Chris's body was on autopilot.
His feet dragged through the sponge-like floor of the Leviathan's innards, the thick membrane squelching beneath every step. The ambient glow from the gas-forged micro-sun overhead cast everything in a dull, beige rot-light. It smelled like bile that had fermented for a century inside a sick god's stomach.
Kelvin trudged ahead, holding the flashlight low. It flickered. The thing was barely holding on after days of exposure to acidic mist and the constant tremors in this living, dying place. Stitch lagged behind, humming something tuneless under his breath, occasionally muttering insults at Chris's back.
Chris didn't respond. He hadn't said much since the bunker. Not after the terminal hijacked his veins. Not after his AI watch—now twitchy and temperamental—flatly informed him that his body had been "partially formatted." Whatever that meant, it hadn't felt like healing. It had felt like invasion. His chest still pulsed with that static ache where his origin organ had been forced open and overwritten.
He wanted sleep. A week of sleep. He wanted food that didn't taste like sterilized sponge, and air that didn't burn the throat.
Instead, he had this: the sound of acid rivers slapping against organic walls, the faint screeching of something shifting above the false sky, and the memory of that voice in the console.
"Welcome back, Exploration Captain Mantle."
That wasn't his title. That wasn't his past.
Unless it was.
They reached a ledge—a sheer drop into blackness below. Kelvin knelt and shone the light down. Chris stood beside him, staring into the depths like it might offer answers. It didn't. Just a distant, gurgling echo, and something large shifting in the dark below. It sounded wet.
"This is the direction, right?" Kelvin asked.
"Yeah." Chris's voice was hollow. "Tail section."
Kelvin nodded. "Good."
Neither moved for a moment.
Stitch spat off the ledge. "What's wrong, afraid to step off into mommy's digestive pipe?"
Kelvin ignored him. Chris didn't blink. The air down here was thicker, less breathable. The gas had started to change. It clung to the inside of the nose, tasted metallic. The AI warned them to keep their masks on—said the new chemical structure included compounds not present on Earth's periodic table.
Gaseous Composition Identified:
XeO₈K
FLr₃Z
BnH₇C(unstable isotope)
Unknown organic molecule chain: unclassified, behavior resembles parasitic mycotoxin
According to the journal they'd found, breathing it in caused hallucinations. But not illusions. Shared delusions—constructs built from the Leviathan's failing mind. As it aged, it went mad. As it went mad, it made others mad with it.
Some believed the Leviathan didn't die of old age. It died from knowing too much.
Chris shook the thought loose and climbed down. The descent was slow—ropes made from sinew, anchored by hooks in bone. It wasn't built for human hands, but it held. Barely.
It took an hour. The final stretch was vertical, through a pulsing chute that spasmed around them as they passed. The organic tunnel vomited them into a massive chamber. It looked like a church if the church had been built from flesh and sorrow.
Every wall writhed. Eyes blinked from the ceiling—hundreds of them. Some were human. Some were not. Most were too decayed to tell.
At the center was a pulpit made of fused ribs, and something atop it… praying?
It turned.
Chris stopped breathing.
The thing's face had no skin. Its teeth were exposed like they were smiling, but its eyes were wide and hollow. Blood dripped from its open palms in slow streams, vanishing into the floor. Its chest was caved in, stitched closed with what looked like hair.
Kelvin stepped back. "Chris—"
The thing moved. Slowly. Reverently. Like a preacher finishing its sermon.
It spoke with a hundred voices.
"Fuel walks again. The Rootless Flame. Captain Mantle. Will you burn for us?"
Chris raised his Glock.
He fired. Twice.
The creature staggered, but didn't fall. Instead, it extended its arms and vomited a thick black gas from its chest cavity. The AI shrieked in Chris's ear.
"DO NOT INHALE. DO NOT INHALE. DO NOT—"
Too late.
Kelvin collapsed. Stitch screamed and flailed behind them. Chris fell to one knee, vision swimming. His watch's screen flickered to a string of unknown characters. Then—English:
"Awakening temporary access to Commandont Layer."
His chest burned. His origin organ spasmed. He felt something alive inside his veins—moving on its own. Something was waking up. Something that wasn't him.
He screamed, clutching his chest. It felt like his ribs were pulling open, like he was about to give birth through his lungs. His Magicka ignited on reflex. The pain doubled. Fire, blood, pressure. He was choking on his own breath. He heard his name. He heard hundreds of voices—his voice—screaming it.
Then silence.
When Chris opened his eyes, the thing was gone. The chamber was empty. Kelvin was breathing shallowly, lying on his side. Stitch had vanished.
The AI calmly stated: "Upgrade sequence aborted. You have ten hours until necrotic spread reaches vital thresholds. Seek purification immediately."
Chris didn't reply.
He stood.
Chris stood in the twitching half-dark, the micro-sun's waning glow sputtering through translucent muscle tissue like a dying bulb behind a stained curtain.
Kelvin lay face-down, unmoving. Stitch had crumpled into a heap of twitching limbs, limbs that no longer bled when torn or scraped but spasmed like a marionette with frayed strings.
Chris staggered over, half-dragged by the weight of his own body. His chest was a molten knot. Something alien was grafting itself to him, tightening. His watch hummed—no, purred, as if pleased.
He dropped to his knees.
"Please…" he rasped, voice dry and cracked. "Tell me how to burn it out. The upgrade. Whatever the hell you did to me."
The screen on the AI-watch flickered. The Nazi eagle insignia twitched into view for a moment before fading back into static.
Then came the voice.
Cold. Crisp. Condescending.
"Begging from a Commandont. Pathetic."
Chris slammed his fist into the floor.
"I'm ordering you. As Commandont. Tell me how to fix this. Tell me how to survive. How to make them survive. I don't care if it kills me later—I'll deal with that when we're out. I need time. I need control. Help me."
A long silence.
Then, the AI chuckled. No mirth. Just mockery.
"Very well, Commandont Mantle. Let us observe your folly."
A blue pulse ran down the watch's edge. The screen went black. Then text began to scroll:
UPGRADE-BURN PROTOCOLS: PARTIAL COMMANDONT ACCESS GRANTEDEstimated burn time: 12 hours, 6 minutes, 44 secondsWarning: Origin organ has reached adaptive phase. Delay beyond 12:40:00 will result in irreversible fusionNecrotic gas contamination in companions: AdvancedKelvin Temple: 4h 12m until systemic cellular collapseEntity STITCH: Already dead. Functional integrity failing in ~3h 58m
Chris blinked.
Four hours?
He reeled back. His hand trembled. His brain swam in heat and fury and static. Kelvin was going to die. Stitch—well, Stitch might've been dead the whole time. But Kelvin?
He bared his teeth, blood pooling at the corner of his mouth from his split lip. He was so tired. Every part of him felt raw and swollen, like his bones had been soaked in boiling vinegar.
"Fine," he growled. "No more riddles. No more tests. I'm done. I order you—as Commandont Mantle—tell me everything. Everything I need to fix this. Everything I need to get us out of this fucking corpse-womb of a monster."
The AI's tone changed.
"Acknowledged. Full temporary override granted."
"Burnout instructions: You must isolate the origin organ's contaminated threads through controlled Magicka manipulation. This will cause excruciating cellular failure, akin to flaying your nervous system from the inside. You may lose function in extremities temporarily. You must not pass out."
"Simultaneously, you will begin initiating External Harmonization, Phase One. This means applying your Magicka to the bio-resonant frequency of the Leviathan's vascular wall to detect semi-passive arterial flow routes."
"Follow the frequency. It leads to the tail. Your escape route."
"Once within the tail chamber, the Emergency Flight Pod must be activated via Commandont blood interface."
Chris exhaled, his breath rattling. Blood ran from his nose. The inside of his ears itched like maggots were nesting in them.
"You mean I have to burn my own body from the inside… while resonating with this thing's goddamn digestive tract... to walk to a pod?"
"Correct. The procedure will cause immense pain. You are advised to scream."
Chris looked at Kelvin. His chest was rising shallowly, mouth slack. His face looked… sunken. Like something had been leeching his life through the air.
No choice.
He took a breath—each inhale crackling in his chest like he was breathing fire—and sat cross-legged beside Kelvin's body. He gripped his own chest with trembling fingers, felt the subtle rhythm where the origin organ pulsed—an echo that wasn't his heartbeat. More like a metronome on a dying engine.
He closed his eyes.
And ignited the Magicka inside him.
It was like detonating a match inside his bones.
The first jolt sent him spasming to the side. He screamed so loud his throat tore. The AI calmly counted down the stages of tissue rejection. His hands curled, fingernails digging into his palms. His vision went white. His skin felt like it was melting off in sheets.
He forced himself upright. Focused. Focused on the thread. The resonance.
There.
It was like hearing the heartbeat of a sleeping god.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
He pressed his mind into that rhythm. Magicka flared from his spine, dancing like snakes of light across the chamber floor.
And then—he felt it.
A pull. A direction.
West. Or at least, what counted as west in the gut of a dead cosmic horror.
Chris fell forward, coughing blood, trembling, but alive.
The upgrade was burning.
Kelvin still had time.
The tail was calling.
He stood, bones screaming, teeth rattling in their sockets, and whispered:
"We're getting the fuck out of here."
The world blurred at the edges. Chris was still sizzling from within, his nerves barely more than frayed cables whipping with raw voltage, but the upgrade—whatever that parasite was—had been torched out of his system. He could feel the change.
He was still shaking when the AI's voice came back, stilted now, confused.
"Burnout process… complete. Estimated time: 9 minutes, 47 seconds."
"Anomaly detected. Expected minimum: 12 hours."
A flicker danced across the screen. Lines of diagnostic code scrolled by in white, some in dead languages, some in scientific shorthand that made Chris's brain ache.
"Conclusion: Genetic compatibility with Commandont lineage confirmed. Bloodline markers… intact. You are not simply a Commandont, you are the Commandont."
Chris didn't answer. He was already kneeling next to Kelvin, his hand pressed to his chest. The rise and fall of his friend's breathing was shallower now. Each breath a struggle. Each second, another molecule of gas sinking into his cells like invisible needles.
He looked at Stitch. The corpse-man was twitching violently now, thin fingers clawing at nothing, spasming in a seizure that didn't belong to anything living. His skin looked like dried wax and old stitches split slightly with every twitch.
Chris hissed through bloody teeth.
"AI," he snapped, "scan them again. How do I purge that gas? You're gonna help me excrete it. From both."
"Excretion of necrotic gas possible via reverse harmonic synchronization. You will act as the conduit. But be warned: exposure through contact will be excruciating. Gas will attempt to bond with your nervous system. Chance of cerebral hemorrhage: 43.6%."
"I don't care," Chris snarled.
He dropped to his knees. Pressed one hand to Kelvin's sternum, the other to Stitch's neck—cold and rubbery, like plastic soaked in meat brine.
"Do it."
The AI obeyed.
Magicka sparked from his palms like a defibrillator made of lightning. Instantly, he screamed. It was like inhaling powdered glass. His sinuses lit on fire. His teeth cracked. The gas poured into him—through him—like being dipped into bleach and bile and something wrong. Something that whispered in languages that never made it to human tongues.
He didn't stop.
Veins bulged in his neck. He convulsed. Blood shot from his eyes and ears.
Then—
It was gone.
Both bodies shuddered, violently, like being pulled from underwater in a dream.
The AI flickered, now calmly informative.
"Contamination purge complete. Companions stabilizing. Reinforcement of subject tissue advised. You are depleted. Enhancement possible via Magicka fusion, but it will scar."
Chris didn't hesitate. He stood, placed his hand against his own ribcage, and whispered the words the AI had forced into his head earlier. Glyphs appeared across his forearm. The Magicka within him twisted, condensed, fused.
His muscles bulged unnaturally for a moment. Bones realigned. His senses sharpened.
It burned.
But he was whole.
He reached down, slung Kelvin over his left shoulder. Stitch—lighter than he looked—over the other. His legs screamed in protest, but they moved.
The Leviathan was shifting. The beat of its inner arteries—pulsing like seismic sonar—guided him. The gas in the air grew thinner the closer he got to the tail's flow-path. He could hear it: a river of meat and organ-slick tunnels, flowing like sewage under a broken moon.
He ran.
The air blurred past him. Acid dripped in rivulets along the walls. He ducked under thrashing tendrils of intestine, darted through tight arterial tunnels, burst through bioluminescent sacs that exploded into violet mist.
He didn't stop.
He couldn't.
Somewhere behind him, something roared. A guttural, ancient sound, not like a beast but like the Leviathan itself remembering that it was still alive, in some terrible way.
The tail corridor narrowed. Chris felt it instinctively—this was the way.
At the end, nestled in a cocoon of bone and skin-wrapped steel, was the pod. Shaped like a drop of mercury wrapped in rusted iron ribs. Lights flickered around it. Ancient, forgotten lights.
A console lit up.
Welcome back, Commandont Mantle. Extraction vessel awaiting activation.
Chris dropped his companions gently to the floor, his limbs vibrating. Blood dripped from his nose, his ears. His left eye had gone blind at some point, weeping pus.
He didn't care.
They made it.
One hour.
That's all it took.
He collapsed forward against the pod's entrance, whispering:
"Open it."
The machine obeyed.
The pod unlatched.
And for the first time in what felt like a lifetime—they were going home.