Since the outbreak various size of gathering start emerging in this world , one such gathering of military individuals became a target of hunt for NW-13.
One hundred and twenty warriors—armored, disciplined, and loud with the confidence of numbers—believed themselves ready for anything the sky could throw at them. They did not know the creature that waited for them.
Rahul watched from a distant screen in his lab, the feed crisp, every microsecond magnified. NW‑13 moved through the trees beyond the wall like a thought taking shape. The figure that emerged from darkness was still, at a glance, shockingly human. But every detail betrayed it as something else.
Bones had taken on a strange density; limbs read like cables of steel under skin. Muscles rippled at impossible angles, contracting with a silence that made even the leaves seem loud. The skin—if it was skin—was not smooth flesh but a living armor: dark, matte patches of hardened plates interleaved with dull, stretchable tissue that flexed when NW‑13 moved. Veins ran across those plates like black rivers; faint bioluminescent lines pulsed under the surface, marking the rhythm of a heart that beat faster than a human's.
The face was the most awful thing to see. NW‑13 had kept its human features, but they had been sharpened into predator geometry: cheekbones that cast harsh shadows, an elongated jawline that could clamp like a vice. Its eyes—two familiar orbs and a faint, third ember where most have wisdom—were cold and intelligent. When it turned its head toward the compound, those eyes measured distances, counted patrols, catalogued openings like a general reading a map.
Its hands ended not in ordinary fingers but in tipped talons—curved, dark, and honed to a biting precision. When NW‑13 moved, it did so on the balls of its feet, a low, gliding step that made no sound the way a cat steps through tall grass. It smelled of iron and ozone, a scent Rahul knew from the lab but never expected to see manifest on a living thing.
At a signal—a flicker on Rahul's monitor—NW‑13 uncoiled. It reached the perimeter and slipped up the wall as if gravity were negotiable; a dozen sentries turned, shouted, drew blades—too slow. NW‑13 was on the first man like a storm. The strike was not cinematic: it was forensic. One talon severed a tendon, another tore through mail and muscle. The man collapsed, half-voice, half-heap. Within seconds the sentry's lamp darkened.
Noise erupted: horns and clanging armor, the battlefield awake. NW‑13 answered not with clumsy fury but with economized violence. It moved as a single-purpose predator through the chaos—step, strike, vanish—leaving bodies arranged like discarded puppets. Where a normal attacker would linger, NW‑13 flowed on, prioritizing targets by threat level: commanders calling orders, archers readying bows, any cohort that might rally and answer.
The warriors tried to form lines, disciplined steel against unknown terror. NW‑13 tested their discipline and found it wanting. A standard phalanx could hold a human opponent; it could not hold an intelligence that anticipated and pre-empted. When an officer barked a command, NW‑13 had already cut the shouting throat, and with a tilt of its head had redirected the rest of the squad into disarray.
There was brutality—close and intimate. NW‑13 used its talons to pry open helmets, to crush windpipes, to drop men with surgical efficiency. It did not scream or roar; it observed. When a veteran warrior tried to swing massively, NW‑13 danced a hair's breadth away and snapped the arm at the elbow, leaving the man to fall screaming, a puppet suddenly bereft of strings.
At one point, a squad leader rallied twelve men and charged. NW‑13 met them in the open, and for a breath the air was thick with steel. The creature spun, a small cyclone of motion, and the dozen became six, then three, then one—each fall precise, each death almost clinical. A blade chewed through chest plate only to be caught and stripped away as NW‑13's talon closed around the wrist and bent it backward until the bone snapped.
Rahul watched the casualty figures climb on his console: thirty, forty, sixty. The compound's outer ring was breached; flames licked at dry thatch. NW‑13 moved like a concept of violence made flesh—no hesitation, no fear, and a terrible intelligence that made even the most valiant flailings look like the flutters of an insect.
But it was not merely a slaughter. NW‑13 demonstrated decisions that were not purely instinctive. Twice it spared a young recruit who had collapsed and pleaded—both times, the creature paused, head cocked as if considering the utility of that life, then stepped away, leaving the recruit alive but broken. This selectivity was the moment that confirmed the experiment's success: instinct and instrument had merged with intent. NW‑13 was not only lethal; it made judgments. It could preserve or take according to a calculus only it could hold.
In less than an hour the compound, meant to hold 120 trained warriors, was silent in a way that belonged to graves. The bodies lay in ragged piles, armor scuffed and blood dark on stone. From the tower's highest point a single flag burned, and the second flag no longer waved.
NW‑13 returned through the smoke to the tree line, hairless silhouette against embers, carrying with it two prisoners—men bound and unconscious, valuable for later interrogation. It moved without triumph; there was a solemnity to its gait, like a creature that had completed a task and recognized its place within a larger pattern.
Rahul saw the data flood in: physiological readings from NW‑13's suit sensors, adrenal spikes, metabolic curves, and, most importantly, neural coherence readings that showed sustained, complex patterns—the hybrid mind had not collapsed into bestiality; it had integrated, planned, and executed.
He felt the old rush then, the cold thrill that always came after a successful trial. NW‑13 had proved one crucial thing: a being could be made to combine human tactical thought, X‑002 lethality, and self‑preservation. A new class of operative had been born—harder to predict, harder to kill, and exquisitely useful.
Outside the compound, smoke coiled toward the sky. Inside the lab, Rahul tapped a key and streamed a silent message to his Nightwatchers: collect the survivors, recover anything of value, and burn the rest. NW‑13's maw of shadow had changed the calculus of warfare. The age of numbers was over; the age of precision predators had begun.