The sun didn't rise; the fog just turned a thicker shade of bile-yellow.
Ren woke up to the sound of something wet dripping onto her forehead. She didn't move. She didn't scream. She just opened her eyes and looked up. The ceiling of the barracks was sweating—a thick, black condensation that smelled like burnt hair and old grease. Above her, on the top bunk, Mei was shaking so hard the metal frame was singing a high-pitched tune of terror.
KR-RUNG!
The barracks doors didn't open; they were blown inward by a sonic charge. The blast wave hit the kids still in their bunks, bursting eardrums and sending several of them rolling into the filth on the floor.
"Up! Up, you walking sacks of rot!"
Iron Jaw walked in. He wasn't wearing his jacket today. His chest was a roadmap of surgical scars, and where his left lung should have been, a mechanical bellows hissed and puffed through a glass pane in his ribs. He was carrying a bucket filled with something that looked like grey sludge mixed with hair.
"Breakfast," Iron Jaw announced. He didn't put the bucket on the table. He just tipped it over onto the floor.
The sludge slid out with a wet splat. It moved. It wasn't just food; it was a colony of bio-engineered protein maggots, thick and translucent, writhing in a pool of nutrient broth.
"Eat up. Or don't. The maggots will eat you instead if you sit still long enough," he laughed, his metal jaw clicking like a Geiger counter.
The boy with the barcode tattoo—the one who had tried to act tough the night before—barfed instantly. He couldn't help it. The sight of the wriggling, grey mass on the floor was too much.
"Disgusting," Mei whimpered, staring at the floor from her bunk.
Ren didn't hesitate. She dropped to her knees. Her stomach was a hollow pit of acid. She reached into the pile, grabbed a handful of the cold, squirming grubs, and shoved them into her mouth. They popped between her teeth like salty, metallic grapes. She swallowed hard, ignoring the way they ticked against her throat.
"Good girl, Ren," Iron Jaw said, his eyes crinkling. "A weapon doesn't care about the taste of its oil."
Once the "meal" was over, the survivors were marched out to the loading dock. But they weren't getting back on the truck.
In front of them stood the "Waste Chute." It was a massive, yawning hole in the ground, three hundred feet wide, filled with the compacted trash of the Inner City. It went down for miles.
"Below us is the Gut," Iron Jaw said, pointing into the abyss. "The Inner City flushes their failures down here. Broken tech, toxic runoff, and the things that grow in it. Your mission is simple. Find a 'Heart.' A Grade-3 Power Cell. There's a downed transport ship about two miles deep into the heap. Bring me a Heart, or don't come back up."
He kicked a crate toward them. Inside were gas masks that looked like they'd been salvaged from a World War I trench. The filters were black with mold.
"The air down there will melt your lungs in an hour without these," he said. "And Ren? Since you're Rank 1, you get the 'Special' lead."
He tossed her a heavy, rusted collar. It had a blinking red light and a small vial of blue liquid attached to the side.
"If your squad fails, or if you try to run, I press a button. The vial breaks. The 'Blue-Line' dissolves your spine from the inside out. It takes about three days to finish dying. Very messy."
They were lowered down in a rusted cage that shrieked as the cables unspooled.
The deeper they went, the darker it got. The walls of the Chute weren't stone; they were compressed layers of plastic, bone, and rusted metal. Occasionally, they saw a face poking out of the wall—a mummified scavenger who had been crushed by a fresh load of trash years ago.
When the cage finally hit the bottom, the floor felt soft. It wasn't dirt. It was a carpet of rotting fabric and decomposed organic waste.
"Masks on," Ren ordered. Her voice sounded metallic and hollow through the rusted respirator.
The group stepped out. Grog was still shaky, his skin a pale, sickly green from the drug crash. Mei was clutching her rebar spear so hard her knuckles were white.
The "Gut" was a nightmare.
Huge, bioluminescent fungi grew out of piles of old tires, dripping a neon-yellow slime that sizzled when it hit the ground. The air was so thick with toxic particulates that it looked like grey snow was falling.
"Look," Mei whispered, pointing a shaking finger.
A few yards away, a "Trash-Stalker" was feeding. It looked like a hairless dog, but its skin was transparent, showing the pulsing, black organs inside. It was eating a piece of lead piping, its teeth grinding the metal like it was a cracker.
"Don't breathe," Ren hissed. "Just move."
They trekked through a canyon made of smashed skyscrapers and rusted girders. The smell was beyond disgusting—it was the scent of a billion lives turned into rot. They passed a "Meat-Tree"—a mass of mutated vines that had grown through a pile of discarded hospital waste, hanging heavy with what looked like pulsating, raw kidneys.
"I'm gonna be sick," the barcode kid gasped, his mask fogging up.
"Do it in the mask and you drown," Ren snapped. "Keep moving."
Finally, they saw it. The transport ship was wedged between two mountains of crushed cars. It was a jagged shard of chrome and carbon fiber, leaking a thick, purple fluid that smoked on the ground.
"There it is," Grog wheezed. "The Heart."
They climbed through a rent in the hull. Inside, the ship was a tomb. The crew were still in their seats, but they hadn't decayed normally. The radiation in the Gut had fused them to the leather. Their skin had turned into a hard, black resin, and their eyes had melted into their cheeks.
Ren reached the engine room. In the center of a web of sparking wires sat the Power Cell. It was a glowing, white cylinder, humming with a frequency that made their noses start to bleed.
"Grab it," Ren said.
Grog reached for it, but as his hand touched the casing, the ship groaned.
Skreeeeeeee.
It wasn't the metal. It was a scream from deep within the piles of trash.
The Gut-Dwellers
Out of the shadows of the engine room, they emerged.
They weren't Twitchers. They were "Dwellers." Humans who had lived in the Gut so long their eyes had fallen out, replaced by sensitive, vibrating whiskers. Their mouths were stitched shut with wire, and they communicated by slamming their heads against the metal walls.
There were dozens of them. They crawled along the ceiling like spiders, their elongated fingers clicking against the hull.
"Give... Heart..." one of them croaked. It wasn't a voice; it was the sound of dry leaves blowing over a grave.
"No," Ren said, raising her cleaver.
The Dwellers lunged.
It was a bloodbath of the most pathetic kind. The Dwellers were weak, but there were so many of them. One grabbed the barcode kid, dragging him into a dark ventilation shaft. His screams were cut short by the sound of a heavy wet crunch.
"Grog! The Cell!" Ren yelled, slamming her cleaver into a Dweller's skull. The head split like a rotten melon, spilling a soup of grey brains and maggots onto her boots.
Mei was pinned against the wall, her rebar spear stuck in a Dweller's chest. Another one was biting her leg, its wire-stitched mouth tearing through her pants.
"GET OFF HER!" Grog roared. He didn't have the Green-Line today, but he had the desperation of a cornered animal. He swung the Power Cell like a club, smashing the Dweller's ribs into powder.
They scrambled out of the ship, the Cell glowing like a dying star in Grog's arms. The Dwellers followed, pouring out of the trash heaps like a flood of pale, naked flesh.
"The cage! Run!" Ren screamed.
They sprinted through the toxic snow, their lungs burning, their vision blurring. Behind them, the sounds of the Dwellers—the rhythmic slamming of heads and the clicking of whiskers—got louder.
They reached the cage just as the first Dweller grabbed Ren's ankle. She turned, hacking at its arm until the bone snapped, her face sprayed with a cold, clear fluid that smelled like vinegar.
"UP! PULL US UP!" she screamed into the comms.
The cage jerked and started to rise. The Dwellers clung to the bottom, their weight making the cables groan. One by one, Ren and Grog kicked them off, watching them fall hundreds of feet back into the blackness of the Gut.
When they finally reached the surface, they were covered in a cocktail of purple ship fluid, clear Dweller blood, and the black slime of the Gut.
Iron Jaw was waiting. He took the Power Cell from Grog, checking the glow.
"Grade-3. Perfect," he said, not even looking at the bleeding wounds on Mei's leg or the missing barcode kid. "Rank 19 is officially 'Medical Waste' now. The rest of you... go wash off in the acid-scrub. You smell like the bottom of a grave."
As they walked toward the barracks, Ren looked at her hand. It was shaking. Not from fear, but from the realization that she didn't feel anything for the kid who got dragged away.
She looked at the collar around her neck. The red light was still blinking.
"Ren," Mei whispered, limping beside her. "We're not human anymore, are we?"
Ren looked at the dark sky, where the black snow was still falling.
"We never were, Mei. We were just the trash they forgot to burn."
Would you like me to start Chapter Four, where the first "Ranking Tournament" begin
s, or should we see the "Medical Waste" being processed in the factory?