Chapter 3: Blue Screens and Body Bags

The service stairwell ended in a door warped by heat and swollen by damp. Eli braced one sneaker against the concrete, shoved with both hands, and felt the metal groan open a few inches before the chain lock snapped like a gunshot.

Morning—if it was morning—poured through the gap in a hard blue-white sheet. It made him flinch more than the darkness below ever had.

He stepped out into the gutted lobby of the apartment block and stopped dead.

The world had not ended all at once. It had been rearranged.

The old mailboxes along the wall were peeled open like cans. A vending machine had been split in half, glass sagging in glittering drifts across the tile, and something with too many legs had dragged a black smear from the front doors to the elevator bank. One elevator stood open on the sixth floor shaft, visible through a hole that had not existed yesterday, its cables hanging like severed veins.

Beyond the shattered front windows, the city looked skinned.

Towers he knew by heart—the pharmacy sign on the corner, the glass-faced co-working building across the avenue, the noodle place with the terrible fluorescent dragon—still stood where they should have. But there were things between them now. Great slabs of dark stone had erupted through asphalt as if some buried ruin had pushed up through the modern city. Sections of the street were overgrown with waist-high reeds silvered by frost despite the summer heat. A bus lay on its side in the middle of the intersection, half-swallowed by a mound of gray crystal that pulsed faintly under the skin of daylight.

And over everything, drifting in the air like afterimages burned into the eye, blue windows opened and vanished and opened again.

LOCAL ZONE UPDATED

District 11 — Urban Ruin / Dynamic Threat Region

Recommended Level: 3-5

Event Modifier: Survivor Scramble

Eli read it once and wished he hadn’t. Recommended level. Event modifier. The words landed with the same bright, hateful cheer as a cabinet startup screen in the arcade, except this game had body bags in the tutorial.

His shirt stuck to his back. It wasn’t only sweat. Corrupted boss blood—if the oily black residue on his sleeve counted as blood—had dried into stiff scales along the fabric. The crowbar hung from one hand. His other hand kept twitching toward the pocket where he’d shoved the warped drop crystal from the sublevel, as if he needed to reassure himself it was still there and that none of this had been the fever dream of a man concussed under his own apartment building.

It was still there. Warm. Too warm.

Outside, something screamed.

It wasn’t human for long.

Eli crossed the lobby without breathing. The motion sensor over the front doors still worked. It chirped a ridiculous little welcome tone as he stepped over a dead man in gym shorts and pushed into the street.

The air hit him like the inside of a busted machine: hot wires, spilled fuel, ozone, wet concrete, and a meat-sour stench from somewhere nearby. Car alarms blared in ragged bursts, then cut off as if remembered by no one. Several had already run themselves into silence. In the distance came gunfire—real gunfire, not the clean digital pop of games—followed by a layered roar that raised gooseflesh along Eli’s arms.

People were moving, but not like people in a city moved. There was no flow, no rhythm, no mutual confidence in sidewalks and traffic lights and next steps. Individuals darted from doorway to doorway with shopping bags, kitchen knives, backpacks, children. A woman in office clothes sprinted barefoot across the avenue with blood down one calf and never looked left or right. Two men dragged a pharmacy rolling shutter down by hand while something hammered from the other side, making the metal bow outward in fist-sized bulges.

And near the intersection, under the shade of the cracked bus, a group had gathered around a man standing on the hood of a police cruiser.

He wore tactical gear that looked too coordinated to have been scavenged in a single night: black body armor over a dark blue jacket, hard knee guards, a clean white armband with a silver spear insignia, and at his hip a sword so polished it threw sunlight like a mirror. He had a level floating above his head in pale blue.

Level 6.

Eli’s pulse skipped.

The man was speaking with a microphone headset that somehow still worked. “—saying it one more time. We have secured a safe route to the Eastbank shelter. If you can fight, you sign up for contribution. If you can’t fight, you still move under guild protection. You do not wander. If you wander, you die.”

He sounded less like a rescuer than a manager trying to move inventory before lunch.

Three others stood around the cruiser in matching armbands. One had a shield like a riot wall strapped to his back. Another carried a long gun too sleek and angular to be normal military issue. System gear, Eli guessed. New-world hardware printed from old fear.

A little queue had formed at the rear passenger door where a woman with a tablet—an actual tablet, somehow unbroken—was taking names.

“What contribution?” somebody in the crowd shouted.

“Ten percent of all acquired loot until district stabilization,” the man on the hood said without hesitation. “Priority healing reserved for registered members. Advancement opportunities for capable combatants. We’re the first guild on-site. You want structure, we’re it.”

“That’s extortion,” another voice snapped.

The man smiled in a way that showed all his teeth and no warmth. “That’s civilization.”

Eli backed into the shadow of a smashed laundromat and watched. His first instinct was to keep going, find his sister, ignore every other human problem in the city. But there were only so many routes from the apartment district to the student housing towers where Nia lived, and all of them cut through open streets. If guilds were already planting flags, those routes were becoming toll roads.

Something cold slid down his spine.

He was seeing things now—no, not things, lines. Hair-thin fissures hanging in the air where empty space should have been seamless. They glittered at the edges of buildings and under road signs, in the gap between the bus chassis and the pavement, around the mouth of an alley on the opposite side of the avenue. Most disappeared when he looked straight at them. A few remained, quivering like cracks in a screen.

Null Diver Perception has detected an environmental irregularity.

No fanfare. No explanation. Just a line of text ghosting across his vision and fading before he could curse at it.

Eli narrowed his eyes at the alley.

The fissure there was wider than the rest, a jagged seam of pale blue that cut from brick wall to dumpster lid and vanished into nothing. Looking at it made his teeth ache. The space around it seemed subtly wrong, as if the alley had been pasted into the city a millimeter off from the rest of reality.

Shortcut? Trap? Bonus zone?

A child cried somewhere behind him. Eli forced his attention back to the street just as the guild recruiter’s speech ended and the crowd surged closer, hope and terror pushing shoulder to shoulder.

Then a shape dropped from the side of the overturned bus.

It was the size of a mastiff and moved like a spider trying to impersonate a wolf. Gray plates of shell armored its shoulders. Human hands—too many of them, fused at the wrists into chitinous forelimbs—opened and closed beneath its jaw like pale flowers. It landed in the middle of the road with enough force to crack asphalt.

Identified: Carrion Hound Lv. 4

For one heartbeat everyone froze together.

The hound’s head split down the center.

The scream that ripped out of the crowd had layers to it, people shouting over each other, the pure notes of panic finding harmony by accident. The guild fighters moved fast—credit where it was due. Shield-man planted himself in front of the civilian cluster. Gun-woman brought the sleek rifle up. The hood speaker drew his sword in a silver flash.

The Carrion Hound ignored the obvious threats and lunged for the back of the line where an elderly man had fallen trying to turn.

Eli moved before the decision finished forming.

He snatched up a loose brick from the laundromat rubble and threw it not at the monster but at the bus’s exposed undercarriage. The brick rang off metal with a shrill clang. The hound’s split skull jerked toward the sound, body twisting mid-pounce in that ugly insect way.

Gunfire hammered.

Blue-white rounds punched through shell and burst out its far side in sprays of black sludge. The guild sword user came down off the cruiser hood with a two-handed slash that took the creature at the neck hinge just as it recoiled.

The Carrion Hound hit the pavement in two writhing pieces.

Silence lasted less than a second before it was replaced by babble, sobbing, and a fresh wave of people pressing closer to the guild.

The sword user looked directly toward the laundromat shadow.

Eli stepped back, but too late. Their eyes met across the street.

The man saw the crowbar, the blood, the fact that Eli was still alive and standing alone. His gaze sharpened, calculating.

He pointed. “You. Come here.”

Eli smiled without humor and slipped through the laundromat’s side door instead.

The hallway beyond stank of bleach and burst pipes. He jogged past stacked plastic baskets and into a rear service corridor that opened on the next street over. The sounds of the recruiter’s operation dulled behind concrete. In front of him, the city stretched in a maze of wreckage and strange new geometry.

He checked his status while moving, because apparently this was his life now.

Eli Voss

Class: Null Diver

Level: 2

HP: 74/100

Stamina: 31/80

Attributes available: 3

Skills: Improvised Weapon Mastery I, Glitch Step I, Null Diver Perception

Three points. He hesitated. In games he always saved resources until the shape of the build became clear. In games, you could restart if your choices sucked. Here, a bad allocation might get him folded into a body bag by lunch.

A crash echoed from farther down the block. A figure in scrubs burst through the side entrance of an urgent care clinic, stumbled, pivoted, and fired three shots one-handed behind her without even looking.

All three hit.

The thing chasing her—a slick-bodied humanoid with a IV pole grown through its rib cage like a spear—jerked backward as bullet holes flowered in its face. It hit the curb but kept clawing forward, dragging itself on elongated fingers.

The woman didn’t run again. She planted her feet instead.

She was maybe late twenties, dark hair yanked into a knot that had half come loose, green scrub top under a ballistic vest too small for her shoulders, trauma shears clipped to one pocket, and blood up both arms to the elbows. Not all of it was hers. Her pistol moved with clipped, economical precision, but the slide locked back empty before the crawler stopped twitching.

She swore once, low and furious, and reached for a fresh magazine.

Something dropped from the urgent care awning above her.

Eli saw the crack in space a split second before the monster emerged from it—a vertical seam peeling open in midair like a zipper in glass. The thing that came through wore the upper body of a man in torn EMT blues and the lower body of a centipede plated in translucent hospital wristbands.

“Above you!” Eli shouted.

The woman looked up exactly as the creature pounced.

She moved fast enough that it only caught her shoulder instead of her throat. Both of them slammed into the hood of a parked sedan. The car alarm went off in a long insane wail. Her spare magazine skittered under a truck. The creature reared, needle-like mandibles opening.

Eli hit it in the side of the head with the crowbar as hard as he could.

The impact jarred his entire arm to the shoulder. The monster’s skull rang like striking a steel beam. It turned on him with electronic monitor beeps warbling from somewhere inside its chest.

Identified: Triage Centipede Lv. 5

“Oh, come on,” Eli hissed.

The woman didn’t waste the opening. She yanked trauma shears from her pocket and drove them into the softer joint beneath the thing’s jaw. Black fluid sprayed her face shield. The centipede shrieked and whipped around, tail smashing the sedan windshield into sparkling cubes.

“Move!” she barked.

He moved.

The tail stabbed where his ribs had been a blink earlier. Glitch Step triggered half on instinct, half on panic. Reality hiccuped. Eli felt the world skip like a scratched disc, and suddenly he was a yard to the left, one foot on the curb, vision blurred by pixel-static that crawled across the edges of everything.

The monster overshot.

The woman recovered her pistol, rammed the fresh mag in with one practiced slap, and fired twice into the open seam under its chin where the shears were buried. The rounds went deep. Blue sparks erupted from the wound.

“Again!” Eli shouted.

He jammed the crowbar into the gap and levered with all his weight. The improvised steel bent. So did the thing’s neck. Bone? Shell? Some horrible merger of both cracked apart.

The woman’s third shot punched through whatever passed for its spine.

The Triage Centipede convulsed, limbs drumming on the sedan hood, then collapsed in a heap that smelled sharply of antiseptic and rotten meat.

For a second neither of them moved. The alarm kept screaming.

Then a blue screen bloomed between them.

Enemy Defeated

Shared XP awarded.

The woman lowered her pistol an inch and looked at Eli properly.

Her eyes were a cool gray, steady in a way he associated with people who had already been running on too little sleep before the world went insane. There was a shallow cut at her temple held shut by dried blood. When she spoke, her voice was rough but controlled.

“You’re not guild.”

“That obvious?”

“Guild people either announce themselves every twelve seconds or try to recruit you before you stop bleeding.” She ejected the mag, checked it, snapped it back in. “You saw that thing before it dropped.”

Eli glanced up. The crack in the air was gone. “Yeah.”

She took that in without widening her eyes or demanding a twenty-question explanation. He appreciated that immediately.

“Mara Dain,” she said. “Paramedic. Or I was, until the universe got patch-noted into hell.”