The Thudding
The impacts echoed from the depths of the base, each one heavier than the last, like the heartbeat of a colossal beast pulsing through concrete and steel arteries. Every crash brought a flicker in the lights, the emergency lamps in the armory winking like demented fireflies, casting leaping shadows that danced a macabre jig on the walls.
De Shui checked his shotgun. Seven high-explosive slugs. Three fragmentation rounds. It would have to do.
He looked over his team. Zhang Yifan had scavenged an old electromagnetic rifle, its power cell blinking a feeble 32%. Lu Xiao hefted two heavy pistols, a tactical knife strapped to his thigh. Li Yuan's tablet was a dead brick in her hand, but the compact submachine gun slung over her shoulder looked functional. Zhou Ming still clutched the dead cutter like a security blanket, but the multi-purpose engineering clamp in his other hand was a solid, brutal piece of metal.
"Comms are gone. The network's compromised," De Shui's voice was a gravelly rasp over the damaged suit radio. "We don't know who's left, or what they've become. Three rules. One: stick in pairs. No solo acts. Two: assume every electronic device is a trap. That includes doors, lights, and especially anything that looks friendly. Three: if you see violet light, don't look. Don't approach. Disrupt it. Fire, water, blunt force. Anything physical."
He let that sink in, his gaze lingering on each sealed visor. "Command is on Sub-level Seven. The direct route is through the living quarters, training block, central corridor. Those are kill zones now. We take the maintenance tunnels. Tighter, dirtier, but less wired. More blind spots."
"The entrance is on the north wall of the secondary armory," Zhou Ming piped up instantly. "Manual hydraulic door. The mechanism might be—"
"Compromised," De Shui finished. "So we won't be using the mechanism."
He moved to the north wall, tapping it with his gunstock. A hollow echo answered from one spot. He took two steps back, raised the shotgun.
"Ears."
The blast was deafening in the confined space. The slug punched a crater the size of a dinner plate into the wall, buckling the metal inward. Darkness yawned beyond.
Second shot. Third.
The torn metal edges formed a ragged, person-sized hole. De Shui went through first, shotgun sweeping the gloom. The tunnel was worse than he remembered—not a corridor, but the base's guts. Thick cable bundles snaked overhead like petrified intestines. Steam pipes hissed. Coolant lines dripped condensation that froze into odd, crystalline shapes. In places, they had to turn sideways and shuffle through.
The air stank of ozone and something cloyingly sweet, like rotting fruit left in a hot engine bay. Drag marks scored the floor. Here and there, purplish-black stains glistened with an unhealthy sheen under their helmet lights.
"Follow the main coolant line," De Shui whispered, the sound swallowed by the pipes. "Straight shot to B5. Then we find a vent shaft down."
They moved in a tight, silent knot. Zhang Yifan covered the rear, his head constantly swiveling. Lu Xiao and Li Yuan stayed in the middle. Zhou Ming stuck close to De Shui, his engineer's eye identifying pressure gauges and valve types, muttering about load tolerances.
Fifty meters in, a new sound cut through the drip and hum: a soft, persistent scraping.
De Shui raised a clenched fist. The team froze.
He killed his light. The others followed suit. Darkness, absolute and pressing, fell. Only the faint green glow of suit status LEDs marked their positions.
The scraping continued. Not metal on metal. Something wet and fibrous moving over a rough surface. A slow, sticky drip-drip punctuated it.
De Shui palmed his last flare, pulled the pin, and rolled it around the bend.
Hiss—
Blinding white light flooded the tunnel.
And illuminated the thing clinging to the pipes.
It had been human once. Shreds of a technician's uniform hung from its frame. A nametag glinted. But from the waist down, it was fused with a massive coolant pipe. The metal seemed to have grown into its flesh, purple-black veins pulsing across the surface. Its arms were elongated, fingers tapered into sharpened metal spikes that scratched mindlessly at the opposite wall.
Its head was the worst. The skull had split open like a rotten melon. Where the brain should have been, a pulsating mass of violet-black energy churned, its surface constantly forming and dissolving the outlines of screaming human faces.
"Parasitic fusion," Zhou Ming breathed, horrified fascination in his voice. "The Void energy… it's using the infrastructure. Using him as a biological control node."
The parasite turned its headless skull toward the light. The energy-core focused. Then it turned toward them.
It screamed—a sound of tearing metal and drowning gasps—and surged forward. It didn't run; the pipe-fused lower body undulated, propelling it with terrifying speed.
"Fire!"
De Shui's shotgun roared. Pellets tore into the creature's chest, spraying globs of violet ichor. It didn't slow. Zhang Yifan's plasma bolt seared its shoulder, making the energy core flicker. Still it came.
"Head! Aim for the core!" Li Yuan yelled, her submachine gun chattering. Rounds sparked off an invisible shield around the pulsating mass.
Five meters.
De Shui ejected the spent shell, slammed in his last fragmentation round. He didn't aim for the shielded head. He aimed for the fusion point where flesh met pipe.
The boom was different—sharper, harder. The shell detonated inside the junction. Metal shredded. Violet energy geysered from the rupture.
The creature shrieked, a true sound of agony. Its lower body seized, the pipe cracking and shearing. The humanoid upper half slumped to the ground, but the metal-spike arms kept dragging it forward.
De Shui charged, reversing his shotgun. The stock came down on the energy core. Once. Twice. On the third blow, it shattered like black glass, dissipating into acrid smoke. The body went still.
The flare sputtered and died.
"Move," De Shui grunted, reloading his last slugs. "That noise was a dinner bell."
They pushed deeper, the tunnel becoming a strangling labyrinth. They fought two more horrors: a sparking monstrosity fused with live cables, and a hissing thing that vomited corrosive steam from pipe-joint mouths. Each encounter cost them—ammo, energy, a piece of nerve.
Then, nearing the B5 marker, the environment itself began to change.
The sporadic stains on the walls flowed together, weeping and蠕动着. The metal plating softened, bulging outward into the浮雕 of agonized faces, mouths open in silent screams.
"Energy density is critical," Zhou whispered, tapping his jury-rigged scanner. "It's not just infestation. The tunnel is being assimilated. We're inside a forming nest."
As if on cue, the wall ten meters ahead bloomed open. Not a rupture—a deliberate, organic unfolding. From it oozed a translucent, gelatinous mass. It had no fixed shape, flowing from a