The bright, pulsating neon signs of the underground metropolis flashed aggressively through the narrow slats of the wooden blinds. Beat shot upright in the gigantic bed with an immense bang. His veins were instantly tight with adrenaline. The rajin volt anting in his earlobe emitted a bright, blue spark that flushed his spiritual pathways with a hissing sound. The hyperactive energy of his reawakened form was already fully recharged after a few hours of deep sleep. He threw the silk sheet aside, jumped to his feet in one fluid motion, and kicked the double doors of his temporary kingdom wide open.
The overwhelming noise of the massive underground bar below instantly washed over him like a wall of pure sound. This was the absolute hub of the illegal street racers.
Beat walked down the wide, steel stairs and took in the sight. The room was gigantic, filled with the heavy scent of burnt rubber, high-octane fuel, and cheap alcohol. At the heavy wooden tables sat a bizarre company of pure speed demons.
On the left side sat the infamous Speed Demons. Their bodies constantly vibrated and glitched in reality. Due to the pure kinetic energy racing through their veins, they left faint, bluish afterimages with every minimal movement. Next to them sat the Speed Pirates, rough sea-scavengers of the floating currents, recognizable by their deep scars and mechanical leg upgrades to artificially pump up their reflexes. Everywhere, there was loud shouting, laughing, and heavy mugs being slammed onto the tables.
In the middle of the chaos, sitting at the largest table in the room, the identical leaders gave him a short nod.
The left half, Karan Pandava, took a calm sip of his drink, set the mug down with a loud thud, and looked Beat straight in the eyes. “Look at that, the sleeping beauty is finally awake. I thought that lightning energy would keep you knocked out for a few days, Beto.”
The right half, Arjan Pandava, polished a shiny engine part with a dirty rag and took over the word, his voice becoming heavier. “We are Karan and Arjan, the Pandava twins. Officially, we come from a group of seven brothers, but the rest of us are spread across the world to guard things strategically. Two are deep at the temples, two of us guard the region around the mountain, and one is deep undercover in the corrupt stronghold of Prince Alec. We earned the leadership down here purely on the asphalt by winning, and because we know exactly how to run this circuit. The government calls us bandits and thieves, but realize this: we are the protectors of these places. Everything the rich elite up there sucks away spiritually and financially from our people, we pump directly back in via this underground to keep the slums alive.”
Arjan leaned a bit further over the table, his gaze dead serious and intense. “But don’t think for a second that we are the ones who are going to save the world. We just hold the lines. We are religiously convinced that the new Lords of the Ward are the ones who will start the new Ragnarok. They are going to break things on a global scale and finally fix them in peace. Until that time, we grind here on the asphalt.”
Karan nodded in agreement and pointed to the heavy wooden tables where the absolute top of the Speed Demons sat vibrating under a heavy, anarchist vibe. “And these guys here pay tribute to that prophecy, to those new Lords. They don’t give a damn about any form of authority, but they ride with a righteous moral for our joint cause. Their speed doesn’t come from simple engines, but from brute antings and soulbound gems.”
At the end of the table, a nonchalant, arrogant guy leaned back. This was Brody. His silver Quicksilver Anting glinted in his ear, and his figure glitched so extremely in reality that he looked like a walking glitch. He looked at Beat with a lethally bored gaze, because everything moved in total slow-motion before his eyes.
“If those new Lords bring the Ragnarok, I couldn’t care less, Pandava,” Brody spoke, while with a bizarrely glitching movement he picked up his glass without anyone seeing his arm move. The liquid in the glass seemed to freeze in mid-air, floating in viscous drops before the shiny silver glow of his anting straightened out reality again. “But let this new snot-nose here survive first. With my Quicksilver Anting, I slow down visual and physical reality as if the world is standing still. I cut through everything before he can even blink his eyes. If this Beto thinks he can keep up with my pace on the track, he’ll hit a wall before he realizes the race has started.”
“You talk too much, Brody; your words are slowing things down even more,” a dark, raw voice cut through the room.
Desmodus, the brute half-hellspawn mix-breed human, slammed his heavy, ash-gray claws deep into the cedar wood of the table with a dull thud. The impact left immediate scorch marks from which thick, sulfurous smoke rose. His eyes burned with a terrifying, red-black light that caused the neon lighting above to flicker and dim.
“My Hell Sprint is fueled by pure hellspawn blood,” Desmodus growled, while the veins in his neck visually began to pump up and light up dark purple from the pure heat of his spiritual pathways. “When I open up that acceleration on the circuit, I literally set the asphalt on fire. The pure kinetic heat digests the air behind me. Your lightning is nice for the show, Beto, but in my shadow, you will choke on the ash.”
Suddenly, a shrill, metallic scratching sounded on top of the table. With a bizarrely agile jump, Shrimpyy landed right between the glasses and mugs. The demonic, crab-like humanoid stood with legs spread, his shiny, deep-sea blue armor plates vibrating from pure excitement. His compound eyes fixed directly on Beat. When he saw the crackling blue electricity of the rajin volt anting, a wave of pure, childlike admiration shot through his gaze.
“WOAH! Do you see that! Look at that lightning!” Shrimpyy shouted with a hyperactive voice that broke the heavy atmosphere in the room in one blow. The beast-human child began to clap wildly with his massive claws, causing small air-shocks to shoot across the tabletop that made Brody’s glass rattle. “You really are that hardcore thunder-hunter the Pandavas were talking about! I like you already, man! That vibe of yours is pure gold!”
Shrimpyy lifted one of his heavily armored feet, where a pitch-black, compact soulbound gem was embedded in the exoskeleton. “But watch out, lightning-buddy, because my Bulletshrimp Anting is no joke! My kin normally use that beast anting for murderous, explosive strikes to demolish enemies. But me? I channel those brute, underground bangs directly through my legs! Every step I take is a kinetic explosion! I sprint as if I’m being shot out of a heavy artillery cannon! And if we have to go through the flooded water channels of the slums in a bit? Then I’m three times as fast because of the hydrodynamic pressure! We are going to ride the asphalt and the walls completely to hell!”
The visual escalation in the bar reached the boiling point. Through the combination of Brody’s glitching silver glow, Desmodus’s smoldering sulfur smoke, and the sonic vibrations of Shrimpyy’s armor, the spiritual pressure in the room began to distort dangerously. The heavy wooden tables began to shake synchronously, and the neon tubes on the ceiling popped out one by one with loud clicks.
Beat felt the rajin volt anting in his own earlobe respond with an obsessed intensity to the challenge. The pure, anarchist but righteous vibe of these speed monsters pumped his adrenaline directly to his muscles. He did not flinch for the threats. With a wide, wild grin, he clenched his fists, after which a network of thick, bright blue lightning bolts exploded over his arms with aggressive crackling, dispelling the remaining shadows from the bar.
Karan Pandava slammed both hands hard onto the table and stood up with a jerk. The brute movement forced the entire room into a deep, respectful silence immediately.
“Enough introductions, the odes have been brought, and the powers are on edge,” Karan spoke, while his gaze slid over the four speedsters. “You all have a big mouth about your antings and your hearts for the slums, but the asphalt never lies. The Ragnarok doesn’t wait. Beto, Brody, Desmodus, Shrimpyy… outside. Now.”
The doors of the bar swung open with a deafening bang. The gang poured out into the streets, a walking wall of pure kinetic chaos. Shrimpyy hopped in front, while the explosive discharges under his feet struck deep craters in the sidewalk and sent chunks of debris clattering against the facades. Brody glided through reality like a silver phantom, constantly glitching and leaving afterimages that pulled the street lighting into a psychedelic haze, while Desmodus left the asphalt smoldering and melting behind him under a trail of suffocating, pitch-black sulfur smoke. Beat walked in the middle of them, his rajin volt anting pulsating with bright, deep-blue lightning bolts that rubbed impatiently over his arms and aggressively pushed away the shadows of the towering buildings. The pure tension between the quartet was so intense that the neon signs along the walls crackled, shifted colors, and began to flicker in a rhythmic cadence as the track drew nearer.
When they stepped into the gigantic, underground arena, a visual spectacle opened that defied all logic. The stands were packed—and I mean really packed to the last centimeter—with thousands of beast-humans. A brute gorilla beast-human had squeezed himself into a way-too-tight, bright pink tracksuit and was roaring on the benches, while a colony of hyperactive ferrets was waving gigantic flags like possessed beings, and a massive, wide-sitting rhino was eating a complete wooden tub of popcorn in one bite. The atmosphere was so suffocatingly hot, and the collective discharge so bizarrely out of control, that a young dog-beast-human in the front row simply couldn’t handle the vibrating spiritual pressure anymore. His eyes rolled back completely, a meter-high spray of blood shot from his nose with brute force, and he went stone-cold unconscious over the railing.
Not a second later, a shrill, wailing siren sound rang out. A crazy, bright-red ladybug wagon drove onto the track with skidding tires and smoking wheel arches. Two beast-humans in tight, white ambulance uniforms jumped out at high speed, hoisted the passed-out dog onto a stretcher in one fluid motion, threw him into the back of the ladybug-cart, and sped around the corner again, honking loudly.
Beat stood stock-still. He looked at the racing ambulance, turned his head very slowly toward Karan Pandava, and pulled a face of pure, uncut bewilderment. With a deadpan, questioning hand gesture, he signaled an obvious: WTF kind of madhouse is this?!
Karan looked casually at the frantic stands, scratched behind his ear once indifferently, and shrugged his shoulders. “Oh yes, completely forgot to mention, Beto… We still owed the beast-humans a considerable favor from a previous job. And SOMEONE HERE…” Karan turned around and pointed with an accusing finger straight at the enthusiastic crab-face of Shrimpyy, “…has invited absolutely the whole fucking slum neighborhood for tonight.”
Shrimpyy acted like his nose was bleeding, happily clapped his massive claws together, and launched himself directly toward the starting line with a bizarrely agile dive.
In a flash of coordinated chaos, everyone moved to the starting blocks. The tension on the asphalt became immediately tangible; the engines and the spiritual pathways of the racers were pumped up to the absolute breaking point. The air above the circuit began to distort, thick and viscous, from the sizzling heat of Desmodus and the glitching, razor-sharp silver of Brody. Beat took his position, his gaze completely locked-in, while the lightning around him formed a hissing, electric shield that made the stones vibrate.
Then, the arena suddenly fell deathly silent.
From the side of the main stage, a frail, old man came shuffling along. He was as crooked as a hoop and was carefully guided by his arm by a young assistant. Step by step, swaying heavily on a wooden walking stick, the grandpa dragged himself to the absolute center of the arena. He stood there on top of the platform, trembling on his legs, as if a soft breeze would make him collapse already.
But suddenly, the old man came alive.
His eyes widened and began to glow with a bright, greenish, anarchist energy. With a bizarrely powerful, razor-sharp swing, he swept his walking stick upward, which transformed into a shiny microphone with a loud, metal click system. The grandpa stretched his back completely straight in one brute motion, his entire spine cracking terrifyingly loud and noisy. The brittle old man disappeared; there stood an obsessed hype-master.
He brought the microphone to his mouth and began to scream with the full chest of an absolute legend through the loudspeakers, a sound that made the eardrums ring:
“FINALLY!! AFTER FIVE YEARS, WE ARE ALLOWED TO RACE AGAIN!!”
The brute soundwave of his voice exploded through the arena. Everywhere, gigantic neon spotlights shot on, heavy firework bombs exploded from the walls with flashing beams of light, and the thousands of beast-humans in the stands began to stomp and roar like possessed beings until the ground trembled.
The hype-master held the microphone high in the air, his voice trembling with pure ecstasy and adrenaline, while he pointed his finger straight at the starting line.
“And we can all thank one specific newcomer for bringing the light! Look at the center of the arena, ladies and gentlemen!”
Beat looked up at the gigantic, central platform above the circuit. There stood the ancient, monumental crystal that had been dark and dead for half a decade. But due to the brute, royal lightning strike of Beat’s reawakened form, the map-crystal was fully powered again. The deep, pitch-black rock shot full with bright, neon-blue veins of pure energy. It began to pulse with a deafening sonic hum, after which a gigantic, three-dimensional holographic track began to spin through the air and show the insane, deadly racetracks of the underground to the world.