Rounding the next corner, the air hit him before the scenery did—thick, metallic, trembling with a low hum that wasn’t coming from the idling engines.
Cars are backed up as far as he can see, trapped in a snarl of steel and impatience. Tyres grind. Horns flare. Drivers stew in the uniquely concentrated misery of not moving.
But it isn’t the traffic that stops him.
It’s the cloud hanging above it.
A dense red mist roils over the line of cars, metallic and sweet, like copper pennies dissolved in hot oil. The air shimmers with heat and psychic pressure. He can taste the frustration at the back of his throat—bitter, acrid.
Fantastic, he thinks. The weather’s doing mood swings now.
Golden-black hornets the size of terriers dart through the cloud, their wings beating with a low droning hum he feels in the base of his skull.
But they didn’t seem to be feeding on the mist; no, it seemed as if they were conducting with it. Every dart corresponded to the twitch of a driver’s fingers, the flush of heat across a forehead, the tightening of knuckles on steering wheels.
The mist seemed to draw a strange glowing bug the size of an orange, shaped inexplicably like a lantern, their translucent wings beating in faint yellow flickers. They skim through the red cloud like minnows through current, nibbling at the anger as if it were pollen.
The hornets snatch them from the air one after another, jaws snapping shut with wet, ugly clicks.
Aster stands frozen, watching the system reveal itself piece by piece.
Every minor human tantrum gets drawn up into the red cloud and monetized by the local insect population.
The city is farming emotional runoff.
Of course it is.
He can’t help seeing the pattern now. On the bus. Outside the pub. Here in traffic. Anxiety, envy, smugness, joy, rage—everything in this place seems to bleed out of people and into the mouths of something waiting nearby.
An economy of emotion.
A supply chain of human weakness.
“If I’m hallucinating this,” he mutters, “I’m either a genius or I need to demand a refund from my subconscious.”
The laugh that tries to come out catches in his throat.
The hook in his chest jerks hard enough to make him gasp, pulling taut, like someone had sunk a line through his ribs and decided to reel him in with no regard for whether the he survived the process.
Across the street, between two parked taxis, the abomination of steel and flesh stared at him, eyes boring into Aster.
Iron bones gleamed beneath strips of meat like rust blooming under chrome. Steam leaked from the seams of its jaw in slow, angry sighs, and its eyes—two perfect circles of white fire—locked onto him with the focused malice of a searchlight finding a fugitive.
Then came the siren.
Not loud at first. Just low and rising, vibrating through his teeth rather than the air. One note, then another—answering calls echoing through the city, closer than he would’ve liked.
Aster froze as every cell in his body forgot language, and the older part of his biology remembered being prey.
No. Absolutely not. Not this fucking thing again.
The Bloodhound moved first.
One jerk—too fast to track—and Aster bolts.
His boots slammed the living pavement, phosphorescent slime bursting beneath each step. The city bent around him like softening glass. He didn’t think. Thinking was a luxury for people not being hunted by a fever dream with industrial-grade lungs. There was only forward motion, away from the siren and claws of the thing behind him that had apparently taken a very personal interest in his continued suffering.
He veered left into a narrower street just as another hound smashed into a parked car hard enough to fold its Astral echo in half. The shockwave punched him off his feet. He hit the ground, skin flaying against grit, scrambled upright before his brain could register the pain.
His golden field flickered.
Another Bloodhound unfolded itself from a side alley, its body collapsing out of shadow like a bridge giving up under bad engineering. Its siren joined the first.
Great. They travel in packs. Love that for me.
He ran harder.
Storefronts blurred past in streaks of coral growth and neon fungus. Windows pulsed. Signs shifted in languages he didn’t know. Somewhere above him, something metallic screamed as a fourth Bloodhound dropped from a rooftop and cratered the road behind him.
For the first time in days, his mind went blessedly blank.
No debating whether he was hallucinating. No philosophical detour into whether psychosis was just a badly managed subscription service. Just one clean, animal thought:
Run or die.
He tore through a pedestrian tunnel, tile walls slick with glowing moss. The sirens echoed through the tunnel like God had hired an orchestra made entirely of industrial accidents.
By the time he burst out the other side, there were five of them.
The first landed on a sedan hard enough to crush it flat. Astral glass exploded across the road in glittering shards. Aster ducked through the wreckage, lungs scalding, the golden shimmer around him flaring as claws raked across it.
His field cracked.
A hot line tore across his shoulder—not quite flesh, but close enough that his body panicked anyway. Gold light splintered around him like stress fractures in glass.
Another corner. Another siren. The mist boiled red around him, thick as fever. Bloodhounds climbed the walls like spiders made of scrap metal and bad intentions.
He vaulted a toppled bin, landed badly, twisted his ankle, kept going.
Another blow slammed into his field and threw him sideways into a parked bus. Astral steel screamed. Glass shattered. He bounced off the door and kept moving on reflex alone.
The shimmer around him dimmed further. Cracks widened. Golden light leaked away in burning trails.
A Bloodhound smashed into the street directly ahead of him. Pavement exploded. The shockwave threw him backward, vision flashing white. He hit the ground coughing blood.
The creature lowered its head. Its siren wound down into a single long note.
It charged.
Aster tried to move.
Too slow.
His field flared once.
Then it shattered.
He felt it more than saw it: a full-body rupture, like every hair on his skin had turned into a tuning fork. The warm cocoon around him splintered into gold dust and vanished.
The second Bloodhound lunged.
And the street detonated.
One blink, he was staring into white mechanical death. The next, the world had gone gold.
Heat rolled over him like furnace breath. Air slammed outward hard enough to flatten dust and paper and the scream building in his throat. The Bloodhound staggered mid-lunge as lines of molten white carved through it, slicing cleanly through metal and flesh before the whole thing collapsed into steaming meat and spare parts.
A figure stepped out of the light.
Robed. Solid. Infuriatingly real.
Aster had never been happier to see a hallucination in his life.
The second Bloodhound struck. The man barely moved. A flick of his wrist, and the creature slammed headfirst into an invisible wall hard enough to crater the road. The third came from the side; the robed man pivoted and drove a kick through its chest, folding metal ribs inward with a wet metallic crunch. Another leapt from behind and got cartwheeled through the Astral shell of a parked sedan, shattering glass into a rain of burning fragments.
He wasn’t fighting so much as sculpting destruction.
Golden sigils flared along his arms. Invisible planes formed in the air and snapped shut like guillotines. Bloodhounds crashed through storefronts. Streetlights bent. Metal screamed.
Then the man turned on Aster, cyan eyes blazing beneath the hood.
“What the fuck are you doing out of the house?” he barked. “Didn’t you read the envelope I left you?”
Aster opened his mouth, but more sirens answered from the mist.
“The Wyrm Eaters have your scent now!” the man shouted over the noise. “They won’t stop until they finish the job and eat the thing inside you!”
He flung three more Bloodhounds aside in a spray of sparks and molten metal.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“I’ll keep them busy. You need to get back to 7 Heart Lane. Whatever comes between you and that house—deal with it. Now run!”
Then the main body of the swarm arrives.
Dozens, then dozens more, pouring from mist, alleys, rooftops. Sirens wailing, searchlights slicing through the haze. Metal and muscle surge in like a tide.
The first whispers of panic surge up his spine. The robed man’s silhouette is a storm of gold in the street’s centre, carving reality, throwing bodies, bending air.
The man doubles his intensity.
Bloodhounds collide midair. Metal screams. Sparks rain down in an endless torrent. Collisions echo like thunder.
Aster staggers backward. Pressure presses against him—skin, bone, teeth. The city trembles under the chaos.
Then the energy coalesces.
Golden seals erupt in spirals, stamping the street, the buildings, the sky itself. Air thickens. Light solidifies into the shape of a giant dragon, somehow formed from solid gold light. Wings unfurl, beating against reality itself, folding space with each stroke. Teeth gleam, psychic energy coiling down its throat. Its roar akin to physics screaming.
The Bloodhounds don’t hesitate for a second. They surge towards the dragon, dozens at a time.
The dragon meets them midair. Claws of gold shred metal and sinew like it is cheap confetti. Sirens bend into harmonics impossible to survive, sounding more like a church organ beaten by baseball bats.
The robed man deals with the Bloodhounds that the dragon can’t handle. Kick, sweep, launch—each motion sends Bloodhounds spinning into the psychic landfill in the sky, their bodies disintegrating into loose springs and oily blood.
Wave by wave, the swarm presses. Each Bloodhound more desperate, more aggressive, screaming in unison.
The dragon is in the thick of it. Tearing through the front line, talons carving arcs of pure energy, wings reshaping space with each beat. Bloodhounds collide midair, bodies spinning, metal screeching, sirens collapsing into distorted harmonics.
Aster’s chest heaves. Breath catches between awe and terror. The dragon’s tail smashes one Bloodhound into another. Sparks and molten fragments rain down, igniting reflections in the puddles. The robed man spins, launching three more into the mist. Each strike feeds the dragon, feeding the golden field, feeding the storm.
A Bloodhound slams into a streetlight only a few meters from where Aster stands. Sparks explode. The smell of burning metal claws at his nose. He stumbles. Goddammit, don’t trip now. Don’t trip. Just run. Just—why am I still here?
The robed man is everywhere at once—kick, sweep, sigils flying, bodies hurled into molten arcs, disappearing.
A Bloodhound collides with another midair. Sparks, blood, springs, metal fragments. They fall, tumble, shatter. Aster catches a reflection of his own terrified face in a puddle. Yep. Definitely dead. Also impressed.
Everything bends, melts, folds, and reforms. He stumbles over a lump of metal and glass, barely registering it as a leg of one of the creatures.
A Bloodhound leaps at him. Reflexes kick in. Duck. Roll. Kick? He barely remembers. Only remembers the word RUN thudding behind his eyes.
The dragon sweeps its wings, folding space, catching the Bloodhound just before it can reach Aster. The impact tears the creature apart as it tumbles into nothingness. Sparks rain. His hair sticks to his forehead. Sweat burns his eyes.
Another wave presses in. Aster’s stomach lurches. He tastes fear, burnt metal, ozone, adrenaline, something like regret, and the faint tang of awe. I shouldn’t be alive. Also, holy shit.
The robed man pivots, golden sigils like fire ants scuttling along his arms, kicking three more into molten arcs. The golden field stretches, snaps, reforms. The dragon meets it midair, wings slicing the sky into impossible angles.
Aster runs, trips, stumbles, and rolls. Every step feels like it might be his last. Sparks skate along the street like liquid knives. Heat burns his cheeks. The roar of engines, sirens, psychic dragons, and folding space hammers his ears.
Run. Survive. Don’t stop.
Everything else is chaos. Everything else is fire and metal and screaming physics. Aster doesn’t think. He runs.
His golden shield was gone, leaving him open to the world in a way that made his skin crawl. The city noticed immediately.
Mist no longer slid harmlessly around him; it pressed in slow and greedy, brushing against his nerves like fingers testing a bruise. Things that had ignored him before now turned. Perked. Shifted in his direction with the sudden focus of predators hearing a rabbit step on a twig.
Six blocks to 7 Heart Lane.
A wet, layered shriek came overhead, something skittering across the buildings with too many joints and too much enthusiasm. Aster doesn’t look. Looking was for people with spare time and less pressing survival concerns.
He just ran.
The city had become hostile terrain in the most literal sense. Vines reached. Pavement pulsed. Every object in sight seemed to have remembered it used to be alive and was deeply resentful about it.
By block four, he made the tactical error of cutting down a narrower side street.
The sound hit first—a hive-thrum, low and living. A nest.
The swollen amber sac clung to a fire escape, pulsing wetly beneath strands of viscous webbing. Giant ant-things crawled over it in slow, synchronized waves, their translucent abdomens bloated with luminous fluid in every nauseating colour of sugar-coated body horror.
Aster stopped.
The ants did not.
Three broke from the nest and came down the fire escape at speed, mandibles dripping yellow resin. One leapt.
Aster threw himself backward and hit a light post hard enough to rattle his teeth. Something clanged beside him.
A pole. Around one point eight meters, glowing softly in the broken sunlight.
It isn’t exactly Excalibur. It’s more like an abandoned lead pipe glowing softly, half covered in unknown nightmare goo. But he doesn’t care. He grabs it in both hands. His brain doesn’t have time to question the practicality of wielding non-approved glowing lead pipes against astral wildlife.
He swung.
Crack.
The creature burst like a syrup-filled balloon, amber goo spraying across the pavement. The nest convulsed.
Every head turned toward him.
“Ah,” Aster said, already backing up. “I see I’ve made a social error.”
They come pouring down the side of the building like a pissed-off waterfall made of sentient molasses. Each drop is a little too fast. A little too precise. A little too focused on him.
He swings again.
Crack—Splurt.
Another goes down. The smell is unmistakably sweet. Sickly. Like someone spilled sugar over a corpse and let it ferment.
They swarm.
One of them latched onto his leg, hot and sticky, trying to burrow. He screamed, kicked it off, and spun the pole in a wide panicked arc that would’ve embarrassed every martial artist on Earth but worked well enough on oversized nightmare ants.
He smashed one against a dumpster. Another burst under the pole with a wet crack. Amber ichor splashed his shoes. The smell was sugar over roadkill.
He laughed once—sharp and hysterical—as he fought his way through them.
Of course. Of course this is how today escalates. Not enough that the city’s trying to feed me to mechanical bloodhounds. Now I’m being mugged by glow-in-the-dark ant jam.
The pole vibrated with every strike, humming warm in his hands. Whether it was helping him, or just enjoying the violence, he had no idea, and frankly didn’t have the bandwidth to care.
He ran the second the swarm thinned.
Three blocks.
It unfolds like the city has let a nightmare slip through its cracks.
Tall. Angular. Wrong.
The thing is… tall? It stands over him on six jointed, stilt-like legs. Its limbs are street signs, torn loose, twisted, and welded by the shape of a dream having a seizure, clanging as they dig into the pavement. Its torso is wrapped tight in overlapping panels of metal scavenged from signposts—STOP, YIELD, DETOUR—its limbs creaking with the sound of dented aluminium folding roughly into the shape of an insect made of stolen infrastructure.
A stick-bug—if the stick-bug had been built by an engineer with a grudge against structural integrity. A CMOS concrete mantis. A thrown-together bone machine of municipal rage.
It screeches.
It flexes one of its extended arms—a makeshift thorax made by wrapping together two speed-limit signs like steel ribs.
Aster barely has time to throw the glowing pole up defensively before one of the machine-insect’s jagged forelimbs lashes out.
CRACK.
The strike hits like a car accident compressed into a single frame. It smashes the pole sideways—Aster’s grip folds. The pole flies out of his hands with the force of a whip yanked by a goddamn hurricane.
“Are you serious?” he gasps. “I just—fuck—give that back!”
The glowing pole pulses weakly out of reach behind the creature.
Aster stares at it. Then at the creature. Then back at his empty, useless hands.
The creature doesn’t care. Its rigid body creaks forward on metal stilt-legs, turning, serrated limb poised for a second strike.
“Fucking brilliant.”
He stumbles backward instinctively, palms raised against nothing, when something underfoot vibrates.
A chain.
Thick rings of rusted steel with blunt-tooth edges meant for holding down something with more fight than common sense. The chain shimmers faintly on a overgrown lawn. Too faintly to have seen it if he hadn’t stepped onto it.
He doesn’t think. There is no time left for thought. He lunges for it, yanking the cold iron from the grass. The links clatter, heavy, stubborn. No good grip. No idea what he is doing.
But when the stick-bug thing rears back, extending a metal limb like a mantis hook—Aster swings.
The chain arcs, sloppy and wide—a laughing insult to precision martial arts. But it hits. Wrapping around the thing’s front leg, Aster yanks, straining against the tension screaming through his muscles and rattling up every vertebra in his spine—but it topples the limb. The creature screeches—a metallic grinding sound layered with something almost insectile.
He stares.
“I… that worked? That worked!”
Then it screeches again and leaps.
Aster braces as the world flips, adrenaline forcing its way into every tendon, every decision.
And God help him, he swings the chain again.
A sloppy, half-aimed whip that catches in the empty slots where a stop sign meets a rusted hinge.
Aster yanks forward with everything he has, dragging the metal mantis a step closer. He can feel its vibrating rage through the chain.
The chain pulls taut, vibrating with the full, shuddering horror of a living steel limb trying to tear itself free, but it only digs the rusted links deeper. The creature lurches sideways—its mismatched legs stuttering.
Aster’s feet tear him forward. No thought. Just NOW. WHILE IT’S OFF BALANCE.
He jumps—ignoring every nerve-firing pain as he throws his body into a shoulder ram against the sign-bug’s nearest leg. Metal shrieks under the sudden pressure. Hydraulic fluid—black, viscous—spills out in a sputtering arc.
The creature reels
Aster’s grip on the chain tightens. His heel plants onto the street signs' smashed plates like they are ribs and he pulls.
It finally falls.
Hard.
Crash. Crumple. Road and refuse erupt underneath it.
Aster is already moving—scrambling over its collapsed mass of shifting limbs. His wild eyes catch gold in the corner of his vision.
The pole.
It lies behind the beast. Practically pulsing with the adrenaline pouring from Aster’s body.
He dives for it.
His fingers close around the pole like a drowning man finds air. He whirls around just in time to see the street-sign mantis ascending again.
Catching the strike over the pole, he barely holds on as both his arms go numb from the strike.
Not giving it another chance.
He loops the free end of the chain around another of its spindly middle joints and yanks—bracing a boot against metal. Wrapping. Wrenching. Tying a knot like he’s hog-tying a briefcase full of knives. Rust rains down on his hands. He can’t think. Can’t stop.
Just wrap. Tighten. Twist. He forces the chain across a secondary joint. Jammed it behind one of its lower limbs. The creature flails, screaming.
Aster doesn’t care. Panic blurs into fury.
He swings the staff.
Crack.
He swings again.
CRUNCH.
Another.
Then another.
The staff slams against steel. Metal buckles. Screws snap. Plates rip. Every blow is a fresh scream from the makeshift monster—and from whatever is left of Aster’s mental scaffolding.
“STAY. DOWN,” he spits through clenched teeth—breath catching on every syllable.
Slam.
“STAY—”
Slam.
“THE FUCK—”
Slam.
“DOWN!”
By the fifth strike, the head armour caves, leaking underlayers of wet circuits and soft matter he doesn’t want to identify. The sixth strike dents the plates into something like bone splinters. The seventh delivers a full-body shudder to Aster as steel-wielding rebar snaps uselessly like cartilage.
Eighth. Ninth. Tenth.
He doesn’t stop until the sound changes.
No more reverberation. No more ringing. Just a soft, wet thunder.
He swings two more times just to make sure.
Silence coils around him like a wet rag. The streetlight flickers above. The chain hangs loosely in one trembling hand. The glowing staff shakes in the other.
The street-sign mantis isn’t moving anymore.
Neither is Aster.
He stands there, mouth open, lungs like knives, trembling in a cloud of fear, victory, disgust—panting, half leaning on the staff, half crumpling to the ground.
His voice emerges, shredded and threadbare.
“One block.”
He spits rust and adrenaline.
“Just one more.”
He gathers the chain.
And he staggers on.
The chain hangs in his hand. Bloodied. The staff. Somehow still crackling faint gold in the grooves between blunted steel. Soul-tired muscles scream at him—but his body… doesn’t stop. It can’t.
He’s a stitched mess of instincts moving through a landscape that wants him disassembled.
He vaults broken sidewalk, dodges plant-tentacles, barely avoids being snatched by a ceiling-bound vine that lashes down like someone’s bad idea of a tripwire. Every step screams at him. Every thought fractures. He runs like breath is currency, and death is tax.
7 Heart Lane.
He barely makes the leap across the property line.
The moment both feet land on the threshold—something roars to life.
A line of glowing script erupts from the ground behind him like someone detonated a boundary wall made of sunfire and calligraphy.
Aster drops to his knees.
Breathing like the pavement is draining oxygen from him.
The barrier pulses once. Twice. Then locks in.
His body trembles. Every nerve a screaming punctuation.
There was nothing left in him but adrenaline, disbelief, and a very specific kind of fury usually reserved for call centres and acts of God.
“What,” he rasped to nobody and everything at once, “the fuck.”