I, Kryzeir

It was daytime, but yesterday's fires continued to rage on, scattered from the Tropics of Wam in the north to the Nowho Forest in the south, and patched over nearly every biome in between. Kryzeir came across some random clothes in an alley between a few destroyed buildings. He found a dirty white shirt, and a change of black cargo pants with straps that tapered at the ankle. He had zero ideas of what to do next. The sun was blocked out by smoke so he couldn’t consume sun rays for energy like usual. He dashed through street after street in search of something to eat, avoiding the pursuits of the brawny Golems. While traversing what was left of Section Celior, he came across a Militia sword in a wrecked freight station. He molded some of the grass stems he had in his pack to create a sheath, his eyes were glassy as he stored the blade on his back. Maki blipped through his mind, staggering him for a moment. He held the nearby wall with one hand, the other to his head. Then, he heard a struggle on the rooftop of a nearby shop in the suburbia, a block from the station. An Aean refugee screamed as he was punched through the rooftop of a diner, to the street. The impact killed him instantly. He was struck by one of the larger mutations, termed Berserk by the first invader Kryzeir encountered in Wajeh. It leapt from the rooftop onto his lifeless body. Digging its claws deep into his torso. Kryzeir froze with fear, and as if on cue, the Berserk Golem sniffed twice, then made direct eye contact with him. Just then, a second one lunged from the same rooftop the first one had. Then a third. All of a sudden a massing horde of more than a hundred Berserk Golems flooded from the hole in the rooftop. The building buckled from the sheer weight of them all. Kryzeir now stood parallel to a gang of mutated brutes, all of whom gained a whiff of the fear permeating from his perspiration. He bolted up the street to his right. The Berserk dashed after him. I gotta survive. Kryzeirs internal mantra became this single phrase while running as fast as he could, trying not to think about the brute pack of mutated savages trailing behind him, who were once sentient individuals. He cut left between a narrow corridor to the next street, the horde had no issue plowing straight through the storefronts of the corridor. Kryzeir didn’t pick up on the correlation between his fear and the hordes interest in him. He couldn't really think straight about anything, his mind on the fritz as more adrenaline pumped through his body and the horde gained ground on him. There was no way he’d be able to kill a beast who was once a sentient being. Outrunning them was his only option. He zipped up fire escapes, swung from protruding pipes and rafters, hopping from rooftop to balcony in numerous directions, over many obstacles, for what seemed like notches, yet he couldn’t shake the Golems. Their bloodlust only increased with his sweat and heart rate, their pursuit becoming more brutal. There were other civilians being chased by groups of the smaller brutes, dodging through glidecars on the streets, and scurrying throughout the devastated landscape, just as he was. The Aean were a naturally agile and durable species, but still with their limits. Kryzeir darted down a backstreet, grabbed hold of a lamppost, and slung himself up from the ground to the roof of what was left of an apartment building. The moment he landed he fell through to a kitchen. Inside, he got an up close, personal glimpse of how his escape attempt would end if he got caught by any one of the Golems pursuing him. A Brawler was shoving its claws inside the body of a deceased Aean who wasn’t infected. It wasn’t eating him or anything, it was just removing his organs, almost as if it were looking for something. There was however a small, partially mutated Brawler standing on the kitchen counter left of the full Brawler, feasting on a rodent. It looked at Kryzeir. He could tell it was a girl, far younger than he was. Kryzeir was jarred, then he heard his pursuers hopping up to the apartment roof. With no time to discern, he started moving again. Some of the horde fell through the same hole he had, fumbling after him, while most continued on the roof. The two Golems in the apartment joined the pursuit. He managed to exit the apartment through a window, and was now running on a row of rooftops in the main impact area of Section Celior. The gap between him and the Golems was no longer safe. From between the smoke, dust, ravaged megabuildings and lifted tectonic plates; he noticed a large, mounted metal object roughly sixty meters in height to the left of the rooftops he was running on. He couldn’t make out what exactly it was through the smoke, what he could hear was the sound of charging turbines, then, a ray of light shooting into the ground from beneath the metal object. “Whoa!” he said. Just as he did, one of the larger Golems in pursuit got close enough to whack him from the rooftop with its hand, the size of his torso, into the building wall across the street. Before he could stand, the entire horde leapt down, coming at him with full force, battering him through the building he had just bounced off of until he came out the back wall, where he was tossed into another alley. The horde slowed their momentum here. Everything he had experienced in his life up to this point was flashing in his memory like a fever dream. He was surrounded at every escape point by the horde. From the hole he was rammed through, to the surrounding alley exits and above fire escapes. He couldn't parkour his way out of this one. The Berserk growled with anticipation as they slowly closed in on their target. They weren’t chasing him on any primal desire for physical food. No, they wanted to feast on the peak of his terror as they ripped into his flesh. These beasts were once simple, civil sentients. What they were now was the farthest thing from civil. And in a foamed, salivating snarl, the Berserk closest to him lunged forward.