Rust stepped into the colossal hypermarket, broken glass crunching beneath his boots.

  The interior felt like a vast cavern. Unlike the gray, ashen world outside, the air here was thick and heavy, clinging to his lungs with the stench of rotting meat and rust. Yet what caught Rust’s attention wasn’t the smell — it was the shelves.

  The walls and ceiling were slowly being devoured by the same black, pulsing tar he had seen in his dream. The biomass consumed everything. But the metal shelves standing amid that nightmare… were perfectly intact.

  Military rations, canned food, water bottles, first-aid kits. Every item bore the cold, sharp P.A.R.A.D.O.K.S logo. While the entire building rotted and was swallowed by parasite tissue, these products remained untouched — not a speck of dust, not a single drop of tar. What kind of company could produce goods that even the apocalypse itself couldn’t touch?

  Rust silenced the questions in his mind. Something wet and sticky touched the tip of his boot.

  He crouched and picked up a rusty flashlight from the floor, switching it on. The beam hit the ground.

  Blood. But not the black tar blood of the creatures he had killed. This was bright, fresh, and vividly red. Human blood.

  He followed the crimson trail deeper into the store, toward the area where the biomass grew thickest. After passing several aisles, he heard a heavy, painful cough. Someone was struggling to breathe.

  Rust slowed his steps. His right hand moved silently to the tactical knife at his waist, just in case it was another Mimic.

  At the end of the corridor, slumped against a rack covered in black tar, sat a man. His trembling, bloody hands were trying to light an old Zippo lighter — perhaps to see his wound or simply to feel warmth.

  Rust approached silently. But the faint creak of his boot was enough.

  The man’s head snapped up in terror. In a final burst of adrenaline, he yanked a heavy, rusted pistol from his coat pocket and pointed it at Rust.

  “Stop, just a second—”

  BANG!

  The gunshot rang out.

  Ever since the night he fought the Alpha, his senses had sharpened into something inhuman. He didn’t track the bullet — he tracked the man. He saw the minute twitch of the man’s forearm, the tightening of his trigger finger. Milliseconds before the hammer even dropped, Rust instinctively tilted his head and right shoulder to the side.

  The bullet whistled past his ear and embedded itself in the wall behind him.

  Before the man could pull the trigger again, Rust closed the distance like a ghost. His left hand seized the man’s wrist and twisted it with merciless force until a sickening crack echoed.

  The gun clattered to the floor. Rust kept the broken wrist pinned, holding the man in place.

  The man groaned in agony, blood trickling from his mouth. He looked up at Rust with wide, desperate eyes.

  “Who… who the hell are you? Where did you come from?”

  Rust answered in a flat, emotionless voice. “I’m Rust. Who are you?”

  The man let out a bloody, bitter laugh. “Fuck off, you freak… I can tell you’re not from around here. You’re one of those cowards, aren’t you?” He coughed violently, spitting blood onto the tiles. His eyes scanned Rust’s clean, high-quality black tactical gear. “Well… at least they found someone decently equipped this time. Look at you… where the hell did you get clothes like that in the middle of this hellhole?”

  Rust stayed silent. The flashlight beam caught the man’s neck — a burned brand of a chained crow skull was visible beneath his torn collar. The man was deathly pale. He was bleeding out.

  “Listen to me,” Rust said, voice still calm. “I don’t understand what’s happening here. Who are you? And who are these ‘they’ you keep mentioning?”

  The man spat blood toward Rust’s face, but Rust moved his head with inhuman speed and dodged it.

  “Heh… go to hell, you bastard,” the man rasped. “You’re too clean. You must be from outside the city. Otherwise you’d have recognized the ‘Chained Crows’ mark on my shoulder the second you saw it.”

  Rust said nothing. He didn’t need to threaten or bargain with a dying man. His eyes — cold, empty, bottomless — simply stared at the man for several long seconds.

  The man’s breathing grew ragged. He finally understood. The thing standing in front of him wasn’t human. There was no mercy, no anger, no humanity in those eyes.

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  His tough act crumbled.

  “Wait…” The voice that came out now was broken, pathetic, trembling. “Please…”

  The man’s bloody hand reached into his pocket, but this time he didn’t pull out a weapon. Between his shaking fingers was an old, crumpled photograph.

  “This… this is my daughter,” he whispered, blood bubbling in his throat. “Two years before the outbreak… before everything went to hell. I abandoned her… If I don’t bring back supplies, they’ll kick us out of the safe zone…”

  A cold echo of the faceless family photos from his dream stabbed through Rust’s chest.

  The man held the photo out with a trembling hand. “You… you’re not one of them. I can tell. Please… if you find her, tell her… tell her that her father loved her very much.”

  Rust slowly took the photograph. A small, innocent smile looked back at him from the darkness.

  “Where can I find her?”

  “South shore of the city,” the man gasped, eyes slowly closing. “This area is completely abandoned because of the parasite nests. People gathered in the northern and northeastern shelters. My daughter… she’s in the Northern Camp with the Chained Crows. Please… Rust…”

  Rust looked at the man’s desperate face. “Alright,” he said quietly. “I’ll—”

  A horrifying, inhuman scream tore from the man’s throat.

  Rust instantly leaped backward.

  The man’s eyes bulged. His stomach swelled at an impossible speed, as if something massive was inflating inside him. His scream was cut short by the sound of tearing flesh and cracking bones.

  SHLAAAK!

  The man’s abdomen exploded outward. Intestines, blood, and ribs sprayed across the floor like shrapnel.

  From the bloody wreckage, a creature the size of a large dog burst out — skinless, bright red, with razor-sharp bone spikes along its back. At the same time, the black tar mass around the man began to ripple. From the ceiling, from behind the shelves, dozens of wet, blind, newborn parasites poured out, drawn by the fresh blood and meat.

  Rust didn’t panic. His heartbeat didn’t rise. He didn’t sweat. The cold hunter inside him awakened.

  The first newborn lunged at his knee with its jaws wide open.

  Rust kicked its head with the force of a sledgehammer.

  CRACK!

  The creature’s neck snapped. Its body flew like a ragdoll and smashed into a metal shelf three aisles away, scattering P.A.R.A.D.O.K.S cans everywhere.

  The rest of the swarm screeched and attacked at once.

  Rust gripped his knife in reverse grip and began to move.

  The dance had begun.

  Unlike the heavily armored Alpha he had fought on the roof, these creatures were blind, skinless, and soft. They were raw, undeveloped meat.

  Zero hesitation. Zero fatigue.

  Rust moved through the narrow aisles like a shadow — sliding, spinning, carving. His knife effortlessly tore through their fragile cartilages and soft flesh. He caught one creature in the air and snapped its brittle spine over his knee. He crushed another’s soft head under his military boot like a grape. Their razor bones were sharp, but their newborn bodies were too weak to follow through against his reflexes.

  It lasted exactly two minutes. They died so quickly not because Rust was invincible, but because they had just been born.

  When the last creature’s throat was slit, its body collapsed. Just like the ones on the construction site, it dissolved with a sickening hiss, turning into black and gray ash that mixed with the tar on the floor.

  Rust flicked the black tar off his knife and sheathed it. His breathing was perfectly steady. There was only a pleasant warmth in his muscles — the dark satisfaction of a job well done.

  He picked up the still-lit flashlight from the ground and pointed it toward the back of the store.

  The cold storage room.

  He walked toward the massive, rusted steel door. The closer he got, the more he felt the unnatural freezing air leaking out. In a building where electricity had died years ago, this room was still ice-cold — defying the laws of physics. Just like Rust himself.

  He gripped the heavy metal handle and pulled it down. The door opened with a wet, flesh-tearing sound.

  The flashlight beam pierced the darkness.

  This was no storage room. It was the womb of hell.

  The floor, walls, and ceiling were completely covered in thick, wet biomass. Concrete had disappeared, replaced by thick black veins pulsing with tar. From the ceiling hung dozens of enormous, semi-transparent yellow sacs filled with amniotic fluid — like a grotesque orchard. The air smelled of fresh blood, frozen meat, and heavy ozone.

  As Rust tried to process the horror, one of the yellow sacs to his left burst with a wet tearing sound.

  Amniotic fluid splattered onto the icy floor. From inside the sac fell a small, eyeless, pitch-black fetus covered in tar — one of the newborns he had just killed, but much smaller.

  The creature twitched on the freezing ground and let out a wet, high-pitched cry.

  Rust raised his heavy military boot and brought it down without a single flicker of emotion.

  CRUNCH.

  Silence returned.

  He now understood where the swarm had come from. This was the incubator.

  His flashlight moved to the center of the room.

  There, connected to all the black veins, was a massive core — two meters tall, asymmetrical, beating like a giant heart made of flesh and tar.

  THUMP… THUMP…

  With every beat, the yellow sacs trembled.

  Rust tightened his grip on the knife and walked straight toward it.

  The core sensed him. It let out a low, threatening groan from within the tar.

  Rust didn’t slow down. He stopped right in front of it, drove his knife into the thickest pulsing point, and ripped downward with all his strength, splitting the thing in half.

  A deafening scream — not just in the room, but inside Rust’s own mind — tore through the air.

  The core convulsed violently. Black smoke poured from the wound. The veins dried up in seconds. The giant biomass began to melt with that familiar sickening hiss. The yellow sacs shriveled and burst. The entire incubator collapsed into a massive pile of ash.

  Rust pulled his knife free and walked out of the cold storage room without looking back.

  He stepped through the broken glass and into the open air once more.

  The streets were the same. Rusty wind and white ash falling from the sky.

  Rust looked up at the dead sky. The familiar pull in his chest — the invisible command he had felt since waking up — was still guiding him north.

  But this time it was different.

  He was no longer just following it to survive.

  He had a photograph in his pocket now.

  He had to find people.

  He had to understand what this curse in his veins was, what the Hunger truly meant, and who had turned the world into this nightmare.

  And if any black tar, any incubator, or any gang stood in his way…

  He would crush them just like he had crushed the heart of this one.

  The real hunt had only just begun.

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