Zeke slowly advanced toward Ray, each deliberate footfall striking the raw concrete with a muted clack that echoed through the cavernous skeleton of the abandoned tower. Pale construction lights flickered overhead, their failing fluorescents casting stuttering halos that glided over his mask in restless waves. His shoulders stayed relaxed—almost languid—yet a strange duality colored his movement: outward confidence paired with an inward emptiness, as though his soul had momentarily withdrawn and left a precise machine behind to pilot the flesh.

A faint chemical tang hung in the stale air, laced with dust from shattered plasterboard still drifting down like gray snowflakes. As Zeke drew close, his gaze—remote, glassy, hypnotic—tracked the minor details of Ray's posture: the jaunty tilt of the neon-green hood, the worn crease in the cargo-pocket seams, the tiny chips of dried concrete that clung to the black-leather toe caps. What finally snagged his attention was the pinky ring glinting under the strobes of a faulty work lamp: a slender band engraved with a stylized butterfly, its wings so intricately etched they seemed to flutter whenever the light quivered.

"Are you the leader of the butterfly gang?" he asked, his voice smooth and unmodulated, like a dulled scalpel gliding across glass.

"Me?" Ray replied, a note of theatrical surprise coloring his tone. "Well, the gang is called the silver moth, but you could say that."

Across the makeshift lounge, splintered two-by-fours creaked in the wind leaking through shattered window panels. From deeper inside the half-built labyrinth, the whine of an untended crane motor rose and fell, a broken lullaby that never quite reached silence.

"What's this about the Prowler?!" the fat gangster bellowed from behind a barricade of mismatched couches, his gravelly voice reverberating against naked rebar.

Without warning, Zeke's arm flashed forward. He locked his fingers around Ray's collar, fabric bunching beneath his steel-tight grip, and pivoted with a fluid torque that sent Ray arcing across the room. The neon figure struck a supporting pillar; concrete split with a dull crack, spraying chalky fragments that rained down on Ray's hood like brittle sleet. Hairline fissures snaked up the column, and the build site itself seemed to groan in protest.

"I'm the Prowler," Zeke menacingly growled, turning a death-hardened glare on the stunned gangster cadre huddled in the smoky rear.

The nearest gunmen jolted as one, their rifles barking short, frantic bursts. But every bullet screeched to a halt a meter from its mark, suspended in a trembling crescent of copper and lead. Casings spun in mid-air, reflecting the dying halogen glow in jittery pinwheels.

"Didn't expect this did ya?" Fredric laughed, voice buoyant as he pinched index and thumb together. A field of unseen force inverted; the frozen rounds snapped backward, reversing course so abruptly they shrieked like shrapnel caught in a storm vortex. Metal punched into flesh, splintered bone, and shattered the half-stitched bravado of the gang's front line.

"Ken!" Ray screamed in desperation. "Do something!"

"Right," the fat gangster—Ken—grunted, surging forward with a meaty fist cocked for Mohawk's skull. Yet before the punch could land, a faint whiff of soot pricked his sinuses. His eyes refocused—and a small, dark silhouette already occupied the space where empty air should have been.

Zeke stood there, closer than a heartbeat, far slighter than rumors claimed yet infinitely more petrifying. In Ken's vision the world narrowed to those predator eyes: emotionless, depthless, fixed upon him like a biologist studying a pinned insect. Some primitive alarm blared inside his skull—danger beyond measure—and he instinctively glanced sideways.

Horror seized him. His own wrist sat imprisoned in Zeke's smaller hand, the bones compressed, disjointed, and grotesquely reshaped to fit that iron grip. Pain detonated, white-hot and immediate.

"WHAT THE FUCK!" Ken screamed in agony, collapsing to his knees while tears tracked through soot on his cheeks.

"Don't overreact," Zeke sighed, voice tinged with mild annoyance rather than anger. "Weren't you supposed to be a big scary gangster?"

"What did I do to deserve this?" Ken pleaded, choking on saliva and terror in equal measure.

Zeke's shoulders lifted in a low, almost weary inhale. "You tried raising your hand at your subordinate." He let the sentence hang, eyes narrowing. "No, that's not quite right. I would have done this to you regardless of if you tried to hit them." His tone darkened, words thickening like storm clouds. "You were born into this world and then you decided to waste that precious life given to you to exploit the lives of others."

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Hatred—patient, icy, inexorable—flickered in Zeke's gaze, and the ambient hum of the half-constructed megastructure seemed to hush in wary solidarity.

"Blade," Ray whispered, scrambling to push himself upright on trembling elbows.

Zeke released Ken's ruined arm. It hit the floor with a nauseating thud as Zeke rolled aside in a single, boneless coil of motion. A compressed scythe of wind howled across the lounge, slicing dust motes apart, before it smashed uselessly against a supporting column and dispersed into grit-laden air.

"This is familiar," Zeke remarked, calmly brushing debris from his shoulder as if dusting lint from silk.

Ray staggered to his feet, adrenaline blasting through his veins. He shuffled into a boxer's crouch—knees bent, hands up, butterfly jacket rippling in the draft—as every nerve screamed caution. But Zeke exploded forward, a blurred streak of black and gray. The collision felt like a battering ram disguised as a man: Zeke's fist drilled into Ray's midsection, the metal of his ring crushing painfully between ribs.

The force stole Ray's breath. His vision fissured into starbursts. Knees surrendered. Floor slabs surged upward, and he collapsed in a heap of neon fabric and wheezing lungs, the bomber's butterfly wings folding beneath him like ruptured petals.

On all fours, body quivering, he found Zeke inches away, crouched like a patient undertaker. Their gazes locked, and Ray glimpsed a chasm in those eyes—an abyss where hope went to fossilize. It was bottomless, ancient, utterly convinced of its own inevitability.

"Say?" Zeke asked, voice soft enough to chill bone. "Do you know someone by the name of Isaac Witz?"

Ray's eyes widened.

"How do you…" he mumbled, voice thin as torn gauze.

"Down in the Undercity, I met a certain individual by that name. Later, he became second-in-command," Zeke explained, his words quiet but carrying the finality of a closed vault. The dusty floodlights overhead hissed, painting the cracked walls in bands of sickly yellow and deep-violet shadow.

"That changes things," Ray murmured, the syllables slipping out as if they were secrets trying to stay hidden.

"Does it?" Zeke wondered, one brow lifting behind his mask.

In answer, Ray slipped off the butterfly-insignia ring and offered it to Zeke on an open palm. Metal glinted under the failing lamps like a crescent of mercury.

"Your loyalty is yours," he said, bowing his hooded head in a slow, deliberate gesture—half surrender, half reverence.

Ken's wet breathing filled the lull. "Are you crazy, Ray!" he shouted, agony sharpening each consonant. "What the fuck are you doing?"

"What our leader would want me to do," Ray replied, voice raw but unflinching. He hauled himself upright, leaning against the cracked pillar that still bled chalky dust from Zeke's earlier strike.

"If he is Isaac's boss, that in turn makes us his subordinates," Ray added, eyes drifting shut in resigned acceptance.

"But he killed our guys!" Ken roared, spit shining on his busted lips.

Fredric advanced with an almost lazy roll of the shoulders, boots squelching in puddled dust and blood. "You know, no one's actually dead," he remarked. "I've stopped the bullets just as they entered their bodies." Bullets hovered behind him like obedient fireflies, gleaming in slow rotation—a silent, spinning galaxy of second chances.

Zeke's gaze never wavered. "Some time ago you promised to help a man get into the Undercity," he said. "He was the son of the Bull-Head Boxer, Jamie—do you recall?" The words dropped from his tongue cold and weighty, as though each name already bore a gravestone.

"Yes, I remember him," Ray rasped, a cough ripping through his chest.

"Is he dead?" Zeke asked, an uncharacteristic note of apprehension threading the question.

"No, why would he be?" Ray answered, confusion wrinkling his brow.

"Then where is he?" Zeke pressed, folding his arms as the wind moaned through the skeletal rafters above, rattling stray chains like distant sabers.

"You mean you don't know?" Ray laughed, a brittle sound that cracked in the air.

"Don't know what?" Zeke's eyes narrowed, cool calculation giving way to a flicker of genuine uncertainty.

"Look, I wasn't completely lying when I said I was affiliated with the Prowler. But the fact that that's you makes this a little awkward," Ray sighed. "A couple of months back Isaac got in touch, told me he's your subordinate. So I devised a plan—if we smuggle people into the Undercity, we get the credits we need to keep breathing." A humorless smile twitched beneath his mask. "I thought you were aware of this arrangement."

"I'm not," Zeke replied flatly, mask hiding any ripple of surprise. "But there's no way the King doesn't know," he added, half to himself.

"What do you mean 'the money you need to survive'?" Zeke asked, words suddenly softer, almost curious.

"To tell you the truth, we're being extorted by the Saber Gang," Ray confessed, eyes dimming. "If we don't pay, they'll raid our district and burn it to the ground."

"The Knights would stop them," Zeke countered, though the certainty in his voice was muted by doubt.

"They wouldn't use magic, so the Knights won't care," Ray said, pausing to swallow grit and fear. "And even if they did, it would already be too late once they showed up."

"Don't pay them anymore," Zeke commanded, the sentence cracking like a judge's gavel.

"Huh?" Ray blinked, visibly stunned.

"During the next gang summit I'll talk to them," Zeke continued, a chill confidence threading through each syllable. "Trust me, I can be very convincing."

"If you say so," Ray laughed—a nervous, but hopeful sound that shimmered like wet glass catching light.

"Say, how many people did you transport into the Undercity so far?" Fredric asked, bullets still orbiting him in slow, hypnotic spirals.

"Over a hundred," Ray answered, voice low but steady.

"Oh? And do you know if anyone else does the same?" Fredric probed, casual but probing.

"I know a couple of guys," Ray acknowledged, the admission hanging heavy in the humid air.

Zeke's eyes widened, pupils contracting like pinpricks of obsidian.

"The Contractor King is getting ready for war."

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