Hey everyone, sorry for the delay. I had to do some rewrites for the previously posted chapters. Basically, the pacing was wonky, with too much info dumped at the end of the VRD floor, so I did a big editorial pass to fix the issue--but that meant weaving some of that new material into older chapters.
Here's what you need to know: Chapter 37 is pretty much unchanged from the previous version. The first half of 38 is the same, but then diverges. Instead of going straight into the VRD Golem fight, they stumble across a Helix Splicer Room. Chapter 39 and 40 are both all new, and then 41 is the Golem battle, which is more or less the same as the first iteration. Sorry for any confusion.
The rest of the VRD Floor chapters are also done, 42 - 44, but they need one more quick edit. I'll get those cleaned up and posted tomorrow for y'all. Sorry again, and thanks for your patience!
Chapter Thirty-Seven – Welcome to the VRD
Three days after the holiday reunion party, we found ourselves standing outside the bitter, snow swept corpse of the Mall Christmas Kiosk, where we’d unceremoniously beat Krampus to death like a bargain-bin piñata at a kid’s birthday party. Despite that, there was no sign the battle had ever happened. Krampus’s body was gone—currently hanging on a meat hook in cold storage—the elves had all melted to goo, and the gore had been dusted over with a thick layer of fresh powder.
Once more, it was an eerie liminal space. Cold, empty, and abandoned.
I was just glad nothing else had moved in to take Krampus’s place while we’d prepped for our decent to the 75th floor. I’d heard talk about an enormous Yule Cat and the last thing I needed was a battle against a pissed off kaiju kitty with anger issues and the desire to turn my body into a scratching post.
We’d rolled the dice by waiting for so long, but it was an unfortunate necessity.
We were running on a razor-thin timeline, but after everything we’d just survived on the 45th floor, I wasn’t about to go in blind when we descended to the 75th. We needed to be ready for anything. That meant restocking my spell cards, figuring out how the new Glyph Arrays actually worked, and taking full advantage of the Soul Forge. It was a treasure trove of resources, I couldn’t afford to overlook.
As my platoon commander had often said, Prior Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.
Even after three full days, I’d barely scratched the surface of what was inside the forge. I hadn’t managed to catalog everything yet—not even close—and a lot of the equipment was still a complete mystery. Sure, there were plenty of Fabrication and Mana Infusion Tables, but there were other, weirder pieces of tech too. A Gravitic Pulse Forge, an Alchemo Alloy Smelter, a Plasmic Distillation Vat, a Quantum Binding Cradle. One piece of equipment, in particular, caught my eye, though—the Multi-Vector Charge Coil, which, according to its glowing info panel, could dramatically boost the destructive potential of traps.
I had no idea how it worked, but after a few hours of tinkering, and a few missteps—including a particularly feisty explosion that resulted in singing off one eyebrow—I had a basic handle on it.
With a working knowledge of the Charge Coil, I set to work upgrading my spell cards.
Although my new Runic Glpyh Array Relic was clearly the upgraded version of Runic Resonance Trap, the basic mechanism was still the same. Carve the desired sigil pattern onto a compatible surface using an Engraver’s Awl, cast the applicable spell to store for later, and let the magic happen. The real trick was figuring out how to layer multiple runes without them blowing up in my face. There was also some additional complexity because not all sigils played well together.
For example, in theory, I could nest both Frostfang Spire and Charbroiled Inferno into one nifty trap card, but when activated, fire met ice and the result was... neither.
Instead, it unleashed a boiling cloud of superheated steam that scalded everything in a fifty-foot radius—friend, foe, or unlucky bystander. Instead of a precision tactical strike, it was a brutal, indiscriminate AoE murder machine. Sure, there were scenarios where something like that might come in handy, but they were few and far between. If I wasn’t careful, I’d end up killing myself or someone I actually liked by accidentally handing them the magical equivalent of a live grenade.
Mostly, I focused on augmenting and upgrading my current spell cards to make them last longer and hit harder. Basic Balloon Menagerie just wasn’t gonna cut it, so I juiced it up with the catastrophic flame damage from Crematorium Incinerator—liberated from the smoldering corpse of the HOA—and layered in an extra effect from a Common-grade Relic called Screw Summoner. The name sounded impressive, but all it really did was conjure 5 to 20 loose drywall screws.
They didn’t do anything and had no magical properties.
It was literally just a handful of matte-black, one-and-a-quarter-inch drywall screws. The kind every contractor across America had in the bottom of a drawer or squirreled away in toolbelt pouch. Total trash… unless I got creative. When combined with the other two, it created a homemade, balloon-fueled IED with plenty of extra shrapnel damage.
After endlessly tweaking the configuration and tinkering with a wide variety of triggering mechanisms, I finally assigned the layout to the Runic Auto-Scriber and produced an entire pack of Claymore Animal Balloons cards. Between the Auto-Scriber and the Multi-Vector Charge Coil—which both increased the trap efficiency and reduced the cooldown time when crafting traps—I was finished in under an hour, which was record speed.
My Discount Doppelbangers also got a badly needed upgrade.
On top of the base spell effect, I also nested Butcher’s Maw and Venomous Payload.
The first upgrade gave the Doppelbangers a serious durability boost—they could now absorb 40% of all damage aimed at me, and they’d stick around for a full minute on the battlefield. Admittedly, in a life-or-death battle, sixty seconds was a long time. Maybe even too long. So I added in a few new conditional triggers, letting me flip the proverbial kill switch and send them into a murderous frenzy whenever I felt like it. And, thanks to Venomous Payload, when the Doppelbangers exploded, they now unleashed a toxic poison cloud that affected all enemies in a ten-foot range.
It was a win-win.
Well, it was a win-win for me, anyway.
I doubted the poor suckers on the receiving end of the exploding suicide clones would see it the same way. But then, if someone had done something to warrant getting blown up by a kamikaze Doppelbanger, I didn’t really give a shit about what they thought.
My Health and Mana Spell cards also got a little TLC.
With Harper along for the ride, the spell cards weren’t nearly as important as they’d been once upon a time, but it was still nice to have ’em around in case shit really hit the fan. And it was always good to have a little operational redundancy built into the pipeline for critical systems. Like not dying from internal hemorrhaging or Yeti tuberculous. If Jakob went down, either Croc or I could off-tank, and if Temp took a serious hit, we still had plenty of damage dealers in the rotation.
But if something happened to Harper?
No one could do her job, so we’d be well and truly fucked.
Elixirs and spell cards weren’t nearly as good as having a secondary healer in our lineup, but they were better than nothing.
For sake of ease, I decided to combine both Health and Mana Regen into a single card, then added in a third Uncommon Grade Sigil called Bless this Mess, which boosted the effects of all Restorative Spells by 25%. The Regen Grenades, as I’d taken to calling them, could be activated instantly through the use of a specific command phrase. And because the triggers could be far more complex, I created a pack for each of my teammates and tweaked the trigger so their cards would only activate when they said the proper phrase.
On top of my standard spell cards, I also spent some time experimenting with the Stamina based Relics, using Croc as a willing guinea pig. It wasn’t hard to convince the mimic. Turned out, the Kannibal Kids of the 24th floor weren’t the only ones who like meat-flavored ice cream. A bucket of Neapolitan Swirl—now in skin, liver, and bone flavor!—covered a multitude of sins. Watching the dog slurp the rancid stuff down was understandably disgusting, though I wasn’t surprised Croc enjoyed it so much.
Froyo and dry-aged corpses were arguably Croc’s two favorite food groups, and the meat-flavored ice cream was the best of both worlds. At least for a mimic.
After the better part of a day, I’d finally come up with two different variations for physical reinforcements.
For the first—dubbed Fortification Field—I stacked Echoed Aura in Group Love Mode with Thick Fat and Escalation of Force to create a team-wide buff. It boosted both Athleticism and Toughness by 15% and increased melee damage by 25% for ten minutes.
The second was a Trap Card I affectionately called The Hurt Locker. It was a nasty little single-target debuff that lowered armor resistance, slowed the enemy by 15%, and made them 20% more vulnerable to elemental spell damage for five full minutes.
Together, the two cards made for a brutal one-two combo that could help turn the tide in just about any fight.
On top of trap card fabrication, I’d also spent countless hours leveling up my core abilities.
With the sudden influx of Delvers from Kringlegard came a hoard of new Relics.
Some were legitimately awesome—Carol of the Damned, Tinsel Tempest, Violent Night—while others were outright useless or borderline cursed.
Among some of the worst were Festive Anxiety, Hot Cocoa Mug, and Wrapping Paper Armor. The first made the user feel a surge of Holiday-related anxiety, while Hot Cocoa Mug simply summoned a cup of room-temperature hot chocolate. That’s it. No buffs. No healing. Just... cocoa. As for Wrapping Paper Armor, it swathed the caster in a layer of “protective” wrapping paper, slowing their movement speed by 15% while increasing their overall armor rating by a measly 1%.
Didn’t come more useless than that.
Most of the Relics went straight to the storefront, but I held onto more than a few for personal use. Pushing my active Relics to max level was one of my top priorities, and luckily, the Soul Forge had just the thing to help: a Ponzi Scheme Essence Transference Circle, which optimized the essence bleed from one Relic into another.
The arcane mechanics behind the Transference Circle were mind-numbingly complex, but the effect itself was surprisingly simple and straightforward—it cut the number of sacrificial Relics needed to level up another Relic by 50%. The total cost to level a single Relic from level 1 to level 15 dropped from a staggering 145 all the way down to a much more manageable 72. Hands down, it was the best thing I’d found in the Soul Forge.
Nothing else even came close.
It also explained why all of Nikoli’s Relics had been maxed out at level 15.
Outside of the Compass of the Catacomber, the Transference Circle was probably the single biggest edge I had in the war against the Monarch. With it, I’d be able to max out my own Relics twice as fast for half the price and, just as importantly, it would supercharge the store’s profits. High-level Relics always commanded a hefty premium, and with this trick, I could upgrade them dirt cheap and flip them for triple or quadruple the usual price.
The possibilities were endless.
Between the Transference Circle and my growing back catalog of available supplies, I managed to push both Hydrokinesis and Neural Slipstream up to level 10.
At level 5 the Mana cost for Hydrokinesis decreased, and at level 10 it gained a new passive ability, Cold Snap, which increased how quickly ice constructs formed and allowed me to shatter those same frosty constructs with explosive force, essentially creating improvised ice bombs.
Neural Slipstream also hit a major milestone at level 10, gaining a game-changing ability called Poltergeist. It let me inflict physical damage and cast offensive spells while in Thought Specter form, giving the skill an entirely new level of flexibility and lethality.
I also brought Frostfang Spire up to level 5, unlocking the secondary Frost Javelin ability, which let me hurl spears of ice instead of just summoning them from the ground.
Although I could’ve pushed some of those even higher with my new stock, I decided to spend my remaining supplies to increase levels on Sleepwalker, Will of Iron, Form FleshTron, Go!, Collective Consciousness, Swarm Tactics, Voodoo Dopplebanger, and Drone Zone, bringing each up to level 10 in preparation to craft the Tome of the Swarm Herald Emblem.
All that was left to do after that was spend some time in the corpse cooler, resembling my army of Horrors after the bloody battle with Krampus.
My Necromarshalls—Drumbo, Synthia, Uncle Sam, Rudolpho, and Meemaw the Snow Hag—all got some replacement body parts and a fresh coat of metaphorical paint, while I fleshed out the remainder of my army with mashed up Sunnysiders and a handful of Yetis. I briefly considered reanimating Krampus, but finally decided to hold off for the time being. The Dweller was powerful, but I couldn’t promote him to the Necromarshall role without more troops, and I didn’t have the resources for that.
Not yet.
And I didn’t want to waste him. He would be a great trump card down the road.
By the time I was done, I had two War Dogs remaining, fifteen malformed Kevins, and four Yetis, all armed to the teeth with Relics and ready for war.
I wasn’t the only one putting our new facilities to full use, either.
Although I’d spent almost every waking moment in either the Soul Forge or the Corpse Cooler, so had Jakob. I’d give him the two alchemy Relic’s I’d looted off Nikoli’s corpse—Elemental Distillation and Suspension of Volatility—and overnight he’d become a one-man brewing machine, using Nikoli’s lab and stash of rare ingredients and reagents to craft a wide variety of truly inspired, and potentially insane, concoctions.
Needlessly to say, some turned out much better than others, though none of them were outright useless.
Some were close, though.
After chugging Can’t Touch This, the drinker would be teleported three meters away from their current location when struck by a blow in combat.
Problem was, the teleportation direction was totally random—it didn’t account for environmental hazards or nearby enemies. You might dodge one attack only to reappear over a bottomless pit or in the middle of a pack of gibbering, bloodthirsty ape men. There was every chance it could hurt as much as it helped. Still, for someone like Temp, it had serious potential as a get-out-of-jail-free card. Get in close, land a critical hit, then blink out before the enemy could retaliate.
Focus Pocus boosted accuracy for mana-based Relics and cut casting speed and spell cost in half for five minutes. The drawback was that the user could only speak in rhyming couplets for the duration of the effect. Goblin Ballsweat increased Athletic Agility, the effectiveness of all Stealth-based Relics, and boosted looting speed by 500% for three minutes, but you also smelled exactly like the name suggested.
Invisibility but Loud rendered the drinker perfectly invisible but caused circus music to play whenever the user took a step. Still good, so long as you weren’t planning on moving. At all. For any reason.
Among my favorites was an elixir called Unbottle me, Daddy. After consuming it, all spells dealt double damage for 1 minute, but the catch was you had to scream “Harder Daddy” before casting any spell. A real double edge sword. Not only would you be obnoxiously loud, but the emotional embarrassment of screaming the necessary command phrase over and over again would be devastating. The kind of cringe that would haunt my dreams for the next decade.
And those were just a handful of dozens.
Shrinkle Juice, Feral Gatorade, and Wizard’s Hot Sauce were all just as good, though equally deranged. Jakob had a full-on arsenal of questionable elixirs and potions for just about any situation. He’d even acquired a leather bandolier from the shop, and had potions strung across his chest like an off-brand Rambo.
Nothing was going to catch the Cendral unprepared.
Three days of prep, potion-brewing, rune-etching, and corpse-gluing later, we were finally ready. I’d stocked up, geared out, and triple-checked my inventory until my brain felt like a soggy dish towel. All that was left now was to step through the next portal and descend to the 75th floor.
We found the spatial doorway tucked away inside of a colorful plywood house in the Christmas village, labeled with a sign that read Santa’s Workshop! Elves Welcome. All Others Will Be Put on the Naughty List. The paint was chipping in some places and peeling in others, and the roof was missing several shingles.
The tiny house had boxes filled with Christmas decorations—colorful garland, strands of Christmas lights, and a variety of broken ornaments—along with a single squat door at the rear of the shack, which definitely didn’t connect to the outside. When I cast Unerring Arrow, the blue beam pointed straight at the door like an accusatory finger.
That was our way down.
“We ready to do this?” I asked, eyeing the door.
“Anywhere is better than here,” Croc said with a shiver. “I’m ninety percent sure this is lead paint, Dan. That and asbestos.”
I squinted and stole a sidelong glance at the dog.
“How can you tell?” I asked.
“We mimics have an exceptional sense of smell. Plus, I licked one of the walls, just to see. It definitely has that dusty flavor you get with asbestos.”
“You really shouldn’t lick the walls, Croc,” I admonished. “Although I suppose lead paint and asbestos are the least of our concerns considering where we are.”
“You couldn’t be more wrong,” the dog said in all seriousness. “Dwellers are dangerous, but mesothelioma is a silent killer, Dan.” The mimic grimaced. “I learned that the hard way down on the second floor.”
“The Devil’s Taint?” I asked, thinking back to the disgusting sewer system, which was still at the tippy-top of my most hated levels.
Somehow, the place was even worse than Eternal Suburbia and the 49th floor combined. Less dangerous, but far more disgusting. Give me meat houses and voracious Eldritch lights any day of the week over endless rivers of knee-high sewage, skin-melting Slimes, and the enormous cockroaches, more commonly referred to as Skitters.
Croc nodded.
“All those sewer pipes are lined with asbestos,” the mimic said. “I was helping a Delver named Tina—really nice lady from Syndney. We spent a month wandering around down there, looking for a way out. She ended up with hyper-aggressive Metastatic Mesothelioma. Her whole body became one giant cancer cell. Eventually she was more cancer than woman. A pack of Skitters eventually finished her off, but then in an ironic twist of fate, they also died of Mesothelioma.”
“Inspiring stuff as always, Croc,” I said, my skin suddenly feeling itchy. “Since I don’t want super cancer, how’s about we get the fuck out of here, huh?”
I squared my shoulders, adjusted the straps on my toolbelt, and stepped through the door.
Usually, the kiosk doors connected to a series of passages that sliced through the floors like an express elevator. But not this time.
The second I passed over the threshold, the world tilted and spun, reality stretching and distorting around me, a chaotic swirl of psychedelic colors flashing across my vision in rapid succession as the Backrooms pulled me apart, one atom at a time, before abruptly reassembling me… somewhere else.
There was no other way to describe it.
It felt like being unmade then crudely stitched back together.
I staggered forward, boots scraping against a metallic grating, before finally catching myself on a wall that hadn’t been there a second ago. The temperature had abruptly risen twenty degrees, and suddenly I found myself going from shivering and half frozen, to sweeting like a Lua pig. I groaned, my head spinning, my eyes momentarily blinded by the sudden, searing light. The air reeked of ozone, plastic, and that weird hospital smell that always made me think of dental work.
“Sweet Baby Jesus,” I muttered, coughing and blinking against the migraine-inducing glow of sterile overhead fluorescents. “What in the hell just happened? Where in the hell are we?”
My eyes adjusted slowly, revealing a corridor that stretched out endlessly in both directions—wide, cold, and aggressively industrial. The walls and ceiling were a clinical shade of white, broken only by hazard-orange warning stripes and clusters of embedded monitors that flashed warnings at me or flickered with complex diagnostic screens and technical readouts that were way above my pay grade.
A metal catwalk ran beneath my boots, but through the slates in the grating I could see pipes the size of subway tunnels—some glowing faintly with blue-green light, others pulsing like arteries. Flexible tubing filled with a liquid red substance stretched across the facility like exposed nerves. A tangled mess of pipes, ventilation ducts, and rainbow-colored cables ran across the ceiling, coiled and crisscrossed, running from everywhere to everywhere else.
The whole place felt like a mashup between a nuclear sub, something out of a sci-fi novel, and a dystopian day spa designed by Half-Life.
Out of curiosity, I squinted and studied one of the wall monitors nearby, my brow furrowed in concentration. The letters seemed to swim in and out of focus the closer I looked. I was starting to think that stepping through the doorway had somehow given me a concussion, but then a notification popped up, courtesy of the Codex.
Whoops! Looks like you’ve stumbled upon an encrypted VRD Research Terminal. Clearance level designation OBSERVE-ALPHA. You do not currently have the appropriate credentials to view this material, so the language has been temporarily rendered in Proto-Variant, Iteration 0.95. If this is an error, please seek out a credentialing administration at your soonest possible convenience. If this is not an error, please exit the research floor now before you are slated for permanent repurposing.
What the hell did Clearance designation Observe-Alpha mean, I wondered? Also, slated for permanent repurposing didn’t sound like a good thing.
I grimaced and turned to look behind me at the doorway I’d entered through.
It was embedded in what looked like a cross between a security checkpoint and a very sad mall kiosk. Sleek metal counters gleamed under sterile lights, each one topped with a monitor and a built-in palm reader. Above them was a cheery neon sign that read WHICH MUTATION ARE YOU? SCAN YOURSELF TO FIND OUT NOW – ONLY 99 BIT-SCRIP!
Just what in the fuck had we gotten ourselves into now?
Chapter Thirty-Eight – Research Wing
The others showed up a few minutes later, but there was a weird delay between each arrival. When I’d stepped through the doorway, the shift between floors had been instantaneous. Like flipping a switch. Or at least it had felt that way to me. But it took Croc a full three minutes before appearing and Jakob stepped through three minutes after that. The pattern continued, with Temp arriving three minutes later, while Harper came last—three minutes behind Temperance.
I asked each of them about it as we waited.
Had something happened back at the Christmas kiosk? Had they purposely delayed stepping through for some reason? Had they experienced a prolonged loss of time between entering and existing the kiosk doorway?
The answer was no on all accounts.
Nothing had happened, they’d all stepped through one right after another, and as far as any of them were aware, the trip had been instantaneous—separated by no more than a heartbeat.
I wasn’t sure what it meant, but for some reason it felt important, so I squirreled that piece of information away for later.
“Wow, this place is insane,” Harper marveled, turning in a slow circle as her iridescent eyes adjusted to the harsh lightning.
That caught me a little off guard.
“What do you mean?” I asked, confused. “You’re a Transmog. You’ve already been to a Research Floor, right? Down on twenty-five?”
She nodded, her eyes still wide with wonder. “It wasn’t like this, though.”
I glanced at Jakob. He was a Transmog too, which meant he’d also paid a visit to the VRD lab on the twenty-fifth floor to use the Variant Helix Splicers—giant, futuristic genome editors that could slice and dice DNA, turning run of the mill humans into something more.
Things with scales and horns and wings.
Things like Jakob, Harper, or Wraith—the de facto Bull-headed leader of Howler’s Hold.
“She’s right,” Jakob said, noticing my confusion. “Although the twelfth-fifth floor is technically a laboratory, everything there is more… industrial. Rusty pipes, scorched workbenches, concrete walls. It reminded me of an underground nuclear facility or some sort of apocalyptic doomsday bunker. This…” he trailed off, eyes wide. “This is something else.” He reached over and traced a finger along one of the kiosk pads. “I’m curious to see what we find.”
Well, that made one of us.
Now that we’d all made it through, I fixed the next kiosk firmly in my mind and cast Unerring Arrow. A blazing trail of blue light snaked off down the right-hand branch of the corridor.
“This way,” I said, waving for them to follow as I set off at a fast trot.
We followed Unerring Arrow for almost ten minutes, no one talking, boots clanking loudly on the gangway, as we cautiously made our way down the corridor marked “WING C.” We passed more blinking monitors, most rendered in a language I couldn’t read, and a wide variety of other strange instruments. Bright orange canisters lined one wall beneath a glowing screen labeled BIO FILTRTION – TANK STATUS: EMPTY. DO YOUR PART, PLEASE REFILL!
We passed several strange rooms as we followed the arrow, most of them locked and inaccessible. Glowing displays hung above each door, though, informing us what lay beyond.
BISECURITY ZONE 6, one read. CAUTION: DO NOT ENTER. IN THE EVENT OF ENTITY ESCAPE, PLEASE REMAIN CALM WHILE BEING DISSOLVED. THANK YOU!
There was a small glass window that offered me a view inside.
The room was rectangular and there were a variety of metallic, coffin-like pods arrayed around the edges of the room, each one with a semi-translucent lid. There were creatures contained within each, though none of them look strictly human. They all had too many limbs or writhing tentacles. A few had shaggy fur while others were covered in bright prismatic boils. In the center of the room stood a gold-plated operating slab shaped like a tongue depressor.
The entire room glowed with an ominous red light—a warning from Spelunker’s Sixth Sense that everything inside was dangerous in one way or another.
We wisely kept the door shut.
The Autopsy Theater, by contrast, was all sharp angles and stainless steel, lit by flickering halogen lights. Tiered observation seats peered down on a meticulously clean central operating table. Beside the table was a glass-topped gurney, covered in sealed vials, empty test tubes, and a wide variety of surgical tools—scalpels and forceps, bone saws and surgical scissors, plus a dozen more gleaming tools I couldn’t out a name too.
It wasn’t hard to guess what the room was used for, though that didn’t make it any better.
Onward we trekked, past MedBay C, Storage Bay 9—filled with towering shelves and neatly labeled boxes—and a BioWaste Disposal Chute with a warning label that said BREACH PROTOCOL F: IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SEDATE SOMETHING.
Eventually, we left the corridor behind and entered into an enormous octagonal chamber, like the hub of a giant wheel. At a glance, it looked like a sparsely furnished breakroom, albeit a very high-tech one.
A cluster of steel tables sat bolted to the floor in the center, each one surrounded by stools with no backs, no cushions, and no chance of comfort. Along one wall, a recessed alcove housed a bank of vending machines, though the continents within looked like nothing I was remotely familiar with.
One machine was stocked with oblong, vacuum-sealed packets labeled in blocky, color-coded glyphs—emerald green, sludge brown, and one that was hazard-light orange. Another held clear canisters filled with slow-churning fluid that might’ve been a protein source, assuming you were comfortable eating something labeled SYNTH-MEAT: BIOFRACTIONAL, CHEW-READY (GEN2.5) – Now with 23% less emotional residue!
“Hey, I’ve always wanted to try Biofractional Synth-Meat,” Croc said, openly ogling at the vending machine.
“What?” I asked. “Since when?”
“Since I learned about it five seconds ago,” the mimic replied, staring greedily at the machine. “I’ve never had Synth-Meat before, Dan, but I’m always saying my food has way too much emotional residue.”
“You’ve literally never said that before, ever,” I replied. “And no, we’re not buying Synth-Meat.” I squinted at the machine. “For one, I’m pretty sure it takes something called Bit-Scrip—whatever the hell that is—and, two, we have no idea what that shit is. I’ll probably turn you into some kind of genetic monstrosity.” I paused, lips pursed into a thin line. “More than you already are, I mean.”
“Don’t be hurtful, Dan,” Croc said. “You know I can’t help my genetic predisposition.”
Opposite the vending machines was a water station, which hummed quietly, colorful lights blinking erratically. Next to it sat a microwave built like a tank, its digital timer permanently stuck at 00:01. An inspirational poster hung above it with a picture of a cat with seven eyes and a description that said VRD ETHIC COMMITTEE SAYS: “You’re Doing Great!” Then, in parenthesis at the bottom, (Please ignore prior announcements from the VRD Ethics Committee.)
Connecting to the breakroom were eight additional airlock doors, which each lead different research wings. EGGR Core Stack, Bio-Engineering Replication Bay, FailSafe Control Break – Level 25, Aether Dynamics Lab 5, Nanotech Assembly Sector, Sub-Level Fabrication Yard, Restricted Wing: S-Class Access, Temporal Observation Annex 2.
I wasn’t sure what any of the various sectors were, but one thing immediately jumped out at me. FailSafe Control Break – Level 25.
That stopped me cold.
Though, not necessarily the “FailSafe” part.
As a former Marine and general contractor, computers weren’t exactly my specialty, but I was a millennial—part of that weird in-between generation that grew up without personal computers, then had to figure them out on the fly before we’d even survived puberty. I knew what a Failsafe was, at least in the conventional sense of the word. In was a built-in mechanism that kicked started when things went to hell, shoving the system into safe mode so it didn’t completely self-destruct.
Rather, the thing that shocked me was the Floor 25 designation.
There was a shit ton I still didn’t know about the Backrooms, but there was one thing I was sure of. We were on the 75th Floor. So why the hell was there an airlock connecting to a place that, by all floor signage and logical reasoning, should’ve been fifty levels below us?
As far as I’d ever understood, the Backrooms didn’t work that way.
Each floor was a neatly sealed nightmare pocket—self-contained, distinct, and disconnected, like the world’s worst department store levels. Sure, you travel between levels through very specific thresholds, but this seemed different somehow. Either someone had seriously messed up the signage—unlikely, given the VRD’s terrifying commitment to bureaucratic clarity—or the floors weren’t as disconnected as I’d assumed.
At least not the Research Levels.
Which raised all kinds of uncomfortable questions.
“Incredible,” Jakob whispered breathlessly.
He looked like a kid in a candy store. It wasn’t hard to imagine why. As a chemist, I knew it was Jakob’s long-term goal to unravel the secrets of the Backrooms then find a way back home, so he could improve the world with the technology here. Cure diseases, fix global warming, use the progenitive capabilities of the Backrooms to solve the hunger crisis.
He immediately beelined toward the door labeled Bio-Engineering Replication Bay and ran a hand reverently over the surface.
“I’ve seen this before,” he said, “or one like it down on the 25th Floor, anyway. That’s where they keep the Helix Splicers.” He paused, lips pressing into a thin line. “I know we’re on a rather time sensitive mission, but I don’t think we should pass up a chance like this. The Splicers are only on the Research Floors and getting to them is… challenging.”
I consider the request for a beat. It was always possible that was the way we were supposed to go anyway, so I cast Unerring Arrow just to see. Blue light zipped out and curved away from the Replication Bay and toward a section marked Restricted Wing: S-Class Access.
Should’ve figured.
“Hate to burst your bubble, but we’re headed that way,” I said, pointing to the door marked with a bright red caution triangle. “And the clock’s still ticking.”
“I know,” Jakob said, “but this could be important. Although the Helix Splicers on twenty-five still work, most of the computer terminals have been damaged beyond repair. We know that there are other races here, but no one knows why. The working theory is that they come from other worlds, or perhaps other dimensions, but no one I’ve ever talked to understands why they’re here or how they got here in the first place. This facility”—he waved a hand at the odd room—“is in far better condition than the one down on the twenty-fifth floor. Perhaps we could find some answers?”
“It could also benefit the store,” Harper added, almost as an afterthought. “Just think about how many people want to make the trek down to twenty-five but can’t for one reason or another. If you could secure a Helix Splicer for the store, though…”
She left the rest unsaid, though the silence thundered with implications.
There were a lot of people who would give there left arm for a shot to undergo the process that transformed someone from a run-of-the-mill human and into a Transmog. Even Temperance had mentioned it a time or two. Personally, I had no desire to give up my humanity for a little extra magical firepower or fortified physical resistance. This place had taken damned near everything from me—my friends, my career, my world—and my humanity was the only thing I had left.
That and my stupid gear.
But there were a lot of other people who didn’t have those same reservations, and adding a Helix Splicer would be an incredible draw.
I sighed. “Yeah, fine. I guess we can go take a quick look. But the second something tries to Cronenberg me, we’re out? Agreed?”
“Of course,” Jakob said, nodding vigorously. “You won’t regret this.”
“I already regret it,” I grumbled, gesturing or the Cendral to open the door.
Jakob didn’t waste time. He pressed his palm against the scanner, and the door’s light flashed green with a cheerful ding.
The room beyond was sleek, clinical, and almost painfully bright.
Rows of screens lined the walls, each flickering with streams of genetic data and obscure medical readouts that I couldn’t make heads or tails of. Large glass canisters ran along the floors, each filled with a viscous fluid in a multitude of different hues—red and gold, blue and green, violet, orange, even a muddy brown. Thick cables snaked upward from each canister, disappearing into the ceiling, and across the front were neatly labeled placards with a variety of different names.
Some I recognized instantly—Cendral, Iride, Ecliputaurs—but there were a wide variety of others that I was sure I’d never seen before. Nymphshades, Celestari, Kobocks, Drekhnaar, Helionites, Mystivores, and Kromalkins. I’d heard there were other races tucked away far below but this confirmed it in a way that idle speculation never could.
At the center of the room was an enormous computer terminal, sleek steel and white plastic, reaching from floor to ceiling. Arranged around it in a crescent were six smooth, pod-like machines with glass panels and an unsettlingly organic design.
Each one looked like it had been grown rather than built, all irregular organic curves and translucent resin stretched over something that vaguely resembled bone. Veins of pale violet light pulsed lazily through the shell, beating like the slowed heartbeat of some slumbering creature. Inside, a thin layer of thick, sludgy fluid clung to the curved walls, reflecting the light with an oily shimmer.
Running along the surface of each pod were ridges and deep grooves, chitinous spikes, and odd bone-like protrusions jutting up at irregular intervals. A flurry of cables and tubes connected the pods to the gargantuan central computer. They reminded me of futuristic butterfly cocoons, which I supposed wasn’t all that far from the truth.
A human went in and something else came out, transformed.
“So those are Helix Splicers, huh?” I asked, quirking an unbelieving eyebrow. I couldn’t possibly imagine voluntarily stepping into one of those DNA death coffins. There wasn’t enough money in the world to convince me that thing was safe.
“Yeah,” Harper confirmed with a nod. “Though these ones look a lot more advanced than the ones I used. Same basic design, though.”
Jakob wandered through the room, heading over to the far wall, where a variety smaller terminals and additional medical equipment waited. Stainless steel tables covered in syringes, futuristic scanners, and a portable gadget that looked part blender, part photo copier. He stood before one of the computers and without missing a beat, his fingers were flying over the controls—typing in prompts and toggling through various system menus.
The others circulated around the room, investigating the pods or inspecting the cannisters along the walls, but I only had eyes for the enormous terminal dominating the center of the room. Unlike many of the monitors out in the halls, this one was rendered in a language I could actually read, which was a nice change of pace. I guess the assumption was, if you made it this far into the facility, you had whatever credentials you needed to be here.
As I approached, a translucent chair with elegant arm rests covered in circular nodes materialized in front of the terminal, almost inviting me to sit. After everything that had happened, I had some well justified trust issues, but as far as I knew, the VRD were technically the good guys. So, despite a growing knot of anxiety, I slid into the chair.
Chapter Thirty-Nine – Inquiry Report
The chair looked to be all hard lines and unyielding glass, but the second I sat down, the material conformed to my body, cradling me like a giant pillow.
As I relaxed into the backrest, a surge of power raced along my arms and legs along with an influx of thoughts, feelings, and strange sensations. It wasn’t so different than the way some Relics worked—imparting you with an innate understanding of how to use them.
This was just more.
Instead of instantly understanding how to conjure a fireball or blast a hole in someone’s torso with a beam of water, I understood the terminal in front of me. Not all the information it contained, obviously. My brain couldn’t even begin to touch the smallest fraction of everything the computer held, but I understood what it was and how to use it.
First and foremost, the terminal was an access point for the enormous VRD Parallax Mainframe—another tidbit of info that floated into my skull—which ran throughout the entirety of the Research Division. Unfortunately, even though I could access anything within the VRD database from this hub, I didn’t have the credentials to do so, and the only information contained locally on this node pertained to the operation of the Helix Splicers and the expansive database of research species.
But holy shit was there still a lot of information.
There were thousands of files, neatly sorted and tagged, each one dedicated to a different species. Not just names either, but detailed genetic logs, environmental notes, medical breakdowns, and a host of experimental data. I scrolled past half a dozen names I didn’t recognize before landing on one I did, Cendrals.
I mentally selected the entry, and a wall of text unfurled across the screen.
Like the handful of other research reports I’d come across, this one wasn’t filtered through my Localized Administrative Assistant, so there were no jokes or snarky commentary—just hard data and observations direct from the VRD Research Staff.
>>> Research Inquiry: Initializing <<<
Test Supervisor: Senior Xeno-Geneticist, Iteration 1.24643A
Test Date: 08.19.1156 BCE (Julian Standard, Updated for User Preference)
Subject: Extraction and Analysis of Cendral Genetic Data – Specimen Set #12, obtained from Vytharia-IX (Prime Fragment)
Introduction
The Cendral race represents a unique genetic offshoot of the long-extinct Dragon Lords of Vytharia, planet designation Vytharia-IX (Prime Fragment). Though they possess a serpentine, bipedal physiology, they are not classified as a standard reptilian species. Instead, their biology combines the raw physical resilience of draconic ancestry with advanced natural adaptative traits, most notably extreme regeneration and elemental resistance.
Preliminary tests confirm that Cendrals display hyper-accelerated cellular regeneration, with the ability to regrow severed limbs or catastrophic tissue loss within approximately 24 hours. Their scales are naturally resistant to thermal and elemental energies (classified as fireproof up to ≤ 1200°F), and they possess strong innate resistances to mana-derived effects, including elemental and necrotic energies.
Cultural Observations
Cendral societies are organized into rigid, clan-based hierarchies led by Matriarchs who trace their bloodlines directly back to the Dragon Lords of Vytharia. Lineage is paramount, with every Cendral able to recite their ancestry for dozens of generations. Status within a clan is dictated by a combination of bloodline purity, personal combat achievements, and the ability to endure the extreme physical trials that mark their rites of passage. These trials often involve feats of endurance—such as surviving submersion in magma-heated pools or enduring extended exposure to high-mana storms—to prove their worthiness.
Honor and martial prowess are the cornerstones of Cendral life. Disputes between clans, or even within a clan, are resolved not through diplomacy but through ceremonial combat, often to the death. These duels are as much about demonstrating skill as they are about upholding ancestral pride. Failure is considered a stain on one’s bloodline, and those who cannot prove themselves are often exiled or relegated to servitude within their clan’s structure.
While their technological sophistication lags behind other dominant galactic civilizations, this is less a reflection of intelligence and more a matter of cultural focus.
Cendrals favor bio-engineered and physiological enhancements over synthetic machinery. Their weaponry is forged from the mineral-rich crust of Vytharia, often tempered with draconic bone or infused with regenerative compounds harvested from their own scales. Armor is grown rather than built—layered with scale composites that harden over time and can repair damage autonomously. These innovations, though primitive by some standards, are terrifyingly effective in both combat and survival.
Research Objectives
Cendrals were initially identified and collected for genetic refinement programs aimed at cross-species augmentation. Their unique traits are highly desirable for both military and industrial applications. Key areas of study include:
Tissue Adaptability: The regenerative enzymes harvested from Cendral subjects can be refined into advanced healing accelerants, capable of repairing bodily trauma in less than 90 seconds when applied to non-native species.
Magical Resistance: Mana-insulating compounds extracted from Cendral scales are currently being synthesized into portable shielding matrices capable of nullifying high-intensity spell damage and energy weapon discharge.
Draconic Heat Tolerance: Their natural resistance to extreme thermal environments is being studied to create survival suits for plasma forges, deep-core mining operations, and volcanic battlefield deployments.
Neuromuscular Fiber Study: Analysis of Cendral muscle density has shown potential for low-fatigue exoskeletal systems designed to boost strength output by up to 200%, with applications for heavy labor or frontline combat scenarios.
Environmental Simulation
To fully study and manipulate Cendral biology and behavior, the VRD Research Division has replicated the harsh environmental conditions of Vytharia-IX within controlled sectors of the Progenitor Ship. Utilizing advanced biome sculpting technologies, they have recreated:
· Volcanic Terrain: Simulated magma flows and thermal vents that maintain temperatures consistent with Vytharia’s geologically active zones, ensuring that Cendral heat resistance and regenerative traits remain fully active.
· Mana Storm Fields: Artificially generated energy surges designed to mimic the planet’s high ambient mana levels, which are believed to play a crucial role in fueling their internal regenerative circulatory systems.
· Geothermal Infrastructure: Integrated geothermal reactors power these artificial environments, maintaining the atmospheric composition and mineral-rich ground conditions required for Cendral habitation.
· Cultural Habitat Structures: Training arenas, bio-forges, and ceremonial combat pits have been reconstructed based on scans of native settlements, allowing researchers to observe clan dynamics, combat techniques, and hierarchical behaviors without environmental interference.
This self-contained biosphere functions as both a research lab and a cultural terrarium, giving VRD scientists the ability to observe Cendral interactions under “natural” conditions, all while introducing experimental variables, such as modified environmental stressors or controlled combat scenarios, to study their adaptability.
To better analyze Cendral regenerative thresholds, combat instincts, and clan cohesion, VRD researchers regularly orchestrate controlled conflicts within these artificial environments. By engineering artificial rivalries between captured clans or introducing powerful Progenerated Dwellers, researchers can force the Cendrals into prolonged battles. These stress tests provide valuable data on healing limits, mana-resistance under exhaustion, and the durability of their bio-engineered armor when pushed beyond normal operating constraints.
Specimens are closely monitored during these conflicts using the advanced telemetry capabilities of the VIRUS Interface to record every cell regeneration cycle, mana fluctuation, and muscle failure point. Those that survive are cataloged for further trials or subjected to genetic sampling, while fallen subjects are repurposed for dissection, enzyme extraction, and integrated through the Influx Processing and Randomization System.
Conclusion
Cendrals represent a high-value genetic and biological resource, combining natural resilience, powerful adaptive traits, and cultural combat proficiency. While their arrogance and martial pride make them difficult to capture and study, the potential payoffs in regenerative medicine, environmental resilience, and combat enhancement are significant. The VRD Staff have already managed to isolate and synthesize a variety of useful Relic and Elixir applications.
>>> Research Inquiry: Complete <<<
Attached to the introductory overview were countless nested files containing detailed anatomical surveys, experiment logs, and pages upon pages of dense research data.
I skimmed through bone marrow extractions, nerve fiber grafting, and controlled regeneration trials where entire limbs had been intentionally removed and regrown just to measure enzyme efficiency. Other report logs focused on testing the limits of mana resistance, and pushing Cendral scales through increasingly destructive stress tests, while a few outlined cross-species hybridization experiments that made my stomach tighten.
I could’ve spent weeks digging through the intel, but I didn’t have that kind of time or patience. The gist was clear enough, though. The VRD hadn’t just collected the Cendrals. They’d broken ’em down shotgun style, reverse-engineered their biology, stripped out anything useful, and turned it into weapons or commercial tech.
I felt my blood simmering, a low, steady rage building inside my chest. For the past three months, I’d been living in hell—fighting, killing, running from horrors I couldn’t even begin to comprehend. I’d cut off my own hand. I’d lost my home, my friends, everything that made me me.
And for what?
So I could be a test subject in some twisted intergalactic lab experiment?
I forced the anger down—knowing the rage wouldn’t help me no matter how justified—and focused instead on an attached folder of video and image files. The more I could learn, the better off I’d be in the long run. At least that’s what I told myself. Most of them were recordings of the research experiments, which I quickly skipped. I didn’t need to see a bunch of snuff films firsthand.
But some were different.
Some showed the Cendrals on their homeworld.
The surface was dominated by volcanic terrain, black rock scarred with deep fissures where rivers of slow-moving lava glowed like molten metal. Vast mountain ranges rose sharply from the plains, their slopes covered in dark basalt and streaks of shimmering mineral deposits. Occasional bursts of steam and ash vented from the ground, suggesting the planet’s tectonics were unstable and prone to sudden shifts.
The footage panned to a sprawling settlement built directly into the cliffs. The architecture was all brutal functionality—function over form—carved stone and reinforced with alloy struts and support braces, clearly designed to withstand the intense heat and unpredictable seismic activity. Many buildings appeared to be cooled or powered by geothermal conduits, with faint streams of vapor rising from vents along their surfaces.
The streets and platforms were wide and utilitarian, showing no trace of unnecessary ornamentation. Cendrals moved through the settlement in tightly organized groups. Their training yards were visible even from above. Open-air arenas where groups of serpentine warriors practiced coordinated combat maneuvers with polearms and scaled shields. Their movements were efficient and brutal, clearly drilled into them from a young age.
Below the city, the footage highlighted a network of cavernous structures gouged into the rock. Industrial forges glowed deep red, producing metal and composite materials in controlled heat chambers. Other areas contained rows of cylindrical tanks and workstations, likely used for genetic enhancements or medical procedures.
The footage clicked off, though hundreds of other videos waited in the archive, each promising more of the same mix of awe and disgust.
The implications of the report hit me hard. It explained why the Progenitor Ship was structured the way it was. Its job wasn’t just research—it was to recreate the habitats of whatever species they’d collected, all to study them in “natural” conditions.
Was that what the lower floors were? The Lobby, the abandoned mall of floor 3, the endless parking garage, and the never-ending expanse of suburbia on twenty-four?
Humanity’s natural habitat?
If so, something had gone very, very wrong.
I scrolled past a few more entries, some with familiar names from the canisters lining the walls, before one caught my attention. It was highlighted in an ugly, pulsing red:
DREKHNAAR – CONTAINMENT FAILURE – STATUS: UNACCOUNTED FOR.
Against my better judgment, I clicked it.
The report was far shorter than the one detailing the Cendrals—and much of the information was either missing, corrupted, or redacted altogether. But even the scant details it provided were eye opening.
>>> Research Inquiry: Initializing <<<
Test Supervisor: REDACTED
Test Date: REDACTED
Subject: Extraction and Analysis of Drekhnaar Hive Constructs – Specimen Cluster #07, obtained from a REDACTED Biosphere (Location: REDACTED)
Introduction
The Drekhnaar are not classified as a conventional species but rather as a bio-organic hive phenomenon. Emerging from a newly discovered Blighted ecosystem in the REDACTED, Drekhnaar assimilate, restructure, and weaponize local biomass into hive-born constructs.
These constructs exhibit highly unstable physiology and aggressive biological mutations, often altering their physical forms within hours of capture. Attempts to establish consistent baselines for their biology have repeatedly failed due to unpredictable morphological shifts.
Drekhnaar display a form of collective intelligence, coordinated through a psychic matrix that extends beyond physical proximity. This allows individual drones to act autonomously but with seamless hive-level communication, adapting in real-time to threats or environmental variables.
Behavioral Observations
Unlike conventional predators, Drekhnaar do not hunt for sustenance. They consume and repurpose organic and inorganic matter, transforming prey into additional drones or raw biomass for hive expansion. Colonies grow rapidly, constructing hive structures composed of fused chitin, bone, and acidic secretions that harden into an almost indestructible exoskeleton. Exposure to Drekhnaar pathogens often results in spontaneous cancerous-like growths to form all over the body.
Specimens within the hive operate under a strict hierarchy:
Drones – Fast, lightly armored, responsible for assimilation of organic matter.
Sentinels – Heavily armored units designed for direct confrontation.
Hive Minds – Semi-stationary entities responsible for generating new biomass and maintaining psychic cohesion.
Hive Minds are exceptionally dangerous, exhibiting both regenerative capabilities and limited psychic influence over non-Drekhnaar lifeforms, inducing disorientation or hallucinations in unshielded subjects.
Research Objectives
The VRD Research Division initiated containment and study of Drekhnaar due to their potential applications in neural communication networks. Key areas of research include:
Assimilation Capabilities: Isolating the key chemical components in the pathogen referred to as the “Blight,” which enables the Drekhnaar to spread rapidly and incorporate non-Drekhnaar lifeforms.
Hive Communication Networks: Mapping their psychic matrix to develop signal-proof, long-range communications for use in hostile environments where conventional tech fails.
Chitin Reformation Trials: Extracting and testing the acid-resistant chitin for potential use in living, self-healing armor composites or adaptive defensive barriers.
Weaponization of Hive Constructs: Experimental efforts to repurpose Drekhnaar as programmable bioweapons have yielded mixed results due to uncontrollable hive instincts.
Environmental Simulation – VRD Progenitor Ship
To facilitate long-term study, VRD researchers constructed a fully sealed, quarantine-grade biosphere designed to replicate Blighted ecosystems. This environment includes:
Blight Fields: Artificially maintained zones with controlled corruption levels to simulate the hostile conditions that encourage hive growth.
Organic Matter Repositories: Bio-recycling pits stocked with cloned tissue, used to trigger hive-building behavior.
Psychic Containment Arrays: Specialized shielding designed to dampen the hive’s collective psychic field, preventing mental contamination of nearby personnel.
Regular controlled “assimilation scenarios” are staged by introducing synthetic organisms or engineered Dwellers into the hive chamber. These scenarios allow researchers to assess the limits of the hive’s assimilation capabilities.
Experiment Status
FAILURE: Containment breach during a recent testing operation resulted in the assimilation of multiple VRD security personnel. The current subject count is unknown, and at least two autonomous sub-hives are suspected to be active within the lower quarantine sectors.
WARNING: Surveillance reports suggest the Drekhnaar have successfully integrated VRD technology, including components from failed research drones and even subsystems of the Progenitor Ship. These hybrid constructs demonstrate increased durability, tactical awareness, and extreme weaponization beyond natural baselines.
Conclusion
The Drekhnaar remain one of the most volatile and dangerous bio-organic phenomena ever cataloged by the VRD. While the potential applications of their integration capabilities and psychic network structures are immense, the risk of hive proliferation and uncontrolled mutation is equally high. All current trials have been suspended pending containment restoration. Extreme caution is advised when encountering any hive derivatives.
>>> Research Inquiry: Complete <<<
As with the Cendrals, there were additional attached files, containing photos and raw archived videos showing off the test subjects. I selected one and the file loaded with a quiet buzz.
I immediately wished I hadn’t opened it.
The screen shifted to grainy surveillance footage from what I assumed was one of the VRD quarantine labs. The room looked like it had once been a clean, sterile facility—smooth metal walls, holographic displays, containment pods.
Not anymore, though.
The entire floor was coated with a slick, black resin and entire sections of the wall were covered in jagged growths, spiny formations and bone fused together in grotesque shapes that looked almost deliberate—like the hive was building its own twisted architecture. In the center of the room was a hulking mass of deformed limbs, which shifted in slow, deliberate waves. I was pretty sure it had been a person at one point, but now I couldn’t tell where the body ended, and the floor began.
It was all connected, fused into a single, heaving mound of teeth, claws, and glossy armored plates.
“Jesus, Mary, and Jospeh,” I muttered under my breath. “What in the actual fuck…”
Chapter Forty – Smash and Grab
Before I could venture down the rabbit hole any farther, Jakob called to me from the far side of the room.
“Dan,” he said, nearly bouncing on his toes in sheer exuberance, “I’ve found something here that I think you’ll want to see—it might help with your hand situation.”
I grunted and reluctantly pulled myself from the chair, the connection to the terminal severing the moment I stepped away, and with it the innate knowledge imparted by the network. I glanced down at my hand as I made my way over to the far side of the room. My limb regrowth was still slower than I’d like, but I’d made some significant progress over the past few days. Instead of a stump with a few gross nubs protruding from the end, I now had a fully formed baby hand.
Or maybe a toddler fist.
I wasn’t good with kids and didn’t know how fast they grew.
But the limb was technically functional, even if it was only a fraction of its normal size.
Jakob waved me over to the strange machine that looked equal parts blender and photocopier. Or maybe an industrial microwave was a better comp.
“This little contraption is portable medical regenerator,” he said, positively beaming. “The MedSynth Unit Mk-II. I suspect there are full body version as well—likely located in the Med Bay—but this one should work wonders on your hand.”
I scanned the contraption with no small amount of suspicion and after a few seconds, the Researcher’s Codex provided a brief description.
MedSynth Unit Mk-II
Rare Artifact
Type: Portable Medical Device (Consumable/Rechargeable)
The MedSynth Unit Mk-II is a field-grade regeneration platform designed to handle trauma that would leave most people dead or begging for a miracle. Roughly the size of a reinforced lunchbox, the Mk-II houses a nanofabrication system, synthetic stem-cell reservoir, and mana-infused bio-stitchers capable of repairing catastrophic wounds in minutes. It doesn’t just seal cuts or close gashes—it reconstructs damaged muscle fibers, reconnects nerve endings, and restores structural integrity at a cellular level.
Where it truly stands out is in limb regeneration protocols—always a necessity for researchers conducting questionable experimentation on hostile species.
Once stabilization is achieved, the Mk-II can trigger accelerated tissue growth, rebuilding severed or missing limbs from scratch using the patient’s genetic template. Full regeneration of a limb can be completed in a matter of minutes with no scarring or loss of function. The Mk-II is also capable of removing hostile and permeant Afflictions, which might otherwise prevent cellular restoration.
The process isn’t gentle. The nanites burn like liquid fire as they rebuild tissue, and the metabolic toll is heavy. Users are often left exhausted, dehydrated, and ravenous, with some experiencing phantom nerve sensations or temporary neurological misfires during recovery. Overuse can lead to “cellular overdrive,” which sounds like a superpower but really means “extra tumors in fun places.”
I whistled.
“Holy shit,” I muttered as I read through the description for a second time. “Jakob… can this thing cure you?”
He grinned and pulled off the leather glove that rose all the way to his elbow.
“I already tried it,” he replied, turning his arm this way, then that. Instead of angry flayed meat, the limb was now covered with glistening white scales. “It truly is a miracle in a box. I’ll admit,” he said after a moment of hesitation, “it does sting more than a little, but the price is worth it.” There were tears welling up in his eyes. “For the first time in years, I have no pain.” He paused and canted his head to one side. “Imagine what good this could do—we could regrow Rebecka’s leg or Sven’s missing ears.”
“Or my hand,” I added, wiggling my baby fingers at him.
“Or your hand,” he agreed, sliding open the receiving hatch, which would allow me to insert my damaged limb.
After what I’d seen while plugged in to the terminal, I trusted the VRD less than ever, but if there was one good thing I could say about those assholes, it was that they sure as shit knew how fix the things they broke. I wasn’t thrilled about undergoing another experiment that involved a substantial amount of pain, but if it meant getting my hand back to working order, I’d suck it up and put on my big boy pants.
I jammed my left hand into the machine and Jakob hit a few buttons, the MedSynth Unit Mk-II coming online with a low, unsettling hum. The interior of the machine lit up with a cold, blue-white glow, casting harsh light across the room.
A translucent containment ring clamped over my wrist, locking my arm in place before I could reconsider.
“Hold still,” Jakob said, his voice trembling with excitement.
“Not like I have a choice,” I muttered, my pulse spiking as the gel-like interior began to shift and mold itself around my tiny hand. It was warm. Too warm.
Then the pain hit.
It started as a faint burn, then quickly escalated to “skin-flayed-by-a-blowtorch” levels in seconds. I clenched my teeth and sucked in a sharp breath as a stream of tiny silver nanites began to scuttle across my skin—knitting bone, tendons, and muscle fibers with manic precision.
“Holy shit,” I hissed through clenched teeth. “I thought you said there was a mild tingle. This? This is not a mild tingle! It feels like my hand’s being rebuilt by angry hornets with welding torches!”
Jakob glanced at the monitor. “Sehr gut. That means it’s working.”
The MedSynth pulsed again, and I felt my fingers stretching. And not in the metaphorical sense. They were literally stretching—growing—the tiny bones lengthening and thickening as muscle fibers wove themselves together like meat-colored cables. The sensation was horrifyingly intimate. I could feel every single nerve as it reconnected, sparking like live wires.
Jakob was beaming. “Your cells are responding beautifully. You’ll have a full-grown hand in less than a minute.”
“Great,” I grunted. “Plenty of time to pass out from pain and drool all over myself.” I shot a look at Croc. “You gotta promise not to eat me if I pass out.”
“Never, Dan,” the dog said, sounding aghast. “Friends don’t try to kill, eat, or dismember each other.” The mimic paused. “So long as the limb remains attached. If something comes off, then it would be a shame for it to go to waste.”
The machine whirred faster, a soft metallic click-click-click signaling the final growth cycle. My once-baby-sized hand now looked like it belonged to me again, though it was slick with the strange iridescent nanogel that the MedSynth excreted like some sort of disgusting afterbirth.
Finally, the clamp around my forearm ease and the unit released me.
My hand was whole.
Strong.
I flexed my fingers experimentally, and every tendon responded like it was brand new.
“Screw me sideways,” I said, staring at it. “Jakob… this thing’s insane. It actually worked.”
He chuckled, wiping a sheen of sweat from his scaled brow. “I told you it would. Welcome back to full functionality.”
I gave my hand one last flex and let out a slow breath, forcing myself to refocus.
We’d already spent too long poking around the chamber. There were places we needed to be and monsters still waiting to kill us, but I couldn’t bring myself to walk away just yet. There was too much knowledge here—too much potential—and the Helix Splicers would make one hell of an addition to the store.
So after hustling everyone out of the chamber, I selected the room on my mini-map and triggered Corvo’s Blanket Fort.
At least I tried too…
Instead, I got a strange error message I’d never seen before.
Whoops! It looks like you’ve just attempted to annex 8,250 square feet of laboratory space belonging to the Variant Research Division. Unfortunately, none of the rooms or subspaces on the Research Levels qualify as Progenerated Material, and are contained within their own restricted Superspace Access Level, which means it cannot be claimed using Corvo’s Blanket Fort!
Huh. Now that was certainly a wrinkle I hadn’t anticipated, though it did explain a few things.
Maybe the 25th floor really was connected to the 75th. Hell, maybe every single Research Level was linked together in some kind of twisted, interlocking web of corridors and subspaces that no one fully understood. That would certainly explain the odd time dilation we’d experienced when crossing through the kiosk.
And the more I thought about it, the more it made sense.
Maybe the reason why the Research Floors weren’t like the rest of the Backrooms, was because we were never supposed to have access to them in the first place. The other floors were Progenerated biomes, specifically designed to trap unwilling research subjects. But the VRD floors had been purpose built for something else entirely—observation, experimentation, and control. A central hub, where the Researchers could watch their test subjects from the safety of a fortified lab.
It still chapped my ass, though.
Knowing I couldn’t just annex the entire area, I tried the next logical thing—planting a doorway anchor. If I couldn’t own the room, I could at least get a shortcut back here whenever I wanted.
But that also met with failure.
The second I planted a door placard I received another prompt.
Whoops! It looks like you’ve just tried to attach an unauthorized spatial anchor to VRD-controlled property. Spatial anchors cannot be deployed on Variant Research Division Levels due to ongoing Progenitor interference. If this is an error, please consult your local Credentialing Administrator for proper clearance.
“Of course I need proper administrative clearance,” I muttered, glaring at the prompt as if I could intimidate it into compliance. “God forbid anything in this place make my life easier.”
So, claiming the space was out. Doorway anchor? Also out. Which left me with only one logical option. Steal everything that wasn’t nailed down—and a few things that were.
“Okay,” I barked at the rest of the team, “if you see anything you can carry, grab it. We’re about to strip this place cleaner than a Black Friday sale at Costco.”
Croc’s mouth—or the jagged approximation of one—curled into a frown. “Are you sure about this, Dan? I mean, I don’t want to second guess you, but I feel like looting a research wing might get us into trouble…”
“If the VRD didn’t want me stealing their shit,” I replied, “they should have left it better guarded. That’s on them for the oversight.”
There was no way all this stuff would fit into my regular Spatial Storage—not with the two-thousand-pound weight restriction—so I triggered Conveyor Logistics, the store’s not-so-subtle teleportation system, and immediately got to work. The humming sound of the dimensional transfer began to fill the chamber as I swept my hand across the first set of canisters. One by one, they zipped out of existence, instantly transported back to the Store like they’d never been there.
The Helix Splicers were next.
Those unsettling, pod-like machines didn’t want to move, probably because they weren’t designed to leave the lab they’d been so painstakingly installed in. But with a few manual overrides—i.e. Croc’s tentacles wrenching them free—they disappeared into storage too. The system gave a small, annoyed ping each time one dematerialized, as if to say, What the hell are you doing, Dan? These aren’t meant for commercial use. But I didn’t give a shit. The VRD had abducted me against my will, so I figured robbing them blind was fair play.
“Shut up and take my loot,” I grumbled.
Medical equipment, surgical tools, syringes, and scanners went next—along with the MedSynth Unit that had healed my hand. I even claimed the central terminal, detaching the main interface from its mount and watching it flicker out of existence as the logistics system whisked it away in a blink.
Harper glanced around the increasingly empty chamber with a raised brow. “You’re seriously taking all of it? Even the equipment bolted to the walls?”
“Especially the equipment bolted to the walls,” I replied, yanking another holo-screen free.
Within a matter of minutes, the chamber was gutted as though a pack of tech-hungry raccoons had raided the place. Even the floor canisters of weird colored fluids were gone, each one catalogued and shipped back to the store for later examination.
When I finally deactivated Conveyor Logistics, the only thing left in the room was a faint scorch mark where the terminal had been. I dusted my hands off.
“Alright,” I said, feeling a little too pleased with my totally justified thievery. “If I can’t have the room, I’ll just take everything inside it. Problem solved.”
Temperance smirked, leaning on her blade. “I commend your efforts, but aren’t you at all worried the VRD might respond in kind?”
“Hey, no alarms are going off yet, are they?” I asked.
Then, as if on cue, the overhead lights flickered, and a sharp klaxon began to howl through the corridor.
“...I hate this place,” I muttered.
“INTRUDER ALERT,” a mechanical voice bellowed from hidden speakers in the walls. “Unauthorized PErSONNEL detected. Research Security Golems have been dispatched to investigate. PLEASE REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE!”
Somewhere deep in the facility, a heavy door slid open with a hydraulic shhunk, followed by the unmistakable click-clack of metal limbs against steel grating.
Jakob turned to me with wide eyes. “Das riecht nach Ärger,” the Cendral muttered. “That sounds like a lot of legs.”
Croc’s ears flattened. “Too many legs. I always say you should never trust something with more than ten legs. As the saying goes, nine is divine, eight is great, seven is heaven, five is fine, four galore, three is the bee’s knees, two is tried and true, and one is likely a very sad workplace accident. But ten?” Croc shook his head. “Never ten.”
“There’s no way that’s a saying,” Harper replied with a frown. “That’s just so incredibly specific and there can’t possibly be enough scenarios to warrant someone coming up with a saying like that.”
“Nope, it’s definitely a very common scenario,” Croc assured her.
“Let them come,” Temperance said. She already had her new weapon drawn and was casually caressing the hilt with a thumb. “We haven’t killed anything in ages. I was starting to get bored.”
With the alarms still blaring and red lights strobing manically overhead, we hustled out of the gutted room and back into the octagonal chamber, where the other doors connected.
While the others argued about how many legs was too many legs, I approached the door to the S-Class Restricted Wing, examining it using both Spelunker’s Sixth Sense and the Researcher’s Codex. Neither gave me any good information to work off. As far as I could tell, the door itself wasn’t trapped or warded, and the Codex didn’t give me any additional information.
There was a digital palm scanner beside the door and, with no better options available, I mashed my hand against the reader and prayed for the best. The palm scanner lit up blue for half a second, then quickly changed to a glowing, angry red.
“WARNING,” the speakers blared again, “You are attempting to access a restricted VRD Wing without the proper SECURITY clearance. Do not attempt to breach this door and remain where you are. Please do not resist. Failure to comply will result in corrective dismemberment.”
The click-clack of approaching metallic legs filled me with a deep sense of urgency and more than a little fear.
Something terrible was coming—I could feel it in my bones.
We needed to get into the Restricted Wing, and we needed to do it before we had a meet and great with the “corrective dismemberment welcome committee.” Obviously, the scanner wasn’t going to let us through without the proper credentials, but there was also a cardkey slot, located directly beneath the palm reader.
Maybe I could use that.
I dropped to a knee and pulled one of my most valuable Artifacts from Spatial Storage. The Quantum Skeleton Key. With no time to waste, I unceremoniously jammed the strange brass key into the override slot, and used one of the two remaining charges.
The airlock door vibrated and rattled in its metallic frame as the key shimmered and pulsed, the metallic edges phasing in and out of alignment. It was the locksmith’s equivalent of black magic—quantum tumblers shifting through millions of potential configurations per second until reality gave up the will to live and let us through.
Behind us, the rhythmic clicking grew louder. Faster. More insistent.
Croc let out a low whine. “Dan, its getting closer. Much closer. I can smell the tungsten and motor oil.”
“Just another few seconds,” I grunted.
I let out a soft sigh of relief as the lock finally released, followed by a ker-chunk as the door slid open with a whoosh of pressurized air.
“Go!” I shouted, pushing Jakob through first, followed by Croc, Harper, and Temp in turns. I slipped in last, and the door slammed shut behind us just as something heavy hit the far end of the hallway with a metallic clang.
“Move your asses,” I hollered, already quick casting Unerring Arrow to guide our way.
The corridor ahead ran straight for a hundred feet then twisted left and dipped downward, red lights still flashing overhead as we barreled through. Behind us, I heard the airlock door open again followed in short succession by the rhythmic pounding of metal limbs. In short order we came to another octagonal chamber—this one with even more corridors branching off.
But it was too late to run.
Something skidded into view behind us, and I knew we were going to have to fight our way out of this like it or not.
“Battle formation,” I thundered, wheeling back to face the corridor we’d just exited from.
Jakob, Croc, and Temp formed a curved wall, shielding me and Harper from any direct line of attack. The room was too cramped to summon my entire army of Horrors, but I still called forth a few of my heavy front-line hitters. Drumbo, Synthia, and Timmy all shambled into view, then quickly moved to take up positions near the door.
I held my breath as the VRD Security Golem finally scuttled into view, charging toward us on a sea of metallic, arachnoid legs.
The creature didn’t look anything like the Cannon Fodder minions from my store. It was brutal fusion of battlefield engineering and surgical efficiency—equal parts armored turret, and mobile defense drone.
It was easily seven eight tall, its armored chassis resting on a dozen heavy-duty mechanical legs, each built like a jackhammer with claws sharp enough to punch through steel. Twin plasma cannons were mounted on broad shoulder plates, and beneath those hung a cluster of secondary limbs. Attached to each was something awful—razor-sharp scythe blades, articulated claws, rotating plasma cutters, and what looked suspiciously like a bone saw attached to a shock baton.
Atop its hunched torso sat a flat, disc-shaped head with a single glowing red eye that swept the room in slow, methodical arcs.
Scanning, targeting, calculating.
Administrative Agent 1.750250B – VRD Security Golem [Level 50]
Constructed by the Variant Research Division to provide immediate tactical response to security breaches, the VRD Security Golem is immune to most magical interference, impervious to emotional manipulation, and built to withstand direct artillery fire. Capable of operating in zero-atmosphere environments and deeply hostile biomes, its job is simple. Locate the target, contain the target and, failing that, disassemble the target into small, manageable chunks for later analysis.
At level 50, this thing was a force to be reckoned with, and even worse it wasn’t tagged as a Dweller. I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of that, but I doubted it was good.
The golem also seemed to be fully inorganic, which meant StainSlayer Maelstrom would be about as effective as a bottle of Windex, and I doubted Temperance’s plague and disease-based Relics would fare any better. On top of that, its armor was thick enough to shrug off most attacks, so it would probably be resistant to Hydro Fracking Blast and anything that dealt slashing or piercing damage.
In short, it was a mobile tank designed specifically to stop creatures with hostile magic.
Creatures like us.
The golem paused at the entrance to the room, its limbs adjusting with a series of clicks. Then it locked onto us with that unblinking red eye and spoke in a smooth, genderless voice.
“Unauthorized lifeforms detected,” it droned. “Lethal force approved. Begin disassembly. Please do not resist. VRD thanks you for your compliance.”
Chapter Forty-One – VRD Security Protocol
While the security golem was just standing there like a deer caught in a set of headlights, I went on the offensive and preemptively cast Frostfang Spire. The metal floor cracked open and a forest of jagged ice erupted upward, impaling the metal monstrosity through the legs and undercarriage, momentarily pinning it in place. The golem let out a series of robotic screeches as it twisted and turned, its arms whirling to life—smashing through columns of ice as it attempted to free itself.
Instead of charging in headfirst, I pulled a Fortification Field spell card from my belt and shouted the activation phrase. It erupted in a ripple of light, washing over my teammates and boosting their attack damage, Athleticism, and overall Toughness. At the same time, I sent a Hurt Locker spell card spinning through the air toward the pinned golem. The card hit dead-on and detonated in a crackling burst, lowering the mech’s armor resistance and speed, all while making it more susceptible to both piercing and elemental damage.
Drumbo launched himself at the golem without hesitation, swinging the Gauntlet of Fist-Shaped Problems in a brutal uppercut that rang off the golem’s plating like a church bell.
The fucker barely flinched.
Synthia spun in behind Drumbo, unleashing a lance of Charbroil Inferno that bathed the golem in searing flame. The creature’s health bar didn’t drop so much as an inch. Instead, its upper half rotated, and its cannons ignited, spewing twin blasts of white-hot plasma that carved a molten trench across the floor. Syntia dove to one side, avoiding the worst of the blast, but one plasma stream still caught her leg, severing everything below the knee.
Instead of rolling gracefully, Synthia landed like a bag of bricks, temporarily down for the count as dark ichor seeped from the charred wound.
Jakob rushed forward with a roar and activated Broken Car Alarm.
A shrill, wheezing blare echoed down the corridor and the golem swung around, already recalibrating as it locked onto the Cendral. Its cannons went hot again, unleashing a stream of liquid fire that splashed against Jakob’s glowing blue energy shield. The plasma hissed and sizzled on contact but couldn’t punch through. Instead, it dribbled down onto the floor, melting through steel and revealing a yawning, wire filled chasm below.
“Is that all you’ve got!” Jakob taunted, car alarm still blaring.
Apparently, that wasn’t all the golem had, because a billowing cloud of flame erupted from its undercarriage, instantly melting my conjured ice spikes. Steam billowed out in a rolling cloud and the golem lurched forward, slamming a hydraulic limb capped with a sledgehammer directly in Jakob’s shield. The blow sent Jakob sailing across the room like a line drive and he smashed unceremoniously into the far wall, his eyes fluttering and his arms going limp.
The golem rotated and fired off another plasma bolt, this one aimed at Harper. Timmy sprang into motion, hurling himself into the path of the beam. Liquid fire slammed into the Kannibal Kid’s narrow chest, carving a hole through his torso, as tongues of flame lapped along the Horror’s limbs.
Harper scrambled out of the way just as the column of plasma punched through Timmy’s back and continued into the wall, melting through a section of white paneling.
For the moment, none of my teammates were in the immediate vicinity, so I sent a pair of upgraded Balloon Menagerie Spell Cards zipping through the air, one aimed at the golem’s flat head, the other swinging low then angling upward toward its chassis. They hit with the force of a magical wrecking ball, flame billowing around the steel monstrosity in a halo of gold and red.
Even from a distance I could feel the heat against my face.
In response, the golem released a blast of some sort of foam coolant that immediately suppressed the blaze before it could do any lasting damage. But the momentary chaos gave me enough time to prepare my next attack. I thrust my hand forward and activated Hydro Fracking Blast. Just like with Nikoli’s mech, I knew there was no way the water blast would penetrate the thick steel plating, so I split the beam and aimed for the joints—shoulder actuators, knee pistons, the exposed servos under its chin.
I neatly managed to severe one of its mechanical legs and it fell to the floor with a clank. Then, using Hydrokensis, the water slithered toward the plasma turrets before flash-freezing in place. That wouldn’t disable the cannons, but it would prevent them from operating with their full range of movement.
Drumbo trundled forward, hurling another haymaker—but the golem summoned some sort of semi-translucent energy barrier that absorbed the blow. The creature chuffed and buzzed, angling its robotic head downward. A hatch on its back flipped open and half a dozen smooth metallic spheres spilled onto the ground. The balls unfurled like enormous roly-pollies, revealing stubby legs, exhaust ports, and gleaming red targeting eyes. Instead of plasma cannons, the miniature golems each had a single, rotating minigun with belts of ammo dangling down.
“Fuck me,” I said, as the first mini golem opened up with a burst of automatic gun fire.
Bullets screamed through the air and tore into Croc, shredding one of the mimic’s tentacles. I acted on instinct, using Hydro Fracking Blast to conjure water, before hastily shaping it into a series of thick frozen shields that hung in the air on threads of telekinetic power. I maneuvered the first frozen shield into place just in time to intercept the next round of gun fire. Chips of ice flew, but the frozen barrier held, protecting Croc from the worst of the barrage.
Harper was already working her magic from the backline, silvery light surrounding her as she spammed Field Surgeon to patch up the wounded.
A shiver raced down my spine as a flash of preternatural insight hit me in the chest. I wheeled to the right just in time to see another mini-golem, with its gun trained on me. I triggered Neural Slipstream as the minigun belched out an unrelenting stream of lead, and the bullets passed harmlessly through my Spectral Form before ploughing into the wall behind me.
If we had any chance of surviving this thing, we needed cover—and the ice shields just weren’t going to cut it. I pulled free several Dopplebanger Clone cards and activated them, summoning a wall of malformed flesh across the room. Although their primary purpose was to absorb damage, the clones had a secondary benefit. Until activated, they were basically indestructible. Meat sponges that could soak up damn near anything.
Harper ducked behind one of the clones a second before another round of suppressive fire turned her into a bloody pincushion.
Croc, now down a few limbs, barreled forward with a snarl, before wrapping a pair of the mini golems in writhing tentacles. Croc hurled one drone against the wall with enough force to dent the metal, then proceeded to smash the other into the floor until it was nothing but sparking debris.
I activated another round of Hydro Fracking Blast, sawing through another leg, while Temperance raced across the air and activated Ghost Leash.
A tether of violet light erupted from her chest and latched onto the gargantuan golem. She reeled herself in like a human grappling hook, landing on the golem’s shoulder just above the plasma cannons. Her Dark Solstice Cleaver flashed as she stabbed downward, driving the blade through steel plating and into the delicate inner workings beneath. Sparks burst like fireworks as the golem jerked violently, its targeting reticle flickering.
Temperance didn’t stop.
“You won’t get away that easily,” she snarled.
She scrambled forward like a woman possessed, anchoring herself with the Ghost Leash and jamming the cleaver in deeper with both hands. The blade shrieked as it carved through metal, and a gout of blue coolant sprayed into the air like blood from a severed artery.
The golem buzzed and shook like a wet dog trying to fling her loose—but Temperance clung tight, laughing like a lunatic.
“I’m going to bathe in your motor fluids!”
Meanwhile, Jakob was finally back on his feet after a little help from Harper. The Cendral pulled free an alchemic vial from the bandolier strung across his chest and hurled it at Golem Prime. Glass smashed across the mech’s sternum, and a gooey green substance immediately began to eat through the alloy, exposing a tangle of delicate wires and intricate coils beneath.
A mini-golem I hadn’t even seen opened up with a spray of gunfire and I was too slow to get out of the way, before the bullets chewed through my side like a rabid pitbull. A blinding flash of pain ripped through me, but my health bar didn’t drop so much as an inch—the clones soaking up the damage on my behalf.
Ignoring the pain, I sent the Bowling Ball of Rolling Momentum blasting forward and it smashed into the larger golem’s exposed internals. The force crumpled plating and—just as the golem reared back to retaliate—the ball arced upward and caved in the thing’s glowing red eye. The eye flashed once before going dark, the creature blinded for the time being.
Harper followed up with a pair of Shadow Eagles that smashed into the golem’s side and sent it reeling.
On Harper’s left, two more drones scampered across the floor toward Jakob. Before I could call out a warning, Croc intercepted again, slamming down on both with tentacles like piledrivers. The mimic was bleeding from a dozen of wounds and bullet holes, but they didn’t seem to slow it down in the least. If anything, Croc looked angry.
Temperance was still manically hacking away, and Golem Prime was now down below forty percent health. But even half dead and blinded, it was still a threat.
It opened up with its plasma cannons once again, this time zigzagging them indiscriminately back and forth, carving deep channels in the walls.
In some ways, this was actually worse than before. I could anticipate and intercept targeted strikes, but this was just sheer destruction for destruction’s sake—the last-ditch effort of a monster looking to take down anything it possibly could.
Clearly, my current arsenal wasn’t all that effective against the armored titan, but that just meant I needed to fight smarter. I took cover behind a Dopplebanger and hastily swapped Echoed Aura for Circuitbreaker Surge—one of the Relics I’d looted off Nikoli’s corpse. Since the golem appeared to be entirely mechanical, I had to assume 10,000 volts of concentrated energy right into its exposed circuitry would probably hurt like a real son of a bitch.
Electricity arced from my fingertips, a web of sizzling blue lines tracing across the air before slamming into the golem’s vulnerable chest cavity. A blinding flash lit up the room as the sudden surge overloaded its remaining power systems. Curls of acrid smoke drifted from its chest, then its shoulder. One of the legs detonated in a spray of molten steel.
The attack had badly damaged to golem, dropping it below ten percent health.
Temp, still riding the monstrosity like an angry rodeo bull, raised her sword and brought it down with a warcry, the blade burning with black light as she triggered Fetch the Skull—her execute ability. The heavy blade effortlessly parted steel and wires as she decapitated the golem in one fell swoop.
The circular steel head toppled to the floor and the creature collapsed in a heap of ruined limbs and wrapped steel.
But even with it dead, we weren’t quite in the clear yet.
Several of the mini-golems were still active despite the death of their gargantuan brother. I could fix that. I cut the timer short on my Dopplebangers, and all of them burst into frantic life, hurling themselves at the security drones before exploding in a shower of gore and a cloud of green gas that quickly spread through the room. The smell was absolutely rancid, though thankfully, the AoE spell only dealt damage to enemies.
A small silver lining in the midst of an otherwise catastrophic shitshow.
A rolling shudder of pure relief washed through me as the last of the turret drones died, cogs and bits of shredded metal decorating the floor.
“Everyone okay?” I asked, breathing heavily.
“Not at all,” Jakob wheezed. “I’ve been shot. Several times, actually.”
I glanced at the Cendral. He wobbled on his feet and could barely stay upright, one hand clutched against his gut. It was impossible to miss the spattering of bullet holes littering his torso and legs.
“On it,” Harper said, rushing to his side, then giving him a Zima and a dose of Field Surgeon magic just for good measure.
Meanwhile, Croc flopped onto the floor, leaking a variety of viscous fluids. “I could use a little help, too, when you’ve got a second. I think I tore something important. Internally.”
Harper moved quickly, sliding to a knee beside the mimic who was now just an amorphous blue blob of tentacles, eyes, and mouth orifices. That was never a good sign. When Croc sustained enough damage, it could no longer retain a solid form and reverted back into its natural state. The mimic was still breathing, though, its health above twenty percent. With the golems taken care of, I had no doubt Harper would be able to get the dog back on its feet.
But she’d have to work quick.
The lights were still strobing red, and the mechanical voice from the loudspeakers chirped a new warning. “Alert! Alert! Alert! Primary threat still detected. Additional security units en route. All unauthorized personnel, please remain stationary. Do not resist. The Variant Research Division appreciates your compliance.”
“Well shit,” I muttered.
We’d barely managed to survive an encounter against one of those security golems. Somehow, I doubted we’d do quite so well against even more of ’em.
“Okay,” I said, rolling my shoulders with a wince. “Harper do what you can, Temp and I will loot what’s worth looting, and then we need to get gone. And I mean fast.”
We set to work immediately, though it turned out there wasn’t much to do.
None of the Golems had a spatial core at all. No Relics. No Artifacts.
This was the first time I’d ever come across something that didn’t drop loot. But that wasn’t the only strange thing. While picking over the mechanical corpses, I realized I also hadn’t received any Experience or other combat related notifications. At the very least, killing a VRD security golem should’ve earned me some sort of Research Achievement, but there was just nothing.
There was only one conclusion I could come to. Not only were these things not Dwellers, but clearly the Researcher wasn’t going to reward us for killing them. That was a troubling revelation.
Still, it wasn’t a total loss.
I found a keycard tucked away on the massive VRD Golem—probably our ticket past the rest of the security doors. So, that was something. But the real prize was the bodies themselves. Since the security bots weren’t Dwellers and were fully mechanical, I figured I could strip ’em for parts and retrofit my Horrors with some serious upgrades.
Some heavy-duty steel armor for Drumbo. Hydraulic, articulating limbs for Timmy. Uncle Sam would surely appreciate the shoulder-mounted plasma cannons. Not to mention all the mini-guns. Enough to outfit a small army.
With the keycard in hand, I sent the wrecked golems back to the store for processing, then cast Unerring Arrow once again. There were half a dozen corridors branching off in different directions, but the spell pointed straight toward one labeled Pathogen Containment Vault.
“Seriously?” I muttered before sighing in resignation.
After reading about the Drekhnaar back in the Splicer Room, the Pathogen Containment Vault was the last place I wanted to go. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how awful the stuff inside was. Well, that wasn’t true—I could imagine. Interstellar centipedes with a thousand legs. Nightmares that breathed black death. Walls lined with asbestos and slathered in lead paint—I couldn’t get Croc’s stupid mesothelioma story out of my head.
Still, Unerring Arrow had never led me astray before.
“Come on,” I said, waving the others over as I made my way toward the door.
“Surely, you cannot possible intend for us to go in there?” Jakob asked, limping up behind me.
I grit my teeth and shrugged, “Unless you’ve got a better idea?”
“I’ve got several better ideas, actually” he said, waving at the other corridors.
Among them were, Thermal Regulation Core 7, Kinetic Systems Testing Hall – Tier 2, and Synthetic Organics Reclamation Stack.
“Surely any of these would be a better option than the Pathogen Containment Vault. Perhaps you missed Croc’s story about the hyper-aggressive Metastatic Mesothelioma?”
“I didn’t miss the story,” I snapped. “And yes, I agree this sounds like the worst possible place to go, but that’s the way the Arrow pointed, so that’s the way we’re going.”
A look of deep concern flashed across Jakob’s face, but when he didn’t say anything else, I swiped the card across the panel. It beeped once and the heavy airlock slid open, releasing a cold gust of recycled air that smelled like disinfectant and something much worse.
Death. Decay. Rot.
Rows of flickering UV lights bathed the corridor in a sickly blue glow, casting long shadows and making everything look just slightly… wrong.
“If we’re voting,” Croc said, dragging itself upright with a noise like wet duct tape peeling off linoleum. “I’m going with Jakob. That place smells terrible. I’ve got a bad feeling about this, Dan.”
“How do you feel about fighting more security golems?” Temperance asked innocently, twirling her still-smoldering blade.
The mimic frowned. “Well, when you put it like that,” Croc replied, “I suppose I’ve always wanted to see what’s inside a Pathogen Containment Vault. I wonder if they have Froyo in there?”
“Somehow I doubt it,” I replied.
Though thinking back to the 24th Floor, I supposed the chances of finding Froyo weren’t zero. The Backrooms sure as shit knew how to throw a curveball when I least expected it.
I could hear the distant clink of metal legs drawing closer and I didn’t want to be here when the rest of the VRD reinforcements showed up. So, I suppressed the irrational surge of fear and pressed forward.
Because in the Backrooms, the only reward for surviving a nightmare… is walking face-first into the next one.