Food.

Kin thought of that almost every day. He sorely missed the meat that he had in abundance back in the outpost, and even the sludgy brown mineral-substitute that he gulped down for breakfast. Now, he only had a small mountain of nutrient paste tubes.

Kin missed his life before the Breach.

The Breach. After much thinking, Kin had realised that he was no longer the old Kin. The old Kin, the old Outpost-boy kin, the one that cried when he fell and scraped his knee, was no more. The old Kin, when he first landed in this hell of a place, was dead. He was replaced by the new Kin, the one that would fight, and run if necessary, the one that knew many things, the one that could survive. Kin named the day when he was ejected out of the dying outpost, lurching into the great unknown. He named it the Breach. With Mion's help of course. It was the day when he learned that crying would get you nowhere if nobody would hear it. It was the day, although the word had lost its meaning here in this inky, hellish blackness, with watery danger on every side, when Kin became a stronger person, shaped by the fact that there was no one for him. No one that would notice him cry.

He still did complain, from time to time. Like now.

"Mion, I'm hungry."

"You just ate."

"Doesn't change the fact that I'm hungry."

"Doesn't change the fact that you're stronger than this."

"That's rich, coming from an AI."

Kin reclined back in the pod, his base of operations ever since his power-suit broke. Oh, how he missed that suit. Without it, he couldn't move with the sinuous grace and power that he did for the first few days. One wrong step would plunge him into a pressure current, the vortex of death that almost ended his life and decommissioned his suit. He had to proceed carefully, not knowing what might be lurking around the corner.

And the Sirens. The nightmarish parodies of human bodies that attacked him not long after he arrived here. Without the missiles and suit weaponry, it was nigh impossible to fight off the humanoid monsters that plagued him. To assuage his fear, he had given them a name, a word taken from ancient myths predating any known history.

Being weak kind of sucked. But it opened his eyes. Everywhere he snuck, Kin noticed new things. A hidey-hole. Spikes that he could lure the Sirens, dumb as nails, into. Little holes left by long-gone pressure currents that led to undiscovered areas. Shortcuts.

Shortcuts were vital.

Kin picked up his bag, a nice piece of equipment that he found in the pod. Apparently, the pod that he once thought was trivial was full of goodies, to prepare for the situation he was now in: total power-suit failure. Grabbing a handful of nutrient-tubes and two spare rebreathers, he stuffed them into the sack and slung it on. Sticking Mion's interface into a pocket, he slung out of the pod.

"Time to go to work."

Kin swam upwards, from the pod, to the ceiling of the the large metal cave that he called home. Nimbly avoiding various struts, he made his way to a hole in the horizontal surface about eight tenths of a meter wide, and pulled himself through. He was now in a maze of wires and pipes, but they were all long dead, and none carried any lethal current whatsoever. They were still scary, though, like big black snakes underwater. Pushing them aside, Kin slowly eased through the bowels of the structure.

Upon reaching a little metal slab, Kin heaved it aside, revealing a small circular hole that led to blackness beyond. Quickly slipping into the opening, he dragged the metal hatch shut. Sirens were strong, but they were very, very stupid. Reaching for his torch, Kin quickly found it and flicked it on.

He was in a gigantic circular pipe, with wreckage floating in the center, and some openings scattered sporadically in the walls. Shaking off the feeling of apprehension that he always got when he descended into the place, he pushed off, floating gently into the center of the huge tube.

I am descending, he though, into the belly of the beast.

Truly, it looked like the maw of some unknown ancient leviathan, an eons-old monster that slept, and would sleep, for eras to come.

This was also a shortcut.

After a few weeks, Kin had mapped out the general structure of the base. It consisted of three huge spheres joined together, with a circular rod transfixing all of them. He had landed in the last sphere and had predicted that it was the loading area and therefore the bottom. Kin reasoned that if he reached the top, he could probably find some clue as to where he was and how it came to be. The area he was in now was the tube running through the three spheres. With a wide open space, it left room for speedy maneuvering, much faster than laboriously picking his way through room after room.

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This time, he was not looking for food. He had enough to last him for three more weeks, gained from days of scrounging and saving. But he had to be careful, and never gorge, even going hungry some days to save paste.

Because he was planning to go deeper into the beast than ever before, straight into the bowels of the Second Sphere. There was nothing he knew about it, nothing that he found that suggested anything about its contents.

So he prepared. He would make a preliminary expedition now and recon the place, then come back later with all his food and go straight in.

It seemed foolish to put all his eggs in one basket, but Kin knew that there wasn’t an infinite supply of nutrient paste around his base. He couldn’t afford to get comfortable. Comfort meant stagnation. Stagnation meant death.

Kin stopped at a cable he had strung many hours earlier, running down one diameter of the tunnel. The inch-thick wire marked the furthest Kin had ever gone: the very end of Third Sphere.

From now on, anything could happen.

Grabbing the cable, Kin brought himself to a stop. A quick glance around revealed a small hole about eighty meters from his current location. That was his destination.

“Mion.”

“Mmm.”

“Time to go.”

“Okay.”

Kin swung himself off the cable, throwing himself off at a trajectory in the general direction of the opening.

“Oh no--’”

Kin cried out as he bounced off a floating piece of metal, rebounding off at a crazy angle. Quickly he paddled towards the hole, using his limbs to propel him in the right direction.

Tumbling in, Kin quickly came to a stop and took a quick check of his surroundings. A pah continued straight, disappearing into the dark ahead, and another branched off to the right about thirty meters ahead. It was blocked up to chest height with debris.

Kin decided to continue ahead. Pushing off struts, he gingerly made his way, fastening his torch to his head and casting it in every direction, the bright light creating jagged black shadows.

Nothing. Not a sound, a vibration, even a slight movement. Kin took a knife out from his belt and slammed its hilt on a strut, then dragged it downwards, creating a low, sonorous screech that resonated in the water. He quickly braced against a wall, knife out, ready to take whatever might have leapt out of the shadows.

Nothing. All was quiet. Kin took this as an auspicious sign and continued onward.

He would come to realise later that there was such a thing as too quiet.

Picking his way through a left turn and then a right, Kin finally came across a door, half jammed. Shining his torch into the pitch black crack, Kin’s eyes widened.

Jackpot.

He could make out what seemed to be the silhouette of a gun-like object. Quickly squeezing through, Kin swam over to it and greedily picked it up.

“Mion, what’s this?”

“It’s a pressure pistol that fires a burst of high-pressured water. Something like the cannon on your old suit but much smaller. Here, check if it works--yes, cock it by yanking the slider back.”

Kin drew the slider back with a sssshhckk. The weapon felt comfortable in his grasp, its weight reminding him of its power. Pointing it at the wall, he pulled the trigger, feeling it jerk in his hands. A trail of bubbles instantly shot out. With a clang, a small but relatively deep dent appeared on the wall.

“...Nice.”

Kin held the pistol in front of him, sweeping it from right to left. Spotting a small crack in the opposite wall, he decided to squeeze through it rather than leave through the door.

He was in a maze of struts, some broken, most whole. Slowly swinging his way through until he got to the other side. Kin deposited himself in yet another long corridor. With renewed bravado he forged ahead. Continued forward until he found another door. This time it was rusty but not jammed, so he dragged it open with a metallic scream, and shone his torch into the foreboding blackness ahead. And then he understood.

Understood why it had been so quiet. Understood why there were no Sirens around.

He was standing in front of the largest creature he had ever seen.

Its head was taller than him and bristled with exposed red teeth as long as his leg. It bore an uncanny similarity to the Sirens, except that on its pink, fleshy head rested a huge, black, alien eye. Twin mandibles on its chin twitched, and upon seeing Kin, its mouth spasmed into a rictus grin.

Oh God it smiled it smiled who taught it that it just smiled like a human

It cocked its head to one side languidly, then opened its mouth a hissed, revealing an inner jaw of human-looking molars, extending all the way down its throat.

“AAGGH!”

Kin broke and ran, his breath fogging on his visor, Mion urgently saying something that he couldn’t hear. He tripped and fell, got up, ran, didn’t look back, turned, didn’t look back, didn’t look back, didn’t look back. Terrified that the grotesque countenance of that monster would be right behind him. He didn’t know where he was going. He would only realise he was lost, lost in this huge, deadly, unknown darkness a lot later.

For now, all he wanted to do was to be away--far, far away from the thing that smiled.