Chapter 4: Break-Room Teeth

The fluorescent lights of the twelfth floor flickered once, then died. In the sudden dark, Megumi’s hand found Yuji’s sleeve, and the silence was filled with the sound of something wet—like a hundred mouths opening at once. The floor beneath them was no longer carpet. It was soft, slick, and warm. Yuji looked down. The pattern of cubicle grids had dissolved into a landscape of pinkish-gray flesh, veined with blue light. Each breath the building took made the floor ripple, pushing them gently toward the receptionist’s desk, which had grown legs—thin, spindly things like a daddy longlegs—and was skittering away into the dark. “It’s all one body,” Megumi whispered. “The whole floor. It’s a giant curse that learned to pretend to be architecture.” From the break room at the end of the hall came a cheerful gurgle. The door was open. Inside, the coffee machine was pulsating. Its dispenser dripped a thick, amber fluid that steamed as it hit the counter. The vending machine blinked once, then its glass front shattered, revealing a maw of mismatched teeth—incisors, molars, canine teeth jammed together in no particular order—that began to chew the air. “Welcome to break time,” said the receptionist’s voice, but it came from the vending machine. “You’ve been working so hard. Why not relax? Have a snack?” The vending machine lurched forward on its plastic casing. Behind it, the entire wall of the break room peeled back like skin, revealing a stomach-like cavity lined with broken office chairs and shredded paper. The hum of the building’s bad-luck collection became a low, hungry growl. Yuji cracked his knuckles. “Okay. So the building’s awake. That’s fine. We just need to find the weak point.” “The weak point is the entire floor,” Megumi said, already forming a hand seal. “It’s a cursed womb. We’re inside its digestive tract.” The vending machine lunged. Yuji sidestepped, grabbed a nearby office chair, and swung it into the machine’s tooth-filled opening. The chair’s legs snapped off, swallowed with a crunch. The machine didn’t slow. “Shadow: Fusion!” Megumi called. A massive wolf made of shadow erupted from his feet, colliding with the vending machine and pinning it against the far wall. The machine screamed—a sound like a kettle boiling—and its teeth bit into the wolf’s shadow-flesh, but the wolf held. “Itadori! The break room! I think the curse’s core is in the coffee machine—the light from Chapter 2 started there.” Yuji didn’t question him. He ran, his feet slipping on the fleshy floor, which now oozed a clear, warm liquid that smelled like old tea. The break-room stomach-cavity expanded as he approached, its walls pulsing with a sickly glow. At the center, the coffee machine sat on a pedestal of fused desk phones, its chrome surface reflecting a woman’s face—the woman from the warm light, but older now, her skin cracked like old ceramic. “You boys don’t know how to leave well enough alone,” she said. Her voice was the humming, but it crackled with static. “Bad luck doesn’t want to be freed. It wants a home.” Yuji didn’t answer. He summoned a burst of cursed energy that flared crimson around his fists. “Divergent Fist!” He struck the coffee machine. The impact sent cracks spiderwebbing across its surface, and the woman’s face screamed—a sound that shook the building. The vending machine outside exploded, sending teeth skittering across the floor. The break room’s stomach walls convulsed, and for a moment, the fluorescent lights flickered back on, showing a normal office with gray carpet and motivational posters. Then the building roared. The entire floor tilted. Yuji grabbed the coffee machine as it tried to slide away. Megumi was shouting something, but the sound was swallowed by the grinding of the building’s bones. The floor was rolling, folding in on itself like a tongue, trying to push them toward a newly opened chasm at the center—a drop into a darkness that hummed with all the pent-up accidents and deaths the building had ever prevented. “It’s trying to digest us!” Megumi yelled, his shadow wolves now circling, snapping at the curling flesh. “We need to destroy the coffee machine and get out before the floor seals!”