Carl hit the courtyard with a sound Rynn would spend years trying to forget.
Not the impact itself—that was over too fast to register as anything but a wet crack that cut off mid-note. It was the moment before that haunted him. The brief window of falling when Carl's burning form twisted in the air, those orange eyes finding Rynn's again, and the smile that spread across melting features.
Not pain. Not fear.
Gratitude.
As if falling to his death was preferable to being warm.
Rynn scrambled backward across the concrete, his palms scraping raw, his bruised legs refusing to cooperate. Carl's body lay fifteen feet away, flames still flickering across blackened remains. The fire should have died with him. It didn't. It spread instead, catching on scattered debris, licking at the courtyard's single struggling tree.
Above, the building screamed.
Not metaphorically. The building itself—bricks and mortar and decades of neglected maintenance—actually screamed as something on the third floor tore through its walls. Rynn saw a shape crash through exterior brick, land on the fire escape, and keep moving. Human shape. Mostly. Except for the arms, which had become something else entirely—too long, too many joints, tipped with blades that looked like they'd grown instead of being forged.
The blade-armed thing didn't notice Rynn. It was too busy climbing, leaping, hunting something on the upper floors that Rynn couldn't see.
He forced himself to stand.
His legs held. Barely. Every joint ached from the fall, and his chest burned where the serpent had stirred, but he was alive. Alive and in the middle of a courtyard with a burning corpse, a collapsing building, and God knew what else pouring out of apartments where wishes had gone catastrophically wrong.
[CHAOS CAPACITY: 1.3 UNITS]
[CHAOS CONTROL: 0.4%]
[RECOMMENDATION: EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY]
"No shit," Rynn breathed.
He ran.
The courtyard opened onto a side street, which opened onto the main thoroughfare, which should have been busy with Tuesday morning traffic. Should have been. Wasn't. Instead, it was—
Rynn stopped at the corner, his mind struggling to process what his eyes were reporting.
Gridlock. Not cars—cars were abandoned, doors open, engines running, drivers simply gone. The gridlock was people. Thousands of them, packed into the street like cattle, all moving in the same direction. Away from something. Toward something. It was impossible to tell which.
They weren't running.
That was the strangest part. They walked. Slowly, mechanically, as if compelled by something stronger than fear. Mothers carried children. Old men leaned on canes. A woman in a business suit still held her briefcase, knuckles white around the handle. None of them spoke. None of them looked at each other. They just walked, their faces blank, their eyes fixed on some point in the distance that Rynn couldn't see.
He grabbed the nearest person—a young guy about his age, dressed in pajamas and slippers, clearly yanked from bed by whatever was happening.
"Hey. Hey! What's going on? Where is everyone going?"
The guy didn't respond. Didn't even blink. His arm was limp in Rynn's grip, offering no resistance, no cooperation, nothing. Just dead weight attached to a walking body.
Rynn let go.
The guy kept walking.
Something was wrong with this. Wrong with all of it. Wishes gone bad he could understand—people were idiots, himself included, and idiots with infinite power created chaos. But this? Mass hypnosis? Compelled movement? That wasn't individual wishes colliding. That was something else. Something organized.
[SYSTEM BROADCAST]
The notification appeared in front of everyone simultaneously. Rynn saw the people around him finally react—flinching, blinking, some crying out as the pearlescent text materialized in their vision.
[ATTENTION, CITIZENS OF EARTH. THE WISH GRANTING PHASE IS COMPLETE]
[INITIATING PHASE TWO: AWAKENING ~ ALL HUMANS WILL NOW BE RANKED ACCORDING TO NEW PARAMETERS]
[ALL HUMANS WILL NOW RECEIVE CLASSIFICATIONS BASED ON WISH FULFILLMENT]
[ALL HUMANS WILL NOW BE INTEGRATED INTO THE INTERDIMENSIONAL NETWORK]
[PREPARE FOR ASSIMILATION]
The crowd stopped walking.
For one breathless moment, everything was still. Thousands of people, frozen mid-stride, their blank faces turned upward toward notifications only they could see. Rynn stood among them, heart hammerding, the serpent in his chest coiling tight.
Then the screaming started.
Not from the crowd—from above. From below. From everywhere at once. The sky tore open in a line of bleeding light that stretched from one horizon to the other. The ground shuddered, cracked, split in a dozen places. And through those cracks, through that tear, things began to emerge.
Rynn saw a creature that was all legs and no body, each limb ending in a different kind of mouth. He saw something that looked like a whale swimming through air, except the whale had too many eyes and the eyes were all looking at him. He saw plants that moved like animals, animals that moved like plants, and things that moved in ways that had no name because human language hadn't evolved to describe them.
[MULTIDIMENSIONAL BREACH DETECTED ~ INTEGRATION PROTOCOL ACTIVATED]
[WELCOME TO THE CHAIN, EARTH]
The words were cheerful. Clinical. Completely indifferent to the nightmare unfolding beneath them.
Rynn ran.
Not toward anything—away. Away from the crowd, away from the creatures, away from the sky that was bleeding and the ground that was breaking and the building behind him that finally collapsed in a roar of dust and debris. He ran down side streets, through alleys, over fences, his body moving on instinct while his mind raced to catch up.
Chaos. The word kept repeating in his head. He'd wished for Chaos, and now Chaos was exactly what he got. Not the power to control it—the power was still there, coiled in his chest, useless without control—but the experience of living through it. Watching everything he'd known crumble into something unrecognizable.
A hand grabbed his ankle.
Rynn went down hard, his chin cracking against pavement, stars exploding behind his eyes. He kicked, twisted, tried to scramble away, but the hand held fast. It was human. Mostly. Attached to an arm that emerged from a storm drain, attached to a body that was somehow fitting through a space too small for any body to fit.
The face that emerged was a woman's. Young. Pretty, or would have been, if not for the way her skin moved—rippling, shifting, revealing shapes beneath that weren't bones.
"Help me," she said, and her voice was normal. Terrified. Human. "Please, something's wrong, I wished—I wished to be beautiful, I just wanted to be beautiful, and now I can't stop changing, I can't—"
Her face shifted as Rynn watched. Cheekbones raised. Nose narrowed. Eyes grew larger, more symmetrical, more perfect. Then shifted again. And again. Each iteration more beautiful than the last, each iteration less human.
"Please," she whispered, and her voice was still her own, even as her features cycled through faces that belonged on magazine covers, movie screens, the fever dreams of artists. "Please don't leave me."
Rynn didn't move.
Not because he didn't want to—every instinct screamed at him to run, to escape, to save himself. But something in her eyes held him. Something human, drowning beneath the perfection. Something that reminded him of his mother, those last weeks in the hospital, watching her own body betray her and knowing there was nothing anyone could do.
"What's your name?" he asked.
The woman blinked. The motion was wrong—her eyelids moved in the wrong order, closing from the outside in—but the confusion in her eyes was real enough.
"What?"
"Your name. Tell me your name."
"I—" Her face shifted again, smoother, younger, the cheekbones now almost inhumanly high. "I don't—it's—"
"Focus on it. Your name. The one your parents gave you. The one that's yours."
He didn't know why he was saying this. Didn't know if it would help. But the serpent in his chest had stirred again, and with it came an understanding he couldn't put into words. Chaos was possibility. Too much possibility, in her case—every beautiful face she could have had, all manifesting at once. But a name wasn't possibility. A name was choice. Was identity. Was the one thing that remained constant across every alternate version of a person.
Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
"Sarah," she whispered. "My name is Sarah."
Her face stopped shifting.
It wasn't the face she'd started with—that was gone, buried under layers of improvement. But it was a face, fixed and stable, no longer cycling through infinite variations. Sarah stared at her hands, watching the skin settle, the bones stop moving.
"How did you—"
The ground exploded.
Rynn was thrown sideways, his grip on the storm drain lost, Sarah's hand torn from his ankle. He tumbled across pavement, fetching up hard against a parked car, and looked back to see what had hit them.
A creature stood in the crater. It was maybe seven feet tall, vaguely humanoid, but its skin was the color of television static and its face was a smooth blank where features should have been. No eyes. No nose. No mouth. Just a void that somehow looked at Rynn with hunger he could feel in his bones.
[CARNIVORE CLASS: BLOODLESS TIER 1]
[CLASSIFICATION: VOID HOUND (JUVENILE)]
[WARNING: MULTIPLE HOSTILES DETECTED]
The notifications flickered and vanished, replaced by urgent red text.
[WARNING: CHAOS AFFINITY DETECTED BY LOCAL LIFE FORMS]
[WARNING: CHAOS AFFINITY IS HIGHLY DESIRABLE TO VOID-ALIGNED CREATURES]
[WARNING: YOU ARE BEING TARGETED]
The void-faced thing took a step toward Rynn. Then another. Its movements were wrong—not walking so much as replacing its position in space, one moment here, the next three feet closer, with nothing in between.
Rynn scrambled backward, but the car blocked him. He looked for escape routes, weapons, anything—and saw Sarah pulling herself from the crater's edge, her newly stable face twisted with fear.
"Run!" he shouted at her. "Get out of here!"
She ran.
The void thing didn't pursue her. Its blank face remained fixed on Rynn, that wordless hunger radiating from its featureless head. It was almost on him now. Close enough to touch. Close enough to kill.
Rynn's hand closed on something—a chunk of broken pavement, loose from the explosion. He threw it with all his strength. It passed through the creature's head like the creature wasn't there, emerging on the other side to clatter uselessly against the street.
The void thing reached for him.
And the serpent in Rynn's chest struck.
He didn't control it. Didn't guide it. Didn't even understand what was happening until after it was over. But in the moment between the creature's hand descending and his own death arriving, Chaos responded to threat the way Carl's fire had responded to cold—instinctively, primitively, without thought or mercy.
Grey lightning erupted from Rynn's chest.
It wasn't lightning like the sky made. It was lightning like the space between things made—the gaps in reality, the cracks in existence, the places where order hadn't quite taken hold. It was the color of storm clouds and old bones and memories half-forgotten. It moved wrong, like the void thing moved wrong, appearing in the creature's chest without crossing the distance first.
The void thing screamed.
Or would have, if it had a mouth. Instead, its entire body vibrated, shuddered, began to come apart at the edges. The grey lightning spread through it like dye through water, turning its static-skin to something else. Something less. Something that couldn't hold together.
In three seconds, it was gone.
Soul returning to the Chaos it had probably come from. Where it had stood, there was only empty air and a faint grey residue that sparkled once and vanished.
Rynn fell against the car, gasping.
[CHAOS CAPACITY: 0.2 UNITS]
[CHAOS CONTROL: 0.4%]
[WARNING: CRITICAL CAPACITY DEPLETED]
[RECOMMENDATION: IMMEDIATE REST AND RECOVERY]
[RECOMMENDATION: DO NOT ATTEMPT CHAOS MANIPULATION UNTIL CAPACITY EXCEEDS 1.0 UNITS]
[RECOMMENDATION: DO NOT—]
"Shut up," Rynn whispered. "Just... shut up."
The notifications silenced.
He looked at his hands. They were shaking. Everything was shaking. The grey lightning had come from him—from the serpent, from the Chaos, from whatever he'd become when he made that wish—and it had saved his life. But he could feel the cost of it. The emptiness where capacity had been. The weakness spreading through his limbs like illness.
Above him, the sky still bled. Around him, the city still burned. Somewhere, Sarah was running, and Carl was dead, and billions of people were learning that wishes had consequences.
Rynn Sabre, who had wished to manipulate Chaos, sat against a ruined car in a ruined world and wondered if he'd just made the biggest mistake in human history.
---
Going On A Release Streak Until Chapter 10... Heheheh...
Your Smiling Author ~ AncestralMAN