The rain began at the stroke of midnight.

It started as the fine, misty drizzle, needled with a Moscow autumn’s chill, but swiftly thickened into a downpour. Heavy drops hammered against the rusted tin awnings of dilapidated apartment blocks—a sodden, numbing, tremulous roar—kicking up pale sprays from the puddles that seethed beneath. Lightning tore across the sky, bleaching the alley in a stark, momentary glare—a stark, overexposed flash, searing the alley’s image onto the retina—before the darkness rushed back in, thicker and heavier, to reclaim it.

Santali lay slumped by a dumpster in the alley’s deepest shadows, his consciousness fraying like waterlogged film.

Awareness of the abdominal injury came as a cognitive shift, cold and precise. A tri-bladed dart, Genesis Threshold specialty, had found a dangerous depth. He felt its presence not as a point of pain, but as a sphere of cold, hollow tension lodged where muscle yielded to the fragile shadow of viscera. Its hollow, micro-porous core had dispensed a concentrated dose of NTX（neuro-hematic biotoxin）on impact; the barbed tail held fast with a serpent’s finality, anchoring itself as his own warmth receded.

He could feel it—a cold, viscous paralysis creeping along his veins—the anticoagulant at work. Thin, uncoagulated blood swirled with the rain, bleeding into pale pink rivulets that traced the earth beneath him. The scent of it was pressed down by the wet, cold air into the cracks between bricks and the decay of garbage, so thin it was almost an illusion, nearly erased by the monotonous, stubborn roar on rusted tin.

The pain was a sharp, constant, but he was more concerned by the black spots blooming silently at the edges of his vision—ink drops in clear water, slowly, irrevocably consuming clarity. A searing ache lanced through his retinas—the toll of overexerting his aerokinesis. His optic nerves screamed a shrill overload warning, accompanied by a faint tinnitus and a throbbing at his temples.

He had to move. Before the blindness became absolute. Before the Genesis Threshold’s clean-up squad converged like hyenas on carrion.

Seven minutes ahead of estimate, he noted, coolly adjusted the parameter. Blood loss and hypothermia lent a sticky drag to his thought processes, yet the core computational module hummed on, icy and precise. He forced his eyes wider. His violet pupils swam, lost focus in the rain-curtain, then surrendered completely to a lightless, viscous density.

[Temporary blindness. Seventy-two hours.]

This knowledge chilled him more than the wound. For ‘S’, the loss of sight meant forfeiting sixty percent of his situational awareness. And he had just eliminated the entire purge squad—L, his partner of six years, among them.

L’s final expression flashed in his mind—no guilt, no struggle, just a cold, procedural finality on the face he’d known since training. The dart had been fired from the concealed crossbow on L’s left wrist, from less than three meters, on a trajectory that precluded all evasion.

A textbook execution. A clean betrayal.

A grimace, meant to be a laugh, twisted Santali’s lips. It dissolved into a cough, speckling his chin with blood that the rain instantly washed pale. He had been thorough. His wind-blades had severed arteries and vocal cords alike, the very air stifling any cry. The bodies were positioned with intent—a staged tableau suggesting a chaotic firefight. Trackers would be misled; the storm would scour away all scent and trace.

Theoretically, he had an eight-hour window.

But theory did not factor in bleeding out in the dark.

His vision was gone, a boundless, thick dark. Yet, perhaps sharpened by the near-death experience, his hearing, his smell, his touch grew acutely heightened. He could parse the distinct pitches of raindrops striking different surfaces around him; he could smell the complex cocktail of rust, blood, and garbage-rot in the air, and beneath it…

He marshaled the dregs of his Arcana. A tremor in his fingertips gathered a wisp of air. It extended like a phantom limb—rusted fire escape, three meters east. Overturned bin, five meters. The alley mouth…

Someone.

Santali’s body tensed instantly, as every function instantly suppressed itself to minimum output. His breathing shallowed, his heartbeat slowed to a whisper, even the muscles around his wound constricted to stem the flow. He lay in the rainwater, perfectly still, a corpse among refuse, only his ears actively parsing each sound beneath the rain’s drumming.

The footsteps were feather-light, nearly swallowed by the downpour. But the wind carried whispers back: weight approximately fifty-five kilograms, a professional’s forefoot stride. Height, extrapolated from cadence, likely one-seventy to one-seventy-five.

They stopped.

The presence halted precisely at the alley’s mouth.

Santali’s mind constructed the scene in crisp, sterile lines: a figure pressed against wet brick, assessing, right hand resting on a weapon, left palm open—sensing for the ghost of spent Arcana.

He was correct.

X stood shrouded in the shadows at the alley’s entrance, her crimson hair a sodden coil against her skin. She carried no umbrella; her black tactical suit was engineered to shed water completely, leaving it impeccably dry. Her right hand indeed rested on the polymer holster at her thigh. Her left was held before her, palm open to the weeping sky.

Minuscule ice crystals formed there, shimmered, dissolved, and reformed.

She was reading the echoes in the air—the afterglow of violence. An intense aerokinetic discharge had torn through this space minutes prior, A-grade at minimum. The crystals thinned, guiding her gaze toward the scatter of bodies in the depths.

Seventeen. Throat wounds. Clean. Deep. Instantaneous.

A professional’s assessment formed swiftly in her mind. But the edges were charred. Not a blade’s work. Compressed air?The thought triggered an almost imperceptible contraction of her pupils.

Intriguing.

She flowed into the alley without a sound, her boots finding dry patches of concrete, avoiding puddles, landing in utter silence. The corpses were arranged with deliberate care, like pieces on a stage. She knelt beside the nearest—male, early thirties, carotid severed, yet his death-mask was placid, almost… relieved.

Internal purge?* Or…

(*Eliminated by his own side)

Her gaze snagged on the device on the corpse’s wrist. A concealed crossbow, bolt fired. The design was Genesis Threshold issue, three years standard. She detached it with practiced ease. A lightning flash glinted off the tiny internal engraving:

B-07-19. Logistics, Workshop Seven, 2019, batch nineteen.

Core team gear.

The air, beyond the heavy wetness and the faint metallic tang, carried the barest thread of living blood, and something even fainter—the unique, fading ‘ripple’ of aerokinetic energy residue, like the final, expanding ring from a stone dropped into stagnant water.

X rose. A blade of ice coalesced in her hand from the damp air. She followed the strongest residual thread, the energy spoor, deeper into the alley, stopping finally before the form collapsed against the dumpster.

He lay on his side, long black hair fanned out in the filthy water like spilled ink.

A bone-white lightning bolt tore the oppressive sky, freezing the alley in a stark, monochrome still.

His face was a bloodless, nearly transparent pale, the faint bluish web of superficial vessels visible beneath the skin, making the wet strands plastered to his temples and cheeks seem blacker. Even in unconsciousness (or appearing so), the bone structure remained sharp—a high, straight nose bridging cleanly to the brow; a jawline honed to efficiency—a study in both aesthetic and functional symmetry.

A ridge of pain etched between his brows. Beneath them, the eyelashes, wet clumped spikes, trembled minutely against his pallid skin, casting minute shadows—a fragility on the verge of shattering intertwined with a profound, almost serene, foundation, projecting a strange and contradictory quality.

X’s gaze, a precision scanner, dropped to the fingers clenched over his left abdomen. There, a dark red liquid, distinct from the rainwater, seeped slowly, persistently, dyeing the dark fabric with a deeper, ominous stain.

—A critically wounded, top-tier aerokinetic, hunted by his own elite organization. The scales of value and risk tipped with micrometer precision in her mind.

She crouched, two fingers finding the carotid pulse at his neck——

Thready. Rapid. Around 130-140 beats per minute. Estimated blood loss: at least 1.5 liters. Pre-shock indicators were present.

Her fingers moved to the wound's edge, pressing lightly. A spasm passed through the unconscious man.

Expressionless, X lifted the blood-soaked fabric, exposing the injury. The foreign object lodged in the muscle tissue was clear: metal, triple-bladed construction, coated against glare, its tail featuring an intricate barb design now fully embedded.

Based on surface projection and the palpation response: entry from the lower left anterolateral side, trajectory angled upward, the tip likely now situated lateral to the space between the third and fourth lumbar vertebrae—its current position perilously close to the lumbar nerve plexus and major vessels, estimated deviation a mere 1.5 to 2.0 centimeters. Without hesitation, her left hand pinned his right shoulder joint. Her right hand plunged directly into the wound.

She located the fragment's edge, secured a grip, twisted it forty-five degrees clockwise to unlock the barbs, and pulled it free in one brutal, precise motion.

Blood surged forth instantly. The man's body arched off the ground, a choked gasp escaping him. X did not spare it a glance, swishing the bloody shard in a rivulet of runoff and holding it up to the lightning's glare.

The micro-engraving on the dart's tail was clear: a single, closed eye.

"'The Nightwatcher.' Direct action unit," she murmured, her tone devoid of inflection.

The shard clicked on stone. Cold congealed anew in her palm—not the fine-dust crystals for sensing, but the blunt instrument of a focused cryo-field. A pale frost-mist bloomed from her fingers, sheathing the abdominal wound. Vasoconstriction was immediate; the gush thinned to a sluggish ooze. Tissue metabolism was forcibly slowed—a standard field-expedient hemostasis.

Buy time, at the risk of localized frostbite and necrosis.

But for a man on death's threshold, the ledger was blank.

One-armed, she hauled him over her shoulder—lighter than expected. He felt hollow—a raptor’s frame built for vast skies, its weight the wind’s own. A precise seventy, seventy-five kilos. Efficient. She adjusted her grip, clear of the wound, her gaze making a final, sweeping pass.

A drop met the corpse. Not with a violent splash or hiss, but a low, wet szzz— the sound of hot iron quenched, yet softer, hungrier. Muscle and fabric responded first: fibres carbonized and shrivelled, melting into a spreading pool of pale yellow gel. Skin foamed white, dense and seething, while beneath it the hard geography of the body—knuckles, cheekbones, ribs—softened, subsided, surrendered. Within two minutes, only a viscous dark residue remained where a man had lain. The rain rinsed it briefly; left the wet stone merely bleached.

It was a mixture of concentrated hydrofluoric acid and a targeted protease catalyst—a formula descended from a fifteenth-century alchemist’s manuscript. She had re-engineered the crude “royal water gold-corrosion,” preserving the fluoride ion’s voracious appetite for calcium, but replacing unstable medieval reagents with modern chelators and enzymes. It reduced a complex organism to its basic chemistry. Efficiently.

Finished, she and her burden dissolved from the alley mouth into the storm's maw. The rain intensified, scouring the final traces. Ten minutes later, the alley stood pristine. Asleep.

Only the air retained a memory of ozone—the faint, clean scent of wind colliding with ice.

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Note: "The Genesis Threshold" – interpreted as "Threshold of Genesis," the instant of all things' beginning. Its covert operations branch is "the Nightwatcher" and it answers only to the mission.