The Fleshfull Machine - Shard 2

The Second Shard: How dare you take HER from me!? 

- 12 -

The cold platinum moonlight rained down onto the jagged crevices, dug into rocks and hillocks,  danced inside the eyes of those few who dared to brave these lifeless plains, the harsh sting of the wind and the paralyzing cold. These intrepid fools hobbled towards terra incognita, their minds gorged on the fruits of fantastical tales and so little facts. One could be easily fascinated by the sheer volume of these unbelievable stories, when contrasted with the miniscule population of people who managed to actually return alive (without taking the state of their mental health into consideration). Since these survivors did not burn with desire to lay bare their crimes for all the world to see "enforcers of the order" included, the grueling facts were damned to disappear among the ocean of fictitious claims like drops of water in a puddle of oil.

The group was spearheaded by a thin pylon of a man, dawning an oversized winter coat that shielded his body from the frigid elements, trailed by a loosely organized flock of dark figures. One of those orbiting satellites was an aging alcoholic with bushy, disheveled hair, clad in a dusty trench coat, nervously caressing the bracelet of hair on his arm.

Jolpin was worried and fearful. The only concrete thread of information the drunkard could rely on was the sight witnessed within that faithful tent, and those relayed by his own weary eyes upon gazing on the blight that stretched between Kalsten's man-made organs. “Insufficient” was an understatement. This was akin to a child trying to sail through an ocean on a raft - a combination of lacking skill and equipment. Gregory might as well paint a bullseye with bright neon colors and hang it on his back, the results would probably be the same.

The massive, bony serpents that wound around Kalsten's western side obscured its jagged skyline, allowing only the tallest of disfigured skyscrapers to remain and baffle the onlookers.

The path ahead met with a sharp, but shallow incline, a wide gash in the soil that was a temporary resting place of the "Fleeting river," whose inhabitant seldom graced the world with its presence, merely opting to appear after the exceedingly rare episodes of downpours. Rooted in its opposite bank, two massive tubes poked in the travelers' direction, beckoning the visitors to dare and venture into their lightless depths. The pair once used to be a part of Kalsten's open drainage system, now abandoned, forgotten, atrophied. The guide nonchalantly slid down into the miniature ravine, soon followed by the rest. The soil, however, was dry, chalky and treacherous, giving away at the lightest of steps. Many of the wanderers could not replicate the elegant movement and landing of the tall, shaven man ahead, with some merely stumbling and trying to catch their balance, others - falling face first into the ground. Jolpin, thankfully, was in the former group.

Dust, loose, flaky ground, spindly foliage and a bunch of pebbles that scraped annoyingly when stepped on. Gregory gazed at these bluish, oval minerals, these dead branches, the scales of the earth in annoyance, reluctant to admit that his eyes dreaded the prospect of screwing themselves upward and glancing at that... blackness, the immeasurable depth, the double barreled shotgun of fate aimed by the colossus named "Life," directly at our protagonist, who in turn was absolutely certain in his conviction that it was only a matter of "when will the trigger get pulled" not "if." They knew each other too well.

Take it easy, old man, Gregory thought, simply follow the footsteps, control your breathing so that you won't give away the fact that you'd kill to be anywhere but in this damned dust bowl! The welling anxiety, worry, and aversion towards those lands unknown and dangerous gradually transformed the dry, sandy river bed into a steep marsh that clung to the drifters' legs, gradually boring deeper and deeper into their skin, fascia, muscles and tendons. The footsteps that once surrounded our protagonist were already distancing themselves from him. One had to hurry, lest they be left behind. It took all the strength of Jolpin's inexistent character to spare him the humiliation of hesitancy-induced paralysis. The man battled his way up the stubborn slope, adamantly refusing to gaze into the abyss right until the moment he firmly positioned his old boots on the solid, dry concrete interior of one of the tunnels. Even through years, perhaps decades in the state of abandonment, the dried stench of sewage still weakly clung to the walls akin to pox marks on a body. A tad nauseating, but tolerable. The guide, Pyotr, completely unphased by the noxious atmosphere, pulled out a flashlight from his enormous coat, setting an example for others to follow, and within a miniature barrage of clicks the invasion of the domain of darkness had begun. The tall, bipedal reed shuffled forward and the rest followed suit. Jolpin felt like a bacteria, on its way to colonize the misused excretory system of a chronically debilitated beast, as he and his "comrades" began making their way towards one of its many bladders.

The stale air was suffocating, the cylindrical walls that appeared to constrict with each passing heartbeat whilst seemingly stretching towards infinity itself. And as the small portal of light behind them was reduced to the size of a mere pinprick, one could not blame our intrepid explorers for becoming increasingly anxious. After all, should some unseen beast make its appearance, they'd have nowhere to run. Thankfully, our wanderers were spared of such an ill-fated turn of events…at least for now.

The beam of light finally collided with something other than the endless blackness, as photons dug into the uneven, rough topology of what appeared to be a wall. At that moment, the sound of boots scraping onto the dry concrete echoed through the abandoned tube. Pyotr, their guide, nimbly spun his torso 180 degrees, allowing the wave of light to smash into the front of his oversized violet jacket.

"And this, ladies and gentlemen, is where we part our ways." Without waiting for an inquiry, the man declared. "As per our deal, I was to escort you to the place. Lo and behold, beyond this threshold lies the outskirts of the Metastasis you all so desperately wanted to enter."

"Wait a minute." Remarked one of the travelers, a woman. "You're just going to bugger off and leave us without a clue as to where to go next? In a place most of us have never even heard off until these past few weeks?!"

The reed of a man merely smirked and snorted, slowly making his way towards the back of the group, completely desensitized to their annoyed, frustrated, predatory gazes. Their lights would soon be extinguished anyway. "That's not my problem, love. Never was, never will be. Our deal was simple, I take you to this nest of nightmares and that's it! There was never a talk of me giving you a God damned tour!" He retorted casually before freezing up upon feeling his left cuff be seized by the aforementioned female. Jolpin couldn't see, but the bald man fixed his wayward client a gaze so intense, it threatened to literally burn through her resolve and her skull. Tearing it free with a single jerk, the guide's body finally detached itself from the flock. "Oh, and one more thing..." He turned around after a few dozen steps. "I suppose you all were smart enough to bring some firepower? A piece of advice, if you think something looks even remotely alive, unload into it with extreme prejudice! You might live long enough to thank me later. Take care and good luck in there!" Those cryptic words and a dismissive wave were the last pieces of wisdom bestowed upon the travels, and the last of Pyotr's presence in all of their lives.

"What a cunt." Whispered someone, when their guide was finally out of earshot. At last, the safety net was off, and they were ready to dive head-first into the embrace hypercomplex feelers of this techno-organic Drosera, each tipped with the most intoxicatingly promising substances.

        - 13 -

One by one, the travelers landed onto the cold, unusually uneven floor of an arched tunnel that turned and disappeared in both directions. The air seemed different somehow, akin to that somewhat heavy scent that settles in a meadow just before the skies bless the soil with rain. The stench of sewage seemed stronger, more acrid and moist.

None of the travelers hid their displeasure over the idea of having to navigate a lightless maze without a semblance of direction. They were in too deep to back out, sadly.

Following the path on the left, the wanderers kept their guard up, scanning the surroundings with utmost vigilance for any possible semblance of life, movement and noise. The irregular surface that the trespassers trampled  gave off a slightly perceivable semi-constant pulse, as if living tissue was worming its way through both the concrete and the soil beneath it. At first the world around them seemed to be at least somewhat rooted in reality, bar a few bizarre etchings, texts and directional signs that were warped beyond recognition into a collection of semi-human, semi-alien symbols. Soon afterwards, the alterations in architecture became more and more prominent, with the pathways becoming increasingly torturous, chaotic and disorganized. Some of the walls were invaginated, and split down in the middle, revealing entire new pathways, their entrance carpeted with broken bricks that perhaps used to be a part of this once absolutely normal wall. These "alternate routes" roused a mixture of aversion and morbid curiosity, with the group coming to an unsaid agreement to avoid entering them if possible. They drifted past basins of sewage, now long dry, overgrown with lifeless moss and lichen, gazing dumbfounded at the water pipes (10 centimeters in diameter at the very least), that broke through the cold floor akin to some hellish greenery through concrete. A sparse minority grew by their lonesome and did not obstruct the path of our explorers, the majority, however were bunched together, occasionally even wound into one another, forming dense clusters that hampered movement, miniature forests the tips of which either dug through the ceiling, or bent and slithered across it and the walls, with a few arching and diving into the aforementioned basin. There were a handful brave fools, who dared to approach and palpate these malformed vessels of an alien city, exhaling in awe as they felt some unknown fluids brushing and scraping the lumens of these metallic enigmas. Not all of these capillaries" were of inorganic origin though.

The footsteps of those armed with the flashlights, those brave few who spearheaded the operation, suddenly quietened. A metallic grey mass, an engorged vein as thick as an oak trunk stretched before them, having apparently broken through the angle formed by the wall and the ground. Extending both upwards and forward, this pulsating abomination formed a small obstacle none of them were in a hurry to clear.

"Why'd we stop?" Asked the same woman who grabbed Pyotr's sleeve in the circular tunnel an hour or so prior. Those ahead merely poked their fingers in the fleshy root's direction, a flimsy barrier none had the courage to approach - bar one individual. An army of belt buckles, zipper heads, metallic tools and semi-empty plastic containers jingled melodically, as an overweight torso of a man clad in a leather jacket awkwardly pushed past his comrades. There's always a daredevil in the group - that must have been him. The man excitedly trotted towards the anomaly, stopping just shy of 10 centimeters from the beating mass, admiring its metallic flesh, segmented by thin black rings of pigment. A flip knife clicked between his fat fingers, after they finished prodding and palpating the soft rubbery flesh. The blade slid into the vein with some difficulty, only freeing itself after trailing a short, vertical path. Almost instantly a uniform column of dark amber fluid shot out of the greyish mass, leaving a black pool on the floor next to the daredevil's right shoe. The latter leapt back a tad, but soon leaned towards the gash again, observing then sniffing with curiosity before breaking the stream's seemingly solid shape with a quick swipe of his sausage fingers. Rubbing the fluid onto his pointy finger with his thumb, the man carefully examined its consistency, appearance, and even taste with a short lick. Jolpin heard a sigh of amazement.

"This is...motor oil!" The man exclaimed, accompanied by a choir of excited jingles. Momentarily, the string that wrapped around a plastic container and anchored it to the oversized backpack was unwound, and the vessel was forced to accept this waning stream of peculiar liquids. The second container soon followed suit.

"Hey, what the hell are you doing!?" Exclaimed a tall man, wielder of the largest flashlight.

"Foraging for wild engine grease, of course!" Retorted the backpacker.

"You mean acquiring an unknown substance with unknown properties, and storing them in dubious containers!"

"Oh yes, because all of us are here for sightseeing and pictures alone." The man scoffed. "I wish to check for the purity of these bad boys, and should it be high, maybe a few of you mates will get a job in the future!" The daredevil chuckled. "It's just bloody oil, nothing to get worked up about!"

"Seeping from an enormous alien vein that has literally broken through a wall..." The “flashlighteer” muttered as he stepped over the mobile roots. "What are the odds this whole endeavor will backfire horribly?"

As the wanderers began stepping over the mass one after the other, the edges of the wound on the massive blood vessel began to bubble and fume, tumorous tissues, fluid-filled cysts extending over the edges, trembling, oscillating madly and one by one fusing into a singular cylindrical scar that slowly obliterated the opening. In a matter of a dozen seconds the newly formed tissue covered the gash in its entirety, invaginated and disappeared completely. Jolpin witnessed this mitotic nightmare, carefully took a swig of vodka and followed suit.

The deeper they went, the more distorted the architecture became, the path zigged and zagged, the aforementioned "alternate routes" began to taper sharply downwards or upwards, appearing as if someone merely tried folding space like paper until they gave up halfway through. The road ahead snaked and branched into dead ends upon dead ends, former pathways obliterated by walls that seemed to have sprouted from overnight from the ground, as if they were mere bamboo shoots that began growing but a week ago. Much to the travelers' confusion, not all of them were composed of worn clay.

The rays of light collided with the uncomfortably smooth yellow exterior of one of those growths, prompting our adventurers to cautiously approach and examine it.

A light knock hinted that it was indeed hollow, and a light thrust of the daredevil's knife broke through the paper thin shell and began to crack like cheap porcelain. With one careful movement, the aged oil collector yanked a chuck of this plastic wall out, cautious as to not cut himself on its jagged edges. Flipping the chunk over, Gregory could observe velvety flesh that bled viscous crimson fluid upon the lightest of touch. Jolpin tried to hide his anxiousness and unease when the biomass's glossy, needle-thin bristles began reaching ever so slightly towards the wielder's fingertips. Others have noticed it as well, and did not hold back from voicing their concern, prompting our daredevil to snort and carelessly drop the fragment on the floor before turning towards the hole itself. Leaning forward, they saw beveled rectangular chambers of identical sizes (approximately 4 centimeters in height and 8 in width) uniformly blanketed by the same velvety tissue, connected to each other by thin, stalky, tubular structures. The bristles moved in a wave-like pattern, shunting the very crimson fluid somewhere to the left hand side. The blade penetrated the back of the chamber just as effortlessly as before, revealing another identical layer, and then two more before the tunnel on the other side could be visualized.

"Shall we?" One of the drifters nodded towards the miniature crevice.

"Personally, I've just about had my fill of dead ends and backtracking." Declared the large flashlight wielder with a hint of annoyance.

"You wish is my command, ladies and gentlemen." The daredevil bowed mockingly, turned around and began tearing the outer shell away with his bare hands, the islands of flesh and plastic coming off like flaky, baked skin.

"I have a bad feeling about this." Muttered one of the travelers.

"Oh, now are you getting a bad feeling?!" Someone scoffed with a nervous chortle.

Jolpin breathed sharply, trying to mentally steel himself for whatever new strain of madness awaited them beyond the organo-polymer barrier. The haze of his thoughts was blown away by a sudden, wettish rustle and a sharp jingle of belt buckles. Turns out the oil forager merely opted to kick the growing entryway to expedite the process, and the inner layers caved  in without much of an issue. It felt like a barrier breaking between two worlds, allowing that noxious, infectious air to bleed into our world. The sharp, dead, moist scent of rot. The biomechanical leaf blades of the drosera that was The Metastasis finally began to curl onto itself.

Most of them gagged when the otherworldly aroma suddenly assaulted their nostrils, our protagonist included, but he also suffered from an affliction of a different kind - the one that boiled the contents in his peripheral blood vessels, set his exhausted nerves ablaze and forced the weakened heart to quaver mercilessly. Jolpin knew what it was, that insidious disease of the mind which laid bare all of humanity's unsightly acts for all the world to shun - Rising panic. The miasma of death thawed a recent memory, formed the night prior besides a pit of flames. It was only a matter of "when" and not "if."

And so he passed through the newly formed, jagged entryway, pushing past another malformed boundary deeper into the Alien city.

- 14 -

The atmosphere was already well past any level of acceptability, its strength forcing all of the explorers to violently gag. Some had to resort to emptying the contents of their stomachs into a nearby basin. Those that could opted to shield their faces with whatever cloth was at hand. Thinking fast, Gregory hurriedly palpated his side and hooked his fingers underneath the old fabric, before momentarily freezing. The destructive nature of the act he was about to commit dawned on the drunkard. That cut of cloth, that old flesh did not belong to some measly piece of apparel, no, that faded red T-shirt was a comrade that tirelessly held its vigil through storms and calms, sunsets and sunrises, a miniature monument to remind the world of tomorrow that he once used to tread this wretched earth. Gregory was about to desecrate this holy artifact, betray the unwavering loyalty of his only real friend.

Something beeped.

In a blink of one's irritated eye the catacombs of dirty browns and reds were washed away by sterile whites and blues. Misshapen forms began to align into a disfigured, half-remembered collage of memories, birthing a room laced with tragedy and misery. A haze of radiant glow, HER radiant glow materialized before the drifter. The luminescent mass was caged between a jungle of machinery that wrapped around HER anatomy, infesting HER, worming their way through that heavenly flesh. The otherworldly beacon of the drunkard's life was slowly crumbling and fading away, and Jolpin could do naught by stare from afar.

No, a ripple of protest formed within the ocean of thought that resided in his skull - a ripple followed by a tidal wave of resurfaced anger and bitterness. NO! Our protagonist cried out inside his mind, feeling his dingy nails digging into his own skin through the crusted clothing. How dare you take HER from me! Yelled Jolpin in the void of his own head, picturing that eternally towering exterior of the Colossus named "Life." He knew what was to be done.

"I'm sorry, old friend." The drunkard muttered, gazing at his companion pensively before tearing its chunk off with one sharp yank. The fabric, soaked with years worth of sweat, dead skin and other products of human epidermis was unwieldy, rough, and odorous, yet something that could be likened to a scent of perfume when compared with the sickening miasma of the tunnel.

The group pushed forward, ignoring the scalding ache that chewed through their muscles, hopeful that the path to the surface would be waiting just around the next corner. Every turn, however, yielded more and more winding paths, larger and denser "forests" of massive veins and pipes, warped architecture and other organo-mechanical anomalies.

A pair of women directly in front of the alcoholic crusader began to whisper in hushed tones, something that was nonetheless audible within the confines of the tunnel.

"You know, something is seriously bugging me. Kalsten is - was not a ghost town, and as far as I know until recently it still supported a sizable population." Upon observing the nod from her companion, the woman resumed. "Then how come even this deep into the sewers we haven't run across a rat, an insect, or frankly anything that is conventionally alive?"

The recipient pondered the idea for a moment before commenting grimly.

"A mass exodus, or an en masse extermination. Something's hunting them, perhaps?"

"That "something" is what worries me. Hopefully we manage to find an exit sooner rather than later."

They did not exchange any more observations, once again leaving only the subterranean pulsation of the Metastasis's organs and the echo of the explorers' footsteps as their sole company.

Ever since they breached the plastic barrier, peculiar spots of mucus began to build up on the walls upon each turn or dead end, gradually coalescing into oval masses. It did not take long for the drifters to stumble upon the larger exemplairs of the aforementioned oval membranes, at least thirty centimeters in width clinging to the walls, laden with weakly luminescent spherical vacuoles the size of apples. Naturally, it was the duty of the overly curious daredevil to approach and examine these peculiar masses. A sharp squelch, and the puffy leather cuff of his arm was already sticking into the paper-thin membrane. Completely slathered in mucus, the engorged fingers were dug into a soft, luminescent ball that, according to him, felt like a balloon filled with slightly viscous oil. That very luminescent sphere was flung across one of the unexplored pathways, causing an explosion of waning orange glow, which managed to stain a wall at the end of a branching hallway, allowing those few observant ones to glimpse a very disquieting sight. The weak rays dug into long, sharp crevices, with some being multiple centimeters deep. Above them, shrouded in the dark, resided another nest of vacuoles. Jolpin saw the light dancing in the leftover shreds of its semi-translucent membrane that aimlessly dangled downwards, its squishy innards nowhere to be seen. The flashlight wielder approached it and bent forward, examining the army of chaotic cuts.

"We've a problem, ladies and gentlemen." He concluded with utmost seriousness, swiftly pulling out and unfolding a short, automatic rifle from his backpack. "Don't ask what we're dealing with. Hell if I know, but if our lovely guide's words are true and these things are "at least conventionally alive," and obey the laws of our world then we're dealing with a pack animal. Approximately, these things are the size of a medium-large dog, they seemed to be really eager to get their maws on those glowing balls we encountered."

"This is their feeding ground..." Exhaled one of the women, the one Jolpin was eavesdropping on earlier.

"Quite possible." Agreed the flashlighteer, crouching down and examining the small clumps of fur, sheared off bits of metal, fragments of something hard, like a shell of sorts. Jolpin's grip instinctively tightened around the polymer frame of his handgun, when the information was relayed to the group. The game was on, and the tunnel bore witness to numerous clicks of cocked hammers, flicked safeties, racked slides, fingers winding around the grips of wood, metal and polymer.

Their progress was considerably slowed from that point onwards. The protagonist's sight would occasionally jump to the neat, barely used immaculately polished slide of stainless steel that twitched restlessly in his hands. Lengthy alcohol abuse did its damage, an effect greatly exacerbated by the ever-present fear of the unknown. How could he hope to keep a steady sight picture with these trembling limbs? Caught in these worries, he shifted his gaze towards others.

Many of them seemed jittery, jumpy at the shadows, restless and hypervigilant - Clearly they too weren't spared of the growing panic that wound around them like vines, something the further changes to the scenery managed to only exacerbate.

And then they found the "Payphone."

At first, it was just another corner to cut, just another forest of metal to navigate with caution, just another path to observe with weapons at the ready, before their eyes were forced to bear witness to "it."

A bundle of cables slithering on the arch of the tunnel almost throughout the wanderers' little trek took a left hand turn towards a wall, before unwinding and unfurling itself into a web of of dozens if not hundreds of cables, ensnaring a rectangular, swollen box of steel akin to some oversized insect. Large chunks of the roof have collapsed, allowing an army of bizarre organic and synthetic tubing to freely prolapse over the enigmatic object, painting a picture of crooked fangs of some unseen beast about to swallow its helpless prey whole. The creation of the macabre imagery left the path partially blocked by rubble, yet instead of shying away from treading such a blatantly unsafe path, there were some who simply could not avert their sight from the scene. They remained silent, motionlessly gazing at that anomalous conglomerate of curiosities, as if it exuded an entire atmosphere of pheromones that danced right around the nigh inexistent barrier of the wanderers' improvised masks. The beams of light trailed downwards, revealing a dark, brownish red floor. It appeared that the numerous little rivers of dark crimson fluid, blackish oils have, over an unknown period, transformed the immediate vicinity of the anomaly into a basin of emulsified liquids of unknown depth.

 In contrast to the expectations set by Gregory, it was the Flashlighteer who took a step forward - A worrying development of events considering the collector of oil didn't even move a muscle, his quiet demeanor perhaps a display of some instinct developed through years of life on the edge. Even though the one who spearheaded their approach swore vilely and almost jumped back after realizing that the fluid was a bit more than ankle deep, he chose to press on nonetheless. The object gave off a strong electric hum mixed with what Jolpin could perceive as dozens of eels vigorously wriggling inside a ribcage of some long dead biomechanical creature. They saw tumors of rusted iron sticking out of their bondage of rubber and plastic arteries, fluids thick as honey dripping from the object’s seams.

Every muzzle was poking in the direction of this once normal box of steel. The flashlighteer reached towards the rusted lock, bent beyond recognition and pulled on it hard and fast. In that moment a wave of flesh and plastic, pressurized in that coffin of steel and flaking paint erupted and plunged straight into the basin of waters and oils. The filthy fluids splashed straight into those closest to it, with the leader of the expedition being caught in its epicenter. Had the space allowed it, he would have dashed back a few meters, and emptied an entire magazine of his carbine into the bulbous, techno-organic mass. Many of them recoiled similarly, but chose to leash their fight or flight response.

"You alive, Simon?!" - Asked one of the females who held the door of the ensnared container, now swung open in the sights of her shotgun.

So he who brought the strongest rays of light into these damned tunnels is named "Simon," Gregory thought.

"You're damn sure I am, Hendrickson!" Yelled Simon from his throne of rubble, still aiming at the mass of flesh. "Now, bloody help me up!"

The woman, known only by the name "Hendrickson," moved over to help her companion up, before stumbling back in shock herself. In that moment, Jolpin's caution was overshadowed by sheer curiosity, nagging him more than the very addiction itself. The unnatural allure was strong enough to push the drunkard past the wall of people he cowered behind since stepping foot in the alien labyrinth, to disregard the frigid mixture of oils, waters and mucus that permeated his shoes like cheese cloth, to drop all preconceptions of safety and approach this potentially dangerous anomaly. He gripped the door, and its crusted hinges gave in completely, snapping in half in sending the chunk of steel straight into the fluid with a loud clank. The sight made Gregory retch.

The distortions on its surface did little to mask the fact that it was once a normal circuit breaker, stuffed with all the standard bits, pieces and anatomical landmarks that would never let itself be distinguished from an ocean of its brethren. A three-leafed cocoon appeared to have grown from within the box of steel, perhaps exerting the very pressure that bent it so out of shape. Now all three of them slumped downwards akin to monstrous drapes, partly submerged into the fluid on the floor. Upon closer inspection, the inner surface of the leaves were composed of steaming masses of glistening, tumorous tissues, malformed sockets, circular circuit boards with strangely shaped dials. Occasionally, one could spot clusters of large tape reels fused into singular, bizarre structures with rolls of what appeared to be genuine, ancient tape eternally caged within their malformed bodies. The short rifle poked its barrel into the cocoon, and flipped one of its draping fragments onto the other side. Gregory and a few others slowly crouched down to examine it further, the former utterly baffled by his newly acquired morbid curiosity. A stalk of bone ran through the entire length of its exterior, with  smaller shoots arising from its surface and growing towards the mass's edges, deep holes ringed by a thick bony rim were occasionally lodged between them on the "leaf's" more or less peripheral territory, with its interior being occupied by some form of machinery. The affectionately named "Payphone" was nestled in the embrace of the three leaves, an abomination in its own right. Its first noticeable detail was a cluster of stout light bulbs, luminescent barnacle-like growths and malformed eyes occupying its top right corner, arranged at random like stars in a night sky. Each gave off a short, chaotic burst of weak, orange glow in some esoteric and incomprehensible for the human mind pattern. The light partially dug into the sides and grooves of a handful of translucent tubes, diagonally stretched over the underlying cancerous masses and technology, with pigmented, glistening eel-esque structures undulating back and forth inside the plasticky shells and giving off a muffled cacophony of wet squelches and trills. The muzzle of the carbine slowly pushed the living tubes aside, revealing a bent rotary dial with a pulsating, bulbous mass partially draped over its surface.

"What the f-" started Simon, trailing off into a barely audible hiss, his sight peering deep into the anomaly and perhaps, almost through it, captivated by some unperceivable extrasensory power.

"Hey?" The man's companion called out to him, visibly uncomfortable with the flashlighteer seizing up in such a manner. A few wanderers also tried to verbally catch the bewildered one’s attention to no avail.

"Did you just hear something..." Muttered Simon, completely entranced by the biomechanical Payphone.

His gloved hand began to glide towards a surprisingly intact speaker, lodged inside a bony mass directly adjacent to the pulsating tumors.

"Who is that?" He whispered.

The glowing masses began to flicker and pulsate more erratically, almost sensing the growing unease of their onlookers, the latters shifting side to side, calling out louder and louder. Hendrickson even reached out to shake some sense into her companion. The only one who remained deathly silent was Jolpin. For a duration shorter than a heartbeat, the congregation of the aforementioned deformed pupils all seemed to have locked their piercing, crooked sight with our protagonist, before resuming their seemingly chaotic twitches.

Gregory felt his blood run still.

"Simon, brother, snap out of it!" Exclaimed the woman, seizing her companion's arm with all of her might. It was as if the man was made of unyielding steel. "Somebody give me a bloody hand here!" She cried out in a mix of fear and fury. None dared to break their perfect stillness.

The drifter did not back down, trying to desperately wrest the alien handset from her companion's deathly grip. The lights were all but strobing aggressively, flashing onto the vacant, sweat-drenched visage of Simon's.

"Hello?" He called weakly. "Who is this...who are you? What are you?"

The unsightly eyes darted in every conceivable direction at a breakneck speed, and as the glow emitted from their luminescent irises and the neighboring light bulbs transformed into solid beams of light...they began to burst. The optical sensors of flesh and synthetic objects exploded violently, spraying shrapnel of glass and tarry fluid in every direction, with drops of the latter splashing straight into Hendrickson's eyes and mouth. She recoiled violently, before retching and emptying the contents of her stomach into the basin.

Small rivulets of blood ran from the minute lacerations that had appeared on the bewildered victim of the metastasis. After a moment that seemed to stretch towards eternity itself, the invisible snare laxed its grip on the weary traveler, who slowly stepped back and dropped the handset into the water.

After observing the lacerated visage, Jolpin couldn't shake off the thought that it seemed "partially erased" in that moment, as if the Colossus named "Life" grabbed an eraser of cosmic scales and gently dragged it across the tall man's face. Soon afterwards, the stupor dissipated completely, but it almost seemed that some piece of his “self” was eternally stranded inside the abominable Payphone, something that dulled the reflection in the man's eyes.

"Oh my God, what happened?!" He reached towards his companion, who still retched and coughed sharply.

"It got into my eye and mouth!" Croaked the wanderer, spitting, breathing laboriously and covering her freshly inflamed right eye. However, for Hendrickson it all seemed a mild inconvenience when contrasted with the grand scheme of things. "What was that about, Simon?! It almost seemed that the thing pulled your mind straight out of your noggin! What did you hear?"

"We need to get out of here." Simon ignored the question, instead opting to command grimly, his voice trembling akin to sheets of metal in a heavy rain. "As far away from this wretched pit as humanly possible!"

There was a palpable mix of surprise and curiosity in the expressions of the other explorers. There was genuine fright in the man's voice, yet it was no fear of the unseen nightmares that unfolded that night, no, it was the terror seeded by the realization of the truth itself. It felt like he was the only one on a sinking ship who had seen through the guise of water, peered through the facade of the small iceberg ahead hiding a mountain of ice under the veil of the endless blue ocean. It was a warning many were damned to utterly disregard.

"Hey, hey, hey come on now, get a grip on yourself!" Hendrickson wiped the small streaks of blood off of her face with her sleeve and grabbed Simon's shoulders firmly. "I'll ask again, what did you hear?!"

The expression of the one who wielded the largest flashlight in the team's possession went dark and quiet.

"Her voice, Hendrickson." Was the answer. "I heard Sophie's voice, and we both know she's dead. She passed away in my - our hands! How the hell does this place, this blasted Payphone know how she sounds like down to the most minute details and mannerisms?!

"Mate, please you're not - "

"No! Listen to what I'm saying!" The man sliced through his companion's words, now it was his turn to grip some shoulders, to peer into the swollen, red eye of his friend. "We need to seek urgent medical help for you! God only knows what was in that filth! Please try to understand, coming here was a horrible mistake, I cannot - will not allow us to stumble into a situation that has no way out!"

The woman, disallowed a moment of reprieve, was forcefully shoved out of the frigid pool of fluids, pulled past the frozen onlookers.

"And you - Cowards!" Simon turned to face his now-former comrades. "Heed my warning! NONE of us can ever hope to be even somewhat ready to face what this mechanical hell has prepared for us! Ritches, debts and even loved ones are worth a mere dime when it comes to this place and your lives. Save yourselves before its too late, before this fucking place buries you all alive!" With those nigh-prophetic words, Simon and Hendrickson disappeared into the tunnel, never to be seen by any of the remaining travelers.

The pulse of the city and writhing hum of the Payphone's insides dominated the soundscape once more, as the guests of the Metastasis slowly began to push through the miniature basin, past the web of cables, past the cocoon of flesh and plastic.

All except Jolpin, who remained still like a statue, for he too heard a barely audible semblance of a voice, like a random crackle in the radio static that was mere inches away from becoming something recognizable... but it belonged to someone else entirely.

- 15 -

The twisted sewers seemed more crooked and inhospitable than ever, now that Simon and his beam of light have split off from the group and disappeared. For a few turns more, the frigid liquid clung to the ankles of the travelers, biting into their flesh akin to an army of miniature beasts starved for the warmth of human blood. In the pathways that followed, webs of cables began increasing in numbers, wrapping around the trunks of pipes, creating dense veils between them that had to be either cut or torn through, an act that didn't seem to be exclusive to our intrepid travelers, as evidenced by torn cables that were strewn in the fluid akin to wounded rain worms, helplessly twitching on touch, occasionally spewing reddish-brownish fluids. Something seemed to have gnawed through them.

The rapid escalation of events, the rancid atmosphere, the cold fluid, the ambient noise, the silence reigning over the group, the incessant wet squelches roused by footsteps that assaulted the ears were definitely taking their toll on the exhausted adventurers. They seemed increasingly jittery, fearful and jumpy, their grunts more exhausted and simultaneously full of contempt and scorn for the endless maze of tunnels. Jolpin hoped the group would find an exit before the tensions boiled over. At least the architecture served as an indicator that the wanderers weren't going in circles.

And just about when the basin was finally making its exit, in its gradual increase of shallowness and subsequent transformation into islands of mere puddles and oily pawprints, a new surprise of the Metastasis reared its ugly head.

"People?" Asked one of the wanderers in hushed tones, pointing their finger at a nearby wall. "Is that a chute or something?" Indeed, what they were pointing at seemed to be a port of sorts, its diameter no greater than a meter, growing through the aforementioned wall, its lip of rusted steel bridging a tubular structure that reached upwards into the unknown with Kalsten's sewers. Upon closer examination, a small collection of grime, dust and dry soil seemed to have formed exactly beneath the port and inside the tube's horizontal segment. It must have come from the surface!

While the idea that that goal, the way out must have been closer than ever emboldened our adventurers, none of them burned with desire to enter the tight chute to try and test that theory.

The current port wasn't the only one of its kind, with more revealing themselves upon each subsequent turn soon afterwards. It didn't take long for an alarming discovery to ambush the visitors. They could easily observe the oily stains of what appeared to be paw prints of a hound (or at least, an animal of a similar build) reaching to and from the said pathways to the surface. From that point on, to avoid any probability of a surprise attack, the explorers agreed to keep their sights centered on each and every chute that would appear along the way.

Gregory felt his hands tremble with unseen intensity, reducing his sight picture, his combat effectiveness to a mere placebo of reassurance towards the others, nothing less, nothing more. All the signs were witnessed until that very second aligned into a disquieting image Jolpin was already made painfully aware of back in the refugee camp. No matter what path they took, no matter what turn or corner, no matter the dead end or a forest of pipes, the pile of evidence only grew - whatever was out there, they were heading straight towards the areas where it nested or congregated. The approximation of exactly what It could have been sent cold shivers down the drunkard's spine, and when the group's attention was caught by a barely audible echo of something in the darkness ahead, our protagonist's heart skipped a few dozen beats.

Gregory wasn't afraid. He was terrified beyond all measure.

A sword of Damocles hung above them all, wedged between the astral fingertips of the colossus named "Life," and it was only a matter of "when" not "if" the blade slipped from its purposefully weak grasp.

The echo grew louder, slowly morphing into indistinct, wettish chirps. Where there is one, there are always many more nearby. Ignorance towards, or purposeful concealment of that piece of survivor's wisdom dug many a shallow grave that day.

Without any semblance of a warning, the path ahead opened up into an expansive, rectangular chamber, wide enough to accommodate all of the adventurers standing side by side. Looking right, one could notice a path cutting perpendicularly through the center of a grated wall that stretched between the current and another chamber of similar proportions. On the left-hand side, grew an army of uniformly spaced chute ports through a wall or distorted bricks. And above them, in an ocean of shadow prospered an entire jungle of twisted apparatuses of bone and iron, connected to one another via an entire web of flesh and rubber wrapped in sheathes of polyethylene. The hum of their life was synchronous with the heartbeat of the metastasis itself, their innards performing a myriad of functions the purposes of which were known only to their creator.

Yet none of that was noticed by the exhausted travelers, no, for their gaze was glued to a peculiar constellation of reddish fireflies that pulsated weakly, bunched up in smaller clusters at the very end the path ahead. A few of them stepped forward, surprised by the fact that instead of concrete, their damp boots and sneakers scraped against a mesh of rusted steel. The Daredevil and Jolpin, the latter on the brink of losing his composure completely, did not budge at all.

Suddenly, one of them let out a sharp gasp, jolting a realization into the drunkard that he was staring at the pristine slide of his trembling firearm and not the sight ahead. In that one moment, a spine-chilling scene unfolded itself.

Bodies. Maybe two or three dozens of them, all piled into a small mound like broken puppets, their defaced shapes partially blurring into a formless blob, swarmed by those very foreboding crimson lights, except now their source was illuminated. Presiding over the pile was a pack of quadrupedal creatures, at first, ignorant of their new guests. That was bound to change in a heartbeat. One of the larger constellations of "fireflies", the one that tipped the pile of corpses slowly floated upwards, seemingly gazing directly at our heroes. Suddenly, "they" released what could only be described as a distorted mix of a hound's howl and an insect's screech, followed up by what Greg considered to be two sharp snaps of beastly mandibles. The others froze before jolting upwards just a tad bit, and turning their piercing crimson glare towards the fresh pieces of meat that delivered themselves straight into their nest. "Where there is one, there are always many more nearby."

The travelers in the front suddenly bunched together. Some screamed in shock, others shouted expletives off the top of their lungs - all of them aimed their weapons at the abominations that once hid behind a veil of darkness.

"Could've really used Simon's little gun right now..." Exhaled the daredevil besides the protagonist, without a trace of his earlier boastfulness, his wavering voice showing signs of worry and fear.

The beasts let out an excited, mechanical howl and in a matter of seconds were already racing towards their visitors. The first of our intrepid adventurers pulled the trigger, and the weapon of their choice roared. The powder charge caged within a brass cartridge, chambered inside a rifled barrel ignited within a split second, shining bright like the sun itself - a short-lived underground star. Jolpin felt like a stun grenade had exploded in his face, even if he stood a good few meters apart from the others. He was akin to a weathered, jagged shoreline struck by a wave of some intangible force, threatening to break it apart. The man cringed from the auditory assault, closing his lightly inflamed eyes and covering his ears. Soon afterwards, another wave smashed into the drunkard, yet another star was born and snuffed out, then an entire cluster of stars came to life to drive away the domain of the dark and to drown out the ceaseless hum of the Metastasis. Gregory was deaf and blind, unable to move and incapable of stringing together a single coherent thought. The roar of firearms sang in duet with inhuman shrieks, followed by a barely audible chime of hot brass hitting the rusted floor.

Our protagonist forced his eyes to open a little, seeing that he had actually moved forward, standing between the firing squad and the immobile man with a massive backpack. One of the formers was shouting at him, gesticulating, pointing at the mound of dead flesh and its owners. The drunkard could not make out what she was saying - "Shoot?" "Come?" "Fire?" "Too many?" "Help?"

Yet Jolpin did not heed that call. On the contrary, the man's gaze trailed towards a grated wall, and the thin corridor that cut straight through it into the unknown, before peering back at the fighters that slowly moved back due to the growing numbers of the hostile fauna. Through the aria of chaos, he caught a glimpse of the aforementioned female clutching a flashlight in her teeth, in an attempt to free her hand up to reload her pistol. Gregory glanced at a rapidly growing swarm of red fireflies closing their distance frighteningly fast, then at his own meager weapon...and made his choice. In a flash the flashlight, still moist with saliva, was firmly locked in his grip, as the drunken wanderer dove towards the opening into the neighboring chamber, towards a tunnel ahead. Barely audible exclamations of shock, fear, baffling surprise and soon afterwards, a wail of pain and a noise of a dull crunch trailed behind him, yet Joplin was deaf to them, utterly dazed, confused and frightened. But also because Jolpin was panicking.

The whole ordeal lasted no more than 20 seconds.

With ragged breath Gregory sprinted through the dark tunnels, dodging walls of flesh and metal,  leaping over veins and pipes littering the floor with great difficulty, making split second decisions on which winding, labyrinthine path to take. Throughout that entire marathon run, a piece of him was firmly rooted back in that fateful scene. "It was suicide!" He thought. "They were already getting overrun. Did those madmen truly hope to stand their ground? Even if they did manage to hold those...monsters off, my presence there would have done nothing. Nothing! What worth is in this blasted peashooter or my inexistent aim!? From the very first shot, those people signed their death sentence!" Jolpin could not tell whether his runaway breath was the result of all the stress or physical exhaustion, of a body that was all but ready for being subjected to such excessive stressors. "I have to keep running. I have to survive, whatever the cost, to brave whatever this metastasis is, to find that damned Fleshfull Machine! SHE is waiting for me. Hold on, my love, I am on my way!"

Out of the blue, a peculiar noise sliced through the whirlwind of emotions, captivating Greg's attention. It was an all familiar jingle of belt buckles, now much more hurried than before. Sneaking a peek leftwards. He noticed that some tunnels he was sprinting through were partially fuzed in some regions, as if mirrored copies began to partially intersect each other, forming terrifyingly smooth "slices" or windows into each other's lumens. Surprisingly enough, every few turns which merged into neighboring pathways, Jolpin would catch glimpses of the daredevil himself, sprinting deceptively fast for his age and build. A perverse sense of relief flashed inside the drunkard's clouded mind - he was not alone in this cowardly act of self-preservation. That shameful sensation, however, was quickly flushed away by a painfully familiar, abominable chirp that began to gradually gain up on him, in tandem with the searing pain that burnt through the man's muscles. Unsurprisingly, the sheer force of desperation that pushed our protagonist's body forward, was also beginning to prove itself a finite resource. Gregory was a rapidly slowing rat in the endless corridors of this infinite, alien maze, and it would not be long before its army of minotaurs caught up to their prey.

"No." Jolpin wheezed meagerly. "I refuse! Not like this! Please, anything but this!" The reigning panic wreaked havoc on the protagonist's mind, as he pushed further and further, eventually begging every deity, every god, cosmic being capable of lending an ear. The rapidly escalating crescendo of paws with sharpened claws excitedly scraping against the weathered floor was all but a few meters behind, obscured by a turn just taken! Was the man truly damned to remain in that lightless tomb for the remainder of his short existence?

"Even YOU..." Gregory hissed in shame and anger "YOU can't torment me further if this body is torn to bloody shreds! Both of us are painfully aware there's plenty of anguish left to be reaped from this wretched corpse with a pulse! So help me, God damn it!" Every word uttered seemed to leave a permanent acidic burn on Gregory's tongue, presumably due to sheer scorn towards his own self, felt by that small shred of self-respect that jutted from the ocean of panic and desperation like a sharp cliff.

Then, In a feat of what could only be described as a display of mercilessly brutal irony, a gradient, a faint hint of something that wasn't mere endless darkness and distorted architecture appeared - it was light!

A newly found hope was reignited within the drifter's heart, strong enough to scorch away even the faintest caution regarding the chance of this mysterious glow being just another nightmare of the Metastasis, yet unseen. It grew stronger by the meter, sparking the flames of hope within the man's weary heart itself and reinvigorating the failing muscles. Jolpin was adamant that a single push, one last bout of strength, one more dive into this rotten hellscape would be enough to finally earn his freedom! He had to believe, he had to make his way outside. SHE was waiting for him, shining through the raging storm of panic - a lighthouse of hope unreachably far, yet nonetheless important for a traveler lost in an ocean of terror.

And there it was!

A miniature mountain of rubble was formed dead ahead, glowing under the golden-orange sunlight that seeped through the halo-shaped ring of caved in cement that bridged the twisted sewers with the outside world. What ensued thereafter wasn't a climb - it was more akin to a leap of faith through that very halo in the roof.

In a flash, the world around Gregory underwent a radical change, as he landed face-first into the cracked, dusty asphalt. Unable to catch his own breath, the man hastily rolled over on his back and aimed his pistol at the entryway into the abyss.

The world itself went dead silent, bleached in shades of white by the rays of the rising sun that stung the eyes of the one who spent hours in nigh pitch darkness, like an army of wasps. While Jolpin could not hear a single hint of his own heavy breath, the drunkard felt his own ribs clamping down onto the torso like the jaws of a bear trap, his heart seemingly a ball of molten metal, threatening to burn through his chest. Noting the obvious cardiotoxicity of alcohol abuse, Gregory hoped wearily that he was not experiencing a full-blown episode of cardiac infarction. The seconds of unabated stress stretched like rubber, molding into minutes that seemed to last forever, trapping the wanderer in a golden-white purgatory of anxiety, pain and a dead silence. That hound of hell could not have been a hallucination, a mere fruit of one’s imagination! That fiend was real, it had to have been!

 Yet, perhaps it wasn't? It was possible that all of the abhorrent "children'' of the Metastasis were gleefully indulging in their carnal desires, worming their way through the freshly opened rib cages of the most recent victims, delighting in the taste of their steaming-warm viscera, the creatures' bloodied paws carelessly trampling their hollowed eye sockets and torn mouths. What if that eternally sadistic colossus that so generously sowed the seeds of terror and treachery in the wandering alcoholic's mind, also molded this phantom to hound his every step? If so, then why need he peer at that bloody hole anymore, completely blind to a whole new world, potentially rife with an ocean of its own dangers?!

No! Jolpin objected, refusing to accept that chase as something spurred on by mere delusions! Gregory was adamant that Hollow Asgard's cheapest of poisons had not corroded his sanity to such grotesque extremes. And proven right he was.

In a flash the hellish beast that gave chase to our protagonist from the very first moment of his flight leapt through the cavity, eager to finally catch up with its would-be prey.

However, Gregory was waiting. The pistol let out a deafening howl, spewing blazing pieces of lead at speeds exceeding that of the sound. And while the ceaseless tremors all but neutered the protagonist's aim, that latter still struck true.

The bullets swirled first through the air, then into the chitin, the tough flesh, and surprisingly...metal.

Jolpin momentarily rolled laterally, away from danger, a piece of him wondering just how many shots were fired in that moment. 6? 7? Excessive maybe, but the end result was deemed optimal on the basis of a writhing beast that soon let out its last, weak, choked out bellow. Finally, Jolpin could examine the creature without a threat of impending doom.

Jolpin's weary mind reached into the black ocean of his washed out memories, spreading through it like tentacles of metal in search of the scenes and images belonging to the those that transpired on that cold night in the refugee camp, pulling out a snapshot of that very fragment, that very piece of organic shell fused with plastic and circuitry. Ebisana spoke the truth, those creatures could truly be referred to as "Grubhounds." The upper side of the creature's torso was shaded bage, wrinkled and hard, covered in sparse but thick bristles, resembling the exterior of a grub, with each large fold having a punched in hole, filled by what resembled a greenish shell of an electrical socket. Moving lower, like a gradient of shades, the carapace of a grub began giving way to patches of what appeared to be light reddish fur, eventually shifting into a lower body of a hound, paws and tail included.

Its head was a similarly grotesque amalgamation of a dog and an insect. The source of that reddish glow seemed to have been a cluster of metallic implants that were fused with its inky black head capsule. In spite of the pistol's relatively underpowered caliber, it still managed to deliver hefty bodily harm to the aforementioned region, with the carapace and those implants being partially ground off, revealing a pinkish mass of stringy flesh wrapped in fascia of wires that resembled a metal spring, some deathly pale spongy bone and inky marrow beneath akin to black pearls in the snow. Whilst lacking any form of medical education, the wanderer was nonetheless intrigued by the alien cadaver's unnatural receptiveness to these apparently synthetic implants, an ability foreign to any form of conventional life that Gregory was aware of. Many would kill for a chance to dissect this... creature, this once fully-functional cybernetic organism, writhing ever so slightly on the sun scorched, dusty road.

Jolpin took a few deep breaths, feeling the inflamed eyes adjust to the light while the face, finally liberated from the overworn, crusted scrap of cloth relished in the embrace of the arid, dry, dusty yet simultaneously fresh and fragrant air. While

the body had yet to fully recover from the cocktail of fear, exhaustion and pain raging throughout it, a new feeling began to blossom deep inside our protagonist's ventricles. It was a sense of relief and sparks of joy, an emboldening call that whispered "You've persevered, and are one step closer to the ultimate goal of your crusade."

Seeing no reason to linger, Gregory slowly skittered towards the nearest shadow, readying himself to face the brave new alien world with its fresh set of horrors. Afterall, there was plenty more suffering to be extracted from that old, decrepit body and mind.

- 16 -

What Jolpin witnessed that fateful morning could only be likened to reuniting with an old acquaintance that has fallen victim to some chronic illness. From the first glance, they were practically unrecognizable, a stranger eaten away and disfigured by their incurable disease, with only a few intact contours hinting at their true identity.

Gregory had visited Kalsten on many occasions in his youth, though could not recall exactly why. Most probably it was something as mundane as entertainment, or a job.

The first bizarre oddity our protagonist could notice was, interestingly enough, the horizon itself...or more precisely - the lack thereof. In a relatively normal city one would only need to align their sight with any major road and be greeted with a small slice of an urban cityscape, along with all the characteristic landmarks of its anatomy. They would see behemoths of concrete and glass, stretching forward into the distance and constricting down to the size of meager chess figurines. That sense of scale, that expanse, that simple urban reality was a detail a layman would never pay attention to under normal circumstances.

The abomination, the demonic cordyceps that festered and grew beneath Kalsten's very skin made sure to thoroughly mutilate and disfigure these very characteristics of its hapless host.

There was no horizon, no gradual shift to even speak of. The road of cement was cracked, uneven, full of bumps and ridges, resembling the back of an aged reptile. From that very back grew out newer apartment complexes, quite literally sliding out some unseen foundation deep beneath the road, scraping against the walls of their man-made "brothers," brandishing their distorted terraces and windows, tumors of metal, massive circular pores with bizarre alien doorways riveted into them. Gregory saw rubble at the structure's foundation, gleamed at the cracks that ran across the points of contact of Kalsten's native structures with these nightmarish pieces of architecture, some of whom even having their entire inner segments laid bare for the world to see.

Wherever Jolpin looked, the image was always the same, albeit with a few differences. Every dozen meters or so, an apartment complex or some other (even more bizarre) structure grew out of the road, obliterating any hope for establishing a proper sightline for the purposes of orientation. Their placement seemed downright strategic, cutting off major roads, boxing the inhabitants in, leaving only the tight alleys, the dangerous subterranean tunnels and perhaps - the apartment complexes themselves. Is this a city-wide issue, wondered the protagonist, picturing Kalsten from a bird's eye view, split into dozens and thousands of segments akin to the hepatocytes of a liver.

Moreover a peculiar, scant mesh of metal and glistening mucus seemed to have stretched between some of the roofs, reminiscent of a spider's web, nowhere near dense enough to obscure the sunlight, yet noticeable regardless. Jolpin wondered as to what purpose these glossy webs served, but had no desire to stick around and find out.

Gregory moved forward, weighing every step and minding every corner of his vision, trying to filter any potential noise and racket from the grating of sand beneath his old boots.

The man wearily passed by a once beautiful post of blackened metal, a former streetlight now bent horribly out of shape, its tubular insides a home to something unnatural. The object, tipped with a decorated tent-like hood was partially bent forward, transforming into a "cap" for a slimy, fleshy growth that was partially curled onto itself in a form resembling that of a human cochlea, with the rest of it being split into multiple tentacles, freely dangling downwards. Greg winced upon the sight of one of the dangling masses weakly reaching out towards him, leaking stringy, pinkish mucus. Though it had nowhere enough length to reach the drifter (from the first glance at least), the latter still dashed back a few steps more, inadvertently slamming his back into some yellowed wall.

Sighing sharply, the drunkard pressed on in search of an entrance to whichever building didn't have it blocked by the pavement or the pieces of the former road, which had folded onto itself akin to a sheet of dough. The two unobstructed ones could be gleamed a dozen meters ahead, a small man-made apartment complex the door to which had fallen out of its hinges, and the adjacent "alien" one that encroached and pushed onto the former structure revealing a gaping hole near its base that wept like an open wound, beckoning a curious (or a suicidal) traveler to explore it.

In spite of utter, debilitating exhaustion, the drifter chose to limp over to the latter opening, wishing to examine it further. The curious structure seemed to once again follow the motif of imperfect mimicry, with its walls being pinkish in color, visible even through the coating of dust, slightly wrinkled and covered in what could be described as pores, its window frames just asymmetrical enough with their distorted decorations to attract attention. The main draw, of course, was the yellowish sludge that nonchalantly seeped from the fenestrated meshwork that supported an entire population of pipes and other tubing, growing between the outer and inner walls and revealed to the world because of that very “wound.” Interestingly, the collapsed segment, yet to be coated in a thick layer of grime had its upward-facing surface covered in cracks and massive fissures, completely stripped of its "inner circulation." A concerning discovery, further complicated by the fact that the markings did not resemble the ones found in the tunnels below. Approaching the wall, Gregory's slender fingertips glided across its porous surface, examining the minute folds and barely perceivable creases for a few heartbeats before recoiling back slightly in sheer shock and disgust. The texture and the temperature was eerily reminiscent of human skin! Feeling a bout of curiosity welling inside, the drunkard picked up a nearby shard of asphalt and carefully slashed at the "Skinwall." It gave in almost instantaneously, the thin outermost layer sloughing off and dangling aimlessly, revealing a reddish mass that was almost instantaneously beaded with the same, yellowish fluid. Jolpin stepped aside to peer through the hole, unsurprisingly unable to glimpse anything beyond some blurry shapes.

Gregory was once again on the precipice of diving head-first into the unknown, into some other miniature biome possibly filled to the brim with its own peculiarities and nightmares. However, that particular call for adventure was promptly disregarded, with him instead opting to carefully walk over towards the entrance of the relatively normal building mentioned prior.

Sliding a fresh magazine into the polymer frame, the specter of a man sidestepped the unhinged door and akin to a thief snuck into the darkness within.

The interior exuded an almost otherworldly chill, as if completely ignorant to the rising sun beyond its domain. The shapes of the interior blended into a barely intelligible mass that stood just mere millimeters from the surface of the black waters. Gregory took utmost care to carefully approach and examine them, growing accustomed to the radical shift of illumination relatively swiftly.

In the past, nationwide standardisation ensured that almost every apartment complex was built upon a small handful of templates, a limited pool of dna of cement, spawning hundreds and thousands of xerocopied "clones." In some twisted way, wherever one looked, whatever city they happened to find themselves in - it would always invoke the feeling of being home.

That dim entrance, that tiled floor, its rusted handrails leading deeper into the structure - It did indeed feel like Jolpin was back in Okad, about to scale the dreaded stairs in search of that old, dead apparent, and that very realisation is what instilled a new form of fear into his old heart.

Cold.

Gregory hated the cold, the mere thought of its frigid bite made the hairs on the man's back stand akin an army of daggers. If given a choice, the man would gladly swap the balanced weather of his home for some suffocatingly humid, tropical country in a heartbeat. Until then, Greg would have to settle for the Hollow Asgard's diluted cyanide. The booze was the refuge, the fuel to the rusted furnaces of heat within, those which embraced and ignited his old bones. One could consider constant inebriation a large downside of the process, yet Jolpin was plenty content with numbing the pain from the ever-festering sores of his soul.

Our drifter crept up the stairs, cautiously turning every dusty knob and handle in fruitless hopes of gaining access to the apartments behind them. The inhabitants of the first two floors made sure to lock all the doors tight, to deny the wanderer his right for entry just before departing towards evacuation sites, or conversely, entombing themselves within. Moving higher, Jolpin observed what appeared to be a half a dozen loose bricks scattered across the steps, rousing a suspicion that a wall may have caved in to the pressure of the neighboring alien structure.

That assumption proved to be a correct one, as the third floor deviated heavily from the established status quo observed prior. Fighting past a small mound of rubble, the chunks of which flaked off on touch and loudly tumbled downwards, Gregory finally reached stable ground. Instead of a wall of faded bage, tipped on both ends with impenetrable metal doors was a gaping hole, allowing one to peer inside and observe a somewhat expansive chamber, a fusion between multiple flats evident by the piles of rubble surrounding a dozen or so surviving support beams. A warmer, yet simultaneously mildly putrid breeze escaped from the man-sized port, making the abandoned tomb the drifter managed to strand himself in feel just a little less frigid. While uncomfortable, the weak gust of air still felt pleasant and inviting to him. An invitation our protagonist chose to reluctantly accept.

The aged wooden floor creaked in protest, when the visitor's damp shoes made contact with its surface. Gregory observed its pattern, vertical rows of what resembled arrowheads stacked back to back. The drifter winced for a spell, as it reminded him of a scornful, polytechnic university he attended in his youth, a memory that hasn't been roused in the drunkard’s mind for over ten years, hopefully to be forgotten for a decade more.

The space ahead was dim and surprisingly vacant, apart from scant remnants of furniture now toppled over. In light of the hellish gauntlet Jolpin had to wade through to get to the Metastasis, he was caught off guard by the possibility of some daredevils ignoring the sealed flats below and gunning straight towards the third floor to appropriate whatever shelf or piece of technology they could find. In any other ghost town, it would be of no surprise, but former Klasten was anything but a ghost town.

From the moment the drunkard passed through that portal of exposed bricks, a growing sense of unease began to bubble within him. He was exposed in an area with little cover, allowing any potential predator to easily spot the unwanted guest. While inside, the breeze took a sharp turn right, drawing one's attention towards its origin, the previously unseen area of the expanse that, paradoxically, stood out even from such a dim environment with its unnaturally blackish shade and well demarcated borders. Jolpin's flashlight clicked alight and dispersed the darkness, first illuminating the floor directly bordering the invasive peculiarity.

It was uneven and distorted with many bumps and dimples, the stacked arrows that seemed to have been pushed upwards were breaking apart, coming off and losing their tightly held unity, as if some mass was growing beneath them, making them resemble the loose surface of a scab a mere touch away from coming off to reveal the familiar reddish growth, glistening in the glow. The few surviving walls around the border zone stretched into what our protagonist assumed to be the alien complex prior observed, the areas where they began their transition from human architecture into alien were marked by unevenly distributed, inky horizontal lines tipped with immobile, bulbous masses of the same color. The latters felt like petrified cysts of concrete, dead and cold with signs suggesting an outward growth.

Gregory had to find cover, a place to hunker down, compose himself and rest even for a spell. Seeing no potential of this in the wall-less chambers and locked metal doors of the current building, he chose to carefully walk over the piles of wooden arrows and break into the perimeter of the one that had the outer walls of human skin. The very first bizarre detail was heard, not observed. The creaks of wood pushed past their prime was replaced with a singular, clean echoey click of something akin to porcelain. Its resemblance to the former "human" architecture was uncanny, with the angular arrows being more rounded, similar to waves interlocking between each other with a few metallic insets randomly peppered throughout their seams. Gregory stepped forward, deeper into the mildly pungent, living structure, cautiously marveling at semi-organic cables slithering across the corners between the walls and the ceiling, occasionally fusing with high mounted pieces of technology somewhere in the distance. Soon, peculiar circular doors began to appear on both sides of the hallway. Visibly intrigued by the sheer unusual shape of these entryways, the drifter chose to approach the nearest one on the left. The "door" appeared to be composed of multiple, horizontally stacked, angular sheets that (at least from the first glance) seemed to give the entryway its intriguing form. The closest fragment was circular in the center, its surface occupied by a round doorknob and a peculiar orifice that resembled a skewed, crescent-shaped keyhole. A mechanism inside the knob clicked upon rotation, yet the curved fragment refused to budge when pushed or pulled, however it proved ever so slightly mobile upon an attempt at circular motion.

"Locked, I guess?" He muttered under his breath. Gliding his sight onto the thick metal frame of the door, the man noticed a peculiar trapezoid object almost organically fused to the doorframe. An assortment of black cables hooked to the trapezoid’s sides, either stemming from the nearby surface of the frame, or shunting something from the depths of the circular mechanism itself. The lower segment of the piece in question was dotted with black, bage and reddish buttons, all of which seemed to be just slightly off either when it came to their size, height or even shape. Moving upwards, a black mirror, probably a screen, met the eye, having two buttons lodged directly in its center, rendering it mostly redundant.

Carefully, a dingy fingertip pressed a random button into its socket. Almost instantly a rhythmic, dull guttural squelch echoed within the entryway's frame, swiftly worming its way upward towards its apex. There, multiple sockets previously unobserved came to life, the spiral pieces of some chitinous, insectoid structures unwinding within. A warm yellowish orange glow, eerily reminiscent of the vacuoles observed in that hellish labyrinth, flooded the room. Its source was a large eye the size of a fist and four smaller "satellite eyes," evenly distributed on the larger one's sides. Five distorted pupils, partially obscured by the ocean of the light produced by the luminescent flesh, were aimed at the visitor. An arrow of unease shot through Jolpin's belly, upon greeting their frigid stare. One could not shake the feeling that these misshapen organs of sight were a mere fragment of a massive whole, a window for something far greater and far bleaker to peer through into our world and through Jolpin's very essence. The drunkard stepped aside, back, front, the eyes didn't avert their piercing gaze for a second. However, within a few excruciating moments, the chitinous structure folded onto the monstrous eyes, snuffing their glow out once more.

Gregory remained silent for a few dozen seconds, before moving over to examine the other doors. The one directly adjacent to the former had a malformed handle that did not budge, the next one had all of its fragments inseparably fused, the third example however, seemed to only lack the skewed keyhole in its center. Surprisingly, the handle clicked and the outermost segment began to rotate circularly, before catching some mechanism behind, allowing the second fragment to follow its stead, eventually joined by the remaining two. Soon the collapsed mechanism smoothly slid into the wall, allowing one to gleam whatever was being hidden behind it, be it safety or danger. Light bled into the hallway once again, bringing with it the unbelievably sweet fresh, dry air. Their source? Two, thin vertical slits on the right side of a uniformly brick red, medium sized room. The man stepped forward, wishing to examine the alien apartment up close, his grip tight around the polymer frame of the sidearm. Almost instantly, the floorboards gave a slight shift, as if something was skittering directly underneath it, between the very spaces separating the two floors. This prompted Jolpin to greatly slow his already sluggish pace.

Directly ahead was another circular door, albeit made of some plasticky material and lacking any discernible keyholes. On his left, Gregory observed a C-shaped table with a round cavity in its center. Behind it, on the reddish-pinkish wall one could make out multiple prominences that bore a great resemblance to folding chairs. Glancing leftward still, in the corner between those very chairs and the wall through which Jolpin entered the apartment was a column with beveled edges stretching from the floor to the tall roof, perhaps even through the latter. Its bage surface was dotted with miniature doors adorned with metal handles, their glossy and freckled coat of paint seemingly fresh out of the factory. The man opted to leave the bizarre thing undisturbed and tiptoed over to those peculiar mounted seats. Upon closer examination, they were covered by what could be likened to a dry, cracked skin-like layer that easily tore upon contact. Hooking his dingy fingers under one of the chairs’ sides, the drifter managed to tear it free from its straightjacket with ease, but was ambushed by the object's weight and almost tripped into the wall itself. Apparently, the item was also suspended on its resting place by a thick cable that connected to its upper segment, slithering into a melon-sized port in the aforementioned wall.

It didn't take much fiddling to unlatch the aforementioned cable, revealing a maw of a hundred rhythmically moving pinpricks, surrounded by a thick metal lip. With that unsightly thing detached, he finally managed to acquire a seat that could also double as a flimsy melee weapon.

With that very weapon now snugly tucked beneath his armpit, the drunkard maneuvered over towards the slits, both barely wide enough to fit the palm of his hand. For a brief moment, the dust and grime of that basin shifted against his skin. Through these portals, the man could finally take a glance at what appeared to be another, larger semi-isolated segment of Kalsten, gilded by the golden light of the risen sun. Ahead, shrouded in that haze and reaching towards the sky akin to massive black monoliths were those very technoorganic skyscrapers that the drifter had the pleasure of witnessing the night before. Now their uneven silhouettes were even grander, even more imposing and alien, accentuated by the pieces of the aforementioned webby meshwork that stretched between the "punier" buildings congregating into rows of cables, perhaps kilometers in length and reaching towards them. These tubular growths seemed to arise from every direction, every cell of the metastasis. However, before their final destination, it seemed that the majority of these strands of mucus and metal would pass through "relay" buildings, structures that seemed to stand perhaps 4-5 stories above the standard Kalstenian complexes.

"Could it..." Gregory muttered before cutting himself off. His mind managed to formulate the rest of the sentence though. "Could it be that the Fleshfull Machine lay at the foundation of those very skyscrapers? If so, do these "relays'' serve as waypointers towards my destination?"

The drunkard shifted his gaze to the left hand side only to greet a segment of the horizon completely dominated by an enormous spiny tube, the very snake-like structure observed the day prior, the one that drew a semi-circle around former Klasten's western border. The man peered at its surface, an island of vines that seemed hair-thin from his vantage point, all entangled with what appeared to be uprooted buildings, factories, pieces of the road, tubing, perhaps even vehicles and technology (the latter three being more of an assumption).

Much like the one before, the streets down below too were a barren mess of broken asphalt and destroyed pavement, its human buildings forced to rub shoulders with just as much if not more mechanically and biologically monstrous structures. Because of the elevated position, Greg's eyes could also make out the rooftops of the adjacent complexes, which mysteriously seemed to be completely untouched, bar a constellation of peculiar details. A few dozen objects shaped like inverted drops with flared bottoms, their details obscured by the radiant glow much akin to the aforementioned skyscrapers.

Stepping back, the drifter turned his attention towards the simpler-looking circular door that could easily be distinguished from the former one by its lighter coloring, and subtle visual cues that highlighted the lack of complexity in design. Instead of a doorknob, it merely had a long, cylindrical handle that beckoned the onlooker to take it for a spin. With the pistol at the ready, the mechanism came to life and the entryway folded and gently slid into its groove. Gregory stared surprised at a compartment that could only be likened to a prison cell, due to its small shape that was all but drained of furnishing. A single slit let the light diffuse inside, illuminating a lone, bare bunk that appeared to have been slotted into a wall. Directly in front of that aforementioned slit lay some blackish object draped in some glossy, yellowish membrane beaded with droplets of some unknown fluid.

Sneaking inside, the drunkard slowly and carefully unfolded the plastic entrance behind him, allowing the slight dimness to set in. In that moment the invisible strings that forced our protagonist to battle forward against all odds finally snapped, and the gravity of exhaustion came crashing down onto his body like a roaring torrent. He needed a moment of proper respite, a way to finally breathe a sigh of partial relief, and luckily the isolation chamber the drifter wound up in could fit that requirement. However, he had to "refuel" first and proceed to investigate that peculiar black object.

The flight for survival, the short scuffle with a beast from hell were intense, yes, yet they could not hold a candle to the absolute monstrosity that Jolpin was just about to dare take on in that moment. Drawing a long, labored yet ultimately deliberate breath the man pulled the thermos out slowly, as if handling a flask of liquid nitroglycerin. Gregory knew that the moment that tomb of steel opened, a calamity would come thrashing out of its cage, contaminating the air with the burning miasma, firing off dozens if not hundreds of its barbed tentacles into the nasal cavities of its prey. Jolpin was painfully aware of the strength of that abomination’s pull, how within a few tugs the lip of the metal prison would already be touching his, leaving that dreaded parasite with a moment too long to drag its scalding cold, pungent body into its hopeless host and captive's throat. Toxic, dangerous, destructive and disruptive, yet so irresistible, disarming and unquenchable... Man was not made for rationing, for holding back, nature had not intended for it to hesitate, resist and "store it for later." No. It was to consume, consume and only to consume, to keep the eternally spinning loop of dopamine rushing, exploding, swirling through the machine, the computer of nerve and microglia, the mechanism of thought and the one thing that mattered the most, the jewel of the body, the glistening diamond to eternally decorate this crown of disgusting mortal flesh! One just had to give in, forget, consume, enjoy, feed the eternally revolving loop further and further until every blasted nerve in the body fell apart and necrotized!

"Enough!" Jolpin caught a welling cry in his throat, instead muttering and cursing silently. This marked the second day in these bleak years when Jolpin actually had to put up genuine resistance to the invisible abomination's relentless advances.

Drawing another breath, Gregory swiftly brought the fluid to his mouth, jerking it and filling his oral cavity with a gulpful of vodka, before momentarily sealing the thermos and storing it away before his tongue could even register the scalding taste.

It was not enough.

It would never be enough.

Gregory desperately searched for some stimulus strong enough to break free of the now unseen beast's stranglehold. Thankfully the blackish synthetic blob proved to have an ample draw to it.

The object proved to be an amalgamation of glossy, jet black boxes with rounded edges arranged in an uneven, conical form. Its entirety was draped in the aforementioned, yellowish membrane that fused with a ring that resembled two blood vessels tightly intertwined with one another. Jolpin was not an especially learned man, more so in the field of medicine, yet even he could not brush off the sensation that the yellowish membrane on its surface resembled that of an amniotic sac. As if this peculiar piece of technology had just been born into this world.

Our protagonist gently grasped the apex of the thin, slimy film and pulled it away delicately. It tore almost instantly, allowing a stagnant, volatile scent of chemicals to finally break out of their amniotic bondage, adding further credence to the notion of the object being a "newborn" of sorts.

Unfolding the chair and gently placing it in front of the anomaly, the wanderer sat down. Gregory peered into five rectangular black mirrors, one of the smaller ones cracked by the virtue of having a slowly pulsating cable lodged into it. Located at the lower section of each "screen" was what could be described as "deformed keyboards" with entire armies of messy cables hooked to their undersides. The largest one, while generally more "normal" in appearance, had an extra segment sticking out of its surface, just a few centimeters left to the center, forming a 45 degree angle with the main body. The other satellite keyboards were much smaller and more alien, possessing a circular design with rounded buttons peppered throughout them in disorganized patterns.

Slowly, the man pressed a random key, his pistol still poking in the screens' direction. For a few heartbeats, there was only a single click and nothing more. However, soon the cord of plastic that pierced the cracked screen, the army of cables beneath the keyboard began to writhe and tense just strong enough to be noticeable.

A low, but nonetheless ear-piercing screech shot through the room, the noise that our panicked protagonist could only describe as "nails on the chalkboard," as the seemingly boundless pits behind the very black mirrors were filled to the brim with blood red hieroglyphs. And for a few seconds Gregory watched them, these malformed letters of different sizes endlessly bursting from the right-hand borders of the screens, mercilessly crashing into the invisible barrier on the left. The symbols were bent, skewed, distorted, alien yet simultaneously familiar and almost human, something that left a profound impression on the onlooker in spite of their short presence.

Unwilling to compromise the situation, while intoxicated by the bubbling panic, the wanderer began frantically pressing buttons in futile hope of silencing the damn thing before it gave away his position to an unwelcome predator. Something must have done the trick, as one of the keys forced the alien hieroglyphs back into the unknown. A few heartbeats later, a barrage of greyish images flashed by the drunkard before abruptly morphing into a still scene. It was a distorted computer menu infested with a rash of black rectangles that made the already garbled UI that much more difficult to decipher.

Gregory briefly scanned the keyboards for some identifiable symbol and pressed another button, then another, until the menu screen reacted, highlighting a portion on its upper left fringes that then shifted downwards a few centimeters to unfold into a small paragraph of jumbled code. Afterwards, some arbitrary key returned said highlight back into its original resting place. Another random click, and suddenly the screeching symbols crashed into the screen with renewed fervour, before freezing and solidifying into some form of alien text. Seeing no reason to read further into it, Gregory pushed a few buttons more and the corrupted menu somehow rematerialized again. Sliding the highlight bar down a few lines of text, the thing magically leapt from the left of the screen to the right, hovering over some distorted mass of inverted colors. Gregory decided to investigate the anomaly further. A click, then nails on the chalkboard, then an image, a whole collage of images appearing on every screen of this black organic computer. Ruined buildings with growths of bone on their sides like calluses, roads destroyed and unearthed by the budding architecture, glowing vacuoles clinging to the brick walls of labyrinthine structures, an image of the sun with small fragments of a bony skyscraper reaching towards it, a structure of metal with hairy tumors of iron dotting its exterior, some elongated creatures skittering in the flooded basement of some house, a pulsing glow in a dark and narrow hallway. Not all of them were of equal quality, some were monochromatic, others - too low of a resolution to make out the finer details, with certain “cameras” being blurred or partially obscured by blackish spots, as if suffering from cataracts or glaucoma. Yet the most important image for the wanderer was rendered crystal clear, a structure, 4-5 stories taller than the rest, resembling a triangle with beveled edges placed on its side with shadows of what appeared to be cables firmly imprinted on its walls. A relay, Gregory thought, the only question being whether or not it was the very same one observed prior, or if the Metastasis had dozens if not hundreds of identical creations peppered throughout its perimeter. Whatever the case, for the moment that structure was deemed a place worthy of exploration. Gregory tried clicking back to the main menu.

Nothing happened.

Again.

Nothing.

In a haze of confusion, and mounting frustration Gregory's finger frantically came down onto that piece of plastic repeatedly, in a vain attempt at eliciting a reaction from the black computer.

And it did, in a way. In a flash, every single screen went pitch black, with the softly writhing cables dying down completely, leaving the drifter alone with the barely noticeable heartbeat of the city. The man went silent, eyeing the object with aversive suspicion, unsure of his next course of action. Gregory slumped back lazily, leaning onto the back of the chair and pensively rubbing his exhausted eyes. The drifter had no desire to prolong his stay in the alien apartment, yet the sheer draining exhaustion threatened to render him utterly sluggish and defenceless in the face of ever present danger outside. In short, the man had to sleep, to rest his eyes if only for a minute. Surely nothing ill would come from a short nap?

A sudden static noise jolted through the room, forcing the trespasser's eyes to burst wide open. The black screens that stopped giving off signs of life minutes ago were alight with greyish whites, whispering a mixture of a crackle and the all familiar nails on the chalkboard.

Jolpin would never forget what he saw that day.

A legion of dingy windows peered back at the world of Kalsten through the otherworldly monitors, small defaced and featureless, stacked in columns of thousands if not tens of thousands, stretching horizontally into enormous apartment complexes, the size of which defied all logic. Some images would cut to those taken from the bird's eye view, revealing these featureless behemoths of concrete to be wedge-shaped, arranged in a circle of six pieces with their imposing brethren, their congregation surrounding a massive sinkhole in the faded cement. As if aware of the onlooker's curiosity, one of the screens flashed towards the ground level, staring at a skewed and bent rail guard, and a terrifyingly vast pore of steel and rust, overlooked by the very same, towering monolithic structures. Gregory stared at the pictures in bewilderment, his mind scrambling to find any scrap of information that could even partially explain the sights witnessed. They could not have belonged to either the Metastasis, old Kalsten or any other city the man had ever seen or heard of. What was he looking at?

The crackle and nails slowly plunged him into a trance, as Jolpin was all but forced to glue his eyes onto the scenes. Once again the camera shot up into the clouded heavens, reducing the buildings that would otherwise tower over the drunken wanderer to those no larger than matchsticks. Through the lens of this "camera" Jolpin gazed at dozens, thousands, hundreds of thousands of those very matchsticks, all eerily organized into a pattern of an infinitely repeating square grid. Xerocopies upon xerocopies, barely distinguishable from one another, yet all together a soulless cold cadre of concrete nothingness. The infinitely shifting angles and sizes of these alien buildings captivated the onlooker’s attention, yet one thing that truly enthralled him and simultaneously wiped the entirety of the Metastasis away, was a mere image of fog. A chalky white cloud diffused through the monolithic structures akin to paint in water, effortlessly engulfing entire segments of the unknown city. Once again, in a display of some mystical form of awareness, an increasing number of black monitors began to fixate on this seemingly mundane phenomenon, though whether or not they all displayed the same location was anyone's guess. The fluid-like condensate slithered through the dilapidated streets akin to tendrils of some unknown beast, scouting ahead and feeling the surroundings. Slowly, their growing presence would easily overpower smaller buildings, as the masses branched and established connections to the neighbouring tentacles of mist before eventually, even the thousand-story apartment blocks were naught but a greyish imprint on the white, eternally shifting surface.

A deep sense of dread began to bore through the protagonist's heart the longer his eyes were fixated on that mass. The man could not shake off a feeling that within that ocean of fog lurked something, something dangerous, something absolutely and utterly ferocious. The artifacts of the low resolution images mixed with the ripples on the chalky mass's surface, molding and distorting into shapes, imposing, jagged and terrifying. Massive monstrosities with dozens of spindly legs nonchalantly shifting between the towering complexes, lanky quadrupedal shadows lurking inside smaller rundown structures, lying in ambush for their prey. Flocks of ragged and torn wings soared through the drab, metallic sky in search of an elevation to nest in, no matter if it was already claimed by someone or something else.

Gregory felt the urge to avert his sight, instinctually fearful of the possibility of that fog breaching the barrier of reality and seeping through this black specimen of technoorganic life, and thus bringing all of the nightmares encased within into his word. Yet, like an insect paralyzed by unseen venom, deathly still he remained. The screens began to dim, the living fog of the alien city sapping the few remaining ounces of their observer’s strength, claiming that miniscule power all for itself, or whatever affront to God brought it into being. Paradoxically, a heart which must have already begun beating its way out of the owner's chest was instead quietening down, as the paralysis finally began to set into its every cell, threatening to compromise the organ’s function permanently. And as the overloaded body and mind of our cowardly protagonist finally began to shut down and sink into the slumber, right before plunging into the void head-first, Gregory could swear he heard that familiar, grating, high pitched noise of the machine fill the room once more. Nails on the chalkboard. Nails on the chalkboard. One question remained, however - was the powered down computer its source, or did it originate from within?

                   - 17 -

Jolpin didn't dream.

Jolpin could not dream.

It was a peculiar side effect of alcoholism. The only moments when the drunkard came closest to experiencing such a state was during the episodes of heavy intoxication, when the ocean stirred by Hollow Asgard’s poison entombed him beneath its enormous golden expanse. This however, bordered with alcohol-induced hallucinations, distinct from the real thing.

Jolpin dreamt that day. The first in years and it was as vivid and palpable as the waking world itself.

The blinding light of the sun illuminated an impossibly vast golden desert, a dry sea in which the protagonist was hopelessly adrift in. Apartment complexes that eerily resembled those found in Kalsten (both human and extraterrestrial) protruded from the surface akin to icebergs of concrete, metal and epidermis, casting jagged dark-blue shadows that shimmered menacingly. Before the drunkard jutted an army of crooked hands, inhuman appendages, malformed maws, all greyish brown, frozen in spasmodic and unnatural gestures, all reaching towards the drifter. A desire to sink into the drunkard’s flesh and drag him down into the abyss below radiated from every broken nail, tendril, claw, blade and fang. They were an insurmountable obstacle, an insurmountable horde surrounding a mountain of discarded, old, mistreated, decaying medical apparatuses, an open grave of CT and MRI machines, stretchers, hospital beds, heartbeat monitors, dozens and dozens more, faded ghosts that once could probably cost a fortune large enough to build entire cities. And on the very peak of this monument to human greed, tragedy, rust and rot stood a figure deified by the halo of gold cast by the sun behind it…HER figure.

The beautiful yet filthy, tawny locks and a torn, blood-stained hospital gown freely and gently swayed in the breeze. Bandages deeply stained in the brownish reds of dried blood coiled around the woman’s delicate hands and feet akin to venomous serpents, with the ones on her left hand extending onto the object it held onto - a crooked parody of an IV stand. The upper third of the abominable stand was a beating mass of tarry, bulbous flesh partially wrapped in a nest of dozens of plastic tubes and wiring. These very translucent tubes reached towards and wound around the figure akin to boas, biting into HER beautiful flesh, desecrating HER beautiful silhouette and shunting some unknown black liquid into HER system, the same one raining down onto the woman’s picturesque fingers from the aforementioned grotesque mass. This apocalyptic scene gave this mysterious female an almost otherworldly shimmer. However, in spite of the glare behind HER, in spite of the enormous distance, Jolpin could attest in surprise that he was simultaneously able to make out the most miniscule of details on HER heavenly visage. The woman's expression was serene, yet judgmental, HER endlessly deep amber eyes a pit of immeasurable depth, dragging Gregory's resolve and willpower into the incomprehensible abyss caged behind those very irises. That burning glare scorched off the man’s flesh, muscle and bone until it bared every cubic centimeter of his guilt and shame for the whole twisted world to observe. He felt like an ant, a speck of dust carried by the uncaring winds, completely and utterly powerless towards the merciless tides of change, a plaything of the hands of fate.

That dreaded colossus named Life... It robbed Gregory of everything with a singular, fluid fell swoop, wiping away every shade, every color, every hue from the man's life, leaving him stranded in a lonely world of cold monochrome. How can anyone hope to stand up against a perpetual titan, an embodiment of a cosmic concept hell-bent on warping its victim’s every waking hour into a nightmare? There was simply no weapon in existence that Jolpin could wield to stand his ground. Or perhaps...

There was one?

Gregory’s eyes shot wide open, as he all but violently leapt from the flimsy folding chair and almost ran into the jet black computer. While able to slow his momentum down, the protagonist did still step on the soft and rubbery outer ring of entwined blood vessels, feeling their low pulse spreading onto his right foot. Regaining his balance, the drifter shifted back and straightened up fully before drawing a sigh of relief, the sights from the world of dreams still fresh in his mind.

The plastic door whirled and unfolded, the chair was firmly tucked beneath Jolpin’s armpit and the jet black computer was dead and dark. Gregory could finally move on now. The profile of light had changed in the reddish room, much dimmer now with the shadows overtaking many of its farther corners, the rest only illuminated by the weaker ambient light that bled through the two slits. Keeping that in mind, the sun was either in zenith, or well past it. Gregory tiptoed over to the openings to gaze at the cell that he observed hours prior, and saw the street being partially shrouded in shadow cast by the complex he was in and the ones directly adjacent to it. At the other end of the cell stood the uncanny “relay” the current destination and behind it, looming in the distance were those familiar spinal skyscrapers, their warped glass windows lodged between the vertebrae twinkling playfully in the eyes of the onlookers.

That twinkle, that entirely eerily still image seemed to stir something in the newly awakened drifter, disturbing a sediment of old memories buried at the bottom of the man’s mind - The scenes and images of the past.

Kalsten.

Kalsten never was an industrial powerhouse of the country, yet within its confines a substantial industrial might was indeed nurtured nonetheless. Men poked and bore expansive pores into the soil tapping into its veins for that which was worth harvesting; Black smoke billowed from the aged beasts, the massive factories that forged, molded and crafted man-made wonders, their enormous snaking assembly lines birthing spare parts, plastic objects, tools, machines, even weaponry. Armies of train tracks converged and slithered through Kalsten’s stations, a path for locomotives laden with tons of raw materials to either enter the settlement to be repurposed, broken and smelted to serve the whims of man, or conversely, to shunt the harvest of the mines to the rest of the country.

The arid planes onto which the city grew for the most part spared it from the merciless winds of geopolitical shifts, skirmishes and wars that swept through the country’s more populated regions. For the most part that is.

As decades flowed by, larger foundries, stronger industrial settlements were seeded much closer to the capital, negating the need for this rusted gem that Gregory wound up in to further its existence. Like an aging organ of an old man, Kalsten too began to wane and fall to atrophy; the living hum of its factories and assembly lines eventually dying down to reserved whispers, with the expansive system of mines and pores of the soil progressively growing unaccustomed to the previously constant stream of insects one would call “miners.” Eventually, even the ceaseless metallic screech of the trains, which was but a simple reality of life began visiting the town in progressively lengthening intervals. And thus the expansive railway systems became akin to tattoos on someone’s dried and cracked epidermis - naught but a mere decoration.

However, Kalsten was unwilling to fizzle out in quiet desperation, to dissolve in the ocean of oblivion. It intended to harness the remaining power of the aged infrastructure, waning population, throttled production, dwindling resources and mix them with the promising shard of the future to fight, to strike back against the Colossus named Life.

The war had begun.

A war for the right to live. In the past decade, the city would rapidly prepare to celebrate and welcome the birth of a new type of miracle, a new scientific invention - the modern microchip. The serendipitous evolution of the miracle technology synergized with existing architecture, promising a production of an entirely new breed of advanced machinery - Modern computers, phones, household apparatuses, heavy automata and much, much more! This was the very second wind, that gulp of fresh air that Kalsten so desperately needed!

Yet! The Colossus works in ways both mysterious and clandestine.

Nobody knows how or why it happened, the collective dream and hope fostered by the entire city and its denizens for months, if not years was murdered in cold blood, aborted in its fetal stage within a mere week, 160 hours. So many new pieces of infrastructure, grids, plans, production lines were left behind to be forgotten, the salvage operation axed to spare the expenses of hauling them all from that semi-arid pit. Thus Kalsten’s fate was sealed, and it was left to slowly wither away. Gregory theorized it would be deserted by man even before he’d succumb to the abominable addiction. The Metastasis merely accelerated the process.

Reminiscence over this very subject eventually bled into the remembrance of the wanderer’s last visit to the town.

It felt like an echo of a broken record, a half-remembered rock song mixed with wisps of cigarette smoke, grime, dust and scorching sunlight, all distilled into sickly brown paint on a yellowed canvas. Through that paint formed the figure of a younger, arguably less miserable version of Gregory that leaned against the old, heavily used outer shell of faux leather of a driver seat in some aged sedan (probably put through hell by its previous owner). The dingy windows on the front refused to slide down past the halfway point, which when coupled with the unsurprisingly nonfunctional AC transformed the machine into a furnace. The young man struggled to see through the cigarette smoke screen that billowed from his companions - old friends the names of which were discarded on the landfill of oblivion. There it was, Kalsten, a wounded beast of a mining town, just robbed of its last shot at life. Jolpin could not recall the reason for their visit, just the road and its depressive destination. It evoked a strange feeling of coming into contact with a purebred relic, something that at least from the first glance had forgotten what progress and new architecture was, which when coupled with the sand, the heat and the deficit of humidity made sure to thoroughly mummify it. The place was akin to a peculiar picture taken at the dawn of the century, something his second-hand car fit like a glove.

They rode on the scorched cement road, perhaps the very one the future drunkard wandered through, searching for something, someone. A detail unremembered, a mere aftertaste of some emotion and a few hazy scenes left to fill the massive gap in the man’s memory. Figures flowed past the car, adults heavily shuffling towards their own unknown destination, warped mirages dressed in old, worn clothing that went out of fashion half a decade prior, left to the whims of fate. Gregory could recall being peculiarly struck by the fact he could not observe a single child wherever he looked.

Unsurprisingly, some of the other diluted images were that of a few liquor stores, a couple of old bars themed around cars, regular convenience stores and strangely enough…

WATER!

Suddenly, a dry and dull pain constricted the drunkard’s throat, forcefully yanking his mind out of the well of malformed lament. The hazy image of a dying city was once again replaced by the all too real one, brimming with cancerous organo-mechanical life. It was as if the body itself had forgotten its need for water, being deprived of the liquid of life for almost 12 hours at that stage. Jolpin quietly cursed himself for being so ill-prepared for the grueling journey ahead, that he didn’t even risk to casually swipe an unattended bottle of water in the refugee camp. No matter, Greg thought, I shall scavenge for something along the way. Theoretically, at least a single bottle of water could be procured in the human apartments.

Seeing no further reason to dawdle, Gregory chose to approach one of the slits in the living room to gaze at the cell of the Metastasis ahead, at the relay building, at those organic towers, and at the neighboring apartments, the latter perplexing him once again by the sight of rooftops which mysteriously seemed to be completely untouched.

 

                                             - 18 -

The semi-organic door of metal spun slowly before gently folding into its nesting groove, flooding the nigh pitch black alien hallway with the soft ambient light. With the pistol in hand, the man gazed at its opposite ends, only sneaking out carefully into the aforementioned hallway after ascertaining its relative safety. The visitor was seen off by the glowing orange eyes that unfurled the moment the wanderer stepped past the door frame. A laser sensor? The drunkard wondered. A small layer of tissue directly beneath the floor reacting to pressure from one’s footsteps? Perhaps the entirety of the room itself was always aware of the presence of our protagonist, opting to bid him a silent farewell?

There was no reason to tread back towards the man-made complex to fruitlessly try and pry open those apartments, prompting the man to delve further into the alien structure, willing to test his luck in the other human building that the opposite end of the hallway would inevitably lead into (as evidenced by the previous observation made through the slit in the reddish room). Drawing a deep breath, clicking the stolen flashlight alight, and tucking the chair deeper into the armpit, Gregory pushed on into the darkness ahead. The ceramic clicked in protest the moment the unwanted guest's old boots scraped against its surface. The man-built torch in Jolpin’s hand dispersed the darkness, unveiling more and more bizarre anomalies the deeper he ventured into the building’s depths. The insets that wedged their reflective bodies between the wavy floor tiles gradually began to increase in size, transforming into sockets, switches, latches, and trapdoors of various sizes. Had they not been shallow, or closed by some locking mechanism Gregory's foot would have easily disappeared into the larger ones. Simultaneously, the walls and the ceiling began showing an increase in frequency of peculiar technoorganic growths of the Metastasis. The tubes and wires that slithered across the walls, giving the building a small tinge of science fiction, began to grow in thickness and number, connecting with peculiar shells of polished metal that upon closer observation, seemed to be slotted into recesses and sockets of the aforementioned walls. For a brief moment, the wanderer marveled at an exemplair’s intriguingly smooth and even exterior, at the curved grates exuding a barely perceivable yellowish glow pulsating in tandem with the miniature bulbs on the horizontal probes that were sticking out of the object’s chassis. Gregory eyed the object, searching for any print, code, factory markings or other pieces of text. And find he did. The metal shell’s deeper sides harbored islands of what one could assume to be fine print, written in some unintelligible alien language - the same deformed symbols observed within the pitch black mirrors of the organic computer, now fenced in by a square with a wavy pattern. For a moment, Gregory pondered over the chance of these peculiar pieces of technology being inserted into the walls by the hands of some unseen, extraterrestrial technicians. For now, nothing of man-like sentience appeared to be present in the Metastasis. Perhaps they’d be somewhere in its deeper reaches?

Moving further still into the unnaturally long hallway, the overgrowth of tubes and technology transformed its deeper reaches into short tunnels of pipes before flaring out and dispersing, only to reform a few meters ahead.

Calm, it was all too calm, and Gregory hated every second of it, the finger on the trigger twitching madly the moment the barrel of his pistol snapped towards the direction of some suspicious looking shadow. Jumpy, he thought to himself, as the tension was kept up to the boiling point yet there was absolutely no hostile life form in sight, something one side of our protagonist’s mind was begrudgingly content with. The other side, however, yearned for comfort of a confrontation, as if assured that an active fight for survival would serve as a way to vent the dread, to forget the whole army of theories and “what ifs” to focus on only one, ONE tangible threat that would unveil itself.

His eyesight met with another peculiar object. Lodged in the upper right corner of the hallway was a machine with an all familiar pristine chassis ringed by small, deep groves, with the size similar to a torso of a fully grown man and a vague silhouette of an old telephone handset. What set it apart from the other pieces of alien machinery were multiple large, segmented cables that slithered into its sockets. Even from afar, their lighter, glossier sections immediately drew the onlooker’s eyes, a curiosity that Jolpin wearily chose to indulge. He retched slightly upon the sight.

Intestines, pinkish bundles of living, writhing intestines wrapped in semi-translucent sleeves of yellowish plastic, the inner surface of its wrinkles and folds whitened with condensate from the fumes exuded by the flesh. Gregory could also make out jet black symbols stamped onto the wrapping, the ones he’d already encountered, next to what appeared to be pores for insertion of large needles. Intestines are designed to absorb and transport digested food, the drunkard pondered in a desperate attempt to distract himself from a wave of bubbling nausea, then perhaps there is something that gains access to the intestinal contents through these pores? Like a massive mosquito of steel and meat sucking the cocktail of nutrients straight out of its source?! The shadows of dread grew ever darker and increasingly more terrifying. Jolpin frantically checked his surroundings with renewed fervour, before resetting his gaze onto the biomechanical tube. Slowly, the man’s eyes scanned the latter’s entire length, one of its ends lying on the floor, tipped with a small multi-jointed robotic arm, resembling that of a mechanical claw. Its 3 fingers were locked open, lying just a few centimeters from one of the ports on the wavy floor. It also seemed that the cable was coiled around a few of the more or less normal-looking pipes. With the metal seat in one hand, Gregory gently prodded the arm and dashed back slightly when its claws snapped shut with an audible clang, their curved tips forming a circular hole through which shot a thick black needle, oscillated back and forth for a few seconds before sheathing back into the arm. Keeping the witnessed sight in mind, Jolpin approached the hole that the tube of flesh and plastic weakly tried to reach. It appeared to be a small hatch with a handle of simple sheet metal that had a hole in its center. Gregory gently slid his hand into the shallow orifice, grasped the aforementioned piece of metal and gently rotated it. The machine released a dull, mechanical click upon each turn, its seams hissing lowly. Within a second the drunkard felt some soft power pushing upwards on his hand from below. He obliged. Slowly, the same light that pulsed from the pristine apparatuses prior began bleeding into the compartment. From the depths of the ceramic floor slid out a rod-like object that from afar resembled a large geological sample with its characteristic echelons. Waterfalls of cold steam overflowed from the holes of its apex, allowing Gregory to observe the object fully after a few seconds. Directly beneath those very holes was a circular meshwork of pipes, succeeded by an all-familiar translucent sleeve that was immediately followed by another section, 10 centimeters or so in height that was comprised of exposed intestinal tissue, their ends fusing with some peculiar machinery, the exterior of which was intermittently dotted with pores the size of a man’s outstretched hand. The rest of the rod disappeared into the unknown and Jolpin had absolutely no desire to pull on it further and risk dislodging the item from its nest. Needless to say, the wanderer was utterly intrigued by the peculiar flesh machine. What purpose did the robotic arm perform and why was it reaching towards this cybernetic object? The hole on its peak could hint at it being an insertion point for the needle that leapt out of the aforementioned synthetic appendage. Possibly, It was meant to shunt the contents of the “handset's” intestines into the glowing rod, or conversely, the other way around. Why? Why would it do this? Did these sleeved tubes of flesh absorb and store the substances of nutritional worth akin to nightmarish roots of a monstrous tree? One could infinitely theorize and picture an entire unseen world of synthetic and organic matter just bursting with life beneath the very floor our protagonist trotted, stretching between the walls, beneath its foundation, completely foreign and unseen. Dangerous and enchantingly intriguing for a scientific mind, yet a nest of horrors for the wanderer’s waning consciousness.

For a moment, a peculiar spark shot through the visitor's hypothalamus, a sudden desire to cut or chew the sleeve of the organic cable open in an attempt to gorge on those (hopefully) non-human intestines, to savor the raw nutrients, to satiate the body’s muted need for sustenance, the hidden strength to power the rusted furnaces of his waning muscles and joints.

Immediately, Gregory thought better of that downright insane idea.

He had to pick up pace, it was a mistake to allow himself to be distracted by this deceptively calm place for such a lengthy period. The semily-organic apartment complex was getting to him, who could tell what effect it had on its visitors’ psyche?

 

-19-

It was close, it had to be close. The semi-organic apparati, the armies of piping, the peculiar pores holding slices of the unseen flesh of the building, all began to shrink and fade away, leaving the stage to be claimed by the more or less “normal” interior that the drifter had the displeasure of witnessing upon his arrival. Instinctively, Gregory began to hold his breath more often, softening his footsteps further, fearful that by some twist of fate some abomination would rear its ugly head at the very end of the grueling stretch. There were none, no demons of shadow, no beasts of rust and veins, no Grubhounds to chase our protagonist, just a wall at the far end of the hallway with a man-sized hole in it. Both stunned by the bizarreness of the fact that he could not observe the weak light bleeding in from the opening up until that moment, and rejuvenated by sheer relief, Gregory barely reigned his desire to break into a sprint and leap through the exit into the outside world. He had to think for a moment, did the interior of the building possess a minute curve, which obscured this discovery from his eyes?

As the drunkard neared the opening, the pathway made a very sharp left turn along an abnormally steep angle, moving towards some unseen upper layers of the complex, impossible to scale without specialized equipment. Throwing it a cursory glance, the man’s eyesight refocused onto the hole in the wall. It appeared that the structure possessed an uneven architecture and a foundation that did not lay parallel to its man-made “neighbor” forming wedge shaped angles both horizontally and vertically with it. This allowed Gregory to see to the destroyed alley below littered with torn chunks of cement that resembled the very dried dirt path he and his companions took the night prior. Directly ahead, conveniently, some sections of the building Jolpin was aiming at seemed to have collapsed due to the encroachment of the extraterrestrial structure he was in. The gap wasn’t expansive enough to be impossible to leap through, but it nonetheless left a ravine that turned the entire endeavor into a very risky one. The thought of being stranded in some dilapidated alley with broken legs, reduced to a squirming pile of meat for some abhorrent monstrosities of the Metastasis to gorge on sent a cold shiver down the man’s spine. However, should the worst come to pass, at least he’d still have his pistol…

A ball of worry lodged itself through Gregory’s throat, threatening to occlude its entirety. Risky. Too risky, the man contemplated. One could only tempt Mistress Luck for so long. Would it not be a smarter move to back track all the way to the entrance and find the very same alleyway from the ground level? No. Gregory could not remain in the hellish apartments a second more, nor could he go back, he had to press onward past the deadly trials.

SHE was waiting.

Jolpin made a short distance between himself and the opening, having not attempted such a daring feat since his school days, unsurprisingly sweating bullets over this insane attempt. It began. With a swift push, Jolpin desperately dashed towards the hole, aiming for the opening that was on the lower level of the neighboring structure. A leap of faith it was. For a brief moment Gregory was a weightless, emaciated bird soaring through the sky, a moment later - a bag of flesh falling with an arc towards the very entry he was aiming for. Lucky. The man’s weakened body painfully and loudly collided with the uneven floor of wood, and its old floorboards gave in instantly, splintering and breaking apart. Gregory grunted and inhaled sharply as his knees and hands were stung by the broken shards of wood, as they sunk 5 or so centimeters deep into the surface. The folding chair which had not left the drunkard's clutches throughout the entire ordeal, loudly crashed into the deeper reaches of the room. Slowly, Jolpin pulled his right arm out, wincing as thousands of small fangs scraped against his forearm, with some managing to penetrate its surface. The other arm fared worse, with a splinter the size of a pen finding its way just shy of where the ulnar bone connected with the wrist. Cursing silently, the drifter straightened up with some hardship before yanking the foreign object out of his body and stifling a grunt of pain. Warm, crimson fluid began leaking out of the wound, an alarm in need of attention, a risk that could not be left to its own devices. Gregory frantically scanned the small apartment he found himself in, frozen in an unsurprising disarray, full of old, moth eaten furniture. Near the hole, buried beneath the rubble of bricks and chunks of painted walls lay a piece of fabric, something that could be used as a makeshift bandage. However, first, one had to perform…

“Disinfection.” Jolpin gulped, as if some of the man’s worst fears suddenly manifested before his very eyes, for one of them truly just did.

His good hand instinctively moved to shield the thermos in the trenchcoat, as if frightened by the prospect of what the rest of the body was intending to do with the transparent gold, the calamity of slow death. Not content with using some rag off the soil, a piece of the coat’s lower segment was hastily torn off. Holding the rag in the wounded hand, Jolpin pensively brought the thermos closer, battling his own self in an attempt to unscrew its lid. It shook, the fluid abomination sloshing eagerly, anticipating its release. And thus it poured, unleashed into the world, thrashing like a blood-thirsty demon, whipping its tendrils gleefully against teeth, gums, and an old tongue…yet none of it rained upon the rag that was in desperate need of sterilization, nor the wound that wept the fluids so vital. Jolpin hungrily gulped the vodka, before recoiling in shame and letting out a muted whine of frustration.

With a swift motion, the dry bandage was affixed firmly to his wrist. This scalding fluid is too vital, I cannot afford to waste it over such trivialities, the man thought to himself, clutching the solid shell of the thermos tight before sliding it back into his pocket. The former Kalsten was vast, he’d definitely stumble upon more medical ethanol and use it to cleanse the small gash sooner rather than later, he had promised himself that.

The floor creaked ominously beneath his boots, a sign that the entire structure was destabilized by the sprouting architecture, transforming into a minefield.

He should have turned back.

Scanning the area, Jolpin recognized the awfully familiar layout of a faceless, standardized flat with low ceilings, rooms connected by simple archways, walls sheathed with shells of yellowed, faded wallpaper, which when coupled with broken exemplars of aged furniture gave the apartment more an air of a desecrated specter of the past than an actual tangible cut of space, as if it would vaporize the moment a weary traveler laid their fingertips on their surface.

Jolpin navigated its interior with ease, the instincts allowing him to easily navigate the flat’s highly standardized skeleton, straight towards the where the kitchen would be - the second smallest compartment. Of course it was a shambles, the table was turned over, partially obscuring a large blackish stain on the wall; The antiquated stove was partly uprooted from its resting place, bent out shape, surrounded by unhinged and broken cupboards, with their contents laying on the uneven floor like sharp rocks on a cobblestone beach.

The drunkard carefully maneuvered past the shards of glass and ceramic, his gaze fixated on the left hand side of the room, on a metal box standing like a pedestal on a dimpled floor. Each step roused a menacing creak and whine from somewhere down below, mixing with worried sighs of our protagonist. Carefully, the dingy fingers wound around the coveted metal coffin’s lever-like handle of iron, feeling the uncomfortable friction of the petechiae of rust throughout its surface. With a very light yank, the once perpetually cold box slowly slid open, eliciting a low startling rumble from surrounding architecture. Jolpn coughed at the cloud of rot and mold that hastily shot out of the old fridge. Like veins on the surface of an organ, the fridge’s formerly beige interior was completely consumed by greenish-blackish growths, the hyphae, the roads leading towards terraces upon terraces of main organic megalopolises - Interconnected, fuzzy balls of mold. The more Jolpin stared at the fungal city, the more his heart filled with disgust, aversion and hopelessness. What could possibly survive in such a hostile environment untainted, one could ask, and the answer would be - Polyethylene. Within that ocean of mold stuck out two transparent cliffs, caging minute specks of light within their clear confines.

Water. Perhaps the sole survivors of the encroaching metastasis in the building. When bottled and stored in a cold, dark environment, water retains its freshness for up to a year. From a cursory glance, the current exemplars seemed to be as pure as the highest grade ethanol that Gregroy had a pleasure to indulge in. Carelessly, his hand plunged into the hazy mass, the fuzzy hairs, the slime beneath them clinging to the man’s skin as it disturbed their rest right until the fingers managed to grasp the malleable shell of plastic. With a single fluid motion, both bottles were dislodged from their prisons, their greenish straight jackets of mold wiped away by the side of the wanderer’s coat. Gregory all but tore off the cap of one of them, his entire body set ablaze by the sudden flash of euphoria. As if drunk straight from the spring, the fluid permeated every mucosal cell of his oropharynx, bleeding life into and between them, revitalizing the body with unseen intensity. The bottle was crushed and its contents - sucked out in the blink of an eye. The drunkard would have never believed that a day would come when the most bog standard, ordinary taste of water would all but utterly overshadow that of his beloved alcohol. Yet, it more than had.

Drawing a loud gasp of relief, Gregory stumbled back with heavy steps, before the sudden realization snapped the blissful trance away, forcing the man to petrify in a bout of shock and fear when the apartment itself bellowed an answer. He was careless, and the floor was in no mood or state to forgive such foolish mistakes. Immediately a gaping maw was formed beneath the wanderer’s feet.

A scream followed by a loud crash. Jolpin, ambushed by shock and pain was suddenly plastered on the lower level of the apartment complex, rolling on a bed of splintered shapes. Another ominous creak broke through the haze of anguish like a nail through a sheet of glass. His pupils instinctively darted upwards towards the disturbance and narrowed to the size of pinpricks. Within a split second, with a thunderous crash the sarcophagus of metal came down from above like a sledgehammer. Jolpin could only grunt sharply and hope for a miracle, scrambling to get out of certain death’s way while completely and utterly unable to get a hold of something solid. Through the sheer force of luck, or the mockery of the colossus named Life, the drunkard managed to shift his torso just barely enough to avoid the coffin of steel from aggressively rearranging his internal anatomy upon its landing. Unfortunately, the drunkard felt his head freeze in place, soon coming to realize that some segments of his messy unkempt hair had found their permanent residence beneath the refrigerator. After a few excruciatingly painful yanks and sharp groans, the old head was finally released from its temporary captivity.

Jolpin slowly dragged his body towards a wall that was the farthest from that blasted hole, leaning against it without ever straightening up.

The man struggled to catch his ragged, runaway breath, once again a hair away from the embrace of death, of the Metastasis. The entire floor was shrouded in shadow, the windows obscured, by uprooted pavement, some fleshy growths, and curiously enough - Sheets of metal that were seemingly welded together.

After a few tenuous moments, Gregory finally calmed down enough to wipe the rivers of sweat that ran down his exhausted visage, before standing up and once again clicking a life into the appropriated flashlight. The sheer contrast between the levels of light above and below made it feel as if Jolpin took a dive straight into a sinkhole, leading into some dim abyss. With gentle steps, the wanderer’s back was stuck to the faded wallpaper as he snuck around a nearby corner, expecting to end up in a living room boxed in from three sides by walls on the next turn left - only for him to see nothing of such sort. The flashlight illuminated two pathways that distinctly connected the current apartment with the two neighboring ones! Much like the previous complex I was in, the man observed. However, the difference in the former was that it was reduced to a single, expansive chamber with bare support beams being the only barrier keeping the ceiling from crashing down onto the floor like a torrent of cement and wood. Here, the structure seemed to have been more or less preserved, with the hints of a somewhat intelligent design being at play. Even the fringes between the flats were seemingly devoid of rubble - just a few trails of dust and deep scratches.

Jolpin crept into the living room, eyes darting back and forth between the dusty pieces of furniture and the entryways that lead deeper into the darkness.

Gregory reached the very place where once a wall rested and peered into the neighboring apartment, before seizing up for a spell. After a few seconds of utter silence, the wanderer turned around and hastily tiptoed towards the iron door that was supposed to lead into the hallway. Of course the door did not budge, most probably blocked by some rubble…or worse. The man released an exasperated sigh, before quietly spitting the vilest of profanities in rapid succession at the barred exit.

The rooms of the neighboring apartments were uncannily clean, free of debris, furnishings, even carpets of any sort. But that was not the main draw, or a great tool of dissuasion, depending on who one asked. Arms. At least 5 dozen of them if not more lifelessly dangled from the ceiling alongside hundreds of pale, plasticky stalks that resembled tentacles, gently rocking back and fourth as if swaying in the wind. Both available ways forward painted identical pictures - a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario. The drunkard struggled to take a small swig from his thermos, before retrieving the chair and reluctantly pressing forward.

Crouching down to almost a crawl, the unwanted visitor skittered beneath the appendages and tentacles like some aged arachnid, the source of light caged behind its teeth. Between every calculated step, the man would take a few seconds to observe the aforementioned arms, noting their deathly pallor, the stains of grime, grease and blood on their palms and nails, and a surprising absence of decomposition. Surely at least one of these torn limbs should have already been a nest of maggots, yet they all seemed so eerily fresh. Gregory pondered over this idea for a spell more. “Perhaps they were a fresh harvest? If so, why settle for upper limbs alone? Was there even such a vast supply of fresh human flesh in the Metastasis? Maybe they were preserved in some way?” Much like with every small detail in the alien city, the only reward an inquisitive onlooker could reap (apart from fates worse than death itself) were increasingly baffling questions. Shifting one’s sight to the tendrils, one could observe that in the core of the whitish semi-translucent masses lay something that could be likened to blackish beads strung up on a thread that seemed to contract and expand ever so slightly. At least four of such masses encircled a single arm, swaying around it menacingly.

Jolpin was already halfway through, and unfortunately, the few rooms ahead also seemed to have hosted the same bizarre scene. The whole situation was a massive omen.

Throughout the debacle, some strange muted sounds, thuds, screeches and scrapes would seep into the darkened compartment - Presumably from the outside world. These auditory anomalies were low like the most hushed of whispers, yet nonetheless distinct from the familiar beat of the Metastasis, the living hum of the abominable imitation of life running beneath all the seams and human-like facades. Gregory tried to keep them out of his focus, to mind the treachery of the floor, the tendrils and the darkness. Which is why it wasn’t his fault when just as his left shoe was about to gently place itself upon the unstable floor, some unseen force collided with the side of the building, just strong enough to startle the wanderer. It wasn’t his fault that he stumbled, that that very region proved to be a maw lying in wait to try and swallow his lower limb. It wasn’t our protagonist’s fault that, unable to regain balance, the momentum propelled him forward, miraculously past any of the “sensory tentacles” and straight into the eerily preserved, filthy palm. The wanderer froze like a deer in front of the headlights, every muscle fiber tense, blood cold as ice, paralyzed in anticipation of something horrible. Moments stretched into the endless abyss of dread and fear. After the tenuous five or ten seconds had passed, Gregory regained the lost composure and tried ducking beneath the frigid arm - After all, none of the tentacles were touched, only the disembodied limb. He was safe for now.

However, the blur above would beg to differ.

Within a flash, a grip of iron enclosed around Jolpin’s weary throat, crushing his windpipe and yanking his head upwards with a frightening strength. Taken aback, shocked and panicked, the man’s left hand instinctively dropped the folding chair and shot towards the disturbance, feeling nothing but the cold prominence of the assailant’s elbow, its filthy nails digging deep into his skin, with the cadre of four tendrils around the limb beginning to convulse and wind around our protagonist. A muted, wettish buzz of some unseen mechanism began radiating from that very section of the ceiling, as the hand constricted further and further, threatening to shatter the vertebrae of its would-be prey.

Not a single wisp of breath could be exchanged between the stranded visitor’s lungs and the atmosphere. The searing panic began winding around the man’s aged spine, but something managed to escape its reach - A dandelion breaking through the concrete bondage of terror, the instinct of survival, the very ancient power, the ghost in the basest of genes that forced its owner to battle through this hell’s no man’s land, the one that still clung to the pistol with the iron grip.

SHE is here.

SHE is waiting.

A deafening roar and a blinding flash filled the entire building for a split second, a prologue for a bullet to enact its bloody purpose - Drilling into the assailant’s biceps through an oblique angle, exiting out of its deltoid region. Then came a second flash, which tore through the enemy’s flesh and winged one of the tentacles, splashing Gregory's face with an equal mixture of blood and oil. The third shot that followed immediately afterwards went straight into the ceiling, managing to hit something that sent the already weakened appendage and tendrils into a spasmic state similar to a seizure. Finally, within a second, the wanderer was laying on the floor akin to a discarded object, greedily gasping for air. A rustle directly above, suddenly knocked sense back into his mind, as Gregory scrambled to crawl away from whatever was moving up there.

In a heartbeat, a shadowy mass plummeted onto the floor directly where its former prey was moments prior. From what Jolpin could notice, its silhouette took up the same space as that of a medium sized dog’s, with at least 3 pairs of limbs, and a human hand connected to its hind segment like a perverse tail. However, that was all a glance yielded, as the uniform, wettish buzz gradually began to fill the entire room, as the once gently swaying organs of plastic began to convulse erratically, soon joined their respective arms as well.

Gregory awakened something! A terrifying swarm! He had to run. Fast!

Yet, therein lay the problem, the path behind was tipped with a dead end while the one ahead was overgrown by a forest of thrashing limbs which made an act of running all but impossible. Darting underneath the awakening abominations akin to a started beetle, wincing slightly at the muted crackles spreading through the ceiling akin to wildfire, eventually followed by the ominous echoes of bodies falling to the floor. Gregory pushed on feverishly, his every misstep and mistake committed in the rush rewarded by a tentacle harshly whipping the man's body, one even managing to graze his temple and drawing a few drops of blood. The pain from these semi-organic whips was excruciating, sending jolts of lightning through his system, yet still the wanderer pushed on, feeling the back of his coat being slowly flayed open. Suddenly, a loud thud broke through the cacophony of thrashing abominations, drawing the drunkard's sight. Then came two, then three and five, rows of asymmetrically arranged orange lights shining back at the intruder. The creatures began their chase, their six limbs tapping excitedly onto the aged floor, their maws releasing a whirling, machine-esque howl.

Gregory had already broken through into the neighboring apartment’s side of the thrashing forest, when one of the creatures caught up to him. Seeing no other choice, Jolpin’s torso hastily spun around, as the man prepared to open fire. Two shots, a deafening roar, a blinding light followed by a mechanical and fleshy squeal of the pursuing beast. The man hastily turned and dashed forward, finally breaking past the writhing masses and being able to release himself from the posture of a quadrupedal animal. In that moment, the drunkard heard a springing thud followed by the sound of a floorboard breaking open and a split second later - the sharp screech of metal being lashed apart. The creatures could jump. They could jump! The second one was more patient, using its human arm as a spring to leap at him AFTER it was already out of the frenzied tentacles’ reach. Armed with a chair, Jolpin smashed the seat into the airborne creature with all his might, breaking it in the process whilst simultaneously sending the monster flying back from whence it came. The thrashing tendrils took care of the rest. Jolpin ran forward, sprinting into the neighboring apartment and then past that as well, all whilst the mechanical whir that grew louder every second inched closer to him. Every once in a while, he'd quickly turn and fire off into the swarm of glowing optical sensors, some airborne, others numerous enough to obscure the floor in its entirety. There were not enough bullets in the city to successfully quell this tidal wave of flesh and metal, Jolpin thought as he ran through the deserted rooms in a desperate bid to find a way out. He had already dashed through the forth conjoined flat when the pistol released a weak click and went silent. Gregory spat in panic at the pistol, while the mechanical horde was merely a few meters behind. The situation was greatly worsened by a dead end that rapidly approached our protagonist.

“No!" He grunted breathlessly, frantically checking every corner and wall for a potential way out. He saw a door that would lead into a hall and immediately pounced on it - naturally, it was locked. The man yelled in rage and terror, before noticing a peculiar detail right beside the iron frame. Cracks. Akin to roots they slithered across their respective wall, possibly waiting for the slightest budge to come crashing down. Thinking things through was an unaffordable luxury, the howling mass was already flooding the compartment! Jolpin stepped back and dashed forward, painfully colliding with the wall, letting it give in instantly and falling into the neighboring hallway. Stumbling forward, veiled by a thick layer of concrete dust, Gregory sprinted onward. The flashlight illuminated the darkness, the massive particles of dust swaying in the air, and an entryway towards the staircase somewhere ahead. Upon reaching it, the wanderer met with a gruesome sight. A pipe running on the upper corner, right at the turn to the aforementioned stairwell had been engorged to the point of bursting, a brownish, greasy, leaky artery, as thick as a leg had sprouted from its insides and branched into two major trunks. One had branched further into a circular pattern, forming a barrier in addition with some translucent tissue interspersed between each vessel. The second major trunk had penetrated the nearby lift shaft, breaking through its doors akin to grass through concrete. Gregory glanced at both of those partially blocked pathways and decided to tackle the latter obstacle, lunging into the doors that were already somewhat pried open. The adrenaline coursing through the system ensured that the muscle strength was augmented beyond its normal limits, allowing the emaciated drunkard to form an opening just enough to squeeze into the empty shaft. The flashlight illuminated an old service ladder directly ahead. All one had to do was jump. With a gulp of worry, the man leapt ahead pouncing onto the rusted ladder. One of its steps gave in almost instantaneously, tearing off with a loud clang and almost taking the protagonist down with it towards the bed of exposed rebar and technoorganic tumors. Managing to regain his balance, Gregory climbed upward gazing at the small entryway left by his presence and at the few members of the swarm of six-legged organisms with human arms that have all but clogged it in their single-minded chase. While the abominations howled ever-louder, the monstrous, rounded heads digging into the metal bondage of their own making, the wanderer gazed upwards in search of an escape route.

The lift doors on the higher floor were more or less intact, allowing a smart observer to notice a small handle tucked away at its upper third segment - an emergency override.

Leaping from a higher position, the drunkard landed on the narrow strip that separated him from a deadly fall and almost slammed his face into the sliding sheets of metal. Quickly regaining his balance, Gregory pulled on the said handle of rusted metal with all his might, dislodging one of the doors and allowing him to pass through. Frantically checking his surroundings, the drunkard glanced down at the swarm that had all but completely chewed their way into the shaft. The flashlight illuminated the abominations, their moist, mottled flesh dotted with mechanical insets and sockets, a spine of steel jutting from their backs, reaching towards their hind segment and unfurling into a technoorganic amalgam of dark red flesh and muscle of fibers that gradually morphed into the shape of a human arm. Gregory gazed at six smaller limbs, tipped with two toes that allowed the abhorrent children of the Metastasis to traverse a whole variety of surfaces. Jolpin felt a sense of unease upon meeting the pupil-less bulbs that were haphazardly peppered throughout the creatures’ heads, exuding a weak, sickly orange light. It did not take too much effort to guide the door back into its original position, shutting access to the shaft once again. Since the floor was more or less well-lit, one could easily notice a nearby window, allowing the light of the outside world to freely diffuse into this layer of the building. The neglected, wooden frame was dry and sun scorched, its hinges filled to the brim with all sorts of nasty particles. The escape route creaked in protest upon each attempt at opening it, but a swift kick broke one of its lower hinges, making the window a bit more “receptive” to manipulation. With a strong tug a path to the outside world was finally open, just as the buzz of metal being drilled through began reaching our protagonist’s ears. The light was heavy on his eyes, but Gregory managed to make out a slope of uprooted cement surrounding the structure’s base and the first floor. A bit of a risky fall, but the drought of safe options never failed to push one towards desperate measures. Hanging off of the frame, through the searing pain and exhaustion, the wanderer shakily lowered his body as much as he could, before loosening his grip and immediately curling into a fetal position.

He rolled with all the grace of a decapitated head, painfully, awkwardly but without sustaining any major injuries. Eventually, the drunkard forced himself back on his feet and reoriented himself on the uneven strip of cement. Immediately reloading the pistol with whatever magazine happened to not be utterly empty, Jolpin swiftly sprinted towards the nearest alleyway, taking cover behind a wall, his eyes frozen onto the recently utilized escape route.

With the characteristically shaky aim, the drunkard peered into the dark portal that he barely escaped from with his life. The foreboding soundscape of the Metastasis seemed to have quietened down in anticipation, its organic hum partially drowned out by the hushed sound of the wind and seemingly, the scalding heat itself. In that moment the reality was naught but a pit of orange light occupied only by four objects: The wanderer, the pistol, the blackened world behind the window frame and the unseen technoorganic swarm thrashing within.

A single-minded act.

A horrible mistake, its treacherous consequences not too far behind, lying in ambush like venomous serpents excitedly waiting for the chance to pounce, a tangible threat lurking just out of sight. One could blame Jolpin for a whole myriad of missteps, but not for the current bout of blinding tunnel vision, considering the hell he had just waded through. It was a shame that the aforementioned consequences spared no thought, or concern for such trivial details.

A lightning bolt of debilitating pain shot through the back of the man’s skull, arcing throughout his body and knocking the life out of every single muscle fiber. Jolpin croaked in shock, losing every bit of sensory feedback from his limp body, slamming into the very wall that was supposed to provide him with cover and painfully reacquainted his facial features with the ground. The man’s eyes twitched uncontrollably, a symptom of a mind in desperate struggle to make sense of the situation, his sight a blur of muddy visuals, the hazy blue skies and the fuzzy halos of the sun that were not supposed to be seen. It was in that very haze of blinding visual noise, the corner of Gregory’s eye caught a glimpse of something unnerving. Whatever “it" was, the concussed brain was utterly unable to process the distorted image. What was that very “it?” A blackish mass. Was it a tendril? A stilt covered in some metallic tumors, belonging to an insectoid creature? A paw of a grubhound that finally caught the scent of the protagonist? Some other abomination, perhaps the theoretical mosquito of iron from before, sinking its proboscis into the old drunkard’s spinal column? Gregory felt like he’d spent an eternity locked inside his own carrion of a body, wondering when he would feel the saw-like protrusions digging through his flesh.

The image began to clear up slightly, revealing a banal sight of black fabric caked in dust and dirt, swaying harshly in the wind.

“Huh?” The man grunted in sheer surprise. “A coat-”

The torrent of pain came crashing down onto the protagonist once again.

- 20 -

A grip of iron lodged into the collar of an abused coat, dragging it and in turn its paralyzed owner into the sunlight. The drunkard dropped heavily, coughing at the cloud of dust roused by his own fall. A figure watched over the pitiful human-shaped object in silence, their still somewhat blurry silhouette shadowed by the midday sunlight, soon joined by two other figures. The first one spoke.

"Well, if it isn't the pile of filth that accompanied us to the withered shithole yestet-bloody-day.” Spoke the trench coat, his voice low, tense, almost completely deficient of its usual arrogant sarcasm. “I never believed in fate, - The latter spat - But I’ll be damned, if this is not a cruel joke of our lady fate’s, for she has masterfully arranged our unfortunate reunion against all odds. To think, an inadequate piece of shite like you’ve managed to survive where dozens of more capable men have fallen…”

A sharp exhale drew the shadowed figure’s attention. The smaller, thinner individual came closer, the glare of the sun unable to obscure their missing left arm.

“You…” - The woman began, her words trailing into a tempered, yet scornful hiss that was teetering on the edge of boiling over.

Jolpin squinted in an attempt to make out her finer details, a fruitless endeavor cut short by a heavy boot diving into the drunkard’s chest, sending a shiver of agonizing pain straight towards the aged spine. The downed one croaked weakly.

“A friend of yours?” The coat-clad one performed a mocking gesture at his companion with his shotgun, without its barrel ever poking away from Jolpin’s vicinity. In spite of everything, there was a hint of caution in his movements, as if the mysterious gunman wanted to enjoy the situation to its fullest, yet was nonetheless constantly on edge - as anyone should have been in the Metastasis.

“You cowardly sack of shite! You impotent arse!” Spat the woman, trying her absolute best not to shout on top of her lungs, each insult followed by a kick to the drunkard's body. “A pinnacle of chivalry that was, leaving us for dead in those damned tunnels, you shriveled up prick!” The stranger swung her stump in a feat of rage only to lose her balance and nearly avoid a fall. For a moment, the stump was dangerously close to the drunkard's face. It was bloodied, hastily bandaged.

“I…I-!” Grunted the protagonist weakly.

“Wanted to stay behind and help us gun down those chirping freaks, but were too weak willed?! Were it not for you, we could have held them off!”

They wouldn't have held the grubhounds off, they couldn't, they couldn't! “It all fell apart because of a single man with a singular pistol?!” Gregory whimpered.

“Because of an example, you aged fool.” Chimed in the shotgunner. “One panicking prima donna breaks the line and the firing squad’s nothing more than shambles.”

He was lying, for the man was not present afore that pack of nightmares! His arrogant demeanor would have not lasted a millisecond down there.

“Lives were lost that day, some damn good people…” Spat the woman poisonously shifting towards the pistol that lay in a bath of dust. A few taps on a thigh got it looking a bit less battle-worn.

“Woah, woah, love slow down. Let's avoid making a racket eh? Might as well paint a bright red target on our arses.” Reacted the trenchcoat upon seeing his companion aiming her new weapon at the wanderer.

“I'm not daft, Sudara. Besides, a bullet's a needless mercy in this situation.”

While the two busied themselves with needless remarks, Jolpin snuck a peek towards the darkened windows, those unhinged by his very boots, those that served as a gateway for the man's escape. Just behind its precipice, in the shroud of darkness like roe on an ocean trench, twinkled an army of the small, orange bulbs. Slowly they grew dimmer, withdrawing into the blackness that bore them. Cowardly creatures, mused Greg hatefully. A sound of heavy footsteps snapped his attention back at the assailants.

“I’m telling you, Sudara, we should have sliced him up back in the camp. That Geezer’s nothing but trouble!” It was Nickolas speaking in his characteristically low, nasally voice, toying with some unidentified cylindrical object with his paw-like hands, his wide frame casting a tall shadow.

“Considering all the grief he caused, I’d say you’re right. It looks like our four-eyed smartass blundered spectacularly.”  - Agreed the shotgunner begrudgingly.

“A blunder indeed…he a friend of yours?” Asked the woman.

“An associate more like, one that desperately needs to be knocked down a few pegs…and maybe a few flights of stairs as well.” Chuckled Sudara sourly, his sight simultaneously darting from roof to roof.

“Damn right!” Noded Nick. “He gets to soak in safety and comfort, while we’re stuck in this bloody hole!”

“I guess all of us got screwed over.” Muttered the one-armed lass before shoving the pistol in her pocket and swiping the unidentified object out of the former’s hands. “That’s my flashlight, thanks.” She growled.

“Fiery one, eh?" Whispered the black trench coat, kneeling over his prey. “You really know how to piss off the wrong people, mate."

“P-please." Jolpin's voice trembled. “Y-you must understand, that entire situation was hopeless! Bunched up in a single group, those freakish creatures would have overwhelmed us from all sides with sheer numbers! I merely tried to survive, nothing more!”

The one-armed one snorted furiously, her stride stopped by the bald one's extended arm that had turned into a barrier. The haze of the sun obscured the former’s expression, but not the defiant scoff that came after.

The latter continued. “I wonder, is that sad pathetic excuse of a whimper, an attempt to delude us or yourself?”

“I’m telling the truth! Had you seen that ocean of monsters, you’d have momentarily realised just how outnumbered and under equipped our entire group was!”

The figures remained silent for a bit.

“Well, I’m open to your suggestions on how to deal with our mutual friend.” Shrugged the shotgunner.

A knife of frightening proportions flashed the sunlight menacingly into the protagonist’s eyes - quite a laconic offer made by Nickolas. Gregory shuddered.

“I’ve noted your suggestion, mate.” Sudara nodded. “But, In my opinion, such an approach can prove to be a tad wasteful.”

“A tad too fast as well.” Sneered the armless one.

“Indeed. But I think for a frail old bastard that stubbornly clings to life, there is one very beneficial use that can leave all the parties satisfied.” Sudara kneeled, yanking Jolpin upwards by his jaw, grinning. "You see, we met a pretty nasty freak of nature on our way here, and the last thing we want is for it to realize we had snuck away in a different direction from where it thought and somehow catch up to us. Would you mind distracting that damned thing if, by any chance, it comes back to check?”

Gregory fruitlessly struggled to break loose of the shotgunner’s grip, but he at least managed to rotate his torso 90 degrees so that his belly was now laying onto the scalding chunk of cement. Jolpin’s hands were instinctively grasping for something to hold onto, to use it as an improvised weapon. At this stage, he was not even dead set on survival, just to cause some harm to that smug, bald, prick of a man - The wanderer was dead anyway, at least like this he could have gone out on his own terms! That is before a familiar, muted slosh reached the man’s ears.

“But, we can’t just let you waltz off scott free.” Chuckled Sudara, having expertly retrieved the coveted thermos from his hostage’s clothing, and now dangling it in front of the drunkard akin to some twisted prize. Jolpin panicked, instinctively lunging upwards only for a heavy boot to pin his neck back onto the scorched earth.

“OOooh, look at that! Our boy has some fight in him!” Scoffed the shotgunner softly, feigning surprise.

“Couldn’t agree more.” Growled the woman that now stood on top of our protagonist, slowly ripping some of the filthy, blood soaked bandages off of her stump. “And I think we’ve just the thing to make sure it doesn’t miss such an appetizing treat!”

Something reached around Gregory's head, wet, salty, with a metallic reek. Ignoring such a disgusting sensation, quelling the bubbling gag reflex was all but impossible. Jolpin struggled and retched, trying to create as much distance from that disgusting object as possible. The woman, however, was thorough. In less than a minute, Gregory’s head and neck were completely slathered in blood and filthy bandages. Yet the worst was still to come.

“My-my, what a smart girl.” Commended Sudara with a semi-sincere, muted clap. “Would not have thought of a better way to -”

“That’s about enough, no?!” Interrupted Nick with a whine, nudging his leader’s shoulder more or less gently. “I know you lot love your bloody self-indulgence, but we’ve been standing out in the bloody open for too long! Please, at least show some sense of self-preservation!”

“Fine, princess, we’ll hurry the show along.” A widened grin and a sadistic stare recentered onto the downed wanderer. Jolpin felt his heart sink, when with a single motion, the cap of the thermos fell onto the bed of dust. “Aw, you carried it all throughout this shitehole for me? A gift I would love to accept, but you see, only a fool willingly rids themselves of sobriety and dulls their own instincts during their crusade through a no man’s land!”

The thermos was upturned, and a small, clear waterfall poured out of its gaping lip. The calamity thrashed outwards in a feat of bestial glee, yet instead of getting to hook its tendrils under the palate of Gregory Jolpin, the abomination crashed straight into a grave of scaling soil, pulverized cement and dust.

A muffled cry of terror and shock wrung itself out of our protagonist, the one-armed lass’s boot being the only thing that kept it from reaching every corner of the Metastasis. In a feat of panic, the drunkard clawed his way forward in a desperate struggle, breaking free of his captors and disregarding the painful scraping of his fingernails, the burning pain from the wound of his arm. He HAD to reach that rapidly drying puddle! He HAD to save his liquid gold, no matter the price, no matter the effort!

It was truly a disheartening sight, a madman shoving moist dirt into his mouth in an attempt to suck out some remnant of that beautiful liquid, tears of utter agony flowing from his reddish eyes spurred on by the realization that whatever amount of that treasure used to be guarded within the little container of metal moments prior - was almost completely gone. The calamity had died, and nothing would bring it back.

“That is just pathetic.” Mocked Sudara.

“Where can we dump him?” Asked the woman dryly.

“Back where we crawled out of maybe? Tricky as hell, and our way out’s all but nonexistent at this point.” Chimed in Nickolas with a slight shudder.

“You know, I was just thinking the same thing.” Muttered Sudara softly under his breath. A firm grip momentarily bit into the stupefied alcoholic’s collar, yanking the latter’s mass with it in a single fluid motion and knocking some sense back into him. Ignoring the drunkard’s desperate whimpers and pleads, brushing off any attempts at resistance with absolute ease, the bald one dragged his victim near the very alley that hosted the ambush. There, on a slope of cement, a fissure partially unveiled a shattered window at the very base of the building, once completely cut off from the sun’s reach.

 “In you go, little man.” Said Sudara, bringing the man’s mess of a visage up close to his. “Would laugh myself to death if lady fate allows us to meet once again.” That snarky grin deepenned, yet out of nowhere it flipped into a genuine frown for some reason. “Damn shame you’re a gutless chicken shit of a man. ‘Could’ve really used such lively lads in my crew. Alas…” Muttered the black trench coat, his words trailing into a small sigh of disappointment.

With a kick to the stomach, Jolpin was forcefully shoved through the exposed window frame, denied a moment’s respite, the small teeth of leftover glass slicing into the man’s shoulders and back, as he fell into an embrace of the cold, hard floor. After a second or so, a bottle of water that had fallen out of Jolpin’s pocket in the commotion landed on his sore shoulder - A mockery of a gift left by the bandits, for hydration perhaps.

Thus he lay there, on a bed of cold, wet concrete, battered, humiliated, robbed, stripped of the one true treasure, the one true source of power, shivering from pain and cold, coughing blood and weeping his heart out quietly.

The play was over, only the sobs of a broken man, a pulse of the metastasis, and the omniscient presence of the colossus named Life remained.

- 21-

Sooner or later, the ocean of tears would have run dry, leaving behind tumors of pain to grow and fester throughout the wanderer's battered body. Sooner or later, the man would have to slice through the suffocating cocoon of sorrow and anguish, plunging back into the realm of terror that was the Metastasis. Coming here was a mistake. The whole journey was a mistake. Death is the only conclusion, the only finale anyone can ever hope to reach in this pit. Such a tirade of thoughts permeated, stained the very fabric of the man’s soul, weighing him down into the mud and filth of remorse.

No.

This is no mistake, on the contrary, it's a price - it must be a price…for HER. A price to pay, to return the light into one's life that was undeservedly ripped out of it! The light. The imaginary glow that shone through the misty eyes, through the unbearable ache, beaming straight into the drunkard's aged orbital cortex, his battle-worn neurons alight with images of that very same desert of dreams. The mountain of decomposing technology, the saintly figure facing HER back to the ever present avarice of the scorching sun, peering straight into the onlooker’s soul.

One could wonder, would SHE wish to spare some of HER priceless grace to a champion that chose to weep and wallow in his own unending misery? The answer did not elude explanation, reason or logic. It was simple, yet simply impossible to argue against. Jolpin had to move on, struggle against the snare of pain and reach that Fleshfull Machine, the centerpiece of this blasted journey!

Exhaling sharply, the half-cadaver of a man began to slowly force himself upward while wincing bitterly, and battling to remain in balance. The strongest and oldest locus of pain pulsed from the man’s wrist, the one stabbed immediately following that fiasco of a jump earlier, the one denied of a disinfectant so foolishly. It had already started to swell and redden a little.

Gregory approached the very window that served as an entryway of both him and the light, the pieces of shattered glass scraping loudly beneath his ruined boots. No way up, too high, which meant that our hapless protagonist had to brave the interior of the complex alone, without any source of light, without a weapon and without…

“Booze!” - Exhaled the drunkard heavily, his body instinctively tightening up at the realization that it was to be deprived of its one source of true nourishment. Sweat beaded on his wrinkled forehead, as the weight of the situation coiled around the man’s sinews and ligaments. The situation, the abominations, the alien architecture, the blood vessels of the walls and tumors of concrete, the machines of plastic and placenta were terror incarnate, yes, but the deficiency of alcohol - That was a nightmare given flesh. He had to take a detour, he had to perform an unthinkable feat and postpone his great crusade! Jolpin had two tasks, one more daunting than the other: They were -

 A sudden mechanical wheeze momentarily attracted the now startled wanderer's gaze. Brooding in the dark corner of the concrete compartment, its valved roots extending in all directions, caressing the bare, uneven surfaces was some unidentified object, its central ovaloid core expanding menacingly as if filling with some sort of gas. Jolpin felt heat radiating from it and decided it would be best to exercise caution.

It did not take much effort to find a potential exit - An ancient door of sheet metal, locked of course, with its interior facing handle being reduced to but a small hole with a short, flared stump.

Trying to open the said door was of no use, futile, which meant that one had to get creative. Tiptoeing to the opposite side of the room, Gregory observed multiple shelves of skeletonized metal, tipped over each other akin to some giant’s domino pieces, their no less abused contents now spilled onto the cold floor - Ancient, moldy cardboard containers, the browning tool boxes, plastic frames accommodating bottles, glass cans and a whole army of useless rubbish. Gregory crouched down, carefully rifling through its contents, slowly retrieving the aforementioned container of tools and gently forcing its rusted lips apart. No care in the world would have muffled its ear-piercing screech, which was then followed by another ominous wheeze from the entity with the roots. The man froze for a few seconds, before reaching into the open container slowly, retrieving what appeared to be the only viable tool that didn’t pose a threat of breaking apart if a feather as much as brushed against its surface - a tire iron. A neat trick acquired in his youth, Gregory knew that the opposite end of his new tool could be used to poke holes through thin sheets of metal. One merely had to have enough strength in them…and no fear for the subsequent ruckus.

The search for a few more options before resorting to the former, sadly, turned out to be a fruitless endeavor, as the “dominoes” of metal were too heavy to even budge, while their contents if stacked together would cave in faster than the man’s pride and self esteem caved before Sudara and his crew. No going back now. Jolpin sighed and snuck back towards the exit of this darkened tomb. Stopping just shy of 20 centimeters from its dingy surface, jolpin crouched down and aimed the pointy end of the tire iron at the door’s lower segment, bracing for the chaos he was about to release. The tool whistled through the air, scraping against the metal surface, and leaping off without as much as leaving a dent in its surface.

The machine wheezed again, seemingly more threateningly. The wanderer gasped in fear, a spark of desperation flashing through his mind. He had to try again, with a straighter angle, with more strength, more weight! The shakily oriented tip pierced through the air, colliding loudly with its target and-

Penetration! Half of the tool’s shaft had already disappeared into the freshly made hole! A small crescendo that could only be likened to multiple small branches being snapped suddenly reached our protagonist, coming from the very unidentified technoorganic growth. Jolpin was now putting all of his might into stifling a full-on panic attack. Without a moment’s hesitation, the tip of the tool sunk into the aged metal like a stinger of steel forming a second hole - out of god-knows how many. At around 7th freshly drilled pore, another threatening “exhalation” from the strange sack-like organ was followed by the snap of something burrowing out of its rigid bed, as the corner of the tresspasser’s eye caught the root-like structures slithering towards his location ever so slightly. Gregory had to pick up pace, but each rushed attempt merely added fuel to the hearth of panic, as failed attempts to penetrate began to pile onto each other with a frightening intensity. Sooner rather than later, only a meter or so separated the protagonist from the twisted appendages, the suffocating atmosphere exacerbated by an unnatural amount of heat radiating off of those branching, abominable tendrils.

FINALLY!

Enough pores have been poked, an entryway was about to be born! Jolpin braced for a kick, aiming at the center of the unfinished rectangle of his making. It hurt, yes, but the surface dented inwards considerably, with another hasty one the makeshift window was finally created, and a moment later Gregory was already forcing one of his shoulders through it, disregarding the uncomfortable scrape of his already abused clothing against the jagged fangs of steel. The escapee pushed forwards on all fours, just to get as far away as possible, even if it meant crawling in the nigh-pitch blackness akin to some low-born cur. Finding a nearest wall to lean against and catch his runaway breath, the drunkard peered back into his handiwork, the single-use window with its sharp frame now probed and examined by the monstrous roots.

A few shaky breaths later, the wanderer tried orienting himself in a compartment that was almost completely submerged in darkness bar a few, scattered, luminescent technoorganic growths that held strong against the steadfast shadow. Jolpin stood up, fished out the bottle, the only personal belonging left apart from the plundered metal tool, and took a quick sip of its rejuvenating contents, instinctively wincing beforehand. From what little information the man's eyes could gleam, he was stranded in the pitch black basement of the building. The neglected, ugly underbelly of every living structure, a bare unfurnished skeleton, painfully utilitarian in its design, filled with the familiar stench of dead air devoid of freshness and a tinge of moisture. Hunching forward like a frail old man, and using the tire iron as a walking cane, the wanderer braved the blackness ahead. The path was thankfully barren of large obstacles, with the subtle whistle of a metal tool scraping against the empty floor playing throughout the majority of the trek’s duration.

At the moment, there were two plans in our protagonist’s mind: 1. To somehow find a way out. 2. God willing, stumble upon an abandoned liquor! The neglected wound desperately needed sterilization, and if there was any liquid with ABV higher than 70% to be found in the damned city - it would have been there. Perhaps a real bandage would also be laying around in the vicinity?

One could’ve asked as to why Gregory Jolpin chose to completely disregard the presence of local pharmacies, and he’d answer in a reassured tone: “During such emergencies, medical supplies evaporate faster than rain in the desert.” In truth, however? Who could tell?

The one-way window was already far behind a right-hand turn when Gregory's gaze met with a familiar constellation of small, beady bulbs exuding a sickly orange glow. Tension shot through the man akin to a bullet, as his body instinctively tried creating as much distance as possible from the source of visual disturbance, much to the chagrin of its owner. The tire iron, once a tool of escape and locomotion now became an unwanted source of noise, upon its inadvertent collision with a nearby wall. The aforementioned bulbs pulsed with a short burst to light, before slowly beginning to move.

The man’s grip tightened, ready to lock in another deadly fight with an abomination of the Metastasis, his left foot hurriedly tracing a semi-circle as a way to ensure that at least some viable space existed for maneuvering. So he waited, sight locked directly with the abominable mix of man, machine and…whatever else was there. Interestingly enough, however, neither sound, nor any sudden movements were displayed by the beast, with the lone creature instead opting to frantically skitter away in the opposite direction of the visitor. Eventually, the now distant lights disappeared altogether, leaving the drunkard equally confused, relieved and on edge. He had to move.

Within a minute, the “walking cane” sung once again, crescendoing sharply against what appeared to be a door grate. Tactile examination revealed many holes with irregular borders, on its surface, as if something tried chewing its way into the thing. It was a stroke of luck that whatever abomination drilled through the once fully functional door, had managed to completely annihilate its locking mechanism. With a short yank, a path to a tiny staircase was open, at the top of which lay the ground floor.

Gregory breathed an audible sigh of relief, when the scant rays of light that bled through the obstructed exit collided with his retinae. Knowing it was impossible to squeeze through that mount of uprooted cement, the wanderer reluctantly pushed towards the stairwell before stopping in his tracks. Before him, a man-sized pipe seemed to have burst from the wall on the left-hand side like some twisted branch of a tree, before hooking upwards and smashing through the stairs themselves, theoretically greatly limiting the said stairwell’s width. What truly unnerved him however, were the drop-shaped sacks of putrid and bulbous flesh that were anchored to its surface via semi-mechanical stalks, their grotesque bodies freely dangling downwards. Being used to the dim environment, Jolpin could make out some of their details. The lower right segment of one of the larger masses was occupied by a curved sheet of greenish metal, which connected to an archipelago of deep mechanical ports in the mass’s center via small hydraulic arms. The uneven skin-like growths around the rims of the said ports oozed with pus and exudate, pooling in an unseen groove on the said sheet’s inner surface. An especially unsettling detail of these unsightly tumors were constellations upon constellations of murky eyes, all with irregular pupils, some opaque as bone, but most as dark as midnight. Between them, like patches of grass in a shallow delta stuck out metallic auricles of light turquoise, oscillating aggressively every other second.

Thankfully, the organs were not focused on him, for now at least. Stripped of both a choice and a desire to navigate beneath those cancerous “fruits,” our protagonist crouched down and slowly began inching up the stairs, stifling a bout of gag reflex, hopeful that his clumsy body would be just stealthy enough to not alert the auditory and visual sensors, and sufficiently nimble to dodge the mass’s dripping, putrid secretions.

Half of the path was already cleared, sufficient space made from the rancid growths to allow one to breathe a sigh of relief and throw them one last cursory glance. A curious detail of their back(?) sides were represented by unusually large patches of technology, mostly assuming the form square-shaped radio boxes, resembling antiquated military transceivers, with bundles of wire, cathodes of ivory and a whole slew of disfigured machinery in between their cracks, seams and imperfections. Dozens of antennae chaotically jutted from the inorganic machinery, poking the ceiling, the walls, the wanderer, and exuding a barely perceivable electrical hum.

The second floor. Barely 3 meters in width, was adorned with a massive crater in its upper left corner, exposing the man-made concrete bones of the building, and the tunneling synthetic marrow entwined with the weeping technoorganic growths, all but completely wrapped in a plastic wrap-esque mesenterium. The slanted pathway reached high into the structure, perhaps through its entirety.

Weak sunlight diffused from the aforementioned port, and the dingy window afore the stairwell unmasked the disfiguring scars that populated the aged, abused visage of the complex. Upon closer inspection they resembled burn marks - deep acid burn marks that stretched for meters without interruption. As if someone dragged acid-drenched parchment over the walls, the floor and ceiling. Gregory bent down and tilted his head, feeling the rough and uneven textures of those peculiarly dry riverbeds, as if left with an enormous paint brush by the Metastasis itself. His fingers, however, froze dead in their tracks when a previously unseen shift in the surface’s reflectiveness leapt out into view. Ironic, a barely noticeable track, a monstrous handprint the size of which exceeded that of Gregory's threefold, hounding the acid-marked “roads” on both ends. The prints were unnatural in every way one could think, a small divide separating the smaller ring and the pinky fingers from the rest of their “brethren,” the phalanges themselves being unnaturally long and spindly (still substantially large when compared to human’s), the marks left by them arranged as hundreds of longitudinal lines. The more or less recent tracks were headed towards the aforementioned crater, with the remaining few being firmly imprinted onto the walls directly adjacent to its rim.

In a surprising display of intelligence and self-preservation, Jolpin chose to go in the opposite direction.

The pipe from before, the one that was as thick as an oak trunk, had broken through the stairs, reaching upwards into the ceiling and beyond. While it only partially obstructed the way to the higher levels, the real deterrent was a familiar technoorganism, the putrid mass of tumors that now leaned against the object, instead of dangling downwards. The branch-like antennae merged with the silhouette of the coffee-colored tube of metal, gaining a semblance of some alien tree.

Gregory approached the humming cybernetic organism, trying his best not to alert it to his presence. Jolpin saw the stalk-like growth, splitting into a dozen or so tentacle-like appendages, each wrapping around the said trunk, all tipped with some tubular, mechanical growths that had an air of welding tools that were lodged into the pipe’s surface. Even from a distance, the eerily smooth connection of the technoorganism and its “host” perplexed the onlooker. It was as if the origin of these cancerous masses, the…Radio polyps stemmed from whatever fluids sloshed within that tube, as opposed to someplace beyond it.

Beside the subtly writhing mass was a battered, metal door that was slightly ajar, an entrance to someone’s former abode, now covered in the same acidic “brush strokes.” The locking mechanism seemed to have been partially dissolved, with the frame in its vicinity being bent out to an almost extreme degree. Another unsurprising slight from the Colossus named Life reared its ugly visage. The said entrance could only swivel in a clockwise direction, threatening to put our protagonist in a dangerous proximity with the “tree” of the metastasis, twice. The wanderer gulped heavily, before proceeding to quietly glide towards the Radio polyp with all the grace of a debilitated alcoholic, grasping the dented metal mere half a meter beside it with his both hands.  Battling against a tidal wave of nausea from an overwhelming stench of rot and unexpectedly - burnt rubber with a side of engine grease, the trespasser began to push the door open with exhausting tenderness, weary of even the most muted creaks of protest from the antiquated hinges. Within a span of two eternities, the passage was finally wide enough to squeeze through. Surprised and somewhat flattered by the sensory polyp’s bizarre obliviousness towards his presence, even when dozens of its sensors all but brushed against his skin, the wanderer snuck past it once again before finally entering the abandoned apartment. Slowly, the abused door creeped back towards its original resting place to remain forevermore, until the eternally invasive semi-synthetic matter of the Metastasis would one day claim its place. However, for a duration shorter than a split second, just as the world on the other side was eternally gated behind this false monolith of rusted iron, a subconscious side of Gregory could have never been convinced that one of the distorted, bulbous eyes of that polyp did not lock its gaze with his.

 - 22 -

The atmosphere had changed, allowing slight coolness to usurp the place of suffocating heat that radiated through the city's growing bones. The aroma of rot lingered for a few moments more, cut off from its monstrous source, doomed to dissipate eventually. Jolpin took a few breaths of respite before straightening up and examining the new cut of space he had just stepped in. No surface in the boxy entrance, and the living room it overlooked was spared of the “parchment" treatment, with the brush strokes of the Metastasis having scarred even the random bits of debris, the broken pieces of furniture, techno organic machinery in addition to the walls, floor and the ceiling. That image, when coupled with a pronounced acidic rancidity of what could be likened to old vomit, made the protagonist feel like he walked in on an aftermath of some massive creature’s unsuccessful attempt at digesting the flat itself from within.

Jolpin stepped forward, eyes still adjusting to the well-illuminated compartment, tinted light green by the half-molten, formerly translucent blinds fused to the window frames akin to old membranes.

Jolpin carefully maneuvered around pieces of destroyed furniture strewn between the unusually smooth, angular,  jet black machines that he likened to radiators, that stuck out like stacks from a sea of acid-soaked flooring. The upper two thirds of these peculiarly even, grainy chassis were mostly devoid of any pores, divots or other markings, with their bottoms having an army of small, horizontally arranged cuts. Like brushes on one's skin, Gregory felt the chill air caress his ankles, emanating from the aforementioned slits of the said “radiators." The subtle streams of cold air intensified, the longer the visitor remained around them. Of all the objects, these pieces of technology seemed to be somewhat spared of the corrosive calamity’s all-consuming touch.

Behind one of the larger shapes, on a wall without windows where the corrosive scars ran deepest, the drunkard spied a handful of small fissures that accompanied a single large one, its margins wide enough to peer into. In the space between the cold radiators and the aforementioned hole, Jolpin’s eyes caught a glimpse of a peculiar pile of debris - one which did not inspire recollection of any piece of furniture. The drunkard knelt, his palm resting on the apex of the adjacent black machine, with the knees bearing the brunt of the uncomfortable chill air it spewed with gradually mounting intensity. The stench of semi digested biomass and bile slithered into the drunkard’s nostrils, piercing his olfactory receptors. One could observe multiple, pearly-beige pieces, their curvature and texture reminiscent of carapace. Those that were somewhat intact, seemed to have two hollow pores on their sides. Beneath the aforementioned shells lay yellowed bones, similarly broken and partially dissolved, their exteriors covered by a myriad of vertical etchings, as if left by some artisan’s chisel. Jolpin’s free hand glided past the skeletal remains and the scant tufts of fur to grasp an unidentified object with a hollow cavity, seemingly created by a strong external force. The familiar grooves ran throughout its spongy interior, shaded pink and brown from the dried substances that once sustained it. Minding the jagged edges around the pore, the wanderer gently pried the piece off the floor to examine it further. A small rotation revealed a dead grin, a union of jagged rows of canine fangs and oversized mandibles of some insect.

“A world of its own.” He muttered scornfully, gently returning the skull to its dried bed of liquified meat and metal. The miniature gust was unbearably cold now.

Gregory wearily approached the fissure.

Barely noticeable, flickering glow outlined its inner rim. Inside, in a net of wires proudly rested another exemplar of alien technology. The slightly tilted, otherworldly switchboard blinked lazily, its disharmonious clicks mixing with low, electrical hum emanating from the can-sized transistors on the object’s sides that resembled folded circuit boards. Tucked away in the upper right corner, was a barely perceivable cluster of screens that resembled those belonging to flip phones melted into a singular unit. A thick layer of semi-transparent mucus clung to almost every corner of the mentioned objects.

Gregory peered deeper, moved closer, compelled by some unseen force, a move so reckless he could not even allow himself to regret it afterwards. Suddenly the switchboard hissed and strobed, the four can-like apparati on its lower segment flicking open for the two pairs of coiled wire to leap towards the protagonist at the speed of bullets. The last thing Jolpin recalled was a burst of dull pain stinging his shoulder blades and neck, combining with the bone-chilling cold biting into his lower waist. He concluded that a metallic radiator of alien origin was not a good cushion to fall on should one be startled. The aforementioned metal wires were almost long enough to stick out of the fissure, poking the enormous wooden sockets that rested on their tips at the wanderer. Fingertips gently caressed their smooth, chamfered entryways, lubricated by a less viscous fluid when compared to whatever clung to the switchboard. Jolpin glanced at the flickering phone screens, puzzled at their purpose (or lack thereof). He had to move forward, but not without peering into the outside world once again. Swiftly maneuvering past the radiators, the drunkard neared a window and forcefully yanked off a half-molten blind that was fused to the wall like some old membrane. The hue in the room changed a tad.

The world outside revealed a familiar cell, the sun-baked sand mixing with the battered, uprooted cement, a twisted stage that moments prior hosted a terrible display of treachery, and human cruelty. The man inhaled sharply at the memory. On the right-hand side, the silhouette of Gregory’s target, the relay, seemed larger and even more imposing. This isn’t the right way, he thought regretfully, not yet. The admission pierced his soul like a brand of blazing iron. In light of the most recent events, a new priority was etched in the wanderer’s mental list: Ethanol. I need to find it and refuel myself, lest I let the last shreds of my strength depart from my wretched shell! I Wait for me, my love, I shan’t sidetrack myself needlessly!

Leaving the greenish apartment was a no difficult feat, as whatever calamity raged through the building's entirely made sure to smash through walls, ceilings, floors that connected neighboring apartments, both vertically and horizontally, almost creating a singular torturous chamber, or a terranean “cavern” of human architecture.

Before Jolpin was an impromptu corridor of conjoined bedrooms, allowing him to gleam at multiple possible routes of traversal. Straight ahead was a battered wall, its cracks and fissures oozing a continuous stream of semi-viscous amber substance into a man-size hole beneath it - a possible way down if one was careful enough. On the right hand side where the door frame once resided the path slumped upward, on the left, the “cavern" resumed its horizontal flow. Conveniently, the wanderer was presented with a generous pool of choice. Should he choose to descend, one would not be remiss to think that he'd stumble upon a thick outer coating of asphalt leaning on the building's sides, an army of dead ends. Comparably, the current level was a more tempting choice. Ascension, however, seemed the most logical option at the moment. If the path led towards the roof, then the man would have been able to scout out the regions of his interest, gain situational awareness and detect any possible hostiles. That is, if Jolpin did not have the pleasure of meeting any of the mentioned “hostiles” along the way.

While the collapsed ceiling was not steep enough to make itself impossible to scale, it nonetheless presented quite a challenge. Using the tire iron as an impromptu climbing tool, the obstacle was cleared within two painstakingly long minutes.

The current layer of the building was somehow even more barren and defaced, blotted by small islands of missing flooring out of which jutted the clotted wires, cracked gears and fenestrated spheres of bone, perhaps having endured a much heavier traffic than the periphery our protagonist had first visited.

The reek of vomit seemed stronger now, more intense, and pungent, accompanying the skeletal leftovers of unseen beasts that only grew in numbers with each passing minute and chamber. Bones, blades, shards of metal, battered and bent remnants of uprooted biotechnology, all arranged in circular piles that were haphazardly peppered throughout the cavern, each encircled by those barely visible, massive handprints. Gregory carefully maneuvered past them, sneaking oblique glances at the aforementioned holes in the floor - soups made of yellowish sludge and greenish oil, peppered with what resembled ground coffee, some fluffy organic material, gears, screws, broken shells of plastic tubing and a whole manner of other random fragments.

Another slope was found, followed by another floor, and another grim graveyard. Suddenly, something snagged on the side of the wanderer's coat, immediately followed by a loud rattle booming throughout the chamber, as a large collection of biological and mechanical waste, accidentally disturbed by the protagonist’s troubled ascent tumbled downwards towards the lower floor. The man froze for a few minutes, bracing for a wettish whir of some mechanical monster, awakened, disturbed, or attracted by his misstep. Statuesque for a few seconds more, the trip was to be resumed for a moment, were it not for a small crunch beneath his boot. Gregory stared at the fractured remnant with a mix of curiosity and worry - it was definitely a human jawbone. Gregory swore under his breath.

More and more sunlight bled into the building, the higher our protagonist got, guided by the sudden appearance of a faint breeze and a fresher aroma of air. The more he gave into its intoxicating allure, the more hurried he was, devoid of a careful step. Within a span of 20 minutes, Gregory was already scaling his last obstacle, eyes glued to the azure skies clearly visible through a massive gash in the ceiling of the final floor. The arid air once again filled the man's body with energy and mind - with relief.

With a hint of joy, the drunkard gazed at the twisted city, much larger and more imposing than the lesion of soil he observed the night prior. The glistening vertebral skyscrapers seemed ever-present, the Northern stars of this world, their coats of wires akin to thousands of threads spreading far and wide among the buildings, winding through the peculiar “newcomers." Behind them, behind the aforementioned pillars of glass and bone, slithered the monolithic tube that demarcated the city's entire western border.

There were other structures that managed to break through the skin of cement, and extend towards the skies, distorted, bent and destructive pieces of architecture that seemingly forgot that they were supposed to mimic those capable of human utilization.

Noticing a slight shimmer moving through the skies in the distance, the drunkard was immediately reminded of his vulnerable position, and that danger could lurk around every corner. Crouching down, he snuck forward through the unusually preserved rooftop, seemingly untainted by the metastasis. Seemingly.

The rim of the hole that led into the innards of the apartment complex was completely surrounded by the massive handprints, creating a distorted star shape in tandem with the unusually narrow “brush strokes” of the metastasis. The aforementioned “star” extended forward into tendrils that flowed and branched akin to the vessels of a placenta, before each hooking into an eerily even circle upon reaching some arbitrary length. These forms reminded Gregory of the enigmatic crop and sandstone circles - concerning and peculiar, yes, with their source nowhere to be seen.

“Hopefully, the dreaded colossus will keep it that way.” The man sighed and crouched onward, accompanied by the crunch of sand, the whisper of the wind and the hum of the metastasis.

The neglected rooftop proved to be deceptively unaffected by the blight of the city. That is, of course, if one chose to ignore the enormous trunk-sized spikes that found permanent residence deep inside the corners where the sun-scorched floor and the dangerously low walls met. They were the anchor points of the “webs” of metal and mucus that seemed to form a faux “roof” over the cells that the protagonist had the displeasure of observing. The “anchors” were certainly mechanical, made from thick, vertically interlocking octagonal rings with neatly arranged rows of cables peeking out from the seams.

Throughout the perimeter, glassy roots, apple-sized valves beaded with luminescent caviar, bluish growths that resembled seaweeds of gnarled tongues coated the inner surfaces of unusually large drains, and tall saucers of sheet metal through which fresh air once circulated into the complex. Curiously, none of them extended beyond the rims of their domains. Every crack and dark corner concealed something foreign pulsating, squirming, writhing. One could not hide from the reach of the Metastasis.

When compared to the oceans of organic and synthetic debris within the building, its uppermost layer seemed to be positively barren in comparison, having only a few scant fragments of bone and metallic objects caked in dust and resembling rocks on a desert highway.

Gregory snuck towards the edge of the roof, hunched over, taking cover behind a coarse wall of one of the three distinct rectangular compartments that lead into their respective stairwells, the only things that reached past one’s waist height. The wanderer kept his head and eyes low, fixated on his next potential destination. The road in the occluded section of Kalsten, seemed to have assumed a U-shape, curving around a residential building that was tipped forward a good 30 degrees or so. While the vantage point ensured that all of the finer details were clouded by the haze of distance, there were some small landmarks peeking out of the sea of folded cement to tell a story about themselves. Broken sign boards and decorations, eye-catching murals and artworks sanded away into nothingness, shards of argon tubes that once lit up with the names of small establishments, stores, pubs, cafes and bars - Each a phenotype of what was grafted into the lower levels of residential buildings akin to donated organs or prosthetics - now more so than ever. The majority have been withering away into nothingness since Kalsten’s short lived revival.

Like cells in a hypoxic body, only those that consumed the nutrients least stood the relentless onslaught of hardship. Coincidentally, they happened to be the smallest as well. Somehow these miniature nexi of societies would always withstand their gauntlets, supported by a serendipitous or apt strategic placement that allowed some to even stand shoulder to shoulder with their larger city-wide relatives. Like the sand on the bottom of the sea, roused by a sudden descent of a steel anchor, the sediment of half-remembered images was roused once again, the searchlight of the man’s mind refracting into darkened corridors, an iron door of an apartment painted white with a red cross in its center, a tall rectangular hole lodged in the wall directly adjacent to it, a space to be filled by a fine mesh of steel. Behind that very grate and just in front of the antiquated skeletonized shelves of cheap steel resided a blurry figure of a man…or was it a woman? One had to move past it, take the stairs and directly above that very makeshift shop, was an identical one - except its insides would have been admittedly larger and Its purpose was to satisfy more “everyday” needs. Convenient, he’d admit. Run downstairs, or take the lift, approach the wall of reinforced glass and tug on the small string sticking out from a tiny pore in its center right section. A bell would ring, or a light would flicker, and the owner would slide into his position, the center stage of a lush, synthetic jungle (or an oversized terrarium) and welcome their regular customer - admittedly the most common form of customer bar a few exceedingly rare exceptions. Most of them had no entry, and those bastards would pass the products to the client on the other side of the glass, mesh, shutter or any combination of the three. And they did play favorites. A dormant memory soured the back of Jolpin’s tongue, the trail of thought reanimating a dead, sour taste of expired fruit yogurt.

These makeshift “stores” were relatively common, yet still somewhat challenging to find, as their locations were passed down grapevines, exchanged through word of mouth, etc. Rarely, a small cursory sign or a miniature banner - something completely invisible from his vantage point would betray their presence. Perhaps there would have been something worth finding there. Resuming his reconnaissance, the wanderer studied the aforementioned building whose only exceptional characteristic was the fact that it was tipped forward, perhaps on a verge of collapse. The ground beneath the structure seemed to have partially given in, forming a dark fissure - the probable reason for its peculiar and dangerous posture.

Directly behind the Tipped One, reaching beyond the otherwise sickeningly even queue of xerocopied buildings was another odd structure. It was grand, with a surprisingly human exterior of rusted iron and cement winding into a single massive stack of a semi-squared coil, clear windows peeking out from the spaces between the enormous folds, transected by uneven triangular frames. Rounded, greyish tumors of steel dotted its periphery, blazing orange glow blasting from the armies of malformed circular fans, distorted even further by heat they spewed. Veils of strands that resembled wet hair draped over the coil’s neighbors, attached to those very technoorganic cancerous masses, as if designed to leech vital nutrients from the surrounding structures akin to hyphae of a parasitic fungus. Perhaps this coil is a predator, a stationary parasyte feasting on its defenceless prey, Jolpin thought. Or maybe it is a symbiote, receiving nutritional support from the tumors in exchange for some mysterious benefit.

With the local landmarks surveyed and a lay of the land firmly imprinted into his mind, Gregory Jolpin already had a mental picture of his next destination. Now, there was a dilemma regarding the route. The drunkard could use the same hole and descend into the lower reaches from there in hopes of finding an exit, he could also brave the three stairwells in hopes of stumbling upon a way out on the building’s other side. The third, the one that seemed closer to gallows humor than an actual plan, involved an assessment of the gap between this building and its direct opposite one for another daring leap of faith. Perhaps there was some piece of technoorganic growth that could be used as a makeshift bridge.

For now, the idea of using something man-made was plenty alluring. The first set of stairs were locked behind a metal door, unlike the one in the basement - much thicker. Perhaps the tire iron could still poke through it, if one tried hard enough.

Sneaking over to the second entrance yielded an image of a stairwell, filled to the brim by the large chunks of concrete that once roofed over it. Acid brush marks were present there as well.

The third one seemed the most intact, a digitless rectangle jutting from the surface of the roof. Deep grooves arranged in 3 pairs marked the structure’s entirety, Its flat top occupied by what could be described as a tree made up of antennas and intertwining cables, twice the height of their “base.” A cocoon of sorts resided on the tip of the structure, its shape resembling a sphere that was squashed vertically into an uneven disc, cobbled together from rounded pieces of some blackish scrap and torn technoorganic fragments, all partially wrapped in what resembled an ivory parchment. A jagged gaping hole reached into the object’s depths, the forceful nature of its creation accentuated by the broken pieces of metal hanging freely from the torn strands of the aforementioned parchment. The disc’s semi-viscous contents seemed to have been scooped out by something, with only a few reddish-greenish drops remaining on the edge of the said hole. Jolpin looked down and tilted his head, noticing the ever-subtle, massive arm prints between the observed grooves.

The latter variety also extended onto the door of faded brick red, transecting its locking mechanism and even the hinges, rendering the potential entrance unstable. If the wanderer was just careful enough, he would have been able to unhinge the door in its entirety…

The man was not careful enough, and as he soon came to learn, insufficiently strong as well, unable to catch the now freed rectangle of metal without it falling, tipping over and thundering across the entire Metastasis. Fortunately, the drunkard managed to dash aside and avoid getting pinned under its weight.

The world stood still, petrified in an everlasting moment seemingly in mockery of the visitor’s yet another short-sighted blunder. A faint grimy scrape reached the protagonist’s ears, their source lost somewhere beyond the roof’s edge. Jolpin hastily snuck towards that very boundary, facing a 4-meter wide space between the two complexes and glanced downwards, noticing a patch of roused dust inside a particularly large hole in the neighboring structure’s 3rd floor…and a pinkish blur that just dashed out of the line of sight! A somewhat muted, hurried barrage of clicks gained on him with frightening speed from the street-facing view of the building.

He shuddered.

Within that miniscule window of a few seconds, the unidentified presence emerged from behind the tree of antennas. That intense pinkish shade, that barely registered mobile mass shot forward like a bullet, executing a single, powerful slash aimed at our protagonist. Gregory swore instinctively and leapt aside, yet only managing to muster a semi-successful dodge, as a constellation of six, needle-like claws dug into his arm and shoulder. The man let out a tortured cry, as a blast of electrical pain shot through his very soul. It was not metaphorical. Thankfully, the maneuver managed to at least deny the talons entry into the deeper tissues. The wanderer, paralyzed in agonizing anguish, collided with the dust-ridden floor and screwed his nigh-shut eyes upwards towards the assailant, now ready to execute its second, final attack. He inhaled sharply, noticing the sudden stench of singed flesh that later turned out to be emanating from the fresh wound. The monster lunged, yet barely covered any meaningful distance, stopping abruptly to gaze at the black cocoon. The protagonist, locked in his own body, had a chance to observe the creature for a fleeting moment.

Even when hunched forward, the hairless abomination stood at least two heads above an average human, its unusually bright, rose-tinted, slightly saggy skin boasting an unusual glare in the sunlight. The muscular back supported a pair of enormous arms that extended into six digits, each tipped by a razor-sharp talon of polished copper. In the shadow cast by the broad chest hid a pair of legs that closely resembled those of a canine. The shades of the sky danced on the pieces of polished metal, contrasting with the dimmed veil of obscured light. The skin stretched thin around its bony prominences and joints, both seemingly too sharp, angular and complex to be considered of purely organic origin. Finally, the man’s eyes trailed towards the creature’s head. The short lower jaw of a hound blended seamlessly into four triangular upper mandibles of some predatory insect, combining into an inescapable cage for the tattered carcass of some multi-legged technoorganism with a broken arm in place of a tail, and a partly digested human leg. Said mandibles were attached to a rounded skull that transitioned from tightly fitting, blanched skin to a pearly-white carapace with two large indentations that hosted the creature’s two, pitch black compound eyes. The latter were ringed by a dozen or so miniature, cylindrical mechanisms. In an ironic conclusion, the proportions of the flesh machine’s head were actually reminiscent of that of a human, instead of the aforementioned species.

A duet of a metallic clank and a wet thud resonated through the air, as the monster with its maw now agape leapt and hurriedly scaled the tree of technology towards the construct of parchment and scrap metal. Its talons dug into it, ripping the top off of the cocoon and sending its pieces crashing down onto the roof, The creature’s head darted back and forth, its talons madly digging into and ripping out clumps of fur, roof insulation and some greyish wet mass. A clump of the latter sort fell besides our protagonist, who was already wresting his ability to move from the jaws of relentless paralysis. Gregory glanced at its hypervascular, lifeless surface that glistened under the cloudless sky with worry. The monster shrieked, hurling the remnants of the shell from the building before dashing down onto the base of the antenas, the blindspot that was beyond the wanderer’s line of sight. Jolpin saw the massive arms swinging erratically, the currents of air singing a low whistle around them, light dancing in the eerily polished oval sockets dotting the upper third segment of the creature’s back, the only part he could gleam properly. The hairless beast swiped off bones, shards of scrap, rancid pieces of rotting biomass, glass and plastic, the familiar blackish shells and pieces of organic paper. Many of these random objects, like the cocoon earlier, seemed to have been fused together by some adhesive substance.

Jolpin managed to stand up with great difficulty, finally regaining his ability to move and most importantly - run! And yet, still the man was like a withered concrete pillar, petrified by the piercing glare of the two compound eyes.

A tiny body with dust-coated, reddish fur gently rested in the creature’s maw. It resembled a pup of a hound, mere weeks old, now frozen in a singular and unnaturally contorted pose. Gregory saw the dripping black nest of intestines and other organs dangling out of its immature maw.

Instinctively, the grip around the left cuff of the worn jacket, and the concealed bracelet of hair tightened, as the man drew a tense breath.

Up until that moment, the grubhounds, the insectoid creatures, the humans and even the unseen denizens of the complex seemed to exude a very…standard, predictable pattern of behavior: Insatiable appetite and fresh meat; a hunt spurred on by the emboldening power of the swarm; paranoia and unapologetic cruelty in the face of a lawless terra incognita; A nest transformed into an ossuary as a testament to bountiful harvests of flesh and machine.

This was as far from them all as night was from day.

Pure, seething scorn radiated from that monster, accentuated by a subtle tremble that betrayed a very blunt state of mind. It was disgustingly human, an irrational maternal anguish made manifest, an unjust accusation refracting from the inky black eyes that stared daggers through the stranger’s very essence:

“How dare you take her from me!?”

 Jolpin darted forward in utter desperation, seeing absolutely no use in trying to outrun such an agile creature on his rush back from whence he came. Dashing into the entrance beneath the nest, Gregory fled down the staircase, even performing a surprising feat of athleticism and leaping over the railing to the floor below with a varying degree of success. The goal was to create as much distance as possible from the creature while using the interior to break the line of sight. Something whispered in Gregory’s mind that the hairless beast was no longer aiming for the kill alone.

The man shot down the corridor like an arrow, frantically swinging his tire iron in a desperate attempt to knock down as many pillars of bone as possible. Within a few short seconds, a low, frustrated screech and a discordant clatter roused in response to the wanderer’s stunt ceased, replaced by a coarse scrape of copper-tipped digits on one of the walls. Jolpin did not dare to swivel his neck even slightly off dead center from his destination that was waiting on the floor akin to a gaping maw of a beast. The scrape was already an arms reach away, mixing with the hateful insectoid clicks of a ravenous monster about to strike. The man leapt into the said maw, hitting a sloped piece of the floor and sliding into the lower level of the building. Dashing left, through the tattered remains of a living room, then through an abused and defaced kitchen, the wanderer tried his absolute best to use non-linear paths and openings in hopes of slowing the creature down even for a fraction of a second. He had to think, fast. Finding a way back, even if possible in that labyrinth, would have eventually turned up a dead end in the wretched boiler room. Attempting to outrun a monster was no less of a risky plan, and as if to affirm that, a short frustrated hiss rang from behind the nearest corner, a sign of its terrifyingly close proximity. The only viable option in the light of the dire situation was to hide, yet even that had to be accomplished with extreme care. Flying through a desecrated bedroom and the remnants of a bathroom directly adjacent to it, a previously unseen gash in the floor unveiled itself to our protagonist. No one could have predicted that It had no slopes to ease the fall, that only a jagged pillar of biological waste would greet them at the bottom. The drunkard only learned of the aforementioned detail when dozens of blunt and sharp objects as large as footballs and as tiny as needles smashed into his body. A pained wheeze worked its way out of Greg's deflated lungs. Even a second of immobility would have turned any target into a sitting duck - a fate now shared by him! However, perhaps that was the much needed solution to the seemingly inescapable problem! Jolpin scrambled among the sea of debris in pure desperation, miraculously grasping the cold exterior of the tire iron and flinging it forward through the hallway and hearing it crackle and deflect from at least two other structures before striking a wall. Meanwhile, Gregory scrambled to bury himself in the newly formed sea of bone, fur, metal, plastic, anything that had even the slightest of chance of obscuring his silhouette and smell, before finally cupping his mouth shut with both his hands in hopes of stifling his runaway breath.

A sudden, heavy thud reverberated through the floor, rattling the drunkard's joints like keys of a battered xylophone. Through some miracle of God, Jolpin was able to choke a hoarse cry back down his hoarse throat, remaining deathly still. An unseen force seemed to pin the left trunk of his trousers.

It was quiet, or at the very least any vocalizations of the abomination were blocked out by the veil of remains. Another, weaker thud landed next to the man's torso on the right, the following one ending up in the vicinity of his left shoulder. Gregory's mind was a raging battlefield of scenarios, each more horrifying than the last, each heralded by the image of those two endlessly deep, piercing compound eyes and an excited semi-canine shriek. Any second now, the imaginary claws would slice their way into reality, shredding and burning through the man's squishy innards. Perhaps instead a powerful limb would come down on its prey's limbs akin to a hammer on a malleable mass of steel, followed by a wet pop of obliterated knees and elbows, with the monster then dragging the helpless “killer" of her children away to the surface. The images then shifted to the sun baked roof and the warm breeze, with its prey leaning against a wall under a blanket of shadows, dust settling into the crevices of Jolpin’s exposed muscles, with him helplessly gazing at the tattered remnants of his skin flailing somewhere in the distance, eternally gone with the wind.

A distorted bellow bled through the osseous barrier, followed by a muffled gust of wind that must have been raised by the amalgam of flesh and machine’s dash in the hallway ahead. Was it truly fooled by such a simple ploy? Did it resume the chase? Doesn't that mean that the coast is clear? No, only a fool would risk revealing themselves just yet. Without as much as moving a muscle, Gregory lay on the peculiarly warm floor, counting every second in frigid terror. Only after reaching the number “600,” the drunkard crept out of his bed of bones with absolute care to not even rattle a single, miniature ossicle. Ironically, the grey blanket that saved the wanderer's life could just as easily damn it on the spot, were he not careful.

With a broom-like motion, a worn boot gently brushed through the dead sediment, clearing its path towards the distorted floor tiles. This motion was successfully repeated again and again, until finally, the man's arm could reach and comfortably lean against a defaced wall, his eyes frantically scanning the area for the valuable piece of bent metal, an irreplaceable tool that had proven itself to be a godsend in many an occasion, including the current predicament. Noticing some grayish object just out of reach, and not wanting to take any more unnecessary steps the wanderer leaned forward, almost tripping on some unseen object and falling face-first back into the calcified pond. Regaining his composure, Jolpin gasped and swore simultaneously before regaining balance and fetching the tire iron from its resting place. After a few more careful steps and frightening close calls, the drunkard could finally move without the risk of his every unaccounted for muscle twitch waking the hell itself.

In that moment, the cavern and tunnels within the apartment complex felt suffocatingly small, a tomb eager to accommodate our protagonist permanently within its confines. Every turn, every drop, corner and pathway had to be thoroughly observed and listened to for any signs of the abomination, with only a distant echoing screech of bloodcurdling fury being a permanent reminder of its active pursuit. Jolpin contemplated seeking refuge within the lower levels of the complex. As if to add credence to the idea, the echo would only ring from far reaches of either the current or the upper floors of the building, never from the unexplored territory.

Unexpectedly, for what felt like 15 minutes give or take, the cavern had grown dreadfully quiet, as Gregory inched his way forward in his search for its depths. The silence grew and pulsated like a swollen tumor in one’s skull, pushing on the delicate tissues more and more with each passing heartbeat. Where is the creature? Did it believe its prey to have slipped into the neighboring buildings and followed suit? Jolpin stopped dead in his tracks. Or perhaps it switched its tactics to that of a less conspicuous approach? Jolpin's chest tightened. Momentarily, a shadowy figure puppeteered by his frenzied subconsciousness began crawling its way into the corners of his sight, nesting in the crevices, hiding in the shadows, waiting for an opportunity to pounce. Suddenly, he was exposed from all sides and directions, surrounded by a million potential predators in wait. Breathe, Gregory, just breathe, the man spoke from within the bottomless pit of his anxious mind. One could not allow themselves to let their composure loose like a pack of ravenous hounds, not yet, the way below and the hopeful exit in there had to be found first. The dead silence was suffocating, clawing at the ears and dragging itself like a single, annoying high octave note.

At last, through a stroke of luck a gaping pore in the floor was finally discovered, residing in the center of four converging paths, two of which united into an open corridor long and wide enough for someone to spot a fly from one edge of the complex to the other. From the cover of one of the surviving walls, the coast seemed clear. Jolpin cautiously stepped forward, nearing the threshold of the aforementioned wall's jagged edge, before halting abruptly. It was a barely perceptible salivatory, clicking gurgle that emanated from behind that edge - the only blindspot the wanderer could not observe. Inhaling sharply and trying to make as little noise as humanly possible, the latter shifted back, crouching down with his mouth caged behind the dingy palms. The only questions now centered around whether or not the cybernetic monstrosity had spotted the target, and how far exactly was it. The answer for the latter did not make itself wait, as six talons hooked around the jagged wall, effortlessly embedding themselves into the exposed concrete mere centimeters away from where Jolpin’s worn visage was moments prior. Gregory shakily screwed his eyes upward, fearful of meeting the gaze of the two bottomless eyes. Much to the drunkard's relief however, the monster appeared to be fixated on the hole itself. Approaching the pore with a terrifying softness of a seasoned ambush predator, the massive technoorganism circled its wide rim with an almost perfectly silent step, leaning onto its knuckles. Only the said gurgle would occasionally escape its fidgeting maw. The bony head disappeared into the black chasm, as if searching for an item lost.

Out of the blue, a distant echo resembling a snap rang through the complex, something very similar to a gunshot. Suddenly, the abomination flinched akin to a startled animal, with its head hastily diving out of the hole. Perhaps believing to have located its target, the creature howled excitedly and leapt ahead towards the origin of the disturbance, completely oblivious to the fact that in the corner of the very jagged wall it used as a springboard, hid the very one it was after - quiet as a mouse.

After a minute, Jolpin breathed a strained sigh of relief before carefully sneaking towards the hole himself. Apart from being unusually wide, what really set the current gash apart from its predecessor, was an equally peculiar, long slope flat enough for one to casually descend without much effort.

The reek of old vomit was all but gone at that stage, usurped almost immediately by its fresher, more pungent successor. The moment Jolpin stepped on a flat surface, he began to retch and gag violently, feeling the slimy acidic taste sheathing his tongue and setting his nostrils ablaze.

Fighting through the unbearable stench, the wanderer braved the depths with extreme caution, ears sharp for any disturbance that may come from above, or below. The trip to the roof served as a stern reminder that light was a precious resource, a deficit of which would only worsen over the trek. Human eyes have an almost uncanny ability to get used to darkness, and Jolpin’s “rest” in the bed of bones made sure his ones were quite well attuned to it. The bone totems of the new denizens now numbered in single digits, reduced to mere amorphous, shaky blobs by the ever present shadow. Gregory effortlessly moved past these shapes, placing each and every measured step with utmost care in hopes of avoiding any unseen item or a hole. There had to have been a reason as to why the dark frequented these levels, as the building was definitely not located underground, and its much more open structure should have allowed more light to diffuse inside, not less. Jolpin wanted to find the cause of the obstruction, which also meant that he had to find a window within a dim and defaced complex that gave no hints as to what room the wanderer was even standing in.

He could not tell how long he skittered in the darkness like one of the monstrous ticks of the Metastasis, his worn and scratched back facing the already waning light that grew weaker with each step. Leaning against the lukewarm walls, the wanderer’s fingers glided across the exposed concrete, catching onto cracks, bumps, unknown iron sockets, plastic prominences and only stopping when a new unknown sensation revealed itself in the now pitch dark. Examining it with both hands, Gregory felt what resembled a soft, webbed lichen growing on the said wall, tracing its origin from a nearby edge of a serendipitously placed window frame. At least that was the assumption, as nothing else fit the characteristic width and height. Its position made making the details out by sight almost impossible, but further tactile examination revealed a rough texture of hammered iron split into sharply demarcated islands that evoked an association with the carapace of a beetle. Occasionally, the surface was peppered with even, round indentations that the soft lichen seemed to stem from. Upon inadvertently applying pressure, something clicked inside followed by a faint noise of unfurling paper. Leaving no window for a reaction, a weak red-pinkish glow began to dance in the onlookers’s eyes, as a four leafed flower, its inner surface covered by luminescent flesh of a fig spread itself open from the said indentation. Deathly quiet, Jolpin stepped back and swiftly re-examined the environment under the newly discovered light. It was indeed a window frame, a shell of metal occupying its entirety, with a heavy presence of chalky rubble on its precipice and the floor hinting at the iron wall's origin. Soon, the light grew dimmer, as the petal began to slowly wind back into the structure. Having shoddily mapped out the path ahead, Jolpin braced for another blackout and resumed his journey.

It did not take him long to find another shell and the flowers inside of it. Gregory caressed the rough surface longingly, knowing that freedom from this tomb must have stretched beyond this very lone barrier. Alas, attempting to pry open the shell seemed a tad too risky, on the grounds of the beast’s possible proximity. Naturally, should push come to shove, one could hope for the tire iron to be sturdy enough to pierce the spaces between each individual piece.

 He pressed another indentation, and the unfurling plant lit his way once again, dyeing the scant totems of bone a warm tone of clouds during a summer dusk, twinkling vibrantly among the broken joints and sockets of metal, the claws of copper and pelts of polyethylene. Behind one of these grim constructions, another path into the lower levels opened, it too peculiarly flatter than its topside brethren, leading into a pit devoid of any light. A surprisingly warm and moist breeze flowed from the gaping maw in the floor, accompanied by a faint echo of something dripping deep within its reaches. With a drawn out sigh, the wanderer dove into the inky blackness. The soreness in his wrist was getting stronger, he had to hurry.

Hunched forward, almost moving on all fours, the drunkard reached what he believed to be an unusually expansive chamber on the ground level, as evidenced by the change in echo of his steps and the aforementioned dripping sound. His eyes, though they could not see, had begun to sting, their far fringes welling up with tears in a desperate attempt to soothe the irritated sclerae. Gregory tried to ignore the pain, carefully wiping the fluid away with the back of his hand. Feeling a path and making his way around the ramp in a clockwise manner, Jolpin cautiously felt for the nearest wall, his fingertips searching for the texture of the familiar lichen, the only hope there was to fully gain situational awareness.

The blooming relief radiated by the flower’s eventual discovery was almost instantaneously strangled to death by an image of an unnervingly vast cavern stretching over the horizon and into the ocean of blackness, its scant details carved once again ever so slightly by the faint glow. Uncharacteristically devoid of any totems of discarded prey and stripped of even its walls, only the lone pillars of battered concrete were the sole man-made creations spared of the creatures’ ravenous touch. Beside them, as if to keep these once unseen and monoliths company, were structures that could not have ever belonged to a place men would call “a home.” Their jagged silhouettes were shaped like upturned funnels, with their technoorganic offshoots spreading wide and digging into the ceiling. It was as if the wanderer gazed at an upturned picture of an ancient tree with its massive roots poking out of the soil. Some sort of papery thin material freely dangled from their midsections, poking out from what could be vaguely equated to pieces of factory machinery converted to resemble fangs, pointing inward into the structure’s core. The former reflected a much lighter hue of pinkish red, when contrasting with the latter. The bottom segment of these creations of the metastasis mysteriously disappeared into the floor, alongside the aforementioned papery material. These peculiar pieces of machinery seemed to encircle small, almost imperceivable islands in the depths of the chamber, resembling unnaturally large flowers with their wavy silhouettes.

Only after Gregory stepped away from the warm cover of the wall did he notice a jagged lip on the floor that demarcated the surprisingly small domain of solid ground, only a meter or two beyond the ramp. Past that lip extended an amorphous, sickeningly rancid pond - no, a sea for all he could tell, that reigned over his limited horizon. Jolpin’s silent heaves and retches accompanied the tire iron's short descent into what felt like partially clumped, expired starch mixed with an entire city's reserves of warm sewage. Thankfully, the tool only reached the equivalent of 10 centimeters or so above an average person's ankle, meaning that the acidic lake did not extend into the lower basement level, or at least not the region around the current patch of flooring.

Gregory exhaled in disappointment and swiftly hovered back towards the fading wall of light in hopes of reigniting it. The man definitely did not burn with the desire to attempt and cross the mass of sludge in absolute darkness. The whole ordeal reeked of a mountain of bad ideas, leading to a tempting proposition centered around ascending back a level, using the glowing flesh-figs and maneuvering from there onward. As long as there were walls, there were markers of orientation, something that was in acute deficit in the current location. The beast also did not seem to burn with desire to venture into the darkened depths. The words formed strings of sentences, the sentences arranged themselves into plans and scenarios most tempting, yet something seemed amiss. Some feeling, some form of intuition, flames from an unseen, rusted furnace slowly kindling in that very moment. What greatly perplexed the drunkard was not the fact that some invisible force within suddenly began to compel Gregory to push forward through the lightless mire, but that a no less abrupt and an even stronger sensation, an almost panic-esque aversion to the path back began to hatch like some parasitic insect within his heart. The furnace’s innards charred and churned what was left of the wanderer's resolve to ascend, forewarning him that within the short span of his absence, something had gone terribly, terribly wrong above. An overwhelming sense of dread began to billow into our protagonist's bloodstream, locking his gaze onto the jagged outline of the hole he traveled through and the blackness beyond it. One had to contemplate their actions carefully, and decide whether or not ignoring such a sudden strong instinct was indeed a wise choice. “The Devil that you know is better than the one you don't," was a phrase that washed up on the decrepit shores of Jolpin's mind, though even it seemed untrue in the light of the current predicament. Finally, against his better judgement, Gregory Jolpin decided to brave the lake of sludge to see what was on the other side.

The sifting caress of the bracelet gifted drops courage in an ocean of terror and hopelessness. Whatever it took, SHE would grace the world with HER presence again.

With a deep sigh of anticipated regret, the man stepped off of the jagged edge and into the viscous, slimy expanse, seen off by the dimming pinkish light. He tried to commit as many of the hazy silhouettes in the distance to memory before fully breaking into the lightless terra incognita ahead.

Then came darkness, nothing but darkness…

23  -

Droplets…droplets of some unseen condensate sang a monotonous, sharp stackato. The sludge clung to the man's shoes with the death grip of a thousand emaciated hands, forcing him to fight for each meager step. The hazy images of local landmarks were still burnt into Gregory’s retinae, and he was dead set on finding them.

“In the land of the blind, the creative man is king,” or something of the sort, he could not recall the phrase properly, but was nonetheless intent on using his “creativity” to the fullest. Being aware of the approximate location of the nearest support beam, the wanderer swiftly got to work once he felt its rough caress. A single vertical line was carefully etched on the surface - a sign it was facing the ramp. A simple arrow ended up on its left, a horizontal line on its right, and an X on its back face - completing a rudimentary compass one could orient themselves with should such a need arise. The slimy floor gurgled and whined, as the wanderer waded through it in search of another potential marker of orientation, trying his absolute best not to stray from the imaginary path ahead. Soon, the tip of the tool gently poked into another object, which thankfully, turned out to be another unmarked beam and not an alien structure gleamed before. Another tactile compass was finished, and the trek was resumed.

Something seemed out of place, however, a barely perceptible disturbance shifted within the fluid in close proximity to the aforementioned compass, beneath which the drunkard's left shoe had inadvertently found its way. Though motionless, the inertia within the viscous mass managed to push the anomaly forward just a tad, enough for him to step aside without disturbing it further. Like the luminescent beam of a radar, the man's arm traced a circle in the air, detecting only the coarse texture of the pillar he had just marked moments prior. Giving the approximate area of the disturbance a wide berth, Jolpin resumed his expedition into the unknown.

No more than twenty grueling steps were made when Jolpin felt the ground beneath him suddenly slipping - something that would have surely acquainted him with the floor were it not draped by the viscous fluid. The source of the disturbance seemed to possess the same profile as the anomaly witnessed moments prior, light, mobile like a loose stack of papers someone dropped and forgot to pick back up. It felt like a long, serpentine strand of fabric, a torn tendon discarded by its user and left to rot in this pit. Attempting to sidestep the object proved futile, as less than a step away another identical piece of alien fabric lay. Both pieces seemed to converge somewhere in the distance, almost forming an imaginary runway for his outstretched arm to follow, and follow it did. The bent piece of metal pushed into something soft, light, and slightly sticky, slowly mounting an increasing amount of resistance as if it was digging into more and more of the object’s inner layers. On touch, a moist piece of thin papery material clung to the wanderer's fingers, weakly tingling the skin. Another layer of the drenched parchment stood directly behind it, followed by a few more, all seemingly arranged in the form of some mimicry of a flower perhaps a meter and a half in width. One end of each “petal" extended deep into the muck, with the opposite one seemingly flowing into the flower’s bud. The first thing Jolpin's fingers felt when reaching its center was something unexpectedly smooth and hot. The object's surprisingly even surface tapered towards its apex, forming an elongated ovoid shape. The only distinguishing landmarks on its wider lower half were evenly spaced curved serrations, open portals for the moist parchment to reach into, bleeding copious amounts of heat in a pulsatile manner. The pulse of the peculiar object on his skin was enough to make the hair on the back of his neck stand, or at least, that was the initial assumption. In reality, it was the familiar gnawing anxiety, the same scorching billow of the rusted furnaces within the man's moth-eaten innards. Something that had gone terribly, terribly wrong above.

Then he heard a faint click…followed by a muffled gurgle of a starchy fluid being disturbed. Gregory’s heart, now a slab of ice, sunk in response. Another louder gurgle echoed through the chamber, followed by more still, each one inching closer towards the drunkard though in a manner that was, surprisingly, not befit of a seasoned ambush predator. The sound of its steps were reserved, awkward, devoid of the terrifying sureness and effortless determination seen prior. The panic-esque aversion to the path back upstairs finally had an explanation. Perhaps, the damned thing caught a glimpse of the faraway pinkish glow of the luminescent fig-flowers during its search, prompting the monster to finally take a plunge into the building's depths. It may have silently skittered in the dark, carefully following the literal trail of light of Jolpin's making. Now, it awkwardly shuffled through the rancid sea intent on laying its paws on the supposed killer of its spawn regardless of the consequences.

For a heartbeat, the drunkard wondered as to why the creature did not merely dip its claws in the sludge to create a current, as he assumed the viscous fluid could've been able to facilitate that. Running swiftly through a handful of theories, Jolpin figured that it either could not generate a strong enough current, possessed no awareness of such a possibility, or consciously held back for unknown reasons.

The wanderer moved, trying to sidestep the flower of the metastasis, doing his best not to slip on the submerged parchment. Masking one's presence let alone movement in this swamp of rotting biomass was nigh impossible, as its gurgles and groans were loud enough to alert anything and everything on the current level and some of the upper floors as well. In response to the man's movement, the churn of the mass in the distance died down abruptly for a single disgustingly long second. In that seemingly endless moment, Gregory fruitlessly fixated at the beast’s approximate direction, waiting for its next devastating attack with a muted, shaky breath. None came, instead the squelch of enormous, muscular hands and feet digging into the digested waste filled the chamber, more intense than ever. While Gregory felt an inkling of relief upon realising that no attack was imminent, he was unable to ignore the reality that the abomination would very likely catch up to him soon, more so if he bumped into some of the invisible structures. With the wanderer’s arm swinging like a horizontally placed metronome, Jolpin shuffled forward like a shell-shocked commander of a decimated battalion, rising from the trenches and pushing through knee-deep mud in a no man’s land.

The tire iron suddenly struck something jagged and metallic, with a force almost strong enough to knock the tool out of its wielder’s hands. A shrill click mixed with a short gasp rang from the direction of the ramp. Gregory hurriedly tried circling the structure in a clockwise manner, his good hand frenzily gliding over the mechanical prominences, before grasping something moist and papery. It took a heartbeat for the searing sensation to burn its way into the drunkard’s palm, as he all but grated a grunt of pain through his teeth, unable to release the sticky parchment from his grip. The gurgle and pop of the sludge had gotten dangerously close. Forcefully wrenching his hand free from the adhesive paper, the drunkard hurried towards the other side of the structure in hopes of creating some barrier between him and the pursuer, the stinging wounds masking the rising heat emanating from the angular shards of machinery. When the splashes of sewage reached the outer shell of the mechanism, the man's back was already firmly pressed against one of the its deeper recesses. The creature went silent for a few moments, making only a handful of curious clicks and low growls, clearly intrigued by the disappearance of its prey's auditory trail. Like a shark circling its prey, spurred on by the smell of blood the monster circled the structure, never too close, never too far. Jolpin was pinned to the place like a fly on a diorama of someone's insect collection, weighing his nigh inexistent options, and when something ever so slightly brushed up on the man’s sludge-soaked shoe he realised that the window of opportunity was closing fast. Swiftly digging his sore palm into the pocket of the battered coat, the drunkard pulled out a half-emptied bottle from its reaches, and waited for the menacing clicks to disappear behind the barrier before attempting to silently hurl it past the supposed location of the parchment flower.

“Damn it!” He mouthed and grimaced, when the lazy splash of the fluid rang only a few meters away from his hiding spot. The creature immediately rushed to investigate, giving its target an opening to inch away as quietly as humanly possible. Inch away he did, quite literally, in fact barely making any tangible progress through the muck, though in spite of the snail’s pace, somehow, Jolpin managed to remain almost perfectly quiet. Unfortunately, that was not enough. A slight current of mire was roused dangerously close to Gregory’s shins.

“How could this be?!” The man thought. “The creature itself is still in the vicinity of the bottle, yet somehow…its arms…the blasted thing's using its arms!” Much like the tire iron, the abomination used the enormous reach of its upper limbs to navigate the environment in an attempt to find and momentarily incapacitate its target. “No matter!” The man grimaced. “As long as that thing keeps its distance, I am content with its tricks!” With the renewed vigor, the drunkard’s legs slowly and silently slid through the muck, akin to the hulls of the great ice breakers heading towards the great unknown. That is, until a very familiar and a very concerning, plasticy crackle reached his ears, followed by a frighteningly powerful crushing sound, momentarily deflating Jolpin's short-lived, flimsy confidence.

Immediately, the beast shot like a bullet towards its original stalking grounds, shrieking with murderous intensity. Gregory’s skin felt a very faint breeze and as if by some reflex his knees gave out, letting a gust of wind whistle right above his head. The second gust however, swiftly followed at an oblique angle and smashed right into Gregory’s frame like a wrecking ball, sending him flying into something hot, and jagged. Joplin croaked and went limp at the debilitating pain that permeated his system, sliding down towards the swampy fluid. Much to his surprise, even in his semi-conscious state one phrase reverberated through his cranium like a bell in an old church: The left hand must not touch the fluid! The left elbow snapped close like the blade of a well-oiled flip knife, leading the weakened fingers to hook behind the man's worn collar. Indeed, up at that point, the wanderer managed to keep the bracelet of hair and to an extent, his wound, relatively clean throughout the journey on the ground floor. However, that most probably would not matter to our paralyzed, semi-conscious protagonist anymore, who was all but a sitting duck at that point, unable to move a muscle. Coughing and grunting in pain, Jolpin’s brainstem was lit ablaze in a feeble attempt to spark the fire back into the cold musculature, a task that was failing miserably. He whimpered in a mix of pain and desperation, unable to do anything but listen to the two sets of splashes that rapidly converged on him from two different directions. Gregory braced for whatever was coming next.

It was an ear-piercing scream of an explosion, a thunder rocking the building to its core, a howl of an entire storm caged within a single millisecond-long strike. The abomination cried out in sheer shock and awe, the creature’s voice distancing itself from its would-be prey's location, followed by a massive lazy splash. Jolpin froze for a few heartbeats in sheer disbelief, his mind unable to process the events of that one fateful second to its fullest extent. A small ember of hope and relief ignited within our protagonist, the necessary grease to get his ancient, mistreated joints to move again. The Colossus named “Life” is yet to be satisfied, it seems, the drunkard thought. He had to move, he absolutely could not allow himself to dawdle, for the technoorganic mechanism that almost became his tombstone began to move. Once again, Jolpin rushed through the stinking mass like a starved, concussed soldier through the muddy trenches, ears sharp for the sudden appearance of a low, mechanical hum that began to permeate through the air. At first, Its sources moved sluggishly, creaking and whining, their splashes loud, more numerous and heavier than that of the beast from the roof. Thankfully, at that moment, the local fauna seemed to be more interested in the larger prey of the two, an advantage the drunkard had to capitalize on. There was a serious problem, however, as Gregory was all but utterly lost and disoriented following the commotion! Madly dashing in the opposite direction of another thunderous explosion, he grasped at the dark in hopes of finding something, anything that would help him orient himself within the lightless crypt. The awoken ones seemed to have already shuffled off their sluggishness, replacing it with an elegant stride that directly contrasted with the hairless abomination's desperate sprint. There was no followup thunder rocking the sea to its core, yet the abomination shrieked in agony regardless, thrashing madly at unseeable assailants. Ear-piercing screeches of metal being slashed by its copper talons reached the fleeing drunkard's ears, but something in his heart whispered warnings that the creature was waging a losing battle. When Jolpin's fingers finally felt the angular exterior of a pillar, the distant reaches of the atrium were already abuzz. He hastily palpated its surface only to feel a coarse “X" engraved on it.

“God damn it!" He spat in a bout of hopeless anger, before scrambling to hatch a new plan. His fingers studied the structure searching for the simple horizontal line on one of its faces. It appeared that Jolpin regained a chance to learn first-hand just how sturdy the metal shells that grew out of the windowsills were. Dashing towards what he believed was one of the walls, Greg kept his ears sharp for the two newly awakened technoorganisms that began to rapidly cover the distance between them and the thrashing abomination.

It was exhilarating to finally feel another hard surface that wasn't an abused chunk of concrete. Leaning into it, Jolpin used the friction with the aforementioned wall as a springboard to gain more ground with each stride. Much to his horror, even after covering quite a substantial distance there was not a single trace of the familiar lichen, let alone the pieces of the carapace. He spat and swore again, only to realize that the familiar cacophony of struggle and pain that played throughout the hairless beast's confrontation with the “locals" had all but died down, and Gregory, being caught up in his daring escape could not ascertain for how long. That was the moment when the frenzied clicks and rabid sloshes caught up to our protagonist, and caught him off guard completely. It seemed weakened, unstable, exhausted even, allowing Jolpin to execute a risky but successful dodge. While the creature’s talons sliced chunks of building materials instead of the target's flesh, two parallel thoughts crossed the man's mind, one more harrowing than the other.

“Had the situation gone so far south that that freak had completely given up on escape and is merely trying to drag me to hell with it!?” That was the first thought. The second centered around the fact that the commotion the hybrid caused was like a magnet that drew the rancid sea dwellers straight to his exact location! For a moment, Gregory felt a scalding rage pulsing from within his core, having been just about fed up with the beast's maniacal persistence. Without thinking, Jolpin dove towards it, ceasing the opportunity and kneeling down before almost leaping out of the mire with an oblique angle, his tire iron aimed at an approximate location of the abomination’s upper third body.

Whatever it was, it only resisted for a millisecond before giving in instantly, and allowing the tool to slide into something soft and almost gelatinous. The abomination billowed out a tortured cry before stumbling back and allowing the supposed killer of its children to escape. It was a small victory, with a monumental price that claimed the invaluable tool and stalled him just long enough for the larger technoorganisms to catch up to them, and in that moment, they chose not to discriminate between their prey. An explosion rocked the wall in the dangerous proximity to the drunkard’s location a few dozens of seconds prior, the aftershock reverberating through the hot sewage. The second hit that came moments later was even closer - it too eerily accurate. Within the span of 15 seconds they'd be on to him. Gregory's palms stung from the friction of his endless search for the familiar texture, the familiar lichen, his last chance for an escape. In the heat of that moment, the possibility of that very escape route leading him back into the cell of the Metastasis where he was ambushed by the other survivors was not even a miniscule consideration. The man almost cried out in joy when his sore skin felt the coarse web and the hammered iron. Jamming his broken, dingy fingernails into the spaces between the metal plates, and pulling in a single-minded, fruitless desperation, the growth of the Metastasis refused to budge even slightly, causing him to curse again, deeply regretting his previous rash counter-attack. But there was a way, another risky gambit that had all but become a norm for the wanderer. He froze, waiting for one of the monstrosities to catch up to him - a matter of a few seconds. The muscles in the legs wound like springs, set and waiting for that one commanding impulse, for that one nightmare given flesh and metal to be just close enough. There was no room for error anymore. And then he moved. Naturally, Gregory could not see the creature’s enormous arm shooting towards him at a terrifying speed, but he definitely felt the burst of wind and the ear piercing howl left in its destructive way. The carapace of iron gave in instantly, its pieces violently ejecting into the newly unveiled void of light. Akin to blood from a severed artery, jets of luminescent violet-red fluid shot out of the remaining pieces of the structure, staining the enormous biomechanical fist that rapidly retracted towards the assailant's center mass. Not paying any heed to it, Jolpin clambered through the bleeding opening, into the blinding orange glow and onto the carpet of dust and sand, crawling through the void of light with a singular goal of making as much distance from the darkened pit as humanly possible, stopping only when the arid air had all but completely ousted the digestive fumes and the miasma of rot out of his old lungs. For a moment, there was no Metastasis, no Kalsten, no lightless oceans of stench and sewage, no deadly abominations - Just Gregory, lying on his back, lapping up the dry air, staring blankly at the azure skies, drunk on the taste of survival. Eventually, the eyes got used to the harsh environment somewhat and the wanderer pushed his exhausted torso upwards with great difficulty, trying to survey the entryway that bled. Dozens of long, clawless crooked hands arched and contorted in unnatural ways, their joints clicking and popping by the sheer ravenous force imposed upon them. He watched as enormous palms dug into the grainy soil, the grime and dust sticking to the armies of horizontal ridges on their rubbery epidermis. Gregory saw the metallic divide that created the space between the supposed ring and middle fingers glinting menacingly, as the appendages sharply shot back into the orifice. A few seconds later, two dark grey, semi-circular lobes bridged by arching serrated teeth of machinery firmly lodged themselves into the entryway’s entirety, with a fold of beige parchment-like material dangling from their bottom segments that glistened in the sunlight. Suddenly, the serrated mechanism whistled and whirred, with the lobes releasing a dull buzz followed by a whine of winding metal. Jolpin tensed. Like a spear from a harpoon launcher, the aforementioned roll of parchment launched into the air.  Jolpin spat and swore instinctively before awkwardly rolling to the side, hearing it land exactly onto his resting place, hurriedly standing up sprinting as far away from that damned pit, and its twisted inhabitants as humanly possible. And run he did, not fully knowing where or towards what hidden danger, and as the portal into the rancid lightless ocean was but a mere spec of dust in the building's man-built hide, and as the sight of a crooked bus stop made entirely out of bone and plastic wrap standing on a cut of blood-red cement grew more and more imposing, did he dare to finally halt his desperate marathon. He was finally safe, for now.

 

                                                                         -  24 -

The thick folds of translucent plastic crackled gently, like the call of crickets heard from the other side of a window, distorted crimson shades of the red cement and those of the sky dancing a somber ballet within them. Like a fresh scab that congealed over a wound, an eerily even rectangle of red cement was inserted into the hide of the mistreated tarmac, the distinct blood-red hue the only distinguishing feature from its man-made counterpart. Within its borders stood the aforementioned bus stop of bone. The arched roof of miniature, fluted, spindly spires combined with its organic support beams’ faux chiseled exterior, making the structure resemble the grand cathedrals of the 16th century. Standing on the precipice of the red-grey asphalt border, Jolpin clearly saw that the strangely curved seat beneath the said arch was a tad too tall for anyone below the height of a basketball player to comfortably sit on. The sun that was already heading towards the horizon illuminated its interior further, catching on an army of rims dotting the thin wall directly behind the said seat. Most of them belonged to normal, boring holes like those air-pores in some of the aged residential buildings of Okad and Kalsten, those that allowed a steady stream of fresh cool air to flow through them down the faceless staircases in the heat of summer along with the light. However, a few of the holes were seemingly plugged by some bulbous masses that reflected the light akin to metal, Gregory could not quite make out the finer details. Stepping to the side, Jolpin gazed at a large patch of plastic fused to the osseous frame on the structure’s side, the human counterpart of which would have been made of glass, encasing a local route map or a large commercial poster. The image printed within resembled those of the latter category, created from only three shades - Black, Vibrantly bright and dark orange. Its design was semi-minimalistic, the main body being the said dark orange, with its brighter counterpart and inky black lines crafting the silhouette of a multi-layered structure, its expansive, rectangular chambers bridged by a latticework of cruciform, thin, tiled bridges all seen at an angle. In the upper left corner was a body of text, the largest of which was composed of seven letters, each more warped than the other, the last one quite literally fusing into the tiles. “S,” “I,” “L,” were the only legible ones, the others being naught by a facsimile of the human writing, having all the needed bits for a foreigner to equate them to the letters of the common tongue, yet in truth arranged in shapes so bizarre that even those versed in it could never decipher them. Beneath the 7 ones was a much smaller paragraph of text, almost completely ineligible from the distance. Not necessarily burning with desire to step onto the red cement, the man leaned forward and squinted. Most of it was utter gibberish, scantily harboring vague exemplars of words like “Blighted,” “Offspring,” “Machine,” “Price,” “Organism,” “Trillions,” and “The Guide.” What definitely did not bring him any comfort was the fact that for a moment, a part of him managed to recognize the symbols. Nails on a chalkboard, the fresh screens of the newborn computer displaying a thrashing ocean of code, a gateway into a drab and lifeless world that threatened to steal his very own soul, HER visage shining atop the mountain of machinery. Trailing his eyes towards the center of the image, the man met the gaze of a single deformed eye, studded with half a dozen pupils, embedded into a crooked parody of an apple, the latter's form mirrored on a horizontal axis, the stems on its both ends slithering into the cruciform platforms as above so below. It may have been the wrinkles of the plastic cover playing with the rays of the sun, yet for a split second Gregory could swear it blinked…

Shifting past the structure, Jolpin carefully maneuvered around the infested lamp posts that lazily swung their organic and segmented mechanical tentacles in the air, the latter type releasing a sort of high-pitched rattle.

The shadows crept further and further across the sun-scorched road, steadfast in their crusade to plunge the isolated cell into darkness, even driving some of those cast by the metallic web that stretched between the buildings to seek sanctuary on the old walls of apartment complexes. And one of such complexes was the same one that was tipped forward, overlooking a surprisingly vast hole in the cement.

Swiftly sidestepping the crimson rectangle and maneuvering past the tentacles, Gregory began covering the distance between him and the pore, throwing quick inquisitive glances at the abandoned remnants of human society. Folded cement leaned onto the rusted shutters that over the course of their agonizingly long lives managed to acquire a considerable collection of large gaping holes, claw marks, bullet holes, and other sorts of damage. They proudly stood beside faceless walls of brown that once were see-through panes of glass, with some of them brandishing maws of jagged shards, portals into the dim interior. The ones the wanderer passed through were of no interest to him, an antiquated tech store here, some random hair stylist salon there. He did, however, briefly consider finding a more or less isolated establishment, with intact shutters to seek cover and hunker down for the night, yet knowing the Treachery of the Colossus named Life, a piece of the man was convinced that the makeshift bunker would turn into a death trap at the drop of a hat, come nightfall. Perhaps some other variant would reveal itself in the future.

With these thoughts in mind, Jolpin carefully approached the Tipped One, an otherwise bog standard panel building whose bizarre pose was its only distinguishing feature.

The edges of the pore in its base occupied almost half of the obsolete road’s width, dragging a small chunk of the pavement into the lightless pit below as well. Gregory observed a lamp post leaning toward the hole, partially uprooted, the fleshy cochlear tentacles dangling lifelessly from the discolored technoorganism that grew from its apex. One could observe trachea-esque tubes sticking out of the shattered rim seeping tangy, syrupy fluid into the chamber below. And quite an expansive chamber it was.

He peered down and saw a flat expanse. Dark lines slithered on the floor in a disorganized manner and disappeared into the structure's depths, themselves made barely perceptible by the current lighting conditions. Directly beneath the massive hole was another pore, rimmed by a very faint glow, it too leading deeper into the unknown.

For a moment, the drunkard pounded its existence. A subterranean space, seemingly without walls and covered by a chaotic mess of lines that occasionally converged to form a coherent pattern. This most certainly was not a part of a simple residential panel building, and especially not characteristic of a town such as Kalsten. It resembled spaces observed in those new, vast residential complexes, like a…

“Parking lot?" he blurted out. What need had such a comparatively miniscule complex of an entire parking lot, that may or may not have spanned multiple subterranean levels? For a moment, the man wondered just how large it was, and how long it had been gestating beneath the soil. Hopefully he wouldn’t have to find out.

Gregory scanned the Tipped One, searching for a way into the inner courtyard, where either it, or other adjacent buildings would have had an entrance, and hopefully - a miniature convenience store built into their first or second floors. Distorted shards of uprooted pavement had transformed into a mound that had plugged the space between the aforementioned building and its nearest neighbor. It was not as tall as to be unscalable for a traveler wanting to get in, yet for someone trying to get out, especially if they were carrying luggage in a hurry to make it to one of the few extraction zones in the city - that was a different story. The calamity within him was calling, and Jolpin began his ascent.

Peering into the isolated courtyard, the corridor of concrete directed his gaze towards the center of the enclosed space, where normally would be miniature patches of greenery, a stadium, a little shred of serenity for the locals to unwind. Now, only a black rectangle, perhaps two stories high, dominated the small cut of the horizon, its very tip glistening in the waning sunlight. Every shred of common sense urged Jolpin to reconsider his next step of action, relying on the isolated nature of each segment of the city being almost purpose-built to trap anything and everything within their confines. Yet, it also was aware that addiction cared not for safety, heeded not the pleas of logic or sense, that implored him to first search the cell in its entirety before committing to such a rash act. Perhaps he would find an abandoned liquor store along the way later, in this comparably larger region of the Metastasis. Addiction had had enough of waiting, enough of “maybes" and " laters,” it wanted its endless thirst satiated in that precise moment. Every-blasted-where in the cursed city was a death trap of some twisted flavor, were the drunkard to search for a store in a building he would have had to enter a yard such as the one directly in front of him regardless. Would other spaces similar to it prove to be any different?

The low rumble of broken shards followed the awkward half slide of our protagonist, as he proceeded to land on a carpet of sand. Pushing against one of the walls, he snuck forward, eyes focused on the black monolith, shrouded in shadow, growing wider with each step taken. The closer he got, the more the man thought he could hear it hum. Apparently, the object was not a rectangle, but an eerily smooth cube that spanned most of the area's perimeter, surrounded by a field of deep cracks that almost reached the entrances of the buildings. It was surprising to observe clusters of windows illuminated by electric light spread throughout the courtyard. Perhaps there were survivors in the area, perhaps Jolpin would want to stay away from them.

The panel building that was the direct neighbor of the Tipped One seemed to be relatively normal, its entryway serendipitously wide open for anyone and anything to pass through. Gregory swiftly tiptoed into its innards, without a source of light, without any means of self defense. Thankfully, a small flicker of orange glow from the depths of the structure proved to be a potential aid in his perilous situation. The inner chambers of the structure looked deceptively normal, with only a few bizarre mechanisms and bony pieces strobing and buzzing weakly in the circuit breaker boxes, and silhouettes of stray pipes growing out of the walls betraying the subtle presence of the ever-present disease. The closer one got to the source of the flickering light, the more it revealed that the path Jolpin's feet crunched against wasn't trotted by man in quite a long while. A brief consideration condensed on the murky edges of the man's mind, the one which proposed searching for an unlocked apartment and staying there. A valid point worthy of consideration that caved in to the utter terror of the man realizing he'd be staying a mere stone's throw away from the rancid ocean and its denizens.

Neither the first nor the second floor had the desired establishments, promoting him to curse silently before swiftly vacating the building.

Hooking right towards the next structure in the line, Gregory's hands gripped the handle of the iron doors firmly. It did not budge. Muttering even more vile curses, he hurried over to the next, accessible complex and went inside. No signs human activity whatsoever, and further still no stores to plunder. With each empty building, the addiction thrashed with increased desperation within the wanderer's body, threatening to shatter its host’s composure entirely. Gregory rushed out of the complex stopping just shy of its precipice, breathing raggedly, trying to somehow forcibly calm himself down, to somehow quieten the thought that he led himself into that trap in vain. There would be a place, there had to have been, one just had to breathe and keep searching. At that moment, Jolpin’s eyes met the gaze of the black cube once again, except a different angle of it had revealed itself. The once back-facing side of it appeared to have had a massive block fused to its surface, a home for enormous transistors to grew out of it akin to mushrooms on the trunk of a tree, forming a dense network of electric wires. From the center of that “electric box" slithered out inky black cables, each the size of a sedan, covering the distance between the black cube and what used to be the largest gap between the buildings, the one that would have lead towards the collateral branches of the main road, before abruptly digging into the concrete, completely blocking it. Only now did the drunkard notice the dull buzz of its silvery transistors mixing with some yet unidentified noise. Gregory, still shaken and struggling with the calamity within, stepped forward just a tad, placing his feet firmly between the enormous cracks and listened intently. It sounded like a throng of people in restless sleep, all entombed within that very box.

Jolpin took another deep breath and turned his sight towards the Tipped One. It is a risk, spoke the remnant of cohesive thought, the building may very well be on the verge of collapse. A necessary gamble, answered the calamity, in the face of an absolute deficit of options.

It was a strange place, the Tipped One, almost feeling like something taken out of a children's amusement park. The biggest challenge was getting a grip on something, as the angle and the sand turned every centimeter of flooring into an impromptu ice rink, something he learned the hard way when he slid and almost fell onto the very first flight of stairs. Thankfully, the man managed to push onto the adjacent wall and avert a disaster…somewhat. Moving in an almost crouched position, centimeter by centimeter, the wanderer crawled forward, trying to maintain a flimsy balance. In the hallway ahead, almost completely invisible to the naked eye was a rectangular cut in the far wall of the first floor.

“Of course!” He almost cried out in bitter anger. “As the Dreaded Colossus would have it!” Still firmly pressed against the wall, weighing his every step, Jolpin finally reached his destination, relieved and simultaneously half-frenzied with anticipation. Shakily palpating the broken shards of thick glass in almost complete darkness, the man stepped over the barrier.

Immediately, the drunkard began fervently grasping at the dark and almost instantly felt his heart drop. Picked clean. The store was almost entirely picked to the bloody bone! Jolpin could do naught but mutter the word “no" repeatedly, as he dug his arms into the black ocean as if searching for that one clam, that one pearl that would twinkle and disperse the shadow in his heart. Little did he know, the ocean was barren. Turning up with only a few plastic packs that were hastily shoved into the coat’s pockets, the drunkard desperately dove towards the farthest corner of the compartment, into the sand and glass, only to turn up with absolutely nothing. He shouted and kicked the pile with all his might, then cried out again, and again he kicked and again he shouted until the flesh of his throat felt like sandpaper. Silence, he now sat in silence, huddled in a corner, fingers digging into his shoulders, ignoring the sudden wave of pain radiating from the one that got the taste of the roof dwelling monster's claws.

Eventually, the drunkard crawled out of that deserted compartment, stumbling towards the nearest flight of stairs that was almost completely obstructed by the grime and sand. Gently scooping out fistfuls of sand, he squeezed through the narrow opening of his creation. A distant light from a torn open apartment bled into the hallway of the second floor, falling between the cracks of a shutter behind which would have been another mini-store. No amount of kicking, and cries of desperate rage would make it budge, and when the Tipped One, tired of the impudent insect’s squirms within its now living innards, rumbled subtly did it finally skitter out in defeat.

The shades of the sky slowly began to shift from golden yellows to the reddish pinks. A lazy stroll over to the final complex to the bent building’s left-hand side, that was unsurprisingly inaccessible, completely deflated the wanderer's resolve. The calamity, however, still had its tendrils wound around his neck and joints, digging into his sides akin to monstrous spurs, forcing him to seek exit out of that courtyard, approaching nightfall be damned.

Turning towards the space between the Tipped one and the structure that he failed to enter a moment prior, the man happened upon a gruesome scene. It was ripped straight from the war photos of the old days. A pile of discarded luggage rested against a tall mountain of rubble, the bags torn, the suitcases shattered, their innards strewn throughout the alleyway alongside articles of clothing, coats, etcetera all burnt as if by flames. There was not a single body in sight, not even a tiny spec of blood, only human-sized clawmarks stretching from the walls and from between the discarded objects towards the black cube, accompanied by a handful of monstrous brush strokes of the Metastasis.

Gregory carefully approached the desecrated mass, weighing the options of traversal. The man was weak, yes, but he was also not weighed down by luggage, and could perhaps find something to use as a stepping stone. A quick search of the surrounding area revealed an empty dumpster that in the shadowed courtyard could easily masquerade as a large rock. Pushing it towards the pile with a great deal of effort, Jolpin climbed on top of it, caught his breath and jumped in hopes of reaching one of the heavier shards of the former road. Having done just that, he scrambled to find solid footing before pushing himself upwards half a meter or so away from the edge. One just had to grit their teeth, grunt in effort, summon every inch of strength in their quivering shoulders, muster that one last push and tumble onto the other side like a sack of old potatoes. Greg did just that.

Since the cell the Tipped One overlooked was “U” shaped, as glanced from the roof of the building that housed the sea of sludge, Jolpin was now situated on the isolated compartment’s other end. Before him stood a peculiar art installation of a building, the one observed prior from the vantage point, the one that resembled a squared coil of rust and concrete with randomly arranged triangular glass frames peaking out from between each coil, the one that appeared to have grown out from the middle of the road to proudly rub shoulder to shoulder with its conventionally created neighbors. The growths on the rusted chassis, the adenomatous tumors of steel seemed even more gruesome from up close, resembling twisted amalgamations of misinterpreted, vintage air conditioners. The fans buzzed and whirred within many circular holes in their exteriors, standing out from the blazing orange surroundings. Even from a distance, one could have easily felt the suffocating heat those tumors exuded. One could also take a better look at the unexpectedly large volumes of thick, black hair-like growths that extended from their galvanized bodies and draped onto the neighboring buildings’ roofs, spreading into thin, veil-like structures that gently swayed in the breeze. They had a strong smell of wet hair.

Jolpin did not even think of entering that structure, even if he could make out where its entrance was. He had a thirst to satisfy, and a relay structure to reach afterwards.

Gregory's eyes trailed a path downwards, towards an unknown establishment in a state of heavy disrepair. It seemed to have a curved exterior that most likely extended into the adjacent street, were the view not obstructed by the alien structure of course. The wanderer carefully stepped over bent pieces of shutter rails strewn around the road, once belonging to the aforementioned place’s stalwart guardians. No panes of glass survived the growth of the neighboring structure either, with them turning into open roads for our protagonist to move through at will.

Before investigating further, Jolpin chose to throw one last cursory glance back at the peculiar piece of alien architecture, only to halt his stride after noticing a peculiar detail his mind had simply ignored before. Behind one of the peripherally inserted, triangular pieces of glass on the mid-level of the structure that was directly adjacent to a twisted air conditioner of metal, and its cadre of blazing orange holes was a lightly flickering glow of the same hue. A quick scan of the rusted coil revealed that the anomaly was indeed unique and uniquely bothersome for our protagonist, as it spurred on the thought that Gregory may have seen it somewhere, and not once.

A barrier seemed to have unfolded from the alien structure, cutting through its neighbors' perimeter, completely isolating a small section of the latter, the one that would have led into the neighboring cell. The man's knees almost gave out when he saw the outlines of empty, skeletonized shelves jutting from the soil akin to islands in the sea, his each weary step accompanied by a crisp crunch beneath the boots. The crunch of glass, the cardboard cutouts of bottles on the said shelves…the wanderer knew it was finally found, he was finally home. And it was empty.

Exhausted whimpers accompanied the act of a cylindrical piece of glass being fished out of its resting grounds, filled with mere sand, dead and tasteless, occupying the broken shells of Jolpin's would-be lifeblood. The man hurled it at the barrier and it echoed like a piece of hollow sheet metal in response. The hands shot into the dark, groping, scratching, searching every nook and cranny of the shelves, accompanied by the stings of shifting glass now louder, messier, frantic and numerous. Then came the crash of the shoddy craft of skeletonized sheet metal hitting the floor, the billowing ring of which immediately snapped the reins out of the monstrous addiction’s tendrils. Jolpin went quiet as a mouse, when a response composed of multiple disturbances reached the liquor store from different sides. He could do naught but curse his utter lack of self control. If there was something left to salvage out of that place, he had to look for it quickly. Gregory squinted in hopes of making out the reception desk and a potential back room into the store’s depths, in hopes of at least finding a first aid box with medical ethanol. To think years back he dared not to debase himself of drinking such concoctions. In the far corner of the building a long table could be glanced, and a meter or so before it, a collapsed segment of the roof rested at the rim of a collapsed floor. Maybe the hairs did indeed leech vital materials from the apartment complexes. Swiftly sidestepping the impromptu path into the basement, he walked past the broken cash register, into a windowless, tiny compartment in the back. It had to have been there, a box with bevelled edges and ridges that the skin would effortlessly identify as pieces of a first aid kit. Effortlessly indeed it was found and dragged out towards the windows for marginally better illumination. Cracking it open, Gregory retrieved adhesive tapes, bandages, scissors, bottles of pills, antiseptic packs, gloves, and a few medical syringes alongside an empty bottle of medical ethanol. It took every ounce of strength of his meager character to not hurl the box at the technoorganic barrier in sheer frustration, upon realizing that there was not a drop of that sacred fluid left. In the heat of the moment, a faintly perceptible twinkle imprinted onto the periphery of his retinae, reaching from the edge of the hole. The closer the wanderer got to it the more he could see the dance of the light refracting through glass. Down there, on an eerily polished floor of concrete were two bottles, both crystal clear and filled to the brim with liquid - the sources of those very caustics!

When the drunkard regained his composure and situational awareness, he was already two thirds into his second bottle, standing inside a vast semi-open space with absolutely no means of ascending back whence he came. He groaned under his breath upon realizing what had transpired moments prior. It was certain that the piece of the collapsed flooring was too steep to scale, meaning Jolpin was officially stranded in the biggest parking lot he had ever seen.

      - 25 -

The weak glow outlined the striated roof, digging into its rough and uneven edges, outlining the surfaces of large cylindrical support beams, reflecting off of the peculiar shapes that the wanderer could not yet make out. Hastily forming a plan in his mind, Gregory, feeling the mental parasite within his lizard brain finally retreating back into its nest, momentarily emptied whatever was left of the bottle’s contents into the soft plastic shell that once held medical ethanol. First, he would have to find an exit, second a safe light source to treat his wounds and read through the information on pill bottles, at least to see if they were safe to consume with alcohol.

The wanderer tried orienting himself, using the gash above him as a waypoint to form a mental map, one which could barely hold its shape due the myriad of disturbances reverberating throughout the underground structure. It was a distant concert of wet crackles, whirs of machines unseen, thuds of heavy steps, the digital clicks and hums of invisible computers. Occasionally a solo would cut through it, a solo of something crying out in mock pain whilst being torn apart, or crushed, or sawed into pieces, a solo of life and death.

Much like the vast majority of abominations encountered, Gregory was nowhere near ready enough to tackle whatever he would come across in the structure. The meager medical scissors could hardly prove useful in a pinch. Shrinking his silhouette down as much as possible, the man waded through the dim expanse, sticking to a path that would in theory lead him into a cell that bordered with the U-shaped one.

A small constellation of beady bulbs shifted between striated gaps in the ceiling, throwing shades of sickly orange glow onto the tumors of polished metal and the cables of wrinkled plastic that nested beside them. They peered at the visitor in silence, perhaps waiting for an opportune moment, or an opportune predator to make their appearance.

Like trees in a forest, the path ahead was walled on both sides by eerily organized rows upon rows of pillars that kept an entire street from collapsing into the soil, splitting the space into rectangular hallways. There was a reason one could even make out such details, which came in the form of a select few pillars occasionally emitting a weak white flash akin to old photo cameras. Even from afar, it was obvious that those special exemplars were not made of concrete.

Shifting forward to investigate, frantically throwing glances at his surroundings that would only coalesce into perceivable images for flashing moments, Jolpin suddenly had to halt his stride, just to process the bizarre display he had just witnessed.

The man was immediately thrust back into the past, inside of a sterile beige hall, abuzz with the hum of people and the clicking of formal shoes on the polished floor. There, next to a sofa of black leather was a low coffee table of glass, with a surface immaculately clean and virtually devoid of smudges or finger prints. Objects such as that would always come with multiple, heavy tomes and reference collections that were always in a nigh pristine condition, in spite of their age. The reason for his presence was eternally lost, but one of the books was deemed significant enough to be remembered somewhat. “Concept cars by the visionaries of the automotive industry.” The man scoffed. Just another fancy name for the premature children of mind destined to be aborted in utero and relegated to a mere fading memory in the collective psyche of mankind. Too impractical, too expensive, too unique for a world obsessed with changing as little as possible, as cost efficiently as possible.  Among the gallery of automotive freaks, he vividly recalled being enthralled by angular concept cars, with their shells a mix of amber plastic and bakelite-esque materials.

The flashing light from the technoorganic pillars illuminated structures that, much to his very surprise, were almost ripped straight from the pages of such reference collections. A dozen of Low pyramidal sedans with short cabins and disproportionately long hoods, bizarre reinterpretations of the mass produced, outdated, crude steel automobiles of his youth, concept cars with aspects of triangular design were all brought to view by those very brief flashes that now evoked an association of stumbling into someone's twisted photoshoot. The finer details would mix and blend into an irrecognizable blur, not that the man even had an inkling of desire to approach any of them up close.

Sticking to the cylindrical beams of concrete as his cover, Gregory, shielding his eyes from the light, made his way towards the technoorganic structure, ears sharp for any auditory disturbance that may have gotten closer to his location. Something in the distance was being violently cracked open like a massive shell of an egg, followed by a strained noise of something wet being torn.

The structure that caught Gregory's attention was already a few meters away, releasing intermittent bursts of a low droning hum, prompting Jolpin to swiftly trace a semi circle around it just to be safe. A mixture of a chrysalis of a beetle and a sarcophagus, that was the association that Jolpin’s mind concocted upon observing the segmented, slightly ovoid technoorganic creation of the Metastasis. Both sides of its barely perceivable, mottled exterior were covered with dozens of grooves, flashing white seemingly at random. Weak, bile green glow ran down the mechanism’s midline, caressing the interlocking edges of its two doors that seemed to have been forcefully pried open, allowing an observer to gaze at the its metallic interior, at the distorted vein-shaped dimples, at the wide insets and cavities ringed with pipe flanges that bled copious amount of pitch black fluid, at the unnervingly numerous screwholes and broken remnants of steel frames still clinging to some of them, at the flaky irregular borders of acid marks and the crude electrical cable sockets. Past the midline, the interlocking doors would converge once again, leaving only a miniscule gap for the light to seep from onto the floor, caught in the same black liquid that extended further forward in the direction the drunkard was headed.

Around the structure, Gregory could gleam multiple metal lips of sealed hatches of various sizes and shapes that may have led deeper into the parking lot’s lower levels. Perhaps they were also above the man, hidden in the gaps of the striated ceiling.

Following the trail of the fluid one could spot another sarcophagus in the distance, standing out from its slightly lighter shaded, drab grey brethren, though seemingly inert.

Small objects crackled beneath Jolpin's shoes, hidden in the technoorganic pillar’s shadow, revealed to be buttons of a keyboard when exposed to the greenish light. The man eyed the mirrored “R" imprinted on the one he picked up with a hint of curiosity, before gently placing it inside the structure. An electric tic and zap echoed somewhere in the distance, and in answer to it, heavy footsteps thudded somewhere parallel to Greg’s current location.

It did not take long for the illuminating flashes to grow weak and distant, threatening to leave our protagonist stranded in the dark once again, though not before the latter managed to reach the nearest technoorganic sarcophagus. The scant trails of black fluid, much like Joplin before, had given the intact chrysalis a wide berth before taking a sharp turn towards the hazy silhouettes of alien automobiles.

The alien structure before him exuded a constant, low droning hum, its observable exterior untouched and unharmed. Following in the footsteps of whatever defaced the previous chrysalis, the drunkard chose to keep his distance, insufficient as it may have been. The fading flash wound around the three polished claws of metal, a barely registered blur that shot down from the gaps in the roof like a chain link whip. The man croaked out a cry of pain and reeled back, thankfully catching onto an adjacent column. Seethes bled through the clenched teeth, as Gregory forced himself to peer at the object, at the mechanical tendrils tipped with three metal claws poking in his direction, visible only for a fraction of a second. The drones had grown louder, more intense, so did the aforementioned heavy footsteps, yet the tentacles remained deathly still and laser-focused on our protagonist. Gregory hurriedly circled the grey pillar’s back before reentering the corridor, hopeful that the distance he had covered was enough to be outside of the sarcophagus’s reach. Whatever was gaining up on the structure was almost a stone throw away, now accompanied by a low distorted whir. He had to move fast. The waning light only managed to hit the dull, rubbery cables, leaving the glistening tips shrouded in dark, still fixated upon the drunkard who was already quite some distance away. Ignoring the pulsating ache in his left arm, hopeful that it was not a full blown fracture, Jolpin slinked further into the darkness ahead, before glancing back at the technoorganic pillar, and a hobbling mass that swiftly stumbled into its immediate vicinity. The flash illuminated a blur that recoiled violently at the barrage of tendrils, scrapes of metal alternating with dull thuds and thin crackles, as the creature desperately and almost aimlessly swung its anatomy from one side of the corridor to the other. That was until its shorter appendage touched the structure. Within a heartbeat, a sound that resembled a locking mechanism disengaging echoed within the mottled structure, followed by the tendrils’ immediate retreat into the ceiling. Like pieces of a wet film being ripped open, the interlocking doors of the now silenced chrysalis slid apart, liberating the bile green glow from its innards. While unable to see the finer details, Gregory gazed upon a bipedal creation of the Metastasis, hunched forward with a massive, spherical growth on its back, palpating something within the structure with its longer arm. Jolpin wanted no part of that twisted play, yet just as the man was to turn around and press on the sarcophagus’s sudden “synthetic exhalation” stopped him dead in his tracks. The breath of the machine spread throughout the parking lot like a ripple across a pond, imitated and repeated by dozens if not hundreds of unseen cybernetic devices throughout its entire perimeter. Within a few seconds, the unseen machines breathed once again, now numbering in single digits and exactly above our protagonist. He swore and took off running when the abomination in the green light let out a guttural growl, violently yanked its arm out of the sarcophagus and dashed straight towards our protagonist with a wild, unstable gait. Sprinting through the darkness, the drunkard's useless eyes desperately darted to and fro in search of an escape. Charting a mental map in his head, the man took a sharp turn to the right and painfully scraped his right leg on a grainy concrete surface. As Greg impulsively recoiled to touch the source of the newborn soreness, a part of him managed to pay heed to a glimmer in the distance, as small as a dead pixel would be on a computer screen - it was orange.

Once again, he had to wander through the dark at a snail's pace, with his hands as the sole tools of orientation that bumped, slammed, glided across moist pieces of plastic, grills of iron, and God knows what else! The creature, on the other hand, seemed to be completely unimpeded by the lighting conditions, with only an occasional hollow knock or a sharp scrape accompanying its frantic, heavy movements and disharmonious whirs. It was obvious that outrunning the thing in its own territory was a futile task, which prompted the wanderer to consider one other available option, the undignified savior unbefitting of a man.

Much to one’s chagrin, the automobiles that had door handles to begin with were all locked. After ripping a few of the aforementioned handles in sheer rush and panic, Jolpin ducked and tried shoving his frame beneath one of the sedans, but the reek of meat and wet hair was so nauseatingly intense that it forced him to drop the idea on the spot. Hearing the creature approaching, the drunkard hastily straightened up, palpated for a frame within its door and smashed his elbow into what he hoped was a window. Without shattering, something thin and filmy bent inwards, almost sending the wanderer tumbling face-first into the driver’s seat. Hastily clambering into it, Gregory ended up in the interior of an angular car of inhuman origin, his back and backside firmly pressed against a seat with an irregular surface that felt like some creature’s gently writhing innards encased in rubbery leather. Stifling his breath, and instinctually closing his eyes, the man was ready for the arrival of the technoorganic predator. And arrive it did, only to swiftly dash past its target’s hiding spot before disappearing deeper into lightless expanse. Only a low sigh of relief broke the silence that followed.

After a few more heartbeats of quiet, the dingy fingers began to softly study the alien interior, gliding across the smooth buttons of a panel that was in place of a cup holder and a gear shift stick, up towards the regions allocated to radios and CD players now studded with apple-sized spherical pieces, then shifting left towards the steering wheel that was closer to that of an airplane in its design. Reaching for the region of the ignition key, the fingertips collided with four triggers inserted into a semicircular piece.

Whilst palpating the rough, squared edges of the “trigger guards,” the images of the “lamprey engine” gleamed in the dingy tent back at that filthy refugee camp, came to mind. One could entertain the absurd thought of Gregory momentarily reminding himself to drive, then miraculously finding a way out and a straight road back to civilization. Naturally, the scientific miracle could have been pawned off to the highest bidder. Indeed, was one really meant to be surprised at the people flocking to the festering city like flies to the sun-baked carrion? The daredevils, the bandits and prospectors blinded by the desire to make history and a decent coin. Men like Sudara must have been a norm, not an exception. A miniscule metal valve in one's heart needs to be cherished and coddled like an apple of one's eye, while the former Kalsten literally gives birth to amalgams of skin and cement, flesh and metal. It is a quarry of scientific breakthroughs just waiting to be mined. And the Metastasis had it open for everyone without a modicum of resistance. Almost.

Caught in his philosophical musings, Gregory's grip gently wound around the wavy form of the steering wheel, and the intestinal seat writhed a tad more intensely. Momentarily, the headlights burst to life only to illuminate a skull of sheet metal, a twisted visage of one’s nightmares staring directly into his soul - a soul that almost vacated his body then and there.

Jolpin recoiled in utter shock, sinking deep into the seat. In front of the alien car stood what could only be described as pieces of meat from a mangled train crash victim mixed with that of a roadkill that a machine was tasked to bring back to “life.” Glistening clumps of flesh and shards of bone grew around and into cables, translucent semi spheres and unknown apparati to form a nest through which poked the silvery labels of lithium batteries. A crooked and lordotic, semi- mechanical spine arched forward and over the aforementioned nest of batteries in the midline of its body, splitting into three branches, one arching left and feeding into an enormous sphere of grainy rubber that took up most of the left side of the abomination’s theoretical “upper torso,” the right one curving into a partial foundation of two right arms, while the third one slithered into a canopy of wires and and muscles towards its hideous head. A skull of sheet metal, designed for some post-apocalyptic masquerade was the only way it would have been described properly. Mostly composed of three sides, the flat frontal one was dotted with a dozen ports with beady, hollow centers that resembled pupils. Directly beneath them was an asymmetrical cut out that resembled the nasal cavity. On the right-hand side, a single “jawline” extended downwards, bordering with a large cylindrical piece, ringed by glistening muscles that served as a faux “mouth” of the technoorganism. Much to his surprise, the creature did not even flinch at the sight of its target, merely opting to stare blankly.

Trailing his sight downward, Jolpin saw the reflections of the flesh and metal dancing on the orange exterior of the automobile, caught in its dashes, blotches, stains, imperfections, and in the two wide, checkered stripes running down its midline, the material inviting associations with the bakelite of the old rifles.

The monster abruptly jerked its head back and shifted backwards to feel the neighboring sedans. One could only describe the movement of its crooked, unnatural limbs brushing against the cars as an act performed with “anticipated confidence.” Eventually, the technoorganism had managed to cover some distance, studying the surroundings, the immediate vicinity of where the wanderer’s auditory trail lingered last. Just as Gregory began to contemplate sneaking from the back of the hiding spot, he noticed that the palm belonging to the creature’s lower, shorter arm was pointing back towards him. Slowly, the mess of wire and meat skulked backward towards the source of light, its uncharacteristic silence only betrayed by the highly characteristic tap of steel toe caps.

Three spindly fingers grew on each side of the disgusting lump of steel and cartilage, sliding across the hood of the alien machine, while an elongated forceps that grew through the palm’s entirety and separated the aforementioned fingers, like a river two continents, snapped at the air in excitement like a demonic venus flytrap. The forceps was coated with all manner of gunk and bodily fluids, a well of sepsis just waiting to be unleashed. Like an arachnid of pestilence, the palm skittered towards one of the headlights, stopping for a few heartbeats over the warming piece of plastic.

Jolpin felt his heart drop.

The abomination let out an enraged shriek, as it swung its longer arm, as thick and bulky as an assembly robot's corpus onto the bakelite hood and roof of Jolpin's hideout like a hammer onto a piece of malleable steel. The chassis shattered instantly into thousands of pieces, just like plastic that the man feared it was. Had he not instinctively shifted towards the door, the limb that currently had the area of the cup holder, the gear shift and the cd player completely obliterated, would have most probably transformed his shoulder into a bloodied mass of raw meat. The abomination lurched forward, clawing at the fragile exterior, its metal faceplate, slowly pushing through the sagging faux windshield. Hastily regaining his composure, Gregory crawled towards the back seat, praying that the imitation glass was just as malleable as those observed prior. One could only imagine what a cruel joke it would have been, if the Colossus named Life made it that the alien creation had much more solid windows on its backside, perhaps as a defensive mechanism from the parking lot dwellers. The slightly moist fabric tightly clung to the wanderer's palm, stretching further and further, breaking like an amniotic sack only after Jolpin's arm was entirely shoved through the window frame. Greg’s torso was already halfway through the opening when the abomination’s frigid fingers suddenly latched onto the wanderer's ankle with the grip of a dead man, the monstrous forceps snapping shut around the fabric of his trousers. Letting out an exasperated grunt Gregory grabbed onto the outer shell of the sedan and kicked the hand with all of his might. It did not budge. Once again, the worn boot descended onto the appendage, and then the faceplace of the creature, still covered in the membranous glass. The arm pulled him further and further back into the car, with Jolpin feeling the outer plastic of the machine slowly reaching its limit. Mustering another desperate blow, the man yanked his captive leg downwards, for the creature's inertia to push it back up and meet his readied heel. A few soft crackles echoed within the appendage, followed by the monster's semi-muffled roar of pain, as the leg was torn from its clutches in the following moments, leaving the reanimated roadkill with only a shred of its would-be prey's apparel in its filthy forceps.

Falling onto the warm concrete floor, the drunkard hastily got up, trying to mentally orientate himself before leaving the technoorganic nightmare to thrash maniacally within the abandoned sedan. Regardless of a potentially fatal outcome, the man definitely ended up in somewhat of a better situation than before - miraculously, one of the headlights managed to remain unscathed, and irrespective of the onslaught, was still a source of illumination. He had finally found a way to push the ever-present darkness back.

Being well aware that the abomination would have been halted only for a short spell, Jolpin immediately dashed forward, sticking to the cone of light and keeping an eye out for cars in his close vicinity. Only when the glow waned and weakened significantly, would he try to push his hand through a nearby membranous window, before pressing every button and palpating every possible surface in search of that one arbitrary trigger to dissipate the next chunk of the black ocean. Not every attempt was fruitful, causing Grefory to hurriedly switch towards a different car in hopes of getting lucky. What other option did he have?

Like a wingless firefly in a ginormous sinkhole, Gregory battled his way forward, pursued by unseen predators, seemingly damned to never see natural light again in his meagerly short lifespan.

Glancing to his side, the drunkard noticed the familiar streaks of black liquid running in parallel to his direction, now replaced with enormous black handprints. Jolpin cursed breathlessly.

Taking a sharp turn left, he sought to reenter the corridor of pillars, cross over to the other side and resume from there. If his theory regarding the reanimated mass of flesh and wire was correct, he would have been safe at least for a short while.

After a thorough search, the hands finally groped the interior of an automobile that was “parked" exactly in the direction the man intended to head towards. Grasping the enormous, skeletonized wheel of a tractor, Jolpin found a veiny prominence that when pressed, lit the concrete beams a dozen or so meters away in the distance. Smiling weakly, he made his way towards them, albeit much quieter than usual - a simple plan simply too good to go without a hitch.

An echo of pained squirms and low sizzles, rang from the dark expanse. Stopping to see, his eyes gleamed many constellations of sickly orange “stars," strobing wildly in the distance. Familiar, yet also different, as from his outlook it seemed that the technoorganic ticks were in the center of the corridor, hovering in the air. Something within the drunkard's core whispered that he knew exactly what was happening.

The lights hovered towards the wanderer with a nonchalant grace, accompanied by the coarse crunch of the striated ceiling, and Jolpin worriedly stepped back in response. Within a span of seconds, accompanied by a rapidly growing dull buzz of machinery, enormous palms covered entirely in horizontal ridges and stained with glistening black fluid, passed through the boundary of light and shadow, the metal piece between the ring and the middle fingers scraping ever so slightly on the concrete floor. Soon afterwards, the said biomechanical hands suddenly rotated 90 degrees to grope and grasp at anything and everything nearby. The reanimated carrion would gain on him soon, yet the man could not dare to make any sudden moves, for he was transfixed onto the horrifying marriage of factory equipment and flesh that was hanging upside down from the ceiling, the whitish parchment dangling from its frontal end, a net holding the half-molten ticks of the Metastasis. Out of all the abominations he had encountered, Jolpin was genuinely left guessing where the parchment creature’s biology ended and the machine began. The enormous techoorganism slowed its pace, the teeth-like mechanisms on its broader front end screeching to life, tilting the papery material and its tortured contents towards our protagonist. The acidic paper swayed back and forth just a tad, as if rousing a small gust of wind onto itself. Gregory hastily stepped aside, taking cover behind the nearest column. The technoorgnaism’s frame suddenly shifted downwards to the floor, the four pairs of crooked arms inserted into random regions of its anatomy, hastily and gracefully propelling the creature towards its new prey's previous location. Stopping mere meters away from the column that shielded him, it did not take too much brain power to analyze that the abomination would have been able to track him without much effort, something it was already trying to accomplish, swinging its enormous papery organ from one side of the corridor to the other. Simultaneously, the scornful gurgles and the echoes of heavy footsteps now were an earshot away, madly meandering to and fro, obviously thrown off by the wanderer's trick. The multi-armed creature merely jerked its papery organ towards the general direction of the disturbance, before resuming its cold, calculated, almost leisurely search for its human prey. Jolpin swiftly dashed down the corridor, changing his covers, feeling the abomination’s  biomechanical joints clicking and popping right behind him. It was fast, much more than that gurgling freak and undoubtedly more powerful. For a moment, Jolpin wondered what would happen were the two mentioned creatures cross paths. Perhaps, that could have been arranged.

“Hey!" He yelled. “Hey you! Over here, come and get me!"

While a barely noticeable shift in the rustling melody of the parchment was the only response from the larger abomination, the sudden silence in the distance grew heavy. Within a few seconds, a figure twinkled in the cone of light behind the two, seemingly lathered in all manner of biological and synthetic fluid, giving its entire anatomy an unnatural shine.

Pushing the weary muscles further, Jolpin suddenly performed a U turn, sprinting  past the large technoorganism in a semi crouched position, hopeful it wasn't able to sense him yet before bolting straight towards the newly appeared reanimated carrion.

“Come on!" The man exclaimed shakily, unsure whether he ran towards his unlikely saving grace, or a violent death. After all, the dreaded colossus did have a twisted sense of humor. The mass of wire and exposed flesh howled and ran towards the one creature that managed to elude it for far too long, its hideous limbs ready to strike. Little did the carrion know that the role of a prey unwittingly wandering into the clutches of a relentless predator would fall onto its own shoulder.

A deafening explosion rocked the parking lot, followed by something heavy painfully slamming onto the concrete floor. A desperate, distorted moan that felt like it was being played through a speaker a few decibels too loud filled the entire compartment, effortlessly overpowering the subtle but ever-present melodies of faux life.

Gregory, who had managed to leap out of the way of the two monstrous children of the Metastasis, now bore witness to the parchment creature, nearly thrice the size of his former pursuer, beginning to swiftly and methodically tear its new prey apart. Clumps of flesh whined and tore under the pressure, wires were sheared apart, shells of metal and plastic were shattered, and limb sockets - obliterated. The carrion could do naught but howl helplessly and struggle to move its broken and useless limbs, as the former cracked the rubbery sphere on its body open like a shell of a wallnut, to wrench the mechanisms within out and onto the acidic paper. That very parchment, now soaked in oils and other fluids, did not even budge towards the wanderer’s direction. Jolpin had earned his window of escape but remained still, his eyes glaring at a newly discovered, valuable piece of biotechnology. Discarded in a rapidly pooling pond of blood, oil and agony lay the shorter arm of the reanimated carrion, its forearm segment almost completely unharmed. The parchment creature, completely oblivious to the drunkard’s advances, greedily lathered both synthetic and organic shreds of its now silenced prey onto the acidic parchment, ignorant to the loss of a small piece of its meal.

Holding tightly onto the newly acquired appendage, the man swiftly snuck out of the hallway of the pillars. Opting to remain in its immediate vicinity, Gregory resumed his previous activity of seeking vehicles for illumination.

Eventually, both abominations of the Metastasis were left far behind. The new task set after the acquisition of the limb did a great deal masking the rising worry over the fact that nothing approaching an exit or a change of scenery could have been glimpsed, just an endless purgatory of alien fauna, suffocating darkness and parodies of human technology. One the aforementioned exemplars, serving as a yet another source of light, illuminated a sought after little detail - a mottled back of a technoorganic pillar that appeared to be inert. On approach, the droning buzz of the structure seemed to have been much quieter than that of its brethren. As a precautionary method, it would have been wise to find an automobile that would face it first, to make sure the man would not be whipped by its tendrils again. The pain from that encounter still lingered in the fringes of his mind.

Within a few minutes, a newly lit cone of orange illuminated the coarse, insectoid back of the metallic sarcophagus. Reentering the corridor with measured steps and watching for any semblance of movement within the depths of the ceiling, the drunkard now stood before the biomechanical chrysalis, shrouded shadow. The dingy palms gently caressed its rough, almost freckled texture of metal, searching for something, anything - be it a button, a keyhole, or some other form of an opening. Finally, the fingertips managed to hook into an indentation, a warm, slightly moist pore that on further examination managed to freely accommodate two of his fingers. The monstrous forceps slid into that opening without resistance, animating some unseen mechanism within. Like a lock being disengaged, a choir of mechanical clicks sang within the machine. Invisible gears spun, prompting the segmented doors and a clear membrane behind them to split apart, letting the familiar bile green glow disperse the darkness. Much to the man’s surprise, the interior of the other sarcophagus was positively barren, when compared to the one he gazed upon in that moment. Its inner surface was covered in a network of coin-shaped nodes, between which many a random piece of technology, each wrapped in a transparent sheath, found a place of residence. Screwing his eyes downward, the network of interconnected nodes converged and disappeared behind a light-green chassis of a computer screen. The object was square-shaped with beveled edges, made of hollow plastic, with neither jet black tumors of miniature screens fused to its exterior, nor placentas or blood vessels growing on and around it. Just a painfully ordinary apparatus, hooked into a keyboard covered in at least two hundred, by his estimation, mobile phone buttons and a single trackball, reminiscent of those seen in ultrasound devices, installed on its leftmost side. Guided by instinct, a finger poked the flat, circular button on the darkened screen and in response, the alien crt monitor gradually lit with its familiar, almost reassuring “bloomy glow,” roused by the familiar ocean of distorted symbols. Interestingly, they were not accompanied by the tune of nails on the chalkboard or any sound for that matter, even though the drunkard could swear he could hear the former somewhere deep within his mind. Eventually the symbols melted into each other, coalescing into a menu of some sort, with a cross-shaped reticle in its center. A mechanical grinding noise in the distance snapped him out of his curious bewilderment. After a few quiet moments of scanning the environment for any sign of movement, the wanderer turned back towards the concave screen. The trackball, greasy from the fresh lubricant, rolled noiselessly within its socket, dragging the cross through the monochromatic, spiral-shaped interface. Naturally, only a few letters of the common tongue were occasionally wedged between the twisted facsimile of the human language. Seeing no further reason to dawdle and wrack his exhausted brain matter over deliberation or theorization, the man guided the cursor towards a line of text that stood out to him the most.

The electric buzz within the sarcophagus grew louder, and the structure exhaled in a familiar manner, mimicked by unseen machines throughout the parking space. The spiral unraveled, leaving a handful of lines at the top left corner of the screen and a single, blinking column on its bottom. Operating on instinct, the wanderer pressed one of the tiny buttons and observed a corresponding symbol appear next to the column. Since every single thing he could press was similar and similarly unknowable, the man proceeded to type out a random combination of letters to see if the machine would react - it did not. Not burning with desire to press each and every button, the wanderer chose to try pressing the trackball in hopes of triggering some mechanism. Serendipitously, the inner workings of the greasy sphere clicked, and the sparse remnants of code melted away into the void. Mimicry of an exhalation rang far, far away. Like ripples across a pitch black pond, hieroglyphs undulated across the monitor, some fading away, others lingering for a few seconds longer before the cycle repeated itself. A breath, a ripple, an identical shape reformed. The shape of a column skewed to the side, as if observed at an oblique angle through the slits in the ceiling. Gently rolling the trackball would wake up the unseen machines in a different region of the expanse, causing the fading image to change. Now he looked upon writhing pyramidal shapes within the void, as some amorphous blob moved between them, its tendrils seemingly growing longer upon each update of the image. A piece from what was later revealed to be a black crosshair had ominously lodged itself in the rightmost edge of the screen, cutting through one of the pyramids.

Jolpin finally understood what he was looking at.

Ascii - a word stranded in oblivion for long, arduous years, only to reemerge like a sudden relapse. The association roused distant olfactory memories - the aroma of the cheapest coffee a human can buy mingling with the noxious fumes of the lowest sort of cigarettes. Then came the cheaply constructed jungle of faded beige cubicles upon cubicles, the sunlight of cold diode, the mind numbing buzz of printers, the chirp of keyboards, the distant and faded melodies of superficial conversations with words relating to numbers, family, work, schedules, pets, the latest pop culture or tech world trends breaking away from that wall of senseless noise to reach the bystanders’ ears. Through the lens of hindsight It was heaven. Sidestepping the company's strict rules regarding the access to wider internet, file sharing, etc, many employees employed Ascii filters to dither images found online to be later shared with others over the company chat, sent in a clandestine manner through work emails, or sneakily printed among official documentation. The tried and true algorithm was truly a sight to behold, and a source of levity in that drab office. Jolpin recalled sending a few especially sultry images to a few of his work friends, most of whom he would not recall at gunpoint. One could wonder about the fate of those nameless and faceless figures that were gone and forgotten, as soon as the man departed the office. What became of them? Did they too leave in search of a better future?  Perhaps they got a lucky break in life, or conversely, had to break apart their families, homes, or their own bodies due to a myriad of risks and illnesses that the Colossus named Life bestowed upon Mankind? Or, possibly, were they still lost in that cheaply built, cost effective jungle? That cubicle limbo immunized to the slightest modicum of change. Jolpin wouldn't know, he never received a single call or an email, not that he tried to reach out either. It would have been ironic to imagine stumbling across those colleagues of his in the Metastasis, perhaps he'd even recognize some of their visages, half fused to a car engine or a man-sized heart growing on a telephone pole or something of the sort.

The trackball rolled at tad, and the new Ascii image began materializing. It appeared to be somewhat tilted, as if the sensor was wedged in a corner somewhere, painting a surprisingly detailed landscape of the vast expanse that Gregory was hopelessly trapped in. Interestingly enough, in the black horizon that the machine could not generate was a familiar cursor. The latter reappeared in the next one, a scene depicting some creature, the cursor’s color once again flipped to pitch black, as it was overlaid on the amorphous entity. With each new image, the synthetic exhalations steadily inched closer, and his sense of unease grew.

A new dithered shot flickered to light, a very recognizable one at that. It was a corridor of pillars, perhaps the very one Gregory had to travel through, with an object standing in its dead center. Much like everything else, the finer details were lost in the writhing code, but even at an angle one could easily tell that the unknown entity was tall and thin. The ground before it alternated between barely perceptible and well demarcated with each update of the image. The familiar cursor was nowhere to be seen. Jolpin felt no further desire to stare at it, flicking the trackpad a tad, only for the screen to defiantly show (presumably) the same object but at a different angle, once again, with no cursor in sight. The third sensor was closer to it, allowing Gregory to observe its motionless, noticeably humanoid shape. Jolpin felt the mounting discomfort and frustration looking at that formless amalgam and rotated the ball backwards, as if hopeful it would disappear. He cursed himself for being correct! The writhing symbols materialized the familiar corridor of pillars, perhaps the very one Gregory had to travel through, now completely empty. Something coiled around the man's spine, as the greased sphere spun frantically, only to reveal nothing but the hollow space between two pillars once again. One, two, three, four empty images, exhalations nearing the chrysalis, the returned cursor growing larger with each new scene, yet the entity was nowhere to be seen. Suddenly as if to spite, or startle our protagonist, the figure returned, the dreaded black cursor, now thrice as large as the early images, finding residence in its torso. Somehow, Jolpin knew that the technoorganic sensor peered into its back.

Cold sweat began to bead on the wanderer's brow. The dingy fingers pressed the miniature buttons at random, animated by the hope of finding a button that would reform the main menu spiral once again. Simultaneously, his sight crept past the computer, the green light, the innards of metal, hesitantly peering into the black void. A single, flickering star floated motionlessly in the abyss, as small as a dead pixel on a screen. Jolpin was practically smashing his palms into the keyboard now, accidentally hitting some lucky key or a combination that returned him to the main menu. Realizing that he only had but a few fleeting moments to act before having to take off, Gregory was already sick to his stomach from fleeing every single, blasted abomination from the smallest to the largest that he crossed paths with. Conversely, that feeling could have also alluded to the body being on a brink of total collapse.

Scanning through the spiral menu, the man's eyes fixated on a random line of text that captivated his intuition. Navigating the ball towards it and pressing the string of symbols brought out a peculiar Ascii diagram. A vertical slice of two neighboring structures, a looping gif of some umbilical structure extending from the top one to the bottom, followed by an eye-shaped symbol spinning on the edge of the screen. Glancing towards the star in the void that had definitely grown larger, the drunkard paced impatiently, his sight covering the span of visible space of the parking lot while anticipating something from the chrysalis of iron. After what felt like ages, one of the man-sized hatches in the vicinity of the sarcophagus hissed, its wheels and winches spinning to life before the hatch itself was raised from the ground. At that moment, Gregory felt like that was his only way out. Pulling the severed arm out of the structure, the man approached the shadow left by the hatch and hastily palpated it, feeling up the cold iron rim of an entryway. Throwing one last cursory glance at the almost nonchalant figure in the shadows, the wanderer dove legs-first into the darkness.

It was like being shoved through a dried birth canal lined with tarpaulin, as unseen rib-like structures rhythmically clamped down on our hapless protagonist, almost knocking the wind out of him in the process. The material painfully grated against his face and hands, as the tube lazily chaperoned the visitor towards the structure's lower levels.

The next thing on one’s mind was the warm embrace of the polished floor, after what felt like a minute stretched into a decade of suffocation. Breathless and blinded by a sudden wave of warm light, the wanderer was paralyzed and utterly vulnerable for a short spell. Through that haze the only thing reaching him was a distant, low, percussive, grinding melody, as if a district-spanning factory roared to life within the depths of the underground facility. “Just how deep did this structure reach?” The man asked himself. “Just how long was the Metastasis propagating within Kalsten’s depths, unseen and undisturbed?”

Rubbing his eyes open, Jolpin glanced at a constellation of fused light bulbs shining down from between the striations in the wavy ceiling. Similar cones were haphazardly peppered in the distance. Unlike the occasionally perceived shades of grey and scant hints of orange bakelite witnessed above, everything on the current layer of the structure seemed to have been tinted in colors between brick red and rust brown. Only the mottled sarcophagus of metal beside him seemed to have remained unchanged.

There was nothing left to do but to stand up, grab the severed limb and find solace in the fact that there was no further need to aimlessly prod the dark, or to break into every other automobile in a desperate search for sources of illumination.

The man stepped forward, maneuvering around nets of cables intertwined with unknown devices that dangled from above like parasitic helminths from the gills of infested fish. The man shuffled between sprouting pipes, rubbed shoulders with the familiar bakelite automobiles, getting caught on small barbed grates that seemed to grow out of the floor at random. His gaze would occasionally trail towards the hazy silhouettes of support pillars that ran parallel to the wanderer, partially shrouded in shadow, rivers of darkness gazing at him from between them. However, one segment of the corridor stood out from the rest, with a dozen or so concrete monoliths, themselves possessing a lighter shade than their brethren, being fused together, retaining their overall silhouettes whilst forming a wavy wall of some kind. Jolpin approached the structure’s edge, eyes scanning its dimmed yet glossy contours and forms, the slight surface imperfections, wrinkles, and pores from a safe distance. Gently skulking beside the structure, the man gazed at the triangular shards growing beneath its surface, as if draped by pieces of thin cloth, pushing outward, almost yearning to be born. The largest clusters seemed to have fulfilled their objective, poking free from their bondage, their translucent surfaces glazed with burgundy liquid, tattered remnants of the wall’s outer covering dangling freely beneath them. Jolpin's eyes trailed towards the other end of the wall, catching a sight of worn rubber boots poking out from the recess between the two final pillars. Immediately, he tensed and moved deeper into the open space, finding cover behind the alien machines and sneaking forward, curious to see what it was. Perhaps the footwear belonged to an unlucky scavenger who may have actually had something of worth to be looted from them. Though one could also wonder as to how that someone ended up two stories beneath the soil. Perhaps that could have been taken as a sign that there was some entry into the brick red level of the parking lot, and thus - a possible exit. Those hopes were swiftly torn to shreds, when a familiar technoorgnaic silhouette, though thankfully motionless, imprinted on the wanderer's retina. Sitting on the floor and leaning onto the wavy wall, Gregory gazed at its two mechanical left arms, crooked and disproportionate, gently twitching as if the grotesque mass of raw flesh and technology was lost in a deep slumber. Following the trail of its branching spines past the canopy of wires, the sheet metal skull peered into the ceiling, a veiny tube that extended from the bottom of the wall inserted into its “mouthpiece” that gently pulsed in sync with the creature’s exposed throat muscles, both synthetic and organic. Interestingly enough, a large polypous tumor rested onto the faceplate, the discolored, root-like stalks extending into its many circular pores. The sight of a dozen pus-encrusted and tightly shut eyelids on the aforementioned mass of flesh served as a stern reminder that the man should have resumed his journey long ago. He chose to do just that.

Fluids sloshed within the torturous pipes, the helminth-esque nests of wires buzzed gently, accompanied by a faint choir of faux life mixing with the billow of the unseen factory. In between bouts of careful observation of his surroundings, Jolpin rolled the sleeve of his battered coat to seize the opportunity and observe his aching arm, seeing a massive purple blotch covering a substantial surface area of the limb, with the underlying structures being somewhat intact but quite painful to the touch. In truth, he was more afraid to examine the wound left to him from that reckless jump and rightfully so. The makeshift bandage was caked in blood, moist blood, a geyser of seething pain set off by even the slightest pressure. For a moment he contemplated seeking temporary shelter inside one of the automobiles, to rest and to finally try and disinfect the wound before it went out of control completely, hopeful that the infection had not set in too deep, and that the large doses antibiotics would keep any emerging pathogens at bay without outright killing him. Self medication and wound treatment with half-remembered first aid skills was never free of risk, yet within the domain of the Metastasis risk was the only certainty bestowed upon the fools who dared to trespass on its blighted grounds. Additionally, the man pondered if it would be smart to also hunker down somewhere, as the surface would have already been visited by the moon and the stars, blanketing a corridor devoid of watchful eyes, helping the abominable face of Kalsten lure in fresh victims to torment and twist beyond recognition. Those who would willingly abandon their family (however intolerable they may be), wellbeing (however fickle it may be), work (however crushing it may be) to chase some campfire fantasies and embellished rumors.

A hollow tap rang throughout the vast chamber, just as Jolpin began to palpate a membranous window to push through. It was hollow, sharp, like a nail on a plastic tube of some sort. It was in close proximity to the aforementioned wall. Instantaneously, the aching muscles tensed as the drunkard craned his neck towards the disturbance, already cursing himself for somehow causing the reanimated carrion's awakening. Another tap echoed, rattling the man's old bones. His tired eyes scanned the hazy silhouette of the structure in the distance, only to be immediately fixated on a singular, flashing source of light, no larger than a few dead pixels on a screen. The third beckoning tap came.

The cursed cycle of flight had to repeat itself, for there was no other approach left. The wanderer felt like he was an exhausted rodent spinning inside a massive hamster wheel. The body had a statement to make - refusal, or more precisely, complete inability to heed the desperate wails of adrenaline echoing throughout the circulatory system. The best the famished musculature could muster was a heavy limp that was just a tad faster than a mild jog. The wanderer's eyes darted back towards the wavy wall, towards the entity that had yet to budge, oblivious to the fact that he was rapidly approaching another child of the Metastasis. A sharp trill accompanied the shifting ground beneath his hastily placed boot, causing the man to stumble forward barely managing to steady his gait and not slam-face first into an obliquely placed barbed grate. A cursory glance revealed a flattened mixture of a radio transceiver and a prehistoric crustacean that momentarily disengaged the locking mechanisms on its sides before folding itself thrice, and diving hastily beneath the closest vehicle faster than he could even react.

“How long until your pitiful athletic skills and on the spot improvisation fail to pull you out of a difficult situation?” The man mused silently in between ragged breaths, and desperate dodges of barbed grates, gnarled nests of pipes and wire canopies. The entity remained statuesque, the source of the glow on its anatomy almost impossibly miniscule. “How long until the Colossus named Life finally tires of tormenting you? Then what?”

Gregory stumbled through a small patch of open space devoid of life and alien machinery, ending up beneath a large constellation of intertwined light bulbs, accompanied by a yet unheard, low creak of a rusted ventilator. He was exposed from all sides.

“No!” The man muttered in exhaustion, upon realizing that the source of the light, the only visible sign of the entity’s presence, was nowhere to be seen. Peering into the darkness behind him, the man wearily stepped back, the torn limb at the ready, scanning his flanks in hopes of catching his pursuer’s approach. That is until his back hit a wall a mere second later.

“Since when was there a wall here!?”

The man shuddered, unable to breathe, unable to move a muscle, unable to make a sound. The drunkard was rooted to the spot, feeling every drop of blood in his veins turn cold as ice in torturous anticipation. Slowly, a miasma of death, an acrid stench of puss began to pollute the air, yet Jolpin could not even muster a gag. Thus, he was trapped in the dimly lit abyss that clamped down on him like the segmented walls of a mottled sarcophagus, with only the symphony of the ventilator and the aroma of decomposing life keeping him company.

Seconds began to bleed into minutes, minutes of stagnant stillness, minutes of anticipated action that never came. Compelled by some unseen instinct, the man's eyes rolled upwards, peering into a towering figure that under the direct light from above was reduced to a jagged form of darkness, with only an army of bluish dots twinkling within it like stars in the night sky, alongside a pulsing orange piece of machinery located on its lower segment. His dried throat could only croak out a hoarse squeal.

“Can you hear it? The melody of your bone marrow attuned to the ceaseless whispers of the Blighted Child?” A robotic, imitation speech spewed from the pulsing apparatus, scratchy, low and unnatural. Gregory remained speechless, as the abomination spoke once more.

“After lending your ears to the gospels of hateful worship, fearful reverence and blinding obsession that flows through the cracks in the lips of the desert dwellers, and having witnessed the festering jewel of the arid soil - can you not claim yourself as a believer?”

The creature shifted backwards with a wettish thud followed by a faint metallic clank.

"The Blighted child...the machine your kind worships, like a moth worships the sun, sees it all..."

The monstrous child of the Metastasis nonchalantly circled its paralyzed prey like a bloodthirsty shark, brandishing its towering amalgam of an anatomy, illuminated by the overhead lights. It was as if a smaller feminine body was forcefully interred into a much larger masculine frame, the former’s contorted figure covered by a thin layer of straitjacket-esque skin. The myriad of mechanical insets, subcutaneous coiling tubes, gnarly gashes weeping copious amounts of blood and greenish yellow pus, and jaundiced spots glinted on the canvas that was its deathly pale epidermis. The twisted, bloodied flesh flowed and intertwined with itself, like roots of an oak extending and winding into a grotesque left leg, while the right one was a fully mechanical, bluish-black limb that seemed to have slashed and broken its way out of the abomination’s iliac crest. Barely mustering enough strength to observe the creature’s upper torso, the wanderer gazed at the orange light bleeding through a grey circular mechanism's orifice, sliced by a fan whirling within. The said apparatus was inserted into the fusion of the two throats, the two metal protrusions on its lower end screwed into the feminine body’s clavicles. Around the point of insertion, the skin appeared to have been flayed in the pattern of a star, suspiciously devoid of foreign bodies or signs of infection. The lower jaws of the organism fused and flowed into each other, bearing misshapen and misarranged teeth, oblique medical screws and metal wires, crowned by a disfigured, hairless skull of half tattered skin, mechanical implants and an entire army of miniature stalky eyes jutting from the apex of the browline down to very bottom of the hollow orifice of its nasal bone. The optic sensors, each dead centered onto our protagonist, peered into his very soul, scorching away at the strands that held the muscles in their iron grip.

“Who…” Gregory choked out a single word. “What…”

“Have you not caught the piercing gaze of its eyes around every corner?” The mechanism sputtered and flashed, words flowing through them akin to chants of prayers dedicated to some horrifying deity, the technoorganism ignorant of, or indifferent to the drunkard's barely coherent vocalizations. “Can you not feel its mechanical ears hidden in the shadows, thriving within the many hollow vessels of your former dwellings, basking under the glory of your star? Have you not stared into an army of screens, windows peering at the vertical slice of its boundless ocean of chaotic thought? Can you not appreciate its vertebrae of steel vibrating to an incomprehensible hymn? The Blighted Child feeds upon your dreams and fears, shunting them through its writhing veins and arteries, biomechanical axons of pure unfiltered thought pushing through reality itself towards…” The creature went silent, swiftly covering the miniscule distance between it and the target of its ceaseless monologue. The man gagged quietly at the stench of rot, whilst locking eyes with the flickering pore.

“The parent, crowned in the great white void it resides, boundless and everchanging. We are naught but lowly cells lost in its world-spanning oceans of tissue and alloy.” Whispers bled through the apparatus, spoken with absolute reverence, before the entity leaned back to resume its sermon. “Hear me, oh festering jewel of this arid soil, the purifying wound of this world! What price will you demand from those who dare tread your hallowed grounds? Will these arrogant vermin have the courage to stand before your immaculate judgement, or will they be damned to fall, broken and voiceless, melding into the bony steps for those chosen few to ascend!?” It leaned closer once again. “And will those desperate to wrest their loved ones from the claws of death, not shatter under the weight of the price imposed upon them?" The apparatus imitated a chuckle as the monster’s disfigured visage all but pressed itself into Gregory’s, warm blood and oil trickling onto his trembling skin. “How deeply will you gaze into the abyss to bring HER back?”

"How?!" Gregory whimpered.

“How,” you inquire? “Who,” you ask? “What” you wonder? The apparatus hissed with poisonous mockery. “Perhaps years of that numbing poison rendered your ears obsolete. How? Had I not already explained that the machine sees it all? Who? A humble guide. What? Just another offspring of the machine of flesh, metal and the purest of thought. Nothing less and nothing more." The creature’s elongated finger poked into the darkness ahead. "Cut deeper through the tissue and concrete, brave the trials of this beautiful new world. Gaze upon the pulsing star and the light within your heart to guide you towards the source of your desperate crusade.” The Guide swiftly circled the protagonist, assuming the same position as the one the two first acquainted themselves with.

“SHE lies in waiting at the temple of concrete and flesh. Either you defy all of the odds of life and reach it, or your necrotic vessel will meld with the armies of its brethren, shaping itself into a path trotted by armies of others.” The mechanism sputtered a slow, condescending chuckle, accompanied by the surprisingly light steps gradually growing distant. The miasma of death loosened its grip on the man's throat, letting him slowly wind his head towards the entity, its disfigured visage blending with the ocean of shadows, leaving behind the pulsing apparatus, slowly shrinking back to the size of a dead pixel on a computer screen. In that moment of lingering tension, the wanderer heard it chant once again. “After all, it matters not when one stands before the immaculate judgement of the Blighted Child, be it today, tomorrow, the day your civilization breathes its last, or when your star dims into darkness.” And as Gregory Jolpin was left trembling in that dimly lit abyss, with the ever-present heartbeat of the Metastasis, the roar of the factory and the Colossus named Life to keep him company, the Guide uttered one last cryptic phrase.

“For what is a day to a moth, when compared to that of the stars?”