CHAPTER ONE
The sun beat down with scorching brilliance, bleaching the rust on skeletal machinery scattered across the plains. The only sound was the wind, whistling a lonely tune through the shattered windows of the abandoned battery factory. Not even a bird dared break the oppressive silence that clung to the dead land.
In a corner of that silence, Jax crawled across the hot ground, desperately clinging to life. All around him were the torn and mangled remains of his team.
BOOM!
A single, final shot echoed from the factory floor. Jax didn't turn, but he knew its source. That wasn't a shot aimed at the monsters that had unleashed this devastation. It was the sound of desperation—another person taking the only escape left to them.
He had to keep moving. He had to widen the distance. Behind him, three canine Shamblers stalked him, their paws making soft, deliberate sounds on the concrete. Their fur was matted and stained a sickly red, but it was the smell that choked the air—a faint, unnatural tang of hot motor oil. Their eyes glowed with bloodlust, and exposed teeth, long since pushed past decaying gums, shone with a metallic gleam.
"I don't want to die… I don't want to die," Jax chanted, the words a desperate rhythm against the pulsing pain in his limbs. It did nothing to stop one of the monstrous hounds from dipping its teeth once again into his already mangled leg.
'AHhhh!!!'
Jax screamed, a raw sound of agony. In one swift, adrenaline-fueled movement, he brought up a Pneumo-Gun that laid beside him—a pressure-based shotgun he'd scavenged from a dead comrade—and shattered the skull of his assailant in a single, concussive blast.
There was no moment to relish the perfect shot. The monstrous hounds gave him no leeway as two more lunged onto his exposed back, their teeth digging deep. He couldn't fire again; the Pneumo-Gun was spent, its single charge expended. He brought up his knife and swung around wildly, the desperate action making them halt, but only for a moment.
They lunged again, unthinking and relentless. One of the hounds impaled itself directly on his knife. The impact ripped the hilt from his grasp; he couldn't muster the strength to retract it from the creature's seizing flesh. He was defenseless.
"Fuck you, Rexo," Jax spat through a mouthful of blood and dust.
He had been part of a team sent to scavenge this place. The leader was Rexo, a Scavenger and a Grade-2 Awakened. Unluckily for them, the supposedly cleared-out Grade-2 nest was very much active. Rexo, the only one equipped and trained to offer some form of protection for the team, had taken the modified bus and fled, leaving Jax and the other Dregs to die. It wasn't a retreat. It was a sacrifice. Theirs for his.
What followed was a massacre.
Two more Shamblers jumped onto him, and he was overwhelmed. The weight on his chest didn't even let him chant his desire to live anymore.
'Is this it?'
The few moments that mattered in his life began to play across his mind like a sad symphony. There wasn't a lot to recall. Just pain, and as he slowly fell into the cold embrace of death, one face came to mind. The only face that mattered. His sister, Ellie.
He couldn't die yet. He had to make sure she didn't end up a pawn of the company just like him. He had to earn enough credits, buy her out of the system, give her a semblance of life.
"AHHHH!!!"
He let out a final, grueling shout, which only served to increase the intensity of the attack. Several other hounds joined the assault, their combined weight and frenzied vibrations pressing down on the rusted metal floor beneath them. With a sharp groan and the shriek of tearing metal, the hollow ground caved in.
Jax fell, tumbling through the darkness with his assailants. He felt like he was in the air forever before he made impact, his body slamming against a massive, dark obsidian rock that laid hidden within the cavity below.
He could feel things in him shatter. The Shamblers that had fallen with him lay sprawled across the floor, knocked out or killed by the fall.
'Why aren't I dead yet?' That was the first thought that came to his mind. His blood, dark and warm, slowly seeped into the strange obsidian rock he had fallen on. He didn't notice, at first, when a tiny dark particle silently slid towards him from a crack in the rock's surface.
The moment it reached his hand, it felt like a prick. Then it began its journey, a line of icy cold fire traveling from his finger, through his hand, up his neck, then into his skull.
Jax saw this all unfold, but he couldn't react. He couldn't move. He couldn't scream. As the particle reached his skull, a mechanical voice came to his ear.
"INTEGRATION IS POSSIBLE" "ACCEPT INTEGRATION OR ALLOW YOUR BIOLOGICAL FUNCTIONS TO CEASE"
It was the first time Jax had ever heard a voice that was completely devoid of emotions, no hate, no empathy, no care, there was nothing. He had a lot of questions to ask, but he knew he did not have that luxury as blood trickled from his mouth, his sight blurring. Maybe the voice was an illusion, a sick form of escape his brain had conjured as a parting gift to the consciousness that it once housed.
But not minding all this, he muttered from a compromised vocal system. "Accept Integration."
There was nothing to lose.
He was dying anyway, there was no possible downside he could see to accepting.
His only other option was death. There are things worse than death, he knew that, but he didn't want to die yet. For now, he couldn't have wanted anything more. He couldn't let his sister travel down the same path as him. He had to live to give her a better future. He had to.
He had no one, but she didn't have to.
His thoughts slowly moved into jumbled mess as he drifted into the unknown