285 Horrors Made
284 Horrors Made
[POV: Will]
“Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha~! Amusing to no end!”
The sound was wrong.
It carried too many tones, too many layers, as though multiple voices occupied the same space, overlapping imperfectly. Slowly, deliberately, he lifted his hands and removed the porcelain mask.
The face beneath was not Nicholas Caldwell.
It was familiar.
Mr. Known.
No.
Not Known.
Guesswork.
Recognition came without clarity, like a memory that refused to settle into certainty.
“It would’ve probably worked if you were just a few ratings higher,” he said lightly, tilting his head. “But all I felt was a tickle.”
The soul in my grasp slipped.
Not pulled.
Not torn.
It simply phased through my fingers, ignoring my powers and the concept of containment entirely. Something touched my throat. It felt cold to the touch and when I turned slightly, I saw another Eclipse standing beside me.
This one was indistinct, his form wavering like fog, his voice carrying a hollow, reverberating quality that seemed to echo from somewhere deeper than space.
“Not bad,” he murmured near my ear. “It’s a decent try. How about I show you how it’s done?”
His hand entered my body.
There was no resistance, no matter how much I tried to resist. He was too strong. He reached inside as though I were nothing more than an open container, and then he pulled. Everything came with it.
My soul.
The Source.
I lashed out instantly, my arm swinging with telekinetic force capable of shattering entire structures, but he was already gone, standing now beside the other him as if he had always been there.
Eclipse remained whole and untouched.
The porcelain mask returned to the main body, sealing the expressionless facade back into place as though nothing had occurred. He released the Source. It fell. Not downward, but away, drawn toward something unseen, something distant, something that claimed it as its own.
Something unfamiliar pressed against my thoughts.
It was fear.
“Please,” I said, the word leaving my mouth before I could refine it, before I could reshape it into something more controlled. “Let’s talk about this.”
He did not respond.
He tightened his grip on my soul.
My left arm vanished.
There was no pain in the conventional sense, no tearing or severing, only the abrupt absence of existence, as though it had been erased from the narrative entirely. No blood followed, no wound remained, only a void where something had once been.
The sensation destabilized everything.
“Wait—wait, stop—please, I can fix this, I can undo everything—just stop—!”
My voice fractured, losing its composure as the pressure increased.
Then he crushed harder.
The world disappeared.
I fell.
Not through space, but through meaning, through structure, through the very concept of being anchored to anything real. Darkness surrounded me, vast and absolute, stretching in every direction without end or variation.
And then the voices came.
“So another one arrives.”
“A mind so loud, now so quiet.”
“Welcome, Will. Welcome to what remains.”
“You held others here in thought. Now you will stay in truth.”
They surrounded me without form, pressing in from all sides, their presence suffocating despite the absence of anything tangible.
“There is no seat here.”
“There is no control here.”
“Only what is left when everything else is taken.”
I could neither see them nor reach them.
And for the first time in two hundred thirty-four cycles, I could not hear myself.
…
..
.
[POV: Nick]
Whatever afterlife I had consigned him to, I did not linger long enough to understand it, nor did I care to. The moment his presence vanished from my perception, something in me recoiled violently, and I doubled over as blood surged up my throat in thick, uncontrollable waves. It spilled against the inside of the porcelain mask before phasing through it in dark streams, dispersing into the air as though even the evidence of strain refused to remain.
“I fucking hate psychics,” I muttered, my voice rough, uneven, lacking the composed amusement I had carried moments prior.
The office stood in ruinous silence around me. The Seat of the Mind, once occupied by something that could peer into the depths of countless consciousnesses at once, now held nothing. No residual presence, no psychic echo, no lingering thread of awareness. He had not simply died. He had been removed, stripped from every layer that could have suggested continuation.
It had been too close.
Closer than I preferred.
I straightened slowly, one hand brushing absently against my suit as the last traces of blood phased away. My body felt intact, yet the memory of pressure against my soul lingered in a way that physical damage never could. That moment, when his grip had tightened, when the structure of something deeper than flesh had threatened to fracture, remained vivid.
I had not expected that.
If there was a silver lining, it was that I learned something knew today.
“I never knew it was possible to rip other people’s souls, huh?”
It had felt almost like magic, an intrusion that bypassed the systems I relied on, something that did not obey the usual rules of interaction. My gaze drifted briefly, unfocused, as I replayed the exchange through the lens of Guesswork, tracing the branching outcomes that had collapsed into the one I now occupied.
Victory had always been the result.
Yet, certainty had never offered me comfort.
“I didn’t think it would be that close,” I admitted quietly, more to the empty room than to myself.
If I had hesitated, even slightly, if I had allowed the bluff of faking pain to falter before its conclusion, he would have adapted. Psychics like him did not waste openings. They expanded them, exploited them, turned them into inevitabilities. If he had shifted approach, if he had abandoned brute force and instead unraveled my mind first, dismantled cohesion before targeting the core?
Even I would have lost back there, regardless if I had the Source or not.
The thought lingered only briefly before dissolving into irrelevance.
The facility trembled.
At first, it was subtle, a low vibration beneath perception, but it escalated rapidly as fractures spread through the structure. Walls split apart along invisible seams, entire sections peeling away as though reality itself had lost interest in maintaining their form.
Beyond the ruptures lay something vast and indifferent, an emptiness that did not resemble space so much as the absence of anything that could be called a place.
I had let go of the Source just seconds ago.
This structure had depended on it.
Now, it unraveled.
I did not remain to observe the full collapse.
The transition was instantaneous, a shift from one coordinate to another without traversing the space between. Another SRC facility resolved around me, identical in purpose, different only in the arrangement of its inevitable end.
They began moving.
Alarms blared, personnel armed themselves, commands were shouted with the same fragile authority I had already seen fail.
The outcome did not change.
Because of the Source within me, there was no depletion, no gradual erosion of capacity. My output remained constant, absolute, sustained at a level that disregarded the usual limitations imposed by exertion or time. Every action carried full weight, every use of power executed without compromise.
I stepped forward.
They fired.
The rounds bent, slipped, vanished, or returned to sender depending on the angle of perception I chose to occupy. My hand moved, and a line of bodies collapsed as their internal structures lost agreement with themselves. A glance erased cohesion in another, his form folding inward before dispersing into something unrecognizable.
A card flicked between my fingers.
Another life ended.
There was no rhythm to it beyond continuation, no escalation beyond repetition. Each moment mirrored the last in purpose if not in detail, each action reinforcing the same simple progression.
I killed.
I moved.
I killed again.
And then again.
And again.
…
..
.
[POV: F-25194]
I had always thought the corridors were too well-lit for anything to hide in them.
That illusion broke the moment Jensen disappeared.
Jensen was a name that we decided between ourselves, somewhat of a culture within the SRC.
After all, it was easier to remember this simple names than just numbers.
I also have a more personal name. Of course, I’m more comfortable with F-25194.
“Hello? Jensen?”
He had been walking right beside me, close enough that I could hear the faint rattle of his gear with every step. One second he was there, adjusting his grip on his rifle, the next there was nothing but empty space where he should have been.
I stopped mid-step, my breath catching as I turned sharply, scanning the hallway behind me.
“Jensen?” I called out, my voice lower than I intended, as if something in me already knew not to be loud. “This is not funny, man.”
No response came.
The others noticed the hesitation and slowed, their formation tightening instinctively. The fluorescent lights above flickered once, briefly dimming before stabilizing again. For a moment, I thought I saw something move along the wall, a distortion rather than a shape, but when I focused, there was nothing there.
“He probably doubled back,” someone muttered behind me, though the uncertainty in his tone made it clear he did not believe it.
We kept moving.
No one wanted to be the one left behind.
—
I heard the impact before I saw it.
A dull, heavy thud echoed from the adjacent corridor, followed by the sound of something dragging briefly across the floor. We rushed toward it, weapons raised, nerves stretched thin enough that every shadow looked like a threat.
When we turned the corner, Patel was already on the ground.
His body was twisted at an angle that did not make sense, one arm bent beneath him in a way that suggested it had broken long before he hit the floor. His helmet had rolled several feet away, revealing a face frozen somewhere between confusion and pain.
“There was something—” he tried to say, his voice barely forming the words.
Then his head jerked sideways, like an invisible hand had taken hold of it.
There was a sharp crack, and his body went limp.
We opened fire immediately.
Plasma rounds tore through the air, striking walls, floor, and ceiling, but nothing visible. The recoil of each shot felt grounding, something tangible in a moment that was rapidly losing all sense of structure.
“Spread out!” someone shouted. “Don’t bunch up, he’s picking us off!”
The suggestion felt wrong even as we followed it.
Being alone felt worse.
—
I pressed myself against the wall, forcing my breathing to stay controlled as I scanned the corridor ahead.
It was too quiet.
The alarms had faded into the background, distant and irrelevant compared to the immediate tension pressing in from all sides. My grip tightened on my weapon as I took a slow step forward, then another, each movement deliberate.
A shadow shifted.
I froze.
It stretched unnaturally along the wall, not aligned with any object that could have cast it. For a brief moment, it elongated, distorting into something vaguely human before snapping back into nothing.
“No,” I whispered under my breath, shaking my head as if that could reset what I had seen.
A hand grabbed my shoulder.
I reacted instantly, swinging the butt of my weapon backward with full force.
It connected.
But not with what I expected.
Lopez crumpled to the ground with a choked sound, clutching his face as blood spilled between his fingers.
“What the hell is wrong with you?!” he shouted, his voice breaking between anger and panic.
“I thought—” I started, then stopped, because I no longer knew what I thought I had seen.
“That’s exactly the problem!” he snapped, scrambling back to his feet. “You thought—”
He vanished mid-sentence, slipping through the ground.
His voice cut off so abruptly it left a ringing silence in its wake.
I stared at the space where he had been, my mind refusing to process it, refusing to accept that something could simply cease to be in front of me without any transition.
Then I felt it.
Breath.
Close to my ear.
I spun, firing instinctively.
The shots passed through empty air.
A figure stood several feet away, just at the edge of perception, as if he had always been there and I had simply failed to notice. Dark suit, fedora, porcelain mask reflecting the dim light in fractured glints.
He did not move.
I fired again.
The rounds bent away from him, curving off at impossible angles before embedding themselves harmlessly into the walls.
My finger tightened on the trigger.
It clicked empty.
He tilted his head slightly.
Then he stepped forward.
—
I ran.
Training dictated I should hold position, regroup, maintain formation.
Training had never accounted for this.
The sound of footsteps behind me did not match my own, appearing and disappearing without rhythm, sometimes directly at my back, sometimes echoing from ahead. I turned corners blindly, hoping distance would matter, hoping something as simple as space could create safety.
It did not.
A body dropped in front of me from above.
I skidded to a halt, barely avoiding tripping over it. The impact had already broken most of what could be broken. The uniform identified him as one of ours, though his face was too damaged to recognize.
I backed away slowly.
Something shifted behind me.
I turned.
Nothing.
When I faced forward again, the body was gone.
My breath hitched.
“No,” I said, louder this time, as if denial could anchor reality in place. “No, no, no—”
A force struck my side.
I was lifted off my feet and slammed into the wall, the impact driving the air from my lungs in a violent rush. My weapon flew from my hands, clattering uselessly across the floor.
I tried to move.
Something pinned me there.
Not physically.
There were no hands, no visible restraints, just pressure, absolute and immovable.
The masked figure stepped into view.
Up close, the porcelain surface revealed nothing, no reflection of intent, no indication of effort. He looked at me the way one might observe an object, something to be considered briefly before being discarded.
I struggled, every muscle straining against something that did not exist in any conventional sense.
“Please,” I said, the word slipping out without permission.
He raised his hand slightly.
That was all.
Pain did not come in the way I expected.
Instead, there was a sudden, disorienting shift, like my body had forgotten how it was supposed to be arranged. My vision blurred as something within me lost alignment, my limbs no longer responding as they should.
The last thing I saw was my own arm bending the wrong way.
Then everything went dark.
…
..
.
[POV: Griffin]
I had expected the Seat of Life to fall eventually.
Instead, we stalled each other into something far worse.
Lifeblood and I tore into one another with a familiarity that felt almost intimate, our powers colliding in a way that blurred the line between opposition and reflection. She had begun as a regenerator, I as a shapeshifter, yet somewhere along the way our abilities had converged into something grotesquely similar. The difference lay not in what we could do, but in how we did it.
She was refined.
I was not.
Blood coated everything. It spread across the floors, climbed the walls, seeped into cracks and pooled into something vast enough to resemble a living ocean contained within artificial boundaries. Every strike I made was answered in kind, every piece I tore from her replaced faster than I could destroy it.
“You don’t stop,” she said at one point, her voice echoing from multiple directions at once as new mouths formed and dissolved across her expanding mass.
“Neither do you,” I replied, though my voice had long since lost a fixed origin, emerging from whatever part of me happened to resemble a throat.
As a Power Mutate, I understood my limits.
There was a ceiling I could never break, a precision I could never achieve. I would never match the clean execution of someone like Nick, never replicate the effortless control true capes wielded over their abilities. Technique, in the traditional sense, had always been beyond me.
What I had instead was tolerance.
The ability to endure instability longer than most could survive it.
Against Lifeblood, that distinction stopped mattering.
Control became a liability.
So I let go.
The shift was immediate and violent. The parts of my power I usually kept suppressed surged forward, unchecked and ravenous. My blood thickened, then distorted, then erupted into uncontrolled growth. Tumors formed in rapid succession, swelling outward in misshapen clusters that fed on everything around them.
I grew.
Not cleanly, not purposefully, but in every direction at once.
Lifeblood responded in kind, her own mass expanding as rivers of blood coiled and multiplied, forming limbs, organs, and structures that pulsed with relentless regeneration. She rebuilt herself faster than I could dismantle her, her presence spreading until it pressed against the limits of the facility itself.
The barriers groaned.
Reality strained.
We did not stop.
With nowhere left to expand outward, we turned inward.
We devoured each other.
My cancerous growths latched onto her proliferating blood, consuming and being consumed in the same instant. Her cells flooded into me, invasive and relentless, while mine burrowed into her, replicating with chaotic aggression. The distinction between us blurred as our substances mixed, fought, and replaced one another in a continuous cycle of destruction.
It became impossible to tell where I ended and she began.
Her organs bloomed across the environment in grotesque abundance, hearts beating in open air, lungs inflating and deflating without bodies, veins stretching like vines in an attempt to outpace my spread. In response, I abandoned even the pretense of structure.
The animalistic aspects of my power took over.
Fangs tore through masses of flesh that might have been hers or mine. Hide formed in patches, only to split apart as feathers burst through, each mutation competing for dominance without cohesion. I was no longer shaping myself.
I was letting everything happen at once.
“You’re losing yourself,” her voice echoed, though it carried no judgment, only observation.
“I never had much to begin with,” I answered, though the words felt distant even as I formed them.
In the end, there was no decisive moment.
No final strike.
No victory.
We killed each other.
Our masses collapsed inward, systems failing simultaneously as the endless cycle of regeneration and destruction reached a breaking point neither of us could surpass. The blood stilled. The growths ceased. The structure we had both abandoned never returned.
Darkness followed.
Then something else.
Awareness returned not as a gradual process, but as a sudden ignition. I existed again, not in fragments, but whole, contained within a different space entirely.
Glass surrounded me.
Fluid clung to my skin.
I moved, and the container shattered outward as I forced myself through it, the remnants scattering across the floor in sharp fragments. Air hit me all at once, cold and sterile, carrying the faint scent of chemicals and something faintly familiar.
I stepped out, naked, unrefined, newly assembled from something as small as preserved brain tissue.
Guesswork had assured me it would work.
He had been right.
Again.
I stood there for a moment, letting sensation settle into place, recalibrating to the fact of existence. My body felt stable, more stable than it had any right to be after what had just occurred.
Lifeblood lingered in my thoughts.
I did not know if she had prepared something similar.
If she had, then time mattered.
If she had not, then it no longer did.
Either way, my course remained unchanged.
I still had work to do.
A voice broke through my focus.
“Holy shit,” the scientist nearby said, staring at me with wide eyes, frozen between disbelief and something closer to fear. “Griffin’s alive.”
I ignored him.
Instead, I reached outward, not physically, but through the strange network of myself I had left behind. Drops of blood, fragments of tissue, small, seemingly insignificant pieces scattered across multiple SRC facilities.
Anchors.
I had placed them deliberately before beginning the destruction in earnest, contingencies embedded within the chaos.
I found one.
Then another.
Each piece responded faintly, distant but present, like echoes waiting to be given form again.
I chose one.
The transition did not involve movement in any conventional sense. It was closer to inhabiting something that had always been mine, pulling awareness across distance and forcing dormant cells back into activity. Structure rebuilt itself around that fragment, reconstructing me from the smallest viable origin.
The lab vanished.
Another facility took its place.
I stepped forward, already reforming, already preparing to continue.
There were still many left.
…
..
.
[POV: L-69283]
I had been trained to recognize threats.
This was not something I recognized.
The hallway reeked of iron and something thicker, something almost sweet beneath it, like rot that had not yet decided what it wanted to become. My boots stuck slightly with each step, peeling off the floor with a quiet, wet resistance that made it harder to ignore what I was walking through.
“Stay sharp,” I said, though my voice came out lower than intended, constrained by the pressure building in my chest.
There were six of us when we entered the sector.
There were five now.
No one had seen Torres go.
He had been behind me, I was certain of it, close enough that I could hear his breathing through the comms. Then there had been a brief distortion in the audio, a wet, choking sound that cut off almost immediately.
When I turned, there was nothing.
Not even a body.
“Torres?” someone called, their voice cracking through the channel.
Static answered.
We kept moving because stopping felt worse.
—
The walls changed first.
It was subtle at a glance, easy to dismiss as damage from whatever had already breached the facility, but the longer I looked, the less it resembled structural failure and the more it resembled something grown. Veins pulsed faintly beneath the surface, spreading in branching patterns that twitched when the light flickered overhead.
“Do you see that?” Kim whispered, her weapon raised but unfocused, unsure where to aim.
“I see it,” I replied.
The wall moved.
A slow, deliberate contraction, like muscle tightening beneath skin.
We opened fire.
Plasma rounds tore into it, splattering dark fluid that hissed faintly where it landed. The surface recoiled, then stilled, the pulsing diminishing until it resembled inert material again.
“Keep moving,” I said quickly, before anyone could linger on it too long.
None of us wanted to test if it would move again.
—
We found Harker in pieces.
He was still alive when we reached him.
That was the worst part.
His torso lay several feet from what remained of his lower body, both halves connected by strands of something that stretched and retracted with each shallow breath he managed to take. His arms were gone entirely, the ends not cleanly severed but frayed, as though something had pulled them apart rather than cut them.
“It’s still here,” he rasped, his eyes darting wildly between us. “It’s not— it doesn’t stay one thing—”
His body jerked.
We all flinched, weapons snapping up, scanning for a target that refused to present itself.
“I can feel it,” he continued, voice rising into panic. “It’s inside, my power is being—”
His chest split open mid-sentence.
Not from an external strike.
From within.
Something pushed outward, distorting the shape of him before breaking through in a spray of blood and tissue. We fired instinctively, rounds shredding what remained, but whatever had moved inside him was already gone.
Harker stopped moving.
No one spoke.
—
I heard something above us.
A faint scraping, uneven, like something dragging itself across metal with too many points of contact. I tilted my head upward slowly, scanning the ceiling panels.
Nothing.
Then Kim disappeared.
She had been directly to my right, close enough that our shoulders nearly touched. One second she was there, the next there was a violent upward motion, so fast I barely registered it before she was gone.
A single drop of blood hit the floor.
Then another.
I looked up again.
This time, I saw it.
It clung to the ceiling in a shape that refused to settle into anything consistent. Limbs extended and retracted, shifting between configurations too quickly to track. Parts of it resembled bone, others muscle, others something less defined, as if it had not decided what it wanted to be.
Kim’s upper body was partially merged into it.
Her face was still visible.
Her mouth moved, but no sound came out as the rest of her was pulled inward, absorbed into the mass with a series of wet, compressing sounds.
“Fire!” I shouted.
We unleashed everything we had.
The rounds struck.
Some embedded.
Some passed through.
Some seemed to be redirected by shifting layers of flesh that formed and dissolved faster than the eye could follow.
It dropped and it hit the ground in front of us, expanding outward on impact before pulling itself back together into something vaguely humanoid.
For a moment, it stood there.
Then it changed.
Its form tightened, features aligning, smoothing, reshaping until it resembled a person.
Kim.
Perfect.
Unharmed.
She looked at us, head tilting slightly, expression just a fraction off, like something imitating a memory without fully understanding it.
“Why are you shooting?” she asked, her voice almost right.
No one lowered their weapon.
“You’re not her,” I said.
She smiled.
Too wide.
Her jaw split along the sides, opening further than it should, revealing layers beneath that did not belong in anything human. Additional teeth formed, then dissolved, replaced by something sharper, more functional.
“That’s correct,” it said.
It moved.
—
I ran because there was nothing else left to do.
The sounds behind me were wet, violent, and final. Gunfire cut off one by one, each burst shorter than the last, until there was only the echo of something tearing through what remained of my team.
I did not look back.
The corridor ahead stretched endlessly, identical doors lining either side, each one closed, each one offering no indication of safety. My breath came in sharp bursts as I pushed forward, ignoring the way the floor shifted slightly beneath me.
Then I noticed it.
The trail.
Blood.
Fresh.
Leading ahead of me.
I slowed despite myself, dread settling into something heavy and immovable.
“That’s not possible,” I whispered.
I had been the one running.
There should not have been anything ahead of me.
The trail ended at a figure standing in the center of the hallway.
Me.
It turned slowly, mirroring my movement with perfect precision. Every detail matched, from the way I held my weapon to the pattern of blood on my uniform.
“You made it,” it said, my voice coming from its mouth without distortion.
I raised my weapon.
So did it.
For a moment, we stood there, identical, unmoving.
Then it smiled.
I fired.
It did not dodge.
It did not need to.
Its body absorbed the impact, reshaping around the rounds before sealing itself instantly. In the same motion, it closed the distance between us faster than I could react.
Something pierced through my torso.
I looked down.
An arm.
Not quite solid, not entirely formed, pushed through me as if my body offered no resistance. It shifted inside me, expanding, branching, becoming something larger.
“You don’t have to run,” it said softly, still wearing my face. “You’re already here.”
My vision blurred.
I tried to speak, but something filled my throat before the words could form.
The last thing I felt was myself being pulled apart from the inside, not torn, but repurposed, every piece of me becoming something else.
Then there was nothing left of me to feel anything at all.