Johann stood before the weathered wooden door of number fourteen Saint Walker Street, his fingers still warm from the last knock. The afternoon air in Selevia carried the usual salty scent—drying fish, a calm sea, the pulse of port city life with its timeless rhythm. But today, beneath all that normality, there was another taste. A taste like wet iron at the back of the tongue, like lightning that had yet to strike.
Lisa Müller opened the door.
The woman might have been in her early twenties, but her eyes were ten years older. Her black hair was tied loosely, a few strands clinging to temples damp with sweat or perhaps tears. She wore a simple grey dress with a clean apron that contrasted with the worry lines on her forehead.
"Yes?" Her voice was flat, without hope. Like someone who had been disappointed by knocks at the door too many times.
Johann opened his mouth, but the words stuck in his throat. What could he say? Your husband is dead? That was obvious. He died bravely? A lie. Robert Müller died like a rat in a trap, like everyone at Thares.
"I..." Johann pulled the letter from his pocket. The paper was crumpled, its edges browned by stains that weren't ink. "I found this. At the fortress."
Lisa looked at the letter, then at Johann's face. Her blue eyes narrowed, reading something in his face—scars unseen, shadows behind the eyes.
"He... wrote this for you," Johann said, extending his hand. His hand trembled. Strange. His hand never trembled, not even when aiming a musket with broken ribs.
Lisa took the letter. Her slender fingers brushed his for a moment, cold as marble. She did not open it. She only held it, like holding a dying bird.
"Robert," she said, not a question. A statement.
Johann nodded.
"He..."
"Yes."
Lisa bowed her head. Her shoulders did not shake. No sobs. Just a gradual slump, like a building finally surrendering to gravity after years of strain.
"Did..." she began, then stopped. "Did he suffer?"
Johann thought of Robert Müller. He remembered his face—a man with a thin mustache and brown eyes that always squinted as if against the sun. He remembered sharing hard bread one night on watch, and Robert talking about the small garden behind his house on Saint Walker Street, about an apple tree that never bore fruit but was still tended because "sometimes, it's not the fruit that matters, but the roots."
"No," Johann lied. "It was quick."
Lisa nodded, once, sharply. "Thank you."
She began to close the door, then stopped. "Your name?"
"Johann. Johann Reth."
"Thank you, Johann Reth." The door closed with a soft sound more final than any explosion.
Johann stood there for a full minute, two minutes. His breath slowly returned to normal. He had completed one thing. One small, meaningless thing in the grand scheme of war, debt, and empire. But it was something.
He turned and began walking home.
At the Reth house, Christine was stirring soup over the hearth. The iron pot was her mother's heirloom, its bottom thinner than the rest, requiring constant stirring to prevent burning. She liked this ritual—the circular motion, the scent of onions and salted meat, the way the steam warmed her face.
Rozemary sat at the table, hands folded in her lap. Her medical notebook was open before her, but she wasn't writing. She was staring into the fire.
"Do you think he'll be alright?" Christine asked without turning.
"Physically, yes," Rozemary answered. Her voice was flat, professional. "His bones are seventy percent healed. His burns are healed. No infection."
"That's not what I meant."
Rozemary fell silent. She watched the flames, the way they danced, the patterns they made. As a Level Two Medicus Divinus, she was trained to see patterns. In heartbeats, in breathing, in the way cells healed themselves. But there were other patterns she had learned to see, patterns in Divinum power.
Today, the pattern felt... wrong.
"There's something in the air," she said, more to herself than to Christine.
Christine turned. "What?"
Rozemary shook her head. "Nothing. Just... a feeling."
But it wasn't just a feeling. The air felt thick, like before a storm. But there were no clouds in the sky. No distant thunder. It was a different kind of tension—like a violin string pulled too tight, ready to snap.
She stood up, walking to the window. The street outside was empty. Unusual for this hour. Usually, there were children running, women washing, men returning from the docks.
"Christine," said Rozemary, her voice sharper than she intended. "Go to the cellar."
"Why? What—"
"Just do it!"
But it was too late.
Johann was halfway home when the sky began to change.
The change was subtle at first—just a shift in color. The afternoon blue turned purple, then a sickly green, like a bruise on the skin of the sky. Then came the sound: a low hum that came from nowhere and everywhere at once. Not a sound heard with ears, but with bones, with teeth, with the fluid between joints.
Johann stopped. His chest—where the miraculous scar was—suddenly felt warm. Not the warmth of healing, but warmth like forged iron, like burning flesh.
He looked up.
The sky became grey.
Not a grey like modern-day city pollution, but truly, utterly grey, as if color had been leached away. Thick black lines appeared in the air, forming impossible angles—angles that hurt the eyes to look at, angles that shouldn't exist in this world's geometry. They intersected, branched, creating a pattern like a mad spider's web scribbled by a hand with too many fingers.
From that sky, light seeped out.
A purplish-green light, like glowing rotting meat. The light had texture—it could be seen moving, pulsing, like living mucus. It had a smell: ozone and sweet rotting flesh and hot metal and something else, something never before smelled by a human nose, something that made Johann immediately vomit into the gutter.
He leaned against the wall, vomit acid in his throat. When he looked again, "it" had emerged.
"It" had no name. No fixed shape. Not a creature, not a god. It was the manifestation of a concept, "The Hunger from Outside." In one moment it looked like a mass of eyes and tentacles, the eyes blinking out of sync, each seeing in a different direction, each reflecting a slightly different reality. In the next, it was like a black hole with teeth—teeth not arranged in a jaw, but in a slowly spinning spiral pattern. Then it became a fractal pattern, pulsing with a rhythm that made Johann's heart race trying to follow it, then beat irregularly, then nearly stop.
It did not look down. It had no attention. It simply was, like a storm is, like gravity is. It was merely that today, at these space-time coordinates, Johann and everyone else within a five-hundred-meter radius happened to be here.
There was no malevolent intent. I'm not sure it is he. But it had no intent. It was like a human inadvertently stepping on an anthill while walking, not out of hatred for ants, but because the anthill happened to be there.
At the Reth house, the walls began to pulse.
Christine screamed—a high, panicked shriek. Bricks, which should be solid and immobile, moved. They curved inward, then outward, forming impossible spiral patterns. Plaster fell like dirty snow.
Rozemary turned from the window, her eyes wide. As a Medicus, she knew bodies. She knew what was possible and what was not. This was not possible. Stone should not behave like flesh.
She raised her hand, summoning her Medicus ability—Caeruleus, Level Two, "Bone Knit," "Pain Soothe." Blue light radiated from her hand... and immediately snuffed out. Not like being extinguished, but like being eaten. The air itself was hungry, and the blue light was its first meal.
"Christine!" she yelled, reaching for the girl.
But Christine could not move. She stood there, mouth open, eyes staring at her own hand.
Christine's right hand began to change.
The change was slow at first—the skin on the back of her hand became translucent, showing the veins beneath, then the muscle, then the bone. The bone of her ring finger began to lengthen, twisting into a spiral, piercing out through the skin. Blood flowed, but not red—black, thick, and shimmering with the same purplish-green as the light outside.
Christine did not scream. She only watched, her face blank with unprocessed shock.
Then the change accelerated.
Her skin melted like wax, dripping onto the wooden floor with a hiss. Underneath was not red muscle, but something else—something that pulsed with its own light, something with patterns like circuits pulsing to a foreign rhythm. Her bones cracked, reshaping themselves into crystalline structures that grew like mad plants, stabbing in all directions.
Her eyes, those green eyes similar to Johann's, burst. Not exploded, but opened like flowers, oozing thick green fluid that crawled down her cheeks as if possessing a will of its own. The fluid formed a nail-shaped pattern.
Rozemary tried to grab her, but when her hand touched Christine's shoulder, the change spread.
The touch was like electricity, but worse. Rozemary's fingers melted together with Christine's skin, fusing, their bones intertwining into one indistinguishable structure. Rozemary screamed—a scream of pain, but also a scream of rejection against what she saw, against what she felt happening to her own body.
She pulled, but could not. They were bound now, physically, cell by cell.
Her Medicus ability rose instinctively, trying to heal, trying to repair. But it was like trying to put out a fire with gasoline. The blue light emanating from her body mixed with the purplish-green light, creating a new color—a color that made Rozemary weep just to see it, a color that should not exist.
Their legs began to melt together, fusing into one pulsing pillar of flesh and bone. Christine finally screamed—a sound not like a human, like a broken siren, like tearing metal.
They fell to the floor, their bodies now one pulsating organic mass. Half of Christine's face was still intact—those green eyes wide open, her lips moving to form the word "Johann" without sound. Half of Rozemary's face was on the other side, her mouth open in a silent scream, her gray eyes emitting a dying pale blue light.
Then Christine's mouth began to widen. Not opening, but truly stretching, skin and muscle stretching like rubber, her jaw cracking and elongating. From within, something emerged—not a tongue, but something like a proboscis made of tiny, spinning teeth. It groped the air, then stabbed into Rozemary's face, piercing her left eye.
They stopped moving.
But they were not dead. There was still breath—one shared breath for two sets of lungs that were now fused. There was still a heartbeat—one strange, double-rhythmed heartbeat, beating too fast then too slow.
The mass pulsed on the floor, half-human, half-something else, utterly trapped in a suffering incomprehensible to anyone still human.
Johann, on the street, saw his house in the distance. He saw its walls moving. He saw the strange light from the window.
He ran.
His right leg—the leg that had been broken—suddenly stopped obeying commands. The bone turned liquid inside, like boiling marrow. He stumbled, fell onto the cobblestones.
As he pushed himself to stand, he saw other citizens of Selevia.
An old man ran, then suddenly stopped. His stomach swelled, then opened like a flower, spilling intestines that crawled out like white snakes. The intestines moved on their own, forming knots, then hardened into stone.
A pregnant woman screamed, hands on her belly. Her belly burst—not an explosion of blood, but an explosion of light. Her fetus flew out, still connected by an umbilical cord that now glowed. The fetus opened its eyes—eyes that were fully formed, eyes that looked at Johann with recognition, with an intelligence that should be impossible—before evaporating into mist.
A small child cried, reaching for its mother who had turned into a statue of salt weeping black fluid. The child itself began to change—its skin became transparent, its internal organs visible, pulsing, then jumping out one by one through its mouth, each organ turning into a paper butterfly before burning.
Johann crawled. His hands on the cobblestones were slick with something—not water, but shimmering slime.
From the corner of his eye, he saw a dog—a brown-furred shepherd. The dog barked at the sky, then its mouth kept widening. Its jaw cracked, its head split in two, and from its opened skull, a metal flower grew—a flower with spinning petals, emitting a high-pitched tone that shattered nearby window glass.
Johann reached his house. The door was open, swinging on its hinges.
Inside, he saw it.
He saw Christine and Rozemary—or what remained of them. The pulsating mass, the fused faces, lives trapped in endless suffering.
"No," he mumbled. "No, no, no—"
His chest burned now. His scar—the root-like pattern, the too-smooth pink skin—glowed. Not the blue light of healing, but the same purplish-green light as in the sky. The light danced in patterns matching the sky's patterns, as if they were part of the same thing.
Johann understood, in a flash of horrific vision. His scar was not healing. It was a trace. A mark. He had inadvertently touched something at Thares fortress, or something had touched him, and it left a residue. And now that residue was attracting attention—not conscious attention, but attention like a magnet attracts iron.
He turned, looked up at the sky.
"It" was still there, rotating slowly. From a mass of eyes, to a black hole with teeth, to a fractal, to something indescribable—something that made Johann weep blood just from looking at it.
And he understood the final, most horrifying thing: it did not see him. It didn't even know he existed. This was like fire not "knowing" about the wood it burns. This was just a process. Johann happened to be the wood.
His body began to change.
It started with his skin—the skin on his arms opened like flowers, but the petals were bone thorns, each etched with microscopic fractal patterns. Blood flowed, black and thick.
Then his internal organs. He felt them moving inside, crawling, trying to get out. His heart beat in his throat. His lungs swelled, filling his chest cavity, then burst, releasing purple smoke that smelled of ammonia and honey.
His bones cracked, reshaping themselves. His ribs grew out through his skin, forming a cage around his now-transforming body. His spine elongated, exiting the base of his skull, crawling on the ground like a tail.
Johann fell to his knees. He wanted to scream, but his tongue had already become a fat worm crawling out of his mouth, falling to the ground with a wet sound. The worm writhed, then burst into a swarm of flies with human eyes.
His vision began to blur. But not from tears—because his eyes themselves were changing. One eye melted, flowing down his cheek like a fried egg. The other swelled, expanding to fill the entire socket, then exploded, emitting light.
Then Johann Reth, who had once been Alex Tan, who had once been the "One Man Army," who had once been a brother, a patient, a hero, a killer, ceased to be.
His body completed the transformation. What remained was not a corpse, not a monster. It was a pulsating crystalline structure, human-sized, made of bone turned to quartz and flesh turned to glass. Inside, organs that had become small, ticking machines pulsing to a foreign rhythm. At the top, a skull—still recognizable as a human skull—with eye sockets filled with pulsing green fluid.
The structure stood in the middle of the room for one second, ten seconds. Then it cracked. Small cracks appeared, spreading, and the entire structure collapsed into purplish-green dust. The dust swirled in the air, forming a spiral, then was drawn upwards, toward the tear in the sky, like smoke toward a chimney.
There was no meaning in their deaths. No lesson. No moral. They did not die for a reason. They did not die as a warning. They simply died by coincidence, like a rock falling from a cliff and happening to crush a bird's nest.
In Selevia, the tear in the sky closed.
The purplish-green light faded. The strange smell vanished.
The sky returned to blue. Surviving birds began to chirp again, cautiously.
The surviving citizens—those who happened to be outside the five-hundred-meter radius—emerged from their hiding places. They saw the empty streets. They saw puddles of strange fluid drying quickly. They saw transformed objects: a sword turned into a perfect spiral, a cartwheel turned into a cube, a glass window turned into a rough gemstone.
They did not remember what happened. There was a hole in their memory. They knew something had happened, but whenever they tried to think about it, their heads hurt, and their minds turned to something else.