Chương 150: 149: ANGUISH

On Earth, the sky was still wrong. Rain fell in violent, slanted sheets, hammering the broken world as though the sky itself were trying to press everything back into place. It struck exposed metal with sharp pings, splashed against shattered glass, and turned ash into blackened sludge that flowed in thin rivers along the streets. Thunder rolled overhead, low at first, before cracking open the sky in jagged bursts, white light flashing through clouds the colour of bruises.

Half the world was gone, and the other half was burning. Steam rose where rain met heat, hissing along roads and drifting from oceans that boiled at their edges. Asphalt exhaled smoke like a wounded lung, while the air carried a weight that did not belong to it, thick and suffocating, every breath dragged through heat, water, and something else that had no place in either. Zeinai stood at the edge of a shattered avenue in what had once been São Paulo. Rain struck him and broke.

It slid from the feathered surface of his suit in thin streams, unable to cling, while droplets hissed against the seams of his armour and evaporated in uneven pulses where something beneath ran too hot to tolerate them. His gaze settled on the ruins ahead. A school. The plaza he remembered had been replaced by a sprawling public complex composed of multiple buildings fused together by corridors, glass bridges, and open courtyards.

Rain poured through the exposed spaces, cascading from broken overhangs in heavy sheets, flooding steps, pooling inside craters, and dripping through collapsed ceilings into the darkness below. It had once held thousands of children. Now it held screams. The front gates had been torn apart, the courtyard cratered, and one wing of the main building had collapsed inward like a lung that had forgotten how to breathe.

Rainwater streamed into the wreckage, disappearing through the broken structure with a hollow, echoing drip. Something moved inside. Lightning flashed. For a fraction of a second, a silhouette stretched across the upper floors, too large and too fluid to be real, its edges warping as though even the light could not decide how to define it. Darkness swallowed it again. Zeinai's mask flickered to life.

[HUD ONLINE] [ENVIRONMENT: UNSTABLE] [STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY: 32% — FALLING] [LIFE SIGNS: 147 DETECTED] [THREAT SIGNATURE: ANOMALOUS — NIGHTMARE / EVOLVING] Rain drummed against the broken structure, mixing with distant thunder and the rising panic within. A shadow moved along the second floor, too large and too fluid to be real. It shifted through the corridor in ways that made the eye resist focusing on it, its outline bending around corners that were not there. [TARGET LOCK… FAILED] [REASON: FORM INSTABILITY / NON-EUCLIDEAN DRIFT] [FEAR INDEX: CRITICAL] [GROWTH RATE: EXPONENTIAL] Zeinai moved. Rain snapped inward at the space he vacated as he crossed the distance in a blur and entered the building, carrying the storm in with him. Chaos swallowed him immediately. Water dripped from ceilings, ran down walls, and pooled across cracked tile floors. Children slipped as they ran, shoes skidding across wet surfaces while teachers shouted directions that dissolved beneath the thunder.

"This way! Move!" A girl stumbled, her hands scraping across soaked tile with a sharp skrrk, and another child lunged forward to pull her back to her feet. The hallway suddenly went dark. Not dim, but consumed. Something passed overhead. WHOOM. The air recoiled. People dropped where they stood, not dead but worse, clutching their heads and shaking as though something had reached inside their skulls and twisted. Zeinai blurred forward.

To the children, he was less a person moving through the corridor than an absence in the world, a skipped frame in reality. One moment panic filled the hallway, and the next he stood between them and the thing lurking in the darkness. The children froze. Their fear did not disappear. It simply found another shape. Zeinai's massive frame towered over them, nearly filling the smoke-choked corridor. His silhouette swallowed what little light remained, while the cold glow of his visors stared through the darkness.

A teacher hesitated, clutching two children against her chest. Zeinai lowered his head slightly.

"Get out." His voice was flat and filtered, carrying neither reassurance nor explanation. It was simply an order. The teacher swallowed, grabbed the children, and ran. The others followed, scrambling through the corridor while glancing back at the enormous figure who remained between them and the Nightmare. Zeinai watched until the last child disappeared around the corner. Only then did his glowing visors turn toward the creature. Rainwater dripping through the ceiling began to fall wrong.

Droplets bent sideways in midair, trailing at impossible angles as something displaced the space around them. A limb stretched downward from the darkness, impossibly long and bending through directions that should not have existed. Water warped around it, elongating before snapping back into place. A head formed where space had no right to hold one. The eyes opened. Hundreds of them. Misaligned, scattered across a face that seemed unable to settle into a single shape.

Each reflected the lightning outside like a broken mirror. Some blinked independently. Others remained fixed upon Zeinai. A few leaked dark fluid that mixed with the rainwater before disappearing into the floor. The Nightmare unfolded rather than descended. Zeinai raised one hand. A small motion. A flick of his finger. TK. [GAUNTLET SYSTEM: ACTIVE] [OUTPUT: 25% → 100%] [SUBSYSTEM: APIS DRIVE — ENGAGED] His right arm hummed. The sound was not mechanical. It was alive.

The air around his gauntlet warped as pressure collapsed inward and heat spiked violently. Molecules tore apart and reformed in the same instant, causing the space before his palm to boil with a sharp hiss. Zeinai struck. There was no wind-up and no visible travel. The distance simply ceased to exist. THOOM. The blow landed inside the Nightmare. Force detonated outward in a contained burst, kilotons compressed into a single point of contact.

Walls fractured, tiles vaporised, and the shockwave tore through the corridor as the Nightmare's body folded around the impact before being hurled backward. SKREEEEE! It crashed through reinforced walls as though they were paper. BANG! BANG! BANG! Classrooms detonated one after another as desks, glass, steel, and concrete erupted into the storm. Zeinai followed through the destruction. The Apis field distorted his velocity into something that did not travel so much as arrive. Another strike. WHAM.

Heat and force stacked upon the first impact, the air igniting in short bursts as the Nightmare convulsed beneath pressure its unstable form had never been designed to dissipate. Its body twisted mid-impact, limbs warping as it attempted to reconfigure itself. One arm lashed outward. SHRRK! Zeinai slipped beneath it. [WARNING: TRAJECTORY SHIFT] The limb separated itself rather than being cut, unraveling mid-swing into a spear of condensed darkness that snapped toward the back of his neck. Zeinai turned. WHAM!

A second impact came from another vector. Zeinai caught the first, his arm locking as force detonated across his guard. The second struck cleanly. BOOM! He was driven backward through the last standing wall, both of them tearing into the main corridor in a violent collapse of concrete and steel. DOOM. They hit hard. Dust and rain surged inward through the broken structure as the hallway reformed around them, shattered, flooded, and barely holding together. The Nightmare rose first.

Its limbs elongated as it studied him, joints bending through impossible angles while its hands reshaped themselves into curved blades that shifted with every motion. It attacked. A high strike. WHIP! A low sweep followed. SHRRRK! Zeinai blocked the first strike and redirected the second, stepping inside the Nightmare's reach before driving his shoulder into its centre of mass. THOOM! The creature staggered. Zeinai followed with a direct palm toward its torso. THUD.

The Nightmare twisted, allowing the blow to glance across its body as its flesh flowed around the impact instead of breaking beneath it. A blade swept toward Zeinai's neck. Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there. SHHK! He dipped beneath the edge, felt it whisper across his armour, and drove his elbow upward into the creature's torso. WHAM! The Nightmare absorbed the impact and countered immediately. A second blade came from a blind angle. SHK!

Zeinai pivoted backward, caught the limb at the joint, locked it for a fraction of a second, then used the grip to rotate his body and slam the creature into the ground. BAAAM! Water erupted outward in a violent ring as concrete cratered beneath the impact. The Nightmare recovered almost instantly.

"FORM IS A LANGUAGE… AND WE OBSERVE YOU SPEAK IT WITH INCREASING CLARITY." Zeinai adjusted his stance. To the survivors watching from the corridors, the battle had become almost impossible to follow. They saw only a blur, a ghost, a towering figure appearing beside them moments before something else struck, somehow keeping them alive while fighting a creature that seemed to learn with every breath.

"MOVE! MOVE!" someone shouted.

"He's saving them!"

"What is that thing?!"

"DON'T LOOK AT IT!" The Nightmare's countless eyes widened. Every scream fed it. Every terrified glance gave its unstable form another moment of definition.

"THEY FEAR. THEY FEED. THEY ARE MINE." Zeinai stopped. Three panels snapped open along his back. SHK! SHK! SHK! Three red-grey drones unfolded from within, birdlike and skeletal, their wings separating into segmented blades of light. They launched. FWIP! FWIP! FWIP! The drones scattered through the collapsing school with surgical precision. Force-fields caught falling students and redirected their trajectories toward intact sections of the building.

A girl tumbling from a collapsing staircase suddenly changed direction as a soft vector shift caught her, while another group was pulled sideways from a buckling corridor moments before the ceiling collapsed where they had been standing. A teacher was lifted from beneath fallen debris and carried toward an exit as though gravity itself had briefly decided to cooperate. [DRONE SYSTEM: ACTIVE] [PRIORITY: CIVILIAN EXTRACTION] The Nightmare attacked again. Zeinai met it. Their collision shook the corridor.

Yet beneath the violence, another process was already unfolding. The battle had begun long before Zeinai entered the building. The Restructurers had been deployed into the air moments after his arrival. This generation was different from the previous versions, refined from Kiri's sample of the Nonagon and redesigned specifically to dismantle anomalous structures at microscopic scales.

They functioned like enzymes, except vastly faster, breaking apart the connections that held the Nightmare together while reproducing and spreading through its body. They were already inside it. Already working. The Nightmare continued speaking while its own structure quietly began losing cohesion.

"WE SEE THE FRACTURE YOU WEAR… THE SHELL THAT REFUSES TO CLOSE." Zeinai's left arm twitched. CRK. Damaged plating split apart. Something shifted beneath it. Black-gold veins crawled through the exposed machinery as metal peeled back, new structures emerging, reforming, and locking into place with deliberate precision. Click. Click. Click. A barrel formed along his forearm, subtly pulsing as though it possessed its own mechanical rhythm.

[ARM SYSTEM: RECONSTRUCTED] [STATUS: ADAPTIVE WEAPON ONLINE] The Nightmare leaned closer. The hallway stretched subtly around it, as though space itself were being persuaded to make room.

"THE HARVEST UNFOLDS… AND YOU PLACE YOURSELF BETWEEN ENDING AND ITS PURPOSE." Zeinai raised the weapon. After Katherine, the researchers had drastically increased their output, only to discover that raw destructive force had a ceiling. There was rarely a practical way to equip a weapon with enough power to simply overpower something capable of threatening entire galaxies. They had abandoned that approach.

With Kiri's help, they had reverse-engineered aspects of the Nonagon's structure and rebuilt the weapon around disruption rather than destruction. Its purpose was not to smash through an anomalous entity, but to dismantle the underlying connections that allowed the entity to maintain its existence. Zeinai fired. FWOOM. The beam did not travel toward the Nightmare. It simply appeared inside it. The creature shrieked. SKREEEEE!

Sections of its body flickered out of existence, bzzt, bzzt, before snapping back a fraction of a second later, as though reality itself were struggling to keep the creature properly defined. [HIT CONFIRMED] [EFFECT: PARTIAL DISRUPTION] [REGENERATION: IMMEDIATE] The Restructurers were still working inside it. They needed time. The Nightmare moved. Or rather, it was suddenly somewhere else. One instant it stood several metres away. The next, it was directly in front of Zeinai. He raised his arm. CLANG! BOOM!

The impact struck like a collapsing wall, driving him backward as rainwater exploded outward beneath the force. His boots tore through the soaked flooring, lockers ripped free from their hinges and slammed into the walls, and glass burst outward in a violent spray. The Nightmare was almost humanoid now. Almost. Its hands reshaped themselves into curved blades as its joints folded through impossible angles. The creature's body widened. Its limbs stretched. Something opened across its torso. Zeinai's HUD flashed.

[RESTRUCTURER DISTRIBUTION: ACTIVE] [TARGET INTEGRITY: 81%] [DEGRADATION: ACCELERATING] The Nightmare stopped. Something resembling uncertainty passed through its countless eyes. Its body shuddered. Only then did it realise that something had already begun eating it from within. It attacked anyway. The limb snapped outward. WHOOOM! Zeinai moved immediately. He knew one clean hit would cut through him with almost no resistance.

His planetary-level defences meant little against an attack operating on a completely different scale. He stepped through the strike. The blade-like limb passed through the space where his torso had been a moment earlier. The Nightmare's body suddenly split wider. Reality tore open. RIIIIIP! Black fissures spread through the air, their edges curling inward as they dragged everything nearby toward the forming void. Desks scraped across the floor. Pieces of ceiling ripped free.

Dust spiralled toward the rupture, while even sound seemed to bend and stretch around its edges. Students screamed as the gravitational pull caught them. A drone dropped hard. THUNK! Its force-field caught two children in mid-slide and hurled them clear just as the tear contracted. Zeinai's HUD rapidly analysed the phenomenon. [ANOMALY DETECTED] [SPATIAL DISTORTION: LOCALIZED] [STABILITY: RECURRING] [FUNCTION: UNKNOWN] He understood. It was a localized singularity, unstable yet repeatable.

The creature had not merely generated another attack. It had developed a function, something alive and adaptive that could alter the battlefield around itself. The longer the breach remained open, the more matter it would consume, and killing the Nightmare might not close it. The fissure could remain behind and continue feeding until there was nothing left to consume. The Nightmare cackled. Paris had seen all of this beforehand.

Zeinai stared at the creature, and something resembling fascination entered his expression. He exhaled slowly. It was beautiful. It was completely mad. Yet he was deliberately holding back. His output remained low, his movements controlled, and every weapon he used delivered short, precise bursts of Apis rather than sustained streams of power. He could have opened wormholes beneath the survivors and moved every person in the school to safety within seconds.

He could have deployed holographic doubles, redirected the entire building through spatial manipulation, or simply overwhelmed the Nightmare before it had time to react. He did none of those things. The creature was adapting. More importantly, it was becoming agitated. Zeinai had no intention of showing it enough power to make it escalate. Every burst was calculated to hurt without provoking. Every attack was brief enough to leave the Nightmare believing it could still overcome him.

He wanted it fighting within the limits it had already revealed rather than forcing it to reach deeper into whatever power remained hidden beneath its evolving form. He was not trying to win the exchange. He was controlling the conditions of the battle. The realization had barely settled when Zeinai acted. RESET. Time skipped backward. The Nightmare stood exactly where it had been moments earlier, before the fissure had torn through reality. The black rupture was gone. The hallway was intact.

The students were still running. The Nightmare stared at the empty space where the singularity had existed. For a brief moment, its posture changed. Confusion passed through its distorted features, as though some instinct told it that something had happened, yet the memory itself had been removed. Within that fractional gap created by the reset, Zeinai moved. Incendiary mines were already in position. BOOOOOOOOOOM!

They detonated against the Nightmare with the heat of stellar cores, collapsing the space around it beneath an eruption of impossible temperature. The creature screeched as it hurled itself away, its body twisting violently through the blast. Confusion flickered through its many eyes. It should have sensed the attack. It should have moved sooner. Its defences should have reacted. They had not. Zeinai gave it no opportunity to understand why.

The side of his arm opened, revealing a compact array of weapons beneath the plating. A volley of condensed hexagonal light erupted. FWOOM! FWOOM! FWOOM! The projectiles tore through the corridor, their targeting systems rewriting the local rules of reality so the Nightmare's evasive movements could no longer fully escape them. Each time it dodged, the trajectories corrected themselves, bending toward the positions it was attempting to reach. The Nightmare twisted. The bolts followed.

Several punched through its body. SHRAK! SHRAK! SHRAK! Holes opened through its unstable form as the weapons burned away its reserves. Every successful impact stripped another layer from its strength, yet Zeinai kept the bursts short, refusing to flood the creature with enough power to force a deeper response. Its power continued dropping with every passing millisecond. The Nightmare retaliated. Its limb snapped outward. WHOOOM! Zeinai moved immediately. The strike passed through the space where his torso had been.

Something rolled across the floor. WHUMP. A gravity mine. The Nightmare continued advancing, unaware of what had just entered its path. The older gravity weapons had attempted to impose absurd gravitational forces directly upon their targets, reaching up to a billion times normal gravity before frequently destroying themselves in the process. Zeinai had learned from that failure.

Anything requiring such absurd force to remain grounded was usually capable of ignoring conventional physics anyway, simply rising despite the gravity. The improved mines worked differently. They did not make the target heavier. They changed the space. The mine activated. WHUMMMMM. A gravity pulse collapsed over the designated area, forcing the entire region into an overwhelming gravitational state. Strength became irrelevant. Durability became irrelevant.

The effect was imposed upon the space itself, making everything within it experience the crushing sensation as though the weight of an entire world had suddenly settled upon the same patch of ground. The Nightmare's movement faltered. Zeinai's visor brightened. The next weapon was already forming. Before he could move, something felt wrong. The realization had barely settled when the HUD flared again, sharper this time, layering another urgency over the first.

[EXTERNAL ALERT: INFRASTRUCTURE FAILURE DETECTED] [LOCATION: 0. 8 KM — ELEVATED TRANSIT BRIDGE] [TRACK INTEGRITY: 12% — COLLAPSE IMMINENT] [ONCOMING MASS: HIGH-SPEED TRAIN — NO BRAKE RESPONSE] [CASUALTY PROJECTION: 312+] Zeinai did not turn immediately. The Nightmare was still there, trapped beneath the distorted gravity, watching him. Rain streamed between them, pooling at their feet and dripping from the creature's shifting form without ever truly touching it. Three hundred and twelve people were about to die.

And the Nightmare was still learning how to escape him. [RESTRUCTURER DISTRIBUTION ACTIVE] [TARGET INTEGRITY: 72%] He held its gaze for a fraction of a second before moving. BOOM. The hallway cracked behind him as he launched forward, the air snapping inward where he had stood. WHUMP. The bridge came into view. A high-speed train roared toward him, its horn blaring through the ruined city. HOOOOOOONK! The metal screamed against the failing track. KRAK-KRAK-KRAK! [IMPACT: 04. 2 SECONDS] Zeinai landed ahead of it.

DOOM. The bridge buckled beneath his weight, cracks racing outward through the concrete as he stepped forward and raised one arm. KRRRRRSH! The train hit him. THOOOOOM! Metal screamed as thousands of tons of momentum collided with something that refused to move. SKREEEEEE! His feet tore through the rails as the impact drove him backward, carving trenches through steel and concrete. Bolts snapped loose and scattered into the void below. PING! PING! PING! His arm held. The adaptive system locked into place.

CLACK-CLACK-CLACK. Zeinai leaned into the train. It kept pushing. Carriages slammed into one another behind the first. BANG! BANG! BANG! Windows shattered. Sparks cascaded beneath the wheels as the entire train compressed against the force opposing it. KSHHH! TSSSSHH! Zeinai's boots finally found purchase. He stopped sliding. The bridge groaned beneath him, hanging precariously over the drop below. RRRRRMMMM. The train continued pushing for another second. Then another. And finally, its momentum died. KUNK. KUNK.

Silence settled over the bridge. Zeinai lowered his arm. [CASUALTY STATUS: PREVENTED] The stillness lasted exactly long enough for him to exhale. Then the Nightmare spoke. Its voice no longer came from the school. It came from everywhere.

"YOU STOPPED ONE." The train disappeared. It had not moved. It had not been destroyed. It was simply gone. Zeinai stood alone on the bridge, his arm still raised, the tracks stretching empty behind him. There was no wreckage, no debris, no shattered carriages, not even bodies.

"BUT THE WORLD IS ALREADY BROKEN." A shadow fell across him from no discernible source. Something moved against the geometry of the city. Rain distorted around it, bending mid-fall as space folded to accommodate its presence. The nightmare stepped through distance in discontinuous fragments, closing the gap without crossing it.

"WE HAVE ALREADY TAKEN EVERYONE YOU WERE TRYING TO SAVE." Zeinai turned. The school was gone. The courtyard, the buildings, the children, the teachers, even the drones were absent, erased as though they had never existed.

"WE HAVE TAKEN BRAZIL." A beat passed.

"ARGENTINA." Another.

"URUGUAY." The voice drew closer, becoming quieter and almost intimate.

"PARAGUAY."

"BOLIVIA."

"CHILE."

"PERU."

"ECUADOR."

"COLOMBIA."

"VENEZUELA."

"ALL OF SOUTH AMERICA." Zeinai remained still. The shadow shifted. The Nightmare emerged from it. It was no longer the creature Zeinai had fought inside the school. It had grown. It had consumed. Its silhouette stretched from the earth into the sky, flickering between a humanoid shape and something vast and geographic, as though the continent itself had been given a body. Mountains seemed to rise beneath its skin. Rivers of darkness coursed through its enormous frame, while its edges distorted the horizon.

"DO YOU KNOW WHAT I AM?" Zeinai's HUD flickered. [ENTITY IDENTIFICATION: UNKNOWN] [THREAT CLASS: APOCALYPTIC] [NAME: ANGUISH] The final word had appeared without any command from him, as though the name had been forced directly into his mind.

"THEY CALL ME ANGUISH." The creature leaned closer. The sky darkened around it.

"AND I HAVE YET TO FEEL THE PAIN I AM NAMED FOR." Zeinai's arm began reconfiguring. [ARM SYSTEM: RECONFIGURING…] [WEAPON SELECTION: ADAPTIVE] [ENERGY RESERVES: 98%] [HEALING KIT: ONLINE — FULLY RESTORED] He had replaced his core and healing kit before beginning the pursuit. He had chased this creature across continents. He had finally found it. Now he understood why Paris had been afraid. Zeinai raised his arm.

"Then let me show you what you are named for." The Nightmare laughed. It sounded like a continent collapsing. RESET. After Butter's previous request, Zeinai had improved the reset device again. Its previous limitation had allowed him to reverse only a single moment, but the new version could reach backward through several seconds at a time. He activated it. The world lurched. He went back. Again. Again. Again.

Each activation peeled away another moment of the Nightmare's arrival, undoing its movements, its attacks, its transformations, until the battlefield began returning to the state it had occupied before the creature ever appeared. Zeinai kept resetting. He would continue until every consequence of its arrival had been erased, until the world stood exactly as it had before Anguish entered it. The train was there again. Anguish was nowhere to be seen. Zeinai stepped off the track.

The bridge shuddered in his absence, rrrrmm, then settled. He disappeared again, this time moving to intercept. — I tried recreating the very first image I made of Butter when I created her as a character.