Gary's fingers tapped steadily against the polished table, slow and rhythmic. On the surface, he looked calm. But in his mind, he was already elsewhere—years away, reliving a night that never quite left him.
Twenty-five years ago. New Year's Eve.
New York City had no idea it was about to bleed. The night had started like any other—Times Square packed to bursting, neon lights flickering across seas of tourists, cab horns echoing through the streets, Broadway humming with energy.
The streets were alive. Loud. Normal. And for once, young Gary Holden—then just a junior operative in Aegis—thought maybe, just maybe, the chaos would take a holiday.
"Man, when do we actually get sent to war?" Gary muttered, eyes scanning the crowd from his rooftop post.
He wasn't joking. He'd been waiting for action since he joined Aegis. Not surveillance. Not babysitting civilians during holidays. Real deployment.
At that time, Aegis had already existed for decades, but field assignments were split by seniority. The seasoned operatives got sent to war zones, quiet missions in hostile countries.
Guys like Gary? They were stuck in crowd control and disaster prevention. His partner leaned against the ledge beside him, sipping hot chocolate like they were just another pair of NYPD beat cops.
Yaseer didn't even look up. "Don't drag me into your soldier fantasies, man," he said with a smirk. "I'm not dying in someone else's war."
"You joined Aegis," Gary shot back. "You're already halfway dead."
Yaseer chuckled. "Yeah, but I still like my organs on the inside."
They shared a laugh—short, casual, familiar. Just two rookies waiting for nothing to happen.
They had no idea how wrong they were.
Before that night, Gary and Yaseer had spent five uneventful years stationed in Manhattan. Aegis, back then, was so far off the books they were practically a myth. Not even the highest-ranking government officials really knew what the task force did.
Their missions read like fiction—terror cells armed with alien tech, smugglers dealing in cursed artifacts, and the occasional rogue operative with a body count in the triple digits.
But monsters?
No one trained for that. Not even in theory. That kind of thing was reserved for movies, comic books, or late-night paranoia threads. Certainly not real life. Gary and Yaseer were still joking about deployment, sipping coffee on a rooftop overlooking Times Square, when it happened.
The first scream split the night.
A piercing, gut-wrenching shriek that didn't belong in a crowd. That wasn't excitement or celebration. That was terror. Another scream followed. Then another. The air seemed to crack with panic.
Both men were on their feet in an instant.
"What the hell…?" Gary muttered, drawing his sidearm as he stepped toward the edge of the rooftop.
Below, chaos had erupted.
The crowd—once a sea of smiling tourists and buzzing locals—was now a storm of stampeding bodies. People screamed, shoved, scrambled over barricades and one another. Children cried. Parents shouted. And still, Gary couldn't see what they were running from.
He raised his comm. "Central, this is Agent Gary Holden. We've got mass panic in Times Square. Requesting status report—what's happening?"
Nothing.
Just static.
Gary's eyes narrowed. "Seriously? No one's picking up now?"
Then came the answer.
Not through the comms—but through the smoke. They emerged like nightmares given form. Beasts. Real ones. The first was a wolf—no, not a wolf. Wolves didn't stand shoulder-high to SUVs. This thing's eyes blazed like hot coals, and its jaw hung open, fangs dripping with something thick and dark.
Behind it came more.
A bear-like thing, only its back was studded with jagged, bone-like armor. Its limbs were too long, its movements wrong—like it had once been something else and was forced into this shape.
Then came the third. No name. No logic. A crawling mass with too many limbs and not enough eyes, dragging itself across the pavement faster than any human should be able to run.
Gary barely had time to curse.
"Contact! Contact!" a voice shouted through the comms—finally coming through, frantic and broken. "Multiple hostiles—non-human! We need backup now!"
Gary didn't wait. He gritted his teeth, pressed two fingers to his comm, and barked, "All teams, light 'em up! Prioritize civilian protection—containment perimeter, now!"
The street below ignited in sound and fury.
Automatic gunfire cracked through the air, bursts of muzzle flash lighting up the night like a strobe show from hell. Agents hidden in alleys, behind barricades, and across rooftops began unloading their clips into the creatures without hesitation. Panic spread faster than the bullets.
Gary locked eyes with Yaseer, his longtime partner and the only guy who could still crack jokes in life-or-death situations. Tonight, his face said everything.
This wasn't one of those times.
"You ready?" Gary asked.
Yaseer scoffed, drawing his second pistol with a flick. "Nope. You?"
"I regret asking for war."
Still, they moved. They sprinted to the edge of the rooftop. Ten stories up—not exactly beginner-level parkour. But they'd done worse with worse odds. Gary threw his grappling line over a nearby ad pole jutting from the building's side, then yanked it hard. Secure.
"On three," he said.
Yaseer nodded, looping his line around a steel beam.
"One… two…"
They leapt. Gravity yanked them down in a blur of neon signs, glowing billboards, and rising screams. The world rushed past in chaos and color. Gary's boots scraped the wall as he angled his descent, using the grappling line to control speed. Sparks sprayed from the edge of the building. Glass shattered as they passed a window, too close for comfort.
Five stories.
Four.
Three.
They both kicked off the side of the building, flipping midair before crashing down onto a fire escape, then springboarding off it to the pavement below. Gary rolled to break the landing—barely. Yaseer landed beside him with a grunt and a muttered curse.
But they were down.
Alive.
And the street looked like hell. A sea of bodies pushed in every direction. Civilians screamed, climbing over crushed vehicles and each other to get away. Sirens wailed. A car exploded somewhere down the block, the shockwave rattling Gary's teeth. The beasts were advancing. No strategy. No pattern. Just raw, primal destruction.
"Form a line!" Gary shouted. "Concentrate fire! Don't let them breach the south barricade!"
A dozen agents who had already shown themselves obeyed, forming a rough half-circle between the civilians and the oncoming monsters. Muzzles flared as more bullets poured into the wolves and hulking things tearing through the chaos. The lead wolf-man took six rounds to the chest and didn't even flinch.
The bear-man—whatever it was—charged through a pickup truck, its plated hide shrugging off armor-piercing rounds like spitballs. The crawling thing moved like a blur, leaping from building to building before tackling two agents to the ground in a heartbeat.
"Reload!" someone screamed.
Yaseer was breathing hard, still unloading rounds into one of the beasts. "Gary, it's not working!"
Gary knew it. He knew it the moment he saw that first bullet bounces off the beast's ribbed hide. But he couldn't say it out loud. Couldn't show fear. Not now.
"Switch to high-impact incendiaries!" he ordered, even though deep down he doubted it would make a difference.
Explosives detonated a second later—boom after boom, sending shockwaves through the streets. Shrapnel flew. Fire lit up the air. The monsters didn't slow down. Gary stared, gun still raised but fingers froze on the trigger. For the first time in a long time, he felt it. That thing he'd trained to kill.
Fear.
Pure, suffocating fear.
And beside him, even Yaseer—his laid-back, always-laughing partner—had gone silent. Because whatever these things were, they didn't feel pain. They didn't bleed. They didn't break. They just kept coming.
"Gary!" a younger agent—Mendez—ducked beside him, reloading frantically. "My rounds aren't doing a damn thing! What the hell are these things?!"
"I don't know!" Gary barked. "Just keep firing and buy time!"
A scream rang out—someone from their team. Another operative, Jenkins, was slammed against a streetlight by a charging beast, his armor crumpling like foil.
"Jenkins is down!" a voice crackled in Gary's earpiece.
"This is suicide!" Mendez shouted.
"Then die loud!" Gary snapped, standing and firing two rounds directly into a wolf's chest. It stumbled—barely—but kept coming.
His heart pounded. Every instinct screamed at him to run, to get the hell out. But civilians were everywhere—trapped in their cars, crawling on the pavement, screaming for help.
"Team Two, flank left!" he ordered. "Get those people out! Team Three—lay suppressing fire!"
Static answered back. His gut already knew the truth: they weren't going to win this fight. Not without a miracle.
And then—just when it looked like the beasts would tear through everything—a shadow dropped from the sky.
No roar. No explosion. Just a silent streak overhead and—
Boom.
A figure landed between Gary, Yaseer, and the monsters, cloak flaring in the smoke like it had a mind of its own. The impact cracked the pavement, sending debris skittering. He was young—barely mid-twenties by the look of him—but there was nothing boyish about the way he moved.
He didn't belong to the military. Didn't carry a weapon. Didn't seem even slightly alarmed. His face was hidden behind a sleek, dragon-motif mask—obsidian black, sculpted with sharp ridges, and glowing gold eyes that didn't blink. The cloak he wore shimmered with an otherworldly sheen, flowing around him like a liquid shadow.
Gary raised his pistol instinctively. "Who the hell are you?"
The masked figure tilted his head, voice calm—almost amused. "A Cleaner."
Yaseer blinked. "A what now?"
"A Cleaner," the young man repeated, chuckling lightly as he flexed his fingers. "Someone needs to clean this beast's mess, right?"
Gary didn't get the chance to reply as a massive boar—no, something worse—exploded from the smoke, jaws open wide enough to bite a car in half.
The Cleaner didn't flinch.
He glanced over his shoulder. "Stay back, you two."
Then he moved. Fast didn't cover it. One moment he was standing still, the next he was gone—launched forward with such speed it blurred the air around him. He flipped over the beast mid-leap, cloak trailing behind him like a scythe through the fog. A glint of golden-black metal flashed on his hand—a ring, Gary realized, glowing faintly.
There was no flash, no roar. Just a single, clean motion—and then the boar-man's head fell to the ground with a wet thud, body skidding behind it.
"Stay alive," the Cleaner called back, voice light and playful. "I'd hate for you guys to die before we really get to know each other."
"Did he just—?" Gary stammered.
"H-h-he... did," Yaseer stuttered.
But the Cleaner was already gone. What followed wasn't a fight. It was a demonstration or a massacre of beasts. He weaved through the battlefield like smoke—untouchable, untethered, unstoppable. Every beast that came near dropped like flies. Not because he was stronger.
Because they couldn't touch him.
One creature, massive and horned, lunged with claws the size of machetes. The Cleaner didn't dodge. He vanished.
Literally.
One blink—there. The next—gone.
The horned beast staggered, then crumpled as its head slid cleanly from its shoulders, thumping to the ground like a bag of rocks. Another lunged—a fang-covered thing with a body like a gorilla and a face that looked like melted bone. The Cleaner caught it midair with a snap of his fingers. The beast froze, limbs rigid, eyes wide—then fell like its strings had been cut.
"What the hell is he doing?" Yaseer yelled over the chaos, swapping mags with trembling fingers.
"I don't know!" Gary shouted, crouched behind a demolished food truck. "But I'm not stopping him!"
Above them, a winged beast swooped, screeching loud enough to crack windows. The Cleaner didn't wait. He launched himself off the hood of a car, spun midair, kicked off a dangling traffic light—and soared.
Time slowed.
A shimmer extended from his forearm—claws? Blades? Something Gary couldn't name—and in a single, effortless motion, he slashed straight through the beast's neck. Blood sprayed in the air like rain. The creature's head spiraled one way. The body another.
The Cleaner landed on a cracked SUV like it was nothing. And he didn't even look winded. Not once did he use a gun. Not once did he hesitate. And yet, everything about his movements was surgical. Fluid. Lethal.
And Gary… or even Yaseer, had no idea how the hell he was doing it.
No weapons. No armor. No backup.
Just a black dragon mask, some kind of flowing cloak, and a body moving like it had been carved for this exact chaos. He didn't need to see. He didn't need to think. He reacted before things happened.
"Save the civilians!" the Cleaner shouted.
Gary snapped back to focus, jolted by the command. "You heard him! Move!"
The rest of the Aegis squad didn't hesitate—they followed his lead without question. How could they not? Every order the Cleaner gave saved lives. Every monster he pointed at dropped seconds later under coordinated fire. When he yelled "Fall back," they moved. When he barked "Hold the line," it held.
Somehow, he wasn't just fighting. He was leading.
By the time the sun began to peek over the horizon, New York looked like a warzone. Fires smoldered. Glass crunched under every step. Sirens howled in the distance. And the streets were littered with carcasses—monster and otherwise.
Gary collapsed beside the Cleaner atop a wrecked delivery van, blood drying on his arm, smoke in his lungs. While Yaseer was trembling from fear and excitement. The Cleaner stood still, his chest rising and falling beneath the folds of his cloak. His mask gleamed under the soft morning light.
"How'd you know?" Gary rasped, turning his head just enough to face him. "About these things? How did you fight them like that?"
The Cleaner didn't answer right away. He tilted his head as if considering how much truth to give.
"Let's just say…" he said at last, "I've been doing this longer than I look."
Yaseer frowned. "What does that mean?"
The Cleaner didn't answer right away.
He tilted his head slightly, golden eyes behind the dragon mask catching the first rays of morning light. Smoke curled in the air around them. The city still burned.
For a heartbeat, it felt like the whole world had paused to hear his reply.
Then he simply turned away. "Another time," he said, voice low. "You're not ready for the full truth."
That was the first lesson Gary and Yaseer learned from the Cleaner. Not everything needed to be understood right away.
Weeks later...
What happened in Times Square couldn't be hidden. Not completely. The news called it a "biochemical terrorist attack." A failed experiment. A mass hallucination. Pick a lie—they printed them all.
But inside Aegis?
They knew better.
And for the first time in its shadow-covered history, the Aegis Division made a choice that broke every rule in its own handbook: they let two junior operatives work outside the chain of command.
Because the Cleaner demanded it.
And because, quite frankly, no one else had earned the right. Gary and Yaseer became the only two agents with direct access to him. He didn't brief analysts. He didn't report to admirals. He answered no summons, took no orders, and signed no forms. He came and went like the wind in smoke.
When he spoke, he only spoke to them.
And what he taught them? It rewrote everything Aegis thought it knew.
And over time, the stories became training. The training became doctrine. And the two rookies who once made jokes on rooftops became the first students of something Aegis had never seen before.
He didn't call it magic.
Didn't call it power.
He called it balance.
Through him, they learned about the Corrupted Rings—how they didn't just grant power, but fed off it. Twisting their host, draining them, using their bodies until only the beast remained.
They learned about Corrupted Essence, the energy that pulsed through the rings like poison—infectious, hungry, and absolute. And then, there were the beasts.
The Cleaner explained that not all of them were beast-men. Most of what the world saw—clawing through streets, leveling buses, ripping buildings apart—were Lower Level Beasts.
Monstrous, yes. But crude.
"The stronger ones?" he said once, gaze fixed somewhere far away. "They're smarter. Sharper. They plan. They remember."
And they came from a world not like Earth—but close. A place, the Cleaner once said, "like yours… only older. Hungrier. Broken."
Gary never fully understood what that meant.
But Yaseer?
Yaseer saw it.
While Gary trained—learning to track beast aura, sense a ring's pulse, master the rhythm of nonhuman motion—Yaseer turned toward innovation. He didn't want to waste another bullet that bounced off armor or pray for lucky headshots.
He wanted solutions.
So he left the field.
Switched units. Got tech clearance. Disappeared into the labs buried five floors beneath Aegis HQ. And within months, Yaseer transformed from a smart-mouthed field agent to the lead architect of Aegis' anti-beast division.
Weapons that could pierce corrupted hides.
Armor that could shield the soul.
Scanners that could detect the energy of the corrupted ring right before it activated. All of it came from fragments of what the Cleaner revealed—and Yaseer's sheer brilliance connecting dots no one else even saw.
He still cracked jokes. Still called Gary dramatic. Still brought hot chocolate to the strategy meetings. But he never stepped onto a battlefield again.
That wasn't his war anymore.
The war Gary was preparing for required something different. Something buried deeper. That was when he learned about something that opened his eyes to the possibilities of the humans' limits.
Mana Gates.
"They're already inside you," the Cleaner had said, back in a concrete gym lit by a single flickering bulb. "Locked. Dormant. Most people never open even one. But if you can... the rules change."
No manuals. No slideshows. No explanation.
Just pain.
The training was brutal. The kind that left Gary flat on the floor, choking on his own heartbeat, his limbs convulsing as the energy he couldn't control roared through him like wildfire.
But eventually… something opened.
A Gate.
And suddenly, Gary felt everything. The pulse of corrupted rings before they appeared. The presence of beasts before they struck. His movements—faster. His focus—razor-sharp.
He asked the Cleaner one night, breath ragged after a sparring session, "Should I… keep this to myself? Or do you want the rest of Aegis to learn this?"
The Cleaner had just leaned against a cracked wall, arms folded, gaze unreadable.
"The technique's not a secret," he said. "But not everyone's built for it. If you think someone's ready—teach them. If not? Let it die with you."
Gary decided to start alone. He had to be the first line. Be the one with the most understanding of it. But he didn't stay alone for long.
"You're learning it too," Gary told Yaseer a week later, tossing him a training rod forged with Cleaner's specs.
Yaseer stared at it like it was cursed. "Nope. Not happening. I've seen what that thing does to your face."
Gary didn't blink. "Not a request."
Yaseer grumbled. Cursed. Complained the whole way through. But when he opened his first Gate… the sparks lit the lab blue, and the look in his eyes changed.
He understood.
The rings were dangerous—but the Gates were the only thing that stood a chance of keeping them in check. The beasts weren't just coming back.
They were adapting. And the only person who could fight them without flinching—without fear—was the one man who never told them who he was.
No matter how many times Gary asked about his origins. No matter how many late nights they spent sitting in the ruins of training arenas, bleeding and laughing and almost feeling like friends.
The answer never changed.
"Another time," the Cleaner would say.