Someone screamed behind Elias. A man. Too close.
The beast lunged. Its talons caught the man across the chest, tearing shirt and flesh in a single swipe. He hit the ground choking, blood bubbling from his throat. The creature pinned him and drove its beak down again and again. Each strike sounded wet, final.
The girl cried out, high and thin, her small hands covering her ears.
Elias staggered backward, his brain white with panic. His hand scrabbled across the counter, searching for anything, anything at all—
His fingers closed around a broken bottle, jagged neck pointing outward like a dagger.
The bird's glowing eyes flicked to him.
It left the corpse twitching and turned.
The shelves rattled as it leapt, wings beating once, the wind alone knocked Elias back against the counter. The jagged beak plunged where his head had been a heartbeat before. Glass and metal screamed. Sparks burst.
Elias roared, more animal than man, and jammed the broken bottle into its chest.
The glass snapped. Black ichor sprayed across his arm, sizzling where it landed. The crow shrieked, wings flaring wide. Elias was hurled sideways, crashing into a rack of canned beans.
The world spun. He scrambled, dizzy, coughing. His hand landed on cold steel; a fire extinguisher, knocked loose from its mount.
The monster was already charging again.
Elias staggered to his feet, raised the extinguisher, and swung.
The first hit glanced off its shoulder, sending a spray of glowing feathers into the air. The second cracked bone; a sound like splintering stone. The creature screamed, lunged, and Elias shoved the extinguisher forward, ramming it straight into its chest.
The glow inside its ribcage pulsed violently. For one terrifying moment, Elias saw it clearly; a jagged shard of black crystal, lodged where a heart should be.
The crow's talons slashed across his jacket, cutting cloth, skin, fire. Elias bellowed and swung again, his arms trembling with effort.
The extinguisher connected with the crystal.
It splintered.
A sound like shattering ice ripped through the store.
The beast convulsed, wings thrashing so violently that shelves toppled, spilling ramen packets and soda bottles across the floor. Its body seized, twisted, and then began to unravel. Feathers peeled away in sheets of ash. Flesh dissolved into oily smoke. Bones cracked, turned brittle, then collapsed.
And when the nightmare was gone, something remained.
It hovered in the air where the chest had been.
A shard.
Jagged. Pulsing. Veins of red and black light crawled across its surface like worms under glass. It beat once, twice, like a heart trying to live outside a body.
The survivors shrank back, whispering.
"What the hell is that?" the older man rasped. His face was pale, his back pressed against the shelves. "That's… that's not natural."
The girl whimpered. "It's moving."
Elias couldn't look away. His breath came ragged, sweat stinging his eyes. He felt pulled toward it, like gravity had bent sideways.
The shard twitched.
It quivered in the air; then launched.
Straight at his chest.
Elias screamed, throwing up his arms, but it was already inside him.
It didn't pierce his skin. It burned through it, molten, invasive, like liquid glass forced between his ribs. His muscles spasmed, his back arched, and he clawed at his shirt, tearing fabric in a blind frenzy. The pain wasn't pain anymore, it was fire in his veins, lightning in his nerves, a violation in every cell.
He collapsed, writhing on the tiled floor.
The last thing he saw before darkness swallowed him was the girl's terrified face.
Elias felt suspended in an endless void, weightless yet crushed under invisible pressure. His breath tore in and out, though he had no lungs here. The pain lingered—fire and needles threading his veins—yet around it pulsed something… alien.
A heartbeat.
Not his own.
It throbbed against his ribs, steady, mechanical, like a war drum echoing in eternity.
And then, across the blackness, words carved themselves in blinding white light:
[ Carrion System Installed ]
[ Shard Absorbed: +1 ]
[ Corruption: 0.5% ]
The glyphs burned themselves into his vision. Strange letters curled at the edges of the words, twitching like worms in the margins, alive, incomprehensible. They slithered toward him, crawled across his skin, and then sank into his eyes.
He screamed.
But the sound never came out. His jaw moved; his throat tore; yet the void devoured the noise whole.
Another wave hit him. Not pain. Not exactly.
Senses.
Suddenly, he heard.
The flutter of wings not inside the store, but outside it— blocks away, thousands of wings, a living storm circling above the city. The sound was crisp, distinct, as though each featherbeat whispered inside his skull.
He smelled iron. Thick, metallic, choking. The stench of rust and rot as if the city itself was decomposing molecule by molecule.
And he felt.
Not touch. Not temperature. Something else.
A crawling awareness stretched over his skin like a second layer. It was as if invisible fingers brushed against every inch of him, probing, testing, tracing every outline of his body. And beneath that sensation was another, worse: he wasn't just being touched. He was being measured.
The void pulsed.
[ Welcome, Elias Crowe. ]
[ You are marked. You are chosen. You are carrion. ]
"No!" His voice finally broke through, raw, desperate. "Get out of me! Get the fuck out!"
The light stuttered, fragmented. For a heartbeat, he thought he saw something beyond the words; a silhouette vast and hungry, wings spread across the void, eyes glowing like furnaces. Its beak opened, slow, deliberate.
And then—
White light fractured into shards.
Elias slammed back into his body.
He gasped violently, the world snapping back around him in a blur of flickering fluorescent light and the stink of blood. His chest heaved, his nails digging deep furrows in the linoleum.
The survivors had gathered in a terrified half-circle, pressed against the walls and counters, staring as if he'd grown claws.
The girl's voice trembled. "H-he's changing."
The older man's lips moved soundlessly, crossing himself again and again.
Elias pushed himself upright, chest screaming with every breath. His reflection caught his eye in the shattered glass fridge door beside him.
And his stomach lurched.
For a heartbeat, the reflection wasn't his.
Black veins spread across his neck and jaw like ink under skin, writhing as if alive. His eyes glowed faintly, embers in the sockets of a corpse. His lips curled back, teeth too sharp.
He staggered backward, shoving the door. It swung open with a hollow clang, breaking the image.
"Fuck… no… no, no, no…" He clutched his head, gasping. "Not me. I'm not one of them."
The girl whimpered, hiding behind the shelves.
The air shifted.
And in that silence, when his pulse began to slow, he heard it—
A voice.
Cold. Hungry. Whispering directly into the cracks of his skull.
Feed me more.
Elias froze, his blood colder than the rain outside.
The buzzing of his phone vibrated in his pocket, sudden and shrill.
He jerked, pulling it out with shaking fingers.
Anna.
Her name glowed across the cracked screen.
The voice in his head laughed softly, a rasp of feathers and knives.
She will feed us well.