Leon stared at the cable.
It emerged from the center of his palm like a dark, metallic snake. Faintly warm, carrying a diffuse, uniform heat that had no business belonging to wire. It pulsed with his heartbeat, swaying in time, rooted to his flesh as if mocking the very idea of skin and bone. There was no blood or jagged pain. Only the sickening certainty that it no longer considered itself an intruder.
The sky didn't glitch again…
That was the part that crawled under his skin and gave him goosebumps. The heavens remained stubbornly, terrifyingly silent. Instead, the world chose to break in front of his face. Not with a roar, but a whisper.
A translucent interface phased into his line of sight. It wasn't sky-sized or undeniable. It was intimate, resized itself with clinical precision, hovering at arm's length, impossible to look past, yet refusing to be dramatic. No neon roulette wheels or that mocking laughter delighting in his misfortune. Just clean geometry and muted tones.
It looked less like a miracle and more like a corporate takeover. Professionalism had finally entered the room.
Leon blinked, his throat dry.
"…Oh. So now you decide to be subtle."
Then, a message broke the silence, but not as loud and extravagant as before. It sounded neutral, but not like a robot. A deep, male-leaning voice resonated with quiet authority.
["URGENT UPDATE"]
Then the tone shifted. This time, almost like trying hard to sound… human.
"Safe period is reaching its... uh, its inevitable conclusion. The Beasts are finishing their mutation process as we speak. Very messy, lots of teeth!"
"Oh great, now everything has personality… and they are all twisted ones." said Leon, more tired that impressed.
"The Beasts will complete their change… Just as the drugs go out of range! Ohh — hey, it rhymes! I didn't — I mean, I totally planned that. Ahem."
The deep voice cut back in, severing the performance.
["OPPORTUNITY GRANTED"]
Leon threw his hands up. "Can I finally get some good news? Please?"
The interface shifted softly. A single sentence appeared as the clumsy voice returned.
"You are now authorized to ask one question. The rule: if it's not about how the game works, it doesn't count. Well… it does count. As your question. I just won't answer it. That's what we call a 'Dumb Move.' Very technical term."
It leaned into mockery.
"If you ask things like 'Why meee?' or 'Is there a god?' or 'What the hell is all this?'— yeah. You know the type. That will be officially logged as a profoundly embarrassing waste of opportunity. Let's not make this awkward for either of us."
[USER INTERACTION REQUIRED]
Leon paused, staring at those words that hovered midair, looking troubled, deep in his thoughts. Part of him still tried to convince himself that he finally went nuts and all he needed was that electric discharge. The other part was boiling, thinking of the strange cable that grew from his palm like a rooted plant, trying to think of the best question he could ask without wasting a good chance to make up for his bad luck.
Then something screamed inside his skull.
Not external, but violent, resonant, vibrating through bone like a shockwave. The kind of resonance that could tear steel bridges apart.
"GET DOWN, YOU IDIOT!!!"
Leon didn't ask questions.
To any unseen observer, he would have looked superhuman, gifted with inhuman reflexes, a kind of spider-sense. Like a marionette with its strings violently yanked, he surrendered to instinct. At the shrill female scream, he dropped flat, collapsing like a stuntman's dummy and snapping into the defensive posture drilled into him by schools run under Angra's militiamen.
A metallic blur ripped through the space where his head had been a heartbeat earlier.
The air screamed.
Something heavy slammed into the scrap-strewn ground, buckling metal and scattering debris like shrapnel.
Leon rolled, heart hammering, and came up just in time to see it. A humanoid figure.
Almost.
The proportions were human only by memory. Stretched, overwritten. Both hands and forearms had been replaced by a strange metallic alloy, fingers elongated into blunt, brutal tools meant to crush rather than grasp. Veins glowed faintly beneath torn skin, pulsing with an unhealthy red light that mirrored the creature's eyes.
Those eyes locked onto Leon.
Still aware. Still conscious.
"PAY ME!" it snarled, voice distorted but unmistakable. "PAY ME WHAT YOU OWE, YOU WORTHLESS PARASITE!"
Leon's blood ran cold.
"No," he whispered. "No, no, no…"
The creature lurched forward.
"THIAGO!" Leon shouted, scrambling backward as the thing swiped at him, metal claws gouging sparks from the ground. "Thiago, listen to me!"
Leon's throat tightened.
Thiago hadn't been cruel. Ever.
He was the one who ran the clandestine boat, ferrying scavengers from the coast to Ilha Grande. A big man with a tired smile, patient even when patience cost him. More than once he had waved Leon's debt away with a shrug, told him to pay when things got better. He postponed payments, split fares, trusted promises instead of credits.
The name did nothing. Or worse — it worked. The creature's face twisted, as if something inside it reacted against its own corruption, sharpening an expression that was already fractured.
"THREE TRIPS," the creature growled, advancing again. "THREE. AND YOU BROUGHT BACK NOTHING! YOU THINK I FORGET? YOU THINK I FORGIVE?"
Leon turned and ran.
Not blindly. Ilha Grande punished that kind of stupidity quickly and without mercy. He moved by instinct honed through repetition, placing his weight only where experience told him the ground would hold, adjusting his stride to avoid hollow resonance underfoot, cutting angles that reduced stress on unstable plating. Every step was a calculation his body had learned long before his mind caught up.
Behind him, Thiago followed with terrifying momentum, each impact sending tremors through the terrain, repeating fragments of old grievances like a broken ledger.
"Caloteiro."
"Thief."
"You owe me."
Inside Leon's head, the voice flared again, stripped of anything but urgency.
"BEHIND YOU!"
Leon veered just as the ground exploded where he'd been a moment earlier, fragments of metal and concrete spraying outward. Another surge followed immediately.
"LATERAL MOVEMENT INCOMING!"
He ducked, feeling displaced air brush past his shoulder as something heavy sliced through the space he'd just vacated.
"You're loud," he panted internally.
"I'm trying to keep you alive," the voice snapped back.
The voice didn't offer paths or plans. It reacted, translating pressure, sound, and movement into raw alarms faster than conscious thought could process.
They descended into lower ground.
Leon recognized the basin as soon as he saw it. Scavengers avoided this place for good reason. Radiation never quite faded here, and the terrain carried stress fractures that shifted without warning. It was the kind of ground that remembered weight long after it was gone.
He adjusted his pace, scanning for patterns in the debris, for the subtle signs that separated survivable ground from a death sentence.
Another warning slammed into his thoughts.
"HIGH MASS COMING AT FULL CHARGE!"
Leon saw it then. The slight sag beneath scattered debris. The unnatural way the ground had settled, tension written into the terrain for anyone who knew how to read it. A failure point waiting for commitment.
He broke toward a suspended steel beam, leapt, and caught it with both hands, pulling his body tight as the corroded metal groaned under the sudden load.
Below him, Thiago didn't slow. The creature lunged with everything it had.
It landed exactly where Leon had already marked as dead ground.
The basin collapsed.
Metal screamed as supports failed. Concrete folded inward. The ground swallowed itself, dragging the mutated body down under the combined weight of impact and structural failure. The noise was violent and brief, ending in a heavy, final silence broken only by settling dust.
Leon hung there for several seconds before pulling himself back onto stable ground. His legs shook as he stood, breath ragged, eyes fixed on the ruin below.
There was no relief. Only exhaustion.
He thought of the man who laughed easily, who delayed payments without complaint, who said the sea had bad days too. In the end, even that kindness hadn't mattered.
The interface reappeared in his vision, clinical and detached.
[USER INTERACTION REQUIRED]
Leon closed his eyes.
"I'm sorry," he said quietly, unsure who he was apologizing to.
When he opened them, the Island was still there.
So was he.