He drifted, half-conscious, the cold metal beneath him groaning with each jolt of the wheeled platform. Light above, harsh and sterile, pulsed rhythmically with the motion—blink, blink, blink—like some ancient machine’s heartbeat. Shapes hovered at the edges of vision, voices murmuring in fragmented tongues.

  “Subject stable... anomalous... no sedation response...”

  His head lolled to the side. Shadows danced across chrome walls, smeared and unreal.

  He tried to speak, but his tongue was thick and clumsy. His voice, when it came, was a dry rasp. “Where...?”

  A figure leaned over him. Masked. Eyes like twin slivers of glass.

  “…no structural anomalies…”

  “…keep the Helminth sedated until the interface is locked…”

  Sedated. Interface. Locked. The words made little sense. But the tone behind them didn’t need translation—clinical. Detached. Purposeful.

  Then the motion stopped. A hiss of decompression. Doors opening. The sound of clamps disengaging, and then the table rose—tilted slightly forward to show him what awaited.

  They’d arrived.

  A dome of blackened steel. Pulsing tubes veined the walls, alive with faint illumination—pink and grey like exposed nerves. Machinery hummed with breath-like rhythm, synced to no mortal heart.

  In the center, the Helminth chamber.

  Not a vat of life. A station of reassembly. Red-tinted organic mass coiled within a cradle of steel, half-grown tendrils twitching in slow, unthinking spasms. Cables pierced its sides. Surgical tools hung like fangs from overhead limbs. At its heart pulsed ta writhing bundle of Helminth-grown matter, not alive, but not dead either. The thing that lived in the walls. Not machinery. Not truly.

  Someone walked forward into his vision. A woman—older, authoritative. She did not wear a mask. Her eyes were pale and sharp.

  "The Helminth strain is not a symbiote. It is a directive. It does not bond. It overwrites.” She paused, examining him with cold fascination. “You are not its master. You are its vessel. Do you understand?"

  He couldn't speak.

  She stepped closer.

  "The others resisted. Screamed. We had to put some of them down. You will do better."

  The table locked into place beside the chamber. Restraints slithered into position. Around him, machines buzzed to life.

  “The body fractures under pressure,” the woman said. “So we rebuild it. Not a cage. Not armor. A second skin. Designed for endurance. For violence. For purpose.”

  A technician approached with an injector, its tip red-hot. The pain came in a burst—lancing through his side, then neck, then spine. No explanation given. No chance to brace.

  He gasped. The restraints held.

  "Anesthetic levels within range," someone noted.

  “No sedatives,” the woman replied. “We need to see what takes.”

  One of the ceiling arms hissed as it lowered. At its end: a semi-organic conduit, flushed red with Helminth biomass, threaded with pale sinews and twitching fibers. It hovered above his bare chest, like a predator scenting weakness.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  Then it struck.

  Not around him. Into him.

  And then—he burned.

  The Helminth entered his body like molten wire—red, wet, and alive. It rooted itself into muscle, burrowed along bone. The pain was beyond measure. Every nerve lit up as if his body were rejecting itself.

  But this was no rejection.

  This was transformation.

  The organic matter of the frame expanded, sheathing his limbs with twitching red tendrils. They pulsed in time with his heart, tightening, layering, weaving. A lattice of flexible, flesh-like armor bloomed across his torso, down his arms, into his legs. Every inch of it writhed with minute, involuntary motion. He could feel it learning him.

  Watching from behind a pane of reinforced glass, the observers spoke again.

  “Response is stronger than the sixteenth. Integration progressing faster.”

  “Neural entanglement at ninety-seven percent.”

  The woman’s gaze never left him.

  “This one will survive.”

  His vision blurred. Pain surged again—sharper, deeper—something inside him pushed back. He convulsed. His back arched against the restraints.

  Then—something broke.

  Not in him, but around him.

  A sharp hum filled the chamber. The red of the protoframe began to smoke. Not vapor, not decay—but shedding. The crimson hue darkened, stiffened, split along golden lines that traced themselves from nowhere. Threaded like veins. Shining like circuitry.

  The air shimmered, unnaturally still, like the breath of the world itself had caught in its throat.

  For a moment, all he could hear was the sound of his heartbeat—then even that was gone. Silence, thick and pressing, wrapped around him like cold fingers. Something in the fabric of space had shifted. A whisper, voiceless and ancient, coiled around his spine.

  It wasn’t external.

  It was within.

  The shard of Void buried deep in his being—silent for so long he forgot it was even there—quivered.

  And then, it screamed.

  Agony and awareness surged through his body, his limbs convulsing with a lightless power. Not pain. Not ecstasy. Something older. Something elemental. Like a memory awakening in stone.

  The world fractured.

  Light bent. Gravity forgot itself. The distant walls of the facility groaned as time hiccupped and stumbled. All around him, the present twisted—recognizing, reacting.

  Not to him.

  To the thing inside him.

  The shard of Void—dormant, slumbering—had been roused. And as it touched the echoes of the true Void here, in this place of forbidden experiments and fractured science, it roared in recognition.

  He screamed, not with fear, but with the fierce clarity of becoming.

  The red frame had turned black. Black like starless void, trimmed with lines of gold that glowed faintly—shifting across his new skin like patterns responding to thought. The material no longer pulsed with organic twitching. It moved with him, like it was him.

  From his skin, black tendrils unfurled—liquid and alive, but hard as tempered swordsteel. They coiled and wove themselves across his chest and limbs like serpents, guided by unseen will. Gold lines veined through them like conduits of power, tracing pathways both beautiful and terrifying.

  The air shimmered.

  The world slowed.

  For a breathless second, he was outside of himself, watching from some liminal perch as the transformation began. His scream echoed between the membranes of dimensions.

  This was not armor.

  This was a becoming.

  It knew him. Fit him. Formed to his bones and instincts with uncanny precision. The right half of his body vanished beneath the protoframe’s embrace—sharp, regal, monstrous. Even the shape of his hand had changed—claws instead of fingers, each movement carrying predatory grace.

  The left side remained bare, human. Vulnerable.

  A mirror of the divide within.

  Golden light bled from his eyes now, pupils slitted like those of some Void-birthed predator. His breath trembled as power surged through him—not granted, but remembered. The shard within had awoken to the presence of something far greater.

  The Void was here.

  And it recognized him.

  The watchers stepped back.

  "What is—"

  “It’s reacting—”

  “No, it’s… adapting. It’s—he’s not rejecting it. It’s mutating!”

  The woman’s expression turned unreadable.

  He fell.

  Not in body, but in mind.

  Images flickered behind his eyelids—cities swallowed by silence, stars warping into spirals, a mother’s hand reaching through glass, black ichor blooming from her eyes. He screamed again, but this time, it wasn’t fear.

  It was clarity.

  The world had changed. Or perhaps he had. It didn’t matter.

  When he opened his eyes, the mask-eyed figure had taken a step back. The others watched in silence, awe and terror blended in equal measure.

  “He lives,” one whispered. “No rejection. The graft is complete.”

  The Helminth shivered once, as if sated, and grew still.