Lily's fingers trembled as the golden blood from Mike's IV dripped onto her crayon drawing. The crayon in her hand moved on its own, etching lines that burned into the tile. Not a child's drawing - a System command.
The wax hissed, melting into the hospital floor tiles like acid. The lines she'd drawn - crude, childlike strokes of a door - began to pulse.
In the jungle, Mike gasped as his vision fractured.
One eye saw Abby kneeling beside him, her new golden iris reflecting the sacred pool – now frozen, its surface reflecting not stars but Lily's door, now three-dimensional.
The other saw his daughter's small hands pressing against the hospital floor, her shadow stretching the wrong way - twisting up the wall like smoke against wind.
The System glitched violently:
» HOST DETECTED: LILY CARTER
» ADMINISTRATOR PRIVILEGES: ACTIVE
» DRAWING RECOGNIZED: [REALITY DOOR - TIER 0]
» WARNING: REALITY DOOR DETECTED (TIER 0 PROTOCOL BREACH)
Abby's grip on Mike's arm tightened. "Your daughter isn't just drawing," she breathed. "She's coding."
The formless hunger in the cavern reacted. The cavern writhed.
Where before the shadow had been formless hunger, now it panicked. Darkness slithered from the walls, coagulating into half-shaped limbs that clawed at the frozen pool - not to attack, but to cover it. To hide Lily's door from view.
Hospital Side:
Lina screamed as the tiles beneath her cracked open, revealing damp jungle soil beneath the sterile floor.
A surgeon stumbled back and collapsed, as his own shadow peeled away from his body, slithering toward Lily like a living thing.
Tribe Side:
~ The remaining warriors - those not already consumed by Marpe's betrayal - convulsed. Their flesh rippled, then melted, reforming into grotesque, worm-like things of pulsing darkness.
~ Abby's shoulder wound tore open anew, not bleeding blood but leaking shadow - thick, viscous strands that moved with purpose.
Mike's breath caught.
The shadow wasn't trying to synchronize the two worlds anymore.
It was trying to stop Lily from destroying both.
Part of the frozen pool exploded upward in a shower of ice and bone.
A skeletal hand shot from the depths, clamping around Abby's ankle with unnatural strength.
The First Bridge - her skull still split from the shadow's birth - dragged herself halfway into the world, her empty eye sockets burning with ghostly light.
"She is not the lock,"
the corpse rasped, her voice the sound of wind through dead trees.
"She is the keyhole. And it has been waiting."
Then - memory flood.
Mike's mind strained under the weight of millennia:
~ 10,000 Years Ago: The First Bridge stood where Lily now knelt, her fingers tracing the same door in wet sand.
The System had glitched then too - creating the shadow as a patch, a crude fix to seal the breach.
~ Now: Lily wasn't just opening that door again. She was expanding it.
Abby drove her dagger into the corpse's wrist, severing brittle bones. The connection broke - but the damage was done.
» NEW QUEST:
» DESTROY THE DOOR OR WITNESS REALITY RESET
Hospital Side:
Lina acted on instinct. She grabbed a fallen surgical laser, its beam slicing through the shadowy tendrils creeping toward Lily. Each severed strand screamed, the sound echoing in the jungle.
Tribe Side:
Mike and Abby fought back-to-back; their movements synced in desperate harmony:
~ Mike's Dual-World Grasp reached through dimensions - his hand closing around a bone saw in the jungle which became a serrated whip of light in the hospital, slicing through shadow-corrupted orderlies.
~ Abby's golden eye pulsed with each prediction, showing her the shadows' movements seconds before they struck. But each use came at a cost - thin cracks spiderwebbed through the iris, dripping liquid gold.
Then - disaster.
A shadow-worm speared through Abby's thigh. She roared in pain - and in the hospital, Lina collapsed, an identical wound tearing open on her leg.
The System screeched:
» CRITICAL FAILURE
» REALITY SYNCHRONIZATION: 95%
» HOSTS "LINA" & "ABBY" NOW SOUL-LINKED
Lily looked up; her eyes were like pools of endless black.
"Daddy,"
she whispered, her voice layered with something older.
"It says you have to choose now."
The crayon door creaked open - just a crack.
What lay beyond wasn't darkness. It was worse - a void where the System's code unraveled like frayed thread, and something lurked in the gaps. A figure stepped forward.
Riggs.
But wrong.
His face cycled through every Bridge's features - Mike saw his own visage flicker across Riggs' skull, then Abby's, then the First Bridge's.
Abby lunged - not at Lily, but at Mike. Her hand passed through his chest as their worlds destabilized.
Inthehospital, Lina moved instead, throwing herself over Lily as the door screamed open wider -
Mike reacted.
He slammed the door shut with his bare hands. The impact detonated through both worlds:
~ Jungle: Every shadow shrieked, dissolving into mist.
~ Hospital: The floor sealed, the crayon lines burning away.
The cost?
Mike's hands burned with blackened veins. The shadow had marked him.
» REALITY SYNCHRONIZATION: 40%
» DOOR TEMPORARILY SEALED
» PENALTY: SHADOWFRAGMENTS NOW TRACKING HOST "MIKE"
Hospital Side:
Lily slept; her fingers curled around the melted remains of her crayon.Lina's leg bore Abby's scar – seemingly permanent, the flesh twisted like tribal ink.
Tribe Side:
Abby's golden eye shattered, the hollow left behind weeping thin trails of shadow.The warriors' remains had liquefied, forming words in the soil:
"NEXT MOON, WE EAT THE SUN."
And Mike?
He stood between worlds, neither fully in one nor the other. The System's final message flickered:
» WARNING: SYNCHRONIZATION BELOW 50%
» HOST MAY EXPERIENCE... DISPLACEMENT.