Kairo's breath hitched in his throat as his eyes locked onto the far wall of the corridor. Embedded directly into the concrete, as if fused with the building's structural foundation, was the rotting torso of a monstrous entity.
It was dead, yet its sheer physical presence radiated a lingering, suffocating malice.
The entity's face was fixed in a permanent, agonizing contortion; its eyes were stripped of lids, stretched way too wide in a glassy, lifeless stare that seemed to look right through Kairo. The proportions of the creature defied natural anatomy—it was built way too tall, possessing an elongated, skeletal leg structure that contrasted sharply with its disturbingly normal, human-sized arms.
Dark, coagulated blood completely covered the floorboards and walls surrounding its perch, feeding patches of a thick, bioluminescent fungus that sprouted directly from its rotting, sloughing flesh. The stench of decay was heavy, filling the narrow space with a thick, humid odor.
Kairo stumbled backward, his leather boots skidding against the grime. "No way..." he whispered, his voice muffled beneath a heavy piece of equipment. "Is this... is this the most hardest part of the game? Are you kidding me?"
The oldest cousin, who was encased from head to toe in a vibrant, crimson-red hazardous costume, stepped forward. The thick visor of his helmet clicked as he turned to face Kairo. "Well, you brought this on yourself, man," he said, his voice crackling through a built-in radio comm. "You used a custom level setting before we booted up, so the system cranked the difficulty. It's even harder than the most hardest official level now."
The red-suited cousin chuckled, a hollow sound inside his helmet. "Besides, you were the one bragging earlier, saying that this game wasn't scary at all and that it was too easy for you. So, we're playing this specific mod to test who is actually gonna win."
Kairo instinctively reached up to scratch his jaw, but his fingers struck the hard, reinforced plastic of a hazardous high-level mask. It was clamped tightly over his face, sealing his nose and mouth with a heavy-duty air filtration unit. A digital readout in the corner of his visor blinked a stark warning: the atmospheric toxicity levels outside were absolute. If he panicked and removed the mask, the ambient spores would liquefy his lungs; he would die in the very next second.
Beside the red suit stood the blue hazardous suit guy. He was the red-suited cousin's brother—another one of Kairo's cousins. He shifted his weight, checking a digital device strapped to his forearm. "Well, get ready," the blue suit said, the static hiss of his mic cutting through the dark. "It's gonna start right now."
The fourth member of the group, wrapped in a dark green hazardous suit, didn't talk at all. He stood perfectly still, a silent shadow against the peeling wallpaper.
Before Kairo could ask for the specific layout of the custom mod, the ambient fluorescent buzzing amplified into a deafening roar. The yellow walls distorted, spinning into a vortex of hyper-saturated RGB lines. In the very next second, the entire group was violently teleported, their physical forms dissolving and reforming in the introductory room of the next level
The air in the new area was instantly colder. The blue hazardous suit guy tapped his forearm display rapidly, his tone shifting to irritation. "Oh, great. The yellow guy has been disconnected from the server. His ping spiked too high, and he couldn't join us for the level transition."
He shrugged, his blue-clad shoulders dropping. "Everybody leave. The lobby is glitched now."
With casual indifference, the cousins began to abort the session. One by one, the red, blue, and green suits began to flicker with digital artifacts. Before Kairo could even process the command, they just vanished out of thin air, leaving nothing behind but the empty space where they had stood.
"Wait! Don't leave!" Kairo screamed, his voice bouncing flatly off the walls. He slammed his fingers against the interface on his wrist, but the "Exit Menu" button was completely greyed out. The custom level had locked the parameters. He was the only one left behind. He couldn't leave at all.
Kairo stood entirely alone, breathing heavily into his high-level mask. He looked around, trying to identify his surroundings. The yellowed wallpaper of the previous maze was gone. He was standing in a vast, sterile concrete complex that looked like a cross between a decrepit hospital and a classified scientist research facility. The air smelled of alcohol, rust, and burnt electrical wiring. To his immediate right, a pair of heavy double doors led into a dark, sloped auditorium filled with empty plastic chairs.
Suddenly, a heavy, solid hand descended from behind, clamping firmly onto his shoulder.
Kairo's heart leaped into his throat. He spun around violently, his boots sliding on the slick floor, thoroughly terrified by the unexpected contact in the silence.
Through the thick glass of a red visor, his oldest cousin smiled back at him. "Are you alright, man?" the red suit asked, his voice returning to the comms channel.
Kairo let out a long, shuddering breath, nodding his head quickly. "Yeah... yeah, I am alright. You scared the life out of me. I thought you guys disconnected."
As he looked past the red suit, he realized the lobby hadn't closed—it had refreshed. Standing right behind the red and blue suits was a new player. Instead of the yellow suit guy who had dropped out, there was someone wearing a bright pink hazard costume.
Kairo blinked, looking at the blue suit. "Are you trolling him? Did you manually edit his character file to make his suit go from yellow to pink while he was trying to reconnect?"
The blue suit guy let out a loud, cracking laugh through the radio. "Yeah! It was me! I changed the hex code in the lobby settings right before the reload!"
"Nah, he didn't change anything," a sharp, feminine voice cut through the channel, coming directly from the pink suit. Kairo's cousin sister tilted her helmet toward him. "The yellow guy was way too scared to keep playing after that rotting wall monster, so I took the controller. I am playing instead of him now."
Before Kairo could respond to his sister, a massive electrical pop echoed from the ceiling. Every single fluorescent light fixture in the long corridor died instantly, plunging the facility into absolute, pitch-black darkness.
The silence lasted for a fraction of a second before three distinct beams of harsh white light cut through the gloom. The cousins had activated their flashlights.
Kairo felt a heavy, metallic weight materialize in his right palm. He looked down, shocked to see a tactical high-lumen flashlight sitting in his grip. It hadn't been there a moment ago; it had simply spawned into his inventory out of nowhere, reacting to the level's environmental trigger.
Instinctively, Kairo raised the beam, sweeping the light across the concrete floor, up the walls, and finally behind them.
The bright white circle of his flashlight illuminated a massive, towering shape standing less than five feet away. It was the exact same monster from the wall—but it was no longer dead, and it was no longer stuck in the concrete. Its elongated leg shifted with a wet, heavy crunch, and its wide, lidless eyes locked onto Kairo's visor.
The sheer absurdity of the horror caused Kairo's survival instincts to short-circuit. Instead of screaming, he let out a low, tired exhale through his mask filters. "Hey there, buddy..."
ROAAAAAAAR!
A deafening, blood-curdling scream erupted from the creature's throat, the acoustic force vibrating the glass of Kairo's helmet.
Before Kairo could even anticipate what was about to happen or formulate a movement plan, the entire group scattered in an instant. The red, blue, and pink suits didn't wait for a command—they were already running for their lives, their flashlights bouncing wildly against the distant ceilings as they bolted down separate split pathways.
Kairo exhaled sharply, his adrenaline spiking as the monster took a massive step toward him. Uh... he didn't catch me, Kairo thought, throwing himself to the right just as a massive, elongated arm swung through the space his head had occupied a millisecond prior.
The monster missed its target, its momentum carrying it forward until it slammed into a heavy security door. With an angry grunt, the beast began punching the metal door, denting the thick steel with its bare fists.
Kairo didn't waste the window. He turned on his heel and sprinted straight down the primary corridor, his flashlight beam slicing through the darkness. As he ran, he glanced briefly to his left through a series of reinforced glass observation windows. Inside the submerged green tanks, several gooey, half-formed monsters were writhing against the glass. The anatomical charts on the walls indicated they were human laboratory tests—subjects who had been systematically altered until they became mindless, shifting abominations.
Kairo exhaled in shallow, rapid bursts, his feet pounding against the concrete. Thank goodness it's just a game, he repeated to himself like a mantra, his mind desperately blocking out the terrifyingly realistic physics of the simulation. Thank goodness it is not real. I couldn't handle that reality even for a single second.
He rounded a sharp corner, only for his flashlight beam to smack directly into a solid, unyielding concrete wall. A dead end.
Kairo's eyes darted frantically across the small alcove. To his right, nestled against a row of ventilation pipes, was a single, rusted metal storage locker.
Without checking the interior, Kairo grabbed the handle, yanked the metal door open, and threw himself inside the cramped space. He pulled the door shut until the rusted latch clicked into place, leaving only a narrow vertical slit of visibility through the locker's ventilation louvers.
He switched off his flashlight, plunging his immediate surroundings into darkness. He held his breath, listening intently to the distant, heavy thud of elongated limbs scraping against the floorboards outside. He waited. One minute turned into two, then three, then five, his heart counting every single second in the dark.
The narrow metallic confines of the locker felt like a sensory deprivation chamber. For five agonizing minutes, Kairo remained completely frozen, his ears straining against the low, rhythmic hum of the facility's background ventilation. The high-level filtration mask pressed hard against his face, his shallow breaths fogging the interior glass before the moisture was swept away by the mechanical exhaust. Through the thin, vertical louvers of the locker door, the corridor outside remained a dark, shifting void of shadows.
Suddenly, a heavy, frantic set of footsteps echoed down the concrete hallway, accompanied by the erratic, bouncing beam of a tactical flashlight.
Kairo braced himself, his muscles locking up as the light washed directly over the rusted metal vents of his hiding spot. A figure wrapped in a bright blue hazardous suit sprinted into the alcove, skidding to a halt right in front of the locker.
The blue suit guy didn't hesitate. He grabbed the handle and yanked the door open, the metallic screech of the hinges cutting through the silence. He stared down at Kairo, his voice crackling through the comms with a mix of adrenaline and sheer gamer irritation. "Hey! Why are you camping here? You don't do that in a custom level, man! You're completely throwing the match!"
Kairo blinked against the sudden glare of the flashlight, rapidly adjusting his grip on his own light as he stepped out of the cramped metal box. His tactical instincts from his forgotten past briefly warred with his current reality, resulting in a completely casual, defensive excuse.
"Yeah... I just went to go for a quick pee break," Kairo muttered, wiping the sweat from his visor with the back of his gloved hand.
The blue suit guy rolled his eyes behind his faceplate, turning his beam back toward the primary hallway. "Whatever, man. I found an exit further down the sub-level. Follow me—everyone's already waiting for ya at the threshold. We need to clear this floor before the spawn rates multiply."
Kairo nodded quickly, his hand tightening around his flashlight. "Lead the way."
They both broke into a hard sprint, their heavy rubberized boots pounding against the slick, blood-stained concrete of the corridor. The beams of their flashlights danced wildly across the peeling wallpaper and the reinforced observation windows, where the gooey laboratory test subjects still writhed silently inside their green fluid tanks.
As they rounded the final corner leading into the expansive, high-ceilinged exit hall, Kairo suddenly skidded to a halt, his hand reaching out to grab the blue suit's shoulder.
A figure wrapped in a crimson-red hazardous costume was wandering aimlessly around the center of the hall, directly between them and the heavy steel security doors that marked the level's extraction point. The way the red suit moved was completely wrong—its limbs were stiff, its head tilting at a bizarre, unnatural angle as it paced back and forth in the flickering light.
Kairo's eyes widened. He shifted his weight, preparing to dart forward into the open space. He wanted to draw the aggro. He wanted to make the entity chase him, relying on his own agility to loop the monster around the pillar while the blue suit made a break for the console.
But before Kairo could take a single step, the blue suit guy violently yanked him back into the shadow of the corridor wall. "Wait! Not now!" his cousin hissed into the radio, his voice dropping into a tense whisper. "Look at the HUD markers. He is not Red."
Kairo stared at the figure through the gloom. The crimson suit looked identical to his oldest cousin's avatar, but there was no player nametag floating above its helmet. It was a skin-walker mechanic—a mimic designed by the custom mod to look like a friendly squad member to lure unsuspecting players into a trap.
"Yeah, I know," Kairo replied, a reckless, competitive grin forming behind his high-level mask. "But I wanted him to chase me anyway. If I pull him out of the center lane, you can sprint straight to the keypad."
"Yeah, you're right about the strategy, but not right now," the blue suit guy countered sharply, his finger pointing toward a digital readout on his forearm. "This level is a custom mod level. The pathing algorithms are completely broken."
As if proving his point, the red-clad mimic suddenly froze. It didn't turn toward Kairo or the blue suit. Instead, it let out a wet, distorted gurgle, turned on its heel, and began sprinting at terrifying speed in the opposite direction—heading straight back toward the level's original spawn point, completely ignoring the exit sector.
Kairo exhaled a sharp breath, his boots gripping the concrete. "Now's our chance! Go, go, go!"
Kairo and the blue suit burst from the cover of the corridor wall, putting all their weight into a dead sprint across the wide exit hall. The heavy steel extraction doors were looming closer, their green status lights blinking a mock invitation through the darkness.
But the custom mod hadn't exhausted its triggers.
Without a single audio cue or warning flare, the ceiling tile directly above the blue suit guy violently shattered into dust. A massive, horrifying creature dropped from the ventilation shaft. It was a grotesque, spider-like entity, its torso composed of a thick, translucent gooey mass that pulsated with a sickly green light. Elongated, segmented arachnid legs whipped out from its central core, pinning the blue suit directly to the concrete floor before he could even register the threat.
The attack was so sudden, so completely out of nowhere, that the blue suit guy's tough gamer exterior instantly evaporated. A high-pitched, piercing scream—sounding exactly like a terrified little girl—echoed through the comms channel, nearly deafening Kairo within his own helmet.
"Help! Get it off me! It's trapping my inputs!" the blue suit shrieked, his flashlight tumbling across the floor as the gooey spider monster began wrapping its translucent limbs around his hazard costume.
Kairo's head snapped to the right. Far across the hall, standing right beside a massive blue security door that was situated a little bit far away from the primary exit, a second silhouette emerged from the shadows. The towering, wide-eyed monster from the wall had heard the scream. It turned its lidless gaze toward the noise and began charging down the central lane, its elongated legs covering ground with terrifying speed.
The blue door was too far. The primary exit was completely compromised by the charging beast.
Kairo's survival instincts took over, his mind calculating the closing distance in a fraction of a second. He couldn't fight both entities without a weapon, and staying to help the pinned blue suit would result in an instant death-trigger for both of them.
Abruptly pivoting on his left heel, Kairo abandoned the central lane and bolted into a narrow, unlit corridor branching off to the left side of the hall. His flashlight beam cut through the dust, reflecting off a flight of concrete stairs that led sharply upward into the upper levels of the research facility.
As he reached the base of the staircase, his light caught the silhouette of another player wrapped in a hazardous costume, running just a few steps ahead of him. Kairo didn't check the color of the suit. He didn't check if it was his cousin sister in the pink suit, the silent green suit guy, or another mimic trap generated by the custom mod.
"Hey! Wait up!" Kairo shouted, his boots striking the concrete steps with a rapid, echoing rhythm.
With the sound of the spider monster's wet screech and the blue suit's fading screams echoing down in the main hall behind him, Kairo threw himself into the dark, following the random player straight up into the unknown upper levels of the complex.