The first thing he knew was pressure.
A crushing, suffocating, wet pressure on all sides. It was dark. Not the dark of a room at night, but a complete, absolute absence of light. A dark that had weight. A dark that was made of cold, damp earth and rotting stone.
The second thing he knew was fear.
A primal, formless terror that screamed from every fiber of his being. Move. Hide. Run. But he had no legs. He had no arms. He was… small. Unbelievably, terrifyingly small. His body was a frail, segmented thing, a sliver of chitin and soft tissue buried alive.
Memories flooded him, sharp and painful. A name. Leo. A life. A desk. A computer screen. The smell of rain. Then nothing. Then… this.
Where…?
He tried to speak. No sound came. He had no mouth, not as he understood it. He had… mandibles. A sense of vibration in the air, a feeling of immense, groaning stone above him. A dungeon. The word surfaced from the slurry of his panic, a concept from the games and stories of his old life. But this was no game. The smell of mildew, of wet rot, of something metallic and old—blood—was too real. The chill seeping into his core was too real.
He tried to move. A pathetic, wriggling spasm. He was curled in a tiny pocket of dirt, a gap between two cold, moss-covered foundation stones of a dungeon wall. He was an insect. A grub. A parasite.
THUD.
The impact shook the world. Dust and grit rained down on him. He froze, instinct overriding thought.
THUD. THUD.
Heavy, rhythmic footsteps. Something big. Something alive. The vibrations grew stronger, closer. A low, wet sniffing sound echoed through the corridor beyond his tiny crevice.
A snout, wet and black, shoved against the opening of his hiding place. Hot, rancid breath washed over him. A single, yellow eye the size of his entire former fist peered in, the pupil contracting. It was a creature—a dungeon rat the size of a large dog, its fur matted with filth, one ear torn, teeth like cracked daggers.
The eye saw him.
Hunger. Simple, ravenous hunger radiated from the beast.
Leo tried to scream. He tried to push back. He wriggled deeper into the crack, his soft body scraping against rough stone. It was useless. The rat's claw, black and hooked, scraped into the gap, gouging the stone. It was trying to dig him out.
This was it. He had been alive for minutes, maybe less. He would be eaten. A snack. A forgotten bit of dungeon biomass.
No.
The denial was a fire in his mind. NO.
A sound, not from the dungeon, but from inside him. A chime. Clean, clear, and digital in this world of rot and stone.
[System Initializing…]
[Error. Host biological template incompatible with standard parameters.]
[Scanning…]
[Designation: Parasitic-Type Entity. Designation Approved.]
[Welcome, User.]
[Primary Function: Vessel Acquisition & Integration.]
Words, concepts, a cold, logical framework laid over his terror. A system. Like in the stories. But there was no grand hero's welcome. No mighty class. Just a label. Parasitic-Type Entity.
The rat's claw hooked around him. The pressure was immense, threatening to pop his fragile form.
[Survival Imperative Detected.]
[Initiating Core Protocol: 'Puppet Thread'.]
[Primary Ability Unlocked: 'Forced Symbiosis'.]
[Description: Project consciousness-core into a viable host. Achieve temporary neural dominance. Stabilize link to overwrite host command pathways.]
[Warning: Host body rejection is fatal. Symbiosis failure is fatal. Host destruction while linked is fatal.]
[Objective: Survive.]
The claw pulled. Leo felt his body tear, a searing line of pain across his side. He was being dragged into the open, into the light of a faint, phosphorescent moss growing on the corridor walls.
The rat's maw opened, a canyon of dripping saliva and stench.
There was no time to think. No time to plan. There was only the instinct to live, and the new, cold tool in his mind.
He focused. Not on his body, but on the core the System showed him—a tiny, bright point of consciousness behind his fear. He grasped it. And he threw it.
Not with strength, but with will.
A thread, invisible and immaterial, shot from his crumbling insect form towards the looming beast. It connected. He felt a rush of noise—a torrent of animal instinct: hunger, anger, a simple map of smell-sound-territory. The rat's mind.
He pushed.
[Forced Symbiosis: Initiated.]
The world went white.
Then, it went large.
Sensation exploded. The smell was overwhelming—a thousand layers of decay, water, stone, his own musk. Sound was a roar of dripping water, distant skittering, the thrum of his own powerful heart. He had… limbs. Four of them. Claws on stone. A tail.
He was inside the rat.
He could feel its primal consciousness fighting him, a raging, simple storm of instinct trying to drown his human mind. It wanted to eat. It wanted to bite. It wanted to crush the little bug before it.
NO. Leo thought, with all the force of a soul fighting for its first real breath. STOP.
He wrestled for control. It was not like moving a limb. It was like trying to steer a speeding, angry cart by grabbing the reins mid-air. The rat's body shuddered. Its jaws, which had been descending onto his now-limp insect form, snapped shut an inch away.
The insect body lay on the cold stone, damaged, bleeding a clear fluid. It was his original form. His true body. And it was dying.
The rat's body was his now. A temporary vessel. The System's information whispered to him. Stabilize the link. Survive for a duration. The host becomes a permanent vessel. A puppet.
The rat's instincts screamed at him to flee, to find a dark hole. The human mind, Leo's mind, clung to one burning thought.
Get to safety. Hide. Protect the original body.
With a grunting, stumbling gait, he made the rat's body turn. He used its own claws to gently, carefully, scoop up the tiny, broken insect form that was him. He cradled it against the rat's coarse, filthy fur.
Then, he ran. The rat's legs carried him down the dark corridor, away from the open space, driven by a human fear guiding an animal's speed. He ran until he found a deeper crack, a hole leading into a warren of smaller tunnels. He burrowed in, placing his fragile original body in a niche of dry dirt.
He collapsed the rat's body at the entrance, a living, breathing barricade.
Inside the rat's mind, the animal fury was subsiding, not gone, but slowly being smothered by the foreign, calculating presence settling over it. Leo felt the connection solidifying. A thread of cold, System-born energy weaving his consciousness into the rat's nervous system.
He was alive.
He was no longer human.
He was a parasite in a rat's skin, hiding in the deepest, darkest pit of a dungeon.
And for the first time since he woke up in the dirt, the fear was joined by something else. A dark, quiet, terrifying curiosity.
[Symbiosis Stabilizing: 1%...]
[Duration to Permanent Vessel Acquisition: 167 Hours, 59 Minutes, 59 Seconds.]
[Current Vessel: Dungeon Rat (Common).]
[Original Body Integrity: Critical. 23% functionality.]
Leo, within the rat, looked through its eyes at his own weak, insect form resting in the dirt.
This was his world now.
And he would survive.