The first thing Damian felt was the pain that hurt.
It wasn't the kind of pain that screamed. It was the kind that hummed under the skin, like your body forgot how to switch off survival mode. The kind that came after your adrenaline burned out and all that was left was the meat.
He opened his eyes to half-light.
Curtains drawn. Sky outside barely blue. That dead in between hour before morning fully settled in quiet, soft, eerie. The system's timer sat frozen at the corner of his vision.
[132:00:01]
Then it ticked down a second.
He exhaled, then stared at the ceiling.
Still alive. still here.
His coat clung to him like a always. Dried blood locked into the fibers. Smelled like metal and smoke and dying things. His boots hung halfway off one foot. His shoulder felt like someone had hammered nails into it. Every nerve in his body screamed to go back under.
But he couldn't.
Not with the clock ticking.
Not with what was coming.
He sat up slow. The room tilted. Shadows pulled at the corners of his vision before his Perception snapped everything into sharpness. His old room looked the same as it did ten years ago. Posters on the wall. That cracked lamp still half-functional. The bed too small for someone who'd already died once.
His eyes drifted to the corner.
The mask lay on his desk.
The kitchen knife still sat beside it, gleaming like it hadn't taken dozens of lives.
Eva hadn't touched them. Good! Smart girl.
He stood, staggered once, caught himself on the dresser. His legs shook. Muscles still worn from the fight in Moscow. His body wasn't the problem though.
His mind was.
Because he knew what came next.
Not just in a few days.
Not just in Prague or Berlin or Seoul.
All of it. The downward spiral. The lies. The ones who thought they were heroes before they died screaming in alleys. The first hidden-level Awakening. The bleedthrough zones. The Voidburst event.
And he remembered something else too.
There were people—
No.
Things were moving already quietly planning things out.
They hadn't shown up on the System yet.
They wouldn't.
Not until it was far too late.
He needed to act now.
Before the rest of the world figured out it was already bleeding.
***
Eva was asleep on the couch, phone dropped beside her. TV still on, playing some shaky news footage from Moscow. The same looped video. Black masked figure tearing through the creatures. Civilians screaming. Buildings burning.
Good thing they hadn't caught my face.
Damian moved like a ghost, no sound what so ever, through the kitchen. Grabbed a protein bar, downed half a bottle of water. Checked the windows. The streets outside were quiet. Not many people, Just early morning cold and the occasional flicker of a neighbor's lights.
The illusion of peace.
He sat at the kitchen table, pulled the System tab open in front of him.
It pulsed.
[User: Damian Voss]
Level: 7
STR: +8 | DEX: +9 | INT: +11 | PER: +7
Passive: [Void] – (Active)
Ability: [Shadow Step] – (Cooldown Ready)
Next Global Event: ???
Time Until System Surge: 131 Hours
He tapped the edge of the screen.
"Map."
Nothing happened.
Then static.
Faint flicker. Just for a second. Then it was gone.
No coordinates. No threat pings. Just a blank, pulsing silence.
He leaned back in his chair, knuckles tapping against the wood.
The map wasn't responding.
This was a variable he didn't expect.
Even in the first timeline, the map still gave vague signals. Low-priority threat detection. Artifact, Gates, Catacombs and stuff's locations. Shifts in danger zones. But now? It was blind.
Someone was tampering with it.
Or maybe worse… someone was jamming the System itself.
***
[Meanwhile — Russian Military Defense HQ, Prague]
"—and we've confirmed the footage is real. Multiple angles. Civilian and drone. One individual. Masked. No known affiliation. No government ties."
General Ruzicka leaned back in his seat. The conference room was dim, lit only by the overhead projector flashing scenes from Moscow. Every clip more surreal than the last.
"We've reviewed thirty-six separate sources," the analyst continued. "All confirm the same individual moving faster than anything we've documented. Zero hesitation. Kitchen knife only. And whatever those creatures were... they didn't stand a chance."
Silence.
Another officer cleared his throat. "You think he's military?"
"No military training we know of produces… that."
Ruzicka squinted at the screen. The man moved like a shadow. Disappeared between flashes. Carved a path through the horde and left bodies in his wake. But it was the precision that unsettled him. No wasted movement. No panic. Every strike meant to kill.
"This person," he muttered, "isn't trying to save people."
"Sir?"
"He's cleaning up a mess."
"And doing it better than we are."
More silence.
Then—
"Should we try to contact him?"
Ruzicka shook his head.
"No. We wait."
"Wait for what?"
The General stared at the footage a beat longer, eyes hard.
"For him to choose whether we're next."
***
Back at the house, Damian stared at the flickering system tab. His breath fogged in front of him even though the heater was on.
Outside, something moved.
Not near.
Not yet.
But distant. Like thunder miles away.
The Void responded first. A sharp pull behind his ribs. His ability wasn't activating, but something inside him knew the next event was starting to form. Just not where the System could see it yet.
He stood and walked to his bedroom. Threw open the drawers. Found his old duffel bag. Began packing.
He had five days.
He could reach the next site first.
Beat the others.
Find the hidden artifact there was to offer for now before they showed up on the system's radar.
And maybe… maybe if he moved fast enough…
Stop the thing that never got stopped last time. Claim the rewards. Get stronger!
His fingers paused over the hilt of his kitchen knife.
He looked out the window.
Snow had started falling.
The world always looked peaceful before it started dying again.
The snow thickened.
Damian zipped the duffel closed, slung it over his shoulder, and stepped out the door without a word. Left Eva a note "Don't leave the house. Don't answer the door unless it's me." Short. Necessary.
His boots hit the pavement with a quiet crunch.
No sirens. No monsters. Just frost-bitten wind and the low groan of the world pretending it hadn't already ended.
The early signs weren't supposed to show until the third surge.
But something was wrong with the System.
The map being jammed? The flicker of static in the interface?
That wasn't just a game lag.
That was interference from the developers.
And he had a pretty good idea where it might've started.
Not far from the outskirts of the city northwestern industrial district there used to be a shutdown textile plant. Run-down. Deserted. In the original timeline, it stayed untouched until Surge 4. Then someone stumbled across it by accident and vanished. What came out three days later wasn't human anymore.
Damian never found out what was inside.
But now? If that thing was surfacing early…
He had to know why.
***
Getting there took less than an hour. Shadow Step didn't care about fences, streets, or broken locks. He slipped past a sleeping world like a ghost.
The air shifted when he got close.
Felt like walking into a static field.
His Perception buzzed hard the way it did before something broke through in Moscow.
And that's when he saw it.
The plant was supposed to be boarded up.
But the main gate…
Hung open. Bent inward. Like something had pulled it from the outside.
He crouched low, reached into the duffel, pulled the kitchen knife he had out. No glow. No aura. But it hummed in his grip like it recognized something nearby.
There were footprints in the frost.
Not big. Human-sized.
But there was no steam. No heat trail.
Whoever made them wasn't breathing.
He slipped inside.
***
The inside of the plant was colder than it was out of it, cavernous, and hollow-silent. Rows of abandoned equipment stretched into darkness. Rust and cobwebs covered everything. But deeper in near the old dyeing vats the air turned thick.
Didn't feel human.
It wasn't human.
It wasn't even beast.
Like the world forgot this place existed.
Damian's breath caught.
He stepped into the center of the main floor and stopped.
Because it was there.
A faint shimmer.
Like heat haze in winter.
Hovering just above the cracked floor—a tear in space, rippling slow.
No System marker. No global ping. Nothing on the UI.
Then—
[???: Hidden Anomaly Detected]
[Warning: This event is not synchronized with the active timeline.]
His pulse kicked.
What the fuck.
The System had never shown that before.
He took a step closer slowly, deliberately—
That's when it spoke.
Not the anomaly.
Something behind him.
"You're early."
The voice wasn't loud. It was soft. Like breath at his ear. Genderless. Emotionless. But it knew him. Knew his name, his path, his presence.
He turned, kitchen knife up—
No one there.
Just flickering weird lights.
A pressure in the air.
Like the world itself was holding its breath.
"Not yet," it whispered again. "But we see you."
The lights blew.
Every one of them.
Darkness swallowed the factory whole.
His System tab flickered erratically back, forth, static pulses. Then—
[ERROR]
[Worldbreaker Thread Interference Detected]
[Stabilization: FAILED]
[Relogic Suggestion: Evacuate Immediate Zone]
He staggered back, heart pounding harder than it had in Moscow. He'd fought monsters. Killed humans. Survived collapse zones.
But this?
This wasn't a fight.
It was a presence of a being out of this world that could kill Damian any moment in a millisecond if it wanted to. Damian knew that very well—
And it wasn't part of the original game.
He bolted.
Broke into a sprint.
Snow slammed his face as he burst out of the plant, slipped behind an old van, chest heaving.
Nothing followed.
No sound.
No movement.
Only silence.
But it wasn't the silence of peace.
It was the silence of being marked.
Then—
"Good move, regressor."
Soft. Inside his skull.
Then gone.
The snow fell again.
Normal, too normal.
His System returned to default, no trace of the glitch. No warning. No evidence.
But Damian didn't move.
He sat there, blade drawn, sweat freezing against his skin.
Something was wrong.
He pulled up his ability panel, fingers trembling.
Just to confirm. Just to make sure.
Then he saw it.
Void — gone.
Shadow Step — gone.
In their place—
[???: Ability Not Yet Recognized]
[Classification: Undefined]
[Caution: Instability Detected]
His blood ran cold.
He didn't even remember blacking out. But somewhere in that darkness something had happened.
Something changed him.
He didn't have five days. He had hours.
And whatever he was now—
It wasn't what he'd been before.
[User: Damian Voss]
Level: 7
STR: +8 | DEX: +9 | INT: +11 | PER: +7
Passive: ??? – (Active)
Ability: ???
Next Global Event: ???
Time Until System Surge: 111 Hours