It was almost comical.
A shirtless young man, streaked with dried blood and dirt, eyes glowing a furious red, sprinting full tilt through a ruined townscape. Corpses littered the streets, rubble blanketed the cracked roads, and mutated monsters twitched in their death throes. And right behind him?
A walking apocalypse.
The thing chasing Kai was easily over twenty metres tall - humanoid, vaguely, as if God had stitched it together from nightmares and rage. Its skin was cracked and blackened, bulging with grotesque muscle. Every one of its steps made the ground tremble, sending up dust and cracking stone like glass under pressure. One of its feet, easily the size of a lorry, flattened an overturned car as if it were paper.
Kai didn't even bother looking back.
He just ran.
"This is fucking insane," he spat between ragged breaths, raising Phantom V's pistol and unloading it behind him as he bolted down a ruined street.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
The shots landed with a series of useless pings against the monster's shin. It was like throwing pebbles at a concrete wall. A bad joke with no punchline.
It didn't even flinch.
'This is like something out of an end-of-the-world film. Worse, even. No wonder Nyx said to survive the monster. Is this thing even killable?'
As if the sheer size and unstoppable momentum of the thing weren't enough, it let out a sudden, guttural shriek - a low, vibrating cry that warped the air around it. The sonic pulse slammed into Kai like a truck, blowing out nearby windows and making his ears ring violently. He staggered, stumbling forward.
He quickly recovered with a roll and didn't stop.
The monster's sunken, lidless eyes were locked onto him like a predator stalking prey. It was slow, at least that's what it seemed like, but each thunderous step closed the distance with terrifying ease. Kai had to dive out of the way more than once as its massive foot crashed down just behind him, pulverising the street where he'd just been.
'Why the hell is it only going after me?!'
All around them, the town had gone eerily still - those few survivors left alive froze, watching the impossible spectacle unfold. Even the other monsters had stopped, as if even they knew better than to cross its path.
But not everyone was frozen.
Two blurs moved in from opposite directions: Takeshi and Nadya.
The swordsman darted across rooftops, katana already drawn, while Nadya rocketed in from the air like a missile, palms glowing with explosive energy.
The cavalry had arrived. But Kai wasn't about to stop running.
Not until that walking disaster was off his heels or dead.
-
"What the hell is that thing?" Nadya shouted, launching herself towards Kai with a blast from her palms. She flipped mid-air and landed in a forward roll, coming up alongside him as they sprinted together down the ruined street.
Takeshi was already with them, a blur of motion across what rooftops remained. His footfalls barely made a sound as he kept pace, leaping gracefully from ledge to ledge, never missing a beat.
Kai didn't slow. Barely managed to suck in air between gasps as he spat out the essentials.
"I found the guy behind this. Captured him. Nearly killed him." He wheezed. "Then he swallowed something, some kind of serum, and turned into that."
Nadya glanced back at the towering monstrosity closing in behind them, her face going pale.
"That's got to be an A-Rank monster… a Calamity Threat," she muttered, shaken. She'd read the reports as most had, the few appearances of such monsters around the world, but never imagined one would show up here. In her damn town.
City-wide devastation potential. Resistant to conventional weapons. Capable of wiping out entire military squads. Creatures like this required heavy bombardment and multiple high-tier mutants just to stand a chance, and even then, victory was never guaranteed.
She was already running on fumes. And Kai? He didn't look much better. Even if he recovered faster than most, his powers weren't suited for large-scale destruction. His blood-based ability excelled at taking down other mutants with precision, not monsters with tank-like skin.
He knew it too. She could see it in his eyes - the frustration. The awareness. He was helpless against such a monster.
As for Takeshi? Who knew how deep his skills ran - but even he wasn't likely to handle something this size on his own. Even if he didn't seem like it, he must be fatigued after blitzing around the town and slicing apart monsters.
And if things weren't bad enough already, it looked like the creature was only growing more unstable by the second.
Then it happened.
The beast reared back its enormous head and let out a scream, no, a sonic shockwave, that shattered windows, blew apart buildings, and split the air like thunder.
AaaAAAHHHHH!
It opened its jaw so wide it could've swallowed a bus whole, then unleashed the cry again. The sound hit like a pressure wave, ripping through the street and decimating everything in its path.
Walls collapsed. Cars were hurled like toys. Corpses and debris lifted off the ground and scattered like confetti in a storm.
Kai barely dived behind cover in time, shielding his ears with makeshift earplugs he formed from blood. Nadya winced hard, palms over her ears as she crouched low. Even Takeshi, agile and precise as ever, was forced to duck behind a broken chimney, teeth clenched.
It wasn't just loud. It was weaponised sound. A direct hit would crush a normal human instantly. Even durable mutants wouldn't walk away with their hearing intact.
This thing wasn't just big.
It was a goddamn natural disaster.
And it seemed to have set its sights on a new target. It was heading towards the very place that they had been desperately protecting. The only building that remained mostly intact despite all the destruction...
Nadya's fight club!