Blake moved down the corridor with the deliberate pace of a man who trusted nothing around him. The emergency lights pulsed in rhythmic sequence, guiding him forward with cold efficiency. Red light reflected off the black composite of his bodysuit, casting jagged shadows that jittered along the warped walls as he walked. The faint hum of the ship’s dying systems thrummed beneath his boots, irregular and faintly organic. It reminded him of a pulse—a sick, uneven one.
He clenched Verdict in his right hand, his finger resting just off the trigger. Kitt remained uncharacteristically silent, but he could feel her attention coiled tightly within their bond, alert and ready. It wasn’t like her to stay quiet this long without some sort of quip or observation. That worried him more than the shifting corridor or the corrupted flesh threaded through what had once been metal bulkheads.
“Kitt, let's try and raise Eland on comms,” Blake muttered into the stale air. His voice came out low and hoarse, his throat dry from the tension pressing on his chest. He paused, waiting for a response from the system.
Static crackled in his ear before Eland’s voice broke through, smooth but faintly distorted. “Blake? You two are safe?”
“For now,” Blake said, continuing forward. His eyes tracked every shift in the corridor walls—the subtle bulges where cables twitched like tendons under stretched skin, or where light panels flickered inconsistently as though struggling to remember their purpose. “I’m inside. Reached some kind of central passage. It’s bad in here.”
“How bad?” Eland’s voice held that careful neutrality Blake recognized—his way of asking a loaded question without giving away how much he already knew.
“Corruption’s everywhere,” Blake replied, stepping over a warped patch of flooring that bent inward like melted wax. “Ship’s guts look half-alive. Feels wrong just breathing in here.” He hesitated before adding, “Ferroghests aren’t just wandering anymore either—they’re organized.”
Eland didn’t respond immediately, but Blake imagined the Stokrine’s massive frame stiffening wherever he was listening from. After a beat, Eland spoke again, quieter this time: “That confirms it.”
“Confirms what?” Blake kept moving as he spoke, his focus splitting between watching for movement ahead and keeping track of Kitt’s subtle alerts in the back of his mind.
“The Outsider isn’t simply influencing this place,” Eland said slowly, as though reluctant to give form to the words. “It’s integrated into it now—fully merged with what remains of the Leviathan.”
“Great,” Blake muttered under his breath. “Just what I needed to hear.”
“This changes things,” Eland continued. The static on the line thickened slightly but didn’t drown him out yet. “If it has achieved full integration—”
The connection hissed violently for a second before stabilizing again.
“If it’s fully integrated,” Eland pressed on quickly, clearly aware they were losing time, “it’ll be able to reshape its domain more aggressively than anticipated.”
Blake grimaced as he passed by a fleshy growth protruding from what had once been an access panel. The organic material quivered faintly at his proximity.
“It’s already doing that,” Blake said flatly.
A sharp spike of static made him wince as Eland tried to respond again, but whatever he was saying was lost beneath an electronic screech that sent an uncomfortable vibration through Blake’s skull.
“Shit.” He tapped at his helmet interface with two fingers but didn’t bother calling out again; it was clear their connection had been severed completely for now.
“Looks like it’s just you and me again,” Kitt finally spoke up after her prolonged silence.
“At least we'll have each other when we get tricked into this thing's stomach,” he said dryly.
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” she shot back lightly, though there was an edge beneath her words—a tension mirroring his own unease.
The red emergency lights pulsed again ahead of him, drawing his attention back to the corridor stretching out before him like an endless artery leading deeper into the Leviathan’s corrupted heart.
“Any guesses on why our new friend decided to cut off comms?” Blake asked as he resumed walking.
“Could be coincidence,” Kitt offered with little conviction. “Or it could be aware you’re trying to coordinate with outside help.”
Blake frowned at that thought but didn’t respond immediately—it wasn’t worth wasting energy speculating when every step forward felt like tempting fate already.
As he continued down what should have been a straightforward hallway, something began gnawing at the edges of his awareness—not quite alarm, just a nagging feeling of incongruity. He stopped abruptly and turned around to look back over his shoulder.
The entrance had vanished.
Blake stared at where the hallway should have stretched straight back to his starting point. Instead, it curved gently out of sight, with no branching paths or intersections anywhere behind him.
"That wasn't there before," Kitt observed through their bond.
Blake pivoted forward and stopped cold. The path ahead no longer ran straight either. It curved away just as the one behind him did—as if space had folded when he blinked, both directions bending toward invisible destinations.
"Well," Kitt said after the silence between them grew unbearable, "this is fun."
The walls rippled like panes of suspended liquid, the floor and ceiling bucking in time. Cursing, Blake took three more steps before he felt it—something pressing against his Mind, light at first, then insistent. Probing. Searching.
"Kitt." He dug his fingernails hard into his palm, using pain to focus. "Guard yourself. Something's trying to get in our heads."
"Already on it," Kitt replied, her voice tighter than usual.
Blake's mind snapped to his SERE training—Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. The instructors had drilled mental fortifications into them for scenarios involving psychological warfare. Not quite alien mind invasion, but close enough.
"1-7-Romeo, Mike-Mike, 4-6-1-7-0, 3-8-8-9-8," Blake muttered, repeating the sequence. It was a well-tested technique: simply repeat a memorized set of MGRS coordinates over and over. Don't leave room in your head for any other thoughts. In Blake's case, he had memorized the location of a childhood memory from the so-called Happiest Place on Earth—it had seemed fitting when he did, and if nothing else it was an amusing irony now.
"1-7-Romeo, Mike-Mike, 4-6-1-7-0, 3-8-8-9-8."
The corridor twisted unnaturally around him, emergency lights dimming then brightening in irregular patterns, but he forced himself to continue moving forward with blind and unthinking stubbornness.
Do you think numbers will keep us out?
The voice slithered through his defenses—distorted and wrong, like words spoken backward underwater, then reversed for playback.
"1-7-Romeo, Mike-Mike, 4-6-1-7-0, 3-8-8-9-8."
The little parasite knows what you are. A killer. A destroyer. You wear the mask of "Protector" but leave only corpses in your wake.
Blake's jaw clenched. The numbers continued flowing from his lips, but something shifted in him. His [Quicksilver Mind]—still nascent but growing stronger—once more gave him an intuition he might not have seriously considered before. In the brief pause between his alphanumeric chanting, he willed the mana cycling limply in his core to action. He bolstered his Adaptability, and with a surge of his Intent… split his consciousness.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
It wasn't strictly that he had somehow become two people; it was simple compartmentalization taken to a radical extreme. He was like a drummer playing differing parts with each hand. One part stubbornly chanted coordinates to keep itself too focused to heed the insidious whispers of the outsider, while another observed the intrusion with detached interest.
It's using pretty standard interrogation techniques, Intel Blake thought. Break down identity. Create doubt. Isolate the subject.
You can't hide it!
The outsider's voice grew louder, more insistent. Stubborn Blake kept repeating his coordinates.
Everyone sees the blood on your hands. Every life you've taken. Every family you've ruined. Every—
"Fuck you," the Stubborn Blake growled, his voice steady despite the throbbing veins in his neck. "I know how I lived my life. I was there."
Point to me, Intel Blake thought with satisfaction. Deny the enemy a clear target.
The pressure intensified, images flashing through his mind—faces of men he'd killed, operations gone wrong, bodies in the sand. Blake laughed—the sound as dark and anything the outsider projected. Kitt had given him worse nightmares about his past on accident.
"I reckon I know what you are too," Blake continued, raising Verdict in defiance as he marched down the seemingly endless hallway. "Just another asshole who doesn't know when to shut up."
He picked up his mantra again as he trudged down the corridor. He hoped that Kitt was okay on her end.
The attack hit Kitt like a tidal wave. Blake's warning flared through their bond—too late. She slammed barriers into place, instinctive defenses that should have been impenetrable. They weren't.
Slick. Wrong. Foreign.
The Outsider's presence slithered between her mental fortifications as if they weren't there. Not breaking through—simply existing on both sides simultaneously. A quantum violation.
Of course, she thought, a sick horror growing within her. So obvious.
Why should any of her natural mental defenses mean anything to this entity? It had already completely dominated the true Leviathan that they were standing in.
"Blake!" Her voice scattered across their bond, fragmented by interference.
Kitt probed at the invasion, searching for edges to push against. There weren't any. The entity had no boundaries she could detect—its essence occupied the same space as her thoughts, like ink dispersing through water.
What do you want? she projected, attempting to localize the intrusion.
No answer came. Only a sensation of being sifted through, examined. Memories accessed without permission. And not like rifling through a cabinet—more like her memories were suddenly transparent, visible from all angles simultaneously.
Get out. She lashed at the foreign presence with every scrap of Intent she could muster. The Outsider ignored her.
Behind the invasion lurked something worse: a growing awareness that she couldn't separate herself from it. Every defense she raised became part of the attack surface. Every countermeasure she deployed gave the entity new pathways to exploit.
Memories bubbled up without her consent. Random. Disconnected. Then... not random at all.
Blake surfaced in her mind’s eye, unbidden and vivid. Then Vylaas appeared, her former host sliding into place beside the current. Their features bled together, contrasts and echoes thrown into sharp relief by their closeness.
A third figure coalesced, and Kitt's consciousness recoiled.
Vylaas' brother, the man once meant to be her original host. The one who killed Vylaas. Who had nearly killed her.
Kaelen.
Despite the fog that normally shrouded her memories from before Blake, the Tylwyth's image crystallized with disturbing clarity. She shouldn't know him this well. Shouldn't recognize the specific angle of his jaw, the exact shade of his eyes. Why did she? Her memories before Blake were incomplete, damaged—
Something new cut through her defenses: a memory, sharp as glass.
A child's whimpers cut through Kitt's consciousness as the Outsider forced the scene into focus.
"Hold still, little one." Vylaas dabbed antiseptic on the girl's leg wound. His fingers worked with gentle efficiency, wrapping clean bandages around the gash.
The girl—Ishta, her name was Ishta—bit her lip to keep from crying.
"Brave girl," Vylaas said, his voice soft. "The medicine stings, but it fights the bad things that make wounds sick."
Only once the antiseptics were in place did Vylaas heal the wound, ensuring he wouldn't accidentally be kickstarting an infection that would end up taking the girl's leg—or her life.
Kitt watched through senses that weren't hers. No, that wasn't right. They were hers… but she hadn't been here. She'd been in the Colossus, her massive form towering above the refugee camp, weapons systems tracking enemy movements beyond the valley perimeter.
The thunder of artillery boomed. The cockpit displays showed targeting solutions, ammunition counts—
But she wasn't in the cockpit. She was with Vylaas somehow.
"Almost done," Vylaas told Ishta. "Where's your family?"
"Don't know," Mira whispered. "Lost them when the ships came."
I wasn't there, Kitt thought frantically.
Yet the memory continued with crystalline detail.
The rough weave of the tent canvas. The smell of smoke and disinfectant. The heat radiating from frightened bodies packed too closely.
"We'll find them," Vylaas promised, tying off the bandage. "I have a friend who's very good at finding people."
A mental hand on her shoulder—Vylaas's warmth coming through their bond—squeezed gently. "Don't we, Medea?"
Kitt jerked back, mental defenses flaring as she reinforced them. She hated to risk harming Blake by pulling on their core unexpectedly, but… This never happened. Who the hell is he talking to?
Ishta looked at her with too-knowing eyes. Not at Vylaas, but at her.
"What's wrong with your friend?" she asked Vylaas.
"She doesn't rememberShe doesn't know who she is. She's broken."
The tent walls pulsed, breathing like living tissue. The refugees' faces blurred, features running like wax.
This isn't real. This is the Outsider.
"Blake!" Kitt scrambled for her bond, unable to find purchase as even that fundamental part of her core felt unreal, like grasping at smoke. There was nothing; no response from Blake. The connection was unreliable, interference from the outsider drowning her out. She pushed harder, throwing energy through their link.
Blake, I'm losing—
The thought snapped like a guitar string pulled too tight. The Outsider slithered deeper, probing wounds in her consciousness she didn't know existed. Each memory it touched turned rancid, twisted.
He's nearly as broken as you.
she thought.
He can't protect you. He won't even want to once he learns his toy is defective. He's a pragmatist. Once he advances enough to repair his core, he won't need you.
"No." Kitt built walls, barricades of will and intent. The Outsider flowed through them, around them, its voice coming from both sides simultaneously.
Images burst behind Chimera's eyes—Blake in a bedroom, weapon drawn and facing a terrified man cowering in bed. A woman screamed beside him, but Blake never acknowledged her presence. He fired point-blank. Blood spattered across his cheeks as he maintained that professional, clinical expression. Not a flicker of emotion registered on his face as he completed the kill.
The face shifted, blurred, remade itself. Kaelen now stood where Blake had been, wearing that identical expression of surgical detachment.
He is just like the kin-slayer, the Outsider purred. Do you really think this one is any better?
Kitt wanted to scream denial. Wanted to reject the comparison outright.
But she was alone, being battered down by something insidious and terrible, and the words wouldn't come out.