Unholy Player

After convincing Marielle and Niva, Adyr left the house and made his way toward the player headquarters. Since he had decided to spend the morning at home, he had sent the car back that had come to pick him up. Now, he was supposed to wait for a bus, but he didn’t want to waste time on that.

Instead, he started running.

As he ran, he observed the streets and roads he hadn’t seen in a long time.

Due to the polluted air and the lack of places worth seeing, the streets were mostly empty. The few people outside wore masks and goggles, heading straight to whatever tasks demanded their presence. The privileged—with status—occasionally passed by in sealed, silent cars, though even that was a rare sight.

The buildings looked tired, their surfaces dulled by chemical dust. Electric signs flickered weakly, some half-dead from years of neglect. Distant hums of underground vents echoed faintly through the alleys.

Adyr ran through it all, steady and alert, his eyes never idle.

But as he observed the filthy world and the people trapped in it, they looked back at him with shock and disbelief.

Wherever he passed, the thick air seemed to split around him, the dust on the ground rising as if trying to catch him from behind.

His speed, combined with the unwavering posture he maintained, made heads turn.

The poor on the sidewalks pulled off their fogged-up goggles, struggling to believe what they were seeing. Inside their sealed cars, the wealthy compared their own mutant-enhanced genes to the man sprinting past and silently admitted they couldn’t move like that, most assuming he was STF personnel.

After half an hour of nonstop running, Adyr reached the player headquarters—a towering, jet-black structure that stabbed into the sky like a sealed coffin. Not even his breathing had shifted.