The rain in Orenth City didn't just fall; it clung to the skin like oil. Vyan skidded around a corner, his boots splashing through puddles that reflected flickering neon kanji. Behind him, he could hear the heavy, rhythmic breathing of Tara, who was practically carrying Sia through the deluge.
"Don't look back!" Vyan hissed, his eyes scanning the pitch-black alleyway.
They didn't know what it was. It wasn't a Syndicate drone, and it wasn't a man. It was a shifting, tattered silhouette that moved with a sickening, asynchronous grace. Every time it got close, the temperature dropped, and the sound of the city muffled into a dead, airless silence.
"We have to lose it!" Tara gasped, her face pale under the purple streetlights.
Vyan pulled a small device from his belt—a modified Kinetic flare. "On three, dive behind the crates!" He primed the flare and threw it toward the mouth of the alley. It erupted in a blinding white light, designed to overload the optical sensors of anything following them. They huddled behind a stack of rusted shipping containers, hearts hammering.
For a second, the creature stopped. It hovered in the white glare, its edges blurring into the light. But it didn't scream or retreat. It simply drifted through the brightness as if it weren't there.
"The flare didn't work," Sia whispered, her voice eerily calm. "It's looking through the light, not at it."
Vyan grabbed a nearby lead pipe and jammed it into an exposed power junction box on the wall. A shower of blue sparks erupted, creating a localized short-circuit that plunged the immediate block into total darkness. In the chaos of the failing grid, Vyan led them through a crawlspace under a collapsed sky-bridge. They scrambled through the filth, outrunning the shadow by sheer desperation.
As they emerged three blocks away, a massive holographic billboard above them glitched. For a split second, the smiling face of a corporate model turned into a screaming mask of static, and the text changed to a language that looked like shattered glass.
"Just a power surge," Vyan muttered, wiping grime from his forehead, ignoring the fact that the rain had briefly started falling upward near Sia's feet. "The city's grid is dying."
They reached a derelict basement door marked with a faded red symbol. Vyan leaned against the cold metal, catching his breath.
"We can't keep running with nothing but flares and pipes," Vyan said, looking at the sisters. "I need to find Kabir. If anyone has the heavy hardware and the safe-passage codes we need to survive this thing, it's him."