The butcher was going to die.

He knew it with the certainty of a man who'd spent his life cutting meat and recognizing when something was beyond saving.

Three of them had him cornered in his own shop — patchwork abominations with too many limbs and faces that screamed silently. His cleaver lay on the floor, knocked from his grip. His back pressed against the cold stone wall. Blood — not his, not yet — covered the floor in sticky pools.

The closest creature lunged, arms spreading wide, fingers ending in bone spurs.

The butcher closed his eyes.

Waited for the pain.

It never came.

Instead, he heard a sound like tearing fabric.

Then silence.

He opened his eyes.

The creature was gone.

Not dead.

Not collapsed.

Gone.

Where it had been standing, the air shimmered — a vertical line, impossibly thin, that bent light around its edges. The line expanded, became a slit, a tear in reality itself.

Through the tear, the butcher glimpsed something else. Another place. Darkness. Stars that weren't stars. Cold that made his bones ache just from looking at it.

The tear sealed itself.

Vanished.

The creature with it.

The other two monsters turned.

A figure stood in the doorway.

Tall. Lean. Wearing a long white coat that fell to his ankles, pristine despite the blood-soaked streets outside. Beneath the coat, simple black clothing. No armor. No weapons visible.

But it was the mask that made the butcher's breath catch.

Pure white porcelain, smooth and featureless except for two eyeholes. No mouth. No nose. No decoration. Just blank, perfect white, reflecting the dim light of the shop like polished bone.

The figure didn't speak.

Didn't move.

Just stood there, one hand hanging loose at his side.

The second creature charged.

The masked figure's hand twitched.

Space folded.

The creature was ten meters away one instant. Then it was directly in front of the masked figure the next — not because it moved, but because the distance between them simply ceased to exist.

The masked figure's hand came up.

Palm open.

He pressed it against the creature's chest.

The creature exploded.

Not outward.

Inward.

Its body collapsed into itself, compressing, shrinking, folding along impossible angles. Flesh crumpled like paper. Bones snapped and twisted. The creature's silent scream became a wet gurgle as its entire mass compressed into a sphere no larger than a fist.

The sphere hung in the air for a heartbeat.

Then vanished with a soft pop, leaving only a faint shimmer where it had been.

The third creature hesitated.

Whatever instinct drove these stitched-together horrors recognized something in the masked figure. Something that made even a mindless monster pause.

The masked figure tilted his head slightly.

Raised his hand.

And pulled.

The creature flew backward — not pushed, but pulled by something invisible. It crashed through the shop's back wall, through the alley beyond, through another building's wall. The sound of shattering stone echoed as the creature was dragged through obstacle after obstacle.

Then silence.

The masked figure turned to leave.

"Wait!" the butcher gasped, finding his voice. "Who—"

But the figure was already gone.

Not walked away.

Just... gone.

One moment standing in the doorway.

The next, empty space.

The butcher stared at the spot where his savior had been.

Then grabbed his cleaver and ran.

Four streets over, a group of survivors had barricaded themselves in a tavern.

Twelve people — merchants, workers, a few students who'd skipped the tournament. They'd shoved tables against the door, broken chair legs into makeshift weapons, and were now huddled in the center of the room, listening to the scratching outside.

The scratching grew louder.

Then stopped.

One of the students, a girl barely sixteen, pressed her ear to the door.

"Maybe they left?" she whispered.

The door exploded inward.

Wood splintered. Tables flew like leaves. The barricade they'd spent ten minutes building disintegrated in a single impact.

Creatures poured through the opening.

Five of them.

One had arms that ended in rusted saws. Another's torso was split open, revealing organs that still pulsed with stolen life. A third walked on hands instead of feet, its body inverted, spine bent backward impossibly.

The survivors screamed.

Backed away.

Nowhere to go.

The creature with saw-arms raised them high—

And stopped.

Its arms — both of them — simply stopped mid-swing, frozen as if time itself had paused.

But time hadn't stopped.

The creature's head could still move, could still look down at its arms in what might have been confusion.

A line appeared across its torso.

Perfectly horizontal.

Impossibly thin.

The line widened.

The creature's upper body slid off its lower body, separating along the line with surgical precision. No blood sprayed. No organs spilled. The two halves just... separated, as if there had always been empty space between them.

Both halves collapsed.

The masked figure stood where the creature had been.

He'd appeared between one heartbeat and the next, materializing from nothing.

The other four creatures turned on him.

He raised both hands.

Space twisted.

The creature with the exposed organs found itself suddenly ten meters to the left — not because it moved, but because the masked figure had swapped its position with empty air on the other side of the room. It crashed into the wall with bone-breaking force.

The inverted creature lunged.

The masked figure sidestepped — but his sidestep covered three meters instead of one. Distance warped around him, bending to his will, making each small movement carry him impossible distances.

He appeared behind the inverted creature.

Placed one finger against its spine.

Pushed.

The creature compressed. Not slowly. Instantly. Its body folded in on itself like a house of cards collapsing, becoming flatter, thinner, until it was nothing more than a two-dimensional outline pressed against the floor.

The outline flickered.

Disappeared.

Erased from existence entirely.

Two creatures left.

They both charged simultaneously — one from the left, one from the right, trying to flank him.

The masked figure clapped his hands together.

The sound echoed wrong — too loud, too deep, resonating in a way that made the survivors' teeth ache.

The two creatures slammed together in mid-air.

Not because they'd jumped.

Because the space between them had folded, bringing them together like closing a book. They collided with devastating force, their stitched bodies tangling, limbs breaking, faces smashing into each other.

The masked figure opened his hands.

A sphere of distorted space formed between his palms — a perfect orb where light bent strangely, where the air seemed to shimmer and ripple.

He threw it.

The sphere expanded mid-flight, growing from the size of a fist to the size of a cart wheel. It engulfed both tangled creatures.

Then inverted.

The creatures screamed — the first sound any of the monsters had made — as they were pulled into the sphere. Their bodies stretched, elongated, dragged into the impossible geometry of the spatial distortion.

They vanished into it.

The sphere collapsed.

Gone.

The masked figure lowered his hands.

Turned to face the survivors.

They stared at him, mouths open, eyes wide.

"Thank you," someone whispered. "Thank you, please, can you—"

The masked figure was already walking away.

Toward the door.

"Wait!" a merchant shouted. "There are more out there! We need—"

The masked figure stepped through the doorway.

And vanished.

Not walked into the street.

Vanished.

Mid-step, he simply ceased to be there.

The survivors rushed to the door, looking out into the blood-soaked street.

Empty.

No sign of the white coat.

No sign of anyone.

Just bodies.

And silence.

The masked figure reappeared three blocks away.

A family — father, mother, two children — were running from something that resembled a wolf made of human parts. The creature was gaining, its mismatched legs somehow coordinating into a loping sprint.

The masked figure appeared directly in its path.

The wolf-thing tried to stop.

Too late.

It ran into him.

Or rather, it ran into the space where he stood — and that space folded.

The creature entered from one side and emerged from the other as three separate pieces, neatly divided as if by invisible blades. The pieces tumbled past the masked figure, already dissolving into ash.

The family stopped running.

Turned.

Stared.

The father opened his mouth to speak.

The masked figure raised one hand — not threateningly, just a gesture — and pointed toward a side street. The safest route out of the district. Away from the worst of the carnage.

Then he was gone again.

Teleported.

Vanished.

Reappeared two streets down.

For the next ten minutes, the masked figure moved through the merchant district like a ghost.

He appeared wherever the screaming was loudest.

Wherever the dying needed saving.

A creature dragging a wounded guard into an alley found itself suddenly falling through a spatial rift, dropping into some elsewhere from which it would never return.

Three monsters cornering a group of children in a dead-end street collapsed into singularities — compressed into points of infinite density before winking out of existence.

A massive thing — twenty bodies stitched into a grotesque centipede — found its segments separated by invisible cuts, each piece falling away cleanly before disintegrating.

He didn't speak.

Didn't stay.

Just appeared, killed, and moved on.

Saving who he could.

Ending what needed ending.

The survivors started calling to him — begging him to stay, to protect them, to tell them what was happening.

He never answered.

Just pointed them toward safety.

And vanished.

Captain Veros was still at the eastern gate, still pressed against the barrier, when he saw it.

A flash of white in the distance.

Moving through the streets.

Creatures dying wherever it went.

"Captain!" one of his men shouted. "Captain, look!"

Veros watched as the white-coated figure appeared in the middle of the merchant square. Watched as six monsters converged on him from all sides. Watched as space itself seemed to bend around the figure, as the creatures were torn apart by forces Veros couldn't begin to comprehend.

"He's clearing them out," Veros whispered. "He's actually..."

The masked figure turned.

For just a moment, Veros could have sworn the featureless mask was looking directly at him.

Across hundreds of meters.

Through the chaos.

Eye to eye.

Then the figure raised one hand toward the barrier.

Veros felt his heart leap.

He's going to break it. He's going to free us.

The masked figure's hand glowed faintly.

Space rippled.

The barrier... flickered.

Just for a second.

Then stabilized.

The masked figure lowered his hand.

Tilted his head slightly, as if considering something.

Then vanished.

Didn't try again.

Didn't stay to help the guards.

Just... left.

"No," Veros breathed. "No, wait, come back—"

But the white coat was gone.

The merchant district still burned.

The monsters still hunted.

But wherever the masked figure had passed, there was a trail of ash and silence.

A path of salvation carved through the nightmare.

And then he was gone entirely.

Leaving only questions.

And the faint, impossible hope that someone, somewhere, was strong enough to fight back.

To be continued...

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