The entrance to Biolab Three gaped before them like a maw. Elias paused at the threshold, taking in the horror that had once been a sterile research space.
The chamber stretched thirty feet across, walls completely transformed into pulsing, organic tissue. Overhead lighting had given way to a bioluminescent green glow emanating from the center—where the core of Korvus waited.
It dominated the space—a massive, writhing amalgamation of flesh and metal the size of a small truck. Human faces pressed against its surface from within, mouths frozen in silent screams, eyes blackened voids. The floor beneath them yielded like dense muscle with each step.
“This is ground zero,” Elias said, vision blurring, the poison gnawing his strength, but he forced focus. The syringe case felt impossibly heavy at his side. “Where it all started.”
He calculated the tactical situation with practiced efficiency. One entrance behind them—now resembling an esophageal tunnel more than a doorway. The core twenty feet ahead. No cover. Three syringes of experimental nanites—their only hope of destroying Korvus from within.
Rowe positioned himself near the entrance, rifle trained on the core, his face pale but determined. “Jesus,” he whispered. “All these people…”
Brin fell to his knees five feet into the chamber, laptop slipping from his grasp. His breathing came in ragged gasps, black fluid streaming from his eyes now too. “It’s too powerful,” he choked out. “The biomass… exponential growth… we can’t…”
His body suddenly convulsed, a wet cracking sound echoing as his chest bulged unnaturally. Skin tore along his sternum, revealing writhing, fleshy cords pulsing with blue veins. Black viscous fluid poured from his mouth, hissing where it hit the floor.
“Brin!” Elias moved toward him, but stopped as the scientist’s fingers melted into a claw-like appendage, scraping at his own face, peeling skin to reveal metal filaments worming through muscle.
“Elias… stop it…” Brin rasped, his voice distorting into something half-human, half mechanical. One eye remained normal, pleading, while the other swelled grotesquely, bursting into a cluster of tiny, twitching orbs.
Elias knelt beside him, maintaining tactical distance. “Brin, focus. We can finish this.”
From the core, voices rose in a discordant chorus: “Join us.” Then, cutting through the cacophony, a single voice—softer, heart-wrenchingly familiar. “Elias, don’t leave me again.”
The voice struck Elias like a physical blow. His mother’s voice—the tone she’d used when his father left, when she’d begged him not to join the military. A primal pain Korvus had somehow extracted from his deepest memories.
It’s not her, he reminded himself, cold sweat beading on his forehead. It’s Korvus, using what it finds in our minds.
“Harris,” Rowe whispered, voice breaking, desperate for her, taking an unconscious step toward the core. Elias grabbed his arm, yanking him back. “It’s a trick! Stay with me!”
Brin screamed—a gurgling, inhuman wail—as his chest split wider with a wet tearing sound, ribs cracking outward like broken fingers. Fleshy cords erupted from the glistening cavity, spattering the floor with chunks of liquefied organ tissue. The cords, slick with blood and yellow pus, writhed like parasitic worms as they wrapped around his neck, tightening until his jugular bulged obscenely. His jaw distended with a series of sickening pops, the skin at the corners of his mouth splitting to his ears. Teeth fell from bleeding gums like pebbles into a puddle of black bile pooling beneath him, replaced by jagged metallic spikes that ground together as they grew, scraping bone fragments and tissue that dripped in stringy globs from his ruined mouth.
“Kill… me…” he managed, his human eye locked on Elias, pleading, while the cluster of orbs pulsed rhythmically.
Elias lunged for him, grabbing his arm, desperate to save someone after failing Harris. But Brin’s limb dissolved under his grip, leaving sticky slime that burned Elias’s skin. Tendrils lashed from the core, knocking the syringe case from Elias’s hand; one vial shattered on the floor, another crushed under Brin’s writhing cords, their blue contents hissing uselessly into the air. The scientist’s transformed body began sinking into the floor, metal spikes scraping against the organic surface with a sickening screech.
The core pulsed faster, its green light flaring brighter. Elias stepped back, opening the syringe case. Only one remained intact.
“Rowe, cover me!” Elias ordered, gripping the last syringe. “We hit it now!”
A shape rose from the core’s surface—horrifyingly familiar. Elias’s own face, but wrong. Eyes black pools, smile unnaturally wide. It spoke with his voice, distorted like a broken recording.
“This is us, Elias. Perfect. Complete.”
Rowe fired, rounds punching into the mimic, oozing slime, but it kept advancing. The mimic laughed, a sound that reverberated painfully inside their skulls. The core roared in response, the entire chamber shaking.
Patel’s voice crackled through comms, “Diversion’s live, but it’s on us!” Foster’s panicked voice followed: “Alpha, it’s reacting! Beta’s pinned down!”
The Elias-mimic stepped closer, the glow around it intensifying. Did we trigger the reaction we wanted? Elias wondered, dread consuming him. Or have we just made it stronger?
He glanced at his hand holding the syringe, skin crawling with the terrifying expectation that at any moment, cords might burst from his own flesh like they had from Brin’s.
The doppelgänger raised an arm, voice cold and empty. “Join us, Elias.”
The room trembled violently, the humming crescendoing to a deafening roar. Elias stood frozen, the last syringe clutched in his hand, the mimic’s black eyes boring into his own.
Brin’s agonized wail echoed through the chamber—a final warning that Korvus wasn’t just an external threat. It was inside them all, waiting to break free.
Elias tightened his grip on the syringe, whispering, “For Harris,” thinking, If this syringe’s all we’ve got, I’ll make it count—whatever it takes, a desperate hope to honor her trust in the face of overwhelming horror.
Korvus was ready to swallow them whole.
Share this post