The floor opened beneath their feet with a sound like shattering bones. Tongues of brilliant orange flame snaked through the cracks like hungry fingers, releasing heat that transformed breathable air into boiling vapor within seconds.

  "Everyone out, NOW!" Alessio's voice cut through the panic like a sharp blade. More than a shout, it resembled a military command born from twenty years of life-or-death situations.

  Brando felt his body react before his mind fully processed the situation. He grabbed Giordano by the arm, pulling him away just as a flaming beam crashed into the exact spot where his friend had been standing a second before. Sparks and debris flew in every direction, but when they headed for the door, they discovered there was no way out.

  The main door was completely engulfed in flames. Not normal flames, but a concentrated wall of fire that had transformed the exit into an inaccessible furnace. The windows were in the same condition—every opening had become a vortex of fire that would have incinerated anyone trying to pass through.

  "We're trapped!" Gaetano, the orange man, shouted.

  "No way," Eleonora, the fox-girl, said, running toward a side window. But she stopped a few meters away when the heat wave hit her like a physical punch. "It's all hell!"

  The floor beneath their feet continued to crack and the flames spread further. Tongues of fire rose from underground with growing intensity—they had maybe a minute before the entire structure collapsed on them.

  "Twenty years," Tommaso, Giordano's uncle, murmured, looking around desperately. "Twenty years and we've never seen the cabin behave like this."

  Rusty, however, had frozen in the center of the room with all three eyes moving independently as if he had three different brains. They scanned every inch of the cabin and suddenly he headed toward a corner of the room that seemed identical to all the others. He stopped in front of what appeared to be a perfectly normal piece of wall and began scratching insistently.

  "What's he doing?" Giordano asked, dodging a piece of falling ceiling.

  "He's... he's looking for something," Brando realized, watching his companion's behavior carefully. "Maybe that's not a normal wall."

  Rusty emitted a sharp bark and began hitting the wall with his front paws. His claws penetrated the wood, but instead of the expected sound, there was a hollow echo.

  "It's hollow!" Brando exclaimed. "There's a space behind it!"

  Alessio wasted no time. With his great strength, he charged with everything he had toward the fragile wall with a shoulder tackle. With a crash, that section of wall that had seemed identical to every other part of the cabin was pierced as if it were made of cardboard. Alessio found himself with his feet in the snow, outside the cabin, having created a passage wide enough for the others to escape through.

  "Quick, OUT!" he yelled.

  Eleonora was the first to jump through the opening, followed immediately by Gaetano. Brando pushed Giordano toward the exit just as the ceiling gave way completely. Rusty leaped through the hole with a perfect jump, landing in the snow with grace.

  Tommaso had to widen the opening with his massive shoulders, but managed to get through just in time, because just as he emerged, the entire cabin collapsed behind him in an explosion of flames and debris.

  The group found themselves in the forest snow, gasping and looking in horror at what remained of their shelter. The cold night air hit them like a beneficial slap after the infernal heat they had just left.

  For a few seconds, the only sound was their labored breathing condensing into little puffs of vapor. Then Brando turned to look at what remained of the cabin. Flames rose toward the sky, devouring everything that had represented safety just minutes before. But what struck him most was the expression on the faces of the four survivors.

  "Twenty years," Eleonora whispered, staring at the flames with eyes that seemed to see beyond. "Twenty years and this cabin has always been our safe refuge. Always."

  Tommaso nodded slowly, his hoarse voice sounding rocky. "And the only place that made us feel human. Where we could pretend to still be alive."

  Gaetano ran a hand through his electric blue hair. "If even this place isn't safe anymore, then the system is changing."

  Brando looked at their faces illuminated by the glow of the flames and felt something he didn't expect: deep respect. These weren't game characters or victims of a failed experiment. They were survivors in the purest sense of the word, who had maintained their humanity through two decades of isolation and constant danger.

  How difficult it must be, he thought, to maintain sanity for so long? How do you not give up when every day could be your last, trapped in a frozen forest that doesn't exist?

  Alessio composed himself first, as if a switch had been turned back on in his mind. He turned toward Brando and Giordano with an expression that had returned to serious, but there was still something vulnerable in his eyes.

  "Boys," he said with a voice that was firm but not without emotion. "What's happening has never happened before. In twenty years, the Pyromaniac has always followed the same patterns and rules. Something must have changed."

  "We're in uncharted territory," Eleonora completed. "But don't be afraid. We've learned to adapt. It's the only reason we're still here."

  "Still here," Giordano repeated Eleonora's words. "My God, you really never gave up."

  Tommaso emitted what could be considered a smile, although it was hard to tell with his stone face. "Giving up means forgetting who we were. And we don't want to forget."

  It was at that moment that Rusty began to growl. All three eyes of the Pseudo-Glacial were pointed toward a specific spot among the trees, where the shadow seemed denser than normal.

  "He's arrived," Eleonora whispered, and her voice had lost all trace of bravado.

  Alessio raised his metallic hand, and instantly the other three positioned themselves. There were no words or discussions. Twenty years of shared survival had created communication that went beyond language.

  About ten meters away, among the snow-covered trees, the presence of the Pyromaniac materialized from nothing.

  Brando felt his mouth become suddenly dry. He had faced monsters in reality, but this was different—a true nightmare with legs. Over two meters tall, it moved with slow, deliberate steps that left footprints of smoking embers in the snow. Each step produced a hiss as the snow instantly transformed into vapor. But the most disturbing thing was the complete absence of a head.

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  In place of a neck, a gush of pure flames spouted into the air. They were flames with an almost solid consistency, and they moved with their own intelligence, creating shapes that vaguely resembled a face before dissolving and reforming.

  The body was covered in living ember armor that pulsed rhythmically like a magma heart. Each pulse revealed incandescent cracks between the plates, from which liquid fire dripped that pooled on the ground with a continuous hiss. The smell of sulfur and burned flesh filled the air.

  Holy shit, Brando thought, it's literally a human torch.

  "Alpha formation," Alessio said quietly, but everyone heard him perfectly. "Tommaso, you're our wall. Eleonora, serpentine movement pattern. Gaetano, territory control. I coordinate."

  Alpha formation? Brando watched carefully as the four veterans moved. It's incredible. They're not improvising. They have a system, a consolidated strategy for every situation.

  Tommaso stepped forward with steps capable of making the ground tremble. "We need to control the aggro," Tommaso explained to the boys while positioning himself. "The Pyromaniac always attacks the most obvious target first. If I become that target, the others have freedom of movement."

  The Pyromaniac reacted exactly as they had predicted. Its hands rose and a concentrated jet of fire launched against Tommaso. The flames hit his rocky chest, completely enveloping him, but the mountain-man didn't move a millimeter.

  "Rock resistance activated," Tommaso murmured, and Brando saw his granite skin become incandescent but resist perfectly. "I can absorb this level of heat for about 50 seconds before I start to give way."

  Eleonora darted in what she herself had called "serpentine pattern." Brando watched, fascinated, as she moved in a path apparently random but actually perfectly calculated.

  "I'll target his blind spots," she explained quickly while running. "The Pyromaniac has no eyes but his spouting flames detect you like sonar. If you move following the rhythm of his pulsations, temporal windows appear where he's completely blind. You have to synchronize with the beat of his fire."

  Her feline agility allowed her to change direction instantly, to stop and restart with a fluidity that seemed to defy physics. Brando noticed that every movement had been tested, perfected, and repeated hundreds of times.

  With quick, expert gestures, Eleonora drew six knives from the crossed belts on her chest.

  Clang. Clang. Clang.

  The knives hit the target dead-on. Some bounced off, but others embedded in the cracks of the armor exactly where Eleonora had predicted, making liquid fire gush out like burning blood.

  Meanwhile, Gaetano demonstrated what "territory control" meant. His orange body moved among the trees like a ghost, but he wasn't simply hiding.

  "Twenty-four anchor points," he said quietly while working. "Eight primary traps, sixteen secondary. If the Pyromaniac moves beyond the perimeter I've established, he ends up in the net."

  With acrobatic agility that seemed unnatural, he climbed the sturdiest branches. His hands moved with mechanical precision, tying ropes and stretching wires in patterns that Brando couldn't completely follow.

  "They're not random traps," Brando realized aloud. "It's a three-dimensional net. They're creating a controlled battlefield."

  Then, suddenly, Gaetano's ropes tightened abruptly. The Pyromaniac, which was moving to chase Eleonora, suddenly found itself entangled. For a moment it seemed surprised, or at least the spouting flames wavered in what could be interpreted as confusion.

  "Now!" Alessio shouted.

  His metallic hand closed into a fist and in a sort of energy that was emitted from his hands went to condense into a war hammer a meter and a half long, with a massive head reinforced by angular veins that gleamed like diamond. He charged toward the Pyromaniac with a speed that contrasted with his heavy armor. The hammer hissed through the air and in a titanic expression of strength went to strike the creature's chest.

  CRACK-BOOM!

  The sound was apocalyptic. The impact resounded like thunder that echoed among the forest trees. In the real world it would have probably taken at least an advanced Blue Stage to unleash such force. The Pyromaniac staggered backward and the spouting flames visibly wavered. Cracks formed in the ember armor, from which liquid fire began to drip like burning blood.

  Alessio's voice seemed changed to a tone of contentment, like when someone is about to savor victory. "Pattern Bravo!" he shouted with satisfaction. "Let's begin the conclusion phase!"

  At that precise instant, the Pyromaniac stopped and it was at that moment that the world changed. Not gradually, like a wounded creature would slow down to stop. It froze completely in an unnatural pose, as if it were a machine and someone had pressed a pause button. Its body stopped moving, and for an instant that seemed to last an eternity, even the flames of its collar froze mid-air.

  "What the..." Eleonora began, but her voice died.

  The silence that followed was more terrifying than any roar. The kind of silence that precedes something irreparable. The kind that digs inside, leaving space only for the awareness that something important is about to change.

  Then, a sound rose creeping. A mix between the hiss of a serpent and the groan of an enormous hydraulic pump. A black, dense shroud began to rise from the ground and stretched upward, swallowing everything.

  And from that fog, a voice. The same as before, but now distorted, almost amused:

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