Josh

Eight Years Earlier – Belarus

“Bravo team, this is Bravo leader. Target located.”

The team leader’s words came through the comms, short and clipped. I glanced at the others, catching the subtle shift as everyone got into position. My breathing slowed while I checked my rifle. The air clung heavy, thick enough to choke, but I didn’t flinch. I knew the drill: find the target, take them out, move on.

Hidden in the trees, I shifted forward, staying low in the underbrush. The dampness of the ground seeped through my gloves, but I ignored it. The forest was quiet, but that was about to change. It always did.

The team paused, tense and alert, anticipating the commander’s orders. We’d been tracking this one for hours, and it wasn’t getting away. Espers—what the government called demi-humans—were dangerous, unpredictable.

“Copy,” I replied.

Lorraine’s dark humor cut, breaking the tension. “Still the newbie, huh, Josh? Third run now, right? How long do you think you’ll last? The last rookie didn’t get too far.”

“What happened to him?” I asked, curiosity getting the best of me.

She hesitated just long enough for me to know it wasn’t good. “The last guy tried bargaining with an Anubis spawn. Got cocky. Rookie mistake. Now he’s walking the afterlife.”

Her laugh was thin, a shield more than anything else.

Sergei scoffed through the comms. We hadn’t talked much off-mission—he kept to himself, like me. Lorraine, on the other hand, never shut up. Maybe that was why I liked her. She never expected anyone to break, not really. She just wanted us to keep moving the way she did.

“Lorraine, don’t scare him off,” Sergei said with his thick Russian accent.

She clicked her tongue. “Relax, Sergei. If he makes it out alive, drinks are on me. Just making sure our boy here knows what we’re up against. If he can’t handle a little story, he’s in the wrong unit.”

But I already knew. Special Unit 9—The Black Hand. We did the jobs no one else would. Kills the Espers, the descendants of gods everyone thought were myths.

In school, we were taught that gods once ruled the Earth. People built temples, offered sacrifices, and prayed for mercy. But they never told us the names of these gods or what they really meant to us.

Civilization grew. Society moved on. People got stuck in their routines—sleep, work, raise a family. No time to question the past. No time to wonder why the temples were abandoned, or what happened to the gods.

That was how the governments wanted it.

Because the truth? The gods weren’t merciful. They were sadistic. When humanity became too sinful, corrupt—too greedy, too violent, too destructive—they’d hit the reset button. Wiped out everything. Again and again. Blood didn’t matter to them. Lives didn’t matter to them.

In the unit, we called the gods hypocrites. They wiped us out with their so-called “cleansings,” purging entire civilizations with plagues, floods, and firestorms. The Great Flood? The volcanic eruption at Thera? The Black Death? All them. But most people don’t know that because the humans before us wrote these events off as natural disasters, accidents of history. The gods’ names faded into myth, and humanity forgot—or tried to.

After the last purge, the surviving governments made sure of it. They rebuilt, creating new systems and belief structures—mostly secular and rational. Science, progress, technology—those were the gods now. But the gods didn’t forget, and neither did their descendants. Espers—their bloodline—still walk the Earth, born from the gods who spawned with humans after the cleansing. That’s what we were told in training.

And that was where we came in. We took their descendants out before they took out everyone else. Some of them didn’t even know what they were until it was too late. When they lost control, there was no saving them. No reasoning. Just destruction.

I never asked for this job. Didn’t have a choice, either. After basic training, they recruited me. I expected the usual offers that came with graduating with excellence. Handling K9 units, specialized rifles, maybe something in intelligence.

But I was so damn wrong.

At first, it all seemed normal—just more advanced training. Then, little by little, strange missions began. The classified files, the things we weren’t supposed to discuss, the secrecy. And that was when I realized what this was.

About gods. Mythological, forgotten fucking gods. About their descendants, about what happened when their bloodlines woke up.

By the time I knew the full truth, it was too late to walk away. Too much knowledge to forget. Take the job or disappear.

Permanently.

I was eighteen. A kid who wanted to run from home. No—that wasn’t it. I wanted to run from him—my father. Leaving behind Isaac, the only person I’d ever loved since I was five. Since the day he and his parents moved next door.

I didn’t want to leave Isaac, but I couldn’t stay and watch the judgment eat him alive. After his parents died in the car accident, he tried to act strong, but I saw the cracks. No more laughter, no more crashing in my room for sleepovers. We did that every night for years.

Hell, that sounded weird, but I didn’t care. I never cared what people thought. The only thing that mattered was having him next to me—until I couldn’t anymore.

Until my father decided it was enough.

He hated the idea of me loving another man. Even when I didn’t fully understand what kind of love it was. I just knew I wanted Isaac to stay close. To be near him. But my father… he saw it for what it was long before I did. And he couldn’t stand it.

Even my dad, in his own way, loved Isaac. He showed it in ways only he could. But when it came down to it, he gave me a choice. A way to “wake me up” from the sin of loving another man.

Forget Isaac or leave.

I left. No choice. I couldn’t let Isaac suffer any more than he already was. Not with his parents gone, not with the weight he carried. I’d left Isaac long before I physically walked away. After his parents’ accident, Isaac shut down, shutting me out along with everyone else. I tried to stay, to help—but he wouldn’t let me in. And when it came down to it, I didn’t fight hard enough. I left because I thought that’s what he wanted. But really, I left because I was scared. Scared of what I felt for him. Scared that I wasn’t enough.

My dad resented me for it—probably still does. He would’ve said this was my punishment—fighting monsters because I chose Isaac over him. Maybe that’s why I ended up here—doing the jobs no one else would, because no one else had known what to do with me.

After a year and a half in the unit, I understood we hunted what shouldn’t exist. The rest of the world didn’t have a clue. Only the government knew what we dealt with. And they wanted to keep it that way.

I was trying to stay focused, but my mind kept drifting back to Isaac. Right before the mission, I’d gotten a message—a photo. Isaac slumped over a table, cheeks red and smiling, clearly drunk. Celebrating Isaac’s birthday.

I’d missed it.

Again.

It was his twenty-first. Shit.

Damon, the fucker, had sent it to me. He had always been around, a friend to both of us, but lately… I had my suspicions they were hooking up. I should have been there. I used to be there, every year since we were kids. But now? I was on the other side of the world, and I hadn’t even wished him a happy birthday.

It wasn’t the first time I’d missed it. I hadn’t spoken to him in months. Every time I thought about reaching out, the guilt shut me down. What could I even say? I left him. And for what?

To clean up a mess that no one else could, just like the gods. Maybe we were. Maybe this was the price I paid for everything I’d done—for walking away from Isaac. For leaving when he needed me to stay. The Black Hand called it saving humanity. I called it avoiding the things I couldn’t fix. The mess I made when I left Isaac—when I abandoned the only person who ever mattered.

“Bravo 2, what’s the status?”

As Sergei responded, static buzzed in the air. “Heat signature’s strong up ahead. He’s not moving.”

“Copy that, Bravo 2.”

Heat. Yeah, that made sense. This one had been classified as a Rank A—an Esper with the powers of Hephaestus, a fire god. So he was human, one part-scorched earth. Flames, metal, destruction. He turned a mall into a furnace in the main city of Belarus, and people died fast. Civilians didn’t stand a chance, so we had cleanup orders.

When the Espers lost control, containment wasn’t an option. They didn’t choose it. Just like Isaac didn’t choose what happened to him. But none of that changed what I had to do. I left Isaac because I had no choice. And I’d do what I had to here too.

Up ahead, the trees looked like they’d been burned down, leaves dried to brittle ash. He wasn’t far.

The commander’s orders came next. “Bravo team, on my signal.”

I held steady, eyes scanning the surroundings. I hadn’t been through enough of these missions to be used to it, but my body already knew what was coming. My hands itched with the tension of waiting.

The commander signaled. I followed, low and silent, my boots barely grazing the forest floor. My heart raced, but it wasn’t fear—it was the rush, the adrenaline.

There was a shimmer in the distance. The Esper. His skin glowed red-orange, hot as molten metal coursed beneath the surface. His forearms were dripping fire as his eyes burned with a fierce, inhuman glow. But then I noticed something more—how his hands moved and shifted. They were no longer flesh but massive, heavy, hammer-like fists—blackened, iron-hot.

Clank. Clank. Clank.

“Is that… normal?”

“Hell no,” Lorraine snapped. “Take cover! Now!”

The Esper slammed one hammer hand into the ground. A deafening CLANK followed, sending a shockwave through the earth. Sparks shot up in every direction like fireworks. A wall of fire erupted from the ground, spreading fast and wild. The air heated up instantly, burning the edges of my vision, and I dived behind a tree as flames whipped through the forest.

“Hold your positions!” the commander barked. I pressed my back against the tree trunk, heat licking at my face even from behind the cover.

I gritted my teeth, waiting for the flames to die down, even just a little. My rifle was slick with sweat. A few long, agonizing seconds passed before the flames started to sputter, shrinking back.

“Bravo team, engage!” the commander shouted.

I moved out of cover, rifle up. The team spread out, everyone falling into place like clockwork. The Esper was still there, hammer-fists raised. They were glowing red-hot, flames curling at his feet.

We opened fire. Bullets hit, but they did nothing. They never do—not at first.

He roared, a deep, echoing sound, and slammed his hammer-like hands again into the ground.

Clank. Clank.

The earth split open, flames licking up from the fissures as if he were calling the fire from hell itself.

We closed in, and my skin prickled with the heat. I flanked him, rifle steady, waiting for the fire to fade. It always did—eventually, they ran out of power, and that’s when we struck.

“Bravo team, switch to armor-piercing rounds,” the team leader ordered.

I didn’t hesitate. The clip dropped from my rifle, and I reloaded in one fluid motion. Armor-piercing. It was the only way to crack through whatever demigod protection he had.

We opened fire again, and this time, the rounds hit. He staggered, just for a second, but it was enough. His fists faltered mid-strike. The flames flickered, sputtering to embers, and I saw my opening.

I moved in, aiming for the weak spot beneath his ribs. One shot, clean. He dropped to his knees, his fire sputtering like a dying flame, a final gasp escaping his molten chest. The stench of burning metal filled my nostrils as his hammer-hands hit the ground with a dull, heavy thud.

“Target down,” announced the commander. It was over.

The heat faded, leaving the cold forest behind. But there was no relief. Just the quiet. It was always like this.

I stood still, feeling the darkness inside me grow. There was no turning back. No fixing what I’d done. Isaac deserved better. He probably hated me for walking away three years ago, for abandoning him when he needed me most. He’d be right to.

But it was for the best. In the end, I was no different from the things we hunted—a monster with no way out.