(September 1st, 2046 )
The city had long since abandoned the concept of silence.
Every street was a battlefield, every alley a graveyard, and every breath filled with the iron taste of smoke, blood, and broken dreams. The cracked neon lights of dead billboards flickered overhead, casting grotesque shadows onto the torn concrete where the remnants of civilization played out their last, desperate acts of violence.
Beneath the ruined sky, under the wavering, trembling haze of fire and storm, two groups faced each other across the shattered remains of what had once been a bustling highway — now little more than a graveyard of twisted steel and burned-out husks of cars.
On one side, a motley crew of figures, dressed in ragged clothes that barely clung to their battered frames, wielded their weapons with a kind of practiced nonchalance that could only come from a lifetime of killing. Steel pipes, rusted chains, wooden bats wrapped in barbed wire — in their hands, such crude things became instruments of artful destruction. Their eyes, glowing faintly under the darkness, were the eyes of predators unburdened by fear or morality.
Opposite them stood another collection of survivors, their weapons no less crude but held with a different air — less born of savagery and more out of necessity, as if survival was the only law they still acknowledged in a world long since abandoned by gods and kings.
None of them were normal.
None of them had been normal for a long, long time.
Each heart that beat within those torn chests carried power, the kind of strength that could rip apart a reinforced door with bare hands, that could lift a truck over their heads if they were angry enough, that could catch a bullet in mid-air if they were desperate enough.
The tension was thick, almost tangible, hanging between them like the blade of a guillotine poised to fall.
No words were spoken.
No battle cries were needed.
Only the slow, steady creak of leather gloves tightening around weapon grips, and the heavy sound of breathing from men and women who knew that the next few minutes would decide whether they lived to see the burning sunrise, or became just another stain on the broken ground.
It started, as these things often do, with a single step.
A man from the left side — a hulking figure with a crowbar as thick as a tree branch — let out a slow, guttural sound, halfway between a chuckle and a growl, before he hurled himself forward with a force that made the cracked asphalt shudder beneath his feet.
The others followed, a tidal wave of violence unleashed.
The clash was brutal and immediate.
Steel slammed against bone.
Teeth shattered like brittle glass.
Blood arced through the air in wet, violent crescents, glistening like rubies under the broken streetlights.
And in that instant, the world became a hurricane of limbs and steel and blood, the noise of battle swelling into a deafening crescendo that swallowed all other sounds — the distant sirens, the collapsing buildings, the crackling fires — until there was only the raw, animalistic violence of bodies colliding with the unstoppable force of desperation.
The hulking man with the crowbar swung his weapon in a wide, vicious arc, the metal humming through the air before connecting with the side of a smaller fighter's head, the impact sending the unfortunate soul flying backwards like a rag doll, his body twisting grotesquely before crashing through the windshield of a ruined car with a sound like shattering ice.
Another fighter, a woman with silver hair matted by soot and blood, darted through the chaos like a specter, her rusted machete carving cruel arcs through the air, slicing open muscle and sinew with surgical precision, her movements too fast for the eye to follow, her bare feet leaving bloody footprints on the fractured concrete with every ghostly step.
Yet the others were not helpless.
A man with hands like stone caught the silver-haired woman mid-strike, his fingers closing around her wrist with a strength that bent the blade in her hand and forced her to her knees — but before he could deliver the killing blow, another figure slammed into him from the side, a teenager no older than seventeen, his thin frame deceiving the eye, for with a scream of pure rage he drove a crowbar deep into the man's ribs, the steel bending slightly from the force of the impact.
They fought like monsters, like demons from the old world's forgotten nightmares, and every blow that landed was enough to shatter bones, to tear flesh, to crumple the wrecks of abandoned vehicles like they were made of wet paper.
The night air was thick with the iron scent of blood, heavy and cloying, almost suffocating, and the ground trembled with the force of their battle, as if even the earth itself recoiled from the madness unfolding upon its broken back.
Rowan stood among them —
Not with either side, not truly, though he clutched a heavy chain in one calloused hand and the savage glint in his eyes spoke of a man who had long since made peace with madness.
His smile was a crooked thing, stretched too wide across a face smeared with grime and dried blood, and when he moved, it was with a careless, almost joyful violence, like a child stomping on ants for no other reason than to feel the crunch beneath his feet.
He leapt into the fray with a savage cry, swinging the chain like a living thing, the rusted links whistling through the air before wrapping around the throat of a towering brute whose only armor was a torn leather jacket and sheer, blind fury.
Rowan yanked hard, pulling the man off balance, dragging him to the ground with a crash that sent shards of asphalt flying in all directions, and before the brute could even gasp for air, Rowan stomped on his face with a sickening crunch, laughing as he did so, the sound raw and broken and filled with something that had once been human but was now something else entirely.
And around him, the battle raged on.
Another man, broad and heavyset with a head shaved bald, hurled a twisted street sign like a javelin, the metal pole piercing straight through a woman's abdomen and pinning her to the crumpled hood of a burning car, her scream cut off into a wet, gurgling noise as the fire caught the edges of her clothes and began to consume her.
A boy, younger than the rest, moved with a strange, jerky grace, dodging blows that would have crushed him into paste, his fingers flashing out with a switchblade again and again, opening arterial wounds with mechanical precision, his face blank and empty, as if the carnage around him were no more meaningful than a passing storm.
The ground itself became slick with blood, making every step a deadly risk, yet none of them hesitated, none of them slowed — the thirst for survival, for dominance, for simple bloodshed driving them forward even as bones broke, lungs collapsed, and eyes were gouged out with filthy fingers.
Cars were lifted and hurled like toys, their metal frames screeching as they crumpled against buildings, against bodies, against anything unfortunate enough to stand in their path.
One man, muscles bulging unnaturally beneath torn skin, grabbed the hood of a taxi and tore it clean off with a guttural roar, using it as a crude shield to batter his way through the crowd, every swing of his makeshift weapon breaking bones and splattering blood across the blackened ruins of the street.
Rowan ducked under a wild swing, his grin widening, the chain whipping out again to snap around an enemy's ankle, yanking the man off his feet with a cruel tug that sent him sprawling, and without missing a beat, Rowan stomped hard on the side of his opponent's head until it caved inward with a wet, nauseating squelch.
He didn't think.
He didn't plan.
He moved through the battlefield like a force of nature, driven by instinct and madness, the chain in his hands singing a song of death with every swing, and in the brief, fleeting moments between attacks, his mind was filled with only a single thought — how utterly beautiful the chaos was, how perfect this raw, unfiltered violence felt against his skin, like stepping into sunlight after a lifetime of cold, dark confinement.
And still, the fight dragged on.
Minutes blurred into each other, becoming an endless stretch of pain and fury, and the numbers on both sides began to dwindle, bodies piling up in grotesque heaps, their blood pooling together into a great black river that soaked into the thirsty ground.
The superhuman strength of the fighters meant that every blow was a death sentence, every missed attack a narrow escape from annihilation, and yet they fought on, refusing to fall, refusing to yield, their battered, broken bodies animated by nothing but sheer, bloody-minded will.
Rowan took a crowbar to the shoulder, the impact sending a jolt of pain lancing down his arm, but he only laughed, the sound sharp and wild, and ripped the weapon free with his good hand, using it to cave in the skull of the man who had struck him with a single, brutal swing.
All around him, the world blurred into a chaotic tapestry of violence — broken teeth, shattered bones, ruptured organs — the very air vibrating with the force of their savagery, the fires burning ever brighter, casting the battle in a hellish, flickering light.
And somewhere, high above the ruined city, a Sphere pulsed silently in the night sky — a perfect, black, malevolent thing — waiting, always waiting, for the moment when the chaos below would spill over, when the fragile boundary between worlds would crack and shatter, and the true nightmare would be unleashed.
But for now, all that mattered was the fight.
And Rowan, mad, grinning, bloody Rowan, was the king of this fleeting, burning moment.