The door didn't want to open.
Nex's steel talons scraped against the rusted access panel, the sound too loud in the suffocating silence of Sector 12's outer tunnels. His crew stood behind him, their breath fogging in the stale air. Karen's rotor-saw spun idle at her wrist, the blades catching what little light filtered through the cracked bioluminescent fungi clinging to the ceiling. Gristle chewed his stim-gum too fast, the nicotine making his augmented jaw click with every nervous twitch.
"Piece of shit," Nex growled. His hydraulic leg pistons hissed as he braced himself, his prosthetic arm whining as he forced his fingers between the door's seams. Metal screamed. Rust flaked away like dead skin. With one final heave, the door gave way, collapsing inward with a sound like a dying man's last breath.
The smell hit them first.
Not the Junkyard's usual stench of oil and decay, but something deeper. Richer. Like the moment before the meat rots.
Gristle gagged behind his rebreather. "Fuck me. That's not—"
"Quiet." Nex's Conduit flared to life in his left hand, the cracked screen casting jagged shadows across his face as he compiled a Flashburn glyph. The spell stuttered at first, the light flickering before steadying into a sickly yellow glow. The beam cut through the darkness, illuminating what the Myriad Corporation had left behind.
The walls were wrong.
Not just rusted or crumbling, but alive in a way that made Nex's skin crawl. The metal bulged inward in places, stretched thin like skin over a festering wound. Dark veins pulsed beneath the surface, branching out from cracked Aether conduits that should have been dead decades ago. Something black and viscous dripped from the ceiling, gathering in shallow pools that reflected their faces back at them—distorted, mouths too wide, eyes hollow.
Karen shifted her weight, her rotor-saw spinning faster. "This place is a tomb. Let's just grab what we came for and—"
The wall breathed.
Not a trick of the light. Not the groan of old metal settling. The panels expanded, the seams between them stretching with a wet, tearing sound. A crack split open, and for one terrible second, Nex saw something move behind it—a flash of pale, glistening flesh, the suggestion of too many joints, the gleam of something that might have been an eye.
Then the ceiling came down.
Gristle barely had time to scream. His Scan Spell—a simple perimeter alert spell every scavenger learned—flickered blue for half a heartbeat before the glyph inverted, the light collapsing inward like water down a drain. His Conduit screen flashed a warning Nex had never seen:
> ERROR: SIGNATURE NOT RECOGNIZED
Then the tendril shot out from the dark, barbed with shards of broken glass. It punched through Gristle's thigh before he could react, lifting him off the ground like a fish on a hook. His jaw spasmed, locking as he tried to scream.
Karen moved first. Her Rust Sigil carved through the air, the glyph etching itself into the thing's glistening flesh. The spell worked—for a moment. The corruption spread, blackening the tendril's surface, eating through sinew and bone. Then the rot changed direction, crawling back up the spell's own lines toward her fingers.
She severed the connection by slamming her Conduit into the ground. The screen cracked. The thing that had been Gristle laughed with his voice.
Nex didn't hesitate. The rank 3 Bloodprice glyph burned crimson as he dragged the blade across his palm, feeding his own vitality into the spell. The explosion of force tore through the corridor, shredding flesh and metal alike. The thing came apart in wet chunks, the pieces scattering across the floor.
They twitched.
Nex's nose bled. His vision doubled. The walls whispered.
Behind them, the door they'd kicked in was gone.
The hallway stretched longer than it should have.
And somewhere in the dark, something that wasn't Gristle anymore called out:
"Boss? Where'd you go?"
Karen's breath came in ragged gasps. Her rotor-saw hung limp at her side, the blades chipped and dull. "We're not in a lab," she said, her voice too small.
Nex wiped the blood from his nose. The red smeared black where it touched his skin.
"No," he said. "We're in its stomach."
The walls pulsed in time with his heartbeat.
***
The darkness here had weight.
It pressed against Lucent's skin like damp velvet, swallowing each cautious footfall as he led the way through the tunnel's dark corridors. The air tasted of rust and spoiled meat, clinging to the back of his tongue no matter how shallow he breathed. Behind him, Kai tried to move like a shadow but have not quite learned how to cling properly, his boot stepped the concrete hard once, just once, but in the suffocating silence it might as well have been a gunshot.
Lucent didn't need to turn to know the kid had frozen. He could feel it in the way the stale air between them stopped moving, could picture the way Kai's fingers would be hovering over his Conduit's dead screen, torn between casting and staying silent. They don't know how the hollowed are managing to sense someone but one of the things they learned was light meant death down here.
Condensation dripped from pipes crusted with bioluminescent fungi, their sickly blue glow painting the tunnel in bruises. The light didn't so much illuminate as it did reveal how much darker the shadows were just beyond its reach. Each drop hit the ground with a sound like a slowing heartbeat, the intervals just irregular enough to set teeth on edge.
Something warm and thick landed on Lucent's shoulder.
He knew before looking up what he'd see. The ceiling wasn't metal anymore, it hadn't been for who knew how long. Strands of glistening tissue stretched between the pipes like a spider's web after rain, the membranes pulsing in a rhythm that matched the faint throb behind Lucent's eyes. Something moved beneath the surface, not rats, nothing as clean as rats, just dark shapes sliding through the meat of the tunnel itself.
Kai's hand clamped onto his arm hard enough to grind bone, but Lucent was already still. Ahead where the tunnel curved, a figure stood motionless.
The Hollowed wore the tattered remains of a Myriad security uniform, the fabric fused to its grayish skin where the Aether-rot had taken hold. Its arms hung too long, fingers brushing knees that bent the wrong way. Every few seconds its head twitched left, then right, like a broken scanner cycling through frequencies.
Lucent exhaled through his nose, counting the spaces between each drop from the ceiling. One. Three. Seven.
He stepped forward.
The Hollowed didn't move.
Another step. The kid followed, his breath hot and rapid against Lucent's neck.
A wet clicking echoed from further down the tunnel, the sound of teeth chattering in a jaw without lips. The Hollowed's head snapped toward the noise, then back to its original position with a speed that made Kai's grip tighten.
Lucent felt the moment Kai saw it. The second Hollowed shambled into view, its lower jaw completely gone, the remaining teeth exposed in a permanent scream. It moved like its bones were liquid, joints bending where they shouldn't as it came to stand beside the first.
For three heartbeats they simply existed together in the gloom. Then the uniformed one reached out with those too long of a finger and pressed its palm against the jawless one's chest. Not an attack. A check. The fingers flexed once, twice, feeling for something beneath the papery skin.
The jawless Hollowed shuddered. A sound bubbled up from its ruined throat, not a growl, not a hiss, but something horribly close to a sob.
Lucent's mouth flooded with the taste of iron. He hadn't noticed he had bitten his tongue.
The uniformed Hollowed dropped its hand. Both figures turned toward the deeper darkness ahead and moved as one, their uneven footsteps fading into the tunnel's bowels.
Kai's whisper was barely audible. "They're... they're still..."
Lucent's hand clamped over the kid's mouth before he could finish. The walls were listening. The ceiling was breathing. And somewhere in the dark, something that had once been human was still trying to take care of its own.
The silence after the Hollowed left was heavier than he has anticipated. He counted to thirty in his head, muscles coiled tight, before finally lowering his hand from Kai's mouth.
Lucent turned his face toward the tunnel's curve where the creatures had disappeared. The darkness there was absolute, a solid wall of black that seemed to absorb the faint blue glow from the fungal growths. He waited for his eyes to adjust, for some shape to emerge from the void, but nothing came. Only the occasional drip of moisture from the ceiling, each drop hitting the concrete.
Kai shifted behind him, his jacket scraping against the tunnel wall. The sound was barely audible, but in this quiet space, it might as well have been a shout. Lucent didn't need to turn to know the kid had frozen again he could feel the sudden tension in the air between them, like the moment before lightning strikes.
The pipe burst somewhere ahead was a mercy. The sudden gush of liquid through corroded metal gave them cover to move. Lucent led them forward, his body angled to avoid brushing against the walls where the fungal growths pulsed faintly. The blue light painted Kai's face in ghastly hues, making the sweat on his forehead gleam like oil. His pupils were so wide they nearly swallowed the irises whole, black pools of terror that kept darting toward every shadow.
At the junction, Lucent stopped. Three paths branched before them, each more foreboding than the last. The left tunnel exhaled a warm breath that smelled slightly of flesh. The center passage's floor was sticky with something that reflected the light in rainbow swirls. But it was the right tunnel that held his attention - the walls there bore dark, vertical streaks that looked too much like claw marks. And at about shoulder height, a single rust-colored handprint stood out against the grime, fingers splayed in what could have been warning or supplication.
Kai's fingers twitched toward his Conduit, the movement so instinctive he clearly didn't realize he was doing it. Lucent caught his wrist mid-reach, feeling the pulse beneath the skin. The kid's hands were ice-cold despite the tunnel's oppressive heat, his fingers trembling like a junkie in withdrawal. When Lucent met his eyes and shook his head once, slow and deliberate, Kai's throat worked as he swallowed whatever plea or protest had been forming.
The sound came from the left tunnel without warning, a wet, rhythmic squelching that set Lucent's teeth on edge. He pressed them both against the wall just as something round and glistening rolled into view.
The head came to rest at an unnatural angle, its ruined face turned toward them. The skin had been eaten away by something acidic, leaving the skull beneath exposed in patches, but the teeth remained eerily intact in a rictus grin. A single milky eye, miraculously untouched, stared blindly upward as the head rocked slightly, as if nudged by some unseen force.
Then came the scraping.
Metal dragging across concrete. Slow. Deliberate. Measured.
The Hollowed that emerged was wrong in ways that went beyond the usual Aether-rot. Its torso had split open along the sternum, the ribs splayed outward like some grotesque blooming flower. Within that pulsating cavity, dozens of small, underdeveloped limbs twitched and grasped at the air, some no larger than a child's fingers, others nearly full-sized arms ending in stumps where hands should have been. It dragged a length of rebar behind it, the end sharpened to a cruel point that sparked occasionally against the concrete.
Lucent felt rather than heard Kai's breath hitch. The Hollowed's head snapped up with unnatural speed, its neck vertebrae popping audibly.
In that moment, the time stretched into eternity, it stood perfectly still. Then its nostrils flared wide, the cartilage twisting as it sniffed the air. A thick strand of blackish saliva stretched between its jagged teeth before snapping and splattering against the floor.
Lucent didn't breathe. Didn't blink. The sweat trickling down his spine felt like ice.
The Hollowed took one shuffling step forward, its bare feet making wet sounds against the concrete. The rebar scraped ominously as it moved.
Then a salvation.
A single drop of water fell from the ceiling, landing directly on the sharpened metal with a soft, crystal clear ping.
The creature's head jerked upward so violently Lucent heard something crack in its neck. The malformed arms inside its chest cavity reached for the ceiling, fingers flexing in agitation. It hissed, a sound like steam escaping a rusted pipe - before shuffling past their hiding spot without another glance. The rebar's scraping faded slowly, swallowed by the tunnel.
Kai sagged against the wall, his chest heaving like he'd just run a marathon. A thin line of blood trickled from where he'd bitten his lip. Lucent waited a full sixty seconds, counting each drip from the ceiling, before motioning him forward with a tilt of his head.
The right tunnel was narrower than the others, the walls pressing in until they had to turn sideways to pass. The air grew warmer as they progressed, almost feverish against the skin.
Something crunched underfoot, Lucent looked down to see the floor littered with tiny, brittle bones. Rat skeletons. Hundreds of them. All perfectly clean, as if licked spotless. All facing the same direction, their delicate skulls turned toward whatever lay ahead.
The tunnel opened abruptly into a vast chamber that stole Lucent's breath away. The ceiling soared into darkness, lost in shadow, while below them pulsed the sickly red glow of dying Aether nodes. The light flickered erratically, casting monstrous shadows that danced across the walls in a grotesque parody of life.
At the chamber's center stood the source of the bones.
A throne rose from the concrete, its surface a grotesque fusion of human remains and rusted metal. The bodies that composed it were so thoroughly merged it was impossible to tell where one ended and the next began, all limbs twisted together, faces pressed cheek-to-cheek in eternal screams, hands grasping at nothing. The whole structure pulsed gently, tendrils of corrupted flesh writhing across its surface like worms after rain.
Upon this nightmare sat something that might have once been human.
Its elongated spine curved like a question mark, the vertebrae pressing against grayish skin stretched too tight. Too-many arms draped over the throne's edges, some ending in normal hands, others in clusters of twitching fingers or smooth, fingerless stumps. But it was the face, or lack thereof, that sent ice water pouring down Lucent's spine.
Where features should have been, there was only smooth, poreless skin stretched drum-tight over bone. No eyes. No nose. Just a single vertical slit positioned where a mouth might be, the edges glistening with black fluid that dripped steadily onto its sunken chest.
Kai's fingernails dug into Lucent's arm hard enough to draw blood, but the pain barely registered.
The thing's head turned toward them with eerie precision.
The slit opened.
And from the depths of that hollow face came a sound that wasn't a voice, wasn't a scream, but something infinitely worse, the exact, pitch-perfect frequency of a Myriad containment alarm, the same ear-splitting wail that had preceded the Aether Incident all those years ago.
Lucent didn't think. Didn't hesitate.
He yanked Kai backward into the tunnel just as the chamber behind them erupted in motion. The walls themselves shuddered as something horrifying and hungry woke from its slumber, the very concrete groaning in protest. The sound of rending metal and snapping bones chased them as they ran, not toward safety, not toward light, but deeper into the belly of the beast, because turning back was no longer an option.
The tunnels were alive and they remembered.