HUD: Integrity: 63% | Neural Entropy: 17% ↑ | Mutagen Saturation: 42% | Sync Established [??%]
My pulse pounded in my ears, drowning out the wet, rhythmic groan of the walls around us. The corridor squelched under my boots—a fleshy tunnel of glistening black muscle, rippling like something asleep and dreaming. Breathing veins pumped sluggish ichor overhead, casting rhythmic shadows like heartbeat echoes. Every step felt like I was walking down a throat.
Behind me, the girl kept pace, one hand gripping a jagged shard of bone she'd torn from the remains of that last malformed corpse. Her breath was shallow. Controlled. But her eyes twitched, scanning everything. She didn't trust the walls, or the floor, or me. Smart.
We hadn't spoken since the collapse.
The previous chamber had folded in on itself the second we left it—like the dungeon was redacting its own past. Time and space didn't mean much here. I was starting to suspect they never had. Now, this corridor was whispering. Not with sound. With memories. Thoughts that didn't belong to me clawed at the edges of my mind. Shapes. Static. A bleeding throne made of twitching eyes. Worshippers with no faces. My knees buckled for half a second.
"You saw it too, didn't you?" she rasped, voice frayed like a torn wire.
I nodded. "Neural Entropy's rising. It's feeding us static."
NEURAL ENTROPY: 19% ↑
She didn't ask how I knew that. Or why I could see it. That unsettled me more than the corridor.
Either she had her own interface… or she didn't care that I was losing my mind.
The hallway unfurled into a dome-shaped chamber lit by a heartbeat-red glow. The air was thicker here. The kind of thick that clung to your lungs and whispered doubts into your ribs. At the center loomed a grotesque pillar of pulsing flesh, veined with dark arteries like industrial cables. Every throb synced with my heartbeat. Or worse—it was dragging my pulse into its rhythm.
I took a step closer. My chest clenched.
ALERT: Aberrant Core Detected. Feeding Cycle Initiated.
Behind us, the exit sealed with a wet slap. I didn't even bother swearing. The floor cracked beneath our feet. Something deep below shrieked like rusted machinery breaking into song.
Bone-laced tendrils erupted like a nest of serpents. One snapped around my leg, dragging me forward. I didn't scream. I'd learned not to waste the breath.
Instead, I let the instinct take over.
My right arm peeled back, bones rearranging into a blade of jagged keratin where fingers used to be. Veins pulsed around the base of the transformation like sutures struggling to hold. I slashed downward, cutting through the tendril as it howled like metal being torn. Yellow heat sprayed across my cheek. Behind me, she was already moving—unnaturally graceful. Combat precision. Not just trained. Engineered.
She drove her bone dagger into a nerve cluster pulsing near a tendril's root. The thing recoiled like it had been shocked. A gout of yellow fluid sprayed her face. She didn't blink.
SYNC RATE: 23% ↑
The spike hit me instantly. Pain needled through my skull like glass. My vision blurred. The HUD shimmered.
<
She looked at me. Something sharp in her stare. Calculating. Ancient.
"Jin."
The sound of my name stopped me. Not because she said it.
Because it sounded right.
I stared back. "You remember me?"
She hesitated. Her lips parted, then closed again. A breath. "No. But I think you remember me."
That made no sense. But it made too much feeling.
The pillar convulsed. From its surface, faces began to form—stretching the flesh like wax under heat. Some of the faces were mine. Screaming. Twisting. Dying. Others were hers. Younger. Older. Broken.
I stumbled back, bile rising. My brain flickered like a corrupted file. Voices swarmed my head.
MUTAGEN SATURATION: 47% ↑
NEURAL ENTROPY SPIKE: 26%
I fell to my knees. Hands to the floor. Breathing flesh flexed beneath my palms.
Then—
—a room. White. Sterile. Screams behind glass.
A voice: "Subjects 07 and 09 exhibit 98.7% compatibility. Splice protocol initiated."
I knew that voice. I knew that room.
I'd never been there.
The girl gripped my shoulder. Cold fingers. Familiar fingers. Her touch cut through the noise like a scalpel.
"You're syncing too fast," she said. "You'll burn out."
I grit my teeth. "Then we end this fast."
The core pulsed harder, like it heard us and was laughing.
A groan rippled through the chamber. Walls peeled back in strips. The floor blistered. Heat surged like infection.
We ran.
My body moved before I could think. Bone spears erupted from my forearm and drove into the pillar's flank. The thing let out a sound—not a scream. A memory of a scream. Something that used to know pain, learning how to feel it again.
She followed, fast and clean, carving upward. Our movements synced. Blow for blow. Strike and step. Like we'd done this before. Like we'd trained for it.
Like we were made for this.
SYNC RATE: 31% ↑
The pillar cracked. Black marrow spilled like tar. My bones vibrated. My blood felt heavier. Like it remembered gravity wrong.
ALERT: Core Structure Failing
Still, we didn't stop. Couldn't stop.
One final thrust. My spear-arm buried deep. She stabbed beside me.
Then light.
CORE DESTROYED.
EXP GAINED: +220
NEURAL STABILITY PARTIALLY RESTORED: 22%
The chamber hissed like an exhale. The pillar collapsed into itself, rotting to ash and data fragments. The exit reappeared, a puckered wound in the far wall.
I exhaled. My arm receded, bone dissolving back into flesh. It hurt. It always did. Like something being born backward.
I looked at her. Her chest heaved. Her blade dripped.
"Who were we before this?" I asked.
She didn't answer right away. Then—"I think we volunteered."
Her voice was quiet. Like a confession. Or a warning.
The exit loomed.
We walked through.
More dark. More flesh.
And somewhere deeper… something waiting to remember us.
Something older than pain.
Something we once called home.