Sard slipped through the shattered door and knelt beside Fast, who was sitting on the bed with his head hanging low. There were no signs of a struggle in the room; only a heavy silence hanging in the air and the cloud of dust left behind by the noise of the breaking door. Sard grabbed Fast's arm and draped it over his own shoulder. Supporting Fast's waist firmly with his other hand, he forced him to stand. Fast stood up, wobbling as if his bones had turned to liquid; his feet dragged listlessly on the floor, making Sard's body his only support.
"Come on, get up, we have to get out of here. Wake up!" Sard commanded. His voice was low but jarringly firm.
Just as he was almost dragging Fast out of the room, Sard paused, staring into the cold emptiness of the hallway. "We need to find Lena too," he muttered to himself. Right then, he spotted Lena, who was standing a few meters away by the wall, watching them with shock and fear. Sard was momentarily surprised to see her there, but he had no time to question it.
Looking at Lena, he signaled her: "We need to get away from here until we figure out what's going on; the area might still be dangerous!" As they moved through the corridor with Sard's support, Fast tried to turn his head with his blurred mind to look at the face beside him:
"Sard?.. What's happening?.."
Sard didn't answer. The trio turned away from the main corridor and headed toward the emergency stairs with heavy iron doors. When the door slammed shut behind them, they hurried down the stairwell and emerged from the hospital's chaos into the ominous coolness of the street.
As they vanished into the darkness outside, the D-Rank officer whom Sard had incapacitated with a single move lay on the floor of the hallway they had left behind. As his consciousness slowly returned, he reached for the radio at his ear with difficulty.
"I lost... I lost the member... Fast..."
From the other end of the radio, a cold, authoritative voice devoid of any emotion rose: "What happened there?"
The officer, trying to keep his throbbing head steady, replied: "He was too fast... He neutralized me in seconds. He took Fast and fled..."
The voice on the other end asked in an authoritative tone: "Who was this person? Could you identify him?"
The officer recalled the whisper echoing at the beginning of the hallway: "The kid beside him called him 'Sard'... I think his name was Sard."
A short, heavy silence followed. Then, the mysterious voice cut the radio without saying another word. Where that radio signal ended, in a dark office at the top of one of the city's tallest buildings... a shadow standing by the window took out a phone while looking out at the view.
"So, Sard, huh..." the shadow muttered, his voice as uncanny as a snake's hiss. "He hasn't been around for quite a while. And now he's poking his nose into my business."
The shadow found a name on his phone and initiated the call.