Vincard melted into the shadows of the Industrial District, the gate's thunderous slam echoing behind him like a final judgment. The new arrivals, those distant, moaning silhouettes, were already stirring, drawn by the gunfire's lingering scent. He crouched low, and skirted their path.
They shambled in loose packs, red eyes sweeping the fog like faulty lanterns. He moved with silent steps over shattered glass and twisted rebar, breathing shallow to avoid stirring the vapors that curled from cracked pipes. „I've no time for the chorus line." He thought, a wry edge to his inner voice.
The immediate threats faded into the haze, their moans receding like a retreating storm. For a moment, he had solitude. He paused in the lee of a collapsed foundry, its walls buckled inward as if crushed by an invisible fist, and surveyed his surroundings with the clinical eye of a surgeon dissecting a corpse.
The district unfolded around him like a fever dream forged in iron and despair: smokestacks rose like petrified spines, their tops jagged where lightning or neglect had sheared them, belching phantom wisps of long-extinguished smoke that mingled with the fog to form grotesque shapes. The ground was a treacherous mosaic of oil-slicked puddles reflecting distorted moonlight, broken by upthrust rails twisted into serpentine loops, as if the earth itself had rebelled against the machines.
Abandoned cranes loomed like skeletal sentinels, their hooks dangling like nooses, swaying gently in the wind with a creak that mimicked whispers. Here and there, machinery lay eviscerated: gears spilled like entrails, belts frayed and hanging like flayed skin, all coated in a patina of rust.
The air tasted of bitterness, charred metal, acrid chemicals, and something organic, sweet-rotten, as if the factories had begun digesting themselves. In the distance, silhouettes of larger structures hulked, their windows empty sockets staring blindly, while faint, bioluminescent fungi clung to the undersides of beams, pulsing like infected veins in a body too stubborn to die. It was abstract horror made manifest: a place where industry had birthed monstrosity, where man's ambition curdled into grotesque parody, the whole scene a symbol of Eldridge's fall, progress devouring itself in eternal hunger.
He pressed on, the scar on his palm a dull ache now, syncing with the district's distant hums. Twice he encountered stragglers: the first, a lone bloodslave lurking in a doorway, its red eyes flickering like failing gas lamps. Vincard circled wide, using a toppled barrel for cover, his breath held until it shuffled past, oblivious. The second was bolder, a pair clawing at a rusted grate. He approached from behind, Mater Doloros whispering free from its sheath. One swift thrust to the base of the skull for the first, a silent crumple; the second turned just in time for the blade to find its throat, black ichor bubbling quietly as it slumped. He wiped the dagger on his coat, sheathing it with a soft click.
Then, from the distance: a clash of steel, a guttural roar, the wet thud of impacts. Not the mindless moans of the horde, but something structured, purposeful. Vincard froze, ears straining. The sounds came from a derelict assembly yard ahead, ringed by leaning silos like crooked fingers. He slunk closer, using the fog as ally, crouching behind a pile of corroded pipes. From his vantage, he watched.
A lone hunter stood in the yard's center, encircled by bloodslaves. The man was tall, broad-shouldered, his coat torn at the seams, a makeshift bandolier of vials glinting under sporadic moonlight. He wielded a heavy cleaver in one hand, a stubby pistol in the other, movements economical, brutal.
The creatures closed in a ragged ring, claws extended, mouths gaping with strings of viscous drool.
The hunter pivoted first, cleaver arcing low to hamstring the nearest, its leg buckled with a snap, sending it sprawling face-first into the mud. As it fell, he fired the pistol point-blank into another's face.
*Bang*
The shot erupting in a flash of silver-laced powder, the head disintegrating in a halo of dark mist. Two down.
Three lunged together from the right, coordinated, almost intelligent. The hunter dodged the first's swipe, using momentum to drive his cleaver into the second's shoulder, burying it deep with a crunch of bone. The third grazed his arm, drawing a line of blood, but he twisted free, kicking it back into the fourth. The pistol barked twice more.
*Bang* *Bang*
Chest shots that staggered them, ichor spraying like faulty hydraulics.
The remaining two flanked from behind. He spun, cleaver ripping free in a spray of gore, and caught one across the midsection, entrails spilling like uncoiled ropes. The last leaped, the claws aimed for his throat, but he dropped low, pistol upward, firing into its belly.
*Bang*
It landed in a heap, twitching.
The hunter stood amid the carnage, chest heaving, cleaver dripping. His coat was shredded, blood, his own, seeping from wounds on arm and side. He leaned on a nearby crate, breath ragged, eyes scanning the fog for more.
Vincard narrowed his gaze from the shadows. The build matched the dossier, burly, scarred, the tangle of dark hair matted with grime. Could it be Bartho? The bandolier of mercury vials suggested as much, glinting like false hope. „If it is him," Vincard thought, weighing options, „he's halfway to the edge. One wrong move, and I end up fighting what I came to save. But answers first—"
Before he could stir, a new shape erupted from the fog behind the hunter. A colossus of nightmare, towering twice a man's height, its form a grotesque fusion of arachnid horror and decayed machinery. It scuttled on elongated limbs like twisted girders, each ending in hooked claws that gouged sparks from the ground.
The body was a bloated, armored thorax, plated in chitinous scales fused with rusted metal shards, as if the factories had birthed it from their own refuse. Multiple heads, three skeletal faces, fused at the necks, leered with glowing red eyes, sockets empty yet alive, tendrils of pale blood dangling like whiskers from jagged maws. A curved stinger arched from its back, dripping venom that sizzled on contact with the air, and webs of ethereal silk trailed from spinnerets, clinging to the fog like frozen breath.
It moved with predatory grace, limbs clicking like broken gears, an abomination that symbolized the district's deepest corruption: industry twisted into primal terror, progress devolved into predation.
The hunter whirled, too late. The creature's stinger lashed forward, piercing his shoulder with a wet thud. He screamed, cleaver swinging wildly, but the thing reared back, lifting him like a impaled trophy. Venom coursed; his body convulsed, skin blackening along veins that pulsed with unnatural light. The cleaver fell from limp fingers.
The monster slammed him down, claws rending, and the yard filled with the sound of tearing flesh, a final, gurgling cry cut short.
Vincard retreated deeper into shadow, heart steady but mind racing. If that was Bartho, the trail just went cold. And whatever that thing was... it had smelled the fight. It turned its triple gaze toward his hiding spot, eyes flaring brighter.
„Yeah... I'm not messing with that," he thought to himself. „But unfortunately, I somehow have to find out if this is the man I'm looking for..."