Chapter 7: The Void in Her Eyes
The sun was hemorrhaging across the horizon, staining the sky in bruised purples and blood-oranges as Kobe finally limped past the outer markers of Amnesia.
The three kilometers of jagged ruins he had just traversed felt like a descent into purgatory. Every step was a battle; his shattered leg wasn't just aching—it was screaming, sending rhythmic jolts of white-hot lightning through his nerves that made his vision blur. Yet, the physical agony withered into insignificance the moment he crossed the city limits.
Something was deathly wrong.
The streets weren't just crowded; they were infested. A sea of bodies choked the narrow arteries of the city, spilling out of alleyways and surging through the passages like a panicked tide under the filthy sky. There were hundreds of them. Faces turned in every direction—lost, haggard, their features stretched so tight by tension they looked like masks of cracked porcelain.
Kobe heard the sounds of a society fracturing. Some were shrieking at shadows. Others wept with a terrifying, rhythmic silence. A few were simply frozen, standing like statues amidst the chaos, their brains having seemingly pulled the plug on their ability to move.
Kobe's pace faltered, his iron bar scraping harshly against the cobblestones. Fragmented voices pierced the roar of the crowd:
— "They've come back! The monsters are back!"
— "It's impossible... not again..."
— "We're dead. We're all walking ghosts now."
He gripped his iron bar until his knuckles turned a ghostly white. The air felt thick, like he was breathing through wet wool. He tried to lock eyes with the residents, but they looked through him, their pupils dilated, fixed on some internal horror or an invisible threat lurking in the smog.
Kobe knew that look. He had seen it in the blackest corners of the ruins. He had seen it on Yan. On Luna. On himself. It was the "Second of Impact"—the moment where the mind snaps because the reality is too heavy to carry.
His stomach curdled into a cold knot. Something is wrong. Something is very, very wrong.
He forced his spine straight, ignoring the grind of bone in his leg.
"Mom..."
The word was a fragile breath, exhaled before he could even process the terror rising in his throat.
Panic hit him then, sudden and violent. He jammed his iron bar into the dirt, using it as a lever to hurl his broken body forward. He wasn't just walking; he was a machine of sheer will, dragging his heavy, useless leg behind him like a dead weight. The pain was a roar in his ears, but he drowned it out with one single destination: the shack.
"Mom!" he screamed, his voice cracking and raw. "Mom, answer me!"
He shoulder-charged through the staggering crowds, stumbling over debris, his heart hammering a frantic, uneven rhythm against his ribs. The townspeople's gazes remained vacant, sliding off him like water. To them, he was just another ghost in a city of the damned.
When the shack finally flickered into view, his heart stopped dead. The pathetic construction of rusted tin and salvaged timber was still there—tilting, exhausted, and fragile, a perfect mirror of their lives.
"Mom!"
He threw his entire weight against the door. It swung open with a violent metallic screech.
Empty.
The interior was a graveyard of their meager belongings. Everything was in disarray—boxes overturned, the thin mattress dragged across the floor, old rags scattered like shed skin. Kobe's breath came in ragged, shallow gasps. His eyes darted with predatory speed, searching the shadows. He tore open crates, ripped the mattress aside, and lunged under the table, his hands shaking so violently he could barely grip the wood. He searched with a manic intensity, as if he could manufacture her presence out of thin air if he only moved fast enough.
Nothing. Only the smell of dust and old cold.
"Mom..." he whispered, the word splintering. "Please... don't leave me alone."
The silence of the room was an insult. He bolted back outside, the fear now a living thing clawing at his insides. He tore back into the city, his voice a jagged blade as he shrieked her name over and over.
"Mom!"
He reached the center of Amnesia, where the press of bodies was so dense it felt like a single, suffocating organism. A massive circle had formed around the main square, a vacuum of eerie, hollow silence. In the dead center of that circle, Kobe saw her.
The grey hair pinned in a neat, familiar bun. The clothes, worn thin but meticulously clean. The slight, weary curve of her shoulders.
His mother.
Relief flooded him with such violence it was physically painful. It felt like his heart had been restarted with a lightning bolt. He threw himself into the crowd, shoving shoulders and clearing a path through people who were too catatonic to resist.
She wasn't alone. Several of the "Rich" stood before her—men in pristine, unsoiled suits that looked like an insult to the dirt of Amnesia. Their eyes were cold, clinical, watching her as if she were a specimen under a microscope.
Kobe's mother was speaking to them. Her voice was low, steady, and terrifyingly mechanical.
Kobe didn't wait for her to finish.
"Mom!"
He collapsed at her feet, his knees hitting the hard earth with a sickening thud. He didn't even feel the explosion of agony in his shattered leg. His eyes were burning, and the tears finally broke, hot and heavy, washing streaks through the grime on his face.
"Mom... why are you here? What's happening? I thought I lost you... I was so scared..."
She didn't move. Not at first.
Then, with a slow, agonizingly deliberate motion, she turned her head. Her eyes—the eyes that had watched over him, the eyes he knew better than his own soul—settled on his face.
Kobe felt the world tilt. The ground beneath him felt like it was dissolving into a bottomless pit. He waited. One second. Two. Waiting for the spark of recognition, the warmth, the scolding, the hug.
Instead, she spoke. Her voice was calm, hollow, as if she were reading a list of chores to a stranger.
"Who are you?"