The city of Draymoor was choking on itself, flooded alleys, corrupt police, biotech gangs, and the smell of rotting wires. On rooftops, where the acid rain hissed off steel and concrete, something stirred.
It wasn’t human. It wasn’t supposed to be alive.
Claw crouched, unmoving. A black rat, taller than most men, hunched in a bodysuit layered with salvaged armor, tubes pulsing with green fluid running down his spine. His tail twitched like a blade's edge. His glowing green eyes scanned the tower below.
Mission: Infiltrate VarkCorp. Erase everything.
Target: Dominik Vark, trafficker of plague-born weapons and splicer of creatures unholy.
Claw descended the side of the building with hooked claws and no safety net. The guards never saw him coming, until one of them slipped in the wet intestines of the man next to him.
In a flash of motion, Claw slammed a curved blade through the guard’s mouth and twisted until bone snapped. The scream came wet and gurgled, silenced by the sharp end of Claw's boot crushing the man’s windpipe.
Blood slicked the floor. Claw didn’t stop to look.
Inside the mainframe lab, men screamed as the lights blacked out.
By the time backup arrived, they found human corpses peeled open like fruit. Entrails pinned to the walls with wiring. One man’s head was turned backward and stitched with dental floss to his own chest.
Claw had used the corpse’s eye to open the retinal scanner.
Deeper. Down the elevators.
Basement Level 7. Quarantine Block.
The Maw Pack waited. Engineered beasts, mutated hounds with metal-stitched ribs, exposed organs wrapped in tech. They moved as one.
Claw stood alone.
No backup. No plan B.
The beasts lunged.
He tore the first one’s spine out through its stomach. Ripped the second’s jaw clean off and jammed it into the third’s eye. One hound managed to bite down on Claw’s shoulder, until he stabbed it in the rectum and gutted it up to the ribs, holding it close like a lover as it died choking on its own bile.
By the time they stopped moving, Claw stood drenched in gore, steam rising off him like a demon just pulled from hell.
Dominik Vark was in his panic room.
But Claw was already inside, sitting in the dark.
Vark turned, trembling.
“You’re just a rat,” he whispered.
Claw stood.
“No. I’m what you made when you got greedy.”
He pulled out the Vial, the same virus strain Vark once sold to kill millions of lab animals for "testing." Claw jammed it into Vark’s neck and held him while his body convulsed, organs liquefying. Face melting. Brain boiling in the skull.
Claw stared into his eyes the entire time.
When it was done, Vark was no longer a man, just meat. Slumped, foaming, dripping.
Draymoor never knew who did it.
But the underworld whispered about a killer in the storm. A ghost that walked like a man but left behind claw marks and ribcages twisted into symbols. They said he only kills those who experiment on the forgotten.
Now? He’s already watching someone else.
Another name. Another night.
He wipes the blood from his blade, stands in the pouring rain, and fades back into the mist of broken neon.
Claw is no hero.
He’s the vengeance that nests in your walls.
And he never, ever leaves survivors.
