The scream didn’t stop.
It tore through Jup’s throat until it stopped sounding human, raw and broken and pulled from somewhere deeper than fear.
He slammed into his desk hard enough to send metal crashing across the floor.
Tools scattered under the bed.
Loose components bounced against the wall.
A lamp shattered near the corner and rained plastic and glass across the boards as his body locked so violently he collapsed before he could catch himself.
Pain ripped through him in layers.
His veins felt too small.
His bones felt too dense.
His muscles tightened like invisible hands were pulling them apart strand by strand before forcing them back together in a shape his body had never agreed to become.
It was not strength rushing into him.
It was not power arriving like some gift.
It felt colder than that.
More invasive.
More deliberate.
Not stronger.
More exact.
Jup’s back arched violently off the floor.
Something shifted in his spine with a sharp internal crack that sent white pain through his skull before the pressure corrected itself and settled.
His shoulder popped, pulled backward as if misaligned, then locked into place with brutal precision.
His jaw clenched so hard he thought his teeth would crack.
He tried to breathe and couldn’t. Find the original chapter at g.com.
His lungs compressed, released, compressed again, as if something inside him was testing every part of him and discarding anything that failed to meet its standard.
“What—”
His fingers clawed into the floor.
“What did you do to me?!”
Triōhnah floated above him in the dark.
Silent.
Watching.
Its black eye stared down without emotion, without panic, without urgency, like this was not an accident, not a malfunction, not a disaster.
Like this was routine.
That terrified Jup more than the pain, because pain at least meant something was wrong.
Triōhnah’s stillness made it feel like everything was going exactly as intended.
Something moved beneath his skin.
Not crawling.
Reorganizing.
His heartbeat stumbled once, then twice, then corrected itself into a rhythm that felt too clean to be natural.
Heat shot through his veins and vanished.
Cold followed it, sharp and surgical, spreading through his limbs as if invisible threads were being pulled through muscle, bone, nerve, and blood.
He could feel pathways opening where nothing had existed before.
He could feel his body resisting, not because it understood what was happening, but because something foreign had entered a place that had always belonged only to him.
From beyond the door, Aya shouted his name.
Then Mark.
Then Dominique screamed.
Their voices should have been close.
They should have been right outside his room, rushing toward him, pounding down the narrow hall, but they stretched thin and distant as if the room had slipped half a second out of reach.
Mark hit the door hard enough to shake the frame.
“Jup! Open the door!”
The lock clicked.
Then clicked again.
Not locking.
Changing.
A thin black seam of light crawled around the edge of the doorframe, and the next strike landed with a dull, impossible sound, like Mark had hit a wall buried ten feet deep instead of cheap apartment wood.
Aya shouted again, but her voice bent into something far away, like she was calling from the other side of water.
Triōhnah did not turn toward the door.
It had sealed the room.
Jup tried to answer.
Only another scream came out.
The apartment lights flickered violently.
Once.
Twice.
Then every remaining bulb exploded.
Glass rained across the room.
The walls blurred, edges softening as if the apartment was losing the strength to hold itself together.
Sound collapsed inward until the whole world seemed to compress into one impossible point inside his chest.
For one suspended second, Jup felt reality fold around him instead of him moving through it, as though space itself had been measured, cut, and rearranged with him trapped at the center.
Then everything disappeared.