The Ones Who Watched
The chimera's twitching body lay motionless, blood soaking into the scorched earth. Smoke still curled from its torn eye sockets and shredded wings. Kael stood over the corpse, his breath steady but his eyes sharp. Behind the mask, his expression didn't betray anything—but inside, he was boiling.
Not from fear. Not from exhaustion. But clarity.
Someone had sent that thing. Not just to kill him, but to watch. To study. The drone that buzzed overhead wasn't military issue. It was too small, too smart. It didn't flee when the fight ended—it stayed, hovering in place, as if recording final data.
Kael raised one hand slowly. A strand of shadow leapt from his fingers, like a whip—but before it could wrap around the drone, it zipped away.
"Too fast," he muttered. "But not fast enough to hide."
---
In an underground facility, hundreds of kilometers away, four men watched the screen intently. Their lab was silent, apart from the whirring of data processors and the dull hum of fluorescent lights.
"Subject Kael neutralized the chimera in less than six minutes," said one, adjusting his glasses. "He's learning to combine his abilities with precision. Shadow Bind, Ghost Veil, Routine Serge, and his mimic—he used them all perfectly."
The woman beside him—Dr. Sayna—narrowed her eyes. "And now he's aware of us."
The screen crackled briefly before going black.
"He saw the drone," she confirmed.
Dr. Langford stood up. "We can't let this continue. If he comes here—"
"He won't," interrupted the fourth scientist, a man with silver hair and cold eyes. "Because we'll kill him first. We created this situation. We created him. We'll end it."
---
Back in the field, Kael walked silently through the forest. The mimic followed him—an exact copy, featureless but echoing his movements like a ghostly shadow. Its body shimmered with the remnants of the fight, claws still wet with the chimera's blood.
Kael reached a clearing and knelt, placing a hand on the dirt.
"They've been watching longer than I thought."
He pulled a splinter of wood from the soil. It was smooth, perfectly shaped. Artificial.
"Even the forest isn't safe anymore."
Kael's mind spun. He'd assumed the trials, the beasts, the chaos—all were random, part of the apocalypse. But now he saw the pattern. The traps weren't set by monsters.
They were set by people.
He stood, his eyes fixed on the far-off mountains. Somewhere there, underground, were the ones who had watched. Controlled. Experimented.
Kael activated Routine Serge for just a moment. Power surged through his veins—he launched a wooden needle through the trunk of a tree fifty meters away. A clean hole punched through it, dead center.
"Testing me like I'm some rat in a maze…" he murmured. "No. This ends now."
---
In the facility, alarms blared suddenly.
"Perimeter breach!" shouted a guard.
On the screen, Kael's mimic was walking into the outer sensor zone, slowly. It held up one hand.
The palm opened, revealing a message scratched into its skin:
"You watched. Now I watch."
Dr. Sayna's face went pale. "He sent the mimic ahead—he knows where we are!"
Dr. Langford barked, "Evacuate the lower labs! Begin cleanroom lockdown! We can't let him reach the bio-vault!"
But the silver-haired man remained calm. "Let him come. Let's see if he's truly the one we've been waiting for. If he survives what's coming next… maybe he deserves to know the truth."
---
Kael stopped outside an old mountain tunnel. It was hidden, covered with brush and rock. But the mimic had marked it hours ago, during its infiltration.
He stared into the darkness.
"I'm coming for all of you," he said quietly.
The robe clung tight to his frame, his two daggers resting at his sides. The obsidian one shimmered faintly; the other pulsed with heat. Together, they hummed.
Kael stepped into the tunnel, swallowed by shadow.
Behind him, the wind carried a whisper through the trees:
"The hunter is now the hunted."
---