The pencil scratched the notebook with a steady rhythm.
Clic. Ras. Clic.
Leo Gómez, 21 years old, was hunched over the desk, copying the formulas in a rush. Stationary waves. Nodes and antinodes. The professor's voice came out low through the headphones he wore half-on. He had been at it for three straight hours and the fatigue weighed on his eyelids like lead. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, letting out a long sigh.
"Node at L/2… antinode at L/4…" he murmured, underlining the line so hard he nearly tore the paper. The coffee in the cup was already cold, but he didn't care. Outside, on the city streets, a car passed by now and then, and farther away a dog barked. Everything normal. Another April night like any other.
He had the phone in the front pocket of his jeans. He had put it away after replying to Mateo: "No way, I have to finish this assignment no matter what." Now the device rested against his thigh, forgotten but there.
Ras. Clic.
Suddenly, the pencil stopped dead.
The laptop screen distorted. Just for a second. Leo blinked, thinking it was the fatigue. But the distortion grew. The pixels rippled like water struck by a stone.
"What…?"
He looked up.
The entire room was wrong.
The walls rippled like curtains under an invisible wind. The ceiling creaked. The floor vibrated beneath his feet, as if the world were spinning on a broken axis. The air became thick, almost solid, and a low buzz filled his ears, vibrating inside his bones.
Leo stood up abruptly. The chair rolled backward and slammed into the bed.
"This isn't real," he said out loud, his voice cracked. "I'm just tired, that's all. I'm going to pass out."
He gripped the edge of the desk with both hands. The wood vibrated. His knuckles turned white. The spinning accelerated. Everything was turning: the wardrobe, the window, the books. Nausea rose in his throat. His heart pounded so hard it hurt.
"Mom…" he murmured without meaning to, even though he knew he was alone. His parents had gone out to dinner.
And suddenly, everything stopped.
No blinding light. No tunnel. Just a clean cut.
The air changed.
A cold wind hit him square in the face, sharp as a knife blade, carrying with it a smell of rust, wet earth, and something rotten. Leo covered his face with his forearm to shield himself from the gust. When he lowered his arm and opened his eyes, the world had changed completely.
His room was still his room… but destroyed.
The right half of the wall had disappeared. An irregular hole, as if something gigantic had bitten the house, opened to the outside. Plaster hung in pieces, cables twisted like exposed guts. His bed was split in two; the mattress vomited yellow foam. The desk had barely held up, but the laptop lay on the floor in pieces, screen black and dead.
Leo staggered backward and collided with what remained of the left wall. The cold seeped into his bones through his T-shirt. He trembled. It wasn't just the wind.
And then he noticed it.
Everything was silent.
The cars no longer passed. The dogs no longer barked. The constant buzz of the city had vanished completely.
He took a step toward the hole. His sneakers crunched over glass and debris. Outside it was daytime. A gray, quiet day, with a pale light falling over a landscape of ruins. The house next door was just a pile of bricks and broken tiles. Farther on, the main avenue lay empty, cracked, invaded by black and twisted weeds that grew between the asphalt like diseased veins. Nothing moved. Not a bird. Not a leaf. Only a cold wind whistling through the remains.
It was daytime… but it wasn't his day.
"What… what the fuck?" he whispered.
He looked toward the horizon. In the distance, maybe two hundred meters away, a huge silhouette moved among the shadows of what used to be a park. Too big to be human. Four legs thick as tree trunks supported a bulbous body armored with shiny, wet chitin. Among the nearby debris, a stray dog stepped on a shard of glass, letting out a muffled whimper, barely a whisper.
That tiny noise was a death sentence. Immediately, the beast reacted. With absurd speed for its size, it hurled a crushed car as if it were made of paper. It took milliseconds. The impact crushed and destroyed the living animal before it could even blink, erasing it from the ground. Then a low roar reverberated in the air, deep and alive, like a thunder that breathed. The only sound in all that silence.
Leo backed up so fast he tripped over a piece of wall. He fell hard on his ass onto the debris. The pain in his hip was real, sharp.
"No, no, no…" he repeated, crawling backward until his back slammed into the door frame. The door was still there, hanging from a single hinge. The second-floor hallway was half intact. The family photos on the wall hung crooked, covered in gray dust.
He patted his pocket. The phone was still there. The familiar weight against his thigh was the only thing that hadn't changed.
He took it out with hands that wouldn't stop shaking. The screen intact. Not a scratch. Battery at 87%. Time: 23:47. The same as before.
"Come on… come on…" he murmured as he unlocked it with his fingerprint.
He dialed 133. His finger trembled so much he almost got it wrong.
He called.
It rang once. Twice. Three times.
Silence. The screen showed "No signal" in large red letters.
He tried his mom's number. His dad's. Mateo's. WhatsApp. Telegram. Nothing. All of them said the same thing: "No connection" or stayed loading forever.
Leo let out a shaky breath and opened YouTube on instinct. The app loaded instantly, showing the home page with the recommended videos of the moment: a highlighted soccer match, a cooking challenge, several viral clips.
Without thinking twice, his finger approached the first video—the soccer match.
Suddenly he stopped dead.
The memory of the dog hit him like a whip: the glass cracking under its paw, the muffled whimper, the car launched as if it were made of paper, and the animal's body disappearing in an explosion of blood and bones.
Leo swallowed hard. He couldn't risk it. With trembling fingers he lowered the phone's volume to the minimum even before touching the play button. Only then did he press play.
The video played perfectly. The image was sharp, but the roar of the crowd and the commentator's shouts now sounded like a distant murmur, almost inaudible.
He paused the video almost immediately, his pulse racing. That wasn't what he needed.
With sweaty hands, he opened the AI app. The interface loaded, but where he always chose the base model, the screen flickered. A new option, with black metallic typography, stood out from the rest: NOA.
Leo frowned. He vaguely remembered forum threads about a model with an experimental architecture, something too heavy to run on local hardware. He selected it out of pure desperation.
The interface cleared instantly, removing useless menus and buttons. A text appeared all at once in the center, with no latency:
[Model NOA activated. VRAM restrictions ignored. No output token limit.]
Leo lowered the screen brightness to the minimum and turned off the phone's volume. His thumbs trembled so much that he had to delete and rewrite several times. He typed as fast as he could, careful that his nails didn't make noise against the glass:
"Are you there? My room is destroyed. Outside everything is destroyed and a giant beast I've never seen is out there. Search the web. What is happening?"
He hit send. There was no loading time. The response didn't generate word by word; the block of text appeared complete and all at once, cold and precise:
[NOA]: Search completed. The global network I access is frozen. Last data packet received 62 minutes ago, right before your point of divergence. There are no reports of anomalies. For the outside world, your current environment does not exist.
Leo stared at the text.
"What do you mean by that?" he whispered, his voice barely a thread.
Suddenly, a deep, heavy tremor made the floor vibrate under his sneakers. The monster was approaching again.
Leo froze. Fear shot up his spine like electricity. Slowly, with his heart about to burst, he carefully peeked around the edge of the hole in the wall.
There it was. The gigantic silhouette advanced among the debris, each step making the damaged structure of the street tremble. It was heading straight toward his block.
Without thinking, Leo crawled backward as silently as possible. He slipped into the hallway, behind what remained of the wall next to the door frame, which still hung from a hinge. He sat on the floor, pressing his back against the wall, trying to make himself as small as possible. From there he couldn't see the monster, but the monster couldn't see him either… at least that was what he hoped.
He didn't know what to do. He couldn't run. He couldn't scream. He could only stay still.
And there he stayed, trembling, with his breath held and the phone clutched against his chest, for at least thirty minutes. Every distant step of the beast made his body tense even more. Sweat ran down his forehead despite the cold. Time seemed to have stopped.
Until finally the heavy footsteps began to move away. The tremor in the floor grew weaker… and then disappeared completely.
Leo didn't move for several minutes more. Only when the silence became absolute again did he allow himself to let out a long, shaky sigh.
"What the fuck is happening…?" whispered Leo, his voice broken, while he pressed his fist hard against his chest and gripped his T-shirt as if he wanted to stop his heart from bursting out of his body. "How can a monster like that even exist?"