Bbdc 7.1 -

The deer took one step forward. The boundary hummed louder, and a shimmer of blue light flickered—a warning arc. The creature stopped, tilted its fungal crown, and the eye blinked.

The rain over the Hífen Gap fell sideways, driven by a wind that hadn’t stopped in three hundred days. Sergeant Mira Venn pulled her hood tighter and watched the treeline through the scope of her Mark-IX rifle. Behind her, the low hum of the boundary fence vibrated through her boots—a sound she’d learned to sleep to. bbdc 7.1

The deer’s jaw, what remained of it, unhinged. A cloud of golden spores puffed out, and for a second, Venn saw her mother. Standing in their old kitchen, the one before the Sporefall, humming as she kneaded dough. Then her mother’s face cracked, and from the fissures bloomed the same pale fungus. The deer took one step forward

Venn’s blood ran cold. 7.0—the original unit sent into Zone 7 twenty years ago, declared lost with all hands. Their memorial was a brass plaque in a hallway no one used anymore. The rain over the Hífen Gap fell sideways,

“We were your soil,” the thought continued, calm and terrible. “Your cells. Your dead. You built a wall against your own reflection.”

A deer stood at the edge of the fence. That wasn’t unusual. Animals often wandered close, drawn by the warmth of the boundary emitters. But this deer had no head. Where its neck should have ended, a pale, fibrous bloom of fungus arched upward like a crown, and nestled in its center, a single human eye—blue, wide, and unblinking.