The ground vanished beneath Ren.
One second, he was inside the flesh-soaked building. The next, reality folded in on itself like a closing wound. He didn't fall or float. He just shifted, like a thought dragged halfway through a sentence and left dangling.
When sensation returned, it was quiet.
Too quiet.
Ren opened his eyes.
Stars.
Endless stars, scattered like bone dust across black velvet. Galaxies curled in the distance. Nebulae glowed with indifferent beauty. He was floating in space, surrounded by the cold silence of the cosmos.
He blinked.
Then frowned.
"Wait… how am I breathing?"
He brought a hand tentacle, technically up to his chest. The suit wasn't sealed. There was no helmet. No oxygen tank. Nothing.
But air moved in and out of his lungs. Cold, but breathable.
He looked around again. "Okay. So I'm in space. Sure. That tracks."
Then he felt it.
The cold.
Not physical. Not the vacuum. Something deeper. A sensation that clamped down on his spine and twisted slowly, like it was checking to see if he'd snap.
He turned.
And saw the world.
No, not a world…the world. The same one he'd just left behind.
Except now, he was looking at it from above.
And it was sick.
He couldn't describe it any other way. It looked like a terminal patient: skin pale, veins exposed, organs failing. Clouds of gray and red circled the surface like infected pus, and the land was pulsing, swollen with something foul. Green veins ran through the crust like mold colonizing a corpse. The oceans boiled in some places, frozen solid in others.
It shouldn't have been possible to see all that from orbit.
But he did.
"Jesus Christ," Ren whispered.
And then the eye appeared.
It didn't blink into existence. It grew. Like it had always been there, just hidden under the skin of the planet, waiting to be revealed.
A single, massive eye red, wet, wide split the surface open. It was so large it swallowed a third of the world. The pupil constricted like a camera lens, focusing.
On him.
Pain lanced through his skull before he could even scream.
Blood poured from his right eye, then his left. His ears popped, then ruptured. A scream forced its way out of his mouth, torn and raw.
"AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"
It felt like someone was driving a molten iron spike directly into his brain. Every thought, every instinct, every memory started to glitch. Like a hard drive being overwritten mid-use.
The System flared.
[WARNING: UNKNOWN ENTITY DETECTED.]
[WARNING: YOU HAVE ENCOUNTERED SOMETHING THAT EXCEEDS HUMAN UNDERSTANDING.]
[WARNING: HOSTILITY DETECTED.]
[DANGER: ENEMY LEVEL EXCEEDS HOST CAPACITY.]
[THREAT LEVEL: APOCALYPSE.]
Ren couldn't focus. His vision spiraled. One of his tentacles spasmed, slicing the air blindly. His mouth was still open, but no sound came out now—just blood and air.
He tried to think.
Tried to move.
But the eye wasn't just watching.
It was dissecting.
Peeling him apart from the inside, layer by layer. Not physically, but spiritually. He could feel his sanity scraping at the edges like it was trying to jump ship.
The sky, if you could even call it that, began to bend around him. The stars twisted. Whole constellations folded inward, dragged toward the eye's gravitational hatred.
He wasn't standing before a god.
He was standing before a diagnosis.
And the world beneath it?
Terminal.