While sunlight glinted off the polished surface of the super train being prepared at Angel's City's central station, a very different kind of meeting was taking place deep beneath the city's bustling streets.
In a windowless, concrete bunker, lit by the cold, greenish glow of holographic projectors, five figures sat around a scarred metal table. The air was thick with the smell of ozone, stale coffee, and a faint, sickly-sweet chemical odor. These were not nobles or knights. They wore utilitarian dark clothing, free of any family insignia. On the wall behind them, the only decoration was a stylized, circular symbol: a serpent eating its own tail. This was the mark of Ouroboros, an organization the world's governments labeled as fanatics, terrorists, and heretics. Their obsession was not with human power, but with the monsters that lurked beyond the great walls. They believed the future of evolution lay not in human Laws, but in understanding—and even merging with—the monstrous.
