The game ended with a scream.
Not theirs—someone else's. Distant. Final.
Matthew, Sora, and Rin burst out of the Hollow Tower as it collapsed behind them, crumbling like paper under invisible weight. Dust rolled out across the cracked asphalt like a wave.
They didn't speak for a long time.
The Death Land had a way of making survival feel less like victory, and more like a countdown reset.
Their wristbands blinked:
GAME CLEARED
+3 DAYS OF LIFE
CURRENT: 5 DAYS REMAINING
The black clouds above started to shift. Faint gray light dimmed further, bleeding into a dusk that never truly faded.
It was night in the Black Zone.
And it felt different.
The moment the light dipped below the jagged skyline, the city seemed to breathe—metal groaning in unseen places, the wind dying, replaced by a pressing silence.
"Where do we sleep?" Sora asked, her voice small.
Rin pointed to a hollowed-out service station half-buried in rubble. One flickering light inside. A metal shutter they could close.
It wasn't safety. But it was shelter.
They barricaded the door with broken shelves and sat in a triangle, backs to the walls, eyes on the dark.
No one wanted to sleep first.
After an hour, the noises began.
Footsteps. Slow. Measured.
Crunching gravel outside. Then stopping.
Then nothing.
Rin gripped the pipe she'd taken from the Hollow Tower game. "Could be someone late to the game."
"Or something else," Matthew said.
Sora swallowed. "You feel it too, don't you?"
He nodded.
It wasn't just fear.
It was presence.
Like they weren't alone. Like something was watching—not directly, but from just outside the edges of awareness. From behind broken windows. From the shadows between collapsed towers.
A sound echoed then.
Not a voice.
A breath.
Too low, too deep, too close.
Matthewstood, heart hammering. "That wasn't wind."
Rin silently pointed to the shutter—it was moving.
Just slightly.
Just enough to show something was testing it. Pressing.
The breathing stopped.
Sora closed her eyes.
Then came a whisper—not from a voice, but from every direction at once.
"Survive the night."
Nothing attacked.
Nothing entered.
But the feeling lingered.
And none of them slept.