Lord_Turtle_the_first

  Simon raised his right arm. The electromagnetic pulse device inside his torso began to whine, spinning up with a low-pitched electrical hum that made the very air around him thrum with tension.

  He whispered, "Now."

  A sharp pulse surged outward—soundless, unseen, but absolute. The wave of energy struck Jessie like a hammer. Her grotesque form spasmed mid-air, limbs convulsing as if wrestling with an invisible force. The nest of cables suspending her creaked in protest.

  Then, silence. Her form drooped. Hanging still.

  Simon stepped forward, each footfall slow and deliberate. Her head twisted toward him in a twitching arc. Sensors blinked like confused eyes. Controlled—but only just.

  "Sorry," he murmured.

  With a smooth mechanical shkkt, the nanoceramic bde extended from Simon’s wrist—razor-sharp, gleaming in the dim emergency light.

  The bde punched into her chest with a sickening crack, splitting twisted bone and machine. Structure gel burst from the wound, spraying across the metal grating in thick, viscous arcs. She twitched—violently—but Simon didn’t stop.

  His palm pressed against her torso. His own structure gel slithered outward, threading into hers, infecting it. Not to control.

  To end it.

  The command surged through his arm: Discharge.

  Inside Jessie’s body, the gel rippled, obeying like a dying nervous system pushed into overdrive. Every wire, every pulse node, every corrupted synapse surged. Her spine arched backward so far it nearly snapped. Sparks burst from her ribs. The air filled with the stench of burning gel and cracked circuits.

  With a deafening shriek of torn metal and dying electronics, Jessie convulsed one final time.

  Then—stillness.

  Her sensors dimmed. The gel hardened. The pulsing mass in her throat seized and crystallized. The nest of cables dropped her body, now a dead weight of machinery and flesh.

  She hit the ground with a wet, metallic thud.

  Simon stepped back, exhaling slowly. His shoulders dropped. The bde retracted with a quiet hiss.

  "Rest now," he whispered. "Whatever you were... it’s over."

  Behind him, Elias approached, wide-eyed and speechless. Even Jerry, tucked safely in his submersible, was utterly still.

  One more nightmare was gone.

  But the darkness still listened. And somewhere deeper in the ruins of humanity, it waited for another chance to speak.

  "What did you do?" Elias asked, staring at Jessie’s lifeless body.

  Simon didn’t look back. "I took control of it," he said, voice low, tired. "I have a device in my torso—an electromagnetic emitter. It lets me command structure gel remotely. But it's limited. One or two creatures, max. Anything bigger, it can't hold."

  Elias just stood there, processing the expnation. Eventually, he gave a stiff nod. They both turned toward the elevator.

  Simon approached the terminal and sent the signal.

  Nothing.

  "That’s not a good sign," Simon muttered, his tone darkening. He overrode the protocols. After a tense few seconds, the door hissed open with a reluctant groan.

  Simon leaned forward, peering down.

  The shaft was deep, at least two dozen meters, and bathed in intermittent red emergency light. Far below, crumpled and twisted, y the elevator car—crashed just like the one at Theta.

  But there was hope. A metal stairwell hugged the shaft's inner wall, narrow but intact.

  "We'll take the stairs," Simon said.

  His helmet’s whiskers twitched.

  A subtle movement. A shift in air pressure. The faintest hint of a presence at his back.

  Then—a shove.

  A hard one.

  Simon stumbled forward, boots scraping against the metal floor. There was no time to catch himself.

  He fell.

  The red lights spiraled past him like dying stars. His sensors bred. Jerry screamed.

  Simon twisted mid-air, his mind already running through options. The magnets in his boots, his arms—he fired them, but the distance was too great, the momentum too fast. He hit a ledge halfway down, bounced, and kept falling.

  Thunk.

  He hit the crumpled elevator hard—hard enough that the impact reverberated through every servomotor in his synthetic frame. Pain wasn’t real for him anymore—not in the organic sense—but the sensation of trauma still surged like phantom agony. His HUD exploded in red, cascading damage reports across his vision: joint actuators offline, stress fractures in his right leg pting, gyroscopic instability.

  His front had taken the brunt of the fall. He had twisted mid-air to shield the submersible housing Jerry, using his own body as a buffer. The impact had shattered his visor, spiderwebbed fractures running across the gss, and one side of his helmet had chipped off entirely. The synthetic pting along his chest had caved inward, pressing dangerously close to the vital power rey and overheating his core processors.

  Emergency subroutines fred to life, rerouting power away from damaged circuits. Sparks spit from his chest. Heat warnings blinked madly across his HUD. One of his shoulder servos had locked, and every movement of his arm felt like dragging broken gss through oil.

  Everything went silent.

  Dust drifted through the shaft like ash in a dying world.

  Above, the jagged edge of the open shaft stared down like a lidless eye.

  Simon groaned and twisted onto his side. Bck fluid seeped from torn seams at his ribs, staining the floor with oily darkness. Somewhere deep inside, gyroscopic stabilizers twitched in confused loops, feeding corrupted signals through frayed circuitry. Pain was no longer a sensation—it was a status report, blinking red on his HUD.

  Someone had pushed him.

  His head tilted back, visor cracked and spider-webbed with impact fractures, refracting the flickering emergency lights above.

  'Elias,' Simon thought darkly.

  "Jerry?" he rasped. The vocal synthesizer stuttered, warped by internal distortion. A moment ter, the submersible on his back hissed open, and Jerry scurried out, squeaking, crawling shakily onto Simon’s shoulder. The little rodent pressed against his cheek with anxious chirps.

  Simon’s shoulders slumped in quiet relief. If something had happened to Jerry… he didn’t want to imagine it. Not after everything.

  He tried to reach the submersible, but his shoulder refused to move. The joint was stiff, locked. Painful sparks fired behind his eyes.

  So he released the magnetic locks.

  The submersible dropped gently onto the mangled remnants of the elevator car below. Its spider-like legs unfolded with smooth precision. Simon ran a quick diagnostic scan. Jerry’s vehicle was unharmed. Stable.

  He, on the other hand…

  System Diagnostic — Initiated:

  Right Shoulder Actuator: SEVERE DAMAGE — Limited articutionGyroscopic Stabilizers: MISALIGNED — Reduced mobilityVisor Lens: CRACKED — Visual crity compromisedCooling System: PARTIAL LEAK — Internal temp risingSpinal Rey Housing: IMPACTED — Command routing degradedPower Core: STABLE — Secondary systems compensatingHe grimaced, if only in thought. Then he looked at Jerry, carefully pcing him onto the submersible’s back.

  "Stay here, buddy. I’ve got this."

  Bck structure gel seeped from his back, crawling down his arms, down his chest and legs. It wasn’t erratic or unstable like WAU’s twisted spawn. His gel was calm—disciplined. Intentional.

  It worked like muscle memory: flowing, forming scaffolding beneath his skin, rerouting connections, sealing tears. It rebuilt him from the inside out, yering new function over broken machinery, fusing what remained into something stronger.

  For thirty minutes, the shaft was quiet save for the low hum of living circuitry.

  Then the gel withdrew.

  And Simon stood.

  He was not the same.

  Simon’s new body was sleek and disturbingly organic. No longer bound by armor and ptes, his exterior flowed like bck muscle—fluid, reactive, almost alive.

  The structure gel now acted like living tissue, holding his form in tightly woven bands and sinews. It wrapped around him like armor that breathed. Faint blue luminescence pulsed beneath the surface—data veins pulsing with thought.

  His helmet remained, but its visor was cracked—a reminder of the fall, and of everything he could not yet repair.

  Simon knelt amid the reddish haze filling the lower shaft, his body eerily still. Jerry was staring at him, tiny frame trembling. The silence buzzed with a tension neither of them could voice.

  Slowly, Simon extended his hand. The armor on his forearm rippled like bck mercury.

  "Hey... it's okay. It's me."

  Jerry squeaked in arm and recoiled, fur bristling in instinctual fear.

  Simon sighed. His voice, now deeper and distorted, carried a synthetic weariness. "Right. I probably look like a WAU nightmare."

  He turned inward, running a system-wide check. Information poured through his mind like a tide of data—his limbs responding first. Nanoceramic bdes slid from his wrists, seamless and silent. They retracted with the same smooth grace, structure gel pulling inward like silk over bone.

  Then came the transformation.

  His right arm bulked outward, reshaping with a soft hiss. Ptes drew back to reveal a humming emitter core. The Tes cannon extended with a mechanical whine, arcs of electricity dancing along its surface. Simon flexed it, then folded it away.

  His fingers shifted fluidly—elongating, sharpening, becoming cws, then back again.

  His torso thrummed with tent energy. Structure gel fused with hardened pting, armor sliding into denser configurations as the Titan Armor protocol engaged. His dermal surface shimmered like obsidian ced with circuitry before retreating again.

  The batteries were working fine.

  He checked the cloaking mechanism—offline. The dense gel disrupted its function.

  Figures. Nothing came free.

  His sensors swept the room. The snake camera was intact. Magnetic limb nodes were stable. Leg silencers activated with a flicker—zero sound. He ran a jump simution. Solid. All green.

  Simon turned his gaze to Jerry. The rat peeked up, still trembling.

  "Still me, buddy. Just... upgraded."

  He lowered his hand. Jerry hesitated, then scurried into his palm, nestling in. Simon exhaled—a synthetic hiss more than breath, but it carried relief. Jerry recognized him. That was enough.

  Inside, his neural server pulsed—clean, fast, alive. Visual data yered across his HUD: heat signatures, electromagnetic fields, structural integrity maps.

  Simon stood, quiet and powerful, then faced the sealed doors.

  He sent a pulse. The doors slid open with a hiss.

  Lifting the spider-legged submersible, Simon carried it forward and stepped through. The corridor beyond was familiar in its decay—shuttle tunnel to the right, a battered shuttle nestled in pce. To the left, sealed doors waited in silence.

  He considered going back, climbing to the upper floor, finding Elias. Demanding answers. Why had he been pushed?

  But that could wait.

  Upsilon was close.

  And Upsilon mattered more.

  Simon climbed into the shuttle’s cockpit. The driving seat felt too small for what he had become. His armored fingers tapped the cracked console. The system flickered, groaned, then died.

  Errors flooded the screen.

  Frowning, he turned and walked to the rear of the shuttle. He opened the maintenance hatch at the back.

  Empty.

  Every component had been stripped.

  Simon stared at the void of circuitry, then let his shoulders fall.

  "I guess I’m walking."

  He stepped out into the tunnel, Jerry perched loyally on his shoulder, and the spider submersible skittered beside them.

  Down into the dark they went.

  The emergency lights—dim, flickering—cast ghostly shadows that stretched and twisted across the curved metal walls. Silence smothered the space, broken only by the faint hum of distant circuitry and the drip of condensation falling like clock ticks.

  Then—movement.

  Simon's sensory whiskers fred to life, twitching as data streamed into his neural hub. Something was ahead. Large. Erratic.

  He came to a stop, his body still as stone. Slowly, with mechanical care, he removed Jerry from his shoulder and pced the little rodent into the open compartment of the submersible. The hatch sealed with a soft hiss. With a thought, he commanded the spider-like drone to scurry along the tunnel wall, out of sight.

  His arms restructured in silence. Gel flowed down to form smooth channels as the nanoceramic bdes slid from his forearms, gleaming under the low light. His leg silencers engaged—his movements now quieter than breath.

  He moved.

  Each step was a calcuted rhythm, a mechanical predator stalking a new unknown. Then, the darkness ahead split open.

  A light buzzed overhead, briefly illuminating the corridor.

  And there it was.

  A centipede-shaped monstrosity. Fused from rotting machine parts, corroded armor ptes, and decayed human remains. Its body unduted with each segment, dozens of limbs scraping the floor or cwing at the walls. Between its chitinous, rust-fked armor, structure gel pulsed like arteries beneath skin. Human arms—some skeletal, some disturbingly fresh—protruded at odd angles, twitching and grasping at nothing.

  Its face, if it could be called that, was a warped mechanical maw. Eyeless. A vertical slit from which rows of rotating gear-like teeth chattered like the ticking of a madman’s watch.

  And it wasn’t alone.

  A flesher stood before it—its form bloated and hunched. With each convulsive jerk, it emitted electromagnetic pulses from the grotesque bulbous head. The pulses cracked the air, briefly halting the centipede’s charge, forcing its limbs to spasm in dey. But it was losing. Bckened fluid poured from gashes in its side, its steps weakening.

  Simon crouched, watching. Listening. Calcuting.

  The centipede shrieked, its scream a wail of grinding metal and wet, garbled static. It reared, its body splitting open in segments as jagged limbs filed. The flesher staggered, then turned—

  —toward Simon.

  It stumbled forward, one shuddering step at a time.

  Simon didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.

  His bdes were still.

  But his body? Ready.

  Whatever this was…it wasn’t going to end quietly.

  Simon quickly analyzed the situation.

  In the span of a heartbeat, his internal processor ran hundreds of possible outcomes. The neural server embedded within his torso fred with activity, and the optimal path filtered to the surface like a whisper.

  Move now.

  His legs tensed.

  Simon darted forward with impossible speed. The centipede shrieked, its mechanical screech echoing like warped radio static.

  Simon slid low, the tunnel floor a blur beneath him. Sparks burst around his shoulders as metal scraped metal. With one smooth motion, he plunged a nanoceramic bde upward into the creature's underbelly—his structure gel hardening at the point of impact.

  The creature let out a shriek that shook the tunnel. Structure gel sprayed like arterial blood, sizzling against Simon’s armor.

  Behind him, the Flesher let out a warped cry and unleashed another electromagnetic burst. The tunnel lit in staccato fshes, the pulse cracking the air like lightning.

  But Simon didn’t flinch. His systems absorbed the wave like a breeze. He was immune.

  The Flesher froze, its head twitching in confusion.

  Simon moved.

  In two strides, he closed the distance. His knee drove into the Flesher’s chest, lifting it from the ground and smming it against the wall with bone-crunching force. Before it could recover, his left arm morphed—structure gel retracting as the Tes cannon emerged from within.

  The coils screamed to life.

  He fired.

  A bolt of raw energy arced through the tunnel and smmed into the Flesher’s skull. It exploded in a shower of structure gel and flesh. The body dropped like a marionette cut from its strings.

  A mechanical roar pulled his attention back—the centipede, thrashing in a final attempt to kill.

  Simon ducked low, avoiding a sweeping cw, and sprinted up the creature’s writhing side. He jumped and nded squarely on its spine.

  At the base of its warped head, he plunged both nanoceramic bdes into exposed gel-veined tissue. His structure gel surged down the bdes, infiltrating the creature’s internal network.

  Command: Discharge.

  The centipede howled.

  Its limbs spasmed wildly. Structure gel burst from its seams. Then, with a violent shudder, its body colpsed—solidifying mid-convulsion into a rigid, lifeless husk.

  Simon leapt from the corpse and nded with a heavy thud, his legs absorbing the impact. His limbs trembled, armor streaked in bckened gel, but he stood tall.

  The tunnel fell silent once more.

  He turned to the shadows where Jerry’s submersible blinked gently.

  "It’s safe now," Simon said, voice low and steady.

  He exhaled.

  Then they moved forward—toward Upsilon, toward whatever came next.

  Lord_Turtle_the_first