No one lifts Crow's corpse from the floor. With his missing eyes painted red, he gazes at the holes in the rust-eaten ceiling, the mutation in his limbs silenced by a light bullet between his eyes. The two warriors take their seats next to me, quiet behind their masks, both reeking of Corruption.

"What do you want?" I ask them. The Corrupted one answers, his mangled arm far too close to my shoulder.

"Doesn't matter."

I reach over the bar table and grab the first bottle I see--rum, strong and covered with a thin layer of dust. It splashes over the sides of two new glasses as I pour them a couple of sloppy shots.

"I'm King," I say, and slide the glasses to them.

"I know," the Corrupted one says. He gives his partner the other drink. "Pleasure." A look from the side of his eye and a curt nod--something about the gesture puts me off. "I'm Delta."

The other raises his glass to me in greeting, black bandages covering yellow sores on his forearms. "Witch," he says, voice young and naive. An apprentice, perhaps?

"What's your business here?" I say.

"Just passing through," Delta replies. He pulls down his mask to sip his rum, cheeks sliced open, gums black and lined with long teeth. The mask slides back over the rot, and he hides his glass inside a skeletal hand.

"Your home is in the opposite direction." I jab my thumb to the door.

Delta looks down at me out the corners of his swollen eyes, sweat pooled in the wrinkles of his brow. "Do we have a problem?"

Witch shifts in his seat next to him, fingers touching one of the many knives strapped to his legs. Thief and I are like children sitting next to them; even at the bar, their shadows swallow us up.

"That's up to you," I say. "What are you doing in my district?"

"Just passage," Delta says. His weeping eyes narrow.

"Passage to where?"

Thief grabs my arm and yanks me away. "Hey, let it go." She gives Delta a wary look. "Their business is their own."

I grab my whiskey, staring at the bottom of the glass. "Huh. Just asking questions."

Delta and Witch relax and turn their gaze to the back of the bar, blinking their tired eyes in the thin daylight.

The music stops in the middle of a song, speakers spitting static in the corners. Silence envelopes us, interrupted by the gentle hot breeze whistling through the doorway. For a moment, Jawbone sleeps.

The guitar returns, the drums vibrate bottles on their shelves. I smash my emptied glass against the table, blue shards reflecting the dim sunlight, and plunge the sharpened edges deep into Delta's Corrupted neck.

Anarchy and chaos are two temptations we Ancients can never resist.

Hunters spring from their seats to either watch the show or kill each other. Fishermen and farmers become assassins with their weapons unveiled. Tables collapse into splinters, people climb on counters to gain a better view, whistling, shouting, and placing their bets on me. The two old men continue to play cards in their corner as if they are the only ones who exist.

I wrap my arms around Delta's neck and drag him to the ground. Although he challenges my height three times over I keep him tied and helpless, legs thrashing, ribcage pressed to the ceiling while he gasps for air. I hold my breath to block his stench and wrinkle my nose when my arms sink into his combat suit, his skin so sticky that it melts.

Shouts explode through the bar around me, the crowd thickens, bottles smash against the floor while we tussle in their midst...not that the fight is very fair, my strength far surpasses his. I slip my knife from my pocket and stab him until his knees buckle, my hands slippery with blood that should be red instead of black.

Over his rancid shoulder, I see Thief attack the other, Witch, who wields his crossbow like the amateur he is. Thief catches an arrow, snatched from midair the second he fires it at my head. She socks him in the stomach, he doubles over, she drives the arrow's tip through the back of his neck. He slides to meet Crow's corpse on the floor, where yellow sores spread across his skin, and insects start to squirm.

My blade meets Delta's throat. Steel slices bloated skin and crunches through bone, his cries silenced by the knife. The bar cheers, smiles slapped across dirty faces. Their shouts crescendo to a roar when I drop him to join the others.

I point to the exit. "The hunt's mine! Get the fuck out!" As if they would listen to me. But I am interrupted by stars and fireworks. Something cracks into my skull and splits the room in half. The floor finds my hands and knees, blood trickles down my neck, darkness blots my vision, and stuffs the cotton further inside my ears.

"Wh-" Dizzy, so damn dizzy. "What the hell?" Blinded by static and black spots, I scramble to find my footing. The floor shifts underneath me with the vibrations of a hundred footsteps and voices hushed by the ringing in my head. Through the darkness, I squint and focus on the remaining bit of light, where smeared lipstick smiles at me somewhere beyond the static in my eyes. Red high heels strike the ground, ankles covered in ripped fishnet tights.

The image swirls. Sharp fingernails sink into my chest and slam me to the ground. Shock reverberates up my spine and renders me immobile, the breath knocked from my lungs.

"I don't care about where you came from," the girl says. Her picture clears second by second. Still, my head aches too much to move, and I stare helpless and paralyzed at her painted face. She sets her knee against my chest and puts her head over mine, dirty hair tickling my cheeks, perfumed breath clogging my nose. Ink and yellow boils ooze from her stomach where my knife once was, a mutation ready to conquer the rest of her tooth-pick torso.

My thoughts race, incoherent and useless, as I scramble for the words and energy I need to fight back. But I can't find the strength to push past the pounding in my skull.

"And I don't care who you are. You're dead!" She holds a light gun between my eyes, thumb poised on the hammer. It knocks, the gun clicks, barrel filling with that familiar, eerie glow.

The air whistles. A sharp breeze clips my ear. My heart leaps into my throat for a moment, vision blotted out by the starlight pressed to my face, but the charge hesitates at the mouth, then fades.

Five arrows slice through her face. One spears a silver eye, the next pierce the space between her brow, three and four blind her twice through the other, and five shuts up her drippy red mouth.

She chokes. Her arms hang from slumped shoulders. I curl my fists together and smack her off of me, where she sprawls across the floor, arrow tips decorating the back of her head.

Someone grabs the back of my shirt. I see my body drag across the floor, limp and unmoving limbs sliding underneath me. Whoever it is, their touch is strong but gentle. They prop me up underneath the bar table where I work through my concussion, staring past the legs of broken rebar stools, still searching for the breath knocked out of my lungs, still trying to put the two sliced pieces of my vision back together.

With shaky fingers, I climb the sides of my face to find my hair, sticky with water and dirt from rolling on the ground. The trail of blood leads me to the center of my head. Something rough meets my touch, something cold and metallic, something that definitely doesn't belong.

A rebar chair leg jammed several inches into my skull.

That bitch.

Thief is yelling at me but I can't hear what she's saying. She holds an empty crossbow in one hand, the other hand shaking my shoulder, her fingers soaked in my blood. The bar starts to empty behind her. Some Ancients push through the crowd and dash out the doorway, colliding with one another over the threshold in a desperate attempt to escape. Curious. We aren't the kind of folk who turn from anything, it's our passion for a fight that gets us killed. But there are two things in this world that will make an Ancient run away, no questions asked, no loss of dignity. Titan would be the first. The second?

Ink Creepers.

Delta's twitching body bloats with mutation, not uncommon or unnatural for Corruption. But his yellow boils turn black, a tell-tale sign of the kind of Beast he'll become. The first hunter points it out and when he does, no one hesitates. They stampede to the hills, some side-stepping the blood on the floor for fear that it would spur on their own mutations. Others make their way to the town below to watch from the rooftops, children and residents joining them in anticipation of their favorite sport. No one wants to be in a fight with an Ink Creeper, no one wants to be anywhere near it, but everybody wants to watch.

Thief stops shaking me and stares over her shoulder, distracted by the chaos. Her one silver eye widens. Sweat drips from her chin. She shoves aside the chair next to me and takes cover under the bar at my side, her warm shoulder pressed against mine. We watch the hell beast come to life, trapped beneath the stools, as the bar empties to leave us alone in the face of pestilence and death.

I've seen Corruption countless times, gone through the first few stages myself, but the process never ceases to bother me. How the body twists without command, how the skin ruptures along an ever-growing spine, how the limbs dissolve into a mess of ink and misplaced bones; it wraps my stomach into knots. Delta is no different from the rest.

The wound on his throat oozes yellow sores and ugly boils. He lifts his head from the ground, eyes narrowed into slits, cloudy and lifeless. The hardened black mask disappears inside a dripping face. Strange hair slides over his eyes, reaching for the ground like thick strings of wax on a melting candlestick. The pattern continues along his body, his clothes overcome by seeping puddles of white skin and waxy strands, his legs bulging with it until they disappear in a mess of stinking ropes and misshapen tissue.

His spine rises to meet the ceiling, the pigmentation translucent enough to expose his ever-expanding ribcage. Something awful squirms beneath the surface. His skin continues to melt in endless strings of wax, spattering the floor with infection. With shoulder blades pointed to the sky he lifts his arms and plants his hands, claws ever-reaching, skeletal, and sharpened into spikes.

This is Corruption at an uproar, too desperate to take a shape, so it drips from bare-bones and swollen limbs. The head lifts and spills wax unending, dotted by two black holes that serve as eyes. Faceless and inhuman, the creature doesn't make a sound. It curls its back against the ceiling, shaking the fluorescent lights from their fixtures and scattering glass over the broken tables. With its gaze set upon the doorway, it pulls skeletal legs from the mass below its torso, clawed feet lost inside the pile of mutation. Silent he stands pressed to the edges of the steel walls, chest heaving with rancid breath.

Thief exhales beside me and drops her head, relieved. "Ah, thank god, it's not a Creeper."

"Just another Variant," I say, disappointed.

She nods. "I'll kill it easy if we keep it in here, that way it doesn't contaminate the tow--"

I take out my knife and throw it at the creature's head.

"No, what the fuck!" Thief reaches for my arm, but she's too late. The blade leaves my fingertips and sails through the air, then slices straight through the strained muscles above its collarbones, lost inside the wax.

The Variant screams, mouthless and demonic, the sound rippling through the floor. Glasses fall from the shelves and shatter, wires and pipes punch through the termite-ridden boards.

He claws at his neck, black eyes bulging with ink, and tears out the doorway to devour Jawbone Hill.

WC: 2199