“Sir, I think I have something you’d want to see.”

Maxwell Washington glanced over at the aide to his left. The man sported a sleek grey suit, nothing too over the top, yet still enough to draw admiration. His head of dirty blonde hair was combed back, positively slick with hair gel. Adam Seezy, as he had always boasted, was a man who got the job done. Maxwell was proud to have someone like him working in the organisation.

If only he could curb that humanity from him. The man would never truly be able to act for the greater good otherwise.

Adam clasped a familiar golden book within his hands, the cover eternally shifting from a mural of a great sea dragon to one of majestic sky islands in an instant. They had tried studying the strange items, but whatever they were made of, it wasn’t something that could be found on Earth or something that abided the laws of it either. Luckily, they proved to be immensely useful in monitoring the overall state of the world.

In the three months or so since the Tutorial had concluded, various factions had risen to prominence on the mainland. The Dojo, Harakat’s Teeth, Genesis; that was just to name a few. In fact, the very last of them was his own organisation, and unlike the ninjas or the terrorists, he didn’t wish to embrace the chaos of this new world or capitalise on it.

He wished to control it.

Maxwell locked eyes with Adam and beckoned for him to continue. He obliged, “We noticed it a few days ago, and after much deliberation, we believe this entry is enough to warrant your attention.”

Adam set the book down onto the desk before his boss, splaying it open as he used the mental interface it possessed to bring up a set of pages detailing various monsters. Wyrms, Dire Wolves, Pontiacs, Krakens, Skin Walkers; there were many the planet’s population had slain and added to the collective knowledge of the Compendium over time. All the while, the levels displayed beneath them never exceeded the threshold of 50. Even something above 40 was a rarity.

Unless the creatures in question were from the nuclear wastelands that had spread across most of Russia and the US. Who would have guessed that all the nukes and nuclear powerplants would have malfunctioned?

The pages continued to flip without any physical input until the book settled on the final page that had content, some entries still remaining blank. Several unique beasts were detailed upon it, and Maxwell’s eyes bulged as he noticed all the entries were actually above level 50, the highest sitting at an utterly horrifying level 75.

Genesis’ leader met the eyes of his aide once more, speechless, “This…”

Adam nodded grimly, “The latest entry was the one we found a few days ago, but all the others had been consistently appearing since the Tutorial first concluded. We had thought them to be flukes… but they just kept piling up.”

Maxwell scratched his greying stubble, “The Tyrant of the Sky…”

As if he could read the mind of his superior, Adam was already accessing the detailed profile of the creature. They read through several more until he felt Max was satisfied. Together, they realised a troubling connection. Compendiums allowed the user to both observe the level and type of the monster killed, as well as the general region it had been slain.

And every single one had been slain in the Australian outback.

Maxwell frowned and steepled his hands on his desk, resting his chin atop them, “Someone’s killing them.”

It may have sounded like the obvious, but it was far from it. The operatives of Genesis had gathered swathes of information about the current state of the world, even a rendered map of it following the System’s changes through using hacked government satellites. Aside from all that, they also knew the rough tiers of the world’s power hierarchy.

Previously, it had been an indecisive tie between Jane Carter, the young matriarch in training from the Dojo, and the unknown being that had been the cause of the accursed Skin Walkers that were currently ravaging the mainland. They had never observed them personally, but by the average levels of the beasts they summoned, Genesis’ statistic results predicted the person to be in the low sixties, maybe higher.

And they knew a human had created them. They could detect a singular human’s aura signature all over them.

But now, with their organisation being made privy to this little tidbit of information, their initial predictions may have been thrown out the window. Forget the sixties, whoever this mysterious person was, they’d have to be peaking into the mid-seventies - possibly low eighties - to have killed such a monster as the Tyrant.

Maxwell would have sent out a unit to find and survey them immediately if not for one simple fact. Australia was the only continent still separated by sea. Every other continent on Earth had fused into one gigantic mass of land. Australia was the only outlier, aside from other small islands and island countries, and no one was willing to brave a cruise across a System altered ocean to travel there.

Fortunately, several people with space-based Ascendancies had cropped up here and there around the place, and their own resident spatial manipulators had at least confirmed that they sensed spatial fluctuations from Australia, meaning they too had their own. They already possessed the suspected teleporter on file, and apparently, he frequently visited a town on the mainland with his powers, sometimes leaving the estranged continent for days before returning.

They had managed to match the unique feel of the fluctuations in Australia to the same ones they sensed from that town in France. It wasn’t too far from the headquarters of Genesis, considering they had based themselves in Paris, only a few days away from the town.

It was possible that they’d finally pay him a visit now that they knew someone of importance was in Australia, though Maxwell would probably only send a lone operative to scout it out first. Some fishy stuff was going on over there, his gut feeling was all but sure of it.

Maxwell nodded approvingly toward Adam, “Good. For now, just keep an eye on their actions in the ‘book’. Is there anything else to report?”

There were still sections of the planet left uncharted by the satellites. It wasn’t that they were dysfunctional, it was that they simply came up blank when surveying those locations. People in his organisation had theorised that those areas must hold immense amounts of energy and thus scramble the effects of the space stationed technology. So, Max always hoped his aides would be able to shed some light on the situations of those places every time they spoke. He didn’t very much like being in the dark, information-wise.

Strangely enough, however, the majority of those areas happened to be significant portions of America and Russia. And until recently, Australia.

Adam hesitated for but a moment before deciding it was best to speak, “It hasn’t been confirmed as of yet, but our experts believe the Skin Walkers to have… evolved.”

Maxwell narrowed his eyes. There were those creatures again. Ceaselessly, the strange monsters were cropping up all over the place, infiltrating settlements and rendering them lifeless within days. Literally lifeless. Any population visited by the horrific beasts were left without a trace of human life, only blood, innards, and signs of struggle.

Not even the corpses were left behind.

From what they knew, the creatures possessed the terrible ability to consume a human being and assume their form, gaining their memories, intelligence, and even personality, at least until they released whatever power let them do so. When that happens, they’d just devolve into mindless monsters like every other creature they’d seen before and become wholly intent on murder.

The situation of the mainland had been chaotic and steadily deteriorating due to their continued presence. Many lived in fear, and the presence of humans on Earth was rapidly dwindling. There had been predictions that killing the originator would end them all, though that was where the problem lay. No one could track the originator.

Max wasn’t even sure his own organisation hadn’t been infiltrated by now, though he felt somewhat confident that they should be fine for the foreseeable future. Genesis had their methods, much like all the other big factions that were popping up.

“Evolved how?” Maxwell was careful in his tone, keeping the underlying panic well under wraps.

Adam’s Compendium dissolved into a golden mist and was absorbed by him as he rubbed the back of his neck, trying to ease up the tension stubbornly clinging there, “The intelligence they gain when eating people… it doesn’t seem to be going away when they return to their natural forms anymore. Instead, it’s becoming… collective.”

Maxwell couldn’t hold himself back and slammed his fist onto his desk, earning the attention of several individuals as they tirelessly worked in the rooms around him. If this was true… well he didn’t know what he could possibly do. With this, the elusive plague of a beast would be able to plan and think and discover as they ate more and more people.

Through their gluttony, they could learn.

The leader of Genesis, and the aspiring head of the new world, leaned back in his chair, pursing his lips as he rubbed the bridge of his nose. They needed to find the creator of these creatures and kill him, and they needed to do it fast. Otherwise, there might just be no humanity left for him to be the saviour of. And to that, Maxwell could only say one thing.

“Shit.”