The emergency lights died suddenly surrounding them with dimness. Their only source of light coming from the bioluminescent fungi growing in between the walls.
Nex's shoulder burned where he'd rammed the sealed door again and again, the impact sending dull waves of pain through his body. The metal hadn't budged. Not when he kicked it. Not when he pried at the seams with his steel talons until the tips bent. Not even when Karen wedged her rotor-saw into the gap and screamed through clenched teeth as the motor whined, sending up a shower of sparks that illuminated the terror in her wide, bloodshot eyes.
The smell hit him first - the sharp scent of burnt wires from their fried Conduits mixing with the stench of something older, something wet and rotting that had been festering in these walls for years. Then came the sound. That awful, familiar dragging. The wet click of joints moving wrong.
Gristle was coming.
Karen's hands shook as she reloaded, the magazine slipping from her slick fingers to clatter against the concrete. The bullets they had left were pitifully few, the casings scratched from desperate use.
She fumbled in the dark, her breath coming in short, panicked bursts that fogged the air in front of her face. "This wasn't the job," she whispered, the words trembling like a child's. "This wasn't the fucking job, Nex. We were just supposed to grab the those things and go. In and out. You said—"
"I know what I said!" Nex's prosthetic leg hissed as he shifted his weight, the hydraulics protesting as fluid leaked from some ruptured line deep inside. The pain was a distant thing, buried under the adrenaline and the growing, gnawing realization that they were trapped down here with something that shouldn't exist.
The dragging grew louder. Closer.
Then the first emergency light flickered back on with a pop, bathing the corridor in pulsing red.
Gristle stood ten steps away.
Or what had been Gristle.
His deformed jaw hung by a few frayed wires, the metal teeth glinting in the bloody light. His skin had gone the color of spoiled milk, stretched too tight over bones that seemed to have... multiplied. Extra joints bent where they shouldn't, fingers fused together into claw-like appendages that scraped against the concrete as he moved. But the worst part - the part that made Nex's stomach turn - were the eyes. Milky white, veined with glowing blue cracks that pulsed in time with the flickering lights.
And he was smiling.
Not the sharp, dangerous grin Gristle used to wear before a fight. This was something else. Something that stretched the skin at his temples until it split, revealing glistening muscle beneath.
"Boss." The voice was Gristle's. Mostly. Underneath it ran another tone, higher, almost feminine, like two people speaking through the same ruined throat. "Don't leave me down here."
Karen made a sound like a wounded animal. Her rotor-saw sputtered to life, the blades catching the red light as they spun up. "Stay back! I'll—I'll fucking carve you apart!"
Gristle's head tilted, the motion too smooth, too fluid. The glowing veins in his eyes brightened. "Why are you getting angry, Karen?" He held up an arm - the one she'd severed at the elbow twenty minutes ago. Fresh tendrils of glistening flesh had already regrown, wrapping around the stump like vines, forming the suggestion of new fingers.
Nex's Conduit felt suddenly heavy in his hand. The battery nearly dead, but one glyph still glowed faintly - Gravity Anchor. Rank 4. Last resort.
He'd seen what happened when you pushed a spell that hard. The backlash could liquefy bones. Could fry a brain inside its skull.
But the alternative...
Gristle took another step forward. His gait was wrong. One leg moved normally while the other jerked, the knee bending sideways before snapping back into place with a wet pop. Black fluid dripped from his fingertips, sizzling where it hit the concrete.
"Don't leave me here," Gristle said. The voice was splitting further now, the second tone gaining strength. A higher tone. One Nex didn't recognize.
Karen was hyperventilating beside him, her breath coming in short, panicked gasps. "Nex. Nex, we gotta—"
"I know."
He activated the glyph.
The Gravity Anchor unfolded in the air between them, the crimson lines burning themselves into reality with a sound like tearing metal. The pressure hit first - a sudden, crushing weight that made Nex's knees buckle. Then came the pain, white-hot and searing as the spell drew directly from his nervous system, bypassing the dying Conduit completely.
Gristle's body contorted, bones snapping as invisible forces pressed down. His smile never wavered.
Then the lights died again.
In the perfect dark, something grabbed Nex's wrist. The grip was familiar - Gristle's callouses, the old scar from where a rotor had caught him years ago.
The voice, though. The voice was all wrong.
"Don't leave," it whispered.
And then the screaming started.
***
Lucent didn't look back.
The thing's wail chased them through the twisting dark, the sound vibrating through the rusted metal underfoot, up through their bones, rattling their teeth like a mag-lev train passing too close. Kai stumbled beside him, his boots splashing through stagnant puddles that smelled like old blood and burnt wiring. The kid's breath came in ragged, panicked gasps, each exhale a whispered curse or prayer—Lucent couldn't tell which.
A pipe burst somewhere above them, showering them in lukewarm fluid that stung where it touched bare skin. The liquid glowed faintly in the dark—pale blue and sickly, like the veins of a corpse left in the sun too long. It lit the tunnel just enough to see the walls were moving.
Not shaking. Not crumbling.
Breathing.
The concrete pulsed like a living thing, the surface rippling as something vast and hungry shifted beneath. The fungal growths they'd passed earlier now twitched toward them, tendrils stretching like fingers reaching for a meal.
Kai retched, barely keeping his footing. "What the fuck—"
"Run." Lucent grabbed his arm, yanking him forward just as the ground behind them split open with a wet, tearing sound. Something long and segmented whipped out from the fissure—not a tentacle, not a root, but something in between, its surface studded with what looked like human teeth.
Kai's Conduit flared to life in his free hand, the cracked screen casting jagged shadows as he compiled a Flashburn glyph one-handed. The spell detonated in a burst of white light, scorching the tendril's tip. The thing recoiled with a shriek that sounded almost human.
For half a second, Lucent thought it might be enough.
Then the walls screamed back.
A hundred fissures split open at once, each one vomiting forth those same glistening appendages. The air filled with the sound of grinding teeth and wet, slapping flesh as the things writhed toward them.
Lucent's knife was in his hand before he'd made the decision to draw it. The blade—etched with old, illegal glyphs—hummed as it cut through the first tendril. Black fluid sprayed, burning where it hit his jacket. The severed end twitched on the ground, fingers sprouting from the wound before it went still.
Kai was casting again, his lips moving silently as he traced a Rust Sigil in the air. The glyph flared copper-bright before slamming into the tunnel wall, the corrosion spreading rapidly through the concrete and the things buried within. The stench of rotting meat intensified as the tendrils nearest the spell withered and died.
It wasn't enough.
More kept coming.
Lucent risked a glance backward—just once—and wished he hadn't.
The abomination was gaining.
What had once been a throne of corpses now moved like a living tsunami, its form constantly shifting—absorbing the tunnel itself as it came. The faceless thing sat at its center, that single vertical slit in its smooth face pulsing as it emitted that same, godawful containment alarm wail. The sound wasn't just noise—it was a command, and the very infrastructure of Sector 12 obeyed.
Pipes ripped free from the ceiling, whipping toward them like striking snakes. The few remaining lights exploded in showers of sparks. The ground itself seemed to tilt, trying to spill them back toward the horror behind.
Kai's foot caught on a buckled section of flooring. He went down hard, his knee twisting with an audible pop. His scream was lost under the abomination's wail.
Lucent pivoted, his boots skidding in the muck. He had half a second to choose—leave the kid and maybe make it out, or stop and probably die together.
The knife in his hand grew heavy.
Then Kai looked up at him, his face pale under the glowing fluid, his eyes wide with a fear so raw it bypassed terror entirely and landed somewhere near resignation.
"Fuck!" as Lucent swore and turned back.
Then the abomination wail from the very depths of its being, vibrating through them and the walls alike.
Lucent's hands flew to his ears a half-second too late—the sound didn't just enter through the ears, it vibrated up through the jawbone, rattled the teeth, made the skull itself feel like it might split at the sutures. His vision blurred at the edges, dark spots swimming as the frequency found resonance in the hollow spaces of his body. Something warm and wet trickled from his left ear.
And Kai wasn't just covering his ears—he was clawing at them, fingers digging into the skin of his temples like he could physically rip the sound out. His mouth was open in a scream Lucent couldn't hear over the all-consuming wail, the tendons in his neck standing out like cables under strain.
Concrete cracked like eggshell beneath the creature's massive, shifting weight. The same corrupted Aether that fueled its growth had eaten away at the structure's integrity for days, and now, under the seismic force of its own cry, the foundation gave way.
Kai slipped on the crumbling edge. For one heart stopping moment, he was weightless, arms pinwheeling over the yawning pit where the abomination was now falling, its throne of corpses disintegrating mid-plummet. Lucent's hand shot out, grabbing Kai's wrist so hard he felt the smaller bones grind together.
The abomination's faceless head snapped upward as it fell, that vertical slit of a mouth stretching impossibly wide—not to scream, but to laugh—before the darkness swallowed it whole. A wet, echoing crunch reverberated from below, followed by the sound of something very large shifting in the dark.
Kai dangled over the void, his free hand scrabbling at Lucent's forearm. Then, inexplicably, he snickered. A breathless, half-hysterical sound that Lucent felt more than heard.
"Fucking—" Kai wheezed, kicking his legs like a hanged man, "—fucking pompous thing—" His grin was all teeth in the gloom. "Tripped on its own—" Another giddy gasp. "God, did you see its face—?"
There was no face. There had never been a face. That was the joke.
Lucent hauled him up with a grunt, their bodies crashing together onto solid ground. The tunnel groaned around them, more cracks spiderwebbing through the walls. Somewhere deep below, the abomination's wail resumed—but fainter now, muffled by layers of collapsed infrastructure.
Kai was still laughing when the second collapse came.
The last echoes of the abomination's wail still trembled through the tunnels as Lucent yanked Kai to his feet. The kid's hysterical laughter died the moment their eyes met.
"Every Hollowed in Sector 12 just heard that," Lucent's look said.
Kai's grin vanished. His throat moved as he swallowed hard, the reality crashing down—they'd traded one nightmare for another. Somewhere in the dark behind them, the first answering shriek rang out. Then another. And another. A chorus of twisted voices, all converging on their location.
Lucent didn't wait. He dragged Kai forward into a stumbling run, their boots splashing through foul puddles that shimmered with traces of contamination. The collapse had bought them seconds, not safety.
The maintenance tunnel ahead was tight, the walls pressing in until they had to turn sideways. Kai's ragged breathing echoed off the dripping pipes as they squeezed through. Somewhere far behind, metal shrieked as Hollowed claws tore at the rubble blocking their path. Too close. Much too close.
Lucent's knife found his hand without thought. The blade's edge gleamed with fresh nicks from their fight. The abomination's blood sizzled where it touched the steel, eating tiny pits into the metal.
The new sound cut through the distant shrieks of Hollowed—not the dragging gait of corrupted flesh, but the uneven beats of boots on concrete. Too heavy to be a Hollowed. Too human.
Kai froze. "Oh fuck—"
Lucent's knife was up before the figure rounded the corner. The dim bioluminescent glow caught the edges first—a tattered jacket, the glint of metal where a rotor-saw arm should have been, now just a bleeding stump wrapped in shredded cloth. Then the face.
Not gray. Nor yellowish.
Human.
The woman, who they can clearly remember as one of Nex's crew, collapsed to her knees five steps away. Her remaining hand clutched at a wound on her side, blood seeping between her fingers. Her skin was pale from blood loss, her lips cracked, but her eyes were clear. Terrified, but clear. No milky film. No glowing veins.
"Help..." The word came out as a dry croak. Her gaze locked onto Lucent's, desperate and lucid. "Please... they're all... gone..."
Then her eyes rolled back, and she slumped forward.
Kai lunged to catch her before she hit the ground. His hands came away sticky with blood—too much blood. "She's not—" he started, then swallowed hard. "She's not one of them."
Lucent scanned the tunnel behind her. No movement. No pursuit. Just the distant, echoing wails of the Hollowed.
Karen's breath came in shallow, wet gasps. The rotor-saw mount on her arm stump was twisted, the gears jammed with concrete dust and dried gore. Whatever she'd been through, she'd fought until the end.
A choice loomed.
Leave her, and they might outrun the Hollowed.
Take her, and they'd all probably die.
Karen's fingers twitched, grasping weakly at Kai's sleeve. Her lips moved, forming silent words.
Not infected.
Just dying.