Kade was already underground when the world learned fear had levels.
The command center sat beneath reinforced rock and steel, designed to survive nuclear impact, meteor strikes, even civil collapse. Screens lined the walls, each one feeding live data from what remained of the world's eyes.
They were losing those eyes fast.
Satellite after satellite went blind—not destroyed, not disabled, but returning data that made no sense. Distances measured negative. Objects appeared before they were detected. Coordinates refused to stay still.
Kade stood over a tactical table littered with maps that were already outdated.
"These things aren't following patterns," one analyst said, voice cracking. "They're not even following physics."
Kade didn't answer. He was staring at a single region on the map where nothing would resolve. A dead zone. A blind spot that swallowed every sensor pointed at it.
"What's there?" he asked.
"No reading," someone replied. "It's like the area just… refuses."
Outside the bunker, the world screamed.
On the surface, the monsters continued to pour through the sky-scar, though fewer now. They moved differently. Less aggressive. More erratic.
Some fled cities entirely, stampeding into wilderness, oceans, deserts—anywhere away from a growing pressure they couldn't comprehend.
Others weren't fast enough.
Entire city blocks vanished without explosion. Buildings folded inward, collapsing into themselves as if crushed by an invisible hand. People died without wounds, without warning—lungs collapsing, bones failing, bodies giving up under forces never meant to touch them.
Witnesses described the same thing:
A shadow where there shouldn't be one.
Air bending.
A sound like the world holding its breath.
Kade watched drone footage freeze mid-flight.
The camera shook violently, then stabilized on an empty stretch of ruined city.
Something stepped into frame.
It was too large to comprehend at once.
Its body rose beyond the camera's field of view, a towering mass of darkness and distorted anatomy. Its shape shifted subtly, like reality was struggling to decide how it should look. A spine curved backward in defiance of biology. Limbs dragged and then weren't there anymore, replaced by different angles, different proportions.
When its head tilted downward, it split open vertically.
Inside was movement. Depth. A sense of something folding inward endlessly.
No one in the bunker spoke.
The creature took a step.
The drone imploded.
Not from impact,from proximity.
Data across the room spiked, then screamed into static.
Kade felt pressure in his skull, like something heavy had leaned too close to his thoughts.
"Is it hostile?" someone whispered.
Kade swallowed.
"It doesn't matter," he said. "It's not something you fight."
They tried anyway.
Missiles launched from miles away. Jets screamed across the sky, weapons firing in coordinated salvos.
On the screens, explosions bloomed—then vanished.
The creature didn't dodge.
It arrived somewhere else.
One moment it stood near the coast.
The next, it occupied the airspace above a city center.
Not traveled.
Decided.
The shockwave alone flattened buildings. People died in waves, bodies thrown aside like debris in a storm. Streets cracked. Bridges collapsed.
The other monsters reacted immediately.
Some charged it.
They never reached it.
They broke apart mid-approach, torn by forces that didn't look like attacks—more like corrections. Pieces scattered, then fell silent.
The rest fled.
Every screen in the bunker showed the same thing.
The monsters were no longer the threat.
This thing was.
On the surface, Rami and Layla felt it before they saw it.
The ground dipped beneath their feet. Windows shattered outward. Fires bent sideways as if blown by a wind that had no source.
Layla looked up.
"Oh," she breathed.
Rogue stood beyond the skyline, vast and impossible, framed by smoke and collapsing towers. He didn't move much. He didn't need to.
Every motion rewrote the space around him.
People ran.
They didn't get far.
Rogue's presence alone crushed crowds, bodies dropping as if strings had been cut. Others vanished when he stepped—not flattened, not torn apart, but removed from where they stood.
Layla filmed until her hands shook too badly to keep focus.
Rami stared, numb.
"That's not an alien," he said.
Layla nodded slowly.
"No," she agreed. "That's something we forgot."
Back in the bunker, Kade finally gave the thing a name—not because it needed one, but because humans needed language to cope.
"Label it Rogue," he said. "Unknown origin. Apex-level threat. Independent."
Rogue.
The name spread faster than panic.
And everywhere it went, the world learned the same lesson:
This was not a war between worlds.
This was a reordering.
And Rogue was at the top.
The name did not make Rogue smaller.
If anything, it made him worse.
Once something is named, the mind tries to fit it into a category—threat, weapon, entity, enemy. Every attempt failed. Rogue did not behave like a creature, or a machine, or a force of nature.
Forces had limits.
Rogue did not.
Across the globe, institutions collapsed in real time.
Scientists argued over data that contradicted itself. Equations broke down. Models returned impossible results or refused to run at all. Quantum sensors detected mass where there was none, absence where something clearly stood.
One physicist in Geneva stared at a screen for six straight hours before quietly saying, "That thing isn't occupying space."
No one asked what he meant.
They already felt it.
Rogue's presence warped causality. Events near him happened out of order. Cameras recorded his movements after the damage appeared. Seismic readings spiked before his arrival. Survivors reported hearing the sound of destruction before seeing it occur.
In one city, Rogue stood still for nearly ten minutes.
Nothing touched him.
Nothing approached.
Buildings around him simply… failed.
Load-bearing columns buckled without stress. Asphalt liquefied and flowed away from his feet. Gravity tilted subtly, drawing debris toward him like offerings.
He did not attack.
He ended.
Military command fractured.
Some leaders demanded total nuclear response. Others begged for restraint, arguing—correctly—that escalation against something like Rogue was meaningless.
Kade watched the arguments unfold on muted screens.
"They're still thinking in terms of force," he said to no one in particular. "As if this thing exists on the same ladder we do."
An analyst turned toward him, pale. "Sir… we've been tracking the monsters."
Kade looked up. "What about them?"
"They're changing behavior patterns. Not just fleeing. They're… migrating. Coordinating."
"To attack Rogue?"
The analyst shook his head slowly.
"To avoid him."
Maps updated across the wall.
Every monster movement curved away from Rogue's projected path. Entire regions were being abandoned—not just cities, but ecosystems. Forests emptied. Oceans showed mass die-offs as creatures dove deeper than biology allowed, desperate to put distance between themselves and whatever now owned the surface.
"They know," someone whispered.
Kade closed his eyes.
They always do.
On the ground, Rami felt smaller than he ever had in his life.
Not insignificant.
Incorrect.
Like a rounding error reality had forgotten to delete.
Rogue moved again.
Not fast.
Not slow.
Just… elsewhere.
The space he had occupied snapped back into place with a thunderous crack, air rushing inward to fill the absence. Several buildings collapsed outright, freed from the pressure that had been holding them together.
Layla kept filming, though tears blurred her vision.
"This isn't destruction," she said hoarsely. "It's editing."
Rami glanced at her. "What?"
She gestured weakly at the skyline, at the way entire sections of the city were simply gone, edges too clean, too deliberate.
"He's not killing people," she said. "He's deciding they were never necessary."
A group of soldiers fired from a nearby rooftop.
The bullets didn't ricochet.
They didn't melt.
They stopped.
Hung in the air for a fraction of a second—then fell harmlessly to the ground, flattened, as though embarrassed by the attempt.
The soldiers ran.
Rogue did not pursue.
He turned.
The motion was subtle, but the effect was catastrophic. The building the soldiers had been standing on folded inward, collapsing into itself without debris or explosion. When the dust cleared, there was nothing left where it had been.
Layla lowered the camera at last.
"We can't survive this," she said quietly.
Rami didn't argue.
In the bunker, alarms screamed as sensors overloaded again.
"Sir," an operator said, voice shaking. "We're detecting another anomaly."
Kade turned. "Another Rogue?"
"No," she replied. "This one's… different. Smaller. Faster. It's moving around Rogue, not away from him."
The room went still.
On a distant camera feed, something blurred through the ruins—too fast to track clearly, leaving destruction in precise, narrow lines. Monsters vanished mid-motion. Structures failed along clean vectors, like surgical incisions through the city.
Kade leaned closer to the screen.
The movement stopped.
For just a moment.
Long enough for a silhouette to register—humanoid, upright, impossibly still amid chaos.
Then it was gone.
Kade felt a chill crawl up his spine.
"That's not the same thing," he said slowly.
"No," the analyst agreed. "But it's close."
Outside, Rogue turned his head slightly.
Not toward the city.
Toward the movement.
For the first time since his emergence, Rogue reacted.
The air screamed.
Two distortions crossed paths at impossible speed. Shockwaves tore through the ruins. Windows shattered miles away. Every sensor in the bunker spiked into the red, then went dark.
When vision returned, Rogue stood where he had been.
Unmoved.
Unchanged.
Whatever had moved near him was gone.
Or had chosen to leave.
Kade exhaled shakily.
"There are others," he said.
"Yes," someone whispered. "But none like him."
Kade stared at Rogue's image, towering and patient, a presence that did not demand worship or fear—only obedience.
"No," he said quietly. "There's only one like him."
Across the world, as cities fell and monsters fled and humanity's explanations died one by one, a single truth became impossible to deny:
Rogue was not here to conquer.
He was here because the world had broken
and something had come to enforce the correction.