Nicholas entered the building with quiet confidence.
Today morning, he had convinced himself that it might finally be the beginning of something better. The prestigious business firm rose several stories above the surrounding buildings, all polished glass, steel, and immaculate stone, a place that was practically designed to make people like Nicholas straighten their backs when they walked through the doors.
He adjusted his tie as he crossed the lobby, briefly checking his reflection in one of the darkened glass panels before continuing toward the reception desk. His suit was clean, his hair was properly combed, and despite the nervousness sitting somewhere beneath his ribs, he felt prepared.
He needed this job.
Losing his previous position had been an unpleasant blow, but it had not broken him. He had a family to support, children who depended on him, a wife who believed in him, and enough pride to refuse to let one setback define him.
Today was the interview that would decide his future.
Near one of the elevators, however, Nicholas caught sight of something strange. Two men were talking quietly beside the doors, and one of them looked absolutely dead on his feet. He was pale, sweating, and stumbling badly enough that his friend had one hand wrapped around his shoulder to keep him upright.
The man's eyes looked unfocused, his posture loose and exhausted, as though he had gone without sleep for weeks rather than merely a few nights.
"Hey, maybe you should go home today," his friend said, concern evident in his voice. "You don't seem too well."
The exhausted man shook his head weakly.
"No... I can't. I have a... deadline to meet. I... have to..."
Nicholas barely registered the exchange. He was already moving toward the reception desk, his attention returning to the reason he had come here in the first place.
He reached the receptionist and gave her a polite smile.
"Hi. I have an interview scheduled today." The woman behind the desk looked him over from head to toe, her eyes briefly assessing his suit, his shoes, his neatly groomed appearance, and perhaps deciding that he had passed whatever silent test she had given him.
"Tenth floor," she said, pointing toward the elevators.
"They're handling the interviews up there."
She paused, then smiled.
"My name's Cassidy, by the way."
She extended her hand. Nicholas shook it with a friendly smile.
"Oh, I'm Nicholas Arc."
He started to withdraw his hand, only to pause when he felt something strange pressed between their palms. He looked down. A small piece of paper had somehow ended up in his hand, covered by a short string of digits.
Nicholas blinked, then looked up.
Cassidy winked.
For a moment he simply stared at her before an awkward smile crept across his face.
"Um..."
Cassidy merely smiled innocently.
"Good luck with your interview."
Nicholas cringed inwardly and thanked her before making his way toward the elevator. He would get rid of it later. It was best not to sour relationships just yet. Who knew if she might have connections that could turn the process of his hiring into something problematic. Rejecting her on the spot might cause difficulties.
He stepped inside, pressed the button for the tenth floor, and waited as the doors began sliding shut.
Through the narrowing gap, he caught sight of the exhausted man from earlier. The man's legs suddenly gave out and he collapsed onto the floor. Nicholas's expression changed immediately. He instinctively reached toward the elevator controls, intending to stop the doors and go back, but before his finger could touch the button, something happened that transformed concern into pure horror.
The man's skin bulged outward and then it split.
Black claws tore through flesh and tendrils erupted from his body as though some monstrous creature had been growing inside him, forcing its way into the world. People began screaming as they saw it.
Nicholas froze, his hand hovering uselessly above the controls as the elevator doors finally closed, cutting off his view. The last thing he saw was a mass of black claws and writhing tendrils ripping through the man's body as the lobby descended into chaos.
The elevator began ascending.
Nicholas stood motionless inside it, staring at the closed doors while his mind struggled to process what he had just witnessed. His breathing became shallow. His heart hammered against his chest.
What had that been?
Some kind of illusion due to stress?
An attack?
A biological accident?
None of those explanations made sense.
The elevator eventually chimed and the doors opened to the tenth floor. Nicholas stepped out with the uncertain movements of someone who had just walked out of one reality and into another. The hallway was brightly lit, and perfectly ordinary.
People were walking around, phones were ringing and new generation holo-computers humming. It almost made what he had seen downstairs feel unreal. Nicholas looked at the piece of paper still clutched in his hand.
The digits were still there.
He frowned at them, then shook his head.
"Maybe I saw it wrong."
He crumpled the paper and dropped it into a nearby trashcan.
"I must have been more stressed that I thought." Nicholas muttered to himself.
It was odd however—the telltale signs of stress wasn't apparent in his system. His breathing was even, and he couldn't really feel that much of a flutter in his stomach, beyond the baseline.
Almost immediately afterward that thought, the fire alarm began ringing.
Nicholas's head snapped upward.
It seemed that something was indeed wrong.
He looked toward the windows, and what he saw made every thought in his mind abruptly stop. Outside, crawling across the side of the building, was a black mass. It was almost liquid in appearance, flowing across the glass from the exterior walls and spreading over the windows like living tar.
Within seconds, it had swallowed the sunlight pouring through the glass. Fortunately, the artificial lights remained on, leaving enough illumination for everyone to see one another and, unfortunately, whatever was coming next.
"What's going on?" someone asked.
"What the hell is that?" another person whispered.
Confusion became panic as employees crowded around the windows, staring at the impossible mass crawling across their building. One of the managers finally understood that whatever was happening was far beyond a normal emergency.
"Evacuate the building!" he shouted.
"Everyone get out now!" He barely managed to finish the command before the window beside him exploded inward.
Glass scattered across the floor. A tendril from the black mass outside shot through the opening with terrifying speed and punched directly through the manager's torso. Blood sprayed across the people nearest to him.
The man's mouth opened in a silent gasp before he began vomiting blood, his body convulsing as the tendril dragged him backward. His fingers clawed uselessly at the floor before he disappeared into the writhing black mass outside.
Nicholas stood frozen as the flesh surrounding the tendril swallowed the man's body. It dissolved into the creature as though the man's flesh were nothing more substantial than water being poured into a larger body.
Then something emerged.
It crawled from the black mass onto the office floor, dragging itself forward on powerful limbs.
Nicholas could only think of one word to describe it.
Werewolf.
It possessed the basic silhouette of some monstrous canine predator, but its anatomy had been warped into something grotesque. Bony protrusions jutted from its body. Strange plates covered sections of its black flesh. Its eyes glowed with a vicious red light, and its mouth opened to reveal teeth that were far too large for anything that had once been human.
The office erupted into chaos and everyone ran.
Nicholas turned with them, racing toward the elevators while others desperately made for the stairwell. The elevator doors opened, and several people surged forward to escape, but before Nicholas could follow, a horrible metallic screech came from within the shaft. Something was climbing upward.
The elevator itself groaned as claws scraped against the metal beneath it.
Nicholas stopped.
He looked at the others already entering the elevator, then at the stairwell. Every instinct screamed that getting into that elevator was a terrible idea. He backed away and ran for the stairs instead.
Several people were already fleeing downward, but they suddenly came racing back up. One man nearly collided with Nicholas.
"Don't go there!" he shouted.
"Monsters are coming up!"
Another man behind him was slower. He was somewhat fat and was struggling to run. Nicholas turned just in time to see a black blur descend upon him. The man's scream lasted less than a second.
Nicholas didn't wait to discover what had happened.
He bolted back into the hallway and threw himself into the nearest office, where a woman was already hiding behind a desk. She looked at him with wide, terrified eyes but said nothing. Nicholas crouched beside her, his heart pounding so loudly that he could hear it in his ears.
Outside, the sounds of slaughter continued. There were screams, crashes, snarls, and the wet sounds of something tearing through flesh. The woman covered her mouth with both hands, tears streaming down her cheeks.
"D-do you know what's happening?" She stuttered out, clearly scared.
"I... I'm sorry. I'm just as lost. There are some werewolf monsters outside."
"W-werewolf monsters? No.... I-I don't want to die," she whispered.
Nicholas swallowed hard.
"Neither do I."
He didn't know whether the words were comforting or simply honest. They waited and eventually the screams gradually became fewer.
Then, there was silence.
Not peaceful silence, mind you, but the kind of silence that came after everything living had either fled or been killed.
Nicholas counted the seconds in his head.
Five.
Six.
Seven.
Ten.
Then the door exploded inward.
One of the creatures leapt through the doorway. Nicholas instantly understood the problem. It was a canine beast.
It could smell them.
The woman screamed as the creature pounced onto the desk, its tremendous weight sending the furniture crashing sideways. Nicholas rolled away just before the desk collapsed. The woman wasn't so lucky.
She was pinned beneath it, and the creature immediately turned toward her. It pounced again and began biting at her arms. Nicholas watched in horror as the woman struggled beneath it, her screams becoming weaker as the creature tore into her.
Something inside Nicholas snapped as his adrenaline kicked in.
The flight or fight instinct.
And Nichola's Arc's body...
Told him to fight!
His form moved before his mind could finish thinking. He grabbed an office chair and hurled it at the beast. The chair slammed into its side and staggered it long enough for Nicholas to seize a broken section of the desk, the wooden leg that had snapped away during the creature's attack.
He swung it with everything he had.
The wood smashed into the creature's face, cracking part of its bony facial plating. The beast snarled and lunged. Nicholas reacted instinctively. Having watched it's brethren pounce several times, he expected the creature to perform that same attack.
He bent his spine backward, letting the creature's claws sweep over him. Nicholas had always been athletic, and he had occasionally worked out, so the movement came naturally enough. The beast sailed over him and crashed onto the carpet.
Nicholas spun immediately and brought the wooden leg down against its leg joint, to attempt to cripple it.
The creature snarled, twisting around to swipe at him.
Nicholas tried to dodge, but he was too slow. The claws tore through his shirt and shredded his tie, leaving burning lines across his abdomen. Pain flashed through him but he ignored it. He swung again, smashing the wooden leg against the creature's head.
The wood cracked and finally broke, but the blow staggered the beast. Nicholas's eyes darted around the room until they landed on a desk lamp lying among the wreckage. He grabbed it and swung.
The metal lamp smashed into the creature's skull, breaking one of its teeth.
The creature lunged again.
Nicholas barely managed to wedge the lamp's metal stand between its jaws and his shoulder. The beast was stronger than him.
Far stronger in fact and it even drove him backward, forcing his shoes to slide painfully against the carpet as its claws seized his arms and began shredding them.
Nicholas gritted his teeth.
Blood ran down his skin and every nerve in his body screamed at him to escape, but there was nowhere to go.
If he fell, he would die.
He knew it.
And if he died, he would be leaving his wife and his kids behind.
He couldn't allow that to happen!
The realization settled into him with an almost unnatural clarity. He couldn't overpower this thing or outrun it. It was also likely that he wouldn't be able to survive another exchange.
Which meant that he needed to kill it now.
His body continued resisting through nothing but adrenaline and pure will. Then Nicholas released the lamp. The creature, suddenly encountering no resistance from the object between them, jerked its head aside to throw it away.
The lamp smashed through the office window.
But Nicholas had already moved. The instant the creature's head turned, Nicholas surged forward and drove his mouth directly into the junction between its neck and shoulder.
He bit down and his teeth sank into flesh. He sawed instinctively, tearing and wrenching until a chunk of black flesh came free.
The creature slammed him onto the ground and clawed at his body, unable to bite him from his angle, but was still able to cause damage to him.
However, Nicholas held on.
The beast convulsed, then it stopped. Its body began dissolving beneath him, breaking apart into black residue that evaporated into the air.
He remained there for a moment, breathing heavily, then he forced himself upright and looked toward the woman. Her eyes were open, but they were glassy and empty.
She was dead.
Nicholas cursed under his breath and turned toward the doorway.
He froze.
Five pairs of red eyes stared back at him. Five creatures stood beyond the ruined entrance, their black bodies hunched forward, their mouths curled into snarls as they watched him with unmistakable hunger.
They had been attracted by the noise that Nicholas had made while fighting the creature.
One stepped into the doorway and another followed.
Nicholas backed away, his feet catching on a broken section of the desk. He stumbled and fell backward. The creatures prepared to pounce.
Then a voice drifted through the room.
"Stop."
It was gentle and almost echoing. Every creature halted. Nicholas turned toward the broken window. Standing upon the edge of the shattered glass was a man. He was handsome, with piercing eyes and the beginnings of an Atlesian braid at the back of his head, though his hair wasn't long enough to contain it and instead spilled messily around his neck.
He stood on the glass as casually as someone standing on a sidewalk, completely disregarding that the edge was barely a millimeter think and every other law that should have probably either shattered it, or cause him to lose his balance.
Nicholas stared at him in disbelief.
The man tilted his head toward the creatures and they snarled at him. The man sighed. Something about the sound changed the atmosphere. His voice gained another layer, a depth that hadn't been there before. When he spoke, a woman's voice echoed beneath his own, ancient and distant, as though it were speaking from somewhere impossibly far away.
"Not this one."
The creatures fell silent and seemingly obeyed his words. One by one, they withdrew from the doorway. Nicholas watched them disappear into the hallway, utterly stunned. Had that man just commanded them?
What was he?
The stranger finally looked down at Nicholas. His expression was one of mild curiosity, as though he had discovered something unexpected amid the ruins of the building.
"You're quite interesting," he said.
"Killing a Beowolf as a mundane. And... you haven't even received any combat training."
Nicholas stared at him. His body was bruised, bleeding, and trembling from adrenaline, yet none of that mattered anymore. The man before him had just commanded monsters that had slaughtered an entire office floor. He had stood on the edge of a broken window several stories above the ground as though physics were merely a suggestion.
A mundane?
The word itself meant nothing to Nicholas, but the way the stranger said it made it clear that Nicholas was about to step into a world he hadn't known existed.
"What... w-who... are you?" Nicholas managed.
The stranger's lips curved into a faint smile. He straightened slightly, almost as though remembering that introductions were customary among civilized people.
"Ah. Where are my manners?" His gaze remained fixed upon Nicholas as the strange layered resonance faded only slightly from his voice.
"I'm Tyrian." He paused, allowing the name to settle into the silence of the ruined office. Then he gave his full name.
"Tyrian Callows."