Into the hollow
Sector East Fringe | Remaining Time: 03:52:28
Emric stepped off the shattered tramway and into the lower corridors of what had once been a subterranean market. Now, it was a half-flooded ruin, shadows broken by flickering safety lights and moss that pulsed with faint bioluminescence.
He exhaled once through his teeth and drew his spark knife. It was sharpened, recharged, and the only thing he trusted today. His last backup pistol had jammed permanently. All he had now was his movement, his mind, and a few makeshift gadgets scavenged from wrecked utility drones.
No team. No map overlays. No tricks.
His HUD pinged as he crossed into a hostile zone.
[Local Conditions: Null Beacon Radius – Signal Interference Active]
[Environmental Hazard: Low-oxygen pockets, flickerlight spores, unstable footing]
[Threat Level: Moderate – E-tier cluster activity detected]
He moved low, silent, hugging the broken concrete pillars. From above, gutted storefronts stared down at him like empty sockets. The air smelled like mildew and hot metal.
Something skittered ahead.
Emric dropped and froze.
A nest of F-tier Scavlar—slim-bodied insectoids with red compound eyes and bladed forelimbs—crawled over a collapsed stairwell, their legs clinking faintly on loose tile.
Six of them.
He didn't hesitate.
With a flick, he lobbed a micro-flare across the floor. It hit a pillar, flashed bright—and the scavlars reacted instantly, shrieking as they swarmed it.
Emric struck from the side.
Three quick kills—throat, under-limb, base of skull.
A fourth reared. He ducked, twisted, and buried his knife in its gut from below.
The fifth turned toward him.
He let it lunge, caught its arm, yanked it into a steel pipe, and used momentum to impale it on an exposed rebar.
The sixth ran.
He kicked a loose fire extinguisher at it—burst of gas and shrapnel—and its carapace exploded.
[+6 Points – F-tier x6]
He moved again.
Deeper.
This sector had long been avoided by other initiates. He knew because he'd looped the pulse activity logs before coming in. Too many hazards. No easy escape routes. High ambush probability.
Which meant points.
Which meant isolation.
Which meant Emric's kind of place.
As he passed a collapsed pillar, his foot slid—and he almost fell into a black pit.
He stared down.
Below, a half-submerged chamber, layered with eggs and bone nests. At least a dozen E-tier Goremites pulsed within the nest—a mutated insectoid species with chitin jaws and acidic internal pressure.
He grinned. "Perfect."
Then he dropped a mine.
The delayed charge landed silently beside a cracked generator.
He climbed higher, settled into a good perch, and activated the detonation.
The explosion was surgical.
Concrete blew inward. Nests collapsed. Three goremites erupted into chunks. The others scattered in chaos—exactly as planned.
Emric dropped in like a hawk, taking the high road through debris. A knife to the thorax and a broken lamp post through its carapace, blood and bile flew in misty arcs.
One creature hissed and lunged with a whip-limb.
He caught it with a boot to the chest and jammed a voltage probe straight into its exposed core.
[+5 Points – E-tier x1]
[+1 Point x4 – F-tier spawns]
By the time the nest was silent again, Emric was heaving breath, hunched over a crate. Blood streaked his shoulder. His knife hummed with low charge. His hands shook slightly—but not with fear.
With clarity.
"Still here," he whispered.
He sat, repatched his sleeve with tape, and checked his HUD.
Just before he tapped the HUD again, a low chittering echoed down the broken passage behind him.
He froze.
Then rolled sideways just in time to avoid a needle-spike that embedded itself into the crate he'd been leaning on—shattering the corner.
Three F-tier Spinecriers crawled over the far railing—thin, arched creatures with glassy limbs and porcupine-like ridges down their backs. Their screech built in layers, vibrating metal and throwing off HUD calibration slightly.
Emric sprang to his feet.
The first lunged. He ducked, jammed his knee into its thorax, and slashed upward—knife tearing through the base of its jaw.
The second opened its ridge—spines glowing with thermal charge.
He ripped a broken wall-panel from nearby, angled it—
Thunk thunk thunk—three needle-spikes deflected into the floor.
He sprinted low and fast, slammed into the creature with shoulder force, then stabbed twice at the root of the spine.
The third tried to escape—wrong call.
Emric lobbed his last flare-stick over the ledge where it crawled.
Light burst.
The creature reared back—and he tackled it mid-shriek, driving it down into the gap below.
Its scream ended in a wet crunch.
[+1 Point ×3 – F-tier]
He caught his breath and moved again, this time through a broken service tunnel. Drips echoed from unseen places, and his feet splashed through shallow water—until he hit a door sealed with rusted emergency bolts.
A quick scan revealed energy flickers inside.
He slipped through a side vent, emerging into what had once been a transit hub's emergency triage zone—now colonized by F-tier Wretchels and one E-tier Cradle Splicer, a twitching thing with thin arms and stitched-together skin, anchored to a spinal growth tower.
He stayed low.
Splicers were unstable. He needed to break its concentration—fast.
He traced the pulse trail to an old control panel nearby. It still had juice.
Emric connected his wrist-pad to the emergency feed.
Power routed.
Overhead magnet array online.
He kicked open a maintenance panel, used the old rail switch as bait, and activated the magnet.
Metal crates clamped upward into the ceiling with a deafening snap, dragging the Cradle Splicer with them by the anchors in its shoulders.
It screamed.
He ran forward, dodged a Wretchel's grasp, stabbed another through its malformed knee, then used a support pipe to vault upward—and slit the splicer's throat in a single clean line across the neck.
The whole nest spasmed.
He dropped down, hit the release—
Crash. The body hit the floor in chunks.
The rest of the Wretchels scattered.
He picked off the last two with controlled flick-throws of his spark knife. One to the eye. One to the throat.
[+1 Point ×4 – F-tier]
[+5 Points – E-tier Splicer]
He coughed, the blood obvious on his lip. But he wasn't done.
Another section of the HUD flickered open—thermal trace nearby. A warning.
Two E-tier Craw-Vultures were circling above the ruined roof of the station—scouting patterns erratic, wings twitching like bent metal fans.
They were scavengers—but territorial. And vicious.
He needed to time it right.
He climbed a busted antenna tower halfway up the wall and waited. When the wind shifted—one of them swooped.
He leapt from the tower mid-glide, slammed onto the creature's back, and buried his knife down into its central nerve cluster.
It shrieked—he rode it down into a heap of rusted ductwork.
The second vulture dove at him.
He dropped, rolled beneath a crumbling girder, and came up behind a power box. He slammed the override switch, and the box exploded—arcing into the vulture's chest as it passed overhead.
It spiraled out of control, crashed, and thrashed for a moment—then went still.
[+5 Points ×2 – E-tier]
He finally stopped. Breath ragged. Hands slick with grime and dried gore.
The HUD pinged again—the familiar chime.
[Personal Points – Emric Vale]
[Kills: 93 F-tier | 25 E-tier]
[Total: 218 Points]
[New Rank: #41]
Emric exhaled through a bloody grin.
It wasn't the top ten.
But it was close enough to make the top look down.
A faint smile tugged at his mouth.
Then a new ping echoed.
[Pulse Shift Detected – Deep Echo Signature]
[Warning: Tier-D Entity approaching local quadrant]
He looked up sharply.
The air around him had chilled, like a storm waiting to break.
He tapped his drone—it was static. His HUD flickered. The air was crawling with distortion.