The stench of misery was replaced by the acrid scent of ozone and steam as Wren launched her attack.
She was a furious blur of rags and rebar, leaping onto the slick, moss-covered tunnel wall to gain leverage.
She aimed and drove her spear toward the convulsing, purple core of the weeping beast, aiming for the mangled silver breastplate that held the creature together.
The monster, reeling from Zane's psychic strike of hope, didn't see the attack coming.
Schluk!
The sharpened rebar spear sank deep into the corrosive, fleshy matter that leaked from the broken Exterminator armour.
The creature didn't scream. It shrieked with a deafening, physical sound that hammered the tunnel walls and made Zane clutch his head.
The massive mass of tentacles and muscle thrashed violently, whipping through the sewage and tearing away large chunks of the stone walkway.
Wren, however, was already moving, using the monster's momentum to dislodge her spear and spring back.
She landed lightly next to Zane, her chest heaving.
"Fucking pathetic!" Wren spat, wiping a streak of black sewage from her cheek. "All that noise for a goddamn whimper."
Zane was still weak, reeling from the backlash of using his Empathy as a weapon. He checked his internal UI.
ESSENCE: 0.1% (DEPLETED)
TIME REMAINING: T-minus 0:53:05...
"It's not whining, it's crying," Zane corrected, pushing himself to his feet. "You broke the psychic shield, but you didn't kill it. The despair is shattered, but the physical armour is still too dense."
Wren glanced at him, her eyes sharp. "I know. My spear is rebar, not Spire-steel. It needs a killing blow, and I can't get past that damn exoskeleton."
The monster, realizing the direct psychic attack was over, slowly began to reform.
Its tentacles stopped thrashing and began creeping toward them, slick with foul, dark fluid.
[...I... HATE... THE... LIGHT... I... AM... SUFFERING...]
The thought-wave was back, but weaker, less coherent. The hope-poison had dulled its power.
"It's recovering," Zane said. "The despair is leaking out, but it's not dying fast enough. I need to hit the core again. I need to pry it open."
"You want to talk to it again?" Wren's face twisted in disbelief. "You'll just save the miserable fucker and we'll both die of starvation!"
"No," Zane muttered, feeling the logic settle into his mind. "My power works best on the edge. Hope breaks despair, but there's no hope in that thing. It just is misery. I'll hit it with the ultimate truth, the one that makes everyone quit. Classic, It doesn't matter."
Wren gave him a hard, feral grin. "Now you're talking like a Stain. You have five seconds, you vulture. Then I'm going for its neck."
Then she mouthed, "We're doomed."
Zane didn't wait.
He channelled the last sliver of Essence in his battery, focusing his Whispers on the monster's core.
"Listen to me, you pathetic, crying waste of steel," Zane projected, pouring his full voice and cynical energy into the thought. "You are not a prison. You are not a monster. You are just a piece of trash that failed to die."
The monster shuddered. Its tentacles froze mid-creep.
"Your state of despair is useless," Zane continued, walking closer to the massive creature. "Your suffering is irrelevant. The Plague-Lord didn't choose you—he dumped you. The Exterminators didn't kill you—they abandoned you. You are a discarded failure, and you're guarding a tomb no one remembers."
Zane spat into the rushing water. "There is no purpose here. There is no glorious suffering. You are nothing but a forgotten, slimy nuisance that stinks up the river. And you know what? No one gives a flying fuck."
The creature's massive, corroded metal form began to shake.
[...NUISANCE... FAILED... TRASH... NO... P-P-PURPOSE... FUUUUCK...]
No Shit!
The psychic agony wasn't shattered this time. It became... inverted.
The realization of its ultimate, cosmic meaninglessness was an agony far worse than its grief.
The creature broke.
Its huge metallic exoskeleton, the remnants of the Exterminator armour, began to buckle inward.
The slimy tentacles tore themselves away from the core. The entire mountain of misery began to collapse, consuming itself.
"The core!" Zane screamed, his own body convulsing from the effort of the attack. "Wren, the core!"
Wren didn't hesitate. She didn't pause to admire his work.
She saw the collapse and charged, her eyes glittering with savage focus.
She sprang off a pipe and plunged her rebar spear with brutal, focused strength.
She drove the weapon through the collapsing silver breastplate, piercing the weakened, rotting flesh beneath.
Wren didn't just stab it. She twisted the spear, grinding the rebar against the monster's last, dying nerve centres.
The monster went silent.
The huge mass of slime and steel slumped, falling forward into the sewage with a monumental SPLASH that sent a cold wave of filth over Zane.
The physical body was dead.
And then, the universe went quiet.
There was no sound, no shock, and no torrent.
The Soul Essence that poured from the dead monster wasn't a flare or an explosion.
It was a vast, cold, unending river.
The core of the monster—the sheer, concentrated mass of its uselessness and grief—was pure Essence. It had been storing the despair of the Grave-Warren for decades, and now, that dam was broken.
Zane's black void of a stomach didn't inhale; it opened.
The Essence flowed into him—cold, smooth, and immense. It tasted like ancient sorrow, eternal boredom, and the profound lack of meaning.
It was the deepest, richest fuel he had ever consumed.
GAAH!
He didn't scream in pain but in absolute, cosmic satiation.
His UI flashed immediately.
REAPER INTERFACE
USER: ZANE (INTERN, SECTOR 7-G)
STATUS: SATED (EXCESS)
ESSENCE: 100% (FULL)
SKILLS:
Skill Name: UMBRAL CLOAK | Type: Drain/Active | Description: Burn stored Essence to fully conceal the user in Shadow. | Cost: 5% per minute. |
SKILL NAME:SOUL SIPHON…
SKILL NAME:WHISPERS OF DESPAIR
(NEW)
Skill Name: GRIEF SIGHT | Type: Active | Description: See recent emotional echoes at a death site. | Range: 1km.
Zane stumbled, dizzy with power.
The exhaustion and the jitters from the Scraps-Shine were instantly gone.
His vision was sharper than before.
He could feel the cold, heavy stone of Essences in his gut—a full battery.
Wren, ignoring him completely, was already wading into the sewage.
She was pulling her spear free and looking for something in the ruins of the monster.
"You're full," Wren stated, without looking up. "I can smell the waste heat coming off you, Stain. Get to work. The feast is open."
She pointed her rebar spear at the massive, flooded tunnel opening behind where the creature had been rooted. "That's the Grave-Warren. Go get your meal. And I'm getting my payment."
Zane walked to the monster's corpse, the rush of power making him feel invincible.
He looked at the creature, and as his new skill, Grief Sight, activated, he saw it.
He saw the psychic echo of the monster's final, devastating thought—a loop of pure, existential despair centred on a single, gleaming, silver box lodged near the core of the broken Exterminator armour.
"What are you looking for?" Zane asked, his voice calm and solid.
Wren ignored him, wrestling with a corroded chain. "Its nest. They always hoard."
"A small, silver box?" Zane offered.
Wren froze. She looked up at him, her eyes wide with shock.
"How the fuck did you know that?"
Zane simply gestured at the dead creature with a shadow-wreathed hand. "I just ate the bastard. I get its memo and stuff. Go dig it out."
He took a final, deep breath.
The raw, ancient screaming of the trapped souls in the Grave-Warren was now a deafening, constant roar in his mind, and it pulled at him like a tide.
He had a full battery. He had a map.
He was going to feast.