The click of the scrap-shot was a death knell in the sudden quiet of the Sprawl.
Kael didn't move. He couldn't. His nervous system felt like a tangled web of frayed wires, each pulse of his heart sending a fresh jolt of acid-burn through his throat. He looked up, his vision blurring at the edges, at the enforcer standing on the ledge above.
The man was an Ironbark grunt, his skin grafted with patches of bark-like armor that pulsed with a dull, sickly orange light. He looked down at the dissolving remains of the Glass-Thorn Panther, then at Kael, his eyes widening in a mixture of greed and disbelief.
"Inert, my eye," the grunt spat, the barrel of the scrap-shot leveled at Kael's glowing chest. "You've got a High-Grade graft in there, don't you? Jax is going to pay a fortune for your head."
[WARNING: BIO-LOAD CRITICAL]
[Current Stability: 58%.]
[Nervous system tremors detected. Motor control degradation: 15%.]
Kael tried to find his voice, but his throat was a ruin of scorched tissue. The glowing yellow bile still dripped from his chin, hissing as it touched the metal.
The grunt didn't wait for an answer. He pulled the trigger.
The scrap-shot roared, a spray of pressurized metal shards tearing through the air. But the man hadn't accounted for the Panther.
In its final, agonizing death throe, the beast's glass-claws spasmed, raking across the already weakened pylon base. The sheer force of the beast's weight shifting acted like a lever. The pylon, already corroded by decades of spores and recently weakened by Kael's acid, finally gave way.
The ledge beneath the grunt vanished.
The enforcer's shot went wide, hitting a cluster of explosive puffball fungi in the canopy above. The resulting blast was a muted thump that sent a cascade of toxic spores and debris raining down.
But that was the least of Kael's problems.
The world tilted. The rust-grates beneath him groaned, the massive iron maw of the pylon collapsing inward like a dying giant. Kael tried to scramble away, his needle-fingers digging into the floor, but his body refused to obey. The tremors were too deep, the strain of the grafts locking his muscles in place.
"No—!"
His voice was a wheeze, lost in the deafening roar of falling masonry and shrieking metal.
The pylon buckled. A massive slab of rusted iron, the size of a shipping container, tilted directly over him.
[CAUTION: STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY LOSS DETECTED]
[Calculating survival probability...]
[Estimate: < 1%.]
Kael squeezed his eyes shut. He felt the sudden, crushing impact of the floor falling away, followed by a weight that made his ribs scream.
Darkness followed. Total, absolute darkness.
He was pinned. Not by a predator, but by the Sprawl itself. His left leg was trapped under a jagged beam, and a slab of concrete was pressed against his chest, making every breath a battle. Above him, he could hear the sound of the pylon still settling, more debris clicking and scraping as it found new points of balance.
Quiet returned, but it wasn't the silence of safety. It was the silence of a tomb.
Kael tried to cough, but the movement sent a fresh wave of agony through his throat. The acid glands, newly grafted and unstable, were leaking—not into his mouth, but back into his own tissue. He could feel the stinging heat traveling up his esophagus, a slow, corrosive fire that threatened to melt him from the inside out.
[STATUS REPORT: BIO-LOAD STABILIZING AT 89%]
[Warning: Internal Graft Leakage detected.]
[Time until corrosive organ failure: 12 minutes.]
He was buried alive. And he was melting.
Kael reached out with his needle-fingers, but they only scraped against cold, unyielding stone. He was alone, deep in the dark, with the system ticking away the minutes of his life.
In the distance, through the layers of rubble, he heard a faint, persistent sound.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
The sound of metal on metal. The Ironbark patrols were already clearing the debris.
They weren't looking for survivors. They were looking for the Seed.