At block twelve, Aster’s luck finally ran out.

  He felt it before he actually saw it.

  The hook inside his chest went taut, as if a fisherman were reeling him in with no regard for tomorrow, pulling so sharply it felt like someone had yanked an invisible thread straight through his ribs.

  He stopped mid-stride, breath snagging in his throat.

  Across the street, between two parked taxis, the abomination of steel and flesh stared at him, eyes boring into Aster.

  Metal skin stretched over machinery that still remembered flesh. A lattice of iron bones gleamed beneath patches of meat like rust blooming under chrome. Steam leaked from the seams of its jaw in slow, angry sighs. Its eyes were twin searchlights, two perfect circles of white fire that swallowed colour.

  The sound came next: a low, rising siren that didn’t echo so much as vibrate inside his teeth. Echoing throughout the city as more sirens replied closer than Aster had feared.

  Aster froze.

  Every cell in his body forgot language, and the older part of his biology remembered being prey.

  No. Nope. Not again. Not this thing.

  The Bloodhound moved first. One jerk, too fast to track, and the world blurred.

  Aster bolted.

  His boots slammed the living pavement, splashes of phosphorescent slime bursting under each step. The air wheezed in his lungs; the city bent around him like glass softening under heat. He didn’t think. Thinking was a luxury. All that existed was forward motion, away from this fever dream with a VIN number.

  Behind him—metal on stone, claws like chisels carving the street. The siren climbed in pitch until it filled the sky.

  He veered left into a narrower road, breath hammering, heart threatening to leap out through his throat. The golden shimmer of his field rippled around him as the first impact hit—an explosion of air, force, noise. A parked car’s Astral echo was suddenly knocked out of its material shell as the creature rammed it, folding it in half like a paper toy. The shockwave punched him off his feet; he rolled, skin flaying against grit, scrambled upright before his brain could announce the pain.

  The field flickered, static sizzling against his skin.

  Another Bloodhound joined the first. It came out of a side alley, unfolding itself from shadow like a collapsing bridge. Its siren harmonized with the other, the duet shredding the air.

  Great, they work together, his mind supplied helpfully, the way a drowning man might note the temperature of the water.

  He ran harder.

  Storefronts blurred, signs written in shifting languages, windows sprouting coral fans that pulsed with each of his footfalls. The world was melting around the edges, but the terror was clean, focused. For the first time in days, he didn’t need to establish whether he was losing his mind; he only had one thought: Run or die.

  The street dipped. His legs burned. His breath came in knives. The hook in his chest yanked again, dragging him forward, as if the universe itself were invested in keeping him alive just long enough to suffer more.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  A roar split the air behind him. Something metallic shrieked—another Bloodhound leaping from a rooftop, smashing into the street so hard the ground cracked. The shockwave rippled under his soles. He stumbled, slammed a shoulder into a lamppost, kept going. Sparks rained from the broken light, staining the mist in gold and crimson.

  He darted through a pedestrian tunnel, walls sweating moss that glowed faintly like panic made visible. His reflection followed in the tile, distorted, too slow—mouth open, eyes wide, a stranger made of fear. The sirens echoed through the tunnel like the gods had started warming up their instruments.

  Halfway through, a fourth one joined.

  Its scream tore the air apart.

  Aster burst into the open again, straight onto a main road choked with derelict cars. The Bloodhounds behind him hit the tunnel mouth together, claws tearing sparks from the concrete.

  He didn’t look back. Looking meant seeing. Seeing meant stopping.

  The golden shimmer around him flared as a stray beam from a hornet hive crossed his path—a brief halo, then gone. He could feel it thinning, the protection draining away like battery life ticking toward zero.

  The city itself seemed to lean toward him. Lights flickered in sympathy.

  He ran between the cars, lungs scalding, mind blank except for the drumbeat of footfalls and the phrase keep moving repeating in rhythm.

  The first Bloodhound landed on a sedan, crushing its Astral echo flat. The impact hurled spectral shards of glass across the road; they hit his field like sleet. The siren spiked. He flinched as sound became pressure, became heat, became hands shoving him forward.

  Then something hot ripped across his shoulder. A talon, a graze—he didn’t look. The field caught the blow, flared bright gold, and guttered. Cracks spider-webbed across the aura like fractures in glass.

  He could feel it now: every breath pulling splinters of that barrier through his skin.

  Four blocks.

  He didn’t count them; his body did, measuring distance in agony. The noises behind him multiplied—more claws, more engines of flesh and metal. Each new siren pitched higher, harmonizing into an industrial choir. The sound crawled up his spine, set his molars vibrating.

  He turned another corner. The street tilted, or maybe he did. Shadows moved wrong, leaning the same way he ran. The mist boiled up from the gutters, thick, bright red as fever.

  The Bloodhounds burst through it, silhouettes of hunger. Their limbs telescoped, claws scraping the walls as they climbed like spiders.

  Aster’s brain was gone. Humour, denial—all stripped away. What was left was heartbeat, breath, the taste of metal and fear.

  He vaulted a toppled trash bin, landed badly, ankle twisting. Pain flared; he bit down a scream. The sound that escaped was a growl, low and broken.

  Another flash—his field caught a blow that would’ve cut him in half. The force threw him sideways into a parked bus. Astral steel screamed, glass shattered, his body bounced off the door and kept moving purely on reflex.

  The shimmer around him dimmed. Cracks widened. The golden light leaked away in trails like burning dust.

  He staggered into another block—streets deserted, buildings breathing slow and wet, every window an eye. Ahead, the skyline swam in colour, mist rising in tides. The hook in his chest pulled again, harder this time, not to guide him but to warn: incoming.

  The next impact came from above.

  A Bloodhound dropped straight out of the smog, smashing the road a few meters ahead. Pavement exploded. The shockwave threw him backward, vision whitening. He hit the ground, rolled, came up coughing blood and panic.

  For a second, the world slowed. The creature lifted its head. Its siren wound down into a single, long note—triumph made sound.

  It charged.

  He tried to move, but the field around him flared, then finally cracked fully, the fractures racing over it like lightning in glass.

  He saw his reflection in a window—gold light splintering into shards around a human outline—and then it burst.

  It shattered. Aster felt it, no, heard it, as if every hair on his body were a tuning fork. It was tactile, a feeling like his skin turning inside out.

  The warm cocoon, the last barrier between him and the living nightmare of the Astral, vanished like it owed somebody money.

  He heard the claws dig in, the siren rise for the killing note—