Manila Ruins, Year 2032
The city no longer had a heartbeat. Smoke rose from shattered towers, thick and gray, curling through a skyline broken into teeth. The war had already carved its name across Manila's bones.
In the husk of what was once Intramuros, a woman hovered above the chaos, her body wrapped in a storm of metal. Trucks, barricade panels, drone wings—anything not bolted to the earth spun around her like an invisible cyclone. Her eyes glowed white-blue, veins pulsing with thought-fueled power. She extended one hand and the metal obeyed, hurtling upward. A jet streaked through the clouds, then twisted mid-flight, folding like paper as it slammed into an invisible wall and exploded.
"Move!" she shouted into the wind, her voice sharp and cutting.
Below, fire erupted.
A man in a shredded gray hoodie dashed between the wreckage of overturned buses and burning streets. His skin flickered with embers beneath the surface, each breath stoking the heat that radiated from his limbs. When he punched forward, flame surged in a focused jet. Three of the Eye's hounds—twisted abominations of machine and flesh—were consumed in fireballs that painted the pavement red and orange.
But they didn't scream.
The largest hound clawed through the flames, its charred hide mutating as it moved. Plates of dark armor burst through blistered skin, shielding it. Its mouth stretched wide into a hinged nightmare, jaw unhinging as it launched itself forward.
A wall of stone met it mid-air.
The ground split open, and from it rose a teenage boy with cracked goggles and dirt smeared across his arms. His boots dragged through gravel, but his hands moved with precision. Concrete and twisted rebar hovered at his back like spears waiting for war. He said nothing. He never did. He simply raised both palms and the city responded.
The beast snarled and advanced.
Overhead, the psychokinetic woman narrowed her eyes and swept her hand in a tight arc. The suspended metal turned into a sudden rain of shrapnel, hammering the creatures into the pavement. The attack bought seconds. No more.
The creatures were learning, adjusting. The Eye had made them to hunt the gifted. Every clash made them stronger, faster, harder to kill. They bent physics. They adapted.
The wind changed.
On the far side of the ruins, two women stood atop a crumbling flyover. One raised her arms and the air thickened around her, howling like a storm on the verge of breaking. The other knelt and placed her palms on the cracked concrete. From the earth, vines erupted—thick, thorned, and furious—snapping through the asphalt and lashing around the limbs of a beast twice their size.
"Ella, now!" the wind-wielder shouted, her voice riding the air itself.
Ella screamed and the sky cracked open. A downward spiral of pressure slammed into the trapped monster. Its chest collapsed with a crunch and it stopped thrashing.
It wasn't enough.
The creatures kept coming. One of the agents stepped through the smoke, its body silver and seamless, face unreadable behind a mirrored mask. It raised its hand and the mist around them thickened, shimmering with chemical static. The temperature dropped. Movement slowed.
Water shivered in the air.
It shifted, solidified.
Then froze into jagged, airborne shards.
Before it could strike, the air changed again—this time, not from wind, but from silence. The water turned in the agent's hand and sliced backward, shearing through its own chest.
Steam rose from the street.
A man stepped forward, barefoot and calm, his presence turning the chaos into something deliberate. Water rippled around him in obedient tendrils. It slithered up his arms, then hardened into razor threads that danced between his fingers. Rain pooled at his feet and rose to meet his call.
He moved like a tide, inevitable and deadly.
The last of the Eye's drones circled overhead. The remaining creatures shifted, recalibrating. They had never faced this many Awakened working as one. They were designed to disrupt, isolate, overwhelm—but the rhythm was broken. The group moved in tandem now, not like strangers, but like a single organism.
Stone struck first. Fire followed.
Wind gathered. Vines crushed.
Water froze. Steel obeyed.
And from above, the final blow came—scrap and bone, tank and steel, lifted by thought and hurled like divine punishment.
The impact echoed across the city.
Then nothing. No movement. No noise. Just the quiet sizzle of rain touching ember.
One of them, no one could remember who, let out a breathless laugh. Not from victory. From disbelief. From exhaustion. From the stubbornness of still being alive.
In the center of the wreckage, six figures stood among the bones of a city that had tried to forget them.
Above, a drone hovered in silence, lens flickering.
Watching. Recording.
Far beyond the clouds, in a place no longer shaped by human hands, someone was listening.
The war was not over.
But for now, the storm had teeth.