The warehouse doors didn’t just open; they screamed. Metal ground furiously against rusted tracks—a harsh, jagged sound that felt entirely too loud for the dead world outside.
Brice stepped through the gap. The sunlight hit him like a physical blow. He shielded his eyes, blinking away the stinging brightness. When his vision finally cleared, the breath caught in his throat and refused to leave.
The city was gone.
In its place was a sprawling graveyard of concrete and ash. The skyline was a splintered ribcage of steel, bleeding thick, oily black smoke that blotted out the horizon. Cars choked the distant interstate in a chaotic gridlock—doors hanging wide, luggage trampled into the asphalt, shattered windshields glittering blindly in the harsh glare.
But it was the silence that felt the heaviest. The omnipresent hum of the world—the traffic, the distant roar of millions of lives—had been erased. Replaced by the faint, crackling hiss of distant fires.
“Okay,” Brice muttered, the sound of his own voice startling him in the quiet. “Just a normal Tuesday in L.A. Traffic’s a bit worse than usual.”
He walked a few paces into the sun-baked parking lot, then stopped. His knees felt suddenly weak. He leaned against the warm brick of the warehouse, sliding down until he hit the concrete.
He needed a minute. Just one.
He looked down at his left hand, his thumb unconsciously seeking out the gold band on his ring finger. He twisted it. It felt heavy. Grounding. A tiny piece of the old world that hadn’t burned away yet.
“I’m coming, Ange,” he whispered to the empty air, his voice cracking. “Just… give me a minute to figure out how to walk again.”
He took a slow, deep breath. The smell was horrendous. Ozone, burnt rubber, and a sickly-sweet copper tang that coated the back of his throat. He pushed himself up.
Every step was a revelation and a hazard. His heavy work boots, which had felt like lead an hour ago, now felt weightless. He pushed off a cracked curb and accidentally launched himself three feet into the air, landing with an awkward, jarring stumble.
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“Right,” he mumbled to himself, adjusting his grip on the tire iron. “New muscles. Less leaping, more walking.”
He stuck to the shadows, navigating an alleyway behind a row of abandoned strip malls. The silence made him paranoid. Every shadow felt too deep; every gust of wind sounded like a drawn breath.
Then, he heard it.
Crunch. Tear. Squelch.
Brice froze. His heart hammered against his ribs in a frantic rhythm, but strangely, his breathing remained deep and steady. The panic was there, but his body wasn’t yielding to it. He crept forward, peering around the corner of a defunct auto-body shop.
Fifty yards away, a creature was systematically dismantling the engine block of a crumpled sedan.
It was the size of a Great Dane, but the similarities ended there. It was entirely hairless, its skin a sickly, translucent gray pulled impossibly tight over corded, mutated muscle. It had no eyes—just a smooth, heavily scarred dome above a snout that was currently split open in three directions, revealing rows of translucent, needle-like teeth.
Brice swallowed hard. His knuckles turned white around the steel bar.
Ding.
A translucent blue box materialized directly in his line of sight.
[Creature Identified: Lesser Scavenger Hound]
[Threat Level: F-Rank]
Brice blinked, trying to wave the text away. “Oh, wonderful. A pop-up ad for my own murder. Thanks.”
The hound stopped chewing.
The creature’s head snapped up. Without eyes, it swept its featureless face back and forth. It inhaled sharply, the dark, wet slits on its neck flaring wide. It locked onto the alleyway. Onto Brice.
It let out a shriek that sounded like a bandsaw tearing through sheet metal. The sound drilled through his teeth.
“So much for stealth,” Brice grunted.
The hound charged. Its claws tore chunks out of the asphalt, propelling it forward with terrifying speed.
Thirty yards. Twenty.
Dread flared in Brice’s chest. I’m going to die. I survived the warehouse just to be dog food in an alley.
But as the creature closed the distance, the fear shifted. He remembered the blinding agony of the awakening. He remembered the cold, clinical text telling him he was nothing. He remembered Angel, waiting for him somewhere in this nightmare.
No.
Brice stepped out from the safety of the wall. He planted his feet squarely, gripping the cold steel of the tire iron with both hands and raising it over his shoulder like a bat. He didn’t have magic. He didn’t have an innate ability. He just had anger.
Ten yards. The hound leaped, its three-part jaw unhinging, a spray of black, viscous saliva flying toward Brice’s face.
Brice swung. He put his hips, his shoulders, and every ounce of his newly forged strength into the arc.
CRACK.
The heavy iron connected flush with the side of the hound’s skull. The shockwave traveled up the steel shaft like a physical blow, tearing the skin from his palms and bending his wrists violently backward. A sharp, searing pop echoed in his right shoulder. The tire iron was ripped from his grip, clattering away across the concrete.
But the creature took the brunt of it.
The hound launched through the air in a spray of black blood. It crashed into the brick wall of the auto shop ten feet away with a sickening crunch, twitched violently once, and lay entirely still.
Brice stumbled back, clutching his right arm as a high-pitched ringing pierced his ears. He gasped, dropping to one knee.
A slow, ragged laugh bubbled up from his throat.
“No innate ability?” he whispered into the ruined city, wincing as he forced himself back to his feet. “Fine by me.”
He limped over to retrieve his bent tire iron, feeling the reassuring weight of his supplies settle against his spine. He stepped over the corpse of the hound and walked out into the sunlight.
Before he could take another step, a massive red window flashed across his vision, accompanied by a blaring alarm only he could hear.
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