CHAPTER 17: A TASTE OF CORRUPTION

(Jinx’s POV)

The silence was the worst part.

After the explosion, after the mountain of rock and steel had sealed them in this tomb, there was a quiet so deep it felt like drowning.

My ears were still ringing.

Every inch of me was a fresh canvas of bruises.

But we were alive.

I looked at the kid, Michael, pushing a chunk of rebar off his back, and a feeling I hadn’t felt in years bubbled up in my chest.

Relief.

I hated it.

Relief makes you soft. Relief gets you killed.

The Rust Dogs had been relieved when we found that DGC transport. We thought we’d made it.

Relief is the little bit of quiet just before the axe falls.

Still, the kid was tougher than he looked. Survived a Ghost ambush and a cave-in.

Maybe he wasn’t a total liability.

Then I saw the gash on his arm, leaking all over the floor.

"You’re leaking," I grunted.

Professionalism. That’s what this was. Keeping the asset in working condition.

I patched him up with the Crawler’s Gut Poultice.

He yelped like I’d set him on fire, which, to be fair, was pretty close to what the poultice felt like.

"Don’t be a baby," I snapped.

Gotta maintain that professional distance. He’s a job. A means to an end. A walking, talking D-Rank core that gets me one step closer to putting a bullet in the man who gave the order to erase my family.

He’s not a friend.

He’s not a teammate.

The Rust Dogs were my team. They were my family.

And they were dust.

We sat there in the dark, the only light coming from the gross, green glow on his arm.

He started asking questions. Smart questions. About the Ghosts. About the Phase-Ripper.

About why they wanted to erase me.

The words came out before I could stop them. The story of the Rust Dogs. Of Leo and Sarah. Of the trap, the monster, and the cleanup crew that came to sanitize the scene.

I hated the way my voice cracked.

Weakness.

But the kid... he didn’t say anything stupid. He didn’t offer a half-assed "I’m sorry for your loss."

He just listened.

And in his eyes, I saw something that wasn’t pity. It was understanding.

His fight was my fight.

That’s what he’d said.

It was a stupid, reckless, and emotionally compromised thing to say.

And it was the first time in a long time that I’d felt like I wasn’t completely alone in this war.

Which, of course, was terrifying.

He offered me the D-Rank core. Just like that.

My mind short-circuited. Nobody gives away a score like that. Not in the Undercroft. Not anywhere. Everything has a price. A favor. A future betrayal.

But his eyes were clear.

His offer was clean.

I took it. And just like that, we were partners. A new business arrangement.

I felt a sliver of something that felt dangerously like hope.

And that’s when everything went wrong.

We found the alcove. A good spot. Defensible. A place to catch our breath and figure out the next move.

The kid was running on empty. I could see it. The way he leaned against the wall, the slight tremor in his hands. He was completely out of whatever freaky, non-mana juice he ran on.

We were sitting ducks.

I was trying to figure out if I had enough juice in my rifle to take on whatever was down here, when I noticed the change.

He wasn’t looking at me.

He wasn’t looking at the exit.

He was staring at the corpse of the Cable Hound we’d killed.

His posture shifted.

The exhaustion, the vulnerability—it just... vanished.

He became utterly still.

It was a stillness that was so complete, so absolute, it was louder than any noise.

A predator’s stillness.

My blood ran cold.

I had seen that look before.

I saw it in the eyes of the Chimera that tore Leo in half. That quiet, patient focus right before the slaughter began.

His face was a mask of conflict. He was fighting something. Something inside himself.

I watched, my hand drifting down, my fingers brushing against the cold, worn grip of my pistol. A familiar comfort against a new, rising tide of dread.

He was losing.

He finally gave in.

He knelt beside the dead hound, and the air around us dropped ten degrees.

The faint, green glow of the poultice on his arm seemed to dim.

Then he raised his hand.

A hole opened in the world.

It wasn’t a Gate. It wasn’t a portal. It was a vortex of pure, silent, soul-sucking nothingness, swirling in his palm. It didn’t emit light; it drank it. The darkness in the cavern seemed to bend towards it, pulled into its greedy, empty maw.

This wasn’t a Hunter skill. This wasn’t something you learned in an Association training manual.

This was wrong.

This was unholy.

He winced, his jaw clenching so hard I thought his teeth would crack. His eyes were squeezed shut, his face a mask of pure agony.

It was like he was listening to a scream that was so loud it was silent.

A faint, oily, twilight-colored light was pulled from the Cable Hound’s corpse. It wasn’t mana. It was something thinner. Something more essential.

It was the creature’s dying rage. Its terror. Its very essence.

And he was eating it.

The light spiraled into the vortex, and he shuddered, a full-body flinch, as it was absorbed into him.

The process was over in seconds.

The vortex vanished.

The cold in the air receded.

He stood up.

The exhaustion was gone. The tremor was gone.

He was buzzing with a cold, humming power that made the hairs on my arms stand up.

He opened his eyes.

And for a fraction of a second, just a heartbeat, they weren’t his.

They weren’t the eyes of the sarcastic, overwhelmed kid I’d been dragging through the tunnels.

They were the cold, white, empty filament-eyes of the Cable Hound. Predatory. Empty. Devoid of anything but a raw, mechanical hunger.

Then it was gone.

The flicker vanished.

He was just Michael again, looking at me, a confused and guilty expression on his face.

But I saw it.

I knew what I saw.

My hand tightened on my pistol, my thumb finding the safety.

The deal was off.

This wasn’t a partnership.

I was no longer guiding an asset.

I was trapped in a cage with a predator.

And I had just watched him feed.