Volume 2 – Chapter 5: The Waiting Game

[April 26 – 7:45 AM]

Auditory tranquillity hung over the lanes the rest of the time, aside from our hurried footsteps. Every breath felt like my lungs were sucking up the space — the air suffocating the space around us, filling it with something I had yet to understand and describe. I glanced at Rika, at her taut features, with a fearful glint in her eye as she looked worriedly back and forth, expecting any moment for something bad to leap out at us from the dark.

We have not stopped, not once, not even for a second. A queasy engraved pictogram in my mind, that figure was in all the moments that followed, leering coolly back at me. It wasn’t a happenstance; I knew that much. Everything about it had been deliberate, deliberate. It wanted something. But what? And why now?

Rika squeezed my hand tightly, bringing me back to the present. "Kaito, what was that thing?" Her voice was low, almost drowned out by the distant drone of the city, but I heard the quaver in it, heard the same doubt I felt.

“I don’t know,” I said, my voice coming out a whisper. “But at the moment we can’t afford to even think about it. We can’t focus on escape.”

We turned another corner, the twisted lanes spread out before us, an endless helix of crumbling buildings and tortuous alleys. No longer was the city a home, it was a prison, and with every step we sank deeper into its rotten heart. Not really, you wrote, there was no escape. Not from the Wyrd, the things that hunted us, not from the city.

And still, I felt a kind of strange magnetic pull to keep going. Something deeper than fear, something to do with survival, with the need to understand what was happening — what we had entered into.

“Do you think we’re being chased? Rika’s voice was louder than a whisper. Not for the first time, and each time she repeated it, it took on a more desperate tone, more of a confirmation of something we both feared.

I paused, gazing up and down the streets before me, my heart racing in my chest. The air was too heavy, too still. “I don’t know,” I said, softly. "But we can’t stop. Not until we’re sure."

As we pressed on, I couldn’t shake the sense that we were walking right into a trap. With its crumbling infrastructure, its frosted dreams, the city felt as if it were holding its breath, waiting for us to screw up. And the more we marched, the more I felt the weight of the eyes that must have been on us — though I could not see them.

I glanced at Rika, her face an ashen grey in the dying light. She was trying her best to look calm, but I could tell she was scared. She was hanging onto me like I was the only thing keeping her tethered to reality.”

“We’ll get through this,” I said to them, even though I didn’t believe it myself. “I ain’t gonna let nothing happen to you.”

She didn’t respond, but I felt her hold on my hand tighten — as if my words were a lifeline she was clinging to. We walked, the crunch of littering debris beneath our feet the only thing we could hear in this city that had once been filled with life.

Or at least that’s what I told myself. The truth was, I was scared. Scared of what was chasing us, scared of the truth we were avoiding. But mostly I was terrified of the unknown — of what awaited us at the end of this grotesque game we’d gotten trapped in.

A noise in front of me, at once. A soft scrape-scrape, metal on cement. My heart leapt into my throat and I reflexively pushed Rika closer to me. “Stick close” I hissed, hand reaching for the knife tucked away in my jacket.

I froze and tried to figure out where it was coming from; it sounded louder. A sort of shudder had caught my breath, for at the end of the street stood the dark shadow of a figure. It was tall, too, looming, and the features were lost in the murk, but there was something unmistakably familiar about it — the same sense of being watched, of being hunted.

Rika went stiff beside me, her breath caught in her throat. "Who is that?" she said, her voice trembling, her stammer begetting fear.

I didn’t know how to respond. My instincts shrieked: Run. I stared nigh helplessly, but something compelled me to do so. The figure advanced and I braced, ready to shift, to react. This time, though, it was different. The figure didn’t come back toward us. It just stood there, waiting.

At that point, time seemed to stand still. The world held its breath.

And then, the figure spoke. It had a low, smooth, nearly hypnotic voice. “Been doing a long running time, right?”

By the color of my face, I could tell blood was leaving it. How could it know that? How could it possibly know?

I tried to steady my breath, willing my voice to remain level. "Who are you?" I asked, edged in steel, though a twinge of doubt deep in my chest undercutting my bravado.

The person did not respond immediately. Instead, it took slow steps forward, as if gauging our responses. I felt Rika’s hand quiver in my grip, she curled it tighter around me, and I wouldn’t deliver a single fright to her underneath my skin. Not yet.

“I’ve been watching you” were the creature’s words, oozing with an unsetting calm. "You and your friend. I think we need to talk."

My mind raced. I couldn’t show it my fear.” "What do you want?" I said, in a low but defiant tone.

The figure’s eyes shimmered in the darkness. “Nothing for now,” it continued, almost relishing the moment. "But soon, you’ll understand. There’s no escaping this. Not anymore."

A cold shiver is frozen down my spine. "What do you mean?" I asked, my heart pounding in my chest.

And the figure laughed, a sound that echoed through the deserted alleys. “You’re already caught in the net. The only question now is when.”

Suddenly, the pieces clicked into place. This wasn’t random. This wasn’t a coincidence. We were branded, and we could not escape.

The figure loomed closer, both heavy and several times the size of the average human. “We’ve been waiting for you,” it said, the words a death sentence.

And just like that, the lights went down.