The initial chaos lasted only a few minutes. Panic, like a fire starved of fuel, gave way to a state of whispered shock. The street, once a river of running people, was now eerily empty, save for small groups huddled in building entrances, like castaways clinging to wreckage. The only light came from the purple sky—a nightmare illumination that made the familiar feel alien.
From his hiding place in the alley, Artur watched. The silence had returned, but now it was filled with a vibrating tension, a low-frequency hum that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once. It was like the sound of a high-voltage line—but felt in the bones rather than the ears.
Artur, a man whose world was defined by nature's immutable laws, felt everything was wrong on a visceral level. The shadows didn't fall as they should; they seemed to stretch and writhe at the edges of his vision. The perspective of the street ahead looked subtly warped, as if he were seeing it through flawed glass. The geometry of the world was sick. This wasn't just a change in lighting. It was a change in the rules.
He dared to peer deeper into the alley. It ended at a tall brick wall. No exit. A trap. He would have to return to the street if he wanted to move. He tightened his grip on the axe. In his mind, he wasn't thinking about "monsters" or "Echoes." He thought like a hunter: where is the threat? What makes noise? What leaves tracks? But here, everything was too quiet.
A middle-aged man in an expensive suit burst out of a doorway and ran into the middle of the street, shouting.
"Help! Someone! What's happening?"
His voice sounded muffled, as if the heavy air were trying to smother it. No one answered. He turned in a circle, the figure of a powerful man reduced to the helplessness of a lost child. Artur watched him, a twinge of pity mixed with a cold assessment: that man would be the first to die. He was loud. And he was exposed.
He remembered the radio in his pickup, the announcer's voice talking about Ninth Street. "Temporary disappearance." "One hundred and twelve victims." The abstraction of the news was now his concrete reality. He was in the second event. He finally understood—not with his mind, but with his skin—what those people had felt. The sensation of being torn out of existence, of being placed somewhere where the laws of physics were only a suggestion.
Suddenly, the man in the suit stopped shouting. He froze, staring toward the end of the street. Artur followed his gaze.
At first, it was just a shadow moving where there should have been no movement. A dark silhouette against a building wall, moving with a fluidity that was neither human nor animal. It was fast. Dragging. Like a giant insect or a piece of living darkness.
A sound finally broke the silence. A scraping sound—chitin or claws grinding against asphalt. Skreeee… skreeee…
The sound made Artur's blood turn to ice. It was the sound of a hunt.
The man in the suit let out a strangled whimper and ran in the opposite direction—toward Artur. The shadowy figure at the end of the street unfurled, revealing an angular, arachnid shape, and launched after him at a terrifying speed.
Artur retreated deeper into the alley's shadows. His heart hammered, not with panic, but with the primal adrenaline of a predator–prey encounter. He felt the smell in the air intensify—the odor of ozone mixed with something rotten, the scent of the hunter. He was no longer a registered Dreamer, a lumberjack, a man out of his element. In that instant, beneath an alien sky and hunted by something from hell, he was only one thing.
Prey.
And the only thing separating his hands from soft flesh was a hickory handle and a piece of sharpened steel.