I woke to monsterous amount of weight pressing around me.
Not the polite kind; not a blanket or an arm across the chest. This weight pressed from every angle, rib against rib, thigh against thigh, the sour intimacy of a heap that had stopped being a group of people and started being a problem. Air refused to circulate. Something cold and slick coated my cheek. I tried to inhale and drew in dust, iron, and a faint chemical sting that made the back of my throat lock up.
My eyes opened to almost nothing. The darkness carried a thin, sickly glow, like fungus that had learned to hate sunlight. It revealed edges without offering comfort. I could make out shapes close to my face: a forearm with grayish skin, a hand with thick knuckles, nails chipped and blackened. Human, I thought at first. Then I saw the wrist.
It had a bony ridge, too pronounced; the tendons sat wrong, as if they belonged to an anatomy chart someone had redrawn from memory and spite. A Locust hand, or something trying to be one.
I moved. The pile shifted with an awful, wet friction. A body slid off my shoulder and thumped somewhere below. Another rolled, exposing a face with a jaw built like a shovel. I had seen that jaw before, on a screen, safe behind glass and distance. It looked less iconic when it stared back with open eyes that would never blink again.
Panic tried to climb into my mouth. I swallowed it. Air mattered more than panic. I pushed upward with both hands.
My hands met resistance, then they gave. Not because the bodies moved willingly, but because I forced them to. I should have felt strain. I expected the familiar protest of muscle and bone, the small indignities of being human. Instead, I felt nothing but leverage. I shoved. Corpses slid aside like sacks of damp clothing.
My head cleared the heap. I sucked in a breath. It tasted like a cave that had been used as a grave. The light came from veins in the rock, faintly luminous lines that pulsed as if the stone had a circulation system. The cave ceiling hung low, jagged, and wet in places, dry and cracked in others. Far off, I heard water dripping at a steady pace that suggested time still existed.
I swung a leg out and stood.
I stood too fast.
My skull rose higher than it had any right to. My eyes met a new horizon. The pile of bodies that had suffocated me sat at my feet, and I looked down on it the way a man looks down on a stairwell.
I stared at my hands again. They were bigger. Not "I have been going to the gym" bigger. They were "this is not my species" bigger. Thick fingers; dense calluses; veins like cables. The skin held a human tone, but it looked tougher, less forgiving, as if it had been reinforced under pressure. My forearms carried scars I did not remember earning.
I swallowed. The sound echoed. That should have been my first clue about the scale of my throat.
I turned my head and caught a glimpse of my shadow on the stone wall. The shadow had the proportions of a myth. Broad shoulders. Long arms. A chest that looked like it had been built to take impacts that would turn a normal person into a smear.
Eight feet. That number arrived without calculation, as if my brain had reached for a measurement it already knew. I felt heavy, but not sluggish. The weight sat in the right places. My joints moved with an unnerving smoothness, like machinery that had been overengineered.
My memory scrambled. There was a university corridor. A cheap energy drink. A late-night binge of lore videos and forum threads, the kind of procrastination that felt productive until morning arrived and judged you. Then something else, something that did not belong; pain like an electrical arc; a flash of white that left a taste of metal; the sensation of falling through a hole cut into reality.
Now I stood in a cavern that smelled like emulsion and rot, inside a body that could crumble a wall just by leaning onto it.
I looked down at my torso. The clothing did not match any wardrobe I owned. It hung in shredded strips, as if it had been torn during a struggle. Under the tatters, my skin looked human. That detail should have grounded me. It did not. It only made the situation more specific and therefore more alarming.
I stepped away from the heap. Bones crunched under my feet. I winced out of reflex; my feet did not care. I followed the cave floor, drawn by the faint glow and the fact that standing still in a corpse pile felt like inviting the universe to escalate.
The cave widened into a rough corridor. Stone ribs arched overhead. In places, the rock surface glistened with a thin layer of crystalline growth, as if minerals had decided to imitate ice. The air held a low hum, not mechanical, not natural. It sounded like the cave itself kept a secret and could not stop whispering about it.
I passed dead things that did not belong together. A Locust drone lay on its side, armor cracked, mouth slightly open. Beside it, an animal carcass, something like a razorhound, all sinew and teeth, but wrong in the way Sera's wildlife always felt wrong. It looked built for war, not survival. I saw another, smaller creature with a long snout and plated back. A Ticker? No. Too much flesh, not enough bomb. Some local scavenger I could not name.
I reached a chamber where the temperature dropped. My breath fogged, which meant my lungs still worked like lungs. The walls glittered. Ice coated the stone in thick sheets, and within those sheets, shapes waited.
Figures trapped in ice.
Human silhouettes, frozen mid-reach. A soldier's posture, gun raised, mouth wide as if he had shouted and then been silenced by the cold. Another figure knelt, head bowed. Their faces blurred through the frost, but the outlines made the scene feel deliberate, like a museum exhibit curated by a sadist.
I stepped closer. My boots scraped ice. The frozen soldier's chest plate showed a faded emblem, not one I recognized from the COG, not clearly. It might have been older, or it might have been something my brain wanted to see. My gaze slid over the armor and found gouges, claw marks that had been preserved in perfect detail.
A sound fluttered above me.
I looked up.
Shapes moved through the upper reaches of the chamber, darting between stalactites. Wings beat the air with a leathery slap. They circled like bats, but bigger, with tails that snapped in tight arcs. They did not dive. They watched. The way scavengers watch a dying animal, patient and near silent.
I kept moving.
I told myself I explored. The truth was simpler. I needed a reference point that did not involve corpses and ice statues. I followed the glow into narrower tunnels, stepping over fissures that breathed faint heat. In one crevice, I saw a slick black residue that looked like dried tar. I recognized it in my bones before I recognized it in my mind.
Emulsion.
The idea should have been abstract. Instead, it felt personal. My body reacted to its presence like a tongue finding a missing tooth.
The tunnel bent and widened again. Something metallic caught the light on the ground. I approached it and saw a cracked mirror, maybe a piece torn from a locker or a lab fixture. It lay half-buried in grit.
I crouched. My knees bent smoothly, absurdly smoothly. I picked up the mirror with one hand. It should have weighed something. It did not.
I angled it toward my face.
The face looking back belonged to a stranger who still qualified as human. The eyes were mine in the sense that they held my fear; they did not match my remembered color. The jaw had broadened. The cheekbones sat higher. My nose looked as if it had broken and healed in a cleaner world. Scars ran along my brow and down one side of my neck.
The hair looked darker, cropped short. The ears sat close to the skull. The neck itself looked like a column. The whole head looked proportioned for a body that could carry it through combat.
I stared until my hand trembled. It was not a weakness. It was a fury trying to find a place to go.
I lowered the mirror.
A wet scrape echoed from behind me.
I spun explosively.
Something unfolded from the shadows, and my brain supplied a label out of habit.
Reaver.
Not exactly. It had tentacles like a Reaver, thick cords that dragged along the stone and then lifted with unsettling precision. The body sat low and wide, a mass of muscle and chitin with a mouth that opened vertically, petals of flesh lined with teeth. Its eyes glowed faintly, dull embers set deep in a skull that had been smashed and rebuilt by evolution.
It did not roar. It inhaled, and the air pulled toward it as if the creature owned the oxygen. The tentacles reached, not flailing, but selecting.
I backed up one step. Back towards the wall, as the cave gave me no room. Then the creature surged forward.
My body moved before my mind finished panicking. I swung my left arm up and caught the first tentacle. It wrapped around my forearm, squeezing.
I expected pain. I felt pressure, then irritation, like a too-tight sleeve.
I grabbed the tentacle with my right hand and yanked. The creature lurched. Its bulk scraped stone. It tried to anchor itself, digging claws into the floor. My pull lifted it anyway, just enough to expose soft tissue under its armored throat.
I punched.
My fist connected with a sound like wet wood splitting. The creature's head snapped back. It spasmed, tentacles tightening reflexively.
I punched again, and again. Each hit sank deeper, breaking cartilage, tearing something vital. Blood, dark and thick, sprayed across my forearms. The smell hit me like a memory of a chemical spill.
The creature convulsed and tried to bite. I shoved my hand into its mouth. Teeth cut my skin, shallow, not enough to matter. I spread my fingers and forced the mouth wider. Muscle strained; bone cracked. I pulled with minimal effort.
The jaw tore apart.
The creature collapsed, twitching. Its tentacles thrashed and then went limp, sliding across the stone like ropes dropped from a height.
I stood over it, chest heaving. My heartbeat sounded like a drum in a closed room. My hands dripped with blood that steamed faintly in the colder air.
Then I felt it.
A seep, a pull, as if the space around the corpse exhaled. Wisps of something pale rose from the torn flesh, not smoke, not steam. It looked like light filtered through dirty water. It drifted toward me and sank into my skin.
I should have recoiled. As my body absorbed it like a dry sponge meeting water. The sensation carried a faint warmth and a sharper edge, a taste of electricity without pain. It slid into my bones, and my bones answered.
A sound chimed in my head. Not audible in the cave; internal, precise, artificial.
Text appeared in the air in front of me.
It hovered without a source, flat and clean, as if reality had briefly adopted a user interface.
SYSTEM INITIALIZATION: PARTIAL
HOST COMPATIBILITY: CONFIRMED
BIOLOGICAL ANOMALY DETECTED: EMULSION INTEGRATION ACTIVE
EMULSION ABSORBED: 12 UNITS
CURRENCY TYPE: ESSENCE (EMULSION-DERIVED)
AVAILABLE FUNCTIONS: LIMITED
UNLOCKED MENU: RESEARCH; ARMOR; WEAPONS
CATALOG ACCESS: EXTERNAL ARCHIVES COMPATIBLE
SAMPLE CATEGORIES DETECTED:
HALO PLATFORM: MJOLNIR VARIANTS; UNSC SMALL ARMS; SHIELD TECH
IMPERIUM ARCHIVE: ADEPTUS ASTARTES ARMOR PATTERNS; BOLTER SCHEMATICS; FIELD AUGMENTS
ADDITIONAL ARCHIVES: LOCKED
WARNING: HOST STABILITY VARIABLE
WARNING: SYSTEM INCOMPLETE
RECOMMENDATION: ACQUIRE ESSENCE; EXPAND FUNCTIONS
I blinked, hard. The text remained.
My hands still dripped blood. My skin tingled where the essence had entered. The cave stayed silent except for my breathing and the distant drip of water.
I stared at the dead thing on the ground. I had killed it with my bare hands as if I had done that all my life. I had absorbed something from it as if the world expected me to.
A laugh tried to start in my throat and died halfway. The sound came out as a rough exhale.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, the fan part of me wanted to catalog everything, to map the chamber, to identify the creature, to make predictions. The other part, the part that still remembered fluorescent lights and a timetable of lectures, wanted to sit down and refuse the entire premise.
The cave and my mind did not want to negotiate.
I looked down the tunnel ahead. The glow deepened. The air tasted stronger of emulsion. If the system spoke truth, then this place ran on a currency I could collect.
I tightened my fists. The blood on my hands dried fast, as if my skin ran hot beneath the surface. My wounds barely registered, already closing.
I walked forward.
Behind me, the corpse pile waited in the darkness, and the ice chamber kept its frozen audience. Ahead, the tunnels led deeper under Mount Kadar, into a world that had already written its tragedies. I had read some of them. I had played others.
Now the story had hands on me, and it had given me a menu.