The rolling green in the wind gave way to a stagnant putrification clinging to the pores. The seemingly empty buildings had occupants within every other building or so - some in groups, some by themselves. Whenever they were close to the entrance, Becker observed their sickly, leathery, scabby skin clinging to their bones. Some had no teeth, some had noses fttened. Perhaps some though of trying something against him, but as soon as the muzzle pointed at them, they retreated back into their lethargic selves.

  And the thick stink of jenkem would not leave until he made it to the riverbed. Only then would he lower the loose scarf.

  Reaching the ruins, Becker overheard heavy steps coming from the main street ahead. Rushing over, he saw lumbering abominations carrying over unfortunate human prey tied to stakes. Though they moaned and groaned, perhaps they had no idea what was going on. They might not be aware that they were being transported by beings of blue skin, pale skin, three arms, and one hoof leg; humanoids with mismatched, multiple eyes; the back of the head shaped like butt cheeks; thick, improbable humpbacks; tentacles for arms.

  Some had rge jaws with small carnivorous teeth. Others, though rail thin with their bones exposed through their skin, ran with more stamina than their more muscle-bound counterparts.

  The word "sele'kwai," in this part of the world, directly transtes to "gene-joke" - evidence that time has not erased the understanding of of what has befallen these wretched beings.

  How a "kaneka," a human, degrades into one is as varied as it is insidious - victims of exposure to mutagens, genetic failures at the point of conception, experimentation with hexes, and what some simply refer as "inspiration."

  In this isnd, they have found a home along with the rest of the refuse here in the Wailing Husks. And the party heading under the building's gash carried off their prey, proudly chanting and waiving their crude clubs and blunt, thick bdes.

  Hidden in a crater, in one of the skeletal building frames, Becker continued to keep his sub-machine gun pointed at them until the ghastly procession disappeared.

  Approaching the breech in the metal sheet wall, his heart slowly raced with assurance and dread as the spot he had seen through his binocurs became prominent.

  It was a sticker rge enough to cover a notebook - a cartoonish dog head with brown fur and a subtle smile, a man's torso, and scaled green limbs and tail with predatory hands and feet.

  Becker: Dog-Face?! Bollocks! [But how could he know what's on the other side?] Oh wait...

  Yawning as if he had not slept in weeks, Becker bit his lower lip hard and centered himself back to the present. A chill ran through his skin and slowly made its way to his bones.

  Flicking the torch light on his gun on, he noticed it dimming slightly. Turning it off, he entered through the hole, encountering a road ending at the wall on the opposite side, with two-story dusty mud buildings on either side with metal stairs leading up here and there.

  Shuffling his feet in a way to not make noise, Becker's gun pointed towards the windowless gaps on the buildings, towards any rge breech in the crumbling walls. He made his way towards one of the stairways closest to room where the chute would be, and as he pce a foot on the first step, a tainted, sickly feeling enveloped his being.

  From the bck interiors, he heard a groaning, clicking drone.

  Running fast, he barely had time to gnce into the rooms he past by until he reached the room. With his nerves fred and the blood sizzling in the back of his head, he kicked the rickety door of the room, almost tumbling into the entrance of the shaft.

  Further ahead, he noticed a small shiny blue bulb at the doorway on the other side with a thin scent of myrrh emanating from it.

  Walking backwards towards the doorway, the tiredness continued to invade every fiber of his being. He caught himself loosening the tightness of his hand on the gun's pistol grip, clenching hard until the knuckles popped.

  The screeching pierced through his earplugs. Taking a few more steps back, he turned on the torch light, and illuminated with transparent forms save for the pitch-bck shadow, ghostly outlines, wavering in accordance with their movements, were the living photo negatives; third dimensional walking silhouette men.

  "Neren."

  And through their partially dark mouths, a raspy, bsphemous screeched reality itself the closer they approached Becker.

  Their very presence were an affront to the senses.

  With the light creating a contrast on their form, Becker opened fire without aiming while moving backwards. Most of the bullets flew harmlessly through them, but those that struck on their bck outlines made the three pursuers fall down writhing and hollering like summoned devils.

  Keeping the gun forward, he approached the other side, where the blue bulb revealed to be three flowers taped to the doorway, resembling cempaxochitl with jade-blue petals, called "wuitziki." As the rich smell of myrrh tingled his nostrils, Becker watched the neren remain where their wounded were, neither moving forward nor attempting to retreat, waiting for something to happen. Through the light, he noticed the shadowy faces contort and nostrils twitch with disgust.

  The more he breathed in the smell, the more Becker recovered his vitality. Taking one of the flowers, he pced it in an inner pocket of his shirt, fttened by the body armor. As he swung the two-way doors and closed it behind him, the neren slowly retreated back into their irs.

  Turning around, Becker was confronted by an enormous rotunda emptied of its contents save for what graffiti and carvings have not faded away, and up above, the light of the morning accentuated the nicotine-yellow color of the dome. There were such a variety of scripts and markings that neither belonged to the same nguage, and Becker suspected, nor to the same age. Whatever their authors attemptet to communicate, they all tell only one message: "We were there, we were here."

  All except one.

  Close to the exit on the opposite side, past the stone stands emptied of anything to dispy, was red script in English with Japanese characters: "Cleansed."

  Through the worn hallways and dusty rooms, every once in a while Becker found streaks of dried crimson on the floor or in a fine line across the wall. The nebulous light that made it in through the gaps on the architecture impressed upon Becker the sensation that he was about to be pounced upon, only to be comforted when another stain of crusty blood was found.

  Finding a stone stairwell close to the center, he went down to the next floor, navigating through colpsed floors and crevices leading to another hallway on the floor. Twice he saw "Cleansed" marked on the wall, guiding him in the right direction, until he reached another two-way doorway.

  Becker: [Dog-Face, again...]

  Cautiously moving ahead, he used his shoulder to push the door open with the MP5SD leading the way.

  Immediately, the slight humidity enveloped him as he was confronted with a variety of pnts overgrowing wherever they had space with thick roots clinging to the walls and the floor. Thick moss covered any patches left untouched by the roots, long grasses and bushes overtook wherever dirt had been piled on.

  From on high, fat water drops hit the ground with a loud *plop.* On the other side of the room Becker saw a balcony with a few plumes of smoke blowing inward with a crisp smell of cooked fat.

  But something else pierced through the smell.

  Inspecting the nooks in the greenery, Becker soon rexed his trigger finger.

  Becker: You can get out now, you're not fooling anyone!

  While still searching with his head and walking like a cat, Becker was caught unprepared by what was behind.

  *Click* *Click*

  Sheepishly, Becker returned to look at one of the stands thickened with foliage. Rising slowly from the leaves, a rosy-tanned Japanese man with thick buzz cut and beady bck eyes looked on at Becker, crowned with wuitziki stuck in between the fabric of a brown headband. His pickled, square face with sharp lines under the leathery eyelids and cheeks had the odd quirk of making him seem eternal - he could be in his twenties just as much as he could be in his seventies.

  Making sure he had Becker's attention, he smiled without changing the sharp stare on his eyes.

  Becker shook his head slightly, moving towards the balcony to check the surroundings bellow.

  The Japanese man left his hiding spot, taking a moment to stretch. Standing roughly at 1.6 meters, he sported pouched webbing over his blue Serbian long coat with a white colrless buttoned shirt exposed at the top of his chest, an two more pouches strapped to his grey, seemingly thin cargo pants with knee guards tightened over. His footwear was peculiar - bck sneakers with the calf raised high like a boot.

  Hanging from a strap and held in his hands was a heavily worked-over Minebea PM-9, proportioned to almost twice its size and fitted with a folding stock. A scope simir to Becker's was attached at the top, while a suppressor tipped the extended barrel.

  As a gunman, he looked like a two-pence scrub not expected to live to see the fulfillment of his contract - a meat-shield for a more dangerous caliber of mercenaries.

  Japanese man: Too much? not even a pat on the head or "Long time, no see, Magic-Man?"

  His rough-neighborhood, older man accent tinged his speech with a sense of dark, humorist fatalism.

  Becker: "Okama."

  Magic-Man: Oh, "okama." Still speaking poorly like a "gaijin," eh?

  Continuing to look down below, Becker saw the sele'kwai spin their quarry on spits over the fires with gleeful mouths gritting in anticipation. One could not tell whether the cooking humans were all dead or not, but it did not matter to some of the more desperate sele'kwai as they cut off bits of meat from their bodies with poorly made knives.

  Magic-Man: So what are you doing here and how did you find me?

  Beccker: Do you have any idea what's happening outside? Your employer's been driven from the north and his enemies are fast on the beat.

  Magic-Man: *Hmph* Well that's a spot of bother.

  Becker took out the note he found on Magic-Man's floater.

  Becker: There's a reason why they say your kind "glows in the dark." Why do you insist on writing poorly? Have you seen anyone write or speak anything resembling Japanese?

  Magic-Man: ...Some of the names sound simir to...

  Becker: Oh, confound all this!

  Such was the trade of Magic-Man, to the frustration of Becker.

  Making his way to the balcony, Magic-Man looked down while taking out parts of a small, half-arm size crossbow, and putting them together.

  Becker: At least tell me the "blue sphere" is not what I think it is.

  While still arming the crossbow, Magic-Man looked at Becker in the eyes. Briefly, one of the corners of his mouth grinned before returning to be ft.

  Becker: NO!

  Magic-Man: You don't think I know what it means? You don't think I'm aware of what the job entails?!

  Becker's thoughts crashed against one another, wanting to blurt them all out more from frustration than from scolding. Bringing himself back to the present, he breathed deeply.

  Becker: If we live, I'll tell how I ended up here, and I'll want to know the same in return.

  Magic-Man: Tell it to your brother, Colonel.

  He continued to mumble in Japanese, though his gruff accent made it sound as if he was chewing his words while elongating the end of his sentences.

  Magic-Man: Look down at where the first two levels would have been.

  With his binocurs, Becker looked down at the cleaved floors.

  Becker: What exactly am I looking for?

  Magic-Man counted the cyanide packed bolts on his person.

  Magic-Man: Close to the middle. tell me if those freaks are still there.

  On the wall and on the ground where two particur sele'kwai - twisted horrors composed of two humans fused by the side like burnt pstic. All eight limbs functioned as arms, and the extended, getinous eyeballs kept watch on its compatriots below with long reptilian tongues flickering, their mouths savoring the captured humans' flesh cooking off. A thick streak of grease was left where these sele'kwai have crawled before.

  Becker: Hounds.

  Magic-Man: Wuitziki flowers aren't much good against these insults to the "kami," and I only have three bolts left.

  Becker: And beyond them?

  Magic-Man: There's some sort of elevator beyond the breech below, underneath the creature on the wall. I have a device on loan said to "mend its spirit...life-force"...something.

  Taking out some of the flowers from his crown, he gave them to Becker.

  Magic-Man: You will need more of them.

  Putting his binocurs in his bag, Becker accepted them and pced them inside with the rest.

  Magic-Man: There's a nearby stairwell leading a few floors down. From there, we'll be jumping.

  Becker tightened his gear while trying to observe the potential path ahead. As Magic-Man knelt and drew the first bolt, he aimed through the scope at the heart of one of the sele'kwai's joined bodies. He focused his attention at how nonchant it was behaving, lost in the drone of another uneventful day.

  The crossbow was suck that it could be aimed almost like a rifle with an extra grip. Focusing on his aim, his breath went shallow.

  *Thwonk*

  The bolt sank deep close to the center of the chest. Immediately the gene-joke's heads and eyes turned back to look at the bolt, but it quickly stiffened, its legs giving way to gravity. As it broke its heads on the rge rubble below, its back stained it with its grease until it finally tumbled down, giving the blood a sickly shine.

  Through the scope, Magic-Man saw the other abomination take notice of the sounds. Ticking across the stone sbs like a loud cockroach, it approached the corpse from atop.

  Adjusting his aim, Magic-Man kept a bead on the creature, waiting for it to slow down. Raising himself from the prone position, he aimed a the general area of either chest.

  *Thwok*

  The sele'kwai let a gurgle out before the cyanide did its work, falling over from the tip of a sb down, where it constricted its limbs like a dead bug.

  He wasted no time in disassembling the crossbow.

  Magic-Man: It's now or never!

  Running towards the other stairwell, Magic-Man struggled for a bit before bringing his sub-machine gun to bear, turning on the torch light on its side. Going as fast as they could, they reached the desired lower lever, with the rest of the stairwell broken down ahead.

  Reaching the broken floor, Magic-Man turned off the torch light, reaching the edge where it was broken and looking down at the floor below. He slowly retreated back to give himself a starting distance and tightening the strap on his main weapon.

  Though far away, the light of the fires served as dim guide from where to contrast their steps.

  Magic-Man: See you on the other side!

  Taking the first leap forward. Magic-Man rushed on and cleared the gap, with Becker right behind. Though both tried to position themselves in the parachute nding position, it was too short of a distance. They rolled themselves into nearby sbs of rubble with Magic-Man being crushed between it and his companion.

  Recovering themselves, Magic-Man once again took the lead as they leapt and climbed through the debris. Every once in a while, he would take a moment to see whether or not another creature spied on them.

  Close to what was once the first floor, both men looked down and could see the weathered, poorly made tents of some of the sele'kwai.

  Clicking the safeties off of their respective weapons, the proceeded onward, Magic-Man hitting the first floor with his feet hard.

  Expecting to find Becker right behind him, Magic-Man's blood turned to ice when he saw Becker reach for something on his utility belt.

  Pulling the pin off of the napalm grenade, Becker let it cook for a second, lobbing it down where the bang was consumed by the dragon-like roar of the fmes.

  Becker: Run!

  Taking the lead, Magic-Man navigated into the breech where he was confronted by row after row of long pilrs looking more like extended server racks than support beams.

  From the corners of his eyes, Becker saw movement between the pilrs, shifting quick in an obvious attempt to cut them off ahead.

  One of the sele'kwai, a muscur hunchback with spiked bones protruding out of hits bald, thumb shaped head, ran down from the left and rushed towards Magic-Man with a filthy sb of metal on a stick in lieu of a war axe. Swinging its arms back, it soon let go of its weapon as it approached Magic-Man, recoiling in disgust and covering its nose. Without breaking his pace, Magic-Man perforated its belly with 9×19mm Parabellum, and closing the distance, knocked it down with a forceful shove from his butt stock. Running behind him, Becker finished it off with two quick taps to the head. Grey-green slime stained the floor as the two left it behind.

  Zigzagging through the racks, the pair soon found themselves too close to two groups to the left and the right. Immediately, they took cover as the sele'kwai chucked crude javelins and slung stones while a few others attempted to encircle them.

  Becker: How much further?!

  Magic-Man: Close!

  In unison, bother covered their respective areas. Each firing on semi-auto, Becker ropped three sele'kwai, riping open their crotches and peppering their chests. Magic-Man nicked one in the face and throat, then shot off the elbow out of one particur skeletal husk, colpsing as the bullets cut its frail form in half.

  Coming from the middle was one lumbering creature with with a bulbous head and fleshy tentacles coming out from underneath, like a rotten flower.

  Becker quickly switched to the next fresh magazine taped to the side and opened fire on its head.

  Becker: Go!

  Moving ahead, Magic-Man took out a white phosphorous grenade, and taking aim, threw it into its form as if throwing a baseball. Reacting to the bump, the creature made to move against Magic-Man when the creature finally danced to the fmes as the white clouds gave way to bck smoke, making a bestial, elongated howl as it fell down writhing.

  Magic-Man: Go!

  Becker rushed towards his position while Magic-Man shot at the others still throwing projectiles at them, all the while avoiding the area of effect of the grenade.

  Once on the other side of the high racks, the two raced through a series of long entryways spilling into a series of metallic doorways held by one long pilr reaching on high into the bckness.

  Training his weapon towards their backs, Becker switched to three-shot burst.

  Becker: Take your time, Magic-Man! We're not in danger, are we?!

  Slinging his gun behind him, Magic-Man took out a device resembling one hand-sized bolt with a gss round top. Twisting the head, the top lit to green. As he pced the top at a nearby console, he dragged it over the buttons.

  *Ban-ban-bang*

  Nothing happened.

  With desperation, he tapped hard at the other end and restarted the procedure.

  *Ban-ban-bang*

  At long st, the console came to life.

  Pressing all the lower buttons avaible, he waited for any one of them to descend.

  *BOOM*

  One of the sele'kwai opened fire with a long, thick tube. The projectile shot wild above with the jagged, prickly projectile sinking into the pilr behind.

  Slinging his sub-machine gun forward, Magic-Man brought the creature down with short, fully automatic fire.

  *Ping*

  Becker turned around with the muzzle at the ready. He need not worry. The doorways opened and revealed something akin to a freight car. He guided Magic-Man by the colr while he continued to empty his clip. Once inside, they took what little cover was avaible while Magic-Man hit the lowermost button.

  As the doors closed slowly, the two pushed them together until they were finally shut.

  The elevator made its slow descent; the two men breathed hard, gasping as if they've held their breath all this time.

  Becker: What does...your literature...say about this.

  They clumsily inspected their ammunition.

  Magic-Man: ...30+ XP. You are now level 2.

  Becker: So...when do we fight...Lv. 69 triple-S...Super-God-Satan, Lord of Vixen Elves from Yggdrasil?

  Magic-Man: Not until we crawl this dungeon.

  Becker: *Huff* If we must. I'll prepare the chains and ball gags.

  For a moment they did not reacted...

  ...

  *Click* *Click*

  Until they smirked and giggled through their oily grins. Becker's ughter built up to a deep guffaw, while Magic-Man's upper teeth became pronounced the harder he tried to keep his snickering composed.