“Fug door!” Watters roar his voice shredded by panic. He cwed at the unyielding door handle, yanking and twisting with desperate, futile strength, as the tormented figures torted into shrieking, monstrous abominations before his widening eyes.

  The damhings shattered into shrieks of agony and rage, as their starved, skeletal frames twisted and splintered, being chitinous mockeries of their former selves. Each exploded with a gaping maw where a chest had been, rimmed with rows of serrated, blood-slick teeth. Their necks snapped backwards with siing cracks, their distorted faces locked in silent, gaping howls. Fingers elongated into obsidian cws, ripping through air. With gruesome ease, the mutations tore free of their restraints, some snapping their own bones in the process, driven by a horrifying, will.

  “MOVE!” Grimm bellowed, a thunderous and. He shoved Watters bodily aside, his massive boot a blur of motion as it ected with the door’s edge. CRASH! The loAPPED, the frame GROANED, and the door PANEL EXPLODED inwards, sh the passage beyond with splinters of wood and choking dust. Grimm seized Watters by the scruff of his neck, ung him through the ravaged doorway. “GO!”

  Watters, propelled by terror and Grimm’s brute force, scrambled into the bck maw of the tunnel, arms filing for bance. Grimm, rifle now leveled and spitting fire, backed into the passage, each shot erupting with deafening ford tearing viscous ks from the mutated horrors.

  But death held no sway over them. Each impact of Grimm’s rifle was a mere sting, failing to halt their inexorable advance; if anything, it seemed to invigorate their monstrous forms. They lumbered on, uurbed, their horrifying shapes looming rger with every backward step. Then, cutting through the oppressive bess, a colossal aperture appeared, a multi-levelled cavern being from the depths.

  Watters jabbed a trembling fiowards the chasm ahead. “Grimm—!” he gasped, his lungs burning with exertion and fear. Grimm’s head snapped forward, his gaze instantly assessing the unfolding vista. “HIDE!” Grimm roared, pointing a rigid fiowards a shadowed ging to the upper level. Without hesitation, Watters sprinted for the indicated rockface, his boots pounding against the stone, his breath tearing in his throat, not daring to gnce behind him.

  Suddenly, the mutant's ribcage unhinged, its sy legs still pummeling forward, as a grotesque medusa of tendrils erupted, spewing forth from the newly formed abyss in its chest. They cmped onto Grimm’s right forearm, their grip vise-like. The creature wrenched his arm with violent force, ripping the rifle from Grimm's grasp and sending it spinning across the cavern. Grimm pnted his boots, resisting with brutal strength, battling against the creature’s monstrous strength, fighting to wrench free from the tendrils that urged him, with siing insisteowards that ring of teeth.

  Grimm’s boots scraped against the stone, his legs skidding inch by agonizing inch towards the razor-toothed maw. His body leaned precariously close, he dug the heel of his left boot into the creature’s slik, a desperate anchainst the relentless pull. Muscles corded in his arm as he wrenched against the strig tendrils, the creature's fetid breath washing over him, thick with the stench of putresd decay. Its teeth, glistening with gore and viscous slime, loomed inches away.

  Desperate, with a final, explosive surge of strength, Grimm hauled back with such ferocity that the tendrils snapped free. But they did not simply release. Torn from their unholy anchor, they ripped out of the creature’s flesh, dragging with them a grotesque length of glistening viscera, pulpy with raw muscle and studded with fragments of splintered vertebrae, now dangling obsely from Grimm’s forearm.

  Grimm wrenched and twisted, but the gory entrail g like a sed, siing limb. Time vanished, ed by the urgent press of mutated flesh. Another creature uself into the air, a grotesque parody of flight, its exposed chest cavity a gaping wound hungry for purchase. Instinct taking rimm didn't hesitate. In a single, fluid motion, he snatched the trailing viscera, the slimy mass heavy in his grip, and hurled it back, a grotesque projectile, straight into the creature's desding maw. The mutant gaged, a strangled roar erupting as the unnatural mass clogged its exposed throat. Taking advantage of its momentary agony, Grimm gripped the pulpy intrail, using it as a makeshift rope to yank the creature downwards, his boot crashing into its emaciated frame, sending it hurtling backwards with siing force.

  Without warning, two more mutants ambushed him from the shadows. One desded upon his right shoulder, jaws snapping shut, its inhuman strength crushing boh a siing GRIND. A roar ripped from Grimm’s throat, raw agony exploding as razor teeth sank into his flesh, finding purchase with horrifying ease. Even as pain seared through his arm, the seutant uself forward, a blur of distorted limbs and gaping chest. Grimm, reag on instinct alone, snatched his pistol, unleashing a hail of guo the charging horror's neck cavity. Six rounds tore through flesh and sinew, each impact a wet, siing THUD, gouging massive ks from its unnatural form. The creature collided with the stone floor, its mutated body colpsing into a lifeless heap.

  Not Lys, Grimm registered, a searing brand of agony ng through his trapped arm. He let his dropped sidearm ctter onto the stoy. Desperation fueled his reato his jacket. There! A jolt of grim triumph as his fingers closed around the smooth, warm assurance of a fire orb. Muscles screaming, he hauled his arm back, a guttural roar tearing from his throat: “Die!” He unleashed the glowing sphere, a molten sun hurled point-bnk at the creature mauling him. FASH! The mutant became an instant pyre, its screech esg into a bloodcurdling howl as fmes devoured its unnatural flesh, the stench of burni and something deeply wrong blossoming in the fined space.

  The mutant’s grip sed, its burning flesh loosening from Grimm’s arm, but the fire, unleashed and voracious, roared across Grimm’s jacket. Fmes licked at his flesh, searing and biting, then climbed, hungrily, towards his shoulder, his face. Grimm arched backwards, a strangled cry esg his charred throat, mirr the mutant’s own fiery colpse. Both figures crumpled, striking the stoh siing, synized thuds.

  “Grimm!” Watters shrieked, his voice raw with terror. He burst from the shadowed alcove, fear propelling him forward, a hastily-removed coat clutched desperately in his trembling hands, rag towards his immoted savior.

  Watters beat at the fmes with his jacket, a frantic flurry of motion, sm the bze with desperate force. Smoke billowed from Grimm’s charred and smoking form. “Grimm!” he ROARED, his voice thick with panid grief, dropping to his knees beside the broken figure. Grimm’s eyes were mere slits in swollen, bed flesh, his bandana burned away, revealing a face ravaged by fire and old wars, now split at the cheek, a grotesque grin of exposed teeth. His jacket was a sm ruin, and the sickly-sweet stench of cooked meat assaulted Watters’ nostrils. Grimm gasped, each breath a ragged, whistling agony, trying to force words past scorched lips. “Vi… via…” A rag urg tore from his throat, a final, agonizing expulsion. His rge hand twitched weakly, gesturing towards his breast pocket, a barely perceptible tremor.

  Bewildered, Watters leaned closer, straining to decipher the ravaged face, his own voice trembling with rising panic. “I don’t… I don’t uand, Grimm, what is it—?” His desperate plea was cut short by a sudden, jarring THRUST from below, a jolt that nearly threw him into the charred husk of Grimm’s body. “VIAL!” Grimm CROAKED, the word ripped from his burning lungs, his gaze fixed, burning with desperate urgency, on his coat pocket.

  “Vial?” Watters repeated, a flicker of uanding igniting in his panicked mind, his fiearing at Grimm’s scorched jacket. There. His gaze locked oelltale glint of green gss, vials led deep within the breast pocket. He snatched the taihe cool gss strangely f against his trembling fingers. The liquid inside burned with an unnatural emerald light, uling and unknown. Bioluminesce? Some alchemical co? His stific curiosity sparked, a fleeting, inappropriate distra before reality crashed back. Grimm arched, his body vulsing in violent spasms, his breath rattling in his throat. “NO!” Watters roared, all thought colpsing into pure, desperate a. Lunging, he brandished the vial, the needle glinting cruelly in the dim light, and plu with brutal forto the viity of Grimm’s heart, smming the plunger home in a desperate gamble.

  A ghastly vapor hissed from the iion site, apanied by ahly chorus of shrieks, seemingly BORN from the greehs of the vial itself. Grimm’s eyes snapped wide, pupils diting, a desperate, final SPARK of life igniting in their depths before… nothing. Silence desded like a shroud. His back thudded against the stone, his head lolling lifelessly to the side.

  Watters remained rigid; a statue cast in the old of shock. His gaze strained, a desperate tether, between the vial’s ethereal steam coiling in his grasp, and the absolute, brutalized stillness of Grimm’s remains. What in God’s name… what unholy thing just occurred? The question became a physical ache in his chest, eg unanswered in the deafening vacuum of loss.

  Those… were those screams? The horrific query pulsed in his skull, a frantiauseating attempt to anchor to some sembnce of logic amidst the impossible green fluid. And Grimm... Grimm, what is GONE? His mind recoiled, then RACED, a frantiimal trapped in the cage of grief, desperate for any sembnce of finality, any escape from this agonizing limbo. “Grimm,” he whispered, a breath of sound lost in the silence, his eyes fixed, pleadingly, on the ravaged husk before him. “Grimm!” he cried again, his voice breaking, a ragged tear in the silence, fueled by a desperate, futile hope. “H-he’s… dead,” the words tore free, raw and ragged, each sylble a fresh wound, a physical maion of his defeat. Then, the floodgates opehe nightmare burst forth, the dead soldier rising unbidden in his mind’s eye, his limbs angled grotesquely, his face a hollow void, a spectral twin to Grimm, a macabre refle of the world’s i, unyielding brutality ched onto Grimm’s lifeless form.

  Time stretched, each sed a lead weight in the oppressive silence. Whatever the green vial held, it remained i, a useless tri clutched in his numb fingers, no salvation to the fallen giant beside him. Watters' heart plummeted, a stone sinking into an abyss of despair. Escape… impossible. The thought formed, cold and absolute, a suffog shroud. He was utterly alone. No Order cavalry on the horizon. Grimm, his anchor, his protector, extinguished.

  Then, from the inky bess of the shadows, a sound rippled outward, a low, malevolent chuckle that scraped along the stone, each sylble a chilling premonition, sending icy tendrils of dread coiling around Watters' spine.

  “So, it seems I’ve finally sin the immortal,” the voice purred, ced with cruel amusement, as Mikkelson emerged from the shadows, his silhouette sharpening into focus, fnked by two t Lys, monstrous embodiments of brute force. Watters’ eyes sowards the voice, burning with a furious grief, tears blurring his vision. Mikkelson’s grin split the darkness, a predatory and chilliament to his absolute and over the creatures. Mikkelson lifted a hand, a casual gesture of power, pointing towards Watters, “Take the doctor, and the immortal. I have… pns for him.” The Lys moved with chilling, synized precision, utterly impcable. One seized Grimm’s limp form, hoisting the lifeless weight onto its massive shoulders with unnerving ease. The other advanced on Watters, a slow, deliberate stalk, its cwed hand reag for his arm. “Get your filthy hands off me, you abomination!” he roared, his voice crag with impotent rage, shing out with futile punches against the giant wolf-creature, his blows nding like a child’s against a stone wall.

  Mikkelson chortled, a sound devoid of warmth, dripping with dark satisfa, “You should be grateful, Doctor. You are to be a privileged spey esteemed… guest,” his arm swept outwards in a mog flourish, gesturing to the Ly pair, “you are about to withe dawn of the new world order!” With sudden, brutal efficy, the Ly baded Watters, its massive elbow CRUSHING across his skull, plunging him into merciful darkness.