The 10:00 PM bus was a hollow shell of rattling metal and stale air, cutting through the thick, humid night of the Rustia outskirts.
Julian Stevenson leaned his forehead against the vibrating windowpane, the rhythmic thrum of the engine rattling his skull. Through his headphones, a lo-fi beat looped—a tinny, repetitive melody that served as a barricade between his mind and the suffocating silence of the other passengers.
He lifted his left hand, the movement sluggish and heavy with the kind of fatigue that settles deep in the marrow. He glanced at his watch. The cracked glass of the face caught the dim blue glow of the interior lights.
10:02 PM.
A long, jagged exhale escaped his lips, fogging the window. "I wish I could earn money without working hard," he muttered, his voice barely a ghost of a sound against the roar of the road.
He watched his own reflection in the window glass of the bus, his eyes looking back at him like those of a stranger. Was this it? Was this the pinnacle of his existence? He thought of the heavy shipping crates at the docks, the way the splinters bit into his palms even through the gloves, and the way his supervisor barked orders as if Julian were just another piece of shit. Every muscle in his back was a knot of dull, throbbing pain. He wasn't afraid of effort, but he was terrified of the futility of it—working until his bones ached just to earn enough to do it all again tomorrow. It felt like he was running on a treadmill that was slowly increasing in speed, while he was slowly running out of breath.
At eighteen, Julian was a study in mundane exhaustion. He wore a faded black hoodie, the fabric pilling at the cuffs, and jeans that had seen better days. His face was the definition of ordinary—the kind of face that dissolved into a crowd the moment you looked away.
He had brownish-black eyes that currently looked sunken and red-rimmed from a double shift at the shipping docks. His hair was black, though at some parts, several strands of naturally growing white hair stood out.
He shifted in the hard plastic seat, feeling the ache in his lower back. "Why must I have to work the job that I don't like or interest just to feed my stomach?" he whispered, his eyes trailing the flickering streetlights outside.
The question tasted like copper in his mouth. He remembered his childhood drawings—sketches of stars—buried somewhere under a pile of unpaid utility bills. Now, his hands didn't create; they only moved boxes. His brain didn't solve problems; it just counted down the minutes until his next break. It felt like a slow, systematic robbery—the world was stealing his youth and his curiosity, trading them for a few crumpled bills that barely covered the cost of the bread and cheap ramen sitting in his pantry. He wasn't living; he was merely maintaining a biological machine that was starting to rust at eighteen.
"The world isn't fair. I wish I could live as I please."
He closed his eyes, imagining a version of himself that wasn't bound by the work. He saw a Julian who could spend hours in a library without worrying about the electric bill, or a Julian who could walk through the city without calculating the cost of every meal. The "fairness" he'd been promised in school—that hard work led to success—felt like a cruel joke told to keep people like him in line. He didn't want a mansion or a crown; he just wanted his own time back. He wanted the right to look at the sky and think about something other than how many hours of sleep he had left before the morning whistle blew.
It wasn't just a complaint; it was a quiet rebellion against a life that felt like a closed loop. Every day was a grind of lifting crates, avoiding his supervisor's sharp tongue, and returning to an empty house where the electricity bill sat on the counter like a threat.
With a sigh that felt like a physical weight, he reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. The device was a relic of better times—the screen was a spiderweb of deep fractures that distorted the light into a dozen jagged rainbows. He handled it with a practiced, gentle precision, swiping his thumb lightly across the glass to avoid catching his skin on the sharp edges. He couldn't afford a replacement, and if this one died, his last connection to the world died with it.
He tapped the icon for the Local News website. It was a habit born of a deep-seated, restless curiosity—a need to know if the world was breaking in the same way he was.
The headline at the top of the page made his thumb freeze.
Julian gently tapped the link, his thumb careful not to snag on a particularly deep crack in the screen. The website was a local affiliate that often skirted the line between tabloid and official government reporting. The layout was stark—heavy black borders and a minimalist aesthetic that felt cold, clinical, and urgent.
As the page loaded, a headline in bold, blood-red font stretched across the cracked display:
THE WORLD IS NO LONGER A SAFE PLACE
The words seemed to vibrate against the glass. As Julian stared at the screen, a sudden, inexplicable chill surged down his spine, prickling the skin at the nape of his neck and making his breath hitch.
...Why did I feel like that?... He was confused. It was just a headline—hyperbole meant to generate clicks. He rubbed his arms through the thin fabric of his hoodie, trying to shake the sensation that he was being watched by something far away. He didn't dwell on the fear for long; his curiosity, fueled by the monotony of his own life, took over. He leaned in, letting the blue light of the phone wash over his face, and began to read.
[SPECIAL REPORT: COSMIC CONTAMINATION & THE DANDELION INCIDENT]
Posted 22:04 PM
The Cosmos is becoming more and more dangerous. For decades, the void above us was considered a silent, empty frontier. We were wrong.
The nightmare began three months ago during the Artemis-IV mapping mission. Two veteran astronauts, Commander H. Vance and Pilot L. Miller, reported an anomaly near the Shackleton Crater. According to the initial transmission, they had discovered "biological traces"—organic matter that didn't match any known lunar mineralogy.
The discovery was historic, but the triumph was short-lived. After confirming the traces were biological in nature, the two astronauts were ordered to retreat to the Lunar Ascent Module. They never arrived. We lost contact with the Artemis-IV team exactly forty-two seconds after they began their extraction. The last audio captured was a burst of rhythmic, geometric static—a sound that technicians described as "intelligent noise."
In response, the United Kingdom of America launched an immediate "Search and Rescue" operation. We sent six more astronauts, augmented by ten high-ranking operatives from the Special Investigation Team (SIT). They were the best we had, equipped with the latest atmospheric shielding.
When they reached the lunar surface, history repeated itself. Total communication blackout. The moon became a graveyard of signals.
We thought the secrets were lost in the lunar dust. But five days ago, at 03:00 AM, a spacecraft—the Vanguard-6, one of the missing rescue vessels—descended from the clouds. It didn't land at a spaceport. It crashed into the Dandelion Fields on the outskirts of the Damia border.
The impact was silent. No explosion followed. Instead, the area was immediately contaminated with "unknown gases"—a thick, iridescent vapor that crawled across the ground like a living thing. The SIT moved with terrifying speed, cordoning off a ten-mile radius. Rumors began to leak from the perimeter: the gases weren't just toxic; they were transformative. Reports suggest that these gases can turn people into mutated monsters, rewriting human DNA in a matter of seconds.
SIT immediately shut down the district, implementing a total "Static" blackout, and began a tactical investigation of the spacecraft.
What they found inside was a gallery of horrors.
They discovered eight corpses within the main hull. Three of these corpses were no longer recognizable as human. They had completely transformed into strange, nightmare creatures. Each possessed six bulbous, amber eyes that wrapped around their skulls and four elongated arms ending in jagged, chitinous claws. Most terrifyingly, their lower bodies had melted away, mutated into a mass of thick, twitching tentacles that had fused with the floor of the ship.
Identification tags recovered from the scene confirmed the worst: these three monstrosities were the remains of the astronauts from the original rescue team sent with the SIT.
The horror didn't end in the cargo bay. Another three individuals were found in a state of "half-mutation." They were laying on the ground, still wearing remnants of their UKA flight suits, but their faces had swelled like grotesque balloons, the skin stretched so thin it was translucent. Their hands had already transformed into writhing tentacles, wet and dark. Most chillingly, their lower bodies had no skin or flesh remaining—only the pristine white skeleton was left, as if something had eaten the meat while they were still alive. These, too, were identified as members of the secondary rescue team.
The final two corpses were found in the navigation room. Unlike the others, these two were "normal." They had no tentacles, no extra eyes. They were Commander Vance and Pilot Miller—the original two who had disappeared three months ago.
Based on the recovered data logs, a frantic story emerged. Vance and Miller had reached the Vanguard-6 and managed to drag themselves into the navigation room, locking the reinforced pressure door shut against their former crewmates. What they encountered outside—what pursued them across the lunar surface and into the ship—remains unknown.
The black-box footage shows the two astronauts' faces looking pale, their eyes wide with a level of terror that defies description. They seemed to calm down for a brief moment after sealing the door, thinking they were safe in the vacuum of the navigation bridge.
Then, the recording changed.
Something hit the spacecraft. The entire vessel shook with such force that the heavy consoles were ripped from their bolts. In the final seconds of the video, the data glitched, dissolving into the same geometric static heard months prior. The screen went black, leaving only the sound of something heavy dragging itself against the metal door.
[CONCLUSION]
This is the strongest proof that Space monsters exist. The space isn't safe.