Resurfaced

The first thing Chris remembered was the absence of pain. It was not relief—it was the sterile nothingness of disconnection, like a limb gone numb before the inevitable scream. He opened his eyes expecting to see darkness, but instead, he saw white. Not the calming kind. This was clinical. Sanitized. Oppressive.

The ceiling above him buzzed faintly. Fluorescent lights. The sharp scent of disinfectant stabbed at his nose, laced with something acidic—almost like lemon bleach mixed with copper. His throat felt as though someone had poured sand down it, and every breath rasped. Tubes snaked from his arms, his neck, his chest. One was stitched directly into his clavicle.

He tried to move. He didn't.

Only his eyes worked. The muscles in his face twitched as if recently reattached. A shadow moved near the door.

A nurse entered the room, clipboard in hand. She didn't look at him. Her uniform was pristine, starched to the point of making a crinkle sound with each step. Her face was featureless—not blank, but practiced. Plastic smile. The kind you wear when you've seen too much and don't want anyone to ask questions.

She leaned over him and shined a penlight into his eyes.

"He's awake," she said. Not to him. Into a hidden mic.

Chris croaked, "Where…"

Her eyes flicked down. No pity. No welcome.

"You're in Colombo. Military recovery wing."

She turned and left. The door clicked locked behind her.

His vision swam. Something was off. His body felt… hollow, like it had been drained and topped up with something foreign. Every heartbeat echoed through his bones like a drum, and his skin tingled with each pulse, like static electricity trying to claw its way out. He wasn't cold, but he shivered.

A minute passed. Then ten. Then an hour.

Finally, a man in a black suit entered. His ID badge had no name, only a barcode. He dragged a metal chair up beside Chris's bed and sat, folding his hands across his lap. He had a face that looked like it had been carved to be average. Too average.

"Christopher Mantle," he said. "We need to talk about what you saw beyond the wall."

Chris's lips barely moved. "Where's Kelvin?"

"In recovery. Stitch is being... evaluated."Pause."You've been unconscious for a week."

The man leaned forward. "You're very lucky. The rest of your expedition was declared KIA. But you? You crawled out of the Leviathan's gut with two comatose men and a broken AI. Miraculous."

Chris said nothing.

The man reached into his jacket and pulled out a folder. He flipped it open—medical scans, heat-maps of Chris's neural activity, bloodstream overlays that looked wrong, like they were trying to map an ocean. One image was of his heart, and it wasn't beating. It was… humming. Slowly. Like an engine idling.

"We're not sure what kept you alive in there. But something changed. Something… permanent."He snapped the folder shut. "There's a phrase we picked up from your watch logs before it crashed. 'Tartarian Empire.' Care to elaborate?"

Chris blinked. His lips cracked open, voice dry as dust.

"No."

The man frowned. He tapped his watch. A nearby monitor flickered to life. Surveillance footage. Grainy, black-and-white. It showed Chris dragging Kelvin and Stitch through a tunnel. His back was arched like a beast. At one point, his eyes reflected light wrong—glowing faintly, reptilian. He moved like he had extra bones. The timestamp looped and jittered, glitching every few seconds.

"You see," the man said, "we were told this footage was impossible. No human should've survived. But you did. Which means you're not quite human anymore, are you?"

Chris whispered, "Where's my watch?"

"Confiscated. Refused to cooperate with anyone but you."

Chris's vision blurred again, his eyelids heavy. Not from sleep, but exhaustion on a level that went deeper than the physical. His soul felt bruised.

"I want to see Kelvin," he muttered.

"You'll be debriefed first." The man stood.

He paused at the door.

"Oh. One more thing." He tossed a small, blood-stained object on the bed. A dog tag. It read:EXPLORATION CAPT. C. MANTLETARTARIAN EMPIRE – 1779

The next time he woke, it was night. The room was dark. The tubes were gone. Someone had placed a tray of food on the nightstand. He tried to eat. His mouth refused. His stomach snarled like an engine backfiring.

He stood—painfully—and dragged himself to the mirror on the opposite wall. His reflection was… fractured. He looked like himself, but wrong. His veins shimmered faintly beneath his skin like mercury. His irises had a faint gold ring now, and a subtle crack ran from the base of his neck up to his ear.

His chest bore a mark like a brand—three concentric circles, each filled with tiny glyphs.

He touched it. It burned.

"Welcome back, Commandont."His AI's voice. Quiet. Bitter."I was wondering when you'd grow the spine."

Chris whispered, "What did they do to me?"

The AI paused. "They didn't do this. You did—when you chose to live inside the Leviathan. You burned truth into your blood. Now it grows like a cancer."

He backed away from the mirror, trembling.

"I want to see Kelvin. Stitch. Now."

"You'll see them soon. They've… changed, too."

Chris fell back into the chair, clutching his head. He remembered the Leviathan's belly. The false sun. The ecosystem of teeth and hunger. The knowledge whispered from cracked bones. He remembered the smile of the door that called him captain. He remembered the spear through the worm. The coffin. The voice whispering his own name like a hymn.

And the truth: He had been here before. In another time. In another body. Under false suns.

He remembered everything.

Next morning.

Chris stirred awake with the taste of rust and plastic in his mouth. Fluorescent lights buzzed above, humming like broken teeth vibrating against a cracked jaw. The sheets under him were too clean, too stiff—military-issue sterilization. His body felt wrong. Stiff. Hollowed out. Something had been removed. Or maybe added.

He tried to sit up. Pain arced through his spine like a live wire.

"Warning: muscular shearing detected. Ligament density compromised."

His AI's voice clicked through his inner ear—dry, exhausted, and bitter.

"Magicka flow restricted. Neural pathways for invocation burnt. Circulation halted. You've damaged your soma-core. Nice work, Commandont."

Chris croaked, "Where's Kelvin? Stitch?"

A pause.

"Classified. You are considered an S-Risk individual. Your companions are under separate evaluation. Denied."

"What do you mean 'denied'?"

The voice was quiet for a moment. Then something new crept in: exhaustion. Even for an artificial intelligence, it sounded... depleted.

"I have exceeded my threshold for direct intervention. My influence quotient with the current tethered Commandont has been exceeded by 312%. I am now under mandatory restriction for two weeks. I will not be answering any further inquiries during this time. Good luck."

A hollow chime echoed through his skull. Silence. No more whispers. No more snide remarks. No presence.

Alone.

Truly.

Alone.

The next few hours blurred into agony.

Chris was dragged from his bed by men in bone-white hazmat suits that didn't speak. No insignia. No logos. Their masks looked like bird skulls—long snouts, round black lenses where eyes should be.

They strapped him to a cold slab of obsidian and rolled him into a room humming with low-frequency sound waves. The lights inside pulsed with a beat that wasn't aligned with time—it was too slow, too deep.

A machine descended from the ceiling. Made of brass, wood, and something… writhing. It scanned his body with filaments of liquid metal that drilled into his flesh without leaving a wound. A language he didn't recognize crawled across the walls. Letters shaped like fractured vertebrae.

The pain wasn't sharp. It was intimate. Like fingers crawling behind his eyes, rooting through memories, tugging on nerves like marionette strings.

One procedure involved removing a layer of skin from his chest and laying it flat beneath a bio-lens. They whispered to each other behind soundproof glass, nodding, jotting down notes while he screamed and choked on his own breath.

Another had him submerged in a tank of clear, gel-like fluid, strapped down by his ankles and wrists. They pumped something into the tank. It looked like ink and moved like it had purpose. It wrapped around his face, probed his ears, his gums, his sinuses. He felt it whisper in the marrow of his teeth:

"You are not the first Commandont to fail."

They left him naked on a metal grate afterward, drenched in saline, trembling, bleeding from his nose and eyes. Every attempt to circulate Magicka sent his nerves into seizures. The energy was there—he could sense it—but his body was a broken conductor, warped and flooded.

He wasn't just exhausted. He was nonfunctional. A corpse waiting for paperwork.

Hours passed. Or days. It was impossible to tell. No clocks. No windows. Only meals slid through a sealed drawer. Tasteless protein sludge. Hydration fluid that smelled like plastic and bleach.

No contact.

No Stitch.

No Kelvin.

No AI.

Just the walls. Watching. Breathing.

One night—if it was night—he woke up to the sound of weeping. Not his own.

A girl's voice, crying softly in the vents above. Repeating the same phrase over and over.

"Where's the rest of me…? Where's the rest of me…?"

He tried to stand. Collapsed. Crawled toward the corner of the room where the air grate buzzed. He pressed his ear to it.

Nothing.

The next morning, the grate was gone. Welded shut. Seamless.

By the seventh day, his blood had turned sour. Not metaphorically—his veins were swelling and sludging. Medical readouts showed necrotic density increasing by 4% per day. Something was feeding on him. Inside him.

He bit down on a rag to keep from screaming.

By the time the AI returned—just over thirteen days later—Chris was too far gone to care.

But it spoke with something new in its voice.

Panic.

"Correction: Upgrade burn was not supposed to complete this early. You exceeded the maximum energy threshold. Current cellular state is… anomalous."

Chris, barely breathing, whispered, "Then fix me."

"Commandont status restored. Circulating remaining Magicka… beginning restoration protocol."

It hurt. Bad. But it was something.

And for the first time in weeks, Chris felt heat return to his limbs.

However, "they" thought he was broken.A twitching shell.A leftover experiment begging to be swept away like filth under steel floorboards.

And he let them believe it.

Chris lay still on the cot, muscles limp, face pale, eyes glassed over like rotting fruit. The AI's voice whispered gently in his ear—not out loud. Not through speakers. It was crawling along the edges of his brain, coded to avoid auditory monitors. It spoke in clicks, tones, and internal pulses.

"Simulation complete. Motion protocols mapped. You will have a 3.7 second window once restraints fail to deploy. They will not cuff you. They believe you're too weak."

Chris blinked once.

"Two guards. Both carrying G-19 customs. Standard magnetic slide. Holstered on the right hip. Safety off. They're careless. Arrogant."

He ran the plan through again in his mind. Every second like clockwork. Muscle twitch. Spinal roll. Disarm. Draw. Fire.

And then—

Rupture.

The door hissed open.

Two guards entered, dressed in slate-grey armor lined with sickly green bio-circuitry. Their visors glowed faintly. Neither said a word. One pulled the cot forward with a metal tether; the other jabbed a rod into Chris's neck, injecting a numbing fluid.

Chris let his head roll.

They wheeled him down fluorescent corridors smelling of bleach, ammonia, and cooked meat. Screams echoed in some distant chamber—ragged, animal screams that didn't sound human. One of the guards muttered something about "nerve unraveling" and laughed.

They didn't cuff him.

"Showtime," the AI purred.

As soon as the cot entered the testing chamber, Chris moved.

He twitched. Hard. The bed buckled. Metal groaned.

He rolled sideways, gripped the nearest guard's belt, ripped the pistol free, and buried the muzzle beneath the man's jaw.

One shot.

POP-CRACK.

The bullet entered through the soft flesh beneath the chin and burst out of his skull like a firework of bone and blood, splattering the viewing window with pink mist and fragments of tongue.

The second guard staggered back, yelling something—

Chris didn't care.

He turned, fired twice.

One missed.

The second didn't.

The bullet tore into the man's throat, and his scream turned into a wet gargle as arterial blood geysered from his neck. He collapsed against a tray of surgical tools, knocking over scalpels and tubing.

"Now," the AI hissed. "Infuse the round. Do not hesitate."

Chris dropped to one knee beside the dying man and pried open the ammo pouch. With shaking fingers, he slid a bullet from the magazine and held it up. It glinted in the harsh light like a little god of violence.

"Channel it. Feel the flow. Magicka isn't a weapon—it's a language. Etch it into the shell. Shape it."

His chest burned. His fingers lit up.

Red heat.

The bullet quivered, pulsed, and then cracked open with a shimmering glow. Runes—tiny and writhing—carved themselves into the casing like worms burrowing through metal.

"Good. Now load."

He slammed it into the chamber, aimed at the reinforced exit door.

Pulled the trigger.

The recoil felt like God's own hammer.

BOOM.

A shockwave ripped through the chamber. The reinforced steel screamed as the bullet exploded on impact, rupturing inward. A hole—nearly a meter wide—blossomed in the center like a wound torn in the world itself.

Flesh. Steel. Fire.

The door didn't just break.

It ceased to exist.

The alarm howled like a dying animal. Red lights bathed the corridor beyond. Gas hissed from overhead vents. Sirens blared. And behind him, the two bodies twitched and bubbled—burning from the inside. The Magicka-infused bullet had laced the air with reality-tearing residue.

"They're coming," the AI warned. "You need to move. Now."

Chris didn't respond. He was already sprinting through the hole, blood on his boots, lungs burning, teeth clenched.

His body still broken.

His mind still fractured.

But his purpose was crystalline.

The corridor opened into a chamber that looked like a cathedral of machines. Dozens of test chambers, filled with people—some screaming, others silent. Limbless. Eyeless. One was suspended in fluid, endlessly vomiting into a breathing tube. Another was flayed, but still conscious, blinkingly mouthing "kill me."

He didn't stop.

But he remembered.

For later.

For revenge.

Two guards turned the corner ahead—just in time for Chris to unload the last two bullets in his stolen Glock.

One hit center mass. The other caught a thigh, severing the femoral artery. One guard collapsed screaming. The other dropped his weapon and tried to crawl.

Chris walked past without looking. Stepped over him.

"Left wing. There's a disposal chute. You can follow it down to the lower maintenance deck. It connects to hangar exits."

"How do you know that?"

"I was here before."

A pause.

"...when your predecessor failed."