Zayne twin blades gleamed in the gray light as he sharpened them with methodical precision.
Left blade—thirty strokes. Right blade—thirty strokes. Check the balance. Test the edge.
The rhythm was meditative, a piece of his old life as a surgeon translated into this nightmare. Precision. Control. Each movement calculated and purposeful.
He sat in the ruins of what had once been an office building, third floor, corner office with good sightlines in three directions.
The bodies of five horse hybrids lay in the street below, already dissolving into white mist. They'd made the mistake of thinking a lone human was easy prey.
They'd been wrong.
He finished with the blades and set them aside, reaching for his gun—a weapon he'd crafted himself from salvaged parts over weeks of trial and error. Barrel from a destroyed police car. Firing mechanism from an old pneumatic tool. Ammunition painstakingly created from materials scavenged across a dozen districts.
It wasn't elegant. But it worked.
He checked the chamber, loaded six rounds, then set it beside the blades.
Three years.
He'd been in Avalon for three years.
Well, technically three years and two weeks, if his count was accurate. Time was difficult to track in a place where the sky never changed, where day and night were just arbitrary concepts survivors agreed upon to maintain some semblance of normalcy.
Three years of surviving. Learning. Adapting.
Three years of searching for a way out.
And now... now Nana was here.
The thought made something twist in his chest—an emotion he'd carefully suppressed for so long that experiencing it felt foreign. Fear? Guilt? Desperation?
All of the above.
He'd spent three years ensuring no one else would fall through that portal. Three years sealing the ice cave, reinforcing it every few weeks, keeping the secret of Avalon buried.
And then one wanderer attack, one moment of weakness, and he'd pulled her into hell with him.
I'm sorry, Nana, he thought, not for the first time. I'm so sorry.
Three years ago,Zayne had woken up in fire.
Literally. The ground beneath him was burning—not metaphorically, but actual flames consuming concrete that shouldn't be able to burn. All around him, creatures that shouldn't exist circled like predators scenting prey.
"What—" His medical mind tried to process the impossible. Head trauma? Hallucination? Some kind of toxic exposure?
Then one of the creatures lunged—something with too many teeth and eyes where eyes shouldn't be—and instinct overrode analysis.
His ice evol exploded outward, a desperate defensive reflex.creature froze mid-leap, becoming a grotesque ice sculpture that shattered when it hit the ground.
Zayne stared at his hands, at the frost still coating his fingers, and understood with horrible clarity:
This was real. All of it.
He'd stumbled through an interdimensional portal into literal hell.
The first week had been pure survival.
Learning that his surgical skills translated surprisingly well to combat—precision strikes, understanding anatomy, knowing exactly where to cut to disable or kill. Learning that his ice evol, previously just a mild manifestation he'd kept hidden his entire life, was powerful here in ways it had never been in the real world.
Learning that to survive Avalon, he needed to become something other than Dr. Zayne Li.
He needed to be a predator.
And now Zayne moved through Avalon like a ghost of winter itself.
He shouldered his pack—supplies scavenged from the latest market raid—and stepped out into the street, his twin blades strapped to his back in an X-pattern, his gun holstered at his hip.
The gray afternoon stretched endlessly ahead.
He moved with purpose, each step calculated. District 7 today, where there was supposedly an untouched pharmacy. Then District 9 to check the abandoned residential area. Then—
Three humans appeared from an alley. Young men, maybe early twenties, wearing mismatched armor and carrying crude weapons. Their eyes held that particular gleam Zayne had learned to recognize:
desperation mixed with cruelty.
Survivors who'd lost their humanity and decided to prey on other survivors instead of working together.
"Well, well," the leader said, grinning to show filed teeth. "What do we have here? A lone traveler? That's dangerous, friend. Lucky for you—"
Zayne's blade took him through the throat before he finished the sentence.
The other two barely had time to register their leader's death before Zayne's twin blades found them—one through the heart, the other through the eye socket into the brain. Clean kills. Efficient.
The bodies hit the ground. Zayne wiped his blades clean and kept walking, his expression never changing.
Worse than demons, he thought coldly. At least demons kill out of nature. These chose to be monsters.
He stopped feeling guilt about killing humans somewhere around year two. Avalon had a way of stripping away unnecessary emotions like empathy and mercy, leaving only the cold calculation needed to survive.
The pharmacy was a bust—already raided, probably weeks ago. But the residential area yielded two cans of preserved food and a bottle of clean water. Small victories.
As Zayne moved through the broken city, he found himself scanning every shadow, every building, every street corner.
Looking for her.
He'd been doing this since he woke up after the fall, separated from Nana by whatever cruel logic governed the portal. Every district he entered, every survivor base he passed (always from a distance—he'd learned that groups attracted attention), every market or supply point—he searched for signs of her.
he found traces. A week ago, he'd discovered bodies in a supermarket—killed with what looked like a large blade. The wounds were precise, the kills efficient, but there was something almost... desperate about them. Like someone fighting to protect something precious.
Was that you, Nana? He'd wondered, examining the scene. Are you alive? Are you surviving?
No way to know. The bodies were already cold, the kills at least a day old.
But it gave him hope. And in Avalon, hope was dangerous but necessary.
He made his way to his current shelter—a partially collapsed parking garage in District 6, structurally sound enough to be safe but damaged enough that most creatures ignored it.
The third level had a section with intact walls where he'd set up his base.
Not a home. He'd stopped thinking in terms of "home" after the first year. Just a place to sleep, maintain his weapons, and plan his next move.
Inside, he'd mapped out Avalon as best he could. Hand-drawn maps covered one wall, annotated with locations of resources, clan territories, cycle patterns, dangerous zones. Three years of exploration had given him knowledge no other survivor possessed.
Including the location of the Wish Bridge.
Zayne stared at the marking on his map—a small X in District 23, in the northern reaches of Avalon where few survivors ventured because the vampire nests made it nearly suicidal.
He'd found it two years ago, during the last blood moon. The ancient tree where vampires nested, and above it, impossibly suspended in the air, a bridge made of ice and light that connected to a portal.
A way out.
He'd tried to cross it. Had fought his way through dozens of young vampires, had nearly reached the bridge. But the blood moon cycle had ended just as he'd started climbing, and the bridge had begun to collapse, and he'd made the choice to fall back rather than risk being trapped in the portal's collapse.
He'd barely survived the retreat, spending two weeks recovering from injuries that should have killed him.
But he'd learned several critical facts:
One: The Wish Bridge only appeared during the blood moon cycle, once a year.
Two: It was real. There was a way out of Avalon.
Three: To reach it, you needed to cross vampire territory during their most active period.Going alone was suicide. But going with a group was even more dangerous because groups attracted more attention.
The perfect paradox. The impossible escape route.
For two years, Zayne had tried to figure out how to solve it. And for two years, he'd failed.
Now, with Nana somewhere in this nightmare, the equation had changed.
He needed to find her. Needed to protect her. Needed to get them both to the Wish Bridge during the next blood moon.
Which was... Zayne checked his careful calendar markings. Eight weeks away.
Maybe nine.
Not much time.pulled out his other map—the one tracking survivor bases and settlements he'd observed over the years. Most were gone now, destroyed by cycles or clan attacks. But a few remained.
Where are you, Nana? He wondered, studying the markings. Which settlement did you find? Are you with the eastern group in District 15? The northern survivors in District 18? Or are you alone like me?
A distant roar echoed through the city—something massive, something angry.
A giant, probably, or one of the other apex predators that hunted the districts.
Zayne's hand moved automatically to his blade, but the sound was far away. Not an immediate threat.
He returned to his weapons maintenance, the familiar rhythm soothing.
But his mind kept circling back to the same thoughts:
Nana with her bright smile and reckless courage.
Nana kicking wanderers with her bare legs despite how dangerous it was.
Nana eating pasta like a hungry hamster, completely unselfconscious.
Nana falling through the portal, her hand ripping away from his, her scream echoing in the void.
Three years in Avalon had taught Zayne to bury emotions. They were inefficient, dangerous, clouded judgment.
But thinking of Nana—of her alone in this nightmare, fighting creatures she'd never trained for, experiencing horrors that would break most people—something cracked in his carefully maintained control.
"I'll find you," he said aloud, his voice cold and certain in the empty garage. "I promise, Nana. I'll find you, and I'll get you out of here."
Even if it cost him everything.
Even it's means he had to become worse than the demons themselves.
He was already halfway there.
Zayne Li, the respected cardiologist from Akso Hospital, was long dead.
The man who remained was something Avalon had forged—a killer, precise and merciless, who understood that survival meant becoming a predator.
But somewhere beneath the ice, beneath the three years of necessary cruelty, a piece of the old Zayne remained. The part that had given a reckless hunter strawberry candy because her pout was too cute to ignore.
The part that had smiled at her in the cafe when he thought she wasn't looking.
That part was still searching for her.
And it wouldn't stop until he found her.
Or until Avalon finally killed him.
Something howled in the eternal gray afternoon. Zayne checked his weapons one last time, shouldered his pack, and stepped back into the broken city.
Eight weeks until the blood moon.
Eight weeks to find Nana.
Eight weeks to prepare for the impossible.
He'd survived three years in hell.
He could survive eight more weeks.
Wait for me, Nana, he thought, moving through the shadows like a ghost.
"I'm coming."
.
.
.
.
.
To be continued.