The toxic, slow-moving waters of the Area 17 canal sludged quietly beneath the rusted iron walkway. The air here was thick with the familiar, suffocating scent of chemical runoff—a stark, gritty contrast to the purified, artificially sweet air of the Upper District Hide had just left behind.

Hide walked alone through the dim, flickering amber glow of the streetlights. His hands were shoved deep into the pockets of his jacket, his face an unreadable mask of cold indifference.

He pulled his right hand out of his pocket. Pinched between his index and middle finger was a crumpled, pristine white napkin, thoroughly soaked in fresh, dark red blood.

He paused at the edge of the canal, looking down at the heavy, blood-soaked cloth. Inside it was a severed human thumb.

Enji Sihue’s left thumb, to be exact.

With a careless flick of his wrist, Hide tossed the napkin over the rusted railing. It hit the dark water with a soft plop, instantly sinking into the toxic sludge, never to be seen again.

Hide let out a slow breath, replaying the events of sometime ago in his mind. The interrogation hadn’t been clean.

Enji was a fucking assassin, trained to endure pain and resist questioning. Even with the freezing edge of Night Singer pressed flush against his neck, the arrogant bastard had scoffed.

Enji genuinely believed Hide was bluffing. He thought Hide was too terrified of his grandfather to actually maim the heir to the Sihue bloodline.

Unfortunately, he had been dead wrong.

Hide didn’t care about clan politics or future retributions. He only cared about answers. When Enji refused to speak, Hide simply shifted the blade, pinning Enji’s hand to the wooden floorboards, and severed his thumb.

The shock and agony of the mutilation had instantly shattered Enji’s arrogant facade. The realization that the person was genuinely unhinged enough to butcher him piece by piece finally loosened his tongue.

But to hide disappointment, the asshole didn’t know as much as he pretended to. He didn’t know where Risa had been moved.

The grandfather handled all "disposals" personally.

But Enji did spill one crucial piece of information. He confessed why the Doom Overseer was being tortured in the basement.

The old man wasn’t just randomly experimenting on it. He was trying to break the beast’s mind to extract a specific location. The location of an artifact—or perhaps an entity—known only as a ’Boundary Pusher’.

Hide narrowed his glowing blue eyes as he continued walking down metal bridge and onto the cracked pavement.

’Boundary Pusher,’ Hide repeated internally.

He had immediately queried the Universal Adaptation System the moment Enji spoke the words, hoping his system possessed some hidden info. But the system had no idea about what that might be. Or it simply chose not to tell him.

Hide didn’t know what a Boundary Pusher was, but his razor-sharp intuition easily filled in the blanks. If an S-Rank monster like the head of the Sihue clan was willing to risk harboring a Supreme Calamity Lord in a highly illegal, heavily warded underground black site just to find it, it had to be something of world-breaking significance.

It was something that could potentially shift the balance of power across the continents. It would undoubtedly sell for millions, maybe even billions of credits. Or worse, it could be a weapon that caused mass devastation.

’I’ll have to ask Claire or Maddox,’ Hide decided, rubbing the back of his neck. ’They have access to the highest levels of the NEA archives. If anyone knows what that old bastard is looking for, it’s them.’

Disappointed by the lack of immediate answers and the dead-end regarding Risa’s location, Hide turned down a wider residential street, making his way back toward his apartment complex.

As he walked past a small, worn-down community park, a sudden burst of cheerful laughter pulled his attention.

Hide glanced over. Underneath the pale glow of the flying lights, a little girl, no older than six, was running around in circles. She was giggling wildly, chasing a small, glowing mechanical butterfly toy that fluttered just out of her reach.

Sitting on a cracked wooden bench nearby were her parents. 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

Hide’s enhanced perception picked up their hushed voices long before he saw their faces clearly. They were leaning close to each other, their shoulders tense, their hands tightly interlocked.

"Did you hear the broadcast?" the father whispered, his voice trembling slightly. "Another gate opened in the commercial sector just ten blocks from here. A Two-Star."

"I heard," the mother replied, her eyes darting nervously toward the dark alleys surrounding the park. "The response team was took twenty minutes to reach there. What if the beasts had come this way..."

"I know, I know," the father interrupted, squeezing her hand. He forced a wide, strained smile onto his face as their daughter looked back at them, waving the mechanical toy. "Look at her go, honey! Catch it!" he called out with a hollow cheerfulness.

Hide stopped walking, lingering in the shadows of a nearby building.

He looked at their faces. The parents were trying so desperately to maintain a facade of normalcy for their child, to let her enjoy a fleeting moment of innocent happiness.

But Hide could see right through it. Their smiles were completely lacking. They were forced, brittle, and painted over a deep, suffocating layer of terror.

They were unawakened. Mundane humans.

They possessed no mana, no physical enhancements, and no system to protect them. They were acutely aware that at any given second, the space around them could tear open, a monster could step out of the void, and their entire lives could be extinguished in a spray of blood.

And when that inevitable day came, they would not be able to do a single thing to save the smile on their child’s face. They would just die, clutching each other in the dark.

Not having any chance or even a hope of surviving in that case.

Such was the absolute cruelty of being powerless in a world that had long forgotten how to be kind.