Finally, nearly an hour of running later, something big decided to challenge his intrusion into the cave’s ecosystem.

  As he had stopped to observe a particularly beautiful waterfall in the cave, the ground started rumbling. Kyle had a lot of combat experience and immediately sprinted in a random direction. It had been a surprisingly decent tactic in his lifetime, as the armor could push 100 km/h in an emergency. A full five seconds and many meters away, Kyle turned and looked at the ledge where he had been standing. A huge cylinder tipped with mandibles punched out of the rock like it was sand.

  Wow, a carnivorous worm. Interesting. Kyle decided to draw out the fight, as he was curious. Megafauna existed in known space, but he had only seen a few of them in the past. The Megaraptors of Mercy III, or the Abominable Pillbugs of Thatran-18-both had been novel experiences.

  Quickly reorienting now that its head was above ground, it turned towards him and dived back into the dirt. It was nearly a meter in diameter at the face, so how was it burrowing? Kyle suspected acid or something, but it didn’t really matter.

  After kiting around the worm for about a minute, it grew tired and began to reenter the ground away from him.

  Oh no you don’t, he thought. Just like he had been trained to, he unclamped the railgun from his chest and brought it up quickly.

  PAST Multirole High Penetration Personal Railguns (MHPPR) were incredibly powerful weapons-the bread and butter of league fleets and ground forces alike. It had been personally made for his armor and was 2 meters long. It fired any slugs from any strong material. Of course, metal could retain its shape and penetrate feet of composite material, but any material would do in a pinch against such a biological target.

  His gun had a top-feeding port where a single round could be inserted into the breach at once. The rails would superheat the material into a form of plasma, and the electromagnetic fields would propel the mass of plasma down the barrel.

  His railgun used plasma, as appropriately sized rods would have been too large to be worth carrying. Base battery railguns and naval guns used Tungsten-alloy rods and sent solid projectiles across the void into other ships. Plasma was barely effective at that range and cooled quickly in the void.

  He had grabbed a rock earlier. The Nanofactory had turned it into a rodlike shape, and he slotted it into the breech easily. Raising the railgun to his shoulder, he waited for the rails to spool up.

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  Although he had to dodge the worm one more time during the process, the AI in his suit allowed him to easily multitask, sprinting away and loading his gun simultaneously.

  Once the railgun was fully operational, he turned back to the worm and pulled the trigger. In an instant, the plasma flew from the rectangular barrel at a speed too fast even for his armor's advanced sensors to track.

  The worm didn’t even realize what hit it. One moment, it had been sniffing the air to detect him, and the next, its tubular head flopped to the ground, cleanly severed from the body.

  The body slid back down the hole it came from, while the head simply oozed green blood and deflated. Interesting. It propelled itself by spines on its sides-upon death, the spines slacked and its body fell back down the hole.

  Kyle walked up to the corpse and clipped his railgun back to his chest after it cooled a bit. In the distance, a large hill of rock had been hit by the residual plasma and now sported a new hole.

  Kneeling by the oozing carcass, he inspected it deeply. He did not doubt that such a stereotypical fantasy creature would have a lot of valuable parts. Sadly, he had no effective way to carry the corpse.

  Simply standing and looking onwards, he picked up his sprint. That had been a pain, and the longer he spent in this stupid cave the more creatures would mistake him for a snack. He was already almost at the ruin, so why not just go all the way?

  ———

  However, before he reached the city, he came across an interesting sight.

  Another, smaller stone ruin similar to the one he had woken up in-this one consisted of a few buildings.

  It was generally structured like a village. Two larger structures were in the center of the collection of ruins. They were surrounded by smaller piles of rubble that were probably once houses.

  Walking up to the center, he inspected both buildings. One was just a slightly larger house, most likely belonging to the mayor or something similar.

  The other was a church.

  Looking at the edifice to stagnation and dogma, Kyle felt his ire rise. The Orion League was a hyper-anticlerical institution at heart. The Founder had seen what religion had done for humanity-slowed progress and propagated ignorance for eons.

  Anyone found practicing religion in an organized manner was reeducated. Not in an internment camp or anything like that, but in more of a fortified college.

  All citizens of the Orion League knew the value of rational governance, the opposite of religion. Every one of them knew they had a civic responsibility to further reason and logic-it was what gave them their post-scarcity lives, after all.

  Kyle walked into the church building. It was a squat building that had a dome built on top of it. A raised platform was surrounded by chipped and scraped stands for spectators.

  Kyle kicked some rocks absentmindedly. He left the church and the village, resuming his run towards the now less distant city walls.

  He would likely be the last person to ever lay eyes on it.