Chapter 195: Overseers
Outside the shimmering perimeter, sitting inside the leather interior of the luxury car, the dashboard display chimed with a crisp, low tone.
Nicholas leaned forward, one hand resting on the steering wheel while his phone screen flickered to life. Beside him, Selena shifted in her seat, her eyes narrowing as the black display rapidly divided into a mosaic of live video feeds.
The signals stuttered for a fraction of a second before stabilizing into high-definition clarity. The mechanical relays Julie had anchored near the barrier worked exactly as designed. The entire state unfurled before them in real time, segmented into a dozen floating viewpoints that hovered over cracked expressways, abandoned shopping districts, and smoldering intersections.
"She actually pulled it off," Selena murmured, her relief evident despite her composed tone. "The feed is holding."
"Look at the monitors," Nicholas said quietly, pointing a gloved finger at the top three screens.
Before Selena could answer, three of the mini-screens flashed with sudden bursts of digital static.
On the fourth quadrant, a lens capturing an aerial view over a residential sector caught a blur of dark motion dropping from a high-rise balcony. A massive, razor-tipped limb snapped through the frame, crushing the marble-sized drone into sparks and falling debris. On another feed, an arc of acidic fluid spewed across the camera lens, melting the glass and cutting the visual to flat gray noise.
Three out of the initial five scout units went dark in less than ten seconds.
"Hostile density is high," Nicholas noted, his voice flat and analytical. "Whatever is patrolling the lower atmosphere has sharp reflexes. Those units didn’t make a sound, and they were still intercepted immediately."
A faint crackle came through the encrypted car radio. Julie’s voice came through on the telecom, sounding tight, slightly breathless, but stubbornly focused.
"Nicholas? Selena? Can you hear me out there?"
Selena tapped the comm switch on the dashboard. "We hear you, Julie. We have visual on the surviving feeds, but you just lost three drones on the eastern approach."
"Yeah, I saw the telemetry drop," Julie whispered back, the muffled rustle of rubble and stone audible in the background. "There are things crawling all over the rooftops. Huge things. I managed to recall the last two into low-altitude hover under the overpass, but I can’t sweep the central core from all the way out here by the border."
"Stay where you are if you’re compromised," Selena ordered immediately. "Do not push forward blindly."
"I have to," Julie replied, her stubborn resolve bleeding through the tiny speaker. "If we just hover around the outer edge, we’re only watching empty streets. I need to move deeper into the inner district and find some of the civilians or survivors hiding in the basements. If anyone knows where the Master set up his main stage and where he’s holding Eric and the others, it’s the people who were running from them. Once I get their location, I can send the remaining drones straight over his head and lock the cameras on them."
Nicholas tilted his head toward the mic. "The moment you leave cover, you become prey, Julie. You saw what happened to your cameras."
"I’m already in a crawlspace under a collapsed garage, and I am definitely not planning on making friends with giant bugs," Julie said, letting out a small, nervous chuckle. "I’ll stay low and move through the service tunnels. Just keep your eyes on the feed."
The line clicked into silent standby, leaving the car filled with the quiet murmur of the running engine.
Inside the dome, Julie carefully slid out from beneath the concrete slab, keeping her body pressed close to the shadows of the alleyway. The air inside the barrier remained thick and rancid, carrying an unnatural, sour tang that made the back of her throat burn.
She quickly realized that the monsters guarding the city were not wandering aimlessly like wild animals.
High above, perched on the ledges of shattered office towers and prowling across the cracked overpasses, the overseers moved with terrifying precision. They resembled grotesque, demonic fiends, their twisted bodies wrapped in armored plates of bone and sinew. What made them horrifying, however, was not simply their brute size, but the way their elongated snouts tasted the wind.
They were hunters bred for a single purpose.
They could sniff out the unique, lingering trace of the plague. Anyone who possessed even a microscopic seed of an impure ability carried a scent that these demonic beasts could track from streets away. It was why every hero who had charged through the barrier had been found, overwhelmed, and captured in minutes. The moment an impure entered the dome, their power was stripped by Joan’s script, but their biological signature remained like a beacon in the night.
Julie watched from behind an overturned garbage container as one of the overseers descended from a rusted fire escape.
The creature had four muscular, clawed limbs and a spine lined with quivering sensory quills. It paused in the center of the intersection, lifting its eyeless head to draw a deep, wet breath through rows of needle-thin nostrils. It hissed, its claws digging deep trenches into the asphalt as it caught the scent of an impure hiding somewhere three blocks away. With a single, explosive leap, it vanished into the darkness, leaving a wake of dust and rattling glass.
Julie held her breath, her hand tightly gripping the strap of her bag.
Her lack of an active impure power was the only reason she was still breathing. To the demonic overseers, she smelled like ordinary dust and damp fabric, beneath their predatory radar as long as she stayed out of their direct line of sight. But one careless sound, one stray footstep on broken glass, would bring their physical jaws down upon her just the same.
She took a slow, deliberate step forward, sticking to the damp drainage trenches along the curbs, carefully treading through the city of monsters.
Back at the border, outside the transparent dome, Nicholas’s one visible eye scanned the remaining live screens with cold, measured focus.
He watched the distorted silhouettes of the overseers leaping across rooftops, noting their movement patterns, their reaction times, and the terrifying speed with which they swarmed toward specific intersections. His hitman instincts began cataloging every detail into clean, tactical parameters.
Selena watched the same screens, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. "They aren’t just guards. They’re tracking dogs. The moment any hero walks in, they don’t even need cameras to find them. They hunt by scent."
"The script said everyone affected by the plague would be captured upon entering," Nicholas said, his voice dropping into a low, even tone. "The dome doesn’t just strip abilities. It provides the hunters with the exact targets they were created to devour."
He tapped his fingers against the steering wheel, his mind already discarding three different infiltration routes that a standard combatant might have chosen.
"If we step in relying on standard entry, we’ll have a dozen of those demons on us before we clear the first avenue," Selena said, turning her head toward him. "Even without powers, our physical presence will draw them if they catch our trail."
"Then we don’t give them a trail," Nicholas replied, his gaze locked onto the feed of the leaping demon. "The first real problem inside that dome isn’t the Master, and it isn’t his crew on the stage. It’s the overseers at the gates."
A subtle, dangerous edge sharpened his expression as he reached down and unlatched the heavy duffel bag resting between the front seats, revealing rows of cold, unpowered steel and specialized gear.
"Before we reach the hostages," Nicholas said calmly, "we take out the hounds."