Raw ground spreads through Jubilee, all-encompassing like overgrown plants. It bleeds out from between the stones, bursts from broken bricks on the walls, and collects in nests on the roofs of each building. Maligned flesh tries to fill those gaps, eating at the raw ground for sustenance, not caring that it’s consuming its progenitor. To the Corps burners, the distinction between the two organisms is meaningless.

The burners incinerate a path through raw and flesh alike, the sappers rigging their powder charges and igniting them, blasting tunnels open in walls where the Lakkies worshiping this temple never intended them to be. The 1st battalion crowds their way through streets, crushed crowds of maligned forming meat walls that crumble, just the same, at the splashing neutralizer bottles.

Anthem stays behind the 3rd squad, lending a throwing hand. A burner walks behind him with a barrel full of the carafes, the product of men creating approximations of Anthem’s work, learning the lessons of the nest, memorizing and applying the recipe themselves. They round a long street heading northwards, several squat stone buildings bunched tightly together, empty now save for pulsing maligned pustules that the burners douse with fire until they pop and the burning life inside scurries around.

Clumps of maligned huddle in a group straight ahead, mouths on the ground like carrion to corpses. Just before Nedland orders a volley of carafes discharged on them, an armored figure emerges from a tunnel mouth. It hacks at the maligned, and the things dare not pull at the figure’s swinging blonde hair. Hess looks in her element, brandishing two machetes and tearing bits and appendages off the maligned, a marauding cloud of claws. The other Thurmgeists join her, nine in all, cutting down each maligned like they’re no more than stalks of wheat, leaving the Corps in the back to mow down the dregs. The women pull ahead, but not before Grace Kanis finds Anthem and only nods.

Her stare captures a lifetime of meaning, perhaps regret or forgiveness. Grace would have seen the display at the gates, proving that Anthem’s neutralizers are applicable and that he’s earned a place in this army and a spot on that gondola home. Her acceptance of this is enough to push Anthem forward and wash him of all hate for this woman as if her aloofness and distance now make perfect sense to him. It could only be the thrill of escape, but it is a feeling he does not want to let go of.

Potholes litter the end of the street, each a little wider than a man but deep enough to grant a view of the vast web of chambers below. Through it, the Corps sees aqueducts running across the enormous space, open entranced buildings carved into the rock, terraces, balconies, and hanging gardens. A collection of massive stone pillars reach out from the temple’s floor, differing in height, unsymmetrical, broken from water, or the raw ground that is pervasive. The stuff encroaches every visible inch, collecting in the center where it bursts from the stone in a tear, twenty or thirty feet wide.

The Gash: the object of their march and the target of the Flung fire seed. Even from up here, Anthem can feel some of its heat, exhausting from the Hells.

Along those platforms scurry hundreds and thousands of maligned, every amalgamation on the archipelago represented, and awful shapes Anthem couldn’t have comprehended until now. There are upright turtles, eels with legs, and a starfish clinging to the temple’s walls like an outstretched finger.

Figures below carve paths along the crowds of maligned, evident as flames burning through a forest. More Thurmgeists have made their way down and started their butchering, cleaving into globs of the creatures beside the forward platoons. The maligned run for the men, but the Thurmgeists rally them as angels painted in the tales, spreading their wings over humanity. For that brief moment, the Corps seems united.

They skirt the lower level of the cylindrical temple proper, the 3rd squad moving through the platoons to reach the internal command post set up at the lowest accessible level, only a few feet above the Gash. Sweat drips from Anthem’s forehead as the Hells attempt to scorch him. Settling into a side room as large as a church that overlooks the tear, they set up the equipment. Around the corner, a scattering of soldiers form an unordered cordon around the hallway leading to the zoo man’s church and his assistants, driving any maligned back should they approach.

Since they left the nest yesterday, Anthem barely had enough time to tinker with the emerging neutralizer. The bottle is buried deep in his haversack, but when he places it on a table, it seems to suck the whole life of the temple into it, turning heads and gazes. Whatever attacked those women may have originated from here. With a live, pure sample, Anthem is confident he can speed the process up faster than any inventor of any neutralizer anywhere. A day is not enough to do the impossible, but he has to try.

At Anthem’s insistence, the closest Corps soldiers he can find haul up one of the maligned onto a table. It still squirms even when one of the men injects a general neutralizer into it. It crumbles before two more men extract a liquid from it. Anthem mixes that liquid, holds the result up to a sun shaft, and sees it’s black.

“Keep going!” he urges. “More!”

The men obey, hauling up writhing maligned, binding them with nets and strong hands. For hours, Anthem extracts while musket volleys echo outside. He produces samples of all colors and consistencies, some like water and others thicker than tar.

When he finally finds the violet sample he discovered from Hess’s pod, it is bright and gleaming, like the carafe at his side.

Anthem commands for more samples from maligned like this one, and soldiers Anthem has never seen before follow without question. Around the corner outside the room, overlooking the larger chamber, two Thurmgeists stand between a squad of soldiers and a giant maligned that resembles a crab, with humongous eyes, long pincers, and a myriad of legs bursting from its chest, some of which belonged to a horse.

The next maligned is the best sample he’s had, the violet goop in its blood the purest yet. He adds it to a recipe of base neutralizers and orders another maligned carried over to him. He distributes the mixture among five syringes and orders one soldier each to begin injecting. They return with mixed results.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“Keep trying,” Anthem tells them.

They run off with more neutralizer syringes while the Thurmgeists cut down the maligned in the hallway outside. Volleys discharge then reload, syncopating with screaming maligned and merging with the bubbling of Anthem’s mixtures. Some of the things disintegrate, while others remain unaffected. It’s inconsistent, but he’s getting closer, accomplishing in hours what it takes other men years or decades.

It is like balancing scales, placing pebbles on each end to achieve the correct orientation. He uses the seeds, roots, powders, and other reagents he’s collected from the march and applies them to the mixtures in quantities diverging by the milliliter. Each attempt comes closer and closer to an effective approximation. Those medical zoologists creating neutralizers for other strands never worked in the heart of their samples, with the exact ingredients and subjects surrounding them. It is the best environment Anthem could have asked for.

And it works.

The resulting mixture is an assortment of substances he hasn’t bothered writing down but could recite again if called upon. He dilutes it to its minimum effectiveness, still enough to sear through a man-size maligned, and replicates it. He uses the water from an offered tank, and when that runs out, men start handing him their final canteens. With the syringes prepared, Anthem’s servants fan out through the temple, injecting more maligned and watching them crumble without fail.

A Thurmgeist returns with a creature clamping to her armor, falling to bits. “Hells,” she says, “where were you this whole time?”

It’s then that four men stride into view of Anthem’s workshop. They stumble as they push past men, the center one approaching, and Anthem recognizes his face. “Watse? Everything alright?”

Since their conversation hours before, you would think weeks or even months have passed. Watse looks grizzled now, with a wound under his neck, dirt stuck to his cheeks, and his eyes hard. He looks at Anthem’s display of beakers with fascination before turning to the Thurmgeist. The two share a glance that Anthem doesn’t understand until he catches Watse reaching his hand out.

Before the thing that is almost Watse can understand what’s happening, Anthem is already on top of it. The Thurmgeist comprehends, helping to pin Watse down to the floor. Watse writhes, screams, and claws at the woman’s armor, desperately trying to undo it. He snarls and calls Anthem’s name, trying to convince the zoo man to release him, but even his voice starts to waiver.

“It’s got you, Watse!” Anthem yells.

The strand, whatever it is, must be sensing danger. In a few moments, it might release and spread. If Anthem is quick enough, he could save Watse’s humanity.

Anthem finds Watse’s neck and pierces it with the syringe. The man flails and cries out, clasping his neck. His body convulses, writhes, and jitters as he pulls at his hair and tries to rip it off. Men try to pull him away just as something bursts from Watse’s tunic and latches onto the Thurmgeist. The appendage is a feeler thick as Anthem’s arm and hurls the Thurmgeist against a wall. Another tentacle shoots out through Watse’s chest, another through his hands that latches onto two, three, and four other soldiers, and from those men sprout more and more until they form a spider’s web of men and maligned feelers.

The first human subject of the neutralizer and a dismal failure.

He stares at the empty syringe in his hand, throws it, and runs out the hallway toward the inner temple, past the clumps of confused men. He enters the vast open area atop a bridge extending to the closest platform. Waterfalls run from channels above, pooling below near the Gash and steaming. Maligned swim those pools, some fearful, others fixing their gazes with big inhuman and human eyes alike. All among it, Anthem runs, confused.

“Wait!” he cries.

The Thurmgeists collecting on the pillar at the end of the bridge are too far away to hear him. They disperse from the circle and walk down an enormous opening. A squad of soldiers Anthem has never seen before notices him and asks what’s wrong, but he’s too confused, too stunned to speak, and gestures back towards where the neutralizer went awry and runs down the steps after the Thurmgeists. Sensing that Thurmgeists may be in trouble, some men fan out behind him. One of them is Unwin, and as they descend into the depths, Anthem sees Lieutenant Nedland barking orders before noticing something else.

Waves of maligned stampede from the end of the bridge Anthem had just left. Behind them, one of the crab things runs their way. Nedland sees it and hails squadrons to intercept the maligned, but it is too large, too heavily guarded. Unwin understands this and looks ready to stay back and defend his lieutenant, but he doesn’t, leaving Nedland in the firing line.

The men run down the single stairwell, winding in a helix shape from the center of the platform to the base of the temple floor. The women are at the bottom now, too far gone. Heat rises, feeling as if Anthem is running straight into a furnace. He yells to the women, but no one hears.

More men flee down the cramped staircase, shouting and trying to assume control as maligned rush down towards them. A hawk-headed, bipedal thing climbs over the staircase’s railing, lurches over the side, and jumps onto the closest soldier. It straddles him on the back and bashes its head onto the man’s until they are joined together, thrashing together, smiling together. Another soldier pushes the amalgamation over the brink.

Far below, the base of the staircase floods out into a platform, the sides of which overlook the temple floor a few meters down, wholly covered in raw ground. The Thurmgeists are there, and upon raised daises, they examine what looks like oval-shaped objects, the same that contained Hess. From their gazes and shouts, Anthem can tell there are also women inside these.

He runs to the Thurmgeists and trips, and then someone’s back crunches against his ribs, shooting the air out of his lungs. He rolls away just as more desperate men flee the staircase. There are maligned in that mess, too, dead and alive and thrashing to get a hold of the closest flesh. Anthem stands and finds the shifting pile of men congealing into one.

“Unwin!” He sees the man at the bottom of that writhing pile. He pulls, expecting to be hauling the equivalent of a pile of rocks, but the Ox-infused won’t budge, his enormous body shriveling to Anthem’s size, and then smaller until his hands slip out of Anthem’s grip and the maligned pulls him inside itself.

Anthem steps back, watching in horror the congealing pile of officers, musketeers, pikemen, and more men Anthem hasn’t learned the name of forming into one shape, limbs connecting, turning to tentacles, to feelers, to antennae, to strange limbs and a body that resembles one of the crabs in the chamber above. On the other side of the maligned construction stand the Thurmgeists. They regard it with awe, just as it sees them in a strange, eager hunger.

Then, a single form sprouts from the top: a woman. A woman, now maligned, taller than any man or woman should be, her hair spread stiff as tree branches, and her arms raised. One of the Thurmgeists screams.

The maligned mass lunges for a woman, drags her in, and turns her. Anthem can’t believe what he’s seeing. This should not be so. He was so close.

But not close enough.