Akira.

Most survivors belong to factions, divided into organizations within them. Akira is a member of the Silent Ones, a faction whose main characteristic is that all its members communicate using sign language to avoid making noise and risking harm. However, Akira and the rest of the group can also communicate in whispers, just rarely. The Silent Ones' camp is very well hidden. Their numbers are quite small. Besides Akira, this group also includes Hector—an adult man with brown hair braided in a high ponytail and professorial glasses. He is quite calm and wise, the organizer of the Silent Ones. There are several other members of this organization besides them. A girl with short hair and others.

Akira looks human, but he has one peculiarity. He has twisted ram's horns on his head. In their world, that's normal, for his race, yes. So everything is normal. Otherwise, Akira is ordinary. His long, blond hair is pulled back into a low ponytail. He has a lighter streak near his bangs. Akira has yellow eyes. He usually wears glasses with a dark filter, but for Akira, they make the world around him appear brighter than it actually is, which helps him survive. Akira also wears a white T-shirt and shorts, along with a long brown cape-coat. He also has white stockings and boots to match. A black scarf is tied around his neck, the ends of which hang down over Akira's back, making him resemble an assassin from some video game.

Its rhythm of life is determined not by the sun, but by the change of duty and hunting cycles. • “Day” (period of activity): · Awakening by a click. Not by a sound, but by a slight vibration of the rope stretched to the duty officer's niche. It means it's shift change. Morning ritual: check your canteen. Stretch so as not to hit the wall. Eat your ration—a flat, tasteless brick of compressed mushroom fibers and lichen. Wash it down with a small sip of water. Job: Akira is a scout-forager (or "Rustle," as they're called). He's part of small, fast-moving teams that crawl into distant, half-collapsed tunnels. Their tasks: · Find mycelium to replenish supplies. · Check old ventilation shafts for drafts (fresh air = life). · Don't make noise. Ever. Every step he takes is first a pressure from the toe of his boot, then a smooth transfer of weight. · Return: delivery of loot to the warehouse. A short, silent report using gestures and notes on a chalkboard. • “Night” (waiting period): · Food (the same briquette, but you can chew it more slowly). Maintenance: cleaning mildew from clothes, sharpening a knife on a special stone, mending shoes. Everything is done slowly, methodically, almost meditatively. Any rush creates sound. Communication: quiet, chest-level whispers with his gallery neighbors. They don't talk about the past—there's none. They discuss routes, the quality of water filters, strange noises in Tunnel 47. Akira is a good listener. He can hear not only words, but also the silences between them, where fear resides. • "The Hunt" (period of non-existence): This is the culmination of his life. Everything for this. · Alarm: not a siren, but a series of quick, gentle vibrations along the alarm rope. Akira's heart doesn't pound—it seems to stop. All movements become practiced and automatic. Procedure: Extinguish the wick. Lie down on your bed in a pre-practiced position to minimize the creaking of the rags. Close your eyes (they say the whites can reflect even dim light). Hold your breath. Count silently. · Expectation: here it is, the main skill, absorbed with milk

Akira's Life. Born in Silence. His world isn't the fall of civilization, but its underground continuation. Akira has never seen the sun, doesn't know the taste of real rain, and doesn't understand what "silence" means in the old sense—the complete absence of sound. For him, silence is an active, tense state: muffled breathing, silent footsteps in stockings down stone corridors, whispers behind a partition. This is his norm. His home isn't a room, but a niche. A hollow in the rock, fenced off by a tattered curtain made of stitched-together scraps of tarpaulin and plastic. Inside: · Sleeping area: a pile of rags and old soft insulation laid on a stone ledge. · Personal belongings (3 items): • Flask. The most valuable thing. Aluminum, scratched. A filter made of carbon and sand is attached to the neck. • Knife. Not a weapon (it's useless against the false morph), but a tool. It's used to clean mushrooms, untangle ropes, and mark days on the wall with notches. • A piece of chalk. A luxury. Akira uses it to draw on the black slate slab beside his alcove. Schematics of the ventilation shafts he's been exploring. Or simply strange patterns he thinks he saw in a dream. Perhaps these are fragments of memories of the surface, passed down by his mother? Light: a wick dipped in a bowl of thick, foul-smelling mushroom oil. It burns only for an hour during "daytime," when you need to check your gear. The rest of the time, darkness.

Akira doesn't dream of the surface. He fears it. The elders' tales of the boundless, open sky send him into agoraphobia and terror. His world has boundaries—the walls of the catacombs. They oppressed, but they also protected. His longing, if it exists, is directed not "outward," but "forward"—he wants to understand the law of the Hunt. Is there logic to it? Can it be predicted not by signs, but by... rhythm? His secret chalk drawings are an attempt to find pattern in chaos.

His happiness is to discover a source of clean, dripping water in a distant tunnel. To hear the quiet, confidential laughter of a child from a nearby alcove (muffled, of course). To simply survive another Hunt and, after the all-clear signal, take a deep, noisy, cleansing breath—the only loud sound he's allowed in his life.

His life is a ritual of preserving humanity in a world where any sound could be his last. He's not a hero, not a rebel. He's a professional at silence, one of the calmest survivors here. Akira is trying with all his might to understand this world and survive.

But Akira has schizophrenia, which manifests itself as a girl with rabbit ears and a red eye on her forehead, in addition to having normal human eyes. She has numerous small eyes on her cheeks. She has black hair with a pink streak. The girl in his mind oppresses him in every way, making comments. But she is the only one who can make sounds in his head while everyone else remains silent. She introduces herself to Akira as Yuliana.

False morphs are incorporeal creatures, their approach is accompanied by the Hunt, determined by the signs of the Hunt.

· Goal: to gain physical form by inhabiting a living body.

Method: Brutal, violent takeover. The false morph does not care about the integrity of the "shell."

· Result: Infected. The victim's body becomes a puppet—the limbs twist, the gaze becomes empty and focused "missing." It's a walking corpse, rapidly decomposing under the onslaught of the alien entity within.

· Evolution: There are hints that, over time, False Morphs learn to infect more subtly, making their hosts less noticeable. This makes silence and observation even more important.

Behavior: Having acquired a body, the False Morph sees every living person as merely a potential "container" for its fellows. Its goal is to breed new contagion.

The main law of survival: silence.

When the alarm sounds and the hunt begins, the only strategy is to become a shadow. To hide.

The past: a normality that is forgotten.

The world was normal until Event N occurred. The aftershock of this catastrophe was the emergence of False Morphs—incorporeal entities obsessed with one goal.

Present: Catacombs. The last refuge.

To escape the incomprehensible threat on the surface, the remnants of humanity fled into the depths. Deep, abandoned catacombs became their new home. It is a labyrinth of fear, where three cardinal rules reign: silence, vigilance, and unity.

The main conventions of the world:

A precarious refuge. The catacombs protect, but they don't save. There are insufficient resources here: food, water, air, medicine—everything is running out. Survival is a constant calculation and search. And most importantly, walls are no guarantee of safety.

The Hunt. It's not a scheduled event. The Hunt is a state of the world, a sudden and silent wave of reality distortion. It comes when it pleases. Its harbingers are disruptions in the usual order of things: a glow without a source, a sharp temperature spike, sounds that shouldn't have a voice. They are monitored by the guards, whose mistake costs everyone their lives. The nature of the threat is False Morphs.