The last of his strength was a flickering ember in a sea of agony. Damien lay in the small, protected maintenance alcove, the metal cool against his burned and bruised skin. The constant, menacing hum and click of the deathtrap behind him was a reminder that to stay here was to eventually die. He took a long, slow inventory of his new body. The deep, cauterized laser burn on his side was a line of searing pain, but it wasn't bleeding. The internal agony from the concussive blasts had subsided into a deep, throbbing ache, but nothing felt ruptured. His skin was a patchwork of angry red burns from the inferno, but it was already beginning to itch, a sign of his enhanced constitution fighting back.
He had survived. The thought was a cold, hard fact in the chaos of his pain. A normal man would be a dead man, a collection of pulp, ash, and severed limbs scattered throughout the tunnel. He was not a normal man anymore. After a period of rest that could have been hours or a day, a time measured only by the slow subsiding of the initial shock, he was driven by a primal need to escape the suffocating darkness.
The final climb up the steep, fire-blackened ramp was a slow, agonizing testament to his will. He used his enhanced strength to pull himself up, his hands finding purchase on the warped and twisted metal, his muscles protesting with every movement. It was a grueling, vertical crawl towards a sliver of light. Finally, his fingers brushed against the cool, rusted metal of the maintenance hatch at the top. He gathered his remaining energy and threw his shoulder against it. With a deep, groaning shriek of tortured metal, the hatch gave way, flooding the top of the ramp with a blinding, hazy light.
He crawled out onto the surface, his eyes struggling to adjust, and was immediately hit by a wall of oppressive, wet heat. It was a physical blow, the air thick and heavy, saturated with the smell of damp earth, sweet, rotting vegetation, and a thousand other strange, alien scents. It vibrated with the deafening, multi-layered drone of a billion insects, a sound so constant and overwhelming it felt like a pressure against his skull.
He looked up. The sun was a hazy, white disc in a pale, sickly-yellow sky. Around him, the crumbling concrete skeletons of ancient buildings, the likes of which he had never seen, were being actively consumed by a bizarre, alien-looking jungle. Massive, bizarrely-colored vines, as thick as his body, snaked up the sides of the ruins, while thick, pulsing creepers covered the ground in a writhing carpet of dark green and sickly purple. A few meters away, a flower with petals the color of an oil slick slowly opened and closed, releasing a puff of shimmering, golden spores into the thick air.
As he stumbled out into the blinding, hazy sunlight, a voice cut through the insectile drone.
"Hey! Look what the rust-rats dragged in."
He froze. He was not alone. Standing not twenty meters away, near the wreckage of a vehicle so old it looked like a metal fossil, was a small group of ragged survivors. There were four of them, armed with a motley collection of crude spears and what looked like heavily modified, scavenged firearms. They were thin, wiry, their skin tanned to leather by the harsh sun, their eyes sharp and predatory. They stared at him, their initial shock giving way to a wary, calculating curiosity.
They saw an anomaly. A powerfully built man, his physique like that of a prized fighter, emerging from a hole in the ground they had always thought was just another solid ruin. His clothes, a tattered, half-burned one-piece suit, were strange, and he bore no markings of any shelter or faction they knew.
Damien, his mind still rooted in the power dynamics of a world where wealth and authority were paramount, made a critical miscalculation. He was weak, exhausted, and in immense pain, but his instinct was to command, not to submit. He pushed himself to his full height, trying to project an aura of power he no longer possessed.
"I require assistance," he said, his voice a rough, hoarse rasp. "Take me to whoever is in charge here."
The leader of the scavenger crew, a woman with a vicious scar across her face and a pulse-pistol held loosely in her hand, let out a short, harsh laugh. "Hear that, boys? He 'requires assistance'." She took a step forward, her eyes sizing him up like a piece of livestock. "You're in no position to require anything, meat. You're clean. No brand. No tribe. That means you're either free salvage, or you're worth something to someone."
Her eyes raked over his powerful, enhanced physique, the kind of healthy, well-fed body that was a rarity in this world. A slow, greedy smile spread across her face.
"On second thought," she said to her crew, "he's definitely worth something. Hey! This meat will sell for a good price."
The confrontation escalated instantly. Damien, realizing his mistake, braced himself. The scavengers, hardened by a lifetime of brutal, opportunistic violence, attacked. They moved with a practiced, coordinated grace that spoke of countless similar encounters, spreading out to flank him.
Damien, relying on his enhanced body, fought back with a surprising ferocity. He was stronger and faster than any one of them. He met the first man, who lunged with a spear, by grabbing the shaft and wrenching it from his grasp with a contemptuous twist. He snapped the wooden pole over his knee and drove the splintered end into the man's thigh, eliciting a scream of pain. He spun, dodging a clumsy swing from another scavenger with a heavy pipe, and threw the first man into him, sending both sprawling to the ground.
But he was one man, grievously wounded and utterly exhausted, against a coordinated pack of predators. The woman fired her pulse-pistol, the shot not aimed to kill, but to cripple, searing across his already burned side. The fresh wave of agony made him stumble. As he roared in pain, the man with the pipe swung again, a crushing blow that Damien barely managed to block with his forearm. He felt the bone crack under the impact, a sharp, sickening sound.
The fight ended as quickly as it began. As he was reeling from the blow to his arm, the fourth scavenger, who had circled around behind him, swung the butt of a heavy rifle against the back of his skull.
A flash of white-hot pain, and then, a welcoming darkness. His last sensation was of the world tilting sideways, of the jeering faces of the scavengers looking down at him, and of the rough, scratchy feel of a heavy chain being thrown around his neck. He had escaped his high-tech tomb only to be captured by the desperate, savage inheritors of his world.
He awoke briefly, a jarring, painful return to consciousness. He was being dragged. He could feel the rough ground scraping against his back. He tried to move, but his hands and feet were bound in heavy, rusted chains. He looked up. The hazy, yellow sky spun above him. He saw the ragged forms of his captors, their voices a low, guttural murmur.
"...strongest clean-skin I've ever seen," one of them was saying. "Broke Marko's leg with a damn stick."
"Doesn't matter," the woman's voice cut in. "Lord Bane pays top price for healthy stock. Especially anomalies like this one. He'll last for weeks in the pit."
A boot connected with his head, and the world dissolved back into blackness.
When he woke again, it was to darkness. Not the clean, silent darkness of his cryo-pod, but a thick, oppressive blackness that smelled of damp earth, human waste, and despair. He was in a crude, makeshift cell, the bars cold and rough against his back. The floor was packed dirt. He could hear the drip of water and the distant, miserable groans of other prisoners. He had arrived at the next stage of his journey, a holding pen for the livestock of a man named Bane.