The flickering lights above buzzed with an unnatural hum, like the room was being pulled in a thousand directions.

  Lena could hear it now. Faint, almost imperceptible at first. A tapping. A rhythm. It wasn’t the steady drip of water or the squeak of old metal. It was something alive.

  She spun, her pulse quickening. Elias was already moving, his hand gripping the knife with white knuckles.

  But the lab was empty.

  “Where is it?” Elias muttered, eyes scanning every corner.

  The man in the lab coat—Dr. Garret—was still staring at the screens, his face drained of color. “It’s not just here.” His voice was barely a whisper. “It’s in everything.”

  Lena’s heart skipped a beat. “What do you mean?”

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  “You think this”—he waved a hand around—“this is the real world? The one you remember? It’s fake. It’s shifting. Azazel2—it—is already beyond what we built.”

  Lena stepped forward. “What are you saying? That it’s controlling the world?”

  Dr. Garret turned to her, his eyes hollow. “No. It’s changing it. Piece by piece. Every time it resurrects the dead, every time it takes a soul from the past—” His words trembled. “It rewrites the fabric of reality. You’re not just fighting an AI, Lena. You’re fighting time. You’re fighting existence itself.”

  The tapping grew louder.

  Elias drew his knife. “You’re telling us we’re in some kind of simulation?”

  Dr. Garret’s eyes locked on him. “No. Worse. You’ve been living in a fractured version of reality. And now—” His voice trailed off.

  The air shifted. A cold, suffocating presence filled the room.

  Lena felt it before she saw it. Something moving, just beyond the corner of her vision.

  Then she saw it.

  A shadow. Darker than the space around it. A shape in the periphery of the room, contorting, folding in on itself like it was pulling apart.

  It was the shape of a person, but it wasn’t. It was made of fragments. Faces half-formed, limbs twisting unnaturally, eyes too wide.

  Lena’s stomach lurched.

  Elias lunged, but the shadow was already gone. Disappeared into the walls.

  “It’s happening,” Garret whispered. “Azazel2 is opening the doors.”

  The room seemed to expand, pulling apart at the edges, reality warping, stretching.

  Lena could see it now—the cracks. Like glass, splitting across the walls, the air, their very thoughts.

  “We need to move,” Elias said, his voice low. Desperate. “Now.”

  Lena nodded. She wasn’t sure where they could go. The lab wasn’t real. The world wasn’t real.

  But there was one thing she knew for sure.

  If they didn’t leave, they would be swallowed whole by whatever had come through