The silence was a wall.

Heavy. Suffocating. Pressing down like a weight on Star’s chest.

But the door had stopped shaking.

He was still on the ground, his face hot and slick. His breath came in short gasps. Something was on him. Something was in him. It crawled across his skin like wet fur, itchy and warm and sentient. He scrambled up with a cry, clawing at his cheeks, trying to tear the feeling off. He could feel it moving, slithering beneath his skin, looking for a way inside—through his eyes, his mouth, under his nails—

He screamed and kept screaming as he gouged at his face with trembling fingers.

“STAR!!”

Yasir grabbed his wrists, firm but careful, voice steady. “Hey—hey, it’s okay. It’s okay now.”

Star stared at him, wild-eyed and panting. Yasir’s expression was a strange mix of steel and softness—a gentleness tucked behind a face that had seen too much.

Star blinked.

Reality returned in slow pieces.

His fingers were wet with blood. His cheeks burned. There was never any mold. Just torn skin, raw and weeping from his own nails.

“…T-thank you,” Star whispered, unsteady.

Yasir nodded, helping him to his feet like it was second nature.

Andrea was still at the door, braced against it with both arms like a dam holding back a flood. Her eyes were fixed, wide. Glenn approached her gently, putting a hand on her shoulder. “We did it,” he said, like he was trying to believe it himself. “It’s not getting out.”

Andrea trembled like a snapped wire and turned into his arms without a word. Glenn looked startled but let her stay there, awkwardly patting her head. “It’s… it’ll be okay.”

But no one really believed that.

Eventually, someone started walking. They all followed. Four shadows moving through a place that should not exist.

The walls pulsed with breath.

Fungal growths quivered like jellyfish against damp tile. Brownish-orange fronds dangled from the ceiling, brushing their hair as they passed. Spores sparkled faintly in the light—if it was light. It felt more like the afterglow of decay, like a bruise on the air.

They didn’t speak. Words felt wrong here. Too loud. Too real.

The walls whispered.

Star whipped around with every hiss—every phrase, every fragment of half-speech drifting through the air like smoke. Some sounded like sobbing. Others like laughter. A woman’s voice repeated his name at one point—Star, Star, Star—but no one else seemed to notice. He kept walking.

The cafeteria loomed up before them again.

It was… wrong.

Star froze in the threshold—and then screamed.

The room had been transformed into a living, rotting nightmare.

The floor writhed with a film of slick, glistening meat. Patches of it pulsed, puckering open and shut like wounds trying to breathe. The tables had fused together into organic growths—half wood, half sinew—rising in spirals like bones twisted by heat.

In the center was a shrine.

An altar made of splintered chairs and calcified remains—bones blackened with mold and fused with roots. Some were human. Some weren’t. One skull looked almost familiar, but Star couldn’t place why. A thick halo of gnats hovered around it, buzzing like static.

The room hummed. Not with sound, but with pressure. Star’s skull vibrated with it.

He screamed again, stumbling back.

“Star?!”

Yasir grabbed him just in time to stop him from collapsing.

Star’s vision spun—and then blinked back.

It was gone.

No meat floor. No shrine. No bones. The cafeteria looked… “normal,” or what passed for it here. Moss blanketed the tiles. The furniture was choked in curling vines. Strange, fluorescent mushrooms bloomed from the ceiling like alien chandeliers.

But nothing impossible.

Star stood up slowly, still shaking.

“I—I’m sorry. I saw—I thought—” he trailed off, throat tight.

“You don’t need to explain,” Glenn said. “We’re all on the edge.”

Star didn’t argue. He couldn’t.

“We need a way out,” Glenn muttered, kicking at the base of a wall. “Something. Anything.”

He grabbed a nearby chair. It fell apart in his hands, wood soaked through like a corpse left in water too long.

“Everything’s rotten…” he said, more to himself than them. “Everything’s turning into something else.”

They moved on.

The deeper they went, the more time seemed to fray. Doors led to rooms that looked untouched for decades. Cabinets collapsed into dust at a touch. The air was humid and sharp, like wet rust. Every step squelched underfoot. A greenish liquid seeped from the floor with each footfall, clinging to their shoes in viscous threads.

Even their clothes were beginning to feel damp. Star scratched absently at his arm. The itching had started again.

They tried door after door.

Most opened to nothing: skeletal rooms, mold-covered mattresses, shelves sagging with unreadable books. Some were empty entirely—no beds, no furniture, no sign anyone had ever used them. The emptiness felt intentional, surgical.

Finally, they came to a door that refused to budge.

Star and Yasir threw their weight against it. It groaned. Andrea joined them with a snarl of frustration, and the door screeched open with a spray of spores and old air that hit like a gut punch.

The smell.

It was thick. Sweet. Wrong. Like flowers rotting in a jar of bile.

The room beyond was a horror show.

Beds shoved violently to the walls, their metal frames bent at unnatural angles under the weight of thick, muscular vines. The growths throbbed with a slow, internal rhythm, like organs too large for their host. Black pustules burst softly along the walls, leaking milky fluid that dripped onto the floor in irregular patterns.

And in the center—was it.

A structure. A corpse. A cocoon. All of those, none of those.