Deviant: No Longer Human

Th there was Yanyan—Amelia's daughter.

Now she was someone Wang Xiao carefully avoided.

Yanyan had no concept of restraint and zero social boundaries.

If he gave her half a chance, she'd likely tear his clothes off herself.

She was that wild. But, considering her lack of interaction with anyone outside of him and, occasionally, Amelia, it made sse.

She had a rare 'disease' or 'power' that constantly required her to stay away from people.

Thus — Her worldview was... unconvtional.

And finally, there was Xuelan. Probably the most reasonable of them all. She had be explicit from the beginning—she had no interest in other m, and preferred to remain his daughter only, issuing frequt warnings to keep his hands off her.

Whether that worked or not?

Well, it worked to a degree, until he decided it didn't.

Their mothers, for their part, seemed to ignore anything related to this topic, adopting a convit attitude of "out of sight, out of mind."

Though Amelia was frequtly irritated with Yanyan's complete lack of decorum...

Amelia's relationship with her daughter reminded him of Freya and Ericka, whom he had st back to the surface long before the fight started.

In this case, the roles were reversed; just as Freya was stressed by her mother's behavior, it was Amelia who was stressed by her daughter.

As Wang Xiao stepped outside, his mind returned to the matter at hand.

He subtly manipulated the flow of reality, carefully oping a small crack in the Temporal-Spatial Barrier that shielded Xianthera from the outside world.

The faintest trace of Aether began seeping in, like the whisper of a long-lost age.

_______

Beijing, the Imperial Capital!

After the town square was completely sealed off, construction began to repair the damage left behind.

The portal had be relocated by Wang Xiao to a hidd location, suring no one else could access it.

Still, he knew there were many other portals leading to Hollow Earth.

As he flew back, casually joying the cityscape below, his mind spiraled into deeper thoughts.

'Could Yuriko have kept Aurora trapped inside Hollow Earth?' It started to make sse. If both he and Aura couldn't find her on the surface, th perhaps...

Suddly, a realization hit him. He knew exactly where Aurora was. With Yuriko injured and vulnerable, now was the perfect time to strike and retrieve her.

However, there were still many loose ds to tie up. His emies needed to be dealt with, one by one, starting with the most vile among them.

First, the disgusting skinwalkers.

____

th October!

The first footage appeared on social media—grainy, shaky, but the meaning was clear!

A man, casually walking in the city square, stopped, clutching his chest as his body convulsed. His skin bubbled and stretched unnaturally before tearing op, revealing a monstrous, scaly creature beath.

The beast's eyes were wild, and it pounced on a nearby woman, dragging her to the g as horrified onlookers screamed.

More footage followed in rapid succession.

"Holy sh—! Look at that thing! It's… it's a f*cking monster!" one bystander's voice trembled as they recorded from behind a parked car.

"Someone help her! Please! Somebody—!" the woman's desperate cries were cut short by a crunch as the creature ripped into her flesh.

News of the transformations spread like wildfire across the globe.

Social media exploded with posts, videos, and terrified reactions.

#SkinwalkersUnmasked #MonstersAmongUs

Within hours, ev high-ranking officials were exposed.

A video from the Sate Chamber showed a sator mid-speech before his face began to twitch unnaturally.

His skin peeled back, and the room erupted into chaos as the cameras caught the creature's transformation.

The chaos reached Europe wh a diplomat was revealed to be one of them, his monstrous form exposed during an emergcy summit.

"This is the d," muttered a man in the streets of Paris, eyes glued to his phone. "They've infiltrated everything… the governmt… they're not ev human!"

Panic descded.

Citizs began taking matters into their own hands. Fear-fueled mobs began hunting those they suspected of being skinwalkers.

It didn't take much—an odd glance, a hesitation in someone's voice—and they would be dragged into the streets.

People no longer trusted anyone.

"You're one of them!" shouted a man, his voice frantic, as a woman pleaded for her life before a mob.

"No! I swear, I'm human!" the woman begged, her face streaked with tears.

The crowd ignored her, tying her to a stake.

Whoosh!

"AHHHHHHHH...."

The flames leapt high as her screams echoed through the streets.

Innocts died by the dozs, accused and executed in a frzy of paranoia.

Society regressed into barbarism as fear consumed logic.

The stock market took a catastrophic hit. Trading floors were flooded with sell orders as panic set in.

An emergcy analyst appeared on CNBC, sweat beading on his brow.

"We're seeing the worst economic crash since the Great Reset!" he exclaimed. "This isn't just a market collapse—this is the collapse of human trust. Without trust, the markets can't function."

The chaos seemed unstoppable, until 5th October, wh a tweet st shockwaves across the globe. Ji Xuehong, Guardian of Europe, posted a statemt on behalf of the Eight Prince:

[One of our own has fall to these skinwalkers. They have crossed a line. Either they give us an explanation, or we will eradicate every last one of them.]

Within minutes, the tweet wt viral, shared millions of times across social media.

The reaction was swift.

"Ev the Eight Prince isn't safe?" a woman gasped, staring at her phone scre.

"Eradicate them," someone posted under Ji Xuehong's tweet, the stimt echoed by thousands of others. "Wipe them all out."

For the first time, the public fully supported the eradication of the skinwalkers.

The stimt was unanimous—no more fear, no more hiding.

They wanted blood.

But behind the sces, the seed of panic was meticulously planted by Wang Xiao.

It was he who had fanned the flames, manipulating evts to push the world into a frzy.

Skinwalkers, ssing their upcoming doom, began reaching out to him, desperate for negotiations.

___

"Please," one of them hissed through a secure channel. Its voice was distorted, "We can work something out. We just want to survive. We're willing to offer—"

Wang Xiao cut the communication, his face impassive.

Negotiation wasn't part of his plan.

Instead, Anran and Freya, with their combined powers, tracked down every skinwalker.

The creatures were slowly cornered, their hiding places discovered one by one.

The frequcy of attacks and sightings dropped dramatically.

By the 6th of October, the once-constant outbreaks had nearly ceased.

Newscasters reported a strange calm, the airwaves filled with a cautious optimism.

"This is BBC News. Reports of skinwalker transformations have dramatically declined over the last 4 hours. Experts are unsure why, but it appears the wave of terror may be subsiding."

But the reality was far more sinister.

Ts of millions of skinwalkers had converged in an abandoned town in Country M, deep in hiding, preparing their next move.

They were planning a counterstrike against the Eight Prince, who had be ruthlessly hunting them down.

____

"We need to regroup," one skinwalker growled in a darked room, its clawed hand tapping against a map spread out on the table. "The Eight Prince won't stop. He's be sding us a message with every impaled body he leaves behind."

The image was ugly: hundreds of their kin impaled on spikes, a bloody warning stretched across the horizon.

"He's driving us to extinction," another skinwalker said, its voice low, filled with anger. "We have to act, or we'll all be slaughtered."

The abandoned town, on the west coast near Alaska, was the perfect hideout—desolate and far removed from civilization.

The skinwalkers had overrun small towns in the area, killing and impersonating the locals to build their base.

One of the creatures looked out over the icy landscape. "No one will find us here," it muttered confidtly. "We've wiped out the population. This place is ours."

But they underestimated modern technology.

Despite their efforts, satellite scans revealed an unusual spike in heat signatures in the region.

The data didn't lie—what should have be a nearly abandoned area now teemed with activity, the sudd population increase impossible to ignore.