We were alone and isolated from Omega.

As I fought myself to my feet, I took out the transmitter Hades had handed me. One glance at the screen showed me they were still up there, and we were far, far away from them. I hit the communications channel, tried to get in contact, but was answered by nothing but static.

“Fucking shit!” I cursed.

Theodor walked up to me.

“Don’t bother, Dylan. They’ve abandoned us.”

“What? How are you so-?”

I closed my mouth when Ares’ words came back to my mind.

‘The moment you’re in the way, I’ll get rid of you.’

Shit, so that’s what happened. Athena had ignored us. To her, we were unimportant, or not important enough to waste her energy on. Still, I had to at least try. As I continued tinkering with the small device, Theodor put his hand on my shoulder.

“Stop toying with it. They won’t answer.”

“You’re saying they just left us here to die, is that it?”

Theodor shrugged. For a moment, he was about to say something, but then he closed his mouth and pushed me back a few steps. I stared at him, but then I heard it, too. Something was moving through the tunnel ahead of us.

A moment later, a dark, reddish worm appeared and slithered in our direction. At first it was only one, then two, then a lot more. When the first one slithered around my foot, trying to snake itself around my ankle, I brought my foot down on it. The thing burst open, leaving behind a puddle of disgusting liquid. The rest was getting closer, too, but Theodor didn’t focus on them. Instead, he continued staring ahead. A moment later, I knew why. What slithered out of the tunnel ahead of us was another worm, but this one was much, much larger. It was a giant abomination that filled out almost the entire tunnel.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!”

Theodor and I rushed down the tunnel, away from the thing. As we ran, I shot back at it. The bullets hit, leaving behind bleeding holes, but the thing was so big, it didn’t even seem to feel them. As it came after us, more and more of the smaller worms joined it. When I unloaded on it again, the wet, outer skin opened up. It revealed a mass of muscled flesh and a giant, gorging maw. A second later, it roared at us, vomiting disgusting liquids and a plethora of smaller worms in our direction. I pulled up my arm to protect my face. Two of the smaller worms got a hold of my arm and in an instant, I felt them tear through the protective armor. Razor-sharp teeth dug into my flesh and began sucking out blood. Still running, and in a panic, I tore them off, leaving behind tethered wounds. Blood was streaming from them, and when I saw the amount, I cursed to myself. If more of them would hit me, I’d be in serious trouble.

I ripped out a flamer and threw it behind me. By now, though, the thing’s outer skin had pulled back to protect its muscular mouth. The flames licked over the wet outer skin, leaving it blistered and sizzling, but that was about it. The creature roared in pain and threw itself forward with full force.

When it revealed its muscular mouth again, Theodor rushed it.

“What the hell are you-?”

Before I could finish, the creature vomited up another surge of worms. Theodor was hit, but didn’t react to them at all. Instead, he ripped out his combat knife and plunged it deep into the muscular tissue. He was thrown back, but right at that moment, I threw the grenade I’d been holding. It crashed against the creature’s mouth and exploded. Its entire front part was torn apart. Burned flesh and worms descended upon us. A few of them were still moving, slithering around me, but they soon died.

“Theodor, are you all right?” I called out as I rushed towards him.

He was on the floor and covered in dozens of worms.

“Shit, we’ve got to get them off you!”

To my surprise, however, the worms simply fell to the floor. None of them had bitten him or even clung to him.

“How did you avoid them biting you?”

Theodor was busy trampling the remaining worms before he turned to me.

“I think they just didn’t attack me,” he said matter-of-factly.

When we’d both caught our breath, we stumbled on down the tunnel. For a moment I stopped, wondering if this was the right direction, but then I thought about the damned worm. Wherever it had come from, there might be more of it. Even worse, I was running out of grenades. I’d only about a dozen of them left.

We hadn’t gone far when another surge of mental energy hit us. This one was by far the worst yet. One moment, I was walking, the next I was on the floor, pushed to the ground by its pressure. I screamed as something dug into my mind, probing and tearing at it. With shaking hands, I rummaged through my pockets and injected a mind blocker, but it did nothing. Images appeared in my mind. Omega was fighting the amalgamation of A-class organisms. Words reverberated inside my head. Futile. Useless. For a moment, I heard screams and saw Ares’ battered body crashing to the ground. Then the images were gone, and the assault was over. For long moments, I lay on the floor, panting and shaking. Freaking hell, don’t tell me even they weren’t a match for this?

“Something’s happening,” Theodor said while he stood over me.

“Is it... coming through? Are we too late?”

“I...don’t know, but the tunnels, they are shifting and changing. It’s doing something to this place. It’s warping it.”

Once I’d pushed myself to my feet, I noticed what Theodor had been talking about. The surrounding flesh was moving and reshaping itself as if it was alive. I watched as chunks of it pushed outward, changing their form before they seemed to crawl back into the walls.

As we walked on, Theodor began mumbling to himself.

“I can see it, Dylan. I can see what it’s doing. It’s not only reshaping the womb, it’s reshaping the laws of physics, the laws of our reality. Soon this place will be entirely different.”

He shuddered before he began laughing to himself.

Mere minutes later, another vision assaulted my mind. I saw them again, the mountains rising from the sky, but for the first time, I got a closer look at them. What I’d thought to be rocks was a writhing, teething mess. It was bodies, millions, billions of bodies that were somehow still alive. As much as I tried to push the vision away, I couldn’t stop staring at it and being sucked deeper into it. This writhing hell might have once been an entire civilization, an entire reality. The bodies’ eyes showed nothing but terror and their mouths were wide open in perpetual screams. This... this was waiting for us. This would-

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

“Don’t look, Dylan!” Theodor suddenly screamed at me. “Whatever you do, don’t look at it! You will lose yourself if you do! Push against it!”

I tried, desperately tried, but only when I stared into Theodor’s eyes was I able to do so. The vision was pushed back, and soon it was nothing but a distant, lingering memory.

“What did you just-?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he let go of me and continued on.

By now, the tunnels had become a pulsating mess of veins. More and more of the strange liquids were pumped through them. Here and there, it was leaking from pores and orifices, drenching the floor of the tunnels in them. As I stared at these openings, I noticed more bodies in the walls. They were being changed, dissolved, and incorporated. It was only after a while, though, that I realized I wasn’t staring at creatures, but people. That’s why those things had been dragging people away. It needed them to form and grow this womb. Theodor’s eyes grew wide when he noticed them as well. He stormed to the wall, plunged his hands into the writing flesh, and tore it open. The person trapped inside was constricted by thick tendons, and stared at us with half-open, empty eyes.

When Theodor tore the tendons apart and began pulling the man out, his mouth opened. Whatever he’d been trying to say, however, was cut off when his body began changing. The man’s flesh burst open, spread out, and formed into strange, fleshy branches. Theodor and I cringed back in horror. The man’s one arm dangling from the wall, stretched out and so did the person’s neck. The man’s mouth opened wider and wider, but no sound escaped from it. Instead, his head began bulging, becoming oval-shaped before the skull broke apart and his eyestalks pushed outward. More and more of his body grew and changed into a network of worm-like branches. Then it all stopped. The disgusting thing that had once been a human being grew limp before it withered away.

“What the absolute fuck...?” I muttered in shock.

Theodor didn’t say a thing and had already continued. I set out after him, but suddenly felt a breeze blowing past me. I jerked around, expecting to find a creature breathing down my neck, but to my surprise, nothing was there.

“It’s the womb, Dylan. It’s alive, breathing,” Theodor said from ahead.

I turned to him.

“Did you think this was just a heap of twisted flesh? No, there’s method to it. This, all this here, it’s a meticulous effort.”

“What are you?” I started, but he just rambled on.

“This was its plan all along. The theoretical data was right. An organism of this magnitude can’t enter our reality. It can’t bring its physical body here. That’s why it’s growing this womb. It needs to create a new body for itself, a proxy, an avatar.”

“What the hell are you even talking about?” I asked, stepping up to him.

“I... I don’t know. What was I saying again?”

As he stared at me, he looked utterly confused.

“You were saying this thing’s using this womb to create a new body for itself.”

“Oh,” was all he said as an answer.

For a moment, he closed his eyes and shook his head before he took a deep breath.

We didn’t have a direction as we continued on, no goal, but there was nothing else we could do. We simply continued walking.

Eventually, we noticed movement ahead of us. I bode Theodor to wait, as I checked it out. What I saw was a twisted creature. It was nothing but a heap of flesh with a multitude of different appendages sprouting from it. I watched as it pushed one of them into the wall of flesh. For a moment, I didn’t understand what it was doing, but then I saw the flesh bubbling and changing shape. As I inched closer, I could finally get a look at what it was working on. The creature hadn’t just pushed its tentacled appendage into the wall. No, it had pushed it into the mouth of a person trapped inside. It wasn’t merely changing the wall, it was reshaping a person.

The gun was in my hand in an instant, and I lit the fucker up. Only a single bullet hit before a surge of flesh pushed from the wall and in front of it to protect it. Then it spread out its tentacles and came for me. Fucking hell, I cursed and threw a flamer. The flames had barely spread when pores opened all over the walls. Disgusting, thick liquid leaked from them and extinguished the flames almost instantly. The smell was unbearable. The thing in front of me, however, merely giggled and a moment later, the image of hundreds of similar creatures doing the same thing was pushed into my mind. I grinned at it.

“I don’t give a shit about the others, but you’re going down.

With that, I started shooting again. As I did, Theodor, too, rushed forward. Shit, that crazy asshole! The tentacled creature, however, didn’t attack him. I watched in confusion as it seemed to push itself against the wall, out of his way, as if to let him pass by.

“You motherfucker!” Theodor screamed at the creature in his rage.

He was about to pull out his combat knife and attack, but there was no need for it. The moment he’d screamed at the creature, it was crushed and torn apart, leaving nothing but a heap of ground flesh behind. Theodor froze and stared first at the remains in front of him before he turned to me, not understand what had just happened.

“Theodor, did you just use... mental powers? How are you able to-?”

“I don’t know, Dylan. I don’t fucking know. Maybe when we destroyed that A-class creature and Sandra shielded me, something...”

His voice trailed off, and he shook his head.

“Shit man, what the hell is happening to you?”

“My head, my mind, it’s all scrambled up,” he stammered, clutching onto his head. “Ever since then... those visions, those whispers, suggestions and... Shit! Dylan, I don’t know!”

He pushed himself against the wall, taking one deep, shaky breath after another. Right at that moment, I heard something from the communications channel of the transmitter. It was working, after all! Between the static, I could make out words, orders. I barely understood any of it, but what I’d heard had been enough. One word made me gasp.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I screamed into the thing, but of course, none of my words reached anyone.

Moments later, the device was quiet again.

“What did they say?” Theodor asked.

“Didn’t catch a damn thing apart from the order for a cleansing.”

“And what’s that?”

“Headquarters’ last resort. They are going to level the entire area with an orbital energy blast. But we’re still here! We’re still fucking here!”

Theodor laughed.

“You know it’s useless, don’t you? They might damage this womb, but they won’t be able to destroy it. Can’t you feel it, Dylan? Can’t you feel this place isn’t entirely here anymore? Don’t you feel how alien it is? It’s a place in-between reality, an altered place. So this cleansing is useless.”

“Shit, but if they are willing to go that far, it can only mean Omega’s... fuck!”

“They are probably gone, Dylan,” Theodor said in an empty voice.

I ripped out the transmitter again, tinkered with it, and tried to get the signal back. At first there was only static, but then I heard something else. Screams, ghastly laughter, and then the sound of tearing flesh. Those screams, though, they were a woman’s, Athena’s.

“If even those guys can’t handle this, then what the hell are we supposed to do? What the fuck can we even do?” I screamed as despair took hold of me.

“That woman, Athena, she might still be alive,” Theodor suddenly suggested.

“What are you talking about? If they called for a fucking cleansing then-“

“No, Dylan, listen,” he cut me off, his face showing some sort of new understanding.

“They gathered all those people here because it needs them. That A-class organism did the same. I thought it needed only their flesh to grow this womb, but what if it’s after their minds? What if it needs them to create its new body? With Athena, though, with a mind as powerful as hers…”

“Shit! So you’re telling me when Headquarters sent Omega here, they might have helped it?”

Theodor gave me a nod.

“It might have known that we’d oppose it with more powerful forces. Maybe that’s why it brought all those vassals here.”

“Vassals?”

Once more, however, he didn’t comment on it. Instead, he came up to me and pointed at the transmitter.

“It should show us where she is, right?”

I stared at the thing, but it showed nothing. Even after I’d tinkered with it for a while, not a single signal was visible. Cursing in anger, I threw the damned thing to the ground.

After a few moments, Theodor closed his eyes and stepped up to the wall next to us. He reached out with his hand, caressing the fleshy surface.

“Hey, what are you doing?”

Instead of answering, I watched as he slowly pushed his hand between the flesh. My eyes grew wide, and I cringed in disgust when he plunged his entire arm into the writhing mess. Theodor’s body started shaking, and his face was covered in sweat. A second later, he pulled his arm back, crashed to the floor, and vomited. For a while, he just lay there, panting, before he pushed himself to his feet.

“What did you just-?”

“Let’s go, I know where she is,” he cut me off.

With that, he set out down the tunnel again. I stared after him in confusion. What the hell had just happened? For a moment, I just stood there, not sure what to do before I set out after him. What other choice did I have?

Fuck Monsters and fuck whatever’s going on with Theodor.