The communications building smelled like dust and old circuitry.

  Ben stepped through the warped doorway with his wand in hand and his boots crunching over shattered glass. Rows of server racks stood in crooked lines like tombstones. Panels hung open, their fiber bundles dangling. Cracked monitors and dented panels. Holes in the roof, letting in the harsh light. It made the scene even more eerie.

  “This,” Ben muttered, sweeping the room with a wary glance, “is not encouraging.”

  Thorn looked around, black eyes scanning the ceiling. “It appears something has been chewing.”

  Chewing was right.

  Cables were bitten clean through. Not cut—bitten. The edges were ragged, some sections flattened by immense pressure. Circular holes the width of a truck tire pocked the floor at irregular intervals. One entire wall had been torn inward; steel supports twisted like licorice.

  Ben crouched beside a relay cabinet. The metal was bowed inward in a crescent shape, tooth marks scoring the surface.

  “Not salvageable,” he said after a moment.

  “You are an astute observer. I admire this about you.”

  Ben gave him a flat look.

  “Of course.”

  He turned toward the door.

  The floor exhaled.

  It was a soft, settling sound. A sigh beneath their feet.

  Then the concrete sheared away.

  “Thorn!”

  They dropped.

  Dust, shattered servers, and a cascade of broken equipment followed them into the dark. The fall lasted long enough for Ben to regret several life choices, as short as it’s been. He braced for impact, twisting to protect his head.

  They landed on a familiar substance, dark and spongy.

  Talk about luck.

  He rolled, coughing as dust filled his lungs. Something clanged nearby. Thorn tumbled free and landed in a crouch, claws scraping stone.

  Above them, a soft, distant rectangle of light could be seen as debris continued to trickle down.

  Ben craned his neck.

  It was far. Too far. The shaft walls were jagged and vertical, churned earth and stone without purchase.

  “We’re not climbing that.”

  Ben looked down at the tracking beacon he pulled from his pocket. The casing was cracked. The screen spiderwebbed. It sparked once and died.

  He let it fall.

  “Well,” he said quietly. “That’s that.”

  Ben opened his karmic gate like he’d been practicing. Of all the tunnels, he felt a slight pull towards one that was larger than the others.

  “This way,” Ben said, “I think.”

  “So, we’re improvising again.”

  “Seems to be our thing.”

  The walls were slick. Not wet—slick. Polished by passage. Subtle light was somehow reflecting its way down even here. The circular bore marks were unmistakable. Something large had carved these corridors, and smaller things had followed.

  The first attack came without warning.

  A pale wormling burst from a hand-sized hole in the wall and launched at Ben’s thigh. He jerked back instinctively, bringing the wand down in a sharp arc. The creature split in two, spraying thin, pale mucous across the stone.

  The sound of it hitting the ground traveled.

  The tunnel answered.

  More shapes erupted from the walls—blind, jointed burrowers with circular mouths ringed with teeth.

  Thorn vanished out of reflex.

  A worm slammed directly into him, anyway, knocking him down.

  It appears they really don’t need to see.

  “Yeah, I’m getting that!”

  Stop speaking out loud. You’re giving us away!

  Ben shut up.

  Sorry!

  He brought the wand down in controlled bursts, not wild swings. He used the tunnel’s narrow width, forcing the creatures into a choke point.

  On your left!

  Ben pivoted just as another worm exploded from the wall at hip height. He blasted it mid-air, spattering the ceiling.

  They fell into rhythm quickly.

  Lure. Move. Strike. Move again.

  The creatures were blind, but they weren’t stupid. They attacked in waves, testing, probing.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  They advanced through the tunnel; random beams of light came through holes in the ceiling. Smaller chambers filled pale, luminescent sacs clinging to the walls. One chamber pulsed faintly, eggs hanging in clusters.

  “Let’s not,” Ben whispered.

  A sac ruptured anyway.

  The fight was tighter here. Ben’s wand flared, Thorn darting along walls and ceiling, claws slashing soft underbellies. Guts and blood sprayed over patches of stone. One coiled up, launched, and latched onto Ben’s forearm, vibrating violently.

  He tore it free and crushed it underfoot.

  When Ben looked up, all the monsters were dead and no more were showing themselves.

  Pushing forward, they eventually emerged from the tunnels into something different: a cathedral-sized cavern.

  Rail tracks ran along the floor. Rusted scaffolding leaned at crooked angles. Broken drill heads and discarded mining tools littered the ground.

  Old supports reinforced the tunnel here.

  “Miners,” Ben muttered.

  And something claimed their work.

  The air changed.

  Still.

  Heavy.

  Watching.

  It came from the darkness with impossible speed.

  Forty feet of armored, low-slung mass flowed forward. Segmented plates of mineral-encrusted hide gleamed dully in the dim light. Multiple clawed limbs dug into stone, hauling its bulk with shocking acceleration. Its round mouth flexed, concentric rings contracting. It looked like a bear with eight legs, no fur, swimming through the air. It had an elongated mouth like a tube but wasn’t a snout.

  Small, wet eyes blinked open along its broad head.

  It stopped ten paces away.

  The stone vibrated.

  Oh shit! Thorn cursed like a human now. In the info-vids Ember gave me access to, it mentions these. It’s a gorum, a type of water bear and tardigrade that has evolved and can swim through the vacuum of space. Didn’t mention those hellworms though.

  “You tear the soft,” it said, voice rippling through the air. “You destroy my young.”

  Ben swallowed.

  Uh-oh, he thought.

  Move! Thorn mentally yelled.

  The mouth contracted.

  Teeth fired.

  Bone-white projectiles screamed through the air. Ben threw himself aside as three punched through a mining support beam. One grazed his side and embedded in the wall behind him.

  The creature lunged.

  He grimaced with a hiss and jumped again, just as the massive body slammed into the spot he’d been standing.

  When it floated into the air high enough, Ben could see a slit opening on the underbelly of the creature.

  Egg sacs spilled from beneath its abdomen mid-motion, gelatinous bulbs splattering against stone. They split instantly. Smaller hellworms spilled out, skittering toward him, latching onto his boots and legs.

  The creature spoke again, slower.

  “Noise.”

  Ben danced a desperate pattern across the cavern floor—darting, pivoting, firing bursts of energy at the massive creature as it pursued him relentlessly. Each time he destroyed a cluster of eggs, more hellworms erupted and scurried toward him. The air filled with the acrid smell of their exploding bodies.

  Only once, his rhythm faltered, and that was enough. The creature's foreclaw punched through his shoulder with sickening precision, driving him against the stone floor. Its circular maw spread wide, teeth anchoring into the ground around his trapped body like prison bars.

  When he aimed his wand at the beast's underbelly and channeled raw mana—the same energy that had obliterated the smaller worms—the creature's armored plates shifted position, absorbing and dispersing the attack harmlessly.

  His stomach dropped. It was learning—adjusting its plates between pulses.

  He felt the null gate inside him, cold.

  Then something else opened.

  Physical Force.

  He didn’t think.

  He opened both.

  Agony lanced up his arms as veins darkened beneath his skin—not charred but altered, pulsing with a dark radiance that devoured light rather than emitted it.

  Reality warped around his fingers.

  For a heartbeat, Thorn felt it.

  Silence.

  The bond between them stilled. Not broken. Muted.

  Benjamin—

  Ben drove his hands forward.

  A beam erupted from his fists—a column of black, radiant force. It struck the creature’s torso, pushing it off of him, ripping the claw out. Ben screamed.

  Looking up at the water bear, it had been thrown away onto its back. Anti-magic spread over it like ink on water.

  It convulsed.

  The small eyes dimmed.

  The intelligence left it.

  What remained was mass.

  Fury without thought.

  It got back to its feet and roared—not words now, just animal sound.

  Ben rolled free, rising on legs that felt stronger than they should. His blackened hands shot two beams of null force again.

  “Thorn!” he yelled, hoping his familiar knew what to do next.

  Something… is happening…

  Ben glanced to Thorn’s position.

  Wings tore from his back in a wet, violent unfurling. Membranous, barbed, imperfect.

  Thorn screamed in pain, jumped off a support beam, caught air awkwardly and used it to glide and fall onto the creature’s head.

  Thorn plunged his blade into the creature's gelatinous eye socket with a wet squelch, twisting as he yanked it free.

  The beast roared in fury and pain.

  The moment the eye cavity gaped open, Ben aimed forward with both hands, channeling a concentrated beam of null energy directly into the fresh wound.

  Power surged through bone and brain.

  The creature spasmed.

  Twitched.

  Went still.

  But his hands were still channeling his power. It began crawling up his arms.

  Thorn started to feel further away. Without realizing it, their connection had begun to feel like a security blanket. And now it was starting to wane.

  “BENJAMIN! SHUT IT OFF! PLEASE!”

  Ben had never felt desperation from his familiar before. It was a shock to his system.

  And that was exactly what he needed.

  Slowly, painfully, Ben squeezed his null gate shut again.

  Silence returned to the mine.

  Ben knelt, veins still black, breath ragged. He forced his physical gate closed. The glow faded. His skin returned to normal.

  He looked down at his hands and flexed his fingers.

  They felt ordinary.

  And that was wrong.

  Thorn landed beside him, wings folding unevenly.

  “…I appear to have escalated.”

  Ben's laugh came out as a strained wheeze, instantly sending spikes of agony through the fresh hole punched in his shoulder. He winced, grateful that at least his new body and mana reserves were keeping him from bleeding out on the cavern floor.

  “Yeah. Come here and help wrap my shoulder.”

  Thorn ripped off his dirty tank top and began slicing it into long strips with his claws.

  As Thorn patched him up, Ben looked at the massive corpse.

  “I didn’t mean to do that.”

  “It was trying to kill us.”

  “I know.” He stared at his hands. “But I don’t want to become something that just… deletes things.”

  Thorn studied him, head tilted.

  “You didn't take its life just because you could. You did it because the alternative was to die.”

  A pause.

  “That’s survival, Ben.” Thorn had been using more contractions in his speech lately. “You’re still on the right side of human.”

  Ben nodded slowly.

  “But I’m still not sure where the line is.”

  “Then we’ll find it together.”

  With surgical precision, Thorn perched atop the fallen behemoth, working his dagger between armored plates until he extracted a glimmering, mineral-streaked core from within.

  "Spoils of war," he said, holding up the dense object.

  Beyond the massive corpse lay their escape route—a reinforced mining shaft. They hurried away from the chamber of death, entering a tunnel far wider than the natural passages they'd traversed. Tiny perforations honeycombed the walls—burrows where hellworms once writhed.

  Following the gradual upward slope, the stale cavern air gave way to something fresher. Sunlight beckoned ahead.

  They emerged into a desolate industrial graveyard—rusted earth movers and excavators with massive bite marks scarring their metal hides. Across the wasteland, the communications building's satellite dish jutted against the sky like an accusatory finger.

  Ben exhaled.

  “Back where we started.”

  “Yes, but we’ve improved since then.”

  “No argument there.”

  Ben looked at him.

  For a moment, neither of them spoke.

  They didn’t need to.

  With no other options they trudged toward the skeletal silhouette of the destroyed communications building, satellite dish now canted slightly, threatening to topple over. The ruined cityscape stretched beyond like a mouthful of broken teeth against the horizon. Drones might patrol those streets, and automated defenses could lurk in the rubble, but they'd face them together. Shelter first. Then—somehow—freedom from this hell-blasted rock.