Evan forced the memory of the Dean Reynolds back into a mental box and slammed the lid.
Thinking about the suspension was a waste of processing power. He hadn't cheated; he had optimized. He saw the solution while everyone else was still reading the syntax. Apparently, in academia, the penalty for efficiency or being too smart was exile.
"Focus," he muttered to himself, checking his pulse on his wrist. "Anger raises the heart rate. Burns glucose. Can't afford the energy bill."
He looked down at his phone. His thumb hovered over an old icon: Code Lancer.
It was a freelance marketplace he used to live on during freshman year—quick patches, database cleanups, fixing broken CSS for startup CEOs who thought they were visionaries. It was survival money. But he hadn't logged in for almost a year now.
The platform's algorithm was brutal. It punished dormancy. By now, his profile was likely buried under a mountain of bots and desperate new freelancers willing to code for exposure or experience.
This is no good, Evan thought, grimacing. Why did I put the CLOSE sign on my store?
Still, the probability of finding a gig was non-zero. Maybe… just maybe, they were a few of his old clients that might need his skills. He tapped the app. The blue loading circle spun.
He was so focused on the UI that he didn't notice the server crash.
Not the app's server.
The world's.
It wasn't a snap. It was a fade. Like a sound engineer slowly dragging the master volume down to zero.
The grinding friction of tires on asphalt… dampened.
The distant wail of a siren… thinned out.
The chatter of the crowd… evaporated.
It was as if the entire city had simultaneously put on high-end noise-canceling headphones. That was when Evan noticed something was wrong with the surroundings.
He frowned, looking up from his screen. The visual data didn't match the audio. Cars were still moving. Mouths were still opening. But the feedback was gone.
"Pressure drop?" he wondered, tapping his ear hard. "Or did I skip enough meals that the auditory cortex is finally shutting down?"
He blinked.
The crowd didn't just blur. They were slowly losing texture. The faces smoothed out into featureless smears. The streetlights, which had been a harsh sodium yellow, dimmed to the color of a dying ember.
The air went unnaturally still. Not calm.
But dead. Vacuum-sealed.
Evan slowed his jog to a walk. His sneakers hit the pavement, but there was no sound. No echo. It felt like walking inside a soundproof booth at the end of the universe.
"What's happening?" he whispered as he was testing something.
As how he had expected, his voice didn't travel. It just fell out of his mouth and died.
"Okay," Evan mouthed, scanning the distortion. "That's not weather. That's like a rendering failure."
He was now on a high alert. He looked around, testing a few more things.
"This is creepy."
He walked a few more steps.
Then came the noise.
Scritch. Scritch.
It sounded like dry leaves dragging across stone. But there were no trees here.
Evan looked at the alleyway to his left. The shadows there were deep, pooling around the dumpsters in a way that looked… thick. Like spilled ink.
And they were moving.
"What is it now?" He squinted, sure his eyes were playing tricks on him. A jagged shape peeled itself off the brick wall—something that looked like a hand with too many joints—and groped blindly toward the street. To his right, the shadow under a drainpipe rippled and whispered, a sound like static interference.
"Okay," Evan whispered, backing up. "I'm definitely hallucinating."
He sighed. "Sleep. I need sleep."
But the shadows didn't care about his sleep schedule. They were inching toward him.
Then, the air changed.
It didn't just get cold; it froze. The humidity vanished, replaced by a dry, biting chill that made Evan gasp, his breath blooming into a cloud of white mist.
The whispering stopped.
The shadows in the alley didn't lunge. They recoiled. The jagged hand scrambled back into the dark like a terrified spider. The rippling pool under the pipe vanished into the sewer grate.
They weren't attacking. They were hiding.
Evan turned his head to see what they were running from.
Walking down the center of the silent, grey street was a man.
He was the only thing in the world that looked real. Everything else was blurry, but he was sharp, high-contrast, and walking straight at Evan.
Whoever this man is, I'm not going to greet him. I'm going right, Evan decided, instinctively stepping to the right to let him pass.
But, the stranger didn't just react; he was already there. As soon as Evan moved, the man was in his path, blocking him.
Evan couldn't stop. Even though it was not that fast, Evan felt as if he had slammed right into him.
It felt like running into a steel beam.
The man didn't stumble. He didn't even sway. He stood rooted to the ground like a statue, absorbing the impact while Evan bounced off, losing his footing and landing hard on the pavement.
"Ow," Evan hissed, shaking out his stinging hands.
He looked up, expecting to see an angry pedestrian.
He saw a nightmare instead.
The man was huge, towering over him in a heavy black trench coat and a tall, stiff hat that looked a century out of date. He wore dark, circular glasses and a black face mask that covered everything else. No skin. No face. Just a void in the shape of a person.
He stared down at Evan—which Evan could feel behind the shades and mask—silent and terrifying.
Evan scrambled to sit up, his heart hammering.
"My fault," he stammered, dusting himself off. "I wasn't looking."
The man didn't speak. He just extended a gloved hand down toward Evan.
Evan instinctively reached up, thinking the stranger was offering to pull him to his feet.
But the hand didn't open to catch him. It wasn't a helping hand.
He was holding something out.
A black card.
Evan hesitated. The rational part of his brain told him to get up and run. But the card drew him in. It looked darker than the air around it.
"What is this?" Evan asked.
He reached out and took it.
The cold bit into his fingers instantly. It wasn't just cool; it was freezing, like holding a piece of dry ice. He looked down at it. In the center of the matte black surface, a single word stood out in white.
"Emperor?" Evan frowned, looking at the stark text. "What is this, some kind of invitation?"
He looked up to ask the man what was going on.
"Hey, what's with the—"
He stopped.
The street was now completely empty.
Evan blinked. He spun around in a circle. No alleyways close enough. No doors opening. The street was wide, open, and completely deserted.
The man hadn't walked away. He was just gone.
Then, the world crashed back in.
The noise hit him like a physical blow—horns blaring, people shouting, the hum of the city returning at full volume. The cold vanished, replaced instantly by the humid heat of the evening.
Cars rushed past. A woman walked right by him, tapping away on her phone, completely ignoring the guy standing frozen in the middle of the sidewalk.
Evan stood there, his breath coming in short, shallow gasps. He looked from the empty street to the card in his hand.
It was still there. And it was still freezing cold.
"Impossible," he whispered. "What just happened?"