The elevator didn't hum; it convulsed.
It was a rusted cage grinding its way up a throat of concrete, shaking so hard the vibratons traveled up through the soles of Aryan's boots and rattled his teeth. The air inside was recycled heat, smelling of ozone and the copper tang of drying blood.
Aryan jammed his shoulder blades into the corner. He couldn't catch his breath… His chest did that distinct, terrifying thing where it felt too small for his lungs. He looked down at his hands. They were trembling, blurring in and out of focus—brown skin rippling into gunmetal grey, then back again, like a bad signal on an old television.
It wasn't fear. It was the wiring. The torture downstairs had scrambled his nerves, and now his body was just a raw, misfiring circuit.
Silas leaned against the wire mesh. He looked bored, but the tension was in his jaw. He tilted a paper coffee cup back, found nothing, and crushed it in his fist. The sound was loud. Too loud.
"Feel that?" Silas murmured. He dropped the act. The theatrical lilt was gone from his voice. "Pressure drop."
The hair on Aryan's arms stood up. Not from cold. From static.
The Masked Man ignored them both. He checked his pistol. Chk-chk. The slide moved with a fluid, terrifying competence. He didn't check it twice. He knew it was ready. He turned, the tactical visor a blank, black mirror reflecting the grime of the elevator shaft.
"Aryan," he said. "Stay behind the focal point. If you run out without cover, you're dead."
"I can't die…" Aryan croaked. His voice sounded like he'd swallowed gravel.
"Everything dies." The Masked Man didn't look away. "Some things just take longer."
The elevator shuddered one last time and died. The gate groaned open, metal shrieking against metal.
Then, the rain.
It wasn't falling; it was hammering the earth. A black, vertical ocean drowning the Karachi shipping yard, turning the dust into slick, treacherous mud. It drowned out the city noise, leaving only the sound of water hitting steel.
The yard was a graveyard. No workers. No movement. Just canyons of stacked shipping containers and crane arms looming overhead like starving, rusted birds.
And one man blocking the path.
He stood perfectly still in the deluge. Older. A face like a dried riverbed, etched deep by hard years in high mountains. He wore an olive coat that had seen better decades. He didn't look like a soldier. He looked like a landslide waiting to happen.
"Iskandar Khan," the Masked Man exhaled.
Silas stepped out of the cage, his boots splashing in the oil-slick water. "The Warlord of the Khyber. I thought he was a ghost story."
"You broke my things," Iskandar called out. He didn't shout, but his voice cut right through the storm. He sounded like a disappointed father. "Abhur was expensive. And the mess downstairs… tedious."
He took a step.
The puddle beneath his boot didn't splash. It hissed. The water turned black, bubbled, and vanished into a foul-smelling vapor.
"Give me the boy," Iskandar said. "And I'll make it quick."
"Denied."
The Masked Man didn't signal. He just moved.
He raised the pistol—smooth, fast, no wasted twitch—and fired three times. Not at the warlord. He shot the chain holding a three-ton steel beam suspended from the crane directly above Iskandar's head.
Snap.
The beam fell. A massive, falling guillotine whistling through the rain.
Iskandar didn't flinch. He just raised a hand, palm open.
"Rot."
It wasn't magic. It was physics giving up.
A ripple of distortion shot up from his palm. When it hit the falling steel, the beam didn't bend. It aged. A thousand years in a heartbeat. The metal turned orange, then brown, and then disintegrated into a cloud of red dust before it could touch a hair on his head.
The rust rained down on him like bloody snow.
"Entropy," Silas hissed, backing up. "Don't let him touch you. He'll turn you to mulch."
"Kill them," Iskandar told the air.
He swept his hand sideways.
The shipping containers on either side of them groaned. The steel walls bowed out and exploded—not from gunpowder, but from the metal simply failing to hold itself together. Shrapnel, jagged and rusted, flew at them like a shotgun blast the size of a house.
"Shield!"
Silas roared, clapping his hands together. A wall of shadow, thick and glossy as obsidian, shot up from the ground. The rusted metal slammed into it, thudding deep but failing to break through.
But the Masked Man wasn't there.
He was already gone, sliding through the mud, under the chassis of a forklift. He moved like water. No hesitation. He popped up on the flank, firing two shots.
Iskandar tilted his head. The bullets turned to lead powder inches from his face.
"Annoying." The warlord stomped his foot.
CRACK.
The asphalt split. A fissure raced toward the Masked Man, the ground turning into a grey, bubbling sludge. The Masked Man didn't look down; he just vaulted off the forklift's roll cage a second before the machine sank into the melting road.
"My turn!" Aryan screamed.
Panic masquerading as bravery. Aryan didn't think; he just let the adrenaline take the wheel. His skin rippled, locking into that hard, impenetrable grey. He launched himself from behind the shadow wall, covering the distance in three massive, mud-slinging strides. He threw a punch that could have cracked a tank.
Iskandar caught his fist.
HISS.
Steam screamed from the point of contact.
Aryan howled. It was a sound of pure, ragged animal pain. The decay ate his skin, turning his knuckles to ash, but his mutation fought back—cells knitting, dying, knitting, dying. A cycle of infinite agony in the span of a second.
"Let him go!" Silas bellowed.
A claw of solid shadow raked across the gap, forcing Iskandar to release the boy to bat the magic away.
Aryan scrambled back, clutching his hand. It was a smoking ruin of wet meat and exposed white bone, the tendons writing like worms as they tried to reattach.
"Cover fire." The Masked Man's voice in the earpiece. Calm. Flat.
From the roof of a sedan, he tossed a canister. It landed at Iskandar's feet.
"Smoke?" Iskandar laughed. He waved a hand to rot the metal.
"White phosphorus."
The canister popped before the rot could take it. A blinding, chemical star ignited in the gloom. It wasn't force; it was heat. You can't rot a fire.
Iskandar snarled, stumbling back, swatting at the burning air.
"Now, Silas. Flank him."
Silas sprinted left, the black veins on his neck pulsing. "I'm going to rip his soul out."
"Try it, witch!" Iskandar slammed both hands onto the wet earth.
The ground liquified.
The entire section of the port lurched. Concrete turned to quicksand. The stacked containers began to lean, groaning as their structural spines turned to jelly.
The Masked Man was already moving. He ran along the side of a falling container, defying gravity for three impossible steps, balancing on the edge of disaster. A shard of rebar whipped past his ear; he didn't even blink. He jumped, caught a cable, and swung to high ground.
He raised the gun. He didn't aim at the man. He aimed at the machinery.
Pop. Pop.
Hydraulic lines burst. High-pressure oil sprayed out, dousing the warlord.
Iskandar wiped the sludge from his eyes. His irises were glowing a sickly, necrotic violet. The oil on his coat began to curdle and rot, but he had lost seconds.
"Rats," Iskandar growled. The vibration of his voice shook the rain out of the air. "Scurrying. Biting."
He looked up at the Masked Man.
"I will show you what a King looks like."
He raised his hands.
The rain stopped. It didn't pause; it ceased to exist. The droplets turned to grey dust in mid-air. The pressure dropped so low Aryan's ears popped. The rust on the millions of tons of scrap metal around them began to glow violet.
He was pulling the death out of the metal. Drawing every ounce of entropy into a single point between his palms. A black hole of decay.
"Aryan," the Masked Man said over the comms. "You're the battery. Silas is the gun."
"What?" Aryan yelled, cradling his mangled hand, standing knee-deep in melting asphalt.
"Silas. Bind the boy. Take the energy. Throw it."
Silas looked at Aryan. Then at the encroaching death ball. A grin split his face—sharp, dangerous, and desperate. "Oh, this is going to hurt."
Silas threw his hands out. Black tendrils shot from his fingers, wrapping around Aryan like pythons. They didn't squeeze; they sucked. They pulled the golden, radioactive fire right out of Aryan's marrow. Aryan arched his back and screamed as his blood felt like it was turning to lava.
Iskandar threw the singularity. A ball of absolute nothingness that erased the air as it flew.
Silas screamed.