Mai groaned as she lifted a hand to her head, pausing in confusion as she was unable to reach it. A memory flashed. An explosion. A crack as wide as three men were tall. Boulders the size of ground cars tumbling towards the ground. More cracks ripping across the cavern, bigger, wider, longer than her engineers had imagined they would be. The realisation that she wasn’t safe. That she was going to be joining the rock falling to the ground far below. Frantically consuming as much BIO-MASS as possible. Forming a mecha, modding it with increased armour, feeding the rest of the BIO-MASS she had into its system. And then falling. Noise. So much noise. Alarms. SOAK warnings. DAMAGE warnings. And then darkness.

“Where the fuck am I?” her mouth felt as though it was filled with chalk, and as she gradually regained her senses, ached all over. Wherever she was, it was dark. She flicked through the visual spectrums on her suit. Thankfully, she was able to find one which allowed her to see properly in the stygian darkness.

Dust hung in the air like a heavy fog. Looking upward she saw a mass of rock and boulders above her. There was a bright flash of light from one of the builders, and then sparks showered down, dying before they reached her. It took a while for her befuddled brain to work out that a boulder hadn’t sparked, rather it was a huge piece of the God-mecha.

“Biyu, Mai calling. Can you hear me?” Nothing, not even white noise. Looking around, she decided she couldn’t just sit and wait for a rescue which might never come. For all she knew, the Nether City forces thought she was dead.

Rocks shifted, smaller ones clattering down from behind her. Turning as gently as she could, fearing that any sudden movement would cause the roof to collapse and finally finish burying her, she faced the direction the noise had come from.

“What the..?” moving on all fours, not an easy thing to do in a mecha suit, she made her way over to where the rocks had fallen. Instead of a rockface, the falling rocks had revealed darkness. Reaching up, she delicately moved a rock from the top of the pile, widening the hole. Slowly, she pushed herself to her feet and peered through into the hole, forming a lamp to shine into the space beyond. “It’s a tunnel.”

And it was a decidedly more secure-looking tunnel than the space she was in. Even as she tried to see how far back the tunnel reached, the rocks above her groaned, gravel tumbling down to patter off her suit.

Throwing all caution to the wind, she started widening the hole, hands blurring as they cleared rock after rock until the hole was big enough for her to just barge through. No sooner had she thrown herself into the tunnel than there was a great rumbling, as if the earth had indigestion, and then the space she had been in was lost as it caved in, uncountable tonnes of rock crushing everything underneath it.

Five minutes later, Mai decided that the mecha-suit was using up far too much valuable BIO-BOOST. Absorbing it, she went with the Night Wolf, adding slightly more armour plates for a five per cent loss in STEALTH, but a twenty-per cent increase in SOAK. A compromise she was more than happy to make.

Her minimap only showed where she’d been and where her suit lamps illuminated. From what she could tell, she was in a completely new part of the caverns, no-one in Nether City ever having mapped the tunnels.

“Not these ones at least,” she muttered to herself as she walked along the tunnel, running her fingers over the smooth surface. As far as she could tell, it was most certainly not a natural tunnel, nor was it one formed by a large burrowing creature, something for which she was extremely grateful. The walls were far too smooth, best guess was that they had been made by lasers. But by whom and why, she had no idea.

“How the … here?” a voice, distorted, sounding simultaneously close by, but also incredibly distant filled the tunnel.

“Shut … stealth pro …”

Mai formed a suppressed SMG on one hand, and a heavy ballistic shield on the other. The shield cost a full three per cent BIO-MASS, dropping her level to eight-five per cent. Frowning, she felt around her belt, then groaned as she realised she’d lost her last BIO-MASS BOOST.

With no choice, she moved forward, shield raised, weapon resting on the special rim designed just for that purpose.

“How the hells did that psycho bitch kill a fucking God-mecha?” said the first voice she’d heard. It was coming from an opening in the tunnel a few paces ahead. Activating STEALTH, she moved up to the edge of the opening, then poked her weapon around the corner, using the sight to see what lay beyond.

She bit down on a gasp as she saw two cullers, their number glyphs clearly hanging above their heads. They stood over a dead mecha-knight, prodding the body as if they were disappointed it wasn’t responding. Zooming in, she spotted the top of a BIO-MASS BOOST just under the body.

If I can get that I actually stand a chance of making out of this mess, not that she knew if she actually wanted to make it out of the tunnels. She still had no idea whether killing the God-mecha had in any way saved the city.

It didn’t matter. Two enemies stood before her, and if they were in that part of the tunnel they must have come from further on, which meant that was the direction she needed to take if she wanted to get out.

Activating TUNNEL FIGHTER and USE SMG, she stepped into the tunnel. Target boxes covered her opponents. All three of her activated skills added bonuses, as did the fact that the two cullers were still completely oblivious to her presence. Bracing herself, she took careful aim on the one nearest to her. As ever, the head shot offered an INSTAKILL, and she took it, not wanting to waste a single bullet in case the bottle under the dead mecha-knight was empty.

HEADSHOT!

CRITICAL HIT! 95%

BLINDED

UNCONSCIOUS

PARALYSED

BLEED @15% PER SECOND

“No!” the other spun, gun raised high. Activating FREERUNNER, Mai dove to the ground, tucking into a roll before coming back up onto her knee. It wasn’t enough, the tunnel filled with orange light as the surviving culler’s weapon fired, the deafening since Mai had changed her suit, the flash blinding.

DAMAGE! 23%

BLEED @2%

INTIMIDATED!

SUPPRESSED!

KILL!

CULLER 2994387 ELIMINATED!

Not one of the enemy’s bullets had hit her shield and she cursed at her bad luck as she tucked down behind it. Gasping at the searing pain in her thigh, caused by what someone might charitably call a flesh wound, but which she viewed as a bloody great gash she activated her TREAT LIGHT WOUND, accepting the five per cent in BIO-MASS.

Her opponent was still screaming and firing non-stop, her attack finally striking Mai’s shield and filling her retinal monitor with a near continuous stream of SOAK messages.

DAMAGE! SOAK 95%

DAMAGE! SOAK 93%

DAMAGE! SOAK 89.5%

DAMAGE! SOAK 87%

DAMAGE! SOAK 84%

DAMAGE! SOAK 80%

DAMAGE! SOAK 79%

DAMAGE! SOAK 75%

DAMAGE! SOAK 74.8%

She’d had enough. Pushing her shield out before her and therefore covering as much of her body as possible, she absorbed her SMG, formed a triple-barrelled shotgun, and fired.

HIT! 45%

BLEED @3%

KNOCKDOWN

STAGGERED

INTIMIDATED

Not caring where the opponent was, she continued to fire, using the wide scatter of her shot to fill the tunnel.

HIT! 33%

BLEED @5%

KNOCKDOWN

STAGGERED

UNCONSCIOUS

Getting to her feet, Mai looked down at the unconscious culler. Blood welled out of numerous holes in her face and torso, coils of her stomach protruding from a particularly large hole in the woman’s stomach. Rolling her out of the way, Mai bent down and picked up the BIO-BOOST bottle. It was disappointingly light. Giving it a slight shake, she heard a little liquid. Cracking open the seal, she drained the bottle of its contents, then checked her BIO-MASS levels.

One hundred and one per cent. She’d take that. Not that she had any choice in the matter.

Mai had been making her way through the tunnels for nearly two hours before her comms channel crackled into life and Dakota’s voice filled her ears.

“Mai! Come in Mai! Gods dammit, if you’re alive, just click twice on your comm!” a smile creased Mai’s face as she finally heard a friendly voice.

“Dakota! Thank the gods you’re alive! I’m in some sort of tunnel system. Lots of enemies. I’ve killed a baker’s dozen. All colours for some reason.”

“Are you hurt?” the concern in Dakota’s voice filled Mai with warmth. All her friend wanted to know was whether she was hurt, whilst all she wanted to know was whether her friends were okay.

“No, how about you?”

“I’m fine, we’ve all healed as well as we can. We’re down to the dregs on BIO-MASS though. I’ve got teams searching the enemy dead for whatever they can find. Talking of finding, you’re finally on our minimap.”

Dakota proceeded to give her directions, guiding her through the maze of underground tunnels. More and more dead cullers started to appear, Dakota explaining that teams of Nether City urbexers had entered the tunnels once they’d been revealed.

“And the collapse?”

“Worked. You utterly smooshed the God-mecha. Took a few thousand of the enemy, and about thirty buildings of the city. All empty, before you start to panic. The ground opened up, and the enemy entered the tunnels to get away from the falling debris. So did our forces. Turn right.”

Mai turned right and walked straight into Dakota’s widespread arms. Before she could react she was pulled into a tight embrace, their armour clanking as Dakota tried her best to crush what life remained from Mai.

“Don’t you ever go and do something like that again,” her friend whispered fiercely, giving her a quick peck on the cheek before spitting on her hand and trying to remove some of the dirt covering Mai’s face. For a second it brought back a memory of her mother doing exactly the same thing, before she realised that her friend was basically mixing spit with muck.

“Yuck! Gross!” she laughed as she pushed Dakota away. “What’s the situation?”

Dakota’s return grin disappeared.

“Best you come see,” she said grimly.

Mai frowned, a lump forming in her stomach as she followed her friend out of the tunnel complex. As soon as they stepped into what passed for daylight in Nether City she cracked open her visor and took a deep breath. It was glorious. Even mixed with the stench of death, burning buildings and rock dust, it was the best air she had ever breathed. But something was missing.

Mai looked over to Dakota, eyes narrowing as she saw a wide grin on her friend’s face.

“What’s different?”

“Oh, not sure, what do you mean?” teased her friend. And then Mai caught on. There was no incoming artillery, the only artillery she could hear was firing from within the city. Similarly the sound of small arms fire was different. Louder by the city, much less coming from the boundaries.

“We’ve won?” she asked, mouth open, hand rising as she tried to hide her shock.

“You killed the leading player, crushed gods knows how many of their soldiers. They’re in full retreat.”

Mai opened her minimap, zooming out so that she could see the battlefield. The score chart next to the map appalled her with the huge numbers of losses on both sides. The one silver lining she could find out of the whole thing was that a number of units had collectively levelled up. Something she didn’t even know was a possibility. Some even had a Gold Star, indicating that they were now classed as Elite.

Bastards are changing the game, that most certainly wasn’t an option when we were taking over the city, even in her time of victory the programmers were meddling, souring what should have been a momentous celebration. Fuck ‘em.

“How far have they retreated?”

“Estimates are about one thousand paces between us and them. They’re flooding back towards the roads.”

“All units, this is Mai Xiao. Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. Chase the enemy down! Close with them. Kill them! Make the ground run red with their blood! Follow them into the Upper City! Charge!”

Looking at Dakota she gave her a wink.

“What say we join our people? I think it’s time we started to Ascend.”

THE END.