The skies above were no longer skies. They were scars, open and bleeding colors that did not exist.

  Nihil walked under them, his boots scraping against shattered asphalt and exposed steel bones of a dead city.

  Every step was like moving through a graveyard of memories.

  Once, this place had been called New Eden District — one of humanity’s last hopes. Now, it was just a broken tooth jutting from the earth, surrounded by the creeping cancer of the Tower.

  The fragments of reality here bent strangely. Sometimes, a door would open into the sky. Sometimes, a street would fold into itself like a ribbon. Nihil had stopped questioning it years ago.

  His body moved automatically: cautious, efficient. Rifle strapped to his back, knife at his hip. His black coat, patched dozens of times, flapped around his knees. His face was gaunt, hollow-eyed, every muscle wiry and tense.

  Ahead, the ruins shifted. A noise.

  Something was coming.

  Nihil ducked behind a collapsed wall, drawing his knife wordlessly. Gunfire would be useless. Some things from the Tower were immune to bullets. Worse, some things enjoyed being shot.

  Breath held, he watched.

  Out of the mist, dragging its swollen body across the broken street, came a Beast.

  It was once human — maybe.

  Pale, rubbery skin bulged with tumors. Its arms had split into clusters of writhing fingers, each ending in a mouth. Its face had no eyes, only a stretched maw of teeth.

  It sniffed the air, seeking.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Nihil waited. Motionless. A statue in the ash.

  The Beast slithered closer, inches away. Nihil tightened his grip on the knife. Heart hammering.

  The thing paused. Its mouths quivered.

  And then — a shudder. A rip in the sky above, a scar opening wider.

  The Beast shrieked, a gurgling, wet sound, and flailed blindly. Without a second thought, Nihil drove the knife upward into its base, where the swollen mass met the torso.

  Black ichor sprayed. The thing collapsed, twitching.

  Nihil wiped his blade on its tattered remains and moved on.

  No time to linger. The Tower would notice.

  Every "room" of the real world now functioned like a broken floor of the Tower — dangers random, rules rewritten. Nihil’s only advantage was experience. His wounds, the dead friends he buried, the endless days alone — they had taught him.

  Trust nothing.

  Hope for nothing.

  Move forward anyway.

  At the end of a ruined plaza, he saw it: a fragment gate.

  It floated, humming faintly — a crack in space, swirling like oil over water.

  A chance.

  Beyond the gate: a shortcut. Maybe a way into a higher floor.

  Maybe death. Probably death.

  Nihil touched the fragment’s surface with his bare hand.

  Instantly, his mind was shredded.

  Visions of screaming cities, collapsing moons, oceans boiling away into nothingness. The will of the Tower pressing down, a weight that could snap gods in half.

  Nihil stumbled, gasping. His nose bleeding.

  But he laughed.

  "Is that all?" he whispered, stepping through.

  The world tore sideways.

  Darkness.

  Then... another place.

  The sky here was worse: fractured into thousands of floating shards, each reflecting a different nightmare. The ground was a mess of bone and root, and somewhere in the distance, the Tower loomed, its black spirals digging into everything.

  Nihil staggered to his feet.

  The air was wrong. Heavy with a gravity that seemed to pull at his soul.

  A whisper brushed his mind.

  — Welcome back. —

  He ignored it. Kept walking.

  A collapsed station lay ahead — subway tracks broken and spilling into the abyss. He needed to find shelter before the true monsters found him.

  He was just a man.

  Nothing special.

  No hero.

  But he was stubborn.

  And stubbornness, in this world, was more powerful than miracles.

  Nihil pressed on, toward the impossible Tower, under the shattered sky.