The corridor shuddered around them like a breathing lung. The walls moaned — not metaphorically, but with real sound — wet and stretched, vibrating with the heartbeat of something far too close. The air grew thicker, smeared with colorless static, like reality was buffering.
They were nearly at the breach — a jagged hole in the world itself, pulsing at the end of the hall like a wounded iris, surrounded by tendrils of exposed, beating material that should not be.
The cow-thing was still coming.
Lumbering. Relentless. Muzzle flexing, that awful nose-mouth slowly widening in anticipation.
Dani aimed over her shoulder and fired again, the grenade bursting in a bloom of orange heat that tore away a chunk of wall and exposed nothing but black.
"Hey!" she barked.
He flinched, nearly tripping over his own feet as Dario bounded ahead of him.
"Hey!" she shouted at the creature, backing toward the breach. "You lactose-loaded steak faced meat balloon! Back off!"
The cow froze mid-charge. Lance blinked. Even Dario tilted his head.
"...Did you just call it—"
The creature lunged. It didn't so much move as erase the distance between them. The ground tore, light jittered, and the sound that followed was half thunder, half collapsing geometry.
Dani screamed—half-laughing, half-panicked—as she spun and tripped over a chunk of fractured pavement.Her legs went out from under her, and she hit the ground shoulder-first, letting out a strangled giggle. "Ha! Okay—yep—too fast! Way too fast—"
Dario threw himself between them.
The sound was like bone striking glass. Sparks of impossible color burst from the impact. The dog's body trembled, small against the enormity of the thing, fur bristling with static light.
"DARIO!"
Lance didn't think. He jumped.
He slammed into the blur of movement, arms outstretched, trying to pull Dario back—
—and the world split.
A pressure roared through him, folding space inward. His body seized, lungs locking as the air turned heavy, viscous, full of shapes that didn't belong. Something warm and human inside him was being torn loose—unwritten.
Not pain. Worse than pain. A hollowing.
He felt another presence—someone breathing through him, someone existing through his skin—and then felt that presence wrenched away. Fingers without names pulling them apart.
It wasn't love, or memory, or recognition. It was a fundamental truth being edited out of his atoms. He didn't know who it was, but the absence it left behind made him want to scream.
The world blinked white.
Lance hit the ground, airless, vision filled with static. The cow's charge had collapsed itself into nothing—like it had tried to gore him through reality and gotten stuck halfway there.
Dario whined beside him, fur standing on end. Dani scrambled to her knees, hand outstretched toward the both of them.
"Mercer! Get up!"
He tried. His body obeyed, but his shadow didn't. For a fraction of a second, he swore he saw two—one human, one fading.
She scrambled backward, fumbling for her weapon with shaking hands.
The beast tore through where she'd been standing a second ago, obliterating the concrete in a bloom of debris and heat.
Reality split open as the cow barreled forward. The wall behind it bent inward, then turned inside out, folding around the creature like the hallway itself was trying to swallow it whole.
And then—
Everything snapped.
Lance felt it first in his ribs, then in his skull.
The twitch became a spiral.
Time slowed. The edges of his vision became unmoored, like his thoughts were slipping down a drain made of light and memory. He staggered after Dani and Dario, but his body felt too long, too distant — like his limbs were walking half a second ahead of his will.
He crossed the breach.
And the world died.
There was no floor — just suggestion of space, like walking on thought. Shapes hovered in the air like bruises, pulsing with unfamiliar colors. Noise wasn't sound here — it was texture, brushing his ears like silk and gravel at once.
Lance's breath caught in his throat as the cow-thing stepped through the breach behind them. It didn't walk — it bent space with its presence, dragging streaks of reality behind it like paint across a wet canvas.
Dani skidded to a stop beside a floating structure that might've once been a fire exit sign — now twisted, blinking random letters like an eye trying to remember how to spell.
"Okay," she said, panting. "Okay, that's a new one."
Lance wasn't okay.
His chest was seizing. The twitch became a pulse — his pulse — echoing from deep inside, where the foreign thing nestled warm and waiting.
He saw too much. Too many shapes. Too many possible versions of himself in the smeared reflections around them. Some of them were screaming. Some were watching. One was laughing with its mouth open far too wide.
Lance fell to his knees.
Dario curled beside him, low growl in his throat, but still calm.
"Dani..." Lance whispered.
His voice came out wrong — like two people speaking from opposite ends of a tunnel.
"I don't think I'm real anymore."
The cow shrieked and began to split — not dying, but dividing, tearing itself into mirrored versions that drifted apart and pulsed with discordant geometry.
Dani hoisted her grenade launcher again. "Get your head on straight, man. This thing's about to get really pissed off."
Lance looked up through flickering vision, the cow-shards growing legs they shouldn't have, spines bending into spirals.
And the twitch inside him?
It purred.
The cow-thing's halves didn't fall.
They slithered.
One bled into the ground—or what passed for ground here—spreading like oil, soaking into the twitching surface and changing it. Veins of dark flesh bloomed underfoot, swelling and pulsing with every step they took. The other half smeared upward, smudging like charcoal across an invisible ceiling until it wasn't a creature anymore, but part of the space. Watching. Breathing.
The rift warped to match it.
Corridors bloomed sideways, fleshy walls pulsing with eye-like knots. A stairway rose from nowhere and melted mid-climb. Shapes that were almost furniture twitched at the edges of sight. Somewhere in the distance, a telephone rang with no rhythm, just static and something like sobbing.
Lance staggered.
The twitch inside him was no longer occasional. It beat in time with his heart, sometimes ahead of it. The tips of his fingers blurred. His vision stuttered like a corrupted VHS frame. Dario pressed close to him, but even the comforting weight of his dog felt delayed, like touch itself was buffering.
"What is this place," Lance whispered, or maybe thought. He wasn't sure if the words made it out.
Dani scanned the perimeter, steps light, precise. "Dimensional overlap. Nesting distortion. Or hell. Take your pick."
The world growled—not with sound, but with pressure.
The walls shifted again, swelling outward.
The cow-thing's eye opened wide across the horizon—massive, bloodshot, vertical—embedded in the rift like it had always been there, like it belonged.
And when it blinked, the entire space twitched.
"Move!" Dani yelled.
Lance didn't.
Couldn't.
Everything pulled at him—the eye, the twisting tendrils, the pulse inside him answering back. His knees hit the non-floor. His hands slid through flesh and fog. His skull rang with noise that didn't touch his ears.
"Lance!" Dani screamed.
And that's when it hit him.
He hadn't told her his name.
His vision snapped to her, head sluggish. "H—How did you know my—"
But his words collapsed, breath vanishing. His mouth opened, and something inside his chest twitched wrong.
Hard.
The kind of wrong that made his spine seize, his fingers curl, his thoughts bleed. He felt himself fall—
Not down.
But out.
No air.
No color.
Only a soft, wet sound, like something chewing in the distance.
And beneath it, a whisper.
Not a voice.
Not even language.
Just presence.
Something was waiting for him here.
Not to kill.
But to become.