The death of a human being is a silent event. The death of a living city is deafening.

  When I cut the umbilical cord of mana linking my mother to the ecosystem, Genesis didn't just shut down. The city suffered a colossal anaphylactic shock.

  The Genetic Control Room around me began to melt. The translucent membrane walls projecting glowing graphs turned brown, shrinking and tearing, releasing a shower of pus and acidic bile.

  Hélio Veras was on his knees, drowning in his own black blood. The Alpha Devourer inside him, realizing the host was dying of magical starvation, began digesting my father from the inside out. The perfect porcelain carapace shattered into useless shards.

  "Arthur..." he gasped, extending a trembling hand, the once immaculate skin now covered in rapidly growing ulcers. "Save me... You are a doctor..."

  I stood before him, holding the Mithril scalpel. My Black Crystal arm throbbed with an apathetic cold.

  I wanted to dissect him. I wanted to cut his vocal cords. I wanted him to feel a fraction of what my mother felt for twenty years.

  But the tower gave way.

  A tremor of apocalyptic magnitude shook the structure. The organic floor beneath Hélio tore like wet paper. The central sphincter, now flaccid and dead, opened into the dark pit.

  Hélio Veras fell into the darkness, swallowed by the bowels of his own necrotizing creation, screaming as the tower's gastric acids consumed him.

  I had no time to savor the revenge. The floor beneath my boots also began to give way.

  [STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY ALERT: IMMINENT COLLAPSE.]

  [RECOMMENDED ESCAPE ROUTE: GRAVITY.]

  "For the first time, I completely agree with you," I muttered to the Parasite.

  The room's vault collapsed. I jumped into the central pit the exact moment the ceiling crashed into my mother's dead pedestal.

  The fall was fast and chaotic. The tube I had climbed up was dissolving into a paste of rotten meat. I used my crystal arm to scrape the walls, creating friction with the black ice so I wouldn't break my legs on impact.

  Down below, on the ground level of the biological atrium, the outer walls had already been breached.

  The Dreadnought Truck was parked amidst the rubble of bone and cartilage. Valéria was revving the Ether engine, the treads spinning over pools of acid.

  I landed with a crash on the truck's armored roof, denting the metal alloy with my weight.

  "Need a ride, Doctor?" Gristle's voice sounded through the external speakers. She was in the turret, firing at the rain of debris falling from the ceiling.

  "Get us out of here, Valéria! The whole city is necrotizing!" I shouted, opening the top hatch and throwing myself into the cabin.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  The smell of death inside was blocked by the air purifiers, but the view through the windows was Dantesque.

  Valéria engaged the gear, and the Dreadnought shot through the main street of Genesis.

  The buildings that previously "breathed" now deflated like punctured balloons. Dermis streets tore open, revealing geysers of sulfuric acid and boiling blood.

  The Gardeners and the corrupted clones surviving in the streets didn't attack us. They were on the ground, writhing, linked to the neural network of a city that had just suffered brain death. They tore off their own masks and wooden arms in an agonizing frenzy.

  "Where are we going?!" Valéria shouted, jerking the steering wheel sharply to dodge the carcass of an "Angel-Cow" that plummeted from the sky, its insect wings melting.

  "The Wall of Flesh!" I pointed through the cracked windshield. "It's the only way out!"

  In the distance, the colossal ten-meter-high wall surrounding Hélio's Eden was undergoing a final mutation. Without the mana to keep it flexible, the muscle was going through instant rigor mortis, calcifying. It was turning into a dam of solid bone.

  "Arthur, the truck's ram can't penetrate dense bone that thick! We'll be squashed like a bug on a windshield!" Valéria swallowed hard, but didn't take her foot off the gas.

  "We're not going to hit bone. We're going to make a decompression channel!" I looked at the backseat. "Luna! I need you to find the wall's central micro-fissure. Where the muscle fibers intersected."

  "Gristle! Prime the harpoon with a concentrated Ether charge. No scatter. A surgical shot."

  Luna connected her baton to the truck's sonic panel. She closed her eyes, ignoring the visual chaos outside, and sang a low, constant note. The radar blinked.

  "Found it! Thirty degrees starboard, three meters off the ground! Density there is 15% lower!"

  "Valéria, aim for her coordinates!" I braced myself against the seatbelt. "Gristle, when I say 'now', you shoot."

  The truck hit a hundred and forty kilometers per hour. The rotting meat floor whipped against the sides.

  The bone wall approached. It grew until it blocked the horizon and the red sky.

  Eighty meters. Fifty meters.

  "Ready..." Gristle growled, her eye glued to the turret's sights.

  Twenty meters.

  "NOW!"

  Gristle fired. The cylinder of flaming Ether crossed the space in an instant and drove itself into the weak point Luna identified.

  The thermal explosion didn't destroy the wall, but superheated the calcified marrow, making it brittle in a five-meter radius.

  In the next millisecond, the Dreadnought collided.

  The Blood-Steel ram hit the superheated bone.

  CRAAAAAAASH!

  The impact threw us all violently against our seatbelts. The truck groaned, chitin plates cracking, the engine choking.

  But physics yielded to brutality.

  We tore through the wall, enveloped in a storm of bone shrapnel and carbonized marrow, and were launched into the air on the other side.

  The vehicle flew over the humus ravine and landed hard on the red grass of the modified Cerrado.

  We landed skidding, kicking up clouds of dust and grass, until the brakes finally tamed the ten-ton monster of steel.

  Silence fell in the cabin. Only the sound of the cooling engine and our panting breath.

  We all looked back through the shattered rear window.

  The city of Genesis was collapsing in on itself. The wall we had just breached crumbled into an abyssal pit. The megaflora of the hypertrophic jungle around us began to dry rapidly, the red grass turning gray and turning to ash as the "Heart" sustaining it rotted away.

  "We did it," Valéria let out a shaky sigh, resting her forehead on the steering wheel. "We got out."

  Gristle climbed down from the turret, her face smudged with soot and someone else's blood.

  "What happened up there, Doctor? Did you find your father?"

  I looked at my Black Crystal arm. It was still stained with amniotic fluid and blood. The digital interface of my left eye had shut down. The Parasite in my liver was quiet, digesting the victory.

  "The patient didn't survive the surgery," I said, my voice thick, stripped of its usual sarcastic tone.

  "The city swallowed him. The ecosystem failed."

  Luna touched my human shoulder. She, as an empath, could read what the words hid.

  "What else did you find there, Arthur?"

  I closed my eyes. The image of my mother's placid face taking her last breath formed in my mind. My anchor to humanity, imprisoned in a monstrous machine.

  "I found the end of the shift," I replied, opening my eyes and looking at the gray grass crumbling to dust. "Genesis is over."

  There was no victory there. Only the brutal survival that brought us to this point.

  "Hit the gas, Valéria. Let's go back to the coast. Central Brazil needs time to heal."