The sky was still gone.
No stars. No moon. No clouds. Just blackness—an endless stretch of void that pressed down like weightless stone. The air was thick, hard to breathe. Chris could hear his heartbeat in his ears.
He was back below deck, soaked in sweat. The walls trembled gently, like the Aether Spire was floating in the chest of a sleeping god.
And then the silence broke.
BOOM.
A single, colossal impact rocked the ship. The lights died instantly. Screams followed.
Not the screams of pain—those came later.
This was fear.
Panic.
Kelvin slammed open the door to Chris's bunkroom, half-dressed, eyes wide. "Something hit us. That wasn't a wave."
The intercom crackled. No voice. Just static.
Then it came again.
BOOM.
The floor snapped sideways, metal shrieking as the ship groaned and twisted. Chris and Kelvin were thrown into the hallway, tumbling over bodies.
Some weren't moving.
The alarms didn't go off.
Because the system was already gone.
The Leviathan had arrived.
Up on deck, all was chaos.
The Aether Spire's reinforced hull had crumpled in three different places—crushed like a soda can. Part of the bow was gone. Just... missing. Torn away and swallowed by the sea.
One of the twins—Emile or Eli—was standing near the rail when it happened.
He didn't scream.
He was there one second, then gone.
Just a blur of motion as a tentacle the size of a subway train slammed down, crushed him into red mist, and flung the remains into the ocean.
Chris burst onto the deck just in time to see another tendril rise from the depths. Covered in pale, smooth skin and serrated suckers like rusted saw blades, it hovered over the survivors.
Then it came down.
A dome-shaped shield from a Magicka-trained support officer blinked to life—too late.
The shield held for a second.
Two.
Then collapsed with a sound like shattered bone.
Blood sprayed across the deck as three soldiers were snatched up and pulled screaming into the sky.
Chris ducked instinctively as something—a tooth? a claw?—the size of a truck plowed through the upper cabin like it was made of paper.
The Leviathan was not a creature.
It was a biome.
An ecosystem of death, bred in isolation past the walls of Earth.
And now it was eating.
Below deck, the water had started rising.
The engine room was gone—ripped open to the sea. The power had failed. Emergency lights flickered dim red.
In the hallways, people ran.
Some fought.
Some prayed.
Some used Magicka techniques blindly, lighting their bodies on fire or freezing their hands to weapons they couldn't lift. A girl screamed as her veins ruptured mid-cast, collapsing as blood poured from her eyes and ears.
Aya, the quiet one, tried to form a shield.
Chris saw her scream something at him—but then the ceiling above her caved in.
She was crushed. Folded in half by a steel beam that landed with a splash and a crack. Her hand twitched once, then stopped.
"Chris! We have to move!"
Kelvin grabbed him, dragging him down a flooded hallway. The water was knee-deep and rising. Another boom rocked the ship, almost flipping them both.
Chris slipped. Caught himself. Behind them, a man tried to climb out of a vent—only for a narrow, chitinous feeler to slide through the opening, hook under his ribs, and pull him in sideways.
The man didn't even scream.
He crunched.
Top deck.
Chris and Kelvin burst into the open air.
Or what was left of it.
The storm was back. Rain came down sideways. Lightning flashed—but there was no thunder.
Because the thing in the water was louder.
It rose.
Part of it, anyway.
Just a fraction of its back—slick and shining, covered in barnacle forests and old shipwrecks fused to its skin. The sea around it boiled.
Chris stared.
It looked like a continent was moving.
The Leviathan turned.
No eyes. No mouth.
Just that overwhelming sense of something ancient waking up. Something that didn't recognize humans as living things.
To it, they were algae.
"THE LIFEBOATS!" Kelvin screamed.
Chris turned—saw one of the mechanical escape pods halfway deployed.
He ran. Slipped. Caught the edge. Pulled himself up as another Magicka-user tried to fight back—shooting spears of boiling water at the monster.
The Leviathan didn't even react.
Its next tendril wrapped around the gunner like a vine curling around a stick of butter.
Pop.
Red.
Gone.
The escape pod launched.
One.
Two.
Three.
Each one held maybe four people.
Chris and Kelvin were in the last.
They didn't look back.
For a few moments, they thought they had escaped.
They floated in darkness. The sea calmed around them. The blood-red sun on the horizon cast an alien light. Chris leaned back against the lifeboat, soaked, shivering, barely breathing.
Kelvin was silent beside him, his face blank with shock.
They didn't speak.
Because they had made it.
They thought.
Then the waves started to pull.
Not outward. Not sideways.
Down.
The ocean itself was sinking.
Chris sat upright. "...What is that?"
A dark shape below them. Not a shadow. Not a wave. A hole. A massive mouth the size of a harbor, yawning open beneath the surface.
Teeth like iceberg cliffs.
And the lifeboat was being dragged into it.
"Paddle—paddle, Kelvin, paddle!"
They tried.
It didn't matter.
The Leviathan opened its maw, and the sea poured in.
And with it, so did they.
The first thing Chris noticed was the smell.
It wasn't rot.
It wasn't decay.
It was wrong.
Like burning sugar and raw copper, like piss and gasoline and church incense, mixed with something older. Something unnamable.
They fell through the darkness in the boat. Fell down, even though they were inside something. The laws of space bent like heat waves.
And then they stopped.
The current stilled.
Light appeared.
But not from above.
From within.
Chris looked up—and nearly vomited.
A massive glowing orb hovered inside the Leviathan's gut. Floating in gas, gently pulsing with heat and soft golden rays. It was the size of a mountain.
A sun.
Not the sun.
A secondary, artificial core of heat and pressure created from centuries of internal chemical reactions and trapped elements. It drifted in a sea of gas, radiating just enough light to keep the interior dimly lit in a permanent, piss-colored haze.
The air was heavy.
The stomach walls were so vast and ridged with organic cliffs that they looked like mountain ranges in all directions. Rivers of thick, bubbling green acid snaked through valleys of sinew and cartilage.
Chris felt his watch vibrate.
The screen on his forearm flickered to life, glitching and crackling, before stabilizing.
"WARNING: You are inside an unknown Class-Ω entity."
"Atmospheric composition: non-lethal, highly toxic."
"Structural estimation: impossible. Spatial anomaly detected."
"Estimated chance of survival: 0.0004%"
Chris laughed. It came out as a wheeze.
Kelvin sat upright, staring at the floating light.
"This isn't possible," he muttered. "This... this thing's bigger on the inside. The gas buildup—it's condensed. That's why it glows like that. There's so much hydrogen in here, it's started to burn."
Chris blinked at him.
"We're inside a living creature," Kelvin said, "and it has its own goddamn sun."
The boat drifted forward slowly, carried by a digestive stream.
On their left, a massive rib curved through the air like an archway.
On their right, what looked like a decomposing ship was embedded in the flesh—covered in vines of nerve tissue and crawling with... things. Small, many-legged creatures with mouths that didn't close. They hissed.
Far ahead, something was moving.
A shape. Huge.
Walking along the stomach floor.
Not human.
Not beast.
Something else that got swallowed and survived.
Chris swallowed.
The watch buzzed again.
"You should not be alive."
The lifeboat groaned beneath them, its synthetic hull hissing as flecks of acid splashed against it from the rivers below. The chemical burns were spreading like infection, melting through layers of polymer and fiberglass with sickening speed. The walls of the Leviathan's stomach loomed around them like the belly of a rotting cathedral, its ceiling lost in fog and the amber glow of the creature's internal "sun."
"Chris," Kelvin said through gritted teeth. "The boat's not gonna make it another ten minutes."
Chris didn't answer. He was already scanning the shoreline.
If you could call it that.
A jagged ridge of flesh and bone jutted up from the stomach acid—a spongy platform the size of a football field, sprouting with clusters of pale, wet plant life that twitched as they passed. Something slug-like hissed at them as they neared. Tiny eyes blinked along its back.
Chris grabbed the oar.
They paddled, fast.
Each pull came with resistance, like the acid was turning thicker the closer they got to land. Chris could hear the hiss now, not from the boat, but beneath it. The bottom was corroding.
"Push!" Kelvin shouted. "Come on!"
The final stretch was a blur of panic. They didn't glide onto shore so much as crash into it, scrambling to drag the boat halfway up the ridge before collapsing beside it, panting.
The hull let out a deep, splitting crack.
A moment later, the rear half of the boat sagged into itself—collapsing in a gurgling heap as a chunk of the floor dissolved like paper in bleach.
"That's it," Chris muttered. "That was our ride."
Kelvin didn't respond. He was already unpacking.
They didn't have much.
They laid it all out in front of them on a patch of spongy, fibrous ground that looked like stretched tendon and felt like damp carpet.
Inventory:
Two Glocks.
One per person. Scuffed but functional. Plastic frames, standard 9mm.
Three magazines each.
Eighteen rounds per mag. That's 108 shots in total—if they didn't miss.
Two combat knives.
Carbon steel. Standard issue. One already had a slight bend in the tip.
Basic armor.
Tactical plate carriers. Light enough to run in, but the plates were designed for riots, not monster guts.
One protein bar.
Crushed. Probably strawberry. Neither was hungry enough to touch it yet.
One flashlight.
Flickering slightly. Batteries low.
Two chest-mounted cameras.
Still recording. LED indicators blinking. Chris had no idea if the Ministry would ever see the footage.
One bible.
Standard Gideon. Water-damaged. Pages stuck together.
Chris stared at it.
"Why the hell did you bring a bible?"
Kelvin shrugged. "I didn't. It was in the survival kit."
"Of course it was."
The camp was pathetic.
They found a small overhang near a patch of bone-stemmed foliage that didn't seem to move. Built a fire out of dry nerves and twisted bits of rubbery bark. The fire smoked green. Smelled like rotting mushrooms and melted insulation.
Above them, the belly sun pulsed slowly, casting everything in a piss-colored glow.
The "trees" nearby twitched when the fire crackled.
Chris watched one. It had no leaves, just long translucent fronds like kelp that writhed in the air as if tasting them.
"Don't sleep near that," he muttered.
Kelvin didn't respond. He was watching the acid river.
There were things in it.
Long shapes. Finned. Occasionally something would break the surface with a low splash—a hump of oily muscle and strange eyes that blinked sideways.
Some were big. Really big.
But they didn't come near the island.
The land creatures were smaller. More cautious. In the distance, Chris saw something that looked like a half-decomposed dog crawl out of a crater and begin sniffing along the ridge. It had three hind legs and no face.
None of them dared shoot it.
Noise didn't feel like a good idea.
Later, as they sat in silence under the flickering bile-light of their fire, Chris leaned back against a piece of exposed bone and looked up.
The ceiling wasn't visible. Just floating particles of gas and strings of gelatinous growths dangling like chandeliers.
"You think there's a way out of this?" he asked.
Kelvin was silent for a long time. Then:
"No."
Chris chuckled bitterly.
His watch buzzed again.
"Body temperature: stable. Adrenal response: critical. Sleep cycle: interrupted."
"Emotional state: pessimistic."
"Yeah," Chris muttered. "No shit."
"Survival odds unchanged. 0.0004%."
He stared at the pulsing sun inside the beast.
A thought clawed its way into his mind—quiet and insidious.
They weren't just inside a creature.
They were inside something older.
Something that had digested civilizations before them.
What if this was what happened to all the expeditions?
What if the other survivors were already here?
Living.
Or worse…
Changing.
He shivered.
Behind him, something small scurried across the flesh-floor, making wet, sucking sounds.
Chris didn't sleep that night.
And neither did the Leviathan.