[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: Mutation Threshold at 57%. Risk of Neurological Drift Increasing.]
The message pulsed behind my eyes, smeared in static like it was trying to warn me through blood. I blinked. The HUD stuttered, then realigned.
"Neurological Drift." Those words made my tongue taste iron. I hadn't spoken in hours. Maybe days. My voice might've been lost in the screaming walls of this dungeon—or in my own skull.
I pulled myself out of the pile of sinew and rot that used to be a crawler beast. My forearms were soaked in its mucus. It twitched even now, long after I'd crushed its neck. It didn't have eyes, but it kept trying to look at me. Kept trying to remember me.
That was the problem. This place remembered everything.
"You're close," the girl said. Her voice again—soft, distorted like radio static filtered through a dream. I turned, half expecting her to be there. But she wasn't. Just black walls stitched together from twitching meat and fibrous rock.
She was in my head again. Or had never left.
I didn't know her name, only that her voice triggered the same system ping that mine did.
[MATCHED GENETIC SIGNATURE: 89.4%. STATUS: LINKED ENTITY.]
Linked. To me. How?
I moved forward. My feet didn't really walk anymore. They slithered. The last mutation had left my ankles… open. Like sockets that stretched when I needed them to leap, or run, or crouch.
I told myself I could still feel pain. That meant I was still human.
Right?
The corridor forked. Left was filled with thin fog that smelled like sulfur and milk. Right led downward. I tasted cold air from below—real cold, not simulated.
I followed it.
[CORE DESCENT: LAYER 3 REACHED.]
Something pulsed. Not in the ground, but in me. My HUD flickered.
[WARNING: Adaptive Tissue is Reaching Instability Threshold.]
I gritted my teeth. I couldn't afford another spontaneous transformation. Not yet. Not without feeding.
I needed to find another beast. Or something worse.
Instead, I found a mirror.
Not really. It was a wall of black ichor, reflective in its stillness. It showed me my own face, but it wasn't mine anymore. My jawline was cracked with bone threading out like wire. One eye was sunken—glowing faintly. The other was mine. Or was.
My voice broke in the silence.
"Why do you keep showing me this?"
The mirror shifted. And the girl's reflection appeared next to mine.
She looked… more human than me.
But her smile was wrong.
[SYNAPTIC PULSE INITIATED. MEMORY DRAIN: 6 SECONDS.]
"Wait—"
It took something from me. A flicker. My mother's voice. Her hand on my shoulder the day I left the shelter.
Gone.
I screamed.
I punched the mirror. My fist didn't shatter it. It melted into it—absorbed, like the wall was drinking me. I tore my hand back. It came out raw, bleeding.
Then I saw it—behind the mirror. A pulsing orb, like an organ breathing through the wall.
A heart.
[DUNGEON CORE FRAGMENT DETECTED.]
This was it. A piece of the living system. The heartbeat of Layer 3.
If I consumed it…
[WARNING: UNKNOWN CONSEQUENCES. CORRUPTION LEVEL: EXTREME.]
I didn't care.
I shoved my hand into the blackness.
Pain shot up my spine like lightning. My brain cracked in half. Visions poured in—an ocean of mouths, a tower made of teeth, the girl's eyes, the sun above the dungeon melting like wax—
Then silence.
And hunger.
[NEW ABILITY UNLOCKED: CORE-TOUCH.]
I fell back, heaving. My hand was still there, but coated in something blacker than shadow. It pulsed with the rhythm of the core.
The system pinged again.
[CORE-TOUCH: Allows limited synchronization with dungeon entities. WARNING: Use increases Neurological Drift.]
"Wonderful," I muttered.
Something moved in the wall behind me.
I turned, expecting a beast.
But it was her. Not just her voice—her. Standing in the flesh. Pale skin, hair like soot, eyes like mine before all this began.
She didn't speak. Just stared.
Then she lifted her hand. Showed me her palm.
It had the same black core-thread as mine. The same corruption.
We were matching.
I didn't ask how.
She didn't offer answers.
The dungeon growled around us like it hated the symmetry. But we stood, two half-humans, staring into a mirror that no longer showed either of us.
I wasn't sure who I was anymore.
But I knew this:
Whatever was coming next… I wasn't going to face it alone.
[SYSTEM UPDATE: Entity Sync 2/2. Linked Pathway Unlocked.]
The walls began to change. Organic tendrils slithered back into cracks like retreating nerves. A passageway unfurled from the core's chamber, shaped not by architecture but by response—like the dungeon recognized us. Or feared us.
She looked at me and walked ahead.
And I followed.
My HUD buzzed with silent alerts I didn't check. I could feel something new surging in my blood: not just mutation, not just hunger—direction.
The descent wasn't over. It had barely begun.
And deep down, I hoped this girl—this mirror of me—would be the tether I needed to stay human.
If not…
Then we'd fall together.