Life at the Arc is better than I thought it would be. The engineers have outdone themselves, rigging up a pulley system to move supplies—and people—to the top. It’s crude, loud, and far from perfect, but it works.
The word must be spreading, because every day brings new survivors. We’ve gone from a handful of weary stragglers to something resembling a community. More hands to work, sure, but also more mouths to feed. That’s the trade-off: growth means risk, and risk means patrols.
We’ve been combing the city, scavenging anything we can. Food, medicine, even just tools or scrap metal—it all has value. Most places have long since been picked clean, but if you’re willing to go deeper into the city, you can still find a few things. If you survive.
Yesterday, we hit a block near Rue Coquillière. We checked an old boulangerie. The upstairs was barren—empty shelves, shattered glass, dust thick enough to choke on. But in the basement, we found…
A rat swarm was eating a corpse.
Hearing us come down, the rats turned. Their eyes glinted, their bodies shuddered, and then one of them… popped.
The explosion was small but vicious, sending a spray of spores and viscera across the room. We fired, retreating up the stairs as more rats began to swell and burst. The noise was deafening, the stench unbearable, but we managed to fight our way out.
Once we were safe, I looked back. The rats were dead, but the spores lingered in the air like a malevolent fog.