Chapter 5
Inadequate Strength Modifier
Levi took one step toward the door and Asher’s grip tightened on his arm.
“The quarters,” Asher said. “We lock the door.”
“We don’t have weapons.”
”We lock the door.”
Levi pulled his arm free and walked into the corridor the team had taken. Asher was behind him in two steps, a hand on his shoulder, and Levi kept walking and talked over his shoulder because if he stopped walking, he’d lose the momentum.
“Whatever got out of Bay Seven is somewhere on this ship, and we’re unarmed. That’s the whole problem. We fix that first.”
“Levi—”
“Armory. Weapons. Then we figure out the rest.” He turned the corner into the corridor, and the alarm was louder out here, bouncing off the metal walls, and underneath it the ship was making sounds he didn’t have context for — deep thuds somewhere below, something mechanical cycling in a rhythm he couldn’t match to anything he understood.
“You know where the weapons are. Peterson told you.”
Asher gave Levi a look that wasn’t about the creatures or the ship — it was about whether Levi was using this as an excuse to follow the team.
“Lower deck,” Asher said. “Security corridor. Stay with me.” Less than fifteen minutes ago, he’d said I love you like he was teaching Levi a new language. Stay with me sounded like the same lesson, just taught with a ruler instead of a gold star.
Levi stayed with him.
They took the stairs because the elevator panel was dead — dark screen, no response to Asher’s thumb or the three times he hit it with the flat of his hand.
The stairwell was narrow, its metal treads with anti-slip strips half peeled off, and the lighting switched from white to amber as they descended.
The air changed too: heavier and warmer, with a humidity that didn’t belong on a ship with functioning climate control.
Their arms brushed on the landing, and Levi didn’t flinch, which would have bothered him more if he’d had the bandwidth to care.
It became obvious at the bottom of the stairs that Asher was lost— he went left, stopped, looked at the junction markings, and went right.
Levi watched the back of his head and thought about what Asher knew: the quarters, the route from the pod bay to the mess, and that was probably it.
Highly detailed directions for a spaceship was probably not on the list of things Peterson told him before Peterson stopped being able to tell anyone anything.
The lower corridor was darker and narrower; the emergency amber lights traded out for red.
A coolant line had ruptured at some point and been patched with sealant that hardened into a dark ridge along the wall, and the floor plating was wet in patches.
The air down here had something in it, like a chemical that caught at the back of his throat.
A vent cover twenty feet ahead blew off the wall and hit the opposite side of the corridor with a clang that made Levi duck as Asher yanked him back against his chest. Steam or gas hissed from the opening for three seconds, then stopped.
The cover sat on the floor, rocking gently on its curved edge.
“That was the ship,” Levi said. He glanced down at the arm banded across his torso and realized he was gripping Asher’s forearm with both hands, not to push him away, but almost as if he didn’t want to let go. He forced his hands to relax and pulled away. “Not the creatures.”
“I know.” Asher stepped over the cover without looking at it. “Keep moving.”
They were halfway down the corridor when Asher’s palm came up flat against his chest. Levi stopped and followed his line of sight to the far end that branched left.
It was one of the creatures moving away from them.
That was what made it possible to stand there and look — the fact that it was moving away.
The height hit him first, the head misshapen, almost flat, brushing the overhead strips.
Then the arms, hanging too low, past where arms should end.
Then the legs, and the joint below the knee that bent the wrong direction on each step — Levi’s eyes kept sliding off the movement, trying to correct for it as his mind insisted the leg should go one way and the leg kept going another.
Its whole body looked wrong, even at a distance, pale and nearly translucent with dark things running under its skin. One of its arms was outstretched, fingers with too many bent joints trailing along the wall, sounding less like nails and more like metal scratching metal.
Underneath the alarm, Levi felt a low hum in his sternum that was…rhythmic? Almost like the same pattern repeated slightly differently each time it cycled.
It turned the corner and was gone.
Levi’s palm was flat against the wall beside him. He didn’t remember putting it there. Asher grabbed his wrist and took the right branch.
The armory door was on a security corridor — a designation Asher either knew from Peterson or decided looked right, and the lock responded to his thumb on the panel.
Inside sat racks and racks of weapons, tactical gear arranged along the walls, knives, and a few strange devices Levi had no reference for but wanted to avoid because several of them were wrapped in duct tape.
Two lockers were already open, the racks inside empty. Someone had been here recently.
Asher moved through it without asking Levi anything. He tried checking the chamber on a gun, but lights activated on the side with a power readout instead. He seemed to find that satisfactory and set them aside, then he placed a pistol on the rack in front of Levi. “Point and pull.”
“I know how to—”
“Don’t think. Point and pull.”
Levi took it and clipped it to his belt. Then he looked at the rack and picked up a second, smaller one and slipped it into his pocket.
“Just in case,” Levi said.
Asher nodded. The two of them were gearing up in an armory, side by side, the alarm still blaring overhead, and Levi realized if he squinted hard enough, this almost looked like a functional relationship.
Don’t squint.
Asher picked up a rifle and turned toward the door. “We’re going back to the room, and we’re locking the door.”
“We’re already down here. The cargo hold is one section over, if we could just—”
Asher raised the rifle and pointed it at Levi’s head, his face deadly calm. Levi looked down the barrel, his hands raised in surrender, then at Asher.
“Okay.”
Asher lowered the weapon and leaned in, smirking as Levi flinched, and kissed him on the cheek. “Good boy,” he said.
The first sealed door was thirty feet from the armory.
It had been open on the way down — Levi was certain of it; they’d walked through this junction ten minutes ago.
Now the door was shut, the panel beside it showing a red indicator, and when Asher pressed his thumb to the scanner, nothing happened.
He hit it with the butt of his gun instead, and the panel cracked.
“Well, that didn’t work,” Levi mumbled.
Asher turned right without comment, heading for the parallel corridor.
They made it maybe forty feet this time before hitting another sealed door — same red indicator, same dead scanner.
The air was warmer than it had been minutes ago, and a section of overhead lighting had gone out entirely, leaving the stretch ahead in near-darkness that they had to cross with only the amber emergency strips along the floor.
A shrinking map. Funneling. Ethan called these a cheap way for the developer to force an enemy encounter because they didn’t trust the player to find it in an otherwise open-world game. He was usually right.
They found a maintenance stairwell that was still accessible and climbed. The upper landing opened onto a corridor where the lights were wrong — on, off, on, off, moving in a wave down the passage like something was testing each section in sequence.
“Is the ship doing that?” Levi asked.
“Purge protocol,” Asher said, reading a panel near the landing. “The system is sterilizing sections. One at a time.”
One at a time. For now.
They came around the corner, and Zoe was there, less than twenty feet away.
For a half-second, the amber lights made it abstract — shapes and proportions and features that didn’t make sense.
Then it parsed.
The creature’s height filled the corridor, its head brushing the ceiling, and Levi wasn’t sure if it was the same one he had seen before, or if all of them looked the same.
The strange flat shape where a face should have been was oriented toward Zoe, with dozens of dark circles extending and retracting like lenses, the tiny apertures cycling with a sound — tck tck tck — and all down its arms looked to be wire-like veins, just visible under its near translucent skin.
It picked her up by the throat, her legs kicking at nothing as she screamed.
Levi reached for the gun at his belt, but Asher grabbed his wrist.
“Don’t,” Asher whispered, pulling Levi back slowly.
Zoe’s hands pushed against the hand holding her as it turned her in the air, like it was examining her.
One of its metal-tipped fingers moved across her back, finding the seam of her uniform between her shoulder blades, and it tilted its face as it felt along the seam.
The uniform parted along the line the fingers traced, opening like the creature was unzipping it.
It traced the bare knobs of her spine, the metal fingertips prodding at the bones before it ran a line down her back.
The skin parted just like the clothes did.
Levi winced as her screaming changed. It had been fear.
Now it was a pitch that wasn’t in the normal range of sounds a person made —it was somewhere deeper than the throat, somewhere structural.
The creature’s fingertips peeled the skin back from the muscle with the same steady attention.
Layer by layer. The apertures on the dish were wide open, the lenses fully extended and focused.
It’s looking for something.
The vibration in Levi’s sternum hadn’t changed.
Zoe’s scream cut out, and the sound that replaced it was just wet tearing.
The creature’s fingers wrapped around the column of her spine and pulled, and the spine came away from Zoe’s body with a dense, wet sucking sound, and her body went slack.
The creature held the spine up in front of its dish-like face, and the apertures cycled — tck tck tck tck tck — faster now, examining what it held.
The dish tilted slightly.
Asher’s grip tightened on his wrist and pulled hard.
They ran. “Don’t let them get their hands on you,” Asher said ahead of him, not breaking his stride.
Levi couldn’t erase the image of Zoe’s spine hanging in the air behind his eyes — the way the connective tissue had let go in sequence, like buttons being undone, and the creature holding what it found up to its dish with that careful tilt.
His stomach roiled and he felt bile rising up his throat.
Good to know I can watch someone get taken apart and not puke now. Really building a great skill set here.
Somewhere to their left, behind a sealed bulkhead, something heavy hit the floor, and the echo of it reverberated into the corridor. He skidded to a stop as he heard a usually easy-going voice groan, all the ease having gone out of it, “Ah, fuuuuck.”
Asher’s grip tightened, and he jerked Levi towards him. “Keep moving.”
He’d needed the NPCs in the sanitarium…when he and Asher tried to beat Faine’s maze solo, they just ran around in circles dying, and it didn’t work.
If this place operated the same way, losing Jasper now meant losing whatever Jasper’s skills were going to unlock later.
It was the strategic calculation, one he could sell Asher while hiding a simpler truth: Jasper was his friend, even if he wasn’t real.
“We need him alive,” Levi said.
“You need to keep moving.”
“If we lose the team, we can’t beat this. It’ll be just like what happened before, Asher!” Levi snapped, pulling his arm back. “You can watch me get my spine ripped out by one of those things a dozen fucking times, or you can let me go help Jasper and maybe we’ll survive this time!”
Asher’s jaw worked. Levi could see him weighing the risk against the reward of giving Levi what he asked for.
“Thirty seconds,” Asher said and let go. “Get him here by then or I kill him myself.”
Levi went around the corner and spotted an open door. He pulled out the pistol like he actually knew how to aim the damn thing, and went through the door ready for anything except what was there.
Jasper was on the floor, his left arm held against his chest, and his shin bone splintered through his coveralls.
On the floor near him was a welding torch still attached to a gas supply, and one of the creatures, dead, with burns singeing most of its body, its narrow torso blistered and split open, revealing a strange mixture of black goo and wiring.
“Levi!” Jasper’s face lit up as much as it, but his face was beaded with sweat. “Really good timing, man. Really, really—”
A hydraulic mechanism engaged behind Levi and Jasper’s eyes widened, the last remnants of his smile vanishing. “WAIT, DON’T!” he shouted. “It’s fine! It’s dead—fuck!”
Levi glanced back and saw, through the narrowing gap between the door and the frame, a pale-faced crew member with their hand on a panel in the corridor.
And behind him — Asher, coming around the corner at a run.
His palm hit the door as it sealed and the impact rang through the metal. Through the small viewport, he could see Asher’s face, his mouth forming the same word over and over. Levi could read it without hearing it.
No. No. No. No.
The door didn’t open.
“Levi,” Jasper groaned. “I don’t think we’re supposed to be in here, man.”
The air around them shimmered like the surface of asphalt on a hot summer day, the air thickening.
Levi’s lungs registered a temperature change before his skin did, his first breath burned on the way in. The second was worse.
Well…this is a new way to go, I guess.
“Levi…” Jasper gasped. “I’m sorry.”
Levi dropped down beside Jasper and gave him a weak smile.
“It’s okay, man.” He could hear Asher’s fists hitting the door, again, again, each strike coming faster than the last. The skin on Levi’s own hands was tightening as his vision narrowed the way it always did, and he let the pistol slip from his grip as blisters bubbled up on his exposed skin.
He heard a sound, but it was strange. Screaming maybe? He wasn’t sure it was him.
He kept his eyes on the viewport, even as his eyes burned and the room grew hotter and hotter.
A door stopped him…he’s going to be mad about that…
Asher’s fist hit the viewport hard enough to crack the glass. The fracture pattern spread across his face in the small window, splitting it into pieces, and behind the cracks his mouth was still moving, still forming the word, still—