There were thousands of pods.
Too many.
They climbed the walls in rows, vanished into amber darkness above, and pulsed faintly in the sickly light of the hive. Each one held a person. Some slept. Some twitched. Some stared blankly through the gum-glass as if they had already given up on being rescued.
Celeste wanted to open all of them.
Of course she did.
Her core kept reaching for them, fluttering against her ribs like a trapped bird, desperate to thread itself through every frightened little light it could feel.
But they couldn’t.
Not all at once.
Not without bringing the whole hive down on them.
So they opened as many as they could.
Silver worked quickly at one console, elegant fingers moving over controls he had no right to understand as well as he did. Arcade, pale and shaking but furious enough to stay awake, guided C.H.I.P. through the locks. Celeste caught people as they tumbled free, helping them stand, pointing them toward the gummy webbing that led down toward the lower exits.
“Careful,” she kept saying. “Slowly. Hold the webbing. Don’t look down too much. Actually, maybe look down enough to know where your feet are. Oh stars, please don’t fall.”
Some of the pods held adults.
Some held elders.
Some held children.
Arcade went very quiet when those opened.
A small Pureblood girl stumbled out of one of the newer pods, fur stained an unnatural candy-pink from ears to tail. Her hands shook as she touched her face, then her arms, then the strange bright colour spreading through her coat.
She looked no older than Lumina.
“Where’s my brother?” she asked.
Arcade froze.
Celeste looked at him.
He knew.
She could see that he knew.
The child in the lab. The one taken away. The one behind the glass. The one with the Sugar Rusher eye.
Arcade’s mouth opened.
Nothing came out.
For once, no joke arrived to save him.
The little girl stared up at him, trembling. “He was with me. He had a blue scarf. They took him after the machine. Where did he go?”
Arcade swallowed.
His quills lowered.
“We’ll try and find him,” he said softly.
The girl searched his face, desperate to believe him.
Then she nodded.
“Okay.”
Celeste’s chest hurt.
Silver gently guided the girl toward the others. “Go with them, sweetheart. Stay close. Don’t let go of the web.”
The girl obeyed, wiping her eyes with one pink paw before disappearing into the line of survivors.
Arcade stared after her.
C.H.I.P. hovered beside his shoulder, optics flickering.
“INTERESTING,” C.H.I.P. said.
Arcade turned on him at once.
“Do not say interesting right now.”
“THE MOST RECENT EXPERIMENTS WERE MOST CURIOUS.”
“They were turning children,” Arcade snapped.
C.H.I.P.’s little head rotated.
“NEGATIVE.”
Arcade went still.
Celeste looked up sharply. “What?”
C.H.I.P. projected a flickering set of files into the air. Graphs, scan patterns, pod results, survival rates, transformation outcomes.
“They were looking for resistance,” C.H.I.P. said. “IF CHILD SUBJECT INGESTS MODIFIED ZYGURR SAMPLE, FULL CANDY-ZOMBIE CONVERSION DOES NOT OCCUR IN APPROXIMATELY SEVENTY-FIVE PERCENT OF RECENT TESTS.”
The room seemed to tilt.
Arcade stared at the data.
Celeste’s voice came out small.
“So… if children eat it, they don’t turn?”
“CORRECTION: SOME DO NOT TURN. SOME MUTATE. SOME STABILISE. SOME DEVELOP TEMPORARY CANDY-MANA ADAPTATION. RESULTS REMAIN ETHICALLY APPALLING.”
Arcade’s face twisted. “They’re experimenting on children.”
“Yes,” C.H.I.P. said. “BUT NOT PRIMARILY TO CONVERT THEM.”
Celeste hugged herself.
“What about Hybrids?”
C.H.I.P. turned toward her. “MODIFIED ZYGURR DOES NOT PREVENT HYBRID CORE FORMATION. HYBRIDS STILL DEVELOP CORES.”
“So Hybrids still gain cores,” Celeste whispered.
“CORRECT.”
Silver’s expression hardened. “And Purebloods and Mythics?”
“VARIABLE. INFANTS AND YOUNG CHILDREN APPEAR TO HAVE HIGHER RESISTANCE UNDER CERTAIN FORMULATIONS.”
Arcade’s voice went dangerously quiet.
“Why would they care?”
C.H.I.P. projected another file.
“UNKNOWN. HOWEVER, DATA SUGGESTS ACTIVE PRESERVATION PROTOCOLS FOR INFANTS AND VERY YOUNG CHILDREN. NUTRITION. MONITORING. LOW-CONVERSION HANDLING. MANY SUBJECTS RECOVERED FROM FACTORIES, STREET COLLAPSES, AND ORPHANED SHELTERS.”
Celeste remembered the little baby pods.
The soft sugar-foam.
The feeding charms.
Mostly untouched.
Mostly alive.
Her stomach turned all over again.
“That doesn’t make it better,” Arcade said.
“NO,” C.H.I.P. agreed. “IT MAKES IT STRANGER.”
Silver’s eyes narrowed at the scrolling files.
“They’re monsters,” he said quietly. “But not mindless ones.”
Arcade looked back toward the rows of pods.
“Why would they keep orphans alive?”
C.H.I.P.’s optics flickered.
“PERHAPS WE CAN ASK. A LARGE GROUP IS HEADING THIS WAY.”
The hive pulsed.
Wet footsteps echoed somewhere beyond the chamber.
Too many.
Silver straightened at once.
“Then we need to open pods faster.”
They moved.
A pod popped open with a wet hiss—
—and a husky Hybrid tumbled out, yelping as he hit the floor and scrambled upright, ears flat in panic.
“OW—okay—okay—still got legs—”
Celeste blinked.
“…Wait. Didn’t I already free you from raiders?”
The husky froze.
Slowly, he looked up at her.
“…Yeah,” he admitted sheepishly. “Echo. Hi. Uh. Got caught by zombies this time.”
He rubbed the back of his neck, tail drooping.
“My sister is definitely going to kill me.”
Celeste sighed in a way that suggested this was not the first time fate had tested her patience.
“Echo,” she said gently, pointing toward the far wall where gummy spiderwebs stretched downward, “the exit isn’t far. Use the webbing to lower yourself down. Carefully. We’ll be right behind you.”
Echo nodded rapidly.
“Yep. Absolutely. Leaving. Right now. No more getting kidnapped. Promise.”
He paused.
“…Probably.”
He scampered off, disappearing into the sticky descent.
Silver and Arcade kept working, freeing whoever they could—hands moving faster now, urgency tightening the air.
Arcade blinked, eyes tracking Silver as he moved with irritating composure.
“…You know,” Arcade muttered, “I’m still not convinced you’re not just being a show-off for dramatic effect.”
Silver didn’t look up.
“I assure you, this is my restrained version.”
Arcade snorted.
“Of course it is.”
A distant scrape echoed down the corridor.
Then another.
Wet footsteps.
Too many of them.
Arcade’s quills bristled. He turned his head sharply.
“…That’s not friendly ambience.”
He glanced at his wrist.
“C.H.I.P.—please tell me you’re done downloading.”
Before C.H.I.P. could answer, Arcade shot Silver a sideways look, squinting like he was trying to solve a puzzle with half the pieces missing.
“So,” he said, “do you actually have powers, or were you just saying that because you look like someone who’s never held a weapon in his life?”
Silver stopped.
Slowly.
He turned, wounded on a spiritual level.
“I’ll try to hit the target,” he said dryly, “and not your ego.”
Arcade put a hand to his chest.
“Oh wow. Am I not the only smug one on the team anymore?”
Silver stepped into the light and casually summoned Windswept.
The bow formed in a smooth arc of luminous mana—elegant, precise. He drew once and loosed an arrow down the corridor.
It split a dangling candy growth clean in half.
No wobble.
No hesitation.
Arcade blinked.
“…Okay,” he conceded. “Show-off.”
Before anyone could say more, C.H.I.P. chimed triumphantly.
“DOWNLOAD COMPLETE! YOU’VE SUCCESSFULLY BROKEN APPROXIMATELY SEVENTEEN LAWS. POSSIBLY MORE. I STOPPED COUNTING.”
The distant footsteps grew louder.
Arcade exhaled slowly.
“Perfect,” he said, rolling his shoulders. “Just another Tuesday.”
He glanced at Celeste and Silver.
The doors creaked open.
Something stepped through that made Silver’s breath catch.
A chupacabra candy zombie—tall, sinewy, its body layered with crystallized sugar plates and translucent gum-veins. Candy chemicals sloshed visibly beneath its skin, glowing faintly like alchemical vitals. Quills bristled along its spine, each one threaded with pulsing syrup-light.
It was terrifying.
And it didn’t attack.
It walked past them without a glance, boots sticking softly to the floor, and stopped beside one of the pod clusters. With practiced precision, it raised an arm and slid a long quill into the slimy, living wall.
The hive responded.
The walls shifted—flexing, rippling, opening pathways like muscles obeying a nerve impulse. Candy conduits bloomed open, data and energy flowing through them.
Then the creature withdrew its quill, turned, and continued on its route like a technician finishing a routine check.
Silver slowly lifted Windswept, instinct screaming.
Celeste caught his wrist immediately. “No.”
He hesitated. “…It’s a zombie.”
“I know,” she whispered. “But look.”
The creature didn’t breathe.
No rasp. No wet inhale. No growl. No hunger-clicks.
No sound at all.
Celeste’s brow furrowed. Why do some attack… and some don’t?
Why did this one ignore them completely?
Before anyone could stop him, Arcade took a step forward.
Then another.
Celeste hissed, “Arcade—”
Arcade didn’t look back.
His quills were low, but his face had gone pale beneath the grime and sugar residue.
“That’s the one,” he said quietly.
Silver glanced at him. “The one what?”
Arcade’s jaw tightened.
“The one who looked at my core.”
The Chupacabra candy zombie stopped.
Not turned.
Stopped.
Its gas-mask lenses fogged faintly from within.
For a heartbeat, nothing moved.
Then one of Arcade’s quills came loose.
Not by force.
Not because he fired it.
It simply slid free from his back, drawn out by some invisible pull, spinning slowly through the air.
Arcade froze.
“Oh, I hate that.”
The quill shot forward.
Not at the zombie.
At Silver.
It clipped the floor just in front of his boot with a sharp crack of light.
Silver flinched, stumbled forward—
—and the Chupacabra moved.
Fast.
One long hand caught Silver by the face.
Silver went rigid.
Celeste lunged, but Arcade grabbed her wrist.
“Don’t,” he snapped.
Silver’s eyes widened as the creature tilted his head left, then right, studying him with horrifying tenderness. Its clawed thumb brushed along his cheekbone. Then it petted his hair.
Lovingly.
Slowly.
Like he was a sick animal on an examination table.
Silver’s voice came out muffled beneath its grip.
“Mmff—absolutely not—”
The Chupacabra produced a syringe from inside its robe and injected him in the neck.
Silver’s entire body jolted.
Celeste gasped.
Then, before anyone could react, the creature shoved a brownie into Silver’s mouth.
A whole brownie.
Silver made a deeply undignified noise.
Arcade sighed with the exhaustion of a man who had seen this nonsense before.
“Don’t refuse the brownie.”
Silver stared at him, cheeks full, eyes blazing.
Arcade pointed at the Chupacabra.
“It keeps doing it until you do.”
Silver looked at the zombie.
The zombie held up another brownie.
Patiently.
Silver swallowed.
The brownie went down with visible emotional damage.
For a moment, nobody breathed.
Then Silver, still held by the face, asked very calmly and very clearly:
“What the fuck was that?”
The Chupacabra made a strange humming noise.
Soft.
Warbling.
Almost like a lullaby trying to remember its tune through broken filters.
Then it released him.
Silver staggered backwards at once, one hand flying to his throat, the other to his hair as if checking whether his dignity had survived the petting. It had not.
The Chupacabra turned slightly and began typing into the living wall with quick, precise movements.
Notes.
It was taking notes.
Arcade stared at it.
Then at Silver.
Then at the brownie crumbs on Silver’s cravat.
His expression went completely flat.
“I hate this place,” he said.
Silver coughed once, offended down to his bones.
“I have been kidnapped, drained, insulted, nearly eaten, and now force-fed pastry by a zombie physician.”
Arcade nodded. “Yeah. It does that.”
Silver’s eyes narrowed.
“That was not pastry. That was a crime with cocoa in it.”
The Chupacabra hummed again, softer this time, and wrote something else into the wall.
Celeste stared at the creature, heart thudding.
It still hadn’t attacked.
It had examined.
Injected.
Fed.
Recorded.
Like a doctor.
Like a caretaker.
Like a monster wearing the shape of both.
Silver wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, glaring at the Chupacabra.
“If it offers me tea next, I am killing it.”
Arcade gave him a tired look.
“If it offers you tea, drink the tea.”
