Chap 159: I’ll Show You Weak

Time had moved fast—four weeks since the last Harbinger mission. It had also been four weeks since Tee had sex, and she was severely deprived. She didn’t want to be the one to ask for it. In the worst-case scenario, Kie would make a trade, offering it only if she did extra training with him. The answer would be no.

She hated being the first one out in group combat training. She knew her teammates believed she was the weakest, but deep down, she knew she wasn’t. She wasn’t the same girl who had arrived at Primus six months ago. She had power, and she was far from the weakest.

Those thoughts consumed her, even during the Leak mission she and her teammates found themselves tasked with.

The teleportation went wrong the moment their boots met new ground.

They materialized inside chaos—swallowed by a living storm of oversized, hairy, screeching creatures. Wings battered the air like thunderclaps. Claws scraped armor. Shrill cries ripped through the space, disorienting and violent, as if the swarm itself were alive and enraged by their sudden intrusion.

There was no time plan.

The fight was on.

Tee moved, her twin buster swords flashing as she carved through the nearest attacker. Steel met chitin in brutal arcs. One creature fell, then another. But as the last one collapsed at her feet, a heavy, familiar dampening settled over her chest. She hated being the only one still fighting bare, while everyone else tore reality apart with glowing power.

She stole a glance at her teammates mid-battle.

Kie was a blur of light and motion. His crystallized Ultramana swords pulsed with raw energy, each swing releasing shockwaves that ripped clean paths through the swarm. He formed glowing constructs beneath his boots—platforms of light that appeared just long enough for him to leap again, climbing higher into the air to meet the flying creatures head-on.

Saeda stood calm at the center of destruction, hands raised. One by one, monsters were trapped inside shimmering energy orbs. With a clenched fist, she compressed them. The orbs shrank. Bones cracked. The creatures were reduced to pulped remains that rained harmlessly to the ground.

Miko became something feral and unstoppable.

She spun faster and faster, flaming swords blurring into a single incandescent ring. She tore through the swarm like a living saw blade, heat and sparks shredding wings and bodies alike. Screeches cut off mid-cry as creatures were cleaved apart before they could even register fear.

Zod shifted tactics.

The blasts from his fists ceased, replaced by a focused stillness. His eyes narrowed as he used his telekinesis to pull on the creatures. Creatures attempting to flee were yanked from the sky mid-flight, dragged screaming through the air and hurled directly into Miko’s spinning inferno.

One by one, the swarm broke.

What had been a suffocating mass became a panicked exodus. Groups of the creatures turned tail, wings beating frantically as they scattered into the towering trees surrounding the battlefield.

The Sentinels slowed, weapons still raised, watching as the sky filled with retreating shapes.

Miko’s brows knit together as she surveyed the fleeing tide. “So many of them.”

Zod exhaled slowly, eyes tracking the disappearing swarm. “They were probably already airborne when they slipped through the rift in the Veil.”

“Seems like they separated into so many directions. How do we find them?” Saeda asked, dropping her opened palms to her side in frustration. 

She knew her teammates all being so close was the cause of the interference. She was eager to split up and maybe go far away—enough to test her theory. 

“We should split up,” Saeda suggested. 

“Wait,” Zod intervened. “Maybe Tee can search for them, see where they went.”

“No,” Kie said, causing them all to look at him. “We need to stop relying on Tee’s foreseeing vision. Remember these missions are a chance to try something new and gain an edge over the Harbingers.”

Tee’s chest flattened. One chance to prove her usefulness was thrown out the window. 

“We split up. Sightings of more than fifty of those things, make contact immediately. No heroics.”

They nodded and separated. Tee took in her surroundings as she ran at super-fast speed, scanning the air for any signs of the creatures.

A jagged stretch of rock-strewn highlands, where a mountainous wall of obsidian and crag towered near the edge of an ancient forest. Gnarled trees scraped the sky, their roots tangled around glowing stones and remnants of a forgotten civilization. 

The air shimmered with unnatural heat. Deep within the mountain’s belly lay a dormant volcano, its breath warming the nearby waterfall that cascaded into bubbling, mineral-rich hot springs.

Like all Leak missions, it was far from civilization. No rescue. No noise. Just the wild, and what had bled into it.

No heroics.

Kie’s last words echoed in her skull.

But he wasn’t around to enforce them.

Separated from the others to scan deeper, Tee was itching—desperate—to unleash what she had kept buried. Especially after being the first to fall during group combat trainings. She clenched her fists. That time, no witnesses. No judgment. Just her and whatever needed to die.

A flicker of movement.

A glowing eye blinked at her from the dark hollow in the rock wall… then vanished.

She stepped closer.

The opening gaped like a yawning mouth, lined with jagged stone fangs. Shadows poured out of it like a silent mist. Her foreseeing vision failed. It was too dark. She tapped the side of her telecom, flicking on the flashlight.

The beam revealed something… beautiful.

Mushrooms. Thousands of them—blue, bioluminescent and pulsing faintly like breathing lungs—dotted the walls and floor. The eerie light made the stone shimmer with veins of reflective silver.

Tch… Bet Zod would say something snobby right about then, she thought. Probably name every species like he invented them.

“Well,” she muttered, nudging a cluster with her foot, “anything this cute is definitely poisonous.”

But then… the mushrooms stopped—abruptly. Ahead of her lay a pit of pure black. A tunnel that seemed to stretch endlessly, swallowing light, sound, and warmth.

She paused, alone with her thoughts.

Weak.

Suddenly, a shriek split the silence. Then another—followed by a flash of yellow plasma.

The insects.

They were there. Dozens. No, hundreds. Crawling the ceiling. Flying through the shadows. Their bodies were grotesque—armored carapaces, sinewy wings, glowing sacs along their backs, and spines that jutted out from their heads like twisted antennae. Their mouths opened wide to reveal a glowing inner maw, spewing plasma bursts in every direction.

But Tee didn’t run.

She smiled.

She was going to show the world what weak looked like. 

Black fire ignited at her fingertips—dark mana, swirling and writhing around her like smoke with a will of its own. She hurled the first blast—shattering a beast’s head clean off its body. Then another, and another. She spun in place, her white hair flicking through the air as bodies exploded around her.

“How is that for weak?!” she yelled at the air. 

She was fast. Brutal. Precise.

Then came the pull—a tug in her chest, primal and intoxicating. Her power reacted to the dark energy within the creatures. She reached out, and it came to her willingly. Their corrupted energy flowed into her, feeding her core like molten nectar.

Her eyes turned pitch black.

Her fingers lengthened, nails like obsidian blades. A strange voice hummed in her skull—low, ancient, like it had always been there.

The cavern echoed with monstrous shrieks. Some of the creatures blasted at her in blind panic, only for her to dodge with her dark energy orb and return fire with double the fury. 

She named the larger ones—mocking them before obliterating them with dark spheres and rupturing fire arcs. One tried to flee. Tee sealed the exit with an explosion of dark mana, grinning as the creature slammed into the wall and screamed.

A group of four beasts huddled together at the center of the cave—larger, older. Elders, maybe. She could feel their presence. She snarled.

“You don’t care about me,” she growled. “So stop pretending. Stop trying to put a Seal on me. There’s no cure. You’re just trying to kill me.”

Darkness curled around her ankles and rose like a storm.

“Lying cowards in robes…”

She let the energy erupt.

A blast of black ashfire consumed the four monsters, reducing them to twitching, charred husks. Somewhere in her mind, Zod’s voice echoed.

“Like every monster, we take them down.”

“Oh yeah?” Tee spat. “Well then… let me show you a real monster.”

More beasts approached, and she didn’t hesitate. Her blasts grew more violent, more elegant. A symphony of violence.

One tried to burrow its way out. She locked eyes with it.

“No you don’t… Beater.”

Her energy formed around the creature like a blackened bloom—then shaped itself into a gaping maw, fangs of light snapping shut with a crunch. The energy sphere closed around the beast’s body, compressing it, until it shrieked in agony. Tee whispered something and the orb burned from within, collapsing with a final, muffled scream.

She laughed.

She was unstoppable. High on power. On rage.

Flashbacks of the dead people at the park didn’t overwhelm her. That absence only fed the rage boiling inside her. She stared down at the heap of critter corpses—already dead, already ruined—and muttered under her breath.

“That wasn’t my fault. It’s not my fault I’m a hybrid, so I can’t care.”

She raised one hand. Dark energy surged from her palm in a brutal blast, scorching what remained until the bodies were reduced to nothing at all.

The entire cavern began to tremble from the overload.

Outside the tunnel, Miko—still scouting—felt the tremors beneath her feet. Her telecom showed Tee was nearby, still inside the mountain. But something was wrong.

Maybe Tee needed help, she thought.

Taking a breath, she did the impossible—vibrating her molecules at high speed, phasing through solid rock until she burst into the cavern…

And froze.

Tee stood amid a battlefield of carnage. Black ash floated like snow. The walls were scorched. The ground was littered with melting corpses. Tee, dressed in her regular mission suit, was a vision of wrath—dark energy crackling around her like a living thing. Her hands gleamed with black fire. Her eyes glowed void-black. She was still feeding, draining energy from a dying creature clawing at the ground, trying to crawl away. She sucked it dry, then whispered,

“Screw being a Sentinel. Let’s have some fun.”

Miko crouched behind a rock, watching in disbelief.

Then came the scream.

Tee opened her mouth unnaturally wide, unleashing a blast of sonic mana into the clogged tunnel. It cracked open, and Tee walked through.

Miko didn’t follow. She tracked Tee’s signal, waited until the girl was clear… then slipped out the back.

Miko’s mind reeled. What was that? Who even was that?

Hours later, Kie’s voice rang over their comms. “Team, regroup. Now.”

They returned, all showing signs of battle.

There were no more insects. No more plasma. No more threats.

Tee stood smug, brushing invisible dust from her shoulder.

“I took out the entire nest,” she said flatly.

“Really?” Miko asked, eyes narrowing. “Not a scratch?”

Tee laughed. “It was easy, really.” A black hole briefly opened in her stomach, healing in real time. “Anyway,” she added quickly, “did you guys finish your targets?”

Miko didn’t answer. She just stared.

Because whatever Tee had become in that mountain…

Wasn’t the Tee she knew at all.

Kie heard the clear violation of his orders. “What did I say about no heroics?”

Tee walked up to him, wrapped her arms around his shoulders, and gave him a passionate kiss.

“Cooper, I’m sorry. I really like killing monsters, and I couldn’t help myself.” She dropped her arms to her sides. “But feel free to report me to the Commander in your mission brief. An order was an order, and I did technically break it.”

The others looked to Kie, waiting for his response.

Tee pouted at him, giving him beady eyes.

Kie looked away and sighed. “No… it’s fine.”

Tee knew he would skew his report in her favor. She smiled.

Miko, on the other hand, couldn’t forget what she had seen—or what she thought she had seen. Perhaps phasing through solid objects had a side effect, one that made her see strange things.

After returning to Primus, Miko’s mind still pondered on what she had seen with Tee. She ended up throwing too much sauce on the chicken and Zod stopped her before she ruined it. 

“Miko,” he said, looking at her. “Are you alright? This isn’t you.”

She wondered whether to tell him but she smiled and told him, “Sorry, I sort of fell asleep a while ago. Didn’t sleep well last night.”

Zod sighed and began wiping the excess sauce off the chicken with a sauce brush. He chuckled, “That’s fine. You should go get some rest. I can finish this.”

Miko thought not sleepy, nodded and left. But one step into her room was all she took before the alarms came. It was time to eliminate another Harbinger. 

Soon, Tee and her comrades teleported to their new location. The terrain beneath their boots wasn’t soil but a skin of shifting plates, sometimes fleshy, sometimes stone. Black trees twisted in unnatural spirals, and the horizon folded on itself like paper soaked in oil.

Before them loomed a broken monument of ancient power—an alien-like skyscraper, impossibly tall and spiraling like a spine of fused ribs. Its surface was cracked, pitted, bleeding faint glows from long-dead veins. The air reeked of rust, salt, and something stranger—like memory left to rot.

At its peak, the Fragment hovered. A crystalline shard, slowly rotating in a pillar of fractured light. It pulsed, and the building beneath it shifted, almost breathing.

Kie stared upward. “There’s the fragment... it's waiting.”

With no sighting of the Harbingers, they moved as one toward the tower—cautious but compelled. Kie forged Ultramana structures mid-air—thin, glowing platforms that let him and the others traverse the shifting terrain and close in on the Fragment with speed and precision.

Around them, signs of an older war lay in ruins. Skeletons curled in the mud—but not human. Their limbs bent wrong, too many joints. Ribcages that spiraled like coils. Heads that split backward like insect mandibles.

Wall carvings, jagged and deep, mapped out anatomy too alien to belong to any known race. One mural showed something humanoid splitting into tendrils, worshipped by things with no eyes.

Statues, once majestic, now cracked and headless. Some had six arms, others no faces. Just hollow masks carved with runes.

At the skyscraper’s base, the terrain curved upward like a spiral tongue. They reached the tower that held the Fragment—majestic and broken, floating in the air like a god’s forgotten altar.

Zod paused beside one of the wall etchings, his Ultramana hand glowing faintly.

“This isn’t just an old civilization,” he muttered. “It's something out of this world. Literally.” 

He recalled the Harbingers' cryptic words about the so-called Creators. Beings they spoke of with reverence and fear. In his mind, their description could mean only one thing. They were aliens, ancient and far beyond human comprehension. Just like what he witnessed around him.

No one argued. 

They pressed forward.

Zod pulled the fragment down towards himself using his telekinesis.

His fingers grazed the Fragment.

Visions exploded.

People cheering his name after helping to save the world. However, the faces of his mother and father in the crowd were of disapproval. He was not getting chaired for being a lawyer which was what they had hoped for him. He was a disappointment. 

Unable to take the visions, he threw the fragment away.

It didn’t fall. It hovered—waiting.

Without a word, Tee caught the fragment mid-flight. The surge of visions crashing through her mind revealed the reason behind Zod’s sudden recoil. One she wasn’t prepared for.

They showed a gleaming world of vengeance unfolding before her. She stood atop a citadel, streets below washed in justice—or was it blood? Banners waved. MG offs lay crushed. Every Xeno-victim avenged. The same cowards who once threw slurs and bombed her kind were gone. Purged.

She was feared. Admired. Victorious.

And then the words came, calling her liar, murderer. She had killed her own kind. She was not a savior. She was a monster. 

As if burned by the weight of something far older than time, she flinched and hurled the fragment away, eyes wide with a fear she couldn’t name.

One by one, each Sentinel touched the Fragment—and each was broken for a moment.

Kie. A room. Warm. Familiar. A mother’s embrace. A brother’s laugh. They were alive. No Ultramana, no gods. Just family.

Then fire. The table burned. Their faces twisted. 

Finally, he stood alone. 

Miko’s fairy-tale ending became a grotesque shopping spree, where her parents only saw her as a commodity to be bought and forgotten about. 

Saeda’s dream of reuniting with her stepmother was pure hope—an impossible wish that reality cruelly denied. The pain of her broken family was a constant, gnawing ache. Seeing her mother sprawled out on the ground after another drug overdose, was a cruel reminder her step-mother was not the problem.

Far above, on a broken cliff, Sade watched.

He had been deactivating the Sealed Bond—one layer at a time, loosening its restraints. Every sigil he broke distorted the zone further, destabilizing defenses... and sanity.

But after watching the Sentinels pursue the Fragment, Sade and the others chose to wait—hoping the visions would break them from within.

But the illusions hadn’t worked.

He watched the Sentinels drop the Fragment.

“Tch,” Legion’s thundering voices murmured in their telepathic link, disappointed.

But maybe illusions weren’t necessary. 

Sade wasn't there for some dumb rock—only to buy Lilith and Legion time to take down one of the Sentinels. And if he could see some progress with the vessel along the way, so much the better. That would be enough.

Kie last held the fragment. He released it, letting it hover in midair. He knew he couldn’t hold onto it any longer. The memories it carried would only grow heavier the more he resisted.

But it didn’t shatter them. 

They stepped back, blinking away the illusions. Shaken but standing. 

Zod clenched his fist. “It’s a trap.”

“We don’t need it,” Kie said, scorched marks across his waist. “We destroy the Harbingers and get out.”

“Where are the Harbingers?” Miko questioned. 

The Fragment pulsed again.

Their senses sharpened to a razor’s edge—every sound, every shadow amplified beyond reason.

Then, tearing through the thick, swirling air above, a massive orb of fire and ash roared toward them, its heat scorching the very sky.

The Sentinels were forced to leap from the crumbling tower—plunging through the chaotic sky as the base exploded in a burst of light, shards scattering into the wind.

As they plummeted through the chaotic air, they were ambushed.

Lilith struck like a living shadow, her dark mana lashing out in searing arcs of death. In her ash-born form, she tore through the air—two arms splitting open into gleaming metal claws. When her mouth unhinged, she let out a bone-splitting shriek that could rattle the soul.

Below, Sade's massive spider-like Leaks skittered through the warped terrain, their purple glowing eyes tracking the falling Sentinels with deadly intent.

Legion arrived.

His voice came like thunder through a canyon. “Time to meet your end.”

But not the man in a hood. No—his true form erupted.

With a monstrous roar, he released his demons. They poured from his ribs in plumes of black ash, screaming, flying, swarming. The sky darkened.

A colossal skeletal beast, centipede-like, its body a flowing cage of bones. Multiple arms, jagged and sharp, jutted from his ribcage like blades. His spine curled endlessly. Horns crowned his skull, far too many, and black ash smoke poured from every joint like steam from a dying star.

Zod trembled at the memory of his last encounter with Legion’s true form. If not for the red swirling vortex that tore him away at the last second… he was certain he would’ve died.

Sade's spider-like Leaks lunged from above, anchoring glowing webs to fragments of the shattered tower mid-air, skittering down the strands like hunters from a higher realm. Their claws snapped, eyes glowing like cursed stars, closing in on the falling Sentinels.

Miko twisted mid-air, blades drawn in streaks of light. She didn’t know if she could face a Harbinger alone—but she could carve through those monsters. Purple blood erupted in bursts as she sliced clean through two Leaks, their shrieks swallowed by the rushing wind. Black limbs spiraled around her like broken wings.

She and her teammates hit the ground in thunderous tremors, stone craters blooming beneath their feet. No time to breathe. No time to regroup.

But before anyone could strike—the ground rippled and burst. All around them, non-human skeletons exploded from the earth. Those same twisted corpses from before were reanimated by history of pain. Their limbs twitched and stretched unnaturally. Some crawled. Some leapt. They attacked both the Sentinels and the Harbingers alike.

One grabbed Saeda's arm—its fingers wrapping twice around her wrist. She howled and slashed it free with her flaming sword.

Miko fast-stepped past a cluster, appearing to teleport through warped air.

Zod spun, kicking blasts from his feet, vaporizing three bone creatures with each turn.

High above, Lilith with her scorched left face, conjured another firestorm—that one monstrous. A colossal sphere of fire and smoke spiraled downward like a wrathful meteor, its tail splitting the sky in red and black veins. It wasn’t just an attack. It was meant to erase every trace of light.

The moment it struck, the ground cracked like glass under the weight of gods. Explosions thundered out in concentric waves—violent, final.

But the Sentinels didn’t run. They braced. Each one summoned their energy into shimmering force shields—bubbles of will against annihilation. Cracks formed, arms trembled, but they held.

Except Tee.

Her shield flickered to life, but something was wrong. The energy wasn't blue Ultramana energy—it was black, coiling, pulsing like a heartbeat. It radiated cold malice.

Dark mana.