I got robbed.
Curled up in the mud of a dark street corner like a shrimp that's been stripped of its shell, that was the only thought left in my head.
…
To be fair, I did make it down to the Lower City with scares but no catastrophe.
All I remember is tumbling off those enormous, rust-eaten pipes, my scream caught in my throat as weightlessness yanked at my gut. Then, in the instant of freefall, I dropped into a huge, pitch-black tube.
Not slammed into the pipe. Fell into it.
That pipe—at least a meter wide—had been torn open by something, leaving a gaping rupture. I just happened, or unluckily happened, to fall straight through that break.
The space vanished beneath my backside, and the next thing I knew I was sliding at high speed along a smooth inner wall coated in slimy moss and years of sediment. It felt like boarding a spiral waterslide to hell—endless, unstoppable. I completely lost my mind and could only let myself tumble and smash around in the darkness, howling like a pig being slaughtered.
All around me was the roar of rushing water—wash—wash—wash—and a nauseating stink of rot and fishy decay. Every so often, something slick and unknown would brush against my cheek.
I don't know how far I "whooshed" along that hell-slide. When a thread of light finally appeared ahead, I was ejected like a cannonball from another rupture in the pipe—
I looked around. It resembled an abandoned water supply station, or more likely a sewage treatment plant. Enormous, rust-crusted machines stood in silent ranks, blanketed in cobwebs and grime. Countless pipes of varying thickness coiled and stretched like steel boas, disappearing into deeper darkness.
I crawled out of that station drenched head to toe. Every layer of my clothes—inside and out—was soaked in filth, all of it mixed together into a stench strong enough to kill flies on contact.
The relief of surviving lasted less than three seconds before it was swallowed by something heavier: despair, and a numb, directionless confusion.
Where… am I?
I tried to understand where I'd landed, but my brain felt like an ancient PC being forced to run the newest AAA title. Faced with this hellscape, it simply froze and crashed.
This was… the base of Spirepeak City?
Where I stood was less a street than a bottomless, man-made canyon. I looked up and couldn't see the "ceiling" of that gigantic space I'd glimpsed when I left the catacombs. All there was was layer upon layer of dense "jungle"—metal, pipes, cables, and haphazard shack-houses jammed together so tightly that not a sliver of sky got through.
That rusted forest blotted out every trace of daylight and turned the world into permanent dusk. Lines and conduits hung from the "canopy" like rainforest vines, occasionally dripping liquids of every color imaginable—God knows what they were—pooling into bubbling puddles on the ground.
It made me think of Donigaton's "hive," but this place was clearly more cramped, more suffocating, and far darker.
Back then I'd been sealed inside thick power armour; beyond the visuals, the environment hadn't really reached me. Here, though, every sense I had was furiously protesting the world I'd been dropped into.
Smells came first, seizing my nasal passages with a density and aggression I'd never experienced before. The fishy bite of machine oil. The iron tang of corroding metal. The sour reek of rotting food. The swamp-gas stink of unprocessed waste fermenting. The sharp, eye-watering burn of unknown chemicals. And the sweat stench of countless bodies crammed together, unwashed for who knew how long—
All of it blended into a miasma so thick it almost felt solid, like an invisible hand clamping my throat. Every breath made me dizzy and nauseated.
Sound was torture too. There wasn't a single moment of quiet.
From somewhere far away came the slow, heavy grinding of gigantic gears, like a prehistoric beast savoring a mouthful of steel. From cheap loudspeakers came a loop of music so distorted it barely counted as a melody, followed by hoarse, hysterical preaching that sounded like dogs barking. Above me, steam pipes trembled and droned without pause, and pressure valves shrieked at random like sudden sirens. Not far away I could hear women crying, men cursing, and a constant, omnipresent coughing—ripping, desperate coughing—as if the entire city suffered from terminal lung disease.
Together it formed a symphony dedicated to decay and pain, one that never ended.
I began walking without purpose.
Or rather, shuffling.
The ground beneath my feet was a congealed black swamp. Near exposed steam lines where it was warmer, it softened into pools of tar-black asphalt, bubbling thickly. In colder areas it hardened into a cracked crust like crocodile hide. Garbage was piled everywhere—scrap parts, broken mechanisms, and filth I couldn't name. One step might land on something hard as iron, the next on something soft enough to feel like rotten flesh.
On both sides of the street, hideous, cancerous illegal construction had proliferated into a nightmare. Rows of mismatched dwellings—honeycomb-packed—looked like coffins hammered into the earth with a giant mallet. Some gaps between buildings were so narrow only one person could squeeze through sideways.
Their walls were patched together from rusted sheet metal, discarded cargo containers, stripped ship armour plating, even chunks of concrete slab. Years of soot and grease had condensed on the surface into a sickening, oily black. When my fingers brushed it by accident, the sensation was like touching the skin of an enormous eel—slick and cold.
Those buildings—leaning in different directions, all looking ready to collapse—were hooked and braced together by countless rusted pipes of every thickness and bundles of thick cables, like crippled giants propping each other up so they wouldn't fall. At the same time, they spread outward and upward like strangling vines in a tropical jungle, sprouting endless thin cables and ropes hung with ragged cloth, slicing what little sky remained into torn fragments.
"Bang—HISSS—!"
A huge steam pipe near me vented without warning, blasting out scalding white vapor and producing a thunderclap of sound. I flinched so hard my whole body jolted. I couldn't even imagine how anyone could sleep in a place like this.
I did pass a few "pedestrians," if you could still call them people.
They were sallow and skeletal, their eyes dull and dead, wearing clothing sewn from so many mismatched scraps that the original color was long gone. I saw one man with a long, rusted iron hook replacing his missing left hand. As he walked, the hook scraped the ground with a shrill, grating screech.
I saw a hunchbacked woman who looked like an elderly version of the servitors I'd seen before. She struggled under two huge iron buckets that dripped black liquid as she walked. With every step, a crude spinal assist—gears and pistons bolted into a terrifyingly primitive mechanical backbone on her back—groaned and squealed.
They all seemed busy with their own survival. None of them spared a second glance for an outsider like me.
In those muddy eyes—eyes that held no hope at all—I wasn't any different from a pile of stinking garbage by the roadside. We were both meaningless components of this filthy, rusted steel jungle, like fallen leaves and scraps of grass.
I also saw several half-naked children crouched by a foul sewage pit, playing some game I couldn't understand with scavenged metal parts. One girl, excited as if it were the best fun in the world, prodded a bloated dead rat floating on the surface with a sharpened iron rod—
A huge dead rat with three eyes.
When I approached, she looked up and studied me with an expression that mixed curiosity and wariness. The other children scattered like startled feral cats, melting into the shadows until only pairs of eyes remained, glittering in the dark.
Gaudy phosphor paints and flickering cheap light-tubes cut through the smoke and damp air, projecting epilepsy-like flashes of text and symbols. Even as a stranger here, I could guess with ease what lay behind those pink and suggestive purple signs: one of humanity's oldest professions.
A woman with heavy makeup—lips painted as if she'd just finished drinking blood—leaned against a rusted doorframe. She swept an empty glance over me, then exhaled a bored stream of thick yellow smoke.
Lights of every size and color blinked from the dense honeycomb of windows, porches, and rooftops. I don't know if I was just paranoid, but I couldn't shake the feeling that behind countless windows, in the alley shadows, there were innumerable eyes watching me from the darkness—
Some guessing at my origin. Some weighing my value. Some judging whether I was a threat.
Most of them simply watched the way you'd watch a fly that wandered into a spider's web, coldly waiting for something to happen.
I have never felt so alone.
(End of Chapter)
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