The smell was lemon and ammonia, a sterile scent that clung to the 44th floor of the OmniCorp Tower like a ghost. Leo Miller knew that smell better than he knew the scent of his own apartment. He pushed the industrial mop forward, its damp gray tendrils gliding across the polished marble in a perfect, overlapping arc. Squeak, slide. Squeak, slide. It was a rhythm that had governed his nights for three years.
He was a creature of the dark, a janitor who lived by the hum of fluorescent lights and the lonely echo of his own footsteps. Tonight, like every other night, his kingdom was silent and empty. The daytime inhabitants—the men and women in their sharp suits and sharper smiles—were gone, leaving behind only the ghosts of their perfume and the day's accumulated grime for him to erase.
Leo was meticulous. He didn't just clean; he restored. He saw a scuff mark on the floor not as a blemish, but as a personal insult. His cart, a rolling monument of gray plastic and chemical precision, was arranged with the logic of a surgeon's tray. Every bottle, every rag, had its place. It was this obsession with order, this quiet control over his small, inanimate world, that kept him sane.
He paused, leaning on the mop handle, and looked out the floor-to-ceiling window. The city sprawled below, a glittering tapestry of a million lights, a million lives that were not his. He pulled out his phone. The screen lit up with a picture of a smiling young woman with his same dark eyes, her arm slung around his shoulders. Sarah. His sister. She was a first-year resident at a hospital downtown, buried under a mountain of debt and sleepless nights. This job, this quiet, invisible life, was for her. Every paycheck was another small stone pulled from the mountain crushing her.
He put the phone away, the familiar ache of responsibility settling in his chest. Back to work. Squeak, slide. He was just about to finish the main hallway when the world lurched.
It wasn't an earthquake, not the familiar rolling shake he'd felt once or twice before. This was a violent, vertical jolt, as if the entire skyscraper had been picked up and dropped a few inches. The lights flickered, buzzed, and died. An instant later, the red emergency lights kicked in, bathing the pristine marble in a bloody, apocalyptic glow.
Then came the silence. A profound, unnatural quiet that swallowed the building's ambient hum. Leo's heart hammered against his ribs. He froze, mop held aloft, every sense on high alert. He was used to noticing things—a loose tile, a flickering bulb—but this was different. The very air felt wrong, charged with a static he could almost taste, like ozone before a lightning strike.
A scream, thin and distant, drifted up from the street below. Then another. And another. Drawn by a morbid gravity, Leo crept to the window.
The glittering tapestry was gone. In its place was pure, unadulterated chaos. Cars were piled up, some on fire, their horns blaring a dissonant symphony of panic. People—tiny, ant-like figures from this height—were running in every direction. But they weren't just running from the fires. They were running from… things.
Leo pressed his face to the cool glass, his mind struggling to process what his eyes were seeing. There were shapes in the streets, things that moved too fast, things that were the wrong color, the wrong size. He saw a flash of iridescent green snatch a person off their feet. He saw a hulking, dark mass plow through a city bus as if it were made of cardboard. It wasn't a riot. It was a hunt.
A piercing, high-frequency tone drilled into his skull, so intense it made him cry out and clap his hands over his ears. It didn't help. The sound was inside his head. As the tone reached an unbearable crescendo, a translucent blue rectangle of light materialized in his vision, hovering about three feet in front of his face.
[SYSTEM INITIALIZING...]
[PLANETARY ASSIMILATION WITH THE GRAND ARCHIVE IN PROGRESS... STAND BY.]
[WELCOME, USER. YOUR JOURNEY BEGINS NOW.]
Leo stumbled back, shaking his head. A hallucination? A stroke? But the blue screen remained, fixed in his field of view no matter where he looked. Panicked shouts erupted from one of the few remaining late-night offices down the hall. A man in a disheveled suit, a senior partner Leo recognized as Mr. Henderson, stumbled out, his face pale with terror. "Did you see that? It's in my head! Make it stop!"
Before Leo could answer, the window at the far end of the hallway exploded inward in a shower of glittering glass. A creature, all sharp angles and twitching limbs, scrambled through the opening. It was the size of a large dog, but it was no dog. Its body was a segmented carapace of slick, black chitin. It moved on six spindly, razor-tipped legs, its head a nightmarish cluster of multifaceted eyes and clicking mandibles that dripped a viscous, sizzling fluid onto the marble floor.
A Skitterer. The name just appeared in Leo's mind, a piece of data downloaded directly from the System.
Mr. Henderson screamed a high, thin wail of pure terror and turned to run. He didn't get two steps. The Skitterer launched itself across the hall with impossible speed, a black blur of motion. It tackled the man, its legs pinning him to the floor. The clicking of its mandibles was the last sound Mr. Henderson ever heard.
Leo's blood ran cold. The part of his brain that wasn't screaming was screaming run. But where? The elevators were dead. The stairs were forty-four flights down.
The Skitterer finished its grotesque meal and its multifaceted eyes swiveled, locking onto Leo.
Fight? Him? He was five-foot-ten, 160 pounds, and the most violent thing he'd done in the last year was aggressively scrub graffiti off a bathroom stall. His only weapon was a mop.
The creature took a skittering step towards him. Leo's mind, a place usually filled with cleaning schedules and chemical compositions, went into overdrive. He wasn't a fighter. He was a janitor. And he knew this floor better than he knew his own reflection.
His eyes darted to his cart. Next to it sat the heavy-duty floor buffer, a thirty-pound disk of solid metal and wiring. Useless as a weapon—too heavy, too awkward. But as a distraction?
The Skitterer coiled, ready to pounce.
Now!
Leo kicked the side of the buffer. It tipped over with a loud, metallic CLANG! that echoed down the silent hall. The creature's head snapped toward the sound, its focus momentarily broken.
That was the only opening he needed. He didn't run away from the monster. He ran towards his cart. He grabbed the handle of the large, rolling trash receptacle—the heavy-duty one, currently half-full of office wastepaper. He pivoted, putting all his weight into it, and shoved.
The receptacle's rubber wheels gave it a silent, deadly momentum. It caught the Skitterer perfectly on its side, not with enough force to injure it, but enough to tangle its spindly legs. The creature shrieked in frustration as it stumbled, trying to untangle itself from a sudden avalanche of crumpled reports and styrofoam coffee cups.
Leo didn't wait to see the result. He bolted in the opposite direction, his work boots pounding on the marble. He knew where he was going: the main supply closet, just around the corner. It was his sanctuary, his fortress. The door was solid oak, the lock heavy-duty.
He fumbled with his keycard, his hands shaking so violently it took three tries before the light flashed green. He slipped inside, slammed the heavy door shut, and threw the deadbolt. A deep, satisfying CHUNK echoed in the small space. He was safe. For now.
He slumped against the door, his breath coming in ragged, painful gasps. The closet smelled of bleach and old rags. It was familiar. It was safe. The blue screen still floated in front of his face, calm and indifferent to his terror.
A new message appeared.
[CRITICAL EVENT DETECTED. SURVIVAL INSTINCTS CONFIRMED.]
[ANALYZING RECENT ACTIONS FOR CLASS ASSIGNMENT...]
[EVALUATING: TACTICAL EVASION. ENVIRONMENTAL MANIPULATION. STRATEGIC TOOL UTILIZATION. AREA DENIAL VIA OBSTACLE.]
Leo's heart gave a flutter of hope. Tactical Evasion? Environmental Manipulation? It sounded impressive. Maybe he would be a Rogue, a Tactician, a Trap-master. Something cool. Something that would help him survive, help him get to Sarah. He held his breath, watching the blinking cursor as if his life depended on it—which, he suspected, it did.
The text solidified.
[CLASS ASSIGNED: JANITOR]
Leo stared. He blinked. He read it again.
[CLASS ASSIGNED: JANITOR]
A wave of cold, hollow despair washed over him, so profound it was almost comical. All that. His desperate, clever, life-saving scramble for survival... and the all-powerful, cosmic System had looked at him and seen... a janitor doing his job. He let out a single, bitter laugh that sounded more like a sob in the cramped darkness.
Scrape.
Leo froze, his blood turning to ice.
Scrape. Scrape. SCRATCH.
A loud, insistent scratching sound started on the other side of the heavy oak door. It was hunting him. And it had found him.