The others had passed out inside.
But Alex stood alone on the balcony, hands gripping the cold, rusted railing as the wind picked up just slightly.
L.A. was loud even at night — sirens in the distance, a drunk guy singing down the block, neon signs flickering like they couldn't decide whether to die or keep pretending. It was chaos.
But above it all, he felt it again.
Not danger.
Not even presence.
Observation.
The kind of awareness you don't sense with your eyes or ears — the kind that crawls across your skin when someone's eyes are on you, but no one's in the room.
He looked around. Up. Across rooftops. Behind lamp posts. Shadows danced, but nothing stared back.
Then—
DING.
The system notification floated across his vision like a whisper etched into glass.
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION]
He Is Watching You.
Alex's stomach turned.
"What… the hell does that mean?"
He whispered it to himself, almost hoping the system wouldn't respond. It didn't.
He closed the interface fast.
"Nope. No. We're not doing cryptic horror riddles tonight," he muttered, backing off the balcony like the concrete would collapse beneath him.
But the feeling didn't leave.
That sense of weight on his back, like someone was reading him — not his actions, but his soul.
He stepped inside, locking the balcony door behind him, like that would help.
Inside the room, the lights flickered once. Just for a moment. He froze.
His breath was shallow.
"This isn't India anymore," he murmured. "This isn't dragons or explosions. This feels... older. Worse."
He opened the system again, hoping for more info, anything that would clarify the ominous warning.
Instead, a faint glitch buzzed across the interface. And then another alert:
[QUEST UPDATE – ARTIFACT DETECTED]
Signal Interference: Severe.Location Obscured.Source of Interference: Bound Curse.Note: Artifact appears to be... embedded within an immortal host.
Object Type: Blade.Condition: Active.Name: [REDACTED]
Alex blinked.
"Embedded… in what?"
No answer.
And somehow, he already knew.
Whoever — whatever — was watching him…
The artifact was part of it.
Plunged into its body.
Not guarded.
Burdened.
Far away — across the city, between two crumbling buildings untouched for decades — "He" stood beneath a dying streetlamp.
The chain around his left arm pulsed again. The air around him was dead still.
Buried deep between his ribs, glowing faintly within blackened, cracked flesh…was a blade.
Old. Ancient. Still humming with dormant power. Not sealed — just… stuck.
Like a key in a lock never meant to be turned again.
"He" lowered his head.
He didn't speak.
But Alex felt it, across the city, like a chill in his bones.
The next artifact was inside something that should not exist.
And it was watching.