Let scream the black of pitch. Let rise the joy of rot. Glory on glory, joy upon joy, the world is always ending.

Hate upon hate, love upon love, let scream from out of the earth. Break apart so as to reveal that which comes from beneath and within, severed open until all is remade into new truth.

Embrace the joy of decay, for it means, above all other possible things, that even at what you thought to be the end, you are loved. Loved profoundly, such that that love feeds the world itself.

- Choir of the Blackened Church, Final Harmony, Closing Verse, sung to the sound of falling artillery.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I'm tired.

It hurts.

I'm tired.

I don't care. I don't care. I keep swinging. The blood keeps pumping, and so I keep moving, pulled forward into life by the part of me that loves me enough to dance in me.

They swarm like flies. They're not, but they swarm like them, gods-fucking damnit. Like watching a sea of baby crabs breaking out of the egg, so numerous that they're like gods-damned sand on the beach.

I've noticed, from here behind the glass, that their insides are funky. I thought there was something strange about the whole thing, insects being more of what I'd consider to be "flesh" than anything fungal, but it seems my ideas weren't exactly unique. Besides the coloration being darker, shinier, their insides still look a lot like the islands of mold I'm still climbing on whenever I can. Their outer shells are more like a hyper-dense leather than chitin, and their insides seem more like a colony organism than anything I would recognize as an animal. No beating hearts, but plenty of hydraulics, pressure moving them in dramatic leaps and clik-clak of claws.

I'm tired, and it hurts.

One of my arms is broken, though it still swings, just more chaotically, more of a flail than that skittering violence of before. I swing it hard enough and fast enough to compensate, as best I can- but it's frenetic. It's chaotic. It's frenzied. It's manic.

My heart hurts. It's pumping so much more than it should be, screaming as it is forced to dance to a beat a dozen times beyond what it should. I would be scared of a stroke, or a seizure, or something worse, yet again- but it's fine if I die.

So I ask the Bloodling to keep dancing, and it does. It forces my muscles to move, the pressure in my veins making me twitch and struggle and move like a broken marionette.

It hurts so much, and I'm so tired, and there's enough in me, in my body and mind and soul, that fucking refuses to give in anyways.

The Glove clicks and writhes, flexes and cuts and extracts and injects, over and over. I don't need to focus on it, because I'm not inventing, I don't need to invent, I just need to fidget, and I have more than enough manic energy for that.

It's messy, disgusting, vile- but every time a new cut is opened in me, one of these skitter-shroom things scissoring holes into my skin, I inject another bundle of choice cuts of fungus.

SYMBIONT ACQUIRED: Fungal Tissue (Legs, Arms, Torso)

Haven't had a chance to shove it into my skull yet, and I don't think it's gone past the muscle systems in my torso to the organs, not yet. It needs time to spread, time to connect, and I'm not getting cut deep enough by these things.

They bleed me, but my blood dances and returns to where it is supposed to be as often as not. They slice me open, but my cloak of fur and bone clogs up their claws and helps clot the wounds. None of it stops the pounding in my chest and my head as the Fleshling's heart beats evermore, ever faster, ever harder.

And I keep cutting.

At this point, all I hear is the clik-clik of claws, coming from a thousand directions, and the duller, meatier thuds of "flesh" that come from me ripping them apart.

It's unsustainable. I'm going to get tired, and if I had an HP bar in this "game", I know it would be ticking right the fuck down.

I'm trying to think.

But it hurts, and I'm tired. Sucks to think, when I'm like this. Too much blood in my brain. Hurts.

They swarm on the living and the dead both. Any wound that opens up, any displaced chunk of the thicker fungi, they swarm over.

They're… they're not here to hunt me. Not really. I've been picturing these guys as video-game entities, even now, but they're not. Or at least, not entirely. They're… designed for this ecosystem. Kind of. Not entirely, but more than a little, and animals, ecosystems, even, above all else, are designed for one thing above any other.

Survival. Be it consumption or reproduction, it's always survival. They're not after me because I exist, the fact that they're so willing to cut their wounded apart and feast, proves it. They're digging into the displaced fungi we've torn apart in our fight, too, digging into torn-open little islands over and over.

They're hungry. They see movement and death, both, as food. The source doesn't matter, does it?

I cut, and I bleed, and I cut, and I am torn, and my head hurts.

But I'm behind the glass, so it's fine.

It's fine. If I die, I come back. It's alright if I die here.

One of my limbs was damaged earlier, one of the artificial ones. The Writhing Limb still works, still throws around the twitching, toothy blade at its end. I can feel through it, nervous systems that don't exist and do exist screaming at me endlessly. It hurts, when things crack and break, when the digits and organelles that make it up scrape along the damage as I force them to move anyways.

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I'm forcing everything to move anyways.

I feel like I want to scream, but there isn't enough air in my lungs. If I had the free time, I think I would be coughing, rather than this harsh panting that is the best I can do right now.

Focus.

Six functional limbs, three of which can be sacrificed. Non-Gloved original arm and two Writhing Limbs, and one is already damaged.

Easy enough decision, once you remove the fear of inevitability.

It's inevitable that it'll hurt.

One of the skitter-shrooms leaps at me, trying to bite at my face, one of the few parts of me only somewhat cut open and bleeding, and the Glove shoots out, instinct half-understood reacting faster than conscious thought. Scalpel-fingers stab into it, impaling the thing and pulling it apart in the same motion.

And then I smear it over the limb.

It works, in as far as I can calculate or process anything working right now. When I swing it, covered in mushroom guts, more of the things that were previously jumping for center mass or my other limbs jumps towards it instead.

They're simple things. They go for movement and for food, and that means blood, and guts, and-

It works. That's what matters. Focus. Stay here. Stay behind the glass.

This is going to hurt.

I know. It'll be ok.

I reach back with the claw, and with scalpel-edged fingers, tear apart the seams of that which is part of me.

And cut off a limb.

It lands wetly, harshly, loud against the water, even with all my splashing and the fighting all around. It doesn't stop the attacks on me, far from it, but there's a window, for just a moment, where some of the attention goes off me and onto the piece of meat I've cut off myself.

I dive under the sludge.

They're under here too, but less so, and they move slower. Which is good, considering how fast the little fuckers can leap when those hydraulics kick in. If this were regular water, I'd be in more trouble, but it's not, it's sludge so thick it might as well be mud. Being able to step on the ground, pushing the exo-fingers on my legs as hard as I can to shove myself forward, gives me an advantage over their somewhat slower swimming.

I can feel the sludge making its way into my cuts, the torn open flesh of my body now home for more and more… mess.

If I were human? I would be dead of infection in hours, most likely.

As it stands… I can only hope that my ADAPTATION stat isn't just for show.

Heh.

Hehe. Hahahaa.

It's kind of funny, isn't it? I'm-

Huh. I'm not sure why it's funny.

That makes me laugh harder.

The glass is fucking thin, huh. Maybe it's all the blood in here.

There's so much blood in here. It's waving at me. It's nudging against me, afraid.

I'll be fine. It's alright if I die.

I blink, through my own eyes, and-

Huh. Have I been laughing while underwater? That's not so fucking good. That's not so good at-

I'm… I'm choking, aren't I?

It's already dark down here. It's already so dark I can't see, I'm just moving forward mostly blind, but it's… fuck. Fuck, the vision's going dark. It's going dark, and it hurts, and it-

I try to breathe, and my whole chest hurts. My ribs feel like they're breaking, trying to bend despite the pressure inside, trying to flex around the desperate way I try to drag air into my body at any measure.

I need to surface. I need to surface, but if I surface too soon-

I feel like I'm-

ADAPTATION ACQUIRED: Sludge Gills

Hah. Yeah, of course. Not so useless after all, huh.

I want to cough. I want to exhale, and find that I can't. Everything is… wrong, but it's right. I'm alive, and there's so much fluid in my lungs that I can't push out or in properly anymore, and I can still breathe. LIke stuff is… moving in and out, but at a different pace. My chest doesn't even hurt, even as every instinct in my brain tries to tell me that I'm dying.

Huh. I guess it was already doing that anyways.

I've been under a lot of intracranial pressure, huh? Maybe it's time I-

Yes. Please. Yes. Please stop. It hurts and I'm so tired.

Yeah, I'm fucking exhausted. Ugh.

It's easier than it was in the real world to convince the Bloodling to slow down. My heart calms, and while it doesn't go silent or anything, it does slow considerably enough that I worry about that for a second.

The pressure in my head eases. The blood behind the glass retreats, just a little, turning to a red tint around the edges rather than something crimson, lapping at my me.

I still think I'm dying. I still know that I'm hurting.

But I need to wait. I need to wait. I…

Why?

Oh! Right! Because if I stay still for a while, I can know with some more certainty if they found me. If they've caught up to me, the…

Huh. Skitter-shrooms. That's a pretty good name for them. Can't believe I coined that while still half-braindead. Fucking mess is what this is.

It's alright if I die.

I don't want to die.

Both are true, and both hurt, more than I know how to say.

Hah. That's almost funny, isn't it?

My head still hurts.

I haven't been bitten, or cut open, or attacked in the time I've been staying here. So that… might mean that I'm ok. Or ok enough.

Fuck it.

I push my head up, and force myself up out of the muck.

And hit my forehead against mush.

Hmm. Ok. Reasonable issue to run into.

I raise my limbs, palpating along the bottom of the mass. My Writhing Limb is particularly adept at it, moving much further than my conventional, original limbs, still shriveled and malformed even with the added lumps of mass I've stuffed into them throughout the fight.

It lasted maybe a few minutes. I did… all this, in just a few minutes.

There. A softer part, something I can cut through.

The Writhing Blade clicks and whirrs, the sounds still carrying even through the muck, no matter how faintly. There's a danger it'll attract more attention, pull someone in, but-

There. A breach. A brighter spot, something I can head towards, even though my eyes are barely even useful to me in this place.

I breach back out, from the slime and into the world. A corrupted thing, with too many limbs, too many fingers doing things that do things no fingers should do, its already misshapen body cloaked in rags of crimson fur and stuffed full of lumps of half-identified mass.

I raise my head, and open my mouth, and out from it falls a mass of liquid that is too heavy. Like vomiting, but out from my own fucking lungs.

I splatter the ground around me as I pull myself up, struggling like I'm dragging myself up out of broken ice, but softer.

And then I look up, and see the world.

I've left the marshes. Reborn again as something new, deep within… what look like caves, of some kind. Dark, but glowing with bioluminescence, faintly hinting at shape and function. Like someplace deep below the sea, a fusion of rotting corpse and underground caverns.

Like whalefall, made entirely of the Grey.

I emerge from out of the sludge, into yet another new world.

And then collapse, exhausted, onto the ground. I have to cough again, and it hurts an entirely new part of my chest, functions that weren't there before.

I lay in the dark, beneath the flesh of the Grey, and re-learn how to breathe.

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