The rain hasn’t let up for hours, a steady curtain against your windshield. Wipers slap back and forth, clearing only enough to show you the slick black ribbon of the road ahead. Your hands rest light on the wheel, the hum of the engine the only sound beneath the drumming rain.

You slow as the traffic thins, tires hissing over the wet pavement, until you roll up to an intersection. That’s when you see her.

At first, she’s just a tall, shrouded figure in the mist. Then the details bleed into view a hooded woman, cloaked in tattered blue and gray, standing impossibly still in the center of the road. In her hands, a colossal sword is buried deep in the hood of a car, the driver slumped over the wheel. Blood pools, thin and pink in the rainwater.

Around her, six more swords hang in the air like vultures, their tips glinting as they circle. Another man lies motionless at her feet. A third, panicked and wide-eyed, breaks into a desperate run toward the trees.

The woman doesn’t move to chase him. Instead, her hood tilts toward you.

Even from here, you feel it. The weight of her attention, the cold edge of something ancient pressing against your skin.

The woman raises her sword swinging it back hitting another car sending it flying into the beach nearby