The freight elevator groaned, a mechanical death rattle that vibrated through the soles of their boots. The ascent was slow, agonizingly so, as the rusted cage clawed its way up from the dungeon toward the surface of the Karachi shipping yard.
Inside the cage, the air was thick with the scent of ozone and drying blood. Aryan stood in the corner, his chest heaving, his skin shifting uncomfortably between human brown and the metallic grey of his defense mechanism. He looked at his hands, trembling not from fear, but from the aftershocks of the torture.
Silas leaned against the wire mesh, sipping his coffee, though the cup was now empty. He crushed it in his hand, the paper crumpling with a dry crackle.
"You feel that?" Silas asked, his voice dropping an octave. The playfulness was gone, replaced by the static hum of the entity beneath his skin. " The air pressure just dropped. Someone sucked the oxygen out of the room upstairs."
The Masked Man didn't look up. He was checking the chamber of his pistol. "One round in the chamber. Two spare magazines. Three flash-bangs." He looked at Aryan. "Stay behind the focal point. If you charge without cover, you die."
"I can't die," Aryan muttered, his voice hollow.
"Everything dies," the Masked Man corrected. "Some things just take longer."
The elevator jolted to a halt. The heavy iron gates rattled, then began to slide open.
Rain. It was pouring outside. A torrential, black rain that slicked the asphalt of the container yard and turned the dust into mud. But it wasn't the weather that stopped them.
The shipyard was silent. The workers were gone. The cranes stood like frozen herons against the storm clouds.
Standing in the center of the main causeway, blocked by walls of stacked shipping containers on either side, was a single man.
He was older, his beard trimmed close and grey, his face a map of deep, craggy lines etched by decades of war in the mountains. He wore a long, dark olive military coat with no insignia, but the authority radiating from him was heavier than any rank. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, unbothered by the rain.
"Iskandar Khan," the Masked Man said. His voice was a whisper, but it carried the weight of a tombstone.
Aryan flinched. "Who?"
" The Warlord of the Khyber," Silas answered, stepping out of the elevator, his coat billowing in the wind. "The man who supplies the insurgents, the cartels, and the politicians. Abhur al-Issar was just a wallet. This... this is the hand that holds the knife."
Iskandar smiled. It was a terrifying expression—fatherly, yet completely devoid of warmth.
"You broke my toys," Iskandar called out. His voice wasn't loud, yet it cut through the sound of the rain and the distant thunder. "Abhur was expensive to train. And the facility downstairs... the structural repairs alone will be a nuisance."
He took a step forward. The puddle beneath his boot didn't splash. It hissed. The water turned black, bubbled, and evaporated into a noxious gas.
"Give me the boy," Iskandar said calmly. "And I will grant you a death swift enough to be considered a mercy."
"Denied," the Masked Man said.
He didn't signal. He simply acted.
The Masked Man raised his pistol and fired three shots in rapid succession—not at Iskandar, but at the rusted chain holding a massive steel beam suspended from the crane directly above the warlord.
Ping. Ping. Snap.
The chain severed. The three-ton beam plummeted, whistling through the air, destined to crush Iskandar into paste.
Iskandar didn't look up. He simply raised his right hand, palm open.
"Rot."
The word was a command to nature itself.
A wave of visible distortion rippled upward from his palm. When the wave hit the falling steel beam, physics unraveled. The solid metal didn't bend; it aged a thousand years in a microsecond. The beam turned orange, then brown, then disintegrated into a cloud of rust and dust before it could touch a hair on Iskandar's head.
The dust rained down on him, harmless.
"Entropy," Silas hissed, his eyes widening. "He accelerates decay. Don't let him touch you. If he touches you, you turn to dust."
"Kill them," Iskandar ordered the empty air.
He swept his hand horizontally.
The shipping containers on the left and right groaned. The metal screeched as if in pain. Then, the steel walls exploded outward, not from explosives, but from the sheer pressure of rapid oxidation. Shards of rusted metal, sharp as shrapnel, flew toward the trio like a shotgun blast the size of a building.
"Shield!" the Masked Man commanded, already moving.
Silas roared. He slammed his hands together. The shadows from beneath the elevator elongated, shooting up like a wall of black glass. The rusted shrapnel slammed into the shadow-barrier, embedding itself but not piercing through.
But the Masked Man wasn't behind the shield.
He was already twenty feet to the right, sliding under the chassis of a forklift. He had calculated the trajectory of the shrapnel blast before Iskandar had even finished the gesture. He moved with a fluidity that was almost inhuman—no wasted motion, no hesitation.
As the dust settled, the Masked Man popped up from behind the forklift, firing two shots.
Iskandar tilted his head. The bullets dissolved into lead powder inches from his face.
"Annoying," the warlord muttered. He stomped his foot.
A fissure cracked through the asphalt, racing toward the Masked Man. The ground itself was decaying, turning into a sinkhole of grey sludge.
The Masked Man didn't look down. He knew the rate of the fissure's travel—fourteen meters per second. He stepped onto the forklift's tire, vaulted over the roll cage, and landed on the roof of a nearby sedan just as the forklift sank into the bubbling sludge.
Perfect calculation. Not a speck of mud on his boots.
"My turn!" Aryan screamed.
The trauma gave way to the instinct. The biological imperative to survive. Aryan's skin rippled, turning that impenetrable gunmetal grey. He leaped from behind Silas's shadow wall, covering the distance to Iskandar in three massive strides. He wound up a punch that could have cracked a tank's armor.
Iskandar looked at the boy with disappointment. "A blunt instrument."
The warlord caught Aryan's fist.
HISS.
Steam erupted where skin met skin. Aryan screamed—a sound of pure agony. The decay effect fought against the adaptive regeneration. Aryan's fist began to crumble, turning to ash, but his cells fought back, regrowing, hardening, dying, and regrowing again in a cycle of infinite torture.
"Let him go!" Silas bellowed.
The occultist thrust his hand forward. A massive claw of solid shadow materialized from the darkness, raking across the distance to slam into Iskandar.
Iskandar was forced to release Aryan to block the shadow. He backhanded the air, and the shadow-claw dissipated into grey smoke.
Aryan fell back, clutching his hand, which was a smoking ruin of bone and raw meat, slowly knitting itself back together.
"Cover fire," the Masked Man's voice came over their earpieces—calm, flat, detached.
From his vantage point on the sedan, the Masked Man threw a smoke grenade. It landed at Iskandar's feet.
"Smoke?" Iskandar laughed, waving his hand to rot the canister.
"Not smoke," the Masked Man corrected. "White phosphorus."
The canister detonated before Iskandar could decay it. A blinding, burning white cloud exploded. It wasn't kinetic energy; it was thermal. You couldn't rot heat.
Iskandar snarled, stumbling back, shielding his eyes as the chemical fire singed his coat.
"Now, Silas. The flank."
Silas didn't need to be told twice. He sprinted to the left, the black veins on his neck pulsing violently. "I'm going to rip his soul out!"
"Try it, witch!" Iskandar roared. He slammed both hands onto the wet ground.
RUMBLE.
The entire section of the port began to vibrate. The metal reinforced concrete beneath them started to liquefy. The shipping containers stacked three high began to lean, their structural integrity failing.
"He's bringing the whole block down!" Silas shouted, leaping onto a floating piece of debris as the ground turned to quicksand.
The Masked Man was already moving. He saw the collapse coming three seconds ago. He sprinted along a collapsing container, defying gravity, balancing on the edge of the falling metal.
A shard of rusted rebar whipped past his head. He didn't blink. He merely tilted his neck two inches to the left. The metal missed him by a millimeter.
He jumped, grabbing a dangling cable, and swung through the chaos, landing silently on a high platform overlooking the destruction. He raised his gun again. He wasn't shooting to kill—he knew bullets were useless. He was shooting the hydraulic lines of the heavy machinery around Iskandar.
High-pressure oil sprayed out, dousing the warlord.
Iskandar wiped the oil from his face, his eyes glowing with a sickly, necrotic violet light. The decay began to spread from his feet, turning the oil into black sludge, but it distracted him.
"You fight like rats," Iskandar growled, the vibration of his voice shaking the rain from the air. "Scurring. Biting. Running."
He looked up at the Masked Man.
"I will show you the power of a King."
Iskandar raised his hands to the sky. The rain stopped falling. Or rather, it stopped existing. The droplets turned to grey dust in mid-air. The atmosphere grew heavy, suffocating. The rust on the millions of tons of scrap metal around them began to glow violet.
He was pulling the entropy from the entire scrapyard into a single point. A singularity of decay.
"Aryan," the Masked Man said, his voice cutting through the roar of the gathering energy. "You are the battery. Silas is the conduit."
"What?" Aryan yelled, clutching his healing hand, standing knee-deep in the sludge.
"Silas, bind the boy. Use his energy. Throw it."
Silas looked at Aryan, then at the Masked Man. A wicked grin split his face. "Oh, that's dangerous. I love it."
Silas extended his hands. Black tendrils shot out, wrapping around Aryan. But they didn't hurt him; they pulsed, drawing the golden, radioactive energy from the boy's mutated cells.
Iskandar threw the singularity—a ball of pure nothingness that erased everything it touched.
Silas screamed