The Conductor turned, its black robes swirling like smoke, and glided back into the darkness of the corridor. It did not disappear. It was simply… gone. The corridor was empty again. Silent.
The quiet left behind was a physical thing. A thick, heavy quiet that swallowed the echoes of the automaton's death shriek and the Conductor's sibilant, chorus-voice. The gantry, a fractured spine of rusted metal, vibrated with a low, deep thrum from the wounded nest below, a sound Haruto could feel in the soles of his boots, in his teeth. He lay on the shaking metal, his mind a blank, white-hot void of shock. He had won. He had survived. His insane gamble had worked. He had pitted the two monsters against each other, and they had eliminated one of the threats for him.
He pushed himself up, his body a collection of aches and bruises. He looked across the new, five-meter gap in the bridge at the Conductor's parting gift.
It was not a bridge.
It was a violation. A glistening, black, organic structure that pulsed with a faint, internal, oily light. It looked solid, yet its surface roiled with a slow, constant, viscous movement, like a river of tar. It was utterly, profoundly wrong, a piece of biology where engineering should be. A bridge made of monster.
"No."
The word was a choked, pathetic sound from beside him. Kaito. He had crawled back from the edge, his back pressed against a support strut, his carbine lying forgotten at his side. He was staring at the organic bridge, his face a pale, sweat-slick mask of pure, unadulterated revulsion. "No. I can't. Not… not on that."
Haruto's gaze was fixed on the path forward. He could still feel the phantom cold on his boot where the Anomaly had touched him, the memory of its deconstructing caress. To walk on it… to willingly place his entire weight on the substance of the thing that had eaten a thousand people… the thought was a cold, coiling serpent in his gut. But the Conductor's parting words echoed in his mind. The Warden is waiting for you on the bridge. There was no other way forward. This was the path. A test. A taunt.
"It is stable."
Riku's voice, a low, dispassionate rumble, cut through the tense quiet. He was already at the edge of the broken gantry, his carbine's light focused on the point where the black substance met the metal. He knelt, reached out a gloved hand, and hesitated for a fraction of a second before pressing his fingers against the glistening surface.
"Don't touch it!" Kaito shrieked, scrambling back, his armor scraping against the strut.
Riku ignored him. He prodded the substance, then ran his hand across it. "The organism is exhibiting properties of a solid polymer," he stated, his voice a flat, clinical observation, as if he were analyzing a rock sample. "It is cool to the touch. Slightly yielding. Like hard rubber. There is no evidence of adhesive or corrosive properties in its current state." He stood up, his movements fluid, efficient. He took a single, deliberate step out onto the black, organic bridge. It held his weight without a tremor. He took another step. "The path is viable."
Haruto watched him, a strange mix of horror and professional respect churning within him. Riku was not a soldier. He was a weapon. A tool that did not feel fear, only processed data. And right now, that was exactly what Haruto needed.
He turned to Kaito. "Get up."
Kaito just shook his head, his eyes squeezed shut. "I can't. I'll fall. It'll… it'll eat me."
Haruto's patience, a thin, frayed thread, finally snapped. He strode over, grabbed the front of Kaito's armor harness, and hauled him to his feet with a grunt of effort. Kaito stumbled, his legs like jelly. Haruto got right in his face, his own helmet almost touching Kaito's.
"Listen to me," Haruto's voice was a low, vicious hiss, a sound more menacing than any of the monsters they had faced. "That thing in the doorway saved our lives. It killed the machine that was about to kill us. And then it made us a bridge. Do you know why? Because it thinks we're interesting. It thinks we're a new, fun toy to play with. And right now, Riku is standing on that bridge, waiting. I am going to walk across that bridge. And you are going to walk right behind me. Because the alternative is staying here, on this broken piece of metal, and waiting for the big bugs to come back. Or for the Conductor to get bored. And I promise you, you do not want to see what it does when it gets bored. Do you understand?"
He didn't wait for an answer. He shoved Kaito forward, a hard, brutal push that sent him stumbling towards the organic bridge. Then he turned and followed Riku, his own mag-boots clanging on the metal before stepping onto the soft, strange silence of the Anomaly.
The sensation was profoundly, deeply wrong. The surface was yielding, like walking on a thick, rubber mat, but it was also… alive. He could feel a faint, low-frequency vibration through the soles of his boots, a slow, rhythmic pulse, like the beat of a monstrous, sleeping heart. The air was thick with the sweet, rotting smell of it. He forced himself to put one foot in front of the other, his gaze fixed on Riku's steady, unwavering back. He did not look down. He did not look at the roiling, furious nest in the chasm below. He just walked.
He heard Kaito's hesitant, shuffling footsteps behind him. He was moving. That was all that mattered.
They crossed the five-meter gap in a quiet that felt a hundred years long. When Haruto's boot finally touched the cold, solid metal of the gantry on the other side, a wave of relief so potent washed over him that his knees almost buckled. He stumbled into the dark corridor, into the blessed, familiar stillness of the ship, and leaned against the wall, his breath coming in ragged, painful gasps. Kaito practically fell out of the opening after him, collapsing to the deck plate, his body still shaking.
Riku was already scanning the new corridor, his carbine's beam cutting a sharp, clean path through the darkness. "Clear," he reported.
Haruto took a moment, forcing his heart rate down, forcing the tactical mind to reassert control over the screaming, primal fear. He looked back at the bridge. From this side, it looked even more obscene, a glistening black tongue extended from the abyss. As he watched, the substance seemed to lose its cohesion. It rippled, turned from a solid to a liquid, and flowed back over the edge of the broken gantry, pouring into the chasm below in a silent, black waterfall. A moment later, it was gone. The path was gone. There was no going back.
"Good," he muttered to himself. Forward was the only way.
He looked at the corridor ahead. It was different from the officer's country. Colder. More functional. The walls were unadorned, gray alloy, covered in thick bundles of power conduits. The red emergency lights were weaker here, casting long, distorted shadows that seemed to writhe and dance at the edge of his vision. The air was still and dead. And there was a new sound. A faint, almost inaudible, high-pitched hum. The sound of active, high-yield power. They were getting closer to Engineering.
"Guardian," he said into his comm, his voice a low rasp. "Status report. Where are we?"
"And the Warden?"
"So it's blind, but it knows we're in the house," Haruto summarized.
The name still sent a jolt through him, a spark of an identity he didn't want, a burden he couldn't refuse. He pushed it down. "What about the Conductor? Where did it go?"
Haruto's blood ran cold. The creature wasn't a symbiont. It was an avatar. A face for a faceless, all-consuming god. A god that was currently spread through the lower decks of this ship like a cancer. It is a river that flows through the veins of this ship. The Conductor's own words came back to him, and he finally, truly understood.
"Let's move," he said, his voice a low, urgent command. "Quickly, and quietly."
They started down the corridor, their formation tight, their steps as silent as they could manage on the gritty deck plates. The high-pitched hum of the power systems grew steadily louder, a constant, whining presence that scraped at the edge of their hearing. The corridor was a long, straight, featureless tube of gray metal and bundled cables. They passed massive, sealed blast doors, their stenciled designations still faintly visible: Primary Fusion Reactor Control. Aft Damage Control. Life Support Sub-station 3. All of them were cold, dead, their status lights dark.
They had been moving for almost ten minutes when the ship groaned again. A deep, resonant, structural groan that seemed to come from everywhere at once. The lights flickered violently.
"Hold!" Haruto commanded, his hand flying to the wall to steady himself.
The gravity failed.
One moment, they were standing. The next, they were floating, their boots lifting from the deck plates in the sudden, stomach-churning weightlessness. But this time, it was different. It wasn't just a simple on-off fluctuation. The gravity plates were fighting each other. He felt a powerful, invisible force pull him towards the ceiling, then another force yank him back down. The corridor became a chaotic, zero-G washing machine, a maelstrom of conflicting gravitational fields.
Kaito cried out as he was thrown against the ceiling, his helmet clanging against a thick conduit. Riku, with his low center of gravity and uncanny sense of balance, had somehow managed to brace himself between the floor and a bundle of cables, his body rigid. Haruto was tumbling, his hard-won orientation gone in a flash of vertigo. He saw a loose maintenance panel, shaken free by the G-spikes, shoot past his head like a metal frisbee.
The Warden was getting more creative. It wasn't just turning the gravity off anymore. It was turning it into a weapon. A blender.
He managed to grab onto a cable, his arm almost yanked from its socket by the sudden stop. He held on, his body whipping around like a flag in a hurricane, as the gravity fields pulsed and fought.
Then, just as suddenly as it began, it stopped. The gravity reasserted itself with a final, brutal thump. Haruto fell the last two meters to the floor, landing hard on his shoulder with a grunt of pain. Kaito crashed down beside him, a heap of groaning armor.
Haruto pushed himself up, his shoulder a hot, angry knot of pain. "Report," he gasped.
"Fine," Riku's voice was a low grunt. He was already on his feet, his carbine sweeping the corridor.
"I think… I think my arm's broken," Kaito moaned from the floor.
Before Haruto could move to check on him, he saw it. The gravity fluctuation had done more than just toss them around. It had torn a section of the corridor wall apart. A massive, meter-thick bundle of the ship's primary data conduits, each one as thick as his arm, now hung exposed from the breach, a tangled, shredded mess of fiber optics and raw wiring.
And they were glowing. Not with the clean, blue-white light of data transfer. They were glowing with a faint, sickly, iridescent green-black light. And they were pulsing. A slow, rhythmic, organic pulse that was perfectly in sync with the low hum of the nest he had seen in the chasm.
The Anomaly was not just in the lower decks. It was not just a river flowing through the ship's veins.
It had become the veins. It was in the walls. It was in the data streams. It was in the very nervous system of the ship.
He finally understood the Conductor's parting words. I would not want to spoil its fun. The Warden wasn't waiting for them on the bridge. The Warden was everywhere. And so was the Anomaly. They were no longer two separate threats.
He was looking at the first, terrible evidence of their merger. An organic god being born from the ghost in the machine.