The Black Garden: Chapter 3

The only way down was the ramp. There was no doubt in my mind that the necromass of the demon was in there, underground. The surface of the concrete had been scoured, all signs of life burned away. No moss, no dirt, no graffiti. The faint scrape of my boots on the smooth surface seemed to echo too loudly against the walls. And as I passed under the rusted boom-gate, I smelled it: a harsh, metallic chemical odor. Some hunters described the Abyssal odor like the smell of a crack pipe or automotive coolant. It was actually potassium permanganate, an antiseptic, concentrated to dangerous levels. Manifest demons secreted the deep violet-black substance as a digestive enzyme, oxidizing and sterilizing the world around them.

I padded down the ramp smoothly, the sword held back along my arm. The chemical odor grew stifling in the dark confines of the basement level. There was a story here: the underground section of the parking lot had been completed, but the foundation was splitting apart in places as one half of the building sheared down toward a small sinkhole. A trail of animal corpses led over to the hole, several of them hanging partway into it. Dogs, mostly, the yellowish spitz mutts we called nureongi in Korea. Like the humans who had been drained and embalmed, these bodies were untouched by decay, save for where the demon’s permanganate infusions had burned their eyes and assholes. As I warily approached the nearest ones, a creeping sensation crawled like spiders up the back of my neck. Abyss-presence. Strong abyss-presence.

The dead animals would have been the first victims of the Violator, soon after it had spawned out of its breach. The stillness of the corpses felt wrong, too deliberate, like they were waiting. I strode over to them, and one by one, I de-limbed them. The schick of the Long Hunt slicing through bloodless flesh and the dull thump of canine heads hitting the floor reverberated hollowly in the cavernous space. Demon-killed corpses had a nasty habit of waking back up, and the entropic energy pooling in this place set my teeth on edge.

The gaping cracks in the foundation explained the abandonment. South Korean building standards had improved a lot by this point in the country’s history, but even as late as the early 2000s, the regulations had been… questionable. This structure had been one of those questionable projects, left to rot once they discovered they were building on sand. I kicked a few of the bodies away and approached the hole. The opening was small, only about as wide as my shoulders, but the concrete under my feet had a hollow sound and almost felt… bouncy.

The crawling sensation slid down the hollow of my spine. There were not that many things that frightened me, but that springy, fragile feeling under my feet made every muscle in my body tense. The hole in the floor was like the punctum of an abscess, the pinpoint hole that drained the well of pus underneath.

Okay, that was far enough. I took a careful step back. Then another. I was staring at the entry to a trapdoor spider's lair. I’d made the right call by looping in my team: we needed climbing gear and anti-grav, people to watch the boundaries of the mission site, and lots and lots of guns.

A brief shudder through the floor was the only warning before the hole exploded outward, blasting a jagged starburst of shattered concrete and rebar and thick, thorny black tentacles. The first tendril lashed out fast—too fast—and wrapped around my left leg with the screech of claws against nanoweave. A second snared my right wrist, pulling taut with unnatural strength.

“Shit!” I twisted away as a third tentacle lunged for my torso, briefly deafened by the crack of splitting concrete. I brought the sword down and sheared both tentacles apart, the Long Hunt cutting clean through mutated, sinewy flesh. The severed piece spasmed violently, spraying black ichor into the air while the rest slithered back into the hole. The tentacle around my leg tightened like a vice, yanking me off my feet. My body slammed onto the floor, knocking the air from my lungs in a sharp gasp. I lashed out with the Long Hunt, twisting mid-pull to slice at the one constricting my leg. The blade caught it at an angle, and with a sick, rubbery sound, it severed just above my knee. The rest of the limb recoiled like a snake, writhing and snapping against the collapsing floor.

The entire building was folding into itself, sucking me down into the widening sinkhole. I boosted my reflexes and strength, holding my breath against billowing clouds of dust, and leaped back. Two more tentacles shot out of the hole, snapping around my waist and foot before I could find purchase. The thing beneath the floor wanted me down there. Right now.

The concrete beneath me gave another groan, louder this time, as fractures spread outward in jagged lines across the floor and the ceiling swayed toward the spreading chasm. It was going to fall right on top of us, the whole fucking building. I twisted in the monster’s grip, forcing the edge of the Long Hunt against the tentacle crushing my ribs. With a snarl, I pushed hard, slicing through the thick cord of muscle and ichor. The pressure around my torso released instantly, and I dropped hard onto my hands and knees. The ichor hissed and spat where it hit my exposed skin.

I hit my implants to boost my nervous system, sharpening my senses to superhuman levels as the floor liquified under my hands. The world tilted, and then I was falling. Concrete and debris thundered down around me in slow motion, smashing more thick tendrils lashing out from the dark below. I cut my way through: the Long Hunt sliced through stone and flesh alike, spitting chunks of concrete and briefly lighting the dim orange darkness with sparks of diamond on stone. Tsariel was with me, the air around me a whirlwind of barely-seen, abstract blades that reduced the collapsing structure to dust and slowed our descent. A bit. I hit the ground in a roll, tumbling just ahead of a rain of debris. Shards of concrete crashed around me in the gloom, some of them larger than cars. I spun up to my feet; behind me, I caught a glimpse of elephant-sized, bestial shapes in the haze of dust and flickering fluorescent lights: tentacles lashing, skeletal jaws gaped in feral screams as they vanished under a waterfall of rubble.

Overhead, the parking lot gave a final, thunderous groan as it collapsed entirely.

"FUCKING WHOREBITCH MOTHERFUCKER-!" I stumbled off into a woozy sprint as the tunnel began to crush in behind me. The air was thick with dust and heat, choking my lungs. I put my head down, kept my eyes forward, and ran. Metal screeched and electricity spat behind me, the lights winking out as they were smashed and buried. There were smaller tunnels to my right, but I didn't dare turn down any of them until the world stopped shaking. When the last deep-bodied crunch had stopped reverberating through the earth, I came to a sliding stop against the edge of a tiled train platform, hacking up dust and congealed ichor. My whole body burned. I was probably going to get mesothelioma... but I was alive.

Once my eyes cleared and my breathing had settled to a thick, raspy wheeze, I looked down at the sword that was once again in my hand. Then I turned back to the wreckage. Something massive lay crushed beneath the rubble: a hulking, quadrupedal torso, half-crumpled under the weight of the collapse. Its thick, muscular limbs ended in claws like curved knives, and its head… or what was left of it… was a jagged mess of teeth and ruined chitin. The corpse was still reaching for me, jaws gaping to reveal a vivid blue mouth lined with shearing, inward-facing spines.

It took me a moment to register what I was looking at.

“Dominators,” I muttered. "It's already spawning Dominators. SEER... you done fucked up."

Dominators were a Chemah-class demon, bestial shock troops produced by mature Violators. Tiredly, I trudged over to the platform and climbed up, finding a place to sit and regather as reality set in. We had been completely wrong about this whole mission. This wasn’t a baby Violator trying to establish itself in Seoul. It was a mature demon, and it had fooled a time-traveling AI that could usually model and plan for immensely complicated missions by doing something completely unprecedented for a demon of its type. It had acted as if it were weak.

Violators and other demons had been profiled by the Abyssal Response Fleet for hundreds of years. There was not a single record of any Avon-class, like a Violator, even briefly suspending its overwhelming narcissism to pretend to be something lesser than it was. I took a moment to piece together the events and the evidence… and found myself feeling grimly impressed.

“Clever girl.” I sighed and leaned my head back against the wall, taking the chance to regenerate. Bruises spread, darkened, then rapidly shrunk and faded to yellow as my body began to rapidly catabolize blood and plasma. Cuts sealed, torn muscle fibers squirmed with tiny electric shocks as they reached for one another and reconnected. A few minutes, and the superficial injuries were gone. But there were issues. I had burned thousands of calories to reach this point, transmuting fat into fuel for magic, and I was now sitting at about 8% bodyfat. It was acceptable, but I had very little leeway to convert more fat for energy. More urgently, my cells were screaming for water and electrolytes. If I didn't get them, I would end up like the other men - dead of rhabdomyolysis or muscle breakdown or cardiac arrest.

I reached up and pulled the KITTEN collar off, throwing it aside, and cracked my eyes to peer around the remains of the tunnel. It looked like a subway tunnel without rails. There were rumored to be many 'ghost stations' like this, even downtown in places like Gangnam and Seocho. In the years following the hot phase of the Korean War, the military dictatorship that ruled South Korea in the sixties constructed dozens of bomb shelters under cities all over the country. When the north continued to do nothing but shake their fists and fart in our direction across the DMZ, some of those bomb shelters were rebuilt into subway stations. Others, like this one, were left sealed and abandoned under the city, only to be rediscovered by unfortunate property developers.

"Fannntastic. Loving this." I willfully burned a few more calories to slip into lifesight. Most of the inorganic dust clouding the air vanished, leaving only a hanging cloud of biosignatures: bacteria, yeasts, fungi, the extremophiles the Violator had not been able to kill. I zoomed in on some of the fungi. It was S. chartarum, more commonly known as black mold. It was one of my best friends in the multiverse.

I picked myself up and padded quietly into the darkness, trying not to breathe too deeply. The floating sea of microorganisms parted like a veil as I paced around, searching for the places where the black mold mycotoxins seemed thickest. The cloud led me down one of the side passages, to a metal door slightly inset into the tiled wall. It was welded shut with mold and lime deposits - a good sign. I slashed the steel apart with several precise, confident blows, stepping through as soon as the heat had dissipated.

It was a signal room. There were old metal workstations here, but none of the equipment had been installed... except for the fire suppression system. A lime stalactite had grown over the sprinkler outlet on the ceiling, dripping a constant stream of water onto the floor. Any carpet had long since decayed, eaten by the thriving colony of mold that had replaced it.

"Wahh... look at you! You're so healthy!" I cooed at the highly toxic sprawl of green-black blotches infesting the drywall.

Dead World-certified Hunters learned to love mold and bugs. On planets scoured by nuclear fire or chemically and energetically sterilized by demonic armies, the presence of fungi and insects was a miracle, a testament to the resilience of life and living things. Holding my breath, I carefully picked my way across and began to gulp at the trickle of water. It was cold and slightly metallic, and like every time I had been severely dehydrated, it was the absolute best thing I had ever tasted. I left the room to breathe, then went back in to drink and drink until I no longer felt like death warmed over. Then I went back into the hall, and with a defiant stare at the pitch darkness ahead of me, I summoned my ATLAS display and pinged the Fetch Quest.

A low rumbling rolled through the station from somewhere not too far away.

"COMMS, we got a black swan on our hands," I thought quickly and precisely as soon as I made the link. “I scouted as ordered and a bunch of fucking Dominators showed up and tried to rip my shit. The main structure has collapsed and I’m trapped underground. Is the Site Control Team down yet?”

“Can confirm, SCT-02 is on site under the holomask, waiting for the terrain to stabilize. The rest of DWO-6 is geared up and about to port down. Status?”

“Alive and whole. I got beaten up from the fall and I’m running a little lean, but I've still got a few thousand calories in the tank before I shrivel up and die. You need to tell AbyssNex that SEER's predictive model failed this operation. This Violator, it wasn't just eating twinks and throwing the wrappers out on the street. It was selectively murdering and staging those corpses in expectation they would be found, and that eventually the ABF would show up. This thing knows about us. It knows our S.O.P and it was able to skew the precog report by a mile. It set up the entry to its lair as a mantrap."

“... Roger that, Zealot. Stand-by." Digger couldn't keep the surprise and concern out of his voice.

There was a long pause on the line. Then a different, deeper, sonorous voice replied. "CEIDR Nexus, copy."

Another: this one light, sexless, heavily synthesized, speaking Confluence Standard. "Taga Avaya Nexus. You are heard."

The line flicked back to the Fetch Quest, and Digger's voice came through again. "Zealot, find a dead zone and shelter in place."

“No. Fuck that. If I don’t move, I’ll die.” There was another rumble, then the howls of Dominators to my left. They were on the other side of the maintenance passage, getting closer. “I’ll fight and gather as much information as I can."

"Got it. Cavalry’s on the way." Digger sounded grim as he cut the line.

I rolled my shoulders and spat a gob of congealed dust to the side. There was no way my team would make it in time. At a minimum, they would have to find a different point of entry; there was a decent chance they wouldn’t find one and would have to tunnel in. Which really only left me with one question.

Was I a bad enough dude to kill everything in this fucking train station?

A wild Ahab grin spread over my mouth. The ground shook as the first of the Dominators closed on my position. I slid one foot back and bent my other knee forward, bringing the sword around in a graceful arc.

'I am with you, hunter.' Tsariel's presence within me was firm, but focused.

‘Front toward enemy.’

Next chapter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/black-garden-4-118203598