Chapter 3: The First Culling

Chapter 3: The First Culling

The thunderous slam of the ferrocrete gates echoed like a death knell, sealing hundreds of desperate souls in a concrete tomb. The sibilant voice from the speakers faded, replaced by a silence so profound it was more terrifying than any scream. Every eye darted around the cavernous platform, searching for the source of the voice, for the architects of this sudden, terrifying trap.

He didn't walk from the shadows; the shadows themselves seemed to congeal and rise. Near the center of the platform, the darkness deepened, coalescing into a figure so tall and unnaturally thin he seemed a trick of the light. He wore a perfectly tailored, high-collared dark suit that absorbed the ambient glow, and his face was a perpetual void, a patch of absolute night where features should have been. A chilling, unnatural cold radiated from him, a presence that promised nothing but endings.

This was a Syndicate Fiend. This was a being of pure, unadulterated menace.

“Aspirants,” the Fiend’s voice was the dry rustle of dead leaves, a sibilant whisper that carried to every corner of the station without effort. “I am Charon. I will be your proctor for this initial phase. The rules are exquisitely simple.”

He raised one long, pale hand, and a massive, spectral hourglass materialized in the air beside him, its sand a shimmering, obsidian black.

“There are… an excessive number of you,” Charon continued, his tone laced with a bored, clinical curiosity. “The Shadow Syndicate has no use for excess. It is inefficient. Therefore, a culling is required.”

With a flick of his wrist, the hourglass inverted. The black sand began to trickle down. “You have one hour. At the end of that hour, the one hundred of you still drawing breath will proceed. The rest… will be discarded.”

A nervous murmur rippled through the crowd. Only one hundred? There had to be at least four or five times that many packed onto the platform. Before anyone could protest, a sound from the far end of the station stole their breath—the screeching groan of another massive gate, this one leading deeper into the tunnels, being raised.

From the blackness beyond, a chorus of guttural snarls erupted, a sound of insatiable, predatory hunger. The first of them bounded into the dim light. They were canine in shape but horribly wrong, mockeries of life. Their grey skin was stretched tight over exposed ribs, their movements a twitching, unnatural scuttle. Claws of jagged, yellowed bone scraped against the tiled floor, and their jaws unhinged far too wide, revealing rows of needle-like teeth. Their eyes, devoid of pupils, glowed with a malevolent, sickly green light. Magically-mutated beasts. Grave-Hounds.

Dozens of them poured onto the platform, a tide of twitching limbs and snapping teeth.

For a heartbeat, there was a stunned silence. Then, chaos erupted.

The first screams were from those at the front, the unlucky or the slow, who were swarmed and torn apart before they could even manifest their powers. A fountain of blood arced through the air, and the abattoir opened for business.

The platform became a whirlwind of desperate violence. A pyromancer hurled a massive fireball that engulfed one of the Grave-Hounds in cleansing flame, only to be dragged down by two more that flanked him. The granite-skinned brute Kai had seen earlier became a maelstrom of destruction, his obsidian fists shattering bone and pulverizing flesh with sickening crunches. The trio of street samurai moved like a single organism, their high-frequency blades carving glowing blue lines through the air, dismembering beasts with cold, cybernetic precision.

Amidst the slaughter, Elara was a vision of deadly grace. She was a storm of ice. She didn't waste a single movement. A flick of her wrist sent a spear of jagged ice punching clean through a hound’s skull. A sweep of her arm erected a shimmering wall of frost that intercepted a charging beast, freezing it solid in an instant. She moved with the fluid, ruthless efficiency of someone who had been trained for this their entire life, her piercing blue eyes cold and focused. For her, this wasn't a panicked scramble for survival; it was a performance.

Kai, on the other hand, was utterly, pathetically useless.

He scrambled backwards, tripping over a discarded pack and landing hard on the grimy floor. A Grave-Hound, its jowls dripping with gore, broke from the main fray and fixed its glowing green eyes on him. It lowered its head and charged.

Panic, cold and absolute, seized him. His mind went white with terror. He had no strength, no weapon, no power that could stop this thing. Elara's mocking voice echoed in his head. Padding for the body count. Save your energy for screaming.

He was going to die. Here, in this forgotten hole, torn apart by a monster, his entire miserable existence reduced to a final, agonized scream.

His mind flashed, not with memories, but with instinct. The rats. His only allies. He sent out a frantic, desperate pulse of a command. Help! Distract!

From beneath the platform, from cracks in the walls and holes in the floor, a dozen rats surged forth. They were a pathetic army, squeaking and swarming at the Grave-Hound's feet. The beast didn't even slow down. It trampled them underfoot without a second glance, a tide of fur and blood that did nothing to halt its charge.

It was a failure. A useless, desperate gesture that only got his companions killed. The hound was ten feet away. Five. He could smell its fetid, carrion breath.

And then, rage cut through the fear. A burning, defiant anger. He wasn't going to die like this. Not as a footnote. Not as a joke. If his power couldn't fight, it would have to think.

His eyes, wide with adrenaline, darted around, cataloging his surroundings not as a place, but as a system of weaknesses. The derelict station was his weapon. The hound was about to pounce, its claws digging into the tile for a final leap. Kai’s gaze shot upwards. Above the beast, a massive, corroded ventilation duct, thick with the rust of a century, was held in place by crumbling brackets. It was heavy. It was unstable.

He poured every ounce of his will into one, precise command. It wasn't a plea for help. It was a surgical strike. He didn't send the rats to attack the hound. He sent them to attack the station.

The high place! The weak metal! All of you! CHEW! NOW!

The response was instantaneous. A swarm of rats, far more than had answered his first call, erupted from a nearby service conduit. They weren't a distraction; they were a tool. They scrambled up the wall with unnatural speed, a living carpet of grey fur, and converged on the rusted brackets holding the massive duct.

Their tiny, razor-sharp teeth went to work. The sound of a hundred rats gnawing on stressed, ancient metal was a high-pitched, frantic grinding, lost in the din of the battle. The Grave-Hound leapt.

CRACK!

One of the brackets gave way. The massive duct sagged, groaning in protest. The second bracket snapped a heartbeat later.

For Kai, time seemed to slow. The Grave-Hound was a blur of teeth and claws in mid-air. Above it, tons of rusted steel and concrete dust began to fall. He threw himself sideways, rolling frantically across the slick floor.

CRUMP!

The ventilation duct crashed onto the platform with the force of a battering ram, landing precisely where he had been a second before. The Grave-Hound was simply gone, reduced to a smear of green-glowing ichor and crushed bone beneath the wreckage.

Dust and debris rained down. Kai lay panting, his body screaming with aches, his ears ringing. He was alive. He was covered in filth and trembling uncontrollably, but he was alive.

He pushed himself up, his eyes scanning the chaotic battlefield with a new, feverish intensity. The pyromancers, the brutes, the cryomancers like Elara—they were fighting the monsters.

He was fighting the environment.

He looked at the chaos, at the crumbling architecture, the exposed wiring sparking fitfully, the precariously balanced gantries overhead. He wasn't a warrior. He was a survivor. And this entire station… this crumbling deathtrap… was his arsenal.

The fear was still a cold knot in his stomach, but something else was there now, something sharp and focused. He was still the weakest person here. But he might just be the most dangerous.