The harsh sunlight of the exterior world didn't feel like a liberation; it felt like an interrogation.
Cattleya stumbled past the heavy iron threshold, her bare feet meeting cold, rain-slicked concrete. The door clicked shut behind her with a definitive, mechanical thud that echoed in her skull, cutting off the dim, flickering fluorescence of Rusty”s basement tomb.
She stood in an alleyway choked with rusted industrial pipes and overflowing dumpsters, flanked by towering brick facades that scraped a gray, overcast sky. There was no Oakhaven here. No digital fog clinging to the cobblestones, no synthetic rain programmed to mirror her heartbeat, and no invisible walls corralling her into a predefined trauma loop.
This was reality. And it smelled of stale diesel, wet asphalt, and rotting v
