The air three blocks from the robbed bank didn't smell like gunpowder or panic; it smelled like ozone and frozen asphalt.
Gael walked with a steady breath. An ambulance siren wailed in the distance. Even so, on the pedestrian street where he stood, there was total silence. His highly developed brain rapidly processed data and noticed the anomaly immediately: there were no birds on the power lines. The insects had disappeared. The few remaining pedestrians crossed the street without knowing why. They instinctively moved away from him.
The city's survival instinct was reacting to a predator that didn't belong to this plane. At first, the threat was completely invisible. Gael only felt the freezing air and saw the trail of black frost appearing on the pavement.
He stopped in front of the window of a closed watch shop. Through the reflection in the glass, he saw no one behind him. However, the second hands on all the mechanical watches in the display stopped in unison. The temperature plummeted ten degrees all at once.
It was a Hound of Fatality. An invisible extension of the god Moros's will. It wasn't built to fight, but to make death an undeniable fact. For anyone else, being within fifteen feet of the beast would have caused immediate cardiac arrest. The Hound was "Fatal Destiny" incarnate.
But when the creature tried to use its aura of death on Gael, it crashed into his solid wall of altered probability. The nearest streetlight burst into a shower of harmless sparks. An underground pipe groaned. It absorbed the impact of the fatality and blew a manhole cover two blocks away.
Frustrated by its inability to assassinate silently, the Hound made a decision. The air trembled, and suddenly, threads of darkness intertwined. Thus, the beast appeared in broad daylight.
It was a mass of dense, sharp shadows. It was the size of a grizzly bear, but shaped like a giant wolf with strange angles. It had no eyes, just two empty sockets that absorbed the midday light.
Upon making itself visible, the mortals' veil of ignorance shattered. A woman walking out of a bakery dropped her bags, letting out a scream of pure, soul-tearing terror. An office worker stumbled and fell to his knees. He looked in horror at that abomination defying the laws of nature and began to sob. Real, raw, primal panic erupted on the pedestrian street as people fled in terror.
Gael turned around slowly. He felt no fear. His mind, now a probabilistic supercomputer, analyzed the creature.
Approximate target mass: three hundred kilograms, he calculated mentally. Estimated charging speed: eighty kilometers per hour. My probability of dodging it with my new reflexes: ninety-nine percent. My strategy: use the beast's momentum against it.
Gael looked over the monster's shoulder. He saw the avenue crossing at the end of the alley. He heard the roaring engine of a twelve-ton garbage truck approaching the intersection. The light was green. The chessboard was set.
The Hound let out a metallic hiss and lunged. It was a missile of darkness fired straight at Gael's jugular.
But Gael was no longer an ordinary man. His body reacted with superhuman elasticity and speed. Instead of standing still, he pivoted on his right foot and dodged the shadows by mere millimeters. As he spun, he used the momentum to deliver a hard, well-placed elbow to the beast's ribs.
The unnaturally forceful blow managed to deflect the monster's trajectory, sending it crashing violently into a fire hydrant. The metal gave way, and a geyser of pressurized water erupted onto the sidewalk.
"You're fast, doggy," Gael muttered, adjusting his shirt cuffs. "But you don't think."
The Hound, infuriated, shook off the water and charged again. Gael broke into a tactical sprint toward the intersection. His agility allowed him to weave through benches and trash cans without losing speed. Reaching the edge of the avenue, he stopped dead in his tracks. He calculated the time to impact of the approaching garbage truck on his right: three seconds.
Gael squared up at the exact edge of the asphalt.
"Come on," he said, opening his arms as if inviting it into a deadly embrace.
The monster leaped with all its fury and opened its shadow jaws wide. It revealed a horrifying row of teeth like broken mirrors.
Gael waited until the very last microsecond. Just as the claws were inches from his face, Gael bent his knees and slid beneath the beast's belly. At the same time, the friction of the universe intervened with its usual brutality.
On the avenue, the garbage truck driver sneezed. A violent sneeze, brought on by a cosmically poorly-timed speck of dust. His foot slipped off the pedal, and his hands gave the steering wheel an involuntary yank.
The twelve-ton mass of steel skidded. It hopped the curb at a terrifying speed and rammed into the airspace Gael had just vacated.
The impact was deafening.
The truck's front grille intercepted the beast in mid-flight. It crushed the beast against the brick wall of the alley with the force of a scrap-metal meteorite.
The darkness let out one final, high-pitched screech before disintegrating completely. In an instant, the beast was reduced to a cloud of black ash that instantly dissolved in the cold air.
The truck came to a dead stop, embedded in the wall. The driver, pale and trembling, stumbled out of the wrecked cab, patting himself down. He was miraculously unharmed. But then he placed his right hand on his left arm. He fell to the ground in the midst of terrible pain. He died of a sudden, implacable heart attack.
Gael stood up gracefully, brushing the dust from the knees of his pants. He approached the truck's smoking grille with a look of satisfaction. He observed the exact spot where the divine entity had been erased from existence. There were no remains, only a faint smell of ozone.
He had faced a hitman of Destiny in physical and tactical combat, and he had humiliated it using the city itself as his weapon. There was one casualty, yes, but his analysis led him to conclude it was a lesser evil.
Gael looked up at the overcast sky. He knew that, somewhere beyond the clouds, those responsible for that attack were watching him.
"Your dog crossed the street without looking," he said to the air, with a cold, defiant smile. "Send a bigger one next time."
He turned around and resumed his walk back to the hotel, leaving behind an embedded truck, a lifeless driver, and the terrified pedestrians who couldn't believe what they had just witnessed. The rules of the game had just changed forever.