Mike sat cross-legged in the center of the corrugated metal room and looked like a monk conducting a ritual of gluttony. A grease-stained paper bucket sat in his lap and sagged under the weight of the roasted carcasses of Sector 4’s finest vermin. He sat within a circle of discarded skewers and picked up another roach. It was glazed in spicy synthetic oil with its legs curled tight against the thorax in a final spasm of death.

  Crunch.

  He chewed with a methodical and joyless rhythm. The spice and the char were lost on him now as he only tasted the data. With every bite the System chimed softly in the back of his mind like a slot machine paying out in fractions of power.

  [Biomass Absorbed]

  [Biomass Absorbed]

  It was a numbers game. The incident at the plaza where the hunger had nearly driven him to eat a human corpse had terrified him. He had realized that the Hunger was not just a feeling but a fuel gauge. If he let it hit empty the monster took the wheel. So he kept the tank full even if it meant eating until his jaw ached and his stomach churned.

  He swallowed the last bite. A warm and golden wave washed over his nervous system to smooth out the jagged edges of his exhaustion.

  [LEVEL UP!]

  [You are now Level 4.]

  Mike exhaled and felt the new capacity snap into place like a fresh magazine seating into a rifle. The headache that lived permanently behind his eyes receded a few inches and he felt expansive.

  Text began to scroll rapidly across his vision.

  [NEW SKILL UNLOCKED: BIO-DETONATE]

  Description: Mark one minion or a cluster with an unstable enzyme. After 1–3 seconds the minion explodes in a toxic burst.

  Mike froze and stared at the text floating in the stagnant air.

  Bio-Detonate.

  He wiped the sweat from his eyes. This was not a surveillance tool and it was not a passive buff. He looked at the cage near his bed where his prized Acid-Spitter roach was sleeping.

  "No," he whispered. "Not you."

  The Acid-Spitter was a sniper rifle and a piece of precision engineering that he was not going to waste. He needed a test subject. He needed a volunteer.

  He reached out with his mind and swept the shadows under his workbench. He found a common cockroach which was a small brown scuttler of no particular distinction. It was just a grunt.

  Come.

  The roach walked out into the open floor. It moved jerkily as it sensed the dark intent in the command but it was unable to resist the authority of the System.

  Mike focused on the new skill. It felt different than the Mutation or the Tether which felt like pulling strings or molding clay. This felt like lighting a fuse. He felt a drain on his own energy as a cold siphon pulled from his core. He channeled it down the mental link and forced it into the tiny body of the insect.

  The reaction was immediate and horrifying.

  The roach stopped moving and its body began to spasm. Mike watched with a mixture of fascination and revulsion as the abdomen of the insect began to swell. It did not grow naturally but inflated like a balloon being overfilled. The brown chitin stretched taut and cracked audibly as it turned translucent. Inside the creature a sickly and pulsating green light began to churn and boil like a biological reactor going critical.

  The legs of the creature scrabbled frantically on the metal floor for purchase but it was too heavy now. It was a bulbous and glowing tumor with legs. It buzzed with a sound like a high-tension wire about to snap and the mental feedback from the creature was pure static agony.

  "Go," Mike whispered with a trembling voice.

  He pointed to a pile of scrap metal he kept near the door which was a heavy rusted engine block from an old hover-sedan surrounded by loose plates of steel.

  Move.

  The command was difficult. The creature fought the inevitable with its mind screaming in binary panic. Mike had to force it and drive the living bomb forward with sheer will. It dragged its swollen and glowing body across the floor. One foot became two. The green light pulsed faster. Thrum. Thrum. Thrum.

  It reached the engine block and crawled into a rusted intake valve.

  [DETONATE.]

  Mike triggered the mental switch.

  BOOM.

  It was not a small pop but a concussion.

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  A wet and violent explosion rocked the container. Mike flinched and shielded his face as debris clattered against the walls. Smoke that was acrid and green and smelled of burnt hair and copper filled the corner of the room. Mike waved the smoke away while coughing and walked over to the engine block.

  His eyes widened.

  The explosion had not been merely force but chemical. Where the roach had been there was a crater in the solid steel of the engine block. The metal had not just bent but had melted and dissolved by a splash of super-concentrated acid released in the blast.

  But that was not the worst part.

  Thousands of tiny and razor-sharp fragments were embedded in the steel radiating out from the crater like shrapnel from a grenade. The force of the explosion had calcified the exoskeleton of the roach in a microsecond before shattering it. The chitin shards had been launched with enough velocity to embed themselves half an inch into solid iron.

  Mike ran a finger over the metal and was careful not to touch the sizzling acid.

  If that had been a person or an enforcer in body armor the acid would have eaten the Kevlar and the bone-shrapnel would have shredded the meat underneath.

  Mike stepped back and his boot crunched on a piece of slag. He felt bile rise in his throat. The Acid-Spitter was a weapon but it was still biological. It was an animal spitting poison and felt like nature turned up to eleven.

  This was a perversion.

  He had taken a living thing and filled it with energy until it was screaming before turning it into a meat-grenade. It was cruel and disgusting. It was a violation of the life he was supposed to be shepherding. He looked at the crater again where the acid was still sizzling and eating deeper into the engine block.

  "Effective," Mike muttered. The word tasted like ash in his mouth.

  He looked at the cracks in the floorboards where thousands of regular and useless roaches lived. He did not need to spend hours mutating them into Acid-Spitters. He did not need to carefully feed them. He did not need to love them. He just needed to grab one and pump it full of death before sending it running into a room.

  It was disposable artillery.

  It was more efficient than the Spitter which required line of sight. The Spitter was valuable but the Bio-Bomb was cheap and endless.

  Mike walked back to his sleeping mat and sat down. He looked at his hands. They were clean but they felt dirtier than they ever had when he was just digging through trash. He had a new tool. He had a way to hurt Riggs and a way to crack armor.

  He closed his eyes and in the darkness of his mind he saw the sector map again. He saw the thousands of tiny lights that were the rats and the roaches and the flies. Before he had seen a family or a hive. Now he looked at them and saw an ammunition belt.

  He laid back and stared at the rusty ceiling while listening to the skittering in the walls.

  "Sorry," he whispered to the dark.

  Before sleep finally claimed him the Hunger purred with quiet satisfaction.

  "Time to work," he murmured.

  He shut his eyes and reached not for a blade or a tool but for the city itself.

  Training began.

  At Level 3 maintaining a link to a single fly had been like holding a heavy weight at arm’s length. Now at Level 4 it felt no heavier than a feather. He pushed his consciousness outward and breached the metal walls of the container. He did not just grab one mind but grabbed a network.

  His consciousness fractured and split into a dozen streams. He merged with a cluster of moths clinging to the ceiling of the drainage pipe. He slipped into the primitive and twitching mind of a centipede crawling through the plumbing of the tenement next door. He rode the optic nerves of a spider weaving a web in the corner of the public showers.

  Sight.

  The darkness of Sector 4 vanished and was replaced by a mosaic of thermal patterns and vibration maps. He saw the heat signatures of sleepers in their beds and the rhythmic pulse of the power conduits in the walls. He was the ghost in the machine and the surveillance system that no one knew existed.

  He focused on a specific target. Leena’s noodle stall was three streets over.

  Leena was the gossip hub of the lower levels. If Riggs was planning something new Leena would be complaining about it. Mike hopped his consciousness into a roach scuttling under Leena’s serving counter. The transition was instant with no lag and no migraine.

  The smell was overwhelming. It reeked of steam and boiled starch and old fish sauce but the audio was crisp.

  "...double shifts at the garage," Leena was saying as she slammed a bowl of grey noodles onto the counter for a customer. "Riggs has the boys welding plates onto the transport trucks. Not armor plates. Lead plates. Radiation shielding."

  "Shielding?" The customer was a tired docker who grunted in confusion. "For what? We are not going into the Dead Zones."

  "Riggs thinks something is leaking." Leena lowered her voice and leaned over the broth pot. "That thing they found. He thinks it is cooking the brains of the boys. Two of the Cutters woke up blind yesterday. Retinas burned out like blown fuses."

  Mike’s real eyes snapped open in the container for a second before closing again.

  Blind. The body of the Celestial was defending itself. It was emitting something like radiation or psionic static that fried anyone trying to cut into it.

  He pushed further.

  He left the noodle stall and sent his mind down into the sewers to map the tunnels. He sent a beetle up the side of the ventilation towers to test his vertical range.

  100 yards. 200 yards.

  He felt the strain building as a pressure in his temples but he held it. He was weaving a tapestry of sensory input. He knew where the patrols were walking and which doors were locked. He knew where the water was leaking. He was becoming an efficient intel gatherer and a cartographer of the unseen.

  For an hour he held the web. He filtered the noise of insect minds and isolated the useful data from the static of eat-run-hide. It was a mental workout harder than any physical labor he had ever done.

  Then he pushed for 300 yards.

  The connection trembled. His brain felt like a muscle being stretched to its tearing point.

  Hold it, he commanded himself. Map the perimeter.

  He forced the connection to stabilize and locked the grid in his mind.

  Snap.

  Something in his brain clicked. It was not a break but a breakthrough. The resistance vanished and the map became clear and effortless and high-definition. The chime that followed was deep and resonant and felt like a heavy gong struck inside his soul.

  [LEVEL UP!]

  [You are now Level 5.]

  Mike gasped and pulled his mind back into his own body. He fell forward onto his hands as sweat dripped from his nose onto the metal floor. He was panting but he was not exhausted. He felt electric.

  Status...

  HOST STATUS: UNSTABLE

  SUBJECT: Mike. LEVEL: 5. SPECIES: Human

  [ BIO-METRICS ]

  Note: Standard Human Baseline is 10.

  STR (Strength): 7 [WEAKNESS]

  AGI (Agility): 7 [WEAKNESS]

  CON (Constitution): 9 [WEAKNESS]

  INT (Intelligence): 12 [STABLE]

  WIS (Wisdom): 11 [STABLE]

  [ACTIVE SKILLS:]

  – Neural Tether

  – Bio-Detonate

  [PASSIVE SKILLS:]

  – Sense Vermin

  – Hive Resonance

  – Bio-Suppression

  Author’s Note:

  [Bio-Detonate] changes the game entirely. He is no longer just a scavenger hiding in the walls. He is a walking hazard.