CHAPTER 15: A SCAVENGER’S TRUCE

The silence in the collapsed tunnel was heavier than the tons of rock above them.

Jinx’s story hung in the air, a ghost that was colder and more terrifying than the spectral DGC assassins.

The last of the Rust Dogs.

A witness.

Michael looked at her, truly looked at her, for the first time.

He didn’t see a cynical, pink-haired scrapper with a love for things that go boom.

He saw the sole survivor of a massacre, a girl who had watched her family get erased from existence.

And suddenly, his own problems felt a little less unique.

His internal monologue, his usual sarcastic shield, had nothing witty to say.

There was no gamer reference for this.

No clever dialogue option.

This was just... real.

"So," he said, his voice quiet, the sound swallowed by the oppressive dark.

"Your beef with the Glitch-Faced Jerks is personal."

Jinx flinched, her tough-as-nails mask snapping back into place.

"Don’t get all sentimental on me, kid," she growled, her voice a low rasp. "It’s just business. Bad business."

"Right," Michael said, nodding slowly. "Business."

He had a key to his mother’s legacy in one pocket.

He had a D-Rank monster core, pulsing with stolen power, in the other.

One was for the past.

The other was for the future.

He made a decision.

He reached into his backpack, the simple motion feeling momentous in the heavy silence.

He pulled out the D-Rank Void-Tainted core.

It pulsed with a deep, obsidian light, a tiny, swirling galaxy of darkness in his palm. It made the faint green glow of the poultice on his arm look pathetic.

He held it out to her.

"Here," he said.

Jinx stared at the core, then at his face, her eyes narrowing with suspicion.

"What’s this?"

"Your payment," Michael said simply.

She didn’t take it.

"For what?" she asked, her voice sharp, laced with a lifetime of expecting the other shoe to drop. "For not letting you get turned into a dust bunny back there? That was self-preservation, kid. Not a charity run."

"No," he said, pushing the core closer to her. "This is for getting me to Red Hook."

"It’s a down payment. For our new business partnership."

Jinx just stared, her mind clearly struggling to compute.

Her cynical, transactional worldview didn’t have a variable for this.

A D-Rank core was a fortune in the Undercroft.

It was a month’s rent.

It was new gear.

It was a ticket out of the tunnels, at least for a while.

And he was just... giving it to her?

"What’s the catch?" she finally asked, her voice low and dangerous.

"There’s always a catch, kid."

"The catch is you have to keep me alive," Michael said, his lips twisting into a faint, grim smile. "And I have to keep you alive. The catch is we both want to burn down the DGC’s little black-ops clubhouse."

He saw the flicker in her eyes. The raw, undisguised hatred she had for the Ghosts.

He was offering her a weapon.

A resource.

A chance.

"My goal is in Red Hook," he continued, laying it all out. "But my war is with a man named Gideon. The guy who runs Project Chimera. The one who signs the Ghosts’ paychecks."

"Your fight," he said, his voice dropping, "is my fight."

That seemed to finally break through her defenses.

She looked from the core, to his face, and back again.

For a moment, he saw the survivor, the cornered animal, weighing the odds.

Then, with a sigh that seemed to carry the weight of all her dead friends, she reached out and took the core.

Her fingers brushed against his, and she snatched her hand back as if burned.

The core pulsed in her palm, its dark light illuminating the grim determination on her face.

"Alright, kid," she said, the words a formal, binding contract. "You’ve got a deal."

She slipped the core into a lead-lined pouch on her belt, the transaction complete.

The air shifted.

They weren’t just two strangers trapped together anymore.

They were partners.

Wary partners who didn’t trust each other, maybe.

But partners nonetheless.

"So," Michael said. "The plan. I’m guessing we can’t just dig our way out."

"Heh," Jinx let out a dry, humorless laugh. "Even if we could, the surface is a death trap. The DGC will have every sewer grate and maintenance hatch in this sector locked down. We need a way out they don’t know exists."

She stood up, her movements stiff but purposeful, and gestured with her head towards a dark, narrow fissure at the far end of their collapsed tomb.

It was a crack in the tunnel’s foundation, leading down into absolute, primordial blackness.

"That’s our exit," she said.

"That looks less like an exit and more like a one-way ticket to getting eaten by things with too many teeth," Michael observed dryly.

"Same difference," Jinx grunted. "That fissure leads down. Way down."

She began checking the load on her energy rifle, the clicks of the mechanism echoing in the silence.

"The old-timers in the Undercroft, the ones who’ve been down here since the Gates first opened, they have stories. They say this entire section of the city is built on a honeycomb of natural caverns."

"When the conduit collapsed sixty years ago, it shattered the bedrock. It opened a door."

She slung the rifle over her shoulder, her face a mask of grim resolve.

"It created a brand new, self-contained ecosystem. A place where the leftover energy from the Gate-fall has been mixing with whatever was already living in the dark."

"A place the DGC has no maps for."

"A place they call ’The Breeding Pits’."

Michael’s gamer brain immediately flagged the name.

Breeding Pits.

Sounds like a high-level spawn zone.

Fantastic.

"You’re saying our only way forward is through a subterranean nightmare world filled with sixty years of mutated horrors?" he asked.

"Yep," Jinx said, a little too cheerfully. "It’s a lateral move, career-wise."

She started walking towards the fissure, her steps sure-footed in the dark.

"Rule one of the Pits, kid," she called back to him. "Everything down there is either blind or close to it. They hunt by sound. They hunt by vibration."

"So, no tap-dancing," Michael muttered to himself. Got it.

He followed her, the darkness of the fissure seeming to pull at him, a physical presence.

They stood at the edge, peering down into an abyss that was so complete it felt like it could swallow the light from his soul.

Jinx turned to him, her face half-hidden in shadow, her electric-blue eyes seeming to glow with a faint, reflected light.

She gave him a crooked, terrifying grin.

"Welcome to the next level."

"Up here, we were hiding in the dark."

She nodded towards the inky blackness below.

"Down there," she whispered, her voice a chilling promise of the horrors to come.

"Down there, the dark is afraid of what’s inside it."