The Trash Collector Of The End World

Now that he understood the caves were more than just terrain features—homes, dens, maybe even sacred places for the Heloxians—he knew better than to sleep in one again.

If he hadn't been lucky with that jacket, he would've been dead by now.

So, while the rain still hissed and lightning still clawed through the sky, he walked.

Just enough to get distance. About a kilometer from the cave, hidden between two strange ridged boulders, he found it—a narrow hole just wide enough for him to slide through on his side.

It wasn't a cave, not really. More like a shallow burrow, barely deeper than a coffin, but dry and hidden.

It was enough.

Inside, wrapped in the Heloxian Jacket and shivering in the dirt, he curled up against the rock wall and listened to the rain batter the planet.

His stomach growled, then twisted in on itself. He hadn't eaten a single thing since the transport—whenever that was. There was nothing around to hunt. No edible plants, no local creatures that didn't look like they wanted to kill him first.

How do people survive here? Do they eat acid-resistant moss? Do Heloxians even eat? Or do they just fight and absorb nutrients through the air or something?

Whatever the answer was, it didn't help him now.

So, for the first night on this planet, he starved.

He didn't even sleep properly. His body ached. The wound on his side throbbed with every breath.

His back was sore from the uneven rock floor. The jacket kept him alive, but it didn't stop the cold from gnawing at his spine.

Still, he stayed alive.

And when morning came—if it could even be called that, since the sky was always overcast and weirdly greenish—the rain stopped.

Just like that.

Ash blinked up at the sky from the edge of the burrow.

"It just stopped…"

Just a dull brightness leaking through the sky, barely enough to call daylight. And in that eerie light, the landscape looked even more alien.

He pulled himself up, stretched his limbs, and looked around the wilderness.

This isn't a dungeon. This is a full planet.

A living, breathing world. Not just a place to complete a quest. Not a single zone or a scripted path. It was massive, untamed, probably full of regions and biomes that hadn't even been charted. And somewhere out there—in all that green and black and acid and ash—was the Heloxian Queen.

And I need to find her.

He pulled out a flat chunk of metal he'd salvaged from his vacuum. It was dented and a little scorched, but smooth enough to draw on.

He sat down cross-legged on a rock, took out a thin, burnt wire, and started scratching.

He wasn't an artist, but he didn't need to be.

He just needed a map.

"Let's see… cave's about here," he muttered, carving a crude circle into the metal. "That's where I met the Heloxian family—minus one dad, rest in peace, you almost skewered me. You'll be remembered… as part of my coat."

He glanced over his shoulder at the Heloxian Jacket hanging off a tree limb.

It looked disturbingly fresh.

A small beetle-like thing crawled out of the sleeve and leapt into the grass.

"Good riddance."

Back to the map. He marked the cave, the acidic swamp, the screaming tree that tried to feed him a live fruit, and the area with rocks that blinked.

"Alright, those are off-limits. Especially the swamp. If it talks, it stalks."

Then he added a line where he'd come across a stream—barely visible, trickling with thick, almost drinkable liquid. He didn't dare chug it yet, but it didn't burn through his gloves, which was promising.

A water source. Step one in not dying.

After an hour of scratching, revising, and swatting away bug-drones the size of staplers, Ash leaned back and admired his work.

The metal slab was barely readable, but it was something. A sense of place. A breadcrumb trail of his survival.

Next, shelter.

He scouted around the hole he'd slept in last night and reinforced it with a stack of large fern leaves—well, they looked like leaves, until he realized they twitched slightly when touched. Still, they stuck to the rocks like velcro and didn't let water in. Ash counted it as a win.

He built a tiny "door" by tying string between two thin logs and hanging more leaves like a curtain. Not secure, but better than nothing. And it even gave the illusion of privacy.

By mid-morning, his jacket smelled like a seafood market had gotten into a fistfight with burnt plastic, but it worked.

The acidic mist no longer tingled when it touched him, and even the occasional electric flicker in the sky seemed to swerve around him like he was carrying an invisible "don't smite" sign.

As he worked, he muttered ideas to himself.

"If I follow the valley slope, maybe I'll reach lower grounds."

He opened his vacuum and dug through the scraps again.

There was half-melted drone metal, shredded security plating, even a broken handle from some kind of alien ladle.

He pocketed anything sharp, heavy, or vaguely usable.

With the right combo of string, parts, and desperation, anything could become a weapon or a tool.

Then he stopped. Something caught his eye.

A cracked lens—possibly from a scanner.

He lifted it to his eye.

It still worked, barely, flickering purple lines across the horizon. Words he couldn't read hovered on the edge of the display, glitching and twitching.

"Language I don't know… but tech I might."

Ash smirked. He was starting to get the rhythm of this place.

"Alright, weird planet. Let's do this your way."

As Ash tied down the last knot on his makeshift door, he froze when he heard the now-familiar sound of Heloxian speech.

Panic hit him instantly.

Without wasting time, he scrambled behind a cluster of rocks just beside his door and pressed his face to the small viewing slit he had carved between the leaves.

Two figures approached.

At first, he thought they were Heloxians again—more of the tribal ones, here to avenge their dead or reclaim their unconscious—but as they stepped closer, he realized something was wrong.

The woman walked upright with a gait that was far too human, and the man beside her carried a sleek metallic case strapped across his chest.

Both of them had green skin, sure, but not the rough, armor-like shells of the earlier Heloxians. Instead, they had smoother skin, humanoid builds, and clothes that looked like actual gear.

Ash squinted. His brain scrambled for explanations. They looked too coordinated to be wild, too sentient to be feral, and too... casual.

Then the woman spoke in that same rough Heloxian tongue, and the man answered with a grunt while adjusting what looked suspiciously like a headset.

She crouched and traced a hand across the dirt near Ash's shelter, inspecting the footprints and string debris he had carelessly left behind.

And then it hit him.

They weren't just Heloxians.

They were hybrids.

Possibly even half-human.

That realization hit him like a punch to the chest.

"You can mate with Heloxians!??"