The fear was gone. The despair was gone. The resignation to the cosmic joke was gone. In their place, a vacuum.
And within that vacuum, something new bloomed—something Artur hadn't felt since the first swing of his axe inside the toy store, only now magnified a thousandfold.
Fury.
Not the hot fury of a man fighting for his life.
This was a cold fury. Black. Absolute.
The fury of an anomaly that refuses to be erased. The fury of a lab rat deciding that if it's going to die, it will shatter the glass of the cage and drag the scientist down with it.
The revelation hadn't broken him.
It had freed him.
If nothing mattered—if his life was insignificant, if everything was merely a spectacle for indifferent gods—then the rules didn't matter either. Self-preservation didn't matter anymore. Pain didn't matter anymore.
The only thing that mattered was retribution.
The only thing that mattered was spitting back into the eye of the universe.
And at that moment, the universe wore the face of the Alpha standing over him.
He looked at the beast and, for the first time, he did not see a predator.
He saw a target.
A manifestation of the system that had tormented him, that had killed everyone he had known. A piece on the board that he was about to remove.
Not to win the game.
But out of pure, venomous spite.
The Alpha sensed the shift and hesitated.
The cornered prey was no longer cowering.
It was staring at her with eyes that held no fear—only an icy void and the promise of violence.
Artur moved.
With a sound that was no longer human—a roar torn from the depths of his shattered soul—he used the carcass behind him for leverage and hurled himself forward.
Not away from the beast.
Under it.
He dove beneath the descending jaws, his broken leg dragging uselessly behind him, pain reduced to distant, meaningless noise. He was inside the creature's guard now, in the lethal space between its front legs.
He still held the axe.
He didn't aim for the belly. He didn't aim for a weak point.
He aimed for the creature's front leg—at the height of what would have been its knee.
He wasn't trying to cripple it.
He was trying to annihilate it.
He struck.
And again.
And again.
The blows were clumsy, driven only by the strength of his shoulders and torso, but they carried a nihilistic conviction. The sound of steel slamming into carapace echoed down the street.
CLANG. CLANG. CLANG.
The Alpha roared—more in shock than pain—and tried to stomp him, but he was too close. It tried to retreat, but he moved with it, clinging to its leg like a rabid dog, the axe rising and falling.
He was no longer fighting to survive.
He was dismantling the machine.
The carapace began to give. A crack appeared.
He focused every strike on that single point.
The crack widened.
It became a fracture.
With one final blow, the axe punched through the armor and sank into the bone beneath.
The Alpha's leg buckled.
The multi-ton creature collapsed sideways, unleashing a roar of agony and fury that made the buildings tremble.
Artur was thrown aside, but he rolled and rose onto one knee, the axe ready.
The beast was on the ground now, wounded, struggling to rise, its front leg bent at a wrong and terrible angle.
The balance had changed.
It was hurt.
It was vulnerable.
And he—
He was only just beginning.
Cold fury filled him, a black energy that numbed pain, that pushed exhaustion away.
He was no longer a survivor.
He was an angel of death.
A broken, bleeding angel—but an angel nonetheless.
And his only purpose was annihilation.
He limped toward the fallen creature, the axe dragging along the ground, carving a trail across the asphalt.
The hunt had begun again.
But this time—
He was the hunter.