Small feet raced across the hard asphalt.
One step. Two steps. Ten steps. Fifteen.
His breath puffed white in a chill that shouldn't have been there. His eyes were wide, wet, and rimmed with red, locked onto a single goal. An exit. Escape. Home. Safety.
He ran so blindly fast he didn't see what lay ahead.
THUD.
He slammed into something warm and soft. It felt like flesh, but not the kind he was used to seeing at the market.
He looked up.
A woman. Or what used to be a woman. Now, her face was a nightmare—caved inward like a vortex sucking everything into its center. Where was her mouth? Her nose? One eye leaked a strange black fluid, the other was an empty socket.
The woman shrieked after the collision.
But it wasn't a human scream. It sounded like a broken radio mixed with the rhythmic buzzing of a thousand insects.
Terror crawled deeper inside him. His mind screamed at him to run. The boy scrambled away, his breath coming in ragged gasps.
His legs shook. His heart felt ready to burst. He collided with a second creature. A third. A fourth.
A man with bones erupting through his skin in a jagged, agonizing display. A child his own age with a mouth split wide across its stomach. An old man whose body was warped into a sickening 'S' shape.
They all shrieked with the same voice. The same hollow, buzzing frequency.
The boy's feet tripped as he tried to bolt again.
He fell.
His palms hit a puddle of strange liquid. Warm. Thick. It was a deep, oily black, like gasoline mixed with blood.
Then came the cold.
From his fingertips, something began to crawl. It felt freezing, then searing hot—burning, then cold again. His skin began to shrivel, twisting into a strange, unnatural pattern. A spiral.
He wanted to scream at the sight of dozens of human corpses piled nearby. Slowly, they began to twitch, transforming into the same abominations he had just encountered.
Before he could process the horror, the sound of a blade slicing through the air echoed... followed by footsteps.
Heavy. Approaching.
He didn't dare look up toward the sound.
He wanted to sob from the overwhelming terror, but finally, he forced himself to look.
A soldier? Maybe. Or maybe not. Clad in armor, gripping a massive greatsword. Dried, ink-black blood coated his entire form.
The soldier stopped a few meters away.
He didn't move. He didn't speak. His eyes were vacant and cold.
The boy wanted to beg for help, to crawl, to scream.
But his body could no longer obey. His skin continued to warp. Dark. Sticky. Revolting. His very humanity was being swallowed whole.
And the soldier just stood there.
Watching him.
Observing his transformation.
[FADE TO BLACK]
"Several years later..."