INICIAR SESIÓNDaniel moved fast. Medical training took a back seat to pure protective instinct. He grabbed the heavy blanket from the corner of the mattress and wrapped it securely around himself, a small, tight smile flickering across his face for half a second. Above everything else, he did not want anyone—especially the scouts—to walk in and see Ara exposed or vulnerable with him in the dark. He pulled on his trousers and shirt quickly, practiced motions, buckled his belt, and crossed the small apartment to the door.He unlatched the deadbolt and pulled the wooden door open.Freddy almost fell straight into the room. His weight had been pressed hard against the frame. Behind him stood Eska, Trish, and two other frontline players—Brant and Sera. All four of them were bleeding heavily. Their uniforms hung in shredded strips. Faces pale, streaked with dirt, blood, and pure exhaustion. One of Brant’s sleeves was soaked through to the elbow. Sera was limping, putting almost no weight on her left leg.
Ara set down hard on cracked pavement, far from the lights and noise of City Hall. Her boots scraped against broken concrete. The night air still carried the faint metallic smell of the battle she had left behind, mixed with dust and the distant scent of smoke. She had chosen carefully an old apartment building half-collapsed on the quiet edge of the ruins, the kind of place no one bothered with anymore. No lights. No footprints. Just silence and the slow decay of a city that had already given up.She kicked the ground-floor door open with what strength she had left. The lock splintered. Inside, the air was stale, thick with the smell of old plaster and abandoned lives. She carried Daniel across the threshold and laid him down as gently as she could on a thin, dusty mattress shoved into the corner. His head lolled against her arm. She lowered him carefully, then dropped to her knees beside him, breathing hard.The claw wound across his side was still bleeding. Dark blood had soaked th
Ara moved before thought could catch up. Her system tore past every remaining limit and launched her body across the broken asphalt in a single violent blur. One heartbeat she was still standing in the crater of her own shockwave; the next she was already between Daniel and the towering thing that had risen behind him. The world narrowed to the space between them—the descending claws, the exposed back of Daniel’s neck, the absolute certainty that she would not be fast enough if she hesitated even a fraction of a second.She didn’t reach for a weapon. She simply stretched out her hand and let the kinetic force pour through her fingers like lightning. Her palm closed around the zombie leader’s massive skull. Mutated skin and bone gave under the pressure with a sickening resistance. She squeezed harder, refused to let go, and with a raw shout that tore from somewhere deep in her chest drove the entire nine-foot frame straight down into the cracked concrete. The impact sent a visible shoc
Daniel’s eyes swept the parking lot in frantic arcs, trying to make sense of the dark that suddenly felt alive and hostile. The elite zombies were everywhere, closing in from the alleys, from behind the ruined cars, from the shadows of the brick walls. Their muscles shifted under torn gear, and those red eyes burned like coals that refused to go out. His heart hammered so hard he could feel it in his throat. He was a field medic. He knew how to stop bleeding, how to keep someone breathing, how to pull a person back from the edge. Although he can fight, he did not know how to fight the way Ara fought. But when he looked at her—shoulders still trembling, the poison not fully gone from her system—something cold and absolute settled in his chest. He would not stand there and watch her die.His gaze locked onto a stack of old rusted storage barrels near the side wall of an adjacent building, next to a scatter of abandoned construction debris. It was hollow, empty and heavy enough to make
Ara sat with Daniel in the thick, unbroken silence of the subterranean bunker, the kind of quiet that pressed against the ears and made every small sound feel louder than it should. Time stretched. She couldn’t tell if minutes or hours had passed. The darkness felt heavier the longer she stayed still, and her thoughts kept circling the same exhausted track—poison, systems failing, and how close she had come to not waking up at all.Finally she couldn’t take it anymore. She let out a long, tired breath and pushed herself off the edge of the seat. Her boots landed flat on the cold concrete with a soft scrape.“I don’t want to be here anymore,” she said. Her voice came out rough, and almost scraped raw. None of the usual steel was left in it. “I need to get out of this room.”Daniel moved at once. His hands found hers and held on tight, tight enough that her knuckles ached a little under the pressure. His eyes searched her face in the dark, looking for any sign that the tranquilizer was
Daniel listened to the receding echoes of Ara’s boots as she walked away down the damp concrete corridor, a sharp, suffocating pain stabbing deep into his chest. It wasn't the agonizing ache of his fractured jaw or the bruised ribs left behind by Ronan's brutal fists; it was something far sharper, an unbearable weight born of helpless desperation as he watched the woman he was trying to save slip deeper into a treacherous web of violence and betrayal. He wiped a streak of dark blood from his chin with the back of his sleeve, forcing his battered body up from the floor of the subterranean bunker. Every movement sent fresh pain through his side, but he ignored it. The physical damage was nothing compared to the hollow feeling spreading under his ribs.A few minutes later, pushing through his exhaustion, Daniel caught up with Ara in a dull, dimly lit room tucked away in the secondary quarters. She was sitting alone on the edge of a narrow cot, completely motionless, staring blankly at th
Ara Pov: “Run faster, they're getting close” A voice called out in front of Ara, as she jumped over the huge crack on the ground, her knee almost giving out, but she kept her stance. Her foot caught the edge of the concrete crack and she stumbled, her body lurching forward. The ground came up at he
Ara POV: The hideout had become a warzone in under two minutes. Three of Elena's players had made it through the lower entrance before Ronan managed to collapse the stairwell, and the fight that followed was loud and ugly and nothing like the clean action sequences she had seen in movies before th
Ara POV: The hideout was not what she expected. She had pictured something grim. Bare concrete, a single flickering light, maybe a bucket in the corner. What she got instead was a gutted storage room three floors underground with actual furniture, a generator humming in the back, and the smell of
Ara POV: "Do you accept your first mission?" "Absolutely not," Ara said out loud, to empty the air, in an empty lot, like a completely sane person. "No. Who even are you? Get out of my head." The voice said nothing for a moment. Then it said, pleasantly and mechanically and with absolutely no re







