You gasp. Your breath, a small cloud of vapor, disappears into the frigid air. You've been running for hours, but adrenaline—or maybe it's the CHANGE, this strange new superhuman condition with a chronic headache—keeps you from feeling tired. If it were the old days, you'd already be sitting on the side of the road, smoking a cigarette and wishing for a quick death. But no, now you're one of the CHOSEN. Congratulations.
The snow, fine and sharp, whips at your face. The ground, the sky, everything is white. The trees, frozen skeletons of a once-living forest, seem to watch you. But what matters isn't them, but the trail that snakes between their trunks. Your prey. A smell in the air, nauseating and metallic. Smells of steel and plastic. A mixture that makes your stomach churn. The famous Low Hunter's Instinct, now complemented by a keen sense of smell for industrial waste.
You know this is your last chance. Not because the threat is great, but because you are the last hope of your band of losers. You, the only being capable of tracking this abomination, since most of your colleagues are still trying to figure out how to use a map. They let you go first, as if you were Beowulf, Hercules, Santa Marta. You, the hero of a prophecy no one believes, the guy who discovered the thing no one saw. And why did no one see it? Because the creature was right in front of everyone's eyes, but only you, the unbalanced genius, noticed it.
And now, your moment of glory. Or death. After all, this is the only way to prove you're not completely useless to your band. The only way to show that you can, in fact, face this PLAGUE of the century... or become the city's next dark fairy tale. This is your hunt, your last show. Bring on the Bane.