The house felt too small after that morning.
Abraham shut his bedroom door carefully, to be quiet as if sound itself might expose him. The click of the latch seemed louder than it should have been. He stood there for a long moment with his back pressed against the wood, listening.
The television murmured faintly in the living room. His mother's cough broke the silence again, followed by the scrape of a chair across tile.
Normal sounds that felt like they belong to another world.
He crossed the room and sat at his desk, hands hovering over his laptop before finally opening it. The screen glowed to life, ordinary and indifferent.
For a second he simply stared at his reflection in the dark portions of the display, eyes slightly bloodshot, skin scrubbed raw from the shower, hair still damp.
He looked like himself, but was he anymore?
He opened a browser. His fingers hesitated above the keys. Then they moved.
"Warehouse fire last night."
Enter.
Results flooded the page: small electrical fires, an apartment incident across the city, an old article from three years ago. Nothing recent. Nothing about a charred structure in the middle of nowhere filled with armed participants.
He tried again.
"Industrial accident unidentified male."
Nothing.
"Teen missing 24 hours."
There were missing persons reports. A college student who hadn't returned from a late shift. A delivery driver whose van was found abandoned. A fourteen-year-old reported missing by his parents in another district.
Faces stared back at him from thumbnails, but none of them seemed to be the boy.
At least, he didn't think so.
He switched to social media. Local community groups. Threads of concerned relatives posting photographs and pleading for information. He filtered by time. Last 24 hours.
The disappearances were real. But there was no mention of a burning warehouse. No reports of gunshots.
No tactical-gear-clad man found beaten to death.
No unexplained corpses.
He swallowed.
If no body was found… where did the hunter's corpse go?
His stomach tightened at the word.
Hunter.
He hadn't known the man's name. Hadn't known anything about him beyond the weight of the helmet beneath his blows.
Another thought slid in, colder.
What if the hunter wasn't a victim? What if he was an employee?
The memory of the man's precision, the way he had moved with purpose, with training, it didn't feel like random participation. It felt professional.
Abraham leaned back in his chair slowly.
If that was true, then the system wasn't just throwing desperate civilians into chaos.
It had structure. Maybe hierarchy or roles.
He shut his eyes and tried to recall the boy's face clearly, the boy who had swung the wooden shard beside him, who had screamed in terror and fury.
But the details were blurring.
The hair had been dark. Or maybe brown. The eyes, wide, terrified. But what shade? He couldn't remember no matter how gard he tried.
But the harder he tried, the less certain he became.
It was like trying to hold water in his hands.
"Are they alive?" he whispered. That was a possibility, a glimer of hope mixed with fear.
But what if the bodies weren't found because they weren't meant to be found.
His gaze dropped to his hands resting on the keyboard. They looked steady. But he remembered how they had felt around the extinguisher, slick with sweat, fingers locked tight.
He opened his banking app again.
The number stared back at him.
$2,000.00
Transaction description:
Survival Compensation – Phase 1.
He wanted to ignore it, to delete the app but then he thought of his mother quietly skipping her own medication refills some weeks so they could stretch the budget.
Thought of her pretending she wasn't tired. Pretending the cough wasn't getting worse.
He stared at the words again.
Survival Compensation.
For what? For killing.
His mind replayed it, uninvited.
The clang of metal, the grunt as the hunter fell, his helmet ripping free. Abraham's first strike to exposed flesh.
He hadn't stopped even when the man stopped resisting. That was the part that kept returning. He had kept hitting.
Because stopping too early might mean dying. He was afraid.
He pressed his palms against his eyes.
"It wasn't murder," he muttered. "It was survival. He would have killed us."
The logic was clean, but it didn't erase the image of the man's face going slack.
He closed the app.
He shut the phone off entirely and let it fall onto the bed. For several minutes he just sat there, staring at nothing. Then he forced himself to think logically.
A new thought began forming quietly.
What if it was temporary? What if he endured a few rounds? Saved enough money. Paid off debts.
Then quit.
There should be an option to quit.
He almost laughed.
There had been no unsubscribe button.
Still, the fantasy soothed him slightly. A finite suffering with a defined payout.
He lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling.
"I did what I had to," he said aloud.
That day when he bought groceries, a lot of them and his mother's medicines, she had asked where the money had come from. He had lied.
"I got the job." He had said. "It pays weekly."
His mother became happy but also surprised.
"Didn't I tell you things will get better." She had said.
Later, in his room when he was still searching for a familiar face in the missing people list, he was caught off guard when the interface materialized out of thin air.
[Orientation Phase 2: Initialization Pending]
[05:00]
The timer went down.
[04:59]
He didn't know what to do, how to prepare, what could be on the other side. All he could do was try to control his panic, but even that was not working. For the whole 5 hours, he kept pacing to and fro in his room thinking of all the possibilities that could end.
The countdown hit zero. And the flash that had happened last time apeared. His room dissolved into white light, as if he was travelling through it. His heart beat spiked, not knowing what he would be facing this time.
One second Abraham was staring at the glowing numbers in his vision in the darkness of his room.
00: 03
00:02
00:01
The next, the air was gone. The bed vanished beneath him. Sound inverted into a high-pitched ringing. And gravity reintroduced itself violently.
He hit the ground hard.
Dirt filled his mouth. The impact knocked the breath from his lungs, and for a moment he could only lie there, coughing into damp soil that smelled of moss.
Cold air brushed against the back of his neck. Leaves whispered above him.
He rolled onto his back, chest heaving.
The sky above was barelyvisible as a pale gray canopy fracturedby towering trees whose branches tangled like skeletal fingers.
The clearing was wide, circular, surrounded by dense forest that seemed too thick.
A translucent blue interface flickered into existence before his eyes.
[Orientation Phase 2]
[Mission: Locate the Gate]
[Time Remaining: 09:59]
The numbers began counting down immediately.
"No," he breathed, scrambling upright. "No, no, no—"
Ten minutes? That was it?
He spun slowly, heart hammering, a tremor was cisible in his hands. He was confused, trying to read his surrounding.
The clearing stretched perhaps fifty meters across. The grass was waist-high in some areas, flattened in others. Mist clung low to the ground, shifting unnaturally as though disturbed by movement he couldn't see.
He realized, he was not alone. To his left, maybe twenty meters away, a girl about his age was pushing herself up from the ground. She had short black hair and wore a hoodie and jeans like she'd just been pulled out of ordinary life.
Her eyes were wide, but her posture was confident, standing as if she had experienced these things before.
Behind him, a tall man in what looked like gym clothes staggered to his feet, swearing loudly.
"What the hell is this?" the man barked. "Is this some VR crap?"
Abraham didn't answer. His pulse was too loud in his ears.
The interface shifted.
[Gate Location: Unknown]
[Warning: Hostile Entities Present]
A low growl cut through the clearing.
Every head snapped towards the tree line. The growl deepened, it was not one voice but multiple.
The mist near the forest edge began to ripple. Then he saw them. They stepped out slowly, hunched and elongated, their bodies vaguely humanoid but wrong in proportion.
Their arms hung too long, fingers dragging through the grass. Skin stretched taut and gray over visible bone ridges. Their heads were hairless, mouths too wide, filled with small, jagged teeth.
What kind of monsters are these? Abraham thought.
A notification flickered briefly.
[Forest Ghoul – Level 2]
Abraham's stomach dropped.
Level 2.
He didn't even know his own level, but he remembered the overlay from the warehouse. Above baseline wasn't the same as strong.
There were at least six of the creatures visible. More shapes moved deeper between the trees.
The timer read 08:47.
"Okay," the tall man muttered, backing away. "Okay, this is staged. This is actors. Right? Right?"
One of the ghouls snapped its head toward the sound, and then lunged forward.
In a heartbeat it covered the distance, its elongated body folding and unfolding like a broken puppet snapping forward.
The man barely had time to scream before the creature's claws sank into his shoulder. Blood sprayed across the grass.
The scream cut short as the ghoul's jaws clamped onto his throat. The sound of tearing flesh was wet and immediate.
Abraham's legs locked in place, he froze
Move.
Move.
Another ghoul lunged, and Abraham was so sure it's his deatg, but the ghoul found a fourth participant he hadn't noticed before.
A middle-aged woman in office attire who had just managed to stand.
She tried to run but couldn't even make 3 steps.
The creature tackled her from behind, dragging her into the grass. Her screams rose and then dissolved into choking gurgles.
[Time Remaining: 07:59]
"RUN!" someone shouted.
Abraham finally obeyed.
He didn't choose a direction strategically. He just ran toward the opposite end of the clearing.
Grass whipped against his legs. Branches tore at his sleeves as he aimed for a thinner break in the trees.
A ghoul shrieked behind him, it was close, really close. He felt as if he looked behind, it will just snap his neck like the others. And he was right but he was not fast enough.
The ghoul crossed him, and Abraham fell, freezing as he locked eyes with it, walking slowly at him and a thought crawled up his spine, he was not gonna go back to his mother.