Supreme Disassemble: Rebuilding the World in the Iron Wastel

Chapter 9: The Rats in the Walls

The tunnels beneath Slum Town didn't smell like old sewage. They smelled like something far worse—forgotten history rotting in a damp, unventilated tomb. Every step Suger took echoed against the slime-slicked concrete, a rhythmic thud that felt like a countdown clock ticking toward something unpleasant.

Watch your step, Suger. The Voice was back, but it had dropped that annoying cheerful tone. It sounded low, vibrating against his skull like a warning bell. These pipes haven't seen a maintenance crew in fifty years. The structural integrity is held together by rust and the sheer stubbornness of the Old World.

"You're telling me now?" Suger whispered. He shifted his grip on the rusted crowbar he’d scavenged from the shop. "I thought you were supposed to be my guardian angel, not a structural engineer."

Claire was three paces ahead of him, moving with the eerie, fluid silence of a ghost. Her new chrome arm emitted a faint, rhythmic hum, a low-frequency pulse that acted like a sonar in the pitch-black tunnel. She stopped suddenly, her hand snapping up to signal a halt.

"Do you hear that?" she asked, her voice barely a breath.

Suger froze. He strained his ears, ignoring the frantic thumping of his own heart. At first, there was nothing but the steady drip of condensation from a leaking valve. Then, he heard it—a skittering sound, thousands of tiny claws scraping against metal, coming from the ventilation shafts above their heads.

"Rats?" Suger asked, though he already knew the answer.

"In this part of the world, rats don't stop at six inches," Claire replied, her green eye flaring with a tactical light. "They’ve been eating radioactive runoff and discarded cybernetics for decades. They don't want your cheese, Suger. They want your copper wiring."

The skittering grew louder, a tidal wave of sound rushing toward them through the dark. Suger felt the familiar blue spark tingle in his palms. He didn't have enough scrap metal down here to build a fortress, and the concrete walls were too thick to disassemble quickly.

System, scan the ceiling. Give me something I can use.

A blue grid flickered across his vision, highlighting a series of high-pressure gas lines running parallel to the ventilation shaft. They were old, brittle, and filled with highly flammable methane.

"Claire, get down!" Suger roared.

He didn't wait for her to move. He lunged forward, his fingers brushing the cold, rusted surface of the gas pipe. He didn't rip it apart; he did something far more surgical. He disassembled the molecular bond of the safety valve, forcing the internal pressure to spike in a single, concentrated point.

The pipe didn't just leak. It shrieked.

A jet of pressurized gas hissed out just as the first wave of shadows burst from the vent. They were the size of small dogs, their fur matted with oil, their eyes glowing with a sickly red light. Some of them had jagged shards of scrap metal fused into their jaws like makeshift bayonets.

"Light 'em up!" Suger yelled.

Claire didn't need to be told twice. She raised her rail-pistol and fired. The projectile didn't hit a rat; it struck the sparking metal grate directly in front of the gas leak.

The explosion wasn't big, but in the narrow confines of the tunnel, it was a sun. A roar of orange flame swept through the ventilation shaft, turning the lead rats into charred husks and sending a wave of superheated air back toward the swarm. The shrieks that followed were high-pitched and hauntingly human.

Suger slumped against the wall, the heat singing his eyebrows. "I hate this place. I officially hate the underground."

Nice shot, kid. The Voice sounded impressed for once. But don't get comfortable. That fire just told every predator in a five-mile radius exactly where the buffet is located. And I’m sensing something much bigger than rats moving in the deep sectors.

"Can we have one minute without a death threat?" Suger groaned, wiping the soot from his face.

"No," Claire said, already moving again. She didn't even look back at the smoldering remains. "In the Inner City, they say the sewers are where the failures go to die. We’re currently walking through a graveyard of everyone who thought they were as smart as you."

Suger looked at the glowing blue notification on his HUD.

New Objective: Navigate the Deep Sectors. Level 9 Progress: 60%.

"Well," Suger muttered, following her into the smoke. "At least the company is charming."

They kept moving, deeper into the bowels of the earth. The air grew colder, and the walls began to change from concrete to a strange, obsidian-like substance—a material Suger’s system couldn't identify. It felt like bone, but it was hard as diamond.

Hey Suger? The Voice was quiet now, almost hesitant. Look at the floor.

Suger looked down. Scattered among the mud and the bones of the rats were hundreds of tiny, discarded memory chips. They were scorched, broken, and ancient.

"What are these?" he asked, picking one up.

Put it in the Ghost-Link, Suger. Let’s see what the rats have been hiding.

As he pressed the chip against his palm, his vision blurred. He didn't see the tunnel anymore. He saw a laboratory, clean and white, and a woman’s face—Claire’s face—screaming as a needle descended toward her eye.

The vision snapped back to reality. Suger gasped, dropping the chip as if it were white-hot. He looked at Claire, who was staring into the darkness ahead, oblivious to what he’d just seen.

The scavenger realized then that the Inner City hadn't just been hunting her. They were trying to erase her. And he was now the only man alive who knew why.

"Let's move," Suger said, his voice dropping an octave. "We're not just running anymore