Other novitiate squads were called into this sector of the Undehive, either from other sectors when they were in the middle of their trial or from having their trial date expedited within this week. There were mass arrests of any suspected drug addicts, which was near everyone including some of the enforcers, as well as bloody firefights against various resident gangs, which was everyone else including some of the enforcers. They also guarded the forensics and repair of vandalized laud hailers. The spirites preferred to practice controlled, sustainable underhive purges but the accusation of heresy called for strict measures that could spare no quarter.

  Yoon Si-nae’s squad was not part of the pleasantries. They came to the place below the Underhive. The Bad Zone that the upperhivers and spirerites called sewers. Every known terrible of the underhive was exponentially worse here, with a few unknown terrors that were whispered about in the shuddered breath of even the most cruel and remorseless ganger. Yet it was a breach into the bad zone that the obscura junkies said was the source of Joy. The rockcrete had been tunneled open to create this new connection to the bad zone, a thought that chilled Yoon Si-nae to the bone. So it was that the novitiates adorned rebreather masks and shoulder lights to follow their Superior into the depths beneath the obscura den.

  While the rest of Gyeo, even the Underhive, saw restoration efforts after the great cataclysm, the sewers were left to rot, the damage and blight wrought by the cataclysm never undone. When the Cleansing ran through the city, the cultists forsaken by the fly god fled down here with their diseased and mutanted bodies. Anyone in contemporary times who found themselves in the sewers either made a wrong turn, by mistake or hubris, or were banished, by persecution or punishment. They may have come down here themselves thinking they could wait out whatever conflict they were hiding from. They may have lost their way in the endless pitch dark tunnels or got bogged down in the waste that coagulated into a mire. No matter how they got there, what now lived in these sewers could hardly be recognized as human.

  One of the crippled lepers dared to grab a hold of Yoon Si-nae’s leg. His swollen lumps looked like he was bulging out of a net that garroted his whole body. He mumbled something in a raspy voice through bulbous lips. She kicked off his pus drenched hand and stomped him into paste from the head down, a warning to the rest of the vagrants who were each disfigured in their own revolting way, barely concealed by their soggy rags, mockeries of the human form the other novitiates said openly. The rest of the diseased sank as far into the rockrete as they could after that.

  Soon enough the sewage became shin deep for them to trudge through. The slosh added to the chorus of dripping leaks, flowing brack, and the drum of the Superior’s power pack. The cheap rebreather could keep out the stench and eye stinging fumes only enough to keep them from retching. Of course that power armor let the Superior wade through like it was a river, and that sabbat helmet let her breath like she was under an ocean breeze, or perhaps that was merely the aspirational composure of Saint Arabella that they were supposed to be mimicking by learning to stomach this disgustingness. If you asked her, she would surely thank her chaplet aquila as the source of her stoicism, the beads a source of comfort since her days as a dialogus. If the fly god is as they say he is, then coming to the sewers should be the standard for the test. Not that The Bad Zone should be wished upon anyone.

  The Superior halted the march just when they got a comfortable gait. A dead end blocked by rubble. They retraced the glow globes they set and went down another tunnel. This one ran off into a seemingly bottomless pit. The next was blocked by a pile of mutilated corpses. They had to leave the breach to get more glow globes and replace their waterlogged footwear. As if the endless trudge was not bad enough, the Superior started up the hymnal of the wanderer for the rest of them to follow. They had a thousand-thousand songs for situations niche or mundane because the spirerites had more free time than they knew what to do with. The novitiates started with humming, but it is expected for the veterans to sing full throated even in the heat of battle. It’s supposed to help keep you steady; if it distracted you, or you otherwise could not do it, then that was proof that the Emperor was not with you.

  They traced through tunnels until they found a section overtaken by sludge nourished fungus. Mushrooms and mycelium decorated along the bed and along the bank. Some mushrooms had stalks as thick as a man that sprouted along the walls. This deep in, far from an underhiver to cannabalize, flora signified fauna. Autopistols were unholstered. Bolt pistol and burner were unmagnetized.

  The tall wall mushrooms began to raise hyphaes from their stalks. These thin little threads, only perceptible by the light glinting off them, bundled into rope that wrapped around the backline of novitiates and reeled them in to be further bound by the sticky stalk. The Superior turned faster than the rest of the group but the sludge lurched up to entangle her. She turned her bolt pistol behind her to blow the sludge off her back, then twirled to unleash her burner down stream. The sludge, and/or whatever was in it, was boiled to burst.

  Under the light of flame and the hymns of the honest harvester, Yoon Si-nae and the unbound initiates used their knives to carve their sisters free of the stalks. Together they shanked the mushrooms like the fungi missed one to many protection fees. Fleshy chunks fell into the river of filth to provide fertilizer for the docile fungus who knew well enough to mind their business and keep their caps down. The furor was capped off by a kick to the last mushroom’s volva. Remaining stickyness had to be scraped off.

  The Superior rallied the squad with the hymnal of the wanderer to continue where they left off in song and in march. They did not go long before she stopped them again. A fissure in the infested rockrete wall gave her pause. Could be an opening, could be a crack. In what light could pierce the darkness, they saw more fissures down the tunnel. The Superior plucked out a small mushroom and tossed it into the fissure from a safe distance. It bounced and landed with an echo: a cavern it was.

  The squad encircled the first fissure. The novitiates would take turns investigating each fissure to ensure no ambush would claim them. If any fissure was too expansive to scout alone, they would call off the expedition so that one with greater numbers and better equipment could take their place. They had already mapped more of the sewers than had ever been recorded. Whoever, whatever, that was so desperate for attention could stew in its impatience.

  Yoon Si-nae was up first. She holstered her autopistols and hunched into the cavern with her knife pointed front. Not a blink into her descent, the dark seemed to thicken as she could barely see the tip of her blade. If she did not feel them, she would not know she was engulfed in rockrete beyond that which she crawled over. The hymnals of her squad was the only indication that she had not somehow died already.

  After what was surely only a moment yet felt like an eternity of crawling, her hand landed on something bony. She leaned down for the shoulder light to make it out. It was a leg, emaciated and hairy yet relatively unblemished, that led up to a naked male body that was much the same. His face was masked by a mushroom cap that had a smile engraved into it. Whatever this was about she was not keen to let him wake up to find out. She shoved eight serrated inches of the Emperor’s mercy up his chin and into his brain. No response. She pulled it out and stabbed between his ribs to pierce his heart. No reaction.

  Then the hymns stopped.

  Yoon Si-nae crawled backward. She did not go so far that she would not hear the hymns. For once she wanted to hear those hymns. If something happened there would be gunshots or louder singing or they would have hailed her over the vox. The only way she would not be alerted was if they—

  Her foot hit a wall. This cavern was a straight line. A cave in? No it would have made a sound. This was more like someone put up a new wall while her back was turned. She kicked it. She could not feel the impact reach the other side as if she hit more than a foot of rockrete. She kept kicking as if she had not already confirmed the fact she sought the last dozen times.

  She unholstered her pistol and fired it back, the muzzle flash unable to light the dark and the ping concurring with previous results. She held the trigger down for a short riff of gunshots that emptied the magazine. She had to hear the click a few times before she tossed it aside to try again with the other pistol, as if it was a defect in the engineering that was the problem. Another riff played against a drum solo to the same silent audience. She brought the pistol forward to reload this time, hyperventilating as she could only feel what she held in front of her face. She let loose as many riffs as her stock of magazines allowed her to, the final magazine her shaky hands dropped down the cavern.

  She crawled after the magazine. Part of her hoped she had somehow taken a wrong turn somewhere along the way, but the passage was more narrow than ever. Mushroom man was gone. Even he abandoned her alone in the tunnel.

  Abandoned.

  Alone.

  She tried to crawl back up but her foot immediately hit stone. She could deny it no longer: she was sealed into this cavern like a straightjacket. Still she kicked as if the next blow would bring a collapse, whether to free her or to end her. Anything would be better than to suffocate or starve in the dark. Anything but to be trapped.

  Again.

  Abandoned.

  Alone.

  She was strapped at neck and wrists and ankles on to a cold table and convulsed in place from the needles they jammed into her. The fluids crawled through her veins and gestated in her intestines until they returned to drain her of the finished product. She was left on that cold table day and night until she broke her bones and ripped her skin to be free. No matter how she fought and struggled to survive she always felt the walls close in around her, that she would blink and she’d find herself back on that table.

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  Her leg filled with acid. Her foot was numb from trauma. She could raise her hind no more. Exhaustion and lack of air made her light headed.

  She was helpless before the Superior, the only thing she could call home in tatters and all her strength for naught, she was chained and collared once again. She was wrapped in robes that choked her neck and wrists and ankles. She was despised by the mistresses and novitiates who humiliated her, ran her in circles and into walls, cheated and penalized her on flagrant arbitraries, all to watch her convulse for their amusement. They would never let her become a battle sister. They put her to work as a rat killing other rats. They brought her down here so that they could leave her to die. When they returned to their spire, they would slander her name, if not erase it entirely.

  That was all the upperhivers and spirerites saw in the rats: tools and entertainment. The underhivers fought and stole from each other, but they could relate to each other too. We were just toys to the top dwellers, no different from the characters in a data slate. They use our bodies, ruin our lives, play with our hopes, then toss us aside and go back to living in the sky. They fight the starving and sickly from the safety of ceramite. Their waste rained down from the hills and towers from which they judged us as filth. They extolled their own virtues and blessings as all the more evidence that the Emperor had chosen them. They punished what pleasures we had as vices while they indulge themselves under cloak. Why did they get to be happy?

  +Don’t we deserve joy?+

  Her shoulder lights flickered out. She could no longer see the finger she raised to touch her eye. From the void, a purple forked tongue rolled out.

  +Everyone else wants you restrained.+

  “Everyone else wants me restrained.”

  +Only you can set yourself free.+

  “Only I can set myself free.”

  +“You/I are/am all you/I have.”+

  She ripped herself from that table when no one would come to save her. She scavenged and fought for scraps when no one would feed her. She gutted anyone who tried to exploit or violate her. Every inch she had was clawed together by her own hands. It was only the sisters who could restrain her again and take everything from her. If she could tear into their armor the way the plastele had been torn, then not even they could stand in her way. Their gear and their ‘laws’ were their only chance to survive, as she had proven time and again when she beat back her ‘sisters’ who jumped her like any other back alley gangers only to skulk to the safety of their noona’s skirts. She would have nothing to fear ever again once she tore this place apart and slaughtered them all.

  +”You/I would finally, finally, have peace. And. Joy.”+

  +Joy.+

  She saw herself alone climb from this wretched pit. The enforces, the gangers, the novitiates all sluggish and weak compared to her advance. But that was already true. It was the soldiers and Sisters that had blocked her path. But now she would snake around their bolts and claw open their armor as if it were paper. She would reveal the faithful flock for the self-centered degenerates they are, free them to descend into the fantasized orgy of blood and carnality that they project the underhive to be. The effluvium they rained down would finally rise to drown the spirerites that thought themselves beyond reach. Once all of Gyeo had fallen into chaos and ruin, she alone would stand upon the last peak.

  +Alone to have peace and Joy.+

  “Alone.”

  Her hands were calloused yet gentle when she kneeled down to cup my cheeks for the first time.

  +She shackled you on a whim.+

  She wrangled me to literacy as she covered for me blowing off my classes. Gave me a stern talking to as long as any lecture though.

  +She paraded you as a pet.+

  She exposed the flaws in my technique in ways only observable by keen examination. Also with a lecture attached.

  +She beat you blue and demanded gratitude.+

  “Through the lightning and the tempest, our Emperor delivers us,” she sang the song of the wanderer, “across the dark, beneath the tide, our Emperor delivers us,” she could hear Hae Nyeo sing to her as if they were back in the infirmary.

  +Everyone tries to take from you.+

  Yoon Si-nae was pitched an unfair fight as ‘training’. She beat her armed and armored ‘sisters’ into the floor and was reprimanded by the noonas for cracking the tile. When she was in bed, Hae Nyeo fed her and sang of the wanderer. It was Hae Nyeo’s favorite song. It was based on a litany from before the cataclysm, adapted for the commonfolk. It was a song about always moving forward, for one was never lost so long as they had the Emperor to guide them.

  +The Emperor abandoned this world.+

  Yoon Si-nae beat down muggings every other day before her name was known, then every other week when some start-ups wanted to make a name for themselves. She was attacked then and attacked now. The difference was she did not have Hae Nyeo then.

  +You are all you can rely on.+

  “Lantern in hand, on beaten paths,” she kicked the wall behind her, “our Emperor delivers us. In fogged mire, from ashen plains—”a power armored boot cracked open the rockrete.

  “Our Emperor delivers us,” sang Hae Nyeo. Her boot continued to crack and chip the wall. The new air, putrid as it was, gave Yoon Si-nae the strength to kick again. Powerful stomps on both ends steadily crumbled the rockrete into rubble until an opening was large enough to pull Yoon Si-nae out by the ankle. “See, you do know the song,” Hae Nyeo said with her hand out.

  “I could never escape it,” Yoon Si-nae clapped the outstretched hand to be lifted from the muck, “It haunts my worst nightmares; here, that was a boon. It is as you said: something beside the fly god stalks these shadows.”

  “That confirmation is all we need for now. We were attacked by mutant dwellers from both directions. It took near all my promethium to send them back. I will lead the charge out, you will cover our rear. Can you do this?”

  “I used up all my ammo. All I have is this,” she drew her blade. Hae Nyeo held her own knife by the tip with the butt pointed at Yoon Si-nae.

  “Then you are unburdened,” she said with a smile. “My sisters! The litany of battle, if you would honor me.”

  A spiritu dominatus, Domine, libra nos.

  Chittering mutants bunched together in a mass that choked the tunnels in vile flesh. One last jet of flame bore a charred opening into the mass and sent the rest into panic and scurry. Burner mag locked, the bolt pistol would have to ream through the rest of the way.

  From the lighting and the tempest, Our Emperor, deliver us.

  The Sisters speared forth, the Superior at the tip. Each bolt blew apart the targets directly in the path. The novitiates behind stamped down on their triggers to unleash riffs of bullets that tore through the rest of the mutants. They discharged and loaded up magazines without skipping a beat as they were trained to. The constant muzzle flash was the most light that these depths had seen in centuries.

  From plague, temptation and war, Our Emperor, deliver us,

  The ones that were not put down by gunfire were finished with slashes and stabs of ruthless precision. Though sewer slime anchored her footwork, Yoon Si-nae hands were at home in these confines. She gutted and diced before many could react, weaved around and riposted those that tried to take a lumberouse swing at her. One thick necked mutant that absorbed a full riff of bullets found both its nape and thyroid pierced by daggers that met within him before they were dragged out to behead him.

  From the scourge of the Kraken, Our Emperor, deliver us.

  The especially leathery and bloated mutants blunted bolts and bullets. Whether they were descendants of cultists, fresh converts, or well adapted evolutionaries was a question for another day. The Superior could overpower any that tried to grapple with her, but that they had hands upon her at all slowed the group.

  From the blasphemy of the Fallen, Our Emperor, deliver us,

  The novitiates turned to slow the horde with bullets as they backpedalled to their escape. The Superior clicked dry her bolt pistol and had to bash down a fungal-infested mutant. His head caved in but his rib cage burst open with hyphaes that roped around her arm and held her down with his weight. That distraction allowed another mutant to restrain her other arm. A third leapt at her from the front but a swift boot, raised from the clutches of sludge, sent him back more twisted and broken than when he began.

  From the begetting of daemons, Our Emperor, deliver us,

  Yoon Si-nae darted to the front to cut Hae Nyeo loose. The rib cage summoned more hematic hyphaes, all of which were severed by a whirlwind of slashes. Hae Nyeo ripped the arms off the other mutants and continued the advance.

  From the curse of the mutant, Our Emperor, deliver us,

  Han Nyeo’s gauntlets bludgeoned meat and crushed bone as she pushed forth. Yoon Si-nae sliced sinew and carved out a path. The novitiates stymied the horde’s determined pursuit until their autopistols clicked empty. The way in front clear, the squad hurried away from the groping claws and tendrils as much as the sewage would allow. The adapted form of these once-Men carried them far faster in the muck; without munitions to slow them, they rapidly closed the distance on the sisters. One tumurous mitt took hold of a trailing novitiate’s wimple only to be severed in short order. Yoon Si-nae tossed the novitiate forward while slicing out the eyes of the assailant, sending him tumbling in front of the horde to trip them up enough for her to escape. What stopped the chase entirely were the faint lumens of the underhive that spilled into the breach. The mutants hissed as if they were burnt and scurried back into the darkness while the sisters ran past the inert lepers until they finally crossed back into semi-civilization.

  “A morte perpetua, Domine, libra nos,” sang Hae Nyeo with composure of full breath, in stance and voice, her chaplet in hand, “finish for me my sisters.”

  “That thou wouldst bring them only death,” the novitiates began in hoarse breaths and between coughs, “That thou shouldst spare none,” one pulled off her rebreather to vomit but continued singing along, “That thou shouldst pardon none, We beseech thee, destroy them.”

  “Good. The canoness will be pleased with what you have accomplished, but allow me the honor of welcoming all of you as my sisters in battle.”

  Vomit girl collapsed into her own disgorge.