——Pawnshop (Second Floor).
Mick pushed the splintered, half-open door the rest of the way. The smell hit him first—blood, and something rotting underneath it.
"Christ." Pauli pulled his bandana up. "What the hell died in here."
They swept their flashlights through the dark.
There were four bodies. Or what was left of them.
The flesh was gone. Stripped off the ribs, the femurs, the faces. Only wet, red-stained skeletons remained, tangled in shredded clothing.
"What the fuck did this?" Pauli backed up. His boot crunched on something hard. He shined his light down. The floorboards were covered in rat droppings. Thousands of them. But the rats were already gone.
Mick moved his beam across the shattered cinderblock wall. "Wild dogs. Had to be."
"Dogs?" Pauli stared at a human skull, the jawbone picked completely clean. "How many strays does it take to eat four grown men, Mick?"
Mick didn't answer. He pulled a heavy black contractor bag from his pocket.
"Just bag the pieces."
——Suburbs. Toby's Bedroom.
The only light in the room came from the dual monitors.
Toby, seventeen and running on three cans of energy drink, watched the progress bar hit 100%.
He'd spent the last of it. Eleven bucks in ETH, converted and gone. The dark web listing had promised '4th and Elm - Unedited Dashcam'.
He dragged the .mp4 file into his private Discord server.
Toby: Watch this. Just bought it off the Abyss.
Three other users were online in the voice channel.
User_Zack: Dude, gross. Is this a snuff film?
User_Lexi: Probably just AI gore.
Toby: Just watch it.
In the video, a figure in a rooster mask was tearing through six officers on a street corner. Dozens of rounds into the chest and shoulders—nothing. Two shots to the head. It tilted its head slightly, staggered once, then kept moving.
User_Lexi: Fake. Total AI garbage.
User_Zack: Yeah, the physics are way off. Look how he throws that cop. Human arms don't have that kind of torque.
Toby frowned. He was about to type a defense when the fourth user, 'Cipher', unmuted his mic.
"It's not AI," Cipher said, his voice quieter than usual. "I ran it through a forensic scanner. Metadata's raw, pulled straight from an Axon body cam system. This is real footage."
Nobody typed anything.
Then, a piercing, high-pitched tone erupted simultaneously from Toby's phone, Zack's mic, and Lexi's mic.
Toby picked up his phone. A Presidential Emergency Alert flashed across the screen in black and yellow:
EMERGENCY ALERT. SHELTER IN PLACE. EXTREMELY DANGEROUS SUSPECT AT LARGE IN SUBURBAN RESIDENTIAL AREA. MULTIPLE LAW ENFORCEMENT CASUALTIES. SUSPECT CONSIDERED ARMED AND LETHAL.
Toby looked back at his monitor. The paused frame of the rooster mask stared back at him. Then a second notification dropped—a local news push alert. A grainy still from a traffic camera: a massive figure in a rooster mask, standing in the middle of a residential street.
"Holy shit," Zack whispered through the headset.
——Sinclair Estate. North Hills.
Carmine Sinclair poured a glass of scotch. He didn't drink it. He just held the heavy crystal glass, staring at the rain hitting his study window.
His younger brother, Nico, paced across the Persian rug.
"It's the Whitmores," Nico said, waving his hands. "It has to be. First our guys get slaughtered at the warehouse. Now, one of their affiliate cash houses gets hit? It's a smokescreen. They're butchering their own low-level guys to make it look like a third party, so they have an excuse to move on our territory."
Carmine took a sip of the scotch. It burned going down. "You think old man Whitmore would strip four of his own men down to the bone just to run a bluff?"
"He's a crazy old bastard. Yes."
"No," Carmine said, setting the glass down. "The warehouse wasn't a hit. It was a slaughterhouse. Now the cash house. Someone else is in the city, Nico. Someone is trying to bait us into wiping each other out."
Carmine walked to his mahogany desk and picked up the secure landline.
"Call the armorer," Carmine ordered.
"Carmine, be reasonable—"
"Call him," Carmine snapped. "The boys on the doors, tell them to ditch the small stuff. I want rifles. No exceptions."
Nico stopped pacing. "You're acting like a paranoid old man. Assault rifles? You're going to draw the Feds."
Carmine looked at his brother. "Do it."
——Midtown. Jax's Apartment.
Jax let out a long, shuddering breath and leaned back in his Herman Miller chair. He took his hands off the keyboard. His knuckles were white, his wrists aching with carpal tunnel.
On his primary monitor, the words glowed in jagged, bloody pixels:
TARGET ELIMINATED. DEATHS: 47 FINAL RANK: A
"Absolute bullshit boss design," Jax muttered to himself, grabbing a half-empty can of Monster energy drink.
He was thirty-two, a full-time Twitch streamer who built his entire career on playing punishingly unfair, obscure indie games. Three weeks ago, he'd picked up an unmarked solid-state drive from a secondhand vendor at a flea market. No title screen, no developer credits. Just a brutally hard permadeath simulator.
The rules were simple and merciless: die even once, and the S-Rank was gone forever. Didn't matter if your next forty-seven runs were perfect.
Jax had lost his S-Rank on this level a day ago.
The game had spawned him into a rain-slicked alleyway playing as a beat cop. No UI warning, no danger prompts, no cutscene. Just a massive giant in a rubber rooster mask dropping from the sky and caving his skull in before his finger even clicked the mouse. Instant death.
It took him 47 more attempts to figure out the script. It wasn't a standard boss arena. He had to dodge and survive just long enough for one of his five AI teammates to yell about a rifle in the cruiser's trunk. He had to sprint to the car, grab the rifle, and lay down heavy suppressing fire to beat the boss back until a hidden 'Backup Arriving' timer hit zero.
"Insane AI, though," Jax mumbled, taking a sip of his Monster.
The boss was ridiculously smart. If Jax dealt enough damage with the rifle, a figure in a bloody hoodie would drop from the shadows and join the fight, buying the boss enough time to pull back.
Jax already figured out what the S-Rank strategy was. If he had known the exact spawn drop, shot the giant in the eyes on frame one, and perfectly commanded the other five AI cops to continuously focus-fire the head, they could have actually killed the boss. But if they did that, the figure in the hoodie would just trigger a retreat script and run away.
Sneaky programming, Jax thought. But brilliant.
It was a massive difficulty spike compared to the first two stages.
Level 1 had been simple. Set inside a dimly lit warehouse, it actually gave him a decent reaction window and three AI teammates, all equipped with MP5 submachine guns. But he had botched the S-Rank on his first blind run. He hadn't understood the game's brutal morale mechanics yet. The friendly AI didn't just act like standard bots—they experienced absolute terror. They panicked, broke formation, missed their sprays, and even caught each other in friendly fire when the monsters rushed them. It took him 20 attempts to learn the AI pathing and finally get a flawless clear.
Level 2 was tighter. A cramped, claustrophobic cash-counting room. No real prep time. Just a two-second warning before the boss kicked the heavy door off its hinges. On his first try, Jax had reacted instantly, dumping his handgun magazine into the doorway to buy time. But the AI teammate standing by the door completely froze and got instantly shredded. The other AI behind Jax, the one holding a shotgun, panicked, missed center mass, and only grazed the monster's shoulder before getting killed with his own gun. A total wipe.
It only took him 5 attempts to crack that one. The winning strat was highly specific: sprint backward at spawn, strip the shotgun from the panicking AI teammate, and hold the angle. The millisecond the door burst open, point-blank buckshot to the boss's head, followed by continuous headshots until the chamber was empty.
"Alright," Jax sighed, roughly rubbing his tired eyes. The A-Rank popped up for Level 3, and the game automatically unlocked a new text file on his desktop: Bestiary_Entry_03.txt
"Fuck this game," Jax muttered.
He wasn't streaming tonight. His wrists were shot, his brain was fried, and he couldn't stomach the thought of talking to chat. He just wanted to decompress for ten minutes and pass out.
He rolled his chair to the left and clicked his secondary monitor. He opened Twitter, ready to doomscroll.
The number one trending topic in the city was flashing in bold letters: #4thAndElmMassacre.
He froze.