Mana dropped from high orbit with a violence that felt almost personal. The pod's heat shield burned away in shearing sheets, coloring her world in afterimages of blue and white. She braced herself for the impact, counted down the seconds by the spasm of her own heart: three, two—

Zero. 

The pod hit the outpost's roof with a fist-blow force, auto-braking foam expanding around her like a cocoon of glue. Mana’s boots hit metal before the hatch had fully vented, the sickly red of emergency lights flooding her helmet’s optics. The tactical drop had left her disoriented, spine tingling from the Core's overclocked feedback loop. Through her HUD, the corridor was a slashing wound of light and shadow—every surface bandaged with crystal growths, the edges crawling with a pulse too regular to be mere refracted light.

She scanned her perimeter. No hostiles. No movement. The only sound was the faint hiss of outgassing from the cooling pod, and beneath it, the irregular click of her own pulse.

Fox's voice cracked through her neural link, a bandwidth so tight it almost strangled itself. “Clear. Move north, vector twenty-two. Facility map is up, but internal sensors are compromised.”

Mana advanced, steps silent on the anti-skid composite. The walls here were not straight—every other meter, the corridor doglegged, each corner engineered for cover and concealment. Classic Erben doctrine: make every approach a killzone, every retreat a trap. She swept with her NEXUS sidearm, the weapon’s matte-black skin cold against her palm.

The air in the corridor was thick, not with smoke or heat, but with something older. The blue crystal had bled up from the floor and across the walls, forming veins and capillaries that branched like a digital circulatory system. It was alive, in a way. As she moved, she felt her own heartbeat echo back at her from the pulsing filaments.

She cleared two intersections without incident. The bodies of the marines—Voss’s team—were supposed to be here. The command had lost their signals at 0200. 

Fox: “Proceed with extreme caution. We lost all vital signs from Voss’s team seventeen minutes ago.”

“Copy,” Mana subvocalized, eyes scanning for thermal or motion anomaly. “No signals. No sign of engagement.”

“Keep moving,” Fox said. “There’s something wrong with the crystal. Not Kollektiven standard. It’s branching in non-fractal geometries. You see it?”

Mana paused at the next junction, leaning in to get a closer look. The crystal wasn’t just growing, it was following lines—pipes, conduit, anywhere with a charge or a pulse. She snapped a still with her helmet cam, overlaid the feed with Fox’s annotated analysis. The lines shimmered with barely-contained energy, but there was something elegant in their order: not a mess, not chaos, but an architecture.

Her skin prickled. The Erben archive’s blue glow had always unsettled her, but this felt like an open eye, staring back.

She advanced through a short corridor that opened into a larger cross-hall. There, half-concealed by a fallen light panel, was the first marine.

Mana swept the space, confirmed the absence of movement, then approached. The body was slumped against the wall, knees bent up, rifle still clenched in one hand. The armor was fractured along the seams, the helmet’s visor caked with a frosted film of blue. Where the suit had split, the marine’s flesh was exposed—except it wasn’t flesh anymore.

The crystal had invaded the body, following the major blood vessels like a parasite. Where veins once traced the wrist and neck, now cold blue filaments glowed beneath skin stretched almost translucent. The chest cavity was cracked open, the heart itself visible, encased in a web of crystal that pulsed, slow and rhythmic, with the outpost’s light.

Mana knelt, steadying herself. The NEXUS pistol never left the body’s center mass. With her other hand, she gently tilted the marine’s head, exposing the neck. The transformation was absolute: from skin, to subdermal fat, to muscle, every cell had been replaced with a lattice of mineral and light.

She scanned for neural activity, out of habit. The helmet pinged a weak signature, then flatlined.

Fox’s voice was quieter now. “Mana, are you seeing this?”

“Yeah,” she whispered, because anything louder would have shattered her composure.

She recorded a slow sweep of the body, then focused in on the wound at the chest. The crystal was not just growth; it was invasion. The geometry was too precise, each branch and sub-branch dividing at almost perfect angles. A thought sparked in her: the way it followed the vasculature was not random, but mapped. As if the crystal was using the circulatory system as a blueprint, colonizing it cell by cell.

Fox’s breathing was audible now, a metronome gone unsteady. “It’s not Kollektiven. It’s not even Erben. This is... Mana, I don’t know what this is.”

She probed further, using the multi-tool at her belt to chip away at a shard near the heart. It came away with a brittle crack, revealing the underlying structure—a mesh of nanocrystal so fine it caught and bent the light, throwing tiny spectrums onto the armor plates. She logged the sample, tagged it for later extraction, and stood.

For the first time, Mana realized the entire corridor had gone silent. Even the hum of the crystals seemed to pause, as if the outpost itself was holding its breath, waiting for her to move.

She advanced, steps slower now. The next body was further down, at the bend in the hall. Same story: crystal growth, face fixed in a rictus that was less terror than awe. This one had managed to unholster a grenade, but the hand was fused to the casing, blue veins crawling up the fingers and under the nail beds. The crystal had frozen the action at the moment of decision.

She recorded it, moved on.

The further she went, the more bodies she found. None of them had time to fire a shot. Each had been caught mid-movement, stilled and converted to blue glass, the sequence of attack and defense fossilized in real time.

At the end of the corridor was the main rotunda. The doors were half-open, jammed by the bulk of another marine—this one fully encased, the visor a perfect mirror of blue crystal. Mana kicked the body aside, checked both corners, and entered.

The emergency lights here cast shadows in perfect circles, reflecting off the domed ceiling. The center of the chamber was a shallow pit, and at its heart a larger structure—a crystalline engine, spined with fractal growth, humming with contained violence. On the far side, pinned to the wall by a wave of fused crystal, was the last of the marines.

Her HUD tagged the ID, a UG Marine.

He was alive, but only barely. The faceplate was shattered, jaw dislocated. The marine's eyes tracked her, slow and feral, the irises a swirling mosaic of blue and white. His chest rose and fell, but the breathing was erratic, the sound like air moving through a wind instrument made for torture.

Mana kept her weapon trained. She circled left, careful not to break line of sight. The NEXUS pistol's charge indicator glowed a soft, ominous yellow.

The marine's lips moved, but the words took three tries to come out.

"Help me," he said, but the voice was wrong—too resonant, layered with an echo that did not belong.

Mana didn't answer. She engaged the comms, let Fox see and hear.

The blue crystal on the marine's torso flexed, as if trying to inhale. His hands clawed at the wall, unable to break free. "Please," he said, the echo deeper now, "help."

Fox's voice shook. "Mana, protocol is to terminate. I'm sorry."

Mana raised the weapon, aimed at the sternum. The marine's eyes widened, and for a moment she saw not a dying soldier, but something else looking through the meat and bone.

"Wait," he said, the word splitting into two voices—one human, one impossibly old. "Don't—"

Mana fired. The shot took him at the heart, just above the main branching of crystal. For a split second, the blue light flared, then the marine's head slumped forward, the body limp. The crystal did not fade, but instead hummed at a higher pitch, as if in mourning.

Mana lowered the weapon. In the silence, she cataloged the scene, her left thumb rubbing rhythmically against the ridged grip of the NEXUS pistol—three strokes right, three strokes left—while her right foot tapped a matching cadence against the floor, the motion so subtle it barely registered in her armor.

Fox’s voice was ragged. “Mana, this isn’t a weapon. It’s a conversion engine. They’re... they’re not killing. They’re changing.”

Mana nodded. “Copy.”

She took one last look at the crystalline structure, watched as it pulsed in time with her own heart, and moved deeper into the rotunda.

The corridor beyond the rotunda was a burial procession. Mana advanced through it one meter at a time, blue veins of crystal weaving the walls into a grotesque filigree. The air smelled of ozone and old bone. Each step brought a new tableau: another body, more transformed than the last, each frozen at the instant the crystal had claimed it.

She counted: six, then nine, then a group of three, huddled in a defensive knot. They had died facing outward, weapons trained on the unseen, but the crystal had pierced their helmets, blossoming from the mouth and eyes in a riot of perfect, intersecting shards.

Fox’s voice kept pace, slower now, as if each word had to be wrestled from the static that filled the channel. “Are you registering the environmental delta? The energy readings are spiking as you approach center. I don’t like this.”

Her own HUD screamed orange, then red, as the crystal’s emission spectrum overwhelmed the sensors. Each surface was mapped in heat signatures, but the readings were inverted: the crystals radiated negative temperature, as if sucking the warmth and life from everything within a hundred meters.

She stepped over the curled body of a marine—female, from the size, but the suit markings had been scrubbed by the blue growth. The left hand reached out, fingers fused together in a single, elegant blade. Mana paused to record, zooming in on the texture of the transformation: the way the crystal followed the shape of the hand, preserving the intent of the gesture even as it erased the flesh beneath.

The next chamber was oval, ribbed with columns that bent inwards, forming a tunnel of bone and glass. The blue crystal coated the columns, forming ridges and spines, some as fine as hair, others as thick as a human arm. Light pulsed from within, traveling in waves that lapped at the edges of Mana’s vision. She kept her pistol up, but the finger on the trigger felt numb, disconnected from the body it served.

“Mana,” Fox said, voice barely above a whisper, “the Core is responding. Your neural signature is being mirrored by the outpost’s mainframe. It’s—” a pause, then a tremor she’d never heard from him before, “—it’s not just broadcasting. It’s listening.”

She nodded, eyes locked on the blue corona ahead. “Acknowledge. Closing in.”

The path narrowed, forcing her through a spiral chicane designed to slow attackers. She moved fast but careful, each step mapped to the geometry of the corridor. The crystal growths had now begun to form intentional patterns—sigils, loops, mirrored fractals that repeated every few meters. It was as if the outpost was redecorating itself in anticipation of a guest.

She reached the end of the spiral and emerged into the central chamber.