Semua Bab Bloodscript: Survival Game of the Reborn: Bab 21 - Bab 30

The bus hummed under my feet like it had never stopped.It was jarring—going from a collapsing vampire castle, a devouring throne, and a monster made of my half-finished nightmares… back to cracked vinyl seats and overhead lights that flickered like they were about to give up.Dracula Castle was gone.One blink, it had been there—towering, bleeding, and screaming. The next, its silhouette dissolved into the endless white fog outside the bus windows, swallowed without a trace. Just another backdrop rolled offstage to make room for the next set.Seven of us sat scattered through the bus, in varying states of damage.Grant. The older woman. Two teenagers. The boy I’d dragged away from the wolves. Corvin. Me.Everyone else was… not here.I slumped into my seat, my heart still racing. The vinyl was tacky under my palms, warmed by bodies and time. My clothes were torn and bloodstained. My throat felt raw from screaming, and from biting things, I probably shouldn’t have bitten.Silence settl

The first step off the bus felt like stepping into a broken TV.The world outside wasn’t fog anymore. It was color—sick, oversaturated color—smashed together and ruined.We stood on the crumbling edge of an overpass, asphalt split and sagging under our feet. Below, a canyon of dead streets yawned between leaning skyscrapers. Their glass facades were spider‑webbed with cracks, whole sections missing like teeth punched out of a smile.Billboards and holo‑ads hung askew from building faces, half of them dead, the other half flickering in stuttering loops.BUY. EAT. CONSUME. OBEY.Static. Glitch. Neon.Ash drifted through the air in soft gray flakes, catching the glow of various signs and turning them into floating, toxic confetti. It got in my hair, on my lashes, melted cold and gritty on my tongue.Far in the distance, stabbing up from the wreckage like a spear, a single **neon tower** pulsed.Its top was wreathed in a halo of sickly green and magenta light, throbbing in slow, steady be

The purple line entrance yawned like a warning.The station for **Static Junction** was marked by a set of cracked doors—one hanging crooked, the other welded half-shut by some old, ugly scorch. The map’s neon arrow had pointed us here; now the track signage above the stairs flickered its own welcome in a sputtering violet glow.WE _IC J NCT N STAT C JU TIO “Looks friendly,” Jax said. “I’m sure nothing terrible ever happened down there.”“Keep moving,” Grant growled.We descended.The stairs were slick with condensation, edges worn down by a million real‑world commuters, and however many players the Game had fed to this level. The graffiti from upstairs continued down here, but it grew wilder—letters stretched, warped into teeth and eyes, glowing faintly along the tile.The platform itself was a long, low tunnel.Flickering lights ran in a line overhead, some working, some dead. Their intermittent buzz carved the space into stuttering slices of illumination and shadow. Old po

“Well,” the raider with the wire‑braided hair said. “Fresh meat.”His voice rolled over the broken plaza, casual and cruel.In seconds, the rest of them pivoted toward us, eyes lighting with a mix of hunger and boredom relief. They’d been waiting for something to do.They spread out automatically, like water finding cracks—fanning around the dead fountain, slipping between overturned benches and chunks of slab. Within a few heartbeats, we were half‑encircled.Mutated, half‑mechanical, neon‑tattooed.Up close, the wrongness was clearer. One had a full metal prosthetic arm grafted roughly at the shoulder, wires still exposed, fingers ending in hooked claws. Another’s eye had been replaced with a cheap, flickering implant that zoomed in and out with a faint whine as he scanned us. Neon ink slithered under their skin, pulsing faintly in time with some rhythm I didn’t want to identify.They were not drones. Not vampires. Just… people. Broken and welded back together by this place.The lead

Cold seeped through my soaked clothes long after we scrambled out of the drain.We’d followed Kieran’s barked directions through a tangle of roots and rusted metal, squeezing past a half-collapsed grate to claw our way up into the ravine behind Frostveil From there, it had been a stumbling, half-crouched run along a deer path until we’d reached the back of the estate’s grounds.The “safe shed” was a stone outbuilding that might once have held gardening tools. Now, it held dust, old crates, and three dripping wolves who smelled like mud and adrenaline.Kieran shoved the warped door closed behind us and leaned against it, breathing hard. Daire dropped the relic case onto a crate with more care than I expected, then braced his hands on his knees, head down for a moment.I pressed my back to the rough wall, sucking in air that tasted like damp wood and the faint, old tang of fertilizer.The baby rolled, unsettled. My bracelet throbbed like something alive under my sleeve.“Everyone in one