Ceres Chaos [Exosuit Progression]

The Keepers continued to fire at Ceres. As his flimsy barricade started to be riddled with holes, he dodged and weaved between the messy layout of the research lab, running behind the base of his shattered vat, and crouching behind it.

[He’s too resistant to the stun shots, hit him harder!] The Keepers began to swap to armour-piercing rounds.

“What?! Are they fucking crazy?” Ceres was still reeling from everything that happened so fast. It’s only been five minutes since he ‘woke up’ in the vat.

While the armour-piercing rounds deflected off the solid metal plate of the vat with a resounding bang, Ceres panted as he struggled to fight the hunger emitting from his body. It felt like if he let go at any moment, he might not become himself any longer.

His body was covered in black scale armour all around, looking like an alien exosuit, except that it felt natural as though it had been a part of him his entire life.

Right now, he needed a weapon. He recalled the positions of all the fallen soldiers and their rifles, but would they be strong enough to penetrate the exosuits? No, he needed a stronger weapon, and the only ones holding it are the Keepers themselves.

The research lab started to shake slightly, a low rumbling sound echoing throughout the wall.

[Warning – Collapse in three minutes]

The three Keepers quickly advanced forward, no longer worrying about taking it slow. They too did not want to get caught up in the self-destruction of the research lab. They flanked Ceres on both sides, trying to catch him.

Ceres was trapped. The two Keepers, 6 and 16, swung left and right respectively, while KIER stood menacingly at the rear with Keeper 23, forming a pincer attack against Ceres.

Desperate and with no choice left, the desire for survival caused his body to slightly slid into ‘hunger’. He felt his body suddenly resonate with something within, giving him strength unlike ever before.

With no other way out, Ceres took a deep breath, before pushing against the vat with all his might, hoping to maybe topple it onto the Keepers. Instead, the base of the vat gave way easily, the entire vat sliding on the floor fast towards Keeper 6.

Keeper 6 couldn’t react fast enough, being slammed by the vat and sent flying towards the wall.

Ceres was surprised at his own strength but took the chance to immediately leap out from behind the vat, rushing towards Keeper 16 who was still surprised by the rapid movement.

Before Ceres could land a hit on the Keeper, KIER suddenly appeared in front of him, blocking the hit. The punch made a significant dent in KIER’s armour, causing it to stumble backwards.

Ceres was shocked that he managed to make a dent using his bare hand, but soon realized that it was the effect of the black armour covering his body, boosting his strength. “Holy shit, I’m strong?” The armour that couldn’t be affected by small arms fire was dented by him?

Ceres had no time to dwell on it, instead taking the opportunity to grab KIER’s arm with two hands and flinging him off in one fluid movement.

KIER was thrown back towards the entrance, while Ceres suddenly felt a flurry of impacts on his left naked arm that dug in deep.

He was shot with an actual armour-piercing bullet! But instead of bright red blood oozing out from the wound, the blood was slightly mixed, as though it had been tainted by a black goo, flowing with viscosity.

The anger and rage within Ceres immediately spiked! The survival instincts kicked in as his body went into autopilot, rushing now at the exposed Keeper 16.

As though they were synchronized, Keeper 16 immediately began retreating, with Keeper 23 running over to Keeper 6 to pick him up. KIER rushed forward again to stall Ceres, but this time Ceres was no longer afraid, meeting him directly with a forward punch.

[Warning – Collapse in two minutes.]

At the last moment before they collided, KIER immediately stopped and retreated, heading back towards the exploded hydraulic door. Ceres tried to chase them, but the suppressing cover fire from Keeper 23 kept him down. Ceres wasn’t immune to bullets!

The Keepers escaped from the lab with KIER covering their route, preventing Ceres from chasing. Ceres did not want them to escape.

Loose rubble and dust started to fall from the ceiling, waking up Ceres from his trance and bringing him back to the present. He needed to escape the lab, but he could not go the way the Keepers came lest he was captured. At least not until he found out what was happening.

“Shit, how do I get out of here?” He noticed the previously unconscious young man known as the ‘White Fang’ stirring on the floor, so he ran over to help him up.

“Hey, wake up! How do I get out of here?” Ceres tried to shout into the ‘White Fang’s ear, but his voice croaked hoarsely and the ‘White Fang’ was unconscious.

Ceres didn’t bother asking anymore, instead glancing around the research lab. There had to be some sort of secret exit built into this secretive shady place. It was almost a given.

He finally noticed a crack in the wall behind the vats due to the self-destruct sequence, revealing a tunnel behind it. Ceres wasn’t sure if it was a proper tunnel or not, but it was better than staying in the collapsing research lab.

Lifting the young man, he carried him on his back before running towards the back of the vats. Ceres threw a single punch at the crack, completely exposing the exit and entering a tunnel that led uphill.

As he ran, the rumbling and shaking only got more violent as time went on, as though an earthquake was happening. “Fucking shit, are they trying to collapse the whole place?”

He narrowly dodged tumbling rocks and falling chunks, while avoiding sinkholes that randomly appeared on the floor. The sinkholes led to god knows where and Ceres was sure that neither he nor the young man he was carrying could survive the fall.

Ceres suddenly realized the tunnel was getting wider, while more and more cracks were forming below the ground. Slipping down into one of the ever-expanding sinkholes was a real possibility.

Not wanting to fall together, Ceres decided to quickly put the young man down on the floor, before trying to carry him with his arms instead.

However, just as soon as he placed him on the floor, a huge explosion rocked the entire area, and the ground started to give way underneath!

***

Ceres gasped as he woke up with a jolt. He was half-buried in rubble and slumped along the wall of an unknown chasm. He quickly glanced around, trying to get his bearings. How much time has passed since he fell?

He looked upwards, unable to see the ceiling or how far he fell.

There was hardly any light around except for the radioactive rocks that dotted the walls, giving off an eerie green light that was just bright enough for Ceres to grope around in the dark. Small batches of insects scurried around the floor. “I got to move, I have to get out of here!”

He could feel a slightly cool wind blowing, so he began to follow the source of the updraft.

“What the hell even happened? What’s the weird exosuit I was wearing… huh it’s gone?” Ceres looked down and realized he was stark naked with his glory visible for all to see.

He staggered along the chasm, walking for god knows how long. A minute, an hour, a day. With nothing to help him keep time, he couldn’t tell.

“Wait… I had superhuman strength during the fight just now…” Ceres thought to himself as he took a break, leaning against the wall and panting slightly. He had no idea how far he walked.

Ceres took the time to ponder over what had happened. In his mind, it’s only been more than an hour since he fought Chad to the end at the graduation ceremony. Who put him in the vat? How long was he in there? Why were people defending him and who were the Keepers?

“Is this some sort of mental illusion?” Ceres tried pinching himself, causing him to yelp in pain.

The pain made him realize that he had been shot during the fight. Ceres quickly patted his body around, checking for bullet marks. “Nothing at all, so I’m invincible too? Wait, better not test that yet.”

Ceres tried to consolidate everything. “Okay, so black scale armour that is formed with my blood filled with black liquid, and I was trapped in a vat… If this is all real, someone just experimented on my body!”

What was in his body that could give him such strength to be able to go toe to toe with an Athen Defender without an exosuit?

“Hmm… System, open menu. Stats. Open Game Interface. Window.” Ceres said each word out loud, before waiting for a good minute.

Ceres even tried a few hand motions, swiping the air, tapping his neck or wrist and even his belly button. He tried every pattern he could think of.

“Wait… no system? No nano machine-like entity to guide me? How the fuck am I supposed to know what to do then? Am I not supposed to get a daily quest now like do 100 pushups a day or it’s the death penalty?”

Unfortunately, none of the novels and holodramas that Ceres watched as a kid were true. Sure, the Galactic Era already had such technology available, but Ceres had not yet come into contact with them yet. And it was obvious the black scale armour did not have such a functionality. Where was the user manual even?

“Shit, that means I’m not the main character, I’m like the genetically modified monster!” Ceres wondered if he was even human anymore. However, considering his current scenario, it was better that he got out of wherever this was first!

“Fuck that, I’ll figure it out later – I need to find a way out now. If I can just get back to Zone 17...” Ceres muttered as he started to move again. He also wondered who were the people that brought him to that research lab, most notably the ‘White Fang’.

Ceres was still trying to find where did the young man fall to, but to no avail. He must have moved more than two hours both forward and backward in the chasm and he found it hard to believe that his body would have been flung any further than that during a straight fall. How did he even survive such a long fall?

Perhaps the young man did not fall with him? If so, Ceres needed to find him for answers. He wasn’t going to get much of an answer out of those hostile Keepers that shot first when he coughed.

He also began to think about his friends. “What happened to the competition? Erik, Braton, Lisa, Ardan, Trissa…” He had to get back to them. For all he knew, they might be looking for him too!

As he walked back and forth, unable to determine where to go, he could still feel the same hunger permeating through his body.

It wasn’t a simple type of hunger, but something greater than his body yearned for. His vision kept switching between normal colour ranges to monochrome greyscale at seemingly random times.

The monochrome environment made everything look grey, including his own body.

Sticking his hand out straight in front of him, he clearly recalled seeing the bright red sparks of light emitting from the Keepers during the fight.

However, right now in his lonely environment, there was hardly any colour other than grey, white and black or a mixture of them. He did see some small sparks on the walls, but they were far too small to even see closely enough.

Ceres tried slapping his head a few times which resulted in a world of pain and no relief. This brought to attention his irregularly strong body.

He was a lot larger, taller and more muscular compared to what he recalled of himself before. What the hell happened to him in the vat? “Whoever fucked with my body, why didn’t you add a System!? Just buy one from the Council or something if you’re going to go this far and forget the user manual!”

Before he could contemplate any further, the chasm rumbled, with more loose rocks falling near him from above. “Shit, I better move out of here before I get flattened.” Ceres had no idea where to go, only choosing one direction to head and sticking with it, hoping all roads lead to somewhere important.

With the dim light provided by the radioactive rocks embedded throughout the chasm, he groped and fumbled through for a good while. His vision was swapping in from normal colour to monochrome at an increasing frequency, and Ceres feared that he would eventually lose his normal colour sight.

The hunger seemed to grasp his heart from within, causing him to struggle to even think properly.

As he continued moving, the fatigue from the fight with the Keepers and the non-stop escape started to catch up with his body, and his energy began to drain out.

With every step, he felt the ‘hunger’ seemed to emit from every pore of his very being. Ceres even started to visualize that even his skin was hungry for something.

Unable to focus enough, Ceres continued to stumble forward with increasing haste, as though it was of the utmost importance to solve this ‘hunger’.

“What the hell is happening to my body? I don’t usually feel this way even when I’m starving.”

Thankfully, a glimmer of hope appeared. While Ceres’s vision was oscillating between normal colour and greyscale, he caught a hint of a dim blue sphere on the wall while in greyscale.

However, when he reached out for it while his vision went back to normal, there was nothing on the wall!

Ceres doubted that he could really see through walls, but the ‘hunger’ overrode his logic, forcing his body and hands to start digging into the wall in the direction of the dim blue sphere. Without even registering it, the black goo within his body came out and formed around his arms, hardening into digging tool shapes.

His body became more and more primal-like as his entire being focused on digging with his bare hands, Ceres hardly noticed that his hands had already been coated with the same black scale armour as before, hardening the tips to allow him to dig.

All he had in his mind was that he needed to reach the dim blue sphere and fast.

Ceres continuously dug with increasing fervour towards the dim blue sphere, which was starting to get closer and closer. Soon as mere centimetres of rock separated him and the blue sphere, Ceres roared as he forced through the layer of rock and launched himself at the sphere.

He instinctively munched into whatever was in front of his mouth, his jaw working extra hard to chomp everything down, his tongue hardly tasting anything as he swallowed.

This went on for a few seconds till he noticed that the last three chomps did not catch anything in his mouth, snapping him out of his primal-like trance.

“Oh god…” Ceres murmured as he finally took a good look at what he had been eating. It was a white maggot-like worm the size of a dog, covered in hair-like bristles, not unlike the setae on other insects. It had a large maw that served as the mouth, with no limbs and two simple feelers at the front.

It might have looked more holy and pristine if it wasn’t for the fleshy bits and innards dangling out of the now sprawled-out skin, with a noticeably large gaping hole in the middle that caved out whatever solid meat it held inside.

A few meaty threads dangled from Ceres’ mouth to the worm, while a putrid smell emitted from within the worm and of course, Ceres’ mouth.

Wiping the meat fluids from his mouth and fighting back the urge to vomit, Ceres instinctively took a step back from the now mangled corpse of the worm, his feet making a squishy sound as it bumped against another hairy worm, which squealed loudly in fear and scurried away.

“FUCK!” Ceres shouted out loud before jumping out in fright, trying desperately to find his footing amongst the hundreds of worms that squirmed along the floor! A cacophony of squeals erupted in response.

“Who’s there?!” A voice echoed out from a dirty pre-fab house next to the worms, while Ceres only finally put the pieces together – someone lived here and was farming these worms.

An elderly man came out of the door, wearing a protective suit and helmet similar to those worn by miners in the event of a gas leak, albeit it was ragged and patched with random strips of fabric.

In his hand he held a staff, which featured a glowing stone in a metal lantern that provided much more light than the eerie green light that permeated the cavern, walking towards the worms.

His face was wrinkled with age, but Ceres realized that the elderly man must have been down here in the subterranean environment for his whole life to have skin that pale. Not even the inners had this kind of skin.

Ceres started to consider how would he be treated with such tanned skin underground. Would people immediately try to attack him, knowing he’s from the surface?

The light glowed onto Ceres, while the worms scurried away from the staff as the elderly man move through the horde of worms.

The elderly man took a closer look. “You don’t look like a Chosen. You’re not a Chosen, are you?”

“Huh? No, I’m from Zone 17…” Ceres instinctively replied, but he regretted that. He should have played it more safely and not said he was from there. Was the old man with the Keepers?

The elderly man’s eyes finally glanced over the half-eaten worm, his face gasping.

“What the… Boy, quick! Come inside quickly!” The elderly man beckoned towards Ceres, motioning towards his house.

Ceres didn’t hesitate and immediately agreed, moving towards the house. He wasn’t afraid that the elderly man could hurt him in any way, considering that he managed to fight the black exosuit head-on. If it was necessary, he would be able to fight his way out, Ceres hoped.

The elderly man hastily ushered him into the house, while using the metal lantern to create a path among the worms. The worms squealed and shifted away whenever the metal lantern got close, allowing the elderly man to ‘shepherd’ them effectively.

Entering the house, Ceres noticed it was just like any pre-fab building, full of the standardized stuff that you would see in a normal bunker-like building. If anything, it felt like a rundown studio apartment, while Ceres also recognized some of the equipment from his days in the electrical trash yard.

The equipment in the house was all extremely old, some of it already broken and degrading. A similar putrid smell filled the house, while Ceres continuously fought down the urge to vomit.

The elderly man quickly rummaged through the pockets of his protective suit. “Quick boy, take this if you want to live!” He retrieved a transparent bottle full of black pills the size of a pellet and handed it to Ceres, who grabbed it without thinking.

“And wear this protective suit! How are you travelling around underground stark naked? Are all outsiders this stupid?! Do you have a death wish?” The elderly man chided him and pushed a spare suit into Ceres’s chest.

Staring at the bottle, Ceres couldn’t help asking: “Hold on, why would I die if I don’t take this? Is there some sort of radiation poisoning going on!”

“Are you daft?! You just ate an entire grodaw and touched a hundred of them stark naked and you don’t want any pills? I know life gets dreary down here, and I don’t know why you ended up here but you should treasure your existence much more, boy! Wait, let me see your feet!”

The elderly man hardly cared about the fact that Ceres had no clothes on at all, instead squatting on the floor to observe Ceres’s feet. “Hmm, strange, no puncture wounds nor any signs of inflammation… You came from Rockhold, right? How are you immune to the grodaws?”

Ceres didn’t know what to reply. He had an inkling that if he told him exactly where he was from, he might end up in a whole heap of trouble. Would the elderly man sell him out to the Keepers in the future? He didn’t even know if this was an inner zone or not!

“Err, I fell a long way, so I don’t remember who I am...” Ceres lied, avoiding the piercing eyes of the elderly man, who stared directly at his eyes, suspicious with a tinge of dark yellow. Ceres became a bit more aware that he had been labelling people with colours for unknown reasons, and the colours never seem to be the same.

An awkward silence passed before the elderly man sighed and stood up straight.

“Well then, I’ll try to see what we can do for you. We do need a good healthy young man around here. There just aren’t enough hands around here.” The elderly man didn’t exhibit any more signs of suspicion, instead taking Ceres at his word, causing Ceres to frown. Who was this elderly man and what was he doing with the worms here?

The elderly man brushed past Ceres to head towards a cupboard at the back of the house, rummaging through a pile of tools. “Since you ate one of my precious grodaw, you have to work to pay it off!”

Ceres instinctively grabbed the tool belt that was thrown towards him. It was similar to what the elderly man wore but flexible for his size. “What are ya waiting for?! Don’t just stare – get to work!”

Ceres suddenly was afraid of what he just got himself into.