“This,” Jonah said, pointing at the largest spike, “is something else. Not pressure. Not so natural. Something moved. Something.. Something..”

Vincent exhaled a shaky breath. “Yeah… I heard it too.”
His fingers trembled slightly as he removed his helmet

Elias turned sharply. “SOUND?"

“I didn’t say I heard it in the air,” Vincent snapped. “It came through the ground, Felt like vibration across my suit."

The room fell silent.

Aria slowly lifted her eyes. “You’re not the only one.”

Everyone looked at her.

She continued, voice steady but softer than usual, “When the crack closed… I felt something brush against the sound waves. Something warm. The ground isn’t just cold ice. There are heat channels running deep below us."

Mira’s expressed. "Define?"

“Shifting,” Aria said. “Moving. Almost mapping us.”

Jonah added, “Captain… whatever’s down there, it’s not small.”

The tension inside the pod thickened like frozen air.

Mira checked the external sensors. The sky, once faintly blue, had turned almost black. The planet’s rotation was fast. Night here fell not like a gentle fade, but as if someone threw a curtain across the world.

Temperature outside dropped thirty degrees in under six minutes.

“We’re pulling back,” Mira declared. “Everyone gear up. Base camp is only two kilometers away. We return, regroup, and analyze at sunrise.”

Jonah frowned. “Captain, with night temperatures—”

“I know,” Mira said. “But we can’t stay inside this pod. A single crack in the shell during a temperature shift, and we freeze before we suffocate.”

Vincent smirked weakly. “Big. Thanks.”

They immediately put on their protective gear, their helmets clicking shut and their armoured exosuits buzzing with mechanical warmth. Before leaving, Aria stepped toward the crack site one last time. It was surrounded by delicate spirals of frost that seemed to be orbiting something alive underneath.

She was staring at it..
Deeper..

The heartbeat thumped once—deep and faint, like a slow echo from miles below.

She froze.

It thumped again.

But this time… it changed tempo when she stepped back.

Responding.

Her chest tightened.

“Aria!” Elias called from the door. “We’re moving!”

She turned away quickly and followed the others out into the dark.

The outer world had changed. Pale moonlight—unlike Earth’s moon, tinted faintly blue—dropped across endless ice plains. New frost developed abnormally quickly, blurring their earlier footsteps into soft white mounds.

Snowflakes didn’t fall from the sky.
The ground grew them.

Elias adjusted the thermal scanners on his wrist. “I’m losing half my readings already. Temperature differential is too extreme.”

Vincent kept scanning the ground with his bio-locator.
“It can still detect micro-life. But anything producing large thermal mass is invisible.”

Mira replied, “Which means the device is useless if the creature adapts to ambient temperature.”

Vincent muttered, “Or if it was already beyond our detection range since the beginning.”

Their boots crunched gently on the frost as they walked on. Their helmet lamps shone on spirals of ice that formed in odd, organic patterns that were too natural to be chance.

About ten minutes in, Aria slowed.

“Captain…” she whispered through the comms.

Mira turned. “What is it?”

Aria pointed at the ground ahead. Beneath the thin layer of ice, something long and shadowy slid slowly parallel to their walking path.

A shape.

A presence.

Jonah immediately checked his seismic pad. The readings flickered erratically.

“We’ve got movement, but… damn it, the ice is refracting everything. I can’t triangulate.”

The shadow moved again—faster this time.

Vincent stopped dead. “What the hell.”

No one argued.

They increased pace, moving quickly but quietly. The thing below the ice glided alongside them like a silent predator tracking a herd.

Jonah whispered, “its soo massive. What the hell”

Then, without warning, the ground quivered. A tremor rippled through the ice, subtle but unmistakable—like something brushing against the underside of a frozen lake.

Aria flinched. “There! Did you feel that?”

Vincent exhaled shakily. “That’s the same vibration I heard earlier. The voice… It’s stronger here.”

Mira gripped her cutterstaff tightly. “Eyes forward. Do not stop moving.”

The silhouette beneath them moved closer—now directly under Jonah.

The ice emitted a low groan.

“Jonah—move!” Aria shouted.

He stepped back just in time as the ice under his boots flexed inward, as though something pressed against it from below.

A single massive push.

Then silence.

Jonah let out a shaky breath. “Holy— It’s right under us. It was right under—”

The ground thumped.

Once.

A slow, heavy beat.

Then again—twice.

A rhythm.

The same rhythm they heard earlier.

Vincent whispered, “It’s Kind a huge. It’s actually—”

CRACK.

A thin fracture streaked across the ground between them, spreading like lightning. The vibration grew louder, stronger.

Elias shouted, “We need to move! Now!”

Everyone started running.

Beneath them, the ice moved strangely, moving beneath a frozen sea like waves. Clouds of frost rose as though something underground had let forth a breath.

Vincent risked a quick glance back. “What the **** It’s accelerating, matching our speed!”

Aria felt the tremors again—deep, overwhelming, almost resonant with her heartbeat.

She thought she heard a low tone beneath the vibration.

Not random.
Not noise.
Something like a breath.

“Captain!” Aria yelled.

Then Jonah stopped so abruptly that Elias slammed into him.

“Lights!” Jonah gasped. “Base camp lights! I see them!”

Far ahead, faint LED beacons flickered through the fog—small, bright, mechanical hope.

Mira’s voice cracked through the comms. “Keep running! We’re almost—”

The ground suddenly lurched upward behind them.

Not crack.

Not tremor.

Uplift.
A bulge of ice rising, shuddering, forcing itself up like something giant pushing against it.

Vincent screamed, “It’s surfacing! MOVE!”

They sprinted

The bulge grew larger—six meters across… eight… ten… and still growing.

Then, with a deafening thunder-like crack—

A massive shard of ice exploded upward.

It erupted like a spear from below, slicing into the air a few meters behind Elias. Shards flew in every direction, clattering off their armor with metallic clangs.

A second shard shot upward to the right—then a third.

The ground was no longer stable. It pulsed, shifting, responding to their movement like muscle tissue instead of frozen land.

Aria heard the vibration again—louder, echoing inside her skull.

A tone.
A cry.
A warning?

She swallowed her fear. "Captain… it’s something..." 

Mira didn’t look back. "Whatever it is, its soo huge, we need to run."

Another ice pillar erupted, sending a wave of frost into the air like mist.

Vincent shouted, “I don’t care—just get me into the damn shelter!”

They reached the base camp’s outer hatch. Jonah slammed his hand against the panel. The door slid open with a hiss.

Everyone piled inside one after another.

Mira was last. She looked back just long enough to see the towering ice pillars sway unnaturally, as if something huge beneath the ground was adjusting its position.

Something close.

Something intelligent.

The hatch slammed shut.
The locks sealed.
Silence washed through the airlock.

Everyone stood there, panting inside their helmets.

Mira’s voice finally broke through the comms, low and steady:

“…what in God’s name is under this planet?”

No one answered.

Outside the frost-covered window, the last pillar of ice slowly sank back into the ground… as if whatever created it was withdrawing again.

Retreating.

But not gone.

Not even close.