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Hunter sagged. Her body was slowly eating itself and she was so tired. Five Pebbles told her where to go to end her life permanently, and she wasn’t going to make it. Her lungs bubbled, making her spit up phlegm and saliva that dripped down her already slicked fur. She hacked, the coughing making her vision blur and black out for a few seconds. Her breaths rattled, her lungs felt sticky and gross against the air of the shelter she had fallen asleep in. She had done her best to complete the task her creator had given her, and now that that was done she didn’t need to be alive anymore. She wished something would eat her already so that she could be done with this miserable life.
Hunter shook her head and hauled her decaying body out of the shelter, which made her shudder with the piercing pain around her joints and organs. She paused, her body shuddering. She sighed deeply.
When the pain decreased she began to drag herself across the metal. It had been a few cycles since the rot had spread to her spine and caused her legs to stop working, so she was relatively used to the feeling of her belly-fur and skin being scraped raw. She coughed hard, spitting up saliva down her front. She hauled herself forward through Outskirts, making her way slowly through the rooms and avoiding the different lizards. Hunter would often have to pause to hack up the fluid that started building in her lungs. She felt exposed. Everything around her would seem to stop and stare whenever she would have to stop for her lungs.
Hunter prepared herself to deal with the red lizard territory, which was nerve racking since they were lethal. She sat at the edge, watching as green and pink lizards tussled together. She waited with baited breath, trying to see when and where the red lizard would appear. She would drag herself as fast as she could once the red lizard had hunted and gotten food for itself. Hunter gasped and coughed when a flash of brilliant colors appeared on the other side of the field, running straight past the other lizards and toward her. She flipped backwards, which meant she landed on the puss filled bubbles on her back, leaving her scraped raw belly exposed. She screeched in pain when one of them popped, spreading the dark red fluids around her.
She couldn’t believe that this was her end. She never thought that she’d end up the meal of a red lizard, something that made her afraid. Even if she wanted to die, she wanted it to be painless. A red lizard’s bite wasn’t something that her creator had said was painless. They had told her it would be the most painful moments of her life until death took her. She closed her eyes and sucked in what she thought was our final breath. She counted the seconds.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
She cracked open an eye and stared as the red lizard was clawing at its nose. Its color spluttered and it snarled at her before turning tail and disappearing. She flipped herself back over, feeling the puss on her back sludge around. Another lizard sneezed loudly when it came too close to her, spluttering and coughing before running away from her.
Hunter watched as they all began to flee. She tipped her head to one side, wondering why they had all left so suddenly at something around her. She glanced around, but nothing was around her to indicate why it had happened. She sniffed and scrunched her nose at the smell. Something was rotting terribly and made her start coughing. It was so disgustingly rancid that she began to retch. It smelled like one of the rot creatures that would often smell after eating.
Hunter dragged herself away while sneezing and retching. Though the smell followed her because of the puss still leaking from the back where some of her tumors had still remained after Five Pebbles had done their best to remove the largest amount of the tumors, it hadn’t entirely worked so she was left with a few quick growing tumors that returned within a few cycles.
She had tried to get the iterator to remove more, but they had told her that she could lose function of up to 90% of her brain stem if she had another surgery due to how close the rot had gotten to her spinal cord. They had then told her to go down into the ground and swim in the golden-black fluid known as the void.
Basically, Five Pebbles told her to kill herself and she had taken only one cycle of being unable to use her spine properly to agree.
Hunter hacked again and her vision blacked out. She stumbled and flopped down, needing to rest as her heart rate picked up. She could feel something in her body that wasn’t hers, usually she could ignore the feeling of the rot spreading throughout her body, but she could feel it near her heart. A sense of doom lurked over her like a dropwig over prey, making her feel intensely paranoid. She continued to pull herself through Outskirts, watching as creatures ran from her. She was constantly looking around her, feeling the creeping sensation in her body with an intense anxiety curdling in her gut.
Her head pounded, making her feel intensely dizzy. Her body slowed to a near halt, making her feel like her joints were ripping apart. She hacked and coughed, feeling her lungs and stomach lurch. Her arms collapsed underneath her.
Her skull slammed into the metal, making her brain bounce inside her skull. She hissed in pain and coughed. Her mind swirled, her thoughts were no longer coherent, which made her disoriented. Hunter’s heart raced harder, making her paranoia spike. She bugs crawling within her intestines and up her throat. She coughed and puss flooded her throat. She spluttered and choked, making some spurt out of her nose. Her lungs heaved, pulling the fluid back into her lungs.
Her brain fogged over. Her heart pounded loudly in her ears and she gasped and spluttered, unable to breathe. Hunter felt something poking into her brain. She twitched and spasmed, unable to stop shaking and screaming
She felt something ripping open her skin. Blood coated her puss covered fur. Her spasming led her to slam down onto a nearby platform due to the amount of movement. Hunter felt the Thing within her brain push against her eyes. She flung her head around, trying to stop whatever was pushing at her eyes. She felt her retinas begin to rip, her vision blacking out with a painful slowness. The blood vessels in her eyes popped and her eyeballs bounced out of her skull. She listened to the squelch of her eyes on the metal below.
She screamed and felt the Thing poking at her brain and face from inside her skull. She coughed and just kept coughing. She flailed around, screaming in pain as her brain was tampered with and her skin continued to rip open. She felt the tendrils dig into her ear holes and into her ear canals, ripping open her eardrums and making the world silent. Her nerves were alight with pain as the rot fused itself with her body.
The tendrils inside her brain pushed down through the top of her mouth and into her throat, consuming her vocal cords, making her screaming stop. When she coughed all that happened was her body tensing and untensing in quick succession, almost like she was hiccupping. She felt her jaw pop out of place as the tendrils expanded out inside her mouth, making her face become stretched.
Hunter couldn’t think, she couldn’t do anything. Her body continued spasming and twitching until it had no more energy. Her flesh was barely there, hanging down from the muscles and tendrils that spiked out of her back.
She continued to spasm and twitch until her mind went blank.