Orion entered the containment, his drone humming beside him with its red light blinking steadily.
He'd expected thick jungle and dense vegetation like he'd seen on the hunter streams, but instead empty buildings stretched ahead with shattered windows and rusted cars at dead intersections. A park sat overgrown with grass pushing through the playground, swings creaking in the wind, and the street lights still worked, probably maintained by the guild.
Nature was slowly reclaiming what had once been a neighborhood, leaving only the wind and the faint mechanical hum of his drone to break the silence.
Pulling the kitchen knife from his bag, Orion started walking toward the park where the open ground seemed safer than the buildings with their dark windows and hidden spaces.
A small creature hopped into view ahead, about the size of a soccer ball with white fur covering its round body and large red eyes gleaming in the dim light. A Furball, D-rank Vermin, the kind he'd seen hunters easily kill on streams.
His heart pounded anyway.
Easy prey. That's what it was supposed to be.
He crept forward slowly as the Furball turned toward him, looked directly at him for a moment, then turned and hopped away. Orion followed because fifteen dollars was fifteen dollars, and he couldn't let it get away.
The Furball hopped around a corner between two collapsed buildings, and when Orion rounded the corner it was sitting there staring at him. As soon as it saw him approaching, it hopped away again toward a cluster of abandoned cars, and he kept following with the knife ready. Every time he got close enough to strike, it would hop just out of range and pause, looking back at him.
It led him deeper into the containment, away from the open park and into narrower streets where buildings leaned against each other. The Furball stopped in front of a manhole, sitting on the edge of the opening, and it looked at Orion, then down into the darkness, then back at him.
Then it jumped down into the manhole.
Orion stopped at the edge and stared into the darkness below. He'd seen hunters go underground for Furballs on the streams, and they always hunted them there, so he climbed onto the rusty ladder and pulled out his phone for the flashlight before starting down. Halfway down the smell hit him, sewage and rot and something worse underneath that made his stomach turn, but he kept climbing till his feet touched wet concrete at the bottom.
In the beam of his flashlight, the Furball sat just a few feet away with its beady red eyes staring at him.
Orion moved forward with the knife ready, and the Furball didn't move.
He lunged.
The knife punched into soft fur and the creature shrieked with a high-pitched sound that echoed through the sewer tunnels.
The shriek cut off as the Furball went still as dark blood pooled around it. Orion's hands shook as he stared at his first kill.
Fifteen dollars.
He sat down on the damp concrete, breathing heavily as the stench bothered him less than it had before. Pulling the Furball close, he pressed his knife to the skin because the pelt was valuable, used in fashion or something he remembered from the streams, and he also needed to extract the Crux from inside.
Something moved in the darkness.
His head snapped up and his phone's flashlight cut through the darkness but showed nothing except tunnel walls and sewage water.
The first Furball emerged from a side passage to his left while another appeared from the right, and then more came from ahead, pouring out of the darkness until three, five, eight, ten of them surrounded him in a tight circle.
"Shit!"
The word tore from his throat as he scrambled to his feet, watching as the Furballs didn't charge immediately but just kept coming, more and more emerging from the shadows until the tunnel writhed with white fur and gleaming red eyes.
Fifteen, twenty, maybe more.
One finally lunged at his chest and Orion stumbled backward, his heel catching on the corpse of the first Furball as he went down hard with his head cracking against concrete. Stars burst across his vision as the swarm attacked.
Weight pressed down everywhere on his chest, his legs, his arms, and he tried to shove them off but more kept piling on, pinning him to the wet filthy ground while their tongues started dragging across his exposed skin, wet yet rough like sandpaper against his neck and forearm.
The skin on his right forearm tore away and pain exploded through him as Orion screamed. His grip on the knife loosened as the tongues kept working, peeling more skin from his left arm and neck while white fur covered his vision completely, and he couldn't move with their weight holding him down.
"HELP ME!"
His voice cracked.
"Someone help me!"
The drone's red light blinked steadily above while he curled into a ball to protect his face, and the Furballs shifted with him as more tongues found his hands.
"Help me! MA, HELP..."
Tears mixed with the sewage on his face.
She couldn't hear him down here in the dark. She couldn't hear him, and if he was going to die, he needed her to be the last thing in his mind.
His mother's image flashed before him, propped against thin pillows and smiling at him, and he remembered that he wanted to see her smile every day.
Three days.
She needs the suppressant in three days.
He couldn't die here.
His fingers tightened on the knife handle and he swung blindly as the blade hit something. A Furball shrieked as the weight on his right side lightened slightly.
"I CAN'T..."
He swung again and connected, then again, each hit sending another creature squealing, but they didn't run and kept attacking, kept pressing in even as he cut them down.
He shoved himself up as Furballs tumbled off his back, and he swung the knife in wild arcs, kept going even as his arm burned and blood made the handle slippery.
"DIE!"
He kept swinging and screaming.
"DIE DIE DIE!!!"
A Furball lunged at his face and the knife caught it mid-air. Another came from the left and he kicked it into the wall, but it scrambled back toward him immediately because they didn't stop or retreat, just kept coming at him one after another.
He stabbed and slashed and kicked until his arms felt like they were on fire, and the Furballs kept attacking even as their numbers thinned.
Ten left.
Five.
Three.
The last one lunged and Orion's knife caught it in the throat as it went still.
Finally, finally, the tunnel was quiet except for his ragged breathing.
Spinning around with his phone's flashlight cutting through the shadows, he waited with the knife raised and breathing hard.
None of them were left.
His scream echoed through the sewer and turned into something between a laugh and a sob as he looked at the dead Furballs scattered around him.
Twenty-five of them lay dead in the filth, every single one that had attacked.
His arms burned and his skin hung in strips, and he'd called for his mother like a child begging to be saved.
But he'd lived.
Twenty-five kills meant 375 dollars, enough for the medicine and enough to buy her more smiles.
His hands were still shaking as he reached for the first corpse, but they didn't stop him from starting to skin it.
The knife work was clumsy and messy since he'd never done this before, and the pelt tore in places but he managed to get it off. He moved to the next one and then the next, working through the pain despite how badly his hands trembled.
Twenty-five Furballs meant twenty-five Cruxes and twenty-five pelts. He worked through the pain, refusing to leave anything behind. The bag filled quickly with pelts and Cruxes stuffed inside until nothing else would fit, so he tied the remaining pelts together into a makeshift bundle he could carry.
When he finally climbed out, his arms screamed with every movement as the torn skin had stopped bleeding but left raw red patches exposed to the air. Walking toward the gate, he pressed the button on the control panel and it ground open with a metallic screech.
The soldiers watched him come out and one of them looked surprised.
"He actually survived."
The scarred soldier's expression twisted with disgust.
"Pathetic."
Orion looked at him, at the clean uniform and unmarked skin, at the contempt on his face for someone who'd just crawled out of a sewer covered in blood and filth.
An hour ago, that word would have hurt.
But Now? now he had 375 dollars and his mother would live longer.
He couldn't care less.
He pressed the button on his drone and it descended into his palm, and another press made the red light blink off as the device powered down. He placed it in the bicycle's front basket along with his bag, then secured the bundle of pelts to the handlebars with shaking hands as each push of the pedals pulled at the torn skin on his arms, but he kept going until the hunter office appeared ahead with its bright lights.
The same receptionist from earlier looked up as he entered. Her eyes moved to his arms where the exposed muscle and dried blood showed, then back to her screen without any comment.
"Where do I sell these?" Orion asked as he lifted the pelts.
She pointed to a door marked MATERIALS ASSESSMENT.
Inside, the smell was different from the office, a mix of animal musk and preserved leather. A man stood behind a counter with a nose noticeably larger than normal.
Probably an evolved trait for enhanced smell.
He smiled as Orion approached and dumped the pelts on the counter, then pulled out the Cruxes from his bag.
"First time?" the man asked.
Orion nodded and watched as the man sorted through everything with practiced efficiency, occasionally lifting items to his nose before typing on a tablet screen.
"Hunter ID?" he asked after a moment.
Orion handed over the card and a machine beside the counter whirred for about thirty seconds with a red light scanning before it spat the card back out.
"375 dollars deposited to your hunter account," the man said.
375 dollars.
Three hundred for the suppressant. Seventy-five left over. A real weapon. Maybe basic armor.
"How do I use the money?" Orion's voice was rough as he cleared his throat.
"It's a debit card, works anywhere standard cards work. Some places give hunter discounts too."
The man's eyes moved to Orion's arms.
"You can get free treatment at any hospital, just show them your ID."
Orion looked down at his arms and saw the exposed muscle and torn skin.
"Thanks," he managed to say.
His vision blurred at the edges.
Strange. He'd made it out. Got the money. His mother would have her medicine.
So why couldn't he feel his legs?
The man behind the counter said something while raising his hands and moving toward him, but the words didn't reach him.
Orion tried to respond.
Everything went dark.