Simon stopped. His sensors locked onto the structure ahead.

  It was unlike anything he had ever seen before.

  Three spirals, each rising ten meters into the abyss, stood in a triangur formation. Smoke curled from their peaks, drifting zily into the water above. The entire site had likely been built atop a geothermal vent, harnessing the pnet’s heat for power.

  The construction was eerily simir to the spirals he had encountered at Site Alpha—

  Metal-like ptes, stacked upon one another like the scales of a deep-sea leviathan.

  Simon’s processors worked rapidly, piecing together the truth.

  'Now I know where all the structure gel went.'

  Then he froze.

  A familiar sensation rippled through his sensors—a shift in water dispcement. Something massive was moving behind him.

  The worm.

  Simon immediately shut down his lights and activated his cloaking system.

  His cameras locked onto the colossal creature as it slithered past, mere meters to his left. Its immense body moved with slow, deliberate precision, gliding toward the spiraling towers of the structure.

  Simon remained perfectly still.

  The worm rose above the spirals—hovering, watching—before diving straight down into the structure.

  And then… nothing.

  It didn’t come back out.

  Simon waited, his synthetic muscles tense, every sensor scanning the area for anomalies. But the abyss remained eerily silent.

  Finally, he deactivated his cloaking system and carefully moved forward, edging toward the structure.

  The signal from the power suits was coming from inside.

  He moved along the perimeter, scanning for an entrance. Then he found it—an unassuming doorframe, gaping open in the deep.

  He hesitated.

  A voice, his own voice, echoed in his mind.

  'Why am I so stupid? I could just walk away. Resume my journey to the surface. Why should I risk it all?'

  But there was something gnawing at him.

  Too many loose ends.

  The strangers in power suits. The disappearance of the structure gel. The worm monster diving into the unknown.

  Simon clenched his fists.

  'I need to find out what the hell is going on here.'

  He steeled himself and stepped inside.

  The moment he crossed the threshold, the entrance sealed shut behind him.

  His wrist bdes snapped out, his body tensing, prepared for an attack.

  Then—

  The water began to drain.

  A bluish light flickered to life above him, illuminating the chamber. A soft hiss filled the air as the wall before him slid open.

  Simon scanned his surroundings.

  The interior was... different.

  The design didn’t match the exterior.

  This was no simple structure. It was alive.

  Vein-like pipes covered the walls, the ceiling, even the floor. They pulsed faintly, as though something moved within them.

  Simon knelt down, pressing his synthetic fingers against the floor, syncing with its surface.

  A vibration.

  A slow, rhythmic pulse.

  A liquid, moving through the pipes in measured intervals.

  Like blood being pumped through arteries.

  Simon stood up, peering through the open doorway ahead.

  Beyond was a hallway, curving slightly—

  Circur corridors, lined with the same vein-like piping, stretching into the unknown. A dim bluish glow pulsed from above, casting the walls in an eerie, shifting light.

  The design was unsettling.

  It was meant to evoke something organic, as though he were moving through the guts of a living entity.

  A deep unease settled over him.

  'This pce feels... alien.'

  He trianguted the signal from the power suits.

  Left.

  Simon moved like a ghost, pressing against the walls, his steps silent as he disappeared into the unknown.

  And whatever awaited him there.

  Simon stopped, his sensors fring.

  Something was moving toward him.

  A grotesque fusion of BULL (UH3) maintenance unit machinery and WAU’s techno-organic mutations, the thing that approached him was a nightmarish aberration, a corrupted remnant of Pathos-II’s twisted evolution. Once a mere maintenance drone, it had been transformed into something far worse.

  Its body was an amalgamation of metal, cables, and pulsating structure gel, the once-sleek form now swollen with grotesque, tumor-like growths. The WAU’s influence had reshaped it, making its frame heavier, reinforced, especially in its hindquarters, giving it a loping, unstable gait. Its legs—once nonexistent—had been grafted onto its form, a fusion of mechanical parts and sinewy organic tendrils, allowing it to move in an unnatural, jerking rhythm.

  The numerous bioluminescent nodes scattered along its warped body pulsed faintly, glowing like the sick heartbeat of a living organism. At the front of its mangled head, a bright spotlight swept the area, a predatory eye scanning the darkness.

  Its arms, elongated and reinforced, twitched—joints reinforced with metal pting and sinewy cables. Once meant for maintenance work, they had been repurposed into instruments of grasping, tearing, and dragging. A haunting perversion of its original function.

  The creature moved slowly, its heavy, ponderous frame making each step deliberate and unnatural.

  Simon had no intention of finding out whether it was still intelligent or merely a mindless predator.

  The narrow hallway offered no escape.

  Simon tensed, his synthetic muscles locking into pce. There was no way around it. No shadows deep enough to hide in.

  His cloaking system engaged, and he pressed his back against the cold metal wall, every circuit primed for an ambush. If the creature saw him, he would strike first—his bdes slicing through its head, severing its vision before he drained its energy.

  The spotlight flickered to life, casting an eerie white beam down the corridor, cutting through the dim passage as the abomination shambled forward.

  Simon watched.

  The thing lurched past him, its twisted, mechanical limbs dragging its bulk forward, the weight of its corrupted body making each step heavy, deliberate, inevitable.

  Then—

  It stopped. Right next to him.

  Simon remained still, every synthetic fiber of his being locked in anticipation. If it sensed him, even for a moment, there would be no time to hesitate. His bdes were ready.

  But then—

  It just kept walking.

  Unbothered. Blind to his presence.

  Simon waited. He counted the seconds, watching as the creature disappeared into the darkness beyond.

  Only when he was certain it was gone did he deactivate his cloaking system. The temporary invisibility that he had used until now had drained a noticeable portion of his power reserves, but he still had enough to continue.

  He moved forward, descending a set of stairs. At the bottom, he stopped.

  Ahead, the hall stretched into the unknown, but to his left, a doorway.

  And beyond it—

  Voices.

  Simon moved closer, pressing himself against the wall, every sensor tuned to the conversation.

  He didn’t peek inside.

  He only listened.

  “Do you think Kate will bring them back?” A masculine voice asked with a thick russian accent .

  A pause. Then, another voice, female, cold, unwavering.

  “Do you question her?”

  The man hesitated. “No—no. I’m not. But you know… it still seems amazing to me. Unreal.”

  A long silence. Then—

  "I think we’re long past that, Kovsky.”

  The name rang faint bells in Simon’s memory.

  But he kept his focus on the conversation—he had too little data to draw any conclusions yet.

  “Yeah…” he finally said, voice softer, weighted.

  Simon remained still, processing.

  Who the hell is Kate?

  And more importantly—

  'I hope "bring back" doesn't mean reviving.' Simon thought grimly.

  From within Simon’s palm, a thin, dark fiment uncoiled—a camera, flexible and silent, resembling a mechanical worm.

  He had built it for this exact scenario—to peek without being seen.

  He angled his palm, letting the cable-like body extend, its tiny lens shifting, adjusting. The feed flickered to life inside his vision.

  Inside the room, the two figures continued their talk. One rested on what Simon assumed to be a couch-like structure, their posture unnatural, yet eerily composed. Their helmets sat on a nearby surface—perhaps a table, or something that served as one.

  And then Simon saw their faces.

  His processors stalled.

  A realization crashed over him like a drowning wave.

  'I made a mistake coming here.'

  Their heads were grotesquely malformed—a swollen, pallid mass of flesh, stretched taut over unnatural bone structures. The skin was slick, glistening as if perpetually wet, mottled with sickly hues of pink and gray. Deep, vein-like ridges crawled across their scalps, trailing downward, fusing into a thick, sinewy mass where a neck should have been—if it could even be called that.

  The eyes were the worst part.

  Massive, bulging orbs, deeply sunken into their malformed sockets. They were framed by a disturbing corona of bristling, bckened fiments—like withered eyeshes that had been fused into the flesh. The eyes did not move, did not blink—only reflected the dim light with an unnatural, gssy sheen, giving the horrific illusion of sentience.

  Despite that, there was nothing human behind them.

  Where a nose should have been, only two hollow slits remained, barely more than shallow indentations in the skin. The lower half of the face was even worse—

  A ruin of flesh.

  The jaw was gone, fused, stretched, warped into a grotesque tangle of tendrils, thick, ribbed folds of flesh that cascaded downward like a mockery of a throat. The ridges along them pulsed faintly, as though something inside was still trying to breathe—or worse, to speak.

  Simon suppressed a shudder.

  The back of the head was just as horrifying—a smooth dome of warped, bulbous skin, ridged with bony protrusions where the skull had shifted, twisted, reformed itself into something unnatural. There was no hair. No human feature left to recognize. Just a featureless expanse of living tissue, grotesquely stretched over something that had long ceased to be human.

  A visage that should not exist.

  A cruel mockery of identity.

  They did not blink.

  They only stared.

  Simon stood in absolute stillness, his mind racing. His processors churned through possibilities, weighing options. The conversation between Kovsky and the unknown woman continued.

  They spoke of gathering more corpses. Excitement lined their words as they discussed where to head next, as if they were preparing for a simple errand rather than desecrating the dead.

  Simon made his decision.

  He would get his answers—one way or another.

  With a low mechanical whir, his right forearm split apart, opening vertically in two as the repulsion cannon housed inside powered up. A faint hum filled the air as the energy build-up vibrated through his synthetic limbs.

  He wouldn't kill them.

  But if they made the wrong move...

  He would make sure they felt it.

  Simon moved.

  In an instant, he stepped forward, standing in the doorframe, his imposing silhouette blocking their exit.

  The unblinking eyes of the two figures shifted to him, their grotesque, filmy orbs locking onto his form.

  Simon barely suppressed the unease crawling up his frame.

  "Do not move. I just want to talk," he said, his voice measured but firm.

  One of them spoke first.

  "Hey, buddy, calm down," Kovsky said, raising his hands. His voice didn’t come from a mouth, but from somewhere deep in his throat, vibrating through the twisted sinew of his neck. "I thought everyone was dead. Who the hell are you? And what’s with that cool—"

  "I will calm down once I have my answers," Simon interrupted, his tone on edge.

  The woman—if she could even be called that—leaned forward slightly, her vein-ridged skull tilting.

  "Then what are you waiting for?" she asked.

  "Are you Neil Tsiolkovsky?" he asked, gaze trained on the malformed man.

  "Yeah. One and only," the creature responded.

  Simon didn’t let the unease settle. His next words came fast.

  "How are you alive?" he demanded. "You died in the ndslide inside the tunnel connecting Phi to Tau. I read your bckbox. Are you just a neurograph inside an organic body?"

  Kovsky shook his head, the movement oddly sluggish.

  "No, no. The bug thingy—"

  "Solipsist," the woman interrupted.

  Kovsky nodded. "Yeah. The solipsists took my body to Kate. And she... revived me. Somehow. I can't remember."

  Simon’s mind reeled.

  "And why did this Kate bring you back?" he asked, his voice dangerously low.

  The woman turned her hollow gaze toward him.

  "She said she didn’t want to be alone," she replied.

  Then, she stared deeper.

  "Look, we mean no harm," she continued, her tone steady, almost pleading. "I know we look freakish as hell, but believe me, we are not monsters."

  Her words did nothing to calm Simon’s nerves.

  "Let's say that I believe you," Simon said, his repulsor cannon still trained on them. "Would you try to turn me into whatever you are?"

  Both of them shook their heads.

  "Our appearance is because our heads were damaged when we died," the woman expined, her voice ced with frustration. "Do you think I wouldn’t want to look normal?"

  Simon’s sensors were locked onto their grotesque faces, scanning for microexpressions, shifts in heart rate, anything that would betray a lie.

  But there was nothing.

  Their voices were steady. Their pulses calm.

  It didn’t mean they weren’t hiding something.

  "Then, what happened to the remains of WAU at Site Alpha?" Simon demanded.

  The woman shrugged. "The thing was dead st time we checked. The solipsists just gathered the hardened structure gel."

  Simon narrowed his vision field. "And its core?"

  The woman hesitated.

  "I... don’t know."

  Simon processed that—the way she said it, the pause, the faint edge of uncertainty in her voice.

  She was either lying or was just as in the dark as he was.

  Then—

  'Simon...'

  The voice was clear. Too clear.

  His sensors fred. A chill that wasn’t real, couldn’t be real, ran through his frame.

  "What the hell?!" Simon spun around, scanning the empty hallway behind him.

  Nothing.

  Just cold metal and vein-ridden walls.

  "Are you alright?" Kovsky asked, his tone genuinely curious.

  Simon turned back to them. "I just heard a voice calling my name."

  The woman didn’t even flinch.

  "That’s Kate," she said simply. "She’s connected to this pce."

  Simon’s fingers tightened around his weapon.

  "What do you mean connected?" he pressed.

  The woman sighed. "I don’t know. She has some kind of telepathic ability, I believe. I didn’t bother to ask."

  Simon’s mind raced.

  "Then she already knows I’m here?"

  Kovsky let out a dry, breathy chuckle. "Oh, for sure."

  Simon’s head snapped toward the stairwell leading upward.

  Without another word, he moved—his mechanical limbs propelling him forward as he ascended the stairs two at a time.

  Then he stopped.

  At the top of the stairs, the hallway had been sealed.

  No doors. No exit. No way back.

  A slow, creeping realization settled over him.

  He was trapped.

  "Fuck."