Mia carried me up the last gap between the cheeks and the closest eye. It was a strange thing to stare at an eye magnified so largely. We were so small. The eye was like a murky pool, filled with ichor and darkness. It was covered in a weird material that felt uncomfortable to my hands, but my discomfort paled in comparison to the opportunity we had. I didn’t know how we could avail of this window, but that didn’t mean I was ready to give up on it.

The beast didn’t seem to fully notice us, its head shaking ever so slightly when I came into contact with the dusky orbs. That however, was nothing compared to its reaction when my hand pierced through the supple membrane, the ichor within splashing over my exposed hand, a tingling sensation coating my arm. The beast let out a confused roar, its face's actions seemingly stopping for a moment as it shook its face. I pushed in deeper, unwilling to be jettisoned from its form when we were so close, Mia temporarily darting about in her attempts to avoid being unceremoniously ejected.

“I think I’ll stay out here and guard you from any stray parasites,” she said, furtively glancing towards the sky. “I don’t think I’m quite as equipped as you are to go into the beast.”

“I don’t think I’m well equipped either,” I groaned, feeling the tingling sensation amp up further on my arm. It was like I was being poked with tiny needles, or perhaps like tongues of fire were licking each square inch of flesh.

“Look, from what I know of most creatures, there’s a passage behind the eye that leads to more important body parts to function. You’re going to need to go through and destroy everything in your path.”

“I was already planning on doing something like that… do you have any other good advice?”

“Uh, monitor and look around based on your electroreception.”

I blinked rapidly, the thought having failed to cross my mind as the prospect of swimming through the creature’s blood, or whatever liquid it was that filled with organ. “You know, that’s probably a good idea.”

“Also, I think it’s gross. You handle gross stuff better, Perry.”

“I don’t know if that’s true either, but alright. Wish me luck and cover my back.”

“You know it. For Javier.”

“For Javier,” I quietly agreed, preemptively reactivating my Swollen Fur. I was likely going to need a source of air within the beast, and I didn’t need to panic as I went deeper and deeper into the beast. With one last glance at the outside world, I took a deep breath and plunged the rest of my body through the membrane, body submerged into the awful material.

My breath nearly left my body as the awful sensation spread, my eyes shut in abject horror, refusing to let that liquid get any additional options to enter my body. I let my electroreception fan out, searching for the biggest signal within the beast and started kicking forward, pretending that this was just a swamp and not the inside of a spike feeder’s eye.

Deep within the darkness time was a relative illusion. I took breaths when I could from the air nested in my fur, refusing to exhale into the eye for fear that the liquid would trickle down my throat. The prospect of how I was going to smell after was almost enough to make me want to scream, but screaming was another prohibited activity within the confines of the beast. It was as though I was in a new world, the first explorer of a horrid realm. Even the realm of shadows paled in comparison to this awful place, my body continuing to slowly make it forward through the monster. I couldn’t stop. If I stopped, it was over.

Hopefully, Mia was doing well out there, as she could be fighting for quite some time as I slowly passed deeper and deeper into the beast. If the eye was anywhere near as large as I thought it was, this trip would take uncomfortably long, and that included my growing discomfort at being submerged in the liquid surrounding my body. My motions were starting to become more pained, my skin unenthused with the material I had doused my body in.

Time started to fade away, only my continued need to breath and my suffering the only real constants. I kept going towards the signal, feeling like I was slowly getting closer and closer, but the absolute distance was hard to measure without visuals to track it. I could spend a lifetime within the beast, my mind vacillating back and forth between my thoughts of pain and my goal. Stopping wasn’t an option, no matter how much my body wished that I could exit the depths of the eye and escape from this pain. Escape was no longer an option this deep in. There was only success or death, and I had already narrowly avoided death once today. I wouldn’t get a second chance.

Yet I kept kicking. I kept pushing forward. I squirreled away my breaths, refusing to hard hoard whatever air there was within my fur, knowing that caution would only increase the odds of failure. I just had to keep moving, as the source was at the other side. I could sense it. I was almost where I needed to be to defeat the beast where it was most vulnerable.

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The source shone in my minds eye as a center of electric activity. It was a brilliant thing, constantly flashing and acting. Whatever it was, whatever it did, I knew that if I could manage to harm this, then perhaps the harm to Titan City would finally end. It was a massive thing compared to my body. The question was how I could manage to harm it, given even if it was much smaller than the spike feeder, it was still too large for my brass knuckles. I gave it a cursory punch but it didn’t feel like the object gave way. I had no idea if my venom would even be effective, and I was reluctant to try and expose other parts of my body even further, my skin singing a melody of pain and despair from its continued presence within the monster.

The option that made sense was the old reliable methodology, a Direct Current for all I was worth. It had never failed me before. Electricity seemed to be the great equalizer, and I knew deep in my heart that this would be the answer. I summoned all my strength and pushed, drained all of the energy I had left, because there was no return trip deep within the beast. There was only success or failure. I kept pushing and pushing, the electricity coursing through the object, more and more trickling out of my body to the beast. All I had wasn’t enough, so I gave more, giving up until I had nothing left and then I still pushed some more, until even my electroreception started to fade away with my consciousness. If that wasn’t enough, nothing would ever be, but while I couldn’t tell what was happening in the outside world, the slow thudding of my heart in my ears was a reliable metric that was I still alive, if only for the moment. Javier had sacrificed himself to give me a second chance. I just hoped this legacy would be enough, even if it came so quickly.

The world faded away, the burning overwhelming my body, no longer able to pretend that it was temporary, that I would be back outside once again. This was my life now. This was the end. An endless wall of burning and pain, my skin seared with the memory of thousands of needles scraping each fraction of my flesh, an endless wall of abrasion sanding to the parts hidden deep. And then in a brilliant white flash of eternity, I could no longer feel at all.

My mind was slow to rouse, but the feeling of a different liquid over my skin brought me out of the painful stupor, only a faint memory of the burning sensation still lingering. I hesitantly reached out with my outstretched arms, noting just the feeling of air parting in my wake, not the awful sensation of the ichor of the beast. My eyes gingerly opened to a wall of water falling upon my face.

“Oh, I think he’s coming to,” said a familiar voice. It was a struggle to focus on the sensation, having become accustomed to only the noise of my heart within the dark depths of the beast, but I rapidly blinked and saw the looming friend-sized shape of Mia off to the side with a bucket of water.

“I thought we lost you too, Perry,” another voice said, my body enclosed in a tight grip. The familiar sensation awoke the rest of my slumbering will, my body remembering the owner of this powerful embrace.

“Vera?” I choked. “You’re alive too?”

“Big words for the man who had to be cut out of the beast by Alain,” she said, refusing to let go of me. “You don’t know how much you smelled. Well, you did smell, but you still smell, too.”

“Excuse me?” I croaked, trying to breathe in her still-tightening arms.

“The insides of the spike feeder were foul, Perry. Now you just smell like you dipped in some trash,” replied Mia, her smile effortless.

“I suppose we can take some comfort in some small measures. You guessed where I was, Mia?”

“I had a sensation. You’ll need to thank Alain over and over, when he wakes up. I don’t know how he traveled that far through shadows inside of the spike feeder, but it worked, and he brought you along with him. He’s currently recovering in the medical bay. Evidently it took a lot of effort.”

“I wasn’t worth having in the medical bay?” I groaned, words tumbling freely from my lips. It wasn’t right to compare my suffering to anyone else’s, but in this instance I thought it was fairly deserved to ask such a question.

"Alain’s just being monitored there. He’ll be up and about as soon as he awakens. As for you, they did some minor treatment and then brought you out for cleaning. A lot of the filth had faded from your body when diving through the shadows, but we couldn’t let anything else linger on your person. You’re welcome to check up with them after, but you came out mostly intact for having been submerged within the body of the beast.”

I let out a deep breath, the weight that had bunched over my shoulders fleeing into nothingness. “Very well then. How did Titan City come out?”

Mia grimaced, turning away to look at the rest of the training grounds. “Around half of the city is ruined, with another third of it in a state not fit to be habited in. It’ll be easier to repair that area, but easy doesn’t mean fast. What we’re also going to work on is setting up refuge camps within the training grounds and in the outer perimeter of the city. It certainly won’t be ideal, but there’s nowhere else to put them. We’ll be working extra hard to defend them until the city is sufficiently rebuilt to allow the population to shift back to their homes.”

“That’s not all, Perry,” Vera interjected. “The death toll is hard to calculate. Lenny’s team confirmed that people were flooded out of Old Titan City. Other's are missing, perhaps taken away by the parasites, which stopped functioning once you felled their host, blessed be the doctrine. That still doesn’t account for those lost to their fellow citizens, their fear overwhelming them that they trampled one another.”

“So, you’re saying that we have an untold amount of dead citizens, the city is mostly in tatters, and we lost Javier and many other of the guards.”

“Well, I didn’t say those last words, but yes, Perry. We did win. But we had a steep price to pay.” Mia put her hand on my shoulder, drops falling onto my back.

What a steep price we had to pay for the city and the people who lived in it. So much lives lost for the sake of the still living. We would have to carry them to the end of our days.