The 24th-floor hallway was a tomb. Flash-frozen oxygen hung in the air like suspended dust, motionless and silent. Stepping out of his fortress, Alex's boots crunched onto the crystallized black gore pooling around Dave's headless corpse. The Ghoul, once a terrifying biological tank, was now just a statue of grey meat and ice, fused to the parquet floor.
Adjusting the sling of the MK12 SPR, Alex tested the weight. The rifle, heavy with its suppressor and bipod, felt surprisingly light. The Level 1 Strength enhancement didn't make him bulky; it made him dense. Muscle fibers coiled like steel cables under his skin. Squeezing the rifle grip, he heard the leather of his glove creak under the pressure.
Check. Magazine seated. Chamber empty. Safety on.
The heat from the consumed core hummed in his chest, a low-frequency furnace battling the -64°C ambient temperature. While the cold still bit at his exposed skin like a thousand microscopic needles, it was no longer paralyzing.
Moving toward the stairwell, he found the fire door warped by the thermal shock of the previous night's flash freeze. Ice welded the hinges shut.
Gripping the handle, Alex didn't bother with leverage. He pulled.
CRACK.
The sound was sharp, brittle, like a gunshot. Frozen steel hinges didn't bend; they snapped. Metal shards tinkled onto the concrete as the heavy door wrenched free, swinging open with a groan of tortured iron.
"Brittle," Alex noted, stepping into the darkness of the stairwell.
The descent was silent. Using his enhanced agility, he rolled his weight from heel to toe, absorbing the sound. He was a ghost moving down a vertical wind tunnel.
By the 15th floor, the sterile scent of ice began to rot.
It was replaced by the cloying, acidic stench of unwashed bodies, burning plastic, and human waste. The air grew thicker, heavier. The survivors on the 10th floor had sealed their hallway as best they could, trapping their own filth along with the heat.
Alex slowed his descent on the 11th-floor landing. Crouching in the shadows, he peered through the gap in the railing.
Below, the 10th-floor lobby was a chaotic nest of desperation. Furniture stripped from apartments—mahogany tables, bookshelves, cribs—was piled high to block the stairwell entrance. Behind the barricade, flickering firelight cast long, dancing shadows against the walls.
"We don't have a choice!" Johnson's voice drifted up, shrill and cracking with hysteria. "The vent trunk is right behind that service panel. We pour the gasoline, we light it, and the draft carries the fire straight up to the 24th floor."
"But... if we burn the building..." a woman's voice wavered.
"He has food!" Johnson screamed, slamming a metal pipe against the wall. "He has heat! Do you want to freeze? Do you want to eat another dog? Or do you want to live like a king up there?"
The mob murmured, a sound of weak, pathetic agreement. They were starving. Their morality had frozen over days ago. Now, they were just crabs in a bucket, willing to pull down anything that tried to climb out.
Abandoning stealth, Alex stood up. He unclipped a small, empty carabiner from his belt and let it fall.
Clink. Clink. Clink.
The metal clip bounced down the concrete steps, ringing out clearly in the silence.
The murmuring below stopped instantly. Twelve pairs of eyes snapped upward, peering into the darkness of the stairwell shaft.
"Who's there?" Johnson hissed, retreating behind a thick layer of plywood.
Stepping into the faint halo of light bleeding up from their fire, Alex looked down at them. His face was impassive, breath puffing out in controlled, white clouds. He looked like a god judging insects.
"I heard you were planning a barbecue," Alex said, his voice flat and amplified by the acoustics of the shaft. "I brought the meat."
"Kill him!" Johnson shrieked, his voice tearing through the freezing air. "He's alone! Look at his jacket! He's warm! Take it!"
Greed overrode fear. Three men surged from behind the barricade, scrambling up the narrow concrete stairs. They wielded improvised weapons—a rusted pipe, a claw hammer, and a kitchen knife taped to a broom handle. Their movements were stiff, joints grinding without lubrication in the extreme cold.
Alex didn't raise the MK12. Bullets were currency; these men were waste.
Vaulting over the 11th-floor railing, he dropped twelve feet. Gravity accelerated his descent, but enhanced constitution absorbed the impact like a hydraulic shock. He landed directly on the lead attacker.
CRUNCH.
The sound was wet and heavy. The man's collarbone disintegrated under Alex's boot heel. Air forced from the attacker's lungs instantly crystallized into a puff of white vapor, cutting off his scream before it started.
The second man, wielding the pipe, swung wild. 1.5x Agility made the world seem to lag. Seeing the arc of the rusty metal, Alex calculated the trajectory and stepped inside the guard. His left hand lashed out, gripping the man's wrist.
The skin felt like cold, hard leather. Alex twisted.
SNAP.
Radius and ulna bones shattered. The man's arm bent at a sickening ninety-degree angle. As the pipe clattered to the floor and the attacker opened his mouth to wail, Alex drove the buttstock of the rifle into his teeth. Enamel and blood sprayed across the wall, freezing instantly into a red-and-white slurry.
Freezing in place, the third man—armed with the knife-spear—stared at his broken comrades. Then he looked at the monster standing before him. No panting. No sweat. Alex just stared back with dead, shark-like eyes.
"Drop it," Alex commanded.
The spear clattered to the concrete. The man followed, falling to his knees.
"Please... I haven't eaten in—"
A boot to the chest silenced him. Launched backward, the man tumbled down the stairs to land in a heap at Johnson's feet.
Johnson stood alone in the lobby, the gasoline canister held loosely in his bandaged hand. The arrogance that had fueled him for three days evaporated, leaving only the shivering, naked terror of a prey animal.
"You... you're not human," Johnson whispered, backing away until he hit the wall.
Descending the final steps, Alex stepped over the groaning bodies to tower over Johnson. The heat radiating from his body was tauntingly warm.
"I evolved," Alex said, snatching the gasoline canister. "You didn't."
"Don't kill me!" Johnson slid down the wall, clutching Alex's boot. "I know things! I know where the others are hiding food! I can manage the slaves for you! Just let me live!"
Alex looked down at the weeping man. "Slaves? You can barely manage your own bladder."
He raised the MK12, aiming the suppressor at Johnson's forehead. This was a mercy he hadn't afforded him in the previous life.
THUMP.
The sound didn't come from the gun. It came from the ceiling directly above them.
It was a heavy, wet impact, like a slab of meat dropped on a butcher's block. Dust filtered down from the acoustic tiles.
Alex froze. Enhanced hearing picked up a sound that shouldn't exist in -64°C weather: liquid flowing. Fast.
Thump. Thump. SCRAAAAAPE.
Something massive was dragging itself through the crawlspace between the 10th and 11th floors. The noise was directly above the ventilation trunk—the same trunk Johnson had planned to sabotage.
"What is that?" Johnson whimpered, looking up.
A single drop of thick, blue viscous fluid seeped through a crack in the ceiling tile. It landed on Johnson's cheek. It didn't freeze. It sizzled.
"Aah! It burns!" Johnson clawed at his face.
Alex didn't wait. Backpedaling, he brought the rifle up to high ready. "System, scan target!"
Before the blue screen could manifest, the ceiling exploded.
A pale, multi-jointed limb, thick as a tree trunk and covered in translucent, frost-rimed chitin, punched through the drywall. It didn't strike Alex. It snatched Johnson.
"HEL—!"
The scream was cut off instantly as the limb retracted, dragging the flailing man up into the darkness of the ceiling void. Bones crunched—a sound like a garbage compactor crushing a turkey.
Then, silence.
Only a gaping hole remained, with blue slime dripping onto the floor where the "Rich Kid" had stood a second ago.
From the darkness of the vent, two eyes—glowing with a rhythmic, bioluminescent pulse—stared down at Alex.
[System Alert: New Hostile Entity Detected.] [Classification: Level 2 Stalker.] [Warning: This entity can bypass standard physical barriers.]
Alex racked the bolt of the MK12, the metallic clack-clack the only sound in the frozen lobby.
"Looks like I'm not the only one hunting tonight."