There was a time, at the start of the Great Famine, before Cunningham split open the thick clouds of radioactive ash and allowed the sun to shine once more on the lands of the Empire, when even the very insects began to starve. Driven mad by hunger, countless legions of Fallow-Flies began to swarm in clouds almost as thick as the ones above. John remembered the days spent huddling in whatever shelter could be scrounged up, the only fullness in his body from terror, as cultivators did battle against the endless sea of flesh-eating insects. Individually even a child could best one of the little creatures, but they moved as a river of bodies in the air, threatening to sweep anything and everything they came in contact with off its feet and into a writhing mass of hungry maws and sharp exoskeletons, beating with millions of wings enough to produce gales that rivalled storms. This was almost that…

But so much worse in every conceivable way.

It was impossible to tell how large the mountainous corpse truly was, with how it seemed to eternally remain the same size no matter how much they moved, but it was clear it was massive and by this point, the black mass had almost fully submerged its face. The swarm moved as though liquid in the distance, and while it seemed like it was probably far away now, that was not likely to last.

“RUN!” Cobalt yelped in terror, the first time he had seen such a reaction from her. Though he was not about to disagree. And by the looks of it, even with the limited emotional spectrum it was capable of expressing, ARTOS was much the same.

Distance was… weird here. He knew roughly how far they needed to travel to get to the strange structure, but trying to put a measurement to that was futile. But as the trio ran faster than mortal abilities would allow John was certain they would have passed it twice by now, a nagging feeling of something deeply and horribly wrong itching at the back of his mind. He didn’t feel tired, whatever his apparently spectral body was made of didn’t really seem to feel such things. But between the emotional whiplash of the past few hours and the current panic and confusion, there was an exhaustion setting into his very soul. He turned around for just a moment, wondering if perhaps he had been mistaken, if there was a chance they had more time than they thought.

The sea was closer now, and just as hungry. He could see what looked like human faces emerging from the shapeless masses, rictuses of rage and grief bubbling to the surface before being subsumed back into the writhing mass of legs and hate. Nope. Nope nope nope. Krack this. Bomb this even, bomb it all to ash!

Buzzing started to echo on the horizon, a low droning hum that consumed all other sound as though it were being crushed under the sheer weight of untold millions of hateful insects. It would take a miracle if…

“Over there.” ARTOS intoned with dissonant neutrality, extending a twisted finger to point towards a massive arch in the near distance. It seems that miracles did happen, though John could swear the arch he saw should have been pretty far from the last recognisable landmark…

And he was almost certain it didn’t look like that.

They didn’t have time to dwell on it, however, as the swarm started to close in.

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Cobalt was not scared of bugs. These. These were not bugs. She wasn’t sure what they were, but bugs didn’t talk!

“MURDERERS! MURDERERS! SINNERS MOST HIGH!” The swarm had screamed in unison, a sound that would have been drowned out by the buzzing for normal ears but unfortunately for her was perfectly audible to her enhanced senses.

“TRESPASSERS DARE DESECRATE THE RUINS OF THE MOST HOLY!” They continued to scream with visceral rage and hatred. “POISON POISON! MARKED WITH THE CURSE! YOU DESERVED NOT THE MERCY OF LIFE!”

“MURDERER MURDERER! LIARS! MAGGOTS ON THE CORPSES OF YOUR BETTERS!” They screamed.

She hated to admit it, but they were getting to her. The insults cut deep into her soul, she could somehow feel them in her marrow.

“Over there.” Artos said, and as promised there was a massive arch of metal identical to the one in the real world minus the tendrils of weird fleshy cables. She prayed her thanks to any Spirits that would listen… though in this place something in her very instincts told her that she wasn’t likely to find an answer. It was hard to describe, but this place felt dead, not even the pulse of Si suffusing this place held the life it had in the material world. Not even the things chasing them felt any sort of living, like broken puppets following orders and spewing insults woven into their clockwork than any living thing. She couldn’t explain how she knew, but the will of Heaven was not an idea that existed in this damned place.

So instead she kept her mouth shut and thought of quite literally anything else other than the rapidly increasing sound of the things at their tail. She didn’t have to look back to know they were gaining on them, the smell of rot in the air now went from everpresent but ignorable to a sensation so thick she could touch it. She scrambled up the broken bits of metal and rubble and frantically searched for anything resembling something else she saw in the tech cache.

“How do you activate this? Artos, any ideas?” She asked frantically.

The silence was deafening.

“You… do you know how you activated the portal the first time?” She asked.

“I thought you did.” It answered honestly.

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John’s shade made its way over. “What did you do before getting sucked in?”

“We were… I don’t know… destroying shit…” Cobalt answered, wracking her head for answers.

“Shit.” John swore.

“I hate to be the bringer of bad news again.” Artos cut in. “But unfortunately I must inform you, we are out of time.”

The buzzing reached a deafening crescendo. Cobalt let her body flare up to its full strength, flesh and bone cracking as she swelled in size. She didn’t imagine blending into the background would do anything right now so she raised the heat in her core to its fullest potential, the metal nearest to her drooping in her presence.

Artos shifted its arm into a vicious whip-like structure, glistening with the conductive sweat John used for his electric attacks that was so thick on its body that its gills were flared and fighting to extract as much oxygen as possible from the strange rot-scented air. Somewhere John’s shade also seemed to gear for a fight, only half-material as it was.

The first titanic insects came over the hills of scrap metal, heralding the rest of the swarm that was now so close the very ground beneath them was rumbling. She might actually die here, Cobalt realised.

But she had no intention to make it easy.

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These were not insects, John decided. He had seen large insects before, Spirit beasts the size of a human torso spitting vile toxic bile wherever they went. Those were nothing like the man-sized horrors coming towards them. They had armour plates that looked like weeping human faces, their legs appeared to be made of twisted metal, and something about them screamed instinctively wrong to his senses. Like a warped mockery of a living thing, a twisted reflection in a disturbed pool. They seemed to be making sounds almost akin to words, but he couldn’t quite discern it over the now deafening buzzing. Buzzing not from what one would typically think of as wings as it happened, but sickly strands of inky shadow that vibrated like warm air. To say nothing of the variation, while some seemed to be on the same plane of, well… reality as Cobalt and ARTOS others felt more like what John was currently, and a rare few seemed even more faded than that, barely outlines visible in the swarm.

To say nothing of the smell of rot. He couldn’t puke right now, he found, and neither ARTOS nor Cobalt were of the constitution to do so. But he imagined for anyone else they would waste precious moments removing the contents of their guts before the swarm hit. So far her heat was keeping the bugs away, but it was only a matter of time before exhaustion did its grim work. He had seen too many fellow Rats overexert themselves and get caught in a helpless pit to think otherwise.

He braced himself to fight naturally, but found his usual tricks… not present. He looked towards ARTOS occupying his body and cursed himself for forgetting, of course, according to Cobalt he didn’t even have flesh right now. What did he expect? Bereft of other options, he picked up a heavy rock, and thought through his options.

They were probably going to die here, a bleak part of him thought. There were simply too many of the bugs, and for every half dozen ARTOS in his body would knock out from a distance twice more would come into the fray. Cobalt was jumping right in, fighting with the blind fervour of a woman possessed, but how long truly could she keep it up for? For every bug crushed, it only seemed to embolden the actions of the endless swarm. Without an escape plan, this was a doomed attempt to delay the inevitable.

There was a hint of movement he noticed, behind ARTOS, and without thinking he willed his arm back. The whip-like cord of his physical body’s right arm slammed back and with enough force to bisect the stealthy creature in twain before a flash of electric power fried what was left. In this moment John realised a few things.

The bugs weren’t targeting him, despite in theory him being a more helpless and just as accessible target for the near invisible bug, and two he had more control over his body than he thought. If only they could do something about it…

A little flash of eerie blue light emitted from the strange ring welded onto his Relic-infused right arm, coinciding with a flash from the larger ring, and a sudden thought emerged to him.

“ARTOS!” He yelled over the incessant buzzing, taking the gamble that the sound would not attract the attention of the swarm.

ARTOS nodded, before forming its hand into a blade and slicing a few bugs that got too close. It did not so much speak, as broadcast the thoughts directly in his mind, further providing credence that the two of them remained linked. [WHAT DO YOU WANT?]

He tried to focus inwards, feeling the thin thread of connection that reached between them, and found something. Grabbing hold of it with his will, John pulled at the connection until he felt something click in his mind.

I still don’t fully trust you, but I know you want to get out of this alive. Let me take back control, I want to try something.

ARTOS paused for a moment, which was just enough time necessary for a particularly close bug to leap forwards in an attempt to rip it to shreds. Cobalt intercepted it in mid-air, still burning with blazing heat, yet sporting several vicious wounds all over her body. She was panting as she said… something. Truthfully it was impossible to hear much of anything right now.

It didn’t matter, he felt something relax on the other end, and John followed his instinct to pull.

With a sudden burst of Vertigo, he found himself dazed and disoriented in his own body… in the middle of a war zone. The main body of the swarm seemed to be here now, the hundreds surrounding them retreating only to return as piles the size of hills made of thousands. It didn’t matter though, whether he was right or wrong this was going to be over soon.

He willed his right arm to extend in the direction of the large ring, the flesh and metal clumsily and painfully extending all the way over to the structure. As the ring fused on his distended finger made contact with the larger structure a small hum washed across the landscape, causing the bugs to pause in their tracks briefly. Not enough to meaningfully change the outcome of the battle considering the portal still wasn’t open, but enough time for John to consider something

Artos… can you carry all the sweat to the end of my arm? He asked.

At the corner of his vision a vaguely human-shaped silhouette slowly rose to its feet and answered. [ENTIRELY FEASIBLE.]

Thank you. He responded as dozens of capillaries and canals opened on the skin, cables twisting and contorting to carry as much slime as quickly as possible to the end. John ignited a spark at the base of his armpit, a little nerve signal converting the gel into pure electric power.

A flash of blue filled the landscape along with a million furious shrieks, then the world became a blur as he was sucked in.