From Moving Crates to Killing Gods-Chapter 14: Two Canteens

We moved like ghosts through the metal jungle, our footsteps muffled by the strange, spongy vegetation that had claimed the ruins of the forgotten Argent. Vines thick as my arm coiled around skeletal frames of silver gray alloy, their waxy surfaces reflecting the sickly green light that filtered through the clouds above.

Darien led the way, his posture rigid and purposeful. He’d selected a path where the vegetation grew densest, the flora formed natural archways over our heads. "Stay close." he called back, his voice barely louder than a whisper. "The plants mask our emotional signatures. The thicker, the better."

Behind me, Kira moved with surprising grace, her fingers occasionally brushing against the strange vines. "I can feel the dark water through these." she murmured. "They’re full of it."

I glanced back at the rest of our cohort. Fifteen survivors, all struggling to maintain the emotional emptiness Darien demanded. Some were better at it than others. Phinyx moved with serene emptiness, his face a perfect mask of indifference. Ember’s jaw was clenched too tightly, her efforts to suppress her fear making it more palpable. Finn walked with his eyes fixed on the distant shimmer of the Citadel, his mouth a tight line of determination that he couldn’t quite erase.

We were a walking advertisement of Corruptor bait, despite our best efforts.

"Eyes forward." Mira hissed from behind, catching me watching the others. "Focus on yourself."

I turned back to the path ahead, but my attention had already snagged on something else, something that didn’t fit. Darien reached for his canteen, unscrewed the cap, and took a careful sip. Nothing unusual, except for the fact that I could see the outline of two canteens at his hip. When he replaced the one he’d drunk from, his hand brushed reassuringly over the second one, as if checking it was still there.

And the other Zero in our group, Mira, also had two canteens. Each drank only from one.

My hand drifted to my own belt, where my single canteen hung. The one filled with black water from the lake cavern. The liquid that supposedly masked our emotions from Corruptors.

Something cold settled in my stomach that had nothing to do with hunger or fear. The Zeros knew more than they were telling us. That wasn’t surprising, the System had always operated on a need to know basis, and apparently exile hadn’t changed that dynamic. But this was different. This was survival.

If they had created their own protection from the black water, why hide it from the rest of us? Unless...

Unless they didn’t intend for all of us to make it back to Argent.

The thought unfurled in my mind like one of the alien vines around us, spreading tendrils of suspicion through my consciousness. It made a horrible kind of sense. The Zeros had combat training. They knew the terrain. They had preparation we lacked. And while fifteen of us had survived the tunnels, how many would the Citadel actually welcome back?

I nearly tripped over an exposed root, lost in these dark thoughts. Kira steadied me with a quick hand on my elbow.

"Careful." she whispered. "You okay?" 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak without revealing my suspicions. The yo-yo continued its mesmerizing orbit around my hand, but my mind was racing, calculating. If the Zeros decided some of us were expendable, who among us could effectively oppose them? Ember had combat potential with her fire, but she was still learning to control it. Mira’s light blade looked deadly. Darien could reinforce materials to weapon strength. The rest of us had abilities that ranged from marginally useful to comically inadequate in a fight.

I thought about my Switch. Its potential was growing in my mind, but I’d nearly burned my brain out using it constantly in the tunnels. Without practice, without understanding its limits, it was unreliable at best.

We continued in silence for what felt like hours, the twisted landscape offering a surreal backdrop to my paranoid musings. Occasionally, Kira would signal a water source, and we’d detour slightly to refill our canteens, our regular canteens, not the secret ones the Zeros carried.

The metal structures around us grew denser as we progressed, the remnants of the outpost revealing themselves in increasingly intact forms. What had once been small bunkers and twisted towers gave way to the shell of actual buildings, their purposes obscured by decades or centuries of neglect and the aggressive reclamation of the alien flora.

And within that flora, we saw them. Not with our minds, but with our eyes. Corruptors. Dozens of them. They were not hunting. They were... existing.

I’d never seen one before. They weren’t what I expected. In the dim light, they appeared as distortions in reality rather than solid entities. Their forms shifted and flowed, never settling into a fixed shape. They weren’t quite transparent, but neither were they fully opaque, existing in some state between matter and energy.

And pinned within that flowing distortion, were their eyes. Perfect, depthless pools of obsidian that did not shift or change.

One lay sprawled in the center of a cracked street as if thrown there, its limbs twitching at odd intervals. Another chewed on the corroded corner of a building, flakes of ancient metal falling from its jaws.

Two others locked in a slow, pushing struggle by a rubble pile, a silent test of strength with no apparent purpose or aggression. They were in the open, unconcerned with concealment, engaged in their own inexplicable routines. Their indifference to being seen was, in its own way, terrifying. It meant we were beneath their notice until we weren’t.

A frozen, breathless silence descended upon our group. It was more than just not speaking. It was a conscious, collective effort.

I could feel the tension vibrating in the air between us, a wire stretched to its breaking point. Next to me, Kira’s breathing had become a slow, deliberate rhythm. In and out, as if she was manually commanding her lungs. Darien’s face was a mask of blank stone. Everyone was doing the same internal drill.

Feel nothing. Be a rock. Be a shadow. Be empty. It was the most mentally exhausting thing I’d ever done, battling against the primal scream of fear that wanted to erupt at the sight of those jagged, alien forms so casually close. We weren’t just hiding our bodies, we were trying to hide our very souls from their perception.

Only when we had finally put a wall of rubble and a bend in the road between us and that awful street did the pressure in my chest ease a little. My shoulders fell, not in relief, but in the cessation of a full body clench. The silent, screaming vigilance didn’t vanish, but it dialed down from a deafening roar to a manageable, background hum. We were still prey, but for now, we were unseen prey.

That fragile, lowering guard was the only reason Finn’s hand was already drifting toward the strange.

"Don’t touch those." Mira warned as Finn reached curiously toward a purple flower.

"They’re called Weepers. They secrete a paralyzing agent."

Another fact the Zeros had somehow neglected to share until it was nearly too late.