A wet, guttural cry. Then silence.

He laughed it off. “Just screen tearing.”

It came from the alley behind his apartment building.

Three days later, his landlord found his room empty. PC still running. The monitor displayed a single, frozen frame from For Honor : three warriors—a Knight, a Viking, and a Samurai—standing over a broken corpse. The corpse wore a t-shirt and jeans.

He tried to scream, but his mouth was full of steel.

The installer was strange. No generic “click next” wizard. Just a single, blood-red progress bar and a line of text that read: “Repacking the eternal conflict…”