The seven letters painted on the walls repeated every hundred or so meters, stared silently at Vega. She treaded hastily through the hallways, reading signs which directed them to the central control room a pace Dan couldn’t quite keep up with. He was very vocal about that fact, and about how he didn’t understand what the floating balls of light were and would have appreciated Vega examining one before killing them – or at least slowing down.

If Farrah were here, she’d tell some nonsense about those being the souls of the dead, and that they should be treated with appropriate respect. Except no one who’d died here had a soul, and those balls of light were just another horribly mutated creature.

Vega felt an unparalleled sense of helplessness as she slammed open a ballasting door, and ran, practically jumping over clusters of steps, down the stairs that led some three storeys lower. Describing an absence of something was hard, but describing the withdrawal of a thought or a feeling mere seconds after it’d been perceived was downright impossible. At some point, about two crossroads after they’d reached the command floor, Vega was no longer sure if that deeply rooted sense of distress she was feeling was from flashbacks to everything that’d happened in hallways just like these, or from that sense of distress vanishing the second it appeared, locking her in a loop of nothing but her thoughts.

“What is this?” Dan’s question came muffled by the two or so hallways separating them. “It can’t be lichen, this place is pristine, what do you think – Vega?” He yelled, his tone distressed.

She gave him a few seconds to catch up, as she stared at the heavy ballistic doors that hid away the heart of this facility. She pressed her lips into a scowl. That wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t a heart, beating at the centre of it all. It was just another neuron in a network of synapses; a redundancy whose role could easily be taken by one of hundreds of others.

“There you are!” Daniel called out from the end of the hallway, as he cautiously walked towards the woman. The beam of his flashlight travelled along the ground, occasionally rising to the walls and ceiling to follow the flat growths along them. “This is disgusting, I don’t know what that is, but fuck is it everywhere and gross…” He stopped next to Vega and shone his flashlight over the door.

A thin network of dry filaments and pellicles slid through the microscopic gaps between the doors and the surrounding walls and tiled floor. It wasn’t that impressive in greyscale, but once the full nuances of oranges, yellows, browns and purples composing it came into light, Vega couldn’t help but find herself short on breath. The network was layered, new filaments growing over dried ones that never decayed due to the staleness of the air, and the efficiency of the ventilation system. It wasn’t alive, in that sense that lungs and nerves and ligaments stretched over dozens of meters never could be. But it wasn’t undead or dead either. It just was.

“Is this …” Vega never finished that thought. She wondered if this was what she was, just stuffed into the shape of a person and covered with skin, held together by an uncomfortably tight suit and routine tasks that gave the illusion of a purpose.

“Central command,” Dan read out the mostly hidden sign on the side of the door. “What do you think is in it? I … I know I insisted on my bunker theory, but this … this is so – I don’t even have the words for it. It just feels wrong. This whole place does.”

He didn’t know half of it.

“I think you can put your weapons away. There’s no one in there who’ll fight back,” Vega spoke, before approaching the door.

Clay Palm Strike

Internally shatter objects of over 2m in radius or side length from a selected point-source, determined by the position of the palm, without destroying the structural integrity of the object. Maximum object thickness cannot exceed object’s smallest side length or diameter.

Expert

Cost: 1P per target per use.

The door shattered with a sound all too dry and crisp to belong exclusively to the metal and synthetic plastics that once composed it. With a kick, Vega knocked down one of the larger chunks formed by her skill, leading most of the left-hand door to collapse inwards.

Daniel gasped and levelled his crossbow at one of the figures in the chairs that lined the circular room.

The layer of those thinly spread organs was thicker on the inside of the control room. It covered everything from the screens and signalling panels on the walls, to the desks and chairs that ran along it. Shapes that were once humanoid lay buried under the network that grew thicker, almost bushy, over a conference table at the centre of the room.

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

It was hard to pinpoint the origin of this organic layer. So, Vega did the next best thing and sank her hands into one of the thicker nodes, and pulled with all her System-granted strength.

A wail filled the room, its source impossible to pinpoint, as the lungs and throats producing it were spread so thin over this dimension and the adjacent one, that natural laws no longer applied to them. The sound filled the room, and ran through the hallways, knocking Dan back, finally able to escape the place that’d kept it prisoner for years.

Vega realised her mistake the very next second, as layers upon layers of dried film collapsed over her.

Tiger’s claw

Without any physical modifications, the user’s hand-nails become razor-sharp like claws. Any natural real material within immediate reach can be ripped.

Expert

Cost: 1P per 50 minutes of use. Free to cancel.

She ripped through the web of dried flesh and mutated guts with a scream of panic. Panic that persisted the second she breathed in fresh air again, and felt that unnatural calmness take over her mind. She wasn’t in control, she’d never been. She clawed at the cluster of bones and residual muscle just because she could.

In the deafening orchestra of her unregulated breathing, that dry and still living film collapsing under its own weight around her, she heard a finger being moved over a crossbow trigger.

She snapped around, and Dan took several hasty steps back. He looked terrified. So, Vega tilted her head in that unnerving way the creatures outside did, before ripping into the pile of non-distinct dried flesh again. She gave him a good two seconds to fire. But when he didn’t she raised a confused eyebrow.

“Vega?” He asked, failing, or perhaps not really trying, to mask his shaky voice. “Are you back in control? Is everything good?”

She couldn’t help but nervously chuckle at his words.

“Control, umm, was not the thing I, umm, lost,” She said, deactivating her skill. “I think one of those is responsible for ‘Weave’. Umm, I’m not sure they can be fully separated from one another anymore, so best not to risk it in case they were double-casting and it’d mess with, umm, Farrah’s domain thing.”

Dan looked at her incredulously. Then he shone his flashlight around the room, which he awkwardly tried to balance under his crossbow in his non-dominant hand. Eventually, he conceded, not without a string of swears directed at the ex-employees, before heading up to a terminal.

Vega didn’t pay full attention to what he was doing and headed back out the hallway.

Although it’d been minutes, it seemed the echoes of those screams were still echoing back and forth, between the ever-shut access door, and this room that’d decisively not been a heart.

“Do you think killing them would be the right thing to do?” Dan’s voice did not drown out those echoes. “Vega, fuck, where did-”

She returned to the command room. The dried and living flesh cracked under her footsteps.

It was easier to tell without the insides of the scientist and technicians sprawled out all over the walls, but Vega now knew for sure she’d never been here before. And worse yet, she still didn’t remember how she went from the facility she was last into the one where she’d woken up.

If Farrah were here, she caught herself thinking, she’d help her look. She’d distract her for long enough for her not to notice her mind rearranging itself to keep herself combat-ready. But both of those, memories and Farrah, were things she didn’t and couldn’t have right now. So she focused on what was there.

“I think they no longer feel pain in the same way you do, so killing them won’t achieve much beyond personal satisfaction and hampering Farrah’s loadout,” She answered.

There was a long pause, uncharacteristic for Dan. His hands were tense as his fingers moved ever so slightly, unable to stay still while he typed something with his mind over a screen only he could see. Then, deep within the facility, the generator turned back on with a disconcertingly low hum.

The lights turned on one by one. They were a sorry imitation of sunlight, that Vega would never again accept as a substitute.

Dan still remained silent. Clearly whatever he didn’t reply earlier was more important to him than the achievement of resuscitating this facility. But Vega wasn’t going to pry.

They’d passed two levels with prison cells, earlier when they were rushing down the stairs here. She gathered up the resolve to ask Dan to centrally unlock those so she could go up and check if anyone was still alive, in the conventional definition of the word.

“Daniel,” She spoke.

She hoped he’d pick up on her request before she had to ask, but he didn’t. His gaze quickly shifted between a file directory and some list displayed on a separate monitor. He mumbled a ‘no’, before typing into the physical keyboard before him, and checking a different list.

“Umm, could you unlock the, umm, access to all cells on floors 3 and 4?” Vega asked. Her fingers had somehow found their way around one of the forearm straps on her suit.

“Yeah, sure, I saw it literally five seconds ago, it’s-” he didn’t turn around, and from his tone, it seemed he was only half-paying attention to her. She could have easily gone up and checked herself if only she were able to break the glass bay windows of the cells. “It’s already open?” he didn’t sound too sure. “You’re gonna check those out? Send me a message if you find the access codes to the main servers. It should be a 12-character password, and three series of pin codes, 5 numbers each. I’ll get what I can from this, but if you don’t find anything,” he paused, looking up, but not around. He couldn’t see Vega’s reflection in any of the monitors, on account of the screens being too bright, but it didn’t seem like he was looking at those as much as he was looking through them. “If I find what I’m looking for here, don’t wait up.”

The faint shuffling proper to someone with two feet came from upstairs, and Vega quickly agreed before rushing up.

However, the second she dashed through the third-floor door, she was met with a hallway full of those awful mutated creatures.