The night was a blur of wrong angles and bad air.
Caz couldn't tell if he was running, crawling, or just falling forward over and over again. His body wasn't his anymore it was a furnace, and every muscle was burning itself alive.
He didn't know how long he'd been moving before the streets blurred into rusted walls and cracked windows. An abandoned laundromat or maybe just a gutted building that smelled faintly of mold and old soap. He collapsed against the far wall, slid down until he was sitting in a shallow pool of rainwater.
The heat inside him didn't ease. It spread.
It started in his arm where the needle had gone in a pinpoint of liquid fire crawling up the vein like it had claws. It snaked into his chest, wrapping around his heart, squeezing until every beat felt like it might be the last.
His breath came in ragged bursts.
"Basilisk Strain Integrating."
The words weren't sound. They were inside. Not like a thought heavier, mechanical, without emotion. They came with an almost imperceptible pulse in his skull, like machinery hidden somewhere under the skin.
"Quest: Survive the Mutation – Time Limit: 72 Hours."
He clamped his teeth together, his hands pressed so hard against the wall that his knuckles split.
"Get out of my head," he hissed.
The voice didn't answer, but his vision shifted. The shadows in the room darkened, then brightened, then warped into shapes that didn't exist scales on the floor, coils moving just out of sight, glints like eyes in the corners. He shut his eyes, but the images burned on the inside of his eyelids.
And then came the cold.
A wave of it, so sudden it made him gasp, rushing up his spine and pooling at the base of his skull. The fire and the ice met somewhere deep in his brain, and something changed.
He couldn't explain it. But for a second, he felt like he was seeing through something else's eyes. Not human eyes. Slit pupils, sharp focus, perfect clarity in the dark.
His heartbeat slowed not because he was calmer, but because his body had decided to. Controlled, measured.
He dragged himself upright and stumbled to the door. The streets outside were empty, the rain still falling in thin, silver needles. The cold had faded as quickly as it came, leaving the fire in its place again, hotter than before.
The voice returned:
"Mutation Level: 2%."
Two percent. And it already felt like dying.
He moved. Not toward home not yet. He didn't want Tessa seeing him like this. Didn't want her to ask questions he couldn't answer.
Instead, he cut down the side alleys, avoiding the main streets where the Rat Knives might still be prowling. Every sound was louder than it should've been dripping water, the squeak of a rusted sign swaying in the wind, the distant hum of faulty magitech transformers.
Once, he swore he could hear the heartbeat of a stray dog halfway down the block.
The strain inside him pulsed with each new sound.
Half an hour later, he reached the back of the tenement they called home. He slipped in through the rear stairwell, moving quiet as the rot-soft wood would let him. The walls here were thin enough that you could hear arguments, snoring, and the occasional scream through three floors of crumbling brick.
He stopped outside their apartment door, leaning against the frame until his breathing steadied. The fever still burned, but his face was steady enough.
He unlocked the door.
Tessa was sitting cross-legged on the couch, a book in her lap, the single lamp in the room casting yellow light over the threadbare cushions. She looked up instantly.
"You're late," she said. No accusation just concern tucked into the edges of her voice.
"Work," he said, moving past her toward the kitchen. He didn't turn enough for her to see the sweat slicking his face.
"You eat?" she asked.
"Yeah," he lied, grabbing a glass from the counter and filling it with tap water. The taste was metallic, but the coolness helped for half a second before the fire came back twice as strong.
He didn't stay long in the kitchen. Tessa didn't press him. She'd learned not to when he came home with that look the one that said don't ask.
He shut himself in his bedroom and locked the door.
The moment he was alone, he collapsed onto the bed, clutching his arm. The fever surged again, and with it came flashes — streets he'd never walked, faces he didn't know, and a set of eyes, his eyes, staring into mirrors that weren't there.
The voice came one last time before the blackness swallowed him:
"Survive. Or be erased."
When he woke, it was morning. His bedsheets were soaked through, his skin pale under the dried sweat. The fire was still there muted, but steady, like coals waiting for breath. His head pounded, and every muscle ached, but he was alive.
Somewhere in the background of his mind, the quest timer ticked down:
"71:04:12."
And he knew then whatever Rigg Malco had done to him, it wasn't going to burn out.
It was going to grow.