Kaai ,inside the great roots of the grafted trees, took off his backpack laid on his back and sighed a big sigh of relief while his hands trembled. " thank you god" he said. He took a few minutes to calm down. After he barely lifted himself and supported his back against the hollowed roots wall and lifted his shirt and examined his body, his entire right abdomen and chest was completely bruised, so was his arm. " at least nothing is broken" he look through the cracks on the root's walls and said " I heard nothing ever since I stopped i don't know if that's a bad thing or a good thing…. But I can't stay here to stay…....those monster didn't try to even eat me. That armored fiend just lunged at me unprovoked…. Unprovoked"
then the realization hit
"I….. I trespassed onto his territory. Then that other monster came and they started fighting even dismissing me. I guess I am too small and weak be a meal." He let out a shallow stifled laugh " not that I am complaining. All I have to do now is to stay out of sight"
Slowly, carefully, he crawled out from the shelter. Every movement felt louder than thunder, though in truth he barely disturbed the mulch under his palms. His breath fogged in front of him though the air was warm, heavy, damp with rot.
The grafted trees loomed above him massive , hollowed, their trunks spiraling together in impossible shapes.
Some bore remnants of branches, twisted into jagged spines that reached sideways like skeletal arms. Others oozed a dark sap that glowed faintly, trickling down their bark like veins of molten glass. The whole forest seemed wrong, listening.
He moved low, half-crawling, half-walking, always pressing himself against roots, ducking under rotten arches, pausing when the trees grew thin and less as though there was a end to this vast vile forest. He was scared. He didn't know what was waiting for him beyond the forest. His rifle weighed heavy against his back, but he dared not sling it in his hands—it had already betrayed him once
Some time later Kaai broke free of the trees, stumbling into light. He bent over, palms on his knees, gasping, sweat and blood mixing on his skin. For the first time since waking, the trees weren't pressing in on him, but what lay ahead chilled him in a different way.
The city stretched out like a corpse left under the sun too long. Towers of steel and glass had folded in on themselves, toppled like dominoes across the horizon. Some streets were buried under mountains of concrete, others cut off entirely by collapsed skyscrapers that leaned into one another like drunken giants.
What unsettled him more than the ruin was the
inconsistency.
One building looked as though it had been empty for centuries, its windows gone, stone flaking, vines spilling down its bones. Another just beside it stood pristine—its windows intact, its doors clean, the kind of place you could walk into and expect the lights to still flicker on.
Kaai didn't have the strength to wonder why. Survival first. Questions later. His stomach cramped, and every bruise along his ribs screamed with each breath. He needed supplies.
The ruins smelled of rust and smoke. Kaai crept through broken streets, every step cautious, until he stumbled upon it.
At first, he thought it was sleeping. The hulking form was slumped against a collapsed pillar, its ironclad armor glinting faintly in the dim light. The same monster that had nearly torn him apart hours earlier. His heart seized, panic urging him to flee
But its chest didn't move. Its head hung at an angle too sharp for life.
It was Dead.
Kaai inched closer, rifle raised, sweat dripping into his eyes. He prodded it once with the barrel. No movement. No sound. Only silence.
He should have left it there. Every instinct told him to. But something else—his old training, his old discipline—took over. He dropped to his knees beside the corpse, hands trembling, and began peeling back the heavy armor. His stomach lurched at the smell, a mix of metal, blood, and something acrid, alien.
"Not human," he whispered to himself. "Not even close."
Still, he worked. With a shard of glass for a scalpel and a piece of rebar as leverage, he pried the plating aside. And then he saw it.
The flesh underneath was thick, fibrous, armored from within. Near impossible to penetrate. But the joints—where plates overlapped. The orifices. The eyes. Soft. Vulnerable.
It wasn't much, but it was something.
Kaai sat back, breath shuddering, hands red to the wrist. His stomach rolled, but he forced it down. He had no luxury to be sick. Knowledge was survival.
He wiped his hands on his torn shirt and staggered to his feet. "Joints. Eyes. That's where you die," he muttered, as if memorizing it, as if saying it aloud would carve it into his bones. He then got up and continued on his journey, passing through the streets of deserted stores and house all empty and this that were not didn't hold anything of value
Then he saw it: a mall.
The glass front was cracked but not broken, its name still half-lit by dead neon. Dust covered the entrance, but not in the heavy, centuries-thick way of the ruins around it. This place… it looked abandoned yesterday.
Kaai forced his way inside. The air was stale but not choking. His footsteps echoed faintly across polished tiles. Rows of stores stretched before him, untouched. Clothes still hung on racks, shelves lined with bottles and cans, untouched by time or looters.
It was eerie. Too eerie. But he pushed the unease down and set to work. He stripped off his torn shirt and traded it for a fresh one from a clothing store, same for his pants and shoes which he changed for boots. clean and alien in how normal it felt after the forest. He found a pharmacy and scavenged antiseptic, bandages, and painkillers. His hands trembled as he patched his chest and abdomen, but the relief of doing something steadied him.
Kaai got up and readied his bag with his new supplies, but a pain echoed from his abdomen.
He was hungry
Kaai collected himself and made his way to the supermarket of the mall. He saw something that didnt make sense. The mall has been completely intact doors, glasses, windows even the supplies remained untouched. It was as if people who worked here disappeared suddenly without a trace like ghosts, he saw a broken glass doors.The glass doors weren't just cracked—they had been cut. A clean, deliberate break along the edges, shards scattered inward as though something sharp and precise had carved its way inside.
He crouched, brushing his fingers along the fragments. They were fresh. The edges still glistened, no dust dulling them, no moss creeping along the cracks like the other ruins.
His chest tightened. Someone had been here. Recently.
Inside, the quiet pressed harder. It wasn't the silence of abandonment—it was the silence of something present, just beyond sight.
Kaai kept low, rifle slung tight, eyes scanning the aisles. At first glance, everything looked untouched—rows of cans stacked neatly, clothing racks intact, shelves orderly in a way nothing else in the ruined city had been.
But then he noticed it.
One aisle had a gap. Not random scavenging—deliberate. A few packets missing from the middle rows, taken carefully, the kind of theft meant to go unnoticed. Another shelf bore smudges, faint handprints in the dust where something had been lifted.
And on the floor, half-hidden in the thin film of dust, the faint impression of a footprint. Not his. Too long. Too light. And too recent.
Kaai's pulse spiked.
He swallowed hard, forcing himself deeper into the store. The further he went, the clearer the signs became: a bottle set slightly out of line, a wrapper torn and discarded under a shelf, a trail of barely disturbed dust leading deeper.
Then—movement.
The soft scrape of metal against tile.
Kaai swung his rifle up before he even thought about it, breath caught in his throat.
At the end of the aisle, a shadow stretched across the floor, long and alien. Then she emerged—two meters tall, clad in pale-gold armor and black cloth. Her skin white as snow, her hair long and gray, but alive, lifting in unseen currents, its color shifting as her gaze fixed on him.
And in her hand, the blade that hummed low, resonant, like a warning.
Kaai froze. She froze.
The shelves between them might as well have been walls of glass, brittle and waiting to shatter. Neither moved. Neither spoke.
The footprints, the missing food, the broken glass—they all came together in his mind at once. This wasn't luck. This wasn't untouched. Whatever this monster was, he was in her territory.