'Holy…' Ren swallowed hard as he stared at the now ruined city of district 6. The metal dome had shattered, revealing broken skyscrapers and collapsed homes. Blood painted the streets in heavy strokes, the air reeked of charred flesh, melted iron, and despair, while ashes drifted down like snow.
As he looked around at the way the skyline had been sheared in half, at the scorched bodies, and all the crumbling facades, a deep dread sank into his gut and refused to leave.
"What in God's name happened…" Simon whispered to himself, trudging toward where Ren stood.
He gently passed the still-unconscious Anya into Ren's arms, then gripped Ren's shoulder. "Come… we have to find your mother," he muttered, his eyes scanning the ruin.
The two began walking, Simon using his strength to clear the rubble blocking their path while Ren followed silently behind, still clutching Anya tightly.
After only a few meters, they both spotted Anele. He stood tiredly at the heart of the destruction, breathing in the unnervingly calm and quiet air, with a severed head swinging lightly from his grip.
Ren's breath hitched as his gaze drifted from the head in Anele's hand to the woman's headless body lying at the man's feet.
'Mom…?' Ren felt his knees weaken. He took a single, stumbling step before collapsing onto the stones in shock.
Beside him, Simon stood frozen, his soul shattering at the sight.
"…No," he whispered at first. Then the whisper twisted into a growl, and he screamed as something primal broke loose inside him. "…No… you motherfucker!! I'll kill you!!"
Tears streaming and murder in his eyes, he sprinted, filled with rage, toward Anele.
Anele turned slowly, watching Simon approach. He then tiredly raised a single finger and a bead of blood floated from the severed head to the tip.
It hung there for a moment, before firing in a red streak that tore through Simon's skull like paper.
"NO!!!" Ren yelled, his voice ripped raw with agony, as he saw his father fall to the floor, dead.
He could not breathe or think. He gasped like someone having a panic attack, and his trembling arms locked around his sister as if she were the only thing anchoring him to reality.
Across from him, Anele exhaled and muttered tiredly, "Humans, tsk... Always reaching above their place."
He swept his finger from Simon's dead body to point directly at Ren's forehead, and a second orb of blood instantly formed at the tip.
But he did not fire immediately. He stared at the boy kneeling in the ash for a moment, then he sighed and lowered his hand, and the orb of blood fell, splashing softly into the ash.
Slowly, he trudged up to Ren, then stopped in front of him studying him.
After a brief moment, he clicked his tongue and muttered to himself. "Tsk. So... you are like me. Born with affinity to water."
Ren did not understand. He simply raised tear streaked eyes to Anele's.
Anele tilted his head slightly and raised a brow. He reached out, gripped Ren's face, and tilted it side to side. "Hmm... it's uncanny. Why do you look like me?" he murmured curiously, his gaze sweeping over Ren's black hair, his ocean-blue eyes, and his pale skin.
Ren gritted his teeth. 'What the fuck is this bastard rambling on about now?'
Anele frowned, as if reading Ren's thoughts.
He grabbed Ren's hair and, in one sudden, brutal motion, smashed his head into the earth.
Pain exploded through Ren's skull. His jaw clacked, his vision blurred, and something deep in his neck popped.
Anele immediately yanked him back up by the hair, then closed his fingers around Ren's throat and hoisted him into the air.
Anya tumbled from Ren's grip onto the rough ground as he struggled to free himself. Unable to breathe, his legs kicked at the air while his hands clawed uselessly at Anele's wrist.
"You are Rhesa's spawn, I should kill you right now," Anele growled.
With that, he hurled Ren's body across the ruins. Ren crashed into a mound of jagged debris; his back arched violently as a searing pain carved down his spine. He tried to scream, but only choked out blood.
Then everything slowly faded to black.
He didn't hear Anele's last words:
"It's no fun killing you now. Your life belongs to me anyway… I'll claim it when you're old enough to make it interesting." Anele waved a hand, already turning away.
He looked down at the girl in the ash, where she lay crumpled, her limbs curled inward like something discarded.
His face twisted with disgust, as if the very sight of her offended something deep inside him. He said nothing more, simply turned and strode away from the ruins of District 6, the severed head still dripping blood in his hand.
***
Minutes later, sirens howled in the distance, thin at first but then grew louder. A soft blue light blinked through the smoke as the Department of Civil Recovery arrived, their armored vans skidding into the ruins and kicking up clouds of soot and bone dust. Behind them, two black patrol units rolled in, each marked with the sigil of District 4's emergency task force.
"Sweet god…" a voice murmured as the doors opened.
Boots crunched against scorched gravel as uniformed responders fanned out. They clutched scanners, med packs, and oxygen tanks. One of them, a dark-skinned woman with short black braids and a medic badge on her vest, stepped forward, raising a hand to her comms.
"This can't be District 6. What the hell happened here?"
They didn't move quickly because the wreckage didn't feel safe yet.
Buildings leaned at dangerous angles, their lower floors shattered. The roads were torn apart, with broken steel and melted glass spreading across the surface. The streets were drowned in blood; there was lots and lots of it, soaking the ruins and asphalt.
An officer in his thirties stared, transfixed by the twisted wreckage of a playground. He murmured, his voice thick with shock, "No way anyone survived that..."
"Check anyway," the dark-skinned woman ordered sharply. "Breathers, heat traces, anything. Just go."
They began to move, their wide eyes reflecting the sheer disbelief they felt as they stepped hesitantly through the ruins.
None of them had ever seen a disaster like this. In fact, none of them knew Virans could do this. Sure, a few of them had worked with Virans before, seen them fly or bend infrastructure. But this? This was beyond anything the world knew.
"Base, this is R-2," someone spoke into their mic. "Confirming total destruction. The eastern dome is obliterated, nothing left but cratered steel. Visual confirmation of at least more than a hundred corpses in the immediate radius. Smoke is too thick to get an accurate count, but it is bad. Real bad."
An older officer, lean and with a streak of gray in his beard, stopped suddenly near a collapsed stairwell. "Over here!" he yelled.
The dark-skinned woman immediately broke into a sprint.
Just beyond the stairwell, half-buried in ash and rubble and separated by several meters, lay two figures: a boy and a girl.
The girl was crumpled, pale as chalk, her limbs folded awkwardly beneath her, while the boy was barely breathing. Blood matted his hair and smeared his temple. His face was swollen and bruised, but the rise of his chest and the twitch of his fingers confirmed he was alive.
"Get me a stretcher!" the woman barked. "I've got two juveniles, one conscious and one unconscious. Possible spinal trauma on the male."
Two responders rushed in with a collapsible stretcher and neck brace. As they lifted Ren, the girl was gently secured in a thermal wrap and placed beside him.
"Where's the closest hospital?" one of the responders asked.
"District 4," the woman replied. "It is just across the ridge. The bridge to District 5 is still under quarantine, and it would take twice the time."
"But this is a District 6 case. Shouldn't we—?"
"I said District 4." She interjected. "If we wait, we'll lose them."
She placed a firm hand on the boy's shoulder as the stretcher rose.
"He's got like maybe minutes or so..."
The responders moved quickly now, urgency setting in. Ren and Anya were loaded into the back of the van. A technician applied a pulse patch to Ren's wrist while another adjusted Anya's oxygen mask.
The door shut and the engine roared.
And just like that, the only survivors of District 6 vanished into the smoke, carried toward the Platinum City, toward District 4.