The thing talked.
It talked to me through my fucking head, it was using telepathy to communicate. I didn't even know this was a possibility one could encounter on Remnant, Father certainly hadn't mentioned it before.
I tried to say something back to it, anything really. But my mouth let out nothing, the immense pressure within my cranium had spread down towards my torso like a reptile, slithering its way down my neck in the most uncomfortable of manners possible.
"No talking, child. Listen."
The words rattled my head akin to someone trying to jam my head into a tambourine, the edges of my visions blurred as tunnel vision set in, focusing every angstrom of my attention onto this being of tendril black and bone white. I could feel something dripping from my face into the innards of the mask donned upon my face. Unlike the blood that leaked from my face earlier, I couldn't make out how hot or cold this liquid was, my face felt numb.
"Much to explain, time is little, follow."
It spoke in a strange manner, jilted and twitchy with random abrupt pauses that completely segregated the flow of one word to the next one, the kind of speech that would be difficult to interpret under normal circumstances, this oddness was all the more exacerbated by the telepathy currently attacking my brain like a dustrail train rattles down a tramway.
Before I had time to mull on how much pain this situation was no doubt causing me, the creature hobbled backwards in the most disconcerting way possible. It moved in a manner that was smack bang in the middle of the uncanny valley, or rather the most uncanny of valleys. Its limbs moved in the same manner it spoke, with an odd twitchy and jagged series of incredibly quick movements, not too dissimilar to how a spider would move around the forest floor whilst on the prowl for prey.
This thing definitely fits the role of a predator, honestly It'd do a pretty damn good job in any environment I could think of.
Perhaps the movement of the limbs on its own wouldn't be so bad, however it was made about a thousand times worse by the way its torso moved. The movement of the torso was strangely fluid, like a ballet dancer. The torso moved as if the torso wasn't even from the same creature that the legs and arms came from, or perhaps it was the other way around.
The creature rotated its torso fluidly to face the opposite direction of me, towards the cave, whilst the limbs surrounding flailed rigidly to accommodate the movement. The creatures neck cracked in an uncomfortable manner as it remained entirely focused on me, its head was currently completely backwards to face me, without any notable contortion of the skin on its neck. It seemed like the skeletal innards weren't even linked to the movement of the muscles and the skin on the outside, or perhaps it was some other combination of the three? Regardless, the neck did not contort in any visible way, but the violent snapping noises and the disturbing dichotomy of a head facing the wrong direction remained.
I felt compelled to follow, the pain got worse the more distance it put between me.
I followed the beast into the cave, trepidation coursing through me as my heart throbbed within my chest at 10 kilometres a second. The cave surfaces seemed familiar at first, the same kind of stone that I had slept in last night, however that rapidly began to change the deeper in we got. A disturbing series of pulsating red tendrils webbed the floor, rooted deep into and throughout the rock above me, below me and around me. The further in we got, the thicker it got until there was no stone visible anymore, only the faintly glowing red tendrils that made up every inch of my surroundings.
We walked for a long time. More time than I expected for what seemed a reasonably shallow cave. Unlike the prior cave I slept in the night before, this cave's surfaces didn't change in proportion throughout the journey deeper, they stayed oddly uniform, almost perfectly so.
Then the journey abruptly ended, when we entered some sort of colossal chamber.
Sacks of what appeared to be pulsating organs lined the walls, all beating in unison. They looked like hearts or lungs or… something, they were all the same thing, whatever that meant. Thick pillars of tendrils dotted the room in a uniform circle, surrounding something in the centre of the chamber.
A pulsating light emits faintly from some sort of yet another pulsating organ, this one definitely looked like a heart of some sort. The creature that had guided all of this way, still causing immense pressure upon my brain, turned its torso back around to face me. I didn't see much point really, given he'd been staring at me this entire walk.
And then it spoke once more, this time notably more whispered and frail.
"Child…certain, your questions are many, but time short. I will die soon. I made an error, I have doomed myself."
It let out a forced exhale through the mask, I didn't even realise the thing could breathe until now, It hadn't on the way here. A strange white powder with a blue hue flitted from his mouth into the air, where it quickly lost its hue and fell to the ground in tiny snowflakes.
Ice dust. The thing had somehow gotten dust lung, a condition that dust miners used to get before the proper equipment was introduced decades ago. Assuming that the tunnels around here were made by this thing, it must have hit an ice dust vein and continued clawing through the compound without realising.
"Dust… an apt name. It has damaged this… the heart. My heart."
It spoke once more, pointing towards the colossal, engorged heart that was about as large as a beowulf which pulsated notably weaker and out of sync with the organs adorning the walls. Upon closer inspection, this heart was littered with scarring from some sort of explosion, the scar tissue was covered in the same ice dust that no doubt coated that things lungs.
"I will die… certain of that. What we are must continue… but my kind are all gone."
It craned a clawed finger towards me, touching my chest as my heart damn near stopped from fear.
"Until you came along… you're different to other humans, so much negativity. Such anger. Such hate. Such sorrow."
All of a sudden, every fear I had regarding this situation was made manifest as it lazily pushed its fingers into my chest, through my ribcage and clasped lightly around my heart with all the effort of one of my sisters.
It then, much to my further horror, tugged my heart out of my chest and rammed it into the gigantic pulsating heart behind him, as if that would somehow help the situation.
Regardless, I was, realistically, in all probability, likely fucked right about now.
My vision swam as the pain caught up to me, I collapsed quickly, crumpling inward into a heap on the floor in front of the beast.
As my vision faded, as the last vestiges of the life that was Jaune Arc slipped away into the aether, the beast too collapsed to the ground, and wheezed out one last phrase;
"We must survive."
These heels were killing me. Dust-damn it all, they were agony.
The aggravating click-clack of these damned shoes blended perfectly into the sea of other women in the crown, wearing the exact same damned kind of shoes with the exact same kind of dress as every other rancid two-faced bitch in this city.
The rabble of haughty noise and fat old ghouls slurping down enough wine to choke out an elephant was getting too much, the pressure in my head was getting worse.
The pressure was always bad, but it got worse with the noises, with people. People always caused problems for me, it hurt to be around them. It hurts to exist at all, most of the time. But people just amplified it.
The older I got, the more responsibilities I had thrust upon me by my noble mantle. The more responsibilities I had to handle, the more people I had to correspond with to manage these responsibilities. Nothing but sycophants and A-grade greed unlike anywhere else in the world.
Atlas truly was a shithole.
As for Mantle, and/or the rest of the coldest continent? Not a clue. I'd never even been down there before. I've been stuck on this floating hunk of steel since the day my birth certificate was signed off. I'd rather be in the middle of the fuckin Vacuan desert, anywhere these pricks weren't wasting hundreds of thousands of lien, if not millions. So much money, so much potential. All burned away on grape juice and fancy stilts. Not to mention the clothes, or the party narcotics that I could guarantee were hidden in the inner pockets of every single person in this room besides my family.
We were a step above that nonsense, apparently. It wasn't good for productivity.
I was interrupted from my thoughts by some sleazy pot-bellied oaf standing by one of the many ice sculptures that were placed evenly around the entire ball room, loudly sniffling as he rubbed his nose over and over again, his arm rapidly twitching like the movements of an arachnid.
Dristal. It has to be. He'd been snorting it the whole damned time whenever people weren't looking. Or perhaps he hadn't even bothered with that much protection of his image.
Money mattered more than image in this place.
"Oh, look sweetie! The General has arrived!" The oaf said to the unhealthily skinny cunt next to him, who didn't even look up from her scroll or otherwise acknowledge him.
I looked to where the oaf was looking. There the tin man stood.
General James Ironwood. The only semblance of sanity in this room at the moment besides me.
Unfortunately, sanity did not tend to follow in his wake. And with a lack of sanity, came the noise. The pressure.
The cheering, the clapping, the slurping of more fucking wine.
I had to get out.
I turned as quickly as the heels would allow and made a bee-line towards the kitchens in the back. I knew the quickest path there, I'd learned the route from dozens of different events in this one ballroom, one of the most popular in Atlas.
Food always helped the anger, the pressure. The kitchen staff knew the deal, I'd worked it out with the chef years ago, I'd known the man since the first time I found my way back here.
Chef Gio had worked here for 27 years, first as a line cook and then he worked his way up to chef, which he got 13 years ago. He was a fat man, just like almost every man I'd seen on the ballroom floor outside of Ironwood and his retinue, he also took part in the excessive drinking and likely whatever else they did. Besides the Dristal, he'd never touched the stuff.
He wasn't working today though, but the rest of the staff still knew not to question my presence, nor me stealing their food.
I kicked open the kitchen door and marched in on a warpath for the chiller in the back. The eyes of two dozen kitchen staff all froze as their eyes darted to meet me. They then immediately clicked back into place on their work, and the movements began again. I snaked past various kitchen stations and their corresponding staff who didn't even blink in my direction. I pried the chiller door open with every ounce of force I could muster, and went for the shelf that had the desserts.
I grabbed a pain-au-chocolat. The quiet hum of the air conditioning unit drowned out the last of the noise that bleeds through to the kitchen from the ballroom. God I hate this shit. I hate that I have these obligations, I hate that I have to deal with these pompous assholes that somehow manage to pull off being holier-than-thou puritans, whilst also being the most degenerative reprobates I had ever laid eyes upon. They had the combined intelligence of oum-damned lobotomy patients and the average Atlas military recruit could likely beat them all in chess.
In a row.
The second pain-au-chocolat.
The sweetness of the chocolate and flaky cakey goodness was slightly spoiled by the coldness of the room, but dear Oum it was leagues above dealing with that crowd outside.
A sloppy handful of some kind of gateau. Chocolate? Black forest? Grimm de plaisir? It didn't matter.
I wish these responsibilities only extended to Ironwood and his military goon squads. Sure, the younger ones were fools who said the most idiotic things ever, but the fact they were mostly not noble-born louts made it manageable. And of course, the older ones were always far too strict and practically kissed the ground Ironwood walked on. But they were far better friends to have than the damned animals in that ballroom. The fat and rich, the disgusting and depraved.
Another handful of whatever this gateau was. Cherry, I think. The cold was muddying the taste a tad.
I could hear odd noises from beyond the doorway to the kitchen. A quiet discussion of some kind. The kitchen staff usually kept themselves no louder than a whisper to avoid disturbing the guests who were often very finicky about being "embarrassed about interruptions" and other such nonsense. I opted to ignore it for now, back to the food.
I reached out towards the shelf to grab something else, loosely rubbing my hand on one of the shelves to get the loose bits of gateau off of my hands. Sure it was dirty of me, but the kitchen staff deep cleaned the whole kitchen daily, and there wasn't exactly any way I could clean them without the kitchen staff having to see me.
Understanding or not, I'd prefer they not see me like this.
I Placed my hand on some sort of creme brulee, or something that at least looked vaguely like that.
I was interrupted by a single footfall right behind me.
I turned, and without thinking my hands flicked outwards to shield my head, as I backed into the shelf I had just been pawing at. Hell, if I had the choice I'd climb through the shelf and hide behind it.
I'm not sure who I was expecting, my father had hit me before, plenty of times whenever I didn't conform, or didn't do as he asked, to the letter. But my mother, my sister, my brother, they'd all partaken in the activity as well. Not to mention the few times that random nobles had done so when they took offence to something I'd said or done. That scenario was uncommon, but my father's closest business associates got away with it.
Money's more important than reputation, that's what he said. That's what he always said.
I certainly didn't expect to see a remarkably worried looking General Ironwood staring me down. His eyes were softer than I remember them looking, gone was the usual sharp glare that permanently marred his brow. It looked like an entirely different person, almost.
"Are you alright, Miss Schnee? Weiss?"
The finality of the slam that echoed throughout the room was the final full stop on an argument that had been repeating every day that I could remember. The stomps that followed just reminded me of how difficult it was to get through to him.
Sat on the blank bed, uncovered and falling apart from years of use and squeaking to appropriately match, I looked around the room, as I usually did. Burgundy wallpaper barely clung to the walls after years of peeling away from neglect revealing the once pristine sanded down timber that made up the walls of the cabin. These walls used to be nice.
Now, not so much.
The wooden floorboards were still solid, considering how little we moved furniture or shoes inside the house, it hadn't been cleaned in a while though. The roof was the same.
The window used to have a nice view, but with the reinforcements put in place years ago, you can barely tell anymore. I couldn't remember what the view looked like, but I think it was similar to the view from the ground floor balcony. We can't see out of that one either now.
Next to the reinforced window, was the control terminal, a bundle of cheap scrolls all wired together into a unified system.
The signature rattle of the Mk 1 turrets echoed throughout the house as one of the many exterior sponsons dispatched another target. More Grimm scouting the house again. It'd only been a few hours since the last scout group had been eliminated in the same way.
I crawled my way over to the control terminal, and stared into the screens.
Sponson 12 had just emptied 50 rounds into something, that was the outermost sponson in the northwest of the territory. The Grimm were keeping a distance, probing more than the used to.
Before, they'd just try and run through the sponson firing lines and eventually they'd all die before they got within the 100m radius line of the house. Now they probed, they tested for weak spots, holes in our defences. Whether or not they know that we can't afford any more defensive resources beyond what's required for maintenance, is something I don't know.
There was nothing else out there for now, if the MR system is still operating.
Gotta check that.
I turned around and crawled to the other end of the room, where a large metal rack rested on squeaky wheels. The MR system was contained within this rack, a reasonably light and portable method of radar, incredibly finicky and jury-rigged to all hell, but functional enough to suit our needs. It played a continuous sound at exactly 150 kilohertz, well beyond the range of human hearing and hopefully faunus hearing as well, but still within the range that it causes the Grimm to get upset, whether that's pain or annoyance is hard to tell for sure. Any higher and the equipment starts getting too stressed and the parts will break faster, and while better parts are available they aren't cheap enough for us to purchase, especially with our already choked supply line. Any lower and the Grimm aren't consistently bothered by the frequency.
I checked the barely operating power cable we were desperate to replace, the tape seemed to be holding and it wasn't sparking, which was better than usual, all things considered. The frequency display showed the right values, it had power, the Grimm weren't making any noise and none of the sponsons were going off.
It was clear, for now at least. It had to be.
I could hear my dad's hurried footsteps plod around the ground floor, pacing as he waits for the inevitable next probe to come to the outer line of defences and die again. He was always doing this, waiting for the next big horde to attack, it had been months, sure. But it was well overdue.
I listened closer, trying to find another set of lighter footfalls intermingled between my fathers pacing.
No luck.
My sister was not home. This was entirely expected, and just as disappointing. Her job took a lot out of her, but given its importance and a lack of other bodies to do the job, it was the only option we had. She was the only reliable method of supply that our territory had, nobody was willing to make deliveries in a region this dangerous and volatile, all the locals refused to come round due to the previously mentioned colossal danger concerns, and while there were friends of dad who'd come by to help out around the house or deliver exotic items from other countries that we otherwise could not get was inconsistent. We could make it consistent if we hired them for their services rather than calling in a favour, but we don't have the money to maintain our defences and pay for much of anything else beyond basic necessity.
I hadn't heard her in weeks at this point, let alone seen her, talked to her, held her, or I suppose being held by her would be more accurate.
I could barely remember her face now, her fashion, her mannerisms, her demeanour, all the little things that made her, her. All gone from my memory, too much time had passed. I did remember her hair though, the same as my dad. Thick, golden hair that had a healthy glow to it.
Not like me.
I was pulled from my thoughts by my dad suddenly rumbling his way up to the door. He wasn't mad or anything, at least as far as I could tell this was just how he walked. The door swung open with an audible creak, some loose wallpaper finally crumpling into a heap on the floor after the door clattered against the wall.
And in walked my old man, with a tray of the usual lunch of the… well, forever, I guess.
A large brown rectangular plastic bag with a sealing tab on top, the front is covered in black writing that was still clear enough to fully read.
Valean Military Ration - menu 11: Cheese Pizza. You couldn't actually read the pizza part, it was covered by a big hand-written sticker that said 'reduced for sale - 85% off!'
From an outsiders points of view, it'd probably look odd for military rations to still be made outside of Atlas, however the company that was making the old Valean military rations during The Great War found that huntsman found them an effective survival food, and they continued selling under the brand of a military ration to this day.
Dad bought these in bulk last year, they'd gone off a couple years prior, but according to him they were still good to eat. According to him, not me.
Personally, I don't think cheese pizza normally has blue marks on it, and the cookies were drier than I think they should be, beyond just keeping them dry to keep them good for longer, they had this odd chalky texture that just screamed wrong. Also the applesauce tastes funny.
If I had the cojones to talk back to my pops I'd refuse to eat this slop, but I know we have no other choices with how tight money is. Saving so much money on our food let me get sponson 44 set up to patch the last major gap in our defences.
There was also a glass pitcher filled with water, filtered of course. Gotta get the government mandated mind-altering chemicals out of them. That's what dad had been saying for the last couple years, it's a relatively new thing here. To be fair to him, the water did taste a bit funny before he started filtering it, so maybe he had a point.
Mind altering chemicals made enough sense with the Grimm in the picture, given that happy drugs make people attract less Grimm, so there should be less deaths from the Grimm.
We don't need it though, according to dad it wouldn't help us anyway. He never tells me why, I've asked at least a million times at this point.
My dad spoke, putting on a friendly face and tone, pretending that our argument before about my intentions to begin hunter training hadn't been thrown back in my face before he marched out and refused to even so much as listen to why.
"Are the guns holding, Ruby?"
I awoke in the cave I had entered somewhere between moments and days ago, it was difficult to tell under the blur of pain that caressed my head with all the elegance of a mop. Strange, considering I should have an elongated finger-sized hole in my heart. And chest, for that matter.
Regardless of the situation, I had to get up again.
I couldn't remember anything happening after my stabbing via elongated finger, beyond the creature being gone and the weird fleshy cave being the same meat-ridden nightmare that it had been before-hand, pulsing vaguely-organ looking things continued to pulse on the walls at the same calming pitch, the pillars of tendril that encircled the centre of the room where this great big heart thing resided. I couldn't see it from my position on the floor, but the pulsing seemed to be calmer than I remember it being.
Slowly, I pawed a hand over where the hole in my chest should be.
Nothing, not even a hole in my shirt.
I clambered my way back to my feet, slowly and steadily to ensure I maintained my balance.
No issues getting up, or otherwise moving.
Strange, how much of that crazy altercation was even real? It was damn-near otherworldly, perhaps it isn't so surprising for the whole encounter to be unreal.
I looked at the big heart on the plinth. The heart was where I remember it residing, however the obvious glowing blue speckles were now notably absent, and the heartbeat was notably healthier sounding, I vaguely recalled the beat being almost broken, and weaker. Now, it beats true in exact sync with the rest of the organs within the room, creating a grand symphony of pulsating rhythm.
I looked around the room, getting a better look at the scale of this place. I wish I had taken in the scale earlier when I first got here, however there were some very important other matters that forcibly took my attention away from me.
The room was about as big as I'd expected, a circular room of about 50 metres width, walls lined with organs and pillars keeping the roof stable above us. The floor, the ceiling and the walls, all the same black tendril that coated the tunnel down here.
What notably worried me more than anything else, was the other tunnels.
The tunnel I'd come from was easily identifiable, as some faint sunlight painted an orange hue over the tunnel surfaces. There were other tunnels, ten of them, making for eleven total. Most of the tunnels seemed to lead to mines of some kind, or some otherwise large room that was causing sounds to echo far further than the other tunnels.
As for what was echoing? Scuttling and scratching.
Something was down each of these tunnels, and either it was giant millipedes with hundreds of legs between them, or there were a lot of… somethings down there.
They didn't seem to be getting closer, therefore if I left quietly and quickly I'd be fine.
The problem was the other tunnels, which obviously lead to small rooms, I could tell because the organs mounted to the walls within bled out pinkish light. They pulsed with light wildly, out of sync with each other. I couldn't hear them over the synchronised thrum of the central heart and the other wall organs surrounding it.
Curiosity got the better of me. I had to figure it out. I wanted to be a damned hunter, and that meant bravery, that meant courage beyond what I could handle, for the greater good.
It took many more tentative steps than were comfortable, about a straight minute of creeping around like some degenerate vagrant, the kind who breaks into the poorest house in town to steal their bread scraps., who preys on the poorest and most estranged of society.
As I passed through the boundary of the central room and this pink lit side-room, the pulse beat that carried a calm throughout my being suddenly changed like a slap upside the head, the calmness immediately warping to discomfort as the organs wobbled on the walls with clear struggle.
The best way I could describe it was, the organs were in pain, beating as if they were alive.
Oh Oum, these things are alive, aren't they?
There was a strange urge within me as that pressure that once crushed my brain now gently caressed my scalp. Less of a painful agony, and more of a gentle urge, a forceful sway of opinion.
I learned once more to walk instead of creep, and I strode forward with all the confidence I could muster, seemingly having lost my ability to fear out of the blue.
I raised my left hand, and planted it upon the organ that beat against the wall with even more strain than the others within this room.
I watched in what should have been horror, but somehow translated within my mind to a vague sense of joy, as a sharp, elongated limb pierced through the wall of the organ, followed shortly by another limb, and then another, and another, until 7 equally long and sharp limbs, either covered in or made up of the same mind-bending black tendril material that made up everything else within this place, tore through the organs fleshy surface, dulling the pink light into nothingness as the creature these limbs belonged to, flopped out of the organ.
This organ looked the same as almost every organ within both this room, and the main chamber. There were hundreds of these things down there, ready to be birthed into wretched existence upon the accursed lands of Remnant.
It was odd, how the creature slowly spread its limbs out as far as it could in a familiar twitchy manner. It moved like a spider, incredibly quick and jittery. I could imagine how fast these damned things could be, given appropriate circumstance. Were these things hunters, workers, prey? All of these outcomes worried me equally.
I backed up a couple steps, both to give it space to rise fully, and to get a better look at the creature by giving it more light.
It was incredibly jarring to look at, almost entirely alien apart from one particular piece.
The seven equally sharp and long blackened limbs met together in some sort of neck, which lead to an almost human head.
It looked vaguely feminine, although barely. With a complete lack of any hair where one would expect, faintly glowing blank white eyes with no notable iris or pupil, and a mouth that could be better described as a tear in the creature's face.
How does a creature such as this even exist? How does this thing eat, what does it eat? Moreover, where the hell does its organs even go? I mean, it's literally 7 wonky legs that connect to a head, where the hell is any of its organs? Does it even have any? Even worse, the damned thing wouldn't stop staring at me.
With a clear lack of method for telling where the thing was looking given the lack of pupil or iris, I had to assume it was staring at me as it slowly rose to full height, about 5 feet tall, just a bit shorter than me. It began to shudder towards me incredibly slowly, as if it was trying to hold itself back.
The fear I was really hoping to feel right about now still remained somehow locked away like an inmate in solitary confinement, completely impossible to even consider in this moment despite that being the sensible option.
All I felt was that same urge I felt moments ago, to reach out a hand.
And so I did as the urge requested.
I plopped my hand on the top of its head, just like I would a dog.
In hindsight, being a bit gentler may have been a better idea.
The creature froze, and the blank, listless eyes seemed to truly lock onto mine for the first time. I could somehow tell it was looking at me this time, I was certain of it now.
We stood, frozen in this odd waltz position for what felt like decades all at once. The only method of keeping track of time as it passed was the signature panicked heartbeats of the organs on the walls within this side room, which seemed to have calmed down after… whatever it was I had done.
Whatever this was that I had unleashed unto Remnant.
The creature drew me from my thoughts by doing something completely unexpected.
The creature's entirely human ears began to twitch, its body began to sway, and the head began to rub into my hand gently.
Just like a dog would.
Oh Oum, these evil murder spider head creatures were friendly.
The strangeness of the situation and all of the implications that it had, did not have time to set in.
Pain shot to my mind like a skewer through my skull, countless thoughts all shooting through my head at once as memories and thoughts that were evidently not my own splintered through my consciousness like a miasma of confusion.
My vision blurred into a solid blackish mass as I reeled back to the floor once again, the creature that was nuzzling into my hand a moment prior had now backed away and made an odd squawking noise, or at least I hoped that was the spider thing, oddly enough. If it wasn't, then it sounded an awful lot like nevermores, or at least that was how Father described the noise.
The thoughts began to slow, and the pain subsided as each ebb of memory slowed.
These thoughts were strange. That was the greatest way to put it really.
Thousands upon thousands of different visions of warfare, different perspectives, different eras, different technologies, different doctrines of war. I was only aware of the doctrine of the great war era before this point, I'd read through my Grandfather's diary on the matter shortly after his passing, one of the few things he'd left to me that I managed to keep a hold of, and quickly after I read up on the doctrine through the books Father had littered around the house.
These doctrines were different, far different.
Great war era doctrine indicated that the appropriate response to being pinned down in a trench, corridor or otherwise backed into a corner, the soldier should make use of grenades.
So many alternatives had just been jammed into my head, different kinds of tools, vehicles, turrets, automated weapons, and all the different methods of implementing these combat tools and parameters.
It was a hellish cacophony of visions, but I'd be damned before I say that it wasn't incredibly informative. Useful, even.
And so much more, more than I'd be able to even write down in dozens upon dozens of journals.
I don't know what that thing did to me, or where it went.
But it felt good… really good to learn again.
Now I remember why Father's books always called to me, why I always took the few trinkets he had time to give me, the hobbies and projects he devoted what little free time he had to show me, I knew now.
Learning was a great feeling, an ecstasy I was overly familiar with. It reminded me of better times, before the encroaching darkness of what amounted to a closet with a lock on it was deployed against me to force… compliance? Submissiveness?
Hard to tell the machinations of a nightmare, or a mother plucked from one.
Foot met ground once again, and I rose from my foetal position upon the floor of corrugated hardened tendon.
I looked dead ahead of me, and the spider from before, once present and calm under my presence, had meandered off to a corner of the room, where it was seemingly… interacting with one of the organ-like masses upon the wall.
It was using some sort of tendril or limb or… something that protruded from what I suppose you could call the undercarriage of the creature. It was the same vague skin colour that coated the rest of its uncomfortable complexion, it bended in a series of different manners akin to a snake, the tendril seemed to lack any sort of bone structure, perhaps it had cartilage like a cats tail, but there was no way to really know beyond grabbing it and finding out.
A sharp pain in my head split my thoughts apart for a split second, before the pain disappeared in an instant.
And I knew that the tendril in question lacked any cartilage, it was pure muscle moving under the demands of the creature's mind.
I knew this now, and I did not know why.
I wanted to know why.
I really, really wanted to know why.
But try as I might, I couldn't figure out where the thought came from.
Something was very very wrong with me now, that much was obvious.
Whether I had become unknowingly or otherwise accidentally accursed, infected or poisoned into delusion was a matter that could be dealt with another time.
I was pulled from my worries by a distant clang from the other end of the chamber I woke up in. The clanging was distant and repeated, a light tinking noise akin to someone tapping a wrench on a metal vice. It was just an incredibly faint echo, so it was either very far away or it was in another room that was far larger than one would expect.
Neither was a good prospect to consider.
The urge to follow, the urge to know was irresistible. After all, this creature was friendly, and who's to say that the source of the clinking wasn't also friendly?
Then again, who's to say it wasn't a threat either?
I knew that it'd be foolhardy to go in without my rifle, which i'd left back at the damned entrance of this mindfuck palace. I swore to myself quietly, thumping my leg with my fist in frustration.
I heard a clicking, a few metres away from me. Behind me.
I turned on my heels as quickly as I could, falling into a makeshift version of a combat stance for fisticuffs.
There stood an even more bizarre sight than the last few, somehow.
Another one of the spider creatures had arrived, and it had Anzio in its grasp, somehow. The colossal rifle that weighed more than any normal firearm was currently held in a lowered position, with one leg within the trigger guard, and the other on the foregrip.
The concept of these things being capable of not only figuring out how to make use of a firearm, but how to fire it knowingly at all, was more mortifying than any other prior thought on them thus far. With how quiet they moved, they were already likely to be some kind of stalking hunter, I hadn't seen how fast the things were but given it got here carrying Anzio with so little noise, I have no way to tell.
It thrust Anzio forward, towards me slightly, while making an odd chirping noise. I could tell it was passing it to me, yet again my mind's reasoning for its understanding defied me. How awfully convenient of my mind to betray me repeatedly within such a small critical timespan.
I took the rifle, hefting it onto my shoulder where it typically sat, once again leaving me with only one arm free.
I really needed to get a sling for this thing, if such a thing exists, given its monstrous proportions.
I nodded at the creature, and marched towards the source of the noise, yet another dark cave with no light source that my eyes had to adjust to. This cavern pathway was not adorned with the wall organs that had decorated the rest of the walls I'd seen so far apart from the entrance tunnel, meaning this was either another method of entrance and exit, or it was a relatively new tunnel.
Marching damn near in the blind and with only a few metres of visible area in front of me, I paced forward slowly with Anzio at the ready, positioned in a hip fire stance, as the scope would be a foolish idea to use in the close of a combat area. Then again, use of something akin to Anzio in an environment as cramped and claustrophobic as this, without any methods of lighting the path ahead of me, was just as foolhardy.
I plodded forward, and plodded forward, and plodded forward for far too many minutes to be either expected or comfortable, given how quickly the path to the prior room where the spider creature had been borne of the wall, had ended so abruptly.
That clinking was getting closer and closer though, steadily so.
Eventually, I came across the tunnel's endpoint.
It certainly wasn't an exit.
The colossal empty room was sparkling from all the speckling of ice dust coating the walls. This was a quarry for a dust vein, that was for sure.
Which meant that this was most likely where that creature that spoke to me through my head had poisoned himself, had given itself dust lung, one of the worst conditions one can experience.
Thoughts immediately came to my head.
Who had built this quarry? Was it the creature aforementioned, or was it a set of prospectors, and just how old was this quarry?
I didn't know how to tell how old it was, but I could at least sort of ascertain whether it was the creature that dug this quarry or someone else.
There's no machinery around, no diggers, no mechanisms, no lighting systems or generators or power cables, at least as far as I could see. My eyes were adjusting better to the darkness, but it was manageable now, to a degree. The ice dust in the surfaces around me provided enough light to make it bearable.
That creature had dug this out, it had taken it and these spider creatures and whatever else was down here for an unknown amount of time. If I knew how to discern the recency of ore deformations, then perhaps I'd be in better luck.
I got distracted by the bigger picture.
The clinking is louder than ever, now notably causing discomfort. It was coming from the centre of the quarry, or at least somewhere in that direction.
The pit in the centre didn't go that deep, about 30 metres down which I had to assume wasn't too deep for a dust quarry, I wouldn't know, I wasn't one of the faunus mine workers under SDC rule.
At the centre of the pit, was a single spider creature, monotonously poking at a dust crystal, slowly chipping away at a small bulging vein of ore with one of the spikes it uses as both legs and arms and everything in between, one had to assume.
Suddenly, a train of thought appeared in my head.
I need lien, bad.
I need lien to get around, to purchase things, to make all this shit easier. So I don't have to use what little bushcraft and survival knowledge I had.
Most dust had to be processed to use for typical uses, for example fire dust requires refining for use in firearms and machinery as a fuel source for vehicles, and if you wanted explosive dust for combat use or artillery, well you had to combine refined lightning dust with raw fire dust, but that only worked to create the explosive amplifier, the actual component that made this dust ignite properly to result in an explosion and not just a fire like fire dust typically did when rapidly oxygenated, was to add a detonation compound that would amplify the fire dusts potency in terms of fire, creating a substance referred to as napalm, or alternatively one could add a lot more refined lightning dust to create an actual proper explosive.
Ice dust did not require any refinement, making it far easier to sell and far more applicable to sell on the scale of me, myself and I.
There were a lot of old mining towns around here, who had restarted their quarries for the war effort. Either I could hopefully "acquire" some equipment from one of those villages and haul it back here to mine away, or I could attempt to trade it for work.
Just one problem.
There's still a blood stained wooden mask adhered to my face, and there's still a hole in my head, and I still shouldn't be alive at all, and I severely doubt that civilians, military or hunters alike would take kindly or fairly to that sight.
I really hope this isn't some last moments before death style fever dreams…
To Be Continued…