Black Nail

[2.] My Ordinary Life

1 year later.

It had been one year since the Merge reshaped the Earth.

The world never ended.

That was the part people still couldn't fully accept.

Instead of collapse, reality expanded.

Cities didn't disappear-they overlapped. New architecture grew into old skylines like someone had layered two worlds into a single impossible blueprint.

And somehow, life continued.

On a high rooftop overlooking the merged city, the wind moved differently now.

Too many structures broke the wind's natural path. Too many layers of existence competing for the same airspace.

Chomp sat near the edge.

A duffel bag.

Alive. Breathing. Watching.

Its mouth opened slightly as a heavy rifle slid inside its storage space-vanishing into a dimension that didn't match its physical size.

A low mechanical hum followed as it processed the weapon.

"Scanning completed," it muttered.

A pause.

Then:

"Nothing unusual detected. Which is... unusual."

A second voice responded behind it.

"Don't say things like that. That's how problems start."

Hydro stood a few steps back, adjusting the rifle strap on his shoulder.

Same age.

Same calm expression.

But his eyes didn't fully match the world anymore.

They looked like someone who had already seen what this place could become.

Below them, the city stretched endlessly.

Old concrete streets ran beneath floating transit lines.

Glass towers reflected buildings that didn't belong to this Earth originally.

Somewhere in the distance, a massive pyramid-like structure pulsed with artificial light-too large, too precise, too new.

Hydro exhaled.

"...So this is what 'stable' looks like."

Chomp tilted slightly.

"You call this stable?"

A beat.

"No," Hydro answered. "I call it contained instability."

They stood in silence.

Vehicles moved below-some familiar, some not. A traffic system that now had to obey two sets of physics depending on which district you entered.