Kruger

By their second day on Jou, the jungle no longer felt alive.It felt awake.

The deeper they traveled, the stranger it became. The air grew warmer, but not from heat—more like pressure, as if the sky itself were pushing down on them. The trees were twisted into unnatural arches, and the wildlife… silent. Watching.

Kaiell and Joran followed a deep ravine flanked by cliffs until it opened into a broad expanse of terrain sunken into the jungle floor. Thick mist clung to the ground. A thin stream cut through the center, flanked by vines that pulsed faintly with bioluminescence.

Their scanners pinged softly.

"Detection zone confirmed," Joran muttered, checking his device. "Marked zone. The Kruger kind."

A waypoint pulsed on the screen. A Valley. That's what the mission header called it.

Kaiell narrowed his eyes. "Why would the examiners tag this zone?"

"Could be a drop cache. Could be a trap. Or…" Joran trailed off as they crested the final ridge and looked down.

At the center of the valley, half-sunken in the earth, was a Voidling egg.

It was massive—taller than a man, oblong and wrapped in layers of pulsating, translucent flesh. Veins of deep purple webbed through it, and it pulsed faintly like it had a heartbeat of its own.

Above it, a Kruger-issued classification tag flickered, suspended midair in a hard-light projection.

OBJECT CODE: 7V-HATCHERRANK: LOW-TIER VOIDLING — LARVAL PHASETHREAT LEVEL: CANDIDATE-GRADEOBSERVATION ZONE — NO INTERFERENCE

"'No interference,'" Joran read aloud. "Yeah, that sounds like a terrible idea."

Kaiell crouched low. "It's part of the exam. A controlled threat. See how candidates react."

"That's not the part that's bugging me," Joran said. He pointed beyond the egg. "That is."

Three shapes moved at the edge of the clearing.

Voidlings.

But not like before.

These were small—lithe, pale-shelled, insectoid. Their limbs twitched unnaturally as they circled the egg. One placed a hand on it. The other hissed and released a black cloud into the air—like a pheromone mist.

Kaiell's stomach twisted.

"They're not guarding it," he whispered.

"They're changing it."

The scanner began to glitch—red pulses flickering, then blinking out.

"Signal disruption," Joran said. "It's being masked."

A fourth Voidling emerged—larger, darker. Its limbs shimmered with unstable matter, as if it were phasing between forms. It carried something—small, black, metallic.

Kaiell's eyes widened.

"That's Kruger tech. One of the tracker modules."

"They must've scavenged it," Joran said. "They're using our tech to jam detection. And maybe… rewrite the egg."

They backed up slowly, but the jungle behind them shifted with movement. A tree swayed without wind. A vine dropped low. The ground moaned faintly.

They weren't alone.

Kaiell pulled Joran down behind a root wall. "We need to record this. Then get out. If they're corrupting a controlled specimen—this isn't a test anymore. This is a breach."

Joran activated his scanner's black-box feature, syncing the data feed.

They watched as the large Voidling placed the device into the side of the egg.

A dark pulse rolled out from the shell.The Kruger tag glitched.The threat level flickered.Then changed.

UPDATED CLASSIFICATION: UNKNOWNSTATUS: ALTEREDDANGER LEVEL: [ERROR]

"Yeah, no," Joran muttered. "That's our cue to leave."

But as they turned, the ground trembled.

The egg twitched.

It released a soundless wave—a vibration Kaiell felt in his bones. Behind them, trees groaned and cracked. A sudden, pulsing glow lit the mist—crimson and white, like a beacon screaming across the jungle.

The Voidlings shrieked and scattered—but not in panic.

In reverence.

Kaiell grabbed Joran. "Move!"

They sprinted back up the slope, ducking branches, crashing through foliage. The jungle twisted behind them, and the deeper sounds—low, thunderous cries—echoed through the trees.

Something else had heard the call.

They didn't stop running until their lungs burned and their legs gave out. Only then, buried in the shadow of a steep cliffside, did they speak again.

Joran slumped down. "Tell me we got that recorded."

Kaiell checked the scanner's backup.

"Yeah. All of it."

He looked up at the distant sky.

Whatever the examiners had planned—this wasn't it.

Something had changed.The jungle wasn't a test anymore.It was a war zone.

And somewhere, inside that altered egg, something not even the Krugers had classified was beginning to wake up.