Lukas blearily opened his eyes.

Sunlight stabbed at his pupils as it snuck past his window curtains, faintly illuminating his room. His fingers twitched, feeling the tender weight of a fluffy white blanket pressing down on him. He felt toasty, but for some reason, it was still comfortable. Like he was wrapped in a cocoon of safety.

He took a deep breath, basking in the familiar scent of jasmine. Quickly turning to the side, he wrinkled his nose as long, luxurious black hair tickled at him relentlessly. Pushing it aside, his attention was quickly focused on the body next to him.

Emma quietly stirred in place, taking the time to languidly sit up and stretch. The white blanket they’d been curled under glided down the gentle curves of her breasts. She blew the hair away from her face with a single huff, shooting him a languid, half-awake smile.

He suddenly felt like a heel, realizing his sudden movements must’ve woken her up.

“Hey, you…”

“Hey,” Lukas softly responded in kind, his gaze not leaving her slightly pale, soft skin—from the top of her shoulders, flowing down across her slender arms until it dove behind the covers. The morning light did exquisite things to her naked flesh, and he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t a fan.

“My, my. Looks like last night wasn’t enough for someone.” Emma winked, her salacious smile dripping with forbidden promises.

An abrupt sensation pulled at Lukas’s core, as simple and unyielding as gravity. He felt the urge to grab her, to feel that slender waist between his hands as she writhed underneath him in ecstasy, looking up with half-lidded eyes. He inadvertently blushed, unable to fathom where the sudden dash of sexual attraction came from. This was Emma, after all. Someone he’d shared his room and life with for several years.

The feeling vanished almost as quickly as it came. Really, what was he thinking? He’d seen her naked before. Many times. Yesterday night, even, from the looks of things.

Whatever. When in Rome…

Lukas leaned into her slender neck, breathing in the scent of her perfume once more.

“Mmm, someone’s feeling pretty cozy today,” she murmured, reaching for his lips. He wasted no time meeting her midway with his own. They felt soft. Comforting. Homey.

“Maybe a bit,” he cheekily replied, before suddenly holding a palm to his throbbing forehead. His body ached from head to toe, and all his joints demanded that he stay in bed and recuperate. For weeks on end, if the intensity was any indication. He’d had pleasurable nights, but never like this. So why was his head pounding as if he’d just run a marathon and then some?

“I need some fucking aspirin,” he muttered, pushing himself up.

“Oh?” Emma arched an eyebrow, her smile not ebbing in the slightest as she coiled against his left arm with effortless feline grace. “Was last night a little too much for you?”

Lukas rolled his eyes. Emma had no compunctions using her feminine wiles to boost her own ego and get what she wanted. It was funny and ironic, seeing as the girl somehow had no concept of what her sensuality could do to most men. Only him, for some reason.

Glancing at his desk, he ruffled his hair as he grabbed for his shirt.

Instead, his hands hit the glass of water on the table. It fell down to the ground and shattered.

“Damn it,” he sighed. Biting back a groan, Lukas pushed the covers off of him and gently freed himself from a mewling Emma to bend down and look at the shattered glass pieces. His fingers barely grazed the surface of one of the shards when he felt something pale and grainy on the surface. The hairs on the back of his neck all suddenly stood to attention, and he felt his shoulders suddenly tighten—

Something cold and wet and crimson dripped onto his fingers.

Blood, his mind belatedly registered as he rubbed it between his fingertips. Had he cut himself somehow? No, that wouldn’t explain how it came onto his hand. Curiously, he craned his neck upward, wondering why blood would be coming from his ceiling, and—

Found a gigantic chunk of plaster falling toward the bed.

“GET BACK!” Lukas screamed, shoving Emma off the other side of the bed. He instinctively raised his right hand up, a strange power thrumming through his body as he batted away the falling debris. Invisible arms grabbed the plaster and smashed it against the wall on the other side, shattering the chunk at the point of contact. The sheer momentum of the collision sent the broken pieces speeding in multiple directions. As if on autopilot, Lukas leaped backward, uncaring of his nudity as he vaulted over the bed and landed calmly on the other side of it, his right hand raised to conjure a—

…a what?

Lukas blinked.

The entire exchange took a second at most.

And yet, for him, it had felt like ten.

“How the hell did you do that?” Emma gaped, her tone tinged with shock and awe.

Lukas flickered his gaze between her bewildered face and the now-broken ceiling. He shifted his stare toward the large, broken pieces of plaster littering the floor, then toward his own unbruised right hand, wondering what in the hell had just happened.

“Luke!” Emma hissed, scrambling to her feet. “What was that?”

“I…” Lukas tried, but no words came to mind to describe it. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t know,” he repeated, feeling strangely hysterical and defensive about the weird phenomenon. “I guess I just—” He glanced back up at the ceiling, as if all the answers lay in the hole that was just created. “Look, are you—are you alright? I didn’t push you too hard or anything, did I?”

“No,” Emma breathed, examining him as if seeing him for the first time. “I’m fine. Clearly, going to the gym has done you wonders.”

“Yeah, I suppose so.” Lukas awkwardly chuckled, clenching and unclenching his fists.

If Emma recognized the uncertainty and puzzlement in his voice, she made no move to voice it. “Anyway, you should really call someone to repair it soon.” She pointed at the debris. “We don’t want another accident when we’re in bed, now do we?” She punctuated the words with a wink.

“No.” Lukas gulped, wary of the gleam in her eyes. “No, we don’t.”

For some reason, his attention kept returning to the glass shards on the floor, with the drop of blood still on its edges. He still wasn’t sure where it came from either—was there some bird stuck in his ceiling? A strange, acute sense of anxiety constantly hammered away at his mind, and it took everything he had not to give into it.

Get over yourself, Aguilar, Lukas chided himself. It was just a freak accident. Nobody’s out to get you.

He repeated the statement over and over in his mind. But the pit in his stomach never went away.

It took fifteen minutes for the two of them to get dressed and step out of his apartment. Oddly enough, Lukas felt a strange sensation of déjà vu as he descended the staircase. He felt like finding the window on the other side and jumping through it onto the backstreet. And the moment he was about to cross the threshold to the outside, he was overcome with an eerie feeling that made him halt.

The odd looks Emma lobbed toward him didn’t help at all.

Emma drove a 2011-model Nissan, though it wasn’t really as old as one would imagine. Both the doors had been refurbished recently, and the hood was replaced with a cheaper but newer substitute. Hopping into the driver’s seat—as he always did—he revved the car.

The vehicle growled and grunted as Lukas took it out onto the main street, just a few blocks shy of Victoria Avenue. But for some reason, he kept shooting glances at the rearview mirror, as if expecting something to happen. A strange tension knotted up his muscles and had his mind in a tizzy, one he couldn’t make heads or tails of.

Instinctively, he picked up speed.

“No need to hurry, y’know!” Emma broke in. “Just drop me at the office as usual. Unless you’ve got something else planned?”

Planned? No, he didn’t have anything planned. He just wanted to drop her off and get the hell out of there. His gut kept telling him that something, or someone, was after him. That much was certain.

First the ceiling incident. And now this.

There was no need to drag Emma into his weird problems.

“—kas? Lukas!”

“Wha—no, nothing else.” He took a quick left. “I’ll just take the bus to the—” He paused. Bus? When was the last time he’d taken a bus to the university? It had always been—

“Luke!”

“Yeah?” he asked, turning toward her. “You know what, I think it’s best if I—” He glanced at the mirror once more. “If I just took your car to uni. Would that be alright?”

“That’s fine…” She trailed off. “But what’s gotten into you? You’ve had this weird, distant look in your eyes since this morning.”

“I’m—”

Emma gently cupped his chin. “Chill out, Luke. Don’t get so freaked out over a bit of plaster. It’s not that hard to fix a ceiling.”

Lukas wasn’t jumpy about some shoddy architecture, but he didn’t feel like explaining that to her. Besides, what would he even say to her? That he felt odd about things he did on a daily basis? Walking out of his apartment building, driving her car, going to the university? That he’d felt a foreign energy flood through his arm and obliterate a chunk of plaster that should’ve knocked him out into debris?

What was next? Finding out he had superpowers and a dead uncle?

This was reality, not fiction.

And he was no superhero. Just a regular mortal.

Mortal.

Mortal.

Mortal. Mortal. Mortal. MoRtAl. mOrTal. MOrtaL. mORTAL. mORtal. MorTal. MORTAL—

“LUKE!” He felt someone—Emma—grab onto the steering wheel and twist it to the left. The Nissan swerved off the road and screeched to a halt, missing the heavy truck in their path by mere inches. His fingers shaking, Lukas saw Emma step out of the car and slam the door. She marched over to his side, opened the door, and angrily grabbed his collar with both her hands.

“WHAT IN THE EVER-LOVING HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?”

But Lukas paid her no mind. His mind raced on overdrive as he replayed the voice in his head. Or were those several voices? Or just him talking? Listening? Doing—undoing—redoing—MORTAL—

“—NEARLY KILLED US, YOU PRICK! WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU—”

“STOP!” he screamed, covering his ears with both hands as he slammed his right foot—

CRASH!

Lukas looked down at the car’s floorboard. Or what used to be the floorboard. His leg had gone clean through the case of the vehicle, the metal cracked and bent and torn apart at the point of impact.

And yet, his feet didn’t feel a sting.

Emma stared at him, her eyes as wide as saucers as she began to slowly back away. “Did—did you just—”

“I’m—I’m so sorry,” Lukas shakily replied, confused about whether to laugh or cry. Pulling the car door shut, he revved the engine again as he threw one last glance at his girlfriend. “About this. About all of today, really.”

“Lukas,” Emma breathed, her countenance softening. It was obvious she wanted to say more, but the words didn’t make it past her lips.

“I’ll be fine.” He tossed her a lopsided grin. Twisting the car around, it sprung to life as he pushed the pedal to the metal—or what remained of it. And without a backward glance, Lukas drove away.

With everything that was happening, he decided that keeping off the main roads was a good idea. Instead, he took a right onto Adams Street and drove past the tall buildings until he reached Lincoln Avenue, the place with the buildings he’d visited with a friend to get a mortgage loan. Digby LLC was right around the corner, a place he used to visit for a summer internship back in his freshman year. The speedometer dial swung to the right as the car sped up, and with it grew his unnatural anxiety.

Something was telling him that he’d picked up a tail.

The question was—who was it? What was it? Why were they following him?

He took a few extra turns purely out of paranoia, even though he couldn’t spot any vehicles behind him. After all, that wasn’t very conclusive. Just because he couldn’t see them coming for him, didn’t mean they weren’t there.

They were probably just beyond the reach of his Scan Radius, especially if the hair-raising sensation was—

He blinked.

Scan Radius? What the hell is a—

SPLAT!

Something small and wide and covered in blood slammed against his windshield. With an incredibly unmanly yelp, Lukas floored the brakes and jumped out of the car to look at what had hit him like a mini kamikaze missile. It was a large creature, with wings and a round tummy that was split open and oozing blood all over his windshield.

“Is that a…bat?

Netopyr.

“Netopyr bat,” he corrected himself, before freezing. Where had he learned that name? For him to recognize it so readily… Was it a species he’d come across before?

Lukas looked at the bloodied corpse again, but found it to be completely unrecognizable.

“This is so fucking weird,” he muttered, holding his palms to his temples. He switched on the wipers, and while most of the gore was knocked off the car, the blood was sticky enough not to budge. Here, in the middle of some random street, and especially with his sudden, uncontrollable paranoia, the last thing he wanted was to be stuck explaining to some random idiot why he was cleaning blood off of his car.

It really couldn’t get worse from here.

Naturally, as soon as the thought had flitted past his mind, the ground began to tremble.

“An earthquake?” Lukas asked in disbelief. “Now of all times?”

But as he looked around at his surroundings, something told him this was no normal earthquake. For a brief moment, the skyscrapers and roads and shrubbery all flickered, as if it was just some sort of illusion. Instead, he could see slender filaments of light and stone walls, and hear songs of metal striking against metal and droplets of water dripping from great stalactites hanging down from cavernous ceilings. And fire—blazing, black fire, with blue lightning and crimson tongues tearing through the buildings like they weren’t even solid structures, as if the million people who lived here were suddenly replaced by countless strands of energy, painting the world in a garish, monochromatic light.

Don’t do it. Don’t do it. Don’t do it—

Lukas couldn’t help it. His eyes met the rearview mirror.

And time itself felt frozen.

What he saw was a stomach-churning, nightmare-inducing mass of horribly sharp scales, all twisting and turning and crisscrossing onto itself with thousands of long tubules merging into each other to create a twisted caricature of a monster that no sane individual would ever conjure, even in their wildest nightmares. A stale, rotting stench assaulted his nose as a maw boasting hundreds of thousands of fangs erupted out of the earth’s crust, followed by tails—two, three, four—ten—twenty—ohMyGOdIamGoingToDiE—thirty tails that destroyed and crushed and obliterated everything around it into smithereens. Looking at this creature was like trying to peer into raw sewage, as the utter wrongness it exuded far outstripped any fear he felt.

Lukas gulped. That strange feeling, the one he’d had roiling inside of him since this morning, told him that this monster was here for him.

Someone screamed, and Lukas dimly noted that the base of his throat felt itchy. Of course, the two things were obviously unrelated. A Wham! Wham! emanated from the other side of the car, and he instinctively crouched to avoid whatever was assaulting Emma’s favorite mode of transportation. Instead, he turned around, intent on sprinting far, far away from this horrible hell-raiser turned real.

Car horns blared all at once like an impatient symphony. But as quickly as it all appeared, it disappeared, followed by a brief cacophony of destruction. A subtle glance was enough for him to understand that the offending cars had all been picked up and tossed away by the creature like yesterday’s garbage.

What a fucking nightmare!

He could feel something damp on his cheeks—maybe he was crying—maybe it was more blood dripping onto him—maybe it was—

There’s no time for that, Lukas screamed in his mind as he saw a car fly over his head and land in front of him, now a crumpled heap of metal, leather, and plastic. And steadily leaking gasoline.

BOOM!

He needed to focus. First escape from the hungry, ravaging monster-beast, then sit and break down the happenings of today’s events afterward. He didn’t have time for thought and analysis when Death was trailing his ass—what on God’s green earth was that thing anyway?

Even remotely thinking back to the monster he saw froze his mind like a block of ice. His legs kept up the motions of running, but there was a sense of detachment from his mortal form. For a few seconds, his mental instructions had no bearing on his bodily functions.

Alright. No more monster thoughts.

He quickly came across a gas station, one with a parked police car in the nearby lot. Maybe the police were carrying some big guns that could bring down this thing?

CRASH!

Another car landed in a heap of steel, and this time it was right on top of said police car. Clearly, if there was any hope of being saved from this thing, it wasn’t going to come from local law enforcement—

“It will pounce from the left.”

Lukas didn’t question the sudden whisper in his head. For once, it felt natural. Like a missing piece of him returned to complete the puzzle. Throwing all caution to the wind, he threw himself toward the right and onto the ground, landing on his hands to reduce the impact. A large, monstrous tail slammed into where he had been just a moment ago, creating a chasm of empty space where there had been a pavement.

Clearly, he was right to trust the mystery voice.

Jumping back onto his feet, he sprinted in a different direction this time without looking back. But the more he ran, the more déjà vu he felt swirling within him. It was like he’d been through this exact situation before—running away from this creature in abject terror, diving to the ground, doing everything in his power to survive…

Except, he hadn’t.

And yet, he had.

The lines between fact and fiction began to blur.

But Lukas chose not to question it. With his body quivering and tears trailing down his cheeks, he continued to run. His legs kept pushing on and on, as if the concept of fatigue did not apply to them. Around him, buildings and cars and broken rocks and upturned pavements fell out of the sky like an Armageddon.

He forced himself to run even faster. If he were any less scared, he’d have questioned how he was able to sweep through close dives, pivot quickly without slipping, and leap across large boulders of rubble like they were playground structures.

But self-preservation was higher on his to-do list. So he didn’t.

“Turn right.”

He was past caring now. The voice in his head was distinctly feminine—not Emma, but who else could it be? It wasn’t like there were that many women in his life. He had no clue, but it didn’t matter. Voice or no voice, he needed a miracle to save his life.

“A miracle.”

Was that amusement he sensed from her tone? For that matter, how was he able to sense some random person’s emotio—

“It is not impossible for you to be saved. But miracles come at a price.”

“WHAT PRICE?!” he bellowed, swerving yet another heavy blow. He nearly managed to avoid it, but a single protruding scale slashed against his abdomen, and warm, red blood oozed out from underneath his skin.

Meanwhile, other abominations started to form around him. A creature that looked like someone had taken a snail, painted it neon-green, and enlarged it to the size of a small elephant was spraying something bright and corrosive in his direction. Rats larger than most household cats ran across the street in strange patterns.

Lukas kept running.

“What price?” he repeated, hoping against all hope that the voice would have a plan—something, anything that would save his sorry ass from this demonic monstrosity. “Come on, what’s the fucking PRICE?!”

An eerie laugh emanated from the darkness.

“This is indeed different from the first time around. I wonder what changed.” She laughed some more. “Tell me, if I grant you the power to exterminate this vermin, will you fulfill a wish of mine?”

“What wish?” Lukas warily asked. Deal or no deal, he was a lawyer-in-training first and foremost. He’d always hear the conditions first.

“To fulfill what you once promised, but chose to forget.”

“Huh?” He narrowly dodged another hit, and kicked one of the rats—cinderfaces, his brain offered—before running again. Where were the fucking police already? EMTs? SWAT teams? The National Guard? Had no one realized that a Jurassic-level monster was obliterating the city? “I don’t—I don’t understand. Just please, help!”

A swipe from one of the creature’s several tails flung him away by several feet. He fell onto his back, groaning in pain as he pushed himself to his feet once more.

Unfortunately, it was ill-timed—

“Then we have an accord.”

—as another tail was headed straight for him. Barely ten feet away.

A spike of raw emotions slammed into Lukas like a physical blow, and his mind couldn’t recognize a distinct one among them. Hate, fear, agony, stubbornness, anxiety, failure—it was all a vast mélange, a cocktail so dense it nearly drove him to his knees.

He was tired. He was struggling, running, and dodging. But to what end? There was no escaping this nightmare. No amount of resilience would save him from this twisted demon from hell. No matter how much he tried to tread water in this ocean of madness incarnate, he would eventually drown in endless paranoia.

In just a moment, everything would be over.

“It is time for you to…”

“To do what?” he begged, his heart palpitating frantically. To die? To become a splattered smudge of red on the ground? That was going to happen anyway. He raised his right arm, hoping that his earlier superhuman feat would repeat itself and save his sorry ass a second time. Logic and reason dictated that his hand would be squashed like a grape, and his face and body were to follow.

But nothing about this screamed logic and reason anymore.

The tail approached, now less than a foot away.

“To remember.”

As the tail slammed against his arm, memories rammed into him like a freight train.

A massive earthquake—diving under the floor—opening up into a giant chasm—blood—pendant—pain. His mind threatened to tear itself apart as memories kept pouring in. His pupils flickered left and right erratically as information, far more than he could assimilate, kept entering. Another memory—finding himself in the anomaly—the bat, azolgs, khorkhoi, cinderfaces—fighting, learning, falling in pain—ethereal creatures that phased through the walls—INANNA—

It all came back to him like waves crashing against a sandy coast, tides that ebbed but once again flowed. He was seeing things that made little sense, of a world that couldn’t possibly have been real. But the endless swirls of memories didn’t let up, and with each new one, his grasp on reality became thinner.

He was becoming more, and Lukas Aguilar was becoming less.

He had no head, yet it shook in denial.

He had no eyes, yet they stared back in defiance.

He would break, yet he would not bend. Not to this.

His heart throbbed violently, the dull thrum increasing in volume as his unease became mounting dread. Clenching his eyes shut, Lukas tried to ignore the feeling, but every hair on his body was raised. He could tell that something deeply unnatural was approaching. A new frightening uncertainty that was alien and taboo and, above all, far beyond his own understanding.

“Get out!”

It drew nearer.

“Get out!” he desperately repeated. Where was it? Outside him? Around him? Inside him? The thrum deepened in intensity, and his head was pounding in sync with his heart.

“GET OUT!”

His vision was inundated with burning, dazzling, white light. Uncountable memories tore through his mind, flowing in without pause or reprieve. They simply would not stop. And with the memories came power, surety, and confidence all rushing back to him. An ever-boiling ocean of lifeforce stirred within him, taking back what was once its domain.

But it didn’t end there.

Dense, liquid, white power flowed through him. Power that was alien. Power that could not belong to any human, only to a world. Creation. Rejuvenation. Mutation. Assimilation.

Lifeforce.

Mana.

Anomalous energy.

Omphalos.

Information he couldn’t make heads or tails of flooded his mind. The data could not be comprehended by a meager existence such as himself, and the whole process was excruciatingly painful and dangerous to his very existence. It wasn’t something he was keen on repeating. Ever. Not if he could help it.

…

But in the end, he survived. For he was Lukas Aguilar.

No, he was an anomaly.

He was ████████ █████, and he would not be defeated.

Liquid lightning rippled through his skin, crackling and radiating power as space shattered around him, like the flickering wisps of a blazing inferno. The force of the tail slamming into him created a shockwave that sent several cars hurling away. It felt as if the very Earth shook.

Lukas’s lips twisted into a maniacal grin as his arm held steady against the blow. Everything was clear to him now. These khorkhoi, cinderfaces, monsters…none of them were real. It was all a twisted illusion trying to mimic reality by transforming his mindscape.

And behind all that transformation was—

His lips moved.

“Analyze.”

As the realization gripped his conscious mind, everything around him twisted into strange shapes. Manifestations of the parasite’s alien mind.

“Yurei,” Lukas growled. “You tried to fuck with my mind. That was a mistake.” He clenched his fists, gathering power within him. “And I’ll show you why!”

He blurred into motion. Faster than the human eye could track, the khorkhoi’s tail swiped toward him, aiming to shatter his face into blood and tissue. He grabbed the motion around the tail and yanked it, pulling the massive creature toward himself. Raising his other hand like an executioner’s blade, Lukas brought it down on the tail segment and severed it from the middle. The amputated limb flailed uselessly before returning to motes of thin purple mist.

Meanwhile, the remaining army of monsters attacked Lukas.

Not that it mattered. This was his mind. This was where he was at his strongest.

Extending both hands outwards, lifeforce emerged from them in the shape of blades nearly as long as he was tall. Lukas spun around, drawing on Kinetomancy to increase his momentum, and struck the incoming barrage with extreme prejudice. Netopyr bats, large and small, came at him like missiles, but he killed them as easily as one would wipe sweat off his brow.

The thousand-fanged monster roared and dove underground, sending tectonic waves all across the terrain.

Lukas chuckled. This fake creature could try all he might, but it wouldn’t be able to take him by surprise.

Scan.

No, he mused darkly, I found prey.

The lifeforce blades merged to become one large greatsword as Lukas raised his hands and brought it down, just in time, as the creature dug out from below his feet.

Blinding light ensued.

And Lukas Aguilar, eyes wide open, let out a soul-wrenching scream.