[POV Era]

  The silence of dawn in the university district was different from that of the city. Here, the wind did not whistle between skyscrapers; instead, it whispered through the branches of dead trees and around stone statues. While Chelsea slept the deep sleep of the utterly exhausted, I remained at the window frame of the dormitory room, watching the horizon with my golden eyes. My sensors were on guard, sweeping a three-hundred-meter radius, but my mind was elsewhere.

  “Almost four months,” I thought. For me, the world had stopped in a university hallway and restarted inside a metal capsule. But for humans, it had been one hundred and twenty days of constant terror.

  Chelsea woke up after exactly five hours. My system timed her awakening with millisecond precision. She sat up slowly, stretching her biological limbs with a pained motion, while I finished checking the surroundings of the building for the third time.

  "Good morning, Era," she said, her voice still hoarse with sleep. "You haven’t moved from that window all night, have you?"

  "I’ve secured the perimeter," I replied, turning toward her. "The sector is clear for now, but Ganut activity tends to increase when the residual light in the sky changes tone. We need to move if we want to keep following Sora’s trail."

  Chelsea stood up, drinking the st of the water from her bottle. As we packed what little we had, Orion’s curiosity—that part of me that still needed to understand how society functioned amid the ruins—surfaced again.

  "Chelsea," I began as we went down the dormitory stairs toward the street, "you said earlier that Sora and the others disappeared from the janitor’s room. What did you do afterward? How did you manage to survive four months alone in this city?"

  We walked along the main avenue of the campus, stepping around the remains of an overturned newspaper stand. Chelsea adjusted her backpack and sighed.

  "I wasn’t alone the whole time, Era. At first, when I saw that Sora wasn’t there, I went crazy. I shouted their names until I lost my voice, risking those things finding me. But after a couple of days, I realized that if I wanted to find her, I first had to stay alive. I started looking for food, water, the basics. And that’s when I saw other people."

  I paused for a moment to scan a side alley.

  "Other survivors?" I asked. "In the building earlier, people seemed… lost."

  "These were different," Chelsea continued. "I saw a small group—about six men and women. They were breaking into professors’ houses, smashing windows and doors. At first, I was scared. I thought they were looters, criminals taking advantage of the chaos. But then I saw them share a bnket with an elderly woman they’d found in a basement. I worked up the courage and approached them."

  Chelsea smiled faintly, remembering the moment.

  "They welcomed me calmly. The leader, a man named Marcus, told me something I’ll never forget: ‘In times of crisis, we’re either a pack or we’re food. We have to be more united than ever.’ They taught me how to hide, how to detect the smell of Ganuts before seeing them. They told me humanity wasn’t over—it had just moved into the shadows."

  "And why did you leave them?" I asked as we jumped over a crack in the asphalt.

  "Because they wanted to leave the city, head for the mountains. But I couldn’t," she said, her tone turning firm. "Sora is here. I know it. So I thanked them and came back to campus. It’s ironic, isn’t it? They were looking for safety in distance, and I’m looking for the truth at the epicenter of the disaster."

  I was about to reply—to tell her that her loyalty was admirable and suicidal at the same time—when my operating system issued a maximum-priority alert. It wasn’t the usual Ganut hum. It was something heavier, a low-frequency vibration that shook my tactile sensors.

  <[ALERT: UNIDENTIFIED BIOMETRIC SIGNATURE.]>

  <[THREAT LEVEL: EXTREME. DISTANCE: 60 METERS.]>

  "Chelsea, hide," I said. My voice was no longer melodic; it was the voice of a combat machine. "Now. In that administration building, behind the security doors. Don’t come out until I call you."

  "What is it? A Ganut?" she asked, panic rising.

  "No. It’s worse."

  Chelsea didn’t argue. She saw the rigidity of my stance and the way my golden eyes began to emit a more intense glow. She ran toward the building and vanished into the shadows of the entrance.

  I was left alone in the middle of the university’s circur pza. The wind stopped. I slowly turned my head, activating the thermal scanner and surface radar.

  Then I saw it.

  It emerged from the ruins of a colpsed auditorium. At first, I thought it was a silverback goril—but it was twice the size. It moved on its knuckles, and each impact against the ground made the shattered gss around me tremble. It had no fur. Its body was covered in a kind of organic armor—overpping ptes of gray, rough skin that resembled granite or rusted metal.

  From its back extended a disproportionately long, thin tail ending in a bony spike that dripped a viscous fluid. It had no visible eyes, only a row of sensory slits along its snout that vibrated rhythmically.

  <[TARGET IDENTIFICATION: CLASSIFICATION “TITAN-01” (TEMPORARY).]>

  <[TISSUE ANALYSIS: DENSITY GREATER THAN REINFORCED CONCRETE.]>

  <[TACTICAL RECOMMENDATION: RANGED COMBAT. HIGH-PENETRATION PROJECTILES REQUIRED.]>

  I looked at the pistol on my hip. Seventeen rounds of 9mm. They were pebbles against a tank.

  "System, the ranged weapons I possess won’t penetrate that armor," I reported mentally.

  <[CONFIRMED. PROBABILITY OF DAMAGE WITH 9MM: 0.02%. IMMEDIATE RETREAT RECOMMENDED.]>

  But the creature had already detected me. Its snout stopped, vibrating violently, and it emitted a sound that wasn’t a roar but a low-frequency sonic burst that made my visual interface flicker.

  Without warning, the beast unched itself forward. Despite its massive bulk, it was faster than any Ganut. In the blink of an eye, it was on top of me.

  Time slowed. I tried to evade, but its arm—thick as a tree trunk—swept through the air in a massive arc. I raised my arms in guard, trusting my invulnerability.

  The impact was devastating.

  I didn’t go flying; my body absorbed the force, but for the first time since I woke up, I felt my servomotors strain. The ground beneath my boots cracked deeply. Before I could counterattack, the creature’s tail shed out like a whip. The bony tip struck my shoulder.

  I heard a metallic screech. My white skin—the same skin that had shattered a Ganut’s teeth—now bore a groove. It wasn’t a deep wound, but the system issued a warning.

  <[CHASSIS INTEGRITY: 98%. SURFACE DAMAGE DETECTED IN BRACHIAL SECTOR.]>

  "Did it mark me?" I thought in horror.

  The beast didn’t stop. It began raining down hammer-like blows with its armored fists. I tried to respond with a straight right to its face—a blow that would have decapitated a human. My fist connected with its frontal pte.

  CLANG!

  The sound was metal striking metal. My arm vibrated violently, but the creature barely jerked its head back. It took advantage of my extension to grab my torso with one of its immense hands. The pressure was horrific. I felt my internal structure groan under the compressive force.

  It lifted me off the ground like a rag doll and smmed me into a marble column. The stone exploded into a thousand pieces.

  <[ALERT: CRITICAL PRESSURE ON TORSO. RISK OF SYNTHETIC SPINE MISALIGNMENT.]>

  I was at a clear disadvantage. My superhuman strength—until now my absolute guarantee—was facing brute force equal or superior to it, protected by natural armor my fists couldn’t easily break.

  The creature opened its jaws, revealing rows of teeth like industrial grinders, and hurled me back to the ground with a force that drove me into the asphalt.

  "Era!" I heard Chelsea’s distant scream.

  "Don’t come closer," I wanted to shout, but the creature was already raising both fists to crush me for good.

  In that moment, I understood that Orion Winst would not survive this—and that Era needed more than brute strength. She needed to find the weakness in that armor, or Sora’s trail would end here, in a crater in the university pza.

  The beast brought its fists down. I rolled aside, feeling the shockwave of the impact against the ground. I rose to my feet, my golden eyes bzing with lethal intensity.

  "System, forget retreat. Analyze the armor joints. There has to be a weak point," I ordered, as the creature turned for a second assault.

  The real fight had just begun, and for the first time, I felt that my invulnerability was nothing more than an illusion.