The Scrap-Wolf dropped into the crater like a landslide composed of meat and sickness.

  Its weight hit the muck with a wet, heavy collision that shook the ground beneath Mike. A sheet of toxic slurry rose up the crater walls, hanging in the air for a heartbeat before gravity reclaimed it. The liquid collapsed, spattering his face with burning droplets. He couldn't wipe them away. He couldn't flinch. The stench hit him a moment later, it was a physical slap to the senses. Hot blood. Sour rot. The sharp, ammonia bite of biological things that should never have grown in this soil.

  His body still refused to move. Every nerve was locked in place by that System warning. It was a paralysis deeper than any sleep paralysis or chemical restraint he had ever known. It felt as if his bones had been replaced with lead pipes and his muscles turned to wet clay. He was a statue made of flesh, discarded in the mud.

  But his heart didn’t care about warnings. It slammed against his ribs like a prisoner trying to punch his way out of a cell. It beat so hard he could see the pulse jumping in the corners of his vision, distorting the grey light of the sky.

  The wolf’s eyes found him.

  They weren't even eyes anymore, not in the way a living thing should have eyes. They were swollen, glistening lenses of scar tissue threaded with burst veins and milky cataracts. They didn't blink. They just fixed on him with a dead, rabid intensity that promised nothing but violence. The muzzle was worse, it was pure meat, lips peeled back permanently by chemical burns to reveal teeth that were yellow, wet, and far too many for one jaw.

  It growled. The sound was wrong, there was a sickness in it. It was the wet and rattling bass of fluid trapped in a crushed throat, a tremor that traveled through the ground and made the mud at his back shiver against his skin.

  Mike told his muscles.

  The command screamed through his brain.

  Nothing answered. His limbs were stone. He was a passenger in his own corpse. The only thing that twitched was the flicker in the corner of his vision as glitchy System text tried and failed to resolve against the backdrop of the grey sky.

  [WARNING: HOST MOBILITY SUSPENDED DURING CLASS SEED BINDING]

  [TIME REMAINING: UNKNOWN]

  [ERROR: TIMER PROCESS NOT FOUND]

  The wolf bunched its legs. Mike could see the anatomy of the thing working under its patchy, mange-ridden fur. Ligaments strained like over-tightened ropes. Raw flesh trembled with stored energy. Tumors bulged along its shoulders, pulsing with their own erratic rhythm. The crater suddenly felt very, very small. It was no longer a hole in the ground, it was a bowl. A dinner plate.

  His thoughts skittered everywhere at once. This was it. This was really it.

  He had always assumed death would come slowly. He thought it would be from the sickness chewing up his lungs, that black cough that took half the sector before they turned thirty. Or maybe a slow fade-out in his rust box back home, dying of thirst because Rigg hiked the water price again and he didn't have the credits to pay.

  No. That would have been too dignified. Mike was going to die as meat. Pinned in a puddle of industrial waste like all the other trash that sank too low in the Heap.

  He tasted copper that wasn’t there. His brain had already jumped ahead of reality, simulating the next three seconds with agonizing clarity. The wolf’s teeth punching in. The crack of his sternum. The chemical swamp sluicing into his chest cavity when it tore him open. It was a useful mind, even now. It was always cataloging. Always analyzing. Even in the face of oblivion, it was trying to calculate the physics of his own murder.

  The beast came at him in a blur of gray muscle and weeping sores.

  Time folded and then stretched. It was the same sensation as when a capacitor blew in the shop. The light stuttered. The sound warped. The wolf’s shadow swallowed him as it lunged. Its jaws yawned wide enough to take his entire head.

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  Something else yawned open inside Mike's skull.

  It wasn't a thought. It wasn't a memory. It was a physical sensation of something breaking. A menu? A channel? No. It was more like a hatch, a heavy, rusted iron hatch that had been welded shut his entire life was suddenly ripped free by a force he didn't understand.

  Cold wind howled through the new hole in his mind. It was a psychic draft filled with whispering static and the ghost echoes of instinct. It felt vast, terrifying, and utterly alien.

  [CLASS SKILL UNLOCKED: Neural Tether Lv.1]

  [DESCRIPTION: Establish temporary directive links with valid Vermin entities within range.]

  [WARNING: CORRUPTED NODE. ADDITIONAL EFFECTS UNKNOWN]

  The world dimmed at the edges. His vision tunneled. The wolf was no longer just an animal, it was a target. A signal. A collection of biological data hurtling toward him.

  Instinct took over, some new, treacherous instinct that wore the System’s voice like a mask. It yanked Mike's awareness toward the oncoming threat. It didn't ask for permission. It just demanded action.

  He reached.

  He didn't reach with his hand. His hands were useless things of bone and meat lying in the mud. He reached with that new part of him. He pushed his consciousness out through the hole in his head. It lurched forward, invisible and desperate. It felt like a phantom limb, clumsy and numb, flung out to grab the wolf by its mind and yank it to a halt.

  For a moment, he felt something ahead of him. He made contact.

  It was horrifying.

  Mike expected the mind of a dog. Maybe hunger. Maybe rage. What he hit was a blast furnace of biological noise. It was a vast and hot intelligence that scorched his mental touch. It was a chaotic storm of predatory focus and pain. So much pain. The beast’s awareness was layered and complicated. He could feel senses cross-wired in ways that defied nature. He felt the optical input from its eyes clashing with the agony of its mutating cells. He felt instincts honed by generations of surviving poison and scrap and worse. It was a labyrinth of suffering and killing intent.

  His mind smashed against it like a fly hitting armored glass. No purchase. It was too dense. Too heavy. Too complex.

  His attempt skidded across that blazing presence. He couldn't latch on. He couldn't find a handhold in that smooth, hard surface of pure aggression. His consciousness deflected off the wolf and kept going.

  He overshot.

  His mind went wild. Uncontrolled. It spun out into the void beyond the wolf, flailing in the dark. The Scrap-Wolf’s breath washed over his face. It was humid and rancid, smelling of old blood and copper. Thick threads of drool swung from its gums and splattered onto his cheek.

  He was dead. He knew he was dead.

  And then a different kind of connection snapped into place. It wasn't one mind, it was hundreds.

  They lit up in his head like sparks catching in dry grease. One moment there was darkness. The next, there was a constellation of tiny, guttering flames. Each one was a point of awareness suspended in the dark. It formed a map, but not on any grid he understood. There was no sight. There was no sound. Just presence. Raw, twitching existence spread through the Heap around him.

  It was overwhelming. The sudden influx of data threatened to crack his skull. He could feel them all.

  Under the crushed appliance to his right was a cluster of points that burned like dull coals. He felt their chitinous legs scraping against rust. He felt their simple, binary need to hide and consume. Beneath him, swaddled deep in the toxic muck, was a slow and slime-smeared crawl of others. They were sluggish minds, concerned only with moisture and decay. In the rotting mattress hung off the crater wall were more tiny lights hidden in foam and stained cloth. Fast. Twitchy. Nervous energy vibrating like a plucked string.

  Cockroaches. Rats. Gnats in clouds above the sludge.

  And lower. Under everything. Things that writhed slowly with minds barely distinguishable from the mud that birthed them. Larvae. Worms. Things without names that cleaned the bones of the city.

  Vermin.

  The word echoed in the hollow space of Mike's mind. All of them were within a breath of him. All of them suddenly turned toward him. He felt the collective jolt of their surprise. They were startled by the invasive thread of his thought shoving itself into their simple loops of hunger, fear, and breeding. He was a giant crashing into their silent, microscopic world.

  His lungs spasms uselessly against the paralysis. The Scrap-Wolf’s jaw began to close. He could see the pores on its nose. He could see the jagged chip in its canine tooth. Panic detonated in his chest.

  It was white, blind, and primal. It wasn't the fear of a man worrying about credits or sickness, it was the fear of the prey animal as the trap snaps shut. It needed out. It needed out or he would die. And dying now, dying like this, felt offensive. It felt like losing a rigged game that he had been playing his whole life.

  So Mike pushed.

  He didn't form words. There was no time for syntax. There was no language for what he screamed down the tether. He took all that terror, the pain of the crystal stabbing his hand, the horror of the infection, and the rage at the System that had paralyzed him. He gathered it into a single, jagged spike of emotion.

  It was a psychic shriek so bright it felt like it might crack his skull from the inside. He hurled that terror at the nearest tiny minds. He flooded their primitive instincts with the absolute certainty of death.

  The world answered.