The zoo's broken gates groaned behind them, iron teeth closing on a place that moved like a mausoleum with a pulse. The road back to Riverside Sanctuary wound through buckled tarmac and overturned bins, glass glittering in guttered sunlight like spilled ice. Overhead, Keith's eagle circled once and cried—a hard, bright note that made everyone lift their heads.
[Global Countdown: 1 hour remaining until beast mutation.]
The words pulsed across their vision and dissolved. Sixty minutes. It tightened the air.
"Eyes up," Marcus said, voice low, hammer slung across his shoulder like a sledge the size of a coffin lid. "We don't stop for anything."
Ethan kept pace beside him, the silver threads coiled under his skin like the promise of lightning. Ellie walked in the center with her husky and Alsatian tight to her knees and the new bear pacing at her flank—massive, silent, the ground muttering under its weight. Keith came on the right with his lion and tiger padding like shadows; further back the crocodile slid along a drainage channel, a rough hide of living armor. The hawk zig-zagged low over rooftops; the eagle kept the sky.
Caleb and Lena were silent. Their hands still remembered the morning's killing—a grip that wouldn't quite relax. Jamie trudged with small, stubborn steps, jaw clenched, the short blade Marcus had given him dark against his fist. Sweat taped curls of hair to his forehead.
They turned a corner into a long, straight street—and the street blinked awake.
Figures stepped from shadowed shopfronts and the mouths of alleys, pale and hard-eyed, moving like a badly rehearsed chorus line. Seven, maybe eight. Thin. Malnourished. But their hands held weight—pipes, a jagged machete, a carpenter's hammer, a hunting knife that had seen better decades.
The man in front had a scar like lightning torn down one cheek. He smirked as if the expression might bite. "Lucky day," he said. "You found pets. And gear." His gaze crawled over Keith's beasts, Marcus's hammer, Ellie's bear, lingered on their bulging packs. "Hand it over. We'll let you limp away."
"Not happening," Marcus said.
Scar's smile thinned. "You think you're the first to say no? We learned early—don't ask, take. That's how you live."
"Sometimes you live by choosing the right fight," Ethan said. His throat felt dry. "Walk away."
The hawk hissed past—just a cut of wind—and perched on a broken traffic light. Keith didn't look at Scar; he looked beyond him—at the shapes in the doorways, at the angles of feet, who twitched forward, who was already half-turned to run. The lion's ruff lifted by inches.
Scar rolled his shoulders. "Take them."
They came on like a loose net—too slow, too thin, too desperate—and still, they came.
Marcus moved first. The hammer's arc was a wide, brutal sunrise, all iron and inevitability. It hit Scar mid-charge and folded him around his own ribs. The thud of body on road was a dirty, human sound. Scar coughed blood and tried to breathe, and then didn't.
Kira vanished.
She reappeared behind a man with the carpenter's hammer, her new daggers cutting their own quiet constellation. One flashed under his jaw—silver ghost trailing the stroke—and a fan of red dotted the cracked shop window. He went down still clutching the handle.
"Left," Keith barked. The tiger pivoted and tore two men apart like canvas. The lion swatted a third and he flew into a mailbox with the sound of wet sticks breaking. Above, the eagle stooped; the hunter's knife pinwheeled away, skittering under a van.
A fourth man bolted toward Ellie—saw the bear—and froze, bravado shattering to fear. He turned to run; the bear stepped once and the ground seemed to tilt around it. He didn't run.
Ethan's threads lanced outward, bright and quick. One wrapped a wrist, another a throat, a third the ankle of the woman with the pipe. He pulled; she went to her knees with a cry, shock flickering across her face because she had expected to die to claw and fang, not to clean, cold silk that burned.
"Caleb, Lena—now!" Ethan shouted.
Caleb stumbled forward, spear quivering. The woman's eyes were brown and human and furious and afraid. He hesitated a heartbeat too long—then drove the point home. Her breath escaped in a hoarse ah, eyes going glassy as the metal slid past bone. When he yanked free, he made a sound like he'd retched the tip of his own lungs up through his throat.
[Level Up.] shimmered across his vision like a slap.
Lena didn't hesitate. Her fire axe rose and fell clean, grim, final. The man she hit stopped being a problem and became a body. [Level Up.] blinked coldly in her eyes.
A boy—Ellie's age, maybe—broke from the hedge of figures and ran straight at Jamie. His knife looked ridiculous in his thin hand. The world narrowed into breathing and the shape of that knife and the small frightened face behind it. Marcus snarled, stepped, swept the boy's legs; the knife clattered. Marcus held him down by the shoulder and looked at Jamie.
"Do it," he said, voice iron.
Jamie's blade shook. "He's my age."
"He would have killed you," Marcus said. He didn't blink.
For a second the street was the sound of Jamie's breath. He looked at Ethan; Ethan's jaw was clenched so tight it hurt. He didn't say yes. He didn't say no. The gods had already said it for them when they built the board.
Jamie sobbed once—a single baked-dry sound—then stabbed. The blade caught ribs the first time, slid the second. The boy sucked in air like it was fire and stopped.
[Level Up.] pulsed in Jamie's vision, obscene as applause.
Silence took the street the way tide takes a sandcastle. Not clean. Not neat. The survivors lay where they fell. They were not ash. They were bodies—flesh and clothing, broken teeth and open eyes with nothing inside them anymore. Blood ran to the gutters and turned to rust when it met old rain.
Ellie swallowed and put a hand on her bear's shoulder to steady herself. The bear huffed softly, as if trying to scent logic in a world that had lost it.
Kira wiped her blades on a dead man's coat with clinical efficiency. Her face was a mask, the edges too sharp.
Keith exhaled slowly. The lion gave one last huff and sat. The tiger licked blood from its paw the way it would river water. Above, the eagle turned in a measuring circle and landed on the traffic light, talons ticking metal.
"The system doesn't care," Ethan heard himself say. The words came out frayed. He hated what his own vision showed: [Level Up.]—not just for Caleb, Lena, Jamie, but for him, for Marcus, for Kira, for Keith, even for Ellie. "Mutant, beast, human—it's all points."
Caleb nodded, eyes wide, knuckles white on his spear. "No tags," he whispered. "Just reward."
Jamie stared at the boy on the ground and made the small choked sound again, like the word sorry folded inside a cough. He didn't cry. There was no water left in him for that.
"Check the sides," Marcus rasped. "If there are more, they'll come now or not at all."
"There are more," Kira said quietly. "Two in the alley. They ran the moment we hit them."
"Let them run," Lena said. Her voice wasn't soft. It wasn't anything. It was a tool that worked.
A whimper nosed out of the alley to their right—thin, bitten off fast. Ethan lifted a hand and the threads hummed; the bear swung its massive head; the husky's ears pricked.
"Out," Keith said, and his voice had command in it like iron filings in a magnet.
Two figures edged into the street with their hands up. A woman in her thirties with bruise spirals around her wrists and a boy of maybe twelve. He had no knife. He had the ghost of one in his stance, a flinch that had learned to be a shape.
"We—" the woman started, and her voice snagged. "We didn't want this. They made us. They took food and then we owed them. Please." Her eyes fixed on the bodies as if she couldn't not look. "Please. Don't kill us."
"We're not a charity," Marcus said flatly. "We've got mouths already."
"We're not them," Lena snapped, sharp enough to draw blood. "If they'd surrendered, we'd have taken them too."
"They didn't," Marcus said.
"No," Ethan said, and his own voice surprised him with how steady it was. "They didn't." He looked at the woman and the boy. Choosing had weight; they flinched beneath it. He thought of Tina's calm on the wall, of Jamie's too-old eyes, of Ellie's set mouth as she reached for the bear because a child had made an adult choice to save something that didn't understand any of this. "You come with us," he said. "You carry what we tell you. You listen when we speak. You don't steal. You don't lie. You don't disappear in the night. If you try—"
Kira's new daggers whispered out of leather. That finished the sentence.
"We won't," the woman gasped. "We won't." She folded as if the promise had weight and she could finally set it down. The boy nodded twice, jerky, like his head might come off if he did it wrong.
Keith clicked his tongue; the lion rose and came to heel. "Move," he said. "Before the hour runs dry."
They moved. They did not cover the bodies. There weren't sheets for that anymore, and the gods didn't pay XP for grief performed toward a camera no one watched.
The road home kinked through a wind-snarled market, past stalls that still advertised fruit that would never be sweet again. A dog barked somewhere far and thin, then three more answered, closer, ugly with a new edge. Ethan's threads prickled. The timer wasn't a number now. It was a taste in the air.
"Keep tight," Marcus said. "Keep quiet."
Caleb walked as if his bones were too loud. The spear shook less now. The shaking had moved to his eyes.
"Does it always feel like that?" Jamie asked no one in particular. The words sounded filed down to fit through the small place between his teeth. "Killing people."
"No," Kira said. "Sometimes it feels worse."
There wasn't anything to say after that that wasn't a lie or a prayer.
The sanctuary's palisade showed first as a darker line against the dusk, then as a set of teeth with light caught in them. The barrier shimmered faintly, a breath held. On the wall, two figures stood watch—Tina, shoulders squared against the cold, and Maya with both hands white-knuckled on the railing, like she could hold the whole safe zone up by herself if she had to. When they saw the beasts, both women straightened; when they saw the newcomers, their faces softened, then pinched, then softened again.
"Open," Lena called, lifting a hand.
The bolts screeched back. The gate swung. The zone's breath warmed them as they crossed the threshold. Inside, the square smelled less like blood and more like smoke and the ghost of soup.
Tina was down the ladder before the gate fully shut, hands on Jamie's face and shoulders, checking for wounds as if she could pull the whole truth of his last hour up through his skin. "Are you hurt? Tell me where you're hurt."
"I'm okay," Jamie said. The voice didn't wobble. The eyes were older again. He set the knife on his belt with the awkward reverence of a boy who wants to be a man and isn't sure he was supposed to start today. "I… leveled."
Tina nodded once, like she'd known and had a private agreement with the world about how unfair that was. She pulled him in and held him so tight his feet left the ground for a heartbeat.
Maya's gaze flicked over everyone else. "You did it," she breathed, looking at the beasts—eagle and hawk knitting the sky, crocodile settling like a log, lion and tiger cat-bright—then the bear hulking by Ellie, who looked like someone had wired the sun into her ribs and didn't know what to do with the light. "You actually did it."
Keith only grunted, eyes already on the wall, the gate, the gaps.
"Two more," Ethan said, tipping his head toward the woman with the bruise-spiral wrists and the thin boy. "They surrender, they come under the rules."
"They eat under the rules, too," Marcus said. "Lena?"
"Got it," she said, already moving for the supply crates, pencil and ration slate in hand.
The gate thudded home. The latches slammed into place. The square breathed.
And the world stopped breathing.
[Global Countdown: 0 hours remaining. Beast mutation initiated.]
The words landed like a hammer dropped from the sky.
The city answered.
Dogs howled—everywhere, all at once, a rising, shredding choir. Birds screamed; the shrieks pitched past human grief into metal tearing. Rats chittered and then their voices changed to a scrape that made teeth ache. Downriver, something heavy rolled in the water and left a wake like a finger pulled through wet glass.
The eagle on the gatepost flared its wings and shuddered as new power rippled through it. The hawk's feathers lifted in a slow crown; its eyes went brighter, deeper. Keith's lion and tiger went statue-still, every hair along their spines standing like quills. They didn't snarl. They listened.
Ellie's bear lifted its head and chuffed, a deeper sound than before, a drum in a wardrobe-sized ribcage. The husky's breath steamed—steamed harder—and ice feathered the stones under its paws. The Alsatian's hackles rose, a thin green sheen threading its eyes like sap.
Maya flinched as if a sound had split her skull. Her hands went to her ears, then her throat. "They're… loud," she said. "They're everywhere."
"Walls," Marcus snapped. "Rotate."
People moved. The sanctuary moved. The new survivors moved like people in a fire drill who believe this is the real one.
Ethan stood a moment in the lantern-wash, heart punching at his ribs. The silver threads hummed under his skin, eager and afraid. He looked at Keith; Keith nodded once. Not reassurance. Recognition. Partners in the only job that mattered now.
Ethan found Ellie's eyes. She met his stare and, after a heartbeat, nodded too. Her hands were on fur and muscle—husky, Alsatian, bear—and they were steady.
He looked up at Tina on the wall, her face pale with the knowledge that she had let her boy go into a world that had made him do something it would never return, and that he had come back still himself. Maya's profile was cut from the same worry and a different metal.
"We hold," Ethan said—not loud. It didn't need to be. The safe zone seemed to lean in to listen. "We hold this place and the people in it."
Outside, the city changed its skin and showed its real teeth.
Inside, the square went still as a lung between breaths.
And then the world exhaled monsters.