The man's smile wasn't warm, and it certainly wasn't human.
Darian felt the wrongness instantly, a cold spike of adrenaline hitting his stomach. The apartment hallway flickered with dying neon light, shadows stretching across the cracked walls. Deep in the building's guts, metal groaned under immense pressure.
Ravion stepped up, his spear lowering to chest level. His knuckles were white. "Hands up," he ordered, his voice tight but steady.
The man blinked slowly, raising his hands in a mockery of surrender. "There we go. Now speak. What are you doing here?" Ravion demanded.
"Nothing dangerous, I assure you," the man chuckled, a papery, dry sound. "I'm just a scientist. Research, experiments... that sort of thing."
Darian's thumb slipped under his coat, his hand shaking slightly as he found the emergency beacon. Click. A silent POND distress pulse fired into the night.
The man's eyes flicked down to Darian's pocket, his sentence dying in his throat. "Ah," he murmured. The skin around his mouth stretched, tearing slightly at the corners to reveal a dark, wet abyss. "Calling for help already?"
The polite facade evaporated. The man's neck elongated with a sickening crunch, veins bulging like black cables beneath his collar. "You children," he rasped, a second, overlapping voice echoing from deep inside his chest. "Always so impatient."
His coat ripped open. Ribs shifted and cracked beneath his shirt, rearranging like gears finding alignment.
Ravion didn't wait. "Last warning!" he yelled, but his voice cracked.
The man's eyes flooded with liquid silver, swallowing the pupils entirely. The concrete floor beneath them buckled.
A hallway away, the makeshift morgue was suffocatingly quiet. Zeri stood near the doorway, her breath pluming in the cold air as she stared at the covered bodies laid across rusted metal tables.
The fluorescent lights buzzed, died, and flickered back on.
"Big sister..."
Zeri froze. The voice was tiny, fragile. She whipped her head toward the dark corner of the room.
The missing kids from the street were standing there. They hadn't been there a second ago. They just stared at her, their faces slack, their mouths curled into identical, impossibly wide smiles.
"Come play," one of them whispered.
"Hey... are you guys okay?" Zeri took a hesitant step forward, reaching out.
The children tilted their heads in perfect, unnatural unison. The skin of their jaws tore. With a wet, ripping sound, their mouths unhinged, vomiting thick, writhing black tendrils. Small ribs cracked outward, piercing their shirts as something monstrous forced its way free from inside them.
Zeri stumbled backward, her heel catching on a table leg. "Oh god—no, no, no!" Panic seized her throat.
One of the things giggled—a wet, gurgling sound—as its limbs stretched, bones snapping and resetting into long, multi-jointed prongs. They crawled off the tables like spiders.
"Stay BACK!" Zeri shrieked. She threw her arms up, activating her gauntlets. Holographic cannon arrays snapped into existence around her forearms, whining with sudden heat.
A creature lunged. Zeri squeezed her eyes shut and fired.
The heavy plasma blast vaporized the creature's torso, spraying hot black fluid across Zeri's face. She gagged, wiping her eyes—but the severed limbs were still crawling toward her, dragging the ruined halves of the body forward.
"Why isn't it dead?!" Zeri screamed, hyperventilating as three more dropped to the floor and scrambled toward her.
Back in the hallway, the floor violently ruptured.
Thick black tendrils erupted through the concrete like harpoons. One slammed into Ravion's chest like a freight train, launching him backward through the drywall. Another whipped toward Darian, who dove frantically, catching the edge of a collapsing pillar as the floor gave way beneath him.
"Ravion!" Darian yelled over the roar of collapsing masonry.
The walls shattered as the man rose into the air, elevated by a throne of writhing black muscle. "People imagine monsters are driven by rage or hunger," he said, his voice easily cutting through the chaos. "But curiosity is far more productive."
From the rubble, Ravion pushed himself to his feet, spitting blood. He thumbed the ignition on his spear. Flames roared to life along the edge. "You sick freak," he gasped.
Tendrils lashed out. Ravion didn't retreat; fueled by pure, reckless adrenaline, he sprinted forward, using the erratic, thrashing tendrils as stepping stones. He vaulted upward, spinning his spear in a blazing arc aimed right at the scientist's neck.
The man didn't even flinch. He just raised a hand.
Two tendrils snapped like whips, catching the spear shaft mid-thrust. Ravion screamed, twisting the weapon and triggering a flare burst that incinerated the restraints, but the momentum was lost. The man simply leaned back, letting the fiery blade miss his throat by an inch.
"Ah. A warrior. How tedious," the scientist sighed. He flicked his fingers.
Three tendrils shot toward Darian, who was scrambling up the wreckage. Darian threw himself sideways, feeling the wind of the first two, but the third grazed his ribs, shredding his jacket and sending him tumbling back to the lower floor.
"He's not even trying!" Darian shouted, clutching his bleeding side.
Before Ravion could respond, the warehouse wall exploded outward.
Zeri rocketed through the dust on her hoverboard, sobbing as she fired wildly behind her. A massive, thrashing horror breached the wall, tearing the corrugated metal to shreds.
Darian and Ravion froze.
It was a towering, bulbous cathedral of fused flesh. Dozens of children's limbs jutted from the mass like broken branches. Faces surfaced across the tumorous body—screaming in silent agony—before being sucked back into the black, pulsing muscle.
Zeri hovered backward, her hands shaking so badly her holographic reticles wouldn't lock on. "What did you DO to them?!" she screamed at the scientist, her voice raw.
The scientist simply watched from his perch, looking toward the distant wail of sirens. "Ah. The rest of the audience. Children are such fascinating vessels... but I believe my data collection here is finished."
He tapped a device on his wrist. The monster shrieked, a sound like grinding metal, and released a concussive shockwave. Darian covered his ears, dropping to his knees. Dust scoured the yard.
When it cleared, the scientist was gone.
"Dammit!" Ravion yelled, wiping dirt from his eyes.
The abomination didn't care. It turned, every embedded face opening its mouth to unleash a deafening, unified scream. Its massive limbs dug into the dirt, ignoring the teenagers entirely as it hauled its bulk toward the chain-link fence.
Beyond the fence lay the street. And people.
"It's going for the civilians!" Darian yelled, his voice cracking with panic. "Zeri, stop it!"
"I'm trying!" Zeri sobbed, unleashing a barrage of plasma fire. The bolts tore huge, sizzling craters into the monster's back, but the flesh bubbled and stitched itself closed almost instantly.
Ravion sprinted after it, raw Essence flaring around his legs. He launched himself into the air, driving his flaming spear deep into the creature's flank. The monster barely flinched. It swatted blindly backward with a massive arm of tangled bodies. The blow caught Ravion mid-air, swatting him like an insect. He skipped across the dirt and slammed into a rusted railcar, the metal caving in around him.
"Ravion!" Darian screamed.
The monster crushed the perimeter fence beneath its weight and spilled out into the street. Civilians shrieked, scattering in blind terror. A man tripped over the curb, scrambling backward as the creature raised a colossal, fleshy limb to crush him. Darian broke into a run, knowing he wouldn't make it in time.
Then, a figure stepped into the intersection.
He didn't run. He just walked into the glow of the streetlights. He wore the black coat of a POND officer. His face was heavily scarred, and where his right arm should have been, an empty sleeve was pinned neatly above the elbow.
In his left hand, he held a katana.
The monster roared, dropping its massive limb down to flatten him.
The man didn't change his stance. He just drew the sword. One fluid, silent motion.
The steel flashed in the sodium light.
For a breathless second, the street went perfectly still.
Then, the abomination bisected. A flawless, invisible line parted the creature from its crown down to the asphalt. With a wet, sickening thunder, the two halves sloughed apart, collapsing onto the street in a tidal wave of black fluid and severed tissue. It didn't twitch.
Silence slammed back down onto the block, broken only by Zeri's ragged breathing and the distant hum of traffic.
The man smoothly flicked the dark blood from his blade and sheathed it with a sharp click. Only then did he turn to look at the three teenagers. A faint, casual smile touched the scarred corner of his mouth, utterly disconnected from the slaughter behind him.
"I heard you kids needed some help."