The wind howled across the blasted plain, a lonely, mournful sound that had been the world's only song for years. It whipped around the skeletal remains of a communication tower, its rusted girders groaning in protest. The only other mark on the desolate landscape was a single, unremarkable concrete blockhouse, its surface scarred by time and weather. It looked like a tomb.
A sleek, black helicopter descended from the bruised sky, its rotors beating the thin air into a frenzy. It settled on the cracked earth, and two figures emerged.
Prime 4, the Butcher of Kongo, was a stark silhouette of violence against the grey horizon. His black mask, still psychologically stained from the atrocity in the Congo, seemed to drink the feeble light. Beside him, Prime 7 was a study in contrasts. She moved with a liquid, unsettling grace, her form seeming to flicker at the edges, a living shadow clad in form-fitting, matte-black tactical gear. Her face was obscured not by a mask, but by a high, stiff collar and a deep hood, from which only a few strands of pale, almost white hair escaped.
"This place is a graveyard," Prime 4's synthesized voice rasped, his disdain palpable. "What do you want to show me, Seven? My work is in the vivisection chambers, not in this… dust."
Prime 7 didn't turn. Her voice, when it came, was a soft, melodic whisper that nonetheless carried a chilling finality. "Patience, Four. The most profound truths are often buried. Just wait."
She led him to the blockhouse. The entrance was a single, heavy steel door, which slid open at her approach, revealing not a room, but the top of a massive elevator platform. They stepped on. The descent was long, silent, and deep, plunging them into the cold, silent belly of the earth. The air grew heavy, smelling of ozone, sterile filtration, and something else… something old and powerful.
The elevator doors hissed open.
They revealed a scene of carnage so fresh the air was still thick with the copper-sweet scent of blood. The antechamber was a charnel house. Architect security lay in twisted, broken heaps. Scientists were slumped over consoles, their white coats now painted in garish red. The silence was absolute, the kind that only follows absolute violence.
And standing in the center of it all, painted in the evidence of their work, were Eva and Maya.
Eva stood tall, her Alpha presence a physical weight in the room, her one good eye burning with a cold, focused fire. Her clothes were drenched, her hands stained to the elbow. Maya stood slightly behind her, a statue of contained lethal potential. Her knuckles were raw, and a fresh, deep gash on her cheekbone was already knitting itself closed, steam rising faintly from the healing flesh. In her eyes was not the feral hunger of the beast, but the cold, clean satisfaction of the huntress.
Prime 4 stopped dead. His black-masked head tilted. He was not surprised. He was… intrigued.
Prime 7, however, walked forward as if the two blood-soaked women were mere statues. She paused as she passed them, her hooded head turning slightly in their direction.
"Have fun, ladies," she whispered, the words a soft, almost intimate caress in the deathly quiet. Then she continued on, disappearing down a corridor deeper into the facility, leaving Prime 4 alone with them.
Eva's gaze followed Seven for a moment, a flicker of something unreadable in her eye—not trust, but a grim acknowledgment. This was the trade. The betrayer had delivered the prize. Her attention snapped back to Prime 4, and all other thoughts were incinerated in the furnace of her hatred.
"Seven…" Prime 4's voice was a low, dangerous growl. "You betrayer." The accusation was not shouted; it was a statement of cold, clinical fact, directed at the empty corridor.
The girls didn't care about Seven's motives. She had brought them the monster they hated most. The architect of the thing in the Congo. The source of the grief that had forged Eva into an Alpha and haunted Maya's every quiet moment. The air crackled with unspeakable violence, a storm about to break.
---
Hundreds of miles away, in a different kind of isolation, the air was thin and cold. Derek and Jordan stood on a high, rocky plateau, the wind tearing at their clothes. Below them stretched a vast, geothermally active basin, dotted with fumaroles that vented plumes of superheated steam into the sky. This was the location Wolfen had given them. The air tasted of sulfur and anticipation.
They didn't have to wait long.
A transport, silent and without markings, descended from the cloud cover. It was not an Architect design they recognized; it was blocky, utilitarian, a brute-force conveyance. It landed, and the ramp lowered.
Prime 6 emerged. His crystalline form refracted the weak sunlight into a thousand painful shards. He was not alone. Flanking him were three figures. They were not hybrids in the traditional sense. They were… amalgamations. Project Chimera. One had the lower body of a large cat and the torso of a muscular human, its face a blurred, screaming composite of both. Another seemed to be a fusion of human and insectoid chassis, its movements a series of precise, jerky clicks. The third was a swirling, barely-contained vortex of flesh and energy, its form never settling.
Prime 6's multifaceted eyes scanned the plateau, his voice a chorus of grinding crystals. "Huh. Why are you here? This sector is scheduled for cleansing."
Derek and Jordan exchanged a single, brief glance. No words were needed. The calm certainty that had settled over them in the months since Leo's death solidified into a cold, hard resolve. The pieces were moving exactly as Wolfen had said they would. This was no accident. This was an appointment.
Derek hefted his weapon, a heavily modified rifle now chambered for the specialized, armor-piercing rounds they had scavenged from fallen Architect patrols. Jordan flexed his hands, the strange, resurrected energy within him humming in readiness. They were no longer just survivors. They were the anvil.
"We're here for the cleaning," Jordan said, his voice flat and dead.
---
And in a place that was no place, on a rocky spire that pierced the cloud layer like a spear aimed at heaven, the final stage was set.
The air was so thin it was barely breathable. The sky above was a deep, star-dusted violet. Below, an ocean of clouds churned, hiding the ruined world from sight. On this pinnacle, three figures stood, their presence warping the very fabric of reality around them.
Prime 1, the boy-god, looked out over the cloud sea, his expression one of serene, childish contemplation. Prime 2, a shifting constellation of bio-luminescent tendrils and calm, all-seeing eyes, pulsed with a soft, internal light. Prime 3, the gravitational goddess, stood with an air of bored impatience, the rocks at her feet subtly straining against her pull.
A fourth figure joined them, not from the path, but from the air itself, materializing from a shimmer of heat haze.
Wolfen Welfric.
He stood below them on a lower outcrop, looking up. He wore no armor, carried no obvious weapon. He was just a man. But the air around him vibrated with contained power. The white fire was a dormant sun in his chest, the obsidian blade of his will sheathed but ready. His pale eyes, set in sclera of absolute black, regarded the three Primes not with hatred, nor with fear, but with the calm assessment of a sculptor looking at a block of marble.
"The children are getting restless," Prime 1 said, his voice a light, melodic tenor that was profoundly wrong in this setting. He didn't look at Wolfen. "They break their toys and scrawl on the walls. It's… messy."
"The equation is unbalanced," Prime 6's voice chimed in through a communicator, the sound strained. "Unexpected variables at the Geothermal Basin. The anvil is… resistant."
Prime 4's rasp cut in, sharp and laced with static and the sounds of impacting flesh. "The Alpha and the Predator are here. In my sanctum. Seven's work."
On the spire, a slow, terrifying smile spread across Prime 1's youthful face. He finally turned his guileless blue eyes to Wolfen.
"You have been a very busy ghost."
Wolfen said nothing. He simply stood there, the bringer of balance at the center of the storm he had summoned. Below the clouds, in a bloody laboratory, an Alpha and a Predator faced their nightmare. On a sulfuric plateau, an anvil prepared to meet a hammer of fused flesh and crystal. And on this peak, above the world, the gods of the new world faced the man who had come to kill them all.
The stage was set. The pieces were in motion. The final, terrible silence before the storm was broken only by the whisper of the stratospheric winds and the sound of Wolfen Welfric cracking his knuckles.