The crimson rift opened before him, thin at first, then widening above the awakened seed into a trembling window of blood-red light. Through it, the camp appeared in broken flashes: firelight, scattered supplies, Rist bleeding beside the seed, Kestin twitching in fear as he readied all four of his arms for what was to come, and Marek twisting away with the stolen prize crushed against his side.
Then Dezcrin saw the creature.
It moved through the chaos on fresh, thick plates of gold and violent magenta energy. It had no face, no eyes to blind, only that gaping, radiating maw of raw power built straight into its armored frame.
'No.'
The thought arrived cold and absolute, cutting through everything else with surgical force.
'It can't be.'
But he knew what he was seeing. He had carried the knowledge for centuries—old reports, older warnings, the kind of history that survived because too many bodies had paid to write it. Dome Three. The Vorid swarms. The extermination campaigns that had burned through entire sectors, hunting things that should not have been allowed to exist in the first place.
Their consumption wasn't born of hunger; it was biological theft refined into instinct. They absorbed everything at their peak—chitin, bone, essence, energy, structure—and then remade themselves from what they had stolen. They fed on what they killed, adapting piece by piece and evolution by evolution until whatever had wounded them once could not wound them twice. The swarms had spread through Dome Three like a plague of transformation, each creature growing stronger with every kill, adapting faster than any living thing had the right to adapt.
'They were all supposed to be dead.'
Burned out of their nests. Hunted through their tunnels. Cut from the Ark's living record until only sealed reports and old blood remembered them.
'It fed on him.'
The creature had taken a piece of Rist—two fingers, a chunk of palm—and integrated it into its biology. That blind, crushing form wasn't a disadvantage; it was built for absolute, unyielding tunneling and slaughter, now fortified by the life force it had stolen.
'How long has it been feeding?'
The question settled through him like ice. If it had consumed Vyx essence this quickly, what else had it eaten before Marek's crew found it? What had it been in that cave, dormant and waiting, before it woke and began hunting again? And what would it become if it kept feeding?
Dezcrin had read the old reports. He knew what happened when Vorids reached Emergent or even his own Endurant rank. They didn't just evolve—they ascended, becoming territorial catastrophes that demanded coordinated extermination across multiple territories and Domes before the infection reached swarm momentum.
'One lives...'
The thought cut deeper than the rest.
'One lived. And now it's here, in my territory, hunting.'
Dezcrin knew if he could control it, he would be unstoppable.
His violet eye burned brighter.
Back at the camp, Marek froze. His eyes snapped toward the rift between one half-step and the next, his body twisted away from the creature's claws with the stolen prize locked against his ribs.
"Boss!"
Dezcrin leaned closer, though he did not touch the gate. Not even slightly. "Why are you opening one of my Blood Seeds this close to my territory?"
Marek's face drained further. "My Lord, we found something. Something valuable. But this thing followed us from the cave. It took a piece of Rist's hand and is freakishly strong!"
"Show me," Dezcrin said.
Marek hesitated for only a fraction of a breath. Even in panic, greed kept his grip absolute; he used both arms to clutch the stolen object tightly against his chest, shielding it with his own body as he evaded the creature with dashing speed.
Above the chaos, Kestin hovered higher into the air, lifting himself well out of the Vorid's reach to avoid the path of its strikes. From his elevated vantage point, he channeled energy through both orbs, watching the beast's movements with frantic precision. Every time the creature lunged and Marek came within a breath of being opened, Kestin flashed a glowing barrier into existence, catching the lethal claws before they reached him.
Safe behind the deflections, Marek kept his arms locked around his loot. He did not reveal all of it. But through the rift, Dezcrin caught a glimpse of the prize's surface beneath Marek's tight grip.
The Blood Seed chamber went still. Dezcrin's violet eye narrowed.
Whatever anger had been burning in him changed shape. It did not fade; it compressed, sharpening into something colder and far more useful.
Dezcrin understood, in that instant, why Marek had risked the seed. The object was not merely valuable. Its worth was obscene, a fortune of stolen growth compressed small enough for a fool to clutch against his ribs.
Now the creature's presence made sense. It had not come to hunt. It had come to reclaim what it valued most because they had taken something it made.
The old reports had never agreed on what to call them. Eggs. Cores. Vorid seeds. Each name had been too small for what they truly were. They were vessels of condensed potential, living reservoirs shaped by a Vorid and fed on whatever the creature dragged into the dark. Every death strengthened it. Every stolen breath thickened it. Every body lost in that cave had become part of what Marek now held against his chest.
To absorb it into a living body was to invite a power no mortal soul was meant to carry. It wasn't a fleeting surge or borrowed strength destined to fade. It was a permanent rewriting of essence, a structural evolution that shattered natural limits and expanded what the body could become.
If the Vorid reclaimed it—if it consumed even a splinter of the potential it had spent cycles cultivating—the beast would not merely evolve. The dormant hive instinct buried within its species could fully awaken, driving it into a reproductive state and granting it the ability to spawn more of its kind.
And Marek had been stupid enough to hold a Vorid's egg against his chest like common loot.
"So that is what you dragged out of the cave?" Dezcrin said.
Marek swallowed. "Yes, my lord."