The stillness didn't last.
I felt the shift before I heard it, the air thickening, not colder, just tighter, like the walls themselves were leaning in. The ambient light, always present but never sourced, dimmed at the chamber's edges, shadows stretching across the floor like a curtain closing too slowly. Even my breath, shallow and strained, sounded too loud. Something had noticed. And it was coming.
I stood, slowly at first, then faster as the low tremor began beneath my feet. This wasn't a quake. There was no rattle or shake. Just a rhythm, steady, mechanical, like a corrupted hard drive spinning up just before it fails. The hairs on my arms rose. I didn't need a prompt. Exposure had caught up with me. And I'd stayed in place too long.
The corridor behind me had changed again. No longer the shape I remembered, it narrowed into a path that pulled inward, like the space itself was tightening. My footsteps echoed with a strange distortion, a ghostly delay beneath the sound. Whatever was behind me wasn't walking. It wasn't chasing. It was being placed, rendered one step closer every time I moved.
I ran.
Pain flared in my ribs with every stride, but I didn't stop. The corridor bent, opened, collapsed. One second I was running through a hallway; the next, dodging into a broken room with no ceiling. The floor flickered beneath my shoes, sometimes vanishing entirely, then recompiling fast enough to catch my weight.
The sound behind me shifted, from pulse to static. A dragging distortion, twitching and stuttering like corrupted audio slammed through overworked speakers. Every time I slowed, it gained ground.
It didn't breathe.
It didn't speak.
It tracked.
A spiral path unfurled beneath my feet, forming in real time. At the far end, a gate loomed, half-metal, half-meat, uncertain in material and shape. I passed through it without hesitation. There was no door to close. Whatever was following didn't need one.
The room beyond was larger than expected. Not just wider, structured. Designed. This wasn't Nullspace, not in the raw sense. This was architectural. Legacy code. Maybe a forgotten tutorial space. Maybe something worse.
The floor dropped in low tiers, each step ringed by embedded light strips, now dead and cracked. At the centre, a squat hexagonal console stood like a forgotten altar. Dead monitors hung above it, flickering in place like stuck boot loops. Nothing moved. The room didn't breathe. It was dormant. Not safe. Not abandoned.
Just waiting.
And now, so was I.
I circled the console, trailing my fingers across the warm casing, searching for something, a menu, a prompt, anything. But there was no UI. No help. Just presence.
Then the noise behind me stopped.
Which was worse.
Because it meant it had arrived.
I turned. It was already inside the room.
This one was taller than the last. Limbs too long, made of mismatched segments and cable joints that twitched in place. It didn't walk, it glided forward in stuttering loops, rendered as if by mistake. Its faceplate glowed faintly through frosted glass, a dull triangle pulsing where a mouth might have been.
It tilted its head. And waited.
I stepped backward, each motion deliberate. It followed. No sound. No weight. It moved like an AI glitching through bad pathing, frame-by-frame, position locked to prediction rather than motion.
Its left arm lifted.
The fingers were wrong. Too long. Joints reversed. Like someone had built a hand from memory but skipped anatomy entirely. The pulse in its faceplate grew sharper. It advanced.
I braced.
I had no weapons. No HUD. No idea what would work.
Then something shimmered beneath the console. Not bright. Not loud. Just a ripple, a warning. A blur shot out.
The entity recoiled, staggered mid-stride as something struck its head with a sharp, physical crack. No growl. No hiss. Just motion. A second strike landed as the blur looped around and vanished back beneath the pedestal.
The malformed entity stuttered. Its limbs glitched mid-animation. One foot twisted backwards, caught, reset. A trail of wireframe debris followed its shoulder like digital blood. It paused. Recalculated. Turned to me again.
I acted.
My hand went to the controller in my hoodie, the same one I'd clung to since that night, and I hurled it through the creature's torso. Not to hit it. Not to hurt it.
To break something.
The moment it passed through the mesh, the system reacted. The console lit. The floor pulsed.
[DEBUG FUNCTION CALLED]
[INVOKE: FORCE_QUIT.PROCESS(NULL_ENTITY)]
[PERMISSION GRANTED]
The entity exploded outward, a burst of static, limbs collapsing into wireframe that shattered mid-air. Geometry bled into nothing.
Then silence.
And for the first time in what felt like hours, I was alone.
Almost.
I dropped to my knees, chest heaving, hands shaking. The bandage on my palm was soaked, dark and sticky. A line of blood ran down my wrist. The floor didn't react. Somehow, that was worse.
Something had changed.
The system was adapting. I hadn't just survived. I'd rewritten something, forced it to process an exception. It had worked. But it wouldn't be ignored.
From beneath the console, the shimmer returned.
The blur.
This time, it didn't vanish.
It moved forward, slow, cautious, one paw at a time. The form was still incomplete. Its plating flickered. Red wiring pulsed at the joints. Limbs twitched. Its tail moved independently of its body. It made no sound.
It sat. Then watched me.
Its eyes glowed. Not fully rendered. But there.
The overlay blinked, sharp and clean.
[UNRENDERED COMPANION ENTITY DETECTED]
[STATUS: TETHERED // CONTEXT: NULLSPACE LIMITED]
[STABILITY: 41%]
[ANCHOR: NULLPOINTER]
I didn't speak. The thing approached. One slow step. Then another. And settled against my side.
Still biomechanical.
Still wrong.
But it stayed.
And for the first time in this cold, untextured hell, something, someone, chose not to leave.