Before i start. the story is something i made BUT i used AI to correct my english nothing more. its not AI genertated but human craft
On a cloudy day, ##### and his girlfriend ##### were on the metro, riding it toward the edges of the city — where their tree was. The tree they had planted during their first college year as part of an unpaid community job they had joined to help the green zone.
They were chatting on the metro, talking about life.
Star Torch (#####): "It's so annoying. The weather was literally sunny this morning. Now it's cloudy."
Girlfriend (#####): "You know the weather here. It has its own mind."
They laughed at their own unfunny jokes.
As the metro entered the tunnel, it stopped. A sharp, forced stop. The kind worth suing the company over.
A voice came through the speakers: "Attention, everyone — the city is under attack. please everyone exit through north stairs. do not use the elevator. I repeat, the city is under attack. please everyone exit through north stairs. do not use the elevator "
The AI's flat tone did nothing to ease the heart. Then the earth began shaking — like an earthquake.
Star Torch grabbed his girlfriend's hand and ran, as did everyone else. Screams and fear took over as people rushed toward the exits. Some made it out. Some stayed underground. Some stayed lifeless under the rubble .
For Star Torch, this was never about survival:
I must protect her. I need to make sure she gets home safe. I've lived through war before. I just have to stay away from the crowd. Safety in numbers is a lie — you become a bigger target. The terrorists always target the crowd . Alone is safer.
While others rushed toward the north stairs, Star Torch took the west stairs with his girlfriend. They moved slowly, deliberately — making no noise, making sure not to run blindly into a group of armed men.
From somewhere in the north, he could already hear the sounds of collapsing buildings and screaming.
Thinking the west was clear, he started running.
He was now in the middle of the street. Above them, a glass building leaned against another building. As he ran, something felt off — something he noticed quickly. No smell of gunpowder. No marks shooting. The building walls had been struck by solid stone rods. small 2m to 3m. done far more destruction than it should have
He didn't stop running. He held her hand. Every second counted; there was no time to pause or think
Then he noticed something else.
Silence.
The only thing prey hears before it sees a predator.
A feeling took over him — something close to déjà vu. Time seemed to slow. Fear gripped him for a second.
Then he shoved his girlfriend away.
The earth beneath them shifted like a living beast, throwing them both off their feet. He looked at her — she was fine, struggling to stand. No blood. Where the earth had moved, a stone spear had erupted. A rod of stone, sharp and aimed directly at where they had been standing.
As he got back to his feet, he looked ahead.
Thirty meters away, a man stood.
He looked human at first glance — though that impression did not last long. His body was a monument carved by hardship rather than vanity: broad, dense with muscle that sat heavy on his frame like iron wrapped in skin, the kind that does not come from any gym. He wore no shirt, no jacket — his bare chest open to the cold air . His trousers were caked in dirt. His hair was dark, falling just past his shoulders, tied back in a rough ponytail . His eyes were the color of a deep ocean, His beard was short, grown out perhaps two weeks without intention.
He did not look like a conqueror. He looked like your normal local buffed guy
He looked like someone enjoying his time. No one else was enjoying this madness
From that single frame, Star Torch understood who had turned the city into a graveyard. One man. All of this — one man.
He understood one more thing immediately after:
This battle is one-sided. Survival: zero percent.
Without turning his head — hoping the man's attention would stay fixed on him and ignore her — Star Torch glanced at his girlfriend from the corner of his eye.
Then he raised his fists. The only stance he knew — a classic boxing position. Standing before something that had reduced a city to ruin, not knowing the mechanics of how, only knowing it had something to do with stone.
He didn't trust the ground he was standing on.
The Man:"HAHAHA—"
He raised his hand in a slow, ascending motion. Stone spikes ruptured from the ground. Star Torch dodged — barely.
Something felt off. The man was attacking slowly. Like a cat playing with its food.
A stone wall shifted while Star Torch was still mid-thought, not giving him a moment to finish it — nearly reducing him to broken flesh against the concrete.
Star Torch charged toward the man. Closing the gap. Thirty meters. Twenty-four.
The man wasn't attacking.
Star Torch dove left as a volley of stone spikes — moving like arrows through the air — came at him from behind.
Star Torch:"RUUUUNN—"
He screamed it while fighting to recover, struggling to get back on his feet — because that was the only reason he was still standing. To fight a battle he had already lost. To buy her time.
His girlfriend knew him. She knew him too well.
He's not surviving this. He's giving everything he has so I can survive. If I stay, we both die.
She ran. She didn't know where. She didn't need to. She trusted the order he screamed and ran — anywhere, as far from the man as possible.
Sadly, life is rarely that simple.
As Star Torch recovered, he rushed the man — trying to drag his attention away from her. Keep the eyes on him. Only him.
Left hook. The man turned his head slightly.
Uppercut — the man caught it with one hand. With the other, he moved his fingers.
The earth beneath the girl shifted like a rug yanked from under her feet. She fell hard. The ground rose around her, forming a stone wall — sealing her in place.
Now Star Torch faced it plainly. He couldn't win. He couldn't even make the man give up. He just needed to make him — anything. Anything that keeps her alive.
He started hitting faster. His breathing shortened. His body was already tiring — like shadowboxing. Except the shadow intended to kill him.
In one motion, a spear erupted from the floor.
Star Torch managed to block it — taking it across both forearms. The man followed immediately with a punch to the stomach that sent Star Torch sliding thirty meters back across the broken street.
He grabbed his stomach, trying to rise. The pain was bad enough to pull sweat out of him, his lungs clawing for air. He turned his eyes to the right — checking on her.
What he saw made the pain disappear entirely.
A stone spear had pierced her left lung.
She had been running away — doing whatever she could to run away just like Star torch wanted.
Her eyes were still open. Not closing. Searching — as if trying to hold onto a version of the world where they had made it to their tree. Her lips were moving. To her, she was screaming. To the world, her lips barely moved.
What were her last words?
Star Torch's fists hit the ground.
As the spear retracted, her body met the cold ground, lifeless and motionless
He was crying and cursing everything at once — the street, the sky, the air itself. Then his legs brought him upright on their own. His eyes locked onto the man. His mind had narrowed to a single, clean point:
I will not stop until he is dead.
A spear erupted from the floor directly beneath him — but Star Torch moved before it fully formed, as though he had felt the ground shift before the order was even given.
More spears rained down from the building above, launched like arrows, falling in a scatter pattern around him. He moved like something with a grudge — fluid and sharp-edged — slipping sideways, reaching out and snatching one of the spears mid-air before charging at the man.
The man turned his hand. The spear crumbled in Star Torch's grip, dissolving into small sharp stones that launched themselves directly at his face.
Star Torch swung his arm across his own head — taking every fragment into his forearm, shredding it, sacrificing it without hesitation.
He was now right in front of the man.
A spike erupted from the ground beneath the man, aimed at Star Torch's stomach. Star Torch caught it with both hands, snapped it, then drove the broken end into the man's shoulder. He followed with a straight punch to the nose.
The man's nose bled.
As Star Torch moved to land a third strike, stone arms stretched out from behind the man — rigid, thick, locking around him and pulling him backward and upward, away from Star Torch's reach.
Star Torch's head snapped in every direction — hunting, searching, eyes wild.
He looked up.
The man was on the rooftop above, catching his breath, staring down.
Star Torch:"I will kill you. I will kill you. Come down here — I will skin you alive."
The man looked down at him. For a moment, his expression carried something that might have been the first fear he had ever felt.
Then he turned and disappeared across the rooftops, vanishing from the fight.
Standing above her body, Star Torch couldn't stop himself. He lifted her — the way a person carries someone sleeping, careful, slow, afraid to wake them.
His eyes never left her face.
He kept telling himself she would open them. Any second now. He did his best not to look at the hole in her chest.
The world around him was still screaming. Sirens. Collapsing buildings groaning and giving way even after the fight had ended. People calling out for help from under the rubble. Voices layering over voices.
He heard none of it.
Like a deaf man. Legs moving on their own, carrying him somewhere without being told. To the only place he knew she would have loved to see today. Maybe he was trying to make it hurt less. Maybe he was lying to himself. Either way, his feet knew the direction.
A tree alone in green field. Small but full — many leaves packed onto branches that didn't have the height to be impressive ,Vines draped from the branches, swaying gently in the air, Their tree.
He sat with his back against the trunk, facing the sun. He laid her in his lap.
He watched the sunset as though it might dissolve into something — as though if he stared long enough the nightmare would lose its shape and let him wake. Behind them, the city was rubble. Sirens from ambulances, fire brigades, police, rescue teams — layers of sound that meant the world was still trying to function.
To Star Torch, there was only him and her.
The shadow of the horizon began its slow climb across the ground toward him.
Star Torch:"I will find you. Out there — I will find you. I will bring you back to life. I will hear your last words. I will cross the world to find you, and I will. I promise."
Just before the shadow reached his eyes, the promise was made.
A promise spoken to a corpse, by a survivor who should not have won. A man who had been written to lose. The story should have ended the moment they saw that man standing in the street — and yet here he was. Hollow.
But alive.
Chapter 2 : Exile in the Living.