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rahuratna · 1 month ago

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Synopsis: In a remote, curse-infested countryside, Atsuya learns that love is all that lies between hope and despair.

My first KusaHigu fic, written for the lovely @jjk-eugie . Happy birthday, Eugie! 🥰🥰

Contents: Post-apoocalytic AU, romance, angst, suspense, mystery.

Banner art: The Angels Came with Glad Tidings - Peter Ferguson

Dividers by: @enchanthings-a

The pathway twists, sinuous, beneath his feet. Breath fogging in the early morning air, he curses at the lack of light, at how every step threatens to turn his ankle at an odd angle. The stitch in his chest snags, abruptly painful, a thread caught on a nail, tugging. Not for the first time, he considers giving up cigarettes for good.

He can smell them.

They are still in hot pursuit, murderous zephyrs that ghost across the countryside, turning air into steel when their bodies solidify and slice across tender flesh. His cheek still stings from where he'd narrowly dodged their last attack.

Their bodies carry a clean, chemical scent, of burning ozone right after lightning cleaves the earth. They cannot be seen, not by an ordinary eye, but Atsuya can sense them.

His trusty blade has left more than a few of them lying rent in his tracks, their essence spilling, corrosive, over the faintly rustling grass. Even with all his experience as a sorcerer, he cannot withstand a flock of them, and if Atsuya has learned anything, it's how to pick his battles.

Cresting a rise, fingers digging into the earth, something eases in his chest as he spots the old farmhouse. The gabled roof, the high-ceilinged barn that stands to the side, the remains of old herb beds all along the length of the building and the shuttered windows, all wrapped in the dark veil of Hiromi's technique.

Safety.

That's what Hiromi's barrier offers, a shield against the constant barrage of cursed spirits that roam the atmosphere in these parts, sailing down in deadly, feather-light formation when their prey comes into view.

Eagerness lends strength to his tired limbs, catapulting him across the yard and though the safety of the barrier. The wind spirits batter fruitlessly against the shadowed window, solid for them, their spindly bodies unable to withstand the heaviness of the collision. Their shrieks of frustration echo across, tearing into the sanctuary of the yard.

Atsuya heaves a shuddering breath and almost reaches for the breast pocket where his cigarettes are kept. His hand stills, quivering. Exhaustion chases the adrenaline that has been coursing through his body. He is suddenly aware of how his chest heaves, the dampness of the shirt clinging to his back, the fluttering protest and burn within his muscles, the straps of the laden backpack chafing his shoulders, unbearably heavy.

He grasps his knees, taking deep, grounding breaths, the pounding in his ears slowly receding. Eventually, equilibrium returns.

The doorknob turns with a squeal under his fingers as he enters the farmhouse, taking in the lit fire in the hearth, the dust hovering in the air, the old couch that had been recently cleaned and set neatly to serve as a makeshift bed.

Hiromi is sitting upright, elbows resting on knees, the shadowed eyes more pronounced against the pallor of his skin. Atsuya clicked his tongue.

"I told you to get some rest."

"I did."

Rising with slow deliberation, Hiromi approaches him. Holding up their defenses has been sapping his strength. Even with his considerable reserves of cursed energy, it is glaringly evident that the barrier he has cast over their refuge cannot be held indefinitely.

Hiromi reaches out, the cool pad of his finger soothing against Atsuya's flesh, tracing the dried blood of the scratch across his cheek. A faint line appears between his dark brows.

"How many of them?"

"Couldn't tell. Too busy running away."

Leaning forward, Atsuya brushes his lips against Hiromi's, brief, tender, a promise of more after their pressing concerns have been dealt with.

"Found some good supplies about a mile off. Another homestead. Had these locked way in a basement."

He kneels before Hiromi, sliding the backpack off with a slight wince. From within the bag, he produces an array of sealed and canned food, some drinking water, lighters, a small portable stove, flashlights, batteries and a toolkit. He gestures to the last item.

"This'll help with fixing up the rover."

His gaze wanders upward, hesitantly, taking in the other man's gaunt aspect.

"Just a day more. That's all I need."

Kneeling in turn, Hiromi's smile is soft, familiar, if a tad wan. He ignores the food and water, even though he has not eaten since yesterday, and reaches for the buttons of Atsuya's shirt. Slipping the dirt-streaked fabric from the broad shoulders, his deep-set gaze takes in the reddened welts where the straps of the backpack have cut into flesh. Atsuya attempts to shrug the shirt back on, but Hiromi isn't having any of it.

"Let me take care of this."

Atsuya's voice is low, charged with something akin to self-loathing.

"No. You're already doing enough."

"I'll eat after I've seen to these injuries."

It doesn't take much to shift Hiromi's request to a smoothly delivered threat. Atsuya grumbles slightly, but concedes. When it comes to turns of the tongue, he can never outdo the former defense attorney.

The first aid kit they'd come across a few days before, in a ruined clinic, is brought out. Hiromi's touch is soft as he brushes the wounds with disinfectant, applying an antiseptic cream before settling gauze across the tops of Atsuya's shoulders.

Even after all of this time, the feel of his fingers on Atuya's skin causes a hitch of shallow breath, a constriction of the ribcage, that sweet, sweet twist of agonised desire, now tainted with a different kind of pain.

Hiromi should be waking up in a soft bed, in the comfort of the shielded city, in impregnable safety. The sun should be painting gold brushstrokes, rich and patterned, all along his cheeks as it comes through the blinds. There should be steaming coffee waiting for him on the countertop, a pristine paper left for his deft fingers to flip open, smoothing out along the crisp pages.

The image is vivid enough for Atsuya's eyes to reflect something of his pain, his guilt. Hiromi had followed him out here after all. He would never leave his side, and Atsuya was fully aware of that when he took this task into his incapable hands. His awareness is brought back to the dingy interior of the farmhouse as Hiromi completes his treatment.

"That should do it."

"Good. Now will you please eat something?"

Hiromi regards him in silence for a minute before nodding and examining the food. There is a sealed bag of rice, canned mackerel and tuna, curry cubes and spam, enough to make a filling, if basic meal.

"I cleaned a few pots and plates earlier. I'll get this heated up."

He frowned as Atsuya rose to his feet, buttoning up his shirt.

"Where are you going?"

"Perimeter check."

Reaching down, Atsuya's calloused fingers card through Hiromi's disshevelled hair, brushing it back from his eyes. He traces down, across the hollow of his cheek, his chin, his throat.

"I'll be back in a bit."

It had been two years since the great Curse Awakening, a sudden shift in the evolution of curses worldwide. Special Grade curses had been a rare phenomenon, in the days of normalcy that came before. Even then, sorcerers were stretched to their limit, their ranks thinned a little further every time a catastrophic event occurred on their side of the spiritual veil.

Now, it was worse, on an order of magnitude they'd never thought possible.

The strange resonance that had passed through the world with the coming of the King of Curses had accelerated the development of existing low grade spirits. Their power had increased hundredfold, but not their intelligence, or awareness. It was as if humankind was suddenly on the receiving end of a mindless and all-consuming rage, one that would not rest until sorcerers and those they protected were annihilated completely.

As he made his rounds of the yard outside the dilapidated farmhouse, Atsuya recalled a time when he could have repelled one of the stinging zephyr spirits with a flick of his finger. Now they flocked high up, hidden among clouds, ravenous and razor-toothed as piranhas.

Hiromi's barrier would hold out for some time yet, but he was more concerned about the attention it would bring upon them. They'd been holed up here for three days already, and on each expedition Atsuya had taken outside the safety of their enclosure, there'd been more and more spirits waiting for him.

He hadn't mentioned this to Hiromi, but he knew that his lover suspected all the same. Hiromi had always been able to read the nuance of his every expression. Sometimes all he had to do was ask a question, and Atsuya's body language would answer for him.

All that was left was for Atsuya to come to terms with where this damnable mission had led them -

Wait. There.

As he rounded the corner of the barn, something caught his eye. Atsuya raised the beam of his torch, approaching cautiously. The stink of foreign cursed energy was stronger here, not the signature of a spirit, thankfully, but certainly the trace of one.

The back wall of the barn sat just outside Hiromi's barrier, the interior bisected by the dark dome. Wandering around to a better vantage point, Atsuya's grip on the hilt of his sword became more pronounced. There was no doubt about it. What he was sensing emanated from that back wall.

Careful not to step outside the barrier, he craned his neck, eyes narrowing as they took in the sight of the barn. The slatted wood was marked with slashes and dents of varying lengths, where the zephyr spirits had beat themselves into oblivion in an attempt to follow him through.

What struck Atsuya immediately, though, was the fact that the markings were by no means random. They'd been applied in a rough circle, with points within facing inward as if forming the spokes of an incomplete wheel.

The zephyrs hadn't been without agency after all. Primitive as it was, they'd left behind a message, one that told of a failed hunt. The grooves in the aged wood pulsed with cursed energy that resonated in his fingertips, all over his scalp.

Sheathing his partially drawn sword, Atsuya made his way back to the farmhouse, lips drawn into a grim line.

"Change of plan. I fix the rover tonight. We eat, get some rest, and leave first thing tomorrow."

Hiromi looked up sharply from where he'd been tipping the hot rice into bowls.

"What's wrong? What's happened?"

"You're telling me you want to stay here a day longer?"

"Atsuya."

The warning in Hiromi's voice is clearer now. He places his palms flat on the table, that unerring gaze never shifting from his partner's face. Atsuya sighed, scrubbing a hand vigorously over his face, rising to tousle his hair.

"Fine. There's ... some kind of trace those curses left behind. The ones that followed me back here. It seems deliberate. It's making me ... "

"Uneasy."

Hiromi completed his sentence, voice lowering to a whisper. He stood at the table, deep in thought for a moment before his brow cleared and he handed over a bowl to Atsuya.

"Eat while it's hot. We'll go with your idea and leave tomorrow morning."

He tilted his head skeptically as Atsuya took the bowl with a grateful sound and tucked in.

"Can the rover really be fixed in time?"

Still standing, Atsuya nodded, shoveling rice and spam into his mouth.

"With those tools I found, yeah. No problem."

"And do you think you'll be able to fix the rover with an upset stomach because of how you've been guzzling your food?"

Atsuya paused, eyebrow raised. He took in Hiromi's stoic expression, the quiver at the corner of his mouth, before snorting in amusement.

"You finding ways to take charge of me, even out here?"

"Everyone and their great aunt knows how much you like it when I do."

Hiromi's reply is airy, sardonic, but Atsuya sees the slight stoop in his posture, the effort in his movements, the way he lowers himself with care into the wooden chair opposite, eyes briefly closing. It firms his resolve even further.

"Right. We leave at first light."

The rover eventually yielded to Atsuya's probing, the engine sputtering into glorious life, a fair miracle considering the amount of time it had been lying dormant. Hiromi loaded their scant supplies into the rear, including the remains of the food they had salvaged.

"Ready?"

Atsuya nodded.

"Drop the barrier the moment we get out."

Guiding the vehicle out through the widened passage of the open double doors of the shed, Atsuya stalled briefly, waiting for Hiromi to clamber into the passenger seat, hauling the last of the supplies into the back.

Just as the rover trundled out into the stillness of the morning, Hiromi doubled over, clutching his head. In spite of his obvious pain, he reached an insistent hand out to Atsuya, encasing his thigh in an iron grasp.

"Don't ... don't slow down ... something's ... the barrier ... can't hold -"

Without waiting for further elaboration, Atsuya slammed a foot on the accelerator, barreling out into the yard, hands working on the steering rapidly to avoid the embankment that bordered the property. The ground beneath the wheels reverberated, a sickening lurch causing the vehicle to jump slightly.

With a ragged gasp, Hiromi released the barrier, slumping back in his seat. Glancing behind them, Atsuya broke into a sweat as he watched the entire farmhouse shudder, the walls buckling under some great, internal pressure.

His gaze snapped forward, focusing on the winding, narrow roads that intersected and wound through the countryside, the tyres screeching as he navigated sharp turns. At the crest of the next rise, an explosive roar rent the air, and Hiromi clutched at the dashboard and swore as Atsuya swerved to avoid a large section of what seemed to be roof tiling that shattered in the middle of the road.

Coming to a temporary halt, Atsuya peered, half fearful, back towards the farmhouse. Beside him, Hiromi was bent over, breathing ragged from the effort it had taken to keep up his barrier against the tremendous force that had battered against it.

"What the - "

Atsuya's voice rasped through his dry throat, eyes widening as he took in the sight of the building that had sheltered them over the past few days.

Thrusting upward, through the rubble, was something that looked like a gigantic carnivorous plant, fleshy fangs the length of his arm open in serrated, scarlet edges in the oval of its maw. The remnants of the farmhouse, concrete, brick, mortar and metal piping, littered the area around, having narrowly missed the vehicle.

An image flashed upon Atsuya's mind, a wheel with incompete spokes imbued in cursed energy, carved into the wall of the barn.

A mark, a target.

His mind raced. The cursed spirits were evolving even further, forming connections between each other of a nature he could not -

Fingers digging into his cheeks brought him back, to the musty interior of the old rover. Having somewhat recovered, Hiromi was grasping his face, calling his name. Dark hair clung to the pallid, sweaty forehead, the composure so distinctive to that beloved face all but shattered. Atsuya gulped.

"Hiro - "

But it was useless to speak, especially now when the magnitude of his actions came rushing down like an icy torrent, chilling him to the bone.

If they had remained even a minute longer, if they had decided to bring along the blankets they'd found in the cupboard, if they'd taken a little more time scarfing down the last of the rice that morning -

Atsuya was a sorcerer, through and through. He'd learned long ago to accept the inevitability of his own bloody end, the fact that sorcerers did not die peacefully, in their beds. He'd seen friends and colleagues pass violently, painfully, before his eyes, and confronted the yawning emptiness they left in their wake.

Hiromi, however ... Hiromi crept into those secret, vital parts of himself that he'd never shared before. He turned Atsuya's heart from a stony, flat continent to a world of vibrancy and never-ending verdancy, a rainforest that rivaled even the monstrous plant that had torn apart their temporary shelter.

He would not let them have him.

He would not let harm come to the man whose very existence drove him to take the risks he did, all so that they could someday live as they -

Tender and violent, teeth clashing against his, fingers digging deeper into his face to bring him back. Such was Hiromi's kiss. Atsuya took a deep, shuddering breath, tearing himself away, accepting the sweetness of that searing rebuke.

Now was not the time to lose himself. Now was not the time to despair. And Hiromi would always, always remind him. Nodding silently, resting their foreheads together for a brief moment, Atsuya turned, carefully navigating around the rubble that now littered the road.

He would fulfill his mission. He would do all that one with his limited power could, in this terrible new world. With Hiromi at his side, with those steady hands, the sweep of his dark hair, the stubble that dotted his cheeks, the wear and tear on his old sweater and gloves, the beauty of his profile against a grimy window, he could never give up. He could never stop, not until the earth claimed both their bodies, side by side.

Fingers woven together as they sped away from the curse-infested fields, Atsuya glanced from time to time at Hiromi where he slept, exhausted, in the passenger seat. Beyond the dozing form of his lover, scarlet and gold threaded across the horizon, the dawn chasing them across fallow fields.

#jjk #jujutsu kaisen #jjk fanfic #jujutsu kaisen fanfic #kusakabe atsuya #jjk kusakabe #higuruma hiromi #jjk hiromi #jjk higuruma #jujutsu kaisen higuruma #kusahigu #kusakabe x higuruma #post apocalyptic #jjk au #romance #angst #suspense #mystery #happy birthday eugie!

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grimacres · 2 months ago

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Eco-War One - Ch.1

Another of my serialized, field-log-style stories. This one went on for quite a while, and is slowly but surely turning into the outline for a proper novel. Alien mushrooms that take over the planet and cause an ecological crisis - what is there not to love? Welcome to the world of Eco-War One!

Diary Log: Max Denton Field Engineer 2nd Class, Eco-Corps XXXI Habitat 17 “Blue Valley” Somewhere south of Warsaw, Poland September 2nd, 2035

We got to the subterranean housing units today, finally. Three months waiting out at the Warsaw camp, and then the transports finally picked us up two days ago. Cramped beyond belief, on those fat trains with the hermetic sealing, but after Warsaw we’re all used to living ass-to-elbow by now.

We’re on the seventh floor, Blue Lane, number 300-something. Still busy unpacking and figuring out the housing unit – everything is either brand new, or still covered in construction dust. The shelter has something like fifteen levels in total, with around a thousand housing units per level, and four people (minimum) per unit. Do the math: sixty thousand people in one place, and there are hundreds of these new silos being dug and furnished every month. Plenty of UN and Eco-Corps guys here too, in their blue berets and vests, and we run through weapon scanners whenever we want to leave the level or visit any of the communal spaces. Makes sense, I guess, but I can’t imagine how long it will take before it becomes chaos down here. The “new paint” smell will wear off around the same time as the patience and goodwill of everyone crammed in here.

Do we have an option? The camps at Warsaw were meant to be a step up from the ruins to the south and west, and even those camps were rough. Food lines for hours every day, and decontamination teams everywhere to steam and acid-scrub everything two or even three times a day. Illness everywhere, from regular vitamin deficiencies – and those horrible flu coughs – to blue-lung and scalp-rot and that weird thing where your nails fall out and your fingertips go numb. Our one tent-neighbor had that, and cut his one finger off by accident while making dinner one night. Didn’t feel a thing until he noticed the blood everywhere.

Will the shelter here end up being any better? Million-dollar question. Government says yes, and the Eco-Corps signed off on the idea. On paper, quite simple: make a sterile environment, practice strict access control with decontamination, and then – in theory – you can maintain the clean environment indefinitely. We live below ground, we work below ground, we spend all our time below ground, and only the brave or stupid folks find a reason to go back to the surface again. Well: the brave/stupid and the Eco-Corps guys, although they are a different case. Good luck getting through the UN lines too, for that matter: they control all access here, to keep Shining Path and the pluon out, and are basically going to be the white blood cells that protect us.

Grim though, actually: what does that make us, lurking below the ground?

A seed, hiding out the winter and blight, to sprout again in springtime?

Or a cancer, in a dying body, slowly rotting away in the dark?

Time will tell.

September 5th, 2035

They switched on the big UV lamps in the communal spaces today, and people literally cried. People who have not seen clear skies or plain sunlight in months – or even years, in some cases – crying as those big lamps came on. Felt amazing, and I’m sure it was 90% psychological. Mary agreed when we discussed it over dinner: that feeling of being underground, of living in a can, becomes a lot more bearable if you can at least go out to a space that looks and feels a bit like what we grew up with. Even if it is just forty-five minutes per day in the Prime Zone (that’s what they call the big park in the middle, where you get direct light); the rest of the time, we can use the walkways around the light-spaces to at least catch some reflected light. Access to the Prime Zone is purely by your ID chip, although some people are already gambling and selling off their PZ times to fund other habits. Bound to happen eventually. We have vitamin D supplements in most of our foodstuffs now, so skipping out on PZ time won’t kill you, but still – people will abuse this, I can see it happening (is that my old analyst training speaking, or my general distrust by now?)

Makes me wonder how they are going to regulate the temperature here, now, with those big lamps going for fifteen or sixteen hours a day, but I’m guessing the smart people who built this place already thought of that. Probably some type of draft circulation system in the upper reaches of the habitat, getting pumped out to the agri-caverns, and then cold air coming from downstairs somewhere to replace it. Round and round like a good little hydraulic system, except this one keeps upwards of sixty thousand people warm/cool.

Speaking of agri-caverns: Mary and her team opened up the next set of tunnels yesterday, and she came home with bloody fingers and missing fingernails after installing UV streamers and hydroponic lines for her entire double shift. They are behind schedule on getting the food sections up and running. Nothing life-threatening, given our stockpiles of foam-bread and that algae derivatives from Sweden, but it will slow things down for sure here. They are meant to have protein reactors up there by the end of the month, and no-one is sure about that timeline currently. Plenty to worry about regardless.

September 8th, 2035

Mary did another double shift yesterday, and passed out on our couch in the living space. I haven’t mentioned our housemates yet – Red and Jenna Holton, from “somewhere to the west” originally – and that is pretty much just because we rarely see them at this point. Red is on the boring crew on level thirteen, breaking ground on more side tunnels (the type of excavations which Mary’s team then uses) and putting in more time than Mary, and Jenna is in logistics at the warehouse district. She only works single shifts, but seems to spend her down-time at some other place. I think she’s not a fan of my Eco-Corps uniform, and is actively avoiding the housing unit while I am here. You’d think someone in Planning & Allocations would have checked for that before lumping us together.

Which brings me to the real news for tonight: Rec Unit 173 is heading out tomorrow, and I’m in charge of Bravo team. Standard water reclamation run, all by the book. Nothing fancy, nothing new, just the usual routine of finding and moving the old hardware. We have a Peacekeeper squad in support, just in case, and we have half a sector grid to work through. It will be the first reclamation run for our habitat, so the expectations are low/high: low for success, high for glitches and speed bumps. If we can just get all the civie volunteers to move in the same direction and not touch the wrong things, it will already be a Win in my books. Bonus points if no-one dies.

I wonder how the habitat is going to handle deaths - I just realized I have never given it any thought. Mulch reactors, to recycle and compost? Or would that be too much of a contamination risk, especially if there was illness involved? Cremation is probably the safest. Graves are out of the question, we won’t have any type of space for that in the bedrock layers - and if we buried people higher up in the softer soil layers, the risk of contamination comes back into play. I should ask Mary when she wakes. I probably won’t like the answer.

Diary Log: Max Denton Rec Unit 173, Eastern Defense Sector 7 Somewhere south-east of Warsaw, Poland September 9th, 2035 Mission: Day 1

Reclamation run Zero One, night one. RR01_01 according to the file header.

What a fucking day.

I’m writing this on my wrist compad, from inside an old apartment building we managed to find a clear space in just before sunset. The trucks are parked in the courtyard below, with the Peacekeepers on perimeter duty. Can’t say I envy them the night ahead. This sector is hell.

We left the habitat around 07:30, with the Peacekeepers leading in their Mantis rover and our two fat-wheeled Solomon trucks bumbling along behind them. Ten bodies per vehicle, myself in charge of the second Solomon (one team per vehicle). Driver is a kid named Eckelson, from somewhere up north. Drives well, but has not yet figured out how braking distances work. We set off to the sector grid we had been allocated, and it took us almost five hours of driving to get there. In a straight line, on a normal highway, it would have been perhaps ninety minutes? Absolute madness. We’re in a part of what used to be Poland, and now falls under that nebulous, shifting “Eastern Defense Sector 7” label. The handful of still-standing traffic signs we passed were in Polish, I think, but Eckelson said some of the later ones were Ukrainian. Who knows what this place was called before - no-one lives here any longer. The Shining Path warlords in Belarus have apparently been probing this area, and we passed some fresh wrecks along the side of the one road. Old Soviet personnel carriers, and those strange organic-looking poly-plastic rovers they have been growing in the Hong Kong labs. Then a handful of Eco-Corps wrecks too, mostly smaller rovers like the Mantis. Looks like two scout elements that had smashed into each other before retreating. Dense pluon forests surrounded the contact point, with golf-heads and purple parasols dominating, and I’m guessing the electro-magnetic interference from the golf-heads blinded the two scout columns until they were right on top of each other. Imagine dying because an alien fungus blinded your battle-cams…

Lunchtime arrived just as we reached our grid point. It had been an industrial park on the edge of a river before - in the Great Before, like the new generation calls it - and now… just ruins, and chaos, and rampant fungal growth everywhere. Gorkassy Park, something. The pluon lay on everything like a fluffy blanket, softening the corners and blurring the lines and making everything look half-melted and organic. You have to really squint and look hard - and use your imagination - to see the industrial lines beneath it all, to spot the sheds and warehouses and manufacturing floors that had once crowded the space here. Now: just pluon. Light purples, yellows, and shades of corpse-white, in a thick wave, drowning everything. We dismounted and started quartering the area, following behind the Peacekeepers as they checked for anything hostile. Well… hostile and able to be shot. A large part of what we face here, cares little for men with guns and bombs trying to deter it. Everyone was in an Hostile Environment suit - us in bulky suits from the science division, the Peacekeepers in their sleek neo-carapace kit - and after the Peacekeepers finished their perimeters we began to spread out and follow our own search pattern.

We lost two Alphas and one Bravo before the first hour was out. The two Alpha guys walked into a room filled with bulloa bulbs, and got blown sideways through a third-storey window when something in the room triggered the bulbs. The third guy, behind them, says they stopped to check something on the floor, and the Peacekeepers found what could be an old SP tripwire in the leftovers, but it could have been anything. There’s old industrial wire everywhere, even more now after the blast. I’m furious - and resigned, now, more than ever - about the fact that no-one had briefed the idiots about bulloa bulbs. They are basically the claymore landmines of the pluon world, and if Hollywood has taught us anything after years of Vietnam movies, it is that you do not mess with claymores. Especially when the damn things grew their own spiderweb triggers through every space they occupied. With their spores now released, the next time we come back to that same space, in a month or two, the entire room would be solid with the same bulloa. Then when that mass blows, it takes the walls with it, and the spores spread even further, and… before you know it, in the space of a year or two, the building itself will be only rubble.

The Bravo kid stepped on a plank with a rusty nail that went through the ankle of his boot. He panics, rips his boot and mask off when he hyperventilates - and gets a lungful of cryateen and blue honey spores before his buddy gets his mask back on. We managed to get him back to the Solomon before he went into cardiac arrest, but after that nothing helped. He’s in a body bag in one of the storage compartments now, along with what is left of the two Alphas after their accident. Just a kid who volunteered to help, with some spectacularly bad luck.

We finished our initial sweeps after that, gave everyone the safety brief again, and tried to find a place to secure for the night. There were old laborer apartments on the western perimeter of the complex, and someone had fired out the fourth and fifth floor in the one block some time ago. I’m surprised the entire place had not burned down, actually, but something must have stopped it from spreading. We’re on those fired floors now, using the clean spaces - if you consider the soot and ashes a safer alternative to a pluon landscape - for our night camp. Everyone in their environ-cocoons for the night, and two people on guard at the stairway at all times. My shift is next. I don’t think I’m sleeping tonight.

September 10th, 2035 Mission: Day 2

I haven’t been awake this long, without sleep, for a long time. Today was a blur: we finished mapping the industrial complex, identified the components worth salvaging, and started dismantling the smaller components. Two eight-hour shifts, back to back. This entire area is classed as Environmentally Compromised, Unfit for Human Occupation - ECUHO, or just Echo when you get tired of pronouncing all the letters - so we can take what we need. Well: we being the Eco-Corps, and only as long as we have the proper paperwork. With the UN legislation from 2029/’30 coming in to aid the reclamation projects, Echo labels now let us strip and salvage anything we find above-ground, as long as there are no living claimants in the same area. A bit like the old maritime laws on finding a derelict ship in international waters, I guess, except we’re not trying to lay salvage and insurance claims against abandoned fishing trawlers in the Atlantic. Now we call it Echo because we’re left looking at echoes of our past lives (not my observation, someone on the Mime-net channel shared that a couple of years ago). Morbid, but not entirely untrue either. I feel like a carrion eater every time I take apart a machine or compo-stack that used to do something else before the world went to hell here. Seeing all those things that used to mean so much to other people, in another time, as they went through their daily tasks and dreams - and now we take it apart and use it to keep our habitats running. One of the Bravos said it felt like stealing clothing from a corpse, and the squad was pretty damn quiet after that.

No fatalities today, and only one casualty: an Alpha kid broke his arm when a container stack shifted and pinned him to a wall. No suit breach, thank the Pope. Kid’s doped to the gills on a stretcher in the Alpha Solomon now, with a tough tomorrow ahead of him.

We also had an afternoon light show, just after the clouds pulled in. Something detonated high up in the atmosphere to the north, and we had greens and purples dancing inside the clouds for a couple of minutes before it faded again. Almost like the Northern Lights, but definitely not something as harmless as solar radiation striking the atmosphere. The Peacekeepers shared a report from their battle-net, about a strike at Halverdt Station - but Halverdt is way over to the north-west, by my reckoning, so whatever we saw was something else. Shining Path testing new cloud-seeders? Fuck knows. Black rain rolled in after that, and we kept our work indoors for the handful of minutes that it pissed down with soot and black mold and kimpani blisters outside. The blisters look like little plastic eggs stuck inside a wet envelope - an orb with flat wings curling out in four directions - and they pop the moment you touch them. They can travel for hundreds of kilometers when airborne, according to the studies, so there is no way of knowing where they actually came from. Could be the next valley, could be Lithuania for all we know. Contains a mix of spores and a mild acid, and is an absolute bitch to clean once it gets into anything mechanical. I sent two of the Bravos to hose down our Solomon immediately after the downpour stopped.

I still don’t understand Shining Path. I mean, I’ve read their manifestos and notes and e-pamphlets that they flood into the public net, and I’ve read the psych reports and analysis shows from the com-net and the late-night forum pools on CNN and NBC and MegaNexus, and I just… I don’t get them. Who in their right mind can look at this unholy mess that we are in right now, and then think to himself “Hmm this is great, I want more of this”? We - and I use the Royal We here, as in ‘we the human race’ - are facing a tangible and substantial risk of complete and utter extinction, and SP wants us to embrace that. They want us to engage with the pluon, treat it as some type of savior or benign spiritual influence, and let it “change us for a better future” as they love to say. Commune with the spirits, feel the union of Gaia and Olmaya or whatever they call this supposed consciousness-gestalt that is in the pluon.

Where is the better future? We are corpse thieves right now, stripping the dead to keep the living going for another day - and SP wants us to stop fighting? Where is this Promised Land that they keep going on and on about? China? China is a hellscape, by all accounts: the rad zones on the Russian border from the Sunshine War, massed rabies in the south, and the industrial heartland overrun by fossil-eating pluon strands like white-vein and cracker mold. Beijing bombs everything that resists CCP authority, and still - SP moves where they will, takes over towns where they will, runs openly SP-aligned settlements along the Mongolian and Vietnamese borders, and nothing can stop them. They have even started building floating settlements on the river dams now, according to the satellite views.

I don’t understand them. Pluon - this plague of xeno-fungus - is not here to save us. It feels like Judgement Day, and Shining Path has become the fifth horseman of the Apocalypse.

I need sleep. We have two more days on-site before we can head back. The wind is up tonight, and my environ-cocoon moves and shudders around me like the intestines of some giant beast that has swallowed me whole. At least the apartment floors here are still dry after the black rain.

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