While we rode the elevator up, and it filled with the grotesque smell of the goo turning to smoke. I couldn’t help but stare at the body.

“Please do not eat the alien creature,” Lilly asked me, pleadingly even, “I don’t know if I could take it, given that I am being continually patterned after you.”

“I don’t feel like eating anything, so you don’t have to worry about that,” I told her, making sure the shotgun got stowed.

I could feel the connection cut, the moment where the tingle under my skin stopped, retreating down to my core, presumably where whatever was powering everything was.

I made sure my handguns were loaded, though I recognized that Righty had wound up in my left hand and Lefty in my right hand, and I fumbled them back into the holsters and then cross-drew them so they were right way around.

“So, any chance you can feel what I feel? With the corners, that is?”

“Not anything out of the normal, why?”

“Because all the corners feel weak, and I’m starting to get the feeling that I can feel something like where the hounds are able to come out of. I cant put my finger on it.”

“That’s… Strange. I can’t think of a reason why that would be, but if that’s what your feeling that’s what your feeling.”

I looked at the gash then, as if staring at my problem might give me an epiphany or perhaps fix my problem.

Funnily enough, the dog took that moment to start turning to smoke, but the smoke dissipated, floating up and into nothing. It did nothing for the smell.

I couldn’t quite place it, like the blood and most of the weirdness of the creature, it was just… not describable. I didn’t even know if there were words for it. It was a bizarre synthesis, so many things, too many things, each disagreeing with one another in a perplexing mess.

It was like it wasn’t real, like the smell wasn’t a smell like it was any sensation that wasn’t a smell, be it taste, or sight or texture.

“It's just… unreal. These stupid things, they keep wigging me out just looking at them.”

“Is that why you keep wincing while you look at them?” Lilly asked a simple question.

“Yeh, its like they have ideas for blood, its messing with my hea-”

I cut myself off as a hole opened in the area between the door and the cabin of the elevator, right along the weakest point of the corner.

I fired once, then twice, plinks and broken glass slamming into the corner, one before the hole opened, and the second as it did, plumes of plasma burst, some of it back blasting, heating me up, but the rest blowing a hole straight out of the carriage and into a solid concrete wall.

I flinched a hand up in front of my face, but I didn’t need to, the plume expanded way too far to carry fire back into me, it just gave me a light tan from the heat.

I split my fingers and spotted the charred face, it extended out, still alive. I fired twice more, the fire in the enclosed space a deafening cacophony as it reached my ear more than once in close succession, bouncing off the walls and right back to me.

Another wall, this time from one of the main corners, and I unloaded into that one, too. I finished up with the first as it fell limp, after the fourth shot, I felt another coming in from just behind me, and I moved, turning as I shot three times into the corner as it came out of the wall. I cursed and turned, moving Lefty to the newest one and Righty to the injured.

Something occurred to me then, and after putting a fourth shot into the second hound as it came in, I turned to the next best corner and put a hole into the best spot they might have come out of.

The corner changed, it stopped feeling weak and became a totally normal corner.

I smiled a bit too much tooth.

I felt cocky.

I shouldn’t have; the next next best corner to get to me, right behind me, opened, and a maw shot out and bit into my calf.

I whirled on instinct, pointing Righty at it and pulling the trigger, only for it to click on an empty chamber.

I pulled my other hand around and over and all but slamming a barrel down next to the base of the monster’s head.

The hammer fell as I started to fumblingly reload Righty with one hand, reaching into my ammo pouch and fumbling out first putty, then the polymer-encased tube of plasma. I managed to get one shot back in Righty the moment Lefty emptied himself.

My eyes flicked over to the corner with the heavily injured dog. I made to move, stumbled a step, planted my feet and flipped Lefty around so I held the empty gun by the barrel.

The dog shot out, and my arm slapped down, slamming the hefty end of the grip down onto its head.

It howled in pain, and I reached up and slammed it down into the beast's skull again and again until it stopped moving.

The whole while, I reloaded Righty with one hand.

I stopped mid-way through reloading and shot a hole through another corner, the initial one that had closed up while I was fighting.

I pulled it back, and got back to loading it, pulling out another shot to try and finish up reloading with one hand, and I got a bit on my shoulder as the corner I was right next to opened up.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

“Fuckin-” I tried to say, as I went to raise my pined right arm up… And didn’t shoot.

It was too close to me, and I couldn’t rotate like I needed to with my right arm like I should, so I reached over with my left arm and clubbed it, trying to chase it off with brute force, but it just, didn’t care.

The cabin was full of stinking, smoking, horrific ooze and the broken body’s of the things. The popping of bone, the reek of not blood filled the car as it rose up hundreds of floors.

I clubbed it again.

The reek was giving me a headache, my calf burned from the cuts as blood flowed free out of my body, mingling with the grotesque synaesthetic charnel house around me. It burbled as it moved through it. boiling the goo and blood that was not blood.

I clubbed it again and felt it retaliate, doubling down on it’s bite by puncturing my arm with its tongue.

I clubbed it again, and for good effort, I placed my foot in one corner, and pushed, pulling the thing out of the wound in the world it bit from and slammed it into the ground.

It scrambled, whipping its paws and trying to right itself, but I didn’t let it.

I kept it on it’s back as it started to cry in alarm and clubbed it’s through, its temple.

I sucked blood down its tongue to the point my arm went numb, but my left arm was fine, so I kept clubbing until there was a cracking noise, and it let go.

I holstered Lefty, and extricated my right hand from the gaping jaw, pulling out the tongue.

It was like an IV bag from a hospital, only it sucked out blood instead of giving you whatever it was that they gave you. Fluids… Whatever

“Lilly… Can you fix my arm?”

“I already am,” she told me, her voice calm.

“Am I going to get any sicker?” I asked her.

“No, no other contaminants have entered you, some more of the same pathogen, if your immune response is any indication, but your immune, at least for now, nothing new.”

I nodded to myself, panting. I had stopped breathing there for a moment.

I tried to move my right arm and winced, but I was able to transfer Righty to my left hand.

I turned, and started putting holes in the elevator.

I found a weak point lined up my shot, and punched a hole in the metal. I had to keep reloading, again and again.

I punched a hole in the wall as a wound started to form and the plasma of the shot penetrated it like it was a block of gelatin, shooting out a plume of goo before closing back up.

It made me want to hurl a little, but I made sure to shoot again and popped a clean hole through where it was weakest.

By the time I was done I was siting there, the floor dry of goo, the room pungent enough that it rang my head into a fierce, head splitting migrane.

The elevator twitched and I fired off everything into the offending angle of the elevator… only to realize that it was the elevator stoping. There was a ding, and the door rolled open to a clear room beyond.

“Oh thank god, it’s over.”

“Please get up,” Lilly asked me, “I don’t want to overtax your body if you get hurt again. There’s only so long I feel is justifiable to turn off the limits your body places on stem cell growth… The last thing I want to do is give you cancer on accident, but we need to get out of here. So start walking. I’ll give a humm to show you the way towards your ship so you don’t have to focus on holding the way finder. NO using your right arm.”

I stopped trying to use my right arm to get up, and awkwardly used my left leg, and left arm and the wall and slowly levered my body up.

My leg stung when I put weight on it, but I refused to acknowledge it, it would only got worse if I looked at it.

Wasn’t that always the way of things? You get a paper cut and barely felt it, but it bled just a bit and then it suddenly felt like someone had just cut your hand off.

“Stupid elevators… I wish I had my sword,” I sulked.

“I hate to tell you the obvious, but you could have used one.”

“I could have, but I can barely use my sword, and I have a talent for that, or bio resonance, or whatever it is. I’m just not that good with them, and all the ones in that room were rather long too,” I pointed out.

“True enough, it might have just gotten in the way, but whats the difference with your sword? It could still get caught!”

I shook my head as I got out of the bloody elevator, only taking the time to click the bottom button, before I left.

If I had left any week cornors, I hadn’t felt them, but if there were any they would be at the bottom most floor of the facility.

I walked over and up the stairs to the entrance hobbling as little as I could as I made my way up to the surface as I told her, “My sword could cut straight through the elevator, it wouldn’t have gotten stuck in there, I’ve used it in closer confines.”

It was still night as I made my way up and into the open, in silence, before she whistled, “That would have to be a monomolecular blade, maybe even finer.” She said, before taking on a suspicious tone and saying, “I suppose, you could say that it is a truly fine weapon.”

I snorted, “Nice. How long until my leg’s better?”

“I don’t know, it will get better when it get’s better, now… That a way,” she said, her words quickly followed by a beep coming from the direction I had came in from.

“What the hell? Ok, I guess I follow the noise, cool. Thanks. At least I can hold a gun. Will you be able to keep the shoes going with a bit of a limp?”

“Hmmm.” She humed, contemplatively, “I think so, yes. Just don’t use your right arm, that’s a more significant injury than an ear drum or your leg.”

Ha, now wasn’t that backwards. A burst eardrum was the type of thing that kills you most of the time, or leaves you deaf forever, but not for me.

It made me almost want to laugh, but the shattered landscape was too dreary, even though I couldn’t see it from where I stood.

So I started moving as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast.

As time went on, and I covered ground in the dark, small chirps intermittently correcting my course in the dark as Lilly guided me.

Soon the dark, as if the sun was rising, raised ever so slightly. There was dim light, and the spike field became visible.

Lilly, who would sometimes chirp up and talk with me, stopped talking.

The spike field freaked me out, what with my newfound fear of corners, but the spikes were incredibly ridged. As if anchored in bedrock, their solidity gave me great confidence that I was not about to run a gauntlet, but they still unnerved me greatly.

Something about them gave me the willies.

I got through the field, the sun rising in the reverse of last time, my leg got better, I got faster, until I was zipping along.

I saw the structure in the distance, a point far off in the horizon.

I could barely imagine how heigh it must have been.

“How tall was that thing do you think?”

“In feet, or in meters?” she asked, distantly.

“Feet, gosh, I cant even-”

“3270 ft, The Sky Piercer Pyramid, was from base to tip 3270 ft, with a two story solid gold cap,” she said in, a tone that was quiet. Somber even, “It was built using the first commercially available matter fabricator, a publicity stunt, but gone full circle to being useful, instead of a waste of time. It was an archology, the largest archology built at the time, and now it’s just… dust.”

3270 ft.

“That’s… as tall as a mountain… two story’s of solid gold?”

Now I stared too.

A broken, inhospitable waste land, dead to the world, and cradled, far off, the base not visible, hidden beyond the horizon, a monument to humanity's grandeur.

“It was built after reactors like yours got big enough to power city’s. A monument that humanity would never need to fear another resource war, because if they needed something, they could in theory make it, even if it was costly. A dream of a brighter tomorrow.”

“That would be a rather nice dream, I suppose,” I told her.

“I cant believe it, it seems too unreal… And I cant tell what’s worse, that you pulled me out of a hazardous waste site, or that… it’s just… all gone.”

I had no words, so I said nothing. I supposed, that was all that was left behind when you lost the game of life. I had to wonder who else had lost it in the past, where were their monuments? We had not so many of our own, what would we leave behind if we disappeared?

It was only the things that got built to last that got left behind, that and the land they were built on. Just dreams of what once was.