Leaving the house felt wrong.
Not painful in the clean, sharp way I would have expected. Not even at first. It felt wrong the way stepping off a stair in the dark feels wrong, like my body knew before my mind did that something essential had been misplaced. Every step away from the bedroom, away from the blood, away from my parents, seemed to pull a thread loose inside me.
By the time I crossed the broken front room, I already felt hollowed out.
The house behind me was still there, but only barely. Just the bare bones of it remained, jagged beams, broken walls, torn-open rooms exposed to the dead sky. A shell. A carcass. The place that had held my life now looked like it had been picked over and left to rot.
And I was walking away from it.
From them.
The thought should have made me turn back. It should have stopped me in the doorway and forced me to my knees all over again.
Instead I just kept walking.
That scared me more than anything.
I climbed over the ruined front wall, boots slipping on plaster and ash, and dropped back into the street. The air outside felt too wide, too cold. Smoke drifted through the neighbourhood in shredded gray ribbons. Somewhere far off, something massive roared, the sound rolling over the rooftops like thunder with teeth.
My chest felt tight, but not in a way that let me breathe harder or scream or cry. It was just a pressure there, a dense and silent weight sitting behind my ribs.
Everything looked wrong now.
The street. The fences. The half-collapsed houses. The broken shutters hanging loose in the wind.
Not because they were destroyed.
Because they were still here.
The world had the nerve to continue existing.
A curtain fluttered in a blown-out window across the road. A loose sign knocked softly against the brick. Dust shifted. Ash fell. Somewhere water dripped from a broken pipe in a slow, patient rhythm.
My parents were dead.
And the world kept moving.
I stood there for a second too long, staring at nothing.
Then I heard footsteps ahead.
Nate.
He had stopped at the end of the lane and turned back, like he hadn't been sure I would come. When he saw me, something in his shoulders loosened. Not relief exactly. More like the easing of a fear he had been trying not to admit.
Neither of us spoke.
I just walked to him, and when I reached him, we turned and started down the street side by side.
The silence between us wasn't awkward. It was too heavy for that. It sat there like a third body walking with us, made of everything that had happened and everything neither of us knew how to say.
My cheek still throbbed where he'd hit me. I could feel dried blood at the corner of my mouth. My face and hands were streaked with my parents' blood, darkening as it dried. Every so often I caught the smell of it beneath the smoke and dust and it sent a cold, hard pulse through my stomach.
We walked past broken homes and shattered carts, keeping close to walls and corners, both of us listening for anything that might be moving nearby. But inside me there was no real caution, not anymore. Only exhaustion. Numbness. A kind of deadened float that made each step feel separate from the one before it.
I didn't know how long we walked like that before Nate finally spoke.
"Are you okay?"
I turned my head and stared at him.
It took me a second to understand the question.
Then a dry, ugly sound escaped me… almost a laugh, almost not.
"Of course I'm not."
Nate looked away for a moment, jaw tightening. "Yeah. I know."
We walked a few more steps in silence.
Then he added, quieter, "I just want to make sure you don't do anything crazy."
That pulled a weak, involuntary chuckle out of me.
It surprised both of us.
The sound died as quickly as it came, but for a second it had been there—small, bitter, ridiculous.
"I'll try," I muttered. "Not to do anything too crazy."
The moment I said it, my mind betrayed me.
A flash of the bedroom.
My mother's face.
My father's torn-open chest.
Blood sprayed over the wall in fans and streaks.
My hand clenched so hard my nails bit into my palm.
The brief crack in the numbness sealed back over. Not fully. Never fully. But enough to make the world feel heavier again.
Nate noticed. Of course he did. He opened his mouth like he was going to say something, then shut it again. Probably the right call.
We kept moving.
The city around us had changed from panic to aftermath in the streets we passed through. The first rush of running crowds had thinned. What remained felt worse somehow. More final.
A market stall smoldered where half the roof had collapsed on top of it. An overturned wagon blocked one end of the road, one wheel still spinning faintly. A body lay draped over a fence several houses down, bent so unnaturally I forced my eyes away before I could recognize the shape as human.
The silence between crashes had grown too large.
It made every little sound matter.
Our footsteps.
The scrape of Nate's shoe on loose stone.
Wind pushing grit over pavement.
The distant cough of a flame catching.
I was so deep in my own thoughts that when we stepped around the corner and saw the monster, I stopped so abruptly my knees almost locked.
It stood in the center of the road twenty feet ahead.
Beginner class.
Even I could tell that much.
I had heard descriptions my whole life, weakest of the monsters, the kind bonded trainees practiced on once they were strong enough, the kind normal guards could handle in groups.
It still looked like something born from a nightmare.
Its body was low and broad, vaguely canine, but wrong in all the places that mattered. Its back was hunched beneath thick cords of muscle. One shoulder sat higher than the other, making its gait uneven even while it stood still. Its hide looked hairless and stretched too tightly over its body, a slick gray-black that shone wetly in the broken light. Ribs pressed visibly beneath it, but not from starvation, more like the flesh had never been put together properly in the first place. Its forelimbs were too long, ending in hands that weren't quite paws and weren't quite hands either, each one tipped with curved claws the length of carving knives.
Its face was the worst part.
The skull pushed too far forward into a muzzle full of needle-like teeth, but above that the eyes sat too flat and human-facing, pale yellow and sickly bright. It was sniffing at something on the ground when we saw it, the sides of its torso expanding and contracting with wet, laboring breaths.
Then it lifted its head.
Its mouth opened.
A low growl rolled out of it.
Beside me, Nate went rigid.
"Run," he said immediately.
I heard him.
I think I heard him.
But the word didn't reach me in the way it should have. It came muffled, distant, swallowed by the sudden roaring in my own blood.
The monster's head tilted.
I saw its teeth.
And all I could think about was claws in flesh.
Teeth in flesh.
My mother's body torn open.
My father split apart on the floor.
Something in me snapped loose.
Not grief.
Not exactly.
Rage.
Pure and hot and blinding.
It surged up so fast that for a second it felt clean, even good. Better than emptiness. Better than numbness. Better than feeling hollow and wrong and useless.
The monsters had killed them.
The monsters had ripped them apart and left them on the floor of their own house like butchered meat.
The thing in front of me might not have been the same one. It didn't matter.
It was one of them.
One of the fucking bastards that had done this.
"Mark," Nate said sharply, grabbing for my arm. "We have to go."
I barely felt it.
"I'll kill them," I heard myself say.
My voice sounded strange, almost calm.
Nate stared at me. "What?"
"I'll kill all these fucking bastards."
Then I ran.
I heard Nate swear behind me, but by then I was already moving, charging the monster with more rage than sense and not a single weapon in my hands.
The creature lunged to meet me.
It moved faster than I expected, far faster. One second it was crouched, the next it sprang forward with its claws outstretched and its mouth split wide, strings of saliva whipping from its teeth.
I threw myself sideways on instinct.
Its first swipe missed my throat by inches.
I felt the wind of it against my cheek.
Its claws carved bright sparks from the wall behind me and shredded a chunk of brick loose in the same motion.
I hit the ground hard, rolled, and somehow found my feet again behind it.
The monster twisted with a snarl.
I didn't think.
Didn't plan.
I just jumped.
I hit its back badly, one arm hooking around its neck while the other hand came down in a fist against the side of its skull.
It was like punching a stone wrapped in hot leather.
Pain shot through my knuckles.
I hit it again anyway.
And again.
I screamed while I did it, not words at first, just raw noise ripped out of me as my fists hammered against its head and neck and shoulders.
"Die!"
I hit it again.
"Die!"
Again.
The monster bucked violently beneath me. Its skin felt slick and feverishly hot. My punches did almost nothing. I knew that, even in the middle of it. I knew I wasn't hurting it enough. Knew rage wasn't strength, not really.
But I kept hitting it because for those few seconds it was all I had.
The creature reared and twisted so hard that I lost my grip.
Then it threw me.
One violent jerk of its body sent me flying sideways into the road. My back slammed against the stones and all the breath punched out of me in one brutal burst. Pain flashed across my spine and ribs. My vision blurred.
The monster landed facing me.
Its mouth opened wide, wider than it should have been able to.
I saw rows of teeth.
Its forelimbs dug in.
It was going to kill me.
The thought came with sudden, stunning clarity.
Not maybe.
Not possibly.
Now.
The creature sprang…