The sound of heavy rain pounding the pavement drowned out everything in the narrow alley. Clyde Erenhart sucked in ragged breaths, heart thundering in his chest like it was trying to break free. His muscles throbbed, vision swam, and the sharp tang of blood clung to his tongue.
He didn't know how he ended up here. Couldn't remember when he started running. Couldn't even say where "here" was. His thoughts were scrambled, like someone had torn his mind into pieces and stitched them back wrong.
A bolt of lightning split the sky open, casting the surrounding buildings in ghostly light. For a moment, he saw things—shadows twitching at the edges of his vision, shapes that didn't move like they should. Like glitches in a world that wasn't supposed to be real.
And then came the hum.
Soft at first, barely there. Then louder. Sharper. It burrowed into his ears and drilled into his skull, like static crawling through his nerves. He dropped to his knees, clutching his head as flashes of memory—if they were even his—invaded him. Flames licking up walls. Screams echoing in the distance. And a single line of code, pulsing across a screen in the dark.
Then a voice. Low. Certain.
"You were never meant to wake up."
Clyde's eyes shot open. He spun around, searching the alley. But nothing was there. Only rain. Only silence.
And then... something changed.
A ripple tore through the air like glass flexing under pressure. Reality glitched—warped—and from the torn seam, something stepped through. A figure. Human in shape, but wrong. Its body flickered like an error, jagged lines and shifting pixels barely holding it together.
Clyde's gut twisted. It looked like a man pulled from corrupted data. Unstable. Broken.
The figure tilted its head, and two crimson eyes locked on him. Cold. Blazing. Alarming.
Then it spoke.
"Run."
Everything exploded.
The rain. The alley. Even Clyde's body—fracturing into white-hot shards of data, scattering like broken code. Reality itself unraveled around him.
And then… silence.
Only the dark remained.