Artur didn't know how long he had lain there, adrift in a sea of pain and exhaustion. Minutes. Hours. It could have been days. Time had lost all meaning.
It was a change in the sound that pulled him back to consciousness.
The absolute silence broke.
Not with the growl of a monster, but with something strangely familiar.
A siren.
Distant. Faint. But unmistakable.
He opened his eyes.
The purple sky was… flickering.
Like a fluorescent lamp about to burn out, it trembled between the sickly violet and a pale, familiar blue.
The blue of a cloudy morning in New York.
Flicker. Purple. The siren vanished, replaced by the familiar hum of the cage.
Flicker. Blue. The distant sound of traffic. The murmur of a living city.
Flicker. Purple. Silence and the droning hum.
Flicker. Blue. A dog barking. A car horn.
The invisible barrier at the end of the street was unraveling.
It flickered with the sky, and with each flash of blue, Artur saw not the infernal landscape—but the continuation of Twenty-Sixth Street. The buildings. The pavement.
The real world.
The cage was collapsing.
The image of the Colossi retreating—the giants withdrawing…
They weren't showing respect.
They were evacuating.
Pulling back because they knew the experiment was over.
The terrarium was being switched off.
The adrenaline that had sustained him for so long vanished. The fury, the will, the stubborn defiance—dissolved with the return of reality.
And with their departure, the pain arrived.
Not the pain he had been enduring, the constant companion.
This was different.
This was the pain of every wound he carried striking him all at once, unfiltered by adrenaline.
His broken leg.
His shattered ribs.
The cuts, the bruises, the torn muscles.
Every cell in his body began screaming at the same time.
The wave of agony was so overwhelming it stole his breath, dragging darkness back across his vision.
The sky flickered once more—
—and stayed blue.
The sounds of the city returned, no longer faint but roaring back in full force.
Traffic.
Sirens.
Voices.
Around him, the bodies of the smaller monsters began to dissolve. They didn't rot.
They became translucent—like smoke—and then simply evaporated, leaving behind dark stains on the asphalt that quickly faded.
Artur turned his head toward the Alpha's corpse beside him.
In the morning light, he saw the creature in all its nightmarish glory.
It—and its two fallen brothers—were the only things that remained.
Within seconds, most of the street was clean.
Only three colossal mountains of flesh remained.
There was no more purple blood.
Only wreckage. Overturned cars. Shattered storefronts.
The devastation of a riot. Or an earthquake.
The kind of destruction the real world could understand.
And there he was.
A broken man lying in the middle of a ruined street, beside three hunting trophies that, somehow, had failed to claim his life.
He heard voices.
Shouts.
People emerging from hiding places, confused and terrified.
He saw Carla step out of an alley, eyes wide, staring at the daylight as if it were a miracle.
He tried to call out.
No sound came.
The pain overtook him completely.
The world shrank to a single point of light—
—and went dark.
His final conscious sight was the reality of Twenty-Sixth Street solidifying around him, the real world reclaiming its place.
He had survived.
He was home.
And as the darkness swallowed him, one final question echoed through his fading mind:
What happens when the specimen breaks the cage—and survives the experiment?