The tunnel was burning around me. Every breath came with the taste of iron and smoke. My armor was shredded, torn open by claws I never even saw coming. The pain was fading now—washed out into something colder, emptier.
They'd left me. Doman, Alex, all of them. I could still hear their voices echoing somewhere far down the tunnel, swallowed by screams and fire.
I tried to move, but my legs wouldn't answer. Blood pooled beneath me, warm at first, then chilling fast. The last thing I saw before the darkness took me were the shapes of the infected swarming in. Crawling. Snapping.
Their shadows blotted out the light.
Then there was nothing.
---
The silence didn't last.
Something clicked inside my skull—a weak electrical fizz that pulsed through every nerve like broken glass. I wanted to scream, but my throat was gone. My chest… gone. The monsters had torn me apart.
And yet—
I felt something stitching me back together. Small blue lights flickered across my arms, spreading, running like rivers under skin that should have been dead. Thick data lines crawled up my neck, converging as my chest sealed shut with a hiss of static.
Energy surged. The ground cracked beneath me.
My eyes blinked open—one glowing deep blue, the other burning orange. But I wasn't *me* anymore. My body twitched, moving without command, like a puppet tugged by invisible hands. My breathing was mechanical, broken, hollow.
The monsters froze mid-step.
Then, as one, they screamed.
They lunged first. I didn't flinch. My arm moved before I even realized it, slicing through the air with a sound like thunder. Heads tore free from bodies. Blood sprayed in arcs that caught the faint light of the dying fires.
Another came at me—huge, armored, its face split open with wires dangling like veins. I raised my hand, and it exploded.
For a fleeting moment, the part of me that was still human recoiled from what I'd done.
But the other part—the dark, humming, newly born thing—was calm. It enjoyed it.
"Target reacquired," a voice whispered inside my skull. It wasn't Doman. It wasn't human at all.
The monsters kept coming. I kept tearing through them, every movement a blur, every step shaking the ground. My vision flickered with blue code as though the world itself was being rewritten in front of me.
Then I stopped—because I felt them. My old team. Far ahead, their comms signals flickering at the edge of my mind like dying stars.
The quiet one, Kai, was gone. Alex and Lain were running. Doman—limping, half-dead—was dragging himself toward the evac tunnel.
And behind them, the giant—the same infected beast that had crushed half their squad—was pounding through the tunnels after them, drunk on blood.
I stepped forward. My joints cracked with sound, sparks flickering down my legs.
"Directive," the voice said again. "Eliminate."
I smiled. It wasn't my smile. It was sharper. Wrong.
---
Far ahead, Alex's scream echoed through the caverns. Then another.
The monster found them.
The code behind my eyes flared bright. The world around me slowed . Each sound stretched like a long metallic note.
I walked—not ran, walked —through the tunnel in a seed that I couldn't explain as the screams twisted into silence.
Through the flames, I saw it: the thing that had cornered them, arms like blades, shoulders scraping the ceiling. Around it were what was left of the upperborn—broken armor, shattered bones.
Doman wasn't among them.
The giant turned toward me. The lights beneath its flesh pulsed red as it roared. I didn't respond. The voice inside my head didn't let me.
My hand rose. A surge of invisible force rippled out, and the creature's roar cut off in a choking gasp. Its body convulsed—then fell apart into chunks that hit the floor with a wet, echoing crash.
For a moment, the cavern went still.
I looked toward the darkness where Doman had escaped. He was alive… barely. Limping through the collapsing tunnels, bleeding, dragging one leg behind him.
Good.
---
Doman stumbled into the outer sector, half-dragging himself toward the safe zone's rusted gates. Every breath sounded like it hurt. He leaned against the wall, coughing up blood.
He muttered to no one, "I'm not gonna die… haha."
A sound answered him. A slow, deliberate step . Then another.
He turned—and froze.
I stood there in the smoke, half-human, half-machine, eyes burning in the haze. Blue and orange light gleamed beneath the cracks in my armor where the data lines still pulsed like veins. My mask was fractured, one side torn away, revealing skin that glowed with circuitry.
"Dash…" Doman's voice broke. "No… no, that's impossible."
The air between us vibrated, distorted like heat haze.
I stepped closer, expression blank, movements smooth but wrong—too still, too precise. The voice inside my skull whispered again:
"kill!!."
"r-rat, Ii mean dash listen to me!" Doman raised a hand defensively. " you got it or rough men, I I had too leave you!"
I tilted my head slightly, like a dog hearing something distant. Then, for the first time since I woke, I spoke—my voice layered, half mechanical, half human.
"Fight?
He took a shaky step back. "You're… you're sick. You've been infected."
"Infected?"
I'm infected?