One night, Sen hung around the cave's mouth, gazing at the far-off, jagged plateaus.
It'd been about twenty-five cycles since he was holed up and claimed this shithole.
Every day was the same tired routine. Hunt, eat, shit, then sleep. That was all there was to it.
He could nanny his resources and scrape by like a rat in this rock for years—grow old, get weak, and eventually become food for the very same things he hunted.
No chance in hell. He would rather take a bullet to the head than wasting away.
He had a purpose burned into his skull. He was going to see what this world had to offer. What to find. What to take. Survival was the price of admission, but dominance was the goal.
He wasn't gonna wait for anything.
His mind settled in the cold silence, under the light of the wrong stars as he turned his back on the canyon mouth and walked back into the glowing, blue-green guts of the cave. He'd mapped the main arteries in his head—a rough sketch for a better route.
Most were dead ends or holes too small for a man to squeeze through. But one... one was different. A wide cavernous tunnel that sloped down. The air felt heavy, carrying a faint, mineral stench he hadn't smelled before. That was the route.
He spent the next few hours prepping his gear. Cooked the last of his lizard meat and packed the tough-as-leather jerky into a crude hide pouch. Sharpened his flint knife and the tips of a half-dozen spears he'd made from a different glowing plant's hard stalks.
He filled his waterskin to the brim and didn't look back. The cavern had served its purpose. Now, it was just a place he used to piss and shit in.
He entered the chosen tunnel. The glow-flora still lit the way for the first few miles: rough stone walls, the scuttling of iridescent beetles, the drip of water.
But as he pressed on, the tunnel swallowed him. It widened, the ceiling soaring into an oppressive blackness high above his head.
Huge cracks and fissures tore through the walls, some wide enough to walk into. He peered into one—it connected to a parallel system of tunnels, an old, complex network riddling the planet's crust. The air grew thick, heavy with the smell of ozone and damp, ancient earth.
For an entire cycle, he walked. The only sounds were the scuff of his boots and the pounding of his own heart. He didn't stop and just kept moving, a solitary bastard in a world of stone and dim light.
After what felt like a goddamn forever, the tunnel opened.
The cavern was so vast it felt like a piece of the night sky got tossed underground.
It was a stone graveyard—stalagmites and stalactites met, forming colossal, gnarled columns that held up a ceiling lost in shadow.
And there, in the center, he heard it. A wet, rhythmic tearing. A crunching of bone.
He stopped dead.
Dimly lit by the distant glow-flora was a scene of primordial slaughter.
A giant centipede, each segment the size of an oil drum, was methodically ripping apart a carcass as large as a crocodile. Its movements were silent, fluid, and utterly terrifying.
Abandoning all thought of fleeing, he snatched a loose metallic-sounding rock, he hurled it deep into the cavern to his left.
As the clatter echoed off the far wall, the creature's head, a nightmare of twitching antennae and dripping mandibles, swiveled toward the sound.
In that instant, Sen launched his first spear.
It wasn't aimed to kill, but to wound.
The hardened tip punched through the chitinous plate on its foremost segment with a sharp crack.
Its head snapped back toward Sen, dozens of obsidian eyes locking onto him.
With a chilling burst of speed, it charged.
Sen held his ground, another spear braced. He waited until the last possible second, then hurled it directly at the creature's maw before diving aside.
The spear vanished into the fleshy tissue of its mouth, but the centipede barely slowed. It thundered past, its countless legs churning the ground like pistons.
As it whipped its body around to attack again, Sen charged its flank. He drove his third spear with all his strength into the soft, exposed joint between two segments.
The creature convulsed, a single, violent shudder that sent Sen stumbling back. One of its rearmost legs lashed out like a whip, catching him in the ribs.
The impact was a white-hot spike of agony and it threw him across the cavern floor.
He landed hard, his ribcage ringing violently, the world spinning. Through the pain, he saw the centipede searching for him, its antennae tasting the air. He rose slowly, his chest screaming in protest. He was out of spears.
Silent, he stalked the perimeter of the cavern as the creature grew more agitated. When its head was turned, Sen broke into a dead sprint. He didn't run at it, he ran alongside it, matching its pace before leaping, grabbing onto the spear still embedded in its side and hauling himself onto its back.
He was on the beast.
It thrashed, slamming its body against the stone columns, trying to scrape him off. Sen held on, pulling his flint knife.
He began to hack at the joint where its head met its body, not cutting, but grinding, sawing through the thick shell. Chitin splintered. Ichor sprayed. The knife blade, never meant for this abuse, snapped, the shard skittering away into the darkness.
Unarmed, Sen stared at the mangled flesh. As the centipede's head reared back, trying to bite at its own body to get him, he drove his fist into the wound.
The sound was not of flesh hitting flesh. It was the sickening, deep thump of rock striking steel. The force of the blow, backed by titanium-laced bone, traveled through the creature's body like a shockwave.
It shuddered violently. He hit it again. And again. Each impact was a dull explosion of force, shattering the internal structure, turning the wound into a gaping crater of ruined flesh.
The centipede's frenzied movements became sluggish. Its legs faltered.
With one final, desperate blow, Sen felt something vital give way deep inside the creature. It collapsed, its immense weight crashing to the cavern floor, throwing Sen clear.
He landed on his back, the impact knocking the last of the air from his lungs.
He lay there, gasping, staring up at the blackness, all four limbs on the ground, head bowed, breathing heavily as the silence of the ancient cavern settled around him once more.
The air tasted like ozone and spent adrenaline. It took a full minute for the white noise in his skull to drain away, replaced by the dull, rhythmic throb from his ribs. They felt like a sack of loose, hot rocks. He pushed himself up onto his knees.
The first thing he did was confirm the kill.
The giant centipede was a colossal wreck of segmented armor and raw, leaking flesh. It hadn't died easily. Its legs were twitching, a final, meaningless spasm of the nervous system. Sen didn't trust it.
He staggered over to the exposed joint where he'd pulverized its insides. The wound was a mess of shattered chitin and pale, greenish-yellow ichor that steamed faintly on the cold stone.
He drove his boot heel down, once, twice, into the ruined segment, grinding the pulp of the creature's internal organs. The twitching stopped. It was dead.
Only then did he let himself feel the damage. He stripped off the remnants of his crude jacket, his movements slow and careful.
The entire left side of his chest was a canvas of deep, blackening bruises. His titanium-laced bones were unyielding, which meant all the kinetic energy of the impact had been transferred directly into the flesh and muscle around them. It was going to hurt like hell for days, but nothing vital had ruptured.
Then he turned to the carcass. The centipede was a treasure trove.
This beast had been the apex of this subterranean ecosystem, and now that position was vacant. Sen intended to file his paperwork with extreme prejudice.
First, the armor. The chitin was thick, almost a dull black, and incredibly tough. He searched the ground until he found a piece of jagged stalactite—a natural hammer and chisel. Hours passed in the gloom as he worked, the only sounds the scrape of stone on shell and his own ragged breathing.
He pried off the largest plates, stacking them nearby. They were heavy, razor-edged, and would make superb improvised armor. They were too cumbersome for full-body wear, but a few overlapping sections strapped to his chest and forearms would turn a glancing blow into a non-issue.
Then, the meat. The carcass was immense, far more than he could consume. It was a feast, but also a liability. Raw meat this size would rot in a few cycles, and the stench would attract every scavengers lurking in the underground network. He carved the choicest sections—long, thick ropes of muscle—and began the laborious process of preparing it for preservation.
He found an empty, shallow depression in the stone floor, an old pool, and lined it with the tough, fleshy leaves of the glow-flora. He would salt what he could with mineral deposits he'd noted on the tunnel walls and use the heat of a new fire to begin the long, slow smoke-curing process.
For at least three full cycles he'd have to stay here.
Preservation was a task for the coming days. Dinner was a demand for the current hour. Sen dragged a section of the centipede's torso—a coil of thick, pale meat—near the protective curve of a massive stalagmite. His flint and pyrite kit was still in his pouch, a reliable piece of gear. He found a pocket of dry dust and rock shavings near the wall, a perfect bed for a small, contained fire, and soon had a steady, orange flame dancing in the gloom.
He needed a proper cooking vessel, something capable of handling a larger cut than the flimsy leaves he used for the lizards. His eyes landed on the massive, shattered plates of chitin he'd just harvested. Selecting a piece that was cupped and relatively unbroken, he used his flint shard to chip away at the edges, smoothing them down until they were manageable. The result was a grotesque, black skillet—a piece of the monster used to cook its own flesh.
He positioned the chitinous plate over the fire on three small, flat stones, creating a crude tripoid. As the fire heated the plate, a faint, acrid smell of burnt shell began to rise, followed by an unnerving, metallic sheen on the surface of the natural 'pan.' It was imperfect, but it was functional.
He cut thick, finger-sized strips of the centipede meat. The flesh was shockingly white, almost translucent, but firm. He didn't bother with seasoning, not having any, and simply laid the strips onto the hot chitin.
The sizzle was immediate, loud in the silent cavern, and the odor that filled the air was deep, musky, and powerfully savage. It wasn't the light, savory smell of the six-legged lizard. This was a scent of raw, powerful protein, something that had evolved to survive in the planet's deepest cuts.
The taste was heavy, oily, and intensely rich like venison. It flooded his system with a sense of immense, immediate power, a brute energy that settled deep into his bruised ribs and aching muscles. He ate and ate until his hunger was a dull ache, chewing the strong, fibrous meat with a primal satisfaction.
He had faced down the cavern's king, and now he was wearing its armor and eating its heart.
It was more than just a simple meal. It was a transfer of dominance.
With a satiated stomach and a clear mind, he focused on the huge, looming centipede carcass.
The smoke-curing process began now. He had a few cycles of hard labor ahead, a few cycles of solitude, pain, and the growing, cold certainty that path ahead was about to get tougher.