The world did not end with fire.
It ended with subtraction.
At 11:47 a.m. Central Time, Ren Walker was pumping gas outside Austin, Texas, when the man at the next pump stopped mid-sentence.
The air shimmered above the asphalt. Cicadas shrieked from a dying oak beside the road. The man had been talking about the heat, about how every summer felt worse than the last.
His voice cut off.
His body unraveled.
Not violently. Not slowly.
He came apart into drifting strands of pale light, as if someone had erased him from existence.
Ren stared at the empty space where a living person had stood.
Across the lot, a woman flickered and vanished beside her SUV. A delivery driver dissolved halfway through stepping out of his truck. Inside the convenience store, customers blinked out one after another, leaving carts rolling unattended.
No blood.
No bodies.
Just absence.
Screams followed.
Phones dropped. Engines revved uncontrolled. A pickup swerved across the intersection and struck a light pole. The world did not explode. It simply removed people.
Ren's pulse hammered in his ears.
"This isn't real." he whispered.
His phone vibrated violently in his pocket. Emergency alerts stacked over one another.
GLOBAL CASUALTY EVENT
SEEK SHELTER
STAY INDOORS
The messages froze mid-update.
The sky split open.
A white fracture carved across the blue, stretching from horizon to horizon. Clouds peeled away from it as if reality itself were being torn.
Behind the fracture was not space.
It was depth.
Layered darkness. Shifting silhouettes vast beyond comprehension. Shapes that folded inward and outward at impossible angles.
Something inside that depth shifted.
Something noticed.
The pressure came next.
It pressed against Ren's bones. Against his thoughts. Against the fragile sense that the world was solid and understandable.
Every surviving human felt it.
YOU HAVE BEEN REDUCED.
The words formed directly inside his mind.
Ren dropped to one knee, clutching his head.
SEVENTY-FIVE PERCENT WERE UNFIT.
The fracture pulsed like a wound refusing to close.
TWENTY-FIVE PERCENT REMAIN.
The cicadas had stopped. The wind had stopped.
Even fear seemed to pause.
LET YOUR LEGENDS DEFEND YOU.
Fire ignited beneath Ren's right shoulder blade.
He screamed.
The pain was surgical and absolute, carving through nerve and bone. Across the world, survivors burned with unseen marks etching themselves into skin, fur, and scale.
When the pain ended, Ren collapsed onto the pavement, gasping.
Something had changed.
He could feel it.
A mark remained beneath his shirt. A circular sigil divided into six faint segments, like chambers waiting to be filled.
The air shifted.
A tremor rippled across downtown Austin.
Glass bowed inward. Streetlights twisted. Gravity bent as if confused.
From the city's center, something descended.
It did not fall.
It assembled.
Angles overlapped in ways that hurt to look at. Its edges flickered between dimensions, refusing to remain consistent. Reality warped around it like heat distortion.
A man ran.
The distortion pulsed.
The man unraveled into threads of light.
Gone.
Ren's lungs tightened.
He should run.
Instead, the world blurred.
The gas station dissolved into dry wind and dust.
Wooden buildings lined a frontier street beneath a wide, endless sky. A saloon sign creaked lazily.
A young man leaned against a post, spinning a revolver around one finger. Lean frame. Sharp eyes. A crooked smile that looked like it trusted no one.
He was translucent, edges faint, sunlight passing through him.
Billy the Kid.
Ren's breath caught.
"You are not real."
Billy's smile deepened slightly. "Real enough for you."
Ren looked down at his hands. They were solid. The dust at his feet felt tangible.
"Am I dead?"
"If you were dead, you would not be scared."
The frontier flickered, revealing shattered asphalt beneath it.
Ren noticed something else.
Billy cast no shadow.
When wind swept dust across the street, it passed through him.
"You are a ghost." Ren said quietly.
"Call it what you want." Billy replied. "I follow the blood."
Ren's stomach twisted. "The blood?"
Billy stepped forward. His boots made no sound.
"You carry something tied to me."
"I do not understand."
"You are not supposed to. Not yet."
A scream ripped through the air.
The frontier shattered.
Austin returned.
The distortion was closer now, warping vehicles and tearing concrete into spirals.
Ren stumbled backward.
"I cannot fight that."
Billy appeared beside him, hands resting near his belt, gaze steady on the creature.
"You can."
"I have never held a gun."
Billy glanced at him. "Your hands disagree."
The distortion lunged.
Time thinned.
Sound sharpened into separate threads. The scream of metal. The crackle of warped electricity. The rhythm of his own heartbeat.
Something aligned inside him.
Like a path locking into place before he consciously chose it.
Ren's arm lifted.
Metal screamed as bolts ripped free from a wrecked police cruiser. Fragments tore from street signs and broken engines, spiraling together in midair.
They folded inward.
Condensed.
A revolver settled into his palm.
Heavy.
Balanced.
Six chambers.
He knew the weight.
He knew the grip.
He knew the draw.
Billy did not hand it to him. He could not.
He only watched.
"See?" Billy murmured. "You are not empty."
The distortion surged.
Ren moved.
His body pivoted cleanly. His stance lowered. Breath slowed.
He drew.
He fired.
The shot cracked like thunder across the fractured street.
The bullet curved in midair, correcting its trajectory by a fraction no human eye could measure.
It struck a flickering weakness inside the creature's unstable core.
For a heartbeat, the distortion trembled.
Ren saw something inside it. A hollow center. A seam.
He fired again.
And again.
Each bullet bent slightly, guided not by sight but by inevitability.
The distortion collapsed inward with a sound like tearing glass and vanished.
Silence crashed down.
Smoke drifted from the barrel.
The revolver dissolved into metallic dust that fell between his fingers.
Ren's knees nearly gave out.
Billy studied him carefully.
"You felt it." the ghost said.
Ren nodded.
"It was like the world slowed down." he whispered. "Like I could see where it would be."
Billy's eyes sharpened.
"That is not just quick hands."
Ren looked at him. "Then what is it?"
Billy's expression shifted, almost thoughtful.
"Every legend carries something hidden. Something that was never written."
He stepped closer.
"Speed was what they saw. But what kept me alive was something else."
Ren waited.
Billy's form flickered faintly in the sunlight.
"You will figure it out."
"That is not an answer."
"It is the only one you get."
A distant roar echoed across the city.
Ren turned.
More distortions were falling from the cracked sky.
People were running now. Some fought back in strange, uncontrolled bursts of power. A man near the highway slammed his fists into the ground and split the pavement open. A woman leapt three stories high without understanding how.
Some screamed names they did not understand.
Some claimed titles loudly, as if declaring them made them true.
Others stood silent, confused, hearing nothing.
Ren looked at Billy.
"Do they all see someone?"
"Not always." Billy said. "Some legends stay quiet. Some test. Some lie."
"Lie?"
Billy's gaze hardened.
"History is full of thieves and kings. Not all of them tell the truth."
Ren's mark pulsed faintly beneath his shirt.
"What am I supposed to do?"
Billy glanced toward the skyline.
"Survive."
The ground trembled again.
In Yellowstone National Park, a gray wolf convulsed beneath pine trees as a massive horned silhouette formed behind it, towering and ancient before merging into its shadow.
In the Amazon rainforest, a jaguar moved through dense foliage while a colossal feathered serpent apparition coiled invisibly along its spine.
Across oceans, something vast stirred beneath crushing depths as a many-headed phantom drifted through black water.
Legends had not only chosen humanity.
They had followed bloodlines through every living thing.
Ren stared at the broken sky.
"You said you follow the blood." he said quietly.
Billy nodded once.
"So we are related?"
Billy's smile returned, thin and sharp.
"Distant enough not to matter at Thanksgiving."
Despite everything, Ren almost laughed.
Another distortion began forming above the highway overpass.
Billy's expression hardened again.
"You feel that pull when you move?" he asked.
Ren nodded.
"That alignment?"
"Yes."
"That is your real weapon."
Ren tightened his fists.
"What is it?"
Billy's eyes glinted.
"Fate." he said softly. "Or Luck."
The distortion screamed into existence fully formed.
Cars lifted from the ground around it.
Ren stepped forward.
Fear still clawed at his chest.
But beneath it, something steadier had taken root.
He did not know what he carried.
He did not know the rules.
He did not even know what the mark on his back meant.
But he knew this.
He was not alone.
Billy stood beside him, translucent and unwavering.
"As long as you are breathing." the ghost said quietly, "I am with you."
The broken sky pulsed overhead.
And the quarter that remained began to fight for a world that had already tried to erase them.