The world wore its scars like armor. Three winters had gnawed at the ruins of cities, leaving skeletal skyscrapers draped in ivy that glowed faintly under moonlight—mutated photosynthesis, the scientists called it. Habitable zones shrank to fortified archipelagos: the Europan Citadel, the Pan-Asian Spires, the Americas' Chain of Bastions. Borders dissolved under the United World Congress banner, a fragile alliance of necessity. Humanity no longer fought for flags but for inches of soil and seconds of tomorrow.
Liu Jian's mercenary unit, *Shadow Vanguard*, operated in the cracks. Officially, they were contractors for the Congress's Frontier Corps. Unofficially, they were the scalpel for wounds too deep for armies. Their reputation bled into myth: the Wolf General who burned battlefields to glass, the Ghost Princess who walked through walls, the Storm Serpent who drowned leviathans in their own blood. But myths don't pay in rations or bullets. The Congress did.
——
The Dead Zone was their latest graveyard. Once a rainforest, now a wasteland of petrified trees and acid fog. Satellite intel had flagged a Category-IV beast—a chimera of scaled wings and fractal claws, its hide crackling with bio-electric storms. The Congress wanted it dead before it reached the Amazon Bastion.
"Standard suppression tactics failed," Yumi said, her voice crackling through the squad's neural link. She hovered in the command pod five klicks back, her mind jacked into drones that painted the beast's thermal silhouette across their retinas. "It's adapting. Last strike team's plasma cannons just… *fed* it."
Liu Jian crouched in the ash, his breath steady. Three years had chiseled him to a weapon: no scars, no tells, just ember-lit eyes. "We'll starve it first."
The plan was pure Shadow Vanguard.
Aisha melted into the fog, her shadow-manipulation cloaking Hiroto's advance. He'd forgone tusk and scale for pure density—a human battering ram, bones reforged by Fourth Realm cultivation. Ravi and Meili flanked high, their forms flickering between serpent and storm.
The beast sensed them. Of course it did.
It uncoiled from the mist, wings shredding the air into static. Hiroto struck first, fists cratering the ground to destabilize its footing. Aisha's shadows lashed its eyes, blinding it long enough for Meili's pressure wave to snap one wing. Ravi struck the spine, crystalline claws screeching against bio-armor.
But the beast *learned*.
Electric storms ricocheted, targeting their neural link. Yumi's drones fizzed. Communications died.
Liu Jian moved last.
Fire isn't energy. Fire is *hunger*. He let it devour—not the beast, but the air around it. Oxygen vanished. The creature's storms guttered. In the vacuum, he stepped close, palm pressed to its heaving flank.
"Burn quiet," he murmured.
The core ignited. A supernova contained, collapsing inward. The beast crumpled to cinders.
——
Victory parties in the Bastions tasted like ash. Crowds cheered holovids of Shadow Vanguard's exploits, children mimicked Liu Jian's ember-eyed glare, and the Congress pinned medals on uniforms they'd never seen stained. But the squad drank in silence, tucked in a bunker beneath the Citadel's glittering towers.
"They think it's over," Meili said, swirling luminescent liquor—a refugee brew from the Siberian Wastes. "Even the Congress."
"They need to believe that," Yumi replied. Her hands, smooth and human again, trembled faintly. The *baihou*'s whispers never left. "Hope's a weapon. We're just the sheath."
Kyra entered unannounced, her presence still bending light like a mirage. She'd aged unnaturally, her quartz eyes webbed with cracks. "The vanguard stirs. Faster than projected."
A hologram spilled from her claws: the Earth's core, throbbing with a malignant glow. Tendrils of alien biomass crept toward the surface, infecting tectonic plates.
"How long?" Liu Jian asked.
"Months. Weeks. Your… *Congress* will not act. They cling to their fragile peace."
Ravi laughed, bitter. "So we die saving people who'll never know why?"
"No," Kyra said. "We die waking them up."
——
The Congress's chambers were a cathedral of lies. Polished floors mirrored vaulted ceilings, delegates in tailored exosuits debating resource quotas while holograms of "reclaimed" zones played on loop. Liu Jian's arrival silenced them.
He didn't plead. He *showed*.
Kyra's hologram ripped through the chamber—the core's cancer, the vanguard's true scale, the armada of voidships darkening Neptune's orbit. The delegates recoiled.
"You've built castles on a fault line," Liu Jian said, embers smoldering in his pupils. "Your enemies aren't the beasts. They're the *heralds*. The real war is coming. And you're out of time to pretend."
The Pan-Asian delegate stood first. Then the Europan. Then the rest.
That night, the Shadow Vanguard's contract was upgraded. No more mercenary tags. They became the Spearhead—the Congress's first and last line of offense.
——
In the Dead Zone's ashes, Liu Jian knelt. The squad's vials hung from his neck, now inert. Mastery had cost them the serum's crutch. Their power was innate, irrevocable.
Yumi joined him, her breath frosting in the acid wind. "We'll need an army. Not of soldiers. Of *containers*."
He nodded. "Start with the Wastes. The ones who've tasted Hollowing."
"And if they refuse?"
He stood, cradling embers in his palm. "They won't. The hungry never do."
Above, the first void rains began—acidic, glittering.
The calm was over.