The Kiss of The Deep:: Deadmen's Reach

The Break Down

Antonio dropped to his knees, a smile still on his bloodied face. My heart dropped, and I tried to crawl to him, desperate to help, to do anything.

But his words stopped me cold. "My favorite Russian mechanic, my badass gangster kid... I'm sorry, I just couldn't keep you guys safe." He paused, his voice weak but steady. "Go find a secret door under my desk, maybe my thank-you gift will keep you two safe."

With those final words, I watched the life drain from his eyes, and the flood of tears I had been holding back finally came rushing forward. It was over. He was gone.

The sound of gunshots and a buzzsaw cutting through cultist flesh barely registered before everything went abruptly dark. My world faded into nothingness. Then, without warning, I found myself in an infinite black void. The ocean.

But I wasn't drowning.

A massive mechanical tendril emerged from the darkness, wrapping around me and pulling me toward an enormous mechanical eye. I could feel it studying me, examining every inch of my broken body. My muscles tensed, adrenaline spiking as I tried to break free, but something in my mind—something foreign—began clawing at my thoughts, ripping through them with a cold, mechanical voice that echoed in the deepest corners of my brain.

"I am Kemet-Hemut."

The words hit me like a sledgehammer. My eye exploded with pain—unbearable, mind-shattering pain that coursed through my skull, rattling my very soul.

I tried to fight the shock, to hold on to what little sense I had left, but in the aftermath, something began to change. A new eye started to form where my old one had been. It was wrong. It wasn't human. It was... incomplete.

I heard a crack, faint at first, and then I saw it—glass breaking, fracturing.

A human-like eye, but not human at all. A gear symbol for the pupil, clear rubber tubes like veins, copper wires pulsing like a living thing. The most grotesque part was how it slithered, crawling over to me, digging its wires into my empty socket.

The knowledge it forced into my brain was endless, overwhelming, and horrific. It sent me into a violent seizure, my body wracked with the intensity of the information flooding my senses.

When I finally woke, everything felt wrong. But there he was, the kid. Holding my hand, asleep beside me. My heart twisted as I watched him, as I felt the sticky, wet sensation running down the side of my face.

I rubbed my eye, expecting the worst, but somehow—somehow—I wasn't completely shocked. Blood. Flesh. It covered my hand.

But my first thought wasn't about the mess. It was about him.

I looked down at his arm, wrapped in bandages, covered in symbols. But his fingers—they weren't fingers anymore. They were black claws, grotesque and unnatural. I didn't care. Not anymore.

Without hesitation, I pulled him close, into my arms, my heart breaking as I held him.

Blood and tears mixed together, pooling on my face as a wave of emotions drowned me. My hand clutched him tighter, and I expected him to pull away in disgust. But instead, he held me close, his voice calm but steady.

"It's all right," he said. "Sooner or later, it all happens to us. We all lose a piece of ourselves. And we lose someone we love. In this city, that's just how it is. The best thing we can do right now is honor their memory and give their deaths meaning."

His words stuck with me, gnawing at my soul, as if they were a part of the lesson we were meant to learn. And to this very day, I carry them with me. The city, the pain, the transformations—they weren't just about survival anymore. They were about finding meaning in the death and destruction, in the pieces of ourselves we lost along the way.