Assimilation

The air in the gym had grown stale. Sweaty. Almost sour. Like something had died and no one had noticed yet.

Eli stirred when Bria moved.

Her silhouette loomed near the barricade, breath fogging faintly in the cold, unlit gym. She wasn't saying anything—just watching the door. Watching it like it was breathing.

Halden rose slower, his back cracking audibly in the stillness. "We're up," he muttered, voice like crushed gravel. "Rest while you can."

Eli didn't answer. He couldn't. He was too tired. Too numb.

He tried to sleep again.

But then the wall screamed.

That's how it felt. Like the wall itself shrieked—a horrible metal-on-metal groan that vibrated through the gym's frame and drilled into Eli's teeth. He bolted upright. Temp was already on his feet, snarling low, hackles raised, fur bristling like black thorns.

Another impact—BOOM.

The gym doors swelled inward. Bolts strained. The barricade shifted, boards groaning under pressure that wasn't human.

Halden was already moving. "Positions! Now!"

Eli scrambled to his feet. Bria stood tense as a tripwire, frost creeping up her arms in thin veins of blue-white ice. Mitchel murmured under his breath.

Then they heard it.

Wet breath.

Slurping.

Not outside the door.

Inside the walls.

Something wasn't alone out there.

Eli felt the pressure in the air shift—something wrong, like someone had inhaled everything clean and replaced it with meat.

The door bulged again.

A hand punched through—a student's hand, or what used to be one. The skin sloughed off on impact, revealing bone slicked with black-red rot. Fingernails torn off. Tendons twitching like parasites.

Bria screamed—not out of fear, but rage—and slammed her palms down. Icy mist exploded outward, jagged and brutal. It caught the wrist—froze it solid—and then shattered it like a snapped icicle.

But the rest of the body forced through.

Its face—her face—was half-melted. A girl. Student. Her ID badge still hung from her collar, melted into flesh. Her mouth had torn sideways. Teeth were exposed past the cheekbone. She didn't speak. She bellowed with fire.

Literal fire.

A gout of flame vomited from her mouth, searing the barricade into glowing embers. Metal screamed. Wood blackened. The heat wave slapped Eli across the face like an oven door bursting open.

They didn't have time.

"Move!" Halden roared. "We clear them or we die in here!"

He dropped the pressure barrier.

The other side of the door exploded open—the hallway was full.

Ten bodies.

At least.

Some of them crawling. Some sprinting. All of them unnatural.

One didn't have a face—just raw muscle with the jawbones hanging loose. Another had no skin at all, only charred meat, his power visibly sparking like fireworks from ruined fingertips.

They surged forward.

Bria acted first. A wave of cold mist. Sharp enough to sting the skin. Ice mist surged across the floor, snapping up into spikes that impaled the first two zombie's mid-leap. They twitched. One tried to scream, but its head fell off halfway through.

Bria groaned, overextending the magic core, causing intense headaches by the shear use of her power.

Eli dove sideways and slammed a palm to the floor. A ripple of compressed air knocked three back—hard enough that one's spine cracked against the wall. It oozed down the paint like spilled meat.

Temp lunged at the fourth. The dog bit down, hard, and ripped. The creature didn't die right away—just flailed, howling through a throat full of blood until Eli crushed it with a second blast.

Mitchel tried to keep up—but his electricity was wild, uncontrolled. One electric blast hit a zombie. The next singed the wall. The third hit the ceiling, raining sparks.

Halden stepped forward.

"Clear a path!" he barked.

Then he pulsed.

It wasn't magic. It was a shockwave—a raw windburst that turned bone to powder. Two corpses flew backward—one smacked into a locker so hard its limbs bent sideways. The other splattered across a doorframe with a sound like wet pasta.

"Go! East corridor—medical wing!"

They ran.

No time to count the dead.

The hallway was a coffin—too narrow, too dark. Every light overhead flickered. Sirens groaned from somewhere above, distant and failing. It smelled like bleach and bile and death.

They passed a classroom.

Bodies inside. Slumped at their desks. One man had chewed through his own wrists. Another had a pen jammed into his own eye.

Something moved under a desk.

They didn't check.

They ran harder.

The door to the medical wing was ahead—thick, metal, reinforced. But the walls here…

The walls had started to bleed.

Thin red trails leaking from the cracks in the cinderblock. Not real blood. Mana-sick blood. Sludge. Pulsing.

Like veins.

"Bria!" Halden barked. "Clean it before we breathe it!"

She didn't question it.

She exhaled—a breath so cold it misted the air solid. Mist crept across the hallway like fingers—freezing, sealing the ooze behind a frozen barrier. The veins pulsed once. Then stopped.

Eli reached the keypad.

Still working.

His hands shook so badly he missed the code once.

"Come on, Eli," he muttered. "Come on—"

The scream that answered him was not human.

Not even undead.

It was something deeper. Lower. Like the Earth itself had learned to shriek.

He slammed the code in. The door hissed open.

Inside: darkness. A room that had once smelled like sterile antiseptic now reeked of meat and burnt rubber.

They stepped in.

The lights flickered on.

A nurse's station—empty. Blood smeared across the windows. A gurney overturned.

The lights buzzed louder. Almost screaming.

Temp whimpered.

Eli turned to shut the door—just as a body slammed into the glass outside. Its mouth was sewn shut. Its eyes were wide. It bled from the pores.

He closed the door.

The lock hissed shut.

But the screaming didn't stop.

The medical lab was dark.

Too dark.

Eli kept his hand on the keypad just a second longer, listening to the lock hiss shut. Behind the reinforced door, the screaming didn't stop. It came in ragged waves—muffled by the glass, but no less real. No less human.

He turned away.

The lab stretched out before them in deep shadows and long steel counters, some overturned, some smeared in something that glistened dully even in the minimal emergency lights. Whatever power was left hummed weakly through a corner backup generator, casting occasional, colourless glows from a few wall-mounted strips. But they pulsed inconsistently—barely enough to navigate by, let alone see clearly.

Temp growled low, not at anything specific, but at the room itself.

"Stick together," Halden said, voice clipped. "No running off. No surprises."

They moved as one—five silhouettes creeping through the ruined quiet. Cabinets had been left open, drawers gutted. Surgical instruments glinted from the floor like teeth. The air carried a chemical tang, but beneath that was something deeper. Organic. Wet.

Bria whispered, "How is this happening so fast?"

Nobody answered.

Less than twenty-four hours ago, the world still functioned. Class schedules. Cafeterias. Students practicing powers in between lectures. Now, this.

Halden approached a sink smeared with a dark substance. He touched it with one gloved finger, then cursed. "Not blood. This is liquefied tissue."

Bria gagged.

Eli bent down near a corner where the floor panels had warped. Something fleshy had grown beneath the cracks—purple-veined, pulsing faintly.

"Guys," he murmured. "This isn't just decay. It's growth, must be someone's power at work, maybe even changed, like these people changed to zombies."

Temp began to whine.

That's when they heard it.

A dragging sound. Wet. Just beyond the medical beds.

Halden gestured for silence. They advanced, quiet but tense.

And then the light strips above them dimmed completely—for three seconds.

When they flickered back, one of the gurneys had moved.

Not a lot.

Just enough.

"Nope," Mitchel whispered.

Eli didn't reply. He pointed up.

Suspended from the ceiling was something half-fused to the tiles. A torso. No legs. Flesh stretching into ductwork like it had melted upward instead of falling. Its jaw hung open too wide. Its chest bulged like something still lived inside.

It twitched.

Bria gasped, stumbling back.

 "Up—look up—"

The ceiling buckled inward as more strands poured down. Tendrils. Ribbons of warped flesh, twitching like nerves mid-surgery. Some of them ended in what looked like fingers—elongated, bone-split, dragging along the floor. Others pulsed with dim veins of crimson light.

A wet thud followed.

Something dropped into the room.

Not a zombie. Not anymore.

The man had once been tall, maybe in his thirties—still wore what might've been a university security uniform, shredded to ribbons around his chest. His jaw dropped somewhere, torn off. His skin was pale but stretched thin like wax paper, revealing vein networks that pulsed red and blue in erratic bursts.

And from the top of his split skull, threads of organic wiring still leaked upward, connecting to the flesh cords that rooted into the ceiling like inverted roots.

Bria whispered, "His mana-core... it's open."

Eli didn't answer.

The creature raised one hand—and the air vibrated.

Not magic. Not like they knew it.

The lightless lab filled with a sudden, high-pitched keening as invisible pressure swept through the space like a scream too high to hear. Temp barked once, stumbling back, yelping. The lights flickered red for a split second as the creature moved—blinked—ten feet forward in less than a breath.

It shouldn't be that fast.

Mitchel yelled, lightning crackling from his palm in panic. "Move—!"

He launched a bolt straight into the creature's shoulder. It hit—but instead of bursting or charring, the impact seemed to sink in. Absorbed like water into cloth. The body twitched once.

Then—

A whipcord of flesh lashed out from the creature's back and speared toward Mitchel's head.

Eli slammed pressure against the cord mid-swing, sending it off course with a sonic snap. The tip buried in the wall, hissing smoke as it retracted.

"It's reactive!" Halden barked, arms sweeping outward as a gale-force blast erupted from his hands, pushing the creature back and shattering several desks. "It's casting subconsciously—triggered by nerves!"

Bria darted in, mist forming at her palms. She dropped to one knee, slammed both hands on the floor—and a wave of freezing fog surged outward, curling toward the thing's legs. Ice clung to its skin immediately, cracking and spreading.

The creature didn't scream.

It vibrated.

Then it shattered the ice just by standing—like the heat inside it boiled out through its bones. Its jaw re-hinged as it stepped forward again, neck cracking with each motion. Its fingers dragged across a metal shelf, and where they touched, the steel began to ripple.

"Get back!" Eli shouted.

The shelf exploded.

It didn't burn. It melted—liquified in a pulse of heatless energy, then reformed into jagged, warped angles that jutted out like teeth. The wave of heat hit next, and Eli's lungs seized. He threw up a pressure bubble just in time to keep the searing pulse from broiling his skin.

"The mana-core's fractured!" Halden yelled, coughing. "It's not channelling through pathways—it's leaking."

Another lash of corded muscle struck out from the ceiling—this one hooked—and nearly caught Bria around the waist. She slid back, skating on thin mist, panting hard.

"It's trying to assimilate the room!" she gasped. "It's fusing with the building—!"

Eli gritted his teeth and clenched his fist.

The air around the creature imploded. A localized sphere of high-pressure formed directly around its torso, compressing bone and flesh alike. The skin cracked. Ribs audibly broke.

It stopped moving.

Only for a second.

Then its chest burst outward in a bloom of bone and red tendrils. The pressure failed.

It kept walking.

Mitchel charged in. "I've got it—!"

He grabbed a metal rod from the shelf debris, electricity crackling up its length—and drove it into the creature's side. The impact hit—the rod glowed—and for the first time, the creature twitched.

Then it turned its head toward Mitchel.

Its skin peeled back in a slow, wet smile.

"Get him out of there!" Eli shouted.

Halden moved like a ghost—one wave of air pressure catching Mitchel and pulling him back, tumbling across the ground. Bria threw a cloud of mist in between them—thick, icy, hiding their movements.

The creature stood still now, breathing in slow jerks. Its mouth twitched. Its hands flexed.

Eli narrowed his eyes.

It was learning.

He looked at Halden. "We need to disable the core."

Halden nodded. "Then we go for the head."

The creature's skin suddenly split along the arms—unzipping—revealing veins of crystallized red-gold energy pulsing like arteries. The light from within threw monstrous shadows on the walls.

Then it raised both arms.

And the walls began to bleed.

Pipes ruptured. Blood—not water—poured from the ceiling vents in thick ropes. Tendrils of severed nerves swung from the tiles. The entire lab began to pulse—in and out, like it was breathing.

Bria whispered, "This is… this is less than a day since Patient Zero. How the hell is it this advanced already?"

No one answered.

Because they didn't know.

And because the creature started moving again.

Eli braced himself, blood running from one ear now from the pressure backlash.

Mitchel crawled back to his feet, lightning snapping from his fingertips.

Halden stood at full height, face pale, ready to burn what was left of his mana core to stop this thing.

Bria's mist curled around her shoulders, eyes focused, lips pressed to a thin line.

The creature lunged.

And the lights finally died for good.