And that’s how I ended up on the streets of Janus Prime, wandering around Downspire among the low-lifes and the poor down here, fallen from the great Upspire Pinnacles of the Castle and the Dungeon, as the headquarters of the Coronals and Umbrans were called.

I had one of the ubiquitous bracelet-coms on my arm, two years old and not exactly stylish, scuffed up and abused... and currently packed full of histories and general education books for me to skim through.

I was wearing a Belt. It had been hidden inside Chalice, all wrapped up and waiting for me in the Compressed hollow hilt there. A Heavy Gravity Belt, capable of taking me all the way up to 6 g’s.

It was at 3 g’s now, and would slowly ramp up as my body healed to adjust to the greater weight. The standard was that I had to be able to do the same things at a higher gravity as I could formerly at a lower one, i.e. the standard was fixed, and I had to meet it to progress on.

It would require time and a lot of physical training. Walking around weighing over two hundred kilos and only going to get higher, too. Hey, good thing I didn’t have any dangly or droopy body parts, huh?...

I’d had a dream about dressing up as a Coronal Knight in white and gold, showing them what a Gold could do... but being Dark Gold was more my style for now. Maybe later...

I plugged in my hair and began to read and listen in my Visual File inside my head. Those from Sir Dorval were very classic and mainline, while Philius was more than happy to include stuff with differing viewpoints and interpretations. Given the sophistication of teaching media, it was a tremendous amount of information dump, and it was going to take me time to go through it... and now I had a connection to the Boole, the massively monitored internet that the citizens of Janus Prime could connect to.

Ah, internet access for someone with a 25 and rising Intellect. The things that I could do...

I began to fill in my lived-line, skating along through the underskirts of this vast stretch of half-mile high residential bloks, and the factories and commericias that existed in between them... along with lots of stretches of no-man’s land and the like.

I had sort of resolved that my Mark of Intellect was going to be the first one I raised to full strength, as I wanted to reach a 28 as soon as possible, and the more Skill Points the merrier, given how much I needed to learn and know to do my job right.

Job then, right. I was going to need a job. There was only a couple credsticks in my pocket, untraceable and liquid cash which would basically feed me for a few days. Since I only needed a fraction of the food of others, they’d last a while.

Well, what kind of job fit a footloose High-G with aggressive combat instincts and a mean streak when roused?

----------------

Office of the Exterminatus Sanctia...

I tried not to laugh at the sign with the puffed-up attitude, as well as several bullet holes and burn marks on it. The circle with a line through a six-legged insect kind of summed it all up.

The city exterminators, widely dubbed The Termites, according to the Boole. Basically, you called them up, deposited money, and the wandering Termites popped up, killed what needed to be killed, and collected their pay. Got an official ID and coat patch and they almost checked your background when you signed up and paid the registration fee.

The lady who took my paperwork was middle-aged, lined all over, and looked me over with the eyes of someone who’d just frown if the Emperor His Bad Self walked through the door and asked to register. Prints and DNA and eyescans, hey, matched up with the ID I suddenly had, I was an Official Native, if not a full Citizen, of Janus Prime now.

She didn’t even take the time to show me how the program she fed into my Band worked, telling me that it had all the instructions inside it and I could peruse it at my leisure and the monthly licensing fee would be deducted from my bounties monthly, thankyouhaveanicedaybye.

I walked out of the decaying office an official Termite, out to save the world and shoot giant rats at the same time.

It appeared I had a lot to read on the internal forums, too...

--------------

“Well, that sounds interesting.”

I watched the vid of a six-foot long spideroid coming out of a doorway, wrapping up a woman walking by, and dragging her back in as her friends barely turned around in time to scream in alarm. Naturally, their first reaction at the sight was to run like heck, writing off poor Nan-C Dru as a goner.

Natural Termite stuff. Standard bounty for a spideroid thing, approximate size, bring proof of kill to local Termite office, blah blah. Small bonus for recovery of any items enabling identification of victims.

Hey, that was only a half mile from here. I flicked on the acknowledgement and skated off in that direction. It was only posted a few minutes ago, and popped up because I was in the area. I should be among the first to get there.

This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

----------------

The place was a run-down factory area, of which there were literally hundreds of square miles of through this mega-city. Janus Prime used a rolling pattern of urban renewal, designating certain sectors every year for destruction and rebuilding as necessary. Businesses would move into the new area, older ones would fall steadily into further decay as time marched on, becoming more decrepit and taken over by derelicts and those below the sight of the powers Upspire. Then it would come around again, things would be razed and built over, and the process would start again.

There were dozens of layers of this underground, the city built up and up over millennia on the ruins of the old, and it was all perfectly natural, the underground living spaces were just more places for those Down and Underspire to live, work, and die, far from the light.

As for the stuff below that, well, that was all part of the risk of living in Downspire. Upspire could and did add on new floors, too...

I walked right in the door where the girl had been snatched, and looked around.

It was perfectly dark, no lights, with a cloying thickness to it that told of a presence that gathered darkness to it and suppressed light. That was fine; when you have devilsight, darkness is like day, with the colors a bit muted.

Plenty of ways to get around not being able to see, but the key point here was not what I could see, but what I could not see, i.e. stuff hidden in vents, tunnels, the other sides of doors, walls, and ceilings, and so forth.

Outer office door, stripped of everything except the trash left behind by bums and people dumping theirs wherever it was convenient. Grey plascrete, support beams, and cables stripped of wiring and conduits, basically everything valuable or salvageable taken, including screws and nails.

Nothing like an efficient recycling society, I mused to myself, and glided forwards.

I flowed through the mess on the floor, papers, scraps, and the bones of things that had died here. There were whispery flutters of stuff among them, and I narrowed my eyes. Silk... with a line of psi running through it.

What we had here was an early-warning system, disguised among the debris.

My Null radiated out, bore down on the stuff, and the shadowy influence was suppressed and faded away, without being tripped. It would feel like its duration had run out, rather than being broken or dispelled, and I walked through and over the stuff, my Vajra ensuring it didn’t stick to me.

I could see the stickiness of blood, and make out the scarring scuffs of the claws on the ends of the spideroid’s legs, looked like ten of them, eight for travel and two for grasping.

I followed calmly, stretching my awareness out along and through the floor and walls, up to the ceiling.

Ho. I looked up at a ventilation duct revealed by the crumbled remnants of the ceiling, and pulled out Chalice.

Just a flash and a hum of gold, and the baby spideroid, body only the size of a human torso, flinched and died as my soulblade punched through what passed for its brain.

It looked like momma was feeding a few babies. Under the by rules, if I stumbled upon a nest, due to the increased threat level, I was naturally offered a bounty multiplier.

I’d have to come up, rip open this duct, and extract its head. Since I wanted its nexal crystal, a two-fer.

Maybe the light was seen, maybe it wasn’t. I continued forwards, wispy stretches of shadow and silk melting in front of my Null.

There, on the other side of this thin wall of plascrete. Chalice drove through and Flared, cutting it in two in the room on the other side. I waited by the hole as it quivered, curled up, and fell off the wall, before moving past the doorway gaping open to the side, any door long since carted off for use elsewhere, and even the hinges long gone.

Useful to man and beast, as it were.

Found my first cocoon of human remains a minute later, discarded in a dusty sideroom, a bag of hardened skin around bones, organs all sucked out. Didn’t touch them yet, they’d been moved here from elsewhere. Judging by the building layout, a major common room, probably used for assembly or inventory storage, was just ahead, the garage door usable by lifters ripped off its rollers and taken elsewhere, leaving a big gaping hole in the wall that could fit a whole swarm of wall crawlers.

I slid up close to the edge, and looked out, and up.

Huh.

There were at least twenty of them that I could see, most smaller than the one in the vid, but there were at least two of those, and a big ass web maze assembled up among the rafters of the ceiling, with something impressive at the core of it.

Well, just one spideroid, right? Hah...

Still, time was a-wasting. Other Termites might be on the way, so no reason to just sit around and do nothing.

I reallocated my enhancements through Chalice, flicked her up, and tossed the flaming blade out.

I spit one of the smaller ones, hit the webbing he was scuttling along, and set it on fire. With a woosh, it began to spread rapidly, and as I flicked up a new blade, I swept left and right at sticky tendrils hung down like fishing bait, and they zipped burning up to the webbing above.

There were hissing sounds, and things in black with many legs began to move very quickly in the direction of the glowing golden sword that nobody could miss. I whooped and grinned and cut the first one jumping down at me with widespread legs in two, ignoring it as the slick, yet bristled hide and legs bounced off me, and was on to the next one.

When the momma spideroid, with a body fully eight feet long, came bursting out of that big bunch of webbing in the middle of the room, I grinned and headed for it, arcs of golden light flashing and Flaring around me as the small ones died and the bigger ones blew apart with Sun Strikes ripping them apart.

They were phrenic, so Psi-bane worked just fine on them, but no reason I couldn’t add Vermin to the Slaughter for my Banes. Not all overgrown bugs were going to be actively psionic, right?

Well, they probably were, but no harm in adding it, just in case.

I should probably let them splatter me a bit, just to make it look good.

-------------

The biggest thing was finding something to carry my spoils and identifying trophies in. I didn’t have a Disk to pile things on or a Masspack, yet.

Thankfully, Momma Spideroid’s thorax was pretty sizable, and once the guts and everything were cleaned out, it fit all their severed heads (after suitable pictures were taken), along with the skulls and what armbands I could find among the score or so of web cocoons scattered across the place and adjacent rooms. I stuffed everything in there nicely, tied it all up with webbing, and walked out a different door than I’d come in with my prize.

There was a Termite office down thataway a mile or three where I could turn in my catch. Humming happily, I headed off that way as I noticed a couple vans pull up, and some fellows in patchwork body armor and bearing workable firearms pile out of them. I discretely moved myself out of their line of sight. Miss Dru was naturally dead and in the process of getting liquified by a fast-acting poison, at least judging by the way her insides drained out when I removed her head for identification...