The apartment door hung like a broken jaw, vomiting red and blue police strobes into the cramped hallway. Inside, an Ares Corp drone hovered near the ceiling, mapping the ruined living room with a rigid laser grid.
The place was gutted. The exterior window had been blown entirely outward, its twisted frame whistling as cold air rushed in from the city drop. Shards of glass glittered across the floor like scattered ice.
"No blood," an officer muttered, stepping over a shattered coffee table.
"Doesn't mean anything. Look at the walls."
Four deep gouges carved through the plaster, running diagonally toward the shattered window. Claw marks. But the scale was wrong. Too wide. Too deep. Not the frantic scratching of a struggle—they were points of leverage. Something massive had grabbed the wall simply to steady itself.
Near the couch, the father sat hunched, face buried in his hands.
"Sir," an investigator prompted gently. "We need you to answer a few more questions."
The man looked up, his eyes red and hollowed by exhaustion. "I came home late," he rasped. "Around midnight. The door was open. The window... gone." He gestured weakly toward the skyline. "And my son. He wasn't here."
Zeri flicked her wrist. A soft blue lattice snapped outward from her gauntlet, expanding into a sweeping holographic array. "Ari, run surface analysis."
"Scanning," her AI chimed, its voice calm and synthetic, mapping depth and pressure along the gouges in real-time.
"Did you hear anything?" the investigator pressed.
"Nothing," the father whispered. "But our cat is gone too. It never leaves."
The officers exchanged a glance. "No blood? No fur?"
Zeri's grid swept the floor. "Clean," she confirmed. No struggle. Just absence.
Heavy boots broke the silence. Three figures stepped through the doorway—black coats, high white collars. The POND insignia gleamed faintly on their shoulders.
The room's atmosphere shifted instantly. The local cops straightened, stepping back without a word. The Ares drone obediently dimmed and retreated to the hallway. The case wasn't theirs anymore.
Ravion glided past them, barely acknowledging their existence. Zeri followed, hands shoved into her jacket pockets, eyes tracking her HUD. Darian brought up the rear, his gaze lingering immediately on the broken father.
Ravion crouched beneath the gouged wall, gloved fingers hovering near the plaster. "Depth," he murmured.
"Ari, extend perimeter," Zeri ordered, leaning out the shattered window. "Whatever hit this place, it came from the sky-lanes."
"No," Ravion said flatly. He stood, his sharp eyes sweeping the room. "The boy wasn't taken. He was gone before this happened."
Zeri frowned. "You're guessing."
"Look at the entry point," Ravion pointed the tip of his boot at the pristine floorboards beneath the window. "No displaced mass. No struggle. It didn't fight anything here. It merely moved through the space."
Darian stared at the ceiling tracks. "Passing through," he murmured. "Not hunting."
He turned back to the father. "Your son. How old?"
"Nine." The word barely made it out of the man's throat.
Darian nodded slowly, the weight of the number settling over him before he forced it away. He looked out the shattered window into the neon-bled fog of the lower traffic lanes. Anything could hide in that metal labyrinth.
"We'll find him," Darian said quietly.
Ravion was already at the door. "We have the trajectory. Move."
The ground sectors smelled of ozone, rust, and old misery. Here, far beneath the polished spires of the upper city, the sky was a myth. Massive pipelines choked the streets like black veins, dripping acidic condensation onto the cracked pavement.
Zeri leaned against a rusted guardrail, grimacing as a droplet hissed against her boot. "God, I hate the under-strata. Upper city gets clean air and patrol drones. Down here? We get the city's runoff. Why would anyone choose to live in this dump?"
Ravion stood immaculate amidst the decay, his posture rigid, eyes reflecting the flickering neon of a dead vending machine. "A natural consequence of gravity," he said, his voice laced with cold aristocratic contempt. "Filth always settles at the bottom. Leave a place without order, and the vermin will crown themselves."
"Yeah, yeah, your majesty," Zeri muttered.
Darian ignored them, watching the street. A junkie slumped in an alley, needles trembling. Two hollow-eyed kids picked through a disposal crate. It was a graveyard of the living.
Then, the shadows warped.
A wet, tearing hiss echoed from a nearby drainage grate. The rusted iron buckled upward. A limb hooked over the edge—too long, slick with matted, unnatural fur.
A drunk stumbling out of the alley froze.
Two vertical pupils ignited in the dark.
The creature surged. It didn't leap; it unfolded, slamming into the man with bone-cracking force. Claws tore across his chest—a glancing, testing blow. The thing crouched over him. It was vaguely feline, but horribly stretched, its spine jutting against taut skin. Half-formed, translucent wings tore through the flesh of its back, trembling uselessly as if trying to remember how to fly.
It unhinged a jaw lined with needle-teeth.
A flash of silver severed the fog.
THUNK.
Ravion's spear impaled the beast's shoulder, pinning it to the asphalt. The creature unleashed a broken, choked shriek—half feline, half mechanical scrape. It thrashed, claws sparking violently against the street.
"Revolting," Ravion sneered. He planted a boot beside the vibrating shaft, driving the weapon deeper. "You presume to hunt in my presence?"
The thing didn't submit. Bones popped as it wrenched itself forward, tearing its own flesh to slip up the spear's length toward Ravion.
"Nope. Absolutely not," Zeri groaned. Her gauntlets whined, plates sliding back to project twin, heavy-bore holographic cannons over her forearms.
She fired. Blue plasma slammed into the creature's flank, vaporizing a chunk of its ribs. It shrieked again, the vestigial wings spasming.
Darian moved in the chaos. He slid under the creature's flailing reach, grabbed the bleeding drunk by the harness, and hauled him backward into the alley. "Stay down," Darian commanded.
The creature finally snapped its shoulder free of the spear, landing on four twisted legs. Then, with a sickening crunch, two smaller, unfinished limbs burst from its thorax.
It lunged at Ravion.
Ravion didn't flinch. He sidestepped the frenzied swipe, his spear becoming a deadly extension of his will. He didn't just strike; he dismantled it. The blade carved behind its knee, pivoted, and drove straight through its center of gravity, arresting its momentum entirely and pinning it to the street once more.
"Zeri," Ravion ordered smoothly, holding the thrashing monstrosity in place.
Zeri vaulted onto a low-hanging pipe, her cannons converging into a single targeting reticle. "Clear!"
A concentrated beam of azure light punched straight down through the creature's spine, blowing out its chest cavity and scorching the concrete below. The vestigial wings flared once, catching the blue light, before crumpling inward.
Ravion wrenched his spear free with a flick of his wrist, clearing the black blood from the blade. The corpse twitched, steaming in the cold air.
Zeri dropped down beside him, wrinkling her nose at the burning ozone. "Well. That was aggressively ugly."
Ravion didn't spare the carcass a second glance. His eyes were already scanning the dark mouth of the alley it had crawled from.
"Mere vermin," Ravion said, adjusting his cuff. "Let us find what it was running from."