While the rest of the world had become unrecognizable, where once there had been cities, forests, and oceans, now lay only ruins, with buildings twisted into jagged skeletons and forests or jungles reduced to no-man's-lands, there were still some pockets of survival.
Small settlements of life called sanctuaries, carved out by those who were either strong enough, or stubborn enough, to resist the corruption through sheer willpower or some other certain strange coincidence.
One such sanctuary existed at the edge of what had once been a sprawling metropolis. There, surrounded by metal scraps, broken machinery, and the stench of decay, resided Marco, the Mechanic.
The title "the Mechanic" wasn't given to him just because he was an actual mechanic, but because of how powerful and terrifying he became once he used his abilities.
Marco had been gifted by the Inkforce just like everyone else. But unlike most, he had not only survived, but had adapted very differently.
During the corruption, he had watched his friends, family, and other loved ones slowly succumb to the invader, watching his city and his entire neighborhood turn into a writhing, mindless monster land.
He felt the crushing weight of pain that twisted minds into madness. The experience had left him with a mental trauma. It caused him to become increasingly bitter, harsh, and unrelentingly aggressive.
He had later built a large mechanical bus from pure metal and gears, crafting inside it a mini mechanical house that could repair itself, harvest mutated fruits from the remnants of corrupted gardens, and defend itself from minor wandering polluted beasts.
Food was no longer necessary for most humans after the pollution, but Marco still consumed it anyway.
Hunger, he told himself, reminded him that he was still alive.
It was in this same mobile bus, surrounded by the hum of gears and the greasy smell of burning oil, that the boy appeared.
He was skinny and short, with short black hair that clung in clumps to a face too innocent and young to understand the brutality of the world surrounding him.
Ragged clothes hung from his small frame, and his eyes were dark and indifferent. He did not cry, beg, nor flinch at the sight of such a burly and dangerous-looking man like Marco.
He simply stood there, looking on with pure confusion and puzzlement.
Marco simply looked at him with an expression one could have mistaken for curiosity. After a brief glance and a few faint deductions, he asked in a rough, deep voice,
"Where're you from, kid?"
The boy, hearing the question, grew only more puzzled and confused, unable to register what was happening.
He opened his mouth in an attempt to speak, but was met with pure silence. He couldn't even begin to understand how communication worked.
Marco, who was also observing the situation, did not really expect him to speak either.
Because, just from the boy's appearance alone, he assumed he must have been one of those unlucky and traumatized survivors of the pollution.
He felt a bunch of different emotions and changes from the boy. Confusion, the indifference to life and death, and faint Inkforce energy fluctuations, though very faint.
This further reinforced his earlier assumption. The boy must have watched his entire family mutate into some kind of terrifying abomination before consuming one another, and he had somehow become the only survivor.
Though he wondered how the boy had survived, he shrugged his shoulders, he really didn't care a bit about such a troublesome matter. Different people mutated and died every day, so it wasn't really anything new.
He studied the boy carefully, before suddenly feeling a wave of deja vu.
He noticed how much the boy looked like his son. His son would have been around this age now, if he were still alive. He sighed inwardly as he grew a little soft-hearted.
"You'll follow me around from now on. I'll teach you how to survive and make something of yourself. In turn, you'll work for me until you're old enough to survive alone."
The boy's earlier puzzlement and confusion became even more pronounced. He simply stood there, staring at the large man obstructing his view and speaking in some incomprehensible tone he couldn't seem to understand.
Marco frowned, thinking that maybe the pollution had turned the kid into an idiot.
Well, he didn't really mind.
As long as the boy listened to instructions, didn't bother him too much, and didn't bring him any trouble, it wasn't a problem.
The years passed in a flash.
Ten years in total.
Ten years of relentless training, conditioning the boy's body and mind, teaching him the principles and applications of mechanics, some basic morals, communication, the consequences of his actions, and the absolute law of survival.
The boy, though indifferent in demeanor, had still managed to absorb it all.
During all this time, the world outside continued to twist as the invader carried on its relentless conquest.
Some of the survivors, those who had endured the inhuman, conceptual pain that accompanied the Inkforce's pollution, and survived, began to carve out their own sanctuaries.
They understood one simple truth, the Inkforce could not be fully resisted, but it could be repelled.
These survivors then discovered the Armaments.
Armaments were objects that, by some strange coincidence, faintly resisted the invader's corruption, and were then infused with concentrated Inkforce energy.
Such a rare, potent, concentrated energy was purer than its scattered counterpart.
It then gained the ability to resist the corruptive nature of the diffused, non concentrated Ink pollution that had mixed into the earth's atmosphere, including the air.
Some Armaments were very simple, a rusted weapon that pulsed faintly with energy, a book etc....
While others were monumental, a car, a building, even a mountain might be an Armament.
Placed in desolate, pollution filled areas, the Armaments pushed away the atmospheric corrupted Ink, creating zones of relative safety.
The distance an Armament could purify depended on how much concentrated Inkforce it was infused with.
A weak Armament might purify and shield roughly ten to a hundred meters of the surrounding perimeter.
The stronger ones could extend their influence over a perimeter of ten kilometers or more.
But an Armament did more than just cleanse. For humans already polluted by the Ink, standing within the radius of an owned Armament could enhance their abilities.
Once an Armament was owned by an individual, it became inseparable from him, equipping its effects and using it to enhance his own abilities were no longer a problem.
The stronger the individual, the more the Armament boosted him.
From the day such miraculous items were discovered, the world became a chessboard of Armaments.
To own an Armament meant being able to awaken, equip, and use it.
Not everyone had the willpower, strength, and fearlessness to even make such a daring attempt at gaining power.
If you were to win, you'd own a very powerful and dangerous equippable artifact.
Dangerous enough to make plenty of other mutants, or other intelligent creatures, cautious and very wary. No one wanted to offend an Armament-reinforced strongman over anything trivial.
But if you failed to win, then..... there was no "then" after that.
The Armament simply consumed the challenger until they became nothing more than drifting dust, and grew more powerful for it.
Those who could find, own, or control these artifacts held the life and death of an entire sanctuary in their hands.
Entire regions were now ruled not by armies or governments, but by the owners of these rare, concentrated relics of power.
From the safety of his mechanical bus, Marco observed the world with a mix of boredom, schadenfreude, and irritation.
His mechanical house hummed and whirred, gears rotating, and exhaust pipes making garring and disturbing sounds as it repaired its damages from the bad mutated climate and occasional Ink polluted storms.
The boy, now grown up, more capable, and more precise in his movements, worked alongside him, assembling new devices, weapons, and defensive mechanisms.
Together, they had not just survived these ten years, but had also adapted, just as the world demanded of them.
But the Ink was still relentless. It seeped into every corner of the earth, mutated more creatures and also twisted more plants.
Even the sanctuaries of the Armaments were not entirely immune.
They could only resist the Ink, not purify or destroy it.
And as the boy continued to grow under Marco's strict, unyielding guidance, it became clear that survival was just not enough.
One day, one of them, or perhaps both, would need to confront the invader itself.
And when that day came, it would no longer be a question of simple endurance.
It would be a question of whether the world would finally have a great savior, or maybe a more terrifying destroyer.