Then—tragedy. Gary and Henry looked down, spotting them. "Well well well," Gary drawled, "look at what we've got here."
Run, Junior!!" Alfie Sr. bellowed. He didn't wait for a reply—just grabbed a fistful of his son's jacket and yanked. Junior's feet barely touched the ground for the first three strides before terror took over and he started pumping his legs on his own, high-pitched screams tearing out of him in short, panicked bursts.
Gary threw his head back and laughed—a big, rolling sound that echoed down the tunnel like a drum.
"Holy shit, dude! We're gonna have so much fucking fun!" He spread his arms wide. "Watching these peasants run is just so funny!"
Henry joined in, a lower, meaner chuckle, and then both of them flew forward, moving far too fast for anything human, yet somehow turning corners with casual precision.
Alfie Sr. and Junior tore around the first sharp bend, boots skidding on wet concrete. Behind them the tunnel rang with the crack of displaced air—Gary and Henry closing the gap.
The two older men dove into a narrow maintenance crawlspace—barely two feet high, rusted rebar and dripping pipes scraping their backs. Junior whimpered as he wriggled after his father, elbows and knees scraping raw.
Gary and Henry slowed just enough to make it cruel.
Gary reached out, casual as picking fruit, and tore a six-foot section of steel pipe off the wall. He spun it once like a baton, then hurled it.
The pipe screamed through the air at supersonic speed—Alfie Sr. felt the pressure wave slap the side of his head before he even heard it. The pipe smashed into the concrete inches from his ear, showering them both with stinging chips and dust.
"Oh my god…" Alfie Sr. whispered. Tears streamed freely down his dirt-streaked face now. He kept crawling, dragging Junior with him.
Henry raised one hand and clapped it hard.
The sound was thunder in a bottle—sewage water erupted upward in a filthy wall, a miniature tsunami that slammed into Alfie and Junior from behind and threw them off their feet. They hit the ground hard, faces skidding through cold muck.
Henry drifted closer, hovering just above the waterline.
"Pathetic," he said, voice flat and cold. "I wouldn't even keep you as a slave in my empire."
Gary snorted, still grinning. "Geez, where did you pull that from? That shit was cold."
They kept running—legs burning, lungs raw, forcing every ounce of speed they had left.
"Time to have some more fun!" Gary shouted, grin stretching wider.
He dragged a deep breath into his chest and snarled it back out.
Cold exploded from his mouth in a savage white blast. The tunnel screamed as the frost ripped through it—water flash-froze mid-ripple, stone cracked with sharp popping sounds, steel pipes warped and split. The entire passage didn't simply freeze; it was beaten into ice, glistening and brutal.
Alfie Sr. and Junior's feet locked in the sudden glacier. They didn't hesitate—ripped their shoes off in frantic jerks and kept running barefoot, soles slapping against ice so cold it burned.
The faster they moved, the more treacherous it became. Their feet slid out from under them at the same instant. Both went down hard, faces smacking the frozen sewage with wet, ugly cracks.
"My turn!" Henry called, almost cheerful.
He curled his hand into a fist.
The air around his knuckles shimmered and warped like heat haze over asphalt. A dull orange glow leaked between his fingers, pulsing brighter with each heartbeat. Heat rolled off him in visible waves; frost on the walls began to sweat and drip.
Then the fire broke loose.
Flames tore out of his fist in a dense, roaring wall—not a stream, not a jet, but a solid mass of white-orange hell that filled the tunnel from floor to ceiling. It swallowed light, swallowed sound, swallowed everything in front of it as it chased the two fleeing figures.
"WHAT THE FUUUUUUCK!!!!" Junior screamed, voice cracking into a register only terror can reach. He looked back once—saw the inferno rushing toward them like a living thing—and kept running blind.
Elsewhere in the labyrinth, Aya and Milo were running for their lives. Knox came through the wall like a missile.
Concrete exploded outward in a choking gray cloud. He didn't slow down—simply flew straight through the next wall, then the next, leaving smoking holes behind him.
"FUUUUUUCK!!!!" Milo yelled, voice raw with panic.
They dove into the narrowest passages they could find—cramped service tunnels, collapsed storm drains, any gap too tight for Knox's massive, armored frame. He didn't care. Every time they slipped through a space he couldn't follow, he simply flew into the wall and smashed it aside in a spray of rebar and dust.
Aya and Milo crawled under a jagged hole barely wide enough for their shoulders, then sprinted down a twisting side passage, changing direction every few seconds in a desperate attempt to confuse him.
Knox just laughed—a low, ugly sound—and kept coming. Knox's powers allows his eyes to see the traces of a living being's footsteps or even an object's traces.
Aya spun, yanked the strange pistol from her belt—the one John had pressed into her hand while she was bandaging his ribs.
She remembered his tired voice, the faint smile he'd given her.
"What's this shit?" she'd laughed, turning the odd-looking gun over in her hands. "Looks like a toy."
"That's because you're thinking about bullets," John had said. "It fires a focused neuro-disruptive pulse. Not electricity—something messier. It interferes with Composite V in their bloodstream."
"You should keep it," he'd added quietly, eyes on hers. "Just in case…you know."
She aimed and pulled the trigger. A pale violet pulse snapped out—silent, invisible except for the brief shimmer in the air. It struck Knox square in the chest.
His body locked. Arms straight. Legs rigid mid-stride.
He dropped like a statue, crashing to the ground so hard the floor cracked beneath him.
His eyes—visible through the cracked visor—widened in total shock. He couldn't move. Not a finger. Not an eyelid. Every muscle in his body had been hijacked by invisible static.
Rage flooded his face. Veins bulged at his temples.
Aya and Milo didn't wait to watch. They turned and ran.
Behind them, Knox finally regained control—only seconds, but enough.
He screamed. A wordless, animal howl of pure fury.
Then he started destroying everything.
Walls disintegrated. Pipes burst. Whole sections of tunnel collapsed behind him in rolling booms of dust and debris. He flew upward at supersonic speed—no direction, no plan, just blind, directionless rage—smashing through concrete and steel like tissue paper, leaving a trail of ruin and thunder in his wake.
"You're fucking dead, Hannah."
Elsewhere, Benjamin had been walking alone for what felt like days.
No drones overhead. No distant sonic booms. No sudden walls exploding into dust. Just the endless, dripping tunnels—cold concrete under his boots, the low stink of stagnant water and rust, the faint scuttle of rats in the dark. His prosthetic arm clicked softly with every swing, a mechanical heartbeat in the silence.
Exhaustion had settled deep into his bones, turning each step into something heavy and deliberate. He wasn't running anymore. He was just… moving. Forward. Because stopping felt too much like giving up.
That fragile peace shattered the moment two figures dropped from above.
They didn't fall. They simply appeared—hovering a foot above the filthy water, boots dry, capes hanging motionless as though gravity had forgotten them. Two rich women. One held a syringe in her gloved hand, the emerald-green liquid inside glowing faintly. Behind them, tethered together with heavy cable ties, shuffled a ragged line of at least ten poor—gaunt faces, hollow eyes, clothes hanging like wet rags. They swayed on their feet, silent, heads down.
Benjamin stopped dead.
Linda tilted her head slightly, studying him like a specimen under glass. Her voice came out calm, almost polite. "Don't move, we won't hurt you."
Benjamin's hand flexed around the grip of the pistol tucked in his belt. He didn't draw it. Not yet. "How the fuck am I supposed to believe that?" he said, voice low, rough from disuse.
Charlotte smiled—small, reassuring, the kind of smile doctors give before they tell you the news is bad. "Trust me, we really won't hurt you."
Before Benjamin could answer, Linda stepped forward and plunged the syringe into the neck of the nearest tied man. The needle slid in smooth. She depressed the plunger. Green liquid disappeared into the vein.
One by one, she moved down the line—quick, clinical injections. No hesitation. No ceremony.
The change started almost immediately.
The first man's body jerked like a marionette with cut strings. His head snapped back. Foam bubbled at the corners of his mouth, thick and white. His eyes rolled until only the bloodshot whites showed, then flooded red—pupils swallowed by crimson. Muscles twitched under skin, violent and random. Every person in the line began to convulse in the same way—spines arching, jaws clacking, saliva dripping in long strings. Low, animal growls rose from their throats.
"They will," Charlotte said softly.
The last word still hung in the air when the first one lunged.
Ten bodies moved at once—too fast, too strong, too wrong. Human legs shouldn't have propelled them like that. Human hands shouldn't have curled into claws that tore concrete when they scraped the walls. They came straight for Benjamin, eyes blazing red, mouths open in foaming snarls.
Benjamin turned and ran.
He didn't look back. He didn't need to. He could hear them—boots slapping water, ragged breathing turning into wet snarls, the cables snapping taut and then breaking as they forgot they were bound.
They were faster than him. One of them—skinny, half-starved, eyes like fresh blood—lunged low and clamped both arms around Benjamin's left leg. The grip was iron. Benjamin stumbled, tried to kick free. Two more hit him from behind—shoulders slamming into his back like battering rams. He went down hard, face-first into shallow black water. The impact drove the air from his lungs.
Then the fists came.
They didn't punch like men. They punched like machines programmed only for destruction. Knuckles cracked against his ribs—each blow landing with the dull, heavy thud of a truck hitting a wall at speed. Pain exploded white behind his eyes. Another fist smashed into his cheekbone; he felt it fracture, felt the bone flex and give. Blood flooded his mouth.
They didn't stop. Shattered pipes and rusted rebar appeared in their hands—torn from the tunnel walls in blind frenzy. The first piece of rebar stabbed downward. It punched through the meat of his shoulder, grating against bone. Benjamin roared. Another stabbed into his side—once, twice, three times. Blood welled hot and fast, soaking his jacket. A pipe cracked across his prosthetic arm; the servos whined in protest, sparks spitting from the joints.
He tried to curl, to protect his head. They didn't care. They kept stabbing, kept punching, kept snarling—rabid, mindless, unstoppable.
Then—
one sharp whistle.
High. Clear. Single tone.
All ten of them froze mid-motion. Fists raised. Rebar dripping red. Eyes still burning crimson. Then, like trained dogs hearing a command, they turned and ran back to the two women—silent, obedient, heads lowered.
Benjamin lay on his back in the filthy water, chest heaving, blood bubbling from his lips with every breath. His vision swam. The pain was everywhere—sharp, dull, burning, throbbing—all at once.
Linda tilted her head, studying the carnage with clinical detachment.
"I'm not quite sure whether if this is a fail or a success. On one hand, we can control them, on the other, they're way too rabid."
Charlotte shrugged lightly, already turning away.
"Don't worry about it, we'll just ask Aris. He's the one who made this, after all."
"But Sovereign's the one who ordered us to test these out. Shouldn't we tell him instead?" Linda asked.
"We'll ask Sovereign first, remember. We always prioritize him first."
"Alright. Well what do we do about him then?" Linda glanced down at Benjamin—bleeding, gasping, barely conscious.
"Leave him be," Charlotte said, voice flat and cold. "He'll probably die in a few minutes."
As if his life were nothing more than an empty shell she'd already discarded.
They rose into the air together—boots lifting silently off the ground—and flew away down the tunnel, the ten rabid poor trailing behind them like obedient hounds.