Pain was his compass—the needle that always pointed to the truth of his condition. Artur's leg throbbed in relentless agony, a map of torn muscle where the scout's teeth had ripped through him. He had spent what felt like an eternity in the darkness of the workshop, bandaging the wound as best he could, fear of infection nearly as sharp as his fear of the creatures outside.
But the silence had stretched on.
After the shelving collapsed over the scouts, the rest had withdrawn. The horde at the breach had scattered.
Why?
Their hesitation had a logic to it.
He couldn't stay. The workshop was a broken fortress now—a trap waiting to be sprung again. Using a length of metal pipe as an improvised crutch, he dragged himself out through the garage door and into the unnervingly empty street beneath the violet sky. The pain in his leg burned so fiercely the world flickered at the edges.
He moved slowly, keeping to the shadows, head turning constantly. The block was quiet—but the devastation told the story of slaughter. Civilian bodies lay scattered, frozen witnesses to the massacre.
Artur ignored them. The part of him capable of horror or pity had been cauterized—replaced by a core of pure survival.
It was when he turned a corner, following a side street he hadn't yet explored, that he stopped.
The smell hit first.
That same metallic, sour reek of purple blood—but layered with something else. A stench of viscera and death on a scale he hadn't yet encountered.
The scene before him was carnage.
But the script was wrong.
The street had become a battlefield. Monster corpses—at least five of them, hound-types and arachnids alike—lay torn apart. But he hadn't killed them. The wounds were different. Not the clean, deliberate cuts of his axe.
These were rips.
Massive bite marks. Limbs torn free. One skull crushed like overripe fruit.
At the center of the devastation lay the culprit.
And it, too, was dead.
One of the larger bestial creatures—the SUV-sized kind he'd faced in the alley and the workshop—lay on its side, a massive gash opening its throat. Purple blood pooled thick and tacky beneath it. But what unsettled Artur most were its other injuries. Its flank was riddled with deep punctures, as if impaled by multiple spears. One forelimb bent at an impossible angle.
He approached cautiously, mind struggling to process.
The beast had killed the smaller monsters. That much was clear. A cannibalistic frenzy? A territorial dispute? He'd seen that pattern before.
But what had killed the beast?
He examined the enormous carcass, and confusion curdled into a new, more terrible kind of fear.
Embedded in its flesh—broken but unmistakable—was the scythe-shaped limb of one of the tall, mantis-like creatures. Nearby, the severed head of another lay on the pavement, its body several yards away.
This wasn't cannibalism.
It was war.
The creatures were not a unified force. They were factions. Different species hunting the same territory—and clearly, they did not coexist peacefully.
An ecosystem of nightmares took shape in his mind, complete with its own food chains, its own predators and prey. He had assumed they were all part of the same horde—a singular army with a singular purpose.
He had been wrong.
The realization was both terrifying and clarifying.
Terrifying, because it meant the danger had more layers than he'd imagined. There wasn't one threat, but many—each with its own methods, its own behavior.
Clarifying, because it explained the scouts' retreat.
Maybe they hadn't withdrawn because of him.
Maybe they had retreated because something larger—something rival—had entered their territory.
He, Artur, was not the only player in this game.
He was just foreign meat dropped into a cage of tigers that already hated each other.
That changed things.
It meant chaos could be cover.
Conflict between factions could be exploited.
He wasn't just fighting "the monsters." He was trapped in the middle of a supernatural gang war.
He looked at the blood-streaked street, at the corpses of different species of demons that had slaughtered one another.
The world had just become infinitely more complicated.
And maybe—just maybe—a little more survivable.