Kave re-entered the cave, having largely recuperated from the harrowing hundred days of maddening isolation.
In truth, one may never recover from such an experience. He simply buried himself in the life above ground and tried to forget the bits of him that were left behind in the shelter.
Following him, Sergeant Elena's footsteps resonated with his deep heartbeat; she walked at a quick pace as she inspected the building, her cheerful voice like light in the abyss he was braving.
"That's some nice concrete work," Elena commented as she touched the walls of the shelter. "Before Durval, this type of concrete was used even on Venus. Very sandy and grainy."
"Yeah… yes… that's… Portland concrete… cement… whatever."
Kave was bothered by descending here again, as almost every bit of this place unnerved him. He felt like what had happened in the past two days was actually an illusion, and now he had to wake up to reality once again.
He never got out…
Adam was never there…
He didn't get to bury his father's burned bones…
How could it be real?
Wartopia?
Miniatures coming to life?
Star Paladins?
Men-at-Arms?
All of that… was it all a lie?
"Hey! Citizen! Kave!"
"…"
Kave turned to Elena, who called for him. Dazed and shaken, he was no longer able to distinguish truth from reality.
"What's that in your hand?" she asked, and he looked down.
"That can't be here… that… that is real!" he thought.
His mother's scissors… that shouldn't be here if he were imagining things.
It felt real in his hand. Maybe if he used it to dig deeper…
Then Elena's hand touched his, and with her cold, prosthetic one, she took the scissors away.
"Are you alright there, soldier?" she asked.
"I… I almost… It became too cloudy in my head for a second…"
He said, holding his forehead and closing his eyes, trying to get his thoughts in order.
"Let's get inside,' she said, uttering some of the most alarming words he had ever heard.
His heart leaped; he wanted to resist, but she had already taken his hand and pulled him along.
Demons surrounded him, jarring laughter and mockery echoing in his ears; their voices, a song of torment designed to break his very soul. They were grotesque in form, some with leathery wings and sharp claws, others with eyes that burned like embers, all vying for his attention, trying to worm their way into his mind and drag him back into madness.
No matter how he looked away, how he quivered, or how he shook them off, their whispers still slithered into his ears, painting vivid images of his deepest fears, mimicking the very screams his mother made before her death, and how his father perished in the fire right after saving him.
The stench of rot and decay filled his nostrils, a suffocating reminder of these demons and their infernal presence. They wanted to tear his brain apart, to unravel the very fabric of his sanity, then drag it out—a pulsating mass of thoughts and memories—chew it with their jagged teeth, spit it onto the floor, and dance all over it in a grotesque celebration of his return to the fold.
But as he was still dragged by Elena's hand, the demons suddenly stopped their pursuit, and he realized that this was not salvation.
He was there!
The part of the shelter he could never hope to reach again.
The Dragon's Den.
There… it was ablaze with the fires that had killed his father and consumed his mother.
The madness…
The shattering…
The demise of a thousand souls…
The room where he kept it all locked.
The forbidden room.
"So this is it, huh?' Elena asked as she looked around, checking everything with her flashlight.
The roars! The roars! The roars!
He could still hear them… they were everywhere.
"I see now,' Elena said, looking at Kave's face, which was drenched with sweat and tears. 'This is where you lost your sanity."
The Dragon gazing down at him, its eyes hungry; humanity kneeling, bald-headed, branded, and chained.
Elena looked away from the shivering man, who was about to fall dead with fear, and when she saw a mechanical contraption on the wall, she walked to it and pressed the button she thought would activate it.
And she wasn't wrong in the slightest. Once she pressed the red button, the fire spread, and the Dragon roared!
"NO!"
Kave fell to his knees, holding his head, shivering, and hiding away. His state was so pitiable, it even saddened the stone-cold Elena Skarn.
All she did was activate the fossil generator, which hadn't even been broken from the start, and the whole hurricane shelter lit up.
It seemed that the engine roars had driven Kave to madness, for he had been listening to them constantly. In his days of madness, he had even drawn the dragon on the walls of the generator room, and all of it contributed to his crippling fear.
Elena walked towards Kave, who had plummeted to the ground, and sat beside him, patting his back.
"It's okay, you poor boy. Come!"
With unexpected kindness, Elena cradled Kave's head and hugged him tightly, as he cried like a child in her arms.
"It broke you that bad, huh?"
Patting his head like a caring mother, Elena kept comforting him until he was able to regain control of his emotions. She still didn't let go and kept shushing him kindly, but her eyes were anything but; her face was red, and her fingers went through his scalp.
"Since you know my world so well, you know that, like most of my people, I grew up underground."
She spoke softly as she started to tell him a story.
"Down in the Sump, people were born to die, and those who descended there were banished forever. Even the Solarium wanted no soldiers from the Sumps."
"But since I was born pretty, I had the advantage no one else had. I could fuck my way up one floor at a time. Pretty girls who did that would usually last up to seven floors before they found themselves slaves to gravity as they went: 'Pheeeew… PISHHHHH!"
"I've seen pretty girls and boys thrown from floors as high as the 80s; some were even so unlucky as to survive the fall, can you imagine it? But no matter how broken they were, I never succeeded in putting anyone back together. Until one day… I actually did."
"He was a good man, a Man-at-Arms; he never told me why he was in the Sump in the first place, but I assume it was for a girl he once knew. All were dead or fucked up in the head, anyway. So he settled for me, and since he had a squad that saved him, I was taken up for the first time."
"You see… the best thing in the world, the thing that saved me from the hell I was born in, was my kindness in trying to put people back together. Kindness takes you a long way up, Citizen Kave. Since then, I have always tried to be kind and to help broken people. My entire squad was filled with those kinds of people, and I made it my life's mission to fix them; I became a mechanic just because I liked fixing things."
"Do you want me to fix you too, Kave?"
He didn't know what to do or what to say, other than that he needed help.
Whatever it was, whatever she could do, he needed her to do it now.
"Please."
He begged for help.
"I promise you won't regret it,' she said and pushed him out of her hug, holding his face and smiling gently. 'You'll be alright."
When he opened his eyes and saw her face, he didn't expect his world to be filled with light, but before he could think clearly and regain control of his emotions, he was instantly pushed to the ground.
He didn't know how Elena was this strong, but as she held his throat with her bionic arm, her eyes became very focused.
"Now, I'll fix you,' she said, her voice a low growl."
"How?' he choked out."
Her lips—scarred from one side downward—pursed into a sadistic smile, unveiling something dangerous.
"The only way a pretty girl knows how, of course."
Kave didn't know what was happening, but her bionic arm pushed his head to face the dragon drawn on the wall. He felt her weight settle over him, a crushing presence that stole his breath away. Her other hand, warm and insistent, found his, guiding it, and then leaving it to explore elsewhere.
"Look at your fear. Fight it, Kave. Prey on it as it preyed on you."
His world narrowed to a roaring generator, a grotesque dragon on the wall, Elena's unyielding grip, and the warm, slippery sensation he was first experiencing. He felt a profound, disorienting shift, a violation that was both physical and utterly mental, tearing at the last of his sanity, only to reforge it into something cold and hard.
Elena knew what switch to flip and what buttons to push. While totally unethical, she knew what she was doing, and she had a thing for broken toys. She made him face something far more primal, feral, and completely drawn from base instincts. When faced with the threat of annihilation, life finds a way to flourish, multiply, and breed.
She pushed his head to face the dragon's image on the wall once again and started whispering words into his ears:
"Own it! Conquer it! Show it you are not its bitch!"
"I… I am not…"
"If you are anyone's, you are my bitch. I own you. I conquer you."
"Ye… Yes…"
Her grin grew wider as all her unholy intentions were now visible on her face while she topped him with a rhythmic motion.
Kave, who knelt on the ground, crippled by fear and shaken by the generator's draconic roars, was nothing but a boy whom Elena had left for dead. Kave, who walked out of the shelter half an hour later, was someone else, something else.
✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧
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