Aya lay broken on the floor of a world that shouldn't exist.
The rock beneath her wasn't just rock. It pulsed. It breathed. It whispered. The cold was not temperature—it was intent. It was the chill of something watching, something beneath the stone, grinning without a face. Her exoskeleton throbbed with fresh bruises, pulsing in tune with some ancient, malignant rhythm. Her limbs splayed like snapped twigs, her breath a hitching wheeze, dragged from scorched lungs.
Her mandibles chattered like teeth in a storm. Her body trembled without her permission.
"Still breathing," she rasped, voice barely more than a thought. "Technically… progress."
But the air didn't care. The air didn't listen. The air didn't need to.
It was listening.
It pressed in on her, dense, oily, crawling. Not wind, not mist, but pressure—alive, awake, watching. It coiled around her like an invisible noose, thick with scentless poison and unspeakable memory. Aya's antennae twitched wildly, reacting to signals she didn't understand, shapes she couldn't see, threats she hadn't earned the right to comprehend.
She felt it, deep and immediate.
This place hated her.
Not disliked. Not inconvenienced. Hated. As though her presence offended the ecosystem of horror slumbering in the bedrock. As though her very atoms were a mistake. Her mind screamed, quietly and constantly, behind every thought.
She'd been through six floors of hell. She'd faced monsters, starvation, fear, despair. She'd joked through her pain, cried through her victories, evolved through desperation.
But this?
This was different.
Aya was no longer prey in a predator's world.
She was unwelcome in a reality that had no use for her kind.
This was the Seventh Floor.
Not a level. Not a dungeon. A threshold.
The point where the Labyrinth no longer pretended to follow rules. Where logic curled up and died. Where time looked the other way. Where monsters had teeth in places teeth didn't belong and names no living tongue could speak. The floor where pain was currency, fear was tax, and existence was a dare.
Aya whimpered as she slowly—agonizingly—forced herself onto her knees. Her legs protested, vibrating beneath her like taut wires straining to snap. The whispering stone below seemed to mock her, muttering in frequencies her brain almost understood. Not meant to be here, not meant to be here, not meant to be here—
She gritted her mandibles. "Shut up. I'm already having a bad day."
Somewhere in the dark, something laughed.
Not a sound. Not even a thought. A psychic echo, a ripple through the oppressive nothing around her. Something heard her. Something large. Something wrong.
Aya froze.
She was not alone.
And not in the comforting way.
In the you-have-accidentally-stumbled-into-an-eldritch-council-meeting kind of way.
The shadows didn't just move. They contemplated. They tasted her fear. Measured it. Enjoyed it. Far above her head, or perhaps beside her—perspective didn't matter here—a shape moved. Massive. Grotesque. Ancient.
Aya couldn't breathe. Couldn't blink. Couldn't think.
A colossal form passed by her in the darkness. Its outline was wrong—shifting, bending, refusing to stay defined. Blackened bone, glistening muscle, plates of armor that flexed like living things. It walked without walking. It moved without touching the ground. It existed with too many eyes, blinking asynchronously, glowing like embers soaked in blood.
The air trembled.
Aya's heart stopped. Then restarted. Then tried to crawl out of her chest and leave her behind.
[System Analysis Failed: Insufficient Access.]
Her mind shrieked. "No. No no no no—don't you do this to me now!"
[System Reply: Be grateful it doesn't consider you food.]
"Oh, screw you!"
But even her mental scream was a whisper against the vast nothing pressing in. The creature turned—just slightly—and a sliver of its attention grazed her.
Time died.
For one moment, one awful, agonizing moment, Aya saw herself through its eyes. An insect. A speck. A mote of matter not even worth swatting. Her soul recoiled. Her memories screamed. Her body wanted to collapse into quantum dust and escape from reality entirely.
And then… it moved on.
Like she wasn't even there.
The ground stopped shaking. The whispers receded.
Aya's legs gave out. Her face hit the whispering stone with a dull thunk, and she lay there, eyes wide, pupils shrunk to pinpricks.
She had survived.
She didn't know how.
She didn't feel lucky.
Her thoughts were static. Her antennae twitched like they had minds of their own, trying to escape her skull.
Then came the notification.
[System Notification: Congratulations! You have unlocked "Hairesy Resistance – LV 1."]
Aya's eyes twitched.
"I want a refund."
But no god answered. No mercy was given.
She was here.
She was awake.
And she was not alone.
Aya moved—but barely. Every inch was defiance. Her limbs weren't limbs anymore, just twitching memories of movement, slathered in pain and trembling like jellyfish strung through a meat grinder. Her exoskeleton clicked, fractured, the sound loud in the silence, a gunshot in a grave.
All around her, the shadows breathed.
Not slithered. Not drifted. Breathed.
Inhaled.
Exhaled.
Whispers like dry leaves scraped against stone, but no wind stirred. No wind existed. Just the presence of things that didn't belong in any sane reality. Some too massive to see. Some too small to perceive. All of them wrong. Bent. Hungry.
The Seventh Floor was no floor.
It was a domain.
No, not even that.
It was a sentence.
A cursed line carved into existence by a lunatic god with ink made from nightmare marrow. This place didn't operate by rules. It had moods. And today's mood was famine.
Aya tried to shrink deeper into her hiding crevice, but the stone pulsed, subtly, under her claw. It was warm. Too warm. Like it had veins. Like it didn't want her there. Like it was holding her still for something else.
And then the air tilted.
No sound. No tremor.
Just a subtle bend in reality's spine.
Something loomed ahead.
First, a shape.
Then a wrongness.
A silhouette bled into the dim, towering and twitching with glacial inevitability. It moved like planets moved. Like tectonic plates screamed when no one was listening. No urgency. No haste. It knew the world bent around it.
The behemoth emerged.
Aya's eyes shivered.
Her brain refused to focus. Her vision stuttered like bad code. She saw its legs—so many, too many—jointed wrong, jointed twice, or not jointed at all. A horror built by a committee of fever-dreams and insect gods. Its torso wasn't singular—it was a collage. A ruin built from blood-warmed plates, clicking, twitching, layered like a rotting onion. Pulsing muscle undulated beneath metal that was never forged. Wet. Slick. Alive.
Then the eyes.
Dozens.
No. Hundreds.
Staring, blinking, spinning in and out of existence. Some vertical, some oblique, some shaped like things Aya couldn't describe. Some weeping. All staring in different directions. Randomly. Rhythmically. Ritualistically.
Aya didn't move.
Didn't blink.
She couldn't.
Because something primal inside her had shattered.
The behemoth wasn't a monster.
It was a natural disaster wearing a corpse as armor.
A tsunami made of meat.
A storm that remembered pain.
Its presence was a pressure, a thought, a scream held in silence. Even the air gave up—refused to carry sound, refused to carry scent. Everything bent away from it. Stone warped. Shadows fled. Aya quaked.
Then—
[System Analysis Failed: Insufficient Access.]
Her vision jerked.
Aya's voice—raw, cracked, half-feral—leaked from her mandibles."Excuse me, WHAT?"
[System Reply: Be grateful it doesn't consider you food.]
"…THAT'S NOT—THAT'S—THAT IS NOT HELPFUL!"
It moved.
A step.
Just one.
But it wasn't just a step. It was a verdict. A tectonic judgment. A sentence of inevitability.
Each footfall echoed inside Aya's ribs.
The creature passed.
It didn't look at her.
It didn't need to.
But then—
A twitch.
One eye—just one—twisted in its socket like a key turning in the lock of the world.
It found her.
It saw her.
No.
It recognized her.
Aya's heart became a black hole, sucking every thought, every hope, every piece of identity into a singularity of primal terror. She felt her soul curl, crumple like dry leaves in winter. The eye blinked.
Not once.
Not twice.
But thrice—like punctuation.
She was marked.
Tagged.
Remembered.
Catalogued.
And then…
It walked on.
Just like that.
It let her live.
Why?
Aya didn't know.
She didn't want to know.
Her mind shook. Her thoughts came apart like wet paper in a storm. Something inside her brain had been stamped with a mark that didn't belong in this world. Her lungs finally remembered how to breathe, and when they did, it sounded like a scream trapped behind clenched teeth.
The silence rushed back in.
The air uncurled.
The stone stopped shaking.
But Aya stayed still.
She didn't cry.
She couldn't.
Her tear ducts had gone numb long ago.
She sat there.
Alone.
Alive.
Marked.
And the whispering walls around her seemed to laugh.
Not cruelly.
Not mockingly.
But like spectators watching someone survive a cosmic joke.
Aya blinked slowly.
"…This floor sucks."
Somewhere, far above her, the Labyrinth turned another page in its twisted script.
And below?
Something even worse woke up.
Aya collapsed again. Her legs just quit.
Not figuratively. Literally.
Her limbs gave out like they'd remembered they had free will and chose cowardice. She hit the stone like a dropped doll, a twitching mess of fear and failure. Her shell spasmed, vibrating like it wanted to leap off her bones and crawl away on its own. Her breath came in glitchy gasps, shallow and panicked. Her claws scraped against the ground uselessly.
I just saw the end of the world… and it walked right past me.
Her thoughts weren't thoughts. They were just reactions. Muscle memory and denial. Her mandibles clacked together so hard she bit sparks. Metallic. Burning. Her heartbeat slammed through her teeth like it was trying to escape her skull.
[System Notification: Congratulations! You have unlocked: Hairesy Resistance – LV 1!]
Aya: "I WANT A REFUND."
The System chirped cheerfully, like a waiter at a diner that had just served her a sentient tarantula.
That thing wasn't a monster. Monsters you can kill. Monsters you can outsmart. That was… bigger. Older. Worse. That was something the world built a religion around just to survive.
Aya tried to move. She failed. She tried to cry. She failed harder. Her brain had shrunk to a corner of her skull where it rocked back and forth, quietly mumbling "nope nope nope" on repeat. Her eyes were wide, unblinking, pupils shrunk to pinpricks as her mind played a slideshow of all her regrets.
The time she poked the cursed door.The time she shouted at the skeleton merchant.The time she bit the snake.The time she chose to exist.
All of them had led to this.
She needed to hide.
She needed to vanish.
She needed to dig a hole, crawl inside, and disconnect from reality like an expired modem.
The air around her still trembled. Not loud. Not obvious. But deep. A distant earthquake that never stopped. A feeling under the skin. Her instincts screamed that the creature wasn't gone—it had just decided she wasn't worth eating today. And that wasn't mercy.
That was worse.
That was pity.
Aya dragged herself across the ground, inch by miserable inch, each movement a declaration of pain. Her joints screamed. Her claws bled. Her carapace scraped along the stone with a sound that was far too loud. She winced every time, terrified that noise alone would bring the thing back.
There was a crack in the wall ahead. Barely large enough for a goblin. Too tight for comfort. But it was dark. It was tight. It was away.
She slithered in like a worm.
It scraped her shell. It pressed on her limbs. It hurt.
She didn't care.
She didn't stop until she was deep—wedged in a coffin of rock and shadows. Her breath rasped against the stone. Her heartbeat echoed like a war drum inside her ears. Every second, she expected the stone to split open and those eyes to blink back at her. Watching. Remembering.
Why did it look at me? Why did it blink three times? What does that mean? WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?!
She shoved her claws over her face like a child under the covers, as if darkness could protect her from divinity gone wrong.
I am not food. I am not food. I am not food.
The words repeated in her brain like a spell.Like a curse.
Somewhere, deeper in the floor, something laughed. Not loudly. Not mockingly. But knowingly. Like the Labyrinth had seen this scene play out a thousand times. Like Aya was just one more insect praying to survive the cosmic roulette wheel of madness.
Her body refused to sleep.
Her mind refused to rest.
She had survived.
And in doing so, she had changed.
Aya felt it.
Something inside her had cracked. Not broken—no, broken implied damage.
This was evolution.
Twisted. Involuntary. Deep.
She had seen a god. Not one made of light or mercy. A crawling god. A silent scream with legs. A devourer of concepts.
And now she was part of the floor's memory. A smudge in the diary of a place that didn't forget. A mark on a list of prey that had almost mattered.
Aya curled tighter in the crevice. A thousand thoughts clawed at her sanity. Her eyes remained open. Wide. Unblinking.
She didn't sleep.
She waited.
Her first steps forward were whispers. Her second, whimpers. Each breath scraped against the silence like a scream. Every movement felt illegal. Her shell creaked. Her claws clicked. The world seemed to flinch with her. She was the loudest sin in a temple of nightmares.
Aya pressed herself low to the cavern floor, slinking like a crushed insect across uneven, fleshy stone. She hugged the wall, ribs rattling, senses shrieking. Her eyes darted, twitching toward every flicker of shadow. Every sound felt like a trigger.
She needed a hole.
A crack.
A hideaway.
A place to unexist for a few hours.
The terrain mocked her. It was wrong. All of it. The stone pulsed with a heartbeat not her own. Veins ran across the floor like roots from a dying tree. Walls mixed with bone and slick, twitching muscle. Vines hung from above—wet, glistening, twitching when looked at for too long. Eyes winked open, then shut. Something inside the vines giggled.
She ducked beneath an arch made of bone. Ribcage. Dripping. Still moist.
Please don't be alive please don't be alive please don't—
It didn't move.
But the stone beneath it wept blood.
Her thoughts, broken and bare, came in bullet points now:
Survive.
Find a hole.
Reconsider every single decision.
Pray. To gods. To demons. To petty spirits who make spoons vanish. Anyone.
Don't. Make. Noise.
And then…
A sound.
Not hers.
Not that thing from earlier.
Something else.
A wet scuttle.
Close.
Too close.
Aya froze.
Heart in throat. Blood in her ears. Breath held like a hostage.
Something had seen her.
No.
Somethings.
A whisper of movement. A ripple in the dark. Her body locked.
And then… eyes.
Dozens.
No.
Hundreds.
A thousand new eyes peeled open in the walls around her. Small. Lidless. Shining. Slitted. Hungry.
They blinked in sequence.
Aya didn't blink at all.
Too many. Too small. Too fast.
Spiders? No. Not spiders. Worse.
The scuttling came faster now—like rain on flesh. She tried to step back, her legs screaming in betrayal, but her foot sank an inch into the flesh-wall.
It pulsed.
The wall moaned.
Her stomach curled in on itself. She ripped her foot free, stumbled back, claws shaking.
From the dark came them—not monsters. Not animals.
Infestations.
Dozens of pale, segmented bodies skittered out of holes she hadn't noticed—no, hadn't existed a second ago. Mandibles clicked. Eyes twitched. Their legs moved too fast. Their mouths didn't open—they peeled. Rows of bone-needles smiled at her.
Aya ran.
Not gracefully. Not heroically. She scrambled like a cockroach on a hot pan. Arms. Legs. Claws. She didn't know what touched what. She just moved.
The swarm poured after her.
Not screaming.
Laughing.
Nope. Nope. Nope. This is not how I go. I will not die as food for psychic centipede laughter.
She ducked under another bone arch—this one twitched. A vine brushed her shell—she screamed. A pit opened up ahead of her, groaning as if in disappointment.
She jumped.
Not knowing what lay below.
Anything was better than that swarm.
She fell three feet. Landed in something soft. Wet. Breathing.
She screamed again.
It didn't eat her.
Yet.
The swarm didn't follow.
They clustered at the edge. Hissing. Watching.
And then they retreated—eyes fading, holes sealing shut behind them as though they were never there.
Aya panted. Every breath a whimper. She couldn't move.
The thing she landed on shifted.
A low groan vibrated through the ground.
It spoke. Not in words. In memory.
A whisper she didn't understand, but felt.
"Something old walks the floor tonight. You should not be here, child of dirt and mistake."
Aya choked on her breath.
She hadn't fallen into safety.
She'd fallen into something older than fear.
But it wasn't eating her.
Not yet.
A whisper and a prayer, she thought, eyes glassy.
She was running out of both.