[POV Era]

  The echo of the countdown from the radio seemed to haunt me as I descended through the core of the skyscraper. One hundred hours. Time had become a tangible resource, sand slipping through my alloy fingers. Upon reaching the 50th floor, my proximity sensors emitted a soft pulse in my peripheral vision.

  <[ANOMALY DETECTED: RECENT BIOLOGICAL TRACES.]>

  I stopped dead, my combat boots barely producing a sound on the concrete. The hallway was plunged into a grayish gloom, but my golden eyes immediately detected something that did not fit with the dusty abandonment of the rest of the building.

  In a corner, next to a row of offices with intact gss, there was a small pile of waste. I knelt to inspect them. They were open tin cans—beans, pork—with the metal crudely bent, as if they had been opened with a knife rather than a can opener. There were energy bar wrappers and empty pstic bottles that still held drops of condensation inside.

  "Someone has been here less than six hours ago," my analytical mind calcuted.

  A trace of hope, warm and painfully human, bloomed in my core. I followed the tracks toward a double door leading to a maintenance and storage area. Pushing it open, my eyes widened in surprise.

  It was a makeshift supply warehouse. There were crates of mineral water stacked, thermal bnkets, and fshlights. In the next room, separated by a drywall partition, I found what appeared to be a communal dormitory. Fifteen canvas cots were arranged in perfect rows. They were empty, but the bnkets were ruffled, indicating a hasty departure.

  "Where are they?" I asked the stale air. "If they have supplies and a safe pce, why leave it all behind?"

  The answer came in the form of a roar that shook the air and vibrated in my auditory sensors.

  BAM! BAM!

  Gunshots. The sound was sharp, violent, and came from the lower levels, magnified by the building's shaft as if the skyscraper itself were screaming.

  <[ACOUSTIC TRIANGULATION COMPLETED. ORIGIN: 30TH FLOOR. VERTICAL DISTANCE: 20 LEVELS.]>

  I didn't think. Era took absolute control, optimizing the energy flow to my limbs. I threw myself toward the stairwell, descending entire flights in a single jump, my feet hitting the concrete with the force of a piston. Each impact should have shattered my knees, but my chassis absorbed the kinetic energy and reused it for the next impulse.

  It took me less than a minute to reach the 30th floor. As I burst through the emergency door, the scene that unfolded before my eyes was a nightmare of blood and gunpowder.

  It was an open-pn office area, now turned into a sughterhouse. Six human corpses y scattered across the gray carpet, the red of their blood creating a horrendous contrast. Some had been torn apart; others bore massive bite marks on their necks. Among the bodies, I saw a man whose hand still gripped a hunting shotgun, his face frozen in a grimace of agony.

  At the back of the room, ten people—men, women, and a small child—were cornered against a reinforced window. They were pale, trembling, some sobbing in silence. And in front of them, three Ganuts.

  They were rger than the ones I had faced in the parking lot, their red eyes glowing with murderous euphoria as they prepared for the final feast. One of them, the closest to the survivors, let out a roar that made the gss vibrate.

  "Hey!" I shouted, my voice moduted to reach a frequency that cut through the air like a knife.

  The creatures turned in unison. The humans looked up, their eyes searching for a salvation they did not expect.

  I didn't give the Ganuts time to react. I crossed the room in a blur of silver speed. On my path, I leaned down without losing momentum and ripped the shotgun from the dead man's hands. My system analyzed the weapon in a microsecond.

  <[WEAPON: REMINGTON 870. STATUS: LOADED. AMMUNITION: 2 BUCKSHOT SHELLS.]>

  Two shots. I needed three kills.

  The first Ganut lunged toward me, cws extended. I slid across the floor, passing beneath its trajectory, and pressed the shotgun barrel against its soft underbelly as I passed.

  BOOM!

  The point-bnk shot eviscerated it in mid-air, throwing its remains against a desk. Without stopping, I used the momentum to spring to my feet and faced the second one, which was already upon me. I aimed for its head and pulled the trigger a second time.

  BOOM!

  The beast's skull exploded in a cloud of bone fragments and bck ichor. The shotgun was now just an empty piece of metal. I let it go.

  The third Ganut, seeing its companions fall, hesitated for a fraction of a second. It was its st mistake.

  I pulled out the hunting knife I had taken from the supermarket. I didn't wait for it to jump. I lunged at it, grabbing its upper jaw with my left hand—hearing the bone crunch under my alloy strength—and with my right, I plunged the knife repeatedly into its chest, seeking the heart my sensors highlighted in red through its mangy skin.

  The beast colpsed under my weight, its life fading in a final wet gurgle.

  I stood up, my silver hair slightly messy, my olive-green jacket stained with the dark blood of the monsters. My golden eyes still glowed with the active combat mode, an intense and supernatural light in the gloom of the office.

  I turned toward the survivors. My mind wanted to smile, it wanted to tell them "You're safe," it wanted to hug them and feel the warmth of other human beings.

  "It’s over," I said, softening my voice as much as I could. "The monsters are dead. Is everyone okay?"

  I took a step toward them, hands open to show I had no weapons.

  The reaction was not what I expected.

  A woman screamed, cowering against the wall. The man protecting the child backed away so much that his back hit the gss with a dull thud. Their faces showed no relief. They showed no gratitude.

  They showed pure, absolute terror—the same they had felt before the Ganuts, or perhaps worse.

  "What are you?" one of the men stammered, pointing at me with a trembling finger. His eyes were fixed on my hands, which did not shake, and on my white skin that glowed softly in the dark. "How did you do that? You moved like... like one of those things."

  "I am... I am a friend," I tried to expin, feeling a pang of pain in my chest that no sensor could register. "My name is Era. I woke up just like you. I've come to help."

  "You're lying!" the woman screamed, her voice breaking with hysteria. "Look at you. Your eyes... you're not human! You're one of their machines! You've come to finish us!"

  "No, listen!" I took another step, desperate to connect. "I just saved your lives. If I were one of them, why would I have killed the Ganuts?"

  But my logic could not compete with their trauma. To them, I was an aberration. A woman with mercury hair who moved at impossible speeds and had just sughtered three monsters with the efficiency of a meat grinder. In this new world, anything that wasn't weak and scared was the enemy.

  The small child began to cry, a high-pitched sound that tore through me. His father hugged him tighter, looking at me as if I were going to devour them at any moment.

  "Go..." the man whispered. "Please... go. Leave us in peace."

  I stood there, motionless in the middle of the carnage, surrounded by the corpses of monsters and humans. Confusion invaded me. I had risked my safety, I had spent energy and resources to save them, and their only response was hate and fear.

  Era felt small, rejected again.

  "I only wanted to help," I said, my voice becoming ft and mechanical despite my efforts. "The radio... there’s a countdown. One hundred hours. You have to move."

  "Go!" the woman shouted again, grabbing a piece of broken gss from the floor to defend herself from me—a pathetic defense against someone who could dent steel.

  I understood that my presence there was only causing them more pain. No matter what I did, my chassis, my power, my very existence was an affront to their humanity.

  "I understand," I finally said.

  I turned around and walked toward the exit, feeling their gazes of terror fixed on my back. Upon reaching the door, I stopped for a second without looking back.

  "There are supplies on the 50th floor. Water, food, and beds. The Ganuts don't seem to go up that high often. If you want to live those hundred hours, go up there."

  I stepped out into the dark hallway, leaving behind the smell of blood and the sound of crying. I leaned against the cold wall of the corridor, feeling the emptiness of my new life. I was invulnerable on the outside, but inside, the rejection of my own species hurt more than any Ganut bite.

  "They are scared, Era," I told myself, trying to convince me. "It’s normal."

  But as I walked back toward the stairs, a haunting question settled in my mind. If the humans feared me as much as the invaders... who was I going to fight for when the clock reached zero?

  "Sixty seconds," the voice from the radio whispered in my memory.

  The clock was still ticking, and I was lonelier than ever.