The sky felt wrong.
Not broken.
Compressed.
Like pressure building behind glass.
Ren felt it in his chest before he saw it. A tightening. A pull toward something unseen.
Billy adjusted his hat beside him.
"It divided." Billy said.
Ren's eyes narrowed toward a narrow alley across the street.
"No." Ren replied. "It narrowed."
He stepped inside.
The city noise faded too quickly. Sound thinned. The air felt heavier, as if it had weight.
Halfway down the alley, he stopped.
A perfect blackened circle marked the pavement.
No blast pattern.
No debris.
Contained force.
Brick walls on either side bore claw marks. Even spacing. Deep. Parallel. Angled inward.
Like something had been testing the space.
Ren's pulse began to climb.
His parents had studied collapse theory. Civilizations. Financial systems. Wars. They mapped how complex systems failed.
Not randomly.
Narrowly.
At night they played cards at the kitchen table.
"Luck is just information you don't have yet." his father would say.
"The house doesn't cheat." his mother would add. "It controls structure."
Ren learned to recognize when outcomes stopped branching.
The night his parents vanished, the air inside their house had felt exactly like this.
Heavy.
Compressed.
Then space folded inward.
No explosion. No damage.
Just absence.
Standing in the alley now, Ren felt the same narrowing probability.
Something was about to resolve.
The air snapped.
A black shape slammed into him.
He hit the brick wall hard enough to lose breath. Claws tore across his shoulder. Pain flared hot and immediate.
He staggered, barely staying upright as the creature rebounded off the opposite wall and landed silently.
A hound.
Black fur that swallowed light. Lean. Controlled.
Its eyes were not feral.
They were calculating.
Behind it flickered a second shape. Taller. Skeletal. A hollow canine outline that distorted the air around it.
Ren's throat tightened.
He was scared.
Not cautious.
Scared.
The hound moved.
It sprinted straight at him.
Ren tore metal from a broken pipe and reshaped it mid-motion into his revolver. He fired once.
The bullet curved sharply toward the creature.
The hound shifted before the arc completed.
Miss.
Ren fired twice more, altering rhythm, adjusting angle.
The shots curved unpredictably.
The hound moved early every time.
It was not reacting.
It was anticipating.
The hound lunged.
Ren rolled too late. Claws sliced across his ribs. He felt warm blood soak through fabric immediately.
He hit the pavement hard. The revolver skidded from his grip.
The hound landed, turned, and watched him.
Still.
Certain.
Ren scrambled backward and grabbed the revolver.
Click.
Empty.
The hound launched instantly.
It had counted.
Its weight crushed him into the ground. Claws pinned his forearm. Its jaws hovered inches above his throat.
He could feel its breath.
Calm.
Measured.
Not wild hunger.
Certainty.
Fear flooded through him completely.
And beneath the fear was heat.
Deep in his chest.
A dense warmth behind his sternum.
It pulsed.
Slow.
Heavy.
It hurt.
Like something trying to force its way outward.
The skeletal silhouette behind the hound grew clearer.
Ren stared into its eyes.
Black dog.
Medieval records. Execution omens. Grave guardians. Death hounds said to appear before inevitable endings.
'You're not here to hunt.'Ren whispered, voice unsteady. 'You appear when death is certain.'
Billy's voice entered calmly. "Yes."
The world slowed.
Dust froze midair.
The hound's breath hung inches from Ren's skin.
'What did you do?' Ren thought.
"I accelerated your perception." Billy replied. "Time is unchanged. You are thinking faster."
Ren's fear sharpened into clarity.
'You're a grave hound.' he thought quickly, staring at the creature. 'You're not an animal. You're a stabilized belief. The idea that death announces itself.'
The heat in his chest flared harder.
'I'm about to die.' Ren said.
"Yes." Billy did not soften it.
The world began to speed back up.
The hound's jaws lowered.
Ren focused inward.
The heat felt thick. Coiled. Pressurized.
He did not understand it.
But it was his.
He reached toward it mentally.
Tried to grab it.
Pain detonated through his ribs.
Something inside him constricted violently.
Time snapped back.
The hound lunged.
Ren's revolver felt heavier.
Different.
He pulled the trigger.
The bullet that fired was darker. Denser. It carried weight that metal did not.
It curved sharply toward the hound.
The creature shifted early to intercept.
Mid-flight, the projectile destabilized.
It snapped in the opposite direction like something resisting control.
It tore through the hound's shoulder.
The creature shrieked. The sound fractured like splitting iron.
Cracks spidered across its body.
Ren stared in shock.
"That was not metal." Billy said.
The hound abandoned prediction and charged directly, committing fully.
Ren grabbed the heat again.
Harder.
Agony flooded his chest as more blood compressed into the chamber.
His vision blurred.
He fired.
The projectile curved.
The hound dodged left.
Mid-arc, the mass twisted violently and corrected.
It punched straight through the creature's chest.
The skeletal silhouette behind it shattered like glass under tension.
Both forms fractured and collapsed into black ash across the scorched pavement.
Silence returned.
Ren remained on the ground, breathing hard.
His hands shook.
His chest burned.
His side bled steadily.
He pushed himself up slowly.
"What did I just do?" he asked.
"You compressed your blood into a projectile." Billy said. "An unstable manifestation."
Ren looked at his hands.
"My blood."
Ren glanced at the ash.
"It was predicting inevitability, and I broke it for now."
Ren swallowed.
"Why did it have a legend?"
Billy stepped closer to the fading ash.
"Animals collect myth quickly." Billy said. "Humans project meaning onto them long before they understand them. Wolves become omens. Ravens become messengers. Hounds become guardians of the dead."
"When enough belief concentrates around a concept, it stabilizes. Not the creature. The idea of it."
Ren felt his thoughts align.
"So that wasn't just a dog."
"No. It was accumulated belief."
Ren pressed a hand to his chest. The heat was faint now, but present.
"My parents studied collapse." he said quietly. "Probability. Narrowing systems."
"Yes."
"They were historians. Gamblers."
"They studied inevitability." Billy corrected. "You grew up recognizing when outcomes stop branching."
Ren's voice dropped.
"The night they disappeared… the air felt like this."
Billy did not deny it.
Ren stared at the scorch circle.
"So something else forced that narrowing."
"Yes."
Ren looked at the fading ash.
"And my blood resisted it."
Billy's gaze settled on him.
"Your blood does not follow clean trajectories. It resists certainty."
Ren was still afraid.
Still shaking.
But something fundamental had shifted.
For the first time since his parents vanished, inevitability had cracked.
And somewhere beyond the city, something recalculated.