Lance didn't wait.
He scrambled to his feet, Dario barking low and fierce at his heels.
Outside, the street was the same, yet everything had shifted.
The cracked pavement stretched and bent beneath their feet, as if the world itself had been kneaded like soft clay.
Behind them, the figure was no longer quite human.
Its form rippled, stuttering between the shape of a man and something far less defined—sometimes a tall, warped humanoid, other times a mass of sharp angles and flickering shadow, as if reality was glitching over the thing's flesh.
It moved with jerky, impossible speed, its empty gaze locked on Lance.
Lance's chest tightened.
"Is that... thing... me?" he gasped, voice cracking.
Kenton didn't answer. Instead, he barked orders.
"Keep moving! The deeper we run, the more it unravels—don't let it catch your mind."
Dani pulled her briefcase from her side and clicked it open.
The compartments unfolded like a mechanized flower, revealing a bizarre arsenal: glowing shards that hummed faintly, a mesh of adhesive sigils, and a small glass jar pulsing with shifting shadows.
She tossed a sigil toward the creature.
It slammed into the thing's flickering form, causing it to shudder and briefly solidify—but it kept coming.
Kenton sprinted beside Lance, voice tight but oddly manic.
"This thing isn't just hunting you—it's trying to pull you apart from the inside out. It knows what you are... or what you're becoming."
Dani fired her grenade launcher behind them, the explosion fracturing the air but never fully touching the creature, which seemed to ripple like water around the blast.
Lance's vision blurred, edges of the street bending and warping in impossible angles.
His own body felt like it was folding over itself—fingers elongating, shadows crawling just beneath his skin.
Dario yipped, leaping to bite at the creature's flickering limb as it lunged.
"No! Dario!" Lance shouted, panic rising.
But the dog was fearless, unyielding—a tether to the last fragments of normal.
The chase twisted through streets that folded into impossible corridors, walls breathing in and out.
The sky above fractured, breaking into shards of glass suspended in slow motion.
Lance felt his thoughts fragmenting, memories slipping like water through fingers.
"Hold on!" Kenton yelled, voice slicing through the chaos.
Dani's sigils caught the creature again, slowing it—but each strike seemed to drain something from her as well.
Lance's eyes, now opaque and swirling with white, flickered toward her.
"You're burning out," he gasped.
She smirked, fierce and unbothered.
"Would you rather I ran and left you with that nightmare?"
He wanted to say yes, but no words came.
The creature's form writhed and stretched toward him, folding into itself and then snapping back—a maddening mimic of his own distorted reflection.
Lance stumbled, heart pounding so loud it nearly drowned out everything else.
He gripped Dario tightly, whispering, "Don't let go."
Behind them, the world twisted tighter, reality bending around the impossible chase.
And as the creature closed in, Lance understood this wasn't just a fight for his body.
It was a fight for his mind.
The creature surged forward, its form flickering like corrupted code—part shadow, part warped flesh, a broken mirror reflecting Lance's own fractured mind. Around them, the street remained unchanged: neon signs buzzed steadily, windows gleamed as usual, and distant chatter hummed in the night air. To any outsider, they were just running. But inside Lance's mind, reality was unraveling fast.
From the creature's jagged mouth came a voice—glitching, stuttering, and broken, like a corrupted audio file struggling to play. It didn't shout threats or demands. Instead, it screamed Lance's own insecurities at him in a harsh, cacophonous torrent.
"You can't hold on—can't keep them safe."
"Mom's smile was never for you."
"They left because you weren't enough."
"Why try if everything you touch slips through your fingers?"
Each phrase was a shard of Lance's past, delivered at impossible speed, crashing over him without mercy. It was neither forgiveness nor accusation—it was pure, raw exposure.
His heart hammered, breath shallow.
He shook his head, trying to drown out the fractured voice.
But the creature's screeches twisted again, warping into a mocking echo: "You fix machines because people break too easily. You joke to hide how scared you are. You're already lost."
Lance's grip on Dario tightened, nails digging into fur.
"Stop," he rasped. "Just—stop."
Dani fired another sigil. The creature shuddered, its form warping violently, but the voice only grew louder, more fragmented, like a glitching nightmare.
Kenton shouted from beside him, "Don't listen! It's warping your thoughts."
But Lance's mind spun, spiraling into the fractured noise.
Images flickered—his mother's eyes not quite meeting his, his father's back retreating into a dark corridor.
He faltered, barely catching himself from collapsing.
Dario whined softly, a tether of warmth amid the storm.
Lance forced himself forward, teeth clenched.
He was running from more than a monster.
He was running from himself.
The world outside the diner remained stubbornly normal. Neon signs flickered their usual tired buzz, the low hum of distant traffic pulsed like a steady heartbeat, and unseen pedestrians went about their mundane lives, blissfully unaware of the nightmare twisting through the streets just a block away.
But for Lance, reality was splintering.
The creature was everywhere and nowhere—its form a writhing mosaic of shadow and distorted flesh, blurring between human and impossible geometry. It moved with a terrifying fluidity, each step warping the pavement beneath it as if reality itself were a fragile canvas being smeared with trembling hands. Yet, to anyone else, it was just a man chasing another man down a city street. Nothing more.
Its voice came next, a fractured, glitching scream, not spoken but ripped from Lance's own mind and thrown back at him with brutal precision.
"You're not holding on."
The words shredded his confidence like jagged glass, the voice glitching mid-phrase before snapping into another:
"Her smile never reached you. You always knew."
It was not accusation, not hatred—just the merciless replay of hidden truths Lance had tried to bury. His mother's distant warmth, the cold space his father left behind, the silent void that followed every failed attempt to matter.
"Why fix broken things when you can't even fix yourself?"
Each phrase stabbed deeper, folding his memories into a fragmented puzzle with missing pieces. Lance's breath hitched. His legs trembled.
Dani ran beside him, the soft click of her briefcase unfolding sharp and steady. She tossed a glowing sigil into the creature's path. The thing convulsed, momentarily stabilizing into something almost human before dissolving back into the writhing nightmare.
Kenton was close, darting between them with a manic energy that never seemed to burn out. His voice was a frantic thread of instructions, warnings, and desperate plans.
"Keep moving! The further we go, the less control it has. But watch your head—this thing knows your fears. It's feeding on them, trying to crack your mind."
Lance blinked, trying to hold onto the dog's warmth. Dario was his anchor—solid, real, loyal.
"You have to fight it," Kenton shouted over the cacophony. "Not just run. Fight inside."
Inside. The word echoed hollowly in Lance's chest.
His vision blurred, the streets folding and curling in impossible spirals, colors bleeding into one another like wet paint. His own hands looked strange—elongated at the edges, shadows crawling beneath the skin like ink spreading through water.
The creature's voice hit again, now a barrage of rapid-fire fragments—memories, insecurities, fears mashed into a deafening storm.
"You're afraid of being forgotten. You're afraid you don't deserve to exist."
Lance staggered, heart pounding so fiercely it threatened to burst free. He shut his eyes, desperate to drown out the noise.
But Dario whimpered, nudging his hand gently.
That small connection, so simple and pure, was a crack in the suffocating darkness.
He forced breath into his lungs and opened his eyes.
Dani caught his gaze, her expression sharp but not unkind. "Hold it together. We're not done."
Kenton's voice sliced through the chaos again. "The safe house wasn't enough. This thing can twist reality around you, but it's still tethered to your mind."
Lance gritted his teeth. "How do you fight a shadow inside your own head?"
"By knowing it's not you," Dani said coldly. "And by remembering who you were before it started."
The creature lunged, a grotesque blur of warped limbs and flickering edges.
The world twisted around them—streets curling, neon signs warping into impossible patterns—but in that pulse, the creature faltered.
The chase wasn't over. It wouldn't be for a long time.