The sound of the Alpha drawing near barely registered in Artur's mind. He was catatonic, paralyzed by the enormity of the truth. His consciousness drifted on the sea of horror stretching beyond the barrier. His struggle, his pain, the faces of the dead—reduced to activity inside a Petri dish.
It was movement on the alien horizon that pulled him from his stupor.
In the purple mist, far beyond the plains of dust, something shifted.
It was large.
No—large was the wrong word. The Alpha hunting him was large.
This was something else.
Colossal.
A silhouette rose slowly from the fog, so tall it seemed to scrape the lower atmosphere of the violet sky. Its shape was vaguely humanoid, but warped into nightmare proportions. Legs like pillars, as thick as skyscrapers, and a torso that vanished into the mist above. It had no head—only a massive, pulsing sphere of orange light embedded in its center, where a chest should have been.
Behind it, another rose.
And a third.
The Colossi.
They did not move with intention. They moved with the slowness of drifting continents. One of them took a step—a motion that took nearly a full minute to complete—and the ground of the alien landscape trembled. The vibration carried through the barrier. Artur felt it in his bones.
They seemed drawn by the disturbance. His battle against the Alphas—the energy unleashed, the deaths—had been like a stone cast into a silent lake. And now the things from the depths were surfacing to see what had rippled the water.
One of the Colossi approached the cage.
Its "hand"—a structure composed of dozens of needle-thin fingers, each the size of a train—pressed against the air. Where its digits touched, the purple sky distorted violently. On Artur's side, the invisible barrier flared with blinding light and released a deafening burst of static, as if straining under immense pressure.
The creature seemed… curious.
Like a human pressing their face against aquarium glass to observe a particularly agitated fish.
The fish was Artur.
The scale defied comprehension. The Alphas—the monsters he had fought—were white blood cells. The immune system of the cage.
The Colossi…
They were the body.
They were the observers.
Perhaps the zookeepers themselves.
Artur's struggle—an epic war for survival in his mind—was nothing more than insects fighting. The death of two Alphas, the feat that had shattered him, meant nothing. They could crush the entire cage beneath their feet without even noticing.
That final understanding was the mercy blow.
If the alien landscape had broken his will, the sight of the Colossi pulverized it.
Insignificance.
That was the ultimate truth.
He was less than an ant. His existence, his fight, his pain—his entire species—was a forgotten footnote in a book written in a language he could never hope to understand.
He laughed.
A raw, fractured sound spilled from his bloodied lips. He laughed at the cosmic joke.
The joke was him.
All of them.
The screams, the deaths, the desperate struggle for survival on Twenty-Sixth Street—everything unfolding inside a small, glowing glass box for the fleeting amusement of incomprehensible monster-gods.
The laughter collapsed into a sob.
He let his head rest against the barrier, the vibration of its energy humming against his skull, and watched the giant Colossus press against his prison—the god of an indifferent universe staring at a dying insect.
He did not hear the Alpha approaching behind him.
He did not hear the snort of rage.
He did not hear the sound of its paw lifting for the final blow.
He had disconnected.
He was lost in the vastness beyond.