And a special thanks to Zero_Tempest_9159 and Finicolcomic68 for the power stones—really appreciate the support 🙏
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The stairwell led to a different level.
Same setup — pre-made wall panels, hidden wiring — but this one had taken damage. The floor at the bottom was intact, and eight meters in, it wasn't. A section of tile had lifted, exposing the subfloor, cracks spreading outward from a point beneath it.
He moved around it. Right wall, left hand brushing the panel, his right arm staying within its current range.
The ceiling was lower here and the damage showed more clearly — impact marks running the first twenty meters, each one a compressed section where something had hit from below hard enough to bend the light fixtures sideways in their brackets. The fixtures themselves were gone. Only the housings remained, bent.
The wall panels on the left had been pushed entirely inward in several sections, the concrete behind them carrying deep horizontal gouges at uneven heights. The width was wrong for hands.
The hallway bent left. He checked the angle. Clear.
Beyond it, part of the ceiling had collapsed, the debris shoved aside like something had cleared its own path. He moved through carefully, the floor uneven beneath it, his balance shifting twice — both times paid for through the shoulder.
He cleared the debris and stopped.
Somewhere deeper — distance unclear — the sound came through the structure rather than the air. Metal under strain. A low groan traveled through the floor and up his legs before fading.
He held still and waited. Nothing followed.
The ceiling dropped.
A two-meter section gave way eight meters ahead, hitting hard enough to carry through the tiles beneath his boots, and dust rolled outward before the sound fully settled.
Something came with it.
It landed wrong — too much weight spread too wide — and the floor cracked again beneath the impact. It straightened, or tried to. The geometry of it made straightening approximate. The lower half was still a man — jeans, belt, the remains of a shirt. The upper half had changed. The back had opened and built outward, mass layered without pattern, and a limb extended from it that was too long and ended wrong.
Set into the growth:
An eye. Large. Wet. Moving independently.
Leon fired twice — center mass, instinct before thought — and the shots did nothing. The thing moved through them the way it moved through the debris, and when it turned, the eye followed separately, locking onto him before the rest of the body aligned.
"Yeah. Not happening."
He went left at the junction. Right was vertical with one exit. Left ran thirty meters to a door and he hit it with his shoulder — it gave — and he was through before it finished opening.
Lab room. Benches down the center, a door at the far end. He moved straight through with his right arm kept in close, and the far door was locked. He turned back. The entry door was still moving, nothing in it yet. A second door to the right — he took it into a narrower hallway with one working light at the far end.
The impact came through the left wall at chest height. Not the door — through the wall itself, the panel punching inward, concrete breaking behind it, William forcing partway through and stopping only because the opening didn't fit the body.
Leon fired the shotgun into the gap without slowing, one-handed, the recoil pulling through his wrist, and kept his line. The hallway ended in a T. Left was blocked. He went right.
Eight meters in, the door ahead opened from the other side.
William came through low, the extended limb catching the frame and dragging the mass forward, and the eye found him before the body finished entering.
Leon looked at the distance between them.
"Right. Of course."
A door on the right wall — he'd passed it. He hit it once and it held, hit it again and the latch gave, and he was through with the door pulled shut behind him.
Stairwell. Down.
The next level was darker. He put three doors between himself and the stairwell, jamming the third with a broken length of conduit — not enough to hold, enough to cost time.
He stopped and listened. Breathing. Electrical hum, lower here than above. Thirty seconds, one breath at the full available depth, and then the wall beside him split.
Not impact — failure. Concrete separating along a crack that had been spreading since the level above, this section finally reaching its limit. The panel came inward in pieces and William came through the gap the pieces left, moving low and immediate.
The eye found him before the body had finished entering.
Leon was already moving.
The layout here was tighter — raw concrete, narrower passages, junctions less frequent. He'd been working through options and the options were running out faster than the corridors were making new ones.
He fired the shotgun behind him at a junction without looking, last shell, and the empty pump told him before he checked. He slung it and brought the Matilda up in his left hand.
William wasn't using the hallways. He could hear it in the structure — stress traveling through the walls faster than he could move through the corridors — so he fired twice behind him into empty space rather than a target, buying the fraction the sound cost, and cut left then immediately right through a door into a room with another door at the far end.
Blocked. Ceiling debris piled halfway up the frame, the gap above it too small to clear fast.
He turned back. William filled the doorway.
Leon fired twice into the mass of it and went for the debris pile. He climbed and forced through, the angle costing him through the shoulder, and dropped to one knee on the far side before getting up.
The next door opened to a catwalk spanning an open space below, the depth unclear in the dim. He stepped onto it and was six meters out when William came through the wall beside the door — not the door itself, the wall — and the anchor point embedded in that section moved with the concrete.
The catwalk shifted two inches, metal grinding against metal, the suspension brackets above straining under the redistribution. Leon grabbed the railing with his left hand and it held but bent slowly under his grip, a deformation that had a limit in it somewhere ahead. A floor panel to his right dropped two inches on one corner and held on the remaining three.
William stepped onto the catwalk and the deflection hit immediately, the grate sections separating slightly, the brackets making a sound that was running out of room. Leon moved faster.
The catwalk ended at a bridge — narrower, spanning a wider gap, the space below opening into something the lighting didn't reach the bottom of. A platform on the far side. A door.
He was halfway across when the catwalk behind him failed. The compromised anchor section let go and the sound ran through the bridge's suspension and into the handrail under his hand, and then the catwalk was gone and the bridge stood alone.
He tried the door on the far platform. Locked.
He stood on the bridge with the locked door behind him and looked back at the gap.
William appeared at the edge of it — not from the catwalk side, from the shaft wall, the too-long limb finding purchase in the fractured concrete and the bulk of the body moving across the surface to the bridge's near edge. The eye tracked him across the gap before the body landed, and then it stepped onto the bridge.
Leon raised the Matilda and turned to face it.
Four meters wide. William at one end, Leon at the other, door at his back. No exit.
Partial magazine in the Matilda, ten magnum rounds in his pocket with no magnum to fire them from, the empty shotgun on its sling. The painkiller was fading, the shoulder's full accounting coming due, and his breathing was tighter than before the run — the exertion having used whatever margin the injection had given him.
William crossed the bridge. Not fast, because it didn't need to be. There was nowhere for him to go and whatever remained of William Birkin had reached the same conclusion.
Leon kept the Matilda up — left hand primary, right at the grip for what it still offered — and watched the eye in the secondary mass track him as the body moved, its motion independent of the lower face, finding him separately and continuously.
He tried the door handle once more without looking back at it. Still locked.
William closed the distance and Leon didn't move. The eye held him the entire way — large, wet, precise — and the too-long limb extended slightly, finding its range.
"Alright. Let's do it."
He held his position. Weapon up.