- Eva Blackwood's POV -
(Location: Elysium — Sector G, abandoned Omega Station)
The smell hit first.
Rot. Stagnant water thick with pus. Rusted iron.
We stood at the mouth of the stairwell leading down to the lower station.
Rain still fell outside, pouring through cracks in the shattered concrete ceiling like small, contaminated waterfalls.
Darkness was almost absolute, save for a few radioactive fungi clinging to the damp walls and casting sickly, pale-green shadows across the place.
"Aiden, cover," I whispered through our comms.
"Copy," Aiden replied. He raised his hands and transparent Eitra streamed from his fingers to cloak the four of us. Instantly our footsteps on the standing water were perfectly silent and our heat signatures vanished. Aiden's Full Concealment skill — A-rank — was ideal for stealth ops.
Damian led the way, his broad sword humming with lightning Eitra in his hand, his body coiled like a spring ready to snap.
Sia stayed in the middle, lips moving silently as she chanted defensive spells, poised to cast in an instant.
Aiden and I brought up the rear. My black eyes cut through the dark like a blade; my short black daggers were hidden in my sleeves.
We descended the steps slowly.
Water rose until it lapped at our waists.
Suddenly Damian stopped and raised his fist. We all froze.
From the depth of the dark tunnel we heard a voice.
"Help me… please… the wall… the wall is eating me…"
It sounded like a little girl — crying, raw with fear and pain.
Sia shivered and whispered, "Survivors? We must hurry."
I squeezed Sia's shoulder hard until she gasped.
"Don't move, you idiot," I hissed coldly. "Focus on the Eitra flow. Does that sound like a child's Eitra to you?"
Sia closed her eyes for a moment, then inhaled sharply and stepped back in shock.
We advanced cautiously toward the source.
At the end of the platform sat an old, derailed train car — rusted and draped in thick cobwebs like barbed wire.
The sound came from the car's ceiling.
I looked up and saw the nightmare.
It wasn't a child. It was a massive lupine-spider creature the size of a small truck, hanging upside down from the ceiling.
But the horror wasn't its spider form — it was its belly.
The creature's abdomen was transparent and swollen, and inside… dozens of human faces, partially dissolved in its stomach acid, floated and moved.
The faces opened their mouths and emitted the recorded human cries of their victims.
"Help me… please…" the monster imitated in the child's voice through one of the melted faces, while its eight red eyes stared at us out of the dark. Aiden's cloak had been pierced!
"Advanced thermal-sensor bait!" Aiden shouted as he stumbled back.
"Attack!" I ordered, my voice icy.
Everything erupted. The spider-monster screamed — no longer a human sound but a metallic, ear-splitting shriek — and spat a massive web of sticky, green, acid-laced silk toward Damian.
Damian didn't dodge. He grinned recklessly and swung his great blade in a wide horizontal arc.
"Lightning Slash!"
A crescent of electrified blue Eitra blasted from his sword and shredded the acidic web in midair. Burning droplets splattered the walls and hissed as they melted the concrete.
But the beast did not wait.
It dropped from the ceiling like a boulder straight toward Sia.
"Shield of Light!" Sia cried, slamming her staff into the floor. A radiant golden dome sprang up around her in an instant.
The creature slammed into the dome with tremendous force and shook the platform, but the shield held.
I had already moved. While the monster focused on the shield, I melted into the shadows.
My A-rank Shadow Walk lets me instantly traverse any shadow within twenty meters.
I reappeared directly over the monster's back. I raised my black dagger, which exhaled dense, smoking darkness.
"Die, abomination."
I drove my dagger hard into the narrow gap between its head and chest.
My dark Eitra didn't just cut flesh — it devoured vitality from within.
The beast screamed in every voice lodged in its belly at once — a symphony of horrific agony. It staggered, black viscous blood pouring from it, legs folding under its weight.
But it wasn't over.
From the tunnel's dark reaches we heard the slap of feet in the water. Dozens… hundreds.
"Eva!" Aiden yelled, shouldering his Eitra-infused assault rifle. "We're surrounded!"
I looked up. From every corridor, from broken train windows and air vents, they swarmed. They were not ordinary monsters. They were the Transformed.
Twisted humans. Some had lost eyes replaced by fangs; others had arms fused to their torsos, now weapons of bone; some crawled on all fours, bellies split open dragging their intestines behind them.
They wore ragged remnants of human clothing — work suits, torn dresses, even children's clothes.
The sight tore at the heart as much as it churned the stomach.
"Form a defense! Sia center, Damian front, I'll wing, Aiden cover!" I barked the orders, steady, smothering any scrap of pity in my chest.
These were no longer people. They were obstacles.
The slaughter began.
Damian turned into a grinding machine. His electrified blade cleaved the Transformed into halves; the scent of burning human flesh hung thick in the air.
He laughed — a mad, ecstatic warrior's laugh — blood splattering over his handsome face.
"Come, filth! Face the academy's champion!"
Aiden stood behind Sia, firing mechanically. His Eitra-charged rounds drilled into skulls and detonated, turning heads into red dust that sprayed outward.
Sia wept silently but her hands never trembled. She launched Spears of Light that pierced chests like golden meteors, and she refreshed our protective wards each time a claw grazed them.
As for me… I danced a deathly dance.
I moved through shadows like an avenging wraith.
I didn't fight with Damian's brute force. I struck vital points only: a stab behind a monstrous neck, a slash at an arterial junction under a mutated arm.
Disappear, reappear. My coat soaked black with blood, but disgust did not come. Only power.
The fight lasted twenty minutes — twenty minutes in a hell of blood, screams, and severed limbs.
The water that had reached our waists turned a dark, viscous red and filled with countless entrails.
Finally the last Transformed fell, its head severed by Damian's blade.
We panted. Damian leaned on his sword, shoulder bleeding from a deep scratch. Sia dropped to her knees in the filthy water and vomited at the stench. Aiden reloaded with shaking hands.
I stood in the slaughter, looking at the corpses with cold detachment.
"Well done," I said, my voice ragged. "But we didn't find the source. These were only guards."
"There's a light at the end of the tunnel," Aiden said, pointing with a trembling finger deeper into the station.
We walked carefully over corpses and gore toward the glow. The light came from the station's main maintenance chamber.
The massive iron door stood half open.
We entered.
The room was enormous and resembled a nightmare laboratory.
Giant glass tubes lined the walls, filled with viscous yellow fluid, and inside… humans.
They floated, still alive, metal tubes piercing their skulls and throats, pumping that corrupt Eitra that was transforming them.
In the center of the chamber stood the Leader.
Not a Transformed human, but something worse — a S-minus rank abomination: a fleshy-mechanical construct.
A three-meter-tall flesh-golem-cyborg stitched from human parts with steel wire, reinforced by gears and arcane engines pulsing with crimson Eitra.
Its head was a mass of cameras and red lenses instead of eyes; it had four arms — two ending in massive circular saws, two mounting concentrated Eitra cannons.
A man in a white coat stood behind the monster, fingers flying over a data slate. When he saw us he smiled coldly and pressed a red button.
"Dispose of them, my subject 404," he said, then fled through a rear door.
The machine turned toward us; its lenses focused, and a warped synthetic voice bellowed: "Annihilate… intruders."
"Damn!" Damian roared and charged.
"Damian, wait! It's S-minus!" I screamed, but too late.
The monster moved far faster than its size suggested. In an instant it raised a cannon and fired a focused red beam that would have melted Damian if not for Sia throwing up a Sacrificial Shield in front of him.
The beam vaporized the shield and slammed Damian back into the wall; he crumpled, unconscious.
"Damian!" Sia cried.
"Aiden, cover!" I screamed, fury like I'd never known.
Aiden poured continuous fire at the beast's head to distract its lenses.
I melted into shadow.
I reappeared behind the construct, reaching for the tubing that pumped Eitra into its back.
But the beast had 360° sensors.
One of the saw-armed limbs twisted backward at an impossible angle and struck me.
I raised my dagger to parry, but the saw's Eitra-powered blades were monstrous.
My enchanted dagger shattered in two; the saw tore into my shoulder. The blade penetrated my coat and ripped flesh.
I screamed and rolled to avoid another blow that would have cleaved me in half.
"Eva!" Aiden yelled as he sprinted to me.
The machine advanced with heavy steps, raising its saws to finish us.
I glanced at my blood-smeared arms and remembered that mocking, smiling face of the Black Joker — the scratch to my pride. I remembered that I was the Shadow Princess and would not die in these filthy sewers.
Darkness is not merely a skill for me. It is my nature.
I stood slowly and ignored the pain in my shoulder.
I closed my eyes and opened the gates of Eitra in my soul as wide as they would go.
"Fall back, Aiden," I said in a voice that was not mine — a sound like ghosts moaning in crypts.
My body glowed with a dense, black halo that began to suck the light from the room. The glowing fungi died; the tubes dimmed.
[Unique Skill Activated: Dark Death Field — Rank A+]
Shadows surged from under my feet like tsunami waves of black, swallowing the chamber.
The construct tried to fire its cannon, but the darkness consumed the beam.
I became a pure wraith.
I no longer ran — I slid through space.
I materialized in front of the beast, my right hand sheathed in a long blade of condensed darkness, sharp as a divine guillotine.
One horizontal stroke — with force beyond human limits — sliced through the machine.
I stood a few meters behind it, gasping as the black halo faded.
For a heartbeat nothing happened. The construct remained motionless, then a terrible metallic screech filled the air.
The horizontal scar my dark blade had carved split through its magical-steel waist.
The machine cleaved in two. The upper half crashed down in a shower of sparks and black oil as its arcane engines detonated.
The S-minus construct lay dead.
I dropped to my knees and coughed as exhaustion crushed my bones. Aiden rushed to me and Sia ran to Damian to cast advanced healing.
"My god… you did it, Eva," Aiden whispered, helping me up.
I looked at the broken automaton and wiped sweat mixed with blood from my brow. A weak, bitter laugh escaped me.
"Yes… I did. I crushed an S-minus monster," I murmured, eyes drifting into the empty darkness. "…but I couldn't catch a G-rank thief. What a farce."
I leaned on Aiden's shoulder and we slowly left that hell, carrying Damian and the lab data we recovered.
The mission was a success; leadership would call us heroes. But inside me, a single truth burned like embers.
Our world is changing. Monsters evolve. Humans transform. And there's a masked thief with a smiling face running through Elysium, pulling our strings like puppets.
"The Black Joker…" I whispered, hearing the rain outside hammer on without mercy. "Next time we meet, I won't neglect my defense… I'll tear that smile off your face, even if I must burn the whole city down to do it."