Thick smoke billowed through every corridor, transforming the sterile white hallways into a hellish maze.
The sprinkler system worked overtime, but instead of extinguishing the chaos, it created choking clouds of steam that reduced visibility to mere inches.
Ginsei pressed his back against the wall, ice-blue eyes wide with disorientation.
"I can't—there are too many heat signatures," he gasped, his serpentine senses completely overwhelmed by the thermal chaos. "Fire sprites, guards, containment fields—it's all white noise."
His usual precise navigation crumbled under the sensory assault. Where he'd normally detect individual heartbeats and body temperatures, now everything blurred into an incomprehensible wall of heat.
"The facility's in lockdown mode," Mochi shouted over the alarms, pointing at the shifting walls around them.
