Artur's patience had been forged in the slow rhythms of nature. He could wait for hours for an animal to move, motionless, blending into the landscape. He applied that same discipline now, watching human drama unfold beneath the sickly sky. The group of would-be explorers, led by the man in the denim jacket, was a study in futility. They had tried walking toward what they believed was the end of the street, only to remain perpetually distant, like Tantalus reaching for fruit forever out of grasp. Then they had turned around, trying the opposite direction, with the same result. The street felt like a closed loop, a cruel joke written into geometry itself.
Their frustration was becoming audible, carrying through the heavy air.
"You can't get out!" the blue-haired young woman shouted, her voice edging into hysteria. "We're going in circles!"
"Shut up! There has to be a way out!" the leader snapped back, but his confidence was in tatters, replaced by impotent rage. He kicked the door of a parked car, and the hollow metallic clang was swallowed by the silence, leaving no echo behind.
From his vantage point in the entrance of the apartment building, Artur watched them the way a man watches a storm gathering on the horizon. They were loud. Careless. And they were about to draw lightning.
Inside the lobby, the small group he had spoken to earlier sat in silence. His words about the toxic environment and the sickened space had stripped away their last layer of denial. They were no longer debating whether to run or stay. Now they were simply frozen by fear, waiting for an end that felt inevitable. Their terror had a smell to it, thick in the room—the sweet, rancid odor of prey that knows the predator is close.
That was when it happened.
There was no roar. No monster stepping out of the shadows. It was subtler, and infinitely more terrifying. At the far end of the street, near where the explorers were arguing, a patch of air flickered. For a microsecond, the wall of a building seemed to fold inward, like an image reflected in disturbed water. It was a flash, a glitch in the fabric of that diseased world.
One of the group, a man standing slightly apart from the others, stopped walking. He tilted his head, as if he had heard a sound no one else could hear. He raised a hand to his ear, confusion spreading across his face.
Artur saw it. His entire body went taut. That was the moment. The predator had chosen its target.
What followed defied physics. A line of darkness—not a shadow, but an absence of light, a tear in the fabric of reality—shot out from the point where the air had flickered. It moved at a speed the human eye could barely register, not across the asphalt, but through space itself, like a black needle stitching the world closed.
It struck the man who had stopped.
There was no sound of impact. The line of darkness simply touched him. For an instant, the man went rigid, eyes wide in a shock that would never reach his brain. Then his body was violently yanked backward, as if snagged by an invisible hook. He was dragged maybe two meters, his heels carving grooves into the asphalt.
That was when the sound came. A wet sound. A fast, brutal tear.
The attack lasted less than a second. The line of darkness recoiled, vanishing back into the brief fault in the air, which sealed itself like a wound knitting closed.
Where the man had been standing, there was now only a body on the ground.
The other three explorers froze. Their argument died in their throats. Slowly, they turned, understanding dawning on their faces like the sunrise of a terrible day.
"Marcos?" the blue-haired woman called out, her voice a thread.
The body did not respond. It lay face-down, twisted at an unnatural angle. A dark pool began to spread beneath it. It wasn't red. Under the purple light, it looked black as tar.
The man in the denim jacket took a hesitant step toward his fallen friend.
"Marcos, get up! Cut it out!"
He reached down to touch the man's shoulder. When he rolled him over, a scream tore from his throat—choked, inhuman, the sound of a mind breaking apart.
The man's chest had been opened. Not cut. Opened. As if something had passed straight through him, ripping everything away in its path. It was a hollow of mangled flesh and shattered bone. A precise, horrific slaughter.
Denial shattered. Silent panic erupted into absolute terror.
The blue-haired woman began to scream—a shrill, relentless sound that pierced the silence. She didn't run. She just stood there, screaming up at the purple sky, the sound of all hope dying. The third member of the group, a young man, doubled over and vomited violently onto the sidewalk.
The leader stumbled back from the body, tripping over his own feet, eyes glassy. He looked around—at the shadows, at the empty windows of the buildings—realizing that the enemy wasn't hiding. The enemy was the place itself, and it could strike from any wall, any shadow, from the very air.
Inside the building's lobby, the woman's scream from outside shattered the paralysis of the small group Artur was watching. The elderly woman sobbed, burying her face in her husband's hands. Carla, the delivery driver, jumped to her feet, her face a mask of pure panic.
"My God, my God, my God…"
Artur did not move. He only watched, his face hard as stone, his hand gripping the axe handle so tightly his knuckles had gone white. He felt no surprise. Only a cold, grim confirmation. The hunt had begun. The false calm was over. Now there was only survival. And he knew, with bitter certainty, that the first attack had not been random.
It was a demonstration. A warning.
And he knew they were next on the list.