Kyra's absence carved a hollow in the tunnels. Her holograms lingered like ghosts, flickering instructions only the group could decipher. The manuals she left weren't scrolls or texts, but neural imprints—jagged memories injected via their vials. Yumi dreamt in Va'tiri equations, waking with equations scrawled on her walls in sleepwalking fits. Liu Jian's hands moved through combat katas he'd never learned, his muscles remembering alien disciplines.
They called it *The Hollowing*.
To harness spirit energy, Kyra taught, they had to fracture their human rhythms. Mornings began with breathwork that left them gasping, their lungs scorched as if inhaling liquid nitrogen. Evenings were spent in sensory deprivation tanks filled with irradiated sludge from the crash site, their bodies forced to metabolize the alien residue. Progress was measured in tremors and blood—Hiroto's tusks splintering, then regrowing denser; Meili's wings molting metallic feathers that cut like shrapnel.
"Third Ring requires three stable fusions," Aisha recited, her voice distorted by the salamander gills fluttering at her neck. She traced a hologram of the Nine Celestial Rings, now tattooed in bioluminescent ink on the tunnel wall. "But the Fourth…"
"The Fourth Ring is a purge," Ravi finished, his serpent-eye pupils thinning to slits. He'd taken to eating raw meat, claiming cooked food "smothered the serum's voice." "No more half-breeds. We become… *containers*."
Yumi stared at the vial around her neck, now streaked with silver and a new thread of gold—the Leviathan's essence, siphoned during their clash. "Containers for what?"
"For the vanguard," Liu Jian said. He'd begun meditating in the wolf form, his human consciousness trapped inside the beast. It left him ravenous, volatile. "Kyra said it's a living weapon. To fuse with it, we need bodies strong enough not to… unravel."
——
The world above spiraled.
Footage of the Leviathan had been dismissed as a hoax, but the coastlines emptied anyway—an instinctive exodus.Government release bounty for the news of their seven people groups.People are talking are they even human. They look like alien to them.
Strange lights pulsed in the night sky. Crops mutated: wheat stalks grew teeth, corn oozed acidic sap. In the martial arts schools, masters whispered of disciples collapsing mid-kata, their skin hardening to bark or scales.
The group acted quietly. Yumi hacked into emergency broadcast systems, piggybacking Kyra's alien tech to transmit subliminal packets—basic breathwork patterns, neural exercises to stabilize rogue DNA. They masked it as a viral meditation challenge.
"It's not enough," Meili said, monitoring social feeds. A clip played of a teenager in Brazil sprouting gills during a swim meet. "They're awakening blind. No control."
"Control requires *The Hollowing*," Liu Jian said. "And we can't teach that through memes."
Ravi grinned, sharpening his talons on a concrete pillar. "Then let's give them a show."
——
The vanguard's lair called to them.
Kyra's final coordinates led to a geothermal plant in Iceland, its reactors built over a magma chamber. Deeper, her maps hinted—through sedimentary layers, past tectonic scars—to where the vanguard slept.
"They'll have security. Military," Hiroto grunted, his voice garbled by tusks.
"Not for long," Aisha said. Her bioluminescence had evolved to manipulate photons—brief invisibility, holographic decoys. "But we'll need a distraction. Something… biblical."
They chose the Blackstone Desert.
Aisha's light-refraction cloaked their descent into a government testing site. Ravi planted charges laced with Leviathan DNA—scavenged from the coast, still potent. When detonated, the blast wouldn't just explode. It would *mutate*.
The explosion tore the night. Sand fused to glass, and from the crater emerged a swarm of scorpions the size of trucks, their exoskeaters crackling with bioelectric charge. The military scrambled, headlines erupting: *TERROR ATTACK OR ALIEN INVASION?*
While the world panicked, the group slipped into the geothermal plant.
——
Beneath the reactors, they found the door.
A Va'tiri airlock, its surface etched with quarantine glyphs. Liu Jian pressed his vial to the panel, the wolf-DNA syncing with the alien tech. The door groaned open, exhaling air older than humanity.
The descent was a pilgrimage into madness.
Tunnels throbbed with bioluminescent fungi, their spores inducing hallucinations. Yumi saw her mother, long-dead, beckoning with *baihou* claws. Ravi laughed at whispers only he heard. They fought creatures—half-earthly, half-*other*—that defied taxonomy: worms with human teeth, bats fused with scorpion tails.
At the magma chamber's edge, they found it.
The vanguard.
Miles of fossilized bone, half-submerged in molten rock. Its ribs arched like cathedral buttresses, the skull a continent of fangs. At its heart, a pulsating orb—a preserved core, glowing faintly.
"DNA… from a god," Aisha breathed.
They didn't hesitate.
Vials were plunged into the core. The serum came alive, screaming into their veins. Yumi collapsed first, her spine arching as gold-flecked wings tore free. Liu Jian howled, his wolf form engulfed in magma-red fur. Ravi's scales hardened to crystalline armor, Hiroto's tusks dripping with molten ore.
But the Fourth Ring demanded payment.
Aisha's gills ripped away, her human lungs regrowing—*pure*, unmutated. Meili's wings dissolved, her storm-petrel essence internalized. The beastial anomalies didn't vanish—they inverted.
They became human.
*Perfectly, terrifyingly human.*
——
Kyra found them days later, her ship a scar across the desert. She was alone.
"The other crash… was a tomb," she said, quartz eyes dim. "My people… chose death over capture." Her claw touched Yumi's now-smooth cheek. "You… have feasted well."
Liu Jian flexed his hand—no claws, but the magma chamber's heat lived in his palms. "We're ready."
"No." Kyra gestured to the horizon, where storms brewed—unnatural, spiraling. "They are here. And your people… are awakening."
On the news, a militia in Kenya repelled hyena mutants with fire and crude chi blasts. In Moscow, a teenager floated above Red Square, skin glittering with stardust.
The Hollowing had begun.
Yumi gripped her vial, now clear as glass. "Then we teach them to cultivate."
Kyra's laugh was a soft chime. "No, child. You teach them… to *hunger*."
Above, the ships pierced the atmosphere—spears of void-black, silent and patient.