The hospital lights flickered once, then steadied.
Kate sat at her glass desk, reviewing quarterly budgets, when the screaming began.
"The bodies in the morgue—they're waking up!"
A nurse burst through the door, face white, chest heaving. "Ma'am, the curtains… no light is coming through them anymore."
Kate rose without hurry. She crossed the office and pulled the cord.
The city had vanished.
In its place rolled a wall of black fog, thick as ink, swallowing skyscrapers whole. Streetlights glowed like dying embers inside it.
So it begins, she thought, the calm of a woman who had long expected the world to break.
"Move every patient to the emergency ward. Lock down the upper floors. Now."
The nurse fled. Kate followed, heels silent on the polished floor, already reaching out with her mind to feel the shape of what was coming.
Outside the electronics store, the sky simply… stopped.
Derrick and Irene stepped onto the pavement, his new box of audiophile headphones and minimalist wall clock tucked under one of her arms. Irene clung to his hand, her fingers crossing around his.
The fog rolled over them like a living thing.
"Derrick, let's go," she whispered, pulling him forward.
Chaos erupted as creatures—including the same kind Jane had slain earlier—surged through the streets, wreaking havoc. Amidst the screams, a sudden, ethereal light began to emanate from a man in his late twenties. "What is this?" he breathed, staring at his glowing hands.
Nearby, a woman cried out as the same luminescence pulsed from her own skin. Their eyes met across the chaos, a silent, instant understanding flashing between them. In the next heartbeat, they moved as one, snatching improvised weapons and tearing into the creatures with startling force.
Jane could only stare, dazed by the sudden shift. As the man drove a pipe through a short, green-skinned creature, he shouted to the woman, "Natasha! It's a goblin! Don't fret—I think we can fight them now!"
"Alright, Williams!" she called back, shattering a wooden pallet across another monster's head.
So the creature I killed was a goblin, Jane realized, the thought cutting through her shock.
Unbeknownst to Jane, a monstrous creature had materialized behind her. It loomed ten meters tall, with a gnarled, bark-like hide and a trunk two meters thick. In its claws, it hefted a crude bludgeon of stone and timber, a meter in diameter, already descending in a murderous arc toward her unprotected back.
"Lady, behind you!" Williams' shout tore across the chaos. He was already sprinting, his muscles burning. One hundred fifty meters—too far! he thought, teeth gritted against the futile distance.
Jane turned. Her eyes widened at the colossal monstrosity filling her vision. There was no time to dodge, only to register the shadow of the swing before it connected with a world-shattering CRACK.
But the sound was not of breaking bones. It was the club itself that exploded into splinters and stone shards against her body, as if striking an unbreakable pillar. Yet, the raw, concussive force of the blow was undeniable. It lifted her from her feet and hurled her across the skyline like a cannon shot.
She cratered into the side of a high-rise building with a deafening impact of buckling steel and shattered concrete. The structure groaned, its facade collapsing inward, then its frame buckling entirely in a chain reaction of destruction. A great cloud of dust and debris billowed upward as the building crumbled, burying Jane beneath tons of rubble.
Meanwhile.
The car crawled through the suffocating fog, its headlights reflecting off the damp pavement until they illuminated shapes that were not shadows. First, a still form on the asphalt. Then another. Derrick's hand tightened on the dashboard. "Stop."
Irene braked, the tires whispering to a halt. They stepped out into the unnatural silence, the air cold and thick. Figures, distant and indistinct, shifted within the gray veil. A heavier shadow detached itself, resolving into a halting form with a bullish head and the torso of a man. It took a ground-shaking step forward.
"A minotaur?" Irene breathed, her voice low. "Here? Now?"
"A mythical creature," Derrick observed, his tone unnervingly calm as his mind raced. Behind them, a sickening wet sound of tissue echoed as one of the fallen forms began to twitch, then another. The fog isn't just hiding them, he realized. It's animating them.
The minotaur's voice was a gravelly rumble. "What a surprise. The scent of old blood on the wind… Princess Irene. Daughter of the Mother Progenitor." It took another step, its mocking tone sharpening. "Or should I say, the exiled princess."
Irene went very still beside him.
"And who is this puny human beside you?" it continued, a cruel amusement in its gaze. "A pet? A lover? How far you have fallen, to cling to such an insignif—"
The insult died in the air. With a sound like a snapped cable, the minotaur's head vanished in a sudden, violent mist of dark blood and bone. Its massive body teetered, then collapsed. Irene slowly unclenched her fist, her entire form trembling with a contained, terrifying fury.
"How dare you, how dare you drag him into your nonsense," she whispered to the headless corpse, her voice colder than the fog.
Around them, every reanimated body simultaneously dropped, becoming inert once more.
"Derrick, let's go," she stated, turning back toward the car.
Derrick's eyes swept over the scene—the fallen giant, the newly motionless dead. She used her vampiric blood-controlling ability to kill the minotaur, which also affected all the nearby dead bodies, he analyzed, and got back in the car.
The sterile chill of the morgue deepened into an unnatural cold. Kate stood frozen, not at the sight of the dead, but at their movement. Sheet-draped forms on gurneys twitched, then sat up. A cooler door groaned as something heavy pressed against it from within.
"Zombies?" The clinical term felt absurd on her tongue, yet here was the evidence.
There was no time for horror, only protocol. Her mind, a scalpel of focused psychokinesis, sliced through the room. Dozens of invisible incisions occurred at once—a silent, simultaneous lobotomy. The advancing figures shuddered and dropped.
But they did not simply fall. They dissolved. A grayish ash, like polluted snow, cascaded from their collapsing forms, leaving only empty sheets and a fine, eerie dust on the tiles.
Kate stared, the scientist in her overriding the survivor. They turned to ash. The reanimation isn't biological; it's parasitic. The dark fog provides the animating force, a temporary possession. Remove the host, and the energy dissipates. Her gaze lifted as if she could see through the ceilings to the roiling gloom outside. The fog is the catalyst. Clear it, and you clear the plague.
The immediate threat was gone, replaced by a vast, pressing question. She stepped over the piles of ash, her shoes leaving faint prints. "The real problem isn't in here," she murmured to the silent room, pushing through the double doors. Her path back to the office was no longer a retreat, but a march toward a new objective: to find a way to disperse an endless, malevolent sky.
Buried beneath a mountain of shattered concrete and twisted rebar, Jane's world was reduced to pressure, dust, and stunned silence. What the hell was that creature? The thought cut through the ringing in her ears. Above, the sounds of battle reverberated through the rubble: the roar of a monster and the sharp shouts of the two who had shone with light.
"This is an Ogre! We have an advantage in agility—use it!" Williams' voice, strained but commanding, filtered down. The scuffle of footsteps and the whistle of blade strikes followed.
So people are awakening abilities globally, Jane mused, the concept solidifying in her mind. Then, with a focus born of grim necessity, she clenched her fist and drove it upward. A concussive boom echoed in the debris-choked space as she punched a clean tunnel through layer upon layer of wreckage. She clawed her way into the open air, rising to her feet just in time to see the nightmare unfold.
The Ogre, a ten-meter-tall monument of muscle and rage, had snatched Natasha in its colossal hand, lifting the struggling woman toward its gaping, saliva-dripping maw. "NO!" Williams' scream was raw. He became a blur of motion, his sword striking the beast's leg in a frantic, sparking flurry that failed to even scar its hide.
As the Ogre's fingers tightened, a sonic crack split the air. Jane crossed the distance in a blink. Her fist, moving faster than sight, smashed through the Ogre's wrist with the force of a meteorite. The massive hand disintegrated into pulp and bone, and Natasha fell, only to be caught in a desperate dive by Williams.
Jane landed between the monster and the retreating pair, her stance wide. Without breaking stride, she grabbed the Ogre's remaining ankle, her fingers sinking into its rock-like flesh. With a grunt of effort that tore at the asphalt beneath her, she lifted the colossal being and whipped it sideways, slamming it into the street again and again with earth-shaking force, like a child mercilessly dusting a rug. When the creature was a dazed, broken heap, she drove her hand into its chest, ripped outward, and finally allowed herself to slump to the ground, spent.
She did not see the torn flesh begin to knit, the shattered bones realign. Her clairvoyance, weakened by exhaustion, flickered a warning a second too late. Her eyes snapped open as a shadow fell over her. The Ogre, fully regenerated except for the mangled leg she had destroyed, was standing.
Jane scrambled to rise, but a gargantuan foot, like a falling tree trunk, caught her in the ribs. The impact launched her across the district. She plowed through a row of parked trailers, shattering them into scrap metal, before her body cratered into the support columns of another high-rise. With a groan of failing steel, the building buckled and collapsed, entombing her once more in a tomb of concrete and glass.
The Ogre, its victory bellow choked, tried to pursue. The leg it had kicked with, however, shattered utterly from the hip down, its miraculous regeneration finally spent. It could only drag itself forward, a half-crippled titan.
From the new mound of rubble, a figure erupted in a spray of debris. Jane, clothes torn and high heels long gone, moved on pure adrenaline. She closed the distance in a furious sprint and unleashed a barrage of punches upon the crippled Ogre. Each blow landed with the sound of cracking thunder, the concussive force flattening the surrounding rubble and shearing the facades from nearby buildings. The Ogre did not just fall; it was systematically, utterly decimated.
Gasping, Jane bent over, hands on her knees. Her breath came in ragged, burning heaves. The fabric of her outfit hung in tatters, and a deep, bone-weary fatigue threatened to pull her into the dirt. So total was her exhaustion that the tremor in the earth and the new, vaster shadow that fell over her registered only on the primal level.
Survival instinct—and the faintest whisper of her passive clairvoyance—screamed a millisecond before the new monster's foot descended to crush her. With the last of her strength, she threw her hands up, palms slamming against the calloused, barnacled sole of a creature that dwarfed the Ogre, her muscles screaming as she held back a mountain poised to fall.
Kate shouldered her handbag and made for the laboratory, her mind already cataloging potential dispersal agents for the fog. The sterile hallway was eerily silent until a low, wet gurgle echoed from the open lab door. Inside, a figure lurched between the workbenches. Its limbs were elongated, joints swollen and knotted like gnarled wood, and its skin had a slick, obsidian sheen.
This one is different, she observed curiously. Mutated.
Without breaking stride, she extended her psychokinetic focus with surgical precision. There was no visible motion, but the creature's skull gave a faint crick as a precise segment of brain matter was cleanly extracted. The body instantly stiffened, and the familiar dark ash began to pour from its orifices.
Now. As the lower half of the form dissolved into swirling particulates, Kate summoned a different power—a faint, shimmering aura of slowed time enveloped the remaining upper torso. Thanks to Derrick teaching me when we were children, she thought, a ghost of memory flashing behind her eyes. His chronokinesis was masterful. Mine is a pale echo, but it should suffice.
Holding both fields simultaneously—the psychokinetic grip and the chrono-lock—was like mentally balancing two spinning plates. She guided the partially preserved, ashing carcass onto a stainless-steel examination table. With a flick of her will, a sterile scalpel lifted and made a swift incision. A sliver of the blackened flesh, plucked from the air, floated to the lens of her electron microscope.
Her eyes narrowed as she peered into the eyepiece. "The cellular structure is a wasteland—neither alive nor dead in any conventional sense. There are no viral clusters, no parasitic organisms and no biological vector," she murmured. "The reanimation is purely energetic."
With a sharp exhale, she released both kinetic fields. The remaining specimen fully atomized into fog, leaving only a stain of soot on the steel. A dull ache pulsed behind her temples. A weaker version of Derrick's gave me quite the fatigue. A full chrono-stasis would have shattered my focus and likely my nervous system.
Pushing the fatigue aside, she straightened her coat. The answer wasn't in the cells; it was in the field itself. But the immediate need was triage. She turned on her heel, her footsteps decisive as she headed for the emergency rooms, the mystery of the fog momentarily filed away behind the pressing calculus of lives still at stake.
Beneath the crushing weight of the troll's foot, Jane's world had narrowed to a single, shuddering point of pressure. Her arms trembled violently, muscles screaming as they held back a mountain. A deep, guttural roar vibrated through the sole above her, and with a final heave, the beast shoved down, seeking to grind her into the pavement.
Through the haze of her exhaustion, a final, sharp clarity emerged. Her psychokinesis, a weightless extension of her will, flowed upward—not with a punch's fury, but with the immense, steady pressure of a hydraulic lift. The troll's foot rose, then its entire colossal bulk lurched into the air, hovering one precarious meter above the ground. She strained to push it higher, to hurl it into the sky, but her power sputtered, drained. Instead, she pivoted, swinging the massive creature in a groaning arc through the air toward the skeleton of a demolished factory.
Her clairvoyant sight, still faintly active, scanned the rubble. There. A cluster of thick steel reinforcement rods jutted from a broken concrete slab. With a thought, she summoned pyromancy, focusing heat until the rods glowed a fierce, blinding orange, the air around them shimmering with waves of distortion. She stopped just as the metal began to soften and drip.
With the last of her psychokinetic grip, she guided the troll's torso downward.
Sssssssssss—THUNK.
A horrific, sizzling sound echoed as the beast was impaled on the superheated rods, the smell of scorched hide and ozone flooding the air. It thrashed once, then fell still.
A stunned silence blanketed the survivors huddled nearby, broken by a hushed murmur. "Did she… just move that? She didn't even touch it…"
Jane didn't hear them. Every ounce of strength was gone. She stumbled toward a half-standing shelter and collapsed against a wall, sliding to the filthy floor. A profound exhaustion, heavier than the troll, pulled at her. Her light blue eyes, too weighty to keep open, fluttered shut. The visible world faded, leaving only the ghostly, grey-scale impressions of her clairvoyance to navigate the darkness. Her silver hair was matted with dust and grime, a stark contrast to the porcelain skin beneath, which remained mysteriously, perfectly unbruised—the only part of her that looked untouched by the battle.
The air in the cavern was cold and still, carrying the scent of damp stone and something older, metallic. Irene's hand, faintly luminous in the gloom, brushed against the unnaturally smooth wall. It pulsed with a slow, deep rhythm, like the vein of a sleeping giant.
"Are we… in another world?" she whispered, the sound swallowed by the immense, waiting silence.
Derrick's gaze was fixed on the tunnel ahead, a black maw descending into the earth. "A dungeon," he stated, his voice low and flat, "is another world."
Irene turned from the unsettling walls to look at him. "What do we do now?"
"We clear it."
His answer was absolute, leaving no room for debate. He began to walk forward, his footsteps making no sound. After a few paces, he paused, not looking back, and added the only explanation he would offer, each word measured and heavy with implication.
"The heart of the fog is here."