Chris tied the last strip of tattered cloth around his nose and mouth, securing it with a knot behind his head. It smelled like iron and mildew, but it was better than breathing in unfiltered madness. Kelvin did the same beside him, double-wrapping his own with a swatch of torn fatigue shirt. Neither of them spoke.
In the corner of the monitoring room, the console had finally gone silent. The screens now pulsed with static, the eerie greeting from the so-called Tartarian Empire lingering in their minds like cigarette smoke in an old room. Chris could still hear the voice in his skull. A voice that was his, but not.
Kelvin flicked on his chest-mounted camera. The little red light blinked steadily, recording everything. Not that he thought anyone would see it.
"We should move," Kelvin said, voice muffled through the cloth.
Chris nodded and slung the emergency pack over his shoulder. It clinked with metal and plastic: three flashlights, a coil of insulated cable, the two Glocks they'd found, five protein bars, two water flasks—one half full of filtered stomach acid, just in case.
The passage to the spinal corridor lay beyond a large, arched bulkhead. Unlike the rest of the fleshy tunnel network, this door was man-made—rusted steel with yellow hazard paint long since faded. Words were scrawled in chalk across the metal in a frantic, jagged hand:
"IT KNOWS."
"SIGHTED IN DREAMS."
"ECHOES WALK ON TWO LEGS."
Chris didn't ask what that meant. He didn't want to know.
Kelvin hauled the lever. The door groaned, slid open—and behind it was nothing but darkness.
The spinal corridor was a grotesque masterpiece.
The walls were no longer raw flesh or bone. They were grown—engineered. Strange sinew-wrapped conduits ran along the ceiling, pulsing with liquid the color of bruised flesh. Every now and then, they passed what looked like tumors embedded in the walls, encased in glass-like sacs. Inside, something twitched. Human-shaped. Almost.
Chris angled the flashlight down the tunnel. There were signs of old expeditions: boots turned to ash, skeletons fused with the floor, even a rusted exosuit embedded in a wall as though melted into it.
They walked.
And walked.
The Leviathan's internals seemed to stretch for miles.
But worse was the sound. The way their boots thumped and echoed. At first, it was normal. But then the echoes stopped lining up. Chris would step, and hear the echo of it seconds too late—or too early. Sometimes two echoes for one step.
"It's not right," Chris whispered. "Physics are wrong here."
"No shit," Kelvin muttered. "This thing's breaking reality."
They passed a broken plaque bolted to the wall. The letters were half-dissolved, but readable:
"Leviathan-Class Bio-Containment Vessel: D1-ONR"
"PROPERTY OF THE ANTI-MAGICKA COLLECTIVE // DEEP EARTH BRANCH"
Kelvin stopped in his tracks.
"Wait. That's impossible."
"What is?"
Kelvin pulled out a worn notepad from his jacket and flipped to a page. On it were scribbled theories he'd heard before becoming an adventurer—conspiracies, fragments of online archives long wiped from the web. One term stood out: Anti-Magicka Collective.
"They were a Cold War-era organization," he said. "Rumored. Like, CIA on crack. Supposedly tried to reverse-engineer powers from other continents. Even tried to nuke an ice wall in the '70s. No one talks about them. They disappeared."
Chris stared at the plaque.
"You think they built this?"
Kelvin shook his head. "No. I think they found it."
By the third hour, the hallucinations began.
Chris saw movement in the shadows. People. Shapes. A woman holding a lantern. A child crouched beside a stream of glowing fluid.
Every time he looked directly at them, they were gone.
The AI Watch clicked softly.
"Warning: neurological anomalies detected. Trace elements of Amnerium-X and Vlatrahydrine in atmosphere."
Chris blinked. "What?"
"Foreign compounds not found on the known periodic table. Likely effects include: auditory hallucinations, memory dislocation, and identity fragmentation."
Chris turned to Kelvin. "You hallucinating yet?"
Kelvin, eyes darting, nodded. "Yep. Saw my dog just now. He's been dead six years."
They passed another console, this one half-fused to the wall like it had grown into the muscle. It hummed softly, and from it a static message repeated over and over in a warbled, digitized voice:
"Tartaria is not dead."
"The whale carries the sins of Gaia."
"The captain must remember."
Chris looked at his hands. They were trembling.
He touched the Watch. "Why did it call me Captain?"
"Data insufficient. This unit was not assigned to your expedition."
"Then why do you recognize me?"
"I… do not know."
Kelvin turned suddenly. "We're being watched."
Chris lifted the Glock instinctively, but there was nothing. Just the steady thump of the Leviathan's organs.
Hours passed.
They found a narrow junction chamber filled with long-dead expedition gear—cans, notebooks, bones. One notebook was dated:
March 9th, 1862
"How long has this thing been here?" Kelvin whispered.
Chris didn't answer. Instead, he turned and pointed his light forward.
Far ahead, barely visible through the fog and gas, was a light.
Not a reflection.
A pulsing, sun-like orb, floating midair at the far end of the spinal duct. Not large. About the size of a car. But real. Radiating faint heat.
"That must be the 'miniature sun' you were talking about," Chris said, voice hushed.
Kelvin nodded. "Gas compression, plus unknown elements. The pressure and ignition temperature might allow self-sustaining combustion. It's… terrifyingly beautiful."
They stared.
It illuminated a platform ahead, grown from the bone and flesh of the beast itself. And there, in the distance, was something unmistakable:
A door.
Metal. Alien. And sealed.
The final section of the spine.
Beyond it, if the files were correct, would be the tail. And the escape pod.
If they could survive the trek.
Chris exhaled.
"Let's move."
But as they stepped forward, the sun above them blinked—just once—and the light around them warped, like heat waves rising from asphalt.
And then they heard it:
A whisper from the walls.
Not in a language they understood.
But in his own voice.
"Welcome back, Captain Mantle."
Chris paused for only a moment after hearing the whisper. The voice—his own, somehow layered in distortion and echo—seeped out from the walls like blood from a wound.
"Welcome back, Captain Mantle."
Kelvin froze beside him. "Are you… are you not gonna react to that?"
Chris didn't even break stride.
"Nah," he muttered, adjusting the strap on his pack. "I'm too tired for this shit."
Kelvin stared at him, slack-jawed for a second before hurrying to catch up. "You're ignoring a haunted intestinal voice that calls you 'captain' in a flesh whale the size of a small continent?"
Chris gestured vaguely with his flashlight. "We've already been swallowed alive, hallucinated dead people, breathed alien gas, and survived a shipwreck in a magical monster's stomach. At this point, man, if a version of me walks out of a wall and starts beatboxing, I'm just gonna sit down and eat my protein bar."
Kelvin chuckled, despite himself. But the humor didn't last long.
The light from the floating gas-sun faded behind them as they advanced down the corridor, and what lay ahead was worse than anything they'd passed.
The Leviathan's spinal interior began to change in texture—less flesh, more rot.
The air grew thicker, more humid. A metallic tang stuck to the back of their throats. The walls bulged and sagged, blistered with pulsating sacs that oozed black ichor, like infected wounds. Bones jutted from the floor at irregular angles—some clearly human, others far too large and alien in structure. Rib cages the size of compact cars. Skulls with antlers and too many eye sockets.
And everywhere, skeletons.
Some lay slumped against the wall, still clutching rifles and packs marked with long-faded symbols. Others were sprawled mid-crawl, fingers frozen in grasping poses. A few had collapsed in groups, huddled around makeshift fires now long gone cold. Every few dozen meters, they'd find one still in the process of rotting—muscle stringing off cracked bone, ligaments taut and twitching.
Chris tried not to look at their faces.
Some had expressions twisted in terror. Others had scratched crude words into the floor beside them. Words like:
"DON'T SLEEP."
"IT DREAMS US."
"THE SUN IS LYING."
One corpse had its mouth stretched unnaturally wide, jaw broken, tongue blackened and swollen—frozen in a scream. Kelvin turned away and gagged into his cloth mask.
"I don't think they died from injury," he said, voice shaky. "They went mad."
Chris nodded, silent. He could feel it too—the weight behind his eyes. The subtle humming in the back of his skull. The pull of something deeper, older.
Every now and then, his flashlight flickered.
Every now and then, the walls breathed.
They pressed forward into what could only be described as a landscape straight out of a fever dream.
The spine opened up into a vast chamber, cavernous and impossible in scale. Dozens of collapsed expeditionary camps littered the floor, each marked by rotting banners, torn tents, and long-dead generators. Black roots grew from the ceiling, intertwining with exposed metal, fused electronics, and calcified bones.
In the center of it all, an ancient tower—grown from cartilage and bone—stood half-collapsed. Strange devices were embedded into its sides, blinking occasionally with sputtering orange lights.
Kelvin stopped beside a half-decayed tent, kicking aside a cracked helmet with a swastika carved into its side.
"Chris," he said, pointing to a nearby body. "Look."
A corpse, wearing a clean, unrotted expeditionary uniform. The same model they were issued. Same arm patch. Same Ministry seal.
Kelvin knelt and checked the tag on the chestplate.
"MANTLE, C."
Chris blinked. "...That's not funny."
Kelvin's voice was flat. "I'm not joking."
Chris approached slowly, crouching beside the body. The face was half gone—eaten by rot or acid—but the jawline was familiar. Too familiar. His breath hitched in his throat.
The AI Watch pinged softly.
"Duplicate biometric signature detected. Anomaly classification: Temporal Disjunction Type-V."
Chris swallowed hard. "You wanna explain that in human words?"
"Either the individual in question is an alternate version of you… or this corpse was created by the Leviathan using incomplete data."
Kelvin stood, backing away. "So either time's broken, or this thing knows you well enough to grow a corpse that looks like you. That's fantastic."
Chris rose to his feet. "Either way, we keep moving."
"Bro," Kelvin muttered, "how are you still calm?"
Chris didn't answer. But the truth was simple:
If he thought about it too long, he'd lose his mind. And they were still walking inside something alive.
They crossed the chamber and entered another corridor, this one narrower, lit by faint bioluminescent growths. More bones. More remains. The air thinned, and they began to hear sounds again—wet clicking, distant hissing, and the occasional thud of something enormous moving deep within the walls.
As they moved, they saw things in the dark.
Twisting shadows.
Things almost human.
And sometimes, in the corner of Chris's vision, he caught glimpses of himself. Not a mirror. Not a reflection. Him.Watching. Smiling.
But always gone when he looked directly.
Kelvin leaned close as they walked. "Chris. I don't think this thing is just alive. I think it's intelligent."
Chris didn't respond.
Because part of him already knew that.
The Leviathan wasn't just a beast.
It was a memory.
A tomb.
A witness.
And it was watching.
Kelvin exhaled hard, his breath muffled by the cloth tied across his face. Sweat had soaked through his undershirt and pooled beneath his armor. Every muscle in his body screamed with exhaustion. His boots squelched with each step—half from the filmy mucus coating the floor and half from blisters that had already begun to split open and bleed.
"Alright," he said, coming to a halt beneath a jutting rib-like arch of bone. "We're stopping here. I need sleep."
Chris didn't stop walking.
"No," he said simply.
Kelvin blinked. "Chris—look around. It's been hours. We're breathing in air that smells like a public bathroom and a gas leak. I haven't slept since the ship. I don't even know what day it is anymore. We need rest."
Chris kept walking. "You wanna sleep inside a creature that watches us through its organs? Be my guest."
"Come on," Kelvin groaned, gesturing back the way they came. "You're acting like we'll die if we close our eyes for two hours."
Chris stopped then, slowly turning.
His eyes were heavy. Red-rimmed. Whatever casual detachment he'd worn earlier had been scraped away by adrenaline and horror. What stood before Kelvin now was something hollowed-out and barely stitched together.
"We just passed a guy wearing my face, rotting in a Ministry uniform that hasn't even been printed yet. We're walking on a floor made of flesh, surrounded by gas that screws with your perception of time. One of us might already be hallucinating. Maybe both of us. We sleep here…" He raised a hand and slashed it across his throat. "That's it. That's the ball game. Lights out."
Kelvin stepped forward, voice rising. "We can't keep going like this, man. Our legs are cramping, we're low on food, and my brain feels like it's filled with static. I get that you're scared—"
Chris turned sharply, eyes narrowing. "I'm not scared."
The silence that followed was thick.
Even the sounds of the Leviathan's breathing seemed to hold its breath.
Kelvin softened a little, rubbing the back of his neck. "Alright, maybe not scared. But something's got its claws in you. And if we keep pushing ourselves until we collapse, we're done. So either we find somewhere relatively safe or we makeit safe."
Chris stared at him for a long moment, jaw clenched.
Then he looked around. The tunnel was tighter here. The walls bulged and pulsed with slower rhythm. No skeletal remains. No twisted machinery. Just a stretch of sickly pink sinew and bone, half-formed.
It was as close to "safe" as anything else they'd seen.
He sighed through his nose. "Fifteen minutes."
Kelvin raised an eyebrow. "That's not sleep."
"No, it's not. But it's better than dying with your pants down when something decides to crawl out of the intestinal shadows and chew on your spine."
Kelvin grumbled but followed suit as Chris dropped his pack and started rummaging.
They set up their pitiful "camp" beside a particularly dense outcrop of bone. Chris used his combat knife to carve a crude circle into the floor, surrounding them in hopes that the acidic secretion wouldn't seep in. The flashlight, now flickering every few minutes, was wedged between two plates of cartilage to cast dim, shaky light.
Their supplies looked even worse in this lighting.
Two Glocks. Six magazines in total. Two knives. A protein bar. One working flashlight. Chest cams that probably hadn't transmitted anything in days. A bible that had somehow avoided damage, and which neither of them had touched. And the watch—silent for now, though Chris had caught it pulsing faintly in the dark once or twice, like it was dreaming.
Kelvin sat down, back against the wall. "You think we're still in the real world?"
Chris looked at him.
Kelvin continued, staring into the dark. "Like… is this still Gaia? Or are we in something else? Another layer. A memory. Hell."
Chris didn't answer right away.
When he finally spoke, it was low. Quiet.
"I don't think it matters anymore."
Kelvin slowly laid his head back, closing his eyes for just a moment. "Fifteen minutes."
Chris stared at the shadows just beyond the edge of the flashlight's reach. They writhed now and then—little shivers of motion that could be imagination or something far worse.
He didn't trust this place.
Not the floor. Not the air. Not even Kelvin, if he was honest with himself.
But he trusted the mission. The drive.
He'd find that pod. He'd leave this place.
And then he'd find out what the hell the Tartarian Empire was.