Hayazaki crouched at the current edge of his tolerance, watching his Axis terminal's warnings flash with increasing urgency. Even at this distance, the church's toxicity tested the limits of his Malara physiology. The air shimmered with lethal chemistry, creating patterns his enhanced senses could barely process.
WARNING: CRITICAL TOXICITY LEVELS the terminal flashed. APPROACH NOT RECOMMENDED.
He reached into his sack, pulling out food that had spent days absorbing the rim's poisons. What had started as simple bread and preserved meat now carried enough contamination to kill any unridden instantly. But for Filis's body, it was perfect training material.
His first bite sent his terminal into a frenzy of calculations. He could feel his body processing the toxins, not just neutralizing them but incorporating them, learning from them. Experience points accumulated as his system adapted, and he immediately fed them back into his adaptability stats. With each level gained, his tolerance increased incrementally.
The next bite would be more potent, he knew. His enhanced body was already adjusting its chemistry to handle stronger doses. It was a careful dance - push too far too fast and he'd poison himself beyond recovery. Move too slowly and he'd waste precious time he didn't have.
But he could feel it working. Every few hours, he could inch slightly closer to the church. His borrowed body sweated purple toxins as it evolved, each adaptation bringing him a little nearer to his goal. The terminal tracked his progress in precise measurements - distance gained, toxicity processed, mutations developed.
It wasn't just about building immunity anymore. His body was learning to thrive on poison, to draw strength from what should kill him. Each step closer to the church forced new evolutions, new possibilities.
The patterns of contamination became clearer as his senses evolved to process them. The church didn't just emit poison - it produced specific combinations, layers of toxicity that interacted in complex ways. His terminal began mapping these interactions, suggesting optimal exposure sequences to build immunity efficiently.
He found a relatively stable spot behind a collapsed wall, where he could observe while letting his body process the latest adaptations. The nausea had passed hours ago, replaced by a strange heightened awareness. His Malara senses were sharpening beyond anything Filis had ever achieved, letting him perceive the toxic flows as clearly as visible light.
WARNING: PHYSIOLOGICAL CHANGES DETECTED, his terminal noted. His skin had taken on a deeper purple hue, and the toxic sweat beading on his forehead carried traces of bioluminescence. He was changing, becoming something more than just a Malara. Each adaptation pushed him further from human baseline, but he couldn't afford to worry about that now.
A particularly potent wave of toxins rolled out from the church, making his terminal scream warnings. But instead of retreating, he forced himself to stay put, to let his body learn from the exposure. The pain was intense but brief - his system was adapting faster now, turning poison into power with increasing efficiency.
Hayazaki slumped against the crumbling wall, his vision swimming. The church wavered before him like a mirage, its toxic aura pulsing in rhythms that seemed almost alive. He'd thought he was winning, adapting, growing stronger. But now exhaustion hit him like a physical weight.
"Why..." he muttered, his transformed body shimmering with bioluminescent sweat. "I was leveling up..."
Then Shen was there - not real, Hayazaki knew, but a projection of his fatigue-addled mind. The hallucination stood with arms crossed, wearing that familiar expression of exasperated concern.
"Just because your body is adapting doesn't mean you would suddenly be okay," mirage-Shen said, shaking his head. "Quick adaptations take a lot of toll on the body. You've been pushing too fast."
Hayazaki let out a nervous laugh, feeling poison-laced sweat roll down his face. "I have to adapt, Shen. I have to level up." His voice cracked slightly. "This world is messed up, and I think I got dumped in the bin of this world."
The toxic atmosphere shimmered around him as more mirages appeared. Kayode materialized, wearing his characteristic smirk. "You sure did get dumped in the butts."
"Hey, I should have said that," Surya's image protested, appearing beside Kayode. "I make the crass jokes and you smack my head when you're nearby."
Kayode assumed a thoughtful pose, stroking his chin. "Oh that's true, it's like our roles switched."
"We should blame Hayazaki," Alexander's voice came from behind, gentle but chiding. "His mind is getting trippy and he's already mixing us up."
"That's not good," Kayode shook his head solemnly. "That's not good. Before you know it he will forget about us."
"I won't do that," Hayazaki whispered, his voice barely a breath in the poisoned air. The words seemed to drift away from him, and suddenly the toxic landscape dissolved.
He was back in the spaceship, its sterile white light almost comforting after the chemical twilight of the church. The familiar dining table stretched before him, its utilitarian surface reflecting the unchanging artificial day. Riley and Angela sat across from him, looking exactly as they had in those strange days between deaths.
"You okay?" Riley asked, her voice carrying none of the awkwardness of her borrowed Zelion body.
"I'm not sure," Angela murmured, tilting her head with that characteristic drowsiness. "I think he just woke up from a bad dream."
Hayazaki looked around the space they'd shared, knowing it wasn't real but feeling the pull of its simplicity. Here, they were just themselves - no borrowed bodies, no desperate missions, no toxic transformations. Part of him, the part aching from too much change too quickly, wanted to accept this dream-reality. To rest here with his friends in this liminal space between lives, where the only challenge was passing time.
His borrowed body's bioluminescent sweat cast purple shadows across this imagined scene, a reminder that he couldn't stay. But maybe, he thought as exhaustion pulled at him, he could rest here just for a moment.
The spaceship's white light seemed to soften as Riley sat up straighter, wearing her 'I have an idea' expression. "We need nicknames," she announced suddenly.
A collective groan rose from the group. "Americans," Shen muttered, "always wanting to shorten everything for convenience."
Riley pointed at Angela's doorway. "Angie!"
"That's literally one syllable less," Shen complained. "I don't understand Americans."
Riley turned to him, grinning. "You're just Shen."
He pouted, slumping in his chair as Surya's hand shot up enthusiastically. "Me, me!"
"Settle down," Riley laughed. "Let me think... King."
Surya's eyes lit up. "Ooh, why King? Do I possess some hidden regality? Something naturally majestic about me?"
"No," Riley said bluntly. "You just remind me of Sun Wukong. The Monkey King."
The laughter that followed filled the ship's recycled air with warmth. Moving through the group, Riley dubbed Kayode "Kay," receiving a grudging grunt of acceptance.
"Dana shall be... Great Dane!"
Shen looked personally offended. "The nickname is longer than her actual name!"
"Quiet, Shen," Dana said, emphasizing his name that had become its own nickname.
Alexander naturally became Alex, and then all eyes turned to Hayazaki. He smiled gently, something already nostalgic in his voice. "What about me?"
Riley thought hard. "Well, not 'Hay' because that sounds like 'hey,' and definitely not 'Zaki' because that doesn't mean anything..." Her face lit up. "Zach!"
The collective booing that followed echoed through the ship's corridors. Hayazaki's laughter joined them, and somewhere, in another reality, his poisoned body slumped against a toxic wall also found itself laughing. "Typical American," he whispered.
Riley's face showed concern. "Are you okay? You seem to be dozing off again."
"I think I am," Hayazaki admitted, feeling the edges of the memory starting to blur.
Then Angela's voice cut through the fading scene, suddenly sharp and clear in a way she rarely was. "Not here." She alone seemed solid now, more real than the dissolving memory around them. "You can't sleep here. It's time to wake up, Hayazaki."
His eyes opened slowly to the toxic twilight of the rotten church, the comfortable white light of the spaceship fading like a dream. But the warmth of the memory lingered
The poisonous dusk filtered through the church's miasma, casting everything in a sickly twilight. Hayazaki stirred from his position against the wall, where he'd somehow survived a night in an atmosphere that should have killed him instantly. His Axis terminal pulsed with an unfamiliar notification: METAMORPHOSIS INITIATED.
The words meant something more profound than simple leveling, though he wouldn't understand the full extent of his transformation for some time. His body had done more than adapt - it had evolved into something new, something that could not only survive but thrive in this toxic hell.
Standing, he adjusted his bag across his shoulders and faced the true entrance to the dungeon. Below the church's altar, steps descended into absolute darkness. The opening gaped like a maw to some ancient hell, and the toxic fumes that had nearly killed him before now poured forth from its depths like breath from a sleeping monster.
He thought of his friends then - of Riley's terrible nicknames, of Shen's careful observations, of Angela's warning that had pulled him back from dangerous dreams. "Thank you," he whispered to their absence, drawing strength from the memory of their time together.
The altar above the entrance caught his analytical eye. He made careful notes in his terminal - this was the third entrance he'd found positioned beneath religious iconography, but unlike the temples to sickness that dotted Sveethlad's landscape, these older churches seemed to celebrate something else. Something darker, more primal.
Death was the obvious answer, but Hayazaki sensed deeper mysteries. Why position the most dangerous entrance beneath this particular altar? Why the geometric precision in their placement across the city?
The elaborate designs spoke of purpose, of knowledge long buried beneath Sveethlad's culture of sickness.
He logged his observations for later investigation. First came survival, then Slasher's demands, then finding his friends. But after that... after that he would uncover whatever rot lay at this world's foundations. He would save it, not just from the Undakwin, but from the weight of its own forgotten history.
With new resolve burning brighter than the poison in his veins, Hayazaki took his first step down into the darkness. The tunnel swallowed him whole, welcoming him into its depths like a long-lost child finally coming home.