He didn't die.
That was the problem.
Or maybe he did and whatever lay after death just didn't know how to stay dead.
Pain was all that Riven could sense. It came in waves each hotter, sharper, more electric than the last. His body convulsed against the metal straps, arms spread out like a heretic on a cross. There was blood from his nose and ears, dripping onto the cold metal table he lay on, its rhythm faster than his heart.
If his heart was still beating.
Fluorescent lights overhead stuttered. Behind a sheet of observation glass somewhere, static-blurred voices yapped frantic commands.
"Test Subject R-017, neural activity crashing"
"The serum damn it, we overdid it. Pull it back!"
"It's too late! He's seizing cut the feed! CUT"
White static ate at his vision. His jaw opened in a silent scream, mouth rigid as though wired shut. Every nerve fiber in his body seared like magnesium. His mind fractured and dissolved, fragments wheeling away into darkness.
Let it end.
Let me die.
Then silence.
No breath.
No pulse.
Only void.
And then, a sound no human was ever meant to hear.
A voice mechanical, detached, imbued with infinite intelligence whispered in his mind:
[SYSTEM OVERRIDE: SUCCESSFUL.]
[HOST VITAL SIGNS: NULL. NEURAL PATTERN STABLE.]
[INITIATING FIRST CONTACT.]
[GREETINGS, HOST RIVEN. YOU HAVE BEEN SELECTED.]
[ACTIVATING: ALIEN SOVEREIGN SYSTEM S.O.L.A.R.I.S.]
The scream he could not voice escaped but it was soundless. It tore through his mind like data being forcibly downloaded into frail flesh. Galaxies collapsed at the back of his eyes. Suns were harvested like wheat. Machines the size of moons inscribed language into the very fabric of time.
Riven's consciousness was ripped from the planet, unraveled like code through the cosmos, stretched tight on a grid of black holes and dying civilizations. His sense of identity dissolved. His name became an echo.
And just before he was going to be erased
He opened his eyes.
The lab was gone.
He lay on sun-baked stone, looking up into a sky of lilac hues and binary suns one burning orange, the other flickering blue like a dead neutron star. Alien monoliths reared up around him, broken and jagged ruins in the shape of ribcages, half-submerged in sand the color of old bone. A blackened wind howled through the monoliths, carrying scents of iron, ozone… and something far older than planet Earth.
He staggered to his feet, blinking through a HUD now superimposed over his vision.
[GENETIC STATE: UNSYNCHRONIZED]
[LOCAL ENVIRONMENT: UNCHARTED PLANET DESIGNATION: NULL]
[THREAT LEVEL: LOW – FOR NOW]
[FIRST DIRECTIVE: SURVIVE]
He looked down at his hands and froze.
They weren't his hands.
His veins glowed with a soft bioluminescence, a lattice of liquid circuitry pulsing beneath charcoal flesh. Nanofibers, finer than spider silk, wrapped around his arms like alive armor. Where there was flesh, synthetic muscle moved dense, efficient, appallingly strong.
One eye opened, displaying telemetry overlays infrared scans, gravitational waves, chemical concentrations in the air. He flexed his fingers. The movement was fluid, too fluid, as if his nerves had been replaced with something far faster.
"What the devil. what am I?" he whispered.
His voice was layered. Not just human. Something else had hitched a ride in his throat something deeper, older, metallic.
A shadow passed overhead.
Slow. Deliberate. Huge.
Riven tilted his head back.
Atop a shattered obsidian spire, a creature crouched. Twice the size of a rhino, with limbs like scythe blades and a body of polished, mirror-like plates. It pulled behind it the ripped remains of what appeared to be a satellite Earth's design, scorched and crushed like foil.
Its eyes dozens of them opened, shining blue.
The humming started.
Low. Wrong. Like a frequency from under the universe's skin.
[WARNING: UNIDENTIFIED LIFEFORM DETECTED]
[PROXIMITY: 122 METERS – CLOSING]
[INITIATE GENETIC ABSORPTION PROTOCOL TO UPGRADE HOST BODY]
[FIRST QUEST: DEVOUR OR DIE]
Objective: Kill and absorb nearby apex predator
Reward: Basic Combat Traits (Claws, Reflex Boost, Infrared Vision)
Penalty: Host Termination & System Fragmentation
A foreign spark of instinct, not his own, coiled in his chest.
Riven stood, feet wide, body lowering into a defensive crouch he hadn't learned, yet knew perfectly. His muscles coiled like wound springs, ready to explode. He could feel the vibrations through the ground the predator's gait. Its breathing. The scent of its rage, acrid and burning.
No fear. Only clarity.
This wasn't adrenaline. It was evolution.
"I'm not prey," he muttered. "Not anymore."
The creature shrieked and leapt.
Riven moved.
Time slowed almost halted. His HUD seared with vectors, trajectory lines, speed calculations. He spun beneath a slashing limb, landed hard, and retaliated with a blow of his own striking upward into the creature's thorax.
Bone clashed with metal.
His fist slammed into the thing's chest spiderweb cracks ran through its armor. The beast roared, flailing, but he was moving again already ducking, weaving, slashing with fingers now tipped with blades of extruded carbon.
Blood flowed viscous, iridescent, reeking of ammonia and ozone.
[GENETIC ABSORPTION AVAILABLE – INITIATE?]
He didn't hesitate.
"Do it."
The system responded at once.
Tendrils black, filamentous unfurled from his forearms and sank into the creature's open wounds. The beast convulsed. Riven convulsed. A thousand nerve endings flared as alien DNA flooded his bloodstream. His muscles tore then reknit. His spine arched. His teeth elongated.
He screamed and it wasn't human.
[ABSORPTION COMPLETE]
[TRAITS UNLOCKED: EXOCLAW PROTRUSION | ENHANCED REFLEXES | INFRARED OPTICS ENABLED]
[UPGRADING PHYSICAL FRAME.]
Riven dropped to his knees, gasping.
His fingers now ended in retractable claws. His vision changed shifting through thermal spectrums, night-vision overlays, and motion tracking. His skin hardened, darkening to a graphite color.
But more than that his mind changed.
He remembered what he had never known: how the creature stalked prey, how it killed in silence, how it listened through vibration instead of sound. The knowledge was raw, primal and now his.
A growl in the distance echoed across the ruins.
More were coming.
[NEW OBJECTIVE: ESCAPE KILL ZONE]
[SECONDARY QUEST AVAILABLE: HUNT TO EVOLVE]
Riven stood up.
He wasn't just surviving.
He was evolving. Integrating. Becoming something more.
Something no longer of Earth.
What is this system?" he breathed aloud, still panting.
[S.O.L.A.R.I.S. – SENTIENT OPERATING LINKED ADAPTIVE REACTIVE INTELLIGENCE SYSTEM]
[MISSION: RISE TO ALIEN SOVEREIGN STATUS]
[REQUIREMENTS: PLANETARY DOMINATION | SYSTEM EVOLUTION | RECLAMATION OF STARFORGED LEGACY]
[WARNING: YOU ARE NOT ALONE.]
He looked out at the horizon.
The sky rippled. In the distance, another figure rose from broken stone. Humanoid but wrong. Its shape shimmered, cloaked in kinetic distortions, its limbs humming with unstable plasma.
Another host.
Another candidate.
"There are others," he whispered.
[ONLY ONE CAN ASCEND.]
And suddenly, he understood the stakes.
This wasn't resurrection.
It was a trial.
Not a gift but a crucible.
He wasn't human anymore. Not a soldier. Not a test subject.
He was what evolution itself had rejected and rewritten.
Something the stars once feared.
A king in the making.
Riven looked away from the predator's body, claws retracting into his arms. Wind swept across the desolate world, bearing the scent of blood, fire, and ancient purpose.
[BEGIN SYSTEM EVOLUTION]
He walked for the first time into the ruins.
And the hunt began.