Level 276 - "The Hive"

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⚠️ Content Warnings ⤴

Info

Original concept and article written by Reddit user u/Nerdykiddo4844. Rewritten by Praetor3005 (author page) and Nikuchan (author page).

Big thanks to Abdallah Amr for the fading block css, as well as to DrAkimoto for the greenlight!

Thanks to Spectre48 and Sky3 for the generel thoughts as well!

Both music tracks have been made by the awesome music composer Dapper Husky. Make sure to check his youtube channel! He made a lot of great OSTs for the Backrooms.

CW: Overall gruesome and graphic images in the offsets. Don't unblur them if you don't want to see that.

Glossary:

Huvvat - Post-corruption Lost name for the Hive
Mundus - Lost name for the Blue Channel, and everything within it
Nihil - Lost name for the Grave
Paradeos - Pre-corruption Lost name for the Hive

Chapter 2 - The Reborn

There used to be a place long ago… back when us Lunar Chimeras were wandering this land for the quest of the Moon… We stumbled upon a beautiful paradise, a land full of verdant nature and peaceful waterfalls…

Paradeos… That's how we called it. The birthplace and core of our world. One of the three gateways of reality. Paradeos, Mundus, and Nihil. The Nest, the World as we know it now, and the Nothingness. Paradeos is in the middle of it all, being the middle way between existence and death. At the center of Paradeos itself, there is the Queen. Born out of the entrails of Paradeos, giving it shape with its consciousness, until its lifespan expires and it returns back to its nest, being reborn once needed.

Isn't it amazing? A place that represents birth itself? When we went there so long ago… We saw eggs of all kinds, but none for our own species. I suppose it's because we were meant for bigger things… We never truly belonged in the regular time flow of this land, given the plans of our Moon. I like to think that the Queen is just waiting for the right moment, for a missing part of it to return and change the outlook of things. Who knows how long that'd take… Not like I'm brave enough to look…

I just wonder how much it has changed since then…

“Olivia?”

“Olivia!”

“Did you seriously fall asleep during my story?”

“Huh?! Ah!” Olivia was startled awake by the familiar voice, a guilty smile on her face. “Sorry… I was just very tired today…” She rubs the back of her head embarrassedly. “I was listening though!”

“Geez! You're the worst sometimes!” Tournesol embraced her closely, tickling her with their fur and nibbling on her cheek. “You're the one who asked me about stories from Lunar Chimera’s adventures! I swear I'll never tell you anything again…”

“I'm sorry!” Olivia pleaded, putting on her most pitiful look. “It was interesting… It's crazy that this world has so many places connected to each other right under our noses… I promise you, one day I'll explore Paradeos with you, and we will build a nice hut there!”

Tournesol eventually caved in at Olivia’s attempt at gaining forgiveness; they huddled up closer to the girl, their blue eyes glimmering, “It'd be nice… I think you'd be a great Queen, huh? Maybe if you went there and asked nicely to the egg, it'll let you take the crown!” They joked, purposefully trying to tease her. “I'm just kidding!”

“Now you've done it!” Olivia crossed her arms. “I know I'd be a good Queen, it's you who'd be a horrible monarch! You'd just sit there all day and decorate instead of doing your job!” She pointed a finger at the other child. “Lazy!”

“It's war then!” Tournesol tackled her, the two children happily playfighting on the grass. For a moment, nothing else mattered except them both and their laughter. It was just a story, wasn't it?

Yet… why does it feel so familiar?

Why is it all so… blurry?

That light… That bright light at the end of the tunnel. When Olivia reached out for it, it was as if her heart began beating anew. She felt herself pulled down, lower and lower into flesh. Her soul became caged into something vaguely resembling a body, until she became one with it.

When she opened her eyes, her mindscape was gone, and she was… somewhere else. A dark, putrid place… Yet, her surprise was swiftly replaced by pain.

Agony, absolutely agony, ran through her body. Thorns in her flesh, fangs piercing her lip, flower petals coughing out of her mouth, and a bitter, reddish substance dripping from her nose. She looked down at her hands, or rather, something vaguely hand-shaped. Her skin had turned rather pale, with some green markings across her arms. She let out a shaky gasp before something warm pulled her close.

A familiar scent, a figure she knew very well.

“Justin?” The man heard Olivia spit weakly, as if she was feeling herself breathing for the first time in forever. “Where… ? What… What happened?” She muttered, still disoriented.

Finally letting her go, Justin stuttered: “You… It’s really you…”

As he started stepping away, the overseer noticed the aftermath.

Olivia looked like a living corpse. The plants around her did not wilt away. Instead, they fused with the body of his loved one, pulsating like veins. Her skin stayed washed out, as if her entire self wasn’t reborn but merely controlled by a partially stitched soul. Her face was missing an eye, replaced by two roses that grew out of her eye socket. Her finger shifted into brown claws, growing out of the skin as if they weren't supposed to be there.

Only her hair was bringing some color to her otherwise pale tone, going from black to pink, clashing with everything around.

“You do not… look alive.” He whispered, trying to recover the contents of his research in his mind. Was this the consequence of the Hive’s withered state?

So many questions flooded his mind. How did she die? What did the afterlife look like? Why was her body like this?

Yet one of them felt more pressing than any other.

“Are… are you okay? Is this really you?”

“I'm… I'm alive?” Olivia questioned out loud, her breathing growing even more ragged than before. “What did you do?… Why- I was… trapped and then- I got dragged here…” She muttered as her eyes widened suddenly. “My lady…” Olivia abruptly tries to get up. “I have to find… I have to find her…” She slumped back down, finding herself weakened.

Justin looked up to her, realizing how much she had grown up, now easily surpassing his height. Despite this, he held onto her, trying to keep her still.

“She kept me alive all this time! I have to find her!” The woman shouted, confusing the overseer further. “Please… You have to help me. How long have I been gone for? Tell me it's not too late…”

The overseer stayed still, the new form of his loved one making him grow uneasy.

"What are you talking about? I thought it was, like, a Grave thing? That's what the Lost seemed to explain. W- Who's this lady you're mentioning? He simply muttered with a shaking voice.

The eyes of the botanist widened at the mention of the Lost. "Justin… What exactly do you know about their religion?"

"I- I don't remember much about this." The overseer conceded, still struggling to register the living corpse in front of him as his lost love. "The Lost theology isn't something I really researched before coming here. All I know is that this place occupied a big place in their cosmology."

Justin stopped for a moment, breathing, desperately trying to recall what he had read about them in the past few months.

"I- I'll be honest with you, I was so overcome with grief I didn't really focus on the theory. I read about how this place could grow immaterial things into physical beings, but I don't know about any lady that would be involved.

Seeing Olivia didn't respond with anything, he sighed.

"I'm sorry, I don’t know how any of this works."

“I need you to bring me out of here. I need to recover and try to contact her again.” Olivia let Justin help her up. “Tell me more about whatever you've done there. This clearly isn't just Liminal Echo manipulation… I heard a voice when I woke up, there's no way it happened just like that. What exactly did YOU read?”

"I'm trying to remember!" Justin insisted as he helped the woman. I just don’t get who that person you're talking about is. Who is she?"

Now fully standing up, Olivia seemed pensive, looking for the right words.

"See… I wasn't in the Grave. It was one of them who kept my soul alive, P-"

A growl resounded in the distance, cutting Olivia's sentence halfway through. The two immediately started running, not eager to discover what just stumbled upon them.

As they tried to get as far from the noise as possible, Justin tried to respond to the reborn agent as well as he could:

“But- the database clearly talked about a threshold to the Grave! I read a lot of scriptures about the Lost’s cosmology. What they understood of this whole reality, the place of the soul, body, what’s in between, that sort of stuff. Even the book I borrowed from Leo explained this!"

Justin cut briefly, avoiding a close flesh stalactite before continuing. “This place is supposed to be a liminal limbo between the earthly world and the Grave. But something's wrong. It- it wasn’t supposed to be rotten like this. I don’t know if it has anything to do with all these stor-”

Justin suddenly stopped. growing petrified, in an instant. “What’s the matter?” Olivia asked, surprised, to which the overseer simply pointed to something behind her.

The same growl pierced the obscurity again, making the duo jump. They watched in horror as a female Wrangler slowly crawled out of the ceiling, a dozen meters away from them.

“We need to leave now!” Justin shouted to the woman as the creature drew closer.

“We don’t have time, Justin! We need to fight!” She eagerly responded, putting herself in front of the beast, who was now crawling on the floor. Olivia looked around for anything to use as an improvised weapon. Yet, all she could see was rotten flesh all around her.

“Justin! Give me something to fight, anything!” She shouted to the overseer, still shaking.

“I… I don’t think we should fight it.” He simply responded, barely moving. “She’s… not moving anymore.”

Turning back to face the creature, Olivia was surprised to see the creature standing still, very much alive, yet not advancing near them anymore.

“Maybe it thinks you’re an entity too?” Justin whispered, unsure of what to do. “I don’t think any operative ever reported a female Wrangler acting like this.”

“What do I do?” The botanist responded, distraught.

“I— I don’t know! I don’t know what’s happening— I don’t know what I’m doing” Justin exploded, the anxiety getting the better of him.

Olivia took a deep breath before making a step towards the female Wrangler.

The creature did not move.

Another step. The entity looked peaceful, almost tame.

“I don’t understand…” Justin whispered. “The hounds from earlier wanted to eat both of our bodies.”

“I can feel her.” Olivia talked to herself. “It’s as if I could talk with her.” She took yet another step forward, cautious. “Good… Wrangler? It’s time to leave us now. You want to leave, right? Plenty of food up there…”

The creature didn’t respond, yet slowly moved away, its body going back into the hole in the ceiling. Just a minute after the encounter, the Wrangler was completely gone, leaving no trace of its presence.

“It’s like what I read in Leo's exposition…” Justin recalled as he walked back to Olivia. “The place was supposed to be supervised by something, a Hive Mind of some sort. Or maybe the entities don’t attack their “siblings”? I’m so confused right now.”

“You’re the one who revived me, Justin, don’t ask me.” Olivia groaned before taking her head between her hands. “God my head hurts… I think we should leave no-”

The botanist froze in place, tetanized. She started to shake, her head starting to hurt further, causing her to stagger for an instant.

“I… I hear something.”

Home…

Helios…

Body split in two…

Where… where are you?

…

You.

I know where you are.

Give him back to me.

GIVE HIM BACK!

All around them, the environment started to convulse. Veins from the floor pulsated so hard they looked ready to explode at any instant. Bones seemed to sharpen as the flesh around them expanded, ejecting bile from their rotten insides.

The Hive felt more enraged than ever, but this anger felt deeper, far more vicious than the disturbance Justin felt as he was reviving Olivia.

This was different.

Olivia turned paler than she already was. “I hear voices in my head!” She shook her head. “What is this?” She asked herself, almost delirious. “She's coming here right now!” She attempted to force her way into a thin crack in the wall, leading to another path, horrified.

“What’s going on, Olivia?” Justin rushed to her. “You said we had to run away-”

“I am!” She shouted before moving again. “We need to leave. She’s coming.”

The environment kept pulsating harder and harder with an undead fury, as if the whole unholy organism was activating itself for the first time in centuries. This was not a contained disturbance like the one from a few minutes earlier.

The Hive knew what Justin did. It knew what Olivia became.

And it was furious.

“Who’s coming?” The overseer questioned, worried about his friend’s state of mind.

“The Queen.” Olivia simply whispered, paralyzed.

. . .