She came into the guild hall in full armor, visor down, plates immaculate. Nobody questioned it; the SCBHG saw dozens of masked operators every day. No one ever realized she wasn’t human under the metal. She preferred it that way. Anonymity made the world quieter.
When the clerk slid the datapad toward her with the briefing summary, Red skimmed it while keeping her helmeted head tilted at an angle meant to discourage conversation. Entrances, estimated numbers, known contraband types, projected threat level. Nothing in the dossier suggested anything out of the ordinary. No red flags, no warnings, no annotations from previous hunters urging caution. It looked routine.
She accepted the contract anyway, partly because she needed the money, but partly because she needed to prove to herself that she wasn’t as hollow and defective as she felt. A simple job would be something she could point to later, something she could use to drown out the quiet suspicion that she was coming apart inside.
As she left the guild building and stepped into the roar of topside Sigma City, Red told herself this would be quick. Efficient. Clean. Something she could handle.
The briefing had been wrong before. It would be wrong again. But she didn’t let herself think about that. She descended toward the Industrial underways with the calm certainty of someone who believed, just for a moment, that the world might not be trying to kill her today.
It was the last moment of certainty she would have for a very long time.
The maintenance sector should have been empty, just concrete, rusting pipes, and the dry hum of dormant machinery, but the moment Red forced the service hatch open, she felt the wrongness in the air. Too quiet. Too clean. Too deliberate. She swept her rifle forward and stepped into the first corridor, HUD flickering as it adjusted to the dim industrial lighting.
She didn’t get three paces in.
A pressure-activated plate under her boot triggered faster than she could shift her weight. A cascade of metallic snaps echoed overhead as an entire ceiling panel dropped open. Gas canisters, military-issue, the kind typically reserved for counterinsurgency units, hit the floor and detonated in synchronized bursts. A dense chemical fog blasted upward, striking her helmet with enough force to rattle her teeth.
Red instinctively sealed her suit, but the gas wasn’t meant to be stopped; it was engineered to infiltrate microfractures. A fine aerosol mist forced its way through the seams around her lower visor frame, the weakest point of her older helmet model. Her eyes stung even behind the tinted HUD. Her breathing hitched. She felt the first flicker of disorientation.
Then the gunfire started.
Suppressed fire erupted from both sides of the corridor, tight, controlled bursts punching into her chest plate and shoulder guards. Her armor integrity readout tanked faster than she could stabilize it. Whoever these men were, they weren’t smugglers with cheap pistols; they were using high-velocity penetrators and matching tactics. She braced against the wall, absorbing the hits, and pushed forward into the choke point, trying to close the distance.
A second trap tripped before she reached cover. A directional charge slammed into her from the right, lifting her off her feet. The world spun. Her rifle flew out of her hands. She hit the ground hard, armor ringing, HUD glitching and rebooting as the gas thickened into a nauseating haze.
She tried to rise. Managed half a push before her limbs trembled and buckled under her. The chemical mix was something designed to overwhelm even augmented physiology, paralytic, sedative, neural inhibitor. She felt her fingers numb inside the gloves. Her vision tunneled.
The men closed in once they saw she was failing.
“Whole damn suit… she’s armored like a spec-ops drop trooper.”
“What the fuck is she doing down here alone?”
“Doesn’t matter. Get the plates off, careful, she’s still moving.”
Hands grabbed her arms, her legs, the back of her collar. Someone planted a boot on her spine plate to pin her fully. Someone else slammed restraints around her wrists, then her ankles. She thrashed with what little strength she could muster, but the gas was already inside her bloodstream. Her muscles refused to obey.
They forced her onto her back. A gloved hand rapped on her visor.
“Hey. Look at this. She’s not even human.”
The visor crack, spiderwebbed from the earlier blast, let the gas spill deeper into her helmet as one of them pried it upward. The moment they got a clear look at her muzzle, her fangs, the fur along her jawline, the mood shifted instantly.
“Well, hell. Look at you. Didn’t expect a freak.”
“Who cares what she is? She walked in here like she owned the place.”
“Let’s teach her not to.”
They dragged her deeper into the corridor, out of the line of fire but still surrounded by the lingering gas. Her armor was ripped at, unfastened, peeled away piece by piece by men who had no idea what she was and didn’t care. They mocked the insignia etched on her chest plate, faded guild markings, scratched from use.
“Hunter, huh? Thought you people were supposed to be good.”
“Should’ve stayed home, sweetheart.”
She tried to fight. Tried to twist, to claw, to bite. But her body was shutting down under the chemical load. Limbs spasming weakly. Head too heavy to lift. Breaths shallow and ragged.
They used her because they could, because there was no one else down there, because Sigma City had places where no screams reached the surface and no authorities bothered to look. In their eyes she was prey, valuable only because she had stumbled into their territory alone.
By the time one of them finally smashed the rest of her visor in and let the gas choke her fully unconscious, she had already lost. The world shrank to the pounding in her skull, the burn in her throat, the weight of hands on her body.
She never had a chance.
They hauled her out like trash when they were done, dragging her limp body through maintenance corridors Red didn’t recognize, her vision a broken stutter of static and smeared light. She wasn’t awake enough to fight, not asleep enough to be spared. Every jolt sent a dull bolt of pain ricocheting through her skull. The gas still clung to her lungs like wet cement.
A loading hatch groaned open. Cold night air hit her, stinging, metallic, thick with industrial dust. Someone grabbed her by the ruined collar of her undersuit and heaved her forward. She didn’t even brace. Her body just fell.
The landing knocked what little breath she had left out of her. The ground beneath her wasn’t ground at all but ribbed concrete, sloped, slick with moisture. A drainage culvert, one of the massive storm channels that webbed the outskirts of Sigma City’s lower industrial zones. Wide enough for a small vehicle to drive through. Deep enough that when the flood cycles hit, anything inside them was swept into the subterranean river system and never seen again.
“She’ll be gone in an hour,” one of them called down. A lazy voice, almost bored.
“She ain’t getting up. Leave her.”
The hatch slammed shut, sealing their silhouettes behind a slab of rusted metal. Footsteps faded. Silence swallowed everything.
Red lay twisted on her side, armor scattered in broken segments around her like pieces of a discarded shell. The night above the channel was a thin grey strip. Her head pounded. Her ears rang. Every breath rattled harshly, still burning from the gas that had seeped deep into her lungs even after her filters failed.
She couldn’t move at first. Couldn’t think. Her fingers twitched against the cold concrete, scraping weakly. Her body shivered in a slow, disjointed rhythm, shock settling deep into her bones.
The concussion made the culvert tilt sideways every time she blinked. Her HUD was dead, visor shattered, helmet half torn from her head. Her eyes wouldn’t focus. Light fractured into halos and double images. She curled tighter, instinctively protecting her abdomen, tail, throat, old animal reflexes deep in the architecture of her rewritten biology.
The smell of the channel water drifted past her in heavy waves. Oil. Rot. Metal. Something chemical. Something that didn’t belong. The next flood cycle would come soon. She didn’t know when. Could have been minutes. Could have been half a night. Time had dissolved into disordered fragments.
A thin trickle of water licked closer to her boots.
That was what finally made her move.
Not courage. Not reason. Just the deep, ancient part of her brain that understood drowning long before it understood language. Her claws scraped against the culvert floor again, louder this time, a dry metallic rasp. She dragged one knee forward. It didn’t hold. She collapsed back down, cheek hitting the concrete hard enough to make sparks burst in her vision.
She tried again.
A dragging, miserable crawl. One hand out. Then the other. Her legs followed in slow, jerking motions, barely responding, nerves misfiring from chemical shock and blunt-force trauma. She slipped twice on the damp concrete, muzzle scraping against grit, leaving streaks of blood where she slid.
Her breath hitched. A wet, rattling sound. She pushed anyway.
There was no plan. No direction. No conscious thought. Just the animal inside her refusing the idea of dying in a drain like a piece of forgotten meat. Every instinct she had was screaming upward, toward air, toward safety, toward anything that wasn’t the rising stink of floodwater.
She reached the wall of the culvert and clung to the rough concrete, claws digging in. Her legs trembled violently as she forced herself upright in slow, stuttering increments. The world tilted again. She almost fell backwards into the channel. She caught herself with one shaking arm, panting against the wall.
Then she climbed.
Hand over hand. Claw over claw. Fur soaked. Muscles failing. Vision flickering to black between each movement. Not heroic. Not brave. Just stubborn, damaged, and built to survive things that should have killed her long before now.
By the time she hauled herself over the lip and flopped onto the outer maintenance walkway, she was barely conscious at all. Her breathing rasped like torn metal. Her limbs wouldn’t stop shaking. Her eyes fluttered shut every few seconds, trying to slip away into nothingness.
She didn’t let them.
Her body, ruined, exhausted, violated, still knew how to crawl. So it crawled. Slowly. Blindly. Away from the culvert. Away from the water. Away from the place they left her to die.
The instinct was simple, primal, unspoken:
Live. Just live. Keep living. Even if there’s nothing waiting on the other side.
And she did. Through nothing but the raw, stubborn refusal to stop breathing.
It took Red hours to get home, long, fractured hours that bled together into a dull, shuddering nightmare of movement without rest. She followed half-remembered maintenance markers and the faint hum of power conduits, leaning on the walls whenever her legs threatened to collapse. The gas still clung to her lungs, turning every breath into a burning rasp. Her stomach rolled with each step.
Her armor hung off her frame in broken slabs, thigh plates snapped, shoulder segments cracked, torso plates gouged and half-detached from their mounts. The HUD in her helmet had fully died somewhere along the second tunnel, leaving the cracked visor useless except for catching her own reflection in its spiderwebbed fractures. She couldn’t read anything, couldn’t track her direction, couldn’t rely on any of the systems that normally steadied her.
She pulled the helmet off eventually, letting it drop behind her with a hollow metallic clatter that echoed through the corridor. It didn’t matter anymore. It wasn’t helping her see. It wasn’t helping her breathe.
Her bare muzzle stung in the cold industrial air. Every inhale tasted like rust, dust, and the sour chemical residue of the gas that had seeped into her sinuses. Her ears rang constantly, noise spiking every time a pipe groaned overhead. Her legs, torn, bruised, punctured, barely supported her weight. Blood dried in mats against her fur where her suit had been ripped open.
There were stretches where she didn’t walk at all. She crawled. One hand forward. Then the next. Knees dragging behind her with sickening little jabs of pain each time they hit concrete. Sometimes she stopped entirely, forehead pressed to the floor, panting shallowly until the spinning slowed enough that she could move again.
No one saw her. No one heard her. The lower service routes were forgotten arteries of Sigma City, and she was just another unseen thing crawling through them.
By the time she reached the stairwell that led to her block of sublevels, her vision blurred so badly she had to feel the railing with both hands. Her steps staggered unevenly. Twice she slipped and slammed her shoulder into the wall, sending a shock through her already bruised collarbone. She didn’t curse. Didn’t whimper. She just tried again.
Her door recognized her implant tag on the third attempt. She barely made it across the threshold before her legs failed for good, dumping her onto the concrete floor of her tiny apartment with a bone-deep thud that rattled the tools on her workbench.
The cold hit her first. Then the shaking.
She tried to reach for her medkit mounted on the wall near her cot. Her hand spasmed and dropped it the moment she got it off the hook. The contents spilled across the floor, bandages, sutures, antiseptic vials bouncing away in every direction. She stared at it all for a second, vision swimming, throat tight. Then she reached again.
She dropped it a second time. Harder. Her claws scraped the metal casing. Her breath hitched.
On the third try she managed to hold it long enough to drag it into her lap.
She opened it with trembling fingers and pulled out the suturing kit. Her hands wouldn’t steady. The needle shook visibly between her claws. She cleaned the wound on her thigh, torn flesh gaping where a piece of her armor had been ripped off, and forced the needle in.
She didn’t numb it. Didn’t have time. Didn’t have the clarity.
The first stitch came out uneven. The second tore. She gritted her teeth and kept going, pulling the wound closed with small, ugly knots. Blood smeared her gloves and the inside of her thighs. Her breathing was shallow, wet-sounding, occasionally interrupted by a tiny involuntary whine when the needle bit too deep.
She patched the worst of it. Not well. Not neatly. Just enough to stop the bleeding.
Then she swallowed one of her painkillers dry, choking slightly as it scraped down her throat. It hit her stomach like a stone. The tremors didn’t stop, but they dulled, settling into a slow, miserable throb.
Her glasses were still on the floor where they had fallen earlier, lenses streaked with a smear of her own blood. She reached for them, wiped them on the least-damaged part of her undersuit, and set them back on her face. The world didn’t stop tilting, but the blur sharpened into something she could at least understand. Straight lines. Edges. The shape of her own room. Something real.
She needed the world to make sense again, even if she didn’t.
She lowered herself onto the edge of her cot, meaning only to rest for a moment, but the motion broke whatever thin thread of control she’d been clinging to. Her legs gave out, sending her folding down into a sit that was more like a collapse. The painkiller was a weak, distant buzz, not nearly enough to touch the deeper ache spreading through her ribs, her throat, her chest.
For the first time since the culvert, there was no forward motion left in her. No corridor to crawl through. No railing to cling to. No instinct pulling her toward the next inch of survival. Just stillness.
And in the stillness came the silence.
It wasn’t peaceful. It wasn’t comforting. It was the kind of silence that swallowed the room whole, smothering everything but the echo of her own heartbeat pounding in uneven, stuttering bursts. She could feel the tremors running through her arms, through her jaw, into the bruised muscles along her spine. Her body wouldn’t obey anymore, not the demand to sit upright, not the impulse to breathe steadily, not the instinct to shut down the memories clawing back up through the chemical haze.
Their hands. Their voices. The way they laughed at her armor, her insignia, her existence. The way she tried to fight and her limbs betrayed her. The moment her visor cracked and the gas flooded in. The sound of someone tapping her broken helmet and calling her “freak.” The weight of bodies pinning her down. The smell. The pressure. The choking.
Every detail surfaced with perfect clarity now that she couldn’t run from it.
She brought her arms around herself, an unconscious, protective curl, but it felt pathetic, small, useless. Her claws pressed against her own ribs through the remains of her suit. Her breath hitched once, twice, then broke entirely.
The first sob caught in her throat like something sharp.
The second tore free without sound.
Then there were too many to count. Raw, uneven, muffled against her own knees as she folded tighter and tighter, trying to compress herself into something so small the world couldn’t see her anymore. Tears soaked her fur, her gloves, the fabric of her undersuit. Her shoulders shook uncontrollably, each breath a ragged, stinging gasp that scraped through her bruised lungs.
She didn’t cry beautifully. She didn’t cry quietly. She cried like a wounded animal hidden in a burrow, trying to keep itself from coming apart after the threat had already passed.
And the worst part, the part that hollowed her out from the inside, was knowing none of it mattered.
The SCBHG would log the job as “contract complication” or “operative withdrawal.” They’d mark the sector as high-risk, maybe update the bounty with a hazard surcharge. No one would ask what happened to her. No one would check on the girl who always came in fully armored and avoided eye contact. No one would care that she had nearly died in a storm channel because they misclassified an entire syndicate as “lightly armed.”
No rescue would come. No apology. No compensation. No justice.
Just another night. Another job gone wrong. Another wound she would stitch shut and pretend didn’t exist.
Nothing in her life changed because of it. No lesson learned. No sudden awakening. No survivor’s enlightenment. Just one more scar layered over a body already built from them. One more memory she would spend the rest of her life trying not to remember.
She cried until her throat burned and her eyes ached and her chest felt hollowed out. She cried until she had no breath left to cry with. Only when exhaustion finally crushed everything else did she fall silent again, slumped forward against her own shaking arms.
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