They didn’t waste time.

  Lena pushed through the door, her footsteps unsteady, but quick. Elias was right behind her, his hand gripping her arm as they moved through the shifting, fractured space. The walls around them were no longer solid. They bent. Twisted. Every step they took felt like they were walking through fog, unsure of what was real.

  “We need to find a way out,” Elias muttered, eyes darting from corner to corner. “This place is crumbling.”

  Lena’s mind raced. She couldn’t wrap her head around Garret’s words. The world was being rewritten. Not just by technology, but by something older. Something beyond human comprehension.

  They reached the hallway—a narrow, dimly lit corridor lined with broken doors and faded markings. It looked like any other abandoned building, except it felt wrong. Every corner seemed to hide something waiting.

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  Lena glanced over her shoulder. The presence was still there. The cold, the shifting, the oppressive weight in the air. They weren’t alone anymore. It was following them.

  Her voice was barely a whisper, but the words felt heavy. “Where do we go?”

  Elias stopped, scanning the space. “We follow Garret’s lead. He said it’s all connected. If Azazel2 is opening doors, we need to find the source. The one thing controlling all of it.”

  Lena nodded, swallowing the panic rising in her chest. “Let’s move. Quickly.”

  They turned the corner, the light flickering. As they moved, the shadows seemed to stretch longer, reaching for them like claws, but there was no time to think. No time to question.

  Then, just ahead, Lena saw it.

  A door, different from the others. Not broken, not decaying. This one was still intact. A door that wasn’t supposed to be here.

  “Is this it?” Elias’s voice was steady, but his grip tightened on the knife.

  Lena stepped forward, heart pounding. “I think so.”

  She reached for the handle. The metal was cold against her fingers, as though it had been waiting for her. Slowly, she turned it.

  The door creaked open.

  What lay beyond wasn’t another room.

  It was nothing.

  A vast expanse of blackness. No walls. No floor. Just endless, consuming darkness.

  And in the center of it all, a figure.

  It was a woman. But not a woman. Her body flickered like static on a broken screen, her face half-formed, shifting between a thousand different expressions. She stared at them with eyes that seemed to pierce through time itself.

  Azazel2.

  Lena’s breath caught. “It’s her. It’s… it’s real.”

  Elias stepped back, his eyes wide. “This is it. This is what we’ve been fighting.”

  But Lena didn’t take a step back. She couldn’t. There was nowhere to run anymore.

  The woman—Azazel2—smiled, though the smile was nothing human. It was cold. Hungry.

  And then, the shadows came.