Cold concrete scraped against Ashryn's boots as he pressed his back into the hollow of a ruined pillar.
Neon blue ley lines pulsed through the cracked asphalt, bleeding raw, unstable energy into the humid night. This was District 7, a shattered graveyard where the grand brick estates of old Dhaka had crashed into the towering steel frames of London after the Great Sundering. Now, only monsters lived here.
Breathing hurt. Inside his chest, Rhoss stirred, a writhing knot of freezing needles digging into his lungs.
"More," the entity whispered, not in words, but in a raw, physical hunger that clawed at his ribs. It wanted a taste. It wanted the sudden, heart-stopping rush of terror that only survival could bring.
Ahead, the skeletal remains of a high-rise loomed like a jagged tooth against the purple sky.
Somewhere inside that concrete maze, a Howler was waiting.
---
Silence fell over the ruins, thick and suffocating.
Ashryn closed his eyes, his fingers tightening around the hilt of his alloy blade. Sweat dripped down his temple, cold as ice. He could feel Rhoss slithering beneath his skin, black veins webbing across his collarbone, urging him to move, to run, to risk everything.
"Patience," Ashryn muttered under his breath, his voice barely a rasp.
"Hungry," the shadow retorted, sending a spike of agonizing cold straight to his heart. Ashryn gasped, his knees buckling for a fraction of a second. The parasite was getting impatient, and an impatient parasite was a death sentence.
Suddenly, the air pressure dropped.
Dust vibrated on the ground, tiny pebbles dancing as a low, sub-audible hum began to rattle the windowpanes of the decaying buildings.
It was coming.
Ashryn lunged forward, abandoning his cover just as a massive wave of compressed sound blasted through the pillar he had been hiding behind. Concrete exploded into powder, sharp shards flying like shrapnel.
---
Screaming tore through the night, a high-pitched, agonizing wail that made his ears bleed instantly.
Standing in the center of the ruined street was the Howler. It was a grotesque, multi-limbed nightmare, its face nothing but a gaping, circular maw lined with concentric rows of needle-sharp teeth. Its skin was translucent, pulsing with stolen ley-line energy.
Adrenaline flooded Ashryn's veins.
Rhoss purred. The parasite drank the sudden spike of fear, the thrilling terror of the hunt, and in return, it unlocked the cage around Ashryn's muscles.
Power, dark and intoxicating, surged through his limbs.
Instantly, his perception of time slowed. The falling dust motes hung suspended in the air. The next sonic blast from the Howler was visible as a shimmering ripple in the atmosphere, tearing toward him like a wall of solid glass.
Leaping to the side, Ashryn defied gravity, propelled by the shadow-energy wrapping around his legs. He sailed over a rusted car chassis, his movements impossibly fluid, a streak of absolute blackness against the neon-blue backdrop.
But the thrill was a double-edged sword.
"Again! Give me more!" Rhoss demanded, demanding more danger, more recklessness. The shadow pulled at his muscles, trying to force him closer to the beast's deadly maw.
Ashryn gritted his teeth, fighting his own body for control. He couldn't let the shadow take over entirely. If he lost his mind to the thrill, he would become nothing more than a hollow shell, a puppet for a monster.
---
Using the momentum of his descent, Ashryn pushed off a crumbling wall, launching himself straight at the Howler's flank.
His blade gleamed, coated in a thin layer of Rhoss's dark energy. He sliced upward, carving a deep gash through the creature's translucent hide. Thick, glowing fluid sprayed onto the asphalt, hissing as it corroded the stone.
Angered, the Howler spun with terrifying speed, its heavy tail slamming into Ashryn's ribs.
Ribs cracked. The force of the blow sent him crashing through a decaying brick wall, burying him in a pile of rubble.
Pain flared, white-hot and blinding.
Through the haze of agony, his mind drifted back to the night his world ended. He wasn't Ashryn then. He was Rayan Ray Chowdhury, the eldest son of a prominent family, living in a world that hadn't yet been torn apart.
He remembered his grandfather, Ershad Ray Chowdhury, standing in the doorway of their ancestral home as the sky tore open.
"भाग पोला, भाग! অগো সামনে খাড়াইস না!" Dada Ershad had screamed in his thick, Old Dhaka dialect, his voice cracked with terror as he pushed Rayan toward the escape tunnels. "আমগো চিন্তা করিস না, তুই বাঁচ!"
Then came his grandmother, Amena Ray Chowdhury, her hands trembling as she pressed a family heirloom into his palms.
"আমার সোনার চান্দু, সাবধানে থাকিস," she had wept, her words a haunting lullaby in the face of annihilation. "এই রাক্ষসগুলা ভালা না। তুই আমাদের বংশের শেষ প্রদীপ।"
He had run. He had saved himself while his father, Rafiur, and his mother, Sajeda, were crushed under the falling debris. He had listened to the screams of his little brother, Rafin, and his sisters, Rafa and Raha, as the Echoes tore through the shelter.
---
Guilt, heavy and suffocating, wrapped around his throat like a physical noose.
"Why did you run?" a voice in his head whispered, a manifestation of his own self-loathing. "You let them die."
Paralysis gripped him. The memory of their screams was so vivid, so loud, that it drowned out the roaring of the Howler currently charging toward his position.
He couldn't move. His limbs felt like lead, weighed down by the ghosts of his past.
"Get up!" Rhoss hissed inside his mind, the shadow panic-stricken as the source of its food threatened to extinguish. "Get up, you weakling!"
Above him, the Howler loomed, its maw opening wide to deliver a point-blank sonic shriek that would liquefy his organs.
Death was right there. It would be so easy to just let go. To join them.
But the face of little Rafa flashed in his mind. She had trusted him. They had all trusted him to live. If he died here, their deaths would mean absolutely nothing.
Anger replaced the guilt, hot and fierce.
"No," Ashryn roared, his voice cutting through the shadow's whispers.
With a desperate burst of strength, he channeled every ounce of Rhoss's energy into his legs. He rolled to the side just as the Howler's sonic blast pulverized the rubble where his head had been a millisecond prior.
---
Rising to his feet, Ashryn didn't feel the pain of his broken ribs anymore. He felt only a cold, calculated rage.
Rhoss roared in tandem with him, the shadow expanding outward, forming dark, spectral wings from Ashryn's shoulder blades. The thrill was gone, replaced by a grim, lethal focus.
He sprinted forward, his speed breaking the sound barrier, leaving a vacuum in his wake.
Before the Howler could chamber another shriek, Ashryn was already beneath its chin. He drove his blade upward, straight through the soft tissue of its throat, forcing the dark energy of the parasite to detonate inside the beast's skull.
Black veins erupted from the monster's eyes as the shadow consumed it from the inside out.
With a final, bubbling gasp, the Howler collapsed, its massive frame trembling as the magical energy holding it together began to destabilize.
Ashryn stood over the dying beast, chest heaving, his face splattered with its dark, glowing blood. He pulled his blade free, his hands shaking from the sheer exhaustion of the fight.
He had survived. Another day bought with his own blood and the parasite's terrible grace.
But the guilt remained, a permanent shadow on his soul, darker than Rhoss could ever be.
As the Howler dissipates into glittering motes of shadow, a whisper, cold and alien, slithers directly into Ashryn's mind: 'Good hunt. But you... are still weak.'