Three blocks.

  It unfolds like the city has let a nightmare slip through its cracks.

  Tall. Angular. Wrong.

  The thing is… tall? It stands over him on six jointed, stilt-like legs. Its limbs are street signs, torn loose, twisted, and welded by the shape of a dream having a seizure, clanging as they dig into the pavement. Its torso is wrapped tight in overlapping panels of metal scavenged from signposts—STOP, YIELD, DETOUR—its limbs creaking with the sound of dented aluminium folding roughly into the shape of an insect made of stolen infrastructure.

  A stick-bug—if the stick-bug had been built by an engineer with a grudge against structural integrity. A CMOS concrete mantis. A thrown-together bone machine of municipal rage.

  It doesn’t roar. Doesn’t scream.

  It screeches.

  It flexes one of its extended arms—a makeshift thorax made by wrapping together two speed-limit signs like steel ribs.

  Aster barely has time to throw the glowing pole up defensively before one of the machine-insect’s jagged forelimbs lashes out.

  CRACK.

  The strike hits like a car accident compressed into a single frame. It smashes the pole sideways—Aster’s grip folds. The pole flies out of his hands with the force of a whip yanked by a goddamn hurricane.

  The staff arcs through the air before clattering onto the pavement eight meters behind the thing.

  Aster stumbles back, hands numb, arms shaking from the impact that feels like it ricocheted through his bones.

  “Are you serious?” he gasps. “I just—fuck—give that back!”

  The creature doesn’t care. Its rigid body creaks forward on metal stilt-legs, turning, serrated limb poised for a second strike that doesn’t care if it goes for his chest, throat, or memories.

  He is defenceless.

  The glowing pole pulses weakly out of reach behind the creature.

  Aster stares at it. Then at the creature. Then back at his empty, useless hands.

  “Fucking brilliant.”

  He stumbles backward instinctively, palms raised against nothing, when something underfoot vibrates.

  A chain.

  Thick rings of rusted steel with blunt-tooth edges meant for holding down something with more fight than common sense. The chain shimmers faintly on a overgrown lawn. Too faintly to have seen it if he hadn’t stepped onto it.

  He doesn’t think. There is no time left for thought. He lunges for it, yanking the cold iron from the grass. The links clatter, heavy, stubborn. No good grip. No idea what he is doing. He’s handled cables, sure. Chains? Not so much.

  But when the stick-bug thing rears back, extending a metal limb like a mantis hook—Aster swings.

  The chain arcs, sloppy and wide—a laughing insult to precision martial arts. But it hits. Wrapping around the thing’s front leg, Aster yanks, straining against the tension screaming through his muscles and rattling up every vertebra in his spine—but it topples the limb. The creature screeches—a metallic grinding sound layered with something almost insectile.

  He stares.

  “I… that worked? That worked!”

  Then it screeches again and leaps.

  Aster braces as the world flips, adrenaline forcing its way into every tendon, every decision. He has no staff. No golden field. No clue. Just a chain and a death wish.

  And God help him, he swings the chain again.

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  A sloppy, half-aimed whip across its cylindrical back.

  The chain catches on metal, caught jaggedly in the empty slots where a stop sign meets a rusted hinge.

  Aster yanks forward with everything he has, dragging the metal mantis a step closer. He can feel its vibrating rage through the chain. And it’s stupid. But so is this whole turn of events.

  The chain pulls taut, vibrating with the full, shuddering horror of a living steel limb trying to tear itself free, but it only digs the rusted links deeper. The creature slams one limb forward, trying to compensate.

  It lurches sideways—its mismatched legs stuttering.

  Aster’s feet tear him forward. No thought. Just NOW. WHILE IT’S OFF BALANCE.

  He jumps—ignoring every nerve-firing pain as he throws his body into a shoulder ram against the sign-bug’s nearest leg. Metal shrieks under the sudden pressure. Hydraulic fluid—black, viscous, wrong—spills out in a sputtering arc.

  The creature reels—fully.

  Aster’s grip on the chain tightens. His heel plants onto the street signs' smashed plates like they are ribs and he pulls.

  It finally falls.

  Hard.

  Crash. Crumple. Road and refuse erupt underneath it.

  Aster is already moving—scrambling over its collapsed mass of shifting limbs, breaths like gunshots. His wild eyes catch gold in the corner of his vision.

  The pole.

  It lies behind the beast. Still glowing. Still humming with that strange, buried pulse. Practically pulsing with the adrenaline pouring from Aster’s body.

  He dives for it.

  His fingers close around the pole like a drowning man finds air. The pole buzzes, hungry, invigorated, alive in a way he hasn’t been since puberty. He whirls around just in time to see the street-sign mantis ascending again.

  No.

  He won’t let it.

  Catching the strike over the pole, he barely holds on as both his arms go numb from the strike.

  Not giving it another chance.

  He loops the free end of the chain around another of its spindly middle joints and yanks—bracing a boot against metal. Wrapping. Wrenching. Tying a knot like he’s hog-tying a briefcase full of knives. Rust rains down on his hands. He can’t think. Can’t stop.

  Just wrap. Tighten. Twist. He forces the chain across a secondary joint. Jammed it behind one of its lower limbs. The creature flails, screaming.

  Aster doesn’t care. Panic blurs into fury.

  He hauls the chain up and over a cracked streetlight base and pins it. Kicks the broken signage once, twice. The creature thrashes—and for the first time, it doesn’t get up.

  That’s it. No more thinking. Fight. Kill. Make it stop.

  He swings the staff.

  Crack.

  He swings again.

  CRUNCH.

  Another.

  Then another.

  Then ten more.

  The staff slams against steel. Metal buckles. Screws snap. Plates rip. Every blow is a fresh scream from the makeshift monster—and from whatever is left of Aster’s mental scaffolding.

  He’s panting through tears. Not crying. Not exactly. Rage-wet. Panic-soaked.

  “STAY. DOWN,” he spits through clenched teeth—breath catching on every syllable.

  Slam.

  “STAY—”

  Slam.

  “THE FUCK—”

  Slam.

  “DOWN!”

  By the fifth strike, the head armour caves, leaking underlayers of wet circuits and soft matter he doesn’t want to identify. The sixth strike dents the plates into something like bone splinters. The seventh delivers a full-body shudder to Aster as steel-wielding rebar snaps uselessly like cartilage.

  Eighth. Ninth. Tenth.

  He doesn’t stop until the sound changes.

  No more reverberation. No more ringing. Just a soft, wet thunder. A probability of gore.

  He swings two more times just to make sure.

  Silence coils around him like a wet rag. The streetlight flickers above. The chain hangs loosely in one trembling hand. The glowing staff shakes in the other.

  The street-sign mantis isn’t moving anymore.

  Neither is Aster.

  He stands there, mouth open, lungs like knives, trembling in a cloud of fear, victory, disgust—panting, half leaning on the staff, half crumpling to the ground.

  His voice emerges, shredded and threadbare.

  “One block.”

  He spits rust and adrenaline.

  “Just one more.”

  He gathers the chain.

  And he staggers on.

  The chain hangs in his hand. Bloodied. The staff. Bent. Somehow still crackling faint gold in the grooves between blunted steel. Soul-tired muscles scream at him—but his body… doesn’t stop. It can’t.

  He’s a stitched mess of instincts moving through a landscape that wants him disassembled.

  He runs.

  And this time the world doesn’t care about style, finesse, or rules—it only acknowledges collision, impact, and blind terror.

  He vaults broken sidewalk, dodges plant-tentacles, barely avoids being snatched by a ceiling-bound vine that lashes down like someone’s bad idea of a tripwire. Every step screams at him. Every thought fractures. He runs like breath is currency, and death is tax.

  7 Heart Lane.

  He barely makes the leap across the property line.

  The moment both feet land on the threshold—something roars to life.

  A line of glowing script erupts from the ground behind him like someone detonated a boundary wall made of sunfire and calligraphy. Intricate. Fierce. A golden wall slams into existence, cutting off everything in pursuit.

  A strange centipede thing hits it first. The golden field slams back. Sparks. Metal. Screeching.

  Then the others pile into it, claws, tentacles, limbs crumpling against the barrier in waves.

  Aster drops to his knees.

  Breathing like the pavement is draining oxygen from him.

  The barrier pulses once. Twice. Then locks in.

  His body trembles. Every nerve a screaming punctuation.

  There’s nothing but him and the house and the golden wall holding the entire pissed-off universe back.

  He coughs. Something bitter climbs his throat. His voice is sand when it finally breaks loose.

  “What. The. FUCK.”

  No one answers—

  But everything out there wants to.

  And everything in here decides it can wait until he’s done breaking.

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