Chapter 83 - 79: The Department of Attrition
The flickering neon of the research wing didn’t reveal predators; it revealed a tragedy of engineering.
There was no heroic standoff in the gloom, no triumphant final surge of adrenaline to carry them through. They looked like fighters in the dying seconds of a grueling, championship bout, battered down to the bone. Their chests heaved, drawing in stale, copper-tasting air that burned on the way down.
Elizabeth leaned heavily against a decaying console, her breathing shallow and jagged. Her face was pale, drawn tight with exhaustion as she compensated for the missing weight of her severed arm, phantom pains echoing through a limb that was no longer there. Will’s muscles trembled under his ruined coat, running on empty fumes and pure, stubborn refusal. They were bruised, heavily burned, and entirely spent.
As the translucent beasts stepped fully into the stark, buzzing light, the true horror of their anatomy became abundantly clear. These weren’t beasts born of the Labyrinth’s natural, chaotic evolution. They were stitched-together amalgamations of rotting organic muscle and corroded iron plating, a nightmare of deliberate design.
Instead of standard, haphazard Labyrinth mutations, their skulls were carved with impossible geometric scars. They were fractal equations burned deeply into the exposed bone—sharp, agonizing angles that gave Will an immediate, throbbing headache just looking at them. The hounds didn’t pant. They wheezed through synthetic voice boxes, leaking a heavy, viscous green-and-purple miasma from their jaws. The vapor hissed as it hit the floor, smelling nauseatingly of rotting meat, sharp ozone, and sterile hospital bleach.
Will focused on the lead hound, narrowing his eyes and expecting the System to provide a standard threat assessment or a monster level. Instead, the blue interface in his periphery stuttered violently, glitching in a cascade of scrambled code as it tried to read an old-world barcode carved directly into the creature’s oxidized shoulder plating.
[Scanning Target...]
[System Error: Biological Taxonomy Unrecognized.]
[Old-World Designation Found: DoD Specimen #404 - Combat Class.]
Will didn’t have the mental bandwidth to process the error, nor the luxury of wondering what a government designation was doing miles beneath the earth. He couldn’t rely on his usual chaotic flurry of shifting armaments, dropping swords to conjure axes in a whirlwind of magical adaptability. He scraped the barren dregs of his recovering mana, dragging the energy up from the empty well of his core. He locked his intent into a single, permanent shape.
A heavy Violet-Gold halberd materialized in his grip. The sudden heat of the mana blistered his palms, but the weapon was solid, dense, and final. He couldn’t un-summon and replace it; his connection to the Warlord network was dead silent. If he dropped the weapon, he was fighting a two-ton cyborg barehanded.
Beside him, Maddie dropped any pretense of her usual flashy footwork. There was no room for brawling acrobatics on a floor slick with acid and grime. She gripped the scarred wooden haft of her own polearm, her knuckles stark white against the grain. She stepped up shoulder-to-shoulder with Will, locking her boots into the pitted steel grates. Without a word, they formed a desperate, two-person phalanx in the center of the decaying laboratory.
The ensuing combat was entirely stripped of elegance. It was a miserable, grinding slog of leverage, heavy footwork, and sheer grit.
The lead hound charged, a terrifying mass of dead weight and grinding gears. Maddie planted her boots firmly on the slick steel. She didn’t swing for a kill. She used the thick haft of her polearm as a rigid fulcrum, catching the beast directly under its pitted iron jaw as it snapped at her face. The massive impact rattled her teeth and sent a jarring shockwave up her forearms and directly into her spine, but the brutal block perfectly redirected the hound’s momentum, throwing its center of gravity wildly off balance.
In the exact second the beast stumbled, its rusted side exposed, Will stepped into the opening. He drove his Violet-Gold blade deep into the flaking cybernetic joints of the hound’s shoulder. The metal shrieked in protest, a deafening screech of tearing alloys. Will wrenched the blade sideways with a harsh grunt, grinding the internal gears to a violent halt and severing the hydraulic lines hidden beneath the plating.
They didn’t stop to admire the kill. They were digging deep into reserves they didn’t know they had. Their lungs burned with the toxic air, their muscles screamed in protest, but they kept moving forward, step by agonizing step. They methodically dismantled the rushing threats through synchronized, ugly attrition. Blood, acid, and sweat coated the floor grates, turning the battlefield into a treacherous slip hazard that made every pivot a dangerous gamble.
To their left, a second hound bypassed the phalanx entirely. It scrambled over a fallen server rack, lunging straight for Elyas. The beast snapped its jaws wide, sending a concentrated spray of the bleach-scented miasma across the rogue’s chest.
The chemical reaction was instantaneous and horrifying. Instead of just burning his armor or searing his skin, the occult acid interacted directly with his deep-earth rogue biology, destabilizing his very cells. Elyas lost his structural cohesion entirely.
He didn’t try to dodge the hound’s heavy tackle. He took the hit head-on and literally splattered.
His body broke apart, collapsing into heavy, wet drops of melting, plastic-like substance that scattered across the corroded floorboards in a wide arc. The hound landed awkwardly in the center of the mess, its iron jaws snapping furiously at the puddles, its teeth clicking uselessly through wet, yielding sludge that refused to bleed.
Elyas’s consciousness remained tethered within the scattered pieces, a bizarre, disjointed sensory nightmare of viewing the room from twenty different angles simultaneously. The deep-earth magic pulled at him. A second later, the drops rapidly snapped back together, sliding across the grates and pulling upward against gravity to reform his tall, lean frame.
It wasn’t a clean, heroic reformation. The rogue dropped immediately to one knee, spending a vulnerable, agonizing second gagging on his freshly re-knit lungs. His eyes rolled back from the sheer nausea and intense disorientation of his anatomy knitting itself back together from a liquid state. He coughed up a splash of clear, viscous fluid onto the grates, his whole body trembling.
"I believe," Elyas wheezed, his voice raw and dripping with morbid exhaustion, "I preferred the acid."
Forcing himself through the debilitating sickness, he immediately weaponized the bizarre mutation. As the confused hound turned back toward him, Elyas threw his newly reformed right arm forward in a desperate whip-like motion. The limb lost cohesion mid-air, turning into a liquid puddle that splattered directly over the beast’s sensory pits and snout.
The moment the sludge made contact with the cold metal, the melted plastic solidified into a mass of writhing, hyper-dense muscular tentacles. Elyas yanked his remaining arm back, bracing his boots against a console. The tentacles wrapped around the hound’s neck like steel cables, tightening relentlessly. He twisted his shoulder with sickening force, choking the beast until its cybernetic spine snapped—a sound exactly like a heavy gauge steel cable snapping under thousands of pounds of tension. The hound collapsed in a twitching heap.
Across the sprawling room, the largest of the fractal-scarred hounds barreled toward Elizabeth. She had nowhere to retreat, boxed in by a wall of dead machinery. The beast slammed her hard against an oxidized terminal, its snapping iron jaws stopping mere inches from her face, pinning her against the metal with sheer, overwhelming bulk.
She didn’t panic, and she didn’t waste precious energy trying to shove off a two-ton cyborg with her one remaining hand. She leaned directly into the pin, staring into the beast’s dead, artificial eyes.
Elizabeth’s chest heaved, her breath hitching as she relied entirely on the single, shifting shadow tentacle manifested in place of her missing arm. As the hound opened its jaws to bite down, leaking highly corrosive rot over her collar and shoulder, she drove the shadow tentacle straight down its open throat.
She bypassed the heavy iron plating entirely. The abyssal shadow magic slithered past the pitted ribs and grinding internal gears, seeking the creature’s center of mass. It wasn’t a magical crystal or a standard monster core. Her tentacle wrapped securely around a wet, fleshy battery grafted deep inside the iron ribs, a grotesque organ pulsing with a sickly, unnatural light.
Elizabeth gripped the core with the shadow appendage and savagely ripped her arm upward in a single, brutal motion.
The sheer force tore the hound’s chest cavity open from the inside out. Corroded metal, frayed wires, and chunks of rotting meat showered the floor grates as the fleshy battery was yanked free. The dead weight of the cyborg finally collapsed at her feet, sliding off her boots.
Silence descended on the laboratory.
There was no triumphant music. There were no witty jokes about victory or grinning celebrations. There was just the grim sound of four exhausted people wheezing, coughing, and leaning heavily on their halberds and the decaying terminals. Elyas stood near the center of the room, staring intently at his own hand, flexing the fingers slowly and looking deeply disturbed by the implications of his own biology.
As their heavy, mana-laced breath filled the airtight room, circulating through the stagnant space, the ambient magic slowly reacted with the dormant technology hidden within the walls.
The facility woke up.
Heavy mechanical relays began to clack loudly within the steel walls, a cascading, rhythmic sound like hundreds of tumbling dominoes echoing down a long corridor. Hulking, old-school server towers hummed to life in the dark corners of the room, their massive cooling fans grinding loudly against decades of accumulated, sulfurous dust. Spools of ancient magnetic tape jerked and began to spin behind thick glass panels.
Eerie, wireframe CRT-green holographic screens suddenly projected directly into the dusty air above the consoles, flickering erratically as they drew power entirely from the ambient breath circulating in the room.
Will leaned his weight on his halberd, wincing as he used his sleeve to wipe a thick streak of sweat and grime from his forehead. "What is this place?"
They pushed deeper into the expansive room, their boots crunching loudly on broken glass and corroded debris. The environmental storytelling surrounding them was deeply horrifying. The green holo-screens displayed complex analog medical scans—intricate, cold-war era blueprints detailing exactly how to surgically fuse biological specimens with heavy artillery plating, complete with margin notes on pain tolerance and rejection rates.
They walked cautiously past rows of shattered, thick-glass vats lining the far wall. The ones that remained intact were filled with pools of murky, yellowish formaldehyde, illuminated by harsh fluorescent strips at their bases. Suspended within the chemical baths were skeletal silhouettes with far too many limbs, their joint structures reversed and warped into agonizing, unnatural angles. Long, jagged mandibles and extra spinal columns floated silently in the preservation fluid.
Will approached the main command console sitting on a raised dais at the center of the room. The terminal was coated in a thick, undisturbed layer of grime. He wiped it away with a heavy sweep of his arm, coughing as the dust plumed thickly into the stale air.
A central holographic emblem flickered to life above the console, casting a sickly green glow over the dust motes dancing in the air, bathing Will’s tired face in emerald light.
It wasn’t the sleek, corporate logo of P.A.C.I.F.I.C.
It was a faded, unmistakable eagle clutching arrows and an olive branch.
The United States Department of Defense.
Will stared at the eagle, his chest heaving, his exhausted mind struggling to process the impossible implications of the symbol. The Labyrinth wasn’t just a sudden, magical apocalypse that Arthur Vance had exploited for corporate gain.
Vance didn’t build this laboratory. The government had been down here first, decades before the System ever fell from the sky, operating a sanctioned black site buried in the deep earth. They had been experimenting on things that shouldn’t exist, actively trying to weaponize biology that defied human taxonomy long before the world ended.
As the dust settled across the console, the System interface in Will’s periphery violently glitched, shifting from its standard cool blue to a harsh, warning-track yellow that demanded immediate attention.
[Hidden Landmark Discovered: Pre-Integration Black Site.]
[System Directive: Assimilating Old-World Data...]
[Warning: Administrator Access Required to prevent Automatic Facility Purge.]
Will stared at the flashing text, a new dread settling heavy and cold in his gut. The facility wasn’t just waking up from its long slumber; it was actively arming itself.
"Boss," Elyas murmured, limping up to the edge of the console and staring blankly at the glowing green eagle, his clothes still reeking of the acidic miasma. The rogue let out a dry, rattling sigh, perfectly encapsulating the sheer, exhausting absurdity of their survival. "Please tell me we don’t have to pay taxes down here."