The air was thick with smoke and ego.
Neon signs buzzed dimly on concrete walls painted with gang symbols, bounty tags, and the occasional dried bloodstain. Laughter spilled from card tables where some of the worst meta-criminals in the country played poker with stolen chips. Someone screamed in the back room, no one paid attention. It was just another night at Havoc's Nest, the kind of place where the law had never reached, and everyone liked it that way.
The bouncer, a seven-foot colossus with cybernetic arms, was leaning against the door, half-asleep, until he saw a silhouette emerge from the tunnel stairs.
Boots. Heavy.
The bouncer straightened. "You lost, buddy?"
The man didn't answer.
He stepped into the flickering light. A hood was draped low over his face, shadow swallowing most of his features. He wore a long black coat, torn at the edges, like it had been through war, and survived. Smoke curled faintly from his gloves, from his skin.
But the most unsettling part?
The silence.
It wasn't just that the man didn't speak. It was how the room seemed to notice him.
Conversations faded. Heads turned. A low vibration rippled under the floorboards like something ancient had just walked in.
The bouncer reached for the gun holstered beneath his jacket. "I said—"
The man raised his head.
Red eyes.
No glow. Just the color of pure wrath.
Recognition bloomed across the bouncer's face like a virus. "No way…"
The man smiled, a mocking one.
Only once.
And then he moved.
Not fast. Not explosive. Just calm and inevitable. The kind of movement that didn't ask for permission.
A chair clattered. One of the card players stood up so fast his table flipped.
"Rafael," someone whispered.
Another backed toward the exit, tripping over a body that no one remembered killing. "He's supposed to be dead…"
A nervous laugh from the bar. "It's a trick. It's some wannabe. Rafael Azar burned to death after fighting that piece of shit, everyone knows that."
But none of them ran.
Because it was impossible.
And deep down, every one of them wondered:
What if he didn't die?
Rafael walked past the first table. No one stopped him. A man with stone skin reached for his drink and found his hand shaking.
Someone muttered, "He's just one guy."
And Rafael finally spoke, voice low and amused.
"One guy."
He stopped.
Looked around at the room full of infamous killers, thugs, rogue metas, and assassins.
"You're right."
He raised a hand, and the shadows curled around his arm like a living thing.
"I'm just... one guy."
Then he unleashed hell.
The first man to die didn't even have time to scream.
Rafael's shadow lashed from his arm like a serpent, punching through the chest of the stone-skinned gambler who had tried to stand. The body arced into the air, slammed into the ceiling, and dropped in a broken heap. Blood splattered across the neon-lit floor in a fan.
Panic shattered whatever fragile sense of dominance the bar had once held.
The shapeshifter to his left shifted into a creature with claws the size of machetes. He lunged—too slow. Rafael sidestepped, grabbed the thing by its jaw mid-shift, and crushed it shut with one hand. Bone cracked like brittle wood. Then he hurled it across the room with enough force that it split the back wall open.
A man with a thermal cannon on his shoulder powered it up, screaming, "Eat this, freak!" But Rafael's shadow pulsed outward in a dome—a sphere of ink-like darkness—and the blast disappeared into it like light into a black hole. A second later, the cannon exploded on the man's arm, incinerating him and three others behind him.
The screams now came in waves.
Someone activated a teleportation ring. Rafael snapped a finger. The darkness reached into the rift and ripped the ring in half, before the user even got a toe through. His charred body collapsed mid-jump.
A woman turned invisible. It didn't matter.
Rafael could feel her fear. He walked toward her, eyes half-lidded, calm. The shadows under her feet rose and devoured her in an instant. A wet gurgle was all that remained.
They fired plasma rounds. They threw grenades. Someone screamed spells in tongues forgotten by time.
None of it worked.
The bar became a warzone. Tables flipped. Bodies flew. Heads burst. It was methodical. Precise. Like he had rehearsed it a thousand times in his mind, and now, finally, he was conducting his symphony of annihilation.
One by one, they fell.
Twenty-three metas in the first three minutes.
Another six in the next two.
One man tried to beg. Rafael didn't slow. A spear of darkness entered through his mouth and came out the back of his skull.
Another started praying. Rafael listened to two words before cutting his legs out from under him and letting the rest of the man burn in the liquor fire.
In under seven minutes, everyone was dead.
Except the bartender.
He was crouched behind the bar, breathing like a dying animal, one hand raised in surrender, the other clutching a bottle that had somehow survived the chaos.
Rafael stepped over corpses, boots dripping red.
He stood behind the bar.
The bartender didn't look up.
"Don't kill me," he whispered.
"Then give me what I want," Rafael said, voice like the grave.
The bartender nodded frantically. "Anything. Anything."
Rafael leaned down, crimson eyes glowing just enough to be seen in the flicker of flame.
The bartender didn't breathe. His lip trembled, but no sound came out. Rafael stared at him, not with rage, but with something worse: silence.
"Where is Lucien?" Rafael asked, voice cold enough to freeze the fire around them.
The bartender's throat clicked. "I—I don't know," he said quickly. "I swear to God, I don't. He doesn't come here anymore. He doesn't talk to me. He's… he's a ghost."
Rafael didn't blink. "You're lying."
"I'm not, man, I swear! He just sends others. Never the same face twice. I don't even know what he looks like under that mask. Please. I don't know."
A long pause.
The fire crackled beside them, casting moving shadows across Rafael's face.
"I believe you," he said, standing slowly. "Sadly."
The bartender blinked, confused.
Then Rafael reached forward, and the shadow beneath the man rippled. It curled around him like black smoke, and pulled him down like a pit opening in the Earth.
The bartender's scream barely lasted a second before the shadows folded in on themselves and vanished.
Gone.
Rafael exhaled quietly. "I guess I'll have to go to another hideout."
He turned, stepping over bodies, weaving between ruined furniture and dripping walls, his boots echoing against blood-slick tile. The shattered door stood wide open, moonlight casting a sharp white contrast against the crimson-stained floor.
Outside, the night was cold.
He walked into it without hesitation.
Behind him, the bar, once a sanctuary for the worst criminals alive burned. Fire crackled as the structure began to groan. Rafters fell. A wall collapsed. The roof soon would.
And Rafael Azar didn't look back
Lucien was alive. But not for long.