The air in the Amazon Guardian Zone was thick, wet, and alive. It was a symphony of a million buzzing, clicking, and screeching voices, a world away from the dry, silent heat of the Giza training grounds. For the first graduating class of the Coalition's elite soldiers—a team of twelve Awakened codenamed "Vanguard"—this was the final exam.
Their mission was simple, a classic search and destroy: locate and eliminate a B-Class Aberration, a "Goliath Grootslang," a monstrous, elephant-sized serpent with armored skin that had been terrorizing a remote sector of the rainforest.
Diego led them, not as a commander, but as a guide, a silent, watchful presence. He moved through the dense, treacherous undergrowth with a liquid grace, his senses not just his own, but a part of the vast, green world around him. He could feel the fear of the small monkeys in the canopy above and the slow, patient anger of the ancient trees.
The team, for all their new training, was a cacophony of discord. The American pyrokinetic, codenamed "Blaze," wanted to burn a path through the jungle. The Russian cryo-kinetic, "Frost," argued for a slow, stealthy approach. The Nigerian woman with skin of stone, "Bastion," advocated for a defensive perimeter. They were a dozen sharp, brilliant knives in a bag, constantly grating against each other.
"The jungle does not reward the loud or the slow," Diego said, his voice a low murmur that still managed to cut through their bickering. "It rewards the aware. Listen."
He led them to a clearing where the Grootslang had recently passed. The signs of its passage were not subtle—a swathe of crushed, splintered trees and a trail of thick, oily slime that sizzled on the jungle floor. But Diego pointed to the smaller things. "The spider-monkeys are silent. The poison frogs have gone deep into the mud. They are not afraid of what was here. They are afraid of what is coming back. It is hunting us."
Before they could react, the ground erupted. The Goliath Grootslang, which had been hiding in a shallow, muddy riverbed, burst from its camouflage. It was a nightmare of muscle and armored plates, its elephantine head sporting a pair of wickedly curved tusks, its serpentine body moving with a terrifying, explosive speed.
The team's training, the careful, meditative control Lin Feng had taught them, shattered in a wave of pure, primal panic.
Blaze unleashed a torrent of uncontrolled fire that turned the humid air to steam but hissed harmlessly off the creature's wet, armored hide. Frost's ice spears shattered against its tusks. Bastion's defensive stance was useless as the creature simply coiled its massive body around her, its constricting muscles causing her stone-like skin to crack under the impossible pressure.
They were being annihilated. Their individual powers were useless against a creature that was a living embodiment of the jungle's raw, brutal strength.
As the Grootslang opened its massive jaws to crush the struggling Bastion, a new sound cut through the chaos. It was not the roar of an animal or the scream of a man. It was the sharp, clean crackle of ozone.
A figure landed in the clearing, a blur of motion. It was Lin Feng. He had been observing the exercise from a distance, a final, unseen test of his students. He wore the Thunder and Fire Restraint, the sleek, black device humming with a contained, dangerous power.
He saw his students, broken and scattered. He saw the monster. He saw the failure. And he knew it was his own. He had taught them control, but he had not taught them synergy.
He raised his gauntleted hand, and the two warring energies within him, the blue and the red, swirled into a perfect, stable harmony. They condensed not into a beam, but into a small, silent, and impossibly dense sphere of violet light that pulsed between his palms. The Annihilation Orb.
He didn't throw it. He simply opened his hand. The orb shot forward, not with the speed of lightning, but with a calm, deliberate certainty. It struck the Grootslang's armored head.
There was no explosion. No sound. The point of impact, and a two-foot-wide circle around it, simply ceased to exist. Vanished. The creature's massive body went rigid, then collapsed, its remaining headless corpse crashing to the ground with a world-shaking thud.
Lin Feng stood over the fallen monster, his chest heaving. He was not looking at the creature. He was looking at his students, his face a mask of cold, hard disappointment.
"Power without purpose is chaos," he said, his voice a low, dangerous rumble that cut them deeper than any wound. "And a team without trust is just a collection of casualties waiting to happen. The test is over. You have all failed."