The water came without warning.
One moment, Nana was sleeping fitfully on her bunk, dreaming of ice caves and hazel eyes. The next, she was jolted awake by screaming and the sound of rushing water.
She sat up, disoriented, and her feet touched cold liquid.
Water. Ankle-deep water. In the settlement.
"FLOOD!" Someone was shouting. "THE FLOOD CYCLE! EVERYONE UP! HIGHER GROUND!"
Nana's training kicked in instantly. She grabbed her sword, her pack with their few supplies, and splashed toward Mina's bunk.
Her friend was already awake, frantically helping an elderly woman to her feet.
"The rooftops!" Mr. Simon's voice cut through the chaos. "Everyone to the rooftops! NOW!"
The water was rising fast. Impossibly fast. Already it was knee-deep, the current strong enough to knock people off their feet. Nana saw a young boy stumble, get swept away—
She lunged, catching his arm, pulling him up.
"Go! Climb! Don't stop!"
All around them, survivors were scrambling for the stairs, for ladders, for anything that would take them higher. But the settlement had sixty people, and there weren't enough routes up. Bottlenecks formed at the staircases. People pushed, panicked.
The water kept rising.
Waist-deep now.
"This way!" Mina had found a fire escape on the building's exterior. She was herding people toward it, her voice cutting through the panic with practiced authority.
"Single file! Help the person in front of you!"
Nana joined her, using her hunter strength to lift children, support the injured, push people upward. The water was chest-deep now, freezing cold, and the current was pulling at them with malicious intent.
The city wants us dead, Nana thought distantly. This isn't just water. It's hunting us.
A woman lost her grip on the fire escape, slipped. Nana caught her jacket, muscles screaming as she hauled her back up.
"Keep climbing! Don't look down!"
Somewhere below, someone screamed—a sound that cut off abruptly as the water claimed them.
The temperature dropped suddenly, viciously. Nana's breath came out in white clouds, and her fingers were going numb on the metal rungs of the fire escape.
Just like the ice cave, some part of her mind noted. Cold like Zayne's ice.Nana shook the thought away.
Focus. Survive. One rung at a time.
Mr. Simon appeared beside her, his weathered face set in grim determination.
He was helping a teenage girl who'd frozen in panic, talking to her in low, steady tones.
"That's it. One hand. Now the other. You're doing great. Keep moving."
Together—Nana, Mina, and Simon—they pushed the last of the survivors upward.
But not everyone made it.
Nana watched helplessly as a section of the building collapsed below them, taking three people with it. Watched as an elderly man simply let go, too exhausted to keep climbing, and let the water take him. Watched as the current swept away anyone who'd been too slow to reach the stairs or fire escapes.
The water was at the second floor now. Then the third.
"EVERYONE TO THE ROOFTOP!"
Simon's voice was hoarse from shouting.
They burst onto the roof just as the water reached the top floor, maybe fifteen survivors out of the original sixty. Cold, soaking wet, shivering violently. But alive.
Nana collapsed onto the concrete, her muscles trembling from exertion and cold.
Beside her, Mina was shaking so hard her teeth chattered audibly.
"H-here." Nana pulled her friend close, sharing body heat. It wasn't much, but it was something.
From the rooftop, they could see across Avalon. And what they saw was nightmare made manifest.
The flood had consumed everything.
Buildings stood like islands in a vast, angry sea that had materialized from nowhere.
The water was wrong—too dark, too viscous, moving with currents that didn't follow natural physics. And in that water, things were drowning.
Hybrids, their horse heads barely above water, thrashing until they went under and didn't resurface.
Demons, their black eyes wide with something that might have been fear, before the water claimed them.
Monsters Nana didn't have names for, all of them struggling, fighting, dying.
And humans. So many humans. People from other settlements, other survivor groups, all of them caught in Avalon's latest purge.
She watched them dissolve into white mist as the water took them, their forms fading like they'd never existed at all.
"Good," she whispered, her voice cold and flat. A hybrid that had tried to kill her last week went under. A demon that had slaughtered people from another settlement dissolved into nothing. "Good."
She felt Mina stiffen beside her, heard the sharp intake of breath. But her friend didn't say anything. Maybe she understood. Maybe she felt the same savage satisfaction at watching the things that hunted them get hunted in return.
Avalon has so many creative ways to eliminate us, Nana thought, watching the water churn. Fire spirits. Poison gas. Floods. It's all just... different methods of the same goal. Culling. Purging. Killing.
The flood lasted three hours.
Three hours of watching the water slowly recede, carrying bodies and debris with it. Three hours of holding Mina while both of them shivered and tried not to think about the people they'd lost. Three hours of Mr. Simon doing a quiet headcount and having to keep revising the numbers downward as he realized more were missing.
Fifteen survivors. Out of sixty.
When the water finally retreated—vanishing as impossibly as it had appeared, leaving only damp concrete and scattered wreckage—they climbed down cautiously.
The settlement was destroyed.
The walls they'd carefully maintained had collapsed. The gate was torn off its hinges and washed away. Their supplies—food, water, medicine, weapons—were either gone or ruined. The careful organization they'd built over weeks was just... gone.
Nana stood in what had been the common area, water dripping from her hair, and felt something break inside her.
"No," she whispered. Then louder: "No, no, NO!"
She'd worked so hard. They'd all worked so hard. Building something that resembled safety, resembled community. And Avalon had destroyed it in three hours like it was nothing.
Her legs gave out. She sank to her knees in the damp wreckage, and the tears came—hot and bitter and useless.
"I can't," she sobbed. "I can't keep doing this.
I can't keep losing people, keep running, keep barely surviving just to do it all again—"
Warm hands gripped her shoulders.
Mr. Simon knelt in front of her, his weathered face creased with grief but also with something else. Determination.
"Yes,you can," he said firmly. "Because that's what we do, Nana. We survive. We rebuild. We keep going."
"What's the point?" Nana's voice cracked. "We'll just lose it again. The city will just find another way to kill us—"
"Maybe." Simon's grip tightened. "Or maybe we'll find a way out. Maybe we'll be the ones who survive long enough to discover how to leave this place. But we'll never know if we give up now."
He helped her to her feet, steady despite his own exhaustion.
"We can't stay here," he continued, his voice carrying to the other survivors.
"The walls are gone. The defenses are compromised. We need to move, find somewhere more defensible."
"Where ?" Mina asked hoarsely.
She looked like hell—soaking wet, covered in grime, her usual fierce expression replaced by exhausted devastation.
Simon pulled out his waterlogged map, squinting at the smeared markings.
"There's an old hospital. District 11, northeast sector. Multi-story, concrete construction, good sightlines. It's in neutral territory—no clan has claimed it yet. If we move now, we can reach it before dark."
"And if another cycle hits while we're traveling?" someone asked fearfully.
"Then we adapt. We survive."
Simon looked at each of them in turn.
"Or we die trying. But I'd rather die fighting than give Avalon the satisfaction of breaking me."
Nana wiped her eyes roughly, feeling something solidify in her chest. Simon was right. She couldn't give up. Not when Zayne was out there somewhere. Not when Mina needed her. Not when there were still people depending on her strength.
She retrieved her sword from where she'd dropped it, testing its balance.
The blade was wet but undamaged. Good.
"Let's move," she said, her voice steadier now. "The sooner we leave, the better our chances."
They gathered what little they could salvage—a few intact water bottles, some weapons that hadn't been swept away, minimal supplies.
Fifteen people with almost nothing, preparing to cross hostile territory to reach uncertain sanctuary.
Simon took point, his crossbow ready. Mina and Nana brought up the rear, their weapons drawn, eyes scanning constantly for threats.
They moved through the broken city like ghosts, each step careful, each shadow suspect. The flood had rearranged the landscape—buildings that had been standing were now collapsed, streets that had been clear were now blocked with debris.
And everywhere, there were bodies.
Survivors who hadn't made it to high ground. Creatures that had drowned. All of them slowly dissolving into that white mist that seemed to be Avalon's way of erasing evidence of its kills.
Nana stepped over a demon's corpse, its black eyes still open, staring at nothing.
A week ago, she might have felt something—relief, vindication, even pity. Now she felt nothing. Just the cold calculation of one less thing that can kill us.
'I've changed, ' she realized. 'Avalon has changed me into something hard. Something that can watch people die and feel nothing.'
The thought should have scared her. But all she felt was a distant acknowledgment of fact.
Behind her, one of the younger survivors—a girl maybe sixteen—stumbled. Nana caught her automatically, steadying her.
"Thank you," the girl whispered.
Nana just nodded and kept moving.
They traveled for hours through districts she'd never seen before. Past the remains of what might have been a park, now just dead trees and cracked concrete. Through an industrial zone where massive machines sat frozen mid-operation, their purposes unknowable.
Across a plaza where statues stood like silent witnesses to Avalon's endless horror.
And always, always, they watched for danger.
Twice, they spotted hybrid patrols in the distance and had to hide, pressing themselves into shadows until the creatures passed.
Once, a demon pack crossed their path, and they held their breath, weapons ready, until the demons moved on toward easier prey.
By the time the hospital appeared on the horizon, Nana's feet were bleeding in her boots, her shoulder was screaming from carrying her sword for hours, and her aether core was nearly depleted from constant low-level enhancement to keep moving.
But they'd made it.
The hospital stood five stories tall, its windows mostly intact, its structure solid.
The entrance was barricaded but not destroyed. And most importantly—
"No signs of occupation," Simon observed, studying it carefully. "No hybrid markings, no demon corruption, no vampire nests."
"So it's empty?" Mina asked hopefully.
"Or about to be occupied by us." Simon checked his crossbow.
"Nana, Mina—with me. Everyone else, wait here and stay quiet. We'll clear the building first."
The three of them entered cautiously, weapons ready, every sense alert for ambush.
But the hospital was... empty.
Eerily empty.
Exam rooms with equipment still in place. A cafeteria with tables set as if waiting for diners who would never come. Patient rooms with beds made up perfectly. Like everyone had just... vanished one day.
Maybe they did, Nana thought. Maybe that's what happens here. The city just takes people.
"It's clear," Simon finally declared after they'd checked all five floors.
"Structurally sound, defensible, and empty. This'll work."
They're brought the others inside, and despite their exhaustion, people immediately began to organize. Barricading entrances. Setting up sleeping areas. Taking inventory of their pitiful supplies.
Nana found a corner room on the third floor with a window overlooking the city.
She sat down heavily, finally letting herself rest.Mina joined her, sliding down the wall to sit beside her.
Neither of them spoke for a long time.
Finally, Mina said quietly, "Sera didn't make it."
The teenage girl who'd been teaching Nana about edible plants. Who'd given her the throwing knives. Who'd had a bright smile even in Avalon's darkness.
"I know," Nana whispered.
"The Wilson brothers. Marcus. Old Chen's daughter." Mina's voice was hollow, listing the dead. "All gone."
"I know."
More silence.
"I watched a demon drown today," Nana said. "And I was happy about it. What does that make me?"
"A survivor." Mina turned to look at her friend. "It makes you someone who's doing whatever it takes to keep living. That's all."
"Is that all we are now? Just survivors? Nothing else?"
Mina didn't have an answer for that.
Outside the window, the gray sky of Avalon watched with indifferent malice, already planning the next cycle, the next creative method of elimination.And somewhere in this nightmare city, Zayne was doing the same thing they were—surviving, fighting, holding onto hope by his fingernails.
I'm still coming, Nana thought, closing her eyes. I promise, Zayne. No matter how long it takes. No matter what I have to become.
I'm still coming.
.
.
.
.
.
To be continued.