And There Was Another✔️

Chapter 43: Heart of Darkness

The first thing that hit Seth as he released the lockout and got the door open, (the secondary exit, they couldn't get the door they'd come in through open because it was too dented out of shape), was the stench. It was an acidic smell of burned meat and something much worse. He found himself looking into a short corridor of flash-fried corpses, all of them coated in a layer of burned flesh and ash. He coughed, wincing, and wondered if the stench came from the neutron purge or the terentatek corpses. In the end, he decided it didn't really matter and that the sooner they could go through this scorched nightmare, the better.

And so he began walking, taking the most direct route he could back to the elevator. They'd made sure that all the doors were unlocked, though that only extended to the top two levels. The one below them, the final level, was on its own security network that could not be accessed from anywhere but on that level they had discovered. Well, except for the neutron purge, that hit almost everywhere. As they walked through the now silent installation, Seth found himself thinking of his chest wound. It burned dully, but that wasn't what had him thinking.

He was wondering how much he could take.

Seth Kast had come to think of himself as very tough, physically speaking. It was something he had ensured through years of rigorous and diligent training, (something he had admittedly been slacking on recently, though he thought he was making up for it in sheer combat). Toughness was first a promise to himself, and then it became a matter of ego, and finally it had simply become a matter of fact. After a certain point, he'd kind of started to take it for granted. And it wasn't just physical strength, but mental fortitude, endurance, pain tolerance, and a handful of other qualities, all of which he had worked hard to strengthen over the past dozen years.

But he still knew that even with all this training, all this experience, all this time invested in almost nothing but strengthening himself, he still had a limit.

It had been reached more than once on this journey. How many times had he passed out? How much pain had he endured? How many new scars had he collected? Dxun had been pretty bad. Taris had been worse.

Death was something that he had resented initially, because he feared it. Eventually, he'd taken a sort of 'I don't give a crap' attitude that punks who knew they were hot stuff tended to adopt. You sort of came to think of yourself as above death, eventually. After that came a sort of respect for it, and then an acceptance of it. If you put on the armor and picked up the rifle, you accepted that you might die sooner rather than later.

And then, eventually, he had come to welcome it.

How many times had he gone into battle sure that he wouldn't come out the other side intact?

Too many to count at this point. Eventually, he came back around to resenting, even hating, death. Because now it seemed as if it would not claim him. Sometimes, he felt cursed. Poisoned. Afflicted. Once, he imagined that he walked like the damned must. He had come to feel as though death was haunting him, and then wondering if death had abandoned him. He just kept on...living. Only it didn't feel like living, it didn't even feel like surviving after awhile.

It felt like...

Dying without dying.

It was a haunting, harrowing, hollowed-out existence. He felt like a skeleton, a husk, no more than a shell of himself.

Sometimes he'd wondered if he was even still alive.

And now here he was, wanting to be alive. Wanting to survive. Being around these people, these four people, traveling with them, talking to them, listening to them, experiencing battle and life with them, having meals with them, connecting with them...