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In the final days of the Old City, the alarms did not sound for rain or war. They sounded for the Pulse—a sudden, violent spike in atmospheric static that triggered the unraveling. ​No one was immune, and no one knew who would break next. ​The change was absolute, effortless, and terrifying. An archivist cataloging ration permits would feel his spine fuse into a rigid, reinforced column; within seconds, his skin would split to reveal dense, oil-slick fur, his teeth broadening into shears as a low, rumbling predators' howl tore from a throat no longer built for human speech. There was no internal struggle, no heroic effort of willpower to hold the mind together. When the shift claimed a body, the human consciousness simply dissolved, replaced entirely by the instincts of a apex hunter. ​The city had adapted not through cure, but through architecture. ​Highways were replaced by reinforced steel catwalks suspended forty feet above the ground. Buildings were constructed as series of blast-proof airlocks; every residential room doubled as a high-security containment cell fitted with automated tranquilizer vents. Dinner conversations were held behind reinforced glass dividers, families speaking through intercoms while keeping one eye on the bio-monitors attached to every wrist. A sudden spike in heart rate or a drop in blood oxygen was often the only warning before a loved one turned into a ten-foot, bone-armored terror that would tear through the drywall to kill anything that breathed. ​Street sweepers—heavily armored automated drones—roamed the lower avenues around the clock. Their job was simple: clear the feral creatures that hunted in the shadowy alleyways below, using high-voltage grids and sonic cannons. Yet, every morning, fresh bloody claw marks scored the sides of the steel walkways above, and abandoned boots littered the crosswalks. ​No one spoke of the future. Society had reduced itself to a cold, efficient routine of survival: work, isolate, contain. The worst part was not the beasts themselves, but the silence that followed an outbreak. When the shift eventually reversed hours or days later, human beings would awaken in the wreckage of their own making, naked, drenched in crimson, staring at the empty rooms where their neighbors used to be—left with no memory of the hunt, only the crushing weight of the carnage they had wrought.