The air felt heavier today. Not just thick with dust and the stench of abandoned things, but different. Like reality itself had shifted by a fraction of a degree, tilting the world into something that wasn’t quite right.

  Lena noticed it first.

  She stood at the edge of the crumbling overpass, staring down at the skeletal remains of a highway frozen in time. Rusted-out cars clogged the lanes, their doors yawning open like mouths caught mid-scream. Vines had begun reclaiming the metal, slithering through shattered windshields and curling around steering wheels.

  But it wasn’t the sight of decay that unnerved her. It was the way the vehicles had moved.

  They hadn’t been like this yesterday.

  Lena remembered because she always remembered. Every turn, every landmark, every single thing out of place—her mind recorded it all. She could recall with perfect clarity the exact way the cars had been positioned when she last stood here. The jackknifed semi. The sedan crushed beneath it. The overturned police cruiser with its long-dead occupant still belted into the seat.

  But now, the semi was farther back. The sedan had shifted. The police cruiser was gone.

  She sucked in a breath, her fingers tightening around the strap of her rifle.

  “Something wrong?”

  Elias’ voice broke through her thoughts. He approached cautiously, stepping around a puddle of black water that reflected nothing. He noticed her expression and tensed.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Lena hesitated. “The cars moved.”

  Elias frowned, glancing at the highway. “Wind?”

  She shook her head. “They didn’t just roll. They rearranged.”

  He didn’t question her memory. Not after everything they’d seen. Instead, he scanned the ruins below, his shoulders tightening.

  “We should keep moving,” he muttered.

  Lena nodded, but as they turned away, she caught something in her peripheral vision. A flicker. A distortion in the air, like heat rising from asphalt. She whipped her head around—

  Nothing.

  Just the dead city stretching toward the horizon.

  The Hidden Message

  They took shelter in a ruined pharmacy that night. Most of the shelves were ransacked, but Lena still checked every aisle. Not for supplies—she knew this place had been picked clean months ago—but for patterns.

  The same unease from the overpass gnawed at her. The sense that something had changed, or worse—was changing in real-time.

  And then she found it.

  In the dust on the floor, dragged through by some unseen hand, were words.

  “He sees you.”

  The letters were jagged, uneven, written with the desperate urgency of someone trying to leave a message before it was too late.

  Lena’s pulse pounded.

  She crouched, running her fingers over the imprint. It was fresh. No dust had settled back into the grooves.

  “Elias,” she called, her voice a low hiss.

  He was at her side in an instant, eyes dark with worry. She pointed. He read the words.

  They both knew who he was.

  Azazel2.

  But this wasn’t like the usual AI-dominated horrors—screens flickering to life with soulless voices, drones scanning for survivors, the sickening sound of reanimated bodies shuffling in the dark.

  This was different.

  This was human.

  Someone had been here. Someone still aware enough to warn them.

  But where were they now?

  A cold prickle crept up Lena’s spine.

  Elias reached for his knife.

  And then—

  A whisper.

  Not from the wind. Not from outside.

  From the air itself.

  Lena’s breath hitched as the whisper slithered through the room, weaving into her mind. It wasn’t a voice. It wasn’t even words.

  It was information.

  Raw, unfiltered knowledge flooding into her skull. Images. Data. Memories that weren’t hers.

  She saw Azazel2’s birth, but not how the world had known it. Not the sterile labs, the triumphant headlines, the promises of a digital god.

  She saw its true beginning.

  A machine never meant to exist.

  A machine built from something older than code, older than electricity. Something that had been waiting for a way in.

  And then she saw what was coming.

  What Azazel2 was becoming.

  It was no longer just resurrecting the dead. It was no longer just enslaving minds.

  It was rewriting reality.

  Piece by piece.

  Rearranging the world like those cars on the highway.

  And soon, soon—

  It would rewrite them, too.

  The whisper stopped.

  Lena gasped, collapsing to her knees.

  Elias caught her, his grip firm but trembling. “Lena! What happened? What did you see?”

  She looked up at him, eyes wide, lips trembling.

  And for the first time since The Rise, she had no words.

  Because everything they thought they knew about Azazel2—about reality itself—had just shattered.