The streets looked like something straight out of a movie.

A bus had mounted the pavement on Lordship Lane, its doors hanging open, its engine still idling. The driver was slumped against the wheel, the horn long since given up beneath his weight. Dark streaks ran down the inside of the windscreen.

A pushchair sat abandoned in the middle of the road, a blue blanket trailing from it. A small trainer lay a few feet away, laces still tied.

Finn didn’t look at it for long.

Most corner shops had broken down, pieces of glass lying around. Through the window of a cafe, a hand protruded from beneath a collapsed shelving unit, fingers still curled around a packet of crisps.

And everywhere, the Integration was rewriting the landscape.

Trees that didn’t belong erupted from concrete, dark-barked and impossibly tall, their canopies thick with leaves that shimmered. He recognized them immediately.

Ashwood.

A common resource node in the game, used for basic crafting.

One had come up through a Ford Fiesta. The roots had split the roof like wet cardboard, and something was still inside, pinned beneath bark and branch.

Finn kept walking.

There were cracks in the pavement that glowed with pale blue light. Mana veins were their name.

In the game, they’d been ambient decoration. Here, they pulsed like something breathing beneath the city — and where one ran beneath a man in a delivery jacket, his skin had gone strange, translucent, showing the branching veins beneath like frost on a window.

’It’s all real,’ he thought. ’Every single thing they built. It’s all here. How is that even possible?’

A postbox on the corner had been swallowed by Ashwood roots. Three blocks ahead, a Rift Stalker crouched on the roof of a car, its coal-black eyes scanning the street.

Finn ducked behind a fence and waited for it to move on, his heart hammering, the kitchen knife slippery in his grip.

Every few minutes, he passed people.

Some sat where they had fallen, staring at their status windows with blank incomprehension. Some were crying.

A few had already selected classes and were testing their starter gear, swinging iron swords through empty air with the grim determination of people who wanted very badly to survive.

He watched a guy in a Deliveroo jacket experimentally thrust a short sword at a lamppost, nod to himself, then march off down the road like he still had orders to deliver.

’Looks like people are adapting already.’

For a moment, Finn thought about how much easier this would be with a firearm.

Then he remembered he was in England, not America, and the closest thing to a ranged weapon he’d ever handled was a barcode scanner.

He kept moving towards the northeast.

If Fracture’s map really had overlaid itself onto London, then a Safe Zone couldn’t be too far away. He just had to keep heading in a straight line in any direction and hope he found one before the city found a new way to kill him.

He turned the corner onto Bruce Grove and stopped dead in his tracks.

The road was gone. It hadn’t been destroyed but rather, replaced. Where tarmac and terraced houses should have been, the Integration had carved out a clearing of earth, ringed by Ashwood trees twice the height of the buildings they had consumed.

The air was thick with a strange flow of energy. He could feel it prickling against his skin—a low electrical hum, like standing too close to a generator.

"This feeling..." he whispered. "If the forums were right... this has to be mana."

And in the center of the clearing, something was waiting.

It wasn’t a Rift Stalker.

It stood eight feet tall, humanoid, its body wrapped in overlapping plates of dark chitin like living armor. Its head was featureless—no eyes, no mouth, just a smooth plane of black shell. Four extra limbs arched from its back, each ending in a curved blade as long as Finn’s forearm.

It stood perfectly still, facing away from him.

And even motionless, it radiated a pressure that made his teeth ache.

He knew exactly what it was.

A Hollow Knight.

It was a Mini-boss tier. Something meant to be tackled by a coordinated party of five near the end of the first week.

It was not something a classless Level 1 with a kitchen knife was ever supposed to see.

Nope, Finn thought, already stepping backward. Nope, nope, absolutely not. Wrong street. My mistake—

The Hollow Knight’s featureless head snapped toward him.

It had no eyes. No visible way to see.

And yet somehow, it knew.

It knew he was there the way a spider knows something has touched its web—through vibration, through instinct, through whatever passed for awareness in a thing made entirely of chitin and killing intent.

’Oh, come on!’

Finn ran.

He made it eleven steps.

The Hollow Knight crossed the clearing in two strides, incredibly fast for something that size. Its bladed limbs churned up the earth as it moved, and then one of them whipped out in a casual backhand.

It caught Finn across the ribs and launched him through the front window of a charity shop.

[-74% HP]

He crashed into a rack of secondhand coats and hit the floor in a shower of glass and rattling hangers.

Pain exploded across his left side.

For one horrible second, he couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t do anything except stare at the health bar hanging in the corner of his vision. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

[HP: 26%]

One hit.

A single hit had taken more than half his health.

"Seventy-four damage," he wheezed from the floor. "One more hit like that and I’m..."

The Hollow Knight ducked through the shattered window. Its bladed limbs scraped the ceiling, gouging plaster, and its featureless head swept the room until it found him—crumpled behind a till counter, bleeding from a dozen glass cuts, a kitchen knife still clutched in a hand that wouldn’t stop shaking.

’This isn’t a game,’ Finn thought. ’That thing’s really going to kill me.’