Oppressive silence wrapped around me, only breaking with the guttural growls of unseen predators, their echoes threading through the hollowed-out structures, mourning the lost city.
The satchel had been cutting into my shoulder for the last stretch. I swapped it to the other side and kept moving.
“About this mutacell,” I said. “You said it could give me abilities.”
“Enhance you in ways you can’t imagine,” Arvie replied. “Yes.”
“Let's do it.”
“Not here. You'd need an intact medical pod and a medic who isn't fertilizer.”
So close, yet so far. But I wasn't one to dwell.
My throat burned with each breath, but I pushed on, forcing each step through the haze, until a smell hit me, burnt, sharp. Not the usual city rot. I froze, instincts prickling, then followed it like a trail of bad decisions.
The fog parted just enough to reveal an open square. A battlefield, scorched and gutted. Craters and debris marked the spot, like the city had gotten fed up and gone to war with itself. And right in the middle, the twisted remains of a military droid, a giant that had seen better days. Its armor was mangled and something about the way it slumped there felt almost... defeated.
A faint pulse of light flickered from its chest, the last whispers of its dying systems. Around it, half-scorched monsters twitched in their final death throes, like nature hadn’t figured out they were done yet.
“Hell of a party,” Arvie’s tone was slick with sarcasm.
I approached. Stood beside it. Up close, the droid was massive, a wreck of mangled plating and collapsed joints, the kind of machine that doesn't go down easy. Whatever had dropped it here had meant business.
A pressure shifted in my chest, a held breath that wasn't mine.
The ground answered a moment later, a slow, deep shudder moving through the soles of my feet before it registered anywhere else. The droid's chassis groaned with it, and a heavy limb slid, dragging across the debris in a long, grinding scrape.
I pushed it aside. Something glowed under it. A rifle, battle-scarred, warm and humming like it had still fight left in it.
“Well, well,” Arvie quipped. “Looks like someone just leveled up.”
I didn’t answer. My eyes were on the beasts. A few were still moving. Not much, but enough. I turned to the twitching remains. My finger found the trigger before my brain had fully caught up.
I squeezed.
Searing blue light strobed through the fog catching the nearest beast in the chest. The stench of flash-fried meat and ozone hit the back of my throat. The creature burst with a sickening pop. I swallowed turned to the others. One by one, the beasts went down, flashing and crumbling to ash.
Only one left. Huge. Ugly. Milky eyes locked onto me, blind yet aware. I fired again. The bolt sheared through its skull with a wet crack, putting it out of its misery.
“Nice shooting, sir. Now let’s see what this new toy can do.”
I gave the gun a once-over and the interface flared in my head, quick flash of numbers flickering a bit then stabilizing. Energy levels holding steady at a third, enough to last a while or to function as a cutter in close quarters. I holstered it, the weight of it a quiet promise that the rules had just changed.
The ruins spread out ahead of me, jagged bones of forgotten systems, steel and concrete left to rot. The city's ghosts weren’t its people; they were the machines. Rogue defense turrets snapped to life as I passed, confused old sentries who’d forgotten what they were guarding.
Their sensors jittered, glitching hard, spitting out bursts of fire in random staccato. I didn’t bother with stealth, no point when the city was throwing a tantrum. I weaved through the chaos, every step a dance with danger, every pause a calculated risk.
The streets below were worse. Sludge and shattered tech. Razor shards that bit through boots. Caverns where the ground had given up and let gravity win.
Things moved in the fog. Creatures emerging from the caverns, their shapes just out of focus, darting between broken walls and fallen spires, never staying exposed for more than a heartbeat.
Some of them got close. Closer than I liked. I dropped the nearest mutts, but the math was against me, for every corpse that hit the sludge, two more shadows bled into the gaps.
Open ground was a losing game. The fog had an endless supply of teeth. I went vertical. Higher ground gave me angles, let me pretend I had control. I climbed rusted walkways, staying above the rot and nests of glowing acid.
“Steady as she goes,” Arvie piped up in my head, her voice a soft hum of humor that cut through the tension like a dull knife.
“Aye,” I muttered, dodging another crumbling overpass. “Smooth bloody sailing.”
Then, of course, everything went sideways. A turret suddenly remembered how to aim. I felt the heat before I heard the shot. The air sizzled past my head, leaving the acrid scent of burnt ozone and close calls.
My heart tried to escape my ribs. I dove behind a wall, the next barrage rattling the stone, sending dust and debris raining down.
“Time to work on stealth moves,” Arvie said, breezy.
“Yeah, let me patch that in, real quick,” I growled, catching my breath.
The turret spasmed and went haywire. I slipped away while it screamed at shadows.
The fog kept its distance. Shapes paced me from cover to cover, never quite there when I looked, patient, circling, waiting for the moment I slipped.
I kept my pace tight, the rifle’s weight a reminder that I wasn’t helpless, just close. Arvie hummed a tune, probably just to annoy me.
“Come on,” I said, stepping over a pile of melted conduit, “Give me a break.”
Arvie laughed. “What? Don’t you like the escort detail?”
Right on cue, a low growl rolled out from behind the ruins, suggesting too many teeth and not enough patience. I answered with one of my own, sweeping the wasteland.
“Yeah, let’s not hang around.”
“Noted,” I muttered, lengthening my stride. Survival had just bumped everything else off the schedule.
Ahead, near the curvature of the dome's perimeter, a narrow passage cut upward through the wreckage. Metal ribs bent into a jagged throat, pointing toward the heavy containment wall. Higher ground meant options. Or at least a different way to die. I took it, boots scraping sparks off buckled alloy as I climbed, choosing forward because it was the only direction that hadn’t tried to kill me yet.
At the top, the rusted gullet spat me out onto a narrow ledge. The light had thinned to that particular shade of gray where shapes start being mere suggestions. The growls had faded into the ambient hum of the wasteland. That made the climb worth it.
Directly ahead, the dome wall loomed close, its surface a patched mass of layered alloy and old sealant. At its base, half-swallowed by debris, a tunnel mouth gaped, its blast doors locked open in a silent scream.
“Looks like a way out,” I said, sweeping the rifle barrel across the pitch-black entrance.
“Finally, we are here,” Arvie replied, her tone warming with mischief. “Want me to tell you what's inside?”
“Can you?”
“I could make something up.”
“No, thanks. I love a good mystery.”
I tightened my grip on the plasma rifle, its weight a spark of confidence that kept me going. I stepped into the dark.624Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡLkJFXM53JD
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