The second birth was less traumatic than the first. Not because it hurt less—the tearing of the membrane still felt like peeling off a layer of sunburned skin—but because the panic was gone.
Panic is a variable. It skews data. It wastes calories.
Grigor slid from the sack, hitting the wet stone with a slap that sounded obscenely loud in the quiet between screams. He didn't scramble. He didn't gasp for air. He simply crouched, knees pressed against his chest, and waited.
The amniotic fluid drained from his lungs in a series of wet, hacking coughs. It tasted like seawater filtered through a slaughterhouse. Salty. Metallic. Faintly sweet in a way that made his stomach clench.
'Breathe. Sample. Analyze.'
The air here was different. The metallic tang of the upper shelves was heavier, but beneath it lay something sharper. Something that stung the back of the throat like a swallowed battery.
'Sulfur.' High concentration. Volcanic origin. Combustible.
And something else. A sour, biting scent rising from the mist below.
'Acid.'
Grigor opened his eyes. The world was a blur of grey fog and bioluminescent slime, but his brain wasn't seeing shapes anymore. It was seeing a crime scene.
He looked at his hands. New skin. Pale, translucent, unscarred. The body was a fresh canvas, reset by Hell's twisted economy. But the mind... the mind was still dirty.
'Good,' he thought. 'Clean is for the dead.'
He stood up. The vertigo hit him—a momentary spin as his inner ear calibrated to gravity—but he pushed it down. His muscles remembered the stance even if the flesh was new. Muscle memory was stored in the soul, apparently. One more data point.
The ledge stretched before him—a narrow spine of volcanic rock slick with condensation and something that might have been mucus. Above, the Birthing Sacks hung like obscene fruit, their bioluminescent glow casting everything in shades of corpse-blue. Below, the mist churned. Things moved in it. Things that didn't need to breathe.
They had eaten him. Soren. Bruna. The boy. They had processed him like livestock.
That was a mistake.
If you kill a man, you end him. If you eat him and let him respawn with his memories intact, you haven't disposed of the evidence. You've just given the witness a chance to review the case file.
Grigor began to walk. Not blindly this time. He moved with the slow, deliberate pace of an investigator walking a grid. Left foot, right foot. Two-second pauses between steps. Eyes scanning the ground in overlapping arcs.
'First priority: weapons. Second priority: concealment. Third priority: intel on their patrol patterns.'
He stopped at a patch of yellow crust accumulating on the side of a thermal vent. The vent hissed softly, exhaling heat that felt almost pleasant against his new skin. He scraped a fingernail across the crust, bringing the powder to his nose.
'Rotten eggs. Brimstone.'
Sulfur. Pure elemental sulfur. Flammable. Reactive. Melting point: 115 degrees Celsius. Ignition point: 232.
He scraped a handful of the crystals into his palm, closing his fist around them. The powder was gritty, slightly warm. It wasn't a weapon, not yet. It was an ingredient. Every bomb started as a shopping list.
'Mix with an oxidizer and you get combustion. Mix with acid and you get sulfuric. Mix with nothing and you still have a blinding agent.'
He moved on.
Ten meters down the ledge, a pool of green liquid had gathered in a depression in the rock. It steamed slightly in the cool air, wisps of vapor curling upward like slow-motion smoke. The smell was sharp enough to make his eyes water—concentrated, like battery acid left to cook in the sun.
A Dreg—one of the faceless, moaning things that hadn't learned to think yet—had stumbled too close. Its foot was dissolving. The flesh bubbled, turning into a grey sludge that sloughed off the bone.
The Dreg didn't scream. It just stared at its own liquefaction with the dull incomprehension of the newly damned.
Its mouth opened and closed. No words. Just the wet clicking of a tongue that hadn't figured out speech.
Grigor watched. He didn't help. He timed the reaction.
'Thirty seconds to liquefy dermis. Sixty for muscle tissue. Bone remains intact. pH somewhere between 1 and 2. Stronger than stomach acid.'
Hydrochloric acid? Or perhaps something biological. A gastric secretion from the Tower itself. The distinction was academic.
It didn't matter what it was. It mattered what it did.
Resources.
Except for the flesh, Hell was just chemistry. And chemistry obeyed laws. Even here.
He found a shard of black glass—obsidian, formed by the heat of the vents—near the pool. Sharp. Brittle. The edge caught the bioluminescent light like a razor blade dipped in ink. He tested it against his thumb. A thin line of red welled up immediately.
'Good edge retention. Brittle, so no parrying. Stab or slash, commit fully, discard after.'
He wrapped the dull end in dried moss to protect his palm, testing the grip twice before he was satisfied.
He pocketed the shard.
Then he turned back to the acid pool. He needed a container.
On the dissolving Dreg's belt hung a pouch—stomach-lining, acid-resistant by biological necessity. The Dreg's fingers twitched as Grigor unhooked it. Not a protest. Just nerves misfiring as the acid climbed past the ankle. The Dreg's eyes—cloudy, unfocused—tracked the movement without comprehension.
'You're already dead,' he thought. 'You just haven't finished the paperwork.'
He filled the pouch halfway from the green pool. Cinched it tight. The leather didn't sizzle.
'Weapon acquired.'
Inventory:
Sulfur (approx. 50g). Obsidian Shard (Blade equivalent). Acid Pouch (Chemical weapon).
It wasn't much. Against a man with a rebar hook, it was barely a start. But it was order. Order was the first step toward control. Control was the first step toward survival.
---
Grigor stopped.
He saw it on the ground, five meters ahead. A splash of red against the grey stone.
Blood.
Not fresh. Tacky. Coagulating. Maybe twenty minutes old. The edges had already started to crust, but the center was still wet enough to reflect the pale glow from above.
He knelt beside it, his knees pressing into the cold stone. The spatter pattern was high velocity—someone had been hit while moving. The drops were elongated, pointing down the ledge. Cast-off from a blunt weapon, based on the distribution. Swing arc suggested an overhead blow.
'Target was running. Fast.'
He measured the distance between the drops. Two meters. A full sprint.
'Barefoot. Light body weight. Female, probably. Under 60 kilograms.'
He leaned closer. The blood was mixed with something else. Something milky, viscous.
'Semen.'
His brain cataloged it without comment. This was evidence. Evidence didn't have emotion attached to it. Emotion contaminated analysis. The techs who got sick at crime scenes were the ones who made mistakes.
He had cleaned up after rape-murders before. The fluids were the same as any other organic compound. Protein. Enzymes. DNA.
'Irrelevant here. No forensic labs in Hell.'
Next to the blood: a clump of hair. Long. Blonde. Torn at the root. The follicles were still attached—pulled, not cut. Force applied at an upward angle. Someone had been grabbed by the hair while falling.
And a fingernail. Polished pink. Ripped from the bed.
'Someone tried to hold on.'
He followed the trail. Not footprints—drag marks. Wide smears where a body had been pulled across stone. The spacing suggested two assailants. Maybe three. The drag pattern was uneven—they'd shifted their grip at least twice.
'Struggling. Still conscious at this point.'
The smell changed.
Iron, yes. Ammonia—someone had pissed themselves. Fear response. Involuntary. And something else. Sharp. Chemical.
'Bleach?'
Faint, but present. The kind of industrial bleach used to sanitize surfaces. Or mark territory. Or... livestock.
'Branding solution,' he realized. Someone was being processed. Prepared for sale. Livestock. Property. The specifics didn't matter—the pattern was universal. Every economy had a supply chain.
'Not my problem,' Grigor thought. 'Dead is dead. They'll use her or they won't. I don't have the resources for heroism. Heroism is expensive. Heroism gets you eaten.'
He had been eaten. He remembered the sound of his own tendons tearing.
'Lesson learned.'
He almost walked away.
His feet were already turning when the sound reached him. Distant at first, then sharper. Human. Female. Hopeless.
Not a cry for help. Something beyond that. The kind of scream that came from a throat that had already given up on words.
Screaming.
'Thirty meters. Maybe forty. Echoes make it hard to judge.'
His feet stopped.