The grin stretched wide across his scarred face.

Korren — towering, broad-shouldered, almost beast-like — stood under the shadow of a half-collapsed wall, binoculars pressed to his eyes. Through the cracked lenses, the silhouettes of wanderers moved across the rubble field ahead.

“Those poor bastards,” he muttered, voice low and amused. “They’re walking straight into the trail we set.”

Every step they took followed a plan he’d laid out days ago — decoys, traps, misdirection. Nothing about Korren’s hunts was random. Everything had a purpose: to satisfy his strange, twisted pleasure in tormenting others and watching them suffer to the bitter end — all so he could achieve his goal.

It had been only a few days since he gave us his latest order, Talgat recalled during the top dogs’ meeting.

“Find a place. Somewhere permanent. Somewhere we can build.”

A fortress, self-sufficient, a foundation for an empire to cultivate wolves to foster poor sheep.

I took that command to heart. We scouted and raided every ruin across the dead plains — old highways, collapsed malls, buried metro tunnels. Every flicker of movement was logged. Headcounts, gear, organization — not out of cruelty, but precision. Korren called it data, the foundation of his “inevitable world.”

He was sharp — frighteningly so. The gang had grown severalfold this past year, swelling with survivors who either feared him, admired him, or simply had nowhere else to go. Strength, intelligence, obedience — those were the only currencies he valued.

Captured enemies weren’t always executed. Some were given a choice: serve as slave, survive, and maybe earn your freedom. Few ever left, though. Even those who did… rarely wandered far. Freedom meant nothing when the world outside offered only starvation, another oppression, or silence solitude.

To outsiders, his world seemed monstrous. To us, it was order.

We were the broken — the abandoned — the ones with nothing left to believe in.

And Korren gave us something to believe in.

He said once, “A world rebuilt needs one thing — control.”

No one argued. We just nodded, because somehow it sounded right.

Later that evening, under the lambent glow of a scavenged lantern, Korren reached into his coat and drew out a small metallic box — something that looked antique, like an old cigarette cartridge. It appeared ancient: dented, its edges worn smooth from years of handling. Inside were strips from his private collection — “film negatives,” he called them — a primitive, centuries-old technology once used to preserve moments in time before the digital age.

They were fragile as skin — tangible memories you could touch with your hands, not swipe through on a screen. Unlike digital images that could be so easily altered, these carried truth in their imperfection. Once an image was changed, he’d say, even if someone discovered the tampering, people would already see it differently. That was his explanation.

He held each film negative up to the light, flicking it gently to catch the glow, studying the faint images one by one. When he found the one he was looking for, he handed it to me.

“See that?” he said.

The image showed a formation of soldiers — rows upon rows, standing perfectly aligned before a single commander. And he pointed, a symbol glinted on their collars: two lightning bolts crossing each other.

“What’s that mark?” I asked.

Korren’s eyes softened—just slightly.

“The Twin Lightning Order,” he said, his voice almost reverent. “Guardians of the world order… a world that once knew discipline. My ancestors served among them.”

He said it with such conviction that, for a moment, I almost believed him.

Maybe the story was true, maybe it wasn’t. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the belief. That symbol became his creed — strength, order, control. The pillars of his madness… or his genius.

My name is Talgat.

Korren was the one who burned my community to ash.

I was just eight when I watched my parents die beneath his fire. The women were taken, the men enslaved. I swore to hate him until the end of my days. But by the time I turned seventeen, the memory had already begun to fade — like an old film reel, its frames scratched, dust-choked, some scenes lost forever. And when the past blurs like that, hate becomes just another thing you can’t afford to carry when survival is all that’s left.

At first, I served him to stay alive and could somehow find a way to avenge. I even told myself I served to understand him — to find the right moment to strike. But somewhere along the way, I forgot which of us was the prisoner and what’s my absolute purpose, to replace him?

He broke me, reshaped me, and called the pieces “useful.”

Now, I move because he tells me to.

And I no longer know whether what I feel is loyalty or surrender.

“Whirr… whirr…”

The soft vibration on my wrist snapped me out of thought. The handheld, solar-powered scanner flickered to life, its screen displaying nearby readings — radiation index, mineral density, elemental traces — within a fifty-meter radius. The signal pulsed stronger with each sweep.

Then it locked onto an area and flashed a notification:

Monazite… the Monazite Sand.

A rare-earth mineral — the raw key to thorium synthesis.

The readings spiked:

8–12% ThO₂ concentration.

Confirmed amount: immeasurable.

That could mean several tons buried beneath the field.

Thorium’s potential had been known and salvage for centuries — common knowledge, even to children. Everyone understood the immense value of Monazite sand, the primary source of precious thorium energy. This land, once known as Thailand, had long been recognized for its moderate Thorium reserves. Yet, in most regions, Monazite concentrations rarely exceeded one to fifteen percent — and even then, the higher grades were almost never found.

But this reading… this was insane.

My hands trembled as I rubbed my eyes, wondering if the scanner had glitched… or if I was simply too delirious to trust what I was seeing.

When Korren heard the report, he grinned — quiet, almost joyous, but not quite. The next step was already forming in his mind: assess the defenses, identify weak points, strike with the least effort and maximum gain.

Inside an abandoned metro station, recently cleared and set up as a temporary hide out,

“This is it,” he said, standing before his lieutenants and field officers inside a station master room, tables and chairs were pulled in just enough to be able to comfortably sit and draw the plan on the white interactive screen.

His voice carried that strange mix of calm authority and burning conviction.

“Our foundation — our pillar of power. If we succeed here, this will be the heart of a new world. With this, we’ll forge an empire that will never fall again… and soon, everything will be within our grasp.”

Stand surrounding Korren, suppressing their joyous cries, all of the presenting subordinates are expressing their utmost devotion which goes as far as to sacrifice oneself to accomplish the cause.

Korren then nod, grateful, for their simple, one-sided mind of these people who were born just to be rounded up to be commanded. And nearly blurting out laughing about such thoughts, Korren holding his hand to cover his mouth feinting to look like he was cultivating something in his mind.

“Albeit how the area looks from the outside with nothing seems value, yet a group of scavengers came out to loot stuff in full capacity and quickly return inside, when we all know that regularly scavengers who recently just got full bag, since hungry men is abundant in most of the places, and security is upon oneself to protect and no one to interfere with another, therefore this is the first unusual sign.

Secondly, despite the readings from the area scanner never failed us even once, the unusual number would only causes us more questions if not quickly resolved, we also cant proceed mean one thing, the area above ground is just a setup, whereas what’s lay hidden beneath this shell, just a simple careless thought, currently the unresolved hypothesis on how this unnatural settlement would be like from the inside, and its people, how would a town with Tatgat love to set his mind on the self-challenge himself  in Talgat’s mind, uncontrollable curiosity for a town which lay underground unlike any other settlement he ever set foot before

For the first time, I saw Korren not as the beast who had destroyed my home, but as a man staring straight into destiny.

And me… I stood beside him, uncertain whether I should feel pride — or fear — for what we had just unearthed.