Each step Seyfe took toward the core felt heavier, not from fatigue, but from the weight of countless voices—not yelling, not screaming, but whispering. Whispering in layers, overlapping like threads in a decaying tapestry, tugging at the seams of his mind.
"You don't belong here…""He left us… he left us…""You'll replace me, won't you?""She sang while they peeled me apart."
The chamber grew colder. Not a natural cold—but one that crawled beneath his skin and clung to his bones. The air trembled like the surface of tainted water.
The core was more grotesque up close.
A mass of flesh and metal, shaped like a throne and spine fused into one. Cords that pulsed like veins writhed gently, some twitching when he got too close. From within the bulk of it, green fluid oozed in heartbeat-like pulses, timed with the low thrum that had been vibrating beneath his feet since he first arrived.
Seyfe clenched his jaw and pressed forward, but with each meter, the whispers grew louder—until they weren't whispers anymore.
They were memories.
Not his.
A girl crying as she watches her brother locked in a tube.A man praying for the experiment to fail before they reach his wife.A scientist whispering "forgive me" before activating a rune.
Seyfe stumbled, clutching his temple.
"These aren't mine… get out—"
"You've seen too much.""You're meant to replace it.""No… no… he's still alive."
He growled and forced himself to move again, dragging his feet through the mucus-like residue on the ground. He reached out—hand trembling—and placed it on the core's surface.
It was warm. Sickeningly so. Like a living body, breathing, resisting him.
"You don't get to live after all this," he muttered, eyes narrowing. "Whatever you are… whoever started this…"
He pulled out the dagger from his boot and drove it deep into the surface.
A shudder passed through the chamber.
The whispers screeched—turning from seductive to violent.
Suddenly the room went dark except for the rune-light, which pulsed faster, like a heartbeat in panic. The veins in the walls constricted. The runes flickered, then glowed a dangerous red for a brief moment.
And then the floor beneath Seyfe cracked slightly—just enough to let him know: you're not done yet.
"Tch… of course it wouldn't be that easy."
A deep growl echoed in the distance, reverberating through the corridors like a predator just awakened.
The voices of the corpses rose in rhythmic chaos, no longer whispers or fragments of memory, but now a chant, broken and discordant, like the growl of a rusted machine trying to mimic prayer. Their cries bounced from the walls in unison, weaving a hymn of madness:
"Awake, awake, break the flesh, tear the time—awake.""The roots remember. The roots demand.""He touched the core. It knows. It SEES."
Seyfe staggered back from the pulsing throne as the walls constricted, veins tightening like muscles flexing in a dying body. Wet, organic creaks rippled outward. The very chamber he stood in was alive—and now it was breathing faster.
The floor vibrated, subtly at first, then with a groaning shift that made the ground bulge and pulse beneath his boots. Dust and green mist shook loose from the ceiling.
And then—
A long, guttural sound echoed through the facility. Not quite a scream. Not quite a roar. Something in between. Something inhuman. A sound of pure fury from something that had been forced into slumber for too long and now woke to a stranger's blade piercing its heart.
Seyfe's breath caught.
He could feel it now—not just fear, but rage. Not his own.
"Something's angry…" he murmured, backing toward the corridor, eyes darting across the trembling floor. "Something ancient."
The runes on the walls began to twist, their glowing patterns deforming into unrecognizable glyphs. The green light dimmed, replaced with pulses of dark red.
"What did you wake up, Seyfe?"
A deep boom reverberated under his feet. Then another. And another.
Footsteps.
Massive, slow, deliberate.
Coming from below.
"Shit."
Seyfe turned on his heel and ran, the chamber screaming behind him, the wails of the corpses now an orchestra of horror as chains rattled and bodies thrashed in their bindings.
Whatever was coming… it was no longer dreaming.
It was awake—and it was looking for him.
Seyfe's boots slammed against the twitching, bone-laced floors as he sprinted down the pulsating corridor, gasping against the thickening air. Each step felt heavier, like the walls themselves were trying to drag him back, to feed him to whatever had awakened.
The screams behind him twisted, no longer random. They followed his rhythm, echoed his heartbeat.
A corridor opened into a stairwell, half collapsed—but it led down.
"Better down than dead," he muttered, and jumped.
His body slammed against the metal grating, then cracked through rotten flooring with a crash. He tumbled down a shaft of mangled pipes and dim, throbbing green light. The fall dragged a scream out of him before—
CRASH.
He slammed into hard stone, dust and blood spraying as he rolled, coughing. When he blinked his eyes open, they adjusted to the faint, eerie luminescence of the place.
It was massive.
A wide, circular arena lay before him—an altar shaped like a forgotten colosseum. Dozens of levels spiraled upward, each lined with crooked iron railings and ragged banners long since stained black with age and rot. Every tier was populated by wailing corpses, their bodies fused into the stone seats. Their heads shook violently, mouths opening and closing like broken speakers attempting to scream but only letting out warped, distorted screeches.
The sound was unbearable—the noise of death trying to sing.
The air carried the stench of embalming fluid and blood, old and pungent. In the center of the arena stood a raised slab, caked in dried tissue and strange runic brands. The ceiling above it was open, a vertical shaft that stretched up into nothing but black.
Seyfe barely had time to register the madness when the walls shuddered again.
A loud snarl echoed from above. Then came a heavy impact—BOOM—as something slammed into the ceiling of the colosseum, splintering old stone.
"No. No no no—"
A massive shadow dropped into the arena, crashing down with enough force to crack the floor. It stood there hunched—wrongly proportioned, pulsating with green veins and armor-like skin that looked stitched together from the corpses of beasts. Its head was long, like a stretched skull, and its arms ended in bone blades that twitched with blood-hunger. The echo of its landing screamed through the corpses, making them shriek louder in a deranged chorus.
It had been chasing him.
It had followed him here.
And now, inside the colosseum of horrors, there was nowhere to run.
Seyfe stumbled backward, adrenaline surging as he scanned the arena for anything—anything—he could use.
The arena whispered his death.The monster waited for him to move.
"Alright then," he hissed, steadying his breath as he eyed the broken pillars, shattered chains, and piles of bones. "Let's dance."
Seyfe's eyes locked onto the creature now standing in the center of the colosseum—the abomination that had chased him through the flesh-forest, the whispering corridors, the halls of suffering. Now, fully unveiled under the murky green luminescence, he could truly comprehend the horror that had been set loose.
It was an Echoform, no doubt—but unlike any he had ever seen. This one was not shaped by the death of a single soul or the residue of a tortured place. No. This was manufactured blasphemy. Engineered suffering.
Its sheer size dwarfed everything, easily reaching the height of a three-story building, its hunch giving it a beastly silhouette. Its hind legs, bent and grotesquely muscular, resembled those of a bloated calf—twisted by augmentation and age, covered in blackened flesh that pulsed unnaturally with green veins. Each step made the ground beneath it whimper as if the earth itself rejected its existence.
Its torso, disturbingly human in shape, looked as though it had once belonged to something noble—broad-chested and upright—but now wore layers of flesh like mismatched armor. Its arms, if they could be called that, were sewn from a collage of beasts' limbs—muscle from goliaths, talons from ravagers, the sinew of night creatures. Every stitch showed crude surgical precision, like someone had tried to sculpt death into a weapon.
Three glowing green eyes pulsed in the middle of its elongated skull, each rotating in place independent of the other—seeing everything, everywhere. Between them, scars etched in runic patterns throbbed with a dull emerald light.
From its back, a tangled system of metallic pipes pumped glowing green fluid through transparent veins that wrapped around its body like a spiderweb of veins. The liquid hissed as it moved, giving off a chemical stench mixed with decay. At intervals, the tubes hissed violently—releasing steam and causing the beast to twitch.
Its tail was perhaps the most viscerally disturbing feature: a mass of writhing, snake-like tendrils, each head bearing sharpened bone fangs and dead, blinking eyes. The snakes hissed and screeched in dissonant harmony, some biting each other in frenzy, others stretching hungrily toward Seyfe.
Its mouth, long and split to the sides of its face, opened to reveal rows of shark-sized teeth, dripping with green saliva that hissed like acid when it touched the stone. A thick, black tongue slithered between the teeth, twitching like it had a mind of its own, tasting the fear that coated the arena.
It shouldn't exist.It shouldn't breathe.And yet—it did.
And it was angry.