The silence of Mangaratiba was not peaceful, it was heavy enough to make anyone think that talking would be an outrageous sin.
On Ilha Grande, the silence was constantly broken by the distant roars of Beasts, the shifting of trash, or the wind whistling through metal. It was a chaotic, living noise.
Here, the silence felt predatory.
"It's too quiet," Briana whispered, her voice barely audible. She walked soft steps, her Burst-Step Greaves dim and silent.
"Keep your voice down," Leon murmured, scanning the rooftops.
They moved inland, away from the docks, hugging the shadows of the abandoned buildings.
The streets were not empty of signs of life—or rather, the end of it. The pavement was stained with large, dark patches of dried blood. There were drag marks on the concrete, scratches on the walls, and shattered glass everywhere.
But there was one thing missing.
"Leon…" Briana hissed, pointing at a large pool of dried blood near a bus stop. "Where are their remains? On the island... on Abraão beach... there were parts of their bodies. The Spared who didn't make it."
Leon knelt by the stain. He touched the ground; it was tacky. Recent. But there were no bones. No torn clothes. No scraps of flesh left behind for the scavengers.
"It's clean," Leon whispered, a cold knot forming in his stomach. "Too clean."
"What do you mean?"
"Rats, dogs, vultures—they leave a mess. They pick the bones." Leon stood up, looking back toward the shoreline where the massive, sloth-like shape stood motionless in the surf. "But that giant thing... the Sentinel…"
"You think... it ate them whole?" Briana asked, her face paling.
"If you look at the size of it," Leon grimaced. "A creature that big requires a massive amount of biomass and energy to sustain itself. Maybe it didn't just feed on these people, Briana. It consumed everything. Bones, gear, clothes... it vacuumed the street."
He looked down the long, empty avenue. It wasn't a battlefield; it was a dinner plate that had been licked clean.
"That maybe explains why there are no smaller Beasts around," Leon theorized. "I think it ate the competition too, just like in the island they were starting to chew on their kin."
"Your assessment aligns with the ecological data", Layla's voice echoed in his mind, low and cautious. "But it is not just hunger keeping this city empty."
"The Sentinel on the beach," Layla continued. "It is emitting a low-frequency hum that acts like a localized Electromagnetic Pulse for biological senses. The most sensitive fauna fled the perimeter immediately to escape the death song; those that remain are suppressing every instinct to vocalize, terrified of being pinpointed."
"So everything is hiding?" Leon asked internally.
"Everything that wants to live. The frequency seems to have a hard limit, though. The sound of the ocean waves creates a disruption pattern—a safe zone of white noise. That is why you could speak near the water. But in here? Every decibel is a flare."
Leon led them to the first place he could think of—a supermarket three blocks from the docks. It had been looted long ago, the shelves stripped bare, but he hoped for scraps.
They found nothing but dust and empty plastic wrappers.
"Leon," Briana hissed, freezing near the checkout counters.
Leon turned. In the shadows behind a register, curled into a tight ball, was a human figure. It was an elderly man, clutching something to his chest. It looked like a slab of matte-black metal, curved like a Roman shield.
Leon approached slowly, hands raised.
"Hey," he whispered. "What are you doing here alone sir?"
The old man looked up. His eyes were wide, bloodshot, and frantic. He didn't speak normally; his lips barely moved, pushing out air that formed words.
"Shhh... silence... silence..."
"What happened here?" Leon asked, crouching down. "Where is everyone?"
"Louder than the sea," the man breathed, rocking back and forth. "We cannot be louder than the sea. The sea saves us. The sea hides us."
"The monster?" Leon pressed.
"Blind," the man wept without sound. "Blind... but it hears the blood in your veins. It hears the fear. They... they left me. I was too slow. I have the shield, but I was too slow..."
"You have a System item," Leon noted, looking at the black metal. "Let me see it. I can tell you what it does. Maybe it can help you get to a safe zone."
Leon extended his right hand, the cable pulsing beneath his skin. He tried to be subtle, keeping his body angled away from Briana so she wouldn't see the black tendril slither out like a living snake.
But the moment the old man saw the cable surge from Leon's palm, he scrambled backward, kicking over a display rack.
CLATTER.
The noise was deafening in the empty store.
"No! No! Don't hurt me!" the man shrieked, his voice cracking with hysteria. He scrambled to his feet, holding the shield between him and Leon, and bolted toward the back exit.
"Wait!" Leon hissed.
But the man was gone, vanishing into the alley.
"PTSD," Layla diagnosed coldly in Leon's head. "His amygdala is firing continuously. He is trapped in a loop of survival terror. There is nothing you can do for him right now. We need to move. That noise might have been registered."
"He's gone," Briana said, looking at the knocked-over rack. "Leon, what did you do?"
"I just tried to help," Leon lied, tucking his hand into his pocket as the cable retracted. "He's very scared... Come on. We need to keep moving."
They left the store, hugging the walls. Leon's heart was heavy. He knew this city. He knew these streets.
"Where are we going?" Briana asked.
"Home," Leon said. "Or what used to be home."
They navigated the maze of alleys until the familiar, peeling facade of the tenement building came into view. It stood silent, the front door hanging off its hinges.
Leon checked the ground floor first. "Mr. Antonio lived here," he whispered, pushing open the door to unit 101.
The flat was empty.
He climbed the stairs to the second floor. Unit 204.
"Dona Olivia," he murmured.
The door was unlocked. Leon pushed it open.
The smell hit him first. It wasn't the rot of the Beasts; it was the stale, sad smell of decay.
Dona Olivia was sitting in her wheelchair by the window, facing the slice of ocean visible between the buildings. Her head was bowed on her chest. Her skin was dry, papery.
She hadn't been eaten or been torn apart.
On the table next to her was a cup of water that had evaporated weeks ago, and a small, empty bottle of the painkillers Leon had given her on his birthday.
"She couldn't leave," Leon's voice broke. Tears welled in his eyes, hot and fast. "She couldn't run. And nobody... nobody took her."
He fell to his knees beside the wheelchair, gripping her cold, bony hand. He cried in silence, the grief heavier than any fear he had felt on the island. She had been the closest thing to a grandmother he had ever known. A woman who offered kindness in a world that traded in scrap.
And she had died alone…
"Leon," Layla said softly. "From her state is safe to say her biological functions ceased approximately 5 days ago. It was likely peaceful. She went to sleep before all this madness began."
"Huh..." Leon wiped his face, standing up. His expression hardened. "We can't leave her here. Not like this. Not rotting in a chair."
He found a shovel in the maintenance closet.
"I'm going to bury her," Leon told Briana. "In the courtyard."
"Leon," Briana warned, looking at the sky. "Digging... it makes noise."
"I don't care," Leon snarled, pushing the wheelchair. She weighed nothing. "I don't care about the rules right now."
He carried her down to the small patch of dirt in the center of the tenement block. He started to dig.
Thud. Scrape. Thud.
The sound was rhythmic, dangerous. Briana stood watch near the entrance, her lighter in hand, trembling.
He had barely dug a shallow trench when the silence of the city was shattered.
WHIIIIIIINE-THRUMMMMM!
It wasn't the guttural roar of a combustion engine from the history books. It was the synthesized, amplified aggression of a military-grade electric drive.
Many years ago, manufacturers were forced to add artificial noise emitters to silent electric engines after pedestrian fatalities skyrocketed. But this vehicle didn't just hum for safety; it screamed for attention. The emitters had been hacked and overclocked to produce a deafening, bass-heavy warble that vibrated in Leon's chest.
A heavy, armored military transport swerved around the corner, its massive electric motors whining under the torque as it crushed a pile of debris before skidding to a halt in front of the tenement.
"People!" Briana gasped. "We have to warn them!"
A man stood up in the open turret of the vehicle. He was wearing tattered military fatigues, but his appearance was wrong. His eyes were wide, spinning with madness, and his left arm...
His left arm was gone. In its place, fused directly into the flesh of his shoulder with thick, scarring keloids, was a massive, rotary cannon.
He held a microphone in his good hand.
"ATTENTION CITIZENS!"
The voice amplifier screamed, the sound echoing off the buildings like a bomb blast.
Leon dropped the shovel. "Is he insane?" he hissed. "He's broadcasting!"
"THIS IS A TOLL BOOTH!" the man laughed, the sound distorted and screeching. "THE KING OF THE ROAD DEMANDS TRIBUTE! FOOD! FUEL! BATTERIES! BRING IT OUT OR I LEVEL THE BLOCK!"
"Hey!" Leon stepped out from the courtyard, hands raised. "Shut up! You need to shut up!"
The man turned, spotting them. He grinned, revealing rotting teeth.
"CUSTOMERS!" he boomed. "EMPTY YOUR POCKETS! I WANT THAT BACKPACK, KID!"
"Listen to me!" Leon shouted, trying to keep his voice under the echo of the amplifier.
"The noise! It will attract the Beast! Turn that thing off!"
The man threw his head back and laughed. "ATTRACT A BEAST? I AM THE APEX PREDATOR HERE! I AM THE NOISE!"
He raised his fused arm toward the sky. The rotary cannon didn't click like a mechanical trigger; it screamed, the magnetic coils charging with a high-pitched whine that set Leon's teeth on edge.
ZZEEEEEEE-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK!
It wasn't the dull, rhythmic thud of chemical gunpowder; it was the violent, tearing sound of magnetic rails launching metal at hypersonic speeds. A torrent of superheated tungsten spikes tore into the clouds, glowing white-hot from atmospheric friction and leaving jagged trails of violet ionization hanging in the air like neon scars. The sonic booms overlapped into a continuous, deafening roar that physically vibrated the concrete beneath their feet.
"We are dead," Layla said simply.
The response was almost instant, but it didn't come from a pack. There were no other Beasts to answer the call—only the Sentinel.
From the direction of the beach, the massive, bulbous shape that Leon had mistaken for a dormant statue simply vanished from its spot.
It was the Sentinel.
Despite its appearance—a towering, wet nightmare resembling a giant sloth draped in rotting kelp—it moved with a velocity that defied its bulk. It covered the distance of three city blocks in a single, fluid blur of grey motion. It wasn't slow. It was an avalanche that had learned to sprint.
It didn't roar. It didn't need to.
It slammed into the side of the armored transport with the force of a freight train.
The soldier tried to turn his turret, but the Beast was already on him. It ignored the gun. It bit down on the man's good arm—the one holding the microphone—and ripped it from the socket.
The man screamed—a sound that rivaled his amplifier.
"SHOOT IT!" he shrieked, falling back into the vehicle, blood spraying.
He raised his fused arm, pulling the trigger mechanism wired into his nervous system.
ZZEEEEE-THWACK-THWACK-THWACK-THWACK-THWACK…
The machine gun roared at point-blank range, the discharge noise drowning in the sickening, wet percussion of impact. The hypersonic tungsten didn't just puncture the Beast's torso; the kinetic transfer shoveled massive wet chunks of pale flesh clean off its flank, vaporizing bone and muscle into a violet mist before the creature could even bleed.
The Sentinel convulsed, screeching in pain as part of its body simply ceased to exist, but it didn't stop. It drove its claws into the man's chest, silencing the scream.
The firing stopped. The man was dead, just like that...
The Beast stood on top of the vehicle, panting. Green blood dripped from the craters in its chest. It was hurt. Badly. But it turned its head.
The slit-ears flared. It heard Leon's step.
It leaped from the truck, landing on the pavement between them and the exit.
"Leon", Layla warned."It's wounded, but adrenaline is keeping it upright. You have to kill it."
Leon pulled the powerful 500 Magnum revolver from his belt. His hands were shaking.
"That guy had a machine gun," Leon whispered, his voice trembling. "He turned that thing into Swiss cheese and it's still standing. What is this peashooter going to do?"
The Beast lunged.
BANG!
Leon pulled the trigger blindly. The bullet sparked off the pavement, meters wide. But the recoil force really surprised Leon.
BANG! BANG!
Two more shots. One hit the vehicle; the other went wild.
The Beast was closing the distance. Twenty meters. Ten.
"I can't hit it!" Leon yelled, backing up, tripping over the shovel he had used for Olivia's grave and feeling his wrist cry in pain from the brute recoil.
"Stop panicking," Layla commanded. Her voice was icy, stripping away the fear. "You are wasting bullets. I am taking over the visual cortex."
PING.
The world shifted. The grey street, the blood, the charging monster—everything faded into a dull monochrome.
Except for the Beast.
A bright, glowing red line erupted from the barrel of Leon's gun, projecting the bullet's path through the air.
And on the Beast's body, three small, golden circles appeared. One on the neck. One on the knee. One directly behind the ear slit.
"Align the line with the circle, Leon," Layla instructed. "Breathe."
The Beast was in mid-air, jaws open. Leon didn't question the sudden hallucination; he just obeyed the geometry.
He adjusted his wrist. The red line snapped onto the golden circle behind the ear.
He squeezed the trigger.
BANG.
The Beast's head snapped back violently. It crashed to the ground, sliding across the pavement, coming to a stop just inches from Leon's boots.
It twitched once. Then, it dissolved into mercury.
Leon stood there, smoke rising from the barrel of the gun. He had one bullet left.
"Did you... did you really do that?" Briana asked, staring at him, terrified.
Leon lowered the gun, blinking as the red lines faded from his vision. "Luck," he rasped. "Just luck."
"You missed three times, a humongous target… given the situation, I can't blame you," Layla noted dryly. "But we are exposed here, Leon. Please, loot the box and finish burying Grandma Olivia. We better pray we don't find out this thing wasn't a loner."
————
Leon tamped down the last shovelful of earth. It wasn't a proper grave—just a raw scar in the dry dirt of the courtyard—but it was the only dignity the silent city would allow her.
"Goodbye," he whispered, his voice cracking.
"She is at peace, Leon," Layla said, her voice a quiet, grounding presence in his mind. "But the living are not."
Leon nodded, wiping his dirty hands on his pants. He turned back to the street where the Beast had fallen.
The massive creature had largely dissolved into the familiar pool of silver mercury, but the process was slower this time, sluggish around the massive wounds the madman had inflicted. Rising from the center of the silver pool—right where the railgun had blasted a massive crater into the monster's chest—sat the reward.
It wasn't like the other boxes.
It didn't have the glossy sheen of the Common drops or the colorful pop of the Rare ones. This box was wrapped in a deep, matte onyx paper that seemed to absorb the light around it. And the ribbon wasn't just a golden strip; it was woven with complex, shifting fractal patterns that looked like circuitry breathing in gold thread.
"That's... new," Leon muttered, stepping into the mercury puddle.
He reached down, his fingers brushing against the strange, textured fabric of the ribbon. He started to raise his right hand, intending to let the cable appraise it before he touched it fully.
He never got the chance.
The moment his skin made contact with the box, the air around him fractured. A massive, heavy window slammed into his vision, vibrating with a gravity that made the previous notifications feel like toys.
[ RULE NUMBER 5 UNVEILED ]