Elias stumbled away from Aether Avenue, his entire body humming with residual, panic-induced adrenaline. The city's noise, once a comforting blanket of anonymity, now felt like a thousand tiny needles, scraping at his sanity. He couldn't stop the relentless reel in his mind: the frozen bus, the silent, suspended driver, and the chilling, emerald glow beneath the traffic pole.
He tried to run, not toward his apartment, but away from the intersection. He ran until his lungs burned, then collapsed onto a park bench, hunched over his knees, trying to force the rational world back into focus.
A delusion. A shared hallucination. A flash mob prank with props. His mind cycled through defenses, each one weaker than the last. He touched the skin of his wrist, feeling the mundane warmth of his blood. The Sybil's ancient, parchment-dry voice, however, echoed over every internal protest: "The world is ending, Elias. In 1090 days..."
He pulled out his phone, a worn model with a cracked screen. He needed to talk to someone—Maya, his manager, anyone. But what would he say? "I met an old woman who stopped time and told me I have to save the world?" The words died in his throat. He was just an ordinary guy. He knew the difference between a good latte and a flat white; he didn't know how to stop a Chronos Scourge.
He glanced at the time: 10:15 AM. His bus route was too exposed, too open. He needed to be under ground, surrounded by concrete, away from the wide-open sky that might suddenly bend into an alien panorama again.
He headed for the nearest subway station, the entrance a chipped tile mouth beneath a steel-and-glass skyscraper. Descending the rattling escalator, the gloom of the subterranean platform offered a false sense of security. The air was heavy, smelling of ozone, dust, and old metal.
The platform was crowded, a mixture of tourists, workers heading to late shifts, and college students with headphones clamped over their ears. Elias stood near the yellow line, trying to blend in, trying to be small. He kept his gaze fixed on the grimy track bed, his hands shoved deep into his pockets.
The lights of the incoming train, the Veridia 5 line, appeared as distant, growing squares of yellow. The metallic groan of the train echoed through the tunnel, and Elias felt a momentary lift of relief—normalcy was approaching.
But as the train thundered into the station, the air grew cold. Not chilly, but aggressively cold, as if someone had opened a massive freezer door. The metallic tang that accompanied The Sybil's magic returned, sharp enough to make Elias's eyes water.
He looked up, scanning the crowds. No Sybil.
Instead, his gaze snapped to the deep, black throat of the tunnel the train had just emerged from.
In the brief, dark space between the last train car and the tunnel wall, Elias saw it.
It wasn't a vision or a glitch this time. It was utterly, terribly real.
It was a thing. It moved like a ripple of heat rising off asphalt on a summer day, a distortion in the shape of a massive, elongated spider, perhaps twenty feet from tip to tip. It had no discernible body, only an armature of pure, visible static, crackling with internal blue light. Its legs were like fractured lightning bolts, and where a head might have been, there was only a churning vortex, a tiny black hole that seemed to suck the light out of the air around it.
It was an Aetheric Echo. A creature of pure, raw chaos that had slipped through the thinning Veil.
And it was trying to get out of the tunnel.
It wasn't fast, but its sheer, unsettling size pushed against the metal-reinforced concrete. The back end of the subway car, which had just passed, began to dent inward, quietly and horrifyingly, like a beer can squeezed by an unseen hand.
Panic, cold and sharp, lacerated Elias's previous denial. This wasn't a delusion. This was here.
He tried to scream, but the sound caught in his throat. The thing wasn't looking at the train; it seemed to be searching, its vortex-head panning blindly across the platform.
It saw him.
Elias didn't know how he knew, but the moment the black vortex pointed in his direction, he felt a crushing, mental pressure, a wave of cold dread that told him this thing didn't just want to hurt him—it wanted to unmake him.
He reacted on pure, animal instinct, shouting "Down! Get back!" and shoving the woman next to him with all his strength.
The woman stumbled backward, and the Echo lunged.
It didn't move across the track; it simply teleported—a sudden, violent tear in the air. One of its static-bolt legs snapped out, hitting the third car of the subway train with the force of a wrecking ball.
The impact was deafening.
A high-pitched, grinding screech ripped through the station. The train, already slowing, instantly derailed, its front two cars lurching violently to the left, ripping sparks off the concrete wall. Shards of safety glass exploded across the platform.
The crowd screamed, a cacophony of terror and shock, scattering back toward the escalators. The lights on the platform flickered, plunging the area into strobe-like flashes of darkness and shadow.
Elias was thrown backward by the concussion, his head slamming against the dirty tile floor. His ears rang, and a metallic taste filled his mouth.
When his vision cleared, the Echo was gone, retreating into the deeper gloom of the wrecked train car, having inflicted its damage.
The air was filled with smoke, the smell of burning wires, and raw terror. People were crying, scrambling over each other. He saw a man holding his bloody arm, another trying to pull open the bent doors of the wrecked train.
He had just witnessed an impossible creature, a thing of pure magic, cause a massive, real-world catastrophe.
As he struggled to his feet, grabbing his ringing phone, he noticed the woman he had shoved. She was pinned against a vending machine, her eyes wide, staring at the shattered, sparking train.
"What... what hit us?" she whispered, her voice trembling. "It felt like a bomb."
Elias looked at the mangled train car, then back toward the dark tunnel. He knew it wasn't a bomb. It was worse.
He didn't know how to find the first fragment of the Aether-Key, but he knew one thing with terrible clarity: The Veil was already failing, and the countdown wasn't a prophecy—it was a literal deadline. He had to find the Sybil, or this city would be torn apart, piece by predictable piece.