Heat blasted Kikaru’s face. She knelt in the sludge.

Gray ash slipped through her bare fingers. Deep cracks marred the white plating of her armor. Soot stained the edges.

The broken Nexus core tore the dungeon apart. Rock evaporated into steam. The floor melted away like cotton candy dropped in water.

Steam rose from the dissolving ground. The cavern walls shrank inward. Pockets of superheated air warped the light.

Kikaru stared at the ash in her hands.

Her discarded helmet lay two feet away. The cracked glass projected a distorted light against the rising steam. The public chat scrolled in a frantic blur.

She wiped her filthy hands on her trousers and tilted the display upward.

The secondary window held the private broadcast. Total blackness. A ragged breath rattled through the audio channel. A wet scrape followed.

That body wasn’t broadcasting.

She looked from the dark screen to the pile of ash melting in the puddle. She looked at the dirt under her nails. Her fingers shook.

The feed proved he was alive.

"He is not dead," Kikaru breathed. Her voice cracked.

Her leg brace locked with a sharp click as she pushed herself up. She turned toward the steaming fissure.

"That thing made me hold the wrong body," Kikaru yelled over the roar of the collapsing stone. She pointed a mud-stained hand at the drop. "The feed is somewhere else."

A geyser of superheated steam erupted twenty yards away. The floor vanished.

Elara drove her boots into the shifting gravel. She grabbed Kikaru by the shoulder plate.

"We cannot dig through vaporizing rock," Elara ordered. "Evacuate to the extraction cables."

Iharu limped forward using his gun as a crutch. "Tell me where to shoot. I don’t care if the floor melts."

"There is nothing to shoot," Elara shot back, dragging Kikaru backward toward the drop zone.

Hiro pressed a blood-soaked dressing against the massive hole in Rina’s back. His hands shook violently. He maintained brutal pressure over the wound.

"I’ve got you," Hiro stammered. He guided the veteran’s magnetic tether clasp into place.

Magnetic tethers dropped through the smoke from hovering drones. The heavy clasps locked onto their shoulder plates. The winches engaged.

The cables ripped them off the vanishing floor. They were pulled up to the transport ship hovering near the extraction ridge.

Elara hit the steel deck.

Smoke poured through the open loading bay doors. The temperature inside the cabin spiked. Medical teams rushed forward to take Rina from Hiro.

Hiro collapsed against the bulkhead. Iharu slid down the wall next to him. The redhead stared blankly at his burned shin guard.

Elara tapped her earpiece, isolating her channel from the squad. "Aris. Trace the private broadcast."

The audio link crackled with heavy interference.

"The feed operates below the mapped grid," Aris reported over the comms. "The signal is unstable. I have severe depth drift."

A rapid clatter of keystrokes echoed through the link.

"Wait. I caught a fragment," Aris said. His voice sharpened. "A faint signal pinging off a deep-bedrock relay. Broadcasting coordinates to all local HUDs now."

A sharp blue alert chimed across every active visor in the transport ship.

Kikaru checked the data flashing across her cracked screen. The coordinates pointed to an unmapped descent route carving deep into the lower mountain.

She bolted.

Bypassing the medics, Kikaru sprinted down the lowered rear ramp. Her leg brace struck the metal grating in a frantic rhythm. She hit the rocky pathway leading straight back toward the steam-choked collapse of the dungeon.

Elara cursed. Drawing her blade, she drove her boots into the deck, preparing to dive down the ramp after the recruit.

A localized pressure drop killed the transport’s engine noise.

The ambient dust hovering in the cabin plummeted straight to the floor grates. The public broadcast drones tracking the extraction squad lost power simultaneously. They dropped from the air and shattered against the metal deck.

A gold authorization icon overtook Elara’s visor, overriding her clearance.

A young man stepped out of the shadows near the cockpit.

He wore a white trench coat with a heavy fur-lined collar hanging past his knees. The dark blue lining caught the emergency lights. A black turtleneck and flared jeans replaced standard tactical gear. Silver-white hair fell over pale, elegant features.

Keeping his hands shoved deep into his pockets, he projected a detached stillness. Kaiju fluid splattered on the decking recoiled from his black boots, inching backward across the steel.

Elara stopped. She pulled her hands away from her weapons. The hierarchy of the grid belonged to the operator in the cabin.

Soma bypassed Elara, stepping onto the top of the ramp.

"Evacuate this sector," Soma projected across the local comms channel. The words broadcast to the ship and the pathway below without a visible microphone. His tone was quiet, holding a focused intensity. "Anyone else who follows me into the dark dies by my hand."

The threat pressed against their spines like a physical force.

Hiro stopped breathing, pressing himself flat against the fuselage. Iharu lowered his eyes to the floorboards.

The purple code projecting from Soma’s wrist vanished. The Hacker silenced her own feed, yielding entirely to Soma’s boundary.

Halfway down the rocky pathway, Kikaru felt the operator’s warning hit her through the local channel.

The pressure locked her lungs for one step.

Then the comms broke under the collapsing bedrock.

The words dissolved into static.

She kept moving. Her boots hit the crumbling stone. Irrational guilt pushed her past the danger limits as she vanished into the rising steam.

Soma stepped off the edge of the ramp. He plummeted into the smoke without a parachute or a tether.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The temperature dropped to freezing as Soma landed on obsidian glass. Bedrock blocked the heat of the upper dungeon. The air smelled of dry earth.

Taking his hands from his pockets, he drew a blade. The weapon cast a blue glare across the dusty floor.

Tracking a trail of black fluid, he walked down the dark corridor. The caustic liquid burned tiny craters into the glass.

He approached a stone door.

Twelve faceless statues lined the archway. The Mimic stood in front of the lock, leaking fluid from its severed arm. It held the extracted key in its remaining claw.

Shoving the hardened key into a rusted groove in the center of the stone, the heavy door groaned. It fractured down the middle and slid backward.

Soma moved. He crossed the distance in a blur, driving his blade toward the creature’s neck.

The Mimic calculated the collapsing ceiling above them. A chunk of rock tore free from the roof. The beast threw itself backward, using the falling debris to block the strike.

The stone shattered against Soma’s blade.

The Mimic scrambled through the old doorway. The heavy slab slammed shut. The old-route lock engaged from the inside.

Soma drove his blade into the rock. The stone absorbed the kinetic shear. A superficial scratch marked the surface as the weapon whined, failing to bite deeper.

The door was locked.

Raising his left wrist, a holographic display projected a fractured string of purple code.

"The old route is sealed," Soma reported.

The woman’s voice cracked through the device. "Break it."

"Negative," Soma stated. "The door will not open from this side."

He looked toward the collapsing side passage where the faint signal had flickered once.

"The target is not behind the door."

Static cut across the channel.

Soma dismissed the blade and moved toward the unstable breach.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Cold stone pressed into Caleb’s spine.

He lay unconscious on a freezing slab deeper inside the unmapped chamber. Darkness coated his cracked visor. Dust settled over the lens.

Paralysis pinned him flat to the stone. He pulled shallow, jagged breaths through his teeth. The draft coming from the open stone door smelled of dry dirt and rusted gears.

Inside his open left side, the altered parasite tissue worked.

The dark shell scraped against his broken ribs. The creature bit into the venom-damaged meat. It cleaned the poisoned flesh away piece by piece.

Agony wired Caleb’s nervous system to the limit. The tearing sensation radiated outward from his spleen.

The creature anchored its claws into healthy tissue for leverage. It stripped the dead flesh away. The vibrations traveled up his spine.

He tasted copper. A steady drip of blood fell from the edge of the stone table onto the floorboards.

He let the thing eat him.

His body lacked the calories to heal the trauma on its own. The deficit drained the heat from his extremities. It pushed the cold from his toes up into his shins.

The earpiece in his helmet emitted a flat, dead hum. The grid was severed. The purple code was gone. He was isolated.

The chewing stopped.

Heat flared in his left side. The open wound sealed shut over the extracted venom.

Thick purple spirals burned into the new flesh. The marks wrapped tight around his lower ribs. The changes ground hard against his bones.

A tiny click sounded near his collarbone.

Tali’s custom circuit woke up. The hidden hardware recorded the massive power draw. It logged the purple spirals.

The gear pushed a broken data fragment out through the dead air. The signal bounced off the bedrock. It fired blindly toward the surface grid.

Then the battery died.

Caleb slipped into the freezing dark.