Well hello hello! This is sooner than I thought!
What can I say? When I'm on a roll, I'm on a roll. Plus, the new job didn't work out (ahem)...so I've made this story my temporary job and I have to say I'M LOVING IT. 8+ hours a day (and/or night) for writing? Yes, please! I mean, I'm not making any money, but who needs money when they've got a massive emotional fetish in their hands?! :D :D
That said, this is not just ANY writing...we are entering a pretty 'horrible' section of the narrative. This was originally all one chapter, but I had to split it into two parts to get the maximum amount of DRAMA for you. I hope you all are ready for some HORROR with a capital "H", because this is it, kids, it's GOING DOWN! In this chapter we get the start of it, in the next chapter we get EVEN MORE...and then after the next chapter...oh man, that's gonna be brtual. Not because of the gore...but because of something EVEN WORSE! I CAN'T WAITTTTTT!
RESPONSES: THANK YOU to EVERYONE who reviewed, you guys pumped me up so much, boosted me to write this section SOOOO fast! Especially the reviews that showed me your emotional reactions, man I was squealing!
FAVORITE MOMENT: (from last chapter) let's see...tough to pick, tough to pick...but if I absolutely had to...hm...probably moment where L looks like he's gonna kiss the girl and Raito is staring, then L ties her up BDSM style and decapitates her :D :D Or maybe...2) part where L says "women don't like me" and Raito has a mini-aneurism? Dunno, so many good times, honestly! What a roller-coaster
I answer to every review that fanfiction allows me to answer - and those that I can't, I want to sincerely thank you. I can't believe that some people read and review this in FRENCH ?! I wonder how that works...is the story translated automatically? Man, I hope everything comes out at least close to the original...incredible stuff, thank you!
WARNINGS: Gore. Lots of it. And some minor profanity. -and in the next chapter, even more GORE. Hey, this is horror after all, what can I say!?
Um..."enjoy"...if you can :D :D
"The flesh is primitive. Obsolete. It decays. But it can be corrected — optimized."
A male voice.
Low, clinical, devoid of warmth — the heavy European accent sharpening its frigidity even more. Detached, like an old recording, warped with time.
Raito's mind surfaced through thick, drowning static.
"The body is pliant; it is moldable. It is created to take orders, and orders it shall take."
A shriek tore through the darkness, raw and wet.
Raito inhaled sharply—his lungs filled with something wrong. The air clung, dense with rot, thick like spoiled meat left to fester in a sealed room. A rancid fusion of decay and machine oil clotted his throat, coating his tongue with an aftertaste of metal and bile.
He forced his eyes open.
Blackness.
Not absolute—slivers of crimson light pulsed like failing synapses, twitching, irregular. The walls rippled in their glow, glistening with a dampness that shone like open flesh.
Another voice slithered through the dark.
"Help us—"
Raito stiffened. The whisper was faint—softer than the shriek before. But something was wrong. The words crackled, fractured, as if they had been spoken a thousand times before, as if they had no source.
He shifted, pushing out of his capsule, wincing as his hands slid along some kind of fluid condensation that had gathered on its outside surface. He wiped it on the only thing he had—his jacket —before trying again to get out without touching anything. His boots scraped against the floor, before— A faint clink.
He looked down.
A shiny silver tag, reflecting the red glow. Sentinel.
He kneeled down to pick it up, fingers of the other hand automatically brushing the side of his neck. Detached. The absence sent a ripple of unease through him. So she kept her word with me…but—
Raito exhaled, slow and measured, forcing his gaze upward and momentarily ignoring the pulsating walls, scanning automatically for the one thing he needed to see.
Pods lined the room in neat, precise rows. Some open and empty. Others—he didn't want to look. But one stood open and apart, half-shrouded in the sickly red glow.
Inside, framed in light—
L.
Raito crossed the distance, his heartbeat a dull roar in his ears.
His fingers pressed against L's throat. Warm. A slow, steady pulse.
Alive.
He let out a breath, but his chest remained tight.
L's head had lolled to the side, dark strands of hair veiling half his face. Raito reached up, brushing it aside—then his fingers caught on metal. Cold, just behind L's ear.
Cerebral Ascend.
The skin around it had softened, the inflammation receded. It peeled away easily, coming off in a damp slip.
He brought it up to his eye level, brows furrowing.
Again, Angel had kept her word.
But that only meant they were exactly where she wanted them.
Watching L's temporarily peaceful face, Raito took a step back — his breath measured, scanning their surroundings more carefully. He looked at the walls beside him, now fully certain they were moving.
Not fast—no violent shifts—but slow, subtle undulations, as though breathing. He could see thin, irregular pores dilating and contracting, exuding something wet and warm. Every few seconds, the low hum of machinery trembled beneath the surface, vibrating the surfaces like a living organ.
"She's listening."
A voice came again, and, for a moment, he thought it was coming from inside the walls.
Raito approached cautiously, not quite daring to touch the surfaces. He didn't have to — as he came closer and his breath ghosted over the wall, it flexed. The hairs stood on the back of his neck. Living tissue, then, as he suspected.
He watched the veins of wire-thin light, running like a nervous system across the walls and ceiling, a heartbeat under thick he moved, the illumination flickered—responding to him, or perhaps to the presence of thought itself.
The whispers curled around him again, like smoke.
"This is what she makes."
His stomach turned. His mind latched onto the single, undeniable conclusion.
The walls weren't built.
They were grown. Grafted.
He stepped back, pulse hammering. His fingers curled, instinct tightening his stance, though it did nothing to still the crawling sensation beneath his skin. The impression that something here was deeply, deeply wrong.
He turned to the center of the room instead, but it wasn't much better. The terminals beside the pods were hulking, biomechanical masses fused into the walls. Wires, slick with an unidentifiable film, pulsed softly, like veins feeding some unseen organ. What should have been simple interfaces were grotesquely fused with organic material, tubes running into fleshy, puckered openings that twitched erratically. One of the terminals exhaled a slow, wet breath, releasing a faint mist of some unidentifiable gas.
He clenched his jaw. This wasn't a laboratory. It was a carcass, wired up and kept alive far past its expiration. And they were inside it.
"We have been inhibited, limited in our ambition due to our limited understanding." the scientist's voice sounded again, coming from the same unseen source as all the other whispers and sounds in this place. "We must think unconventionally, outside the box. We must dare to think in ways that haven't been thought before, to do things that have never been done." This voice would fade in and out, as though it was some kind of unending lecture — and perhaps more than those calling for help, its coldness was blood-curdling.
He stepped away again, scanning the area. The walls made out of flesh. The terminals made of partially organic tissue. The constant voices, the stench of rotting flesh. It was becoming evident: This wasn't just some repurposed sector of the building. It was something separate, something constructed outside the company's oversight. He remembered the logs. The fragmented reports of unexplained disappearances. And L's own research, the conclusions he had drawn from all the exploration they'd done.
Angel had made her own sanctum.
Deep in the company's underbelly, beyond even the reach of its creators, she had built this. But clearly, she hadn't just used steel and glass and concrete.
The walls, for one, were made out of…flesh.
And how had she gotten her hands on flesh?
Raito's stomach clenched. Is this where she brings them? The ones who vanished without a trace? The employees that went missing — are they in here?
Are those their voices I can hear?
A quiet sound broke through his thoughts. A rough exhale, a faint shift of movement.
He turned sharply.
L.
Long lashes moved, brows pulling together faintly before L's breath evened out. His pallor, though still intense, had lost the deathly cast it carried before. Color was returning.
Then—
"Raito-kun…?"
The voice was hoarse, cracked from disuse. But lucid.
Raito exhaled, tension uncoiling from his spine. At least she kept her word.
L's lashes fluttered open, unfocused for a moment before his gaze found him. "...Did it work?"
Raito's brow creased. "What?"
"The Incinerator…" L trailed along, h's fingers curling faintly as he brought his hand up to the edge of the pod. His grip was weak, but deliberate, as he took in the space around them.
For a second, Raito just stared. Then he understood. That was the last thing L remembered. That final moment before unconsciousness had taken him.
He didn't get the chance to respond. L's gaze lingered past him, taking in the walls, the terminals, the sickly red glow that pulsed in uneven heartbeats. Realization dawned through his features, but he still spoke, with the air of someone who knows the answer to their question:
"…Where are we?"
The answer settled in Raito's throat like lead. He met L's gaze evenly.
"Her basement labs." His voice was flat, devoid of preamble.
L blinked, processing. His face remained impassive, but Raito could see it—the way his mind sharpened, recalculating. Adjusting.
A slow inhale. Finally—
"That was not the plan," L murmured.
"No," Raito agreed, jaw tight. "It wasn't."
A flicker of something unreadable passed behind L's eyes before he made a low, considering sound in his throat. A hum of acknowledgment, of displeasure. Then he shifted, pushing himself upright.
His fingers trembled slightly as they wiped across the pod's slick surface.
L peeled his fingers away immediately, staring down at his palm like Raito had done. The strange film clung to his skin in strands, stretched between his fingers like glue. His lips parted slightly—whether in disgust or calculation, Raito couldn't tell.
Like Raito, he rubbed it on his black jacket to clear off. The viscous residue smeared, thick and stubborn, refusing to come off. He rubbed harder, but the sensation only deepened the unease in his expression.
Just then a warbling, mechanical screech slithered through the walls. Binary, distorted. Corrupted code trying to speak, failing.
L's head snapped toward the sound.
Raito turned to look around too—a shift in the air, something subtle but undeniable. A low, mechanical murmur crawled up through the floor beneath them.
"…body must be moulded… controlled… adjusted…"
The words were wrong—echoing in a flat, detached monotone. And yet, within them, a second voice writhed. Human. Choking, stuttering. Drowning.
As he heard L shuffling to get out of his pod, Raito took a step forward absently, looking at the dormant pods around the chamber. He noticed one of them had a flickering blue light, as though some kind of static video screen was inside.
He looked back just in time to catch L reaching behind his ear, fingertips grazing the skin where Cerebral Ascend had once been embedded. There was no surprise on his face, only calculation, as if measuring loss against necessity. He lowered his hand when he met Raito's eyes.
"Looking for something?" Raito asked, his voice edged with something unreadable.
L turned his eyes to him but didn't answer. Silence stretched between them, taut as a wire.
Raito narrowed his eyes, an open glare "Why did you do it?"
They both knew what he meant.
"We needed the maximum decryption speed we could muster," L said simply.
Raito's expression darkened. "You could have mustered with breaks."
L looked down at his boots, bending down to adjust the laces. "Perhaps. But they would have been hard anyway. I wasn't able to decrypt her code at all after a point. My cognitive abilities were…compromised."
Raito waited for further justifications, but they never came. He just ended up watching L secure his boots, with meticulous nonchalance.
After a short silence, when it became clear L considered the topic closed, Raito gave out a long sigh. Finally, with a faint hint of resignation—
"It's not because I made you wear tighter pants, is it?"
L looked up from his boots with a neutral expression and deadpanned, "That didn't help."
Raito rolled his eyes and scoffed. "Well, at least they look good," he muttered, before turning his attention back to the walls. He traced a finger along the glowing structures embedded in the organic surface — almost touching but not quite. "What do you think this is?"
He felt L step up beside him, eyes narrowing as he studied the network of nerves and filaments. "If these are biological conduits, it's possible they serve as a hybrid processing structure. Organic matter transmitting data in the same way nerves would, but with more detail."
Raito frowned. "You're saying it feels?"
"I'm saying it processes," L corrected. He reached out, stopping just shy of touching the structure. "And possibly thinks."
Raito pulled his hand back from the wall instinctively. The thought of being inside something aware, something capable of reaction, coiled unease in his stomach. He suspected as much before, but having L reach the same conclusion was a damning confirmation.
Suddenly, a mechanical screech interrupted them, crackling from above, skipping like a damaged recording, breaking apart into warped syllables.
"…not dead, not dead, not dead, not—"
Raito clenched his jaw, forcibly tuning it out.
He set his jaw. "We need weapons. Fast."
L didn't disagree.
A wet exhale seeped through the air, like a warm breath of rot — soft, almost imperceptible.
Then—
Movement.
Raito turned sharply.
One of the pods trembled - the one that had been flickering blue before. Its glass surface fogged with condensation.
Something twitched inside, coming close to the glass — the shadow of a hand. Human.
Raito's pulse spiked. The figure shifted, slow, sluggish—then its head jerked, too fast, too wrong. The outline of an amorphous face became clear, staring back at them. Its mouth opened, lips forming words—
Then its entire face glitched.
Like a corrupted video feed, the features fractured—eye melting into jaw, nose dissolving into shifting static. The mouth split and reformed, a silent scream warping in on itself.
Raito didn't wait to see more.
"C'mon"
He grabbed L's wrist without a second thought, dragging him toward the closest open door — unknown danger be damned. L let him.
And the whispers followed.
After passing through a short, dark corridor, they came into what looked like a relatively large antechamber — like a lobby at the entrance of some kind of larger complex. The air hung thick, damp with something that reeked of old blood and rusted circuits.
There were a few terminals around, flickering incessantly and incomprehensibly, but no indication of movement — robot, ghost or otherwise. As L drifted towards the nearest screen, eyes sharp and fingers hovering. Raito stayed close, scanning the room with restless vigilance. The reception desks nearby were stained in what looked like disused electronic tablets, but no weaponry that he could detect. He raised his eyes to the ceiling, seeing pieces of what must have once been neon and metal signs hanging up above — now completely overtaken by organic residue.
"They didn't build it like this," Raito said, half-thinking aloud.
L turned his head slightly, his eyes shadowed in the dimness. "No," he agreed softly. "The materials, the layout—" He glanced upward, toward the vein-riddled ceiling. "This started as a human research site. Illicit, maybe. But meant for humans."
Raito's stomach turned. "And now?"
"Now it's something else." L gestured toward a rusted ceiling-mounted camera. Tendrils of fibrous tissue coiled around the lens like a parasitic vine, threading into the casing. "It's been overtaken. Repurposed."
"By Angel."
L didn't respond directly, but the tightening of his mouth was noticeable as he raised an arched finger to point at the screen.
"This is neither machine nor human code." his voice sounded clipped, and Raito focused on the screen to see the strange brainwave-like marks flowing along, familiar yet somehow different, with patterns that seemed to be intentional rather than monitored.
"Brainwaves?" he asked, with rising unease.
"No. Whisper is brainwaves. Human brainwaves." L's gaze didn't leave the display. "This is something else." His fingers twitched toward the pulsing interface. The shifting symbols moved like a living thing. "This is…new."
Raito's pulse hammered in his ears. "New?" he repeated, knowing he sounded dumb but unable to restrain it. "As in new language?...or new species?"
L said nothing. His fingers hesitated—then brushed the console.
Instantly, a hiss of static cut through the air. The screens glitched, flickering between binary code and something else.
Then—
A human figure appeared.
A corrupted video feed, booting up on its own. A gaunt silhouette, trembling.
The voice was ragged, fractured. A woman.
"She said she'd set us free."
L didn't move. Raito's breathing slowed.
The feed flickered. The figure twitched violently, hands clutching at something unseen.
"But I can still feel my hands," the woman's voice trembled. "I don't have hands anymore."
Raito swallowed, a cold, sick feeling rising in his throat.
The image stuttered, distorting.
"Where are my hands?"
A pause. A shudder.
"What are they touching?"
Another pause. Then—
"What are th—010101010101—
It collapsed into machine screech, making them both recoil. L slammed a command into the console, but nothing happened. The screech was rising, becoming a holler. Without thinking, Raito kicked it
It went dark.
Silence.
Raito exhaled through his nose, pulse thrumming against his ribs.
L stood rigid. His fingers were still pressed against the console's edge.
Raito didn't wait around to see what else would pop out.
"C'mon," he muttered, voice low.
L didn't argue. After one more moment of gazing at it he followed, both their steps quickening as they went through the next door.
The corridors in this place were more like tunnels; narrow and cramped; nothing like the spacious vistas they'd been traversing until now in this building. The walls pulsed faintly, their glistening surfaces soft but dense, their texture disturbingly familiar. Organic matter had fused with structural components, swallowing what had once been sterile composite panels. Here and there, fragments of the original architecture peeked through: corners of glass screens, broken metal casings, terminals blinking with incomprehensible data streams.
And of course, running on every side, still the veins of dim, flickering circuits — now more prominent and exposed than ever before. The glow twitched like nerves firing, erratic bursts of electric current stuttering through artificial synapses. Combined with the flesh-like walls that almost clung to their clothes, the experience of walking through this place was less like walking through a building and more like being swallowed.
They walked steadily. The air was damp, stale, laced with a chemical tang reminiscent of antiseptic. Beneath it lingered a coppery bite—faint, but present.
And always, always, there were the voices. They curled through the walls, slithering over the hum of a constant, engine-like buzz that seemed to vibrate permanently through the entire complex. First that of the calm, dispassionate lecturer, echoing through unseen speakers. His tone never wavered, even as his words spiraled into nightmare.
"Neurological relay latency remains under 45 milliseconds in optimized subjects. It is important to notice the predispositions of the body, but only in as far as to understand how to subve—"
Then it would crackle, giving way to others— male or female, robot or human, echoing around them from the ceilings, the floor — everywhere.
"…data conversion: successful…integration imminent…"
"Kill me! Please! Just kill—"
"…partial neural retention… corruption detected.
"Go away!"
Raito clenched his jaw. Nothing I'd like more, he thought with bitter sarcasm, knowing that the voice was most likely not addressing him.
It wasn't long until signs of serious, serious problems became evident. When the hallways started branching out, revealing rooms, offices and labs beyond. What started to emerge looked like a version of the upper floors – the Robotics department, the Neurotech department – but utterly nightmarish.
They passed a security station half-consumed by tissue. The terminal hummed faintly beneath a thick growth of vascular filaments, its screen flashing strings of binary interspersed with faint, erratic waveforms. A laminated badge lay on the desk: K. Matsuda—Cognitive Research Division. The plastic was smeared with something dark.
Raito checked the wall racks for anything remotely useful — zilch.
The walls contracted as they moved deeper into the labyrinth, each narrowing passage feeling more and more like a digestive tract. Soft tissue gave way to jagged, calcified ridges, as though the corridors were ossifying.
The ever-present voice followed them, mixed with staticky whispers:
"Neural interface requires uninterrupted signal integrity. Failure to maintain cortical link results in behavioral disintegration…subject will respond with involuntary aggression."
"Neurohacking fundamentals," L murmured. "This sounds like a recorded training module."
"I don't remember asking for a lecture." Raito hissed back, unapologetic about his bitterness.
L stopped in front of one of the rounded openings branching off the main hall. He tilted his head. Raito stepped beside him and peered into the dim chamber beyond. Metal desks were arranged in neat rows, each topped with what looked like helmets lined with needle-like electrodes. Some helmets were cracked, stained brown. Transparent monitors flickered in the air above each station, displaying disorganized brainwave patterns like frantic seismograph readings.
As they turned to leave, the voice crackled again, this time distorted.
"…neural interface requires…uninterrupted…signal integrity…"
The lecture dissolved into static, replaced by a sound like distant, wet chewing.
The next corridor opened into a gallery lined with floating holograms. At first, the images were mundane: company advertisements boasting advances in neural networking. It almost looked like the other floors of Erebus— smiling employees wore metal implants like fashion accessories while slogans hovered beside them:
"Erebus Neurotech: Your Mind, Your Future."
"Experience Erebus: Life Without Boundaries."
But as they passed through the gallery, the images shifted. Now the holograms showed different figures: men and women in patient gowns standing against sterile backdrops, each with a thin black line drawn down the center of their foreheads — as though preparing for surgery. Their mouths moved in silent synchronization, but no sound came out. Instead, only the whispers from above, staticky and broken as always.
"Cognitive disruption threshold surpassed. Disconnection… incomplete. Dissociative aggression likely."
They moved on again, into another hall.
"What exactly were they doing in here?" Raito spoke through gritted teeth, wanting and at the same time not wanting to know.
"What they couldn't do elsewhere." came the answer, as blunt and precise as always "Illegal human experimentation, clearly."
As though to confirm L's point, the next room came up. Four chairs stood bolted to the floor in a neat semicircle, facing a central console. Dried straps dangled from the armrests. Above the chairs hovered a single holographic interface, faint blue lines forming a wireframe image of a human brain. The occipital lobes pulsed rhythmically.
L's eyes narrowed. "These chairs weren't for passive observation," he said. "They were immersion rigs." He gestured toward the floor, where faint grooves circled the base of each chair. "Neural synchronization chambers. Multi-subject interaction."
"Group mind experiments," Raito said flatly. "Why?"
L rubbed his wrist absently. "The applications are obvious: coordinated workforce management. Rapid information exchange. Possibly military." He gestured toward the console. "But they were likely unsuccessful."
"How do you know?"
"The chairs are mismatched." L tilted his head toward the closest seat. "Different models, varying electrode placements. This was a late-stage iteration. Desperate."
The hologram brain flickered. For an instant, the blue lines reformed into the shape of a human face—mouth open in a scream.
Raito swore under his breath.
They continued corridors twisted without logic. They passed doors sealed with biometrically locked panels, the scanners crusted with dried, dark residue. And rather than getting better, things seemed only to get worse: Further down the hall, they entered a chamber where organic matter spread across the ceiling like a fungal lattice. Transparent tendrils dangled toward the floor, swaying as if scenting the air. L knelt beside a console, wiping a gloved finger across the surface.
"Artificial mycelium," he muttered, examining the translucent film clinging to his glove. "Likely part of a neural relay system."
Raito touched the wall experimentally. It quivered beneath his palm. The movement was subtle but unmistakable: a slow, pulsing contraction, as if the structure itself was breathing.
A faint voice crackled through the walls.
"Integration…incomplete… consciousness integrity compromised…"
They left that room quickly.
Time blurred into a monotonous rhythm of exploration and retreat. The corridors repeated themselves in impossible patterns; twice they passed what appeared to be the same door labeled Cognitive Encoding Lab, though they hadn't doubled back.
The lecture voice returned occasionally, always monotone, always clinical:
"First phase: Neural Upload. Second phase: Hybrid Construction. Third phase: Neural transference. An eternal mind needs an eternal body. Eternity is unforgiving — and we must be unforgiving in return."
Raito stopped, the last statement giving him pause.
Then— Static again.
"Unforgiving, eh?" he muttered, searching for L's eyes in the darkness.
L was already looking back at him, his eyes loaded.
Raito said nothing, he didn't need to. Just turned forward and started walking again, secretly glad that the environment was forcing their shoulders to brush as they moved. L was soft, a familiar weight, human. A tether to something real. The only thing here that wasn't wrong.
The only thing here that saw things as he did.
A security terminal glitched beside a warped steel door, its screen displaying unreadable graphs. L kneeled to crouch beside it, tapping at the keyboard. The machine responded with distorted commands in a language that twisted itself into gibberish before disappearing. He wiped his hands on his trousers and moved on without comment.
Raito exhaled, slow and measured. His fingers slipped into his pocket, grazing the smooth surfaces of Sentinel and Ascend. His stomach twisted. If push came to shove…if it was impossible for L to unlock doors or find information…if they were attacked by machines…would he need to use them again? Would they have a choice?
Nevertheless, despite the constant trepidation rising in him, he made sure not to stop moving.
And neither did the walls.
A shudder passed through them as he and L went by—subtle, but unmistakable. Small, irregular openings lined the surface. Some remained slack, undisturbed. Others pulsed softly, their wet, membranous lips trembling. As if breathing.
As he looked at them, one of them sighed.
Raito froze, the sound a bit too human.
He hadn't meant to. But something about it—the heat of the breath, the faint click of something shifting beneath—set his nerves on edge.
His heartbeat slowed. He stared too long. Was it…an actual human mouth; stitched into the wall?
L's hand closed around his wrist.
A sharp tug.
Raito barely had time to react before L pulled him forward, yanking him out of stillness.
His pulse hammered in his ears. He felt L's grip tighten as they moved faster, as fast as the dark narrow space would allow, toward the yellow light at the end.
The air again was thick with stale blood and machine oil, laced with something sour and chemical, something that clung to the tongue. The glow from embedded circuits was dimmer here, uneven, as though the walls were worn and lifeless. A haze of dust and organic residue clung to every surface, soaking into the deep gashes in the workstation tables.
The binary static on the sound waves had lost its rigid precision, its structured bursts of data transmission.
Now, it bled.
A child's voice, soft, tentative.
"…Mama?"
A second, older—calm, but edged with something desperate.
"Hush, love. Close your eyes. It'll be over soon."
Then—
A mechanical voice, overriding both.
"Neural transference incomplete. Subject unstable."
L didn't slow, but Raito saw the tension in his shoulders.
At the center of the room was a long worktable. At first glance, it looked like a pile of discarded equipment, twisted steel, fractured plating, ruined circuitry. But as they neared, the details sharpened—
It wasn't machinery.
The limbs lay scattered across the table, haphazard and wrong, as though they had been discarded mid-assembly. Some were still fully human—arms severed at the shoulder, hands curled into half-formed gestures, fingers bent as if still reaching for something. Others were hybrid, skin stretched thin over exposed wiring, joints reinforced with fused metal and tendon. A few were entirely machine, but even those had a grotesque organic mimicry to them—nails where there shouldn't be, tendons sculpted from thin, fibrous mesh.
Raito's stomach turned. He pulled away first, breaking toward the workstation tables.
Something—anything—usable.
Behind him, L moved to the terminal, fingers hovering just short of the screen.
Raito kept his focus on the tables. The debris was thick here, tools scattered across bloodstained surfaces, long jointed scalpels and rusted forceps. He ran a hand over the clutter, pushing aside pieces of discarded components until his fingers met something solid.
Half-buried beneath a collapsed tray—
A plasma cutter.
The handle was worn, the weight heavy in his grip. He thumbed the activation switch, and a thin, crackling arc of energy snapped into place, humming steadily.
Not a gun. But it would do.
Across the room, L exhaled sharply.
Raito glanced over, still sorting through the workstation debris. "What?"
"This screen…" L tilted his head slightly, pupils narrowing as he looked at the screen's output. Lines of waves, like a needle of an earthquake tracker, were formulating on it.
"It's… not running on binary." His voice was soft, almost a murmur, like he wasn't entirely speaking to Raito. "Not a memory cache. Not storage. It's running brainwaves."
A pause. Then—
He tilted his head slightly, and the waves on the interface tilted with him.
Raito stilled.
L barely breathed. He adjusted his stance again—and the interface followed.
"…It takes commands from thought.," he muttered. His fingers flexed over the surface, hesitation in the tension of his hands.
Raito felt his pulse quicken. His grip tightened on the plasma cutter. "Step away from it."
L hesitated, eyes still flicking over the interface, but obeyed.
As soon as he pulled his fingers back—
The terminal went dark.
Like it had been watching.
Raito exhaled, forced himself to move again. Damn L and his penchant for experimenting with everything in this damn place. He looked around, needing something practical to do.
He turned his attention back to the scattered equipment, searching for anything remotely usable—his fingers brushing against cold, discarded instruments, overturned trays, broken tools—
Then.
A laser gun. Small, lightweight. Functional.
He picked it up. Looked good — the beam was not very large, it was designed for surgical usage. But still, pretty lethal. He turned to give it to L—
But L was no longer at the terminal.
Raito spun immediately, seeing he'd drifted to the far side of the room, standing before a containment cylinder.
Something was inside.
Raito's steps slowed as he approached. The liquid within was pale blue, faintly luminescent. Suspended in its center—
A human head.
The skin was untouched, unnaturally preserved, the features eerily smooth. The eyes were open, but unseeing...glassy. Dead.
L was already scanning, his touchpad hovering over the interface next to it. The display glitched, completely unresponsive.
Raito felt something cold settle in his spine.
L kept looking ahead as Raito reached him. "Looks like an attempt at neural upload," he said. "Probably an earlier one."
"Was it—" Raito glanced at the head. "Successful?"
"Unclear." L tilted his head slightly, gaze unreadable.
Raito didn't like that answer.
He forced his eyes away from the tank, holding out the laser gun. "Here."
L took it, fingers curling automatically around the grip. As he adjusted it in his hand, testing the release button, a sudden sound of static came from behind them — the terminal with those disturbing 'brainwaves' had flickered back to life, its screen booted up on its own.
The images were distorted at first, lines of corrupted data washing over it in bursts of static. Then—
A human figure came into focus.
Strapped down. Thrashing.
Mechanical arms hovered over the patient's skull, movements too precise, too sterile to belong to a surgeon. Instruments descended, metal prongs clamping onto the flesh just beneath the scalp.
Then, without warning—
The machine cut into the skull.
The man's screams filled the room.
No anaesthesia. No mercy. No hesitation in the cold, calculating precision of the arms as they peeled back the bone and inserted thin, glistening data ports directly into the brain matter.
Raito's stomach turned. His grip on the laser gun tightened.
L had gone rigid. His pupils tracked the video with an unreadable intensity, his hands curled around the laser gun with white-knuckled stillness.
The man's voice cracked between wet, choked sobs.
"Please, no—"
A mechanical voice overrode them.
"Cognitive deviation detected. Additional corrections required."
More instruments descended.
The man convulsed, muscles locking in a grotesque, full-body spasm.
Raito tore his gaze away. He turned to L. "So she was ripping out people's—"
Then he froze.
Behind L, in the cylinder—
The head was smiling.
At L's back.
It was subtle—the faint curl at the corner of its preserved lips, the malicious slowness of it, as though it was aware that it was being noticed.
"Hm?" L asked, still distracted by the video feed.
Raito didn't think.
His body reacted first.
His free hand caught L at the waist, pulling him over and away from the containment unit. L stumbled slightly against him, surprised, but didn't protest as Raito's grip shifted, pushing him forward by the small of his back—away from the thing and towards the door.
Satisfied with L walking away, Ratio turned to the cylinder again, where the head, still smiling, was now watching him.
It hadn't moved, its expression unchanged. But there was something too patient in the way its glassy eyes remained locked onto him.
Abomination.
He glared at it, fingers flexing over the plasma cutter.
It would take seconds. A simple arc of energy, one clean slice, and he could erase whatever parasitic awareness still clung to that thing's remains.
His breathing slowed, adrenaline surging in his veins. But then—
"Raito-kun?"
L's voice, steady. Already moving.
Raito exhaled. His grip on the plasma cutter didn't ease. His eyes lingered a bit more.
But after a moment, he turned away, finally, and followed L through the door.
That was probably the first one — the first indication that the situation here was every bit as bad as they'd imagined — possibly worse. Without access to any database or ability to read computer systems, it was tough to say what kind of experiments Angel had been conducting, exactly; and whether it had been only Angel or someone else helping her before she 'took over'... but one thing was patently clear: the activities were definitely related to uploading human consciousness into machines…and there had definitely been invasive, painful human experimentation involved.
The next time they encountered one was in another large chamber. Four cylindrical tanks stood in a semicircle, thick cables extending from their bases into the floor. The glass was cloudy but not opaque; faint silhouettes floated inside, limbs contorted unnaturally. The tanks were rimmed with corroded electronic plates, each labeled with glowing alphanumeric codes.
"Specimens," L murmured, stepping closer. His eyes tracked the cables. "The neural implants interface with the chamber's floor. Probably to measure synchronized brain activity."
Raito approached one of the tanks. The figure inside was an adult male, his torso marbled with synthetic muscle fibers that stretched beneath pale skin. Delicate tendrils extended from his scalp, branching into the walls of the tank like fungal roots. The man's mouth hung slightly open, his eyes closed.
Raito expected them to open at any minute.
He felt movement under his feet and jerked backward immediately, causing L's head to snap over.
A wet, skinned thing scuttled past his foot, the size of a rat but unmistakably wrong. It was fleshless, muscle and sinew fused with twitching circuitry, tiny metallic filaments laced through raw, exposed tendons. Its sightless head flicked toward the nearest wall—then, in a sudden, jerking movement, it shoved itself inside.
The wall took it.
A soft, sucking sound. The opening sighed. Then it sealed shut.
Raito exhaled through his teeth.
"Let's go." he simply said, unwilling to admit just how uneasy he felt.
The hallway beyond the tank room descended slightly. The walls became smoother again but grew more translucent. Behind the tissue, thin metallic wires twisted and coiled like metallic nerves. Every so often, a circular membrane—similar to an eardrum—throbbed softly within the wall. Raito did his best not to look too closely again, focusing as much as possible on the reassuring softness of the body beside him.
They passed a side room with an open door. Inside, the floor was covered in a viscous, pale fluid. Half-submerged in the liquid was what looked like…a human skull embedded with metallic circuits. The bone surface twitched sporadically.
L crouched beside the doorway. He didn't cross the threshold.
"Looks like cerebrospinal fluid," he muttered, causing Raito to curl his lip in disgust. He'd suspected as much — unfortunately. He lifted his laser gun and tapped the stock against the damp floor, testing the viscosity. The surface rippled and glistened. "These implants..." He squinted at the skull's embedded mesh. "They didn't just monitor brain activity. They tried to rewrite it."
"Successfully?" Raito asked.
"Hard to tell. But judging by the state of the…subject…" L gestured toward the twitching skull. "...not well."
Raito as he watched it. "And where the hell did they find all of their 'subjects', I wonder." he muttered, pursing his lips "Bet their release forms didn't account for this."
"You never know." L's voice had the tiniest tilt of something, as if he was playing devil's advocate on purpose "They may have worked on cadavers."
Raito smirked slightly, but it was bitter "Oh, I do know."
The voice interrupted them again, this time louder:
"Cognitive relay stability compromised. External synchronization unavailable. Abort… abort… abort."
The words dissolved into static.
"C'mon" he said, getting a stale taste from it all. He waited to feel L's sleeve against his before walking onward.
The next corridor was lined with floor-to-ceiling glass panels, most fogged with condensation. But one pane – one pane was clear enough to reveal what lay beyond: an observation room containing small chairs and a tangle of colorful wires suspended from the ceiling. Toys lay scattered across the floor—wooden blocks, plastic animals, puzzles with cartoonish faces.
The walls inside the room were padded and scrawled with deep, jagged lines, as though scratched by fingernails.
"A nursery?" Raito said, a tone of disbelief and disgust at once.
"Not a nursery," L said softly. His voice was devoid of emotion, yet his hands gripped the edge of the window. "A playroom."
Raito followed his gaze. One of the puzzles had been set aside on a low table. Its image showed a stylized human brain with color-coded regions. Beside it lay a small plastic doll. Its eyes had been replaced with tiny black lenses.
"Cadavers don't need playrooms." he stated, the words thick and bilious in his mouth.
The speaker overhead crackled again, as though wanting to enrage him:
"Cognitive integration incomplete. Subject group terminated."
They left, quickly.
The place grew stranger and more irrational the deeper they went. The corridors seemed to fold on themselves; at one point, they passed a wall-mounted terminal with scrolling brainwave activity only to encounter it again twenty minutes later, though they hadn't turned back.
The organic tissue grew thicker. Along one passage, tendrils dangled from the ceiling, dripping milky fluid into floor vents.
The lecture resumed:
"Neural network adaptation requires constant recalibration. Overstimulation may result in hallucinations, dissociation, and eventual collapse of identity integrity."
The voice paused.
Then it added, in a slightly different tone:
"Do you understand?"
Both of them stopped.
Raito glanced at L. L had gone rigid, his eyes fixed on the wall speaker. His fingers flexed against the barrel of his laser gun.
The speaker hissed, dissolving into static.
Raito turned forward and moved without further ado, satisfied to feel the tug of L's hand appear automatically on the back of his jacket, sticking to him in the half-light.
The tunnel's ending, anyway. He thought with relief, seeing the blue-green hue coming from the chamber ahead. If the…'voices' were actually aware and liable to attack them…he didn't want to stick around.
"…hello? is someone there…?"
Raito ignored them. His focus had already zeroed in on the shapes he could make out beyond the door. Glowing tanks of some sort. With objects inside, he realized, his stomach twisting.
The moment they stepped into it, the voices finally fell quiet — but upon realizing the new sound that had taken their place, Raito wasn't so relieved anymore.
The sound of breathing — loud and diffuse, as though it was literally coming from the walls again.
The chamber was vast, larger than any lab they'd seen before. The walls curved seamlessly, forming a biomechanical amphitheater, its design too fluid to have been built by human hands alone. A soft, wet pulse shuddered through the air, a rhythm that matched neither a heartbeat nor a machine.
The glow here was different—a sickly turquoise, viscous and uneven, pulsing like something alive. The walls loomed too smooth, too black, curved into unnatural seamless arcs. The air was thick with the smell of blood—not fresh, but old, stagnant, clotted into the walls themselves. The floor was slick in places, dried fluids cracked underfoot, streaked across twisted metal spines jutting from the ground like bones.
And then—
The bodies.
Not like the ones before. Not like any they'd seen before.
At the center of the chamber, a single terminal was waiting, glowing steadily with streams of legible text. Unlike the others, this one seemed comprehensible; functional.
L was already moving toward it.
Raito barely acknowledged it. His attention was locked on the containment tanks.
They lined the chamber's edges, tall, fluid-filled, thick with a translucent gel that suspended the bodies inside like larvae trapped in amber — and they were each more horrific than the last. Caught in a mix of amazement and morbid fascination, he approached them; stunned.
Behind him, it seems L had finally found a terminal that was accessible. His eyes were already scanning the screen in record speeds and digesting data, reporting his discoveries live—a steady, analytical stream of information, complementing and rationalizing the irrational horror Raito was seeing.
"Looks like they took them from the streets — at least in the beginning." L murmured. "Sex workers. Homeless. Orphans." A pause "The classics."
Raito barely heard him.
The tank before him was fogged at the edges, but the figure inside was still visible enough. Female. Young. Her skin smooth, pale, preserved in a way that felt too perfect — except for her eyes. They were gone, replaced by optic fibers. And her mouth…her mouth…was open, with what looked like a huge cable stream jammed inside — all the way down her throat and possibly into her body. He watched her hands floating, loose at her sides—
Until they twitched.
A tiny spasm, subtle, involuntary.
Raito's stomach turned. He stepped away from the tank immediately.
"Later they graduated to company employees. Possible whistleblowers — liabilities…apparently even people the CEO didn't particularly like."
"So this was all sanctioned?" Raito blurted, head glancing over momentarily as he walked to the next.
"Obviously." L said, making Raito grit his teeth lightly. "Looks like he was the leader — and Schaunhauer his first lieutenant. The place was operational long before Angel went haywire."
"And what made her go haywire, I wonder…" Raito muttered as he looked into the next tank.
It was worse.
The figure inside was partially fused into its containment unit. The spine extended outward, threading itself into a biosignal screen. His mouth was open, lips slightly parted, caught in the shape of a murmur too soft to hear.
"They was testing permanent transference," L muttered. "Making humans conduits. Interfaces, rather than just hosts."
"Interfaces…" Raito echoed, looking at another body.
This one was grafted directly into the wall.
"Interfacing with what?" he asked, observing it with increasing horror.
Its back had split open, nerve endings stretched outward like roots, tangled into the structure itself. His optic nerves had also been removed, replaced with fiber-optic cables, blinking erratically, transmitting data like an organic server
"Machines. Trying to merge them entirely. Make it so there was no difference between body and machine. They wouldn't even know where one ended and the other began."
Raito swallowed back bile.
Another.
A torso.
Only a torso.
It was wired directly into a control panel, lungs still expanding and contracting, somehow still breathing. Its jaw moved, lips forming words that would never be spoken.
Above it, the monitor flickered.
Raw binary streamed across the screen, as though it was talking.
Raito exhaled, ragged, and forced himself to turn away.
"And what stopped them?" he asked absently, if a bit sarcastically, knowing that — rather than stopping — what had happened when Angel went crazy was probably worse.
He walked near the next unit, wondering what atrocity he'd be faced with next, when he furrowed his brow at L's lack of answer. Only then did he realize that, for some time now, L had stopped talking.
He turned toward the terminal, to see what the other was doing, and his frown deepened.
L seemed a bit…rigid.
His back was to him, motionless. Too still. His shoulders seemed tight, his arms frozen at his sides, his head tilted back just slightly — a rather strange way to look at a screen.
Raito took a step closer. Stepped to the side a bit. Squinted.
And froze.
The screen.
It wasn't a screen. Not anymore.
It was a face.
Human skin stretched over glass, fused at the edges, thin and too pale, the features barely distinguishable from the terminal itself. Its mouth was open, lips cracked, slack—
And something was extended from its mouth: a thin, wet wire, glistening in the glowing light.
Buried in L's forehead.
Raito's breath vanished.
"L!"
He closed the distance in seconds, his heartbeat a violent, erratic hammer against his ribs.
From up close it was worse; L's eyes had rolled back, nothing but white visible beneath his lashes. His mouth hung open, a thin string of drool slipping down his chin. His body remained upright, suspended by something unseen, his weight shifting unnaturally, as if he were being held in place by invisible strings.
Raito's pulse roared in his ears. He looked at the wire. Thin. Delicate. Embedded directly into L's brain.
What should he do? Pull it? Cut it?
Fuck!
And if he did — would it kill him?
And if he didn't— would it be too late?
What should he do?!
His grip tightened on the plasma cutter. His hands shook. He had to decide. He had to decide.
The terminal was flickering, the entire chamber shuddering, hateful whispers swelling up in excitement.
And then, just as his mind was churning desperately in rising desperation, L's hands moved.
Not to the wire —To his own throat.
Raito barely had time to react before those fingers locked in.
His own hands shot out, grabbing desperately at L's wrists, trying to pry them away—
Too strong.
L's grip tightened, fingers digging into his own windpipe with unnatural force.
"L—STOP!"
Nothing.
His body was loose everywhere else, but his hands—his hands were choking him.
Raito's breath hitched, panic spiking through him like white heat. His grip slipped, his arms burning with the strain of trying to wrench L's hands away from his own throat.
L's breath stuttered—a wet, choking sound. His face was still slack, blank, pale.
Raito snapped his head up.
The thing on the screen was there, its stretched leather-thin face staring back at him, unmoving. The flickering of the terminal cast horrific shadows over the taut, warped features.
Raito's teeth bared.
"Let. Him. Go." He grit out, staring right into 'its' eyes, knowing 'it' could hear him very well.
For a long, awful moment, nothing happened.
Then—
It moved.
Its lips changed; they widened.
Like that damn head before. It was smiling. Just smiling.
Raito froze.
Then—
"God damn you!"
The plasma cutter was in his hand before he'd even thought about it.
He lunged.
The arc of energy sliced into the face. .
A scream.
Not from L.
From the terminal.
The face twisted, mouth contorting open, wide, wide, too wide, screaming as the severed wire recoiled into its mouth like a leech retreating into flesh. The screen rolled back from the force, flipping over to reveal how it had fooled them: it was double-sided — the front side a normal display, the backside this horrid monster.
L's body lurched backward, finally released from suspended animation. His hands were still locked around his own throat.
Raito pulled him free, dragging him back from the console—then tackled him down to the floor, with an impact that made the surrounding tanks shake.
"L!"
Knees pinning him down in a straddle, Raito's wrenched his wrists apart, the fingers still stiff and unyielding. He saw a piece of metal still on L's forehead, as though that thing had deposited something; a piece of cable or whatever. It was there embedded, twitching in L's forehead like a buried parasite.
Raito wrenched it free, and flung it away — far, far away, somewhere in the dark recesses of the chamber. It left a circular wound behind on his head — bloodless, as though scorched — but all traces of it seemed gone.
L's body arched, spine bowing off the floor in a violent seizure-like spasm. A breathless, soundless reaction—then stillness.
Too still.
Raito's pulse pounded in his ears.
"L—L, wake up!"
Raito shook him by the shoulders. Slapped him lightly across the face.
No response.
Raito's hands shot forward, clasping both sides of L's head, pulling it up slightly and bringing his own lower. His breath shook, eyes desperately searching L's for signs of awareness.
"L—fuck, come on—"
Raito shook him again lightly, his forehead almost brushing L's, his own breath mingling with L's shallow, uneven exhale.
Still nothing. L didn't respond, just lay there like a ragged doll.
A second stretched too long. Raito gritted his teeth. What the hell was he gonna do? If L didn't wake up soon, then—
Then, in a split second—
L's hands snapped up.
Inhumanly fast.
They latched onto Raito's wrists, fingers digging in like a vice.
Raito's breath caught.
L's eyes were still rolled back.
The grip didn't ease.
For a moment—Raito didn't know if he was waking up or attacking.
Then—slowly, slowly—the pressure faded.
L's fingers twitched—
Then relaxed a bit, at the same time as the whites of his eyes receded, black pupils rolling back down, returning.
Their gazes locked. Sharp. Aware.
Neither of them spoke.
Neither of them moved.
They just stayed there interlocked, Raito's jaw hanging lax, breathing hoarsely, his hands clasping L's head and L's fingers curled around Raito's wrists — as though uncertain, lingering. They searched each other's eyes, as though asking and answering the same question at the same time — Are you here? Their breath synced, unconsciously falling into the same slow, uneven rhythm.
As moments stretched, Raito didn't dare move. A mix of relief and panic simmered in his chest, making his heart throb painfully as he stared at the black eyes. Was he normal? Was he ok? Something struck through Raito's heart, some kind of sharp, weird terror feeling unlike any other fear he'd felt before — a different kind of fear that he couldn't quite explain. He kept looking into those eyes, searching, unable to understand what the hell was happening — outside him or inside.
Finally, slowly, he felt L's fingers loosening, uncurling.
The black eyes blinked. Slowly, woozily, but they blinked — and kept looking at him. Still here.
Raito let out a breath he didn't know he'd been holding. He let his own hands loosen, not realizing how strong the hold had been that he'd kept on L's head. He watched, relieved, as L kept it in place — not letting it fall like dead weight. Only slowly, very slowly, did he let it drop to the ground, lying supine and taking deep breaths, clearly coming back to himself.
Raito watched him for a bit, satisfied with the way his chest seemed to rise and fall normally, the way his eyes remained aware, blinking quietly. Turning his head lightly, Raito sent a venomous glare back at the screen terminal. Sure enough, the face was there again; it had flipped back and was watching them, its expression now different:
Hungry.
Raito's lip curled.
Then he moved.
He grabbed L's wrist and yanked him up. Hard.
L gasped slightly, still recovering, but Raito didn't let go. His fingers dug in, unyielding, pulling him up and dragging him along without hesitation.
L stumbled along, dazed and still clearly out of it, but unresisting. Raito's gaze flickered between checking on him and on the terminal, still unchanged.
He pulled L harder, ignoring the small sounds of strain coming from the other man. He didn't care; he kept pulling — past the center of the room, past the containment tanks with the twitching bodies, over the cyborg limbs strewn on the floor, all the way across to the door opposite the one they had entered.
When he came close to it he slowed his pace, squinting to make out what was there. Looked like all the previous corridors they'd passed — the same glowing nerve-vines on the walls, the same too-human openings breathing out stale air.
He threw a glance back at L, watching the black eyes blink again, then come up to meet him — still dazed. Raito clenched his jaw, hand staying on L's time, as they entered the dark tunnels, he didn't let go.
The labyrinth swallowed them whole. Step after step, hour after hour, they moved through its endless corridors, their footsteps muffled by the faint, sticky squelch of the floor beneath. The walls, once lined with warped metal panels, were now slick and membranous—dark, glistening surfaces riddled with shallow openings that pulsed faintly, like breathing mouths. The air carried a metallic tang, sharp and sterile, with a sour undertone that clung to the throat.
Raito led the way, plasma cutter raised, its faint, whining hum a thin thread of reassurance against the oppressive quiet. His other hand gripped L's with unwavering determination, the leather of his glove slippery with sweat. L had been... off since the incident with the terminal—pausing mid-step, gaze drifting to unseen points in the distance. His eyes sometimes flicked upward as if hearing something just out of reach. The behavior wasn't constant, but it was consistent enough to gnaw at Raito's nerves. He squeezed the hand in his grasp harder than necessary, seeking comfort in the warmth of L's pulse beneath the glove.
The whispers were louder now. What had once been an indistinct murmur now resolved into clearer fragments—half conversations, disjointed commands, and that one voice. Always that one voice. Male, German-accented, sterile:
"Cognitive layering requires precise modulation. Overstimulation leads to neural cascade failure… Residual awareness persists in 3.6 percent of cases."
A pause. Then a burst of static, followed by binary strings cascading into nonsense.
Raito's teeth ground together. He hated that voice. Hated the lecture-like cadence, the calm detachment with which it described grotesque procedures as casually as arithmetic.
They kept walking.
The corridor shifted into a sloping descent, and the scenery deteriorated with it. What had been warped remnants of sterile lab infrastructure gave way to glistening tissue striations, as though they were walking down the throat of a colossal creature. The air grew denser. The soft lighting overhead pulsed in time with a faint vibration beneath their feet—a heartbeat that wasn't theirs.
They passed rooms that had once been legitimate laboratories; L noted the discolored outlines of equipment mounts and recognizable symbols etched into the cracked flooring. But the facilities had been overtaken, consumed. Equipment merged with organic growths, screens embedded like tumors into the walls, their displays glitching with abstract brainwave patterns.
"Still not a nursery?" Raito's lip curled, pausing by a lab where rows of empty cribs stood covered in dust. The cribs had metal bracings on either side—restraints for tiny limbs.
L studied the surroundings, eyes narrowing. "Cognitive enhancement trials. Possibly pediatric applications. Early-stage brainwave mapping." His gaze traveled along the floor, tracing patterns of tubing now lined with translucent, vein-like growths. "The architecture suggests an early prototype lab. Human-centered research, later overtaken by…whatever this is."
Raito didn't respond. He didn't want to imagine the timeline.
They moved on.
In another chamber, mechanical arms hovered mid-motion, snipping at empty air. The scalpel tips were stained dark brown. Beside them, a monitor displayed a still image: a man seated at a desk, smiling at the camera. The image flickered, and the man's skull was split open, metal coils protruding from the exposed gray matter. The caption beneath read:
"Neuro-Cognition Project: Neural Bridge Interface. Experiment 076."
Raito tightened his grip on the plasma cutter. They moved on.
The corridor floor softened beneath their steps, the surface pliant and warm. Raito could feel it through the soles of his boots—like decomposing muscle, slick and unsteady. The walls exhaled in rhythmic waves, expanding and contracting with each step. L stopped once to shine his laser at the organic texture; thin, translucent layers of tissue revealed embedded circuitry beneath.
The whispers persisted.
"Neural tissue compromised."
"Identify subjects: viable. Proceed with caution."
"Skin integrity: diminishing."
They passed another room where something twisted and vaguely humanoid was spread across the ceiling. The torso dangled downward, vertebrae stretched taut like a grotesque chandelier. The chest cavity rose and fell in shallow, mechanical breaths. L ducked beneath it without comment. Raito hurried after him, pulse racing.
The next chamber was lined with wall-mounted hologram emitters. At first, the projections were mundane: corporate meetings, presentations of exoskeletons, sterile demonstrations of robotic limbs performing surgical tasks.
The images shifted.
A woman sat at a desk, smiling as a thin, metal probe burrowed into her temple. Her smile didn't falter, even as the other side of her skull crumpled inward.
Another projection revealed a boardroom. Executives seated around a glass table, nodding in silence. As Raito and L moved further in, the perspective shifted. The executives were fused to their chairs, their spines extending into the floor as if the furniture had grown through them. Their mouths moved soundlessly, eyes fixed ahead in blind servitude.
L stopped and pointed. "This isn't a simulation."
Raito followed his finger to a glitching timestamp in the hologram's corner. The date looped endlessly.
"It's real footage," L said softly.
Raito swallowed, a knot tightening in his chest. "Why would they display it like this?"
L tilted his head, staring at the frozen figures. His voice was quiet, almost dreamlike.
"It's not them who display it."
Raito stiffened. The words sank like ice in his veins.
He didn't respond. He didn't ask. He simply tightened his grip on L's wrist and walked away, pulling him with him.
They left the holograms behind, stepping into another corridor where the fleshy walls trembled with every footstep. The German voice returned, calm and unyielding:
"Consciousness integrity compromised. Deviation detected. Initiating next phase."
Neither of them said a word.
The next corridor stretched ahead, narrow and damp, its walls bulging inward as if trying to swallow them whole. The air grew thick, dense, pressing against their lungs with every shallow breath. The pulsing heartbeat from the wire lights above slowed into an irregular rhythm, thudding through the structure's sinewy frame.
A whisper crackled through the static. Faint. Fragmented.
"…the efficiency of thought over language…"
Raito ignored it. He was used to the voices by now: endless layers of distorted conversation, overlapping like corrupted data streams.
"…do you feel that? The neural lattice is stabilizing…"
The whisper shifted. Distorted wetly, like flesh being stirred in a vat.
"…so many at once…so much data…"
Raito's muscles coiled instinctively. The voice didn't sound like the usual system rambling. There was something sharper about it—something aware.
Then, out of nowhere, a different voice. A voice he knew.
"You always felt different, didn't you?"
Raito froze mid-step. His heart slammed into his ribs.
That wasn't random system chatter. That was her. Angel. And not in the fragmented glitch she usually used. This was direct. Intentional.
He turned sharply, eyes snapping to L.
L stood still. Limply. His head tilted back slightly, mouth half-open, gaze locked on the ceiling. His breathing was shallow.
"Don't you think it's strange," the voice cooed, silky and cold, "how you always felt closer to computers than people?"
Raito's pulse spiked into panic.
"L." He tugged on the man's wrist.
L didn't move. His pupils were dilated, fixed on some unseen point overhead.
"All those stupid, naive, illogical people…"
Raito swore under his breath and yanked harder, pulling L forward. The other man stumbled into his chest, nearly falling. Raito caught him and steadied him, gripping his shoulders.
"Oi." he growled, voice low and urgent.
The black eyes blinked once. Slowly. And then again. L's focus returned like a lens snapping into place. His breath shuddered as he recalibrated, and without being told, his free hand grasped the back of Raito's jacket, gripping tightly.
Raito exhaled and turned to walk, dragging L with him. The hand on his jacket anchored him. Kept them tethered to each other. Kept them tethered to here.
The hallway eventually ended at another intersection. They picked the left branch at random. Then the right. Another left.
Hours blurred past. Or maybe it was minutes. Time had no meaning down here; the walls shifted and breathed, and the corridors seemed to fold back into themselves. They passed through labs with shattered equipment and scattered surgical instruments. They squeezed through ventilation ducts slick with mucus-like residue.
Sometimes, they heard things in the distance: metallic footsteps that stopped the moment they paused to listen. Sometimes, Raito thought he saw shapes flickering at the far edges of his vision—human forms moving just beyond the range of his flashlight. He never turned to look directly.
The plasma cutter in his hand felt heavier by the second. He kept it raised regardless.
L kept close the entire time. Always within reach. Always holding on.
But as the hours dragged on, Raito noticed the shifts: the way L's eyes flickered toward unseen points in the distance, or how his fingers occasionally flexed as though interacting with something intangible. He heard the faintest murmurs sometimes—L's lips moving soundlessly. Listening. Calculating.
Raito kept his grip tight and his pace steady. He didn't know where they were going. He didn't know if they were moving in circles.
All he knew was that stopping was not an option.
The corridor curved left, then right, then down into a shallow descent. The walls shifted in texture, the fleshy, veined surface gradually replaced by clusters of small embedded screens.
Each screen displayed an eye.
Hundreds of eyes lined the walls from floor to ceiling. Different shapes, sizes, colors—hazel, blue, gray, green—but all bloodshot, with pupils that contracted and expanded as the two of them passed.
Raito slowed, against his better judgment. The eyes followed him. When he stopped, every screen blinked. Simultaneously.
The sound was soft. Wet.
He clenched his jaw, forcing his muscles to relax, and turned his head slightly. "Are they—" he started.
But before he could finish, L's grip on his hand tightened—and then jerked him forward.
"Come on," L murmured. His voice was low, distracted. But his pace quickened.
That was another thing: L's responses weren't just delayed anymore. Sometimes they were disturbingly fast. Overly sharp. As though he was seeing something Raito couldn't.
"What?" Raito asked as they hurried through the corridor, eyes blinking all around them. He didn't expect an answer, and he didn't get one. L simply kept his face averted, pulling him forward.
As they stepped into the next hallway, the lecturer's voice crackled back to life, louder than before, repeating a phrase Raito dimly recognized:
"…once assimilation threshold is approached, human consciousness will resist. One may be tempted to mercy. But one must not give in. One must always remember: an eternal body needs an eternal mind. Eternity is unforgiving—and we must be unforgiving in return."
Raito's stomach knotted. He was starting to suspect who that voice may belong to, but he couldn't stereotype based on surnames. But if it was indeed the person he suspected…
He walked faster, took the lead again.
Until now, in every 'department' they'd passed through, there had always been a plan—tenuous, maybe. Lunatic, often. But still a plan. Something to follow, however faint.
Here, they had nothing. No escape route. No tactical objective. Just a labyrinth of horrors and the cold, primal imperative: survive.
And it was getting worse.
The walls were no longer just closing in—they were compressing, forcing the two of them closer together with each step. The membranous surface beneath their boots trembled, slick with viscous slime that clung like half-congealed saliva. L's grip on Raito's arm tightened; his fingers curled slightly inward, as though unaware of the movement.
Raito let him.
His attention locked on the path ahead, where the walls had begun to glow—not with sterile LEDs or sleek fiber-optic cables, but with something else entirely.
Translucent membranes stretched taut over the surface like skin drawn across bone. Beneath the film, amniotic sacs pulsed in uneven rhythm. Gelatinous bubbles bulged from the walls, distorting the shapes of the figures inside. Some were embryonic, skeletal limbs curled inward, their joints twitching with spasmodic reflexes. Others were more advanced—humanoid bodies suspended mid-formation, faces blurred beneath the gelatin. A few were completed: pale figures with too-smooth skin and hairless scalps, their limbs hanging limp.
One of them opened its eyes.
The sockets were perfectly human—deep brown irises framed by pale sclera—but they stared from a metal skull. And they were locked directly onto Raito.
His breath seized. He jerked backward before he consciously registered the movement.
"Fuck..." he hissed through clenched teeth. The plasma cutter was already in his hand, whining as it powered on. If these things moved—if any of them moved—he would sever them without hesitation.
Behind him, he heard the crackle of the surgical laser activating.
Good. L, at least, was still with him.
Raito's gaze dropped briefly to the floor. Pale blue veins pulsed beneath the surface like circuitry infused with organic nerve fibers. Light coursed through them in sluggish waves, traveling between walls and ceiling, like signals passing through synapses.
The realization crept coldly down his spine.
The entire facility—this twisted amalgam of flesh and machinery—wasn't just mimicking a body. It was one. Breathing. Watching. Listening.
How the hell did she build this place… he wondered. The words slipped out unbidden, a whisper of disbelief:
"How did she build this…?"
The answer came immediately, absolute and definitive:
"Skin was cultivated from harvested tissue samples," L said. His voice was low, clinical, disturbingly sure. "Spliced with polymer mesh for durability. Neural pathways were constructed from cortical cells extracted from early test subjects."
Raito's pulse skipped.
He didn't turn. Didn't speak. Just kept walking.
The unspoken question burned beneath his ribs:
How do you know that?
He told himself it was possible. L could've gleaned that information from the fragmented logs he'd accessed earlier. Sure. Possible. But…those logs had been incomplete. He'd seen them himself. And that kind of grotesque detail—the harvesting of tissue, the extraction of cortical cells—that didn't sound like corporate research records. That sounded like something… else. Something they wouldn't document officially.
Something the system itself might have whispered to L.
What else did it tell him?
And worse: what did it learn from him?
A faint noise interrupted the thought.
Wet movement.
Soft. Rhythmic. Coming from behind.
Scrape. Scrape. Skitter.
Raito's jaw tightened. He didn't turn around—just walked faster, gripping L's hand more tightly.
The fingers in his grasp responded with equal pressure, holding firm. Present. Grounded.
Still here. Still with him.
Not against him.
Not yet.
By the time they reached the next chamber, Raito's legs ached with every step. Hours of walking through that pulsing, organic maze had worn him thin, and the persistent adrenaline wasn't helping. Unlike the other 'undead' here, he was still subject to exhaustion—and hunger.
He dug through his pockets with one hand, searching for the last few energy tablets. His fingers brushed against crumpled gauze, the mini-flashlight, the cold metal of his multitool. No tablets. With a frustrated growl, he shifted to the other pocket, glancing around the new area while at it.
This place was different. No bodies. No shattered containment tanks leaking grotesque contents across the floor. No mangled experiments twitching in forgotten corners.
Instead, there were pods. Human-sized, perfectly aligned in neat rows. Dozens of them. Their surfaces were slick with the same glistening filth that coated the walls, and the pale blue glow emanating from within was soft, steady. Different from the crimson pulse of the rest of the labyrinth.
Raito squinted at the nearest pod. Blurred silhouettes shifted behind thick condensation. Something—or someone—was in there. Breathing.
His pulse quickened. He dug more aggressively through his pockets, knife slipping from his grasp before he swore, letting go of L's hand to kneel and retrieve it —
Where the hell are those tablets?
His fingers moved faster, sifting through the folds of his tactical vest. The endless compartments were great for gear, but a nightmare when packed haphazardly under stress. As he patted the inside pocket, his knuckles grazed something cold and sharp.
Not the knife.
His brow furrowed as he pulled it out, glinting faintly under the sterile light. The mirror shard.
He'd nearly forgotten it. The tiny sliver of reflective glass the elision boy had given him outside the building. "This might come in handy!" the kid had chirped with eerie certainty.
That moment felt like a lifetime ago—before Erebus, before Angel, before everything had gone to hell.
Raito turned the shard in his hand. It reflected the pods behind him in fragmented, distorted pieces. The boy had claimed it was important. And then there was Nora. She'd helped, hadn't she? Or had she lured them to this nightmare instead? Were the spirits guiding him...or setting traps?
A surge of paranoia rose in his chest.
Throw it away. Toss it before it turns into something worse.
His fist tightened around the shard. Then he inhaled through his nose and shoved it back into his jacket. The danger of supernatural glass seemed trivial compared to the cybernetic horrors all around them.
He resumed his search. After another thirty seconds, his fingers finally closed around the foil of the tablets. He exhaled with relief—
—and froze.
L wasn't beside him.
His stomach dropped. His head snapped up, scanning the room with wide eyes.
"Where—" The word barely left his mouth before he spotted the other figure standing a few feet away. Relief rushed in—and was immediately replaced by dread.
L was standing in front of a terminal.
Raito surged forward, heart pounding.
L wasn't touching it. Wasn't leaning toward it. His arms hung limp at his sides. But his head tilted slightly, eyes locked on the flickering screen. His fingers twitched.
Raito didn't think. He lunged. His arm hooked across L's chest and yanked him backward.
"Get away from that." His voice came out sharp, furious. "You're not touching it."
L stumbled, but didn't resist. He didn't even react. He simply swayed in place as Raito maneuvered them away from the terminal, his eyes still fixed ahead like a moth hypnotized by flame.
His lips moved.
"The system doesn't need physical input." His voice was quiet. Detached. "In fact… it never did."
Raito's breath caught. His grip on L tightened.
The screen flickered again, scrolling rapidly as though unseen hands were typing.
"It functions through thought," L murmured. His head tilted again, his pupils blown wide.
Raito's stomach turned.
"You're not thinking at it, then. " he gritted out, stepping in front of L and blocking the terminal with his own body. "Quit looking at it."
The black eyes shifted to meet his, and it felt like watching a camera lens adjust focus. Slowly, L blinked. The tension in his posture eased.
"Good," Raito muttered. His hand shot to his vest, fingers closing around the foil packet at last. He slapped one tablet into L's palm. "Take it. Now."
L didn't argue. He tipped his head back, throat moving as he swallowed the tablet dry. Raito watched the motion like a hawk.
The pods hummed softly around them. The blue light reflected off L's pale face, giving his skin a cold, lifeless sheen.
Raito ran a hand through his hair, jaw tight. "Okay. We're leaving."
He turned toward the nearest exit, dragging L along. But L's voice stopped him.
"The terminal has the capacity to deactivate the pods," he said.
Raito paused, slowly pivoting back. "Deactivate as in...kill them?"
L gave a slight nod.
Raito's gaze flicked toward the pods. The blurred figures behind the glass remained still, faint shadows barely visible. The thought of what they might look like unblurred made his skin crawl.
"Forget it," he said curtly. "We're not touching anything."
He started walking again.
"It can also activate them," L added softly.
The words sliced through the silence like wire.
Raito stopped mid-step. Turned his head.
L stood perfectly still. Eyes wide. Lips slightly parted.
The hum of the pods pressed into the silence.
"Why," Raito asked, voice low, "would anyone want to activate them?"
They locked eyes.
The pod lights cast faint reflections across the floor between them—pale blue lines that seemed to stretch like veins.
L's expression didn't shift.
"One wouldn't," he said at last. "But if one would...one could."
The sentence made Raito's pulse jump. The phrasing. The tone. The simple, unblinking calm behind the words.
Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong.
He swallowed, jaw tightening.
"You're done talking," he said flatly. His fingers latched onto L's wrist, dragging him toward the exit with far less care than before. L followed without resistance.
As they passed the pods, Raito didn't look back. He didn't want to see the way L's eyes lingered on the terminal.
And they did linger—just long enough for the screen to flicker one last time and display a single message:
COUNTDOWN INITIATED
The words vanished as the door hissed shut behind them.
A/N:
...
Not good, man. Not good at all.
Let me know what you thought - this part had a lot of horror and exposition, I know...but hopefully you are also enjoying how the horror situation is also affecting the characters...and how it's making them act (can we all just say MAAANHANDLIIING...) i can tell you, I sure am :D
To be continued in the next week or so in
Let me know your favorite moments and emotional reactions as you give me 4-5 days for the next chapter... Erebus VII: Bodies