The voice came again, louder this time, cracking through the thick air like a knife through old bark. Elias didn't breathe. He didn't flinch. Didn't even blink. His body had gone still in a way that no schoolkid should ever know how to master, pressed flat against the dusty wood of the ancient bell tower floor, staring at the grain as if it could answer the question screaming in his head — why was someone calling out loud in a church where only the dead belonged?
"Hello?"
There it was again. Male voice. Young. Human. Human enough, anyway.
And that was the problem.
Because he wasn't alone anymore.
Because the voice was bait.
Or worse, it was real.
Elias had seen what the world did to loud things. It didn't matter if it was a dog barking or a man screaming for help. This new world didn't make space for noise. It punished it. Noise was sin now. Noise got you killed. And the fact that this idiot hadn't already been torn limb from limb meant either he was fresh meat or damn lucky.
He remained crouched, eyes never leaving the open archway just below, where that voice was still calling into the gloom like it belonged here. A part of him wanted to shout down — to curse, to warn, to tell the kid to run — but instinct, not kindness, won out. He didn't move. Didn't reply. He just listened. Waited.
Then he heard it.
Not the voice.
The other thing.
That low, vibrating hum.
Like a violin string stretched just too tight, humming from beneath the earth.
The Singer.
It hadn't made a sound yet. Not one that could be traced to a mouth or tongue. But Elias had felt it before. That hum — it was how it searched. Not with eyes. Not with ears. But with pressure. Like a predator waiting for the echo to bounce back before it pounced.
It was already here.
And the idiot below had no idea.
Elias didn't hesitate after that. He spun, crouched low, backtracked through the spiral stairs he'd memorized an hour ago. Every step was deliberate. Every shift of his weight measured. The wood creaked once beneath his heel and his heart nearly stopped. He didn't run. Running made noise. Running was for people who hadn't learned that surviving meant swallowing every instinct that used to feel right.
The voice came again. Close now. Just outside the bell tower entrance.
"Hey! Is anyone in here? I swear I'm not infected—"
Elias grit his teeth hard enough he tasted copper. The sheer stupidity. The arrogance. The hope. That awful, burning hope in the kid's voice. It was a death wish. No one said things like that out loud anymore. No one hoped out loud. It was like lighting a flare and dancing in front of it.
Then came the sound that Elias had been dreading.
Not the voice.
Not even the Singer's hum.
But the shift in the air. The sudden silence.
The moment before a scream.
Not a human scream. That would've been merciful.
What came next shattered every stained glass window in the church.
The Singer's wail wasn't sound so much as pressure — like someone dropped a hammer into your skull and spun it sideways. Elias dropped instantly, arms covering his ears, mouth clenched shut so he didn't scream. You couldn't scream when your jaw was vibrating. You couldn't cry when your brain felt like it was bleeding.
The kid wasn't so lucky.
He screamed.
And that was enough.
Elias didn't look. He didn't wait to see where the creature was. He just moved. Vaulted over the crumbling pews and ducked low behind the pulpit. He found the kid lying stunned, mouth open, blood on his cheek from the shattering glass. The poor bastard was holding a metal rod like a sword. Useless. But Elias grabbed him anyway. Yanked him by the collar and hissed in a voice low and sharp enough to cut through the chaos, "Shut up. Don't talk. Don't breathe. Not unless I say."
The kid blinked up at him in shock but didn't speak.
Good.
Because the Singer was here.
And not at the door.
It was crawling sideways across the church's outer wall, its arms too long and its fingers too sharp, hooking into stone like it weighed nothing. It didn't even look like it was trying. It moved like water. Like sorrow made flesh. And worst of all, it was silent now. No more screaming. It was listening.
Elias pulled the kid backward, crouching behind the altar, and watched as the Singer paused near the stained glass window. Its head tilted. Not like a dog. Like a person trying to remember a song they'd once known by heart.
Elias rolled a silver chalice across the floor.
It clanged once. Then again.
The Singer snapped its head toward the sound and vanished through the far window in a blur of limbs.
They had seconds.
"Move."
Elias didn't whisper this time. He dragged the kid toward the side door, through the crumbling remains of the old priest's chamber and into the alley. He didn't check to see if the Singer was following. He knew it was.
They ran.
He didn't remember how far. Only that the pain in his lungs made him feel alive in the most miserable way imaginable. When they finally ducked behind a rusted dumpster in a narrow alley, Elias collapsed against the wall, his hands shaking, his teeth sore from how hard he'd clenched them.
Beside him, the boy — Max, he would later learn — panted like he'd run a marathon on broken feet. "What the hell was that thing? Jesus—"
Elias didn't answer. He stared at the far end of the alley, waiting for movement. Waiting for that hum to come back. For the windows to shatter again.
It didn't.
Not yet.
Instead, silence.
And that silence was louder than the scream had been.
Eventually, Elias let himself speak. Not because the danger had passed. But because the kid deserved to know the stakes. "It's called a Singer. It hunts sound. It doesn't need to see you. Doesn't need to smell you. Just needs to hear you. Which means if you talk again without permission, we die."
Max was pale now, the adrenaline draining from his face, leaving only fear and confusion.
Elias should've left him.
He knew that.
One more mouth. One more risk.
But he couldn't.
Because when he looked at the kid, he didn't see a stranger.
He saw himself. Before the bookstore. Before the blood. Before the death.
Before the second chance.
Max spoke quieter this time. "I've been hiding in the library near the city edge. Three days. No food. Barely any water. I thought I heard people. I thought—"
"You thought wrong." Elias's voice wasn't cruel, but it wasn't soft either. "This isn't a world for thinking. It's a world for listening."
They didn't talk again until night.
When the sun finally dropped and the world went darker than dark, they moved again, sticking to the edges of collapsed buildings and long-forgotten drainage ditches. Max didn't speak once. He learned fast.
That earned him something.
Not trust.
But maybe the beginning of something close.
By midnight, Elias had found them a spot — a half-looted pharmacy with a basement storage room that still smelled faintly of bleach and death. He tested the air first. No rot. No blood. No fresh prints in the dust.
Safe enough.
He locked them in. Set traps with old string and rusty cans. Then turned to Max. "You sleep. I watch."
Max nodded, too tired to argue.
Elias didn't sleep.
His system pinged in the silence
Warning: Mutation Patterns Increasing. Tier 2 variants emerging in 48 hours.
He didn't move.
Didn't react.
But inside, something shifted.
Because if the Singer was Tier 1—
What came next would be worse.
And the system wasn't going to help him.
Not unless he paid.
He had 25 coins.
It wasn't enough for anything.
No weapon. No armor. Not even boots that didn't squeak.
And yet, the shop offered something new now:
Sonic Disruption Pellet — 100 Coins.
Temporary Deafness Syringe — 150 Coins.
Ear Filters — 200 Coins.
Everything was evolving.
Everything had a cost.
And Elias understood now — this wasn't a game. The system wasn't a god. It was a mirror. It gave only what you earned. And what you earned was bought in silence, blood, and cleverness.
He looked over at Max, curled in the corner, shivering beneath a jacket two sizes too small. Just a kid. Just a boy who hadn't had time to harden yet.
He could've let him die.
It would've been smarter.
Would've been cleaner.
But Elias remembered his brother's laugh. The way his little hands had tried to help bar the door as the moans grew closer. The way he'd screamed when Elias pushed him away.
He'd died with that scream.
And maybe, just maybe, Elias wasn't ready to hear another one like it.
Not yet.
He wrote in his notebook one last thing before dawn came.
Never talk in churches. Never trust silence. Never assume you're alone.
And as the cold crept into his bones and the shadows lengthened, Elias thought, not for the first time, that maybe the worst part of survival wasn't dying.
It was remembering.