The smell hit them first.
Ammonia. Rotting meat. Unwashed skin.
It drafted up from the tunnel mouth like the breath of a corpse.
"Shields!" Decimus roared.
The dozen surviving soldiers of the mine's garrison locked their shields. It was a pathetic wall—plywood reinforced with scrap metal, held by starving men. But it was a line.
Marcus stood behind them. Narcissus loomed to his right, a glowing blue lighthouse in the gloom.
Click-hiss-click.
The sound grew louder. It sounded like wet feet slapping on stone.
"Hold!" Marcus ordered.
Shadows detached themselves from the darkness.
They spilled into the torchlight.
They were human. Once.
Now, they were Scavs.
Their skin was translucent pale, veined with angry purple chemical burns. Their limbs were too long, stretched by malnutrition and mutation. Their eyes were milky white orbs—blind from living in the absolute dark.
They didn't run. They scuttled. On all fours, like spiders made of meat.
"Gods save us," a soldier whimpered.
"The gods are gone," Marcus snapped. "Kill them!"
The first wave hit the shield wall.
CRASH.
It wasn't the impact of soldiers. It was the frenzy of animals.
The Scavs threw themselves at the wood. They clawed with fingernails that had hardened into black talons. They bit the rims of the shields with jagged, yellow teeth.
"Push!" Decimus screamed, driving his spear into a pale chest.
Black blood sprayed. The Scav shrieked—a sound that pierced the eardrums—but it didn't stop. It climbed up the spear shaft, snapping its jaws at Decimus's face.
"Narcissus!" Marcus yelled.
The giant moved.
He stepped over the shield line.
He didn't use a weapon. He used mass.
He grabbed a Scav by its ankle. He swung it like a club.
CRUNCH.
He smashed the mutant into three others. Bones snapped. Bodies flew backward into the dark.
The Scavs recoiled from him. Not from the blow, but from the light.
"They hate the light!" Galen shouted from the rear, throwing a bottle of oil. "Their eyes are sensitive!"
A Scav lunged at Narcissus. It latched onto his chest, trying to bite the blue sun burning there.
ZAP.
The mutant convulsed. The unshielded heat of the Fusion Core cooked its face instantly. It fell back, smoking.
But there were too many.
They poured out of the tunnel like floodwater. Fifty. A hundred. They crawled over the walls, across the ceiling, bypassing the shield wall entirely.
One dropped from the roof. It landed on a soldier's back.
"Get it off!" the man screamed.
The Scav buried its teeth in his neck. A spray of arterial red painted the floor.
"Break formation!" Marcus ordered. "Circle up! Back to back!"
He drew the Vibro-Knife.
A Scav lunged at him.
Marcus didn't swing. He thrust.
The humming blade met the mutant's ribs. It didn't stop. It slid through bone, lung, and spine effortlessly.
The Scav went limp.
Marcus kicked it off.
Another one. Low. Going for his legs.
Marcus slashed downward. The Vibro-Blade severed the creature's arm at the elbow.
The Scav shrieked and retreated, clutching the stump.
[THREAT DETECTED: ALPHA UNIT INBOUND]
The UI flashed red in Marcus's mind.
The floor shook.
The horde of small Scavs parted. They chattered excitedly, backing away to the walls.
Something heavy was walking up the tunnel.
It stepped into the light.
It was seven feet tall. A slab of mutated muscle and tumorous growth.
The Foreman.
Its skin was thick and gray, calloused like rhinoceros hide. One of its arms ended in a stump fused with a heavy iron pickaxe. The metal had grown into the bone.
It had no eyes at all. Just a mouth full of needle teeth.
It sniffed the air. It smelled the blood.
It smelled Marcus.
It roared. A sound that shook dust from the ceiling.
"Iron Dog!" Marcus yelled. "Left flank!"
Narcissus charged. He lowered his ceramic-plated shoulder.
He slammed into the Foreman.
BOOM.
It was like two bulls colliding.
The Foreman staggered back, but didn't fall. It swung the pickaxe-arm.
Narcissus caught the blow on his new vambrace.
CLANG.
The ceramic held, but the force drove Narcissus to one knee. The stone floor cracked under him.
The Foreman raised the pickaxe for a killing blow.
"Hey!"
Marcus sprinted. He picked up a discarded torch from the floor.
He threw it.
It hit the Foreman in the face.
The mutant roared in pain, thrashing blindly. Fire singed its sensitive skin.
It turned toward Marcus. It tracked the sound of his breathing.
It charged.
"Marcus!" Lucilla screamed from the rear.
Marcus stood his ground. He held the Vibro-Knife in a reverse grip.
The Foreman swung the pickaxe. A horizontal slash meant to cut Marcus in half.
Marcus dropped.
He slid on the blood-slicked floor.
He went under the swing. The wind of the weapon ruffled his hair.
He popped up inside the Foreman's guard.
He drove the Vibro-Knife up.
Under the chin. Into the brain.
HUMMM-CRUNCH.
The blade sank to the hilt.
The Foreman froze. Its arms went rigid.
Marcus twisted the blade.
The creature spasmed. Then, slowly, like a felled tree, it tipped backward.
It hit the ground with a heavy thud.
Silence fell over the chamber.
The lesser Scavs stopped chattering. They heard their leader fall. They smelled the change in the air.
One of them hissed. It backed away.
Then another.
Then the whole pack turned and scrambled back into the darkness, screeching in defeat.
Marcus stood over the corpse. He was covered in black mutant blood. His chest heaved.
He pulled the knife free. He wiped it on the Foreman's gray skin.
He turned to the refugees.
They were staring at him. Decimus. Varro. The women in the back.
They weren't looking at a survivor anymore. They were looking at a predator.
Marcus walked to a crate and climbed on top of it.
"The surface is dead," Marcus said. His voice was calm, cutting through the adrenaline. "The deep is death."
He pointed at the floor.
"We live in the middle. We are the iron in the rock."
He looked at Varro.
"You wanted to know why I brought the giant?" Marcus asked. "This is why. Because monsters hunt in the dark. And you need a bigger monster to kill them."
Varro lowered his head. He dropped his improvised club.
"We are with you, Caesar," Varro whispered.
"Good," Marcus said.
He pointed his knife down the tunnel.
"Because we aren't done. We don't just defend this hole. Tomorrow, we go down there. We clear the nest. We take the mine back."
"Marcus."
Lucilla's voice. Urgent.
She ran up to him, clutching the datapad.
"The signal," she said breathlessly. "I tracked it during the fight."
"Vane?" Marcus asked, stepping down.
"No," she said. She showed him the screen. A frequency wave pulsed steadily. "It's not coming from the sky. It's coming from below."
"Below?"
"Deep," she said. "Miles down. In the lowest shafts where the mutants came from."
"What is it?"
"It's a drilling telemetry signal," Lucilla said. Her face was pale. "Marcus... the Board isn't just bombing us from orbit. They already have a team underground."
Marcus looked at the dark tunnel again.
The mutants weren't just living down there. They were fleeing something.
"They're drilling for the core," Marcus realized. "From the inside."
He sheathed the knife.
"Galen!" Marcus shouted.
The physician looked up from bandaging a soldier.
"Pack your kit," Marcus said. "We're going on a dungeon crawl."
[QUEST UPDATED: THE HOLLOW EARTH]
[OBJECTIVE: LOCATE AND DESTROY THE DRILL]
The UI faded. Marcus smiled.
"Let's see what else Vane is hiding in the dark."