Despite Karst's indisputable assholery, Fyn found himself unable to resist the tantalising lure of information.

The issue was that he knew so little. Where did he go from here?

He had tried his best to convince himself he wouldn't go to the address. He had even stayed up all night thinking about how stupid Karst would look when he didn't show up. Oh, it would be hilarious…

And then he remembered that Karst knew where he lived, and it wasn't so funny anymore.

Asshole or not, Karst held all the cards.

Such it was - whether Fyn liked it or not - he set off from his apartment at six-thirty in the morning with a scowl like a thundercloud. He looked like, if given a good enough reason, he might explode.

Contrary to what you might expect, the morning air was not fresh. It was heavy and acrid, smelling of burnt plastic and smog.

Historically, Ireland was a country of great natural beauty. Rolling hills and bubbling creeks, fresh seafood and natural produce. If advertisements were to be believed, the milk from cows there could damn near cure cancer. However, times have since changed.

Currently, Ireland is not famous for any of those things. Its biggest claim to fame at the moment is that a rather popular group of sentinels come from there.

Fyn even had a mug with them on it, although he was embarrassed to admit this.

Ironically, Dublin was perhaps the farthest thing from natural, and the reason for this was rather straightforward. You see, with Ireland being famous for farming and possessing a large number of cattle, it was hit incredibly hard by the transit. Harder than most places.

No one knows for sure why the transit caused all the animals to gigantify, what matters is that they did - and Ireland had a lot of them. Suddenly, the rolling hills were covered in mutant cows the size of buses, and sheep that could flatten a tank.

People flocked towards the cities to escape being mauled by twenty-tonne monstrosities. And that wasn't even the worst of it.

There were also invasions from the breaches that opened above the earth with seemingly no warning. The closer you were to a sentinel, the higher your chances of survival and - as you might expect - all the sentinels were in the biggest cities. Namely, Dublin.

As a result, Dublin was hideously overcrowded. Its population had quintupled in the last twenty years only, and its infrastructure had not kept up.

Crushed by the weight of its population, the city was structured in a way that could only be described as suffocating. The poor lived in clustered red brick houses - with smokestacks poking out through jagged rooftops like flagpoles jammed into thick mud. The great chimneys never stopped belching black poison into the bleached sky above. Day after day, year after year.

These cramped districts made up about two-thirds of Dublin, beginning at the docks and circling around the city centre without ever getting close enough to touch it. The nice parts, anyway.

Fyn lived had always lived in one of these districts. He had been there so long that the rancid air no longer bothered him, and the smell had simply faded into the background. That didn't mean he liked it there, just that he had gotten used to it.

Once he had left his apartment, Fyn made his way towards the centre of Dublin. He passed many boarded-up shops along the way, the ancient paint of their signs peeling away like rotten orange peels. The roads he walked along were pockmarked with craters from Blight attacks. No one had the money or time to fix them. No cared. No one important, anyway.

This was another facet of living in the poorer districts. Those with money could afford to pay sentinels to protect them. Those without - did without.

If an attack appeared near Fyn's apartment, then the closest sentinel would get there when they got there. Perhaps they would finish their smoke break before heading out. On the other hand, if someone's mansion got attacked, sentinels would be falling over each other to go and protect it.

Strangely, despite all this, Fyn still revered Sentinels. There was something magical about them - besides their magical abilities, obviously. He couldn't put it into words; they were just... different, almost holy. Perhaps it was because, in spite of the neglect, he admired the work that they did.

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It was strange to think that he was one of them now. Or... was he one of them? From what he understood, Humanists weren't invited to the Sentinel barbecues. If Sentinels even had barbecues.

Fyn began to wonder if this was justified. Now that he was a humanist himself, he felt no pressing urge to go and torture a bunch of innocent people. And, despite his overall assholery, Karst didn't seem like the type to make your nan grow an extra arm for shits and giggles.

Although they had experimented on Fyn, so clearly they could be twisted...

Fyn massaged his temples, feeling a migraine coming on. He wasn't sure what to think or believe anymore.

So instead, he focused on walking.

As he made his way through the rundown areas - towards the wealthier ones, Fyn watched as the shops got fancier, the restaurants got cleaner, and the smell became bearable. By the time he had made it to the city centre, the number of cars on the road had multiplied tenfold, and every person he passed wore clothes that must have been washed within the last few days.

Fancy bastards.

Just as he was walking through the centre of Dublin Fyn felt the ground shake. The tremor continued for a full sixty seconds before subsiding, making lamposts sway like twigs in a breeze. All around him, he heard buildings creak, and concrete groan as the world shifted like an old man rolling in bed. Everything shook and trembled, sending shivers up his spine.

But the people seemed not to care about the earthquake. Instead, their gazes were fixed above them, as they stared up at the sky with fear in their eyes.

Fyn joined them, watching apprehensively as a blinding, purple flash sliced through the clouds like the hull of a ship cutting through a mighty wave. The sky above was exposed like an open wound for a brief moment, and all he could see through the gap was blackness, along with the occasional twinkling light.

The whole city went silent as every eye turned to stare at the gash in the clouds. Fyn could hear his heartbeat like a drum in the quiet. It was deafening.

Finally, a loudspeaker crackled, and a woman's voice blared out through the static.

"Warning! Warning! A category two Breach has opened within the upper atmosphere above Dublin. Please remain indoors as local Sentinels deal with this threat."

Fyn sighed in relief, and the people of Dublin seemed to share his sentiment.

"Only a category two," he heard someone scoff. "That'll be sorted in twenty minutes."

Just like that, everyone resumed walking. It was like a switch had been flicked or a video was unpaused. All the fear and panic melted away like morning frost, and suddenly, everyone was continuing about their day.

Fyn continued on his journey. He wasn't particularly worried about a category two breach, as that was the second weakest possible one. Usually, it would take a category four Breach for anything to actually make it to ground level, so for now, he considered himself safe.

However, as he walked, his thoughts were full of wonder. Up there, above the clouds, people were fighting. Sentinels were fighting. They were like guardian angels.

And... to an extent... he was one of them.

For the first time since leaving the warehouse, he started to think that maybe his new abilities weren't such a bad thing after all.

After he passed through the city centre and continued into the 'capitol district' - as it liked to be called - Fyn watched as a few new types of buildings appeared.

First and foremost were the training barracks.

Each had a rather unique design that usually consisted of a Frankenstein hybrid between a boxing gym and an army boot camp. Inside, they were decked out in state-of-the-art training equipment as well as coaches for just about every martial art you could think of, and a few you couldn't.

The barracks were packed with children sparring or meditating on hard mats. But not one of them was above the age of fifteen. No point in training after that, he thought.

Fyn wrinkled his nose up at them. Before he understood how the world worked, he too had wanted to train in one of these barracks. Maybe then… he might have had a chance at passing the entrance exams to one of the academies in the Forward Holds.

Alas, such places charged more in tuition than both his parents made in a year. And that was when they were still alive.

No, Fyn had ended up training on his own with rusty buckets full of water as weights and an old broom handle as a weapon. Suffice to say... he was not accepted.

Apparently, malnourished street rats didn't have what it takes to become a mighty sentinel.

So, when he looked at these kids in their fancy barracks, a sharp pang of jealousy came over him. Why couldn't he have been given that opportunity? No one had wanted it more than he had. No one deserved it more than he did...

With a sigh, he shook off the envy and walked on. His dad used to say that if we all dwelled on the unfairness of life, nothing would ever get done. And Fyn found this to be especially true.

Besides, he was a sentinel already... technically. What was there to be jealous of?

Street by street, he paid careful attention to the signs he passed. The capitol district was unfamiliar and left him with a distinct sense that he didn't belong there.

Whether it was his ratty clothes or mangy hair, he looked like where he was from.

And he could tell by the odd glances that he was getting that the people here knew it.

He began to feel this inexplicable, nauseating anxiety. What if they reported him? What if he was caught and they found out he was a humanist? He would be killed for simply existing. Soon, he was walking quicker than before, keeping his head down as he did so. All the while, he prayed that no one would notice him. Prayed that he would make it to where he was going in one piece.

Luckily, he didn't have too far to travel. Soon, he arrived at his destination, the second type of building exclusive to the capitol district.

And an ironic one at that. It seemed all his prayers had gone to good use because the place he ended up - at seven in the morning - was a church.

The one place you would least expect a humanist to be.