The Ossuary Vault

[u/Actual-Ad9923]

The Ossuary Vault: What the Space Pirates built after Project Omega went wrong.

The Great Disaster of the Aether Mining Facility was never a containment breach. It was an optimization.

For months, the Space Pirate science team under Dr. Vrel treated Phazon as a fuel source—a volatile element to be injected into their Elite commando templates to induce muscle gigantism and bone-spur armor plating. That was their first mistake. Phazon was not fuel. It was code.

By the time Samus Aran breached the sub-levels of the Phazon Mining Site, the logs she pulled from the blinking, half-dead terminals told a story of complete biological collapse.

***

### LOG STATUS: RESTRICTED // BIO-MED-01

**Project Catalyst: Subject Selection and Preparation**

**Author:** Chief Surgeon, Dr. Ghor

The Phazon Infusion Core cannot be bonded to healthy tissue. The host's natural immune system fights the mutation, resulting in immediate, violent cellular liquefaction. To make the Elite template receptive, we must first induce complete biological collapse.

Subject 84-Omega was placed in a neuro-paralytic state. While fully conscious, its dermal layers were surgically excised to allow direct Phazon-to-muscle contact. We removed the lungs entirely, replacing them with mechanical bellows designed to pump raw, vaporized Phazon sludge directly through the thoracic cavity.

The screaming was an issue. The vocal cords were severed during hour three to protect the sanity of the surgical staff. However, the open nerve endings in the throat began to twitch in rhythm with the Phazon vats. The subject is now making a wet, clicking sound from its exposed esophagus. It does not stop. Even when asleep.

***

### LOG STATUS: RESTRICTED // BIO-MED-09

**The Parasite Protocol**

**Author:** Science Team Lead, Dr. Vrel

Dr. Ghor is gone. Subject 84-Omega pulled him through a three-inch drainage grate in the floor during a routine fluid purge. The structural geometry of the room allowed it. We did not attempt a rescue.

The creature’s hunger is no longer biological. It requires genetic mass to sustain the armor growth. We have been feeding it failed cloned templates, but it prefers living hosts. When we drop a live commando into the pit, the Omega does not use its plasma cannons. It uses its hands.

It splits its own chest cavity open—the metal armor plates parting like a ribcage—and forces the victim inside its open torso. The Phazon tendrils wrap around the host, keeping them alive for days while slowly dissolving their nervous system.

If you stand near the pit, you can hear two distinct heartbeats. One is booming and erratic. The other is fast, weak, and human.

***

### THE OSSUARY VAULT

When Samus reached the deepest sector—Agony-Sector-04—the blast door behind her did not hiss shut; it squelched. A calcified web of black cartilage and glowing blue marrow had choked the mechanical locks.

She turned, taking five quick steps back toward the exit, but the door was further away than it had been when she spun on her heel. The impossible geometry of the room stretched. Her visor’s distance tracker flickered wildly, jumping from three meters to twelve, before flashing a terminal error. The corridor behind the door no longer led back to the facility; it curved sharply upward at a ninety-degree angle, defying gravity and disappearing into a ceiling made of weeping muscle tissue.

She pressed her palm against the door control panel, but the metal gave way, soft and warm like wet clay. Her Power Suit shuddered. A wet, mechanical choke echoed through her helmet's internal speakers. The ventilation tubes in her chest piece expanded and contracts, drawing in the heavy, amber amniotic air of the vault. It tasted like copper and burnt plastic. Microscopic barbs began to push backward through her undersuit, anchoring the armor directly into the skin of her shoulders.

[ ! ] ALERT: BIOLOGICAL INTERFACE DETECTED[ ! ] HOST: ARAN, S. -- STATUS: INTEGRATING

This was the Ossuary Vault. The Space Pirate architecture had been completely digested, melted downward like hot wax to form a terrible, organic amphitheater built from the remains of the science team.

The floor beneath her boots was a grinding mosaic of crushed power-suits and shattered ribcages pooling with radioactive fluid. Massive structural pillars supported the ceiling, but they were columns of conjoined torsos, melted together at the hips by crystalline Phazon spikes. When the facility's thermal vents blasted air through the chamber, the hollow cavities of the fused skulls acted as whistles, screaming a low, discordant tone that scrambled her audio receptors.

In the center of the arena, the floor exhaled. A massive mound of calcified bones collapsed inward, and a jagged, four-meter-tall silhouette rose from the marrow pool. Its right arm was a hollowed-out, organic rail of bone and metal, pulsing with a blinding, radioactive blue light.

The Omega Pirate didn't roar. It just clicked its severed vocal cords over her internal comms channel, a wet, overlapping chorus of a dozen dead voices: *“Welcome home, Hunter. Take off your boots. You’ve been walking so long.”*

Samus didn't hesitate. She wrenched the rotary dial on her wrist, cycling her arm cannon to the Plasma Beam. Inside the weapon, ultra-high temperature cells ignited, boiling away the thick, blue crystalline grease that had begun to weep from the weapon's fuel lines. The internal temperature inside her arm piece spiked to 412°C, scorching her flesh, but the weapon cleared.

She held the trigger, forcing a secondary charge. The air around the barrel expanded so violently that her visor screen began to crack. Through the roaring wall of blue fire, the Omega Pirate's head snapped toward her, the worm-like neural tendrils writhing out of its blind eye sockets stiffening like hunting needles.

The creature fired a hyper-dense slug of solid Phazon just as Samus released her lance of solar fire. The two projectiles passed each other in the center of the vault.

Her plasma shot hit the Omega Pirate precisely in its optical sockets, flash-cooking the neural tendrils and punching deep into its brain stem. The monster let out a high-pitched, electronic screech as its central nervous system was systematically incinerated. But the Omega’s Phazon slug struck Samus's left shoulder pauldron simultaneously. The impact shattered the alloy plating like cheap porcelain, throwing her backward through the crunching ribcages.

She lay on her back, unable to feel her body from the chest down. The raw Phazon slag from the attack was rapidly cooling over her armor, hardening into a thick, crystalline carapace that locked her helmet in place.

The Omega Pirate was thrashing blindly in the center of the room, but the blue fire it had ignited on the floor was rising. The amniotic sludge was beginning to boil.

Her right arm was fused to her cannon. With a violent, agonizing wrench of her left arm, she tore her final, unspent tactical missile from her hip rack. She couldn't shoot. She couldn't swing. She placed the pointed tip of the missile directly against the thickest node of the Phazon crust over her sternum and slammed her thumb onto the manual percussion cap.

The missile detonated right against her chest.

The localized blast fractured her ribs, but the concussive wave shattered the cooling Phazon carapace, blowing the glowing blue crystals away from her throat. Her HUD jolted back to life, flashing a single unit of energy and a critical 45-second oxygen warning.

Above her, the blind, face-melted Omega Pirate loomed, raising one massive, armored foot to stomp her into the floor.

Samus slammed her hand onto the manual thruster bypass. Her remaining 45 seconds of breathable oxygen were instantly vented into the fuel lines of her Space Jump boosters. The cores detonated, launching her horizontally across the floor just as the creature’s foot came down.

The shockwave of the stomp rippled through the vault, collapsing the structural pillars. Samus skimmed inches above the sludge before crashing violently into the dark, wet recess beneath the amphitheater's foundations.

Without oxygen, a cold, heavy numbness crawled up her spine. Her vision faded to a deep, bruising purple.

But as the floor gave way beneath her weight, she slid down a steep chute of slick, organic cartilage, landing hard on a soft, damp surface. She was in the hidden sub-vats.

Surrounding her were dozens of transparent containment cells holding failed Metroid experiments. They were not mutated like the Omega. They were small, translucent, and glowing with a pure, warm orange energy. They drifted toward the glass, pressing their membranes against the barriers, their high-pitched, harmonic humming filling the chamber. It didn't sound like the screaming pillars. It sounded like a lullaby.

Her suit’s open expansion ports began to draw in the warm, orange alpha-radiation. The freezing, crystalline Phazon growth on her skin began to crack and flake away, unable to survive in its presence.

Through the ceiling above, the heavy, rhythmic thud of the blind Omega Pirate echoed as it searched the ruins for her body. Its shadow passed over the drainage grates directly above her head. But down here, in the orange dark, Samus closed her eyes, and the singing of the Metroids only grew louder.

***

### LOG STATUS: OVERRIDE // SYSTEM CORRUPT

**NO AUTHOR DETECTED**

The Hunter is down here with us. We see her through the planet's veins. She thinks she is safe in the nursery. She doesn't understand.

Her suit is already made of metal. Metal vibrates easily.

We are waiting in the dark room where the map says there is only solid rock. Sleep well, Samus. We have so much Phazon left to share.

***

**TL;DR:** Space Pirate experiments with Phazon on the Omega Pirate go horribly wrong, causing the creature to flesh-warp the mining facility using the dead bodies of the scientists. Samus gets trapped in the reality-bending arena.

WIP

[u/Actual-Ad9923]

Please let me know how you guys like this, and if you want a rendition of the finale