[POV Era]

  The weight of Chelsea in my arms was the only constant in a world colpsing into absurdity. Her eyelids remained sealed, oblivious to the speed at which my alloy joints devoured the distance. I ran beyond the main perimeter of the camp, exploiting a breach in the sewer network that the system had identified as a blind spot for patrols. I knew leaving her behind was a risk, but taking her with me into Sector Alpha was a guaranteed death sentence.

  I found an old office building on the outskirts, a concrete structure that, miraculously, still had its security doors intact. I leapt inside, breaking the internal lock with a calcuted pressure from my white glove, and settled her in a dry corner, hiding her behind heavy filing cabinets.

  [ Stable pulse. Oxygen saturation at acceptable levels. The sedative agent is beginning to be metabolized by her biological system ] the system reported. [ She will be safe here for at least six hours, Era. But time for Sora Tanaka is running out. ]

  "I know," I whispered, leaving a small ration of water and one of my emergency daggers at her side in case she woke before I returned. "Stay here, Chelsea. Please, just stay here."

  I left the building like an exhation. The night outside the dam was an abyss of ash, but my objective y in the heart of the concrete beast. I returned to the settlement, but this time I did not use the shadows to hide; I used them to hunt. I entered Sector Alpha through an industrial ventition hatch, dropping into a corridor where the air tasted of static and rotten flesh.

  The first hours were an exercise in sensory frustration. Sector Alpha did not follow the architectural logic of the rest of the dam. Corridors curved at impossible angles, and Sora’s thermal trail dissolved among leaks of hot steam and electromagnetic noise saturating the environment.

  [ Detecting multiple biological signatures at fifty meters ] the system announced. [ Anomalous behavior. Movement patterns do not match standard human activity. ]

  I pressed myself against the wall, activating passive camoufge. When I turned the corner, I stopped short. The corridor was a gallery of silent horrors. Dozens of people, dressed in rags that had once been settlement uniforms, walked back and forth with mechanical slowness. Their eyes were open, but their pupils were dited to the point of total blindness. They did not speak. They did not moan. They simply walked like sleepwalkers in a dream from which they could not awaken.

  I watched a man collide headfirst with a woman. Neither reacted. The impact knocked them to the ground, but they rose with the same robotic inertia, without looking at each other, without uttering a word of apology or pain, and resumed their erratic march toward nowhere.

  "What have they done to them?" I asked, feeling a nausea my processor attempted to filter.

  [ An altered brainwave frequency is being detected, driven by an external source. These individuals are not conscious; their motor functions have been hijacked by a constant biotic pulse. They are... empty vessels ] the system replied.

  Suddenly, a heavy sound, like leather striking metal, echoed at the end of the corridor. From the shadows emerged a figure that forced me to recalibrate my combat sensors. It was a Ganut, but not like the ones I had killed in the city. This one was more streamlined, its organic armor a metallic gray almost bck, and its movements cked the erratic clumsiness of the wild specimens. It moved with terrifying economy, with a predatory elegance that suggested a higher consciousness.

  The Ganut approached one of the sleepwalkers. The man did not even attempt to flee when the creature seized him by the head. In an act of clinical brutality, the Ganut began to devour him, but not like a starving beast, rather like something consuming fuel. One by one, the people were consumed in absolute silence, broken only by the crunch of bones.

  My first impulse was to intervene, to unsheathe the bde of my glove and slit the throat of that abomination. But I stopped.

  "Something is strange here," I thought. "This Ganut does not hunt by instinct. Look at how it pauses and seems to listen... as if it were following orders through a link."

  I observed from the darkness, analyzing its patterns. It did not attack just anyone; it selected those whose biotic signature seemed weaker. Its weak points were the same the core beneath the scapu but its reaction speed was three times greater than normal. If Sora was in this sector, this was the kind of monster hunting her.

  "I cannot waste time on it now," I murmured, turning my back on the silent carnage. "Sora is the priority."

  I moved away from the corridor of sleepwalkers, descending deeper into Sector Alpha. The map in my vision flickered, trying to make sense of a byrinth that seemed to reshape itself. I walked through corridors where the walls were coated in a bck, viscous substance that pulsed faintly.

  Then I heard it.

  It was not the heavy step of the bck Ganut. It was something smaller, more agile. The sound of tiny cws scraping metal, moving through the pipes above my head. I stopped and looked up, but saw only shadows and steam. The sound ceased the instant my neck tensed.

  [ Alert. Movement signature detected on the positive Z axis. The intruder is extremely agile. Thermal camoufge exceeds ninety percent ] the system warned. [ Era, we are being followed. ]

  I kept walking, but now my right hand rested on the activator of my vibrating bde. With every step I took, I heard an almost perfect echo from above or from the side ducts. This was not a frontal hunt; it was surveilnce. Someone or something was escorting me toward the heart of Sector Alpha, measuring my capabilities, observing how I reacted to the horrors along the way.

  I felt a fixed gaze at the back of my neck, an intangible weight that made my proximity sensors emit constant warning signals. Sector Alpha was not a prison, nor even a boratory; it was an ecosystem designed by a diseased mind that had learned to use Harvest technology to create its own demons.

  "Sora..." I whispered, quickening my pace. "Hold on a little longer."

  The sound of cws against metal grew more rhythmic, closer, as if the stalker had decided it had seen enough and was ready to make its move. The darkness of Sector Alpha seemed to close in around me, and for the first time since I awakened as Era, I felt that the technology granting me power was also what made me the most coveted prey in this byrinth.