The body on the plate no longer held anything human. It was a mass of translucent flesh where Etan’s face and Tsuki’s struggled for the surface, as if their skin were a sheet stretched over two different entities. Their limbs seemed to vibrate out of frequency, leaving blue trails in the steam-saturated air.

  The Priest did not deign to look him in the eye. He pushed the operating table out of the Projection Hall, the steel wheels screeching against the metal of the deck.

  "Doctor, prepare the database," the Priest ordered as they traversed a narrow tunnel surrounded by pulsing cables. "General Marcus will not accept an unstable Omega. He wants him ready for the expedition within the hour."

  Aris followed the table, cold sweat beading on his forehead. He nervously checked a small handheld device. "Priest, you don't understand... the Bug is already eating the signal. As this... thing... passes, the cargo hold’s security systems are reporting micro-crashes. This isn't a transport; it’s a contamination!"

  "It is merely unchanneled isekai energy," the Priest retorted, opening the Calibration Chamber door with a code.

  They shoved the table into the center of the room. Above them, the holographic monitor activated automatically, projecting a cold light onto the blend of flesh and light.

  LEVEL DETECTED: 4 (VIOLATOR)

  STATUS: OMEGA (RED)

  RECOMMENDED PROCEDURE: IMMEDIATE AMPOULIZATION

  "Ampoulization? Never," the Priest snarled. "We must downgrade him. I want that monitor to show GREEN ALPHA - LEVEL 2. Only then can Marcus use him as a key for the portals."

  Tsuki, embedded within Etan’s skull, heard everything. Not with ears, but through the room's magnetic frequencies. The definitions of "Green" and "Level 2" reached her like electrical insults.

  The Priest activated the machine. Four hydraulic arms descended from the ceiling, ending in needles that vibrated at high frequency.

  "Commencing coherence rewrite," the room’s metallic voice announced.

  "Priest, stop!" Aris screamed. "Look at his body! He’s absorbing the calibration! We aren't resetting him—we’re giving him a language to speak to our network!"

  Too late. The needles plunged into the blue slurry of flesh.

  Tsuki snapped her double pupils open. She didn't scream. She smiled. A smile that spread across both fused faces.

  "Green... Alpha..." Tsuki’s voice echoed through the ventilation ducts, erupting from the ship’s speakers. "You want a Level 2? You want stability?"

  The holographic monitor went haywire. The red of the Omega alert turned into absolute black.

  TOTAL SYSTEM CRASH

  PHYSICAL LAWS DISABLED BY USER: OMEGA

  OPENING ALL CONTAINMENT UNITS DUE TO LOSS OF COHERENCE...

  Throughout the ship, the sound of locks exploding was simultaneous.

  Aris covered his ears while the Priest watched in horror as his brass fingers transformed into fragile sprigs of white coral. The "Bug" had left the room. And now, the cargo hold was a hell of liberated monsters.

  As the holographic monitor projected error signals as black as wounds, Doctor Aris snapped open a steel briefcase. His hands were no longer trembling; they were racked with spasms. He pulled out a pneumatic syringe pre-filled with an amber liquid—Stasis-7, a panic inhibitor used by frontline surgeons.

  Pssh-t.

  He drove it into his neck, straight into the jugular. A raucous sigh escaped his lips as his pupils dilated into pinpricks. He turned toward the Priest, who was still trying to reset the console with coral fingers that were crumbling away.

  "Stop touching those keys, you useless piece of iron!" Aris yelled. The drug was giving him a frigid, violent lucidity.

  "Doctor, regain control! The procedure is—"

  "The procedure is assisted suicide!" Aris interrupted, spitting blood from where he’d bitten his tongue. "You were hasty, Priest. You wanted to cut corners to please Marcus, and you’ve damned us all. Do you know what you did by shoving those needles into that shell?"

  Aris pointed to the hybrid body of Etan and Tsuki, which now seemed to be drinking the room's darkness.

  "That being's power is tied to contact, you idiot! As long as he was in the hold, he was isolated. But you... you gave her a highway of copper and brass. You plugged the ship’s sensors directly into her nervous system. You didn't 'calibrate' her—you gave her the keys to the city! Right now, through those needles, she is the ship."

  Aris laughed, a dry, joyless sound, as he loaded a second dose of the drug.

  "You tried to write an 'Alpha' command in a language she invented. It’s like trying to give orders to a wildfire while handing it a lit torch. Look at that monitor! It’s not reading her data... she’s rewriting ours. Your precious Catalog? It’s become her shopping list. And she just ordered our deaths."

  The monitor emitted one last high-pitched whistle before dying.

  STATUS: OMEGA DOMINANT

  SHIP NEURAL NETWORK: COMPROMISED

  "I’m leaving now," Aris said, his voice flat from the sedative. "And if I were you, I’d try praying to your metal God, because Omegas don't leave witnesses."

  At that moment, the chamber’s armored door began to buckle inward, as if an invisible hand were crumpling it. Outside, the first roar of a liberated Level 3 monster made the walls tremble.

  The chamber door collapsed inward with a groan of strained metal. From the mist of steam and oil emerged the figure of the Needle Woman. There was nothing holy in her advance; her wings of transparent hands clawed the walls, leaving deep gouges in the steel.

  The Priest backed away, uselessly pressing a command on his now-melted console. The steam powering his mechanical arm hissed out in a thick black stream. He knew. You could see it in the way his pupils searched for an exit that didn't exist.

  "It’s over, isn't it?" the Priest murmured, his voice reduced to a metallic rattle.

  Aris, slumped against the wall with the syringe still stuck in his neck, gave a lopsided smile, his gaze lost in the ceiling that was weeping rust. "Outside that door are three hundred years of torture that just learned how to walk. Even if this ship doesn't explode, we wouldn't make it to the upper deck in one piece. We’re slaughterhouse meat, my friend."

  The Needle Woman lunged. One of her transparent appendages passed through the Priest's chest. There was no magic, only brutal physics: the hand vibrated at a frequency that dissolved molecular bonds. The man’s chest didn't tear; it vaporized into a grayish mist. The Priest fell to his knees, staring at the perfect hole through his sternum, watching his own lungs collapse into the void.

  Beyond the threshold, the horror was purely biological and mechanical:

  The Gear-Man: A prisoner whose limbs had been grafted into hydraulic pistons was literally biting the bulkhead apart, metal teeth screeching against lead. Every movement tore strips of his own flesh, but he continued, driven by a motor imperative that no longer knew pain.

  The Stain: A creature that had once been a little girl walked down the corridor. Every object she touched lost its form: the guards' rifles became soft as clay, their armor melting into their skin in a single dough of leather and blood.

  The Remnants: Formless masses of flesh, the scraps of failed experiments, crawled out of the vats like giant slugs, suffocating soldiers under their dead weight, absorbing them through pure osmotic pressure.

  Tsuki rose from the operating plate. Etan’s body was a tangle of spasms, but she held him upright through sheer force of will. She felt the needles of the calibration machine slide out of her flesh like shards of glass.

  Aris looked at her, the drug now blurring his vision. "Go… Omega. If you stay here, you’ll become part of the heap. This ship is a banquet for crows, and we are the main course."

  Tsuki did not answer. She looked at the Needle Woman. The two anomalies stood in silence for a moment amidst the destruction, recognizing each other as the only two living things in a graveyard of metal.

  The Vector gave a violent lurch. A deep explosion from the engines tilted the floor by thirty degrees. Time was up. Aris, now drained of drug and terror, slid against a bulkhead, staring at the shadow descending from the ceiling ducts. It was a mass of translucent membranes and multiple mouths clattering together with a sound like shattering glass.

  "No... not you..." Aris wheezed, reaching out a trembling hand. "Subject Beta-9... Cora... please, it’s me."

  Cora did not utter a cry. Her tentacles, like exposed tendons, lashed out with unnatural speed. They coiled around the doctor, hoisting him off the ground. Aris didn't even have time to scream; Cora’s central mouth swung open, revealing rows of chitinous teeth that began to grind him, starting from the legs. The dry snap of bones exploding under pressure echoed as Aris’s flesh was sucked into that pulsing sac of viscera. Within moments, nothing remained of the doctor but an empty syringe rolling across the metal floor.

  Tsuki, standing over Etan’s trembling body, looked away. There was no time for pity. Ahead of them, the only escape route to the life pods was barred.

  The Flesh Wall (Level 4 Beta) occupied the entire corridor. It was a mechanical tumor: a formless mass of assimilated soldiers, brass plates, and high-voltage cables pulsing like arteries. Hundreds of red eyes stared into the room, while human hands emerged from the mass, clawing the air in nervous spasms. It wasn't a being that wanted to fight; it was an obstruction of reality that sought only to consume what was left of the ship.

  The Needle Woman moved to Tsuki’s side. Her transparent hands beat frantically in the smoke-heavy air.

  "It wants to take us down with it," Tsuki whispered, feeling the heat of explosions rising from the lower decks. "Needle Woman! You must pin it down!"

  The anomaly of the golden needles did not wait. She lunged at the wall of flesh. Her transparent projections became solid as diamond blades, driving into the monster's pulsing masses to hold it steady, preventing it from closing in on them.

  Tsuki dashed forward, her feet sinking into the blood flooding the floor. She reached the base of the abomination and pressed Etan’s hand against the warm, ferrous flesh.

  "Collapse..." Tsuki thought, injecting her "Bug" directly into the heart of the mass. "Lose your coherence. Become nothing."

  Under Etan’s touch, the Flesh Wall began to "glitch." The assimilated soldiers began to peel off like scabs from a wound, and the ship's metal turned liquid once more, opening a slimy, smoking breach through which the light of the escape pods flickered.

  The corridor pulsed with intermittent red light, rhythmic with the explosions tearing through the ship’s lower decks. Tsuki, dragging Etan’s body through the slimy gap in the Flesh Wall, found herself before a figure who was not heading for the pods.

  He was a tall man, wrapped in prisoner’s rags. He wasn't running. He sat on the floor before the auxiliary cockpit door, his hands immersed in a pool of hydraulic oil that seemed to respond to his touch.

  "It’s useless to run for the pods," the man said without turning. His voice was steady—too calm for a man about to die. "They’ve sealed them from the outside to keep the anomalies from escaping."

  The Needle Woman approached him, her transparent projections quivering in the electric air. She tilted her head, observing the man with a mixture of curiosity and recognition.

  "Who are you?" Tsuki asked, Etan’s voice emerging as a metallic breath.

  The man stood up, his oil-blackened hands now shimmering with a silver reflection. "I was an architect of routes. Now I am merely the helmsman of a wreck. If you want to live, get in there. We won't be descending to Oakhaven. We’ll make her fall where they can never find us."

  As they entered the cabin, the Needle Woman stopped at the threshold, looking at Tsuki. Steam enveloped her face, marked by brass inhibitors.

  "My world... did not have these names," the woman said suddenly. Her voice was not a whisper, but a jarring melody. "Do not call me Subject 704 anymore. I am Llyr-Vahn."

  The name rang through the cabin like a discordant chord, a word Etan’s human tongue struggled to process. It did not belong to this realm of steam and gears.

  The Oil Man—Zeryth—sat at the auxiliary helm. He didn't use the levers. He plunged his arms directly into the console’s energy conduits. His veins lit up with pure silver as the ship let out a harrowing wail.

  "Hold on to something," the man ordered, as the horizon outside the glass began to rotate violently. "We’re going over the Northern peaks. If my life is worth as much as yours, we’re crashing into the Void Beyond the Mountain."

  Tsuki huddled against a bulkhead, clutching Etan’s chest. She felt the ship’s prow rise, defying gravity for one last, desperate instant, before plunging into a mad dive toward the dark clouds shrouding the mountains.

  The last thing Tsuki saw, before the impact blacked out everything, was Llyr-Vahn’s face illuminated by fire, as the ship tore through the clouds, aiming for the unknown.

  The black smoke of the ship rose straight toward the gray sky, motionless among the silent peaks. The wreck's heat was the only thing keeping the grip of the frost at bay.

  Zeryth, the pilot, wiped his face with trembling hands, leaving streaks of silver oil on his skin. He turned to Llyr-Vahn, who sat a few meters away. The needle woman’s face was wet with tears; they were not tears of pain, but the release of a tension that had lasted for years.

  "We’re out..." Zeryth whispered, his voice cracking. "Llyr-Vahn, we’re actually out."

  She nodded slowly, her transparent projections fading like smoke in the wind. "I no longer feel their chains. But look..."

  She pointed toward the mouth of the cave where they had dragged Etan’s body.

  From the shadows of the cave came the sound of light, uncertain footsteps. Zeryth turned, ready to spring, but froze mid-motion. He stood staring at the figure emerging from the darkness: a girl with dark hair and sharp features, wrapped in the tattered remains of the tunic that, only minutes before, had belonged to a boy.

  Zeryth arched an eyebrow, his gaze shifting from the girl’s now-slender shoulders to her pale face. There was no terror in his eyes—only the wonder of a technician watching an engine change shape before his very eyes.

  "Weren't you a boy when we pulled you from the shell?" Zeryth asked, his voice raspy from the smoke. "I knew Level 4s were unstable, but a complete cellular rewrite in such a short time... it’s the first time I’ve seen it outside a calibration lab."

  Llyr-Vahn turned slowly, studying Tsuki’s new form with her pupil-less eyes. "The shell has surrendered," she observed in her melodic, jarring voice. "The other... the human... I no longer feel his frequency. Did you erase him during the impact?"

  Tsuki looked down at her hands, feeling the different weight of her own body, the sensation of air on skin that now answered only to her. "I didn't erase him," she replied, her voice clear and stripped of its former masculine distortion. "He has simply slipped into the depths. The shock of the crash broke the levee. He no longer wanted to be here, and the body... the body simply followed my desire to exist."

  Zeryth spat a lump of blood and ash into the snow, looking back at the wrecked ship. "Well, I hope this new form is sturdier than the last. Beyond these peaks, there’s no one coming to calibrate you if you start falling apart."

  He stood up, the metal of his internal prosthetics screeching in the frost. "Boy or girl makes no difference to me. As long as that 'bug' of yours keeps us clear of Kaelos's retrievers, you can turn into a dragon for all I care."

  The ship’s smoke was thinning, giving way to a cold that bit at the skin. Around a small fire fed by the remains of a wooden crate, the three survivors sat like shadows cast against the white of the snow.

  Zeryth stared at his fingers, still stained with that silver oil that seemed to pulse with a life of its own.

  "It’s not magic," Zeryth began, his hoarse voice breaking the silence of the valley. "To me, every piece of metal is an exposed nerve. When I pour this oil, I stop being a man and become the gear. I feel the steam pressure as if it were my own breath, and the resistance of the pistons as the tension in my muscles. If the ship veered beyond the mountains, it’s because I felt its weight in my bones and I pushed it to curve as if I were bending my own back. It’s a constant weight, a clatter of scrap metal that never stops in my head."

  Llyr-Vahn looked up, her transparent hands appearing for an instant like reflections on water before vanishing.

  "For me, it is the opposite," she said, her voice seemingly vibrating in the air before reaching their ears. "The world is too solid. Too heavy. Every time I touch something, I feel the pain of its consistency. My wings... they are not limbs. They are the moment I stop fighting against matter. When I project them, I feel a purest chill, and the world becomes mist. I didn't strike that Priest. I simply allowed a part of me to exist in the same space where his heart existed. It’s like a discordant note trying to become harmony: if I push too hard, the reality around me cracks because I am not supposed to be here."

  Tsuki listened to them, huddled in the remnants of the tunic, feeling the fire's heat on her new skin. It was a strange, singular sensation, no longer mediated through Etan’s filter.

  "I feel none of that," Tsuki murmured, looking at the palms of her hands, now small and smooth. "I don't feel the connection with the machines, and I don't feel the cold of space. When I was in Etan’s body and the machines touched me, I only felt that the world was… wrong. Like a mistake on a written page. I don't push, and I don't vibrate. I see the error, and I erase it. When I touched that wall of flesh, I didn't want to fight it. I only wanted it to stop being solid, because its solidity hurt me. And reality agreed with me. It’s as if the world were a thought, and I were the only doubt capable of destroying it."

  Zeryth stared at her for a long time, then spat a lump of ash into the snow. "A walking doubt. Great. We’re a pilot who feels iron, a woman who walks through walls, and a system error."

  Llyr-Vahn gave a faint, sad smile. "We are what remains of a world that tried to catalog us. And now we are in a place where there are no labels."

  Tsuki pulled her knees to her chest. She felt Etan stir deep within—a light thrum, like a prisoner knocking on a cell door too far away.

  A metallic, rhythmic sound came from the snowy slope.

  Clang. Strash. Clack.