My back slammed hard against the cold wall as the slimy ooze rose over my feet. The thing didn't seem to crawl; it was more like it was dissolving the entire room. Its iridescent surface churned,wrapped in shards of glass and fragments of gears—all torn from Professor Kael.
"Stand behind me." Director Veridia's tuning fork emitted a piercing hum,distorting the air into a visible ripple that pushed back the leading edge of the slime. But it was useless. The thing just paused, and the gap was immediately filled by more squirming matter.
More spinning crystal teeth emerged from the sludge, this time forming complete sentences. The voice was still the metal girl's, cold yet laced with a strange curiosity: "Old Blood... Hunger..."
The void magic in my palm flickered like a dying flame. Pain still felt like a nail driven into my skull, a leftover from the living rune. "What does it even want?"
"Your blood. Your genetic code. The Bone Weaver's calling card." Veridia's voice was taut. She flicked the tuning fork again, the resulting ripple even weaker. "Normally the 'cleanup crew' handles these kinds of breaches. But you led it straight into a core area."
"My fault?!" I spat, struggling to pull my feet from the increasingly high, glue-like ooze that reeked of cloying rot. "Your damned classroom started it!"
The slime suddenly arched, forming a tentacle with a spear-like tip that shot straight toward me. I instinctively raised my black-scaled hand to block—my mind flashing with images of it being severed.
But there was no impact.
The tentacle stopped an inch from my palm, its tip quivering before blossoming open like a disgusting flower, revealing layers upon layers of crystalline teeth. They grated against each other, emitting the metal girl's voice, but this time with a different inflection, almost... perplexed.
"...Weaver's... mark?"
It wasn't talking about the scales on my hand. It was talking about the faint white line on the back of my hand, like an old scar—one I didn't even remember getting.
Veridia's movements also halted. Her gaze sharpened, pinning my hand. "Interesting."
"What's interesting?!" I was nearly driven mad by disgust. It just hung there, neither attacking nor retreating, just buzzing, repeating those words with its grating teeth.
"It recognizes something more direct than 'Old Blood.' A more recent mark." Veridia slowly lowered the tuning fork, her eyes looking at me like lab rats suddenly speaking. "You've recently been in contact with the Weaver's creations. Direct contact."
The metal forest. That cold embrace. My mind buzzed.
That split second of distraction was enough.
The suspended tentacle violently exploded —not in attack, but disintegrated into countless rainbow-colored, oily droplets that slammed into me head-on. I raised my arms to shield my face, feeling the droplets bore/drill into my skin upon contact, icy cold.
More of the slime seethed/boiled, no longer trying to cover the entire room but converging entirely on me, abandoning Veridia. From the walls, floor, even the ceiling, all the ooze peeled off, merging into a growing, iridescent wave, at the center of which was that constantly opening and closing mouth of crystal teeth.
"Hunger!" it shrieked, the sound transforming into pure noise that made my eardrums ache.
I turned to run, but my feet were utterly stuck. Just as the wave was about to engulf me—
—a roar that absolutely did not belong to a human came from the direction of the operating table.
Professor Kael, pinned by glass shards, had his lens-eyes flare with a blinding red light. The shattered gears and circuits in his chest cavity spun and ground wildly, spraying sparks.
"My... laboratory!" he hissed, his voice like tearing metal.
A broken mechanical arm suddenly shot out from the base of the operating table like a cannonball, smashing into the slime wave and blasting a huge hole. Slime splattered everywhere, hissing as if burned.
Professor Kael, or what was left of him, sat up with a motion that completely disregarded his own damage, glass shards cutting deeper inside him, some oily, iridescent blood spurting out. He ignored it all. Another intact mechanical arm whirred into position, its end opening to reveal a port glowing with a dangerous blue light.
"Unsterilized biomass... contamination!" he bellowed, the blue light intensifying.
The slime wave seemed to judge him the greater threat. It hesitated, swaying between me and Kael.
Veridia moved. She ignored Kael and the slime, instantly flashing to my side. Her icy fingers clamped down on my scaled wrist, her nails almost digging between the scales.
"Don't resist," her voice was quick and low, brooking no argument, "unless you want to become the grand prize in this garbage war."
Before I could react, she dragged my hand and shoved it directly into a nearby puddle of Kael's iridescent, oily blood that hadn't yet been covered by the slime.
The moment my fingertips touched the blood, my mind felt cleaved by lightning.
My vision was filled with a massive rune—- Hunger.
Not an image on a wall screen. A living, roaring concept. I could feel Kael's pain, his fury, the endless void created by the insane energy consumption needed to sustain his life. All of it was packed into this rune, transmitted through his blood.
The slime let out apiercing shriek. Sensing this more intense, direct "feast," it immediately abandoned me and surged toward the still-roaring Kael.
Veridia took the chance to yank me away. My feet finally came free from the ooze. She gestured at the wall, and a hidden door slid open, revealing a dark passage.
"Go!"
I took one last look back.
The slime had completely engulfed Professor Kael. The crystal teeth were frantically chewing through metal and flesh. The blue light flared once and then died. The entire room had become a rainbow-colored, churning digestive chamber.
And just before being swallowed, Kael's red-flaring lens eyes penetrated the ooze, staring dead fixedly at me. There was no anger, no fear in that look, only a kind of... intensely greedy recognition.
The hidden door closed behind us, completely cutting off the terrible chewing sounds.
In the pitch black, there was only the sound of mine and Veridia's breathing. And the iridescent blood still glowing faintly on my hand, along with the burning rune of Hunger seared into my mind.
Veridia's voice cut through the darkness, cold and hard:
"Congratulations, Thornwood. First lesson: you learned how to feed one monster."
"Using another monster as bait."