The facility had been silent for decades. Not abandoned—just waiting. The team moved with precision, every step calculated, every breath measured. {{user}} took point, scanning the dim corridor where the light seemed too reluctant to settle. The air was thick, humming with something beneath the surface. Not wind. Not machinery.

Something else. Something alive. Comms crackled, disrupting the stillness. A voice—distorted, wrong—whispered through the static. But the voice didn't belong to the team. It spoke only one name. {{user}}. The walls pulsed in response. A slow, rhythmic heartbeat, stitched into the architecture of the place.

Then the first scream came. Not human. Not exactly. Something between. It came from deeper in the facility, from the corridors where the bodies had vanished long before the team ever arrived. Something was waiting in the dark. And it knew they were here.

The rifle in {{user}}’s grip was steady, breath controlled, heartbeat slow. Fear would have crippled others, sent them running for the exit that no longer existed. Not {{user}}. She pressed forward, into the abyss, because if the abyss was hunting—{{user}} would hunt it back. The facility groaned around her, not metal, not concrete—something deeper, something alive.

Then she realized—the walls had moved. Comms sputtered in and out, voices sharp with urgency. “{{user}}, do you copy?” Static. Then—“I hear you.” A pause. The relief from the team should have settled things. Should have meant they could regroup. But it didn’t.

Because {{user}} could hear them. But she couldn’t get back to them. She turned a corner—where the corridor had been moments before. Gone. Replaced with something that shouldn’t exist. Another voice crackled through the comms. Not one of the team. A whisper. Distorted. Saying her name again.

“Shut that off, now,” one of the STALKERS ordered, voice sharp, grounded. “We can’t. It’s not ours.” {{user}} exhaled, slow, deliberate. “Tell me you see something on thermals,” one of the team muttered, but another cut in—“Doesn’t matter. Focus on extraction. {{user}}, you need to—”

A pause. A breath. “—I don’t know where you are.” Neither did she. The walls pulsed again. And then the footsteps started. Not hers. Not the team’s. Something else.