Itsuki trudged through Yaoshima's central market, a towering stack of shopping bags balanced awkwardly in his arms.
"Keep 'em comin'... man, I'm already beat. What do you even need all this stuff for anyway?" he groaned, a bead of sweat trickling down his forehead as he let out a heavy sigh and squeezed his eyes shut for a second.
"I have my reasons," Nene replied evasively, her eyes glued to her phone screen. She was scrolling through something Itsuki couldn't quite make out.
He tried to pry, but getting anything out of her was like pulling teeth. "You've been starin' at that thing all day. Seriously, since this mornin'. What're you even up to?"
Nene didn't even look up. "Whatever I'm doing isn't any of your business. Am I not allowed to have a little privacy?"
Her flat, unbothered tone was driving him nuts, but he quickly gave up the fight. "Alright, fine, fine," he sighed, shaking his head. "Whatever you say... keep your big secrets then."
As they stepped onto the escalator heading for the upper level, Itsuki let out a soft groan. "Y'know... you got me luggin' all this stuff around like I'm your personal butler or somethin'. Kinda harsh, don't ya think?"
He kept his tone laid-back, leaning slightly to sneak a look at her face and see if he could catch even a sliver of a reaction.
Nene finally glanced up from her phone, giving him a flat, unimpressed look. "You're a guy, aren't you? The 'luggage,' as you put it, usually falls on you. Try being useful for once—it'd be a nice change from your report card."
"HEY! My grades are fine, thank you very much! Man, even Taki wouldn't be this cold-hearted, geez. Gimme a break."
Nene just gave an indifferent little shrug as the escalator finally carried them to the top floor. "Your grades are fine if you're trying to pass kindergarten. But hey, since intellect isn't your strong suit, at least those arms of yours can be useful for heavy lifting."
Itsuki let out a long, defeated sigh, deciding it wasn't even worth fighting back anymore. As he fell in step behind her, he mumbled under his breath, "Man, she's so annoying..."
Suddenly, the ground jolted beneath their feet. A low, violent rumble shook the floorboards, rattling the display cases and sending a wave of confusion through the crowded upper level.
"The hell...? Was that an earthquake?" Itsuki muttered, freezing in his tracks.
A heavy, tense silence fell over the entire floor. For a few long seconds, nobody moved a muscle. The bustling noise of the market completely vanished, replaced by the hushed, nervous murmurs of the shoppers around them.
"Did you feel that?"
"Was that a quake? I didn't see any warnings on my phone..."
"Is the structure safe? Should we take the stairs?"
"Hey, look at the lights, they're flickering—"
Small crowds began to cluster together near the railings, people nervously glancing at the ceiling and checking their phones, waiting to see if a second shockwave was coming.
Itsuki and Nene rushed to the railing, leaning over the fence to stare down at the lower levels just as a bone-chilling screech echoed through the atrium, reverberating across the entire marketplace.
"They're coming!" a woman shrieked from below, her panic instantly setting off a domino effect through the crowd.
Near a high-end storefront on the ground floor, a couple of bodyguards immediately braced themselves. One of the men in suits unclipped a heavy baton from his belt, his knuckles turning white as his hands trembled. "The government wasn't kidding... these things can actually show up in broad daylight?! Why now?! What the hell woke them up?!"
Two of the creatures were already prowling near the central fountain, their unnatural shapes twisting in the afternoon light, while the panicked screams rising from other floors signaled that even more were spreading rapidly throughout the rest of the market.
Nene's eyes trembled with a mix of shock and intense curiosity, her fear instantly losing out to the urge to document what was happening. "If I can actually trace them... I can finally study one up close," she muttered to herself, completely tuning out Itsuki.
She spun on her heel and bolted straight into the surging crowd.
"H-Hey, Nene! Where the hell are ya goin'?!" Itsuki yelled, stumbling forward a few paces as the heavy bags swung wildly in his arms. "What's gotten into ya?! I didn't know we were runnin' already! What about all the shit you made me carry?!"
Nene didn't even turn around, weaving through the panicked shoppers as if she was using the chaos specifically to lose him.
"Hey, Nene!" he shouted again, but within seconds her bright head of green moss hair dipped beneath the sea of bodies and vanished. "She's officially gone nuts!"
Panicking, Itsuki fumbled his smartphone out of his pocket, Takumi's name instantly coming to mind. "Maybe Taki can figure this out..." He unceremoniously dumped the mountain of shopping bags onto the floor, pulled up Takumi's contact, and hammered the call button.
Before the line could even connect, a heavy distortion rippled through the air like a localized pressure wave.
In a split second, every electronic device in the market went haywire. The overhead fluorescent lights flickered violently before dying completely, plunging the atrium into a dim gloom. Digital directories blacked out, register screens glitched into noise, and the hum of the air conditioning cut out completely.
Itsuki pulled his phone away from his ear—the screen was flashing a mess of static, emitting nothing but a piercing, high-pitched ringing noise. No signal. Zero service.
"Shit!" Itsuki swore, pulling the dead phone away from his ear.
All at once, the ambient noise of the market—the music, the screaming, the frantic footsteps—muffled and faded away into a eerie, heavy silence. The only illumination left was the afternoon sunlight pouring down through the glass atrium roof.
Then the light began to play tricks. Dark, suffocating shadows seemed to bleed across the bodies of the panicked crowds below, swallowing their features whole. High above them, stretched across the glass ceiling, a massive silhouette shifted against the sun—a shape so unnatural that most people's minds refused to even register what they were looking at.
Itsuki's breath hitched in his throat, his eyes wide as he stared up at the roof. "Is... is that...?"
To most of the crowd below, the shadow on the glass was just a bizarre blur in the light—a strange, shimmering distortion in the afternoon heat. But for a few, the blur began to resolve into something far too real.
Itsuki's vision pierced right through the illusion.
The color drained instantly from his face, leaving him pale as a corpse. Heavy, cold sweat broke out across his forehead, stinging his eyes as he took an involuntary step back. Terror gripped his chest, so tight he couldn't even force out a breath. The longer he stared, the sharper the horror became, until the thing perched atop the glass was stripped of all camouflage.
It was a monstrosity ripped straight out of a nightmare.
Hunchnet low in a predatory crouch, its sleek, muscular frame was encased in dark, bone-like armor that looked forged from bio-tech plate and exposed vertebrae. A thick mane of wild black hair whipped violently around its head, despite the lack of wind. Glowing red eyes burned from behind a terrifying, bone-white mask—a skull-like visage featuring long, swept-back horns and a jagged maw crammed with needle-sharp teeth.
Dark, smoky energy bled off its dark grey skin, rolling off its limbs like black flame. Its long, clawed hands gripped the frame of the skylight with razor-sharp talons, while a segmented, armored tail whipped behind it, ending in a wickedly curved, scythe-like blade that gleamed under the sunlight.
It crouched directly above them, a creature born to harvest lives, its glowing red eyes locked onto the helpless crowd below as it prepared to bring their world crashing down.
"N-No way..." Itsuki stumbled backward, his movements slow and agonizingly rigid as every muscle in his body quivered with sheer terror.
The entity's crimson eyes bored into him, cold and merciless. A suffocating pressure—thick, dark energy—flooded the entire floor, wrapping around Itsuki's chest like iron bands. His lungs seized. His heart hammered violently against his ribs, sending a surge of panicked heat crashing through his veins. The world seemed to warp around him, the passage of time grinding down to a agonizing crawl while he stood paralyzed, feeling like a helpless animal trapped under the gaze of an apex predator.
His numb fingers finally gave out, releasing their grip.
The heavy shopping bags hit the floor with a loud, hollow thud, bouncing once before tearing open and scattering their contents across the polished tile. But he couldn't even bring himself to look down.
All around him, total bedlam erupted. The sheer heat of raw human terror surged past his static body—a frantic wave of screams, weeping, and wild, desperate footsteps as shoppers trampled over one another, sprinting in the opposite direction to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the nightmare on the glass.
Yet Itsuki remained rooted to the spot, swallowed by the darkness pouring from the monster above, unable to break the paralyzing trance of his own impending death.
Then, with a vicious, sudden motion, the monster slammed its armored arm straight into the glass roof.
The skylight exploded. Overwhelming force shattered the reinforced panes into thousands of jagged shards, raining down into the marketplace in a glittering, deadly shower. The sharp fragments bounced violently off the steel railings and marble floors, whistling through the air like shrapnel.
The Ghoul plummeted through the shattered opening in a blur of hyper-aggression.
That sudden, violent descent snapped Itsuki out of his paralysis. Primitive survival instinct surged through his veins, forcing his frozen limbs to react. He flung his right arm forward, twisting his weight around as he desperately tried to throw himself into a full-on sprint.
He didn't even get the chance to accelerate.
The moment his back foot dug into the tile to launch forward, the floor beneath him buckled. With a deafening roar, the entire structure erupted as the upper level gave out completely under the impact, collapsing into a massive, jagged crater.
Itsuki's balance instantly shattered. Gravity yanked him downward, the floor disappearing beneath his boots. He scrambled in mid-air, flailing his hand out in a desperate, blind grab for the crumbling edge of the walkway. But the ledge was already too far out of reach, escaping his fingertips by inches.
He fell.
The air rushed past his ears, choked with concrete dust and sharp glass. As he tumbled through the open drop, heavy chunks of falling debris battered his falling body. A massive slab of reinforced tile clipped his shoulder, pinning him against a cascading shower of steel and stone. The jagged rubble slammed into his torso and legs on the way down, catching him in the collapse and burying him beneath a heavy, crushing wave of falling architecture as he crashed into the floor below.
As Itsuki was buried beneath the avalanche of concrete and shattered glass, the Ghoul struck the lower level with a earth-shattering stomp, the sheer weight of its impact pulverizing the floor tile into powder.
It slowly stood to its full, menacing height, unhinging its jaw to reveal rows of glistening, needle-sharp fangs bathed in the afternoon sun. Then, it unleashed a roar.
It wasn't a normal animal's cry—it was a hideously distorted, metallic screech that tore through the air like grinding steel and tearing flesh. The sound reverberated through the hollowed-out marketplace, vibrating so violently it threatened to shatter whatever glass remained in the building. As the deafening screech peaked, a thick, suffocating cloud of black smoke gushed from the depths of its throat, billowing outward across the edges of its open jaw like living, toxic shadow, choking out the daylight as the creature announced its reign over the massacre.
To be continued...