After a short rest the group had started moving again, leaving behind the food court.
Lucian had expected a straightforward layout, rows of shops and broad corridors, but the place twisted on itself like a maze. Escalators rose to nowhere, hallways bent into darkened loops, and the skeletal remains of displays left only shadowed shapes for their nerves to invent. Every step echoed too loudly. Every breath felt borrowed.
The mall seemed endless. Hallways bent into one another, storefronts yawning open like dark mouths, and some of the fluorescent lights above flickered as if half-alive. The group moved cautiously, every sound amplified by the empty mall's hollow acoustics.
Yet somehow they had made it to another food court, where empty wood tables lay scattered like abandoned barricades. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, some flickering, others dead entirely. Identical to the last but without the scraps they had left last time.
Sinclair sighed heavily. "Looks like the mall is repeating itself."
"But that's impossible, we've only been moving in a straight line." The rest of the survivors began murmuring amongst themselves. "I thought one of those storefronts we passed looked familiar.
As they quieted back down the silence of the food court stretched around them, broken only by the faint groan of the mall's steel skeleton. Then, without warning, one of the darkened advertisement boards flickered to life.
A giant eye stared back.
It was uncanny — a human eye, filmed in shadow, the skin around it swallowed in blackness. Its iris twitched slightly like a crack addict looking for its next fix, the gaze unblinking and impossibly present. Lucian stiffened. He knew that eye.
God had arrived.
Every other screen in the food court hummed to life — vending machines, electronic maps, even a cracked tablet one of the survivors had abandoned. All of them pulsed with the same image: the eye. A hundred gazes, all locked on the group.
When God spoke, his voice bled through the mall's speakers, fractured between masculine and feminine, dozens of tones woven into one distorted choir.
"Lucian," the voice quietly hummed sentimentally, though everyone heard it. "You found friends. How sweet." The chorus of voices—high, low, male, female, childlike, ancient, everything in between—distorted through the food court screens.
Lucian's blood ran cold. But when he glanced at the others, he noticed the difference.
The smaller survivors looked shaken, confused, their wide eyes darting from screen to screen in horror. But Adrian and Sinclair… they only stiffened, expressions tightening in grim recognition.
Adrian muttered under his breath, almost to himself, "Not again…"
Sinclair's hand twitched near the revolver at her hip, jaw locked. She didn't look confused — she looked furious.
Lucian caught it instantly. They've seen him before.
"Who the hell is this?" one of the younger survivors demanded, voice cracking.
Adrian's face paled. "You don't want to know."
"Silence," God cut him off with a ripple of static that made the screens flare brighter. "I am God. And you are all players now. Lucian, you are not my only chosen piece. No, no. I enjoy many games. Many toys. You should feel honored to share the stage."
Lucian grit his teeth.
God's voice purred, amused. "Now then lets play a game of Hide and Seek. The rules are simple. My lovely angel will be the seeker and you the hiders. Make it out of the mall without being caught. If my angel sees you… it will make the last mistake you made eternal."
The skeptic survivor Misser—the same one who had loudly protested Lucian joining them earlier—snorted, trying to mask his fear with bravado. "Screw this. I'm not hiding from some TV signal." He muttered something under his breath and wandered toward one of the branching halls, ignoring Sinclair's and Adrian's warning.
The shadows deepened.
Something slid silently into being down the corridor. At first, Lucian thought it was a trick of the light, a warped reflection on polished tile. But then it moved—an immense, floating pane of black glass, shifting and gliding with unnatural smoothness. Rectangular at first, it twisted and reshaped itself into jagged polygons as it slid closer.
Its surface shivered like oil. In its center burned a single eye: a white sclera, a ringed red iris, no pupil—cold, unblinking.
The skeptic went pale. The Angel looked at him.
The air cracked. Sound shattered. His body froze mid-step, eyes wide — and then, with a sharp crack, he shattered. In a single instant the man's body broke apart like a pane of glass struck by a hammer, the shards slightly drifting apart before his pieces suspended in midair—arms, legs, head, each fragment hanging motionless like shards on invisible strings.
Even the air around him fractured, hanging in jagged splinters of light. The floating shards that caught the dim mall light before suspending themselves, perfectly frozen, like a broken statue mid-collapse — arms half raised, mouth open in terror.
He didn't fall. He didn't move. He simply… stayed there.
The group recoiled in horror.
Sinclair had already lifted her gun, revolver steady. She pulled the trigger — the blast echoed through the food court, the bullet striking the angel. The creature exploded into a thousand pieces, glittering glass shards scattering across the tiles like deadly rain.
The survivors gasped in relief — but Lucian didn't. His gut told him this wasn't over.
It seems that Sinclair thought the same.
They were right.
After a second or two the shards twitched.
The pieces quivered, then began to rise, shards swirling back together, forming a cyclone of glittering glass. The fragments slammed together, merging into a seamless pane once more. The angel's eye blinked open, calm, unbothered. Within moments the angel was whole again, its faceless form unmarred.
"It can't be killed…" Lucian whispered, dread pooling in his chest.
"Shit," Sinclair hissed, cocking the hammer back again.
"Wait— I got this!" another survivor shouted emboldened by the successful attack earlier, swung a golf club at the recently reformed glass Angel. The weapon passed straight through its body like striking water, the body rippling outward with no effect. The survivor stumbled forward, off balance.
The angel's body snapped toward him.
Lucian stayed rooted, weighing the odds. Adrian didn't hesitate — he dove, tackling the man out of the way just as the iris pulsed. The space they'd been standing in cracked apart, fragments of air hanging like broken glass.
"Move!" Adrian shouted, dragging the shaken man along.
They bolted, Lucian with them, threading through the labyrinth of storefronts.
God cackled with palpable amusement. "Let the game begin!"
The Angel glided after them. It didn't rush. It didn't stumble. It floated with unerring patience, reshaping itself to fit the path: narrowing into a vertical sliver to pass through doorways, flattening to slide between pillars, then expanding again with a noise like glass under pressure.