The sound started in Emil Cross's teeth.
Not a sound he heard—a sound he felt, vibrating through his molars like they were tuning forks struck by something that existed in the wrong direction. It made his jaw ache. Made him want to swallow except his throat had forgotten how.
"You feel that?" Torres muttered beside him, hand already on his rifle. His other hand—the one that wasn't quite human anymore, the fingers too long and bending at one too many joints—flexed nervously. Stage 1 Marked, bound to The Stranger. The hand was just the beginning.
Emil nodded. Couldn't speak. The sound was getting worse, like wet meat being torn but reversed, like reality was rewinding something that should stay buried in the past tense.
They were on the eastern wall of Sanctuary-7, forty meters up on the observation platform where the floodlights cut through the darkness beyond the barrier. The Null Zone stretched out there, three kilometers of dead space where physics got confused and gave up. Nothing should be able to cross it.
The air thickened.
Emil watched it happen in real-time—the atmosphere turning syrupy, viscous, hard to breathe. Like inhaling honey. He gasped and tasted copper. No—tasted fear, actual fear, a flavor that coated his tongue like rancid meat.
"Rift opening," Torres said, and there was something in his voice that made Emil's stomach drop. Not panic. Hunger. The Stranger's influence, making Torres see people as prey even when he didn't want to. "Big one. We need to—"
Reality unfurled.
There was no other word for it. The darkness ahead of them opened, but not like a door or a tear. It bloomed. Like a flower, if flowers were made of screaming shadows and had teeth growing from their petals. The space between moments peeled apart, and through the wound in the world, Emil saw—
Nothing.
Not darkness. Not void. Absence. The place where existence went to die.
Then the nothing became something worse.
The Feeding Ground manifested like a tumor birthing itself into reality. One second: empty air. Next second: a structure that shouldn't exist, all sweating walls and pulsing architecture, a building that breathed, its windows like eyes that wept something too thick to be tears.
Emil's radio crackled to life, drowning in static and voices.
"—manifestation, eastern sector—"
"—The Flesh, repeat, it's The Flesh—"
"—civilians trapped inside, forty-seven signatures—"
"—all Marked units respond—"
Torres was already moving, but Emil stood frozen, staring at the Feeding Ground. It looked like an apartment complex that had been digested and vomited back up, all wrong angles and organic textures. The walls weren't made of concrete. They were made of meat. Muscle tissue stretched over a skeleton of bone, pulsing with a heartbeat that Emil could hear from here—a wet, rhythmic thump-thump that matched the sound still vibrating in his teeth.
Three years ago, his sister Mara had been pulled into something like this.
They never found enough of her to bury.
"Cross!" Torres grabbed his shoulder—the human hand, thank god. "Move your ass! We've got civilians dying in there!"
Emil forced himself to move. Grabbed his rifle even though bullets didn't do shit against a Feeding Ground. Followed Torres down the wall ladder while the alarm shrieked across the sanctuary and floodlights swiveled to illuminate the growth.
The Feeding Ground was expanding.
Emil watched it happen as he ran. The structure grew like accelerated cancer, new rooms budding off the main mass, walls splitting and reforming, windows opening like dilating pupils. The sound of its growth was worse than its appearance—a wet, organic squelching, the sound of flesh being forced into shapes flesh was never meant to hold.
By the time Emil reached the staging area, Lieutenant Kara Voss was already suiting up.
She was Stage 2, Bound to The Flesh three years ago during the initial Hollow Year manifestation. She'd saved forty people that day. Cost her everything that made her human.
Her bare arms were landscapes of tumorous growths, each one pulsing with its own heartbeat. Not random mutations—functional anatomy. Emil could see eyes blinking in the meat of her bicep. Could see mouths opening and closing silently in the flesh of her forearm. When she moved, the growths moved with her, a symphony of wrong biology.
But the worst part was her face.
She was smiling.
Not because she was happy. Because she couldn't tell the difference anymore between agony and ecstasy. Stage 2 did that—scrambled the wires in your brain that separated pleasure from pain. Made you want the transformation.
"Six-person team," she said, her voice steady despite the extra mouth that had grown in her neck trying to echo her words. "Three Marked, three Normal. We go in, extract civilians, and get out before the domain stabilizes. Once it stabilizes, we're all meat for the grinder. Understood?"
Emil nodded along with the others. The team was already assembled: Torres, Emil, and Private Chen (Normal, terrified, first deployment). The Marked were Voss, Sergeant Iris Kane (Stage 1, The Stranger, face currently not her own), and Corporal David Reeves (Stage 0, The Corruption, skin starting to show the telltale green of early rot).
"Standard extraction protocol," Voss continued, strapping on the useless body armor. It wouldn't stop The Flesh from taking you, but regulations were regulations. "Normals stay back, provide suppression fire if anything manifests. Marked take point. If anyone hits their Digestion threshold—" She locked eyes with Reeves, whose hands were shaking. "—you pull back immediately. We don't need more Consumed today."
Reeves nodded, but Emil saw the fear in his eyes. Stage 0 meant he was barely holding on, 15% Digested at most. One bad encounter could push him to Stage 1. Two could make him Tainted. Three...
They didn't talk about three.
The Feeding Ground pulsed in the distance, its heartbeat loud enough now that Emil felt it in his chest, synchronizing with his own rhythm. Wrong. So fucking wrong.
"Move out," Voss said.
The approach was worse than Emil expected.
The ground leading up to the Feeding Ground was normal concrete for the first ten meters. Then it started to change. Flesh began growing through the cracks, pink and raw, pulsing with veins that carried something too dark to be blood. The concrete itself seemed to be transforming, turning soft and warm and organic.
Emil stepped on it and felt it give, like stepping on someone's stomach.
"Don't think about it," Torres muttered beside him. "Just keep moving."
But Emil couldn't stop thinking about it. Couldn't stop noticing how the flesh beneath his boots was warm, body-temperature, and how he could feel it flinch slightly with each step, like it was aware of him. Like it was tasting him through his soles.
The entrance to the Feeding Ground wasn't a door.
It was a sphincter.
A circular opening in the fleshy wall, ringed with muscle tissue that contracted and dilated rhythmically, drooling a clear, viscous fluid that pooled on the ground. The smell coming from inside was overwhelming—copper and decay and something else, something sweet, like rot wrapped in sugar.
"Oh fuck," Chen whispered. "Oh fuck, I can't—"
"Yes you can," Voss said, not unkindly. The mouths in her arm were all moving now, mouthing words in sync with hers. "You can, because those people inside don't have a choice. We do. Now move."
She stepped through the sphincter first, the muscle tissue dilating wide enough to accommodate her, then contracting behind her with a wet squelch. Iris went next, then Reeves, then Torres.
Emil forced himself forward. Chen was behind him, whimpering.
The sphincter dilated, and Emil stepped through into hell.
The inside of the Feeding Ground was worse than any nightmare.
The corridor wasn't a corridor—it was an intestine. The walls were made of layered muscle tissue, pink and glistening, contracting in rhythmic waves that pushed forward, deeper into the structure. The floor wasn't solid. It was soft, spongy, giving with each step. Emil looked down and saw he was walking on what looked like tongue tissue, covered in thousands of tiny papillae that swayed as he moved.
The ceiling dripped.
Not water. Something thicker, more viscous, like saliva mixed with mucus. It landed on Emil's neck and he shuddered—it was warm, body-temperature, and it moved on his skin, trying to find purchase, trying to seep into his pores.
"Forward," Voss ordered, and the team moved deeper.
Every step made a sound: squelch, squelch, squelch. Wet. Organic. The walls pulsed around them with that heartbeat—thump-thump, thump-thump—and Emil realized with dawning horror that the entire structure was a single organism. They weren't walking through a building.
They were walking through something's body.
The corridor opened into what might have once been a lobby. Now it was a stomach chamber, the walls lined with what looked like gastric pits, each one secreting clear fluid that pooled on the floor, ankle-deep. The smell was overwhelming—acidic, burning, making Emil's eyes water.
And there were people.
Forty-seven civilians, pressed against the far wall where the acid hadn't reached yet. Families. Children. An old woman holding a child who couldn't be older than six. They were screaming, but the sound was muffled, wrong, like the flesh walls absorbed noise and gave back only wet echoes.
"Extraction team, form up!" Voss shouted. "Normals, get these people out, same way we came in!"
Emil splashed through the acid—it burned, even through his boots—and reached the civilians. They grabbed at him with desperate hands, crying, begging. He pulled a young woman forward, started guiding her back toward the entrance.
That's when the Feeding Ground shifted.
The walls contracted.
Not slowly. All at once, like a massive muscle spasm. The stomach chamber became a throat, the opening they'd entered through becoming a narrow passage that was closing, fast. The walls squeezed inward, and Emil heard screaming—not from the civilians, from the walls, thousands of throats hidden in the flesh all screaming in unison.
"Move! MOVE!" Voss roared, and they ran.
But the throat was faster.
Emil saw it happen. Torres was ahead of him, pushing civilians through the narrowing passage. Chen was right behind Emil. Then the walls contracted one final time, and the passage became a closing fist of meat.
Torres made it through.
Chen didn't.
Emil turned just in time to see the walls swallow three people—Chen, an old man, and a teenage boy—pulling them into the flesh like quicksand made of muscle. They sank into the walls, and Emil watched Chen's face press against the translucent tissue from the other side, mouth open in a silent scream.
"No!" Emil lunged forward, but Torres grabbed him.
"He's gone! Don't—"
But Emil could see him. See Chen inside the wall, his body visible through the semi-transparent tissue. Could see the flesh working on him, breaking him down, dissolving him from the outside in. Could see his uniform disintegrating first, then his skin, then the layers beneath.
Could see his skeleton becoming visible.
Could see his eyes still moving.
Still aware.
Still conscious as his body was digested alive.
Emil vomited. Couldn't help it. The acid and the horror and the smell, all of it came up at once, burning his throat.
"Cross, on me!" Voss's voice cut through the haze. "We're not done!"
The team had made it back to the entrance sphincter with maybe thirty civilians. Fifteen were still trapped somewhere deeper in the structure. And the Feeding Ground was changing, the walls pulsing faster, the heartbeat accelerating.
It was stabilizing. And once it stabilized, it would seal permanently.
"We need to go back," Emil managed, wiping his mouth. "There are still—"
"I know," Voss said. Her face was grim, but the extra mouths in her flesh were all smiling. Stage 2. She was starting to lose it. "But look."
She pointed deeper into the Feeding Ground.
The corridor ahead had transformed. It wasn't an intestine anymore. It was something worse—a nursery. The walls had become wombs, distended and pulsing, each one containing a human-shaped figure. Emil could see them through the translucent membrane. Could see the trapped civilians, their bodies transforming, bones bending in impossible ways, new limbs budding from their torsos.
The Feeding Ground wasn't killing them.
It was reshaping them.
"This isn't a normal manifestation," Iris said, her stolen face showing genuine fear. "It's trying to birth something. Create Consumed."
"Then we abort," Torres said. "Pull back, call in—"
"There's no time!" Voss cut him off. "Look at the exit!"
Emil turned. The sphincter entrance was contracting, the muscle tissue squeezing shut. In minutes, maybe less, it would seal completely. Everyone still inside would be trapped.
"We need someone to hold it open," Reeves said, and his voice was shaking. "Someone Bound to The Flesh. Someone who can... who can merge with the domain, force it open from inside."
Everyone looked at Voss.
She looked back with those eyes that couldn't quite focus anymore, that saw the world through the lens of The Flesh's hunger. The growths on her arms were pulsing faster, excited. The mouths were opening wider, drooling.
"I'll do it," she said simply. "But you need to understand what this means. I'm at 58% Digestion right now. Stage 2. Using this much power..." She laughed, and it wasn't quite sane. "I'll hit Stage 3. Maybe Stage 4. I won't be coming back."
"Lieutenant—" Emil started.
"This isn't a discussion, Cross." She was already walking toward the deepest part of the Feeding Ground. "Get everyone out. That's an order."
She didn't wait for a response.
Emil watched her go, watched her step into the nursery chamber where the walls were birthing horrors. Watched her press her hand against the pulsing flesh.
And then he watched her merge.
It started with her hand sinking into the wall, the boundary between her skin and the Feeding Ground's tissue dissolving. Then her arm. Then her shoulder. But it wasn't absorption—it was integration. Her flesh was growing into the structure, spreading like roots, like veins, like cancer.
The tumorous growths on her body erupted, splitting open and sending tendrils into the walls, burrowing deep. Emil heard her scream—but it wasn't a scream of pain. It was ecstasy. Pure, transcendent pleasure as her body became part of something greater.
Her face was visible for a moment longer, pressed against the translucent wall, and she was smiling.
Really smiling.
All her mouths smiling in unison.
Then her body exploded outward in a wave of tumorous growth, spreading through the entire Feeding Ground like wildfire. Emil felt the structure convulse, felt the walls tear open as Voss forced the domain to split, to open, to release its prey.
The sphincter entrance dilated wide.
"GO!" Torres screamed, and they went.
Emil ran, pulling civilians with him, splashing through acid and blood and things he didn't want to name. Behind him, he heard the Feeding Ground screaming—all those hidden throats shrieking as Voss tore it apart from within.
He made it outside, gasping, dragging the last civilian through the entrance. Torres and Iris pulled more through. Reeves collapsed, his Stage 0 corruption spreading visibly across his skin, green and rotting.
The Feeding Ground convulsed one last time.
Then it collapsed inward, the flesh walls folding and crushing and compressing until the entire structure was gone, leaving only a stain on the concrete—organic matter and blood and bone fragments.
And somewhere in that mess, scattered across a hundred square meters, were the atoms that used to be Lieutenant Kara Voss.
Emil stood there, shaking, while the medical teams rushed past him toward the survivors. He could still see Chen's face pressed against the wall, still see his skeleton becoming visible, still see those eyes—
"Cross."
He looked up. Dr. Senna stood before him, her Stage 1 Eyes allowing her to see far too much. She was looking at him with something like pity.
"You're thinking about Binding," she said. It wasn't a question.
Emil nodded numbly.
"You saw what it costs today," Senna continued. "Voss is dead. Reeves just hit Stage 1—he's got maybe a year before he's Consumed. Chen..." She glanced at the stain where the Feeding Ground had been. "He's still in there, you know. Some part of him. The Consumed retain awareness. Not all of them, but most. They're trapped inside, screaming in languages we can't hear anymore."
"I know," Emil whispered.
"And you still want to Bind?"
Emil looked at the survivors. Looked at the families reunited, crying, holding each other. Looked at the little girl from earlier, clutched in her mother's arms, alive because Voss had given everything.
Looked at the eastern wall, where three more Feeding Grounds were manifesting in the distance, their flesh-towers rising against the dark sky.
"I can't watch people die anymore," he said. "I can't be useless. Even if it means..." He couldn't finish the sentence.
Dr. Senna was quiet for a long moment. Then she nodded.
"The Binding Chamber is below Sanctuary Command. Level 13. If you're serious, meet me there at midnight." She turned to leave, then paused. "Choose carefully which Fear you Bind with, Emil. It determines not just your power, but how you'll eventually lose your humanity. Some transformations are more merciful than others."
She walked away, leaving Emil standing in the blood-stained aftermath.
The radio crackled on someone's belt nearby: "Four additional Feeding Grounds detected. The Slaughter, The Spiral, The Corruption, and The Dark. All Marked units report for assignment. Estimated casualties: 200 civilians."
Emil looked at his hands. Normal, human, powerless hands.
He thought about Chen's eyes, still moving as his body dissolved.
Thought about Mara, swallowed by walls three years ago.
Thought about Voss's smile as she became a cancer, spreading through the Feeding Ground with something that looked like joy.
I have to choose, he thought. Stay weak and watch everyone die, or become the monster and forget why I wanted to save them at all.
But deep down, he already knew.
The choice had been made the moment he watched his sister die and couldn't do anything to stop it.
At midnight, he would descend to Level 13.
And he would choose The Dark.