Chapter 198: Attacking the Overseers
The boundary of the dome shimmered like a sheet of translucent oil suspended against the night sky, refracting the pale moon into sickly streaks of amber and violet.
Nicholas and Selena walked side by side across the cracked asphalt of the highway border. The smell of the masking compound was cold and sharp against their skin, a tight, waxy seal clinging to every pore.
Nicholas carried his weight low, the reinforced tactical pack balanced across his shoulders without making a sound.
At his hips hung the twin suppressed sidearms; tucked along the small of his back and thighs were balanced carbon-steel combat blades and weighted spools of monofilament wire. Beside him, Selena walked with a measured stride, fingers resting inches from the grip of her holstered nine-millimeter, her eyes scanning the dead landscape ahead.
They took one synchronized step forward, and the world shifted.
Crossing the threshold did not feel like hitting a wall. It felt like stepping into an ocean of frozen mercury.
An instantaneous, sickening weight slammed into Nicholas’s chest.
The faint, ambient hum of impure energy that had buzzed in the background of his blood for months went stone dead. It did not flicker or fade gradually; it was simply severed, as though a master breaker inside his nervous system had been violently flipped off.
Deep inside the recesses of their consciousness, the quiet, child-like cadence of Joan’s script echoed with chilling clarity.
[And every impure lost their ability. Powerless and weak, they stood no chance.]
The words vibrated through their skulls before dissolving into the stale air of the ruined city.
Selena stumbled half a step, letting out a sharp, ragged breath as her hand shot to her temple. Her face paled, the psychological shock of having her internal senses infiltrated rattling her composure for a fraction of a second.
"Her voice is really annoying," Selena whispered, steadying her footing with a tight grip on her holster. "It feels like someone placed a speaker in my head."
Nicholas did not stumble.
He stood perfectly still on the cracked road, head tilted slightly, running a rapid, cold inventory through every joint, muscle, and nerve ending in his body.
He rolled his shoulders back. He flexed his fingers inside his tactical gloves, feeling the precise tension of the leather against his knuckles. He rotated his left ankle, testing the friction against the grit, and dropped into a fleeting, low crouch before rising in one fluid, silent motion.
The void power was gone. His copy abilities were gone. The supernatural perks that turned men into gods were utterly absent.
Yet, beneath the absence of magic, the brutal, unyielding foundation of his life remained entirely untouched.
His bone density, his tendon strength, his spatial awareness, and the thousands of hours spent carving muscle memory into lethal efficiency had never belonged to an impure ability.
They belonged to the hitman.
’And It seems I’ve still got my super strength as well’
A faint, cold smirk touched the corner of Nicholas’s mouth.
"The story only strips what the plague gave you," Nicholas said softly, his voice barely carrying past the collar of his jacket. "Let’s get going"
They slipped into the shadows of the abandoned transit station on the eastern approach.
The station was a massive, hollow cavern of twisted steel beams, shattered glass skylights, and derailed train cars that leaned against the concrete platforms like dying behemoths. Piles of scorched luggage and shattered turnstiles littered the concourse.
Above them, perched on the rusted iron catwalks that spanned the roof, the air carried a faint, rhythmic clicking.
Nicholas raised his left hand, flashing a closed fist.
Selena froze instantly, melting behind the thick support pillar of a ticketing booth.
Fifty feet ahead, near the main staircase leading to the lower boarding platform, three dark shapes emerged from the gloom.
They were Overseers.
The beasts were grotesque, quadrupeds covered in overlapping plates of jagged, bone-white armor that looked like ossified chitin. Their snouts were long and needle-thin, quivering violently as they drew deep, wet sniffs of the ambient air. Muscular shoulders rippled with corded sinew, and their long, whip-like tails ended in heavy, serrated barbs that scraped against the tiled floor with a grating screech.
The lead hound paused, lifting its eyeless head toward the rafters. It took three deep, rasping breaths through its nasal slits, tasting the stagnant draft flowing from the entrance.
Because of the sulfur-ester compound clinging to Nicholas and Selena’s skin, the beast picked up nothing. To its predatory senses, the two intruders registered as nothing more than cold stone, wet dust, and inert metal.
It lowered its head with a low, irritated grunt, turning its attention back toward the bloodstains dried into the train tracks.
Selena leaned closer to Nicholas, her voice a ghost of a whisper in his ear. "Three targets. Alpha on the left is the largest. Central one has thicker carapace over the cervical spine. Right one is leaner, higher agility. If any of them shrieks, the echo through these iron girders will carry across five blocks."
"No acoustics," Nicholas whispered back. "We take them on the floor simultaneously. Prepare the flash trip."
Working with seamless precision, Nicholas unclipped a spool of tungsten-coated monofilament wire from his utility belt. The wire was thinner than a strand of human hair, capable of withstanding two tons of shear force, and sharp enough to slice through bone under proper tension.
He fixed one end to the anchor bolt of the ticketing booth’s iron frame, then tossed the weighted lead bob across the corridor.
Selena caught the tiny weight without making a sound, drawing the line taut three inches off the floor across the main choke point before securing it to a steel bench.
Above the wire, Nicholas primed two mechanical flash canisters. These were not explosive grenades; they were non-electric, spring-loaded phosphorus capsules designed to ignite with an intensely blinding, silent white flare upon physical trip activation.
Nicholas drew his twin suppressed pistols. Selena drew her sidearm, steadying her grip with both hands just as Nicholas had drilled into her in the basement.
He picked up a small fragment of broken ceramic tile from the floor.
He didn’t throw it at the beasts. He flicked his wrist, sending the shard skipping across the concrete thirty feet behind the far wall, creating a sharp, sudden clatter.
The three Overseers snapped their heads toward the sound in unison.
With terrifying speed, the lean hound on the right exploded forward, bounding across the concourse with a low, guttural hiss. The other two followed immediately, their heavy claws gouging trenches into the linoleum tiles as they sprinted toward the disturbance.
They hit the choke point at full sprint.
The lead beast never saw the monofilament line. Its front forelegs struck the razor-thin wire at thirty miles an hour.
With a wet, sickening crunch, the wire sheared clean through the creature’s armored ankles and dense bone.
The hound’s momentum flipped its heavy torso head over heels, crashing into the concrete floor in a violent, sliding skid that shattered its jaw against the tiles.
Before it could open its throat to screech, the trip mechanism engaged.
A blinding, noiseless burst of brilliant white light erupted directly in the faces of the two trailing Overseers. The sudden flash seared their sensitive optic nerves, sending them into disoriented, thrashing confusion as they lost all spatial awareness.
"Perfect,"
Nicholas moved.