Adam once hid out in a meat locker. He was thirteen back then. Four years in an orphanage, living off slop and tussling with the other boys in his room, hardened his heart. It brought neither experience nor wisdom, and he ran afoul of a security guard while trying to nick an expensive ring in one of Steeldale's few upper-class areas. The guard chased him a merry way through the halls of a shopping mall, the insides of a vegetable shop and down multiple floors of a fashion store.
He was squat as a kid, with limbs as skinny as a monkey's, but his small stature and quick feet brought him the skills to slide under tables and zip through doors before they slammed shut. The memories blurred at this point, but he ended up jumping through a metallic door behind an empty counter. He bolted it shut before realising where he was.
Skinned up cows hung on racks in neat little rows like clothes on a line. The bodies dripped, coating the metallic floor in puddles of blood that squished rather than splashed. He walked down the middle, covered his nose and found that it did nothing to prevent the pungent, raw filth from worming up his sinuses. With it came the slick, encroaching realisation that every human looked like that beneath their clean skins and pretty words.
The abattoir followed protocol. They weren't in the wrong. He still cursed them, and himself, as he shivered under a table there, his face buried in the darkness instead of facing the meat outside.
The cavern was worse. His mind flew back to the gas chambers in boot camp. Don't breathe too much. Break the seals with two fingers. The skin will bubble with infections and burns if you half-ass the straps. None of this training would have helped. The red was not gas. It moved in defiance of natural law, flowing upwards into the ceiling, clinging to the walls as throbbing masses, or swarming on the floor in clusters of crimson dots. Lucy didn't conjure light; the red was bioluminescent enough.
He glanced over at her. Her expression was ironclad, her mouth firmly shut. Her breaths came shallowly through her nose. He read somewhere that the lungs of a War Maiden were fitted to filter out toxins. The techies could never have expected this.
A text message popped up in his interface.
Are you okay, Chosen? It was from Lucy.
Yeah. You? There was a delay between his thoughts and the text sending over to Lucy's end.
It's disgusting, but I believe my mystic core is shielding against the corruption. It might be a consequence of having linked up to you, Chosen. Let's text from now on. It's slower, but we can't risk breathing in this corruption.
Their footsteps crunched against the rocky floor, then gave way into wet, muddy squelches. The throbbing masses on the walls seeped dripping, maroon fluid that reeked like rotting fish. Stalactites clung to the walls that disgorged red when smashed.
Then, movement.
Incoming!
Wraiths rushed at them. Adam and Lucy pulled out their rifles and fired. The blasts hit them in the chest, and they kept on coming. Adam's eyes widened as a shadow lashed out of from behind. He ducked, avoiding a fleshy hook on the end of a tail-like appendage. He grabbed it with his mystic and crushed the end. The wraith shrieked as the hook exploded into a wad of pus and meat. More rounds to the torso finished it. A smoking spot festered where Lucy's enemy was.
Be careful above. They're clinging there. Lucy messaged.
Experience (Combat) acknowledged: +12%.
That was higher than expected. The concentration of the red must have strengthened the wraiths. He then checked his plasma gauge and stiffened.
Plasma: 70%
Lucy, my mystic cost more!
I noticed too. This proves it. Our mystic core is naturally trying to keep the corruption out. We must hurry!
They continued after consuming an emergency plasma packet. The sugary taste was gone. The cavern seemed to stretch on forever, winding and twisting like the human intestines. It was impossible, Adam thought. Office buildings weren't this expansive. There wasn't enough space beneath the mountain.
More monsters attacked. They took them out with their guns this time. The mere act of existing put a strain on their plasma synapses. He saw the meter tick down, his body paying the tax for the red.
Red.
Crimson and vermillion. Like a ripe cherry, like the paints he used to play with in preschool, like the time Mary read a thesaurus to him, because she found it on the streets and didn't have money to buy other books. It dripped, it pooled, it lifted itself up and down as if carried by invisible spider threads. Einstein would throw a fit. Or was that Newton? He sucked real hard at science class. Mary took the family's intellectual potential. Their father drowned his in sherry.
How far? He asked Lucy.
A couple of minutes. The ground is getting rockier. Hold on. She grabbed his hand. A faint tremor ran up his arm. Their fingers overlapped, and he felt her pulse beat faster than he expected. One wrong step and they'd plant face-first into the red particles swarming around their feet.
[IDENTITY_REDACTED], where the fuck are you? He tried to think back to when he fought Lucy. That time, he'd parsed through a cloud of the red corruption until he reached the core of her being and lifted her out. It occurred within a sort of spiritual or mental state. This was in the physical world.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Maybe he needed to reach the bottom and kill whatever was there. Maybe, maybe, maybe. It pained him to walk, to breathe, to think. Penny was right, he thought. There was no way she'd even survive the upper section of this cavern. Maybe he should apologize when he got back.
He almost laughed. Apologise? Him? Last time he did that was to his drill instructor at basic, and only because the man shouted at him so loud he thought he might defecate his pants. He was a real soldier now. Diving headlong into dangerous territory was what the Marines did, right?
After another stretch of uneven floor and monsters, their exploration screeched to a halt, thanks to a steel-grated door. Pulsing masses filled the gaps, jiggling back and forth. He gave the handle a try. Locked. Lucy motioned him to step back and fired at the front. The shot caused the pulses to retreat, but left the door untouched.
He peered closer and noticed a keypad. God, no. Please no. He was going to have to hack into this? Was there an Attribute he could use to assist him here? He flicked through the Augmentation Foci. None of them were targeted specifically at corruptive forces, not even the blasted Scourge.
It might've been the trick of the light, but Lucy didn't look so hot. The muscles in her upper portion were strained, setting her cheeks rigid between her taut mouth. Her teeth were gritted, as if she were contemplating biting through the door with her raw strength. Her grip on his hand was hard before and now felt like a vice.
Cover me, Lucy. He sent.
What are you going to do, Chosen?
Hack into it.
No! It's too dangerous! We don't know how the keypad has interfaces with the corruption! It could destroy your mind.
This place isn't right. The space is all jumbled up. Our laser blasts failed to blow down the door. Doubt our mystics will do the same. The two of them had consumed multiple plasma tablets to reach this point. The deeper they went, the more drain the red had on their plasma. The low plasma warning message had bombarded him more times than he liked. Besides, I've got that purifying thing. It'll be okay.
Promise me you'll disconnect as soon as any trouble surfaces.
I was going to anyway. Adam switched interfaces and accessed the Augmentation Foci.
Give me the [Hacking II] Augmentation. Electric currents sped through in his brain. 2 Biometric Keys were consumed. A text dump appeared in front of him, scrawling gibberish as white on black, then vanished.
Successfully installed the [Hacking II] augmentation!
He placed his hand on the keypad. Metal wasn't meant to feel squishy.
The security encryption of [#UIG34G&* Door] is weak enough to allow forceful decryption and/or exploitation. Initialize hacking procedure?
Go.
His vision twisted and once again he flew down the tunnel of lights. But like the cavern, something was wrong. Everything remained pixelated and techno-vivid, but the blue and yellow had given way to red, orange and bruise-purple. He stepped across a walkaway covered in uneven bumps and entered the main plaza of the encryption.
Enemies shambled forward. They dragged their virtual feet across the landscape. Adam's avatar sliced through one. It vanished into pixels, and then came the pain and the static.
"Knew we shouldn't have come here..."
He cut through another one.
"Kadence, that bitch, what a shit idea, I'm gonna tie her in the next place and fucking…"
A third fell, only for two more to swarm from behind. They were pouring out of the lumps in the distance, crawling like dying insects across an irradiated concrete road. Virtual and physical melded at one, and with no jaw to clamp down, Adam screamed, too.
"Why us? Where are you? Where are you?"
"It's inside me. It's crawling up me. I'm transforming! I'll be a…"
"It's cold, but it's hot. I'm on fire, but I'm freezing inside. Help me, someone, anyone…"
He ran, even as his virtual head threatened to split in two. The [Hacking II] augmentation made him faster, stronger, swifter here. He charged headfirst into the last section at the end of the plaza.
The thread was locked behind a case. He roared and smashed his fist against the transparent panel. It left a dent.
"A…a light that once perished now l-l-loves, lives, shines once more!"
It spurred him on. He drew back and punched with his other fist. The panel cracked. He did it again, and he saw the MOB, standing firm within one of Astraea's colonies, the image of its soldiers, bureaucrats and visitors frozen in time. Soldiers exercised in the yard. A War Maiden with bags under her eyes swallowed an entire pot of coffee in a single go. Space tore around a gigantic metallic ring and the half of a spaceship, sleek and with a curved bow, poked through.
The panel buckled. More cracks appeared in its frame like spiderwebs.
Distortion. Terror. Fragments split off the MOB like chunks of dead skin shed from an animal. One by one, they fell into empty space, then towards the skies of red. One sank deep into a mountainside. It smashed into the earth and remained there.
Without the MOB, it did nothing. Without a purpose, it stayed immobile. Grass grew around it. Insects and small creatures swarmed above and around it. Rain and snow, wind and dust attacked the metal. Then came the red.
He looked back. Enemies approached. Estimated time: one minute. Adam punched the case so hard his arms were practically pistons. [Hacking] made the pain real, gave him the uncomfortable, familiar feeling of blood running down the side of his hands.
Air rushes into a vacuum, and worms crawl into carrion. The beacon had a gaping hole that needed to be filled. The red crawled upon the beacon and strangled it like ivy. It expanded and filled the space like a gelatinous mass, over and over until the earth itself buckled under its weight.
The crack gave way into a hole. He pulled the sides apart, then threw the debris behind him.
Humans had sapience. Objects didn't. However, it was said that humans could imprint parts of themselves upon an object.
Perhaps that imprint could resemble a soul, and if that were so, could it call out too?
A boy and a girl walked into the red.
Adam took the thread and snapped it in half.
Two-factor authentication has been completed. Proceeding with [IDENTITY_REDACTED].
A wave of blue and white overtook him. He was sent flying back to reality, and through the haze of transmission, he witnessed the cavern shaking, Lucy support his body, and the radiant stellari tearing through the red like bleach upon a massive stain.
[IDENTITY_REDACTED] was successful!
Hacking of [#UIG34G&* Door] was a success!
Experienced (Exploration/Purification/Hacking) acknowledged: +65%
User Adam Westfield's Competency Level has progressed from 2-3 to 2-4! Acquired 1 Biometric Keys!
120 Stellari acquired!
The [Data Broadcaster] augmentation has been installed!