Cold stone pressed against Caleb’s spine.

He stared straight up through the cracked glass of his visor. The ceiling disappeared into the dark. The chamber stayed cold, untouched by the heat boiling through the tunnels above.

Old air moved across his jaw.

He tried to lift his right hand.

The muscles refused to fire. Paralysis locked his body flat against the slab. He could not turn his head or twitch a single finger.

The custom ballistic weave pulled tight across his ribs. At a one-point-two percent sync rate, the dead fibers offered zero assistance to his locked joints. The cold from the stone table seeped through the heavy fabric.

It sank directly into his marrow. His chest felt empty, stripped of any remaining body heat.

A wet rattle vibrated in his throat with every shallow breath. Scorpion venom pumped through his veins. The poison burned under his skin, tracking a bruised purple web across his collarbone.

The discoloration seeped deep down into his left side. The tissue there was already rotting.

Blood pooled beneath his back and spilled over the edge of the stone table. One thick drop hit the floorboards. Then another.

The rhythm marked the failing beat of his heart. He could not shift his weight to relieve the pressure on his spine. He could only stare straight up.

A single line of text glowed in the lower corner of his dark HUD.

[UNKNOWN USER: Caleb.]

The letters flickered. Corrupted static washed over the purple font. It broke the syllables apart, scattering the code across the cracked glass.

The light from the text cast a faint glow over the inside of his helmet.

[UNKNOWN USER: I’m losing your depth.]

He lacked the muscle control to answer her. He could only watch the text glitch against the dark glass. Code fragmented across the visor.

Symbols bled into strings of raw data. The military grid was gone. She provided the only remaining tether to the surface.

[UNKNOWN USER: The stone is eating the signal.]

The digital connection fractured into jagged squares. Her code scrambled, searching for a clean relay through the bedrock. It failed.

Purple pixels rained down the inside of the glass. The connection was physically degrading under the weight of the mountain.

[UNKNOWN USER: Stay aw—]

The connection sputtered. Dead static filled his earpiece. The mechanical whine faded into a dull, flat hum.

The purple text died. The screen froze into a blank, dark slate.

He was cut off from the grid.

Without the static, the chamber offered only the wet sound of his own blood hitting the floorboards.

isolation pressed down on him, heavier than the ballistic weave.

Ten feet away, metal scraped against rock.

The Mimic stepped into his narrow field of vision. Its steel-plated boots struck the stone. Caleb felt each step through the slab.

Black fluid dripped from the severed stump of its left shoulder. The drops steamed against the floor. The caustic liquid smelled like burnt rubber.

The creature stared down the length of the chamber, focusing on the dark boundaries of the room. It did not look at the human bleeding on the table.

"Broke the core too fast," the Mimic complained.

It sounded like a mechanic staring down a broken engine block. It rolled its remaining shoulder. It grunted at the friction in its synthetic joints.

"Cut my arm off. Now I have to pry the locks."

The creature walked out of Caleb’s sightline.

Cold air hit the gaping hole in Caleb’s left side.

The broken bone spike from the Scorpion had torn straight through his lower ribs. It flooded the muscle with venom. The central anomaly behind his sternum thrashed weakly.

The raw tissue around the wound turned black, rotting at an accelerated pace. The poison fought the natural clotting of the blood. It stripped the oxygen out of his failing system.

The Mimic walked back into view.

It stopped beside the stone table. The black dome of its head tilted downward. It evaluated the ruined ballistic weave and the black blood soaking the rock beneath Caleb’s back.

It operated with cold, mechanical efficiency. It tilted its head a fraction of an inch to the right, adjusting its visual angle to inspect the jagged Scorpion spike. The broken bone leaked a steady stream of yellow venom into the open wound.

"Messy," the creature muttered.

It raised its remaining hand. Jagged steel claws extended from the metallic fingertips with a sharp click. The dull light caught the serrated edges of the metal.

The Mimic drove its claws straight into the open wound on Caleb’s left side.

Pain broke through the numbness. A wet choke of blood bubbled over Caleb’s lips. The agony spiked down his legs and up into his jaw.

He tasted iron in the back of his throat. His jaw locked open, unable to pull air into his failing lungs. The pain wired his brain to the limit, blinding him to the shadows of the room.

The monster dug its steel fingers deep behind his lower ribs. Cold metal scraped hard against the jagged Scorpion spike. The friction ground directly into Caleb’s collarbone.

The creature bypassed the central anomaly behind his sternum entirely. It hooked its claws into the necrotic, venom-soaked tissue mass pooling near his spleen.

It pulled.

The sound of tearing meat filled the cold air. The extraction required leverage. The monster shifted its stance, bracing a steel-plated boot against the edge of the stone table to gain traction.

It ripped the poisoned tissue out of Caleb’s body. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

A hard rush of cold hit Caleb’s exposed internal organs. The vacuum of missing flesh pulled his chest cavity inward. Freezing air settled directly against his failing lungs and stomach.

His heart stopped long enough for the medical monitor to flatten. A solid red bar replaced the erratic green spikes on his failing HUD. Cold pulled him under, dragging his consciousness toward the edge of death.

He fought the sinking sensation. He tried to force a swallow, but the muscles in his throat refused to work. Saliva mixed with blood and pooled in the back of his mouth.

Cold bit deep into his exposed lungs.

The Mimic held the dripping mass high in the air.

Venom began glowing inside the tissue.

The meat twitched, then unfolded.

Concentrated poison forced the flesh to change.

Dark tissue unspooled into a thick, segmented shape. A dark shell snapped together over the raw tissue, hardening instantly in the freezing air.

Red light radiated from the newly formed parasite-key.

It curled tightly around the monster’s steel fingers. It snapped blindly at the cold air, thrashing in the iron grip and trying to crawl back toward Caleb. It snapped its jaws, struggling against the metal holding it back.

The Mimic evaluated the squirming thing. It treated the grotesque transformation like finding the correct tool.

"Good enough," the Mimic decided.

It turned its back on the slab and walked away.

Caleb’s vision began to tunnel. Black crept steadily into the edges of his sight. The cold consumed his fingers and toes.

It rushed inward toward his failing lungs. He lay entirely helpless, unable to twitch a single muscle to stop the catastrophic bleeding. His chest remained a ruined, open cavity exposed to the dirt and old air of the room.

The Mimic approached a heavy stone door at the far edge of the chamber.

Twelve stone figures lined the chamber. They were faceless and sunk deep into the rock. The statues stood in the dark, their stone shoulders draped in thick dust.

The Mimic stopped in front of the door. It stared at a deep, circular groove carved into the center of the rock face.

"Four generations," the Mimic muttered.

Its voice carried deep, practical annoyance. "Your people forgot what the fourth generation sealed down here. Still building cages the exact same way."

The monster shoved the glowing parasite-key directly into the stone groove.

The red light flared. The illumination bled into the cracks of the rock. The light traced the carved lines of the doorframe.

The temperature in the room dropped further, chased away by mechanical energy waking inside the bedrock.

Deep inside the rock walls, old stone mechanisms shifted.

Stone ground against stone until Caleb’s teeth hurt. The acoustic pressure pushed against his eardrums. The vibration rattled through the floorboards and traveled straight up the legs of the stone table into his spine.

The sheer weight of the moving parts sent sheets of gray dust raining down from the ceiling.

The dust coated the floor and settled over the twelve statues. Deep, rusted gears caught and slipped, groaning under the strain of centuries of disuse. The mechanical friction created a low, humming frequency that vibrated the pooling blood on the stone table.

Eleven stayed still.

The twelfth figure reacted.

The statue immediately to the left of the door shifted its weight. The grinding rock traveled across the foundation. The faceless head bowed in a slow, deliberate gesture of recognition.

The bow was enough.

The stone door cracked open.

Dust coated the cracked glass of Caleb’s visor, obscuring his fading sight. The friction of the stone sliding over the floorboards carried for several long seconds before grinding to a halt. The air coming from the dark corridor smelled of dry earth and ground rock.

It did not carry the heat of the collapse above. The draft blew the dust across the floorboards.

The Mimic let out a short, tired exhale. It reached into the groove and yanked the glowing parasite free.

The red light dimmed slightly in its grip. The heavy stone door remained open.

The monster turned around and walked back to the stone table.

Caleb’s vision was almost gone. Only a razor-thin sliver of light remained. Cold pulled him continuously under.

The steady drip of his blood marked the time he had left on the slab.

The Mimic stopped at the edge of the table.

It lifted the squirming, segmented parasite and dropped it carelessly back into the gaping hole in Caleb’s left ribs.

The wet tissue hit his open organs.

The parasite burrowed downward. The dark shell scraped against his broken ribs. The creature pushed deep into the cavity, sliding through the pooling blood.

Desperate to survive, the starving thing bit directly into the blackened, poisoned flesh bordering the Scorpion wound.

It chewed into his side, consuming the venom-soaked tissue. The feeding sent a sharp, agonizing jolt through his body. The creature dug its claws into the surrounding muscle, anchoring itself tightly against the bone as it stripped the dead meat away.

The erratic tearing sent hot flashes of pain radiating out from his spleen. It overwhelmed the cold pulling him under.

The pain spiked through his nervous system, sharp and invasive. The agonizing bite clashed against the sudden clearing of toxins from his failing bloodstream. Caleb could not tell if the creature was cleaning the infection or consuming him alive.

Caleb’s body jerked once against the stone slab. His throat locked around a scream that never came. He could only bleed.

The Mimic leaned closer.

It watched the parasite settle into the cavity. It looked satisfied.

"It grew," the Mimic said.

The parasite vanished entirely into the wound.

Caleb’s chest moved once.

Then he felt it start eating.