The Ëchüha Incident: Part 2+3

QSI-N_0266801c(3)
Fhá Vngví - Hàkétzü DZ-C_060041386
Part 3

Imperial Ministry of Inquiries
Inquisition Dispatch HKTZ:x-045ca9e3bdaf41220c_21€

Dropkick Demons Insertion

Tension, the air stank with it. Every breath carried its taste, an acrid flavour, foul, saturated with the bite of fear and the tang of nerves taut as tripwires. It filled the hold of the drop ship with a heady scent all seven men strapped into their seats knew better than their own mother’s cooking. Each one had smelled it on drops both short and long into LZs hotter than a wolf-rayet. They’d been through every hell imagined and discovered a few new ones along the way, hells that stank of terror and death—the lull between shooting matches even more so. The smell, that smell, it was stronger this time, as if the tensile strength of air had strained itself beyond the breaking point and was only held together by sheer stubbornness and the peculiar taint of the Glitch.

Something about this operation was different, off. Hvórþ could feel it in his bones like a visceral wrongness. Every instinct in him screamed it as it did in every Dropkick Demon under his command. They weren’t being sent in as the hammer of the Imperium’s wrath. They weren’t doing high stakes intel gathering, they weren’t taking names and kicking ass, hunting HVTs or establishing beachheads deep behind enemy lines.

Clearing the way for a Blister Blitz in an absolute clusterfuck was their bread and butter and no matter what Katzali had to say, Hvórþ knew this wasn’t that. They weren’t here on another ordinary high stakes recon operation either. It wasn’t going to be just another Europasday in Shittsville because Shittsville had already came and went a long time ago. The star had already gone supernova, and the black hole was long through feeding on its corpse. Where they were going was colder than ice, colder than the space between stars, colder than the tombs of emperors whose bones had turned to dust three ages ago and had already been forgotten in the endless paper cathedrals of imperial bureaucracy.

Put simply, the planet was dead.

From what Hvórþ had been given from previous UAV reconnaissance operations, the situation was unlike anything he had ever seen before. All that was left of the little princeling’s palatial spaceport was crushed bones of imperial splendour. Skeletons and fragments of buildings, unrecognisable as to what they once were, rose out of piles of rubble and drifts of ash and dust, as if defiant to the wrath of the gods themselves. What shape anything once might have taken could scarcely be imagined. The scene was one of total devastation, unlike anything mankind could produce by the means suggested.

When he’d first been given still frames from UAV recons, he’d thought only a nuclear armaggeddon of a variety not seen in five ages could have obliterated everything to such an unfathomable, unrecognisable degree. But there were no such craters, no glassed impact sites, no fallout detectable anywhere on the surface. Radiation scans showed only moderate elevation, more consistent with high volcanic activity than nuclear bombs, and the ruins suggested a more conventional demolition by way of shelling and bombing and urban warfare.

The scale of it was completely unbelievable. Whatever war caused this was so far beyond the limits of human tolerance that Hvórþ questioned whether or not the Rimworlds had staged some manner of defence here. But this…this was no Rimworlds homeland defence. Those always brought First Marines, and First Marines had a way of making their presence unambiguous, unmissable even. Hvórþ had seen it. He had seen what the AFR’s gods of war were capable of and had prayed every day since then to never see it again. When no signs of their handiwork were to be found, Hvórþ neither praised the gods nor felt any form of relief.

There was only one answer to the question of who did this.

What had happened to this backwater oubliette for the disgraced son of Imperial royalty was self-inflicted. The perpetrators and the victims were the Imperium herself. All that could be seen in every scan, recording, and VScape was the aftermath of Imperial weaponry turned inward, with not a scintilla of evidence of anyone else being involved.

It was civil war. There was no other option.

Despite what all the data read, Hvórþ could not reconcile that. The Rimworlds, or, for that matter, any civilisation fighting off a hostile force until there was nothing left to fight over made some sense to him. Humanity had a long and storied history of fighting off invaders even when it was only for the pure principle thereof. This wasn’t that.

It was civil war. Brothers killing their brothers, fathers killing sons, mothers killing daughters, the most brutal form of fighting. Fighting few had stomach for, fighting that could not go on, but did. And it went on. It went on and on and on, until every centimetre of ground had been fought over so totally that, by the time all was said and done, whatever they were fighting for in the first place had been replaced in its entirety with pure hatred of their enemy, until they were fighting just to fight, to destroy the enemy. Driven by an insatiable desire to exact some petty vengeance over the totalising destruction of everything they had once been fighting over, they had fought until no one was left to fight over it anymore.

That’s what all the evidence seemed to scream. Hvórþ he couldn’t understand that. It was less comprehensible to him, less intuitive to him than the bizarre, wispy, shadowy creature he’d seen attacking a comms station on one of the VScapes the UAVs brought back.

That, perhaps, more than anything was what had unsettled the men. The material Katzali had provided in as part of their briefing the day before was obviously not everything brought back—this being an Inquisitorial Dispatch after all. There was one VScape that stuck out to everyone, one they had all discussed privately, out of earshot of the Inquisitor and well away from the listening ears of his servants. One that Hvórþ was convinced had been intentionally selected from a large pool of other Vscapes.

According to their briefings their stated objective was to pinpoint the source of an intense GQF in the heart of where the banished noble’s palace would have been and to use some fancy equipment Katzali’s tech heads had given them on it—equipment Hvórþ wasn’t even confident worked at all. Between the suspicious Vscape and its hostile creature, the number of drones lost in previous missions, the malfunctioning comms stations dropped ahead of their departure, and the cloud wall forming a kind of event horizon sealing each side of from the other, Hvórþ didn’t trust it. Something was out there, something dangerous. Whatever it was, Hvórþ knew in his bones that the Big Geek couldn’t be anything other than a hive of them.

Katzali knew it too. He had to. None of the maths added up with any of this. To send the Dropkick Demons on this mission, to go poke at a heart of darkness on a dead planet, it stank of pretence and Inquisitorial lies. What Katzali was really interested in were the entities. Why, Hvórþ couldn’t say. What he knew, what everyone knew, was they were simply the bait. Drawing out the entities was the real mission. For what point or purpose, not a single Dropkick Demon knew, only that it was going to be the death of them.

In the drop ship’s hold, the stench of mortal terror accompanied a silence thicker than fortress armour. For the first time, they knew they were going to face an enemy they couldn’t beat. There were no jokes, no banter, no pranks, none of the usual noise they had made a thousand times before on a thousand operations before. Each one, every soldier Hvórþ had spent the last forty Tanno fighting with was silent as the grave as they stared into the face of death fast approaching, making peace with inevitability as best they could.

The sound and vibration of the Joxa-Class drop ship’s braking engines igniting rattled through the small hold. Each Dropkick Demon pulled his gas mask over his face and performed final weapons checks as they awaited the pilot’s signal.

“Demon Alpha, this is Joxa-5 we are approaching LZ, prepare to drop in six-zero seconds!” Kija, Joxa-5’s pilot, called over the comms channel, breaking Hvórþ from his thoughts.

“Copy, Joxa-5,” Hvórþ returned. “Drop in six-zero.”

Hvórþ gave his team the signal and they performed final gear checks, ensuring they had everything they needed. Once they were boots-down, they would be on their own. No comms, no resupplies, no reinforcements, and no rescue.

“Check flare guns!” Hvórþ barked, patting his vest for the flare gun holster he’d mounted for quick access.

No comms also meant they would have to signal the dropship the old fashioned way.

“Twelve hours, boys!” Hvórþ bellowed as the sound of the drop ship’s landing thrusters roared through the hold.

Hvórþ disengaged his flight harness, grabbed the strap above his head, and rose to his feet, holding his IK-T87G6 Spec-Ops modified light machine gun—Little Ikki—in one hand for the final few seconds. Without warning, the drop ship plunged to the left, heavy vibrations rumbling through the deck, knocking Hvórþ off balance. He lost his grip on the strap and toppled over, slamming hard into the floor.

“Joxa-5, what’s going on up there?” Hvórþ said into his wicomm, as the drop ship righted itself and began accelerating upward again.

“Demon Alpha, LZ is a no-go,” Atzumi, Kija’s co-pilot, commed in, “platform partially collapsed under us. Prepare for airborne descent at two-five-zero metres elevation and relay ready signal.”

“Roger that,” Hvórþ replied, picking himself off the floor. “Looks like it’s Jumping Djinni, boys!”

Reaching into an overhead bin, Hvórþ grabbed a backpack-mounted jumpjet attachment. Kàng, Hvórþ’s designated jump partner, turned and Hvórþ secured the device onto his backpack. Three strong tugs to confirm it was secure and Hvórþ signalled Kàng. He turned around and waited as Kàng strapped a set of jumpjets onto his backpack. He felt three tugs and turned back around to attach Ichika’s jumpjets. Once everyone was on their feet, facing forward, Hvórþ strode to the back of the hold where the lever to open the loading ramp was mounted. Nodding to each of member of his squad, he placed one hand on the lever.

“Demon Alpha, we are on station for aerial drop, releasing safety lock on your signal,” Kija commed in.

“Twelve hours,” Hvórþ barked, muting his wicomm, “once we’re down there, we’re lone wolves. You see anything, you call it. Mirage, ghost, the apparition of your favourite whore in Fucktown! There is no such thing as a crywolf on this operation! Our primary objective is to exfil safely with as much intel on the situation as possible! In twelve hours if I don’t see every last one of your fugly mugs on this drop ship, I will come back here, raise your worthless arse from the dead, and kill you again! You ladies understand that!?”

“Yes, Commander!” the squad barked in unison.

“Good, then let’s raise some hell!” Hvórþ bellowed, unmuting his wicomm, “Pilot, this is Demon Alpha. Djinni are ready to jump. Repeat, Djinni ready to jump.”

“Copy, Demon Alpha. Djinni ready to jump. Disengaging airlock safety.”

The light above the loading ramp changed from red to green and Hvórþ pulled the lever. An alarm blared as a series of mechanical clunks, clangs, and hisses issued from the loading ramp, before its heavy hydraulic arms began to lower the ramp.

A low, mechanical drone hummed from the arms as they pushed the armoured ramp forward. The ramp locked into place, and a crack of light widened from the top of the ramp as the arms pivoted downward.

Hvórþ let his weapon hang by its sling. With his free hand, he signalled the jump elevation before closing his fist. Thecrack of light widened from the slowly opening doors bringing a cloud of dust billowing into the hold. Once the ramp had lowered completely, Hvórþ pushed the lever fully up, locking in pilot control. With his free hand, he counted down three, before giving the sign to jump.

One by one, Hvórþ’s men filed out of the drop ship, giving just enough time for the solider they followed to clear the landing zone.

“Pilot, Dropkick Demon is away,” Hvórþ said over comms, once Kàng had jumped. “Repeat, Dropkick Demon is away.”

“Copy, Demon Alpha. Bus is RTB in twelve, with or without you.”

“A-firm, Joxa-5,” Hvórþ repeated. “Twelve hours. Demon Alpha out.”

Hvórþ took his weapon in hand and charged out of the hatch, jumping off in a pencil dive. Almost immediately his jumpjets activated, jerking his backpack’s straps painfully into his armpits. He lost visual almost immediately after, as he entered a huge cloud of dust kicked up by the others. The jets brought him down gently on a loose pile of rubble, kicking up even more dust. As it settled, Hvórþ readied his weapon again, and engaged his V-Mesh recording system. Once cleared, and he could see his surroundings, the unsettling feeling he’d had the whole way down from orbit went from a seven to an eleven.

The apocalyptic landscape left in the wake of whatever had happened here, showed on a holoscreen, did no justice to the direct experiencing of it, full-force, in the flesh. Standing there on what could have been a wide avenue or any number of other kinds of spacious areas, assaulted in all five senses directly by the torn up landscape, the tableau once painted on screens and VR Jacks truly became real, and the horror of it hit him like heavy artillery.

Nothing was identifiable. The city had truly been blasted into a literal oblivion. In what could have been a wide avenue, where he stood on one of countless scattered piles of indeterminate fragments of unknowable origin, everything lay in ruins, littered with rubble, burnt wrecks of vehicles, bones of the long dead, and half-decayed corpses devoid of any fly, maggot, or colony of other such foul rot-eaters, each half buried or scattered in myriad pieces amidst partially intact remnants of fallen structures. In that street—or, he assumed it was a street—all he saw in every direction was selfsame devastation. No matter which way he turned, all he there was were broken shards and fragments of the unidentifiable.

Under layer upon layer of ruddy brown clouds so thick daylight barely shone through, a diffuse, ochre twilight seemed to cast it all in amber, further amplifying a visceral surreal terror to the environment. His brain knew time was passing, but the unchanging, unmoving, stillness of his environment screamed the opposite. The was air still and dead, without wind or disturbance. The only sound in his ears was the persistent ringing of his tinnitus. Despite the emptiness of all sensation, Hvórþ couldn’t help but feel like the uniformity was not a product of what was not there. It wasn’t a void of sensation he was experiencing, but the destruction of all its parts, the reducing of all sounds and sights, all sensation, everything to its most basal form before being amplified to its absolute limit, each component part cancelling another other out in total destructive interference. Simultaneously overwhelming and empty, deafening and silent, still and frenetic, in stasis and tachyonic, everything destroyed into nothing.

Hvórþ tried to clear his head, but found he couldn’t. A buzz built behind his eyes, burrowed deep in his brain as he surveyed his surroundings, attempting to locate where they were amidst frames or twisted pieces of buildings still standing like fingers raised, rudely gesturing their defiance to gravity, each one noteworthy and yet forgotten as soon as he looked away. Some still had their lowermost floors half-buried in the cataclysmic aftermath of a manner of apocalypse Hvórþ had no name for. No…he had it…it was on the edge of his mind. For this…this was not the aftermath of war, not even the Rimworlds’ totalising armaggeddons in defence of their homeworlds held even the saddest of matchsticks before what conflagration had consumed Ëchüha Tvì Éshà.

Insatiable rage had blasted even the bones of this world to powder to feed the cannons mounted atop Har-Meggido. No quantum of blood, no throne of spines, no ocean of eyes, no fists harvested by the reaper’s scythe, no sickles broken over iron fists, no offerings of death placed upon the altars of enmity, nor skulls stacked as thrones to Lords of Strife would ever have sated such hate. The compulsion that drove this world to such self-destruction would never be satisfied by any measure less than the full summoning of war incarnate, so as to bring forth true gods of battle sleeping deep in the molten hearts of every world, to shower their blessings of absolute finality upon their enemies as glorious shards of the One Truth.

There was no life here. Nothing. Not even the lowest rat, maggot, bacterium, or spore of slime mould floating on the wind or feasting on a billion dessicated corpses trapped in amber light in the ashen wastes left behind. In the aftermath of the one war to end all others, this was the shape of peace, the shape of death triumphant. Only when glaciers quaked and plagues rained would the dead decay once more. This place was—

“Boss!” Ichika shouted from the bottom of the hill. “You alright!? Just standing there!”

“Yeah,” Hvórþ answered, shaking his head. “Hell of a view!”

“Sure you ain’t shell-shocked!?” Ichika joked.

“Shut up!” Hvórþ fired back.

Maybe I am a bit, Hvórþ thought to himself as he descended the mound of rubble.

He’d been in warzones most of his life, seen a lot of soldiers come home with Old Pete. Maybe he’d been in the game too long, and Old Pete had dropped by for a visit.

No…it’s not that, Hvórþ dismissed. The buzzing in his brain was still there. He could feel it, a primordial urge, a festering rot. Gnawing, biting, gnashing, thrashing about, it wanted out, it wanted to be free.

“It’s nothing,” he muttered to himself as he watched his team poking through the ruins. “I’m just fine. It’s all in my head.”

“Which way, boss?” Lìngbi asked, once Hvórþ had joined them on a low mound of rubble.

Looking around, Hvórþ couldn’t even tell where their landing zone was supposed to be. He brought up the map Katzali had given him on his TacPad. No use.

“Nobuo!” Hvórþ barked at the squad’s sniper. “Want you to glass bearings 240 through 265 for fresh demo.”

“On it,” Nobuo responded, dashing up a pile of rubble.

A few seconds passed as the sniper surveyed the area with his binoculars, before Nobuo replied, “I got something! Looks like our LZ fell apart like a sodden maxi pad! Bearing 253, three hundred metres!”

“Copy! 253, 300!” Hvórþ barked, marking the location on the map.

“See that…” he continued, gesturing toward what may have been a hab-block or any number of things at some point, “…oh…what the fuck is that anyway? That thing! Go scout it out!”

“What thing?” Nobuo responded, jokingly.

Hvórþ glared at Nobuo.

“On my way!” Nobuo grinned, making for the ruined building at a trot.

“What in all hells happened here?” Lìngbi asked, picking up what looked like a shard of metal wrapped on one end in strips of tyre.

“That’s what we’re here to find out,” Hvórþ answered.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Ichika responded. “Fucking Incursion came back. Dusted the whole place.”

“You see any xeno corpses lying about?” Tüanmv fired back.

“Well…no…” Ichika admitted.

“Yeah, neither do I!” Tüanmv cut off. “Got any more genius ideas to share!?”

“This was self-inflicted,” Hvórþ said, matter-of-factly, “some kind of anticog got hold of everyone.”

“How do you know?” Ichika questioned.

“We’re not wearing rad suits,” Hvórþ answered.

“Hey! Boss!” Nobuo shouted from inside the nearby maybe-hab-block. “Come take a look at this!”

“Stay here,” Hvórþ ordered to the rest of his squad.

He didn’t need their usual antics right now, not with a creeping malaise buzzing about in the back of his mind. Hvórþ took his weapon in both hands and trotted across rubble mounds and a wreck or two—it was impossible to tell what was what—toward the building.

“What?” he asked as he entered the building, ducking through a doorway half-blockaded by a concretion of indistinguishable substances.

“Look at this shit,” Nobuo said, gesturing toward a corpse leaning against one wall with his torch.

Flicking on his own torch, Hvórþ passed the light over the body.

“Huh,” he mused, “hasn’t decayed at all.”

“Just like the ones outside,” Nobuo added, “but these are fresher.”

“Yeah,” Hvórþ agreed, “any idea how old?”

“Six lunes,” Nobuo guessed, “maybe more. They’re pretty dessicated. You ever seen anything like this?”

“No…” Hvórþ answered, panning his torch around the room.

As he did, he noticed the dimmest of yellow lights flickering just in the corners of his eyes. He whipped around, aiming his torch toward where he thought the lights were, but only revealed more corpses.

“Holy shit…” Nobuo breathed, “there’s more of them?”

“Did you see…” Hvórþ began, but stopped.

“See what?” Nobuo asked, approaching the bodies.

“Nothing,” Hvórþ dismissed, following Nobuo. “Never mind. My eyes hadn’t adjusted.”

“You sure?” Nobuo asked, leaning over a dessicated corpse folded over a counter.

“Yes,” Hvórþ answered, stepping around a corpse splayed out on the floor. “Got any idea how old these are?”

“Six months, maybe,” Nobuo assessed, “hard to say. I don’t know how anything could have survived out here, though, let alone people.”

“Looks like they put up a fight,” Hvórþ assessed, approaching a corpse holding a makeshift spear in a dessicated hand as if they were trying to fend something off.

He nudged the spear with the barrel of his gun. The hand practically disintegrated, dropping the spear with a loud clatter, sending a jolt of adrenaline through Hvórþ’s stomach.

“Shit…” Nobuo exhaled, “don’t fucking do that. Gonna give this old dog a heart attack.”

The two chuckled, both out of amusement and stress.

“You think whatever got them’s still here?” Hvórþ asked, inspecting the other corpses.

“Nothing got them,” Nobuo said, entering a larger back room, “there’s not a scratch on them.”

“This wasn’t mass suicide,” Hvórþ disagreed, “they were fighting something. Or, trying to.”

“Fighting what? Unless you’re seeing something I’m not, there’s no injuries, nothing.”

“I don’t know,” Hvórþ answered, picking up what looked like an improvised machete made of a sharpened piece of steel countertop. “Check the rest of the bodies.”

“For what?”

“Weapons,” Hvórþ said, tossing the makeshift machete aside. “Something’s not right.”

“You’re damn right,” Nobuo agreed, “this is fucking weird.”

“Hey! Boss! Y’all alright in there!?” Kàng called out, from a distance.

“Peachy!” Hvórþ shouted back.

“Finish up your CV already! Ichika’s getting on my nerves!”

Hvórþ sighed, shaking his head.

“Should we…” Nobuo suggested, gesturing with some kind of shank he’d found.

“Tell them?” Hvórþ assumed, picking through the room. “No. Don’t need to spook em.”

“Think this is the last of them,” Nobuo said, picking up a spear. “The fuck happened here?”

“Don’t know,” Hvórþ answered, entering the back room, “but whatever did this…well…let’s hope we don’t run into it.”

“Damn straight,” Nobuo said, tossing the spear aside. “Fucking spears and swords and shit. The hell’s that about? Not even a gun around.”

“Don’t know,” Hvórþ answered, “but I suspect the Inquisitor has a good idea.”

“Fuck me running,” Nobuo swore, panning his torch across the back room again. “He knows something, dunn’e?”

“Let’s get a move on,” Hvórþ grumbled, turning back to the entrance. “What the shit?”

The lights, he saw them again. Hvórþ panned his torch over a section of the wall in front of him, then off of it. His brow furrowed as he panned his torch back onto the section of wall.

“Nobuo, turn off your torch,” Hvórþ ordered, turning his off.

“In this fucking tomb?”

“Turn it off!” Hvórþ hissed.

“Fine,” Nobuo acceded, turning off his torch. “Oh, what in unholy incestuous skullfucks on a Solsday morning…?”

What Hvórþ had only been able to see out of the corners of his eyes before, now, in pitch darkness, stuck out like neon marquees in a subcity slum. Faintly lucent claw marks had been left all over front and back room, like they had been painted with a dim, foetid, phosphorescent paint. Most disturbingly, all the bodies had claw marks on them, but these were different. Unlike the ones on the walls and the furniture, they didn’t have the appearance of being painted on, but looked as though a luminous blue gas was flowing out of dull-blue gashes glittering faintly. Looking down at his feet, Hvórþ spotted a set of footprints, glowing with the foetid yellow lucence, leading behind him, into the back room. Turning around, he saw the footprints trailing deeper into the back room, toward where the bulk of the corpses were. Hvórþ’s stomach fell through the floor when he saw the telltale pattern of a fight right below Nobuo’s feet.

Hvórþ turned his flashlight back on. Nobuo lifted his hand to block the light.

“Hey!” Nobuo yelped. “Watch where you’re shining that thing.”

The blood in Hvórþ’s veins turned to ice. Behind Nobuo, something dark and wispy shifted. His eyes widened as something began to rise. Thin, lanky, and disfigured, it was like an emaciated human, but with limbs too long and too thin, a torso too narrow. Its hands were horridly stretched, like baking pans, and six spindly, bony clawed fingers, each the length of Hvórþ’s forearm sprouted from them, hanging below the creature’s knees.

“Come on, it’s not funny, boss!” Nobuo protested as the horrid creature rose from the ground. “Boss!?”

Frozen in place, Hvórþ could only watch as it raised its head—a shrunken, shrivelled skull stretched over with skin so thin he could see spiderwebs of black veins bulging beneath. Wretched tufts of greasy, tangled black hair sprouted here and there like extensions badly glued onto its scalp and then never washed. Two, enormous, bulbous, black eyes stared, lidless, at Nobuo. It had no nose, only a giant mouth, stretching from ear to ear, perpetually open, baring row after row of broken and jagged teeth. The creature reared its head back and issued a blood curdling screech, splitting the silence like a thunderclap.

In an instant, both men had weapons drawn and Nobuo had turned around to face the creature. In the next the creature lunged forward.

“NOBUO!” Hvórþ shouted, but it was too late.

Without even having seen a clear shot of it, Hvórþ knew now what had attacked the Comms Station in the Vscape. He knew this was that thing. He knew it in his bones. That wispy, shadowy blur waylaying, tearing the station to pieces, this was it. Hvórþ’s felt his legs quivering as the creature lumbered at Nobuo.

Nobuo screamed and the two of them opened fire as the creature unleashed another shriek. It lashed out, tearing at Nobuo with clawed hands. The moment its claws touched him, Nobuo went silent, limp, and fell to the floor, as though the creature’s touch was the very touch of death. In disbelief, Hvórþ watched his bullets pass harmlessly through the creature, like they weren’t there, or the creature was an apparition. But it couldn’t be either. The creature screeched and shrieked, lashing more furiously at Nobuo with each bullet that phased through it. Each flailing strike of its limb scattered dust and bashed against objects, but had no discernible impact on Nobuo.

Hvórþ, realising it was too late and that his weapon’s only effect was making the creature angrier, stopped firing. It wailed triumphantly over Nobuo’s body and then lowered itself to all fours. Hvórþ watched, unable to turn away, as it unhinged its jaw like a snake, clamping it over Nobuo’s gas mask, as if it were trying to eat his face. Then, a bright blue gas began seeping out of Nobuo’s face and into the maw of the creature, the light visible descending down in its gullet and into to a grotesquely attached heart, that with each beat, tore one of the spiderwebbing straps of flesh holding it in place off as a new one attached itself.

Overcome by nausea, Hvórþ doubled over and vomited onto the floor in front of him. While still bent over, he heard a snapping, followed by the sound of footsteps rushing closer.

“FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!” Hvórþ screamed, tearing out of the room.

It had finished feeding.

“Boss! What happened!” Kàng asked, rushing the door as the rest of the squad sprinted over.

“RUN!” Hvórþ yelled, sliding through the half-blocked doorway as another shriek pierced the air.

“What the fuck is that!?” Kàng shouted, as the creature crashed and thrashed its way through the front room.

“MOVE!” Hvórþ roared, but it was too late.

He glanced over his shoulder and saw the creature fling itself out of the building in a cloud of debris, burying its clawed fingers into Kàng’s chest. The two toppled over and the creature unhinged its jaw to suck more blue gas off of Kàng’s face.

Hvórþ didn’t need to see anymore. He turned his head forward again and continued running. Whatever that thing was, they needed to get as far away from it as possible.

“WHY AREN’T WE SHOOTING THAT FUCKING THING!” Ichika shouted.

“THAT’LL JUST PISS IT OFF!” Hvórþ shouted back, scrabbling to reactivate his wicomm device.

“IKOMM Power On!” it chimed in his ear.

“Joxa-5, this is Demon Alpha! We need immediate extraction! Do you read!?” Hvórþ shouted, desperately as the five remaining Dropkick Demons tore recklessly across the broken landscape. “Joxa-5! Do you copy! Joxa-5!? Shit! NO FUCKING COMMS! GODS DAMMIT TO HELL!”

Hvórþ reached for the flare gun holstered in his vest, and had just lifted it out its holster when his boot caught on a chunk of rubble half-buried in an ash drift. Instinctively, he thrust his hand out to break his fall, scrabbling back to his feet.

“What the fuck is that thing, Hvórþ!?” Ichika shouted as he passed Hvórþ, sprinting heedless to the hazardous terrain.

Hvórþ accelerated to match Ichika’s pace. Terrain hazards be damned! Nothing else mattered except putting as much distance between himself and the creature behind him. If he fell into a pit and died, it had to be better than whatever that creature was going to do to him.

“I DON’T FUCKING KNOW!” Hvórþ screamed, over the earsplitting shrieks of the monster chasing them.

He grabbed for his flare gun again, only to realise he must have flung it when he tripped.

“FUCKING GODS DAMNED SHIT!” he roared, tearing the holster off his vest.

He threw it at the ground, shattering the hard polymer case in a strangely satisfying explosion of bright orange shards. It was beautiful, the destruction, like punishment cast onto the deser—

“Where’s Nobuo!” Lìngbi shouted.

“FUCKED!” Hvórþ roared, furious, though he didn’t know why.

Ichika, who had taken point, tore into a mass of industrial-esque wreckage. Muttering curses to the man for choosing even worse terrain to run through, he followed, rushing up a mound of rubble on his hands and knees before hearing Lìngbi unleash a torrent of expletives.

At the top, Hvórþ leapt over, sliding down the steep incline toward a the burnt out shell of what might have been a delivery van at one point.

“Fuck this! I’m going back for him!” Lìngbi declared, skidding to a stop at the top of the mound.

“Don’t you fucking dare!” Hvórþ barked, before being cut off by another ear piercing shriek. “Lìngbi!? Godsdammit!”

Hvórþ vaulted over the burnt out maybe-van as Lìngbi opened fire on the creature. Inside the densely tangled and twisted ruins, it was impossible to determine where the creature might be. Lìngbi’s blind fire, spraying didn’t have a prayer. Tüanmv and Ëtsvhá jumped over Hvórþ, attempting to catch up to Ichika as he sprinted for a tangled rat’s nest of metal. Hvórþ ordered them to keep running as he racked his brains for a way to save Lìngbi from him self.

Scanning his vest Hvórþ, saw only one thing.

He grabbed a smoke grenade, pulled the pin, and hurled it over the van, preparing to vault over it. Issuing sparks from the primer, the grenade arced over Lìngbi’s head as he stood atop a pile of rubble, weapon drawn, still firing the lazgun for all it was worth. Every muscle in Hvórþ’s body tensed—the seconds spanning small eternities.

The grenade detonated.

A cloud of smoke burst out of it, descending over Lìngbi’s head. For the briefest half-second, Hvórþ thought it might be enough. A shocked Lìngbi pivoted around, his lower body becoming engulfed in smoke. Lìngbi half twisted to look Hvórþ’s way, a shocked look on his face. In that moment, a plume of smoke rose behind and to Lìngbi’s left and Hvórþ saw one, clawed hand slash across Lìngbi’s chest. Hvórþ barely heard himself cry out as he watched Lìngbi, twist over and fall, his shock deepening as he disappeared over the mound of rubble and into the cloud of smoke.

“NO!” Hvórþ cried out. “GODS DAMMIT! LÌNGBI! NO! FUCK!”

Smoke fully blanketed the pile of rubble and a diffuse blue glow flickered inside it as the creature devoured Lìngbi’s energy, squealing as it did, as if it was in pain. Plumes and tufts of smoke wafted out of the cloud as the glow faded, almost like the creature was thrashing about like a panicked animal.

“Boss! C’mon!” Ichika shouted, grabbing Hvórþ by his backpack.

“Fuck off!” Hvórþ swore, pushing Ichika away.

“Boss! We gotta go!” Ichika implored.

“Gods dammit, Lìngbi!” Hvórþ repeated.

“Boss! Come on! Move!” Ichika pleaded.

“I’m coming back, Lìngbi!” Hvórþ swore, as the creature issued a long, pained howl. “I’m coming back for all of you!”

Turning, Hvórþ followed Ichika, sprinting off toward what remained of the Dropkick Demons, racing away toward a twisted mass of ruined metal.