," Zayn said, his voice echoing through the entire plaza. "Seal your doors. My debt is with the ones who wear the crowns, not the ones who serve them. But if you stand between me and the spire... you are merely debris."
The soldiers looked at their fallen General, then at the shattered gates, and finally at the "Abyssal King" standing in their midst. One by one, they lowered their rifles. The sheer weight of Zayn's aura made their hands tremble too much to aim.
Zayn reached the base of the spire. He didn't use the elevator. He placed his hand against the cold metal of the tower's side. The black mist of his aura began to snake up the building, turning the silver metal into a bruised, obsidian black.
He was hijacking the faction's entire broadcast system. He wasn't just attacking a clan; he was about to speak to the entire city of Metamorphia.
Zayn stood at the base of the spire, his Abyssal Aura tendrilling into the circuitry of the tower. High above, the massive holographic screens that usually displayed Crownstar propaganda began to flicker and bleed into a deep, bruised purple.
"People of Metamorphia," Zayn began, his voice being picked up by every speaker in the district. "For too long, the Five Clans have fed you the lie of stability while they rot from within. I am the consequence of your 'shunned' blood. I am—"
"NOW!" the General screamed from the ground, coughing up blood but wearing a manic grin. "ACTIVATE PROJECT GORGON! UNLEASH THE CHIMERA-SHELL!"
Zayn's eyes narrowed. He felt a massive surge of energy beneath his feet.
The Secret Weapon: The Chimera-Shell
From a hidden hangar beneath the plaza, a massive mechanical hiss echoed. This was the Viper Crest's crown jewel—a Bio-Mechanical Titan specifically designed to hunt high-level demons. It stood twenty feet tall, its body made of "Null-Steel" (a metal that absorbs aura) and powered by the harvested hearts of three different supernatural beasts. It didn't have a face—just a single, glowing red lens and two massive hydraulic claws.
The soldiers didn't just ambush him; they formed a "Null-Circle." Fifty soldiers slammed specialized rods into the ground, creating a field designed to suppressed Zayn's demonic powers.
"You thought we were afraid?" the General laughed hoarsely. "We were just waiting for the dampener to charge! Kill him! Leave nothing but ash!"
The Chimera-Shell roared a sound of grinding metal and beastial screaming and lunged. Its massive claw, glowing with anti-demon energy, slammed into the spot where Zayn stood.
BOOM.
The shockwave shattered the windows of the surrounding skyscrapers. A thick cloud of dust and "Null-Soot" covered the area. The soldiers cheered. No one survived a direct hit from the Chimera.
"Is he dead?" a Commander whispered, squinting through the dust.
From the heart of the crater, a low, rhythmic thumping sound began. Thump. Thump. It was the sound of a heartbeat, but it was too loud, too heavy. It sounded like a drum in a hollow cave.
"Primal Rage... Second Phase," a voice hissed from the smoke.
The dust didn't just settle; it was blown away by a sudden vacuum. Zayn was standing there, holding the Chimera-Shell's massive hydraulic claw with one hand. But he looked different. His "Abyssal Black" hair was now floating as if he were underwater, and the red in his eyes had spilled out, forming glowing "tear marks" down his cheeks.
The Null-Steel of the robot was cracking where he touched it. He was overflowing with so much power that the "dampening field" was literally melting.
"My turn," Zaynwhispered.
With a terrifying display of raw strength, Zayn didn't just push the robot back—he ripped the entire arm off the machine. Metal screamed, wires snapped like dry twigs, and green bio-fluid sprayed across the pavement.
Zayn swung the massive mechanical arm like a club, smashing the Chimera-Shell into the side of the communications spire. The impact was so great the tower groaned, leaning dangerously.
He turned his gaze toward the General and the soldiers holding the Null-Rods.
"You had the chance to watch your world change from your homes," Zayn said, his voice now layered with a demonic echo. "Now, you will watch it from the dirt."
Zayn vanished moving faster than the human eye could track. A second later, he appeared in the center of the soldier formation. He slammed his fist into the ground.
"ABYSSAL ERUPTION!"
Black spikes of solidified shadows erupted from the earth in a circle, shattering the Null-Rods and sending the soldiers flying like ragdolls. He wasn't killing the civilians, but the "Viper Elite" were being dismantled with surgical, brutal precision.
He walked back to the spire, stepping over the smoking wreckage of the "Secret Weapon" as if it were a discarded toy. He grabbed the broadcast microphone again, but this time, he didn't just speak. He projected his image to every clan territory in Metamorphia.
"To the leaders of the Five Clans," Zayn said, his blood-red eyes staring into the souls of everyone watching the screens. "The Viper's Crest was your shield. I just broke it with a flick of my wrist. I am coming for the crowns. Hide in your palaces. Pray to your ancestors. It won't matter. The Abyssal King has arrived."
He finished the broadcast by punching the tower's main console, sending a feedback loop that fried every electronic device in the district.
Silence fell over the ruins of the Viper's Crest. Zayn stood alone in the wreckage, the "Primal Rage" slowly receding, leaving him in a state of cold, dark triumph.
The feedback from the shattered console hummed a dying note before fading into a heavy, suffocating silence. The "Chimera-Shell," once the pride of the Viper's Crest, lay in a heap of scrap metal and leaking bio-fluid, its red lens flickering like a dying heartbeat.
Zayn stood at the center of the devastation. His chest rose and fell slowly, the Primal Rage retreating back into the depths of his blood, leaving his veins feeling like ice. His abyssal black hair finally settled, but his eyes—those burning red embers—remained fixed on the horizon where the distant spires of the other four clans pierced the clouds.
The General lay paralyzed in the rubble, watching as Zayn turned his back on the ruins.
"You... you think this changes anything?" the General wheezed, blood bubbling at the corner of his mouth. "The Crownstar... the other four... they will erase you. You're just one man."
Zayn stopped walking. He didn't look back.
"I am not a man," Zayn replied, his voice cold enough to frost the air. "I am the debt you've ignored for a thousand years. And I've come to collect."
As he walked toward the perimeter of the district, the survivors parted like the Red Sea. Soldiers dropped their broken weapons, and civilians watched from the shadows of their homes, their fear slowly twisting into something else—awe. For the first time in the history of Metamorphia, someone had punched a hole in the "unbreakable" hierarchy.
Zayn reached the edge of the sector, where the smoke from the fires met the cold night air of the city. He looked down at his hand; the knuckles were stained with the green fluid of the Chimera and the dust of the gates. He didn't wipe it off. It was a brand.
The chapter ends not with a shout, but with a chilling realization across the city. In the high palaces of the remaining clans, the holographic screens went black, leaving only a faint, lingering image of Zayn's red eyes burned into the monitors.
The "traitor's seed" had bloomed. The hunt was over, and the reign had begun.