The polluted Grimecity air had never tasted so clean. Or so fragile.
They'd taken refuge in a derelict clocktower, its gears frozen in eternal protest. Below, the amethyst glow of the Aethelburg Spire pulsed like an infected heart. The silence was thick, broken only by Elara's quiet sobs.
Nana leaned against the wall, her tendrils retracted. "It tasted my attack. It digested it."
"He is the first hunger,"Kurok said, staring at his hands. "I am just... an echo." The realization was a cold stone in his gut. He wasn't special. He was a copy. A flawed one.
"It doesn't matter what you are," Kael's voice cut through the gloom. She was at a broken window, scanning the streets. "It matters what you do. Croft has a perfect consumer. We have a scared child and a virus with an identity crisis."
Elara flinched.
Kurok knelt before her. "Hey. Look at me." Her wide, terrified eyes met his. "That thing... it only knows how to take. But you..." He pointed to a rusted iron beam above them. "You can give. That's a power it will never understand."
A single tear traced a path through the grime on Elara's cheek. She reached a trembling hand toward the beam. "It... hurts," she whispered.
"The city?" Kurok asked softly.
She shook her head. "The silence. Where it walked... there's nothing left to grow. It's a... a rust that eats life."
The concept was chilling. Subject Zero wasn't just consuming matter; it was consuming potential.
"Show me," Kurok said, an idea forming, brutal and simple. "Don't make a flower. Show me the rust."
Elara looked confused, but she closed her eyes. Her small hands clenched. Instead of vibrant life, a wave of grey decay spread from her fingertips, crawling up the beam. It didn't just rust; it erased, reducing the metal to inert, colorless dust.
She gasped, pulling her hand back as if burned. The decay stopped.
Kurok stared at the perfect, dead circle on the beam. A void.
"You didn't just show me," he breathed. "You made it."
"I... I don't want to!" she cried, horrified by her own power.
"But you can," Kael said, her voice sharp with newfound respect. She looked at Kurok. "He consumes what is. She can create what isn't. A negative space."
The strategy wrote itself. A terrifying, desperate strategy.
"We don't fight his hunger with more food," Kurok said, standing. "We fight it with starvation. We fight it with her."
A sharp crack echoed from the roof. A small, polished stone with a data-chip landed at Nana's feet. The Gutter Kings.
Nana retrieved it. "They're offering a meeting. Says they have a... taste of our problem."
The chip contained a single image: a blurry photo of a man in a lab coat, his body half-dissolved into the same fungal-wire composite as Subject Zero, being loaded into an unmarked van. The location was the old sewage treatment plant. The timestamp was three hours ago.
Croft wasn't just maintaining Subject Zero. She was trying to make more.
"They're farming him," Kael realized, her face pale.
Kurok looked at Elara, then at the dead spot on the beam. The rules were now absolute, the factions clear:
· Aethelburg (Croft): Order through Absolute Consumption. Goal: Create an army of Subject Zeros to "cleanse" the city.
· OmniGen (Cross): Control through Exploitation. Goal: Capture Kurok and replicate his chaotic creativity as a marketable product.
· Gutter Kings: Anarchic Opportunists. Goal: Profit from the war and claim territory from the chaos.
· Kurok & Crew: Chaotic Preservation. Goal: Protect the living, breathing chaos of Grimecity from both consumption and control, using any means necessary—even the power of decay.
The battle was no longer about survival. It was about ideology. And their newest, smallest soldier had just been handed the most dangerous weapon of all: the power to unmake.
"Alright," Kurok said, his voice steady, the cold stone in his gut turning to iron. "Let's go see what's on the menu."
He offered a hand to Elara. After a moment's hesitation, she took it. Her hand was small, but her grip was firm. The scared child was gone. In her place was a weapon, a healer, and a revolutionary. She had finally stopped being a spectator.
The next course in the war for Grimecity was about to be served. And for the first time, they were the ones writing the recipe.