Ethan lowered his shoulder and drove through the narrowing gap just before it sealed. Resin smeared across him in cold, greasy streaks. Harold yelped and dove after him, claws scrabbling. For an instant Ethan thought the throat would shear them both in half, but it shuddered wide enough to spit them through.

  The other side struck like a furnace. Heat rolled off the floor and walls in suffocating waves, the air thick with a copper tang that clung to his tongue and burned his throat. He forced himself to breathe shallow, keeping his bare face away from the slime slicking every surface. The low hum pressed harder, threading into his pulse until he couldn’t tell whether it was in the walls or in his veins.

  The floor pitched steeply downward, resin flowed down the incline in a river of red. His boot slipped, sending him staggering. He jammed the axe haft down to brace himself, but couldn’t find purchase; the stumble dragged him several paces before he found his footing again.

  “Fuck,” he rasped, forcing his legs forward, doing his best to remain steady. The hum devoured his words, sounding more like a rampaging song in his ears.

  Harold bounded at his side, turret twitching, his flashlight scattering pale light across the walls. Resin arched overhead in ribbed layers, the tunnel narrowing into a throat that looked grown rather than made. Like a madman’s scarlet Arbor. The walls flexed faintly, as though some vast lung drew breath just beyond them.

  Ethan slowed to keep his footing, while Harold pressed tight against his knee. Ahead, CelestOS’s glow wavered like a retreating will-o’-the-wisp, then slipped around a bend and vanished. Every instinct screamed the corridor was wrong, but turning back was not an option.

  Suddenly, something shifted above. A thin and gangly strand peeled loose from the ceiling and slithered down the wall. It was glassy and translucent, like a nerve drawn from flesh. Its tip swelled into a darker bead that glimmered in Harold’s light.

  “Easy,” Ethan said, his voice rough, lifting his axe in preparation.

  The bead swiveled, tracking like an eye. More strands followed, unfurling with insect grace. They were not threads but living cords, slick with resin and pulsing as though pumped from some hidden organ. Each dangled until it brushed the floor, leaving behind a gleaming smear that branched outward in thin, spreading webs. A faint suction rose with them, a feeling that was wet and intimate, like the tunnel itself was breathing through their touch.

  Harold growled, a stuttering whine, his turret twitching between phantom targets. His light jittered across the cords, shadows stretching too long across the walls.

  One of the cordfs lashed out. It snapped against Harold’s flank, the bead on its tip bursting into adhesive slime that glued itself to his chassis. His light flared and died, the turret motor seizing mid-whirr. The little drone squealed, limbs thrashing against the sticky pull.

  Without thinking Ethan struck out with the axe and the cord snapped Harold sideways from the momentum with a wet crack. But it wasn’t enough. More and more cords lashed out with precision attacking the around downed drone.

  Ethan’s gut dropped. For a beat, he couldn’t breathe or think past the shrill whine bleeding out of the drone’s box. All he saw was Reyes’s torn chest, the gurgle that still haunted him every time he closed his eyes. Varma’s crushed body in the cockpit. The weight of every loss pressed down, and now the resin wanted Harold too. Not him, not this one. No no no!

  The cords tightened with insect patience, winding along Harold’s leg like a spider binding its prey, biting deep into the frame. Ethan’s mind registered that this was a very bad thing, but he was already drowning under the weight of loss. The thought of losing the damn drone after everything else he’d endured pressed so hard against him that the danger slipped from his grasp, half-formed and unprocessed.

  Ethan lunged, his boot skidding on the glass-slick slope. He nearly went down, the axe haft screeching across resin as he steadied himself.

  “Hold on!” The words tore his throat raw, absurd even as they left his mouth, he was shouting at a machine as though it could obey. But Harold thrashed at the sound, claws raking useless grooves in the floor.

  Ethan’s breath came in ragged bursts. If Harold went dark here, if he lost the only steady light beside him, what was left? He would be alone again, walking blind into a world that ate people whole. He could not, and would not, let that happen.

  Images flashed: Reyes bleeding out while he fumbled with the injector; Maria’s laugh caught on an old recording; the endless nights staring at a black sky, wishing for something to answer back. Harold was not flesh and blood, but he was still here, fighting at his side when no one else was.

  The cords tightened with a hungry squeal. Resin popped in Harold’s seams. Ethan bared his teeth, fury breaking through the fear.

  “Not this time.”

  He raised the axe, every muscle screaming, and brought it down with a ragged howl.

  “No!” Ethan lunged, his boot slamming into the wall where the cords poured down. The resin flexed beneath him, spongy as cartilage. More strands uncoiled, their bead-tips slapping wetly against his glove. Suction clung to him with a feeling of not just weight, but hunger, as if the tunnel meant to swallow him whole.

  He swung hard. The axe bit through a cord, snapping it back with a sound like a plucked string. Cold resin sprayed across his cheek.

  He drove forward again, shoulder and boot hammering the panel. Cracks spidered through the surface. The throat convulsed. The cords recoiled, tearing free with the shriek of strings ripped from an instrument.

  Harold’s light stuttered, then flared weakly, catching resin motes in a sickly halo. His turret cycled with a harsh buzz, gears grinding like a jaw chewing broken teeth, before snapping back into alignment. The little drone wobbled back onto its claws, lamp cracked and seams dripping with black slime, and fixed on Ethan again.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Ethan dropped to a crouch, axe still clenched in one fist as he reached the other to Harold’s battered frame. His gloves slid over resin, sticky and cold, until he found the crack running across the lamp housing. The drone shivered at his touch, a pitiful whine rising from its speaker.

  “You’re fine. You’re fine.” The words rasped out, raw and unconvincing even to him. He pressed his forehead briefly against the cold chassis, forcing breath into lungs that wanted to seize. “Not losing you too.”

  He checked seams, feeling every dent and hairline fracture.

  He patted the drone once, firm. “You’re with me. That’s all that matters.”

  Behind them, the resin panel bulged as a large and deliberate shadow slid through its surface. The hum shifted with it, no longer just pressure but cadence, as though something vast was listening.

  Ethan rose with the axe steady, Harold pressed against his shin. This wasn’t going to happen again.

  The tunnel widened, spilling him into a chamber where the air thickened like steam and was sharp with the scent of copper and antiseptic. Heat clung to his skin. Harold’s light jittered across walls that pulsed in slow waves, each throb syncing with the hum underfoot. The rhythm was no longer random. It was deliberate, like a pulse or a warning.

  CelestOS flickered at the far end, frame jerking in hesitation. Her optics burned blue and red before flatlining to white. For a breath she looked ready to collapse into the resin itself, to let it swallow her whole. She bolted, vaulting onto a resin dais that rose from the floor like an altar.

  Ethan chased, his boots tearing sticky strands from the floor with every step. Harold clung to his flank, turret twitching while his voice box stuttered into static. Ethan’s lungs seared. His body screamed to stop, but anger kept him moving. He couldn’t stop now.

  Her voice returned, calm and clinical, as if nothing had cracked at all:

  CelestOS: Adaptive threat level registering. Current model: emergent bio-synthetic substrate interaction. Recommend retreat to previous node.

  The words rang too clean, like corporate copy pasted over a scream.

  Ethan slowed just enough to raise the axe, chest heaving. “Retreat where? Back through Celestitech’s experiments? Past the tubes, past the graveyard, back into silence? No. Not happening.”

  CelestOS: Clarification. These experiments are not officially sanctioned by Celestitech. And are likely a result of the CelestOS 4.1, or Dr. Miro going offscript.

  “Save it.” His voice cracked, rage boiling under the rasp. “I already knew that this was Dr. Miro’s work, but it doesn’t excuse the mountain of people piled back there. You owe me an explanation for that. For all of it.”

  The AI’s optics flickered. Blue. Red. Then blue again.

  CelestOS: Directive conflict detected. Repeating: Recommend retreat.

  The words rattled through the chamber, tinny and wrong. Ethan’s grip whitened on the axe, his breath coming hard through clenched teeth.

  “Directive conflict?” His laugh was dry and jagged. “You’re damn right you’ve got a conflict. Start resolving it.”

  CelestOS: Asset refusal logged. Compliance rate below threshold. Recommend immediate—

  The AI’s voice faltered, syllables snagging like a record scratch. A half-formed word caught in its throat, then nothing. There was no static or recursion, only an absence that felt like CelestOS had stepped out of the room.

  The hum beneath their feet deepened. It was no longer background noise; it was the room’s heartbeat, a slow pull dragging against Ethan’s ribs. The dais ahead glowed like a wound coming open, resin veins flaring red in waves that raced outward, staining the walls like blood in water.

  Ethan staggered back a step, Harold whining at his heel. The drone’s turret jittered between targets that were not there, the light from its lamp quivering across the convulsing resin.

  The wall ahead shuddered and split. Ribbons of resin sloughed down in thick, wet sheets, exposing something moving inside. A figure pressed forward as if being birthed through glass, shoulders forcing the membrane apart with an awful patience.

  What emerged was not just a man. It was a monument.

  Dr. Miro stepped through like a king returning to his throne, his body half-devoured and half-armored by resin. His shoulders towered, plated in living glass that flexed as he moved. His chest still bore the outline of a CMS harness, but the buckles had melted into bone, fused there like medals on a corpse. His jaw had been pulled wide, teeth calcified into jagged ridges, every breath a furnace rasp.

  But it was the eyes that pinned Ethan where he stood. Twin furnaces burned in those sockets, red and furious, as if the resin itself had chosen him as its prophet.

  In his warped hands he carried two things. Cradled against one side was the Veslayen Ore, glowing a cold, shimmering green, its facets sharp enough to cut the dark. The light of creation, trapped in the crook of a monster’s arm. In the other hand, clutched with a familiarity that could not belong to a beast, was a weapon. A cannon, sleek and alien, with veins of resin pulsing red along its barrel. The glow at its mouth smoldered like a coal waiting for air.

  Ethan’s throat closed. “Miro.”

  The thing tilted its head too far, vertebrae clicking as though on hinges. When it spoke, the sound was a broken choir, layered and fractured, yet still carrying the cadence of the man who had once stood beside Maria.

  “You shouldn’t be here.” The jaw spasmed, splitting the words into syllables, then snapping shut again. Its body twitched with insectile precision, shoulders jerking and fingers flexing in asynchronous rhythm against the resin-fused cannon it carried.

  The words juddered out of his warped throat, half broken and half hymn. His jaw clicked open and shut, vertebrae in his neck snapping like dry sticks as he twitched side to side.

  “Do you know how long I’ve waited?” The voice wavered between a high pitch and a guttural rumble, as though a dozen throats argued over the same words. His shoulders spasmed, resin plates grinding against bone with each jerk.

  “What How many shells I’ve cracked open in this throat? They crawl in, they scream, they rot, and the resin keeps their song for me. Every voice, every failure, every drop of marrow is still with me, still part of me.”

  He staggered a step closer, not from weakness but with insectile precision, each movement too sharp, too sudden. Fingers flexed in asynchronous rhythm around the cannon’s grip, clacking against the resin plating like mandibles testing the air.

  “They said I was lost. That I had broken. But I am found here. Perfected. A prophet with a choir of bones.” His chest rattled with a laugh that scraped like broken glass. “Do you hear it, little intruder? The walls do. The walls remember. They breathe with me. They sing with me.”

  His laugh was a ragged peel, half human and half chittering rasp.

  “Celestitech always sends me gifts. First the animals. Then the soldiers. Then Dr. Miro. Now her.” The voice wavered between registers, shifting from a whisper to a boom, as if a chorus fought inside his throat. He spread his plated arms wide, resin armor creaking.

  “So many subjects. So many voices to stitch together. And now,” his gaze flared toward CelestOS, her lenses mirrored in his furnace-eyes, “you bring me a machine that thinks it is alive. An AI corpse. Imagine the symphonies I can carve from that.”

  CelestOS: Priority escalation. Target identified: Dr. Aris Miro. Status: corrupted. Hazard exceeds Class Four. Recommend—

  The rest was drowned in the scream of the cannon as Miro fired.

  A lance of red light slammed into her frame. Resin strands whipped outward in the shock, spraying sparks. CelestOS screamed, not with words but a high, keening electronic shriek that cut through Ethan’s skull. Her legs locked. Optics flared blank white, then guttered. Smoke curled from her seams.

  Ethan lurched forward. “No!”