The third morning clawed its way over the ruins, dragging with it the filthy gold light of a sick sun. Ren woke to the sound of concrete cracking somewhere below him, distant but sharp enough to jolt him upright.
He gripped the rebar instinctively, muscles tight, heart hammering.
Nothing emerged from the shadowed stairwell.
Not yet.
He exhaled slowly, lowering the makeshift weapon. His body ached in ways it hadn’t the day before — a deep, stubborn soreness in places he didn’t even think muscles existed. Sleep hadn't helped. If anything, it had made him feel worse.
He wiped a hand across his face, wincing as rough skin scraped against his forehead.
His hands.
He stared at them in the pale light filtering through the broken windows.
The fingernails, thicker and darker than before, looked almost like horn. The veins on the backs of his hands were more pronounced, a sickly blue-black threading under skin that seemed thinner, stretched too tight.
He flexed his fingers experimentally.
There was no pain. No stiffness. Only strength. A tension under the skin like something ready to snap forward with sudden violence.
Ren curled his hands into fists and shoved them into his jacket pockets.
Ignore it.
Survive first.
Understand later.
He gathered his things — the battered backpack, the scavenged knife, the lighter — and crept toward the stairwell. He moved quietly, testing each step with the edge of his boot before committing his weight.
Noise was death here.
The second floor was worse than he remembered. Something — or several somethings — had moved through during the night. Scattered debris, long gouges in the walls, blood smeared across the cracked tiles.
No bodies.
He didn’t know if that made it better or worse.
Ren moved through the ruined office floor like a shadow, heart thudding in his ears.
Outside, the city groaned under the weight of another false morning.
The hunger gnawed at him, low and insistent.
Not for food.
For ruin.
He could feel it now, stronger than ever, a pull toward breaking things, toward spreading decay. It sang in his blood like a second heartbeat.
He gritted his teeth and pushed it down.
Not yet.
He needed to stay human. As long as he could.
Ren slipped through a broken side door and into the street.
The city had shifted again overnight.
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Ash drifted thicker now, swirling in slow eddies between the gutted buildings. The air smelled sharper, metallic, like rain on rusted iron.
There were no sounds but the scrape of ash across stone and the low, distant rumble of something vast moving far beyond sight.
Ren stuck to the alleys, keeping to the deeper shadows where the sun’s diseased light didn’t quite reach.
He needed food.
Real shelter.
Maybe even other people, if such a thing still existed.
And he needed to understand what was happening to him before it was too late.
The ruins pressed inward as he moved — buildings sagging over narrow lanes, tangled masses of rebar and melted steel blocking the wider avenues. He climbed where he could, crawled where he had to, always moving forward.
By midday, he found another marker.
A crude symbol daubed on a wall in what looked suspiciously like blood: a spiral broken in three places.
Ren paused, studying it.
He’d seen similar marks before — hastily painted, half-erased by time and decay. Some warned of Nightkind nests. Others marked places stripped clean of supplies.
But this one was different.
Fresher.
Sharper.
A warning?
A claim?
He moved past it cautiously.
Every step felt heavier now, not just from exhaustion but from the thickening presence of the ruin itself. The air seemed denser, harder to breathe. The light twisted strangely at the edges of his vision, bending around corners that shouldn’t exist.
And then there were the threads.
At first, he thought it was just his eyes playing tricks.
Faint lines stretching between objects — from a shattered lamp post to a crumbling wall, from a burnt-out car to a pile of rubble.
Thin, almost invisible strands that pulsed faintly in the corner of his eye.
He blinked, rubbed his face, tried to banish them.
They stayed.
He realized, with a sick twist of certainty, that they weren’t optical illusions.
They were real.
Somehow, he could see them.
The threads of ruin.
He followed them without thinking, drawn along their tangled paths.
The hunger purred approval.
Ren snarled under his breath and forced himself to stop.
Focus.
Control.
He wasn’t a slave to this thing. Not yet.
He knelt beside a crumbling wall, one of the strands connecting it to the ground like a diseased root. He touched the stone gently.
The wall crumbled under his fingers.
No force. No effort.
It simply gave way, collapsing into a heap of powder and jagged fragments.
The thread winked out.
A pulse of warmth flared from the shackle on his chest.
Ruin Spread: +1
Chain Score: 3/???
He sat back hard, breathing fast.
That had been deliberate.
He hadn’t just watched something die or defended himself against an attack.
He had chosen to spread ruin.
And it had answered him.
The strength humming in his veins grew sharper, more focused.
He hated how good it felt.
Ren rose slowly, brushing dust from his hands.
He needed to test this. Understand it. Before it consumed him entirely.
He moved on, deeper into the city’s corpse.
The threads thickened as he went, crisscrossing like spiderwebs between the ruins.
Some pulsed weakly, barely noticeable.
Others thrummed with a heavy, dangerous energy.
He avoided the thickest ones for now.
Baby steps.
He found another target — a rusted streetlight leaning precariously over a shattered fountain.
He touched the base lightly.
The entire structure groaned and collapsed in a spray of dust and twisted metal.
Another pulse from the shackle.
Ruin Spread: +1
Chain Score: 4/???
This time, the mutation wasn't subtle.
His vision sharpened further, the ash swirling around him slowing until he could see each individual fleck spiraling in the ruined air.
His hearing expanded, picking up the skitter of rats in distant buildings, the hollow moan of wind through shattered alleys.
And his hands.
The nails thickened further, the skin along his knuckles darkening, hardening.
He flexed his fingers.
Power hummed through them.
Survival, the hunger whispered. This is how you survive.
He moved faster now, learning to trigger the threads, to feed the ruin carefully, strategically.
Small acts.
Controlled burns.
Every pulse strengthened him.
But he knew — even as he reveled in the new abilities — that there was a price.
There was always a price.
He could feel it at the edges of his mind, a slow erosion of things he didn’t want to lose: memories, feelings, the small fragile parts that made him more than just a breathing thing.
And worse, he could feel something else stirring inside him.
The Hunger.
Still slumbering.
Still silent.
But not for long.
Not if he kept feeding it.
The ruins thickened ahead, rising into a jagged ridge of collapsed towers and twisted girders.
A perfect place for monsters to nest.
A perfect place for ruin to thrive.
Ren tightened his grip on the rebar and moved forward, the threads of decay stretching out before him like a path made of bones.
