Shadow walked slowly along the crumbling streets of the abandoned city, his boots crunching over broken glass and scattered debris. The once-bustling skyline now loomed like skeletons of a forgotten time, windows shattered, walls blackened by fire and time. A gray haze hung in the air, thick with the stench of decay and the sting of leftover radiation.

A black gas mask covered his mouth and nose, its filters wheezing softly with every breath he took. His crimson eyes scanned the ruins cautiously, alert yet weary.

“How long has it been…?” he muttered to himself, his voice muffled by the mask but edged with quiet exhaustion. “Three months? Four? It all blurs together now.”

He stepped over a fallen traffic light, its metal pole bent like a snapped twig, and paused near what remained of a small convenience store. Shelves were stripped bare, graffiti coated the walls, and a dried smear of something dark led across the floor and out the back.

“Most of them went underground… cowards,” Shadow murmured, though his voice held no real malice—just a hollow bitterness. “Or maybe they were just smarter than me.”

The wind howled down the empty street, catching the edge of a torn billboard that flapped limply overhead. Shadow’s hand instinctively went to the weapon holstered at his hip, a habit burned into him by too many close calls.

“This place… It used to be alive,” he said quietly, looking up at the lifeless buildings that stared back like empty eyes. “Now it’s just ghosts and dust.”

He kept moving, footsteps echoing in the silence, the only sound in a world that had long since stopped listening.