"Guess I'm not getting out that way."
Linray glanced up at the manhole cover, now sealed shut by steel pipes jammed through the opening. If he wanted out, he'd have to find another exit.
The pipes had gone quiet for now. Linray took the moment to catch his breath and process everything that had changed about him.
*"@SCP Foundation!"*
A private message from Zheng Zha popped up in the group.
**Zheng Zha:** *"That raincoat you gave me is incredible. If it weren't for it, Loli would've been shot! I seriously don't know how to thank you. I'll get you that hydrogen fusion reactor no matter what."*
*"Gotta go — I'm about to beat the shit out of that damn kid. If I don't hit him I'll explode!"*
Zheng Zha's message came in a rush and then he was gone. Linray stared at it for a long moment before it clicked.
"Wait — the raincoat. I gave it to Zheng Zha. He just confirmed he HAS it. But up there, those cabins dodged me the exact same way bullets slide off the raincoat..."
He looked down at his own coat. Normal fabric. Normal stitching. Nothing anomalous about it at all.
"It's not the coat. It's me."
The cabins hadn't crushed him. They'd slid past. Just like bullets sliding off the raincoat. But Zheng Zha had the raincoat — he'd just said it saved Loli from a bullet. That meant the ability wasn't coming from the item anymore.
It was coming from Linray himself.
"Did I... absorb its ability?"
Could touching a containment object transfer its properties to him? That was the only explanation. The bulletproof raincoat was with Zheng Zha. But the power — the danger-dodging — had stayed behind. In him.
"I'm really not human anymore, am I..."
For a split second, something dark flickered through his mind. If he could absorb SCP abilities just by touching them — what would happen if he touched SCP-682? The Hard-to-Destroy Reptile. The thing that adapted to anything, survived everything. Or SCP-173 — The Sculpture. Snap a neck just by blinking.
His stomach turned. No. He wasn't going down that road. The Foundation's entire history was a graveyard of people who thought they could control anomalous power. Every single one of them ended up as a footnote in a containment breach report.
He shook the thought off and kept moving through the sewer. The wrench was gone — lost somewhere in the chaos above. But that was fine. Without a tool in hand, SCP-015 shouldn't react to him.
How to actually contain the thing? He'd figure that out when he got there.
Linray was the type to stay calm under pressure. Cautious but not timid. The discovery that he could absorb SCP abilities only made him steadier.
He waded through the filthy tunnels without panic, scanning every direction.
Then he noticed something wrong.
The sewer was *moving*.
It was subtle at first — turns that shouldn't have been there, walls that looked different from minutes ago. The entire tunnel system was shifting around him, rearranging itself with every step he took.
It took a few minutes before he was certain.
The sewer had become a living maze. One that changed as he moved through it. There was no correct path — every route reorganized itself to keep him trapped.
Linray reached into the stagnant water and felt around. His hand closed on something solid. He pulled it up — a broken hammer.
The instant the tool appeared in his grip, the pipes went insane.
The walls twisted like intestines in peristalsis. Dozens of tangled pipes of varying lengths burst through the concrete from every direction.
Foul sewage — not just water, but something chemical, reactive — poured from the ruptured pipes and surged toward him.
The moment it touched his clothes, the fabric began dissolving. Visible, real-time corrosion. Where it hit bare skin, it burned and itched simultaneously.
Linray's expression changed. The bullet-dodging ability didn't work on liquid. The raincoat's anomalous property deflected solid impacts — not corrosive sewage.
If he stayed here, the acid would melt him alive.
Then he saw them. Inside two of the larger pipes — two bodies. Almost completely dissolved down to bone.
"Those must be the park maintenance workers..."
Remnants of uniforms confirmed it. Equipment engineers who'd come down to inspect the pipes. They never came back up.
Linray swung the hammer with everything he had and smashed the pipe that was flooding him.
The pipe flinched. It actually *recoiled* — shrinking away from the impact. It hadn't expected that kind of force from a human.
The flow stopped. The sewer froze.
Linray seized the opening and ran, splashing through the muck toward any source of light.
The Pipe Nightmare's main body wasn't down here at all. What he'd just broken was an offshoot — a tendril. The real thing was somewhere above.
A weak beam of daylight filtered down through a gap ahead. A manhole cover, sitting loose at the end of a dark corridor.
He climbed the stairs, shoved the iron cover aside, and hauled himself up behind the Ferris wheel.
There it was.
The cables running beneath the Ferris wheel were exposed, and tangled through them — fused with them — was the main body of SCP-015.
It had assimilated the Ferris wheel's entire frame. The ride's structural skeleton was barely recognizable, consumed and replaced by the Pipe Nightmare. The thing was enormous.
The broken hammer in his hand suddenly felt very, very small.
Then an idea hit him.
"Electricity."
The pipes were fused with the electrical cables. There was moisture inside them. If SCP-015 was even remotely alive — and it was — a massive electrical surge should cause it serious pain.
He tossed the hammer aside and followed the cables to the park's control room.
The moment he flipped the master switch, cheerful carnival music blasted through the empty park. Every ride roared to life at once — bumper cars, teacups, the merry-go-round, all spinning wildly.
Including the Ferris wheel. Without its cabins, the naked frame spun like a possessed skeleton, faster and faster.
The electrical current surged through the bearing brackets beneath the wheel. Linray could see the arcs of electricity jumping across the metal — visible, crackling, furious.
The Pipe Nightmare couldn't take it.
A filthy, stained pipe began peeling away from the Ferris wheel's frame, writhing as it detached.
Linray grinned. It was working.
He cranked the capacitor box in the power room to maximum. Every motor in the park screamed under the load, pushed far beyond their limits.
The current tore through the infrastructure like lightning, arcing between rides, sparking off every metal surface.
A five-meter-long sewage pipe — the Pipe Nightmare's core body — dropped to the ground, thrashing.
Linray chased after it.
**BOOM.**
The Ferris wheel — gutted, stripped, spinning at suicidal speed — finally couldn't hold together. It exploded outward, sending debris across the entire park. Rides were smashed. Equipment shattered. Sparks and lightning danced through the wreckage.
The safety systems kicked in automatically, cutting all power to the distribution room.
The carnival was over. What had been a colorful amusement park was now a field of smoking rubble.
And in the middle of it all, Linray grabbed the five-meter Pipe Nightmare with one hand.
The pipe coiled around his arm, trying to fuse with him — trying to turn his body into more pipe.
"You're trying to eat me?! What the fuck!"
He slammed it into the ground.
The Red Queen's voice rang in his ears:
"Containment object secured. Initiating transfer back to Site-Ω."
Energy surged from Linray's body, binding the Pipe Nightmare in place. Light flashed — and he was gone.
---
...
A cleaning worker pulled up his cap and stared, jaw hanging open, at the smoldering ruins of what used to be an amusement park.
"Dear God... what happened here? Did the local gang have a grudge against a Ferris wheel?"