The merchant district had always been loud.

The cacophony of haggling voices, rolling carts, street performers, and bellowing vendors created a symphony of commerce that never truly died. Even in the early afternoon, when the tournament pulled most of the crowd toward the coliseum, the marketplace thrummed with life.

Then the screaming started.

Not from the coliseum — though distant roars echoed from that direction too — but from the streets themselves.

A baker stood outside his shop, wiping flour from his hands with a stained apron. He'd been measuring ingredients for the evening rush, already imagining the flood of customers once the tournament ended. People always wanted fresh bread after a day of entertainment.

He heard it first.

A wet, dragging sound.

Like something heavy being pulled across cobblestone.

He turned toward the alley beside his shop.

Something emerged from the shadows.

It walked on two legs, but the gait was wrong — lurching, uneven, as if the legs belonged to different people and hadn't agreed on how to move. Its torso was a canvas of stitched flesh, patches of skin in varying shades of brown, pale, and sickly gray. One arm ended in a hand with fingers too long. The other arm was just bone wrapped in strips of muscle that pulsed with each movement.

Its face...

The baker's breath caught.

Three faces. Stitched together side by side. A woman's face on the left, frozen in eternal terror. A child's face in the middle, mouth sewn shut. An old man's face on the right, one eye socket empty, the other eye milky and staring.

The creature's head tilted.

All three mouths opened at once.

The child's sewn lips tore apart.

The baker tried to run.

His legs wouldn't move.

The creature lunged.

It crossed the distance in a blink — faster than something that broken should move. Its bone-arm swung forward, the exposed radius sharpened to a point.

The bone spear punched through the baker's chest.

He looked down, gasping, watching the yellowed bone emerge from his sternum, glistening with his own blood. His hands reached up, trembling, touching the wound as if he couldn't believe it was real.

The creature pulled back.

The bone withdrew with a wet schluck.

The baker collapsed, blood pooling beneath him, soaking into the flour dust on his apron. His eyes stared upward, still confused, still uncomprehending.

The creature stepped over him and continued down the street.

Two streets over, a fruit vendor was closing her stall early.

The tournament always drew the crowds away, and there was no point wasting the day when she could be home with her family. She hummed while packing the last of the apples into wooden crates, already thinking about the stew she'd make for dinner.

A shadow fell across her stall.

She looked up, expecting a late customer.

A woman stood there.

No.

Not a woman.

Something wearing the shape of a woman.

Its body was stitched together from at least five different people — different heights, different builds, all crammed into a single form. The seams wept a clear, foul-smelling fluid. Its legs were mismatched, one thick and muscular, the other thin and ending in a clubfoot.

But it was the arms that made the vendor's stomach lurch.

Six of them.

Growing from the torso like the branches of a diseased tree, each one a different length, a different thickness. Some ended in hands. Others in claws. One just ended in a stump wrapped in barbed wire.

The thing's head was too small for its body — a child's head sewn onto an adult neck. The child's face smiled, a grotesque, innocent expression completely at odds with the horror below it.

"M-money?" the vendor stammered, backing away. "Do you want... do you need...?"

The creature lunged.

Two arms grabbed the vendor by the shoulders. Another wrapped around her waist. The fourth and fifth grabbed her legs.

The sixth — the one ending in barbed wire — swung toward her face.

The barbed wire wrapped around her head like a crown.

Then pulled.

The vendor's scream became a gurgle. Skin tore. Blood sprayed across the fruit stall, painting the apples red. The barbed wire tightened, cutting deeper, past flesh, into bone.

The scream stopped.

The creature dropped what remained and moved on, dragging its mismatched legs across the cobblestones, leaving a trail of blood behind it.

In the market square, a young couple had stopped to admire a jewelry stall.

The boy held up a silver necklace, grinning. "What do you think? Would this look good on you?"

The girl laughed, swatting his arm playfully. "You can't afford that."

"Maybe I've been saving up."

"You? Saving?"

They were still laughing when the ground cracked open between them.

Hands erupted from the cobblestones.

Not monster hands.

Human hands.

Dozens of them, pale and grasping, fingers stretching upward like plants seeking sunlight.

The girl screamed.

One hand grabbed her ankle.

She fell, her laughter transforming into terror. More hands wrapped around her legs, her waist, her arms. They pulled her down, dragging her toward the widening crack in the earth.

"HELP! SOMEONE—"

The boy lunged forward, grabbing her hand.

He pulled.

She pulled.

The hands pulled harder.

The girl's grip slipped from his.

She slid down into the crack, her screams echoing from below, growing fainter, then wet, then silent.

The boy stared at his empty hands.

Then more hands emerged.

They grabbed him too.

He didn't even have time to scream before they dragged him down into the dark.

The crack sealed itself.

The cobblestones reformed.

As if nothing had happened.

But the blood remained, pooling in the cracks between stones.

A mother ran through the streets, her daughter clutched to her chest.

The child was crying, face buried in her mother's shoulder, tiny hands gripping her dress with desperate strength.

Behind them, something gave chase.

It moved on all fours — but it had too many limbs, eight legs sprouting from a centipede-like body made of stitched-together human torsos. Each segment bore a face, all of them screaming silently, mouths open, eyes bulging.

It was fast.

Faster than the mother could run while carrying a child.

She could hear it gaining — the wet slap of too many limbs hitting stone, the clicking of bone joints grinding against each other.

"Please," she gasped, not knowing who she was begging. "Please, someone—"

A merchant stepped out of his shop.

Saw the creature.

Saw the mother.

And stepped back inside, slamming the door shut.

The mother's heart sank.

She ran harder, lungs burning, legs screaming.

The creature pounced.

It landed on her back, eight limbs wrapping around her body. The weight drove her to her knees. The child fell from her arms, hitting the cobblestones and rolling away, wailing.

The mother tried to reach for her daughter.

One of the creature's limbs wrapped around her throat.

Squeezed.

Bone cracked.

The mother's body went limp, head lolling at an unnatural angle.

The creature released her.

The body slumped forward.

The child screamed.

The creature turned toward the sound.

Throughout the merchant district, the horror multiplied.

A tailor was torn apart by a creature with blades for fingers, his body reduced to ribbons of fabric and flesh indistinguishable from each other.

A group of street performers tried to fight back with their props — wooden swords, fake daggers. They died screaming, their costumes soaked in real blood.

An elderly woman was dragged through her own shop window by hands that punched through the glass. Her neighbors heard the screams. No one opened their doors.

A young guard, barely out of training, tried to stand his ground. He raised his spear, hands shaking, shouting orders that no one obeyed. A creature with a dozen arms grabbed the spear, grabbed him, and pulled him apart like a child tearing petals from a flower.

Blood ran through the streets in literal rivers, pooling in gutters, staining the white cobblestones a deep, arterial red.

The air filled with screams — some cut short, others dragging on and on until throats went raw.

And still the monsters came.

More of them.

Crawling from alleys.

Emerging from sewers.

Pulling themselves out of the earth itself.

The merchant district became a graveyard.

At the eastern gate, Captain Veros stood with his unit — twenty armed guards, the best-trained soldiers in the city watch.

They'd heard the screaming.

Seen the smoke rising from the merchant district.

"FORMATION!" Veros bellowed, drawing his sword. "We move in, evacuate civilians, establish a perimeter—"

He took one step forward.

And stopped.

Not by choice.

He couldn't move.

His boot was frozen in place, mid-step, as if the air itself had solidified around him.

"Captain?" one of his men called.

The guard reached forward.

His hand struck something invisible.

Smooth. Cold. Unyielding.

"No," Veros whispered.

He pressed both hands against the barrier, pushing with all his strength. His men joined him, twenty soldiers throwing their weight against the invisible wall.

Nothing.

It didn't even flex.

They were trapped.

The eastern gate — the closest entrance to the merchant district — was sealed.

Through the archway, Veros could see the streets beyond. Could see people running, falling, dying. Could see the creatures hunting them down one by one.

Could do nothing.

"Break it!" he screamed, desperation cracking his voice. "Axes! Hammers! Magic! BREAK IT!"

His men tried.

Axes bounced off without leaving a mark.

Hammers shattered against the invisible surface.

A mage threw three different spells — fire, lightning, force — and every one dissipated on contact like water hitting hot stone.

The barrier held.

Veros sank to his knees, hands pressed against the wall, watching the slaughter continue just fifty meters away.

A woman ran toward the gate, arms outstretched, blood streaming from a wound in her side.

"HELP!" she screamed. "PLEASE, HELP—"

A creature grabbed her from behind.

Pulled her down.

She reached toward the gate, toward the guards, toward salvation that stood so close and might as well have been a world away.

Her hand fell.

Veros slammed his fist against the barrier.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Until his knuckles split and bled.

Behind him, his men stood in helpless silence, weapons drawn, watching their city die.

And they could do nothing.

Nothing but listen to the screaming.

To be continued...

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