The hairs on my arms suddenly stood on end, an electric prickling that shot down my spine like ice water. Not cop instinct—I'd felt cop instinct a thousand times, that vague unease when something's off. This was different. Sharper. More insistent.

  Wrong. Something's wrong.

  The sensation screamed at me, a primal warning that bypassed thought entirely and went straight to the lizard brain that had kept my ancestors alive on the African savanna.

  My hand was already moving toward my rifle before I consciously understood why.

  A sound, the rustle of dry leaves from the bushes behind me, broke the strange spell of the blue screen.

  My head snapped around, rifle coming up, training overriding the shock. But I was too slow. A second lizard, a carbon copy of the nightmare I'd just killed, burst from the foliage like a missile.

  It launched itself at me. Pure, explosive violence.

  It hit me with the force of a wrecking ball, the impact driving the air from my lungs in a single, brutal punch that left me gasping. The world became a spinning vortex of green scales and blue sky, my boots leaving the ground as the rifle was pinned uselessly between the creature's weight and my chest.

  Can't breathe can't breathe can't—

  Its jaws, slick with saliva that smelled of rot and something unnervingly metallic, like old pennies and meat left too long in the sun, snapped inches from my face. The sound was like a bear trap closing on empty air, a wet click of teeth on teeth that sent a spray of warm spittle across my cheek.

  I shoved with everything I had, my arms straining against the crushing weight pinning me down, my mind screaming a frantic, unending loop of getitoff getitoff getitoff.

  A deafening CRACK exploded to my right, so close the muzzle flash was a white-hot star in my peripheral vision. I felt the concussive wave of the shot roll over me, felt it in my teeth and my chest cavity. The pressure on top of me vanished as the beast's body was kicked sideways like it had been hit by a truck, tumbling away in a spray of green gore.

  I scrambled out from under the twitching carcass, gasping for breath that wouldn't come, my lungs refusing to work properly. I rolled to my feet, raising my rifle to finish it, but there was nothing left to finish.

  A gaping, steaming hole had been blown clean through its chest cavity, big enough to stick my fist through. Green ichor, thick as oil, sloshed from the wound onto the gravel in rhythmic spurts that slowed as its heart gave up the ghost.

  Holy shit.

  I scanned for more threats, my training finally kicking back in, before my eyes found Kira.

  She stood on the other side of the cruiser, maybe twenty feet away, a 12-gauge shotgun held firm against her shoulder, her stance textbook perfect. A thin curl of smoke rose from the barrel, dancing in the afternoon heat. Her expression wasn't triumphant or relieved.

  It was utterly bewildered.

  She wasn't looking at the dead lizard. She was staring at a point in the air just to the side of it, her eyes wide and unblinking, her mouth slightly open. The look of someone who'd just been told the fundamental laws of physics were more like gentle suggestions.

  "You okay?" I yelled, my ears still ringing from the shotgun blast. The world sounded like I was underwater, all muffled and distant. My concern for her was overwhelming the disbelief at how close to death I'd just been.

  "Umm..." Her voice was shaky, distant, like she was speaking from the other end of a long tunnel. "Elias, do you see this... this blue square thingy?"

  She gestured vaguely at the empty space in front of her with one hand, the other still gripping the shotgun like a lifeline.

  Then she gasped, a sharp intake of breath, and looked down at her own arms. She inspected them as if she'd just sprouted a new set, turning them over in the light, flexing her fingers. "Whoa," she murmured, her gaze snapping back to me, a mixture of awe and terror dancing in her green eyes.

  "No, but I've got one too," I said, the words flat and toneless with fresh dread. The second impossible thing in as many minutes. At least I'm not the only one losing my mind. "What does yours say?"

  She read it out loud, her voice a monotone of disbelief, each word carefully enunciated like she was trying to convince herself they were real.

  "'Congratulations for killing an invading monster. Registering as a New Player. You have earned the title "Second Best" in your area. All stats increased by 5, and a reward box will be placed in your inventory...'"

  She trailed off, her eyes still fixed on the invisible screen, her brow furrowed in concentration as she read something I couldn't see.

  Second Best.

  I couldn't help it. A grin, sharp and manic, spread across my face despite everything—despite the dead monsters, despite the impossible screens, despite the fact that reality had apparently taken the day off. This was going to drive her competitive nature absolutely insane.

  This is perfect.

  "Second best?" She turned on me, her eyes narrowing with that familiar competitive fire I'd seen a hundred times at the range, on training days, any time someone suggested she couldn't do something. The shotgun lowered slightly as indignation replaced terror. "What was your title?"

  I thought about telling her the truth. I honestly did. But... where's the fun in that?

  "Best Around," I lied, keeping my face carefully neutral.

  "Best around?" she scoffed, her voice rising with each word. "You'd be dead without me... best around my ass."

  She took a step toward me, and I saw the exact moment the shock and terror transformed into something else—righteous indignation mixed with genuine offense. "You better not let this go to your head, or I will show you how much better I am at kicking your ass."

  There was a wicked glint in her eyes that told me she absolutely would do it, blue screen or no blue screen.

  I couldn't help it. A laugh, sharp, slightly hysterical, but genuine, tore from my throat. It felt good. Like releasing pressure from a valve before the whole system exploded.

  Thank God her feisty spirit is the same, or I'm not sure how I would have responded to this messed-up situation.

  The moment of levity, brief as it was, felt like oxygen after being underwater. But it couldn't last. Not with two impossible corpses bleeding green into the dirt, not with blue screens we couldn't explain, not with the weight of what we'd just survived pressing down on us like a physical thing.

  My own screen was still hovering there in my peripheral vision, an unwelcome passenger in my field of view. It shifted when I moved my head, always staying just at the edge of my vision unless I looked right at it. Like it was tethered to my eyeballs.

  How the hell do I get rid of this thing?

  I tried to treat it like a faulty heads-up display, running through mental commands like I was troubleshooting a piece of broken equipment.

  Off, I thought. Nothing. The screen just hung there, patient and waiting.

  Exit. Still there, mocking me with its existence.

  Go away. Shoo. Close.

  The moment the thought Close formed clearly in my mind, the blue box winked out of existence like someone had flipped a switch.

  "Whoa," I said, the surprise sharp in my voice. The sudden absence of the screen was almost as disorienting as its appearance had been.

  "What?" Kira glanced over, her focus momentarily breaking from her own invisible companion.

  "I just thought about closing it, and it vanished," I said, still half-expecting it to pop back up and prove me wrong.

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  She stared intently at the space in front of her, her brow furrowed in concentration, her lips moving slightly as if she was talking to herself. A moment later, her expression cleared.

  "Cool," she said, a note of wonder creeping into her voice despite the circumstances.

  A new notification flickered at the edge of my vision, translucent and insistent. I almost dismissed it on instinct, but something made me pause.

  Passive Skill Developed: Threat Perception

  Current Proficiency: 1%

  Effect: Heightened awareness of incoming danger. Warning intensity increases with threat level and skill proficiency.

  I stared at the text, my mind trying to reconcile what I was reading with the cold, hard reality of the corpses bleeding green into the dirt. A skill. For sensing danger. The System had just quantified my survival instinct, turned it into something measurable.

  The warning I'd felt, that electric prickling right before the second lizard attacked, hadn't been luck or coincidence. It had been this. A new sense. A supernatural early-warning system.

  One percent proficiency. That meant it could get stronger. More reliable. The thought was both comforting and deeply unsettling.

  I closed the notification, filing it away in the rapidly growing mental folder labeled "Impossible Shit That's Somehow Real."

  She racked the shotgun, the shuck-shuck of the action a deeply reassuring sound in the sudden quiet—a mechanical certainty in a world that had just proven it had no rules. The empty shell casing pinged off the gravel, still smoking.

  "What do you think that was?" she asked, gesturing with the barrel toward the lizard she'd killed, careful to keep it pointed in a safe direction even now.

  "No idea," I admitted, my eyes drifting back to the creature. The adrenaline was finally starting to ebb, replaced by a cop's need to understand, to document, to make sense of things. "That 'player' thing it mentioned is... unsettling."

  In Valen County, "monsters" was just another word for someone high on the latest designer drug, seeing things that weren't there. Bath salts, spice, synthetic cathinones—the street names changed but the result was always the same. Some poor bastard convinced demons were crawling out of the walls.

  But this? This was real. Solid. Dead. And bleeding green all over a crime scene I had no idea how to process.

  "The blue screen said it was dead," Kira pointed out, moving to flank me as I approached the carcass, her own shotgun at the ready, covering angles I couldn't see. Good partner. Always watching the flanks.

  "I'm not inclined to trust pop-up windows that appear out of thin air after a monster attacks," I said dryly, the cop in me refusing to take anything at face value. "Besides, for all we know, we're both hallucinating from something we ate at that diner of yours."

  She bristled, that competitive fire flaring again. "Hey! I guarantee that food would've been amazing if we'd had the chance to actually eat it."

  Fair point.

  I knelt beside the carcass, the smell of it, copper and sulfur and something organic that reminded me of a reptile house at a zoo, hitting me full force. My knees pressed into the damp earth, the moisture from the morning dew still clinging to the grass despite the afternoon heat. The hole from the shotgun was big enough to stick my fist in, easily. I could see pulped organs inside, though I had no reference for what a normal lizard's insides were supposed to look like. Everything was just... wrong. Too big. Too alien.

  I slung my rifle across my back and pulled the tactical knife from my vest. The blade was sharp enough to shave with, maintained religiously because a dull knife was a dangerous knife. The weight of it in my hand was familiar, comforting—a tool I understood in a world that had stopped making sense.

  I ran the tip down its back, applying steady pressure. The knife made a high-pitched skreee of steel on something harder than stone, the sound setting my teeth on edge and sending a shiver down my spine. The blade skated across the surface without penetrating, without even leaving a scratch. It was like trying to cut through a ceramic plate.

  "Scales on the back and head are like armor plate," I noted, my voice falling into the familiar cadence of evidence collection. Investigate. Document. Report. "But the underbelly looks softer."

  I tried to pierce the flesh on its stomach, but even there, the knife point just skated across a lattice of smaller, more pliable plates. Like a Kevlar vest made of reptile hide. It wouldn't go through no matter how much pressure I applied, no matter how I angled the blade.

  My rifle didn't do much to the other one, either.

  I looked at the shotgun wound again, at the devastating cavity Kira's close-range buckshot had created. The edges of the wound were ragged, torn—not the clean entry holes my 5.56 rounds had left. That was the only thing that had worked so far. Everything else was just noise and wasted ammunition.

  Close-range. High-energy impact. Overwhelming force at point-blank. That's the playbook.

  "Thanks again, Kira," I said, straightening up and meeting her eyes. The weight of what had just happened, how close I'd come to being lunch for a dinosaur, settled over me like a lead blanket. "You really saved my ass."

  A fierce smile touched her lips, though a slight blush tinted her cheeks, visible even through the grime and sweat. "I've got your back."

  The moment stretched, something unspoken passing between us in the aftermath of violence. Her green eyes held mine for a beat too long, and I saw something there—relief, yes, but also something else. Something that made my chest tighten in a way that had nothing to do with the adrenaline crash.

  Not now, Elias. Focus.

  Then a new thought, cold and sharp, cut through the warmth. Communications.

  "We need to call this in," I said, my hand already reaching for the mic on my shoulder. My fingers found the familiar plastic, pressed the transmit button. "Dispatch, A06, how copy?"

  Static. The empty hiss of a dead channel, white noise with no voice underneath.

  I tried again, hitting the tone alert first, a feature designed to cut through interference and get dispatch's attention. The high-pitched beep should have made every radio in the county squawk. "Dispatch, this is A06, urgent traffic, come back."

  Nothing but the hiss of white noise, like the radio was searching for a signal that didn't exist. Like we were the only two people left in the world.

  "Not hearing you through mine either," Kira said, already heading for the cruiser, her boots crunching on the gravel. "Let me try the car radio."

  I watched her climb in and talk into the vehicle's mic, saw her mouth moving through the windshield, saw her cycle through channels—dispatch, county-wide, state police, emergency services. Saw her face fall with each unsuccessful attempt, the worry lines deepening around her eyes.

  She emerged a minute later, a worried frown creasing her brow, her hand unconsciously gripping the shotgun tighter.

  "Nothing," she said, the word heavy with implications neither of us wanted to voice. "On any channel. The entire radio system is just... dead air."

  Shit.

  I pulled out my cell phone, hoping against hope that maybe, just maybe, we'd have better luck with civilian infrastructure. The screen lit up, at least the phone still worked, but the status bar at the top was a monument to our isolation.

  No Signal.

  Not one bar. Not even searching. Just... nothing. Like the cell towers had been switched off, or we'd driven into some kind of dead zone. Except we were in the middle of farm country, not the wilderness. We should have signal here.

  The last thing I'd managed to load before the network died completely was a news headline, half-rendered and frozen: "Unconfirmed Reports: Similar Phenomena in Seoul, Berlin, S?o Paulo—"

  Then nothing. The page had stopped loading mid-word, the spinning wheel of death mocking me as the cellular network collapsed entirely.

  Similar phenomena.

  The words echoed in my head, their implications unfurling like a nightmare in slow motion. Seoul. Berlin. S?o Paulo. Three cities on three different continents. If they were all experiencing "similar phenomena" at the same time, then this wasn't local. Wasn't regional. Wasn't even national.

  This was global.

  And if every major city in the world was dealing with this simultaneously, monsters pouring out of impossible gates, communications networks collapsing, infrastructure failing, then who the hell was coming to help us?

  The answer settled in my gut like a stone: no one.

  We were on our own.

  I set the phone down and focused on the scene around me, shoving the thought into the same mental box where I kept all the other things too big and terrible to process. One crisis at a time. One monster at a time. The global apocalypse could wait until after I dealt with the local one.

  The unnatural silence of the farm suddenly felt a lot more menacing, a lot more deliberate. No birds singing in the trees. No insects buzzing in the grass. No dispatch on the radio. No cell service. No connection to the outside world.

  It was like someone had drawn a circle around this property and cut it off from the rest of civilization, leaving us alone with the corpses of things that shouldn't exist.

  The world had gone quiet.

  "Okay," I said, forcing a calm I didn't feel into my voice. The training took over, providing structure when everything else was chaos. "New plan. We take pictures of everything—document the scene. Then we drive back to the detachment and figure out what the hell is going on."

  Evidence. Documentation. Chain of custody. The fundamentals still apply, even when the world's gone insane.

  I opened my camera app, the familiar interface a small comfort, and started documenting the impossible. The two lizard corpses, their green blood already starting to congeal in the afternoon heat, turning from liquid to gel. The ruined coop, its splintered boards scattered like kindling, feathers still drifting in the air. The eviscerated bull, still steaming slightly in the grass, its intestines gray-pink ropes in the sun.

  I took close-ups of the scales, the teeth, the claws. Wide shots showing the scene in context. Evidence photos, like this was just another crime scene. Like I could file a report that would make any sense to anyone.

  As I focused the lens on the gaping hole in the second lizard's chest, Michael's terror-filled scream echoed in my memory, sharp and clear as if he was still screaming it.

  "MONSTERS!"

  The kid had known. Somehow, through the drugs or the shock or whatever the hell had happened to him, he had known what was coming. And we'd written him off as another junkie seeing things that weren't there.

  How many other calls have we dismissed? How many other "crazy" people were trying to warn us?

  Yeah. That about summed it up.

  I took one last photo, a wide shot of the entire scene, something for the prosecutors who would never believe this shit even with photographic evidence, and turned back to the cruiser.

  Kira was already behind the wheel, her jaw set, her hands gripping the steering wheel with white-knuckled intensity. She'd reloaded the shotgun and racked it, the weapon now resting between the seats within easy reach.

  "Let's go," I said, sliding into the passenger seat. The familiar smell of the cruiser—coffee, gun oil, the faint chemical tang of the cleaning products they used at the detachment—was oddly comforting. Normal things in a world that had stopped being normal.

  As we pulled away from the farm, I couldn't shake the feeling that we were leaving something behind. Something important. But the silence of the radios, the dead cell towers, the impossible blue screens—it all added up to one inescapable conclusion.

  Whatever was happening here, it wasn't isolated. And we needed to warn someone before it got worse.

  The farm disappeared in the rearview mirror, but the memory of those yellow eyes stayed with me. Cold. Calculating. Not the mindless gaze of an animal, but something else.

  Intelligence.

  The thing had been thinking. Planning. And somewhere out there, there were more of them.

  Hunting.

  Always hunting.