Karen's boots slipped in the black fluid oozing from the walls, her breath ragged as she glanced back.
The containment pods stood open behind them, their glass shattered from the inside.
Not all the things that crawled out were moving—some lay twitching, half-formed, their veins flickering like dying embers.
But the ones that could walk…
They were all heading the same direction.
Toward the abomination.
"That's not fucking natural," Karen muttered, her good hand gripping her pistol tighter.
Even the Hollowed weren't this coordinated.
This wasn't hunger.
This was summoning.
Lucent didn't slow down.
His knife was already out, his stride eating up the distance as he scanned for exits.
No hesitation.
No discussion.
If they stopped, they died.
Simple as that.
Kai's Conduit buzzed in his hands, the screen glitching with interference. He skidded to a halt under a ventilation grate, pointing up. "Air ducts—we can—"
"No." Lucent didn't even look. "Too tight. No room to fight."
"You wanna fight that?" Kai jerked his chin toward the distant shriek of metal rending—the abomination was close.
Too close. "We can't outrun it!"
Lucent's jaw clenched.
He knew Kai was right.
The ducts were a death trap if the abomination followed but so was staying in these halls.
A wet crunch echoed from around the corner.
Something was coming.
One of the hollowed that escaped a containment pod.
Its milky eyes rolled towards them.
It just stared.
The facility convulsed around them.
The metal walls screeched as the abomination's fury tore through SubLevel-7 like a child overturning furniture in a tantrum.
Karen's shoulder slammed into a shuddering wall panel as another seismic wail shook the corridors, the impact sending fresh waves of pain radiating down her ruined arm.
She could feel it in her teeth—not just sound, but something deeper, something that vibrated in the marrow of her bones.
The abomination wasn't hunting.
It was raging, desperate, tearing the world apart because the thing it wanted most wasn't there to take its wrath.
Lucent moved ahead of them, his knife reflecting the stuttering emergency lights.
He didn't need to look back to know they were being followed.
The tightness in his shoulders, the way his free hand kept drifting toward the Q-Serin vial in his pocket, these were the only signs he felt the primal urge to run.
Kai's Conduit spat static.
His hand pressed against the wall as if he could steady the shaking facility through sheer will.
"It's not after us," he panted, his voice barely audible over the groaning metal. "It's looking for someth-"
A section of ceiling collapsed ahead of them, raining dust and sparks.
Through the gaping hole, something vast and glistening pulsed in the darkness above—not the abomination itself, but its influence, its corruption spreading through the facility's veins like ink in water.
The intercom crackled to life with a burst of static that made them all flinch.
The voice that followed was smooth, amused, utterly at odds with the chaos surrounding them.
"Containment failure in Area Seven."
Karen's breath caught.
That voice—the same one that had welcomed them to this nightmare, that had watched their every move.
The abomination went utterly still at the sound, its distant shrieks cutting off mid-wail.
"All security protocols compromised."
A pause.
The facility held its breath.
"How disappointing."
The reaction was instantaneous.
The abomination's scream tore through the metal around them, so loud Karen felt something warm trickle from her left ear.
The walls bulged inward as something enormous moved with terrifying speed toward the sound of that voice.
Lucent grabbed Kai's arm, hauling him forward as the corridor behind them collapsed in on itself. "Move!"
But Karen hesitated, staring at the nearest wall where black fluid seeped between the panels.
The abomination wasn't just angry.
It was heartbroken.
The realization hit her like a punch to the gut—this wasn't the rage of a monster.
It was the fury of something that remembered being human, that remembered anguish.
The emergency lights flickered, then died completely, plunging them into darkness save for the faint blue pulse of Kai's malfunctioning Conduit.
In that sickly glow, Lucent's face was all sharp angles and shadow, his eyes reflecting the light like an animal's.
The intercom fizzed again.
"Run all you like."
Another pause, filled only with the sound of their breathing and the distant, wet tearing of metal.
"You're already dead."
Then the world went dark in truth, the last of the lights guttering out as something vast and hungry drew closer through the ruined halls.
Karen's fingers found the grip of her pistol by instinct, though she knew it was useless.
The abomination wasn't their enemy—not really.
But in its grief, it would destroy everything, including them.
And in the dark, with the walls breathing around them and that terrible, knowing voice still echoing in their skulls, none of them could say for certain they wouldn't do the same in its place.
The facility shook again, harder this time, as the abomination's wail rose to a pitch that threatened to crack the world in two.
Kai's hands shook as he traced the illumination glyph across his Conduit's cracked screen.
The spell flared to life with a sickly blue glow, revealing the sweat-slick panic on his face.
Light pulsed outward in uneven waves, throwing their distorted shadows against walls that breathed in time with the abomination's distant wails.
The moment the light appeared, the blast door behind them shrieked like a living thing and slammed shut with finality.
Karen whirled, her back hitting the wall as the impact vibrated through the metal.
"That wasn't fucking random." Her good hand went to her pistol, though they all knew bullets wouldn't stop what was coming.
Lucent didn't bother looking back.
He was already moving down the only remaining corridor, his knife glinting in the unstable light.
"We're being steered." His voice was gravel, his shoulders tight with the knowledge of what that meant.
The voice over the intercom chuckled—a dry, staticky sound that raised the hair on Kai's arms.
"Warmer," it whispered, the word slithering through the speakers.
The corridor narrowed as they ran, the walls pressing in like the facility itself was swallowing them.
Kai's light flickered over patches of blackened fluid seeping from the ceiling—not blood, but something thicker, something that moved against gravity to form glistening strands between surfaces.
The abomination's presence.
Its anger.
Karen's boot slipped in the muck.
She caught herself against the wall, her palm coming away sticky. "It's herding us right to it. That bastard—"
Lucent rounded a corner and froze.
The hallway ended in a yawning chamber, its vaulted ceiling lost in shadows.
At its center stood the abomination—not the shambling horror they'd seen before, but something coiled and waiting, its too-many limbs folded like a spider at the heart of its web.
The black veins threading its flesh pulsed in time with the facility's dying lights.
It wasn't chasing.
It had been waiting.
The intercom crackled one last time. "Good luck."
Then the speakers died, leaving only the wet sound of the abomination unfolding itself, of something that remembered being human rising to meet them.
Lucent's fingers brushed the Q-Serin vial in his pocket.
Behind them, the sealed blast door groaned as something heavy leaned against it.
No retreat.
Not anymore.
The overhead lights flared to life with a brutal, sterile whiteness, revealing the nightmare in full.
The abomination loomed at the center of the chamber, its form shifting like oil on water.
Tendrils of blackened flesh unspooled from its mass, lashing out with terrifying precision.
The Hollowed that had shambled toward it—drawn by some unseen call—now writhed as those tendrils pierced their bodies, burrowing deep.
Karen's breath caught in her throat as she watched one Hollowed—a thing that might have once been human—twitch violently as the abomination's tendril pulsed beneath its skin.
Its milky eyes rolled back as its flesh melted, dissolving into the abomination's mass like sugar in water.
But it wasn't enough.
Even as it absorbed them, the abomination raged.
Its massive form convulsed, slamming against the walls hard enough to buckle steel.
A howl tore from it—not of hunger, but of frustration, a child's scream magnified into something monstrous.
The lights flickered in time with its tantrum, strobing like a failing heartbeat.
Kai's Conduit sputtered in his hands, the illumination spell dying as the abomination's presence disrupted the Aether.
"It's not stopping," he whispered, his voice thin with horror. "It's still—"
Lucent didn't answer.
His eyes were locked on the abomination, on the way its form rippled and surged with each Hollowed it consumed.
It wasn't sated.
It wasn't calm.
If anything, it was growing larger, angrier, its movements more erratic as it thrashed against the chamber's walls.
The intercom remained silent.
No taunting voice.
No instructions.
Just the abomination, and the terrible, gnawing truth—
It still couldn't find what it wanted.
And until it did, nothing in this facility was safe.
At Least, to all of them.
The words fell like a guillotine blade.
"I'm going to use Q-Serin."
Lucent's voice carried no inflection, no hesitation—just the cold certainty of a man stepping onto a gallows.
His fingers moved with deliberate precision to the hidden pocket sewn into the lining of his coat, where the glass vial had rested against his ribs for days.
The fabric whispered as he withdrew it, revealing the slender container filled with liquid that caught the flickering emergency lights and fractured them into prismatic shards.
Karen's breath stopped in her throat.
She knew—had always known, from the moment she'd seen the way Lucent's fingers twitched toward that hidden pocket during their worst moments.
Q-Serin wasn't medicine.
It wasn't salvation.
It was the last card a man played when the deck was already burning in his hands.
Her jaw clenched hard enough to make the muscles jump, but she said nothing.
What was there to say?
The abomination's howls shook dust from the ceiling, each scream vibrating through their bones like a tuning fork struck against their spines.
Kai's Conduit flared in his trembling hands, casting erratic shadows across the sweat-slick planes of his face.
"We can help, you know." The words rushed out too loud, too fast, the desperate protest of a boy who still believed in alternatives.
His free hand reached out, stopping just short of Lucent's arm. "You don't have to do this alone. There's got to be another—"
"You can't." Lucent didn't look at him.
His attention remained fixed on the vial as he worked the stopper free with his thumb.
The seal broke with a soft, wet pop that seemed obscenely loud in the trembling silence between the abomination's screams.
The liquid inside swirled, thick as mercury, catching the light in ways that made the eyes ache to look at it directly.
It smelled like aether and something darker, something that curled in the back of the throat like the memory of a fever dream.
Karen's hand closed around Kai's wrist with enough force to make the bones grind together.
Her grip spoke what her voice wouldn't—the warning, the plea, the awful understanding.
There were no heroes here.
No last-minute reprieves.
Just the terrible calculation of survival that left blood under everyone's nails eventually.
The abomination's latest wail shook the world, closer now, so close they could hear the wet tearing sounds of its passage through the facility's metal veins.
The corridor behind them groaned as something massive and hungry pressed against the buckling walls.
Lucent tilted his head back.
The Q-Serin caught the light as it poured into his mouth, a slow, deliberate swallow that made the tendons in his neck stand out like cables under strain.
For a heartbeat—nothing.
Then his body arched as if struck by lightning, every muscle locking in perfect agony.
His knife clattered to the floor as his fingers splayed wide, tendons standing in sharp relief beneath suddenly pale skin.
The veins in his arms and throat darkened, rising to the surface like ink spreading beneath parchment.
His vision whited out for one terrible second as the drug catalyzed in his bloodstream, the chemical chains unraveling to bind with his nervous system.
He could feel it rewriting him on some fundamental level—synapses firing faster, neural pathways burning brighter, his very cells becoming conduits for something far beyond human limits.
The taste of copper flooded his mouth as capillaries burst under the strain.
Then the world snapped back into razor-sharp focus.
Aether rushed into him like a tidal wave through a shattered dam.
It burned through his veins, scouring pathways through muscle and bone as his body became the circuit for forces never meant to be channeled through flesh.
His left hand moved first—fingers contorting into the first sigil of the Inferno Lance even as the skin split along old scars, glowing fissures spreading up his arm like cracks in overheating ceramic.
The glyphs unfolded in his mind's eye, each one a fractal equation of fire and force that would have shattered an ordinary man's consciousness.
Five Rank 5 glyphs interlocked in his thoughts, their quantum computations warping reality at the edges as they demanded payment in aether and agony.
The Q-Serin stoked the inferno in his blood, muting the scream of his nervous system to a distant buzz as it optimized his biology into something barely human.
His voice, when it came, was layered with harmonics no human throat should produce.
Then—
"Inferno Lance."
The air ripped open.
Five lances of blue-white plasma screamed into existence, each one a condensed star's worth of fury bound in glyph-carved containment fields.
They struck the Hollowed first—creatures that had survived bullets and blades and spells dissolved instantly into screaming vapor, their aether-tainted flesh offering no more resistance than paper to a blowtorch.
The stench of ionized flesh and molten metal flooded the corridor as the lances pivoted, tracking toward the abomination's central mass with horrifying precision.
Karen had to shield her eyes as the heat warped the air into liquid ripples.
She could see Lucent's silhouette at the epicenter—wreathed in coronas of leaking aether, his shadow stretching and twisting against the walls in ways that hurt to look at.
The Q-Serin was keeping him alive.
Barely.
The abomination was shrieking now, entire sections of its biomass boiling away under the plasma storm—but it was learning, adapting, its flesh darkening into aether-resistant scales even as they watched.
Lucent's nose was bleeding black.
The Q-Serin's time was running out.
And the abomination was still standing.