Chapter 1: The Stain on the Concrete

Chapter 1: The Stain on the Concrete

The air in OmniGen Tower’s sub-level-three maintenance corridor tasted sterile, a filtered blend of chilled ozone and industrial cleaner. It was a stark contrast to the gritty, rain-soaked streets of Neo-Alexandria the Anomaly Corps had just left behind. Here, everything was chrome, white, and unforgivingly bright, the recessed light panels humming with a low, oppressive energy.

“Clean and quiet,” Elara Rostova stated, her voice crisp and devoid of emotion. Her dark hair was pulled into a severe bun, and the cybernetic wiring along her temples pulsed with a soft, analytical blue light. She surveyed the corridor, her armored long coat hanging perfectly still. “Client said it was a simple psychic bleed. An employee snapped under pressure. Left a nasty emotional residue. Our job is to scrub it, digitally and psychically. Standard procedure.”

From behind her, a mountain of a man named Jax grunted in agreement. He had to duck to avoid clipping his head on a ceiling conduit, his immense frame making the spacious corridor feel suddenly claustrophobic. Patches of his skin shimmered with a metallic, iron-like sheen under the harsh lights. “Get paid. Get food.”

“You’re a poet, big guy,” Sila quipped from the shadows near the far wall. She was a ghost, her lithe form wrapped in silent-weave clothing that seemed to drink the light around her. Her undercut hairstyle and the glint of piercings in her ear were the only sharp things about her soft, umbral outline. “I’m just hoping their network has some back doors. Corporate data pays better than scrubbing emotional skid marks.”

“Focus, Sila,” Elara warned without turning. “The payday is the job we were hired for. Nothing more.”

Kaelen Vance lagged behind them all, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his worn tactical jacket. The ghost of himself, a faint, spectral afterimage that clung to his form like a shroud, flickered more intensely in the sterile environment. His silver eyes, tired and haunted, scanned the pristine concrete floor. He hated these corporate jobs. They always tried to sanitize the messes made by the monsters in suits. To them, a human tragedy was just an inconvenient stain.

“Let’s get this over with,” he muttered, the thin white scar bisecting his left eyebrow looking stark against his pale skin. “The hum from these lights is giving me a headache.”

“It’s not the lights, Kael,” Elara said, stopping before a section of the floor that was cordoned off with temporary laser fencing. “It’s this.”

The ‘stain’ was unimpressive. A dark, vaguely circular discoloration on the pale grey concrete, no larger than a dinner plate. It looked like an old oil spill, chemically cleaned until only a faint memory of it remained. To a normal person, it was nothing. To Kael, it was a psychic scream frozen in time. The air around it was ice-cold, and the low hum in his skull intensified into a piercing shriek.

“Right,” he sighed, pulling his hands from his pockets. “Jax, stand back. Sila, watch the access points. Lara… try not to enjoy the show.”

He knelt, his reinforced knee pad clicking against the floor. The spectral echo around him solidified for a second, a perfect, translucent copy mimicking his every move before dissolving back into a shimmer. This was his curse, his ‘gift’ as a Residual—the power of Chrono-Echo Perception. The ability to touch an imprint of the past.

“Just a light touch, Kael,” Lara cautioned, her voice softening fractionally. “We just need to confirm the nature of the event, then we can deploy the psychic neutralizer.”

Kael ignored her. A ‘light touch’ wasn’t how it worked. You didn’t dip your toe in a tidal wave. He braced himself, the premature grey streaks in his black hair seeming to catch the light, and pressed his gloved palm flat against the center of the stain.

The world shattered.

It wasn’t a memory; it was a sensory assault. The sterile corridor vanished, replaced by a storm of raw, agonizing sensation.

Desire. A desperate, all-consuming hunger for more. A desire to break the weak shell of flesh, to become something greater, something divine, as promised by the data-needle in his arm.

Obstacle. The body fighting back. Bones snapping, reforming. Muscles tearing and re-knitting themselves into impossible shapes. The primal terror of a man named Alistair Finch from OmniGen’s Bio-Engineering department as his own cells betrayed him.

Action. A guttural scream that tore his human throat apart, reforming it into something new. His fingers elongated into bony talons, scraping furrows into the concrete. His spine cracking, arching, as new limbs—wet, red, and hideously malformed—punched their way through the skin of his back. He felt the slick, coppery taste of his own blood, the searing fire of radical transmutation.

Result. A monster. Not a man, not anymore. Something writhing and broken, a symphony of body horror trapped in a loop of its own creation.

Kael ripped his hand away with a choked gasp, scrambling back as if the floor were electrified. He slammed into Jax’s solid leg, the big man’s hand landing gently on his shoulder to steady him. Kael’s breath came in ragged bursts, the spectral afterimage around him flickering violently.

“Kael?” Jax’s voice was a low rumble of concern.

“That… that was no ‘psychic bleed’,” Kael rasped, pushing himself up. He wiped cold sweat from his forehead. “That was a transformation. Involuntary. Agonizing. Someone turned that man into… something else. Right here.”

Elara’s expression hardened, the blue light at her temples glowing brighter as she processed the new data. “A forced mutation? Corporate espionage? This just went from a cleanup to an investigation.”

“Worse,” Sila’s sharp voice cut in. She had melted from the shadows and was now crouched by a wall panel near the stain, her fingers tracing a hairline crack Kael’s vision had seared into his mind’s eye—the mark left by the transformed man’s flailing hand. “There’s something here. Something he was trying to hide, or maybe just dropped.”

With a deft flick of a tool from her belt, she pried the panel open. Tucked inside, nestled amongst a bundle of fiber-optic cables, was a small, military-grade data chip. It glinted under the corridor lights.

Elara knelt beside her instantly. “Don’t touch it.” Her eyes narrowed, the cybernetics focusing on the chip. “That’s proprietary OmniGen tech. Heavily encrypted. Getting caught with that is a death sentence.”

“So we leave it?” Sila asked, a challenge in her tone.

“No,” Elara said, a dangerous glint in her eyes. “Knowledge is leverage. And whoever did this to that employee… they don’t get to bury it.”

As she reached for her multi-tool to safely extract the chip, a low, wet growl echoed from the far end of the corridor, where the darkness was thickest.

It was a sound that didn’t belong in the sterile, ordered world of the corporate tower. It was ancient and predatory. The humming lights above them flickered once, twice, then plunged the corridor into a terrifying twilight, emergency power kicking in with a blood-red glow.

The temperature plummeted. Every member of the Anomaly Corps froze.

“Lara,” Kael said, his voice barely a whisper, the silver in his eyes seeming to glow in the dim red light. “The echo… it’s not gone. It’s… it’s live.”

From the shadows, a shape began to unfold. It was a grotesque silhouette of mismatched limbs and a twitching, elongated torso. It moved with a sickening, disjointed gait, its form seeming to warp and shift with every step. Wet, tearing sounds accompanied its movement. It was the result of the transformation, the thing Alistair Finch had become. And the psychic energy radiating from the newly discovered chip had just served as a dinner bell, waking it from its dormant state in the building’s forgotten corners.

The simple payday was gone. The clean, quiet job had just become a cage match.

The Flesh-Warp raised its head, fixing them with multiple, glowing eyes. It opened a maw that was too wide, filled with needle-like teeth, and let out a screech that was a horrifying mix of a man’s scream and a beast’s roar.

The fight for survival had begun.