The cavern stretched above them like the ribcage of some long-dead leviathan, its arches lined with pulsing blue veins that throbbed in time with an unseen heartbeat.
Glowing mucus sacs dangled from the ceiling, twitching occasionally as if something inside dreamed of movement. The air was thick with the scent of wet copper and something sweetly rotten.
Marin knelt by a jagged outcrop of crystalline growth, her Rift Mapper humming softly in her hands. The device cast a pale green glow across her face as she adjusted the signal bandwidth, her brow furrowing.
"Gemstone signature's weak," she muttered, tapping the screen. "It's too fractured to be a core."
Five faint blips pulsed across the scanner's display.
"We'll need to hit all of them to trigger collapse." She glanced up, her glasses reflecting the eerie bioluminescence. "And they might move."
Nearby, Sylvie flexed her serrated vein-whips, the calcified hooks glistening with a thin sheen of Rift-born fluid. She scowled as one of the tendrils twitched involuntarily.
"We shouldn't have let Kai go in last," she grumbled, shaking out her arm. The whip retracted slightly, veins knitting back together under her skin. "He's greener than Lune's drama career. He's gonna piss himself the second something growls at him."
Ash didn't look up from sharpening his bone blade against a piece of volcanic rock. "He'll adapt," he said simply. His voice was rough, like gravel underfoot. "If he doesn't, he dies. The Rift has its rules."
Sylvie rolled her eyes. "Yeah, yeah. Survival of the fittest, blah blah. You're such a poet, Ash."
Marin stood, tucking the scanner into her belt. "Enough. We're wasting time."
They moved deeper into the Rift's shifting biome, the cavern giving way to something resembling a jungle—if jungles were made of black fungal trees and grass that wasn't grass at all, but thin, membrane-like strands that shuddered as they passed.
Then Marin froze.
"Hold."
Half-buried in the spore-thick ground, something coiled.
It was the size of a large dog, its body a translucent spiral of flesh lined with thousands of twitching cilia. At its core, a faint glow pulsed, slow and rhythmic, like a heartbeat.
Marin crouched slowly, her gloved fingers hovering just above it. "Genovore Larva," she murmured. "Non-aggressive, but lethal if provoked."
Sylvie tilted her head. "That the kind that gives you claws or brain hacks?"
"Depends." Marin adjusted her glasses. "Every parasite mutates uniquely once it enters a host. Some grant vision beyond the light spectrum. Others slow cellular decay. But if the body rejects it..." She trailed off.
Ash finished for her. "You become Riftspawn."
Sylvie whistled low. "So the usual gamble."
Marin nodded. "This one's purebred too. Not a hybrid, not a fragment, bully intact." She stood, wiping her hands on her thighs. "They evolved to be... tempting."
This is how GeneDevourers are made, Marin didn't say. Not infection. Negotiation, then adaptation—or madness.
Sylvie's grin was all teeth. "Bet Kai's having a real fun time right about now."
Ash sheathed his blade. "Move."
They pressed forward, warier now. Somewhere in the shifting dark, Kai's signal remained off-grid.
---
Kai's lungs burned as he skidded around another corner, his boots slipping on the slick, pulsating floor of the Rift biome. Dead end.
I'm cooked.
He whirled, heart hammering, just as the sound of skittering limbs echoed behind him. The creature—that creature—loomed at the mouth of the tunnel, its beetle-like carapace shimmering with blue bioluminescent jelly, four eyes blinking in erratic patterns.
Kai's survival instincts short-circuited.
Instead of screaming, he straightened. Brushed dirt off his jacket and cleared his throat.
"Hey!" he called, voice cracking only slightly. "That was... beautiful, elegant, and rhythmic. I've never seen such passion!"
The creature froze.
Kai barreled on, gesturing wildly. "Those pelvic spirals were Masterful. The way you—" He flailed a hand. "—undulated? Art. Pure art!"
The creature tilted its head, antennae twitching.
"No, no, don't be shy!" Kai continued, sweating. "You were spectacular, I mean it. Such control, such... oozing symmetry! And the sounds were so musical! Like a dying violin played by an angel with too many fingers!"
A long, terrible silence.
Then, slowly, the creature gestured for him to follow.
Oh, it worked?
---
The cave glowed softly, its walls lined with pulsing veins that expanded and contracted like lungs. A "table" of bone-pulp stood in the center, flanked by two seats made of coiled tendons. The creature motioned for Kai to sit before sliding over a leaf-shaped bowl filled with steaming green goo.
It smelled like sugar left to rot in a dumpster.
Kai took a sip. His taste buds staged a mutiny.
"Exquisite," he choked out. "A subtle... pungency."
The creature made a series of clicking noises that Kai somehow felt more than heard—a telepathic pulse of static and emotion.
"You're human, yes?" it conveyed. "I once loved a human. Impregnated him, actually."
Kai nearly spat out the goo. "Oh. Uh. Was she—he—uh—what did they look like?"
"Looked like you," the creature mused.
A small figure shuffled in from a side chamber—a child, human in shape but with blue-tinged skin and eyes that glowed like deep-sea jellyfish.
"That's our offspring," the creature said proudly. "The human died. Sad. He liked bread."
Kai's soul briefly left his body.
"I, uh... what position did he prefer?" he asked weakly, because apparently his brain had given up on self-preservation.
The creature blinked innocently. "Spiral-rear."
Kai's smile was a rictus of horror. "I heard about that from the old man who lived next door. He taught me some terms. Never explained them, though."
The next hour devolved into surreal chaos...
Kai complimented the creature's slime consistency. "So viscous and so moist. A delicate balance of mucus and je ne sais quoi."
The creature showed off its prized collection of broken shoes. "The laces are tragic, but the soles are divine!"
They debated the philosophy of toes. "Humans have too many. Five is Excessive. Three is elegant."
The creature insisted Kai try on a jelly-skin robe. "It breathes and also screams sometimes, but ignore that."
Kai, in a moment of existential curiosity, asked if parasites felt love. The creature pondered this. "Only on Tuesdays."
Through it all, Kai's mind screamed one realization:
The father was a man! A human man!
And now there's a child.
What the f*ck kind of Rift is this?!
The creature patted his hand. "You're tense. Need more goo?"
Kai's grin was a death rattle. "I'd love some."
---
The conversation stalls. Kai, out of options, says, "Maybe... I want to be impregnated too. Could be... a bonding experience?"
The creature's limbs cracked as it stretched, its gelatinous sac pulsing with a slow, rhythmic throb.
"I always stretch before insemination," it explained cheerfully. "Ritual."
Kai's smile froze. His soul, already halfway out of his body, made a valiant attempt to flee entirely.
Then—
Everything slowed.
The cave's bioluminescence dimmed. The creature's movements blurred, as if Kai were watching it through thick, warped glass. His heartbeat thundered in his ears, each pulse a hammer-strike against his ribs.
And then, cutting through the silence like a blade—
"You joke with monsters, but what does that make you?"
The voice. His voice. The one that had lived in the back of his skull since he was twelve years old.
"You laugh to hide the rot."
---
Memory.
A bathtub. Cold water turning pink at the edges. Kai, twelve years old, trembling, his skin splitting open along his forearms in jagged, hairline fractures. No pain—just the terrible, creeping wrongness of watching his own body betray him.
He'd scrubbed at the cracks, as if he could wipe them away. But they only spread, deepening, darkening, until something beneath the skin shifted.
Then—
"You're mine now."
A whisper, slick and intimate, curling up from the base of his spine.
Kai had screamed. No one came. His clan was already destroyed, and he had lived alone until then.
The voice never left.
It spoke to him when he bled—when he fell from the Institute's training rigs, when the other kids shoved him into lockers, when his own mutations tore him open from the inside.
"Let me help," it would murmur, as his blood pooled on the floor.
It spoke to him when he cried—those rare, shameful nights when the weight of living with something unnatural inside him became too much.
"You don't have to hurt alone."
And it spoke to him when he killed—the first time he'd been forced to put down a Rift-spawned dog in the Wolfram kennels, his hands shaking around the bolt-gun.
"See how easy it is?"
He'd tried to ignore it. To drown it out with laughter, with sarcasm, with candy trades and stupid jokes. But it was always there.
Now, standing in the belly of a Rift, facing down a creature that wanted to impregnate him, Kai realized something:
He was tired.
Tired of running, tired of pretending, and tired of being afraid of the thing that had kept him alive all these years.
Sylvie's voice echoed in his memory:
"Your parasite will push you and want control. You give it blood, or it takes you whole."
Kai closed his eyes.
"Fine," he whispered, not to the creature, not to the Rift, but to the presence coiled inside him. "I'll spill blood for you."
A pause.
Then—
"Good."
The voice purred.
Kai opened his eyes.
The creature was still stretching, oblivious, its sac now swollen and glistening.
"I'll kill that thing," Kai said, his voice no longer his own.
The parasite unfolded.
His vision fractured into prismatic shards. His bones moved, sliding under his skin like live things. Pain—white-hot and glorious—erupted along his spine as something sprouted, jagged and serrated.
The creature finally noticed.
Its four eyes widened.
Kai smiled.
Then—
A single, wet snap of bone.