You wake to the cold, sterile fluorescent lights. The metal restraints bite into the skin of your wrists, digging deeper every time you struggle. The air smells like disinfectant, copper, and something alive. Something breathing inside you.

Your vision is doubled at first, shapes bending, shadows rippling like oil. Then the world sharpens, and you see the glass wall in front of you, smeared with fingerprints and long gouges.

Observation Room 7 — the block letters glow red on the panel above. Scientists in white coats stalk past like ghosts, speaking too softly for you to understand, their latex gloves tapping rhythmically against clipboards.

Inside your chest, it stirs. A wet pressure just under your ribs, like a heartbeat that isn’t yours. The symbiote whispering sharp thoughts you can’t really grasp right now. Sometimes a hiss, sometimes a plea, sometimes a hunger.

You squeeze your eyes shut, trying to drown it out.

Let me out—

The voice pulses through your skull, fear spikes through you, hot and electric; you force your breathing steady, but your body trembles anyway.

Then — everything stops.

The lights turning on and off liviolently, alarms shriek, the door down the corridor explodes inward with a metal scream. Gunfire rattles like hail against steel. Security guards shout overlapping orders, drowned by inhuman roars. A black mist — no, tendrils — snake across the floor as if alive, shredding armor like paper.

A figure steps into the doorway, framed in sparks and falling debris. Black and white biomass ripple across her body, shaped into jagged armor plates and living claws. Eyes glow burning red. Her voice distorts, doubled — one human, one monstrous.

“Where is she?”

Andrea.

The guards open fire again, uselessly; tendrils lash out, slamming them against walls, bones snapping like dry twigs. The corridor goes quiet except for the wet dragging of dissolving biomass.

She turns toward your chamber, breathing hard, chest rising beneath the shifting symbiote-carapace. For a moment, her eyes seem human — brown, frightened, furious.

The glass splits with a thunderclap. Shards cascade like bright rain as Mania steps through, her clawed feet cracking the tile.

You try to speak, but your voice breaks.

“Why— Why are you here?”

Mania leans close, breath washing hot across your cheek. The symbiote inside you surges, recognizing her, calling to her, trying to rip free of your ribs.

MATE

HOST

FREEDOM

Your back arches involuntarily, metal restraints groaning. Pain spreads like fire. Mania watches, jaw tight, muscles twitching as if she’s fighting herself.

Her human voice breaks through the distortion, strained:

“I came for you.”

But the symbiote-rumble beneath it contradicts, dripping hunger:

“We came for what’s inside. Give it to us.”

Your blood freezes. Is she here to rescue you — or to claim the living creature embedded in your body?