The moment Hal stepped out of the dim hallway where he had been kept waiting, Marlon stopped scrolling through his datapad and spoke with an oddly formal tone.“Mr. Rodgraim… It’s time. The generals are requesting your presence.”That alone made the remaining officers in the vicinity straighten stiffly.Hal exhaled. It wasn’t fatigue, it was the weight of the next few minutes.He nodded once. “Let’s go.”Marlon led the way, but the moment they reached the main exit of the Organization Bureau… everyone froze.The doors slid open, and a wall of noise slammed into them.Voices. Cameras. Reporters. Hunters. Civilians.A crowd so dense it looked like the entire city had poured into the street outside the Bureau.Hal blinked, startled.“What the…?”Marlon’s jaw dropped. Several officers instinctively reached for their earpieces, swearing under their breath.“How, we’ve been suppressing the news! How did so many people..?!”But even he knew the answer.Nothing in modern Kansas City spread fa

The decision was made without ceremony.There were no raised voices, no dramatic declarations. Just a quiet shift in the room, subtle but unmistakable, like a current changing direction beneath still water.Phil Cobblestone was the one who spoke.“Numbers tell us what you are,” he said calmly. “But not how you move.”Hal understood immediately.He inclined his head once. “You want to see it for yourselves.”“Yes,” Liu Chen replied. “Under controlled conditions.”Hal didn’t hesitate. “Fine.”There was no bravado in his tone. No challenge. Just acceptance.Because if the world only had a year left, then wasting time pretending was pointless.The MHO training facility lay far beneath the headquarters, sealed behind layers of clearance and spatial reinforcement. It wasn’t advertised. It wasn’t listed on any public schematic. This was a place designed not for Hunters—but for failures that could not be allowed.The chamber they entered was vast, circular, its walls formed from overlapping a

No one spoke at first. The silence that followed the cut transmission wasn’t empty, it was crowded. Heavy with memories that had no right to still breathe after all these years. Phil Cobblestone was the first to break it, not with words, but with a slow exhale. His eyes weren’t on the shattered chamber or the flickering screens anymore. They were somewhere else. Somewhere far older. “…It was ten years ago,” he said quietly. Hal felt the shift immediately. The air changed, not with Qi, but with memory. “We didn’t call them Legendary back then,” Cobblestone continued. “We didn’t even believe such a rank could exist. Emperor-tier was the ceiling. That was what all our models said.” Alexander Dragunov let out a low, humorless chuckle. “Models,” he muttered. “We lost three cities before we realized models don’t mean shit when the world decides to break its own rules.” The memory unfolded, not as a projection, but as a shared scar. A dragon. Not a wyvern. Not a scaled beast pre

The rising of a calamity. That was what happened next. A suffocating weight slammed down on the battlefield without warning, crushing breath from lungs and freezing blood mid-flow. Hunters staggered as their Qi instinctively compressed, defensive fields activating on reflex alone. Then the street split, concrete tore apart as something clawed its way upward from beneath the ruined city of Olathe, dragging with it shattered asphalt, twisted rebar, and the broken remains of lesser ants crushed beneath its emergence. The Legendary-tier Ant stood, towering far above even the mutated Emperor-tiers, its body was a mass of deep obsidian chitin so black it devoured light. The surface wasn’t smooth, it was layered, ridged, armored for war. Massive mandibles unfolded slowly, each serrated edge thick enough to shear through reinforced bunkers. Its front limbs ended in hooked scythes that scraped against the ground with a sound like grinding steel. And its eyes, were empty. No r

Smoke drifted lazily over shattered streets, blackened car husks, and collapsed concrete. The massive corpse of Chaos Basek lay motionless at the center of destruction, its obsidian carapace split open, ichor seeping into fractured asphalt like oil bleeding into rainwater. Hal stood atop it for a moment longer, Grim Killer resting against his shoulder. Then the chiming of rewards ended, and silence reclaimed the space. All around, surviving Hunters slowly rose from rubble and cover, eyes wide, breaths shallow, some staring at the dead Legendary-tier monster as if it might still rise, others staring at the lone figure who had ended it. Hal didn't say anything and nimply stepped down. The moment his boots touched the ground, the change rippled outward. The ants, those that had been charging, screeching, climbing over one another in blind frenzy, froze. Then, as one, they fled. Chittering shrieks echoed as the remaining ant species poured back into shattered tunnels and exposed