Victor's ankle screamed.

The pain was sharp, white, edged in bone-grit – but distant. His ribs ground when he breathed. Something shifted wrong in his side. Bruising. Maybe a hairline fracture. But none of it mattered.

Because the floor was breathing.

He lay half-curled on the slick surface, one arm braced beneath him, palm sinking into warm, sponge-soft tissue. Not earth. Not stone. Something wetter. Thicker. Like a slab of muscle dipped in oil. It shifted with each breath – not his, but the monster's. A slow, dragging inhale that made the chamber tremble. Somewhere deep in the pit's gut, something sighed.

And the floor moved with it.

Victor's eyes opened fully. The ceiling was gone – just blackness. The blast doors had sealed behind him, silent. No seams. No hinges. No light. The only glow came from below – a reddish, thudding pulse beneath the meat. It lit the chamber in dull, wet flashes. And in each flicker he saw it clearer.

The pit wasn't empty.

It was flesh.

He rolled to one knee, boots sloshing in the wet. A soft, suctioning sound as something let go beneath him. The ground wasn't uniform – it was quilted. Swollen. Threaded with sinew and veins. Faces bulged from it like bubbles, skin taut. Some were expressionless. Others were locked in mid-scream. One was weeping.

A whisper crawled across the floor.

"Victor..."

He froze.

It didn't echo. It didn't come from above. It came from under him.

The whisper passed again – dozens of voices now, threading into one another. Old. Young. Male. Female. All wrong. All close.

He shifted back a step and the floor changed. Muscle tensed. A ridge formed beneath the meat – sliding, repositioning. A tongue, grey-pink and too wide, unrolled from a nearby fold and brushed the heel of his boot.

Victor didn't flinch.

But his heart beat harder. Not from fear. From clarity.

He scanned the chamber. No ladder. No walkways. No rails or emergency access. Just a ring of seamless stone, polished smooth and lined with feeding tubes and twitching nerves. The pit had no exits.

No escape.

Because no one was meant to leave.

Vault absorption.

The phrase echoed. From the lab. From the battery ward. From the technician's bored mouth.

He hadn't been brought here to die.

He'd been brought here to join.

Victor crouched lower. One hand touched the floor again, this time slow, deliberate. He pressed his palm into the muscle and felt it breathe against his skin. A slow flex. An invitation.

The bastard thing was alive. Not just alive – conscious. It felt him.

The whispers returned.

Some begged.

Some wept.

Some chanted.

And in that chorus of violation and memory, Victor understood the truth. This wasn't a creation. Not a science project. Not even a demon.

This was worship.

They didn't build this thing. They grew it. Fed it. Named it God.

He stood slowly, favouring his good leg. Every inch of the chamber felt like a lung. A throat. A stomach.

And he was standing in its mouth.

…………………

The pit trembled.

Somewhere deep beneath the fleshy sprawl, a rhythm began – not footsteps, not breath. A pulse. Wet, resonant, dragging weight through tissue. It came from the core.

Victor turned.

The central mass was shifting.

What had been a low, swollen node – barely visible beneath folds of meat – began to rise. Limbs peeled away from it in clusters. Some fused, some twitching. A spine uncoiled like a rope of knotted vertebrae. Moaning mouths stretched along its side like barnacles. At the peak, a skull – too wide, too melted – rotated toward him with eyes that blinked out of sequence.

It wasn't looking at him.

It was feeling him.

The floor rippled beneath Victor's boots as the thing moved. It dragged itself forward with cords of melded arms – fingerless, jointless, just slabs of motion-stump dragging bone and tendon through the slick.

Victor backed a step, ankle grinding, but he didn't run.

The core lifted – higher now, swelling as it rose, becoming a bulbous, shuddering mound the size of a tank. Its surface was covered in stretched skin, roped with tendons. Faces swam across it like images projected on meat – dozens, maybe hundreds. They blinked. Twitched. Shifted.

And then the whispers stopped.

Silence.

No voice. No motion.

Just presence.

Then it hit.

A wave of pressure – not physical. Mental. A punch to the soul. Victor's mind cracked sideways under the weight of it, eyes flickering, balance slipping as memories not his own crashed through the wall.

He wasn't in the pit anymore.

He was ten years old, and Prague still had laughter in its streets. A market. A boy running with a stolen loaf of bread tucked under his coat. Guards chasing. The mother screaming behind him – "Take me, not him!" – as they dragged the boy away. Her voice broke on the word please. And then: blackness.

Another flicker.

A man kneeling before the Cathedral of Flame. Pale robes. Arms spread wide. His voice sang with devotion as Tomas laid a hand on his chest. "Let me serve." The man smiled as tendrils pierced his ribs and pulled him down through the floor. His mouth didn't stop smiling, even as the light drained from his eyes.

Another.

A girl. Seventeen. Contractor grade. An Enforcer – uniform half-burned. Dragged into the vault by three others. She was whispering – not screams. Prayers. Her arms were chained behind her back. The collar crackled once as a tendril slid into her eye socket. She didn't scream. She just said, "I was loyal." Over and over.

Each soul was still there.

Trapped. Flattened into impressions. Folded into a neural chorus. Not erased. Not even fully dead.

Just processed.

Victor staggered back as another wave hit – this time more chaotic. Thousands of fragments, all trying to speak at once. Faces flickered across the chamber walls now, projected by some inner psychic light. Smiling, sobbing, moaning, begging.

They weren't trying to warn him.

They were welcoming him.

Join us. Complete the circuit. Become fuel.

Victor clutched his head. Something was pushing into his thoughts – not a presence, but a protocol. A command. Not in language, but instinct. Something primal.

Yield. Flatten. Dissolve.

The pit glowed brighter.

If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

Tendrils arched from the back wall now – thick ropes of gristle and nerve, pulsing with light. They weren't just feeding into the monster. They fed out, through the ceiling, through unseen conduits. A network. A system.

Victor's eyes tracked them, even as his mind reeled.

They were going somewhere.

Powering something.

The tendrils weren't roots.

They were veins.

And the heart that pumped them was elsewhere. Distant. Towering.

Watching.

Victor felt it. A thread in the psychic flood. A coldness. No face. No voice. But intent.

A presence on the edge of comprehension. Like trying to stare at a cathedral through fog and knowing it was looking back.

The master.

A demon.

Victor growled low in his throat. A pulse rose from his chest. The Chimera stirred – not with rage, but rejection.

No.

He gritted his teeth and pulled hard against the intrusion. Pushed back with his own will. He closed the gates. Shut the doors. Brick by brick, he sealed the crack.

The meat monster lurched. It didn't flinch. But it paused.

Victor's mind began to clear. The voices dimmed. The walls settled.

And something in him… shifted.

Claws didn't form. Not yet. But his muscles thickened. Heat licked up his spine. His skin prickled with the first ripple of change.

It isn't just a monster, Victor thought, teeth bared. It's a mouth. A battery. And it wants my juice.

No. Not today.

…………………

The monster shifted.

Its core hunched low, quivering in anticipation. Tendrils bunched along its flanks, twitching like leashed whips. The moans returned – rising in volume, overlapping, shrill and sick with longing.

Victor stood motionless in the pit.

His boots were sunk ankle-deep in warm, pulsing flesh. The screams pressed against him from all sides, the air thick with the heat of thousands of failing bodies. Too many names. Too many mouths. Too many prayers stitched into one living grave.

And then—

Something snapped.

Not fear.

Fury.

His breath dragged in like fire. The heat coiled inside his chest, rising from his gut to his throat until it choked him. His hands shook – not with panic, but restraint. The Chimera writhed just beneath the surface, teeth bared, muscles caged.

And Victor let it out.

His spine arched as the transformation hit.

CRACK.

His ankle snapped backward, then twisted back into place with a jolt that spat blood. Bones shifted. Shoulders bulged. Black, oil-slick fur erupted across his back in sharp, spined ridges. A tail lashed behind him – thick, prehensile, reptilian, ending in a split tip like a serpent tasting the air.

His arms bent wrong. Then right. Fingers elongating into claws – five-inch obsidian scythes that clicked as they touched.

Victor's eyes went gold. No longer human. No longer even beast. Predator eyes. Ancient. Focused.

He roared.

The sound tore through the pit – not a scream, not a challenge, a declaration.

The meat monster responded.

It lunged.

Tendrils lashed across the chamber like whips. Some struck the floor, sending slabs of flesh flying. Others snapped toward Victor's throat.

He met them head-on.

The Chimera didn't dodge.

He charged.

His claws tore the first tendril in half with a wet snap. Fibres split. Black ichor sprayed across his chest. Another vine wrapped around his thigh – Victor's tail curled and crushed it mid-coil, the bones inside snapping like dry twigs.

He hit the monster's core with full force.

Flesh exploded on impact. Screaming faces peeled back as his claws dug deep. He tore downward, carving through fused muscle and exposed organs. Beneath the outer layers, he found twitching guts – veins that glowed with pale memory-light, pulsing not with blood but with something closer to prayer.

He ripped them out.

The monster screamed.

Not aloud. Inside his skull.

Thousands of voices at once – pain, betrayal, disbelief. The mound shuddered violently, then began to change. Its limbs curled inward. Its faces twisted.

Adapting.

A new cluster of arms emerged – Victor's arms. His own face formed at the end of one stalk. It opened its mouth and hissed in his voice:

"You left him. You let him burn."

For a moment, the words hit bone. April. Max. The fire. But he shoved it down. That wasn't his fight – not here.

Victor's eyes narrowed.

"Wrong fucking play."

He lunged again – this time with both claws. He severed the head. His own face went flying, landing in a puddle of fused lungs and teeth.

The meat shuddered. Faces retracted. Some began to cry.

The core tried to retreat – rolling backward, fusing itself to the pit wall in a desperate bid to escape.

Victor wouldn't let it.

He leapt.

Wings burst from his back – midnight-black, jagged like torn steel. They weren't built to fly. Not yet. But they gave him lift. Gave him the height to slam down from above.

He hit the core like a meteor.

His claws dug deep. Elbow-deep. He ripped upward, carving a wound down the middle of the thing – parting flesh, cracking ribs, tearing through cords of tendons laced with blinking eyes and teeth. Light bled out in pulses. Glowing nerve-fluid hissed into the air, spraying his chest.

At the centre of the wound: the soul-core.

A sphere of living flesh, ringed with tiny arms – each one clutching a different object. A necklace. A coin. A child's shoe. Talismans of the lives it had taken. Each one pulsed with stolen will.

Victor reached in.

The core shrank from his touch. The mouths around it screamed.

"Don't—"

"We remember—"

"It hurts—"

"We don't want to die—"

"We don't know how—"

Victor's claws closed around the node.

And ripped.

The core tore free with a wet, fibrous snarl. Blood and soulfluid sprayed across his arms in iridescent streaks. The light pouring from the wound was blinding – pulse-white and violet, stuttering like a failing signal.

The monster convulsed. All across the pit, limbs seized. Faces folded in on themselves. Tendrils spasmed. The entire mass heaved like a dying lung.

Victor stumbled back, the soul-core clutched tight in his claws.

Still alive.

Still twitching.

It beat once.

Twice.

Victor stumbled back, the soul-core clutched tight in his claws. Still alive. Still twitching. It beat once. Twice. Then it screamed again – louder. Higher. Not pain. Panic. As if it knew what came next.

Not gone.

Waiting.

…………………

The soul-core thrashed in Victor's grip.

Not a heart – a hive. It pulsed with stolen vows, fingers of meat curling from its sides, clawing at his chest like it wanted to bury itself inside him. Glyphs lit and faded across its surface – Contract marks, names, the residue of souls devoured but not erased.

Victor snarled. His tail wrapped around it, holding it firm.

It was still screaming.

Not aloud – inside. A chorus of trapped minds, begging, bargaining, pleading to be remembered. A woman crying for her son. A priest trying to sing. A hundred voices, stacked and boiling.

Victor bent his knees.

And screamed back.

The Chimera surged. Claws plunged into the core – deep, to the wrist – and with a roar, he tore it open.

A burst of soul-fire detonated from his hands – white-gold laced with violet script. The air cracked. The pit walls shuddered as a blast of psychic agony erupted outward like a scream made of light. Memory splashed across the chamber. Contracts. Names. Lives. Pain.

Victor staggered, coughing black smoke. His fur was scorched. One wing hung limp, half-slagged. Blood poured down his side. His vision swam.

But the monster was worse.

It convulsed.

The mass writhed, limbs snapping inward. Tendrils flailed wildly. Moaning faces twisted and collapsed like rotten fruit. Something vital had been unplugged—not just broken, violated.

Then— a thunderclap.

A section of the chamber collapsed in a burst of concrete and rebar. Dust roared outward. Metal screamed. Something above had given way – an old utility tunnel, half-forgotten, now gaping open like a wound in the wall. Rubble tumbled down in waves. One jagged slab clipped Victor's side, tearing into his shoulder.

He didn't stop.

Even bleeding, even staggering – he ran.

The monster roared behind him – no voice, just pressure. Hunger. Tendrils lashed through the dust. A hundred fused hands reached for him. One scraped his calf. Another tore a gouge along his spine.

Victor leapt.

He dove into the smoke, claws scrambling on loose stone. The tunnel was narrow, cracked, bleeding foul air and rusted steam. A hand caught his ankle – he spun, kicked, ripped it free.

The last tendril retracted.

The monster didn't chase.

Not because it couldn't.

Because it was confused.

Wounded. Fragmented. Soul-network disrupted. It twitched like a thing mid-seizure, not dead but no longer whole.

Victor lay panting in the tunnel mouth, half-crushed under fallen pipework.

Then he heard it.

A voice.

Faint. Fractured. Real.

"Help… me…"

It wasn't the monster. It was one voice, human, fraying at the edges.

Victor froze.

Something deep inside the vault was still alive.

He closed his eyes. Rage flickered behind his ribs. Not against the monster. Against what they'd done to so many.

He didn't look back.

But he whispered, steady:

"I'll come back."

Then he moved.

The tunnel trembled behind him. But the flesh did not follow. Not yet.

…………………

The tunnels stank of old water and older death.

Victor limped through them – barefoot, blood-soaked, half-conscious. The searing heat of the Chimera had finally ebbed, leaving behind a body barely holding together. His right wing dragged along the wall behind him, cracked and folding inward like burnt leather. His left ankle bent slightly wrong again, healed at the wrong angle mid-sprint. It didn't matter.

He kept moving.

The floor sloped downward into ancient stone. These weren't prison corridors – no lights, no surveillance. Just old Prague. Pre-demon. Pre-Tomas. A latticework of medieval sewage lines and plague graves, long forgotten and repurposed by rot.

Water pooled at his feet. Not clean. A greasy, brackish trickle that smelled of metal and oil and some other wrongness he couldn't name. Piles of bones clustered in side passages – rat-picked. Some human. Most old.

The collar sizzled against his neck.

It had been flickering ever since the soul-fire blast. Trying to reboot. To reassert control. Every few steps it fired a small jolt into his spine – enough to make his shoulder jerk or his vision blur.

Victor didn't stop.

He reached up.

Fingers closed around the synthetic band. It pulsed—warning him, maybe. Or begging.

He tore it off.

The filaments ripped from his skin with a hiss. A final spark bit into the base of his neck. Then silence.

He threw it behind him without a word. The collar clattered against the tunnel wall and slid into the dark.

Victor staggered forward until the air changed.

Dry.

Stale.

Safe.

He sank to the ground – back against an ancient wall, shoulder dislocating slightly as he slumped. He didn't fix it. He let it hang. It would heal itself soon enough.

The quiet wasn't peaceful. It was hollow. A drained vacuum that made his thoughts echo too loud.

He closed his eyes.

Faces came back.

Not from battle. From inside the monster. From the core. Memories he didn't ask for but couldn't forget.

The mother sobbing, offering her life for her son.

The boy, frozen mid-sprint, taken anyway.

The priest who smiled as the tendrils swallowed his throat.

The Enforcer with broken limbs whispering "I'm sorry" as the last of his soul was devoured.

They weren't just victims.

They were souls. Digested. Repurposed. Converted.

Fuel.

Victor didn't cry. He didn't even breathe hard. He just stared into the dark.

And thought about what kind of thing could feed that abomination. Could build it. Could use Max to power it. The very fire Max awakened in others – their strength, their souls – harvested like fruit and stuffed into that writhing battery of suffering.

A demon.

Not one like Kimaris, Mammon, Verrine or Zagan. Not even one that killed for pleasure.

Something worse.

A thing that fed on faith. One that devoured flesh and soul. A thing that mass-produced pain.

Victor's jaw clenched until his teeth bled.

He remembered the sound of it begging. Remembered the tendrils dragging themselves back into the pit. That massive flesh cathedral still pulsing behind him.

Not dead. But cracked.

He let his head rest against the stone.

The dark pressed in. The pain stayed sharp.

And inside his chest, something cold settled.

A promise.

"You built a god out of meat. I'll tear it down – pit by pit, body by body, bone by bone."

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.