The pitch pulsed with hungry light. Thousands of incendiary points, like scattered embers in a coal chute, resolved into the eyes of things that moved with unsettling speed. A low, guttural chittering filled the abyss, growing louder, closer. Mireya cursed, wrenching a heavy-gauge shotgun from its rack in the crumpled elevator cage. "Isken!" she snapped, already chambering a slug. Isken didn't need the warning. His hand shot out, grabbing Gavril's exposed ribcage, yanking the skeleton closer. "Stalker! Wolf-Beast! Artillery platoon! Now!" He reached for the familiar mental tether, the one that hummed with the power of his undead legion, ready to unleash the howling horde. But there was nothing. Just a dead line, a silence so profound it felt like a physical blow. [“System override. Necromantic protocols temporarily disabled. Evaluation: Subject’s dependency on accumulated bio-matter for conflict resolution. Objective: Overcome fear of loss.”] The familiar, detached voice of his past self echoed in his skull, calm and infuriatingly cheerful. Ice crept through Isken's veins, colder than any fear of the beasts. Betrayal. The system, his lifeline, had just cut him adrift. He was unpowered, surrounded by a tide of hidden horrors. The first of them, a multi-limbed thing with too many chitinous joints and luminous eyes, skittered into the faint, phosphorescent sheen from the canyon walls. It moved with the speed of a startled viper, its mandibles clicking. "Bastard system!" Isken snarled, pulling his sidearm. Mireya was already firing, the shotgun's roar deafening in the confined space. The multi-limbed beast exploded in a spray of ichor and bone fragments, but two more were already lunging from the gloom, one at Isken, one at Mireya. He fired, the hollow-point round tearing through the creature's head, but its momentum carried it forward, slamming into him and knocking him against the dented steel wall. A sharp pain lanced through his ribs. He scrambled, reloading, adrenaline a bitter taste on his tongue. This wasn't a game. This was the cold, hard fight of a trench-runner, the kind where every bullet counted and death lingered on every breath. Mireya, a blur of practiced motion, dropped her empty shotgun and drew a pair of silenced pistols, her shots precise, economical. She moved like a dancer, a deadly ballet of evasion and retribution. "Back to back, Naldor!" Her voice was tight, but her eyes were sharp, reflecting the encroaching horrors. They stood in the center of the crushed elevator, a shrinking island against a rising tide of tooth and claw. Gavril, ever the useless one, whimpered, his skeletal frame rattling as he tried to hide behind a twisted support beam. Fennic, however, was a whirlwind of terrified activity. He scrabbled through the debris, his whimpers growing louder with each near miss. A shower of sparks erupted from a mangled console as he slipped, tumbling into a pile of mangled machinery. A moment later, his shriek cut through the din. "Uh, Isken? Mireya? I think I found something!" His voice was high-pitched, laced with a familiar, absurd strain of luck. A rapid-fire *KA-CHUNK-CHUNK-CHUNK* ripped through the air, drowning out the chittering. A stream of tracers ripped into the encroaching void, tearing apart three creatures simultaneously. Fennic, covered in grime and soot, stood hunched over a heavy, six-barreled weapon, the massive Gatling gun a ludicrous addition to his wiry frame. It was mounted on a damaged, wheeled cart, somehow still functional, somehow fully loaded. He was firing it with a wild, desperate joy, a manic grin splitting his dust-smeared face. "Take that, you… you scaly bastards!" he yelled, his voice cracking. The sustained fire created a temporary perimeter, giving Isken and Mireya a crucial moment to breathe, to reload. The sheer volume of fire was terrifying, and for the first time, Isken felt a flicker of grim hope. But the creatures were endless. They came in waves, a suffocating press of bodies and feverish yellow pupils. The Gatling gun’s ammunition counter, visible even in the dim light, was ticking down with alarming speed. Isken saw the look in Mireya’s eyes—the quiet, fierce resolve of a woman ready to die for what she believed in. Then, something shifted in him. The fear of losing, the crippling guilt of his past, the self-preservation that had defined his miserable existence—it all receded. He had caused this. He had broken the world. But he wouldn’t let it break *her*. Not now. Not when she had chosen to trust him, to stand by him. He would buy her time, even if it meant becoming another corpse for the Marrow-King's collection. He would die here, but he would die fighting, protecting the only thing he had left to protect. A strange, serene calm settled over him. [“Evaluation complete. Subject: Naldor, Isken. Fear of loss: Overcome. Dependency: Mitigated. Necromantic protocols: Re-established. Output amplification: x10. Congratulations. You get to keep your toy.”] His past self’s voice, a casual hum in his mind, was almost drowned out by the sudden, overwhelming surge of power. It wasn't a flicker, not a hum—it was a roaring inferno, a torrent of dark energy that coursed through his veins, connecting him to every fallen life, every scattered bone. The air crackled around him, thick with the scent of ozone and freshly turned earth. “Oh, you want a fight, do you?” Isken’s voice was low, laced with a cold fury. His fingers hooked into claws, and the shadows around them deepened, writhing with latent current. The hundreds of Chimera-Beasts that had fallen to Mireya's precision, to Fennic's panicked Gatling fire, to his own desperate shots, began to twitch. Their limbs spasmed, their broken jaws snapped shut. Those predatory gazes now flared with a dull, obedient sheen. Tendons ripped, bones snapped back into place. Muscles, shredded moments before, reknit themselves with sickening speed. The ground vibrated, a low growl emanating from the rapidly reanimating horde. Within seconds, the elevator cage was surrounded not by enemies, but by a loyal, terrifying army of resurrected Chimera-Beasts, their bodies riddled with bullet holes, now glowing with a sickly emerald aura. Their claws were sharpened, their teeth bared, and in their reanimated jaws, they clutched broken pieces of steel, fragments of rock, and discarded munitions, ready to hurl them at the perimeter. “Artillery, boys,” Isken whispered, a ghost of a smile touching his lips. “Let’s give them a proper welcome.” At his silent will, the hundreds of monstrous projectiles launched into the darkness, a storm of jagged shrapnel and bone. The cavern echoed with the screams of buried foes, quickly followed by the thud of falling bodies. The sheer power, the raw, unbridled ability to turn death into his servant, was intoxicating. The green radiation from his undead army intensified, pushing back the oppressive gloom. And then, as the light expanded, the true scale of their predicament became horrifyingly clear. The cavern walls, not mere stone, began to ripple. Thick, fibrous tissues, like exposed muscle, pulsed beneath a veneer of ancient rock. Gaping orifices, rimmed with razor-sharp teeth, slowly began to peel open along what had appeared to be a natural fissure. It wasn't a hidden lair they had crashed into; the Marrow-King wasn’t hiding *in* the canyon. He *was* the canyon, a skyscraper-sized behemoth of flesh and stone, slowly waking up around them.

The Ninety-Ninth Failure