The abandoned hospital breathed.

  Adrian pressed a flaming claw against the building's outer wall, feeling the shudder of unnatural respiration beneath his fingertips. The brickwork pulsed like living flesh, its mortar seams weeping thick yellow pus that smelled of fermented memories. Behind him, Kaelis adjusted the plague doctor mask they'd scavenged from a dead Sanctum patrol—the only way to filter Mordriss' airborne madness.

  "Remember," Kaelis' voice came distorted through the beak-shaped filter, "the Rotting Lord doesn't just infect your body. He colonizes your sense of time." His demon arm had withered further since the cistern battle, now resembling petrified wood veined with bioluminescent mold. "What feels like minutes in there could be days out here."

  A gurgling scream echoed from within the hospital. Not of pain, but of something far worse—recognition. Adrian's VII brand throbbed in response.

  They stepped through the ruptured doorway into hell's laboratory.

  The Breathing Labyrinth

  The hospital's interior defied physics. Corridors twisted back onto themselves, staircases led to identical floors, and the walls bled slow tears of blackened lymph. Adrian's enhanced vision caught the truth—every surface was layered with translucent skin, the building itself a living membrane stretched over something far older.

  Fungal growths pulsed in time with their footsteps. Some sprouted human hands that beckoned; others bore Kaelis' face mouthing silent warnings. The air grew thicker with each step, until they reached a massive ward where the ceiling had collapsed to reveal...

  ...a cathedral of flesh.

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  Hundreds of bodies dangled from the rafters on meat hooks, each cocooned in a shimmering fungal chrysalis. Some were clearly Sanctum hunters; others wore antiquated armor from forgotten eras. At the center stood Mordriss, his plague doctor mask connected to the building's nervous system by pulsing umbilical cords.

  The Rotting Lord turned, his mask's eyeholes leaking spores. When he spoke, the voice came from the walls themselves:

  "Ah. The Seventh has come to reclaim his cradle."

  Three-Stage Revelation

  1. The Flesh Archives

  Mordriss reveals the hanging bodies are preserved Eclipse Hunters from all seven generations. Their mutated organs float in specimen jars lining the walls—each labeled with Adrian's brand pattern at different stages of evolution.

  2. The Omega Secret

  Kaelis is forced to remove his armor, showing his body is riddled with fungal symbionts slowing his corruption. "We were never meant to kill the lords," he admits. "We're vessels. Each lord's power brings us closer to becoming..." His gaze flicks to an empty chrysalis labeled VII-OMEGA.

  3. Vaulk's Masterstroke

  The hospital trembles as Sanctum forces breach the perimeter. Inquisitor Vaulk's voice booms through Mordriss' fungal network: "Initiate convergence." The Rotting Lord's mask splits open, revealing—

  —a perfect replica of Adrian's face, grown from the harvested tissue of previous VII-series hunters.

  "Come home, prototype." The thing wearing Adrian's face extends a hand dripping with symbiotic spores. "The Eclipse requires its omega."

  Kaelis' demon arm finally crumbles to dust, revealing what the fungus had been suppressing—his brand now reads VII-ALPHA.

  The first of seven.

  The last warning before the end.

  The spores coalesced into a hovering map of the Abyss, with six locations pulsing crimson—each marking an Alpha's last known position. The seventh pulse thrummed in Adrian's chest.

  Kaelis' remaining human eye dissolved into fungal threads as he whispered: "They never told us... the brands are seeds."

  Then—

  —the hospital's flesh walls spasmed—

  —the suspended chrysalises began cracking open in unison—

  —and the first Alpha's voice echoed from all directions at once:

  "The Eclipse begins at midnight."