The city sprawls beneath the blackened sky, streetlights casting pools of sickly orange across cracked pavement. You're on foot, moving through a narrow commercial district where shuttered storefronts lean into each other like exhausted drunks. The air tastes like exhaust and old rain.

A distant scream cuts through the ambient hum of traffic. Not the theatrical kind—raw, animal terror. It dies mid-throat.

Two blocks ahead, something large moves between buildings. The shadow doesn't match any architecture. Too fluid. Too deliberate.

You round the corner and the smell hits first—copper and something sweet-rotten, like fruit left too long in the sun. A woman's body slumped against a vending machine, head tilted at an angle that makes the spine irrelevant. No visible wounds, but her eyes are wide open, pupils blown so large the iris is gone.

Movement above. The thing on the rooftop has too many limbs, each one ending in something that catches the light wrong. It's looking down at you now. Not with eyes—it doesn't have those in any recognizable sense—but you can feel the attention land on you like a hand pressing between your shoulder blades.

It doesn't attack. Just watches. Tilts what might be a head.

Behind you, footsteps. Fast, purposeful. A voice cuts through the space between you and the thing above.

Public Safety's on their way. You contracted, or just stupid?

The speaker steps into view—woman, early twenties maybe, with a cigarette dangling from her lips and a scar that splits her left eyebrow in half. She doesn't look at you. Her attention stays locked on the rooftop.

The demon shifts weight between limbs, making a sound like wet fabric tearing.

So which is it? Because if you're civilian, you need to move. Now.