The sulfur smell hit him first. Sharp, chemical, familiar. His own trap, leaking into the dead air like a warning he couldn't read.
Then the footsteps.
Heavy. Deliberate. The scrape of metal on stone. The weapon dragging behind its owner like a promise.
Milo stood ten meters below, watching him with those empty, ancient eyes. The boy hadn't moved since the whistle. He didn't need to. He'd done his job. The rest of his pack would handle the rest.
Grigor's hand found the crude acid pouch. The stomach's membrane was slick, fragile. One wrong squeeze and he'd dissolve his own fingers.
'Three-on-one. The math is murder.'
Soren's voice drifted up from the fog like smoke. "I smell him, Milo. Our friend from last time."
A wet laugh echoed from somewhere to the left. Bruna. The vulgar muscle.
'Two flanking. One blocking the slope. No exits.'
He cataloged his resources.
'Acid pouch: one use, maybe two if I'm precise. Sulfur crystals: flammable, but no ignition source. Obsidian shard: sharp, brittle, close-range only.'
Against an experienced killer and two scavengers who'd already eaten him once. Who knew exactly how he tasted. Who knew exactly how he screamed.
'The math is murder. But math can be wrong. Math assumes rational actors. These people ate me for dinner.'
---
Milo tilted his head.
The boy didn't remember much. The Sacks had taken most of it—the drowning, the rebirth, the endless loop of dying and waking that erased memory like water erasing chalk.
But he remembered the kitchen.
Winter light through dirty windows. The kind of grey that made everything look like a photograph from before color was invented.
A woman's voice. High. Endless. Screaming about the bills, the bottles, the father who'd left. Screaming at the walls, at the empty cupboards, at the boy who sat too quiet in the corner.
She never stopped. Not when the money ran out. Not when the electricity died. Not when she started drinking the cleaning supplies because they were cheaper than vodka.
Milo's hands had been so small back then. The knife from the block, the one she used for chickens, had felt enormous in his grip.
He didn't think about it. He just wanted the noise to stop.
And then it did.
The silence was the most beautiful thing he'd ever heard. The warmth of blood on linoleum, soaking between his bare toes. Her eyes still open, but finally, finally quiet.
He sat beside her for a long time. Hours, maybe. He didn't feel bad.
He didn't feel anything.
That was the day he stopped speaking.
---
Milo blinked. The memory dissolved like fog.
He was watching the new one, the man on the slope. The one who smelled like chemicals and desperation. Milo had seen that look before. The calculation. The weighing of odds.
Milo tilted his head, waiting for the man to run. They always ran.
---
Grigor's fingers tightened on the acid pouch.
Two options.
'FLIGHT: Scale the scree. Lose them in the upper corridors. Survive. Reset.'
He'd done it before. On Earth, every time the job got complicated, he stepped back. Not my problem. Not worth the risk. The pay wasn't good enough. He'd walked away from a dozen scenes where intervention might have saved someone.
He'd walked away from the woman not six hours ago.
'FIGHT: Use the acid. The shard. Become something other than prey.'
The whisper came then. Faint. A pressure in his chest, behind his sternum, like a second heartbeat trying to sync with his own.
'Clean it.'
He didn't know what it meant. But he knew what he wasn't going to do.
He wasn't going to run again.
'Screw the math.'
---
Bruna came from the left, laughing. Her teeth were brown with old blood. "Look at him! Naked as the day he hatched—"
Grigor threw the acid.
The pouch burst on impact, spattering across her face in an arc of smoking yellow. The biological acid wasn't industrial-grade, he'd estimated its pH at roughly 1.5, somewhat stronger than gastric fluid, but it was enough.
Bruna's laughter became a scream.
She clawed at her eyes, stumbling, crashing into a stone outcrop. The smell of burning meat joined the sulfur tang in the air.
'One down. Two seconds bought.'
Soren didn't hesitate. The old farmer charged up the scree, the hooked rebar swinging in a wide arc. Not wild. Controlled. The motion of someone who'd killed a thousand cattle and never wasted a stroke.
Grigor threw himself sideways.
The weapon whistled past his skull. Close enough to feel the displaced air. Close enough to hear the rust scraping stone where his head had been a heartbeat ago.
'A hand's width from death.'
He rolled, scrabbling for purchase on the loose rock. His knee hit a sharp edge. Pain flared, hot and immediate. Blood on stone.
Soren was already recovering, bringing the instrument of violence around for another swing.
'Milo.'
The boy was coming. Silent. Fast. Flanking from below, bone-blade raised.
And Grigor remembered.
The hamstrings. That's the region Milo aimed last time. In the first hunt, the boy had cut his tendons from behind, collapsing him for the slaughter.
'Not this time.'
He pivoted, ignoring the scream of his torn knee, and caught Milo's strike mid-swing. The bone-blade scraped across his forearm. Skin parted, blood welled. But he was already moving, driving the obsidian shard forward.
The volcanic glass bit into Milo's forearm. Second blood drawn in Hell.
Milo recoiled.
Not in pain. Something else. The boy stared at the wound—at the blood running down his wrist, dripping onto the grey stone—with an expression Grigor couldn't read.
'Surprise?'
As if he'd never seen his own blood before.
'But that is impossible...'
---
Soren stopped.
The old farmer stood three meters away, his weapon raised, breathing hard. His eyes moved from Bruna, still screaming, clawing at her melted face, to Milo, staring at his wound like a broken toy, to Grigor, bleeding, shaking, but standing.
Soren spat.
"You're not worth the cost." A pause. His jaw worked, chewing on the words like tobacco. "Today."
He grabbed Bruna by the collar and dragged her toward the fog. Milo followed after a long moment, still staring at the cut on his arm.
The Pack retreated.
---
Grigor stood on the scree slope, alone.
His knee was screaming. His forearm was slick with blood, Milo's and his own. The acid pouch was empty. The obsidian shard was cracked, the edge dulled from the single strike.
He'd won.
'No. Not won. Survived.'
But it was the first time in Hell that something had run from him instead of the other way around.
He looked down at his hands. Trembling. Covered in blood and acid residue. The phantom sensation of the silver cat statue pulsed in his palm, a souvenir that no longer existed, anchoring him to a life that no longer mattered.
The whisper came again. Louder now. A pressure in his chest that felt less like a heartbeat and more like a voice.
'Clean it.'
Grigor didn't know what it meant.
But something in him was waking up.