I swept my gaze across the crowd of strangers one more time, but no one approached the ragdoll lying on the stones.
That was the thing about strangers.
They cared for one another only until it cost them something.
Only until the danger stopped being abstract and started wearing a face.
Sympathy lasted right up to the moment it demanded action, and then it dissolved into distance and excuses.
No one stepped forward.
Not because they agreed with what I did. Not because they approved of it.
But because doing nothing was safer.
Because if someone spoke up and ended up in the same state as the man curled on the ground, there was no guarantee anyone would help them either.
After all, even now, they hesitated.
I saw it in the way eyes flickered away, in how feet stayed rooted despite the winces and shallow breaths.
Their fists remained clenched not out of readiness, but out of pure indecision.
Everyone was waiting for someone else to become braver first.
Nonetheless, I was lucky the Church girl did not intervene.
If she had, I wouldn't have been able to do that.
Now that I looked at her properly, she didn't have a speck of emotion on her face.
Only her eyes were lit, not with concern, but with something closer to ambition.
Maybe expectation.
Whatever it was, one thing was clear.
She was not intent to help the locals.
Then I sucked in a lungful of fresh air and moved my fingers, tracing the familiar box through empty space, the invisible frame closing around a human-shaped void.
I shut my eyes, and my senses sharpened immediately, the whistling of air rushing past my ears suddenly clear, almost intrusive.
It felt as if my brain had begun firing neurons at a speed far beyond its usual limits, thoughts snapping into place faster than I could consciously track them.
A strange surge of mental energy followed, sharp and vivid, accompanied by fleeting, relaxing images that skimmed through my mind in the span of a heartbeat.
And then everything went black.
Everything except me.
The world vanished, leaving only my awareness suspended in a vast, empty darkness. It was the same scenery I had once seen before.
The one from the Eioldinir Line.
Except this time, outlines bled into existence.
My eyes were still closed.
There was nothing resembling the world anymore.
No people.
No street.
Just darkness, cut apart by boundaries. Countless outlines hovered in the black, layered and intersecting, some tall, some compressed, some warped into awkward proportions that barely resembled anything human.
Some outlines were tall, some short, some hunched or rigid.
Each one was layered twice. A tighter outline glowed red, hugging the shape closely.
A second outline, slightly offset, hovered in blue around it.
They moved when the entity moved, adjusted with every shift of weight, every action I couldn't see but somehow knew was happening.
Even the ground wasn't an extempt.
The ground beneath me appeared as faint, uneven contours.
The street stretched forward as a mesh of intersecting lines.
Carts, doors, walls, scattered tools, each object reduced to a clean outline, floating in the void exactly where it should be.
They were spaces, or rather accurately say, Hit & Hurt boxes.
Despite my amazement, one outline slid into my peripheral, which did not quite line up with the body inside it.
I followed it instinctively.
There, among the dense overlap of standing figures, it was situated.
It wasn't taller, and it wasn't wider. Infact, it barely drew attention at all had I not noticed it before.
That was the problem.
Its red boundary didn't touch its blue one.
'What is that thing?'
They floated apart, separated by a thin, impossible margin, and the figure did not move at all.
I tried to focus on it, but as soon as I did the surrounding outlines distorted.
Then I opened my eyes, and reality filled itself in behind the outlines.
The street reappeared beneath the mapped planes.
Stone, wood, faces, blood, lamplight, everything rushed in at once, the real world flooding over the skeletal framework I'd been seeing, yet the outlines didn't vanish, and hovered over them like a thin membrane.
My gaze snapped to the center of the street, where the anomaly had been, but the space was empty.
It was as if nothing had ever stood there at all. Even the hit and hurt box had vanished, leaving behind no trace for my senses to cling to.
' Something had been there… perhaps something strange,'
I thought to myself, the familiar edge of irritation rising, threatening to swell and spill over for just a brief second.
But it didn't.
I knew better than to allow my overthinking tendencies to take the reins, at least not in the situation I was in.
Nothing good ever came from spiraling when the ground beneath you was already uncertain.
I swept my gaze across the vicinity once more, instead of chasing what had already slipped off.
A hit and hurt box, the same outline, hovering where there was absolutely nothing.
No body.
No distortion in the air.
Just empty space pretending to be empty.
I followed it without moving my head.
It was tucked near the edge of the street, where the crowd thinned and attention died naturally.
Between a leaning stone wall and a collapsed wooden awning, broken crates were stacked haphazardly, one split open and spilling warped planks onto the ground.
A rusted cart wheel rested there, half-swallowed by shadow, a torn canvas hanging over it like a bad disguise.
That was where the outlines anchored themselves.
Hidden in noise.
In clutter.
In places people refused to look twice at.
I didn't let my gaze linger there for too long, because once the creeper came to know that we knew its hiding spot, it would definitely try to flee.
I swept past after a brief second, expressing my dissatisfaction to make it clear that I was not interested in that place at all.
Reinforce its ideas.
"So that is how it wants to play it,"
I whispered under my breath, lips twitching barely.
Fine.
I didn't need to see it to kill it.