Storm clouds hung low over the sprawling city. The silence beneath them was too heavy, too thick to be natural.
Even more unnerving, despite the threatening sky, there wasn't a single breath of wind. The city felt sealed, like it was holding its breath.
Adam Weber sat on a bus ride home from university, half-aware, his gaze drifting out the window.
After a few minutes, the bus slowed to a stop at a red light. Adam frowned slightly when he noticed the window trembling, subtly, unnaturally. It wasn't the engine. It wasn't the wind.
His body tensed for no clear reason. His hand curled into a fist on instinct.
The hairs on his arms stood on end, and his heart began to pound far too fast, as if he were standing in front of the greatest threat of his life.
"This isn't normal," he muttered, wiping sweat from his brow.
The traffic light turned green, and the bus rolled forward again.
Out of the corner of his eye, Adam glanced at the elderly, gray-haired man seated beside him.
The man looked as though he'd just seen a ghost. His eyes were wide, frozen in a vacant stare straight ahead.
Seeing the man's condition, Adam was about to ask if he was okay, but before he could say a word, a sound echoed above them.
It was a sound, yet Adam couldn't describe it. His mind couldn't grasp its tone or shape, no matter how hard it tried. It was something fundamentally alien, something the human brain simply wasn't built to understand.
Before the young man could even process what was happening, an unnatural, blinding light erupted across the world, washing over everything like a shockwave.
The light reached the bus as well, searing into every pair of eyes inside.
Adam froze as something invisible swept through his body and mind, leaving behind a cold, foreign sensation lodged deep in his chest.
As that alien feeling settled in, words formed in his mind, and then manifested in the air before his eyes.
[Essence Record has been activated on planet Earth. You may now summon your status window at any time.]
Adam stared at the floating text in confusion, trying to make sense of it, when a hysterical scream tore through the bus.
It was filled with such raw terror that it sounded like someone was trying to rip their own soul out through their throat.
And it wasn't the only scream.
The bus filled with them, one after another, a cascading wave of panic.
Adam turned toward the elderly man beside him. He was screaming at the top of his lungs, clutching his head, his face twisted in absolute horror.
Then his body began to glow.
Unnaturally.
His veins lit up like live electrical cables, shining through his skin as his screams grew louder and more frantic.
And then...
BOOM!
The man exploded like a human bomb right in front of Adam.
A red burst of blood and gore splattered across Adam's clothes and terrified face as his mind struggled to comprehend what he had just witnessed.
Fragments of skin, bone, internal organs, and torn clothing hung from the seat where the man had been moments earlier.
Adam felt warm, sticky blood running down his cheeks, dripping onto the floor.
The taste of iron flooded his mouth. His hands, coated in the old man's blood, instinctively clutched his stomach.
And he vomited.
Uncontrollably.
Terror was etched across his face as he tried, and failed, to understand what had just happened.
What the fuck was that?!
Why the hell did everyone start screaming?!
And why did that man start glowing like a torch… and then explode like a goddamn bomb?!
The image of the explosion flashed through his mind again, and when he caught sight of what remained of the man's organs out of the corner of his eye, his stomach twisted.
He threw up again.
Before Adam could truly grasp the situation, something slammed into the bus.
The impact was so powerful that he was thrown over the seat in front of him, crashing onto the floor on his back.
The bus tilted violently onto its side. Lying on the floor, Adam felt gravity betray him as his body was hurled into a metal barrier along the wall.
The collision knocked the breath from his lungs. He tumbled across the floor like a rag doll.
Something tore into his arm, like a red-hot rod driven straight into the joint.
The world around him lost all sense of shape. Everything was tilted, broken, wrong.
Seats dangled from what was now the ceiling, and Adam's body swayed helplessly as he clung with all his strength to a seatbelt he'd grabbed on instinct while being tossed around the bus.
Someone groaned beneath crushed seats that had fallen from above, desperately trying to crawl free.
The bus was twisted, caved in, deformed, as if a giant fist had smashed into its side.
The stench of leaking engine fluids, fuel, and blood assaulted Adam's nose as flashing lights flickered outside.
He could hear his own heartbeat, unnaturally loud and close, while a piercing ringing filled his ears, as if someone had pressed a drill against his skull.
His eyes frantically scanned the wreckage, searching for an emergency exit or a shattered window.
But the first thing he saw was a headless woman.
Her body remained upright for a moment before folding in half and collapsing to the floor, her left hand still gripping her purse.
Beside her lay a man in a suit, or rather, what remained of him, hanging lifelessly from seats on the ceiling, his blood and entrails smeared across the window.
Toward the back of the bus, where smoke and steam from the engine obscured vision, something moved.
Its motions were wrong, jerky, unnatural, like its joints no longer followed human rules.
Seeing all this, Adam's breath hitched painfully in his chest. His heart hammered like a jackhammer.
His body refused to move.
He began to tremble, not from cold, but from pure, primal panic. An instinct that screamed only one word:
Run.
Adam groaned as he released the seatbelt and fell down toward the lower side of the bus.
Pain flared in his right arm and knees, but adrenaline drowned it out as he scrambled forward on all fours toward the front.
In his frantic rush, a jagged metal rod jutting from the bus frame sliced into his calf, but he didn't even feel it as he desperately tried to escape the hell the bus had become.
Weaving through collapsed, tilted seats, Adam had to navigate around twisted metal and human remains.
His foot slipped on something soft. Wet.
He looked down and saw a blood-soaked hand, what remained of fingers scattered beside it.
Nearby, on one of the crushed seats, lay something that had once been a face. Now it was nothing more than a red pulp, with one wide-open eye still staring, as if trying to understand what had happened.
Adam blinked several times, stupidly, as his brain tried to process what his eyes were seeing.
Then he recoiled in horror, stumbling back half a step, nearly losing his balance.
His mind finally shut down, unable to logically assemble the scene before him into anything coherent.
His consciousness retreated, trying to shield itself from madness, as his legs carried him forward anyway.
At last, he reached a shattered window. The glass was cracked and bent enough to crawl through.
Without hesitation, Adam forced himself through the opening, ignoring fresh tears in his skin and shredded muscles.
He spilled outside, landing on his knees, scraping them raw against the asphalt.
Finally.
I'm out of that hell.
He gulped in several breaths of damp air, thick with the smell of ozone and ash.
But the world in front of him was unrecognizable.
Burning buildings reflected in Adam's eyes. Vehicles lay overturned and smoking, like dead animals.
The asphalt was cracked, stained with blood, and littered with shards of glass.
Through the smoke, distorted silhouettes moved, some crawling, others standing on trembling legs, as if they had just learned how to walk.
Human bodies were scattered across the sidewalks. Some were charred. Others were twisted at impossible angles.
On the roadside, a barely living man clutched his head and howled like an animal as his arms stretched unnaturally longer, his skin peeling away like old paint.
Adam couldn't comprehend what he was seeing.
Everything he knew, his normal life, had shattered in an instant. Streets that had been full of life that very morning were now a zone of death and feral screams.
Above him, the sky pulsed with a bloody purple glow that offered no warmth - only dread.
This was no longer the same world.
What lay before Adam's eyes was nothing less than an apocalypse.
Panicking, Adam dove behind an overturned car, trying to hide from the apocalyptic landscape around him.
Pressing his hands into the dirty, damp asphalt, he noticed they were shaking uncontrollably.
He clenched his fingers against the ground, taking deep breaths, trying to calm himself, trying to anchor himself in this new reality.
As he finally began to steady himself, a strange window appeared before his eyes.
Name: AdamLevel: 1Race: HumanAge: 21Class: NoneTitle: NoneHP: 85/100 / Mana: 50/50 / STR: 11 / AGI: 10 / VIT: 12 / INT: 7Stat Points: 0
"What the fuck is this…?" he muttered, staring at the numbers, trying to understand them.
"This is… a character screen? Like in a game?" Adam whispered to himself, disbelief flooding his voice.
But before he could analyze the stats further, his ears caught a high, grating screech, like tearing metal.
Then another sound followed. Deeper. Animalistic. A wet, rasping gurgle that froze his blood.
The noises came from multiple directions, impossible to associate with any known creature on Earth.
Each sound stabbed at his nerves, as if his instincts were screaming that something unnatural was approaching.
Adam looked ahead.
Between the flames and thick smoke, dozens of meters away, silhouettes moved.
At first glance they looked human, but their movements were jerky, wrong.
One dragged a leg as if paralyzed. Another had its head tilted at an absurd angle, its jaw… hanging loose.
One of the figures, its skin torn open and part of its cheek missing, exposing teeth and muscle, slowly turned toward Adam.
Its eyes were empty. Its head cocked slightly, as if its neck had long since stopped working.
From its mouth came a guttural, inhuman screech.
They look like zombies from movies…
Adam thought, recalling a few cheap B-grade horror films he'd watched as a kid.
But the reality before him wasn't a movie.
One of the creatures lifted its head. Its nose was torn away, and a brown fluid seeped from its mouth.
It took a step toward Adam.
Seeing the unnatural movement of their kin, the rest of the figures turned as well, and began moving toward him.
Adam staggered back, slamming into the wrecked car behind him. Instinctively, he glanced sideways, searching for an escape route.
And when he looked behind him for just a second...
He saw one of the figures… start to run.