The atmosphere was deathly quiet, carrying the sterile, suffocating weight of an underground black site—a high-security penitentiary or fortified bunker wiped completely from public records.
Step... step... step
Heavy combat boots echoed through the narrow concrete corridor. The approaching figure possessed a towering, athletic build, his weathered face mapped with faded bullet scars, deep scratches, and old concussive bruising.
Holstered at his waist was an exotic, heavily modified sidearm. Resting atop his brow was a dark green commander's peaked cap, pinned dead-center with an ominous insignia:
[ Z-Tier: Black Division Badge ]
Embroidered across the ballistic vest over his chest was a legendary moniker: Captain Bolt.
He reached a reinforced cell door, the heavy biometric lock hissing open as he stepped inside.
Suspended in the center of the chamber was a man shackled from neck to ankle in heavy titanium dampening chains. Pulsing crimson emitters ringed the perimeter, bathing the prisoner in a constant, low-frequency suppression field.
Captain Bolt stood over the captive, breaking the silence with a dry chuckle.
VOLUME 3RD - CHAPTER 36 - BEGINS...!
"So, Arclight... how are we holding up? It's only been a few days, but I trust our hosts have been seeing to your accommodations with proper care? I did warn you once before, didn't I? Crossing them was never going to end well for you."
The prisoner forced his head up, his cracked, blood-crusted lips parting through shallow breaths.
"You miserable bastard... what are you doing here? Why... why are you even breathing? You were supposed to be rotting in the dirt... the public's beloved hero, Bolt..."
Before he could finish the curse, his chin slumped against his chest, his consciousness slipping away under the humming weight of the red dampening fields.
"Tch. Looks like they really put you through the wringer, old friend." Bolt adjusted the brim of his commander's cap, turning toward the heavy vault doors. "Rest easy for now. I'll be seeing you very soon... Lucian Arclight. Or should I still address you by your callsign—[ SOLARIS ]
Leaving the subterranean cell behind, Captain Bolt ascended the elevator shaft to the facility's upper sanctum.
Seated around an elevated, obsidian conference ring were none other than the Four Great Founders of SS PARTNERS—the legendary titans who had reshaped the global landscape of modern military technology.
"The prisoner just passed out," Bolt reported casually, coming to a halt before the platform. "Military preparations are fully greenlit across the board. Every asset is primed and positioned for the target date."
A faint, arrogant smirk surfaced across Victor's face.
"Do you honestly believe anyone on this map possesses the power to stop us now?"
Vincent cut in from the shadows behind him, tapping a digital data-slate glowing with operational dossiers.
"Every protocol has been finalized on paper. All that remains is tomorrow's countdown. The second the sun rises, we initiate Operation Red in full force—and this fragile world will finally witness what absolute authority truly looks like."
With those chilling words hanging in the cold air, the scene shifted away into the dark.
The scene snapped back to the battlefield, right where the tragedy had unfolded.
At the absolute final fraction of a second, Kye forced his broken limbs forward. Catching Arisa before her head could strike the pulverized asphalt, he cradled her weight against his chest, shielding her from any secondary trauma.
The surrounding air plummeted into sub-zero stillness.
Smirks touched the lips of the surviving executives, while a suffocating, dead silence gripped the Alliance. Kye pressed his fingers against her neck.
Nothing. Not a single pulse. Her chest lay entirely still.
The wind suddenly turned violent, whipping pulverized stone, shattered glass, and thick clouds of road debris into a howling vortex around them.
Ravik broke the silence, scoffing as he rolled his broad shoulders.
"What's with the long face, Kye? Are you honestly taking it this hard? We just lost two of our own comrades—where's your sympathy for us? You've only lost one so far. But don't you worry... the rest of your little squad is next in line. Looks like my hands are getting dirty all over again—"
The words never finished.
Before Ravik could even blink, Kye had already transferred Arisa's motionless body into Saito's trembling arms.
In that same microsecond, a fist tore through the air directly toward Ravik's face.
Ravik's eyes stretched wide in sheer panic.
CLANG!
On raw survival instinct, Ravik crossed his massive forearms, his dense martial arts hardening his flesh into the shape of an iron pavise shield.
It was useless.
The kinetic shock shattered his guard instantly. The sheer concussive pressure overpowered his balance, violently blasting his massive frame backward across the asphalt.
Kye didn't give him room to breathe. Before Ravik's boots could even find purchase on the ground, Kye materialized above him. Every strand of his elemental reserves flared around his second knuckle—an overcharged, lethal execution strike aimed straight for the throat. Ravik wasn't ready.
BOOM!
A heavy black silhouette intercepted the blow mid-descent.
For the first time since the raid began, Darius abandoned his brother's side to throw himself into an ally's defense.
"Darius?! What the hell are you doing?! Why did you jump in for me?!"
CRACK!
Every heart on that street stopped beating.
Hairline fractures raced across the invisible air in front of Darius's armored gauntlet. The localized artificial space-time fabric—the very barrier deemed completely invincible—was splintering under the weight of Kye's fist. The sheer density of the blow exceeded the threshold of spatial absorption itself.
Darius instantly disengaged, leaping backward in cold terror.
The smoke parted, and standing directly before him was Kye.
His eyes were no longer human. Twin flares of pure, murderous red eye burned from his sockets, his aura suffocating every living soul within a hundred-meter radius. Another lethal strike was already whistling toward Darius's neck—
SPLASH!
A fist punched clean through flesh and bone, erupting out through a broad muscular spine.
The torso impaled on Kye's forearm did not belong to Darius.
It belonged to Kaizen.
Driven by his awakened Authority, Kaizen had surged forward in his fully manifested [Demi-Human Beast Form]—his muscle fibers quadrupled, monstrous fangs protruding, tearing through his uniform into an apex predator.
Yet even with his ultimate defensive beast-form engaged, he couldn't deflect the impact.
Hk-khh... ugh!
Thick black veins spider-webbed across Kaizen's monstrous face as gallons of dark crimson vomited past his jagged teeth. Clamping his clawed fingers around Kye's impaling arm, he forced out a bloody sneer.
"Kye... you miserable bastard... is this all you've got? Was that really... your best shot...?"
BOOM!
Kye didn't even look at him.
A devastating, point-blank spin-kick shattered Kaizen's jaw, tearing him off the impaling arm and rocketing him through the air. Kaizen smashed through the reinforced facade of a two-story storefront across the boulevard, bringing the entire structure down on top of himself in a mountain of rubble.
Behind them, Saito sat frozen on the curb, his mind drowning in sensory overload. He saw Hollow's unnatural shadow awakening, and now this incomprehensible, demonic surge from Kye—yet his trembling hands remained pressed against Arisa's cold chest. Her lungs weren't drawing breath. Her heart wasn't beating. With every second slipping away, Saito couldn't offer Kye tactical support even if he wanted to.
A brief memory flashed back to the momentArisa had opened her eyes.
Waking up amid the debris, her blurred vision had caught sight of Darius descending upon the exhausted Kye with that colossal executioner's broadsword. Without running calculations, without hesitation, and with zero regard for her own survival, she had dumped every drop of reserve adrenaline into her suit's thrusters, throwing her soft mortal body directly into the path of the steel.
SPLASH.
Across the cracked road, Darius stared at his fractured vambrace in absolute disbelief, his breath turning shallow.
Desperation took over. Exchanging frantic glances, Darius, Ravik, and the remaining executives rallied their remaining reserves, screaming as they lunged together in a synchronized, all-out charge straight at Kye.
Then, the world froze.
[ Absolute Fear ]
THUD! THUD! THUD!
Mid-stride, all three executives were slammed out of the air, their faces driven violently into the asphalt as if an invisible mountain had crushed them from above.
Tears of blood leaked from their wide, trembling eyes. Crimson poured from their nostrils and lips. Their muscles locked into rigid paralysis, their nervous systems completely refusing to obey their wills.
Darius's chin was pinned to the rock, his vocal cords trembling under the sheer suffocating weight of the killing intent pressing down on his spine.
"How...? How can this be your power, you miserable bastard?! When Veyron and I went to war against that monster back in the day... I felt this exact same pressure! There's no mistaking it... this isn't your technique! This is Grimm's executioner pressure!"
Kye heard none of it.
No words reached him, no questions mattered, and no answers existed. His fractured mind was stripped down to a single, pulsing imperative:
[ Die ]
Flames, crackling golden lightning, and raw kinetic mass coalesced violently around his trembling knuckles once more. The air howled, threatening to swallow the entire city block whole. But right at the tipping point—
Fzzzt.
The light died.
Every trace of elemental energy evaporated into thin air. The suffocating executioner's gravity vanished in an instant, liberating the executives from the crushing weight that had pinned them to the asphalt.
Kye collapsed hard onto his knees.
Ughh... ugh!
Thick, dark blood spilled past his lips, spattering against the pulverized pavement. His physical frame had hit its absolute physiological breaking point—his nervous system was frying, entirely unable to sustain another drop of power output.
Darius dragged himself up, wiping the cold sweat and blood from his jaw with a jagged breath. Another side Kaizen thought for a second
"Hah... for a second there, I almost wondered if this little insect possessed an infinite energy core like mine."
Ravik pushed through the pain, steadying his battered stance. He glanced across the smoking street toward the collapsed storefront. "Kaizen? Are you still breathing? Your abdomen..."
Kaizen stepped out from the rubble, coughing crimson but grinning like a deranged maniac. "I'm alive, Ravik. It hurt like hell, sure... but we won this damn war. My Demi-Human Beast Form doesn't operate on a countdown, and the accelerated cell regeneration is already sealing the tissue. Stop worrying."
CRACK-BOOM!
The burning mountain of debris behind them tore open.
Rocketing straight out of the flaming cargo wreckage was Veyron. Blood-soaked and completely deranged with fury, a blinding sphere of pure, catastrophic energy pulsed within his raised fist, glowing with the heat of an artificial sun.
Darius's face turned ghostly pale. He screamed at the top of his lungs.
"You reckless idiot! Veyron, stop! What the hell are you doing?! The detonation radius from that will kill all of us!"
A brief memory carved through the battlefield's haze.
Deep in an uncharted black-site operation, Veyron had once slaughtered an entire battalion of over a thousand elite soldiers single-handedly. Almost every man had dropped dead from nothing more than a solitary, horrific strike: [The Concentrated Singularity ]
Veyron's true secret was never just speed. In every skirmish, he skimmed micro-reserves of kinetic energy, siphoning and compressing the charge indefinitely until he chose to unleash it in an extinction-level blow.
The memory snapped back. Veyron closed the final hundred meters in a heartbeat, an unstoppable missile homing in on the paralyzed Alliance.
CRACK-SHOT!
A sonic boom shattered the night.
A high-density anti-materiel round from a hypersonic maximum-damage sniper rifle punched clean through Veyron's skull, spraying bone and brain matter into the air.
Standing atop a jagged slab of concrete was Elena. Barely clinging to consciousness, her trembling fingers held the smoking barrel of her heavy rifle. She managed a weak, blood-stained smile.
Yet reality warped into something grotesque.
Even with his cranium pierced, Veyron's body refused to drop. Driven by sheer residual momentum and dying muscle spasms, his frame twitched, staggering forward, clawing toward them.
PIERCE!
A jagged iron needle tore clean through the side of Veyron's throat, severing the spinal column with a sickening crunch.
Veyron's momentum ceased completely. The gathered energy in his hand dispersed into thin smoke. His lifeless body collapsed face-first into the dirt, stone dead.
Standing behind the corpse, her body trembling with unhinged malice, was Valerina.
Every eye on the shattered avenue stretched wide in sheer, paralyzed shock. Even the surviving members of the Alliance froze, unable to process the macabre scene playing out before them.
Valerina stood trembling over Veyron's corpse, the jagged needle embedded deep in his severed spine. In her final dying heartbeat, she had fulfilled the solitary, twisted obsession that consumed her life. She had struck down one of the favorites.
Her vision blurred into a sea of red as memory swallowed the pain.
Years ago, within the sterile white walls of an uncharted black laboratory, two young sisters had been treated as mere raw material. Bound to cold metal examination tables, they were the biological daughters of a high-ranking syndicate shadow—a man who willingly surrendered his own bloodline to illicit human engineering.
Through countless agonizing trials, they manifested the [Authority of Blood]
The biological alteration was violent: the moment either sister bled, her heart bypassed normal circulatory limits, synthesizing a hyper-oxygenated, foreign bloodline that augmented neuromuscular velocity and physical density beyond human thresholds. But the mutation carried a horrific toll—with every ounce of blood spilled, their cognitive sanity dissolved into feral, unhinged euphoria.
"Look, Seraphine! Look at my arm!" A young Valerina had giggled through pale lips, holding up a forearm weeping with deep, crimson gashes.
Seraphine rushed over, her small hands frantically pressing sterile gauze against the lacerations.
"Valerina, be careful! Look at how deep that is! Why can't you just stay away from the sharp tools?!"
"I didn't trip, sister," the little girl had whispered, tilting her head with a chilling, wide-eyed grin. "I took the scalpel and carved it myself."
In the observation box above, their father watched the exchange in cold, analytical silence.
Has the Authority warped their cognition this severely? he had jotted down, swirling a glass of dark liquor. Two sweet little girls, reduced to children who fall in love with their own bloodshed. Yet Authorities only awaken from dormant psychological traits. Did they inherit this madness from me, or was it born in the dark?
Their lethal talent carried them through the ranks at a terrifying pace. Before long, both sisters wore the mantle of Special Executives within Bansho's personal squad. They were not the original four—Bansho's division had chewed through dozens of executive candidates who failed to adapt, leaving empty seats in their wake.
Upon their arrival, they crossed paths with Bansho's favored crown jewels: the Undefeated Brothers, Darius and Veyron. In those early days, Kaizen was still a tortured lab specimen undergoing cellular mutation, while Ravik was merely a raw recruit clawing his way up from the outer rings.
And in that same era, both sisters tasted bitter, crushing humiliation at the hands of Grimm and the brothers.
"I will kill them all," Valerina had snarled through clenched teeth after the duel, spitting blood onto the training floor. "Father told us the only way to the apex is over the dead. First Grimm... and then I'm going to rip those smug brothers limb from limb!"
Seraphine never carried that bottomless malice. She kept her composure, forever stepping between her sister's mania and the world.
Valerina only accelerated her reckless descent. Then came the sudden, quiet news that shook the underground: Grimm was dead.
"Valerina, what is the point of pushing yourself to the brink like this?" Seraphine had pleaded, catching her sister as she collapsed in exhaustion. "None of this feels right anymore. The Authority is poisoning your mind. It's making you sick."
Valerina snapped around, gripping Seraphine's collar. "Are you insane?! Father sent us here for a reason! We have to execute the mandate! We have to—"
SLAP!
Seraphine's hand cracked across Valerina's cheek. Tears welled in Seraphine's eyes, spilling down her bruised cheeks.
"Open your eyes! He doesn't care about us! He never did! He threw us into the syndicate's meat grinder, and he never once spoke a word about what happened to Mother! You're letting this wretched power rot your soul!"
Seraphine buried her face in her sister's shoulder, her shoulders shaking violently. "But... you're all I have left in this world, Valerina. No matter how mad you become, no matter what hell you walk into... I will always walk beside you. I will protect you until my last breath."
Through countless assassinations, street wars, and high-level raids, that promise held unbroken. Seraphine took the bullets, blocked the blades, and bled alongside her younger sister.
The past collapsed back into the ruins of the present.
Kneeling over Veyron's motionless body, tears cut clean tracks through the dried soot on Valerina's cheeks.
I didn't think... I was capable of crying anymore, her fading mind drifted into the dark. Sister.. sister.., why does my chest feel this empty? Did we... did we throw our lives away for a lie?
SPLASH!
Darius's massive broadsword cleaved through the dust in a blinding arc, severing her thoughts and her life in a single concussive blow.
Valerina dropped limp into the rubble, joining her sister in the dark.
"Brainless, sentimental garbage," Darius growled, lowering the blood-streaked steel. "You chose this moment to settle a petty childhood grudge? This was the time to secure total victory, not drag your pathetic insecurities onto my battlefield!"
He turned his monstrous bulk toward the crater where Kye lay motionless, his eyes burning with absolute, extinction-level bloodlust.
"And as for you, Kye Kurasaki... your time on this earth has officially expired. I will personally extract every drop of blood you stole from my brother. And your little human vermin? I am going to peel the flesh from their bones while they beg for death."
[ END OF CHAPTER 36 ]