The soldiers were scattered, some groaning, others unmoving. Their hunt was over. But Jin's was not. He lay on his stomach, his ears ringing, his body screaming from a dozen new injuries. He pushed himself up, his arms shaking violently.
The fog was gone, blasted away. In its place, a massive crater glowed with a soft, pulsing blue light. The air smelled of ozone and burnt earth.
He was out of trees, out of ditches, out of tricks. The calm, disembodied voice from the radio returned, this time from a speaker on the lead vehicle. "Target is immobilized. He is to be taken alive if possible. If not, terminate with prejudice."
Jin spat a gob of blood onto the road. "Alive?" he rasped. "You had your chance for that." He raised his rifle, the movement slow and agonizing. He was going to die here. He knew it with the cold certainty of a man who had seen death a thousand times.
But he wouldn't die like a dog on the side of a road.
His mind, a desperate engine, churned through options. There were none. His body was spent, the well of his energy a dry, cracked riverbed.
He had avoided drawing on his power for years, knowing that each use was like shaving a sliver off his life, accelerating the decay of his aging cells. His skills were rusted, his control over energy was not as good as what it once was.
Then, a memory surfaced, not from a battlefield, but from a quiet afternoon. A cheap, dog-eared cultivation novel he'd read on a long deployment, its pages smelling of dust.
He'd read it as a joke, a fantasy, but one concept had stuck with him: blood burning. A forbidden technique where a cultivator would ignite their own life force, their very essence, for a final, brilliant burst of power.
It was fiction. Insanity.
But what was his life now but an insane fiction?
He didn't know anything about igniting a life force, but he knew anatomy. He knew the heart was the engine. He knew that if the engine stopped, the lifespan ended. So, what would happen if he forced the engine into overdrive?
A grim, wolfish smile touched his lips for the first time in days. A final, desperate gamble.
He closed his eyes and reached inward, past the pain, past the exhaustion, to the faint, sputtering ember of his power. He found the energy, weak and pathetic, and wrapped it not around his fists, not around his skin, but around his own heart.
And he squeezed.
For a second, nothing happened. Then, his heart seized, a fist of pure agony clenching in his chest. He gasped, his vision going black. Then it hammered once, twice, a frantic, thunderous beat that shook his entire frame.
THUMP-THUMP. THUMP-THUMP. THUMP-THUMP.
It was the sound of a drum beating the charge for the end of the world.
Pain, white-hot and absolute, erupted behind his eyes. He felt the capillaries in his skin burst. Blood trickled from his nose, his ears, the corners of his eyes.
But with the pain came a flood of impossible power. The wounds in his shoulder and thigh didn't heal, but they were rendered irrelevant, drowned in a tidal wave of adrenaline and raw energy.
He felt his muscles swell, his bones harden. The years seemed to melt away, not in appearance, but in sheer, brutal potential. The rusted gates of his power were blown off their hinges.
He stood up straight, no longer a broken old man, but a pillar of imminent violence. The rifle in his hands felt as light as a toy.
Inside a reinforced command vehicle parked half a mile down the road, Marcus watched the scene on a high-definition monitor. He saw the target, who had been on the verge of collapse, suddenly stand tall. He frowned, leaning closer. "What's he doing? Is he surrendering?"
"Sir, I'm getting a massive energy spike from his position," a tech reported, his voice tight with alarm. "Off the charts. I've never seen anything like it."
On the screen, Marcus saw a faint, shimmering aura of red mist begin to bleed from Jin's skin. It was the vapor of his own superheated blood. "All teams," Marcus said, his calm voice suddenly strained. "Open fir! Now! Light him up!"
The world erupted in a storm of lead. A dozen rifles opened up, their muzzle flashes turning the foggy night into a strobing nightmare.
Jin didn't bother with cover. He moved.
He was clumsy at first, the sheer force of his revitalized body almost too much to handle. A round clipped his arm, tearing through flesh, but he barely felt it. He was a freight train, and the bullets were gnats. He charged directly into the line of fire, his boots cracking the asphalt with every step.
The first soldier saw him coming, a look of pure disbelief on his face. He tried to backpedal, to aim, but Jin was already there. Jin didn't punch him. He simply ran through him. The soldier's body was thrown aside like a ragdoll, his armor crumpling, his bones shattering on impact.
Jin ripped the rifle from the man's hands, not to fire it, but to use it as a club. He swung the weapon in a brutal arc, the steel stock connecting with another soldier's helmet. The helmet didn't just dent; it caved in with a sickening, wet crunch.
He was adapting. The rust was burning away with his lifespan. The muscle memory, forged in a hundred war zones, was taking over. He moved through the remaining soldiers not as a man, but as a force of nature.
He was a whirlwind of fists and feet, each blow landing with the force of a car crash. He grabbed a man by the throat and threw him into one of the trucks with enough force to buckle the steel door. He stomped on another's leg, and the bone snapped with the sound of a dry branch.
Blood sprayed, painting the gray road in strokes of crimson. The professional, disciplined soldiers broke. Their training hadn't prepared them for this. They weren't fighting a man; they were fighting a myth, a demon made of rage and dying light.
In the command vehicle, Marcus stared at the monitor, his face pale, his calm demeanor shattered. The tactical display was a sea of red icons blinking to black.
Vitals flat. Vitals flat. Vitals flat.
He saw one of his men, a decorated veteran, drop his rifle and simply turn to run, only to be caught by a fist that punched clean through his ceramic body armor.
"Pull back," Marcus whispered, his voice trembling. "All remaining units, pull back! Containment has failed! I repeat, containment has—"
His voice was cut off as Jin, his body wreathed in a visible red steam, turned his head and looked directly at the treeline where the command vehicle was hidden. He couldn't have known it was there. But he looked right at it. And he smiled.
It was a smile of pure, unadulterated hell. A vision of what was to come. In that moment, Marcus knew with absolute certainty that if this man survived the night, his own life would be a living nightmare, and it would not be a long one.
Only three soldiers were left on the road now, their backs against a truck, their rifles shaking in their hands as they stared at the monster standing amidst the carnage of their comrades.
Jin stood over the broken bodies, his chest heaving, the red mist around him pulsing in time with his hammering heart. He knew he was burning out. He had maybe a minute left before his heart exploded. It was more than enough time.
He took a step toward the last three men, ready to finish his masterpiece of terror.
That's when it happened.
The crater beyond the treeline pulsed once—then erupted. A shockwave tore outward, a wall of force that flattened trees, flipped trucks, and hurled screaming soldiers into the night.
Metal screamed, glass shattered, fire roared. The disciplined line dissolved into chaos as men and machines alike were blasted aside like leaves in a storm.
But Jin remained. The wave passed over him, through him, leaving him standing in the ruin, blood steaming from his skin, eyes wide with something other than rage.
The battlefield was silent now, broken only by the crackle of fires and the groan of twisted steel. The crater still glowed, blue light pulsing like the heartbeat of something alive beneath the earth.
Jin stared at it. For the first time in a long time, he felt something other than hate.
He felt curiosity.