Jack clicked his fingers once, leaned back in his chair, and stared at the mission screen like it had personally insulted him for the last three hours.
"Done," he muttered to the empty room. "Gravemind, Uprising, and High Charity. Legendary. I actually did it. Miserable. Completely miserable..."
The old television hummed in front of him, its glow washing the cramped bedroom in pale blue. Empty crisp Dorito packets sat in a heap by the desk. A half-finished bottle of Mountain Dew had gone warm hours ago. Somewhere outside, rain tapped against the window in a steady, boring rhythm, but Jack barely noticed. His whole world was still full of plasma fire, infection forms, distant shrieks, and the ugly satisfaction of surviving sections that clearly did not want him alive.
He rubbed both hands over his face and laughed under his breath, the kind of laugh that came from exhaustion more than amusement.
"Legendary, they said. Fun, they said."
No one had said that, of course. He said it for his own benefit. There was nobody else in the room to hear him. Nobody else to appreciate the amount of nonsense he had just forced himself through. He had spent the better part of the evening getting battered by Brutes, cornered by Elites, ambushed by pure forms, and swarmed by enough Flood to populate the moon.
Still, he had done it.
Jack sat forward again and looked at the final mission list, his thumb resting lazily against the controller. The names alone stirred the whole mess back into his head. Gravemind, Uprising, High Charity. Even now, with the safety of a game paused and his own bedroom around him, those levels still felt oppressive like they had weight.
He snorted and shook his head.
"The Flood are ridiculous," he said aloud. "Actually ridiculous. You get one spore in the wrong place, and that is it. Whole planet gone. Everyone screaming. Everyone turned into soup and tentacles."
He tilted his head and smirked.
"And the Covenant aren't much better. Flying around, glassing worlds because someone in a disability chair said so. All that firepower, all that fanaticism. Honestly, if you were the Flood in one of these universes, half the job's already done for you. You just wait for everyone else to fuck up first."
He tapped the controller against his knee and kept talking because it amused him, and because after a long enough session, every stupid thought started sounding halfway profound.
"What would that even be like?" he asked. "Being the Flood, I mean. Not some combat form with its chest burst open and bits hanging off. The whole thing. The infection. The mind behind it. Everyone either kneels, gets eaten, or joins. Efficient, really."
He grimaced.
"That sounds bad out loud."
Then he grinned.
"Still. Overpowered. Completely overpowered. Same for the Covenant. Imagine rolling up to a galaxy with all that nonsense. Either become one with the parasite or get shot by aliens with a religious complex. Great choices all round."
The room went quiet.
Jack stretched, hearing his back pop, and tossed the controller lightly from one hand to the other. The joke had run its course. He was tired. He should have turned the console off, brushed his teeth, and gone to bed like a functional human being.
Instead, he clicked his fingers again and said, "Fine. Let me be the Flood, then. Or the Covenant. Whichever gets me through tomorrow faster."
The sentence left his mouth. The air changed.
At first, he thought the television had flickered. The screen dimmed, then brightened so sharply he flinched. Pressure gathered in the room. Not heat. Not cold. Something stranger. The sensation of space folding inward, of walls growing distant while everything pressed closer at the same time.
Jack's smile vanished.
The bottle on his desk trembled. The rain outside stopped. The television's hum cut out so abruptly that the silence throbbed.
"What?" Jack said.
The light in the room bent.
There was no explosion. No dramatic tearing sound. No warning beyond the impossible sensation that the world had just become optional. One second, Jack sat in his chair with a controller in his hands. Next, the chair, the room, the television, the rain, and every familiar object in his life were gone.
He stumbled onto a floor that did not feel like a floor.
It was white. Not painted white or lit white. White in the way an empty page was white, except deeper, broader, and endless. The space stretched in all directions, with no corners or ceiling. It hurt to look at it for too long. There was no visible source of light, yet everything was illuminated. No sound. No distance. No sense of scale.
Jack nearly fell, caught himself, and stared.
His chest tightened.
"No," he whispered.
The word vanished into perfect silence.
He turned in a full circle. There was nothing. No door. No walls. No marks. Just that impossible, empty expanse. He looked down at himself. Same clothes. Same hands. Same stupid T-shirt. Controller still in his right hand.
"That is not funny," he said, louder this time. "Who's there?"
The white ahead of him rippled.
It did not open. It gathered. A shape formed from brilliance itself, like a figure outlined in sunfire and held together by thought. Human in the loosest possible sense. Taller than any person Jack had ever seen, but with proportions that shifted if he looked directly at them. Its features refused to settle. Eyes one moment, stars the next. A face that looked almost kind until it looked ancient and utterly indifferent.
It stood before him without footsteps.
Jack forgot how to breathe for a moment.
The being regarded him.
"You expressed desire," it said.
The voice came from everywhere. Not loud, yet impossible to ignore. Calm, precise, and so utterly certain that Jack felt smaller simply by hearing it.
Jack opened his mouth. Nothing came out.
"You contemplated power," the being continued. "Assimilation. Dominion. Conquest through infection or force. You did so in jest, but desire spoken is still desire given shape."
Jack swallowed hard. His mouth had gone dry.
"I," he began, then stopped. "I was joking."
"Yes."
That single word landed with dreadful finality.
The being raised one hand, or something like a hand. Images flared around Jack in bursts. Stars. Worlds. Cities the size of continents. Fleets burning in orbit. Armies colliding across ash deserts. Vast green hordes. Cathedral-ships. Teeth. Fire. Spores drifting unseen through crowded streets.
"You will be sent to another galaxy," the being said. "You will enter a realm of war so exhaustive that peace survives only as a memory. In that place, you will possess the means to spread, adapt, consume, and command. You seek passage to other realities. That privilege will be granted only after you achieve something of sufficient scale."
Jack's heartbeat hammered in his ears.
"What does that mean?" he managed. "What counts as sufficient scale?"
The being's light sharpened.
"Conquer a world. Break a civilization. Accomplish an act so extravagant that it cannot be ignored. Do this, and the paths between universes will open to you."
Jack stared at it, every thought tangling at once.
"This is insane."
"Yes."
"I can't do that."
"That remains to be seen."
"What galaxy?"
The being looked through him.
"One your species has named in fiction. Yet fiction is only ignorance granted narrative shape."
Jack shook his head once, too stunned to do more.
"No. No, you cannot just say that and leave it there."
The being did not answer. Instead, the white beneath Jack's feet darkened. Not into black, but into depth. A chasm made of distance. He felt gravity return in a violent lurch.
"Wait," Jack said, finally finding his voice. "Wait, hold on, I don't know anything about fighting wars, I'm not evil, I was talking rubbish after Halo, you can't actually send me somewhere because of that, I take it back."
The being's form began to dissolve into brightness.
"You will adapt," it said.
Then the ground vanished.
Jack fell.
He did not fall through air. He fell through sensation itself. Through pressure, heat, motion, memory, and a roar of things too large to name. For one hideous instant he thought he felt every cell in his body pulled apart and rewritten. Then the falling stopped.
He became aware of stink first.
Industrial rot. Oil. rust. sewage. stale air recirculated a thousand times through rusted vents. Then sound. Distant machinery. Clanging pipes. Footsteps. The echo of voices somewhere far above. He tried to gasp and realized, with a flash of cold terror, that he had no lungs.
He had no body.
There was no weight in his limbs because he had no limbs. No skin, no feet, no heartbeat. He was spread thin and drifting. A haze. A cloud. Countless minute motes suspended in damp, filthy air.
Jack's mind buckled.
No no no no no
He tried to shout and produced nothing. Tried to move and discovered that movement now meant drifting currents, tiny shifts, the strange collective awareness of innumerable particulate fragments. He could sense moisture on corroded metal. Heat signatures passing at a distance. Organic matter. Breath. Blood. Nervous systems. Life.
Prey.
The word appeared in his mind whole and complete, and the fact that it felt natural horrified him.
He floated in the depths of some immense undercity corridor, half tunnel and half alleyway, its walls crowded with pipes, broken vents, and riveted plates slick with grime. The ceiling hung low in places and vanished in darkness in others. Dim lumen strips flickered weakly overhead. Somewhere farther off, men were shouting. Jack had no idea what language they spoke, yet instinctively marked them as movement, biomass, opportunity.
He recoiled from the thought, or tried to.
"What is happening to me," he thought, and even his own inner voice felt thin.
Then he sensed someone close.
Small. Human. Malnourished. Running.
A child staggered into the corridor ahead, maybe ten or eleven years old, wrapped in patched rags and an oversized coat that had been repaired so many times its original colour was impossible to guess. He moved with the desperate, jerking speed of someone who knew better than to stop in the wrong part of a city. His face was dirty. One cheek was bruised. He glanced behind him again and again as he ran, as though expecting someone to turn the corner with a knife.
Jack stared in mute disbelief.
The boy ran straight through the drifting cloud.
Contact sent a shudder through Jack's awareness. He felt the warmth of skin, the rhythm of breath, the electric chatter of a living nervous system. The complexity of a whole body. The sheer abundance of it.
Jack froze.
A shape flickered in front of his vision. Not in the corridor itself, but somewhere overlaid on reality, like a crude interface projected directly into thought.
A single button.
Absorb Host
Jack stared at it.
"What?"
The boy slowed, coughing, one hand braced against the wall. He had not noticed anything. He looked terrified, exhausted, and very, very alone.
The button remained.
Jack did not think. Instinct, panic, confusion, and some newly implanted predatory reflex all aligned at once. He reached for the command in the only way he could and pressed it.
The cloud surged.
Spores collapsed inward in a single invisible rush and vanished into the boy's body through nose, mouth, eyes, pores, every vulnerable membrane at once. The child gasped and stumbled forward, fingers clawing weakly at his throat. For one terrible moment Jack felt everything. The wet interior of lungs. The pulse of blood. Muscle fibres contracting. Neural pathways lighting under intrusion.
Then perspective snapped.
He was no longer the cloud.
He was sitting.
The boy had collapsed against a stained metal bulkhead beside a broken pipe that hissed weakly with steam. His chest rose and fell in ragged bursts. His hands shook. Through the child's eyes, the corridor looked larger, harsher, more oppressive. Every surface was scarred. Every shadow seemed occupied.
Thoughts not his own surfaced in fragments.
Ran from the Topaz men.
Don't go back.
Mira will be scared.
Need food.
Need to get back before shift-bells.
Don't let them find you.
The boy's mind, desperate and fraying, tried to make sense of itself. He pressed a trembling hand over his mouth.
Jack watched from inside.
The child thought of a little girl with cropped hair and a missing front tooth, grinning over a stolen ration tin. A younger sister. Mira. The image carried affection so immediate and raw that Jack felt it like a physical ache.
Then darkness flooded the edges of vision.
The boy sagged.
The last coherent thought from him was not fear for himself. It was her.
Mira.
Everything went black.
When awareness returned, Jack felt heavier.
He had arms. Legs. A heartbeat. Lungs dragging in foul air. His head pounded. He opened his eyes to the same rusted corridor and nearly gagged as the stench hit him full force.
He was in the boy's body.
Not beside it. Not above it. In it.
Jack jerked upright, then pressed himself back against the wall in horror. Memory crashed through him in layered waves. His own life, his room, his game, the white chamber, the being. Then the boy's life, raw and fragmented but horribly intimate. Hunger. Fear. Gang markings painted in mineral blue. Narrow hab tunnels. Sister. Sirens. Smoke. Whispers about conscription gangs, enforcer raids, off-world wars that never ended.
Jack put both hands to his face and stared at fingers that were not his.
"Oh God," he whispered.
He knew the name of this place.
Not from the child's memory alone. From his own. From books, videos, half-remembered lore discussions, and now reinforced by what the boy had known without ever naming it in the same terms.
Hive city. Vulcanus.
World. Armageddon.
His stomach twisted.
He knew what Armageddon meant. He knew the name that loomed over its fate like a storm given flesh. Ghazghkull Thraka. Ork warlord. One of the great monsters of that setting. A name attached to invasion on a scale that made ordinary war look tidy.
Jack sat frozen in the filth of a hive underworld, breathing the air of a doomed city through stolen lungs, while the weight of realization settled on him piece by piece.
He was in Warhammer 40,000.
He was infected Flood inside the body of a hive child.
And somewhere above this rusting maze of pipes and darkness, history was already winding itself toward invasion, slaughter, and fire.
Jack lowered his hands very slowly.
"This," he said to no one, voice thin and shaking, "is a disaster."