Description

What Aroan called ‘the world’ was a wound that never closed, screaming beneath it's own skin.

The era before the collapse, the one whispered about in folklore, had never promised a happy ending. It was a time devoid of boundaries, utterly lacking in pity. The concept of negotiation to avert violent conflict—to save one's life through words—was an obsolete, forgotten language. Here, in the present, violence was the only dialect understood, the answer breathed with every stale gasp of air.

Civilization did not fall in a single moment—it spoiled slowly, eaten alive by its own sins, until it's final screams blended into the noise of the invasion.

The very atmosphere was diseased, thick and heavy, choking the lungs with a wet, feral musk of cornered wolves, the damp, grave-soil reek of the shambling dead, the razor-sharp, metallic tang of unknown apex predators, and the acrid, burning sulfurous exhaust spewed by the Orgs as they ripped through cityscapes like festering, open wounds.

Looming over this terrestrial nightmare was the most unsettling presence: the Aliens. They moved among the ruins wearing humanity like a thin, unnervingly flawless mask; their skin possessed an almost synthetic smoothness, and their eyes were vast, terrifying voids, empty of any recognizable spark of life or soul.

These were not the foolish, easily defeated invaders of old myths. These beings were brilliant, fiercely adaptive, and utterly merciless. Their physical forms subtly mutated, reshaped by the harsh, alien climates of the worlds they subjugated, yet their collective minds remained fixated on one cold objective: securing a perfect, uncontested home.

The weak perished instantly, their screams swallowed by the environment, while the strong engaged in death-defying, brutal contests, fighting until only the last individual—or the last allied unit—remained standing.

Coexistence, natural ecosystems, and mercy were concepts utterly foreign to their rigid, self-serving laws of survival. Their presence clashed violently with every other living thing, guaranteeing one outcome: an endless, grinding war soaked in fresh blood.

And in the festering cracks of this dying reality, monsters thrived—a wrathful world that the people of the past preferred to forget, choosing instead to retreat into comforting delusions.

They believed such terrifying realities were confined to dusty history books, to be dismissed as mere creative imagination figures, hiding somewhere in the ether, perhaps stuck in their own personal hells of perpetual combat.

Aroan and his friends had been suspended in a brief, fragile bubble of normalcy—summer break, celebrating the last vestiges of their childhood rebellion with a sweaty, spirited football game on a patch of overgrown grass.

Then came the sound: sharp, piercing screams ripping through the twilight woods, followed by the sickening sight of a body hitting the ground.

The general populace lived in their self-imposed comfort bubbles, clinging to the belief that such horrors belonged only in asylums or in the passive thoughts of the deluded.

It began that night. Aroan was setting up his equipment, preparing to record a casual YouTube vlog, when the gasping screams erupted from the dense shadows of the woods nearby. The camera, recording faithfully, captured the hot, frantic energy of the struggle in stark detail. The vampire—a creature whose true nature they were only beginning to comprehend—suddenly erupted in hostility.

It struck with brutal, unnatural force. Blow after blow slammed into his friends, the impacts bone-jarring and sickeningly solid.

They cried out, their groans sharp with real pain, and bright, arterial red immediately began to stain their shirts. This was no roughhousing; this was a calculated attempt to kill.

Aroan felt a massive, overwhelming thirst spike through his core as a blow grazed him, a swishing impact that momentarily stunned his senses. His eyes snapped wide open in horror as he realized: he had retaliated, and he had killed it. He had killed what he thought was a person.

In a desperate, immediate reaction, he went live, posting the raw footage to his YouTube channel, pleading for help regarding his act of self-defense. The response was instantaneous and deafening. Views popped up by the hundreds, then thousands. Instead of condemnation, he received a torrent of feverish praise—a wave of fanboys and fangirls cheering his lethal efficiency.

His group of buddies, witnessing the explosive virality, felt a strange, giddy sensation—butterflies fluttering wildly in their stomachs. It was a vampire. They had gone viral for ending a vampire.

This was their new reality. They immediately pivoted, chasing the intoxicating rush of fame and money by positioning themselves as the premier vampire hunters. Months bled together, fueled by late-night research gleaned from movies and obscure texts. Their kill count soared, matching the lustful, high turnover rate of their growing notoriety.

The cycle was set to break on Sunday, the day before their summer break officially ended. Aroan was violently pulled from a deep, exhausted sleep by a sound downstairs. It wasn't the usual creak of the settling house; it was a light, almost musical padding of feet on the wood floor, followed by a soft, high-pitched humming.

He stumbled downstairs, his body heavy with sleep and dread. There, illuminated by the faint moonlight filtering through the window, stood a cute femboy, dressed in an elaborate, almost theatrical cosplay—a miniature, stylized version of Dracula, complete with glossy, patent-leather boots that reflected the dim light. Aroan, still groggy, failed to recognize the danger beneath the costume. This creature, however, knew him intimately.

It recognized Aroan, though Aroan had never seen this face before.

The realization crept in slowly, cold and suffocating, until he understood that the night itself was no longer his enemy—what awaited him was far worse.