The blood is still fresh, you can literally smell death around you in every room you walk in.

The facility is under attack and the attacker is obviously more capable than they thought. Some screams here and there, from a distance, that later faded abruptly after the sounds of broken shores and skulls. Dead bodies everywhere, some still shaking with open eyes.. Not a single doctor, scavenger, investigator, experiments alive.

Elina, loyal to the director since the beginning tried to stop her. She is only just a girl, anyway! What harm can she bring upon such powerful being? Elina’s blades are on the floor, soaked in blood and her head is slipping slowly down her shoulders. Elina collapsed in frond of the girl. She is finally dead..

Rebirth program – Hybrid Assassin

It’s been years since the last time anyone saw Elina.

You would think that a scientist would take her body to keep it safe somewhere. Not too far from the truth, I must say. Days passed by, weeks, months.. Elina opened her eyes and first thing she notices, besides the fact that she is still alive, is the place around her. The air hits differently, her body feels different.. and if you want to take a look in her mind I will tell you what you would see.Confusion, images from her death plus her past life.. dancing, love, the eyes of her killer then hate towards men, humans in general, the satisfaction of her first killing. It all happened so quickly. Her brain is messed up right now. Elina tried to get up on her feet to take a look in the mirror that was in her room.

Look at that! A faultless body, all white and clean. Her face is hidden tho, under a mask that’s connected to wires going in her whole body. She tried to remove it but it didn’t work. The mask is completely attached to her face. There is no way, it’s coming off.

– Welcome back little sister! We felt your death and brought you back here. For now on, this is your home, where you belong.

The voice comes from the corner. Elina turned around and saw Amphitrite and right beside her, there’s another creature who looks exactly like them two. Sicarius. For the truth to be told, Sicarius felt an instant deep connection with Elina, almost like she can hear Elina’s thoughts.

– Your body is now more resistant to temperature changes, completely immune to toxics, even stronger and much more flexible, increased ability to jump and speed as well! Not only that.. You can self-heal in no time and take a look at your blades! They are thermal blades now that pop in and out of your arms and can be upgraded without surgery. Yes and.. don’t worry about the mask. Not only it made your vision fully upgraded, heat, night, distant and ultraviolet vision are just some of the basic upgrades.. but it also allows you to spew your toxic saliva and infect your targets from a remarkable distance, breath underwater and pretty much stay alive in every environment. If you turn around you will see some changes on your back as well. These are poisonous spikes coming out of your flesh that will automatically shoot out when they sense any kind of threat behind you.

You are nothing like you used to. You’re so much better now. So much more. We fixed you sister!

She was a new Hybrid Assassin of Amphitrite

Model @kohona_felis

Design by Argus Dorian | Dark Cyberpunk Artist
Story by Revna Dorian & Argus Dorian

© Decaydead | Argus Dorian

One of the most primitive feelings of humankind is fear.

Without someone telling us, we used to fear the time when the night falls and yet we were enormously afraid of the light either is comes from the sky or the ground. Anything new could be nothing but scary. We knew better than trying to have a beast as our pet. We used to fear the deep water and the highest of places. Somehow.. we were never afraid of dying. How come?..

Fear has a special skill.. it tricks you into believing that something bad will happen even when you can’t be sure about it because you never tried. People found a way to keep themselves safe during night time by building homes. They found a way to use the light, wherever it comes from for their benefit and the community’s. We can’t be afraid of deep waters now that we found a way to sail on it or even traveling in it without keeping our breath. Now we have airplanes and submarines.. boats and ships. Now we have animals that used to be called beasts. Cats and dogs were not so cute and adorable back in the day. To sum up, there is no difficulty that we haven’t found a solution to. Such clever species.. why our youngest still fear the dark then? The deep seas and the highs? Not all children of course but a noticeable amount of them do.

We are grown ups now and we know better! The less fear you have, the best life you get. No anxiety, or any kind of mental illness. How come the earliest generation suffers from mental illnesses then? We have all figured out! When you have nothing to be afraid of, nothing can bring no harm upon you. Right? Right..

Is it though?

The problems and concern that I used to try and wrap my head around mean nothing to me now. Now we are dealing with actually problems! Fear has a face now.. a specific smell.. a mind of its own.. a pattern. One more of our natural fears is the loud and sudden noises. No matter how brave you think you are, when you hear gunfires, your heart will stop for a second or two. You see, our mind is trying to keep us safe by sending signals throughout our body that danger is near.

Our evolution caused the addition of infinite fears.

Fear of dying, failure, loneliness, rejection, other people’s opinions on your life choices and the list never seems to end. We end up having millions of reasons to be scared, therefor deeply unhappy and in order to keep our children safe from the same unbearable feeling.. instead of working on ourselves to find the very roots of our problems, we burden them with them. Is it really the only way we can help them? To share with them our biggest fears? Will this help them escape the feeling or the possible bad outcome of a similar situation?

In our life, we never stopped speaking ways out of trouble and problems. Eliminating the dangers, we succeeded to have lees to fear from the outside but the human’s mind is way more complicated than that. We are problem solvers, we are fixers, builders, hunters.. and we chose to live without the basic functions. By making these decisions the fear couldn’t come from outside so we turned inside and we found traumas, wounds, scars in our souls and minds. Turn the lights on in a room is easy, try and do that in your deepest bits in you. What keeps you awake at night? Its not the wolf that’s howling.. its not the bear that smelled your food.. is it the fear of losing someone? Or is it still what happened in second grade? Or maybe, what your parents think of you.. or what’s wrong with you and they all leave you.

We hide in underground shelters, caves and abandoned houses so they can’t find us. We are looking for a way to keep them away from us so we can survive another day todo the exact same thing. You know what keeps me awake last night? The ‘I love you” I should have said when I could and instead, I chose not to and that is something that truly hunts me day and night but it also keeps me alive. Another day.. another opportunity. We can never know what is going to happen the next minute. No relaxation at night time, no resting. All day, every day.. fighting for our survival. Now there is no more slackness, just death waiting outside. We can’t possibly know what might come through the shadows.. and if the shadow is the last thing our eyes will come across.

If we are lucky Elina will not come in our shelter. Keep in mind that it’s not the same Elina any more. She is far from the Director’s obedient pet. Elina has been upgraded, changed, evolved. Her death had a greater impact than we thought it would. I don’t have many informations about her yet but i’ll tell you this much.. you don’t won’t to come across her. Ever. I named her Shadow Assassin just to keep the right truck in her story. I wish I knew back then, how things would turn out today so I wouldn’t pick her.. I wouldn’t change her.. once again, we were condemned.

Model @kohona_felis

Design by Argus Dorian | Dark Cyberpunk Artist
Story by Revna Dorian & Argus Dorian

© Decaydead | Argus Dorian

Mothers’s corpses.. embryos.. unsuccessful experiments were not to be wasted.

They were all mashed and given to the new experiments as food. The Director always finds a way to use whatever she can for her advance. Especially now that she has finally succeeded to make the very first predator out of scratch, the new embryo dead experiment.

The world outside the shelter remains as it is. Dark, rotted and even more scary than the day before. Shadows of impoverished people are now hiding behind the ruins of a formal society. What once was bursting with life is now a gigantic graveyard. Whoever made it till today and is still alive, just as myself, I’m sure brings back in mind their past life. We all had dreams and goals to go for and achieve and now we are all the same. Scared and unsafe. We are trying to survive for just a bit longer.. another day, hour.. second.

Some are fighters and I give them that. Some are wounded and in no position to fight either to defend themselves or to protect others. Many of them feel useless while others have found the ultimate goal in their life, to protect. These I am most envy for. They found courage and strength for the ones they love. They found ways and plans and guns and means to fight back. To be completely honest with you, I’m not sure quite yet on which category I might be.

From the moment we wake up till the time we go to sleep, if we are lucky enough to actually have such luxury, we must be aware and always on edge just to make sure that their is no hunter outside our doorstep. The craziest thing is that you can’t even trust the ones you staying with anymore. You can never tell if someone got infected or not.

People saw an assassin watching a group of hunters, looking for the perfect opportunity to attack. They did nothing of course. Just stayed there admiring this biomechanics creature of distance.

Her eyes were piercing her target, her weapons ready to fire. I think that this assassin might need the hunters to get the samples to Amphitrite. From all I gathered, Amphitrite needs samples to expand her skills and knowledge. The assassin was not alone tho. A predator came from behind her, staring at her. Damn, the predator has no eyes. That’s what my people told me anyway.

The assassin felt its presence and turned around. Predator’s hands filled instantly with blades from inside out and the Assassin attacked on a heartbeat. The fight didn’t last long. She stand no chance against him anyway but she didn’t know. After he cut her in half, took her head as trophy. Rumours say that his name is Bone Collector, chief on a new Predator’s squad that is hunting down the assassins that turned against the Director. To summarise.. a new war begun.

Please, help us!

Model: Marco Hoppner @marco_bjolfurson

Design by Argus Dorian | Dark Cyberpunk Artist
Story by Revna Dorian & Argus Dorian

© Decaydead | Argus Dorian

Until now, we thought that hunters were just infected people who turn into beasts hunting us down, torturing us till we are no more, simply because this made them happy for some reason.

What we didn’t know and we just came across to is that hunters can procreate, unlike our saviours.. the assassins. Can you imagine that? The ones who fight for us can only be made by human’s hand and our enemies can multiply by themselves.

First question that comes to mind is..how?

I mean, how two beasts that only know murder and hunting can feel the need to create life?

Evolution plays its mystery real once more. Not only they kept the ability and the instincts of us humans but they now possess abilities taken from animals. We still have no idea who this can happen. We do assume that by eating the assassins, the hunters somehow stole parts of their DNA that’s combined with animal DNA and here we are now.. soon enough, outnumbered. We used animal’s DNA, I remember to make our assassins stronger. We never thought that this would actually backfire like this.

Hunters are now on the top of the food chain. They live everywhere, multiplying and know how to adjust to their environment to keep on making babies! I’d never thought I would actually say this one day. We’ve seen them spitting their venom as some kind of marking their territory and if you accidentally touch it with bare skin, get ready to join them in a matter of hours.

Would you like to hear something even scarier?

They lay eggs!

They literally push out dozens of eggs each time and this is their revolution! They carry their eggs on their spine just like spiders do plus the babies have the ability to grown on their own. No support is needed from the parents after few weeks! Not like us humans.. we need our parents to survive. Without them, as babies, we would have no hope to survive.

It feels like our planet is no longer ours anymore. They have it. They stole it. Which makes me wonder.. was it ever ours to begin with? Since when we developed this stupid theory on which we stood by all these years, that earth is ours to play with. Maybe our downfall was not only predictable and obvious but also necessary beyond words. We are not the superiors anymore and maybe we never had this position in the first place.

Think about it for a minute. Think about how vulnerable we truly are, how fragile. We need all that we made to protect ourselves from beasts and cold. The hunters need none of them to survive. Nothing. They use what they can but they don’t need them. I bet you can now count at least 10 animals stronger, faster or even larger than us. The difference between us and these animals is that they can adjust in their environment. We need to make stuff in order to survive, not thrive. Just for surviving.. maybe we are the strangers here.

After all, we tried to play gods and see where it got us. At this point, I think it is safe to say that we are now officially fucked.

Model: @the.victoria.rose

Photographer: @bruce_stirling_john_knox

Design by Argus Dorian | Dark Cyberpunk Artist
Story by Revna Dorian & Argus Dorian

© Decaydead | Argus Dorian

At first, we won a few battles with these monsters.. at least some of our people would come back! Now! Now they all die!

The greatest searchers here say that is it because the ground is so contaminated with the toxic saliva and the hunters’s blood that the moment you touch, it is the last moment of you being human! The infected are attacking the rest of the team! We are in danger! Now more than ever.. we are doomed. In every corner there is something waiting for you to fall into a trap, or do the wrong thing to get you! And the craziest part is that the hunters’s newborns are keep on multiplying day by day!

Assassins that are not with our side anymore waiting on top of buildings to attack you when you least expect it and of course the most dangerous specιes out there are your own people who are crying out for help while they have already turned into hunters who just set a trap for you!

I still remember the first time this happened in front of my own eyes. The first time I saw someone I knew turning into a hunter. Back then we were not paying attention to the news, to the warnings. We didn’t believe in the virus’s outbreaks and had absolutely no idea of what’s coming next. We didn’t really care. We used to hear the incidents on the News and say it won’t reach us.. exaggerations.. just another show to watch.. sold journalists.. we would change the channel to watch football instead.

I remember wearing up early in the morning to the barking of my neighbour’s dog. I put my mask on because my phone alerted me of the high infection levels that day, looked outside my window and I saw Monika, the dog’s owner. I opened my window and shouted her name. She didn’t even looked at me. Her eyes were locked on her dog, in silence.. until she grabbed it so fast from its neck and ripped it apart. The little dog was screaming for help in agony. I could almost feel its pain through my bones. Monika literally feasted on its body, covering her face in its blood. Three of the dog’s legs were attached to its body no more, the other one was shaking. This woman was gripping its insides so tightly as if she was extremely hungry. Then it hit me. I shut the window hard and bent down so she couldn’t see me. My curiosity wouldn’t let me stay there hidden for much longer. I had to look and I still regret it!

I stood up a bit, just until the height of my eyes was a little past the window. I was terrified. She locked eyes with me.. these were not Monika’s eyes tho. This creature that looked exactly like her, has black eyes. Blood was running down her face.. she wasn’t Monika. Not anymore. She threw her mask on the ground and run towards the park where I lost her. The first thoughts in my mind was something between what just happened and am I going to die? I thought about calling the police but there was no power in my home. Tried to turn on the tv, still nothing. I looked around and that when I first saw it. The purple velvet box, right next to my bed.

If only I knew back then that this box would change my life forever.

Design by Argus Dorian | Dark Cyberpunk Artist
Story by Revna Dorian & Argus Dorian

© Decaydead | Argus Dorian

Its late at night. Not a soul around here..nobody except the snipers on the roofs. 16 of them, heavily armed and well camouflaged. I see their heat trail still, no matter how hard they try to hide it in their uniforms. I caught myself thinking about how they could die. I’ve seen it many times before. Nobody is safe after all! As I walk down the street I feel as if something pushed me a bit aside but I didn’t see anything. Like a ghost running right besides me! Suddenly, the snipers fall down one after the other. The trail becomes cold blue..a sign of death. I laugh and approach the building, the entrance. There are two machine guns, easy stuff.. I just look at them and diagrams, codes, all the functions of the machine appear before my eyes as I enter the system and reprogram it remotely so they now they protect me.

I easily open the double metal security door using the same system and enter the building. A long corridor full with soldiers looking at me, pointing their weapons at my direction. They must be joking, right? The machine guns turn on them killing these little people in seconds.. Bullets everywhere.. no sound was made. No sound but their screams mixed with my laughter.
It was a matter of time before the corridor is covered in blood, bodies torn apart, some still writhing begging for help and mercy, but I don’t feel a thing. I just finish them right there. What a beautiful sight..my mom would say ‘its such a mess! Clean it up!’ It matters not! Wherever I look, I can only spot bits of human flesh scattered all over the place. Wonderful decoration..too bad they will just get eaten by animals or hunters. We will deal with them later tho! Look at this skull there! So pretty! This is a work of art, indeed. I knew I should have become an artist! I was really good with pastels since young age!

I have to do deeper in order to find it. This is my mission. she was very clear about it. Amphitrite gave me every information that I needed. Its in there, I’m sure of it!

Whoever comes against me, should have known better! Now I’m quite qualified to deal with my enemies. Finally.. I have my blades now! Have you ever tasted blood from a blade? Its funny how similar these two different things taste.. both like iron! Just in case I’m the only one that knows this fact, it is my responsibility to share it with others as their last lesson on this earth!..I need to kiss them right on their lips to teach them this valuable lesson! Maybe next time humans will know better and not combine iron with people! They are so funny tho! Running either towards me or away from me. I got to admit..those who try to fight me gained a bit of my respect. Too bad they will all end up on the ground.. just look at them! How cute they are trying to climb the walls..to call elevators.. or help. No no no sir… I was once in your position. I was screaming for help and nobody came darling..deal with it. Nobody cares..nobody cares..nobody cares..

Oh there we go! The labs! Scientists..doctors..blah blah blah.. easy pray! Come on! I thought Amphitrite would trust me with something a bit challenging! That’s like a long walk on the beach! No resistance, sweeties? Really? You’ll just give up? Come on! Give me a fight to think about at night! Is that a vaccine? Will it turn me blue? Will it turn YOU blue? Let’s test it on you, love! Oops..sorry! Wrong vein? No vein at all? Oh was that a bone? Sorry, love. I am no scientist you see!

Enough fun..lets get some work done! Alright..there we have the computers. Logged in, surveys downloaded, secret experiments.. ‘secret’..really now? We all know bitch! They all know! All Director’s files are right here. Successful or not. Drafts, ideas, researches..everything. amphitrite will be so proud of me! We can finally go for stage two now! Okay, done! Oh where are my manners? Was I raised by wolves? How could I forget to bring a gift once I entered!? Never mind, I have on here! Sadly, it is one of my favourites.. anyway. Hope you enjoy!
Im out!

Is that explosion? And another one? And another one? Wow..the whole building goes up in flames..thats good. It’s a bit chilli outside. I’m sure they will thank me later! Ungrateful little worms! Thank me! Thank me for saving you from the hunters!

Its sad really, if you think about it..i’m only obey to the orders. I didn’t choose to cause this mess! Or did I? Why do I feel the need to cry? Is this what happens and fulfilment feels like? I can’t keep my eyes open..

Woke up sweaty, my breath is heavy and I feel intense anxiety! It was a dream..was I dreaming?? That means I was sleeping.. on my desk? Holding a pen? That doesn’t make any sense! I need to record it and write it down! Oh..I already did.. what’s happening? Am I loosing my mind?

Model @varisvarjo

Design by Argus Dorian | Dark Cyberpunk Artist
Story by Revna Dorian & Argus Dorian

© Decaydead | Argus Dorian