Dr. Creepen's Dungeon - S2 Ep90: Episode 90: Supernatural Military Horror

Episode Date: July 27, 2022

Today’s special podcast offering is the complete BREACH series from Episode 1 through to 13, a phenomenal original work by Amelie C. Langlois, kindly shared directly with me for the express purpose of having me exclusively narrate it here for you all. https://www.reddit.com/user/AmelieCLanglois/

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This is one of the most beloved series that I've ever done over on my main channel. Remixed, re-edited and re-enhanced for your listening pleasure here on the podcast. Now, of course, my dear friends, as ever before we begin, a word of caution. Tonight's military-themed story may contain strong language, as well as descriptions of violence and horrific imagery. If that sounds like your kind of thing, then I'm pleased to introduce to you, breach. Part 1. Operation Macaria. My name is Tobias Thain, and I was employed under the Breach Initiative, a multinational organization that investigates and eliminates potential threats

to the stability of our world, threats that the public is forbidden from knowing about. I come from a different opinion. I don't know what will happen to me for running my mouth about this but people need to know what's really going on out there something big is coming and i don't know if we're going to survive it it all started with the traveler that's what they called him anyway a lot of us are former marines who were recruited for something called operation macaria a real hush hush type of business with the kind of orders you don't know until it's too late to say no to We had been dropped on the Algerian coast, and our objective was to secure the body of a ranking AQIM member before any Hajie in the area found him first.

His convoy had allegedly been hit, and he was carrying documents on him that would tip us off on an upcoming attack. The insertion was rough, thanks to the wind carrying us into some rocky terrain, but all six of us made it down over the drop point intact and got our bearings on the deep. GPS. It was the kind of twilight where there's barely a sliver of light in the sky, just a dark blue glow flooding over the black. It was storming out, the wind and rain lashing against us with the kind of fury I've never seen before, to the point that it felt like wading straight through a hurricane and carrying 60 pounds of gear on my back didn't help. Mother nature had

our number. I'm still convinced to this day, but something was messing with the weather. Our optics could see through the dark just fine, but our pace was downright glacial. It was freezing too. It was winter at the time, but the storm let you really feel it, and shivering in the cold is not exactly the first thing that comes to mind

when you hear you're being deployed into Africa. That's the downside of growing up through Arizona summers all your life. You don't get used to the other side of the spectrum. The terrain was not our friend, and the cliffs at the higher elevation were dangerous in our conditions, so we had to take a route through a canyon that would put us about one click off from our destination. The upside was that it shielded us from the worst of the wind, but it was still the only thing you could hear, the dap-arms whipping around so hard overhead I almost thought

they would snap. our comms guy, Barry, who sent the coordinates of our extraction point, and apparently the body was coming with us, provided we could actually find the thing. Some part of me wondered why they wanted the body so bad, but the military isn't exactly the place for asking questions, so I kept it to myself. I could tell I wasn't alone, though. The others started getting nervous, and it wasn't just the ability. objective. Something in the air wasn't right. Out there, and you could taste it. I don't know how to describe it exactly, but all I could think of was being a little kid again and sticking my tongue on a nine-volt battery. We got out of the canyon and started moving along the rock face, layers of sediment jutting out around us as the wind started to pick up again. Lightning flash

through the sky, and I started to notice distortion in my night vision, like the warping effect when you hold a magnet too close to a screen. Thermal was the same, until eventually, it failed entirely. It was the same with the others, and Barry was having trouble with his equipment, like something was interfering with our gear. We took off our optics and continued on through the dark, while Vasquez, one of the other riflemen, took point, with a flashlight to conceal our numbers. We were nervous about him being spotted by patrols, but the twilight was history,

and, save for the occasional flash of lightning, it was a pitch black out there. The terrain started to dip, and Barry let us know we were getting close to one of the main roads, and, more importantly, our objective. Cue my relief. I was soaking wet and freezing cold, and couldn't wait to be done,

though we'd still have to drag a body for half a kilometer. Huh, said Barry. That's weird. We turned to him. What's weird? I asked. This guy was part of a convoy, but the coordinates of the body are way off the road. Probably crawled out there and died, said Jeffreys, our sergeant.

Keep moving. We took cover behind the palms as best we could as we made our way down into an open valley, our goal on the other side of a rock formation up ahead. My legs burning with exhaustion, we turned the corner, keeping low behind the sparse bushes as Vasquez went ahead. That was when we realized that our op had nothing to do with AQIM. The light illuminated the severed half of a man in what I'm. I could only describe as power armour, black angular plating covering every inch of his skin, and sliced clean across the midsection with his bleeding intestines hanging out in the rain.

It was like he'd been cut in two by a surgical laser, but his lower half was nowhere in sight. What the fuck? muttered one of the riflemen, the rest of us leaving our cover for a better look. "'Looks like a goddamn space-marine,' said Barry. "'We've got prints,' said Vasquez. I followed his eyes to the massive footprints he'd bedded in the mud nearby, trailing off toward the main road, in the same direction as our extraction point.

The ground around the body crunched beneath my boots, scorched black and glistening in the light, like it had been dusted with shards of obsidian. Jeffreys ordered Barry and another to carry the body, and they lifted it up. "'Heesh, this guy weighs a ton,' said Barry. "'From the looks of it, it wasn't just the armour. Even if it was only half of him, the man's body was more than twice the size of a normal humans.

"'Let's get out of here,' said Jeffries, the wind and rain lashing against his face mask. There's something up with this place, and I don't like it. The rest of us followed behind Vasquez, the trail of footprints continuing beneath us as we moved through the storm. A head, a light flickered in the darkness, quickly revealed to be the remains of a hard-gee patrol stricken across the muddy road, the final remnants of the fires burning out in the rain. The Jeep looked like it had been sheared in, too. the remains of several men and their discarded rifles splattered across the ground, gaping charred holes, faintly glowing in their mangled bodies,

like something had blown straight through them. I couldn't see any casings on the ground. Those guys didn't even get a shot off. Do they get hit by RPG fire? asked one of the riflemen. Jeffrey shook his head. I think we all know this is a little above our pay grade, he said. Keep it going.

Stay tight and eyes open. This couldn't have happened more than half an hour ago. We continued past the sinking road and moved down into a dark mountain pass, dirty rainwater spilling over the cliffs above and the rocks at our sides. Thunder rolled through the sky, and we paused to wait for Barry and the rifle. men to catch up, the weight of the body clearly wearing on them. Equipment starting to work again, said Barry, panting and out of breath. It's that place where we found this guy. Something ain't right about it.

That was when I noticed that I could only faintly taste the electrical soundess on my tongue, like it was fading away the further we went, but something was still wrong. I'd started to feel like I was being watched. I kept a careful eye on my surroundings, but I couldn't see anything through the storm, and I could tell the others were getting paranoid as well. The pass opened up into a shallow canyon, and a blur of motion rushed through Vasquez's light.

I swore, and we stopped dead in our tracks, my heart hammering in my chest. Lights on, everyone, said Jeffreys. We took out our lights and quickly mounted them on our rifles, sweeping them across the cliffs that surrounded us. We had eyes on us, and they weren't letting up. A rustle of dirt sounded from behind me, and I spun around, shining my light over the sparse bushes and dripping palms. But nobody was there. And then I saw it.

It was almost invisible, like a barely noticeable. of space moulded into the outline of a hulking person standing in front of the trees. I backed away, getting the attention of the others as I kept my light on the motionless blur. My finger twitched on the trigger that something inside me told me not to fire. It was like a sense of absolute danger, like I was on the precipice of a decision that could end my life in that very moment. The blur rushed away, startling me as it passed into the darkness faster than I could track it. Stomping footsteps sounded from all around us, but none of us fired, remaining utterly still and paralyzed with fear in the invisible stampede.

The footprints of another blur splashed into the mud nearby, moving inhumanly fast as the raindrops beat against a faint momentary outline, but then they were gone. The sound vanishing into the distance of the storm. I don't know how long we stayed there. But eventually, Jeffrey's got us moving again. And we continued through the canyon, wordless and shaking with panic and adrenaline. There were more of the footprints embedded in the mud,

easily three times larger than anything a human could ever make. I still felt eyes on me. But whoever, or whatever, was stalking us, we didn't see them again. They were letting us live. But why? Did they want us to find the body? Eventually, the canyle levelled out into an elevated clearing,

the lights of an osprey shining faintly in the distance. We made our way over to it as quickly as we could, myself and another taking over the carrying of the body. The gunner behind the M240 waved at us. the blades of the helicopter rushing above our heads as I help push the body inside and we all climbed up

Jeffries gave the all clear and the pilots took us up the soaking terrain rushing beneath us as we disappeared into the storm the body we found was something else I don't know too much about it

and from what I've heard it's way above any of our researchers' heads but from what they figured out so far it'll be responsible for a lot of the new tech coming out the plating on the armour was nearly indestructible and was outfitted with advanced anti-gravity and teleportation systems all running on some sort of antimatter core that scares the shit out of the guys in the lab on account of it having enough energy inside to vaporise the entire planet

the guy himself was decked out with cybernetic implants with eyes that could see for miles, track magnetic fields and ultraviolet light, and apparently even process of fourth spatial dimension. His brain was nothing but self-replicating nanomachines, but he was definitely human or used to be. I could go on for days about all the shit they found, but we got to use some of it in our later operations,

so I'll leave it out until then. Most important of all, the armour had a cloaking field that they still can't manage to replicate, enough to make its wearer and anything they're holding nearly invisible. The implication being, there's still a group of them out there. We don't know why they're here, or how their friend got killed, but we have a strong, educated guess that they aren't from our universe. We think there's some kind of scouting party, but what they're looking for

well I have no idea ever since that day though we've had a lot of strange things happening things that don't play by the laws of our universe and they're only getting worse I don't know if it's because

of the scouts or more likely the reason they're here in the first place but either way that was the birth of the breach initiative I'll do another write-up next week. We had an op in the high Arctic a while back that I still have nightmares about. Well, until then, stay safe. Part 2, Operation Snowshoot. This next one took place a short while

after the formation of breach. We had some strange encounters before, but this was the first where I honestly thought I might die, and I don't think I'm alone in that. It took place in the High Arctic and once again included Barry, our Coms Guy, Jeffreys, the guy in charge, Vasquez, our ornery rifleman, and a new addition by the name of Tanner, a British dude that used to serve in the SAS. We were all huddled up in the Osprey, which was decked out as a mobile command and control centre, flying through the clear skies over an endless expanse of snow. Along with our two pilots, we had two more guys who were slated. to stay behind and bounce all our comms back to HQ, but I don't remember their names.

The researchers had some time to work on the traveller's tech, and wound up replacing our M16s with handheld railgun prototypes. Now, the usual response to this is, railguns, that sounds sweet. Until you realise you don't fire railguns, they fire you. The recoil was death. God, I saw so many dislocated shoulders, they started modifying our armour to compensate. The early versions also had no power modulation, so the slug could rip straight through 20 houses in a row if they were ever stupid enough to deploy them in an urban environment. As for the traveller's buddies who were still doing something in our universe, we hadn't heard much at the time.

A village in Libya got erased from existence by some kind of implosive force that cut it straight out of the earth. But we had no idea why, and none of our surveillance on the area was picking up anything. Back to the matter at hander. We were being sent to investigate a research station that had gone dark. Normally, it wouldn't be any of our business, if it weren't for the last distress call sent out of there. All you could hear was the howling wind, and this guy freaking out, as he's somehow freezing to death in the middle of the station. Then, There was this deep wailing sound that tripped every primal instinct in your brain that told you to get the hell away. You had no idea what had made it, but it made you feel like your skin was on fire, the way it missed with your nervous system, like the worst pins and needles you'd ever had.

We sat down about two clicks off from the station. When the five of us got out, putting on our goggles, when we saw how blinding the sun was against the snow, We were well insulated, but I could still feel the sting of the cold through my mask, even in the absence of wind. Barry pointed us in the right direction, and we started moving. The blades of the Osprey coming to a halt overhead as the one staying behind got set up. We walked across a massive plain of snow, an Arctic camouflage, a mountain range looming in the distance. Save for our movements, it was completely silent. A part of me liked it, because we could hear things coming, but at the same time it was unnerving to be so far from everything.

I watched an Arctic fox make its way across the snowy dunes in the distance, occasionally stopping to look at us before continuing on. We eventually reached the base of the mountains, moving in through a low valley as the wind began to slowly pick up, whistling through the air as the station finally slipped into view. "'Get down,' said Jeffreys. "'We got low to the ground and took out our binoculars for a better look. There was one main building and two ancillary structures. One of the latter blown to pieces, the scattering of scorched debris buried in the snow around it. One of the doors to the main building had been torn off its hinges,

sweeping claw marks embedded in the metal. But otherwise there was no movement, and all we could hear was the wind. Sierra, this is Sierra One, said Jeffries into his radio. We got a visual on snowshoe, over? Sierra One, you're free to engage, over, command responded. Roger, out. Vasquez and Tanner took point, and we slowly made our way down into the valley.

The wind intensifying as gusts of snow began to blow over the dunes. Do you guys see the door? asked Vasquez. Blancing back at us. No, we all missed it, I said sarcastingly. Why do you think did that? Our new quarry, I suppose, said Tanner. Man, they are not fucking paying us enough, said Vasquez. Better than suicide by two shots to the back of their head, said Barry.

Shut the fuck up, said Jeffries, as we drew near to the station. me eyes open we made our way to the intact ancillary structure vasges and tanner counting us down before opening the heavy metal door i took point as the rest of us rushed inside sweeping my light across the dark and empty hall we split off into the two adjoining rooms and eye angled into the one on the left taking the corners and behind the piles of boxes and disused equipment that littered the room sunlight filtering in through the frame window. Clear, I called. The others doing the same from the second room. It's just storage, said Barry, as we filed back into the hall. We made our way back outside and headed toward the main building, a storm growing overhead as the light began to dim, stepping over the pieces of scorched metal and wood that littered the snow. We made our way past the unhinged door and into the main hall of the station. The lights flickering overhead. "'Egenerators intact,' said Barry.

"'Tanner and Vasquez guarding the open entrance "'as the rest of us moved ahead. "'The wars were slick with ice and frost, "'like they'd been doused in a flash frozen liquid, "'two surveillance cameras looming overhead. "'There,' said Jeffries, "'noting a frozen trail of blood "'near the sealed second entrance at the end of the hall,

"'snaking round the corner. "'We cleared the rooms at our sights "'as we slowly crept, closer to it. Passing a bathroom, a surveillance room filled with blank monitors and a chair on the floor and a room of frozen computers and communications equipment. The latter had two 357 casings on the ground and a splatter of blood stricken across the banks of electronics, but nothing else of note. We turned the corner, the trade of blood smearing across the ground into a ruined recreation room.

Frozen gore splattered across the walls and the remains of a broken pool table. Television shattered behind a small bar at the back. The air smelled like alcohol and blood, broken bottles and glass from the bar, littering in the ground alongside several 308 casings. What the fuck happened here? muttered Barry, holding up the severed half of a ticker T-3.

The remainder in ragged splinters on the ground. I could hear the wind howling outside, groaning against the walls as the sunlight that once shone through the windows faded to a twilight darkness. Ain't it the middle of the day? I asked. Jeffries nodded with a bothered expression as he searched behind the bar. Sierra, this is Sierra One, Jeffrey said into his radio. snow shoes clear looks like they got attacked by something over

Sierra one recover any surveillance footage and return ASAP this storm's going to make things difficult over Roger out said Jeffries shaking his head as he looked over

at the two of us hmm weather was supposed to be clear today this shouldn't be happening I looked up and saw a surveillance camera camera frozen in the corner of the room, pointed at the entrance. Well, let's figure out what did this, I said. We made our way back out into the hall and turned the corner.

Vasquez and Tano were waiting inside, near the broken entrance, a frigid breeze whistling through the opening. It almost looked like it was night out. Storm's a little harsh, said Tanna. We can't stand out there. "'It's fine,' said Jeffries. "'We're heading out in a bit. "'Just need the surveillance tapes.'

The two of them joined us as we all filed into the surveillance room. The cameras were still operational, but the lenses were frozen over, blanking out all the screens. Barry switched on the radio for one in the rec room, and it still functioned, the sounds of the storm crackling through the speakers.

He rewound the footage to the last audio spike, A few days prior, and we began to hear the indistinguishable muttering of a man's voice. The monitors still blanked out. His breathing was stuttered, as though he were freezing. A low wail burned through the speakers, setting our nerves on edge. The same wail that we had heard on the distress call. A heavy stomping faded in, followed by the sound of the man screaming. There was a low, rumbling growl, and the screaming ceased to the wet, crunching of bone.

We listened as the creature seemingly devoured him, the gruesome snapping and tearing of meat, crackling over the speakers. His expression grim, Barry transferred the surveillance logs to a flash drive, as Geoffrey's radio began to hiss with static. Sierra 1. This is Sierra, said Command. We've got movement, and we need you back here ASAP, over. Sierra 1, we've just got the footage, said Jeffreys. Inbound in 15. Stay put until then. Out.

Jeffries turned to the rest of us. Let's get out of here. Double time it. Vasquez and Tanner took point as we quickly left the stand. and stepped out into the screaming blizzard. Gusts of ice and snow blotting out the sun as they constantly lashed against us. Barry oriented us with his nav system and we started heading up out of the valley.

Every step requiring twice the effort as the wind fought us at every opportunity. Sierra One, we are pulling out. I repeat, we are pulling out. yelled command over the radio as we left the valley. We've got contact. this stormy... The transmission faded to a crackling hiss

and a booming explosion echoed in the distance ahead. Fuck, said Vasquez. Keep going, said Jeffries, picking up the pace that we made our way across the plains of snow. They could still be alive. The bird's still on the nav map, said Barry, looking down at his equipment. They're just west of where they were.

Barry reoriented us and we moved through the darkness as quickly as we could, weighed down by the gear on our backs as the wind and snow howled against us. Then our lights illuminated something ahead. It was one of the pilots,

frozen solid while standing up like a petrified statue. His perpetually screaming face staring into the darkness beyond. We continued past him. The storm shrieking around us as we blindly followed Barry's directions. It's just up ahead, he yelled over the wind,

which seemed to be only getting stronger. Hurrying through the howling blackness, the scorched, snow-swept metal of the downed osprey soon slipped into view. The cockpit was compacted into the frame, one of the pilots laying dead in his seat, with his skull crushed against the crumpled interior. blood and brains dripping from the metal. The other two were missing.

There, said Tanner. We followed his gaze to a trail of blood stricken across the snow, disappearing into the darkness beyond. We moved forward, only to find a frozen, severed arm half buried in the snow, the trail dispersing into a ragged spatter. The calms at the station are linked up with H.Q, said Barry. we can use them to call for Evac. Jeffries quickly nodded,

his eyes scanning the screaming shadows. Good thinking, he said. Let's go. We retreated back the way we'd come. The cold seeping through my layers as frost constantly clouded my sight. Somehow the temperature kept dropping. Too fast to be anything natural.

ahead of us two severed feet stuck out of the snow the remains of the frozen man who had been standing there only moments before a low haunting wail cried out through the storm instilling me with a sense of primordial dread something was coming we picked up the pace running as fast as we could beneath the weight of our gear and the onslaught of the wind my muscles are burning as we followed us a barrier across the plains of snow. But then, I stopped. I couldn't move. Wait, I called, a sense of impending doom flooding over me as I looked down and saw that my legs were frozen to the ground. Tendrils of ice creeping over my body as the chill rapidly sat me of my strength. The others ran back to help. I'm frozen, I yelled. Get me free. Hurry. I looked back as the wind shrieked against me, the cold penetrating my skin as movement stirred through the darkness beyond. Contact, yelled Jeffries, his railgun charging with a high-pitched wine as he took aim

and fired with a deafening bag. The others joined in, firing upon the shadows as an anguished, unnatural scream cut through the air. The stir of movement retreated in. into the storm, and the others lowered their weapons to start chipping away at the ice that encased my legs, freeing me. Let's go, said Jeffries. This thing's controlling the weather.

We have to get inside. We continued through the blizzard and made our way down into the valley once more. The ancillary structures of the station soon coming into view. The wail of the creature reverberated through the air from the distance behind us. it was still following us. Our lights swept across the main station ahead, and we found our way to the torn entrance. Moving inside is a welcome reprieve from the storm.

Fane, set up Claymore's of both entrances, said Jeffreys. Barry, get to the comms room and secure our Evac. The rest of us will set up a blockade in the wreck room. Everyone went to their posts, and I took one of the mines from my. pack as I approached the torn door to the station, the wind howling into the hall from beyond. Sticking the claymore on the wall, I armed it and backed away, taking out another as I made my way to the outer entrance. Another whale reverberated through the air as I armed the second

mine. It was getting closer. Barry came out of the Comptorum, his expression terrified. What's wrong? I asked. He motioned for me to follow as he walked to the rec room and we joined with the others who were setting up lines of cover with the broken pool table and splintered furniture. They can't fly in through the storm,

said Barry. We've got to kill whatever's doing this. Oh God, said Vasquez. Relax, it'll be fine, said Jeffries. We're a real. indoors. It can't freeze us in here. The wind began to pick up, and one of the claymores exploded, shaking the ground beneath our feet. I moved out into the hall to check. Thane, get back here, the old Jeffries. Ignoring him, I peaked around the corner,

the scorched hall entirely empty as the wind howled through it. It's not here yet, I said, backing away into the recrifice. room. It was just a storm. The wind started to shake the walls, and the door of the other entrance was suddenly blown off its hinges, triggering the second Claymore and showering the hall with shrapnel as I dove behind the wall for cover. I swore, shaking my head. Are the cameras in the hall still intact? asked Barry. I glanced out, and saw both of them still in place. Yeah. Why? I can lock myself in the surveillance room and use the audio to tip you off on which entrance it uses.

Then you can just fire through the walls to take it down. And if it comes for you? asked Tanner. Same thing. Light it the fuck up. I'll barricade the way as much as I can. Door one will be the first. Door two will be the one that just came off. All right. Get to it, said Jeffries. Barry disappeared into the hall, and I moved back behind the bar, resting my gun against the counter as the others took cover. Radio check, said Barry over the radio.

I'm in place. Over. We read you. Over, said Jeffries. Roger, out. Another wail howled through the air, forcing every hair on my body to stand on end. It sounded like it was right outside. Massive footsteps began to shake upon the ground, and my finger slipped into the trigger guard, eyes on the wall into the hall. Door two, said Barry, over the radio as the creatures stomping drew closer. We all aimed our railguns at where the entrance would be, charging their capacitors with a high-pitched wine,

before firing in a cascade of deafening bangs, blowing a series of holes into the wall. my ears were ringing, but I could still hear the pain shriek that followed, reverberating against my mind like a droning feedback. Vasquez peeked through one of the holes in the wall and immediately backed away. His expression won of abject horror as he backed into the corner in a panic, sweating and hyperventilating. Get it together, said Jeffries. Mary, is it still alive? I don't... The thundering stumps with the creature answered for us, as it came lumbering into the room,

and my blood ran cold. It was an obese, worm-like nightmare bound into a monstrous, humanoid form. Its warped skull gaping open into a rasping, razor-tooth more, that split down into its drooping stomach. Its translucent skin writhing upon its bow. like a bed of insects. Its alien gaze met my own as it drew all the warmth from the air in a single breath, the cold kneeling through every aspect of my being, as I felt like my mind was being sundered in two. Overwhelmed with terror and adrenaline, I fired it, we all did,

wanting only to stamp out whatever it was that we were seeing, whatever nightmarish aberration had invaded our reality. It didn't belong, shrugging off the metal slugs that ripped through its writhing flesh. It lumbered straight toward me, dragging its long, sweeping talons upon the floor, before raising them up and swiping at me,

knocking the gun from my hand. I backed against the wall, and it brought its talents down on me again, a white-hot pain, cutting through my body as it ripped through my chest. I clapped to the ground, in agony, crawling out from behind the bar as the creature turned its attention to the others, loosing a low, warbling growl that shook through my mind with a horrible unease.

The wind howling through the open door, the horror lurched towards Vasquez, swiping its massive talons at him. He ducked at the last moment, only to get snatched up in the creature's other hand, ignoring the shots that blasted through its drooping flesh, it swallowed half of Vasquez's screaming body into its gaping more and bit down, messily tearing him in half. Blood and intestine spilling down from its jowls, it discarded Vasquez's severed legs as it swallowed the rest of him whole, turning to the others with a rumbling growl.

Its footstom shaking the floor beneath me. I pulled myself toward my gun and picked it up. bracing it against my shoulder and taking aim as the nightmare lazily swiped at Tanner, who deftly rolled out of the way before unloading another shot into the creature. I fired my own gun, the recoil dislocating my shoulder as the shot struck the creature in the head. It was starting to slow. It shambled toward Jeffries as we continued to pummel it, but it was unable to go any further. It collapsed with a low groan, hitting the floor with a tremendous weight.

It was dead, but I couldn't look away from it, even as everything in my mind scrimmed for me to do so. It was the first thing I'd ever seen that was physically painful to look at, like its skin was twisting through an angle that my brain couldn't consciously interpret. Jeffrey's hurried over to me, looking down at the bleeding wound stricken across my chest. You'll be all right, he said, helping me up and popping my shoulder back into place. He looked absolutely terrified. Let's get the fuck out of here. The three of us retreated back into the hall.

The walls pop-marked with glowing holes as the wind slowly died down. "'Barry, you in there?' "' yelled Jeffries as we stopped outside the surveillance room. "'The door completely frozen over. "'I'm here. "'You're Barry from the other side.' "'Back up,' I yelled, "'taking the cutting torch from my pack and going to work on the door.

"'The torch melted through the ice with ease, "'and we tore the remainder away, "'opening the door and freeing Barry. "'Thanks,' he said, "'glancing over at the corner that led back into the rec room. Is it in there? You don't want to see it, said Jeffries.

Get H.Q. on the line. We need Evac. Now! Barry nodded, disappearing into the comms room as I kept my eyes locked on the fading blizzard outside. The sunlight slowly breaking through the darkness. My hands were still shaking. My heart hammering in my ears

as the image of that thing was still burned. into my brain. It's never left me, even to this day. It took another 20 minutes for our Evac to get there, another Osprey setting down outside. We left the building and piled into the helicopter, the blades chopping overhead as we slowly rose above the ground. The snow speeding by beneath us. I look back to see the station vanishing into the distance, and all I could think was that I never wanted to see anything like that again. But I knew that I would, again and again, until it broke me.

They later went back to collect the body and did whatever research they could on it. But they didn't learn much. All I know is that it wasn't from our universe and was apparently made of something that didn't align with our conception of matter. We still had no idea how it got here, how any of these things were getting here, and all we could do in the meantime was fight them off, like the immune system of the human race. I think that's what I'll talk about next. About three weeks after Snowshoe, I got deployed to a compromised research facility out in the swamps of Louisiana.

Call it an experiment with psychedelics gone horribly wrong. Until then, thanks for listening. Oh, stay safe. Part 3, Operation Lucent Blue. Thane here. Sorry, it's been a while. Something's been going down with the guys still in the unit, and I'm getting tailed every time I leave my apartment.

They switch out their surveillance officers every few blocks, but I've got a good memory for faces, and they only have so many people to assign to me. The boy still in breach apparently found a town covered entirely in meat moss, for the lack of a better term, up in North Dakota. They firebombed the whole area, but it's still spreading underground, like roots. Anyhow, back to the matter at hand. This next one is the first time we had concrete, undeniable proof

that something truly bizarre was happening, not just on the scale of otherworldliness or even breaches from other universes, but something from another dimension entirely. We were deployed to the swamps of Louisiana to infiltrate a covert research facility being operated by the Prometheus mandate, a shady multinational organization that we hadn't even heard of until someone on the inside leaked some info to us and swallowed a cyanide cocktail a day later.

It wasn't much, but it was enough to spook the brass. And knowing what we did afterward, they were right to be scared. In terms of the traveller and his scouts, we didn't have any real news at the time, but we were getting some strange seismic readings around where the village in Libya went. The boys in the lab fixed the recoil on our railguns, though, and thank Christ for that. We also got some prototype power armour, complete with the world. cloaking modules and an oxygen supply, but they still couldn't replicate the alloy from the traveller's armour.

And the fact they were giving us air meant that they were sending us into a toxic environment. Naturally, though, they didn't tell us much about what we were actually walking into. The objective was to secure the facility and gather anything we could on what exactly they were doing there. Not exactly brimming with detail, considering the ever-presenter. risk of death or dismemberment. We swept low over the rural swamps in the Osprey. Two pilots up front and myself, Jeffries, Barry and Tanner in the back.

They ditched the mobile command center idea, and the pilots were ordered to get the fuck out as soon as they dropped us off. I kept getting the impression that anybody who knew what we were actually walking into was scared, shitless of it. But they wouldn't breathe a word of it to any of us. Like we'd desert on the spot if we figured it out. The Osprey slowed, hovering over the bog, and Jeffries threw the rope out the door,

the end disappearing into the trees below. Grabbing hold, he climbed out, and the rest of us quickly followed, an aura of wet decay radiating into the air the closer I got to the ground. Slipping through the cover of leaves and branches, I sat down with the others in the muck, my ankles disappearing into the ground beneath me. The rope was wound back up, and the Osprey turned and went back the way it came,

the chopping of the blaze disappearing into the distance until only silence remained. That should have been our first red flag. Normally, you'd hear something out there, whether it's insects, animals, or even the wind. but that place was dead silent. None of us brought it up, but I could tell the others were bothered by it. Barry got us oriented, and we started making our way through the swamp,

the hot sun shining through the trees. Our armour made it easier to move through the muck, but one thing they didn't add was air conditioning or ventilation of any kind. So, ten minutes later, the only word I can use to describe the insolven. of my suit was moist. The really fun part, spoiler alert, is that they never fixed it. Every single operation from then on out, I had to bat in my own sweat.

You also couldn't take them off without help, so relieving yourself on any sort of extended op was like a little slice of hell. In basic, that used to be the standard if you ever felt the urge in the middle of the run. but you never expected to keep doing it after you got your MOS unless you eventually got suckered into scout sniper or some other recon. Apparently, well, you would be wrong. As soon as Barry let us know we were close.

We all activated our cloaking modules and pushed forward. We were leaving leg-sized holes in the swamp wherever we stood, and the blur was a lot harsher than the travellers, but it was better than regular camel, and we could selectively communicate through our face masks without making any outside noise. Two o'clock, said Barry, stopping to look through the scope of his railgun.

A short ways ahead. Two men in gilly suits were moving across a finger of dry land, camouflaged M-16s in hand. Tanner, you're up, said Jeffries. Tanner moved ahead. leveling his scope on the men as they walked. I've got the one in the back, said Barry, charging his railgun with a faint wine.

Ready? said Tanner. Three, two, one. With a soft hiss, they fired two subsonic slugs at the men, and their upper bodies exploded, painting the trees with a splatter of blood and bone fragments. Clear, said Barry, lowering his gun and continuing forward. That was when things started getting strange.

A couple of minutes later, I started to notice the sunlight getting paler, almost like twilight, but in the middle of the day. Are you guys seeing this? I asked. Oh yeah, said Jeffries, stopping to point up at the sun shining in through the trees. It was like a blue eclipse, just a pale ring of ghostly light shimmering around a black disc in the sky. What the fuck? said Barry, looking up at the bizarre sight. Let's keep moving, said Jeffries. You know the drill. We picked up the pace, and the further we went, the more the light seemed to bleed from the eclipse,

gripping down from the base like a glowing seam in the sky that deep, by the minute, bathing everything in an indigo light. I was still getting chest pain from where that thing in the Arctic had hit me, piercing through my ribs with every step I took, even with the armour assisting me. We got movement, said Barry, creeping forward as he raised his gun, the trees parting to reveal a fenced concrete platform that ramped up into the walls of a large structure,

a layer of grime staining the exterior. Beyond, a guarding green camel patrolled along the paths, but his eyes weren't on us. Thane, get us in, said Jeffreys. Tanner, take point. I moved up and lit my torch against the metal of the barbed wire fence, slicing a large hole through it, carefully pulling it away and setting it down in the muck

Tanner ducked through the opening and the rest of us followed close behind moving on to the path where the guard was slowly walking away from us the trees have been cleared around the facility and another guard was perched in a watchtower at the far corner ahead of us looking out over the swamp with an AR-10 wait here until he comes said Jeffries watching the guard on the

the walkway as we all took cover behind the structure. Tanner, you take him out as soon as he's near. Keep it quiet. Consider it done, said Tanner. The blur of him removing the knife from his belt, shimmering upon the air. After a couple of minutes of waiting, the footsteps of the guard drew closer to us. Tanner peeking out around the corner as the rest of us stayed hidden, as the guard stepped out in front of us. Tanna grabbed him and covered his mouth, soaring open his throat as he dragged him in behind the wall. Holding him still until he bled out, Tanna propped him up against the concrete, hidden from sight. Move up, said Jeffries. Tanna took point, and we made our way across the open, concrete path. Moving past the watchtower and around the corner, the front of

the building glowing in the indigo light. The entrance was in sight. Two guards posted out front, but they were both smoking and looking out into the swamp. Move past them, said Jeffries. Let's get inside. We slipped past the oblivious guards and entered the facility. The halls lined with blackened metal, painted with strips of blue that traced across the walls, each marked with white lettering that indicated where they led, that being administration, testing, communications, and maintenance. Testing it is, said Jeffries. Eyes peeled ahead as we followed Tanner through the labyrinthine complex, the halls lit by

strips of fluorescent light upon the ceiling. The facility seemed like it had almost been abandoned, and though we heard voices from one of the other corridors, nobody crossed it. our path. Eventually, we were led to a large, open chamber, filled with electronics, a sealed elevator booth in the centre of it, with its doors welded shut. Two guards kept their eyes on the elevator. Their expressions deeply uncomfortable, while a woman in a lab coat monitored a terminal nearby. Tanner and Barry, take out the guards, said Jeffreys. Thane, keep the lady breathing, but keep her quiet.

I've got some questions for her. I crept up behind the woman as the others took their positions, Jeffreys setting up near the door to shut it. We each sounded off, and Jeffreys started the count. Three, two, one. I grabbed the woman from behind and covered her mouth, dragging her back from her chair as the others slashed open the guard's throats and waited for them to bleed out. Jeffries quietly shut the door and disabled his cloaking module, walking toward me as the woman tried to scream through my fingers and struggle in my grip, but to no avail. Okay, said Jeffries.

My friend is going to take his hand off your mouth, but if you scream or signal for help, you're going to die. You stay quiet and answer my questions. You get to walk out of this. Not if you understand. She nodded apprehensively, ceasing her struggling. I slowly removed my hand, but still held her in place. First question, Geoffrey said. what are you testing

the woman shook her head I don't know she said they don't tell me anything I swear to God hey Tanner said Jeffries stop peeling off her fingernails

if she doesn't answer in five seconds Tanner walked over in a blur of motion and grabbed the woman's hand holding his knife to it as Jeffries counted down. Five, four, three. Wait, wait, said the woman, okay. Well, shit, I thought you didn't know anything, said Jeffries.

I don't know a lot, she said, shaking my grip. But they put me here to monitor the undergrounds to make sure nothing comes up while the station's being decommissioned. Beneath us is a tesseract. I meant to keep something from passing through the walls. What the fuck is a tesseract? asked Jeffries. A 4D cube, I said. And how exactly did this something get down there? I don't know, honestly, said the woman.

It's something to do with modifying chionite to make contact with another place. anything more than that is over my head. It's not my department. I'm just a tech. And this thing, said Jeffries. Is it hostile? Not unless you're schizophrenic. But you can't go down there.

It's... Watch me, said Jeffries. Leveling his gun at the woman's chest. Vane, open up the elevator. I released the woman and took out my torch. walking over to the elevator. I slowly cut through the welding of the door, sparks flashing against my cloaking field in a haze of distortion.

Give me a hand, I said. Barry coming up from behind me to help me pull the heavy door free and then carefully set it down on the ground. As Jeffries and Tanner led the woman into the elevator, Barry briefly disabled his cloaking module and took a sentry from his pack, setting it up on the wall and pointing it at the cloak. door. He waved his hand in front of it to make sure it was tracking his movement and then

joined us in the elevator. We're good, he said. Jeffrey's reactivating his own cloaking module. You don't understand, said the woman, her expression terrified. You can't do this. We have no idea what this thing even is. If it gets free. Yeah. I'm sure. You're really concerned about the well-being of humanity," said Jeffries, hitting the button to go down. The elevator groaned around us as the cables above slowly lowered us into the shaft. Can I at least stay in here with one of you? I don't want to go in there.

I heard the others talking and... Actually, you're going up front, said Jeffries. You're going to give us a guided tour. The elevator groaned to a halt And the grated blood-stained barrier that now stood before us slid open Revealing a hall lit by a glowing blue light A faint mist whispering through a door half open at the end Jeffrey shoved the woman ahead of us

And we followed her as she slowly crept forward The texture of the walls around us Rithing like a bed of worms something's wrong she said beginning to stumble as she clutched her stomach i don't feel right then maybe you should have explored another career trajectory said tanna keep walking opening the door the woman stepped into the next room and stifled a scream immediately looking away we moved in behind her and i saw what used to be a recreation room. Television's, pool tables and

bookshelves dripping with streaks of blood as trash and bodily fluids littered the room. A faint mist wafting over everything. Thankfully, I couldn't smell a thing, but nothing could take away what I saw

next. Snaking across the floor was a tangle of flesh that wound up into a basin of twitching arms that had taken residence on the couch, and above it a conglomerate of fleshy skulls were fused together around an exposed heart, slowly beating as the multitude of sunken eyes jittered within their sockets. From the exposed valves of the heart, streams of a watery, red-tinged

liquid trickled down into the basin. It wasn't blood, being almost clear, but The blood was surely a part of it. The woman began muttering to herself, slowly running her hands across the squirming walls. Mind explaining what the fuck we're looking at? asked Jeffreys. The woman ignored him, twitching as she started repetitively banging her fist against the concrete, humming to herself as though she was slowly losing her mind. Jeffries walked over to her, snapping his fingers in front of her face. Hey, what the fuck is wrong with you? The woman slowly turned, rocking in place as her eyes shifted to the amalgamation of flesh in the center of the room.

Her pupils were completely dilated. Slowly, the liquid in the basin of arms began to rise into the air before splashing down again, as though it were being lapped up by an enormous, invisible tongue. The woman began to hum in distress, unable to peel her gaze away as the lapping of the liquid abruptly stopped. We all backed away from the basement, keeping our guns trained on the seemingly empty space. The woman was suddenly ripped from the ground and dragged screaming across the ceiling, disappearing into the adjoining hall as her shrieking disappeared into the distance.

Tanner, take point, said Jeffries. We're doing a quick sweep and then we're getting the fuck out of here. Keep your skin covered up, said Barry. There's something in the air. We slowly followed Tanner down the hall, passing by an empty bathroom with the door ripped off his hinges. The floor covered with the floor covered with the door. the blood-soaked glass of the shattered mirror. We then passed two bedrooms, equally torn to shreds,

yet the second had an intact bed shoved into the corner of the room as something slowly pulsed beneath the covers, as though breathing. A long, fleshy tentacle hung down from the blankets and coiled beneath the bed, squirming in the indigo darkness. Tanner advanced forward, and we turned into the kitchen where the woman was pinned to the far wall by some invisible force, staring off into space as her mouth hung agape. Hold your fire unless it attacks us, said Jeffreys, keeping his gun trained on the cluttered space ahead. Slowly, the woman's flesh began to ripple and expand, and we slowly backed away into the hall, watching as her features melted away into the shape of a viscous sphere. Her disjointed arms dangling from the undulating mass as her legs folded back into the

fluidic chaos, the snapping of bone cracking upon the air as her limbs crumpled like discarded wrappers. Slowly, the floating sphere of flesh split open into a yawning moor. Consentic rings of human teeth spinning into nothingness as it exhaled a faint mist into the air. The invisible creature loosed a chittering hum as it breathed in the vapour, several bloody handprints appearing upon the wall and smearing across it in long, sweeping motions. We're leaving, said Jeffries, moving back as the rest of us followed. Slowly we made our way back down the hall. when I looked into the closest bedroom, I saw a sunken, human face peering at me from the pulsating

mass beneath the covers, extending from the hidden darkness upon a long, rubbery neck. It opened its mouth, unhinging its entire skull to reveal a throat, layered with masses of staring, dilated eyes. Yet they did nothing but watch as I slowly moved out of sight. Following the others back into the recreation room where the basin of twitching arms and faces gazed in every direction at once we quickly hurried back to the elevator and jeffreys hit the button the grating sliding shut in front of us as the cables groaned above beginning to pull us up through the shelf just as the floor could slide out of view i saw the long turtle-like head of the thing that once lur beneath the bedroom covers peeking into the hall from the open rec room door.

It sunken, dilated eyes watching me intently before it slipped from sight, the concrete wall of the shaft passing in front of us. We didn't say a word. The elevator bringing us to the surface once more, as we filed out of it, and Barry dismantled the sentry. The dead body of a man in a lab coat riddled with bullet-holed. next to the open door of the chamber. We moved back down the hall and found our way out of the facility,

Barry and Tanner wasting two of the guards out front and dragging them inside before the watchtowers could spot us. We left through the hole in the back fence, the body of the patrol still laying undisturbed against the concrete. As we made our way back, Barry caught for the Evac, and the blue eclipse slowly faded into a pale, ghostly light once more, before splitting back into the familiar, blinding glow of the midday sun. It didn't take long for the Ospre to arrive, and we got out of there as quick as we could.

Breach sent in a strike team a couple of hours later, killing everyone on site and assuming control of the facility. I don't know much beyond what my contacts in R&D told me, but we think these guys may be responsible for all the weird shit that's been happening, at least in part, like they drew some forgotten offshoot of existence too close to our own. The strike team secured an encrypted comms record that the facility had with other Prometheus bases before the staff could wipe it. But nobody can figure out where, geographically,

the messages were coming from. And anybody that wasn't killed by the team committed suicide on the spot. From what I've heard, the entire Zoran was created by the quantum entanglement of a Chyenneite sample with a cluster in another reality, prompting any wildlife to stay the fuck away from it.

Why they chose Chionite, nobody really knows. The working theory is that it's the only thing our universe has in common. with whatever we're bound to. They don't know what to do about the thing in the underground, and they have no idea how the Tesseract around the living quarters was even constructed. So they're apparently choosing to just let it be until they understand it better.

Hopefully they can wipe the whole thing off the map. Prometheus was recruiting people and locking them down there on the pretense of high-paying clinical trials, spiking their water supply with acid while that thing waited in the background. Now, everything that goes down there unprotected is transfigured into something that breathes and bleeds LSD, sustaining whatever it is that now calls it home, and any hostile action doesn't even affect it. Opening fire on it is like shooting at the air, and it won't even try to hit you back unless you've been dosed. Even then, nobody can describe what they're seeing, because the human mind is, well, only human, no matter how much you try to alter it. As for me, well, I'll get back to you soon.

A while before I left, we got deployed to investigate something called the Cult of the Vale, up in the North West Territories, who somehow obtained an artifact that could summon lightning storms. Until then, stay safe. Oh, and avoid looking at the room. I was watching it last night, and I swear it was looking back. Think about your health for a second. Are your eyes the first thing that come to mind? Probably not, but our eyes go through a lot,

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Part four, Operation Thunderbird. Thane here. Now, this one was a little strange, relatively speaking. It was myself, Jeffries Barry and Tanner again. The brass seemed to like us, together, even if we were smaller than a regular breach squad, so they started using us for the operations that didn't warrant a lot of loud noise and dead bodies. Results, as you'll see, tended to vary. We were being deployed at night to a remote location in the Northwest Territories.

The big, black, nothing, speeding beneath the osprey, as the faintest tips of snow-cover trees glinted in whatever moonlight could slip through the clouds. By then, something had happened with the travellers. Those seismic readings we were getting from Libya were there for a reason, probably controlled detonations. We thought they were building some kind of underground outpost, and as far as I know, well, they still are. We sent UAVs and even some guys on the ground, and they couldn't find a way in, but that didn't necessarily surprise us. as far as we knew they were so far beyond us

that anything we did was likely to just antagonize them and well there's only one thing you do to a mosquito on your arm I heard people are getting paranoid though and started to consider more hostile options

I hope for our future that they don't they made some minor improvements to our rail guns this time and not so minor improvements to their scopes. Since we could selectively power our shots between subsonic stealth and blow through 16 city blocks and kill somebody's cat, we now had the ability to track movement through walls,

provided they weren't too thick. Unfortunately, our shitty cloaking feel still made us look like discount predators, and our armour was truly uncomfortable. R&D was busy trying to counterfeit the self-replicating nanomachine tech from the traveler, but stopped when they realized that their prototype nanomachines were about to turn the planet into nanomachines. For this operation, we were also given what we were pretty sure was a bomb, packed in a featureless hexagonal cylinder with a little crease along the middle.

It had pop open with a hiss, revealing a keypad and the black metal that shrouded the internals. Barry pointed out that there used to be a lettering on the inside, but it was intentionally scratched off. I don't know where they got it from, but it wasn't our tech. And a part of me doubts it even came from our planet. I only heard so much from the other squads. There are some things they just wouldn't talk about.

Eventually the sky began to flash with lightning, a massive storm brewing overhead that foretold our destination. Our objective was to infiltrate the compound of an organisation called the cult of the veil, who had, apparently, made contact with an unknown deity, and traded something in exchange for an artifact that could summon storms. We knew this, because a First Nations community had lived in the area for hundreds of years, and in the span of a day was reduced to a flaming ruin. You could see the storm from space, like a cyclone had formed in the middle of a continent.

As for why they gave us a bomb? well, they apparently came upon the information that the cult was establishing contact through a stable portal to another universe. So our job was to figure out how they were doing this and deliver the package, so to speak. We deployed about two clicks off from our destination, because any closer, and the bird would get a zap from the sky. We were at least authorized to communicate with our handler at HQ this time, because unlike the Prometheus mandate, A cult that was previously only known for huffing paint fumes Wasn't going to intercept our cause. Looking through our night vision,

we move through the woods as quickly as we could, our armor insulating us from the cold as the sky flashed with lightning overhead. Barry led the way with his comms equipment, our cloaking fields shimmering upon the air as we passed through the trees. Slowly, the terrain began to rise as we moved up a mountainous incline, large rocks jutting out of the snow as our armour carried us forward. "'Hold on,' said Barry, his blur pointing at a section of stone that was chiselled flat, and painted with a ruin in dried blood.

"'That's Elder Fluthark, a reversed Durithas ruin.' "'Meaning?' asked Jeffreys. "'A lot of things. None of them good. Point being, it's an ancient Germanic alphabet that is no business being here, so it's probably a marker put down by the cart. A marker for what? I asked. That. He desailed his cloaking module, and we looked at where he was pointing. The shadow right there.

I looked ahead, saw a thin, black line tracing across the ground between the rocks, and then passed them, disappearing into the distance. It didn't catch the light at all, even when the sky flashed with the storm. Sierra, this is Sierra One, said Jeffries. I think we've found some kind of ward. It's like a shadow, but it's just black. Barry says he's marked with a reversed Thurisaz ruin. Please advise. Over. Sierra one, this is Sierra, said H.Q.

The ward is possible, but lethal if touched. proceed over it, ensuring nothing, including debris, makes contact. Over. Roger out, said Jeffreys. Moving forward as Barry reactivated his cloaking module. Carefully, Jeffries stepped over the shadow and surveyed the other side. We're good, he said. The rest of us followed, and as I stepped over the ward,

I felt the air humming around me, like pins and needles on my skin. Keep an eye out for any more. I don't want to know what these things really do. Barry took the lead again, and we crept forward at a noiscibly slower pace, searching the ground for wards with every step, as sleep began to patter against the trees overhead. Lights, said Barry,

stopping to look through his scope. We moved up behind him, and I began to see the flicker of torchlight in the distance as the terrain levelled out, a powerful wind howling against us. I raised my gun, peering through the scope and increasing the magnification to see the glowing outline of a man in robes, moving through the darkness beyond the trees. Jeffries motioned us onward, and we crept closer until we could see the cultist in the torchlight that danced before the mouth of a cave. He was wearing the skull of a caribou, bleeding ruins carved into his skin.

Tanna, you're up, said Jeffries. Oh, make it quiet. On it, said Tanner, moving ahead as we slowly follow behind. The wind and freezing sleet howling through the trees as the storm cracked overhead. Jeffrey signalled for us to stop, and we watched as the blur of Tanner crept up behind the man, who was stumbling and mumbling as though heavily intoxicated. Tanner jammed his knife into the base of the man's skull, cutting through his brainstem before catching his body and slowly easing it to the ground.

Grabbing hold, Tanner dragged it off into the trees before rejoining us. The faint sound of a rasping song echoed from the cave beyond, warbling through a distorted pitch that could not have been produced by human vocal cords. Jeffries took point, and we followed him into the cave, the Eldridge song reverberating through the torch-lit stone, ruins slathered upon the flickering walls. Saoilo, said Barry. Sunlight or safety, reassuring, said Tanner.

As we continued onward, the tunnel slowly opened up into a wide cavern, filled with rows of tents, crafted from the hides of animals, torches burning before them. In the centre of it all, hundreds of men and women sang the distorted song, naked, and carved with twisting rooms, yet beyond their gaping mouths was only a starry blackness. They danced and swayed in the circle around a massive pile of books, and at the top a man sat in a high chair, voraciously reading a massive tone as he twitched and shuddered in place. Behind him a woman slowly massaged his skull, yet a finger seemed to sink into the bone, working through his brain as the man violently flipped,

to the next page, his frothing black saliva dripping from his chin. I'm not even going to ask, said Barry. There, I said, pointing as I noticed a massive obsidian archway at the end of the cavern, two guards standing before it with wooden staves as they deliriously wrapped their heads against the rock. We're going round, said Jeffries, as we carefully crept down the rock face. keep it slow and stay behind cover we don't want to catch their eye we followed behind him making our way down to the cavern floor and taking cover behind a tent a writhing tentacled shadow stirred from within and began to cry like a human child wasting no time we moved from tent to tent slowly working away to the end and then keeping low near the open archway look said barry pointing in a massive ornate hammer that sat within the flames of a bonfire, his gleaming surface sparking

with electricity. I think that's it. Not our objective, said Jeffries. The clean-up crew will pick it up after the smokes cleared. The man in the high chair started to yell something in another language, his barking intonation grating upon my ears. That's Danish, said Barry. Who the fuck I are?

are these people? What are they saying? asked Jeffreys. Fill my skull, said Barry, sounding confused. The man was repeating the same thing over and over again. A high-pitched wine began to screech through the cavern, and I clenched my teeth in pain, and then it faded. The man stood up from his chair, and made his way down from the pile of books. The crowd parting before him as his eyes split apart within their sockets, making way for several thin, spider-like legs that wrapped around the back of his head. The guards next to the archway rose from their stupor as the man strode with confidence toward them and disappeared into the chamber beyond. The guards shambling in his wake as they muttered incoherently

in an excited tone. "'Move up,' said Jeffries. We followed him into the chamber, which was crafted entirely from the bones of massive inhuman arms, winding together into a cradle of hands and long, tapered fingers. In the centre, the skeletal design dipped into a black and fleshy pit, that hummed with a sickening radiance. Slowly, the man crawled to his hands and knees, and crept into the pit, disappearing into the darkness. The guards shambled back outside, where one collapsed to the ground and immediately fell asleep.

My equipment's saying this is it, said Barry. Down there. We're really going to go in there, I asked. I think you know the answer to that, said Jeffreys, getting onto his knees and crawling into the pit. For all we knew, it could have been a sacrificial altar that would kill us all before we even processed it, but we followed nonetheless. I went last, slipping into the darkness as I slowly worked my way down across the fleshy walls. A strange, tingling sensation ran over my skin, and I suddenly felt the gravity reverse itself, like I was being pulled up into the sky.

But I fought against it as my eyes met the light of day, and I climbed up onto the surface, nauseous and disoriented. Tanner grabbed my hand, helping me in the sky. Tannor grabbed my hand, helping me up and I surveyed the world that now surrounded us. Switching my night vision off, I saw that it was daytime and we now stood within a massive circular library that seemed to tower forever into the sky. Beyond the marble pillars that surrounded us, the ruins of a city spanned to the horizon and the sun looked as though it were slowly disintegrating, its glow overtaken by a creeping black malaise. A spiral staircase wound upon the wall. that were lying with books all the way to the top,

and upon it the man with the legs jutting out from his eyes slowly made his way up as steps. Others rocked in delirium nearby, clutching their staves of winding wood. Far above, the library was open to a roiling, localized storm that flashed with lightning, yet through the blackened clouds, I almost thought I saw the shape of a massive crimson eye.

my heart seizing in my chest as its gaze briefly fell upon me. The sky flashed again, revealing a spanning chasm of teeth that disappeared into the gale a second later. Something was up there. One of the men nearby started to scream and shout in Danish, brandishing his staff as he seemed to be looking straight at us. Can he see us? asked Barry. I don't... The staff flashed with light,

and Jeffries has blown back against the wall with a thundering boom, his cloaking field crackling away as books rained down on him from above. I ducked, just as the man turned to me, a bolt of lightning tearing overhead and lighten the shells of flame as I charged the capacitors of my gun and unloaded a uranium slug into his chest. The man was bisected by the rome. round, blood and organ splattering against the tomes as the cultist from the caverns began to run up the steps, nearing the top. A low growl reverberated through the air, as Jeffries crawled to his feet,

reactivating his cloaking module as it fizzled with distortion. Another cultist rose from behind the rubble that surrounded one of the pillars, slowly shambling toward us as he wretched and twitched with insanity. Barry asked him something in Danish. leveling his gun at the man's chest. The cultist only continued forward. Barry repeating his question until several long, spider-like limbs erupted from the man's mouth. Barry backed away, as Geoffrey shot the cultist with his rail gun,

blowing him back in a spatter of blood. We're not going to get anything out of these guys, said Barry. Let's finish this. Fane set up the bomb, said Jeffries. As I took the bomb from my pack, a flash of lightning cracked from overhead as someone fired at us from the stairs. The blast igniting the ground as it barely missed me. Tanner opened fire on the enemy, who was clad in the blood-soaked skull of a caribou, which promptly exploded as a slug tore through it and blew the remains of the man against the wall.

books clattering down from above. I opened the bomb and began to arm it, giving us 16 minutes to get clear of the blast. An inhuman scream cried out from above, and I looked up to see the man from the cavern being telekinetically lifted into the sky as a massive, suckered tentacle descended from the clouds, latched onto the man's skull and bored inside.

The fleshy appendage pulsated. with hunger as it drank the knowledge from his mind. The bomb lit up as it was armed, and I locked it up, Jeffries and Tanner firing at someone overhead. We're good, I said. All right, get back, said Jeffries, firing again with a loud bang as an arc of lightning lashed against the nearby wall, flaming pages blowing through the air. An enormous, misshapen hand descended from the heavens above, coated with a black gangrene as its claws slowly reached for us. The others fired at it, forcing it to flinch back as its flesh was blown away, the sky rolling with thunder. Hurry, I will cover you.

I got onto my hands and knees and quickly crawl back into the pit, as the others helped Jeffreys fight back the claws of the Eldrish deity. Their gunfire booming from above as I sank into the darkness and switched on my night vision. The gravity reversed around me, and I eventually found myself crawling back up through the other side, rising to my feet in the cavern as Barry came through behind me. Tanner followed, and then Jeffries, his cloaking field malfunctioning from the massive burn stricken across his torso, where the metal of his armour melted into his skin. "'Hmh, looks I will be getting out the old-fashioned way,' he said, "'charging the capacitors in his railgun as I took a grenade from my panic,

the song of the cult is still rasping from the cavern beyond, as another man twitched upon the chair. "'Cere, this is Sierra One. "'We need Evac, ASAP, over.' "'Cierra one, this is Sierra. "'Evac is inbound in three minutes. "'The coordinates have been folded. to your navigator, over.

Roger, out, said Jeffries. Got him, said Barry, looking down at his map. Let's get the fuck out of here, said Jeffries. Bain, you do the armours. My pleasure, I said. Ripping the pin from the grenade, I ran forward and tossed it into the ring of singing cultists as Tanner and Barry slit the guard's throats behind me.

The grenade detonated, blowing several, several cultists pieces as the rest were showered with burning shrapnel. The others opened fire with their railguns as we quickly advanced straight through the cavern, blasting holes in anyone we saw. A blinding pain cut through my nerves as a bolt of lightning struck me in the shoulder. My cloaking field crackling away as the man in robes began to charge another blast upon his staff, only to be decapitated as Tanner unloaded around into his skull. A woman ran towards us with a knife in hand, screaming in a deranged madness.

I charged my railgun and fired upon her, blowing her back across the cavern as her organ splattered against the tents that rived with shadowy tentacles. Taking out another grenade as the others gunned down the cultist guards that fired upon them, I pulled out the pin and tossed it into one of the tents before whatever was inside could tear through the hide. It exploded, a piercing childlike shriek, echoing upon the stone, as a flaming cacophony of tendrils and screaming mouths spilled across the ground, needling my mind with an aura of raw depravity, as I struggle to keep my bleeding eyes on the nightmare. Contact, right, I yelled, my vision blurring in delirium. The others turned, unloading their railguns into the shrieking aberration before it could close the distance. and blowing it back as it quickly burned to death upon the rocks.

Reaching the end of the cavern, we ran up into the narrow cave, a bolt of lightning bursting against the ceiling above and raining sparks upon us. Slipping away, we hurried out of the cave as Barry took the lead, the sky flashing overhead as the storm of sleet lashed against us. We ran as quickly as we could, and I glanced back to see the flickering lights of the cultists in the distance. slowly beginning their pursuit. Stop, yelled Barry,

stumbling to a halt as he pointed out the ward that was stricken across the ground. Carefully, he stepped over it, and we did the same. Just as a cultist wielding a massive knife came screaming out of the forest behind us. His face carved with bleeding ruins. We didn't even get to fire

before he stepped on his own ward. All I heard was a sickening crunch. a splatter of blood smacking against me as he was sucked into the shadow within a split second. Barry, said Jeffries, when we get back, remind me to buy you a beer. Yes, sir, said Barry, continuing forward as the lights of the cultists drew closer in the distance. As we made our way down the incline, a light gleamed from overhead as the sound of an osprey cut through the storm, hovering above us as the wind lashed against it. The M240 gunner tossed down a rope

Before opening fire on the advancing cultists We began to climb it The strength of my armour carrying me up as I gripped the cord tight And pull myself up into the helicopter Joining with the others as the gunner fired another burst As we sped away I could see the lights of the cultists below Yet before they could try to shoot us down

A blinding flash cancelled the night The hill that can't the Eldridge cavern erupted in a massive explosion, throwing off a tremendous shockwave that blew back the trees and lit them aflame. The Osprey shook as we rose into the clouds, speeding away as quick as we could. I look back to see the remnants of a fiery mushroom cloud, scorching the sky with a deep orange. I swore. My body still shaking as a numbing pain coursed through my skull. as the others took off their masks I saw that they were feeling the same

slumped back against the interior of the helicopter as they struggled to catch their breath when I became more lucid and the adrenaline wore off I began to wonder how the Canadian government was going to explain away the detonation of a nuclear bomb then again until I came along breach was always good at keeping things quiet

and blaming seismic events on fracking was a favourite of theirs, much to the displeasure of the petroleum industry. Some other teams went back to clean up the mess, but thanks to everything being vaporised, they didn't find anything out of note beyond the hammer, and yes, they're calling it Mjolnir. It's currently powering another outpost that's being used for the development of an artificial intelligence, on account of them being too terrified to even touch the traveller's antimatter core. Speaking of covering things up, I got a visit today, just not at my apartment. There's a special kind of, oh shit, that you feel when you get cornered in an alley by four guys with submachine guns.

Turns out that they don't particularly care about me running my mouth, because anyone that's heard of these is under the impression that their works of fiction. They do want to keep an eye on me, though. in a very close and personal way. I'll be joining my old squad for whatever it's worth, and they made it clear that it wasn't a request. I can't say I'm looking forward to it. Camaraderie was great, but at the end of the day,

I got out because my mind was starting to break. Nobody's meant to see the things we've seen, and if something major is about to happen, I'd rather be freezing in Alaska than fighting on the front lines. I heard another small town got overrun by the routes in North Dakota. They firebom the whole place and removed any trace of it from the internet, like it never even existed. Here's hoping they figure out how to stop it.

Next up, if I'm still breathing, I'll tell you about the one in Egypt. An archaeologist found a hidden passage in KV62, the Tomb of Tutankar moon, and it led to an upside. down version of earth. Until then, thanks for listening. Oh, don't drink the tap water. Part 5. Operation Osiris. Thane here.

Well, when I look back, I think this is the one that did it. The one that made me want to leave forever. It's hard to think about. But I've come to learn that writing these down is an excellent source of therapy when nobody else will believe you or even understand. We were deployed to the Valley of Kings in Egypt

where a stable breach to another world had been discovered in KV62 or the Tomb of Tutankhamun. Flying in from our impromptu outpost in Luxor it was myself, Jeffries, Barry and Tanner along with a new addition to the team

an artificial intelligence we called Sprite. I have no idea where HQ got it from, but it reminded me a lot of the bomb from Thunderbird, which apparently salted the earth with coal bolt 60, because the prevailing rumor was that most of these things were somehow vulnerable to gamma rays. Anyway, Sprite was essentially a metal ball that floated, but it could split open and project wings from its size to fly higher

than its gravity propulsion would allow, and it was armed with dual laser cannon. that could slice through solid steel in less than a second, so we didn't complain. We figured that Breach was stealing tech from the other universe, but nobody ever told us anything more, and it didn't have anything to do with the travellers. I watched the green farmland of the Nile speed beneath us, as I sat in the back of the Osprey with the others,

trying to shake off a hangover from the night before. Around that time, whiskey was the only thing that put me to stop. sleep and I can't say I'm any different today. When you're alone in the dark, when you close your eyes, everything that haunts you creeps out of the woodwork, and sometimes a good drink is the only thing that does the trick. For me, replace sometimes with every time. For this op, they managed to reproduce some of the traveller's anti-gravity tech and outfitted us with gravity boots, which essentially let you walk around on the ceiling.

We didn't know why we would need these, but we quickly found out. Our objective was pure recon. Explore the breach and get the footage from our face marks back to HQ in one piece. We were to avoid combat at all costs until we better understood the connecting world. But by then, we knew that was the least likely rule to actually apply to us. They also had modified the optics in our masks to give us a limited perception of the fourth dimension. What we would use that for, we didn't know, but we were told to switch to the new mode when we reached the burial chamber and switch it off when we were through.

We flew low over the valley, the Egyptian government cooperating with our efforts by sealing it off from tourists for the day. It was almost eerie, seeing so much. tombs and ancient ruins completely abandoned in the desert. We sat down right before the tomb, the sandy stone walls of the walkway surrounding us as we hopped out of the Osprey, Sprite drifting alongside Jeffreys as the helicopter took off and left us to our work. Jeffries seemed to like Sprite and treated it like a pet dog or something, even when it was probably a thousand times smarter than any of us. It's funny how an inability to converse changes. your perception of something, even among the familiar.

Parrots and crows are smarter than human toddlers, but we don't see people locking their kids in cages much. Tanner, take point, said Jeffreys, petting Sprite, who only beeped in either satisfaction or disapproval, and never really figured that out. Tanner moved up, activating his cloaking module as we all followed suit, making our way down into the stony tomb and into the antechamber. We took a right and emerged in the burial chamber, the open sarcophagus laying in the centre of the room

with a pane of glass set over the top. Right there, said Barry, pointing at the western wall, which was painted with a grid of twelve baboons alongside several hieroglyphics. He stepped toward it and raised a hand to his mask, switching to the new visual mode. He swore, stumbling back as he looked up at something that only he could see.

We followed suit, and as soon as I hit the switch, my vision went dark. A wailing noise howling through my ears like the feedback of an amplifier, pitch blackness, I could see the white outline of a door where the wall had been, shuddering and twitching in and out of reality like a skipping film. The shapes of the others briefly flashed into focus before failing out again, like blotches of white paint had been smeared over my sight, briefly conforming to their bodies before falling away into the darkness. The shimmering mirage of Tanner disappeared into the doorway,

sinking into the trembling shadow. The others followed, and I went last, stepping forward into the void as it passed over my armour like a viscous ink. I could hear one of the others speaking, but the voice was muffled, and filled with distortion, blaring against my ears until it was too painful to listen to. Then, everything was normal. I looked up to see Jeffries withdrawing his hand from my mask,

having switched my vision back to default. He was standing within a narrow and jarringly tall hallway, extending into the distance for further than I could see, while only a solid wall stood behind us. The stone was completely lit, though no light source could be seen, and was painted with rows of golden, stylized unks, each inscribed with a dark, drooping sigil. "'Amenta,' said Barry, looking up and down at the paintings, the underworld and the setting of the sun.

Tannen moved ahead, and we followed him in single file down the narrow hall, as Sprite drifted above us, activating its own cloaking field that blended almost seamlessly into the background. I'd never felt claustrophobic before, but if anything was to ever bring it out in me, that place was it. It seemed like the walls were slowly closing in on us, and I almost found it difficult to breathe until the light of day began to shine from beyond. We picked up the pace until we reached the end, and Tanner stopped before what looked like a ledge, dropping down into an endless expanse of dark, thundering clouds.

This job never ceases to surprise me, said Tanner. Above the sky hung a vast desert of ash, as though we were looking at an upside-down world. Rays of sunlight shone faintly through the storm, but what little could be seen of the sun itself looked like it was corroding to nothing, as though the world was slowly dying. Sprite drifted ahead,

floating out into the void before looking back at us, a bolt of lightning flashing across the sky below. Turn your boots on, said Jeffries. And whatever you do, don't jump. I reached down and turned on my gravity boots, which humped to life as the ground beneath my feet suddenly felt heavier. We all began to walk up to the wall until we were standing on the ceiling and looking at the world as it should be.

Tanner cautiously took the first step, carefully easing a foot onto the ash before finally committing and walking forward. Blood to hell, he said, shaking his head, you're not going to like this. The others followed suit, and I went last, stepping out onto the lifeless desert. My blood immediately rushed to my head, and I felt like I was being yanked up into the sky by my pack. As I gathered by bearings, I began to hear a distant sound upon the silence that dominated the world, like the high-pitched wine of a power saw cutting through metal, only for it to stop, and then resume once more, constantly alternating with a disjointed rhythm

that made my skin prickle and burn. What is that? I asked, looking round. Sounds like it's coming from over there, said Barry. winding at an ashen dune in the distance that obscured the way beyond. Move up, said Jeffries. Tanner. Tanner slowly made his way across the desert, and we followed in his wake. I thought I could see the shapes of things stirring in the sky,

moving faintly through the farthest reaches of the clouds, but it was almost imperceptible, like I was looking up on an invisible mass swimming through the darkness. It almost reminded me of the creature above the library back in Operation Thunderbird. Eventually, we made our way over the June, and immediately stopped dead in our tracks when we saw a vast expanse of fallen corpses, all clad in a black metal armour of wicked blades. Between the rows, creatures strode upon long, pale and slender legs that bent back upon the air with a monstrous elasticity. Like spiders granted a humanoid shape. Their ragged, dark cloaks hung from their flesh, faces obscured beneath their hoods as they glided across the wasteland with a malign grace.

Withered, vestigial wings hung from their backs, and within their claws, they each gripped a violin of bone, strung with sinew and rotting meat as they drew their bows across their vile instruments in unison, producing the ear-splitting sound that reverberated against my mind like a painful feedback. Beyond them, in the centre of the deathly plain, stood a narrow black pyramid of obsidian, surrounded at each corner by tall, ruin-marked obelisks. Far above the pyramid, an identical one hung from the thundering sky, and at its peak, an immense, blindfolded creature was perched like a praying mantis, as I was a heart of hanging upside down in the void.

Its slender, elongated limbs were wrapped in white, blood-stained badges, barely revealing the writhing the writhing tendrils that swam underneath like a bed of worms, while its six arms remained perfectly still in the air, each ending in long, gnarled talons. It's more of rippling needle-like teeth stretched back across its face, as though its crawling skin had been stripped away. Jeffreys, Tanner asked, waiting for instruction. I'm thinking, said the sergeant as his eyes searched the bizarre landscape. Okay, we're going to crawl past these things and get a recording of the inside, he said,

noting the dark entrance at the front of the pyramid. When we get to the bottom, keep it low and spread out so the trail isn't obvious. boots in contact with the ground at all times. If somebody gets spotted, we abort. Understood? We all agreed and fanned out across the June, carefully making our way down the incline before it levelled out onto the field of bodies.

I dropped to my hands and knees with the others and slowly inched my way forward, trying to leave as little a trail as possible. That was when I noticed that the bodies I passed between didn't seem to be volleys at all, or at least not anymore. They were just empty suits of black armour, like a demonic legion had shed their carapace and left it abandoned in the ash.

Its occupants had either withered to absolutely nothing in the passage of time or were utterly disintegrated by some malevolent force. I looked up at one of the looming figures that played its violin of bone, waiting for it to pass before continuing on. The sound was almost unbearable, being so close, and I thought I felt my ears beginning to bleed as a high-pitched ringing began to set in above the din. Our face masks had noise modulators that filtered the report of our guns and of any explosive charges, but the grating scrape of the macabre instruments didn't seem to register. I'm almost there, said Tanner.

Where are you guys? Barry and Jeffries responded that they were close. I'm falling behind, I said. More of those things out here. Just keep it slow, said Jeffries. Don't rush. I crept through the field of discarded armour. Eyes on the entrance to the pyramid as I carefully shifted through the ash.

I heard the stomping of footsteps nearby. Looking to my right to see one of the tall, cloaked horrors surveying the area, drawing the bow across its violin as it sniffed the air. I held perfectly still. My vision locked on the impenetrable shadow beneath its hood, as it seemed to be staring right at me. Then it turned away, continuing on its aimless path across the barren wasteland. I waited for a moment and then continued onward, moving slowly through the ash until I joined the other, at the entrance, their blurs shifting against the nearby terrain.

I'm here, I said, briefly glancing up at the immense, blindfolded creature that hung from the sky above us. Move up, said Jeffreys. Tell, take point. We rose to our feet and quietly entered the black complex, moving down the room-marked hall, which was plated with dark hexagonal tiles. The corridor ended at an intersection of two stairways, both looping down to somewhere beyond, and set astride a sigil of a weeping willow, engraved in the obsidian.

We moved down the left-hand path, the steps between our feet following a chaotic rhythm of spacing, as though designed for something that spontaneously generated new limbs for every step it took. We then emerged within a vast pyramidal chamber, four runic obelisks surrounding a circular pool of blood that seemed to tug at my mind, lulling me into a hypnotic trance. Barry, Sprite, get a recording of each pillar, said Jeffreys, snapping me back to reality. No one had tried to decipher these ruins. Barry and Sprite moved ahead, looking the obfirm. up and down as we cautiously approached the pool of blood. I could hear a whisper then, rasping upon the air as I felt myself slip into the trance once more. I could feel myself walking,

but I wasn't there, lost in the darkness of my own mind as a sense of overwhelming danger suddenly overtook me. Thane, yelled Jeffries. I opened my eyes and found myself about to crawl into the pool, the blood whirling infinitely below as it seemed to draw my consciousness into its deaths. Overwhelmed with adrenaline, I tried to fight the malign impulse that had been forced upon me, but my muscles could only twitch and tremble, the cloak, blur of sprite, nudging against me but to no avail. It reminded me of an anglerfish, drifting through the abyssal trenches as it drew its prey in with its light, only to reveal the gaping must more that truly awaited them.

I couldn't resist, and the painful, feverish warmth of the blood needleed through my skin as my fingers sank into the pool. Tanner's arms wrapped around me from behind and yanked me back onto the ground, the sensation violently tearing away from my mind and sending a numbing shock through my entire body. Stay back, said Tanner. There's something down there. Barry, are you done? asked Jeffreys, retreating to the stairs as he shook himself back to reality,

trying to shrug off the mesmeric power of the blood, but his resolve was quickly failing. Got it, said Barry. Get the fuck over here, said Jeffries. We're moving out. We regrouped and quickly made our way back up the stairs, reaching the top, and then running down the long corridor

as the sound of scraping violins returned. Their cloak bear is striding across the desert beyond. We could no longer feel the influence of the pool. We got down to our hands and knees and spread out once more. Stay low, said Jeffries. We're almost home. Slowly and carefully, we began to shift through the barren field of ash, avoiding the discarded suits of armour that littered the wastes.

Thunder rolled through the clouds above as I kept my eyes on the cloak figures, the chaotic music grating against the air, and then it stopped. Fuck, said Tanner, fear in his voice. Ah, guys, we may have a problem. I looked over and saw one of the creatures staring directly at a blurry spot on the ground, where I had a shone. assumed Tanner was lying. Every one of the cloaked figures raised their bows to their violins, and played a screeching, paralyzing note that cut through my mind, the taste of blood filling my mouth. As it ended, so did our cloaking fields, flickering away in a haze of distortion, and leaving us exposed upon the ground as a surge of terror and adrenaline flooded through my senses. get up and fire is removed said jeffreys now i rose to my feet alongside the others charging my rail gun and taking aim at one of the creatures I pulled the trigger and the gun kicked back against my shoulder, the shot blowing a hole

through my target as it collapsed to the ground with a heavy thud. The others fired their own weapons, and we began running forward. The other figures rising above the earth and flying into the sky, their dark cloaks whispering upon the air. All they did, however, was observe, looking down at us from above. A low drone shuddered through the air. air, and the blindfolded nightmare dropped down from the pyramid in the sky, its limbs bending back and breaking its fall as it landed upon the ashen waists. Rising slowly, it unfurled to

its full towering height as its body twisted back into alignment with a series of sickening pops and cracks. Then it raised its talents to its head as we ran across the field as fast as we could. We charged our railguns and turned to unleash a volley on the looming horror, our shots cracking through the air, but failing to even affect our target, the slugs warping through its writhing bandages in a distortion of space. Slowly it raised its blindfold, revealing two empty black sockets,

and a third eye embedded upon its forehead that glowed with a burning light. The eye flared with a burning light. the seething radiance, and the sky darkened to the shade of pitch, crimson shadows coursing through the ash as all the colours of the world grew vivid and sharp, and then I was gone. I was a child again, my life flickering through my mind as I witnessed every terrible moment buried within my memories, the death of my dog, the friends who betrayed me, the parents who kicked me out onto the streets, forcing me to join the Marine, Corp when I had nothing else in my future but a bullet to the head.

I saw the people I met in Basic and beyond, and saw the moments when I learned that they were dead, killed by IEDs, or martyrs strapped with explosive belts and tins of shrapnel. I felt absolute despair in that moment, and wanted nothing more than to die. But then I heard a voice calling me back, Barry screaming my name over the commiss. system. I began to feel my own skin again, my consciousness flooding back to me as tears dripped down from my eyes. A terrible numbing pain radiated against my brain as I looked up at the glowing third eye of the abomination, and I felt my eyes beginning to swell and bleed. Then I heard a scream and a cry of desperation. I looked up just as Jeffries lost his footing in his delirium,

and immediately fell up into the sky. Tanner and Barry lunged to try and save him, but were too late. Their fingers passing through only air as Geoffrey screamed and plummeted into the storm above. Then a sickening crunch sounded upon the air, a sprite rammed into his falling body at full force, breaking his ribs, but just barely knocking him back up to us. I reached for him and grabbed hold of him. his hand, his terrified breath trembling over the comp system as Tanner and Barry quickly secured

me from behind, preventing me from being torn off of the ground with the weight of Jeffries. With all my strength, I pulled him back down to the ash, the others assisting until his boots finally met the ground once more. Jeffries coughed and weased for air through his splintered ribs, Tanner and I throwing his arms over our shoulders as we walked him up the incline as fast as we could. As the looming nightmare observed our escape, the cloaked figures rushed across the sky, lashing tendrils of black shadow through the air that struck my back with a burning hiss, searing through my armour and nearly toppling me to the ground. But I fought through the pain and continued on. Barry charged his railgun and opened fire on the drifting horrors as

spright soared up into the sky, its wings expanding out from its shell and firing their twin lasers at the creatures. The beams and slugs cracked against the flicking barriers that now protected the flying nightmares, flashing with bursts of spark and flame but failing to penetrate their shields. We reached the top of the hill, the hall to the tomb now coming into view as we hurried across the wastes. Another tendril of shadow whipped overhead, burning the ash like a sliver of acid, and the sky flashed with lightning. We quickly took shelter in the hall, and Barry kept firing behind us, buckling over in pain as the cloak figures slashed through his armour with their Eldridge magic.

We made our way down the corridor, overwhelmed with adrenaline as I tried to push through the pain, and carry Jeffries to safety as Sprite soared overhead, Tanner staggering in much the same way as his burns melted into his armour. We got company, said Barry from behind. His voice pained and weak. I glanced back to see one of the cloaked nightmares drifting down into the mouth of the hall, watching us intently from the darkness beneath its hood. Its cloak swept aside, and its body unfurled like a flower of meat and writhing worms as I felt its presence of salt our minds, a numbing pain thrumming against my skull as we reached the end of the hall. Barry fired at the rippling horror, but to no avail. His shot exploding

against its shields with a thundering boom. We activated the fourth-dimensional mode on our masks and did the same for Jeffries. The world falling dark as the white outline of the door shivered before us in the void. Gripping Jeffries tight, we moved through the screaming shadows, emerging upon the ceiling of the burial chamber

as Barry and Sprite followed behind us. Switching our vision back to normal, Barry immediately called in. Sierra, this is Sierra One, he said, coughing up blood beneath his mask. we need immediate evac and medical outside kv 62 over sierra one this is sierra is the site hot over site secure over said barry roger evak is inbound ETA two minutes, over. Roger, out, said Barry,

nearly collapsing as he made his way down the wall and back onto the floor, switching off his boots as we all followed suit. We quickly hurried back into the antechamber and up the passage leading outside, looking back at every moment to ensure we weren't being followed. The light of day met my eyes

as we stumbled out onto the walkway before the entrance. The silhouette of the... osprey shimmering upon the horizon like a mirage as my head thrarmed with pain still managing to stay on our feet we backed up as the osprey dove down and slowly landed upon the weathered stone the blades chopping overhead we piled inside the gunner keeping his eyes on the tomb and we took off once more the desert sands rushing beneath us and that was the long last thing that I remembered. I woke up in medical, back at HQ, doped up on morphine as I tried to figure out what had happened. It almost felt like a dream. We were apparently all suffering

from a collective stroke and had to be rushed in for surgery to stop the bleeding in our brains. Jeffries had his ribs reset where they could be and was practically in love with Sprite after that. We were all covered in. chemical burns and they treated them as best they could but I've still got the scars to this day I didn't realize how many times I'd been hit but then again that's usually how it goes when the adrenaline is flowing they deciphered some of the ruins from our video footage which were an analog of ancient Egyptian and all they roughly said was this born in blood we give of the blood and resurrect our Lord Borgeth, the flesh that walks.

As for what's happening now, they're considering hitting the travellers with a nuclear strike, and I don't think I need to tell you what a colossally bad idea that is. I can only hope that they don't go through with it. Barry told me that another breach squad found a guy that they think is from the other universe, but he's not connected to the travellers, or anything else we've run into. They were allegedly interrogating him with hydrophluoric acid

to the point that his skin looked like it was rotting off his bones. He was already pretty messed up, though. And all Barry could tell me was that he kept saying something about a Project Atlas and some sort of void between universes. But there was never anything about a Project Atlas on record, and all of his knowledge regarding Conflict Atlas on record. current or past events was completely scrambled, like he came from another timeline. Our handler is telling us now that we're being deployed with several other breach squads

to that town in North Dakota that they first firebombed, in a full-scale assault on whatever it is that's still alive out there. People in neighbouring communities were apparently cutting and mutilating themselves, walking blindly toward the town like they were caught in a trance, and any that were captured were completely incomplete. coherent no matter what we did to them. The footage from our UAVs show them crawl them into the old manholes that led into the sewer, but they never came back out. So we think that whatever's causing the roots of meat moss is taking shelter down there. In a way, I'm hoping I don't come back, but if I do, I'll give you all another update. In either case, thanks for listening. Thanks for listening.

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531, 2,600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BEDMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. Part 6. Operation Blood Siren. Thane here. I'm writing this from medical, back at HQ. I'm hurt, but I'll live. Something happened to my brain, more than anything, and I'm still seeing things. It's like the world is too saturated, and the corners of my vision won't stop shaking. I hear whispers at night, and every dream is a nightmare, no matter how much they drug and sedate me.

They can't tell me when I'll be better, but I hope it's soon, because I feel like I'm losing my mind. I was lucky, really, but I couldn't say the same for a lot of others. We were supposed to deploy outside our target in North Dakota, but then something happened. We started getting reports that every breach on record had violently killed. collapsed for no discernible reason, in many cases explosively. Casualties were high, and suspicion immediately shifted to the travellers. Like I said before, some people wanted to outright bomb them, but since any seismic readings from the area had stopped, it was decided that we'd finally pay them a visit. My squad wasn't a part of this, but the people that were used the tech

from our new scopes to form a rough image of the topography out in Libya, and, as expected, found a structure buried deep underground. It didn't have a way in, so they bored straight through the earth until they hit metal and breached the structure. They scouted it with a drone before sending anyone down, and told it was dark and completely offline, like everything had been dismantled. The travellers were nowhere to be seen, and the teams found the remnants of a machine that they think was used to create an artificial wormhole, almost entirely disassembled and missing every one of its key components. Every other machine that was still recognisable had been seemingly devoted to a single purpose, the construction of a bomb the size of a

small building. This is the part I'm not supposed to know about, but rumours spread in here like wildfire, and it isn't right to keep this under wraps, even if something happens to me for writing this. The bomb, thankfully, had been disarmed and was locked to prevent tempering. Nobody, save for the travellers, could even detonate it if they tried. The part that, as everyone worried, however, is what this bomb would do if the travellers were to return. The current consensus is the complete annihilation of our universe. We think the travellers were from somewhere else entirely, somewhere other than the universe that the Prometheus mandate had fused to our own.

It seems they were planning on getting rid of our universe before the other could fully invade it, like they were cutting off an infected limb, but wherever we were connected to, I guess something happened there, something that severed its link to us. So the travellers had no reason to be here and left all their world destroying garbage behind, like the good Samaritans they were. What an invasion from the other universe would have entailed. We're not entirely sure, but this next operation gave us more than a few ideas.

Whatever happened over there, we are very, very lucky. but that wasn't the only thing that was bothering people. We have an insignia for breach that we wear on our armour. Looks out like two interlocking scyths. Tanner likes to joke that it looks like a biker tattoo. Barry though, he showed me a brief clip of an empty supply crate they found down there, which his buddy in another squad had sent to him. And the first thing I saw was a white emblem emblazoned upon the metal.

It was essentially our own insignia. only with a cybernetic skull printed over it that matched the dimensions of the dead traveller we'd found in Algeria. There are a lot of theories, but nobody really knows what it means. And when Barry's friend tried asking anybody in charge about it, they pretended like it was nothing. We think the brass knows something, but what that is, well, is anyone's guess.

In any case, for Bloodsiren, six breach squads were unified into the path find a section and were split into fire teams. It was myself, Jeffries, Barry, Tanner and Sprite. And our objective was simple. Infiltrate the sewers beneath the ruins of the town and eliminate all resistance. We knew by then, however, that it's the simple ones that are usually anything but, and the fact that they were sending over 20 of us down there meant they expended one hell of a resistance. We were being flown in on three ospreys. two fire teams in each, with plenty of backup alongside us to secure the surface and actors a mobile CNC network. That network would assume control of the Grey Eagles we had on loan from the US

army, on account of them being on a need-to-know basis with breach, and that would clear out any of the people that had been hypnotised into wandering toward the town. We were all given a low dose of LSD, which was allegedly supposed to protect us from the mind-altering hazards. Having my first psychedelic experience in the middle of a high-stakes operation was not exactly my idea of fun, but it didn't affect me much. I remember sitting near the M240 gunner, looking out the back of the Osprey as we flew over the woods, all the colors of the world growing vivid and weighted. It reminded me, in the most uncomfortable way, of when I stared into the third eye of Borger. that blindfolded thing in Operation Osiris. We were first in formation,

the other two Ospreys flying through the sky behind us as their twin blades chopped through the air. We started to descend, and the others got ready. The first thing I noticed were the streaks of violet that started to span across the midday sky, gradually subsuming the clouds as we drew closer to our destination. I hadn't seen the other fire team much, sitting across from us in the purple glow,

but I knew they were the strike team that cleared out the facility in Lucent Blue after we'd left, and they had two more men than we did. For this op, Jeffries and Barry had their railguns, and Tama had a flamethrower, but every combat engineer was given something special. I had what they were calling a Crest W-2 electrical cannon, a small stock of which had been secured from the other universe before its connection was severed and was seemingly made by the same people who built Sprite

and the Cobalt bomb. It had a large hexagonal barrel lined with electronics and almost looked like a futuristic grenade launcher without a buttstock made with a dark metal alloy that was painted with streaks of red. It probably weighed over 40 pounds, but thankfully my armour helped with that. I somehow doubted it was even meant to be carried by an unassisted human. I never got a chance to actually fire it before the op-low, so all they told me was to stand back when I finally did. I had a pet theory that whoever it was that was making these things were the same folks who put the breaches out of commission, like they were caught in some sort of cosmic war, but none of the squads ever talked about actually seeing one of these people. The most I ever heard of was an old bunker they'd found in a world covered entirely in ice,

half destroyed by some massive explosion that had apparently vaporized an entire ocean Anyway, I'm rambling, back to the op. We set down on a decommissioned highway A short ways out of town And poured out of the osprey as the others slowly landed nearby The sky was a rolling miasma of violet clouds Churning and writhing like a living organism

As the sun burned with a crimson glow The road was badly damaged and were stricken with fissures and gusts of ash, while in the distance the ruins of the small town were visible through the burnt-out tree line. It seemed odd, though. Most of the scorched trees still stood upright, except for one part, where the forest had been somehow flattened in a wide, sweeping path,

led straight into town. Two fire teams moved ahead of us down the open trail, and we followed, the other three filtering through the woods alongside us, and it wasn't long before we reached the town. The houses and shops had been seared to nothing, like standing skeletons of charred wood and crumbling masonry, though I couldn't see any bodies.

It was like the entire town had been abandoned long before the bombs had ever hit. The fire teams ahead of us split off onto the neighbouring streets, and Barry led us forward. A nervous tension whirled up from within me as I began to see what the old UAV footage didn't. A creeping moss of bleeding meat had consumed the pavement ahead of us, spilling out from the centre of town and crawling over the ruined structures.

It was alive, tendrils snaking across the broken concrete as razor-toothed moor shuddered and gasped upon the air. It smelled like fuel, even through our masks. We slowly walked over the layer of meat, the flesh sinking beneath our boots as multitudes of jittering, dilated eyes began to emerge from the folds to watch us intently. I never felt more unwelcome than I did in that place, like the environment itself wanted us dead. Barry led us to an open manhole, overflowing with a mottled skin that snaked around the ladder, Sprite hoppering close to Jeffries as Tanner looked up at a ruined police station at the far end of the road. This is ours, said Barry.

The boom of an explosion echoed in the distance, and we turned to see a plume of smoke rising far off in the woods. Pathfinder to all fire teams, said command. Disregard drone fire, and check in when you're at your entry point. Over. This is Pathfinder 3, said Jeffries. We're in position. Over. I look down into the darkness of the fleshy pit,

as the other fire team slowly sounded off, another explosion booming in the distance. Bathfinder to all fire teams, you are free to engage, out. Tanner, take point, said Jeffries. Hesitating for a moment. Tanner enabled his cloaking module and lowered himself into the hole,

gripping the blood-slicked ladder as he slowly descended into the depths. We followed suit, my cloaking field humming to life around me as I blurred into the background and crawled down to the open hole. I could hear a sucking, squirming sound as the darkness swallowed me,

and I turned on my night vision before setting down in the tunnel with the others. A bed of hands and spanning fingers had subsumed the ground, crawling and twitching as they caressed our boots, while the passage beyond wound into a bleeding chasm of clenched teeth and horrifically elongated limbs, spun together upon the walls as they pulsed and writhed with movement. Tanner slowly advanced, and we followed,

the horrible unease lingering in the back of my mind as the bones of the hands crunched beneath my boots. I felt like I was walking through the intestines of a living being, throbbing and breathing through the walls of flesh. Tanner motioned for us to stop, aiming his flamethrower at something in the distance. Someone's alive, he said. We slowly eased forward, and the shape of a man slipped into view, naked and shivering in seizure upon the ground. Cut his throat and move up, said Jeffreys. Nobody lives. Tanner crept forward, drawing his knife.

only to stop and peer ahead. I followed his gaze as I walked and saw the countless others that were sprawled out upon the widening corridor of meat. A writhing layer of men and women littered the bed of twitching hands, once locked in a vile orgy of blood and depravity, yet now only seizing in a deranged madness

as their flesh slowly fused to the walls. It was like the entire place was short-circuiting. Pathfinder to all fire teams, said command. The transmission distorted with a hiss of static. Be advised that hostiles have been encountered. Stay alert, out. Would it really kill them to offer a little more description? said Barry. A loud crack echo through the air,

and we turned our focus to a seizing woman in the near distance, whose flesh began to quiver and roil as her bones expanded and broke within her skin. We backed away as the others around us started to violently shake in the same manner, and I watched in horror as their bodies began to separate. Arms, heads and tors sprouted hundreds of long, finger-like limbs as they poured themselves free from the hole and split apart into shuddering pits of deformed teeth that screeched upon the air. Vane, clear them out, yelled Jeffreys. I knelt upon the floor of grasping hands As the screaming abominations began to skitter toward us On the ceiling and walls

More flooding in from the darkness of the passage ahead As Tanner swept a streak of fire across the corridor Barely holding them back Aiming at nothing in particular I pulled the trigger But my weapon only started to charge with a high-pitched wine The broad barrel glowing with a flickering light As it shook within my grip

Thane, hurry the fuck up, said Jeffries, firing his railgun at one of the creatures with a loud bang, as Sprite began to rake its lasers through the horde. Just as the shrieking horrors closed in on me, the charge reached a crescendo. I pulled the trigger again in desperation. A flash of blinding light cancelled the darkness with a thundering boom as the weapon in my hands discharged a tremendous electrical shockwet. disintegrating every creature in a rippling avalanche of gore that tore down the corridor and seared the meat clean from the walls. Fire and smoke was all that remained, blood and splattered remains dripping from the ceiling and running down the walls.

Even the floor of hands had been blown back into the scorch brick of the sewer. God damn, said Barry. I'm jealous. Jeffreys led out a side. sigh of relief, and Sprite beeped with an alleged approval as Tanner moved up. Crawling to my feet, I followed Tanner alongside the others, slowly moving through the burnt-out passage. Gunfire echoed in the far distance, and I could only assume that another team was fighting something of their own. The moss of creeping meat gradually resumed as we reached a fork in the passage, stepping back onto the bed of hands that rubbed against my boots, like they were trying to get inside.

Fane, clear the left. Tanner on the right, said Jeffries, more men and women seizing upon the ground in the other corridors. Tanner swept his flamethrower across the passage on the right, the writhing clusters of people screaming in pain as they slowly burn to death and tried to split into individual creatures. I knelt upon the ground, bracing the electrical cannon against me as I prepared,

to fire down the corridor on the left. Tanner swore, and I looked back to see him prying away a disembodied hand that had leapt onto him, whipping it against the wall and unloading a swath of flame onto it. Looking back down the left, I pulled the trigger, and the weapon began to slowly charge. I thought I could hear footsteps coming from just ahead, though I wondered if it was only my imagination. Do you guys... A stabbing pain shot through my body as I was knocked onto my back, my weapon tumbling across the ground. A long icicle had impaled me through the chest, blood gushing out from my armour as my cloaking field flickered away.

Contact, left, yelled Jeffreys, firing his railgun at something in the darkness as Barry quickly joined him. A hulking man emerged from the shadow, standing at least seven feet tall and wrapped in an eye. armor of blackened painting and blood-stained razors, like he was wearing the carapace of a demonic knight. I immediately recognized it as the same armor that littered the desert in Operation Osiris. His teeth had been filed into razor-sharp points, and his skin was marked with bleeding runes, shrugging off the blasts of railgun fire like there were nothing, as a cloak of human flesh billowed in his wake. Sprite's lasers sliced across his armor in a flogues. Sprite's lasers sliced across his armor in a flash of sparks, and the man growled in pain, conjuring a flickering light in his razor-tiped

gauntlets, before lashing a wave of chilling power at Jeffries and Barry, freezing them in place in a sudden growth of ice. But Sprite managed to dodge out of the way, raking its lasers against the hulking figure once more. Noticing the charged electrical cannon nearby, I started to pull myself toward it as Tanner unloaded a stream of flame on the approaching man, who ignored It was ordered entirely as the fire burned upon his wicked armour, conjuring a spear of ice before launching it at Tanner. Tanna dove out of the way, and the spear shattered against the wall, as my hands wrapped around the charged electrical cannon. I angled it up at the armored figure before it could conjure another spear of ice and pulled the trigger. The man's upper body exploded in a burst of gore and ricocheting shrapnel, as the electrical shockwave ripped,

him apart. The glowing remnants of his lower body collapsing to the ground as I shook off the adrenaline and slowly crawled to my feet, keeping the freezing spear embedded in my chest to slow down the blood loss. Luckily, it barely missed my heart and lungs. Get us free, said Jeffreys, still locked in a prison of ice alongside Barry. Tanner and I prided away, slowly releasing them as movement stirred from the right-hand passage. We all turned to it with our weapons raised, only to see another fire team emerge from the shadows, covered in blood with their cloaking fields long since dissipated. We lowered our weapons, relieved to have backup. Fire team six, said their sergeant.

What happened here? Three, said Jeffreys, praying a shard of ice from his shoulder and pointing at the remains of the armoured figure. we're apparently fighting wizards now yeah we had one of those said the other sergeant nodding in recognition had a flail and three fireballs like a freaking knight or something ripped our navigator in two with his bare hands

before Wilkes here took it out he pointed back at their engineer who had an electrical cannon of his own we're gonna make those fuckers pay "'Bone to argue with that,' said Jeffreys. "'Let's go. Tanner, you're up.' Tanner slowly moved ahead through the left-hand corridor, sweeping a streak of fire for anything that still moved.

Even with the extra support, I felt a sense of dread building up in the air like we were heading towards something terrible. It felt like the walls were breathing around us, a rattling wind coursing through the flesh as the sound of a heartbeat thumped upon the air. "'Heads up,' said Tanner, stopping and pointing ahead. At the end of the passage, a wooden door painted entirely in black

stood embedded within the brick. A white handprint pressed upon its surface. I could feel something beyond it that I had never experienced anything close to. Like an aura of pure evil was radiating from the other side. You guys feel that, asked Barry. I nodded.

Pathfinder, this is Pathfinder 3, said Jeffreys to Command. We're with Fire Team 6 outside a sealed door, and I think the primary targets on the other side. Please advise, over. We waited a moment for Command to respond, the other group gathering nearby. This is Pathfinder to Fire Teams 2 and 5, said Command, through a hit. of static. Converge upon Fire Team 3's location and proceed after rendezvous. We forwarded a marker to your navigators, out. We lost two teams already? asked Barry. What the hell are we fighting? Nothing good, said Jeffries. Gunfire began to echo in the distance from the corridor

behind us. We'll check it out, said the other sergeant. Dagger, move up. The other team quickly. disappeared into the darkness, and we waited for their return as gunshots and explosions continued to rattle through the air. I kept my eyes on the door the whole time, like something was drawing me to it. I could barely even feel the pain of my injury. Footsteps sounded from behind us, and I turned to see Fire Team 6 emerge from the darkness, two other fire teams tailing closely behind. Their numbers looked a lot lighter than when we first went in. Okay, said Jeffreys, a nervous tension in his voice. Tanner, you're up. Keep it slow.

Tanner moved forward with caution and opened the black door, stepping out into the darkness beyond. We followed behind him, emerging upon an endless expanse of writhing meat. Above stars and streaks of celestial gas shone through a cosmic abyss, like we were somehow standing beneath the night sky. "'We'll take point,' said another fire team, moving into the darkness with the others. Jeffries didn't protest, looking around and staying as close as he could to Sprite, as though profoundly bothered by his surroundings.

Then we heard nothing but heavy footsteps beating across the distance as something rapidly approached. "'Contact, right,' yelled one of the others. I hit the trigger on my weapon before I even looked into the darkness beyond. Charging it as four hulking, armoured figures charged toward us from the shadows. Everyone opened fire, railgun blasts sparking against their armour as they quickly close the distance, one ramming his gauntlet through a man's head before smacking another away. I brace myself, and fired my electrical cannon at one of them, lighting the field around us with a blinding flash as the shockwave disintegrated him.

Another immediately charged toward me as the other fire teams engaged the rest. Wielding a massive ruin-marked sword in a single hand, he swung it at me, and I immediately ducked, the blade whistling over my head, only to catch his gauntlet as he smacked me several feet into the distance. I tumbled to a halt upon the ground, feeling like I'd been hit by a truck as he knocked the flamethrower from Tanner's grip and rammed his gauntlet into his ribs, breaking them on impact with a sickening crack. As Tanner wheezed for air, the armored man raised his sword, about to bring it down for a killing blow, only for Sprite to lash him across the face with its lasers. The man grunted in pain, the shots of Jeffries and Barry sparking

against his armor, and barely even denting his skin. Pathetic, bellowed the man, shrugging off Sprite's attacks as he marched towards us, undaunted. We will flay the meat from your world, and you will rive forever with the flesh. He swung his blade at Jeffries, who ducked under the attack, and let back as he swung again. Too many of us are through. You can do nothing but cower and die. Embrace your end. He swung his sword, slashing Barry across the chest in a spatter of blood, knocking him back. The other teams were slowly winning, another shockwave disintegrating one of the armored men nearby, as gunshots and crackling flame sown it from all around us. Get the gun! I yelled, the taste of blood in my mouth as I pointed at the electrical cannon

that had been knocked from my grip. Jeffries ran for it as the armored figure conjured a ball of flame his free hand and whipped it at Jeffries, narrowly missing him as it burst upon the fleshy ground in a fiery explosion. Jeffries rolled and picked up the weapon, triggering the charging process as the man turned his attention back to Barry, knocking the railgun from his hands with a strike of his sword. Barry stumbled back, clutching his bleeding wounds as another slash barely missed him. The man bellowing with laughter as he reveled in the terror of his enemies. Then Jeffries fired the charged electrical cannon.

The man's head and half of his torso instantly vaporized with a thundering boom, blood spattering against me as his remains collapsed to the ground. One of them still remained near another fire team, ramming his sword through a team member's chest before casting him off like a rag dog. Sprite soared through the air and temporarily blinded him with a flash of its lasers before another engineer took aim with his electrical cannon and blasted the creature to pieces. of the thundering shockway.

They were finally dead. But the other teams had been reduced to only seven members, and we were almost too injured to fight. I slowly crawled to my feet, a dull pain radiating through my bones as Jeffries helped Tanner nearby. You need Evac? asked Jeffries.

Tanner shook his head. Let's finish this, he said. Worry about me later. I helped up Barry, the bleeding from the wound in his chest beginning to slow, as Sprite drifted back to us. The remainder of the other teams advanced ahead of us, charging their electrical cannons beforehand as they crept into the darkness. The expanse of meat began to rise, gradually ascending into a mountain of bodies, woven and

fused through a macabre tapestry that towered into a vertical ring of blood-stained flesh. the remnants of a portal between worlds that had ceased its function with the severing of universes. Now to pawn it, however, was a lone, slender figure draped in red, a black emblem of a willow emblazoned upon its garment as it clutched its mask of feathers in a manic insanity, twitching in place as it slowly glanced up at us. Its skin had been completely flayed away, revealing the bleeding meat beneath. Jeffreys motioned for us to stop, holding us back as the others aimed their weapons, and another sergeant gave the order to fire. The blast of three electrical cannons discharged in a cascade

of thundering booms, shockwaves slamming against the cloaked figure, and vaporizing everything around it but the creature itself. Kneeling within a sea of crackling flames as the remnants of the disused portal clashed behind it. It looked up at the other fire teams, as though annoyed by their presence. Jeffries eased us back as it raised a single hand to them, and what I saw next would be burned into my mind for as long as I live. The others exploded into a fine, red mist, obliterated on a cellular level as though swatted off the face of existence,

and their blood smacked against us as we stood paralyzed in horror. Suddenly alone with the creature that disintegrated seven soldiers with only a thought. It looked up at us and removed its mask, revealing only an inky void beneath. Images of chaos and death flashed through my mind as I was suddenly overtaken by a hunger for meat. I wanted to tear my own flesh off, stuttering and trembling within my armour as the overwhelming tide of evil and depravity flooded through. my mind. Then I blinked and the hunger was gone. I saw Vasquez sitting in the creature's place, wearing our old armour and looking just like he did on the day of snowshoe. I never told the legionnaires, said the creature that wore his form, its voice grating against

my mind with an aura of raw power. It seemed unstable, shivering beneath its breath as though in a tremendous amount of pain. Their hunger blinds them, even when the truth courses through their veins. They'll never know how it feels to be severed from the whole. There was no I, no individual. Yet now I kneel before the flesh I should rightly devour more alone than I have ever been. Mure from the other universe, asked Jeffries. his weapon more out of a recognition of futility than an act of surrender. What are you trying to do here? What do you want from us? I blinked again, and the creature had adopted the form of Jeffreys, looking back at us with an expression of forlorn defeat.

I could feel my mind slowly unhinging, like a nervous tension was building within me the longer I remained in the creature's presence. His thoughts radiated against me like a psychic feedback, but I didn't feel the slightest bit of hostility, only sorrow. I want something that you can never give me, it said, smiling weakly before vanishing into thin air. We looked around in a sudden panic, searching the black expanse, but only an empty nothingness surrounded us. We were alone, the stars gleaming above us in the artificial night. This is Pathfinder 3 to Pathfinder, said Jeffries.

Please respond. Over. He waited for a moment before repeating himself, but received no response, listening to the cold static on the other end. I'm not getting anything on my equipment, said Barry. I think it's this place, Jeffries nodded, glancing back at the mound of flesh with a nervous paranoia. Okay.

he said, standing in place as though unsure of what to do, let's clear out. He began walking back the way he'd come, and we slowly followed him, stumbling under the pain and stress of our injuries as Spride drifted in silence overhead. We found the back door and made our way back through the scorched tunnels, a sense of utter emptiness, suffusing the darkness as we finally arrived at the ladder, and climbed it to the the surface. The purple skies had began to disperse, breaking away into the blue light of day as a welcome sunlight shone against us. Jeffries called in, and one of the Ospreys flew in overhead to take us out of there. We didn't realize how injured we really were, and were

apparently on the verge of death when they got us to medical. Adrenaline had worked its magic once again. We don't know what we faced down there, but whatever it was, it seemed to have left of its own volition. People stopped being drawn into the sewers, and the flesh died off in short order. Breach sent in another sweep of the area a day later, in the hopes of capturing one of those legionnaires in black armour, but they couldn't find anything left down there but a few starving people. The alloy they recovered from the fragments of their armour confused them even more than the travellers, and all they really discovered was that it was partly organic. Any scraps of their skin were just as tough, shrugging off bullets like a solid steel. Whatever they were a part of,

we think they were planning on assimilating our world until something on their end cut them off and left them stranded on earth. Now, we can only hope that it stays that way. Breach isn't going anywhere, but all of us need some time to recover. Our numbers are hurting, but even without a direct link to the other universe, plenty got through in the meantime. We still have a job to do, and provided I survive long enough to record these things, I'll be back with more.

The others started reading these while they heal, by the way, and are amazed that I haven't been executed, but in any case, thanks for making it this far. And Pluto isn't the planet. Something much, much worse. Part 7, Operation Gladiator. Hey guys, Thane here. It took us a while to get healed up.

Even with the medical tech at HQ, but we're back in action until further notice. I get muscle spasms from where the Legionnaire stabbed me with a magic icicle, but otherwise I'm trauma-free on the physical front. We all went under the knife in a bid to replicate some of the travellers' sabro-netics, and our bones are now reinforced with a titanium foam, so every breach got will be a lot more difficult to kill. No nanotech brains just yet, but our cerebrospinal fluid was replaced with a sort of gel that

better cushions the brain from impacts kind of like how a woodpecker's tongue is wrapped around its own as the, well, surgeon put it. Even in plain clothes, we were a force to be reckoned with. No word from the travellers or whatever was controlling the legionnaires, but seeing as the invading universe punched more than a couple of holes in our own, we've had our work cut out for us, even after the connection was severed. Our numbers were decimated.

after blood siren, so command has been pushing recruitment from the main branches of every NATO member, with an emphasis on special operators who can keep their mouths shut. Why, I'm still alive, on the other hand, I have no idea. Like I said before, I guess it's not a problem if only one guy's doing it, and the shit we do is so unbelievable that it practically does its own Opsack, hiding in plain sight and all that. well for this op we were deployed to Italy Castel madama

to be specific a municipality about 20 miles inland from Rome it was being used to house an underground fighting ring that pitted random dopes that wouldn't be missed against the kind of monsters we were vaporizing on a daily basis it was attracting some heavy hitters on the world stage

and got a little too popular for its own good wasn't long before the brass got wind only thing is this would normally be a low priority case for us given the comparative threat level but an informant gave us a hint that got everyone real interested

the arena staff were used to small game stuff that could tear a man to shreds for the pleasure of the audience but would buckle under gunfire or electrified restraints apparently they got brave and picked something else up

something that was a lot more deadly than they were equipped to deal with. But it didn't go on a rampage and waste everybody like you'd expect. No, instead it willingly decided to stay there. It liked it, so long as the bodies kept flowing. Burned off the description. Command thought it was a bona fide legionaire, so we were being dropped in to interrogate it as best we could

and kill anything that got in our way. The shutdown of the arena was not a priority. We were to enlist the staff, they were in any way amicable. Given that these things actively wanted to assimilate our universe and turn it into a meat moss, command was not thrilled about the prospect of any remaining on earth. So, they were hoping to figure out where the thing's controller went. Nuclear arsenal on standby.

We flew in from an outpost on the coast of Croatia, packed into a UH 60M with all our gear from Blood Siren, which myself, Jeffries, Barry, Tanner, and Sprite. The others had their rail guns, and I got to keep my electrical cannon. The boys in R&D even made some improvements, installing a desperately needed safety, and making it accumulate a passive charge, so all I had to do was pull the trigger every five seconds, and a small army would cease to exist. We hovered near some farmland, east of the town, and repelled down into the cover of the trees,

Sprite drifting in overhead. Barry got us oriented with his gear and the bird flew off, leaving us to it. It's underground. Just past the highway, said Barry. We can get in outside the cemetery. Ah, peachy, said Jeffries. Lead the way. We activated our cloaking fields and made our way through the trees. The cover broke into a small empty road, cracked pavement spruing beneath our boots as the land began

to dip into the highway beyond, green hills rising across the cloudy blue horizon. Jumping over a fence and moving down the hill through what looked like a small orchard, we made our way over the grassy highway underpass, keeping out of sight as the sound of cars rushed upon the air. Cutting through the trees and past another road, we moved between the buildings of crumbling masonry and pale, pastel shades of concrete, the sun shining brightly through the clouds. It was almost pleasant, compared to our usual destinations,

and seeing people moving through the distant streets was a welcome reprieve, even if I knew it wouldn't last. Walking past a small, empty parking lot, and between a gathering of cramped homes, Barry's shimmering blur pointed to a rundown building of weathered brick,

the cemetery rise towering in the background. He almost looked abandoned, and a rusted metal fence ran the perimeter of the property, overgrown weeds shifting around me as I followed the others up to the building. There was a door outback that almost looked like a boarded-up entrance, but, well, it wasn't. It was only made to look that way. There was a white handprint smeared in paint upon its centre, like the doors in the sewers of blood siren. Barry counted us down and gently pushed it open with a whining creek. Rail gun aimed into the darkness it revealed.

beyond the door a staircase led beneath the structure extending down farther than we could see tanner you're up said jeffreys gun at the ready tanner descended into the shadow and we followed closely behind a dim light soon flickered in the distance at the bottom of the stairs and as we reached it we stepped into a long disused hallway a steel and blood-stained door standing at the far end broken fluorescent bulbs blinked and hummed overhead lighting the dirty moulding concrete that surrounded us and offering the only semblance of noise in the otherwise silent catacomb i would have thought that an underground fighting ring would be louder sprite beat flying ahead of us to stop tanner from going any further it decloaked and shook back and forth as if warning us off you see something we don't asked jeffreys Sprite bobbed up and down in the air as though nodding what had hurt us Jeffreys asked

Sprite remained still for a moment and then shook to say no Jeffreys examined the walls ahead as he thought to himself kneeling he picked up a small stone and tossed it down the length of the hall Nothing happened Barry is this the only way down here he asked. As far as I know, said Barry.

Jeffrey's nodded. Okay, he said. This is going to suck. Sprite, hang back and keep an eye on us. When they take us, follow in and figure out how to spring us loose. Don't get caught and call for backup if you have to. God knows we should already have another team down here. Sprite cloaked once again and flew off back the way we came.

What do you mean by when they take us? I asked. They are not us unconscious, then take us in, said Tanner. Couldn't have said it better myself, said Jeffries. Ain't that jump into conclusion, sir? asked Barry. Jeffries laughed. I bet you are hundred, I'm right. He said, stepping forward, Barry shrugged, and we all follow closely behind. As if on cue, iron gates slammed down from the ceiling in front and behind, boxing us in as the walls around slid up with a mechanical hiss, revealing smooth, reflective pains of intricately traced ruins, each slathered in glowing blood.

As the ruins flared with light, a ringing blare through my ears, I began to feel faint. Losing control of my body, I clasped to the ground and the world around me faded to darkness. I woke up in a cold sweat to a horrible screeching sound, coming from somewhere in the near distance. I was in a concrete cell where the others, safer sprite, and we'd been completely stripped of our weapons and armour. My head was pounding, and there were strange sounds echoing from the dark and decrepit hall beyond the bars, spadows of dry blood coating every inch of the mottled concrete. The others are getting rowdy, A thing, said Jeffreys, leading back again. the wall. They can smell us like fresh meat. You sure inspire a lot of confidence, I said, shrugging off a splitting headache. Any word from our spherical friend? Jeffrey shook his head. Not yet, he said, just a matter of time. Never know what hit him, said Tanner.

What about people? I asked. Have you guys seen any yet? Two guys passed. a little while ago, said Barry, surplus AK-47s and chain mail. I guess they were expecting to get bit. A buzzer sounded from down the hall, and the screeching from the other cells intensified. Footsteps clattered through the distance, and in short order, six men revealed themselves,

stepping out in front of ourselves. The jailer among them had a key card in his hand, and the others had their rifles, just as Barry had said. it's a shot-down, boys, said the jailer through a heavy Italian accent, swiping his keycard against a reader and unlocking our cell door. Don't do anything stupid. The men with guns backed up like a firing squad, keeping their weapons trained on us as the jailer beckoned us to follow. Singol fire, he said. We follow behind him, passing by the cells of chained and tentacled abominations that thrashed and snapped at our

side. Near the end of the hall, a spatter of saliva smacked against me from a hissing, skinless cat. His tail replaced by three scorpion-like stingers, as its massive claws raked against the concrete and struggled in its restraints. Oh, don't worry, boys. The manticle is not for you. You got something special coming your way. You had some real interesting hardware. Coming in here, eh? Best to mark the occasion. He glanced back with a wink and a smile and let us up a set of stairs, the arm contingent keeping a healthy distance at our rear as a sound of distant cheering grew upon the air. On the top of the steps, we emerged within a large metallic chamber, a plague of rust creeping across the walls and into the two elevators that stood at opposing ends of the room. Directly across from us, a door stood closed, vicious claw marks embedded in the solid steel.

We were lined up in the centre of the room as the men kept a watchful eye. He sounded like the cheering was coming from directly above us. You were there, big guy, said the jailer. He was looking directly at Jeffreys. You were ahead into that elevator over there, eh? He pointed at the one at the far end of the room. Jeffries nodded at us with a smirk and made his way over to the elevator. When he stepped inside, a bar gate slammed down in his wake.

locking him within. The rest of you were. Since you're all acquainted, get the front row seats. The jailer continued. We're going to throw you in there one by one, all against the same opponent. Sounds easy, hey?

Maybe we don't even get to the last. You guys look tough. Oh, a bunch of fighters here. He walked over to the closed door and opened it with his key card. From there, we were let down some sort of research block. The rooms at either side filled to the brim with expensive electronics and supercomputers,

where men and women poured over tabled maps and whiteboards scrawled with intricate designs. One of the rooms, to my lack of surprise, had my electrical cannon, which looked like it was being scanned by a large x-ray machine. This didn't look like any backwater operation. They were being well-funded. I'm guessing you boys already know where you are, eh? Come in prepared like that, said the jailer, begging us to follow him up a long ramp, where the roar of the unseen crowd grew louder with every step. I'll save you the song and dance then. At the end of the ramp, a large metal gate stood closed,

decaying scraps of flesh splattered at its base, with a security camera watching us from above. The gate slid open, revealing a large, sandy arena, and the roaring crowd that surrounded it, cheering in adulation upon the bleachers as we were led between them, an order to stand before a row of six pillars. The three of us were each shackle to our own, facing the arena, which was protected by a humming force-field

that shimmered upon the air with a low hum, a rim of glowing, arcane runes surrounding the blood-stained pit. You boys have a good time, eh? said the jailer, patting me on the shoulder before walking away with his guards. On either end of the arena was a seal gate, each linked to what I shuned were the elevators below. Without Sprite's intervention, I had no idea how we were going to get out of this. My eyes searched the men and women that observe from the stands, dressed in elegant fineries and drinking the supply of absence that was endlessly served to them,

in stark contrast to their dirty and blood-stained surroundings. Ladies and gentlemen, moved an unseen announcer from the speakers overhead. This evening we have a treat for you. It turns out that a certain insidious group of men planned on shutting down our fine operation. Where are these men now, you ask? Jane to the pillars and awaiting their chance a glory in the arena. Crowe booed at us, the nearby patron splashing us with their drinks.

I swore the alcohol stinging my eyes. The gate on one side of the arena slid open, and Geoffrey stumbled out, shielding his gaze from the blinding lights. When he regained his sights, he looks up at us, giving the thumbs up as though completely unconcerned. The speakers whined overhead as the announcer resumed his introduction. One by one, we're going to educate them on the finer points of what exactly we do here, as they face off against a crowd favourite. Astrogoth, the destroyer of souls. The gate on the other end slid open, and a towering legionaire stomped out of it. He'd been deprived of his weapons and armour, and he was still a seven-foot wall of muscle,

marked by bleeding rooms that were carved through every inch of his body, and a sigil of weeping willer that was sliced across his chest. So much for the interrogation. The legionaire grinned sadistically. His sharpened teeth glinting in the light as he looked down at Jeffries with an unrelenting cruelty. Captured in Portugal of the Atlantic Coast by a team of no less than 20 men, boomed the announcer. Astrogoth was a force to be reckoned with,

but he has cast aside the call of the sea to slaughter and kill for your entertainment. Let the battle begin. The Legioness summoned a ball of fire in his hands and whipped, at Jeffries, who rolled out of the way as it burst against the sand in a flash of searing heat. Jeffries deftly rose to his feet, and the Legionair charged toward him, his thundering footfalls thumping on the sand as he recoiled and ready to mighty blow. Just as he swung, Jeffries ducked and rolled between the Legionaire's legs, coming up behind him and kicking him hard in the back of the knee. The Legionair buckled off balance, enough for Jeffries to roundhouse him in the

the back of the head, his shin cracking against the titan skull. Growing in annoyance, the Legionair turned just as Jeffreys is about to throw a spinning back kick to his stomach. The Legionnaire called his foot and ripped Jeffries off the ground, swinging him overhead before hurling him across the arena like a rag doll. Jeffery slammed against the metal walls, collapsing to the ground as the crowd roared around him. What in the bloody hell is he doing? muttered Tanner. He should wait it out.

Jeffries crawled to his feet, grinning through the blood in his teeth as the Legionair slowly advanced toward him and threw a hard blow at his head. Jeffries ducked under the Legionaire's fist and angled out of the way as the Titan swung again, barely missing as Geoffrey circled out behind him with a smile. What's wrong?

asked Jeffries, raising his arms in his best, come get me posture He can't hit me The Legionaire laughed As he advanced forward You think death is the worst That can happen to you He said with a deep and bellowing voice

You will be my plaything Meat And I would instruct you well In the true definition of suffering The Legionnaire charged forward And swung with all his minds Jeffries rolled under the blow and the titans' bloodied fists sailed overhead as Jeffreys came back up

and jabbed at the Legionaire's face before throwing a hard cross to his jaw. Yet the attacks seemed to have little effect. The Legionnaire smacked him, knocking him to the ground before stepping forward in a bid to crush him. The Legionnaire brought his foot down with a thundering stomp, just as Jeffries rolled out of the way and rose to his feet, spitting a mouthful of blood to the sand. Oh, I know perfectly. well how bad things can get.

He said with a grin, I just don't give a shit. With a snarl of rage, the Legionair whipped a ball of fire at him, and Jeffreys ducked as it sailed overhead, detonating against the walls of the arena in a booming explosion. So, what were you doing in the ocean, huh? asked Jeffries.

You don't look like the sailing time. The Legionair smarts. You expect me to stand your ocean? before you espout some villain's exposition he mocks i have been tempered by a pain so exquisite that it is indistinguishable from the most lurid of pleasures you will get nothing from me but death a blur overhead caught my eye speeding across the dome ceiling of the chamber it was spright gloke from sight though what it was doing i had no idea i watched as the legion air swung at jeffreys again and again who only dodged every blow and kept his distance. A flash of light flared from where Sprite was now running its lasers across the ceiling, as though trying to cut a hole straight through it, though nobody else seemed to notice.

Captivated by the display as Jeffreys failed to slip one of the Legionaire's punches and caught a hard cross to the jaw with a resounding crack. Blood and teeth flew through the air as Jeffery stumbled back, clutching his face in pain, though kept a line. by cybernetic enhancements. That's when I noticed the warmth upon my arm. It was a drop of his blood, trickling down my skin. But that would mean that the force field that protected the arena was no longer in effect.

Sprite had found a way to disable it. Guys, I said, getting the attention of the others as I motioned to the drop. They quickly caught on, looking up at Sprite as it finished slicing a hole in the ceiling. the cut-out section falling down and landing in the centre of the arena with a tremendous thud of shattering concrete. Jeffries and the Legionair berth turned to see what was wrong, just as something fell through the hole from above. It landed in the sand and immediately slithered toward Jeffries like a snake, though I had no idea what I was looking at. Its surface was like a clattering machine of scintillating light and writhing metal. Jeffries backed up, unsure of what to do.

just as the machine snapped onto him and scaled his body in the blink of an eye, binding itself to his limbs. Jeffries, however, was not harmed. He stumbled back in confusion, looking down at the bizarre powered exoskeleton that now traced across his body. It was the technology of the travellers, far beyond anything breach had ever been capable of producing. That's when Sprite opened fire on the audience,

raking its lasers through the crowds in streaks of fire and explode, of death, blood and ashes splattering across the bleachers as the guards opened fire upon the cloak-tron, though to no avail as their shots collided with its crackling forcefield. Sprite turned to them, and vaporized them all in a blast of laser fire. Down below, the Legionaire charged towards Jeffries, who effortlessly slipped his punch and rammed his fist into the Titan's gut. The Legionair buckled over in pain, just as Jeffries hooked him across the jaw, dislocating it in a spatter of blood and teeth. Looking down at his new armour in amazement, Geoffrey's backed away with a smile.

Welcome to Earth, motherfucker, he said, throwing a hard kick to the Legionaire's head and instantly caving in his skull with a deafening crack. The Titan's body fell to the sand, and Geoffrey stumbled forward, like he was suddenly being controlled by the armour that had enveloped him. He placed his hand on the legionaire's fractured skull. His armor emitting a low drone as it presumably scanned the contents of the man's brain. Then it ceased, and Jeffreys was allowed control once again. Shrugging it off, Jeffreys effortlessly leapt up onto the platform that held us

and started to pry our shackles apart. Ah, I guess that takes care of the interrogation, he said. He was missing half his teeth from where he was. where he'd been hit. Where the fuck did that thing come from? asked Barry. Jeffrey shrugged, too overjoyed to care. The gate behind us that led to the research block slid open,

revealing two men that immediately opened fire on us. A bullet grazed my shoulder, and I took cover behind my pillar, gritting my teeth in pain as the shot sparked against the metal. But Jeffrey's only advanced toward them, raising his hand and projecting a bolt of lightning, from his armour that instantly incinerated one of the men. The remaining guard fired his rifle at Jeffreys,

but the bullets only sparked against a crackling force field. Before stopping the man, Geoffrey snatched the rifle from his grip and punched clean through his skull with a sickening crunch, blood and brains smacking against the walls as the now headless corpse collapsed to the ground. Well, shit, now I'm jealous, I said. Sprite drifting in overhead as it disabled its cloaking field.

Jeffreys patted it, and it beeped in alleged satisfaction. I glanced back at the arena, where hundreds of mutilated bodies burned in the crackling flames. Well, let's go get our guns back, said Jeffreys. Then we can all have some fun. We followed Jeffries through the open gate as he cleared a path of destruction and carnage through every gun. card contingent that advanced against him, effortlessly vaporizing them one by one with his powerful arcs of lightning that chained from one man to the next. The windows of the research block shattering to pieces as the cascade of fiery explosions rippled down the hall.

Reaching the room that held our guns, Jeffreys ripped the metal door off its hinges and tossed it aside. We filed into the room. The electrified bodies of several researchers slumped against the blood-stained electronics. The others retrieved their railguns from the tables, and I removed my electrical cannon from the X-ray machine. It was a struggle to hold without my exoskeleton, but through the haze of adrenaline, I barely even noticed. I am not firing this thing without my armour, said Tanner,

looking down at his railgun. I respect the continued existence of my shoulder, never mind my eardrums. Just take it with you, said J. Jeffries. Anyone else see my comm's gear? asked Barry. I looked around, though saw nothing, shaking my head

with the others. Hold on then, he said, taking a seat at one of the computers and bringing up a bash prompt. I need to contact H-Q, he said, typing on the keys. Ah, this belonged to the Prometheus mandate. What were they doing here? asked Jeffries. I don't know,

said Barry. They're records are all gone. Somebody cleared everything out. The log said it was a remote connection, though. If it wasn't another Prometheus outpost, somebody must have had a back door in the network. How's that Evac coming? I just sent the message, said Barry, tapping his foot impatiently. Just outside, splight sliced a fleeing researcher in two with his lasers, blood splattering against the shattered glass and moulding concrete. There, Barry continued. EDA, five minutes.

We need to get topside. Barry closed the connection, and we followed Jeffries out into the hall. Striding through the destruction, we left the research block and arrived back in the chamber beneath the arena, where the Manticore from earlier was tearing apart a contingent of guards.

Casting the body of one aside, the last man fired upon it with his rifle, the feline abomination snarled, as it slowly cornered him, and then jabbed at him with one of its tails, impaling him through the stomach. The Mantikour lifted the guard into the air, and with a horrible, sucking sound, the tail posited and drunk the internal organs from the man until he was completely hollow. Casting the withered corpse aside, the Mantikor turned to us with a hissing growl. It jabbed a tail at Jeffries, who snatched it out of the air so fast that even he was in

pressed, ripping it from the creature's body with his tremendous strength before stepping forward, wrestling its thrashing form to the ground, and stomping on its head with a loud crunch, killing it instantly. "'I really hope I get to keep this,' said Jeffreys, gritting wildly as he led the way into the prison block. Downstairs the hall was filled with trashing, tentacled abominations, all feasting upon the corpses of the guards. Someone had opened all the cells, giving the nightmare's free reign of the complex.

Barry, did you do this? No, said Barry, shaking his head. Fane, you do the arms, said Jeffreys. I nodded, kneeling down as I braced the electrical cannon against my shoulder. Just as the creatures began to take notice of us, I pulled the trigger, and the weapon kicked back with a thundering boom, loosing a shockwave that ripped down the entire length of the... the hall in an explosive surge of vaporizing gall.

Rising to my feet, I looked down the corridor with a demented grin, the ceiling and walls dripping with blood and smoking flesh. My ears were ringing, and my shoulder felt like it was on fire, but I didn't even care. Jeffries continued forward, and we followed close behind, making our way past a security checkpoint where an undulating mass of black, goy tendrils slathered its tongues through the intestines of the dead jamer, drinking his blood with a ravenous hunger. Jeffries fired a bolt of lightning at it,

and it loosed a piercing scream that cut through my mind and bled my ears, shifting and thrashing as it smeared its necrotic blood across the monitor banks, and finally collapsed in a smoking heap. Continuing up an old staircase marked by the same, and flickering, half-shattered bulbs that we'd seen on our way in, we arrived at a heavy steel door, opening it to reveal the hall we'd first come through. Sprite, is it's safe going now through here? asked Jeffreys. Sprite drifted forward and then beat, bobbing up and down in the air as if to say yes.

Jeffries padded the drone and advanced forward, leading the way back outside without incident. I breathed in the fresh air as the night's sky. I met my eyes, happy to be back on the surface. Jeffrey swore as his new exoskeleton ripped away from him and shot up into the sky faster than my eyes could follow, disappearing into the clouds above. Good while it lasted, said Tanner. Jeffrey's frowning in disappointment.

A short moment later, and we began to hear the sound of a helicopter blaze chopping upon the air. We looked up and saw the UH-60m fly down from the sky in hove, just above us. The gun had tossed down a rope, and we quickly chimed up, piling into the helicopter, and getting out of there as quick as we could before too many locals started

to wonder. The injuries from that op were comparatively minimal, and I'm thankful for that. Jeffreys needed a neck brace and some dental work, but apparently all his teeth were already implants from being knocked out sometime in the past, so it was basically another day at the office for him.

We don't know where his exoskeleton came from, not apart from strongly suspecting that the travellers were still monitoring our universe. Sprite, though, was sent an encrypted transmission that nobody at HQ has been able to crack, and we assume that it was directed to cut the hole in the arena ceiling. But what information is really out there, and what's being deliberately kept from us, is still a mystery. A while later, while Barry and I were having a beer, He told me that he and some others were doing network maintenance back at HQ, and they'd found out that the entire comm system had been bugged,

meaning that whoever did so would have full knowledge of any active operations, as well as any still in the pipe. And Barry insisted that it wasn't there when he'd checked in the past. The weird part is that as soon as he brought it up to anyone in charge, he was immediately dismissed with some bullshit excuse that kept changing every time he asked. We're thinking that breach is in contact with the travellers, whether they want to be or not. But for anything more than that, we just don't know. The clean-up crew did a full sweep of the arena after we left,

but any guards that might have survived our escape had been eaten by the creatures that were released down there. And there was nothing on file that clarified the involvement of the Prometheus mandate. Barry's current theory as to what went down was that the travellers heard people, talking about a legionaire on Combs, so they sent their exoskeleton to gather information from its brain. Probably the exact information we were looking for,

but we did get something out of it. The announcer mentioned the Atlantic Ocean, and while that doesn't exactly narrow it down, it at least gives us a place to look, and ever since we found that out, Breach has been pouring all its resources into doing exactly that.

Anyway, thanks for sticking with this. word is that we're being sent to china next where the bodies are more than a couple of farmers who've turned up half melted or half eaten well i'll update you guys after we've deployed until then stay safe and avoid the city of edmonton on march forty second Part 8. Operation Wukong. Hey, Thane here. Well, we got back from this one quite a while ago, but he's still giving me nightmares. So I figured I'd try to write about it. It's supposed to help, I guess, though at this point,

my problems run a little deeper than just needing to express myself. No news from the travellers or legionnaires, but breach has been searching in the Atlantic Ocean, with the aid of FVEY intelligence agencies and their satellites. We were deployed to China, a ways north of Songxi, near the Yangtze River, up to several reports of farmers turning up Eden, or melted like they'd been doused in acid. Normally this alone probably wouldn't have reached our ears,

if it weren't for the rumours surrounding these incidents. Locals believed that the area had been cursed by malevolent spirits, and heard screaming or cries for help in the night. The sun would rise, and usually, nobody would even be missing, because everyone was too frightened to investigate the sounds, calling into question what exactly was making them. A witness's grandson later recorded it and released it on the internet. Oh, that got our attention.

It's been taken down on most places, but we all got to listen before our deployment. At first, all I could hear was the wind, but then a man started to scream in the distance. yelling, help, or help me in Mandarin over and over again. It sounded normal, but it kept going on, and after a minute I started to get this terrible chill down my spine, like something was wrong with what I was hearing. Every call had the exact same intonation as the last,

right down to the smallest detail, to the point that it didn't even sound like a language. Reminded me of the power that Barry's cousin, had, an African grey who liked to repeat the sound of somebody knocking on the door. So if you weren't used to it happening over and over again, you'd actually think there was someone there. Then, another man joined in. It was a different voice, but it was yelling roughly the same thing and would occasionally break up the cries for help with a scream of pain. Only the scream would sound exactly the same every time. It was probably one of the most disturbing things I'd ever listened to.

just because of how unnatural it sounded. And I wasn't alone. Every one of us agreed that something wasn't right. I wasn't looking forward to finding out what that something was. We flew in from Taipei in a UH 60M and had civilians cleared out in advance, tracing along the river until we hit our mark. It was night, and a star shone brightly through the dark clouds overhead.

It was me, Jeffreys, Barry and Tanner, since Sprite was busy being analysed in R&D, and we were armed with three railguns, power armour, and my favourite electrical cannon, which I took to calling Vera. We weren't equipped with our usual cloaking modules, because, according to command, we were there to draw out the enemy, whatever that enemy turned out to be. Everything was shrouded in a dense fog,

billowing over the land below in the pale glow of the moon. We rappeled down into the mist and landed in the middle of a rice paddy with a splash, the muddy water coming up to my shins. The bird flew off and we were left alone in the humid darkness, switching on our night vision. The train was dead flat. You couldn't see much beyond a couple lights way off in the fog. Barry took out his nav equipment and got us oriented. That way, he said, motioning ahead.

about six hundred yards. Tanner, take point, said Jeffreys. Tanner moved ahead and we followed, inching forward through the mist that swallowed us. Save for the stirring of water in our wake, it was completely silent. And even with our heavy armaments, I felt a sense of vulnerability creep up in the back of my mind

like I could be attacked at any moment and would be dead before the others could even react. They crossed over a water, gap between the fields and continued on to the next. Tanna raised his hand, motioning for us to stop, and pointed his firearm at something in the water. I crept forward with the others and saw that it was half of a bisectic corpse, his inner strewn between the stalks. His face had been melted into his skull as though sprayed with a powerful acid. A sense of dread washed over me then. I could feel the presence of eyes watching me, something that I couldn't see, but could surely see me.

The others shifted with their knees, and I knew that they felt the same thing. Tanner advanced forward through the darkness, and we followed closely behind, by finger slipping into the trigger guard as the wind begin to howl upon the air, rustling through the rice that swayed between us. The feeling of being watched slowly intensified, and I glanced back at every opportunity, expecting to see the horror that stalked me, but it was never there. And only watched and waited, lurking in the shadow of the billowing fog. I heard something then, far off in the distance, screaming. An old man yelling for help, repeating himself again and again.

But the cries were getting closer every time, until they almost sounded like they were directly in front of us. Hannah stopped, finger on the trigger as he peered into the howling mist. The voices began to shout, coming from all around us, when we were surrounded by a crowd of invisible onlookers, for they all repeated the same terrifying unnatural cadence. I heard a piercing scream from directly behind me and spun around in a panic, yet there was nothing there. Every voice ceased at once, and the air fell to a death.

silently, silent. Paralyzed with fear, I lowered my gaze to the water, and saw a man's face looking back at me, his dead, sunken eyes peering up from a skull of pale, drooping skin, like the flesh of a drowned corpse. Slowly, rose above the water, standing upside down on its unnaturally long, slender arms, as the other half of its enormous body revealed itself. Looming above me, it was only. a dripping vertical moor of sword-like teeth that split down into the creature's yawning torso. All I could hear were the drops of water that fell from its horrifying frame, and the quickening heartbeat that drummed in my ears.

Before I even knew what was happening, it snapped down on my arms with a vicious crunch and ripped them clean from my body. The blinding pain tore through my senses, and I clasped to the ground, screaming agony, as blood gushed from the body. the ragged stumps where my arms used to be. A cascade of deafening bangs cracked through the air. The others opening fire on the creature with their railguns, blasting it back in a spatter of blackened blood.

Yet as soon as that blood struck my armour, it only hissed and bubbled, eating straight through it and sinking into my skin in deep, penetrating wells. Arrived in horror and pain on the ground, trying to pry the smoking armour from my body, but to no avail. The joints melted together, trapping me inside and leaving me

to the mercy of the nightmare's acidic blood. A chorus of hissing and snapping growls sounded from all around us as more of the creatures emerge from the mist, dashing toward my squadmates on their long, spindly arms, while their gaping moors flailed above them. Most were blown back by the barrage that followed,

but two flopped into the water with a splash, shuddering and recoiling as their terrifying mouths open wide. They lunged forward, vomiting projectiles of corrosive bile that struck Barry and Jeffreys, who could only scream in pain as the acid rapidly ate through their armour. Jeffries ripped his chest-place and mask off in time, but Barry wasn't so lucky, and his armour fused to his skin with a bubbling hiss,

forcing him to his knees while he shrieked in absolute suffering. Tannaduct as another glock. of bile just barely missed him and unloaded a shot into the oncoming horror that spat it, splattering the area with his acidic blood. Jeffreys picked up his railgun and rejoined the fight, bisecting one of the nightmares with a deafening boom. I was beginning to lose consciousness from the blood that gush from my severed arms, but all I knew in that moment was adrenaline when another of the creatures rose from the water just ahead of me,

slowly advancing toward me as his gaping moor drooped before it. I yelled for help, screaming back, but the others were too busy fending off the rest of them. Looming above me with a shuddering rasp,

the other worldly terror snapped towards me as I fell back into the water, its massive teeth, scissoring shut inches from my face. I kicked the horror off me, knocking it back into the mum, spitting the blood and water from my mouth,

mouth as it leaked through the melted remnants of my mask. I crawled away on the ragged stumps of my arms, desperately pushing myself forward with my legs. I could hear the nightmare advancing from behind, its hissing growls stuttering through the air. The boom of a railgun cracked overhead, and a white-hot pain burned through my skin as my back was spattered with a creature's blood. The dissonous began to overtake me, and darkness crept into corners of my vision. my blood gushing into the water around me. Too weak to hold myself up, I collapsed. I felt my mind slip into the voice.

And that was the last thing that I remember. I woke up for a moment in the helicopter. Jeffrey's looking down at me overhead. But so much morphine was running through my veins that everything was just a haze of color. The pain was unbearable, even through the drugs when I realised that my arms

were still gone tried to scream but Jeffries and Tanner only held me still the pale light of the full moon shining from beyond as I slowly slipped back into oblivion.

I can recall flashes and images after that but nothing coherent enough to describe. I woke up again two days later in the medical wing at HQ

my entire body was wrapped in bandages and I was restrained so I couldn't move. I was in an unimaginable amount of pain, and no matter how many times I hit that morphine button, he really didn't make much of a difference. Barry laid in the bed next to me, his torso wrapped in bandages from where he'd been burned. I don't remember how long I was there for, even with all the tech available to us, it must have been over a month. Barry got out before me, but he still came to see me every day, and he kept me up to date with what was going on.

Two other squads cleared out the rest of the creatures after Jeffreys was forced to call an emergency Eva. At least we hope that they were cleared out. We're still not sure how they got there in the first place. The brass took to dubbing the man-eaters, which seems very appropriate. Their calls, we're guessing were actually the cause of their last victims, repeated to lure in any good Samaritans wondering what happened to their missing friends. Barry, whose buddies with a comms guy on one of the clean-up squads,

told me they heard one calling for help, this time in English. It was screaming in my voice. In the meantime, I've got some prosthetics coming my way. So I'll be back in the fire soon enough. No rest for the wicked, as they say. we're keeping stateside for the next one something called Operation Dagon sitting the cornfields of Kansas

anything more than that I can't tell you just yet I'll see you all soon remember to leave a snack on your doorstep tonight it's hungry and it's watching you Part 9 Operation Dagon Fane here well this one's been sticking with me so I'll tell it to you as straight as I can. I don't have a lot of fears doing what I do, but every now and then I see something that makes my skin crawl, even if at first glance there's nothing particularly

wrong. I guess it's because we're hardwired to be bothered by certain things, like predators, toxic substances, you name it, and even if your eyes catch something, that doesn't mean that your brain always registers it. You feel terrified. This A sense of danger that paralyzes you in your step, but you just don't know why. Your subconscious has seen something. It knows something, but it has no ability to tell you what. So all you're left with is the feeling, the fear before the storm. Understandably, it took me a while to recover after the man-eater in Wukong ripped off my arms and burned half my body.

Sometimes I feel like I'm getting injured for a living, but I try not to think about it. I know my life expectancy, and it isn't much. Might as well do what I can in the meantime. Try and keep people safe, and to that end, they hooked me up with some very nice prosthetics, built off the traveler tech that was used for our exoskeletons. I can never enter the civilian world again, given the five-fingered science experiments I now use to dream. myself into alcohol poisoning but well I suppose I wasn't planning on it and HQ isn't so bad

so long as Barry and the rest of the guys are still here honestly the muscle spasms from getting stabbed in blood siren are a lot worse than this and unlike my arms there's nothing they can do about it's funny how the little things matter so for this one they're sending us out the cornfields of rural Kansas. Our objective was to secure and evacuate a confidential informant, a farmer who's been feeding us information. It was all regarding a strange phenomenon that had been occurring on his land. He'd posted a video to the internet showing a bunch of dead animals, just bones, picked clean and laying in the grass. He was saying that this had been happening for a while. We didn't know why. He was just asking for advice, but we quickly.

shut it down and set up a regular contact line with him. He had a family out there, wife and daughter, along with two local boys that he paid out to help in the fields. He started to get worried for their safety. During our contact with him, he kept finding more animal bones in the woods out back of his property, all picked clean just the same, like anything organic had been stripped from their bodies. It was usually small stuff, squirrels, like, but then they got bigger. and it wasn't long before he started reporting something altogether different. He was on a low priority line at the time, but he sure got our attention fast. He kept livestock as well, just not as much as surrounding farms.

He said it was mostly for his family. But then, one day, the animals started acting strange. The cows and hens would just stare at him, never moving. They didn't even register fear or any concerns. of any kind, only a blank consciousness, like they'd been hollowed out. He let a cow inside to be slaughtered, but as soon as he put the bolt gun to its head, he felt a fear that he just couldn't explain, like it had him locked in place. He said his fingers wouldn't even move. He just twitched like a deer in the headlights while this animal stared at him with his empty

black eyes. He said it cried then. He cried blood. A couple of red tears dripping down its cheek. Well, he backed away and understandably got the fuck out of there. A day passed and he decided to let one of his farm hands take a crack at it. A 16-year-old boy named Jack, who had a good heart but was a little slow on the uptake. Oh, he never came back. The informant grabbed his shotgun, went out to the barn, but there was nothing there. just the cow staring right at him

a couple days later and his daughter said she saw the boy out in the fields just looking at her she said there was something wrong with his face but refused to elaborate the informant went to find the other worker and let him go but they were nowhere to be seen when we called their parents they said the boy had never come home ever since then barricaded his house kept his wife and daughter locked inside while we mobilized a team, our team, to get them out of there. He says he's been hearing sounds in the night that he can't describe, but he has the windows boarded up, so he can't look out to see, even if he wanted to. I'd hear that sound too soon enough,

and ever since, well, I can still hear it in my head and in my dreams, and I just wish it would stop. It was myself, Jeffries, Barry, Tanner and Sprite, who finally got back from R&D, much to the delight of Jeffries. They still couldn't crack the transmission that had been sent to it, presumably from the travellers, but they figured it was safe enough to keep deploying Sprite on operations, given how effective it was at keeping us from dying, and in the meantime they had the universe-destroying bomb on full lockdown. We were strapped into an Osprey with ancillary team. which would function as our mobile CNC for the arm.

I remember looking out back, watching the fields and forests rush by underneath us while we flew over low terrain, thinking that, in another life, I would like to live in the field. Well, any field, really. You could see everything around you. It just seemed so secure in a cozy sort of way.

I'm probably wrong, but it's nice to fantasize every now and again. He slowed, began to hover over a wooded area, tossing the ropes out of the back and quickly rappelling down into the forest. My boots hit the dirt, joining the others while Sprite drifted in overhead, and the Osprey flew away to set up command a couple of clicks off our position. Barry took his gear out, tried to get us oriented, and we switched on our cloaking fields, my eyes scanning the broad sycamore trees that surrounded us as rays of golden sunlight shone. down through the canopy. This way, said Barry, leading us forward through the trees.

We're about 15 minutes out, then we'll hit the farmhouse. We follow closely behind, moving carefully across the grassy dirt. Apart from the wind rustling through the leaves and the sound of twigs snapping beneath our boots, it was completely silent. In a place like that,

there should have been songbirds moving through the foliage and chirping upon the air, squirrels scampering across the bar, but it was like the world around us had been abandoned by everything. We slowly approached an open glade where something on the ground glinted in the light. It was the bones of a cow, utterly dry and gleaming in the sun, like they've been cleaned and preserved for an exhibit. Jeffreys radioed in. Sierra, this is Sierra One, he said.

Are you online? Over. This is Sierra, said Command. Go ahead, Sierra One. Over. We got bones outside the exclusion zone. Recommend setting up a perimeter with H.Q. We may have a containment breach.

Over. Acknowledged. We'll bounce your request. Over. Roger, out, said Jeffries. Kneeling to examine the bones more closely. He prodded them with the muzzle of his railgun. that found nothing of interest.

Rising to his feet, he motioned Barry onward, and we continued into the depths of the wood. The silence began to slowly unnerve me. A minute later, Tanner pointed at something half buried in the soil. Squirrel, he said, looking down at the frail skeleton. We moved past it, and it wasn't long before the trees began to break, and we saw the old, white farmhouse across the yard. its windows boarded shut

and its paint peeling away from the wood it stood next to a massive cornfield the golden stalks swaying in the gentle breeze as the silhouettes of three crucified scarecrows loomed in the distance a brown wooden barn and several fenced enclosures flanked it one of them containing a chicken coop all the gates were hanging open

but I couldn't hear any animals "'Oh, shit,' said Jeffries, "'motioning for us to crouch down in cover. "'I turned round to see him looking at the yard in front of the farmhouse "'and immediately realized what was wrong. "'Next to two red pickups and a bike laying on its side, "'a local police cruiser was parked. "'Jeffers turned on his radio.

"'Sierra, this is Sierra One,' he said. "'You've got a visual on the house, but the guy called the cops there's a car out front over Sierra one this is Sierra said command

you are free to engage evak any law enforcement on site we'll get in contact with the local PD over Roger out said Jeffries Tanner

take point Sprite circle around back and make sure we're clear Tanner crawled to his feet and we followed closely behind him moving toward the farmhouse as Sprite drifted ahead and flew up into the sky where I could no longer see it through its cloaking field. Coming up to the house, we took our positions behind the wall while Tanner knocked on the door. No answer.

He knocked again, waiting a while longer before trying the knob. It was unlocked and unbarricaded. Tanner quickly pushed the door open and angled inside. the rest of us rushing in behind him. There was nobody inside, as far as I could see. To our left, the house opened up into a living room and kitchen, while directly in front of us. A staircase led up to the second floor.

Frame pictures of the farmer, with his smiling wife and daughter, hung from the wall and sat on the old lacquered cabinets. Several coats dangled from the nearby rack, with a row of shoes and boots lined beneath them. It didn't seem like the family. he had gone anywhere. Tanner, Barry, secure this floor, said Jeffreys. Fane, with me. Tanner and Barry left for the kitchen, or Jeffries and I kept eyes on the stairs. Everything was completely silent. My vision wavered to a large paper diorama, seated on the cabinet next

to the staircase, coloured with crayons and depicting a smiling man in overalls driving a red harvester over a cornfield, while several poorly drawn cows grinned in the background. His daughter must have put it together for school. Clear, said Tanner. He and Barry rejoining us at the stairs. There's some old breakfast sitting on the kitchen, said Barry. Look like they were interrupted by something. A robotic beep sounded from behind, and the cloaked outline of Sprite drifted in next to us.

Jeffries patted it, looking back. up the stairs. Hello, he called out. This is Sergeant Jeffries. Up called Dagon. We're here to evacuate you and your family. No response. Sir, are you at home?

Something shifted from upstairs, like somebody was just waking up. Hey there, you know the man's voice. Thank you so much for coming. I don't know what I was gonna. Hey, well, make you. yourself comfortable. I'll put on some tea. He sounded strangely upbeat, though, well, something was off, like he was trying to hide the fact that he was worried. Sir, that isn't necessary, said Jeffries.

Can you please come downstairs? We need to speak with you. Sir, I would make to speak with yourself. Put on some tea, said the man. His words beginning to slur. No, it's just, I'm fine. I'm fine. a headache. We looked at each other in confusion. A distant skittering sounded from all around us, like something was crawling through the walls. We immediately raised our weapons, a cold chill running down my spine.

Jeffries motioned us onward, and Tanner moved up the stairs, leading us on to the second floor and across the balcony. We entered the adjoining hallway, passing by two open bedrooms in a bathroom, all of them empty. A single-closed door remained at the end of the corridor. There were two bodies, daughter, said the voice from behind the door.

He was starting to sound increasingly deranged, altering the pitch and cadence of his speech like he'd forgotten how to talk. Oh, don't mind, my, I swear, they were right, officers, sir. We need to speak with you. Jeffries counted us down, and on one. On, Tanner kicked open the door, aiming his railgun into the room. Though he didn't fire, only paused as several flies buzzed out into the hall. He drew closer, and for the first time, I saw what had become of the family.

The floorboards were smeared with blood and filth, clouds of flies humming through the air. A woman's bones laid sprawled upon the ground, like she was trying to get away. from something. Bits of rotting flesh still clinging to her skeleton while in the corner of the room the decaying corpse of a little girl lay curled up in a ball. Pools of vomit smeared beneath her. Most of her skin and organs were missing. It looked like something had been eating her. Upon the bed, a bloated, shaped squirm beneath the blood-soaked blankets, the arm of a man hanging down over the side as he began to gurgle and moan with pain. What little flesh we could see was horribly bruised, like he was bleeding underneath.

What's that sound? He murmured through his spit, muffled by the blankets that obscured his form. As soon as we stepped forward, a wet, tearing sound echoed throughout the room, and the man's dangling arm dropped free from the hole, hit in the ground with an awful smack. Blood and pus gush from the severed limb, while several black, otherworldly centipedes began to crawl out of it. Their forms twisting and collapsing into themselves,

like they existed within an angle that my mind could not perceive. In so many legs that they breached the realms of physical impossibility, were covered in a scourge of black, soulless eyes that shifted across their bodies like liquid, paralyzing every muscle in my body with their maddening alien gaze. The adrenaline quickly overwhelmed the fear And I raised my electrical cannon Aiming at the writhing massive insects That was slowly unfurling beneath the covers of the bed

I pulled the trigger The weapon kicked back against my shoulder Throwing off an electrical shockwave That vaporised everything in front of me In a cloud of blood and acrid smoke The ruins of the bed Been knocked against the back wall Within the flames that now swallowed the entire room

I could see the surviving instex rive, burning to death as they loose to screeching, soul-destroying wine that needleed through every sense I had. We're leaving, said Jeffreys. Tanner, take point. Double-time it. We followed Tanner back down the hall as the sound of skittering shifted from all around us, coursing through the walls that groaned and strained with the insectile horrors that now pulsed within them. contact ride yelled tanner aiming down the balcony at a middle-aged man in a police uniform who stared up at us with a vacant expression his skin was heavily bruised and he seemed to be stumbling sierra insert ab called dagon yelled jeffreys identify yourself the officer gurgled like something was caught in his throat

fight coffee officer he slurred what the fuck is that love yourself oh thank you run away sherry get your mother and go jeffreys fired his railgun at the man with a deafening bang blowing off his shoulder in half of his face the officer only stumbled back centipies writhing three from the shattered gore of his injuries his arm fell from the the tattered scraps of his shoulder, and he loosed a haunting, chittering whale that burned through my mind with a numbing pain, overwhelming me with a sense of raw, existential fear. Don't look back, he slurred, continuing to stumble toward us. Sprite lashed his lasers across the few insects that tried to get closer, slicing them in two in a flash of sparks. Hold your fire, yelled Jeffries. Thane, clear it.

Snapping back to reality, I shodd my electrical cannon and fired at the officer, the shockwave disintegrating his body in an explosion of flaming gall. Move up, Thane, check out six. Tanner rushed down the stairs, and we followed close behind, the screaming aberrations flailing in the blood-drenched fire all around us. The snapping sounded from behind, I briefly turned to see the wall at the top of the side, stairs crack open, a wave of centipedes pouring out onto the floor.

I fired another shockwave to cover our escape, burning them back if only for a moment, and we quickly fled the house, running out onto the sunlit yard. That's when I looked out of the cornfields and realized that two of the scarecrowes were missing. Damn, we've got more of them, I said, pointing out at the field. The scarecrow's two are gone. Jeffrey swore, turning on his radio just as the body of a teenage boy sliver the three from the corn, his mutilated corpse twisting across the ground like a bloated snake. Sprite immediately fired at him, slicing his body in half with his lasers.

But the boy only wailed upon the ground as several new, insectile legs crack free from his severed torso. Saw it in the fields, he slurred, choking on something. jumping in his throat, crawled inside. Recoiling, his jaw unhinged from his skull, and he vomited a stream of shrieking centipedes at us. We all dove out of the way, scrambling across the grass while we tried to get clear. Sprite fired again, decapitating the creature, whose body began to rapidly swell and expand with gas, before exploding with a thundering bang, throwing hundreds of centipede.

through the air. Two of them landed on me, and I immediately tore one of them off while I prided the second away from my face mask, his writhing tendrils trying to get inside. Ripping it free, I crushed it in my fist, only to watch in horrors thousands of smaller centipedes gush from its body. Panicking, I tossed it to the ground, and fired my weapon at the swarming mound, burning it clear before regrouping with the others who were struggling to remove the parasites that had crawled and scampered across their armour I ran over to Tanner prying two of the insects off his back while he tore one away from his face

on me let's go yelled jeffreys we quickly followed him while sprite covered us raking its lasers across the earth in streaks of billowing fire Sierra this is Sierra one We've got a serious container breach. The informant is dead. Hostile is a swarming parasite that infiltrates the host body, requesting airstrike on the exclusion zone.

Authorization Mercury, over. Sierra one, this is Sierra, said command. Air strike is inbound. Clear the area, over. Quarantine every farm in a five-mile radius, and sweep the woods with thermal. Nothing gets in or out. over.

Acknowledged, said command. Evac coordinates have been forwarded to your navigator, over. Roger, out, said Jeffreys, disabling his cloaking field while the rest of us followed suit. Barry, get us out of here. Barry took his nav equipment while Sprite and Tanner held back another wave of parasites, which were beginning to spill out from the front door of the house. This way, said Barry, running ahead.

We quickly followed him to the tree line and entered the woods just as a sonic boom cracked overhead with the roar of a jet engine. A B-1 Lancer tore through the clouds above us, a cluster of bombs falling in its wake that detonated above the cornfield in a cascade of brilliant explosions, and showered it with a thousand trails of white phosphorus, ghostly ribbons of smoke shooting into the sky behind us. I could hear the screams of those things. so many that they fused together in a horrific wailing shriek that carried upon the air and threatened to annihilate any shred of sanity I still had left. Barry led us further into the woods, another sonic boom cracked through the sky, followed by a series of shuddering explosions as the farmhouse and yard were reduced to rubble.

Streaks of white smoke erupting over the forest canopy. Contact! yelled Tanner, firing at something I couldn't say. sea. The rotten corpse of a cow unfurred from above, its hooves wrapped around one of the branches like prehensile limbs as its entire body split open down the middle, unfurling to reveal a gaping sphincter of flesh that vomited a giant thrashing centipede. As it lashed toward us, the others opened fire with their railguns, blasting it back in a splatter of gore. It fell from the tree, only to immediately upright itself with a monstrous elasticity

and stand up on his back hooves, like the flailing parasite was using the bovine corpse as a pair of legs. The others backed up, and I fired at it, vaporising the upper half of its body and splattering the trees with dripping visker. It shredded lower half-clapsed to the ground, and swarms of smaller insects immediately slivered three from it, creeping towards us through the grass. "'Ignore them. Keep going,' said Jeffreys.

Barry continued forward while Sprite lashed its lasers across the ground in our wake, creating a fiery barrier to cover our escape. Soon we heard the sound of the Osprey of the head, and we quickly ran over to where it was hovering. The M240 gunner tossed the ropes out of the back, and we grabbed hold, pulling ourselves up into the aircraft as fast as we could, and piling inside. As soon as Sprite joined us, Jeffries gave the go-ahead, and we started to fly away.

While we strapped ourselves in, I looked back to see the wall of pale smoke that had consumed the farm. Another bomber tore through the sky behind us, losing another payload that burst upon the air, and bayed the woods in streaks of white phosphorus. I hate bugs, I said. When we arrived back at HQ, we were immediately, met by a hazmat team and everyone on the osprey was quarantined until they figured out that we were all clean. Breach locked down the area as best they could, though we're honestly not sure if any of the parasites got out in advance. The fact that they could hijack the central nervous system and ride around

like a regular person for a while was rather disconcerting. Every nearby town is closely monitored in the meantime. But, thankfully, No new cases have popped up. Where they came from originally, on the other hand, we have no earthly clue. We have to assume it's the other universe that was severed from us, but there had to be a breach somewhere for that to happen. We don't know where that would be.

We haven't heard anything from the travellers, and our search of the Atlantic still hasn't found any legionnaires. Turns out the ocean is rather large. We know we're looking in the right place, though. because we've been getting a ton of reports about missing sea life and tangles of bloody meat washing up on shorelines. Hopefully, whatever they're doing isn't taking place underwater because if it is,

then we're shit out of luck in terms of detection. Ah, the next one in the pipeline, Operation Bushido, is sending us to Japan, believe it or not. Barry says we're taking out a necromancer, whatever the hell that's supposed to mean in real life. Well, he refused to elaborate. So until then, stay safe. And remember, they're not hallucinations.

They're trying to communicate. Part 10. Operation Bushido. Thane here. It's been a long couple of months. Sorry I disappeared on you, but everyone's been such a panic lately. Can't shake the feeling that something terrible is about to happen. I'm not sure I want to be here when it does. Breach is the traveller's bomb on total lockdown.

We have several more countries funding us now, trying to figure out a way of disarming it, but we only have the vaguest idea of how it works. Maybe a little more after Bushido, but still so far beyond anything we've ever seen, it might as well be magic. I wonder if it would be quick. I have to assume that it would be

it's made to destroy our entire universe. We're so small and insignificant compared to everything around us that we probably wouldn't even see it. it coming. One moment we'd be there and the next we'd be gone like we'd never even existed.

The travelers are here. We don't know what they want but we've seen their ships in the skies. A fisherman off the coast of Morocco recorded a video on his phone and posted it to the internet. Breach had him killed, along with everyone he knew, and wiped everything they could before it managed to take hold and spread.

They were always quite good at that. The video showed something decloaking in the sky, all the clouds rushing away from its design like they were somehow frightened to be near it. It almost looked as though it were of alive, spines trailing down from this bizarre angular ship and riding the wind like liquid metal, throwing off a low-frequency sound that major ears bleed even through the recording. Barry said it reminded him of a broad-head arrow, but I never saw the resemblance. He could barely even stand to look at it without a dose of acid. there are at least three as far as we know and they're only ever seen over the ocean

maybe they're looking for the legionnaires I couldn't say maybe I should be grateful because if they thought we were doomed they'd just detonate the bomb it's not like we could stop them all the real bullshit started with Operation Moschido and I have to say that I didn't see it coming it's just some dumb routine up in Japan

a necromancer from the parasitic universe was supposedly summoning and devouring the souls of the dead, well, according to H.Q. I don't know how they figured this out, but the operative word to keep your mind is soul. None of us know what that really means, or if it implies there's any sort of afterlife. But the way it was explained, our bodies are like vessels, an interface for the soul, the seed of consciousness, to interact with the physical world. We later got the impression that was exactly why Breach was so interested in the necromancer, because it turned out that souls were what powered the bomb, and Comar knew it, long before we were ever deployed.

According to the books that we recovered from after the Opny, a level of energy they could output was beyond anything we'd ever thought possible, and with enough control you could somehow use them to manipulate reality, changing things, creating something out of nothing, or unmake an entire universe. It just depended on the will of the wielder. Should they actually have the power to use them? Humans do not, but legionnaires, their controllers, and presumably the travellers absolutely do. Our destination was in the Akaishi Mountains, and allowed to say anything more than that. Our objective was simple. Kill the necromancer. Afterward, I remember finding it odd that they didn't want him captured alive at all costs,

given what he could potentially know about the bomb, but, well, no, for some reason they just wanted him dead. Either way, things don't always work out the way you plan them. It was me, Jeffries, Barry, Tanner, Sprite, packed into the back of a UH-60 modified for stealth operations. Our packs holding all the equipment in the world that we never actually used, because every single operation was so quick and violent that camping out was never an option, say for one or two times. Maybe I'll tell you about them someday. The others had their railguns. I had my electrical cannon, courtesy of whoever the fuck the crest were.

We still didn't know. We haven't been cut off from their frozen bunker in the other universe. But we sure did appreciate their gear. Sprite was always a welcome addition to the crew. We hovered off the side of a mountain just before sunrise, an expanse of trees blanketing the range as far as I could see. Everything we could make out in the faint pale light of the morning was green, except for the summit, which was barely exposed and covered in snow.

That was exactly where we were headed. We said her goodbyes to the gunner and repelled down from the helicopter, Sprite following just behind us as our boots hit the ground. The ropes were pulled back up, and the bird got out of dodge while Barry took out his nav gear to orient us. Hope you guys are ready to climb, he said, taking the leap. We all activated our cloaking fields and followed him up the ever-ascending incline, grass and twigs crunching beneath my boots in the near darkness that learned.

under the forest canopy. I've switched on my night vision, revealing the steep rock face that waited for us at the top of the hill. Sprite, move up and scour for us, said Jeffries. Don't engage, only reports. Sprite did it as he was told, and floated ahead. Isn't it just the one guy? asked Tanner.

Well, this isn't a job that keeps his promises, said Jeffries. Best to assume we have no idea. We dropped to our hands and knees When the incline became too great to stand on Crawling up the mossy earth Until we hit the towering rock face Thane, you're up said Jeffries

I took the grappling gun from my pack And loaded it with a charge Holding the gun against my cheek I took aim up at the mountain Searching for a spot that looked stable enough To hold our weight When I found it I pulled the trigger And the hook shot up at the target

The rope trailing behind it before it hit its mark and projected an anchor into the rock with a soft thunk. I detached the gun and put my full weight on the rope, testing its strength. We're good, I said. Ladies first, said Jeffreys, nodding at me. Yes, sir, I said, grinning inside my mask. Pull myself up onto the rope and attached it to my pack as a precaution, letting the strength of my exoskeleton carry me as I quickly climb 30 feet up the rock face

and sat down on the broken ridge that flanked the mountain, the sparse few trees jutting out from the mossy cavities that lined the entire way up. I'm here, I called. Sprite beeped an inch away from my face, nearly giving me a heart attack. I could never see him like our own cloaking fields, while I gave him a pat as the others slowly followed,

making their way up to us. When they were all with me, Barry led the way around a narrow ledge that snaked over a hundred-foot drop. staying as close to the rock face as possible. When we passed it, we continued up a ragged incline, where it looked like a landslide had taken a chunk out of the mountain. Massive, jagged boulders impeding our path through every opportunity.

The snow was starting to make itself known, streaks of white carrying down the nearby paths, until our own boots started to crunch upon it, our arm insulating us from the biting cold. The wind was picking up, but Barry said we were almost there. "'Right up ahead,' he said, pointing at a cliff about twenty feet up. I loaded the grappling gun with another charge and shot it just above our target,

the hook slamming into the wall of rock beyond it. I detached the gun, put it away, and tested the strength of the run. I climbed up as quickly as I could, Sprite flying just ahead of me, and pulled myself onto the snowy cliff. "'I'm here,' I repeated, scanning my surroundings as the others made their way up the rope. We were getting closer to the summit, the ledge winding up into a narrow rocky path, obscured by two columns of stone that almost appeared to be man-made. It was getting brighter out, and the sun would soon follow. The others climbed up next to me, and Barry pointed at the pillars.

Should be right through there, he said. No more heights, as far as I know. Jeffrey's nodded. Tanner, you're up, he said. Tanner moved ahead. We followed in between the pillars and up the winding path, before we emerged upon a small snowy clearing surrounded by looming cliffs, the summit towering just overhead, and beneath it the entrance to a dark cave yawned open before us. Something about it gave me a sense of foreboding,

the way it lurked in the pale blue light of the morning, grey, rocky spines jutting out around it like a pair of teeth, ready to snap shut upon its prey. jeffreys called in sierra this is sierra one he said we've got eyes on the cave no contact yet over sierra one this is sierra said command you're free to engage over roger out tanner advanced toward the entrance we followed close behind slipping into the darkness of the cabin we emerged upon a small ledge that led down into a placid river of blood stalactites hanging from the ceiling like a hundred hundred spears ready to fall. Following the rocky trail through the shadow, we sank into the stagnant pool, our cloaking fields flickering as it wavered around our passage. Just ahead, it ran through an archway of stone like a fetid blood gutter, and with our guns at the ready, we followed it

into the larger chamber. The sounds of motion stirred ahead, echoing faintly upon the broken walls, until we arrived at a path that led up to the bizarre hexagonal ceiling of a ritual ritual of a stylized sun. I recognized the four ruins that surrounded it from what Barry had told me after Operation Thunderbird. They were a part of the elder Futark, but I wasn't sure what they meant. Twin Braziers flanked the ascent as they burned with a violent, otherworldly flame, and all the way to the top, the feathered bodies of dead cows lay to spayed,

out upon the blood-soaked stone, layered atop a bed of nameless avian bones. Slowly, we crept up the path. The feathered corpse is crunching beneath our boots, no matter how much we tried to avoid them. It wasn't long before the entirety of the ritual chamber slipped into view. The sigil of a crescent moon marked upon the blood-stricken stone, while in the centre at all, a conglomerant of twitching birds had been fused together in a horrific mockery of an altar. Flesh and feathers merging into each other in a mound of shifting meat and chittering beaks. Somehow, they were all still alive, but they didn't sound like birds anymore.

I couldn't describe the grating, insectile chaos that I heard in that cave, but I remember the feeling more than anything. It was a feeling that something was broken, but it wasn't working the way it should. And for the sake of my sanity, I could only pray that it continued to malfunction. It's like it was trying to connect to something far beyond our reality, but it lacked the ability to actually do so. Atop the altar, a massive crow had been spayed out over the others,

its drooping wings shuddering and shaking, while a runic dagger that had been wrapped in human flesh impaled its chest. At least that's what I thought I saw. I thought I saw a crow, but it wasn't. It was something else, the way its body contracted and warped, breaking through the fabric of existence like a skipping film. The guise of the crow was what my mind applied to it,

to shield me from the horrifying reality of its true nature. The air warped around it with a gravitational lensing like it was struggling to implode into a black hole, but was prevented from doing so by the dagger that bound it, and standing directly behind it was our target, the alleged necromancer. He was clad in the armour of a samurai, surrounded by the bookshelf of a small study, tables of alchemical ingredients scattered around him,

and his assembly of hanging Rune Mark Scrolls. He didn't seem to notice us standing there, even with all the noise that we'd inadvertently made. That all, he just didn't care. I raised my weapon, aiming at him alongside the others, yet something about him bothered me. He seemed old and frail, weakened by age, but he was. He moved with a strange sort of jittering swiftness that almost frightened me, scanning his open books with a look of despair and frustration. Tanner, take him out, said Jeffries.

Yes, sir, said Tanner, bracing himself next to me. A deafening bang echo through the chamber as he poured the trigger. And the necromancer snapped to the side faster than I could perceive, dodging the projectile entirely before it harmlessly exploded against the war behind him. He looked in our direction, trying to see us through our cloaking fields. Who goes there? He called. Weapons free, said Jeffreys.

The others opened fire on the man who miraculously dodged every shot, flickering and weaving from side to side in a sudden blur, like he was moving faster than the speed of sound. Bracing my gun against my shoulder, I pulled the trigger and launched an electrical shockwave that caught him off guard, slamming into him with a shuddering boom and knocking him back against the wall. His skin was blistered and he grunted with pain, but he was otherwise unharmed by a shot that would have utterly disintegrated a legionette.

Cease this of futility at once, he snarled, his eyes locked upon our position. A slug from Barry slammed into his chest, denting his armour and temporarily winding him, but he quickly dodged the barrage of the others, carefully advancing toward us. as he bobbed and wove through the onslaught. I said, cease, he repeated. I was about to fire another shockwave, when Jeffreys decloat and raised his hand, signalling for us to stop.

The necromanse have paused in his advance, eyeing us with curiosity. Who are you? What is this world? He asked, his voice deep and weathered. Nobody answered. Why does the conduit stutter in this place? I have slain a watcher by the teachings of Borgeth, but I fail to even hear his whispers.

We were sent here to kill you, said Jeffries. Any idea why that would be? I looked at Jeffreys, unsure of his motivations. It wasn't like him to potentially endanger us for the sake of his own curiosity. The necromancer studied us carefully, examining the shifting outline of our cloaking fields, as though attempting to determine our number. "'The astral lords,' he said. "'Dacenture, didn't they?

"'Are they so vindictive that they would follow me to another world? "'All I want is to live my life by my own rules. "'Is that so much to ask?' "'I have no fucking idea what you're talking about,' said Jeffreys. "'Who are you?' "'The man looked at us with confusion, "'as though perplexed by the response. "'I was a paladin of the Asherald.

"'astrolords,' he said, "'like he was explaining a well-known fact "'that we should somehow be aware of. "'You don't know of whom I speak. "'Where am I?' "'I think he got cut off,' said Barry, "'deactivating his cloaking-field. "'He's from another universe, right?'

"'He turned to the necromancer. "'You probably found your way here "'and got stranded like the Legionnaires.' "'What?' said the man. "'I don't understand. "'Legoners. "'What business do the darklings have with this world.

But why would breach one in dead? asked Tanner through our radio. It's an obvious asset. Unless this place is beyond the lunar fortress, said the man, seeming to understand something that was known only to him. That understanding quickly faded

to a creeping, existential horror. His eyes widening with absolute fear. Stuttering beneath his breath, he pulled the knife from the bizarre crow that laid atop the altar. We all raised our weapons in an arm, aiming at him, but he only laughed in utter bewilderment before beginning to remove his armour.

You were afraid of me? He began to hastily carve an intricate runic symbol into his own chest with the blade. Geoffrey started to speak. What are you? I'm destroying my soul, said the man, finishing the symbol and beginning to work on several others.

The truest gift that Borgief ever granted me. If you're smart, you'll copy these marks and follow in my step, because if the ascendants and their darklings capture you, you will wish that death was the greatest of your concerns. I know that you don't understand the dangers of my world, but trust me when I say that the cessation of your existence is the only merciful path you can take. The man plunged the dagger into his chest,

and the ruinic markings flared with a ghostly light. "'Twitching and convulsing, he clasped to the ground before falling completely still. "'He was dead. "'I was utterly lost, still unsure what to make of the situation. "'Objective complete,' I said, deactivating my cloaking field alongside Barry. "'Jeffrey shrugged, still confused and alarmed. "'Where's Sprite?' asked Barry. "'The rattle of gunfire suddenly echoed through the cavern,

come from back near the entrance, and then it stopped. Tanner, take point, said Jeffreys. We all reactivated our cloaking fields and followed Tanner back into the river of blood, moving through the sloshing liquid as quickly as we could. When we emerged on the other side, the light of day was shining through the entrance to the cave, illuminating the decimated bodies of six soldiers clad in black,

spent brass and M-16 scattered on the ground next to them. They'd been sliced apart by laser fire, their wounds still glowing and whispering with smoke. Sprite decloak nearby and beat. Jeffries chuckled and gave him a pat. What do we got here? he asked. I knelt down and amassed one of the soldiers, revealing the lifeless face of a bearded, middle-aged man. His skin was carved with bleeding rooms, not too dissimilar to the ones from the legionnaires, and even in death he radiated an aura of utter insanity.

His arm, however, had a patch that I recognised. Prometheus Mandate, I said, pointing at it before crawling to my feet. Oh, this is bad, muttered Barry, wandering out into the daylight at the snowy entrance of the cave. A bullet exploded against the nearby rock, and Barry hit the ground for cover, the report of the gun echoing through the distance a second later. He swore, scrambling back over to us as the sound of a helicopter passed overhead. Geoffrey switched on his radio. Sierra, this is Sierra One, he said.

We got hostile contact at our position, Prometheus Mandate. At least one sharpshooter to the east and a bird overhead. But we don't have a visual, requesting immediate evac. Over. Sierra, this is Sierra. Set come out. Has the target been neutralized? Over.

Affirm. Over. Acknowledged. Evac is inbound. ETA three minutes. Stay in cover and clear snipers with your drone. Over. Roger, out, said Jeffries, turning to Sprite. Take out those sharpshooters and stay out of sight. We're counting on you. Sprite beeped, activated his cloaking field and flew out into the daylight. We waited in the cave with our guns trained on the entrance,

the Prometheus helicopter passing over us again. A shot rang in the distance, followed by a scream that was abruptly silenced by something. Right ahead, said Tanna. A group of three Prometheus soldiers came up from the snowy path, rifles trained on the cave entrance, but they couldn't see us through our cloaking fields. Thane, you're up, said Jeffries. Taking aim at the oncoming force, I poured the trigger, and the electrical cannon kicked back against my shoulder.

throwing off a burning shockwave that utterly vaporized the three men, their blood and decimated organs splattering back across the snow. A blur rippled through the space before us, and Sprite decloaked, beeping as he drifted next to Jeffries. The sound of a jet engine began to roar in the distance, until a sonic boom cracked overhead, and a deafening explosions shuddered through the air. Flaming debris ricocheted across the snow outside,

raining down from the sky while the sound of another helicopter started to get closer. Sierra One, this is Sierra, said Command over the radio. Evac is at your position. Over. Sierra, this is Sierra One. Roger, we're moving up, out, said Jeffries, waving us onwards. Tanner took point. His railgun trained on the path while a modified U.H60 hovered above us, the M240 gunner, throwing ropes out of the side before opening fire. on something we couldn't see. Spent brass raining down from the sky as gunshots rattled through the air. I slung my weapon onto my back and took hold of a rope, quickly ascending alongside the others before

pulling myself up into the helicopter, the deafening shots of the machine gun booming right next to me. Two bullets clinked against the side of the aircraft, and I peaked over the edge where I saw a fire team of Prometheus soldiers taking cover behind the two man-made pillars, several of their number laying dead in the snow. When the rest of my squadmates piled into the helicopter, the pilot took us up into the sky, flying away while the sound of a jet engine screamed through the air behind us, followed by the crack of the sonic boom.

I look back, just as the aircraft's payload detonated alongside the mountain in a cascade of thundering explosions, streaks of fire and debris pluming into the clouds, while the cliffs dislodged in an avalanche of rock, incinerating any remaining Prometheus soldiers. Turning away, I lay back in the helicopter alongside my friends, Geoffrey's holding sprite beneath his arm with a smile. I remember being thankful that at least none of us had got dismembered this time,

but the reaction of the necromancer still bothered me. He genuinely thought that we were completely doomed. Maybe he didn't realise that the parasitic universe had been severed from our own and came to his own conclusion in his mind, but either way, he seemed absolutely terrified, and that made me wonder what exactly we were up against. Why would he destroy his own soul, rather than face whatever was coming? None of us really had an answer for that, but it spoke volumes that the travellers were willing to annihilate our entire universe

in order to prevent it from happening. Anyway, that whole area was apparently the sight of a long-dead Karasu-Tengu cult, where they killed a large number of crows for an undisclosed reason, presumably for some sort of sacrifice. Though Barry tells me that doesn't make any sense. The necromancer wasn't using the souls of dead humans either. Instead, he was using the souls of the birds to fuel whatever sort of altar or conduit he'd made in there.

He wasn't consuming them at all, if he even could. The only thing is, that altar didn't work the way it was supposed to. What that would have meant for us, we're still not entirely sure. The cleanup crew recovered some books that the Prometheus raid had missed, which gave us an idea of what it was really going on, but they got everything else,

including the body and whatever creature in there was pretending to be a crow. He didn't get to keep it for long, though, as one of our jets intercepted the transport and shot it down. The only thing that survived were a couple of chunks of the necromancer, but the runes he had were lost.

All we know is that they were linked to the entity known as Borges, the blindfolded horror show that we had encountered back in Operation Osiris. The books claimed that it ruled over a race of occult practitioners known as warlocks in a frozen wasteland called the Steigian Reach, and we assume that these warlocks were the flying hoodie creatures that nearly killed Jeffreys. The darklings that the necromancer had mentioned, on the other hand, were likely the legionnaires and their controllers. the latter of which he referred to as ascendance,

but there was no mention of either in any of the books, nor anything about the astral lords or the lunar fortress. Something of particular interest, though, was the blood of the necromancer. According to Barry's contacts in medical, if you injected it into living tissue, it would heal pretty much anything. Cure cancer, diseases, injuries, you name it.

Except a couple of days later, It would turn you into something. I never saw the creatures that came out of those experiments, but they apparently all resembled birds in the loosest possible definition of the world. The most dangerous variation happened when you injected an actual bird with it, which resulted in a fourth-dimensional monster that could fly through walls like they were air. I am told it disassembled several researchers before they finally figured out how to kill it. We don't know how the necromanes have managed to tolerate the big.

but we're guessing that's what gave him the ability to dodge bullets, given that he wasn't actually eating the soul's eclectics. Another fun but comparatively useless discovery was the violet fire that burned inside the cane. You could spread it onto anything that would normally catch fire, it would take thousands of years to actually consume its fuel and was resistant to things like water and wind, so in the ideal environment it would burn forever. It was maintained by a swarm of highly efficient, self-replicating organisms, but they didn't fully inhabit the third dimension, so our ability to study them was limited. We don't know what Prometheus' interest in the operation was.

They never attacked one of our squads before, in the entire history of breach, even after we'd killed plenty of them. They knew they couldn't stand up to us, so they must have really wanted something out of that cave. Just yesterday, Barry had a theory that we were sent there to kill the necromancer so that Prometheus couldn't capture him alive, but we're still not entirely sure why we wouldn't want him alive as well, unless the knowledge that he possessed was somehow too dangerous to remain in the world, no matter who had control of him. Even still, now that we know what powers the bomb, he could have at least helped us disarm it. Then we wouldn't have to worry about it anymore.

And isn't that what we want? Anyway, we've been on temporary lockdown at HQ for the time being, and all our resources are going into finding the travellers and whatever it is they're doing back here Prometheus has been moving out into the open as well a lot of chatter on the dark websites but we can't decryp their codes yet so we don't know what they're planning they're gearing up for something though and their numbers are a lot greater than we gave them credit for

we don't have any operations in the pipe but all the guys say hi including Sprite and I'll let you know if anything happens That's if it doesn't make it to the news channels first. Until then, stay safe. If you see something moving under a family member's skin, kill them and burn the body. They are not the person you remember. Part 11. Operation Exile.

Operation Exile. That's what the travellers called it, when they made the decision to kill us all. The bomb would destroy everything that we were, and ever would be, burning our souls to dust so that nothing could ever bring them back, so that nothing could ever feed upon them. It turns out that the necromancer had the right idea after all. This is Thane and, well, we're in a lot of trouble.

Prometheus has been preparing for something big, but we had no idea what, and anyone we tried to capture killed themselves before we could take them into custody. Then we'd all stop, like the calm before the start. storm. We pulled the base off lockdown. Jeffries and Tanner were both on duty while Barry and I were slamming back drinks at the canteener outside the mess hall. It had been tense, not knowing what could be coming our way, and we figured it was time to celebrate. Well, after neither of us could no longer walk in a straight line, we shambled past the barracks wing, harassed Sprite over at R&D, and found our way to the airfield door so we could finally take a walk outside. The two

checkpoint guards posted next to them, swiped our IDs and let us through, the heavy steel barrier sliding open in front of us. Barry shuffled ahead of me, and I could see the beginnings of the night sky over the walls of the complex. Apart from the base itself, there was no light pollution out here, so you could see every star in the sky, streaks of cosmic radians burning over the vast rows of helicopters and maintenance hangers, or the dark silhouettes of watchtowers lurked upon the horizon, each outfitted with a laser defence system designed to shoot down incoming missiles and aircraft. I was about to follow Barry outside, ready to take it all in, when a blinding flash of light swallowed my vision and a thundering boom shot through the air,

deafening my ears and knocking me onto my back with a concussive shockwave. Barry scrambled over to me as I crawled to my feet, looking up to see that one of the towers had been reduced to a smouldering ruin. My ears ringing, I stepped forward and looked up to see a bizarre aircraft descending from the sky above the airfield, like a sweeping hook with wings of vicious metallic thorns, glowing crimson sigils burning upon its every surface. Elan began to sound, and the remaining defence towers locked onto the ship, their lasers flashing against it, only to burn upon a sudden force-field of hexagonal lines,

streaks of sparking fire raining down from every point of impact, but failing to penetrate the flickering barrier. The dark aircraft turned through the sky like liquid upon the air, and the weapon systems beneath its wings flared with minute beams of seething antimatter that collided with the unseen towers, a cascade of explosions cracking through the distance a moment later. Upon the horizon, the likes of several incoming helicopters slowly approached, cutting through the night as the lone alien craft swiftly dispatched any remaining defences.

Come on, said Barry, running back into the hall as the two checkpoint guards rushed out into the darkness with their rifles at the ready. Let's get to the armoury. Gunshots rattled behind us while I followed Barry into the depths of the complex and emerged with the luminous central chamber, contingents of soldiers rushing over the walkways of glass and grated silver that flate the walls of the second level. while others emerged from the barracks doors, dressed in fatigues with their M-16 slung over their shoulders. Panicked chatter crackled from every radio, while orders were barked through the air in the chaos, everyone in a hurry to quickly mobilize.

Passing through the blinding fluorescent lights that burned overhead and reflected upon every gleaming surface, we joined the surge of off-duty personnel that were running toward the armoury, and stopped when we saw Jeffries and Tanner tailing behind another breech squad. in their power armor, railguns in hand. You two get suited up, said Jeffries. We're setting up cover just ahead. We're using the airfield hall as a choke while the other team's deploy from the underground shafts

and box them in. Who's attacking us? I asked. Dramathius, said Jeffries. They're backed by the Legion airs. Now, go. We continued down the corridor until we reached the armory. The sprawling chamber separated.

raided off from the towering shelves of equipment and weapony by the silver grating, while the armourers struggled to accommodate everyone that was rushing toward the queue windows. Barry and I were hurried in through a separate entrance alongside several other breach squad members, moving past the rows of workbenchers and scattered parts before we arrived at the holding area for special operations gear. Sue armourers quickly took our powered exoskeletons down from the racks and anchored them to the floor before moving to assist the others. The back of my army yawning open before me, I stepped into it, and it locked into place around my limbs, humming to life as it sealed me inside, and the heads-up display flickered in around me. When it was fully powered on, I took an electrical cannon from the racks and armed it, very quickly joining me after he loaded his railgun. Let's kick some ass, he said. I nodded, and we ran back down the rows, other squad members rushing by us.

to get suited up. We passed through the grated door and hurried through the crowds of the main armoury leaving it for the corridor that led back to the central chamber. Something beeped them overhead and we looked up to see Sprite decloaking above us, following an hour wake

as gunshots rattled through the hall ahead. Entering the central chamber, we saw it was now sectioned off with metal blockades, soldiers and breach squads taking cover behind them while they kept their weapons trained on the hall, to the airfield. Several Prometheus soldiers had been gunned down in front of it, clad in dark, lightweight armour, black balaclavas and M4 carbines as their blood dripped from the silver walls.

Jeffries motioned us over to where he and Tanner were positioned in front of the open hall, and we took cover next to him. Sprite beeped again, and Jeffries patted him. Good boy, he said. I was wondering if they'd release you. Our radio systems crackled to life within our suits. Overwashed all personnel, said command. Four hostile aircraft have landed on the strip and two have taken the helipats on the roof. We have Prometheus fire teams establishing a perimeter around the base,

localized at the airfield entrance and supported by legionnaires. All personnel maintained offensive positions out. Switch to thermal, said Jeffries. They're around the corner. I kept my eyes on the corner at the end of the hall and switched my visor to thermal. The red outlines of several Prometeus soldiers crouched just ahead. To say the least, I was way too drunk for this. Can our railguns penetrate the walls? asked Tanner.

Not here, I said, keeping my electrical cannon braced against my shoulder. Command crackled in through the radio once more. Delta, Delta, and Gamma squires are in position beneath the airfield and are ready to engage, they said. All personnel of blockade chug points remain on standby and prepare to support out. One of the Prometheus soldiers tossed a smoke grenade out into the hall. It popped and started to fill the corridor with a dense wall of smoke, but they seemed to be unaware that we could still see them. The soldiers angled out from behind the corner with their rifles raised,

and the breach operators around me immediately opened fire, railguns cracking through the air, and messily splattering the oncoming force across the walls. One of the soldiers dove back into cover at the last second and fled out of sight. His comrades reduced to a mess of pulverized meat and organs behind him. A resonating boom shuddered through the complex, and the lights burnt out around us.

The HUD of my visor crackling and distorting before it corrected itself. I switched to night vision, cutting through the darkness that now enveloped the blockade as the soldiers around me began to mount lights on the rails of their M-16s, their beams panning through the shadows in confusion. EMP, said Barry, keeping his eyes trained on the hall. Another boom shocked through the structure above, thus falling down the ceiling like something had just collided with the base. Gunfire echoed through the distance from somewhere in the communications wing. Overwatch to all personnel, say come out. Delta, Theta, and gamma squads are down. Maintain defensive positions and do not leave the base.

If your blockade has been compromised, fall back to the R&D safe room. Protect the bomb at all costs. Out. Another boom echoed in the distance, followed by another just above us. The structure shaking beneath my feet is loose debris clattered down from the ceiling. A second fire team of Prometheus soldiers gathered behind the wall at the end of the hall. Pull back, said Jeffries, urgently tapping me on the shoulder. Hurry!

Barry Tanner, Spright and myself followed Jeffries through the blockade, while another breach squad took our place, leading us to the connecting hall of the R&D wing, just as a thundering explosion echoed through the complex, and the ceiling of the central chamber gave way behind us. I quickly covered my head and got low to the ground as a beam of antimatter shot down from above, and with a blinding flash I saw half the room disintegrate in a split second before the shockwave knocked me to the floor.

Disoriented, I scrambled across the metallic tiles, rivers of blood smearing beneath me as gunfire rattled through the crackle of flames. Come on, yelled Tanna, grabbing me by the hand and helping me up. I looked back to see a glowing pit in the middle of the room, dismembered body parts strewn about the remnants of the barricade, while injured men and women screamed in pain and struggled to fight back against the Prometheus soldiers that poured in through the airfield hall. Jeffreys opened fire on them to cover our escape,

his powerful shots decapitating them in explosions of blood and bone before they quickly turned their attention to him. Their bullets harmlessly clicked and ricocheted against his armour. And Sprite raked his lasers through the advancing force, messily bisecting several of them, but they kept on coming. Then, three dark figures plummeted down from the glowing hole in the ceiling, and landed in the centre of the room with a heavy thud. Legion airs.

The eight-foot-tall titans of rippling muscles stood to their full height, clad in the blackened armour of demonic knights, as cloaks of human flesh hung from their imposing frame. Their skin was scarred with vicious ruins, and in the claws of their wicked gauntlets They each wielded great swords and battle axes that would have taken several men to even lift, Expertly crafted to inflict the highest amount of pain that they physically could. I took aim with my electrical cannon, yet before I could fire a legionaire raised his hand to me, And a searing heat began to melt the weapon in my grip.

I dropped it. the bubbling metal of its design glowing red hot upon the ground. The Legionair laughed, bearing his razor-sharp teeth as the others opened fire with their railguns, but failed to even scratch the terrifying figures, every shot uselessly sparking against their flesh and armour alike. While the other two began to slaughter the remaining soldiers in the room, the Legionair before me held his unbroken gaze, raising his sword in the air as he slowly approached.

"'Your fate have been written,' he bellowed. "'A soldier tried to run past him into the hall, "'but he swiftly snatched him up with a single hand "'and crushed his skull within his fist. "'Your reality belongs to us, "'and your flesh belongs to me.' "'I turned and quickly retreated with the rest of my squad, "'running down the corridor

"'as the laughter of the legionaire bellowed through the air, "'and another echoing boom nearly shook me off my feet. Turning into the sprawling lobby of the R&D wing, we saw a fire team of Prometheus soldiers pinning down the meagre remnants of a blockade. Their shots rattling and sparking across the metallic desks and shattered windows of the adjoining office block, while our allies struggled to return fire. Jefferies, Tanner and Barry immediately gunned them down in a hail of depleted uranium. Their blood splattering upon the silver walls, lit only by the lights of the rifles and the flashes of gunfire. Another three Prometheus soldiers came in through the secondary hall they were attacking from,

one of them shooting a fleeing researcher in the back, while the other two took aim at us. I felt the shots of a five-fifty-six ricochet harmlessly against my armour, but the second soldier fired an AR-10, the 308 round piercing through Barry's plating in a splatter of blood. Jeffery's antenna quickly returned fire, joined by several men taking cover, beyond the blockade blasting the Prometheus soldiers to pieces you okay Jeffries asked Barry nodded clutching his stomach in pain bullet's still in me he said with a pain grin might need a new kidney thundering footstombs echoed from the hall that the soldier had come from and a legionaire emerged from the blackness the

men at the blockade opening fire on him to no effect come on said Jeffreys, leading us past the reception desk and into the office block, shattered glass crunching beneath my boots, while the men arounders continued to fire through the darkness. One tossed a fragmentation grenade at the lumbering titan, but it only harmlessly exploded at his feet, the shrapnel doing absolutely nothing. Another brute squad of five emerged from the shadows at the end of the block,

hurrying past us and all wielding electrical cannons. "'Cierra, this is Epsilon,' radioed the other sergeant. "'Help us set the perimeter.' We stopped and turned as they took over at the blockade. We found our positions just behind them, all of us quickly taking aim at the Legionair. The wicked creature only grinned and slid his palm with a runic dagger, revealing a twisting, ornate sigil that had been carved into his skin. "'Ey stachs, defiler of gods,' he hissed.

step forth from my blood the other breech squad opened fire electrical shockwaves slamming into the legionaire and utterly disintegrating him vaporized flesh and bits of armor splattering and ricocheting against the walls nothing more seemed to threaten us but gunshots still echoed in the distance four allied soldiers rushed in from another hall in the lobby ahead looking terrified and covered in blood "'Over here!' he owed a man from the blockade at our side, motioning them over. "'Get to the labs. We've got this.' The soldiers hurried past us and disappeared into the darkness at our back. Another shuddering boom echoing throughout the complex and shaking a cloud of dust from the ceiling. "'Guise,' said Barry, a hint of fear in his voice. I turned to see him pointing at the remains of the Legionair, whose blood began to boil. and crawl upon the ground winding together into a bubbling pool as more of the crimson

liquid was drawn off the walls and pulled into the hole as though possessed of its own intelligence what the fuck muttered one of the other breach operators taking aim at the churning pool then my heart seized in my chest a sense of overwarming dread immediately flooding through me in a haze of raw adrenaline A long, clawed hand emerged from the blood like I was staring into a portal to another world. Several more slender arms slid forth into our reality, splaying out across the tiles like the limbs of a spider. And in their wake, something pulled itself up from the pool and unfurled at least 16 feet above us.

It looked down at us as though we were dust. I could barely breathe, like all the oxygen had been sucked from the air. I'm not sure how to exactly describe what I saw in that moment. It seemed to shift through a thousand different identities, its face like a collapsing star of teeth and nothingness that made me want to slit my own throat. Its bizarre, hermaphroditic body was bound by an armour of constricting thorns that cut into its flesh with every unnerving, wrongly angled movement,

six mutilated breasts hanging down from its slender otherworldly form that embodied a nightmarish parody of inhuman excess. The other breech squad began to open fire, electrical shockwaves ripping against the horrific aberration, but to absolutely no effect. Its face of withering flesh opened into a moor of spiraling fangs that wept down into infinity, and from that moor hit loose a scream that brought me to my knees.

The structure trembling as though caught in an earthquake, while the blasphemous sound scraped through the very depths of my soul the others around me clutched their ears in vain screaming and writhing upon the ground while several soldiers started to fall into seizure but nothing could prevent the wailing shriek that stripped my mind with its resonance and then it ceased i could only shudder upon the tiles confused and disoriented fall to your knees and Back, the nightmare bellowed from all around us, for the eyes of suffering have graced your flesh. I scrambled back across the floor alongside the others as the towering creature snapped up one of the breach operators and opened its more of a limitless void, rasping with a perverse hunger.

The operator immediately fell limp, as though all the life had been instantaneously drained from his body and a ghostly light wept from his armour, sucked into the pit of spiraling teeth as the looming terror drank his soul. It discarded the empty shell of a body and turned its focus to the rest of the squad members who fired upon it with their electrical cannons. It only swept its claws through their ranks,

cleaving three of the squad members in a splatter of blood and organs. The horror picked up the remaining operator and sank its countless claws into his skin while he screamed within its grip. Open mortal and bear your flesh. I can taste the fear upon your soul. With a sickening slickness, his claws warped around the man's shrieking body

and slowly turned him inside out, blood, intestines, and dislodged bones spilling out from the unrecognizable mass of flesh. Two legionnaires entered the lobby from one hall, while a large contingent of Prometheus soldiers entered from another, immediately stopping when they saw the aberration turned toward them, and ignore us completely. It didn't care if they professed to be its allies.

It just wanted to inflict as much pain as it possibly could, and when it smelled their souls upon the blood-drenched air, it couldn't deny its hunger. We fled through the ruined office block as the screams of the Prometheus soldiers cut through the distance, uselessly firing upon the looming nightmare as it ate their souls and flayed them alive. We quickly moved past an abandoned checkpoint and emerged within the laboratory section of the R&D wing, countless testing and storage chambers flanking us and walled off by bulletproof glass.

Running past the gurneys and stacks of overturned crates, muzzle flashes burned through the darkness beyond, and legionaire marching unimpeded through the distant chambers as she pulled. pursued a guard with several researchers. The guard stood his ground, firing his M-16 at the advancing figure. But the bullets only bounced off her tempered flesh, run-scarred and clad in a lurid, revealing lingerie of blackened plate and tapered razors. The legionaire plunged her gauntlet into the guard's chest

and ripped out his beating heart, taking a bite with a rasp of hunger as she focused her gaze on the fleeing researchers, knowing that we could do nothing to stop her, we followed Jeffries through the rows of chambers to the high security zone, where a barricade of debris had been piled around the checkpoint, breach operators and allied soldiers aiming their weapons from behind their cover. We're Sierra, said Jeffries, raising his hands. Let us through.

The blockade lowered their weapons, eyes peeled to the darkness as we quickly passed them, and entered the main foyer that connected a network of sealed, but transparent project rooms, like a spiraling panopticon of glass. More barricades and heavy weapon armatures were bolted to the ground alongside a large gathering of personnel at the ready, as though every survivor had fled to that room. Beyond them all, a massive silver airlock stood embedded in the wall, identifying the chamber that must have held the bomb. I'd never actually seen it in person before, thanks to my lack of clearance, but I could

somehow feel it upon the air, even through the walls like I was suddenly sucking on a live matry. Another cascade of shuddering booms reverberated from somewhere in the distance, dust and debris billowing down from above. Then I heard the shriek of that Eldridge nightmare once more, quieter as it echoed from the laboratories we just come from, but it was still enough to fill me with dread every inch of my skin prickling with unease. The fuck is that? Asked one of the guards alongside us. I'm still asking that myself, muttered Jeffries. It's coming this way.

How exactly are we planning on stopping that thing? I asked. We can't, and we aren't, said Jeffries, a grim tone in his voice. The only thing we can do is by time until the Air Force nukes the base, and hope it doesn't trigger the bomb, that or the travellers cut out the middleman. We're fucked either way. "'Well, where are the travellers?' asked Barry. "'It's their bomb. You'd think they want to defend the thing?'

"'Maybe, but in the meantime, I don't think our lives mean shit in their eyes,' said Jeffreys. "'Fuck it. We've got a job to do. These things want to fight. We're going to give them one.' A legionaire emerged from the laboratory hall, and as soon as her eyes locked upon her own, she snarled with hunger and charged towards us. The other breach operators immediately opened fire on her with a barrage of shockwaves, blasting her to pieces in a rush of vaporizing gall. The aberration screeched once more from somewhere beyond,

the sound of shattering glass echoing through the distance until only silence remained. I could hear my heartbeat hammering in my ears, hyperventilating in fear with my eyes peeled on the shadows ahead. The slender horror erupted from the darkness, and I stumbled back, my heart seizing in my chest as everyone around me scrambled to open fire, but it was already upon us, sweeping its long spider-like claws through the front of the barricade, and shearing several defenders in two, blood and debris scattering across the floor. Drenched in the gore of the men who'd just been disembowed before me, I grabbed one of their discarded electrical cannons and aimed it at the shrieking night. nightmare, pulling the trigger in a blind attempt to stem it out of existence. The weapon kicked back against my shoulder, and the electrical shockwave slammed into the creature. But just like the countless railgun shots that rammed against it, it did absolutely nothing to slow its advance.

The horror completely ignored the assault, picking up any nearby defenders in its claws, and messily biting them in half before ripping the souls from their bodies. The voice of Overwatch crackled in through the radio. Our personnel fall back to the safe room, yelled command over the chaos. Do not let it touch the bomb. Jeffreys grabbed Barry and I from behind. Come on, he said, pulling me back.

You can't hurt it. I turned away, following him and the rest of my squad over to the airlock as the other struggled to hold the nightmare back, while the airlock slowly slid open with a shuddering, grown and looked back at the ravening abomination. It ceased its slaughter, countless crimson dilated eyes splitting open across its flesh, before every single one of them immediately focused upon me. Every muscle in my body froze, and as the horror raised a single, drooping limb and pointed directly at me, the world around me dissolved away as though it were a painting splashed with thinner.

What took its place is difficult to describe, but I remember the feeling more than anything, the feeling of my soul tearing itself apart, of my mind fractioning into a thousand pieces. I stood within a forest of bleeding flesh, skies of warring crimson, violet and rotting bile, colliding through the mirage of reality. The air was viscous, pushing through my lungs and cradling my body like a slurry of liquid meat, and all around me, cellular windows burned and wavered through reality, trailing across my vision in a sickening my asthma of tangled skin and nameless viscera. Before me, the aberration stood,

pointing at me through the shifting world as if its mind forced itself upon my own, yet my eyes were not on that towering horror. They were on the nightmare that lurk beyond it, looming forever above the monstrous wood, A willow of pure void stretched Across my sight and occupied my soul Every branch winding down into its pits Of gnashing infinite teeth

That threatened to devour what precious little remained of my sanity Back and forth It recoiled and pulsed like a contracting muscle Set into the world Throwing off shockwaves that ripple through the multiverse Like a psychic wind of unbridled carnage Backlit by a star of a hue with no name The caustic glow of the Eldrish God fell upon me, and my skin burned, every nerve in my body bursting into flame as the taste of blood filled my mouth.

But try as I might, there was no true description for the thing that I saw. There was only the sensation of being corroded from the inside out, eaten away by its acidic gaze while every aspect of my identity burned to dust in the primal wind. I felt like a collapsing star, imploding into myself as I struggled to behold the paralyzing sight, and then it was gone. I was standing back at H.Q. once more, the servant of the godlike willow lowering its outstretched claw. I collapsed to the ground as the fighting continued around me, but I could barely hear it above the ringing in my ears. The image of the willow scorched into my sight like a stinging after image. Every muscle in my body twitched and convulsed.

I felt like I was having a waking seizure. My squad mates yelling for me over the radio, but I couldn't make out their words. I felt like my identity had been blasted to nothing, and the only thing that remained in its place was a terrifying hunger that permeated every aspect of my being. I wanted to rip into my own flesh and swallow it whole. I wanted to kill and destroy. I wanted everyone around me to scream and suffer while I broke it.

and suffer while I broke their bones and ran my hands through their bleeding organs and sank my teeth into their skin and tasted their meat. I wanted to feel it slide down my throat, blood dripping down my chin while I reveled in the perverse glory of my own surrender. Then I felt arms pulling me back. I wanted to tear at them and flinched their fat from their bones, but I was still paralysed by the sight that I'd witnessed and could do nothing more than twitch as I was dragged back to safety. I saw the heavy doors of the airlock pass over me, and as soon as they did, they began to close, slamming shut in my wake. I was in the safe room. Somebody propped me up against the wall and removed my helmet, but I couldn't even tell who they were. Everything

looked the same to me, in a blur, just meat, ready to be bled and devoured. Soon my senses began to return and I could see the others looking down at me. Come on, man. Come back to us, said Barry Lee, while he glaring in his voice. He took off his helmet, staring into my eyes with desperation. Please, Thane, just look at me. You can fight this. My gaze met his own and all I wanted to do was peel the skin from his face and disfigure him until I could no longer recognize his features, bearing my teeth while I twitched upon the ground, but then a sliver of rationality started to break through, a sliver of who I was.

The bloodlust slowly faded to nausea, and all I felt next was discussed. I wretched, regaining some fraction of control and began to cry, a flood of raw emotion suddenly rushing through my mind. I'm sorry, I stuttered, barely able to speak through the seizing of my muscles. "'Sorry for what?' asked Barry. "'I'm just happy your back, man. I was worried.' "'What did that thing do to you?' asked Jeffries. "'I shook my head, swallowing a mouth full of blood.

"'I don't know,' I said, still twitching and shivering in place. "'Guess I'll have to write about it.' And I cracked a half-hearted smile. Looking up I could see the bomb in the middle of the chamber, like a sphere of swimming metal that twisted and refracted with every shift of my sight. How breach was interfacing with it I had no idea. There were about 30 of us, most wounded in some way, with their eyes on the banks of monitors that occupied the walls

alongside the massive sealed door. This doubled as some sort of command and control centre that could be fallen back on, but what our actual command was doing, or where they were in the complex, I had no idea. because they certainly weren't in the room with us. On the monitors we could see almost everywhere inside and outside the base. The exterior was a ruin of flaming rubble. Dead bodies strewn across the airfield while the alien craft drifted through the sky,

downed helicopters and jets smoking in the desert beyond. A small contingent of premedeous soldiers still occupied the blood-soaked expanse, but most were inside, killing any survivors they could find alongside the least. Legionaires. The slender androgynous aberration that had forced the vision of the willow upon me still stood in the room outside, but it made no attempt to breach the door, remaining eerily motionless like a spider ready to strike, and at its side two legionaires feasted upon the remains of our fallen allies. Directly in front of the safe room door, a man in Prometheus armour stood unmasked. Vicious runes slashed into his face as he stared into the camera, motioning that he

wanted to speak. They can't get in here, said Jeffreys. They would have done it already if they could. What does he want? asked one of the guards. Jeffries radioed in. The man, this is Sierra. He said, we're in the safe room. Got a hostile outside the doors requesting a dialogue. How do we proceed? Over. No response. Jeffries repeated his request, waiting a while longer, but nobody from command picked up. Hesitating he looked at the controls beneath the monitor bank and hit a button on the keypad. Suddenly we could hear the room beyond over the speakers. Are we ready to be civil, then? asked the man from Prometheus, the twisted nightmare in the background eyeing him with hunger as though only barely tolerating his existence.

Jeffreys held down the speak button. What do you want? he asked. Simple, said the man. We demand that you relinquish the weapon of the traitor legion, in the name of Prince Dominiarius, speaker of the Red Willow. Do this and you will be spared until the day of ascension. Jeffries looked back at us We have no fucking idea what you're talking about

He said his voice weary Yes you do You found it beneath the sands of Africa And you're gonna do what? Detonate it? asked Jeffries If you do that we all die Detonate it On the contrary, we want to disarm it

Said the man Your commander's on the other the hands I wonder where their loyalties truly lie. I understand you've been searching for the traitor legion, but ironically you've been working for them this entire time. The men who stand at your side and call you soldier are the ones who've been keeping the weapon safe, safe enough to detonate, should the traitors deem your universe unnecessary. Jeffries look back at us, I, if I get executed for that cun just told me. I think we're going to be. I think we're a little past that point, said Tanner.

We all suspected it. Jeffries turned back to the monitor and held down the speed button. Well, tough shit, he said, as you're not getting it. He muted the feed and stepped back from the controls. Only one thing left to do, he muttered. We wait, said Barry. A warning flashed on one of the other screens displaying a feed of information. Everyone walked over to it, and Jeffries read it out loud.

"'Impact event,' he said in confusion. "'Upper atmosphere, inbound, eight hundred thousand metres per second.' He looked back at us, but we had no idea what it meant. Then something else caught my attention on the monitors surveying the airfield. I pointed, and Jeffries turned back to them. A dark figure slammed down upon the concrete, cracking it beneath him in a cloud of debris. before standing to his full height. He was clad in a powered exoskeleton of black, angular metal that flowed and conformed to his towering frame,

standing at least ten feet above the ground as he surveyed the surrounding area. He was a traveller. The craft of the legionnaires drifted down from the sky, and he turned to face it. The vessel opened fire with two beams of searing antimatter, cracking against the traveller in a burst of sparse. barking flame and burning the area around him to dust. But when the assault ceased, he was completely unharmed. Smoke whisked away from his armour, and he raised his hand to the aircraft, the air around him warping with a gravitational lensing before ripping toward the vessel faster than I could perceive, blasting straight through its shields and utterly disintegrating its

frame in a wisp of powdered metal, blowing away upon the wind. Every Prometheus soldier on the air field opened fire, their rifles rattling over the speakers, but their bullets only sparked uselessly against the traveller's armour. Within the blink of an eye, the traveller teleported to each soldier, ramming his fists through their body so quick that it looked like the entire group simultaneously exploded until there was nobody left but him. Soaked in blood, he slowly advanced towards the complex, entering the main hall and making his way to the central chamber, where two legionaires and several Prometheus soldiers attempted to engage him. He merely raised his hand to them, never breaking his stride, and everyone in the room just

vaporized, splattering against the walls in a burst of gore and liquid meat. The traveller made his way to the R&D wing, knowing exactly where he was going. Moving past the office block that was littered with sundered bodies, he entered the laboratory section where several legionnaires and a handful of Prometheus soldiers waited for him. They opened fire, the legionnaires conjuring spears of frost and bolts of lightning in their wicked gauntlets, but their attacks were barely even acknowledged by the approaching figure, who only raised his hand and projected a beam of flickering void across the entire room, effortlessly slicing through every wall and messily bisecting every living thing that it hit.

drenched in gore the traveller passed the high security checkpoint and enter the section outside the door the two legionnaires charged at him and he and he punched clear through the first one's skull in an explosion of blood and brains before picking the second one up and effortlessly ripping him in half scattering his remains across the ground the twisted aberration loomed above him and shrieked with a voice that unnerved my senses even through the walls of the safe room but the travel didn't react. The nightmare brought its claws down on him and he snatched them out of the air, ripping its limbs clean off before advancing forward. His fist glowed with a burning energy and he plunged it straight into the creature's chest. His body imploded with a sickening crunch, cracking inward under a massive influx of gravitational energy before exploding outward, his bloody remains splattering across the walls. And the traveler, a

approached the safe room. And before the Prometheus man could say another word, the traveller smacked him across the face, his skull exploding in a splatter of blood and bone. The monitor flickered as the traveller instantly overrode every security system we had, and the heavy doors began to slowly open. Nobody even raised their weapons, too unsure of what would happen, or what his intentions actually were, and even if we had thought, we were nothing compared to him. We were entirely at his mercy. Barry helped me up and leaned on him for support as the traveller finally entered the chamber.

Towering over us, his armour swam like the night, a perfect embodiment of technological might. He said nothing for a time, and we couldn't see anything beyond the helmet of his armour. Then somebody else stepped in from behind him. I'd never actually met them before. I just knew what they looked like and who they were, or at least I thought I knew who they were. I'm forbidden from describing them or giving their identity,

but they and their compatriots were the commanders and founders of breach. You can relax, said command, standing next to the looming traveller. You won't be harmed, and he isn't here to detonate the bomb. Their eyes met my own. Tobias thing, they said. you've been telling quite this story i didn't respond unsure of what to say command asked jeffreys what's going on here command smart you are free to speculate but i am not here to be your exposition they said i am here to brief you rest assured that on my level our organization has been aligned with the travelers from the very beginning i'm not allowed to repeat the conversation that followed until you until after our next operation.

The travellers found out whether darklings have been hiding, and soon we're launching a full-scale assault on them. I only hope that I'll be ready in time. I still don't have full control over my muscles from when that thing paralysed me. The traveller claimed that it was summoned directly from the parasitic universe.

Our worlds are being drawn back together, and in a way you can feel it, like a lingering dread that you can taste upon the air. Honestly, I'm scared, and I can't shake the feeling that something horrible is about to happen. Every time I fight these things, I feel like I'm dying a little bit more inside. I just want it to stop. Whatever. It's my job, I'll get it done.

Well, I'll ride an update if I survive the operation. Wish me luck. Part 12, The Lunar Fortress. Something about the ocean always terrible. It's the sheer depth of it, all that darkness waiting below the surface, and you have no idea how far it really goes. You're just treading water, and in that moment you are prey. People don't seem to extend the same courtesy to the cosmos, but they should. It's so inconceivably vast that there's no real frame of reference right.

The challenge of deep is 11,000 meters below sea level, but when we look up at the sun, sitting on that pale blue curtain that hides us from the beyond. That's millions of kilometers. Thousands of trips around the earth. That's less than a pinprick on the universe's skin. It doesn't even register. So many people are eager to see what lurks behind the thresholds. They never ask themselves if they should,

because sometimes our insignificance is our shield. I remember when the sky started to change. Sitting back in the Osprey with Jeffries, Barry, Tanner and Sprites, another breech fire team seated across from us. We had no idea what was about to happen, but we could taste it when the clouds began to twist into the violet, roiling chaos of the unknown, and the air was like raw meat upon the tongue, the sense of blood and fuel riding on the wind.

We'd been dosed with psilocybin as a precaution against psychological trauma, but out there it was useless. We could all feel it, this horrible, existential dread as the ocean passed beneath us, and adrenaline flooded through our veins, even when we were still so far away from danger. I remember thinking about that moment when we were cowering in the safe room at HQ, but bombed our backs while the traveller and command stood before us. And what help are we going to be compared to this guy?

Asked Jeffries. eyes on the towering armoured figure the dark plating of his designs swimming across him like liquid metal it is your duty to serve bellow the deep half-mechanical voice of the traveler the spawn of the elemental are a stain upon existence they must be cleansed they will help us command clarified but even then victory is not at all guaranteed we are compounding a sentient universe that that they call an elemental, an aspect of a primal concept or emotion, and the ascendants have nearly rejoined it to this plane. It's in its naturally dormant state right now, hence the event that's suffered it from before

Bloodsiren. But any connection with our world is a danger, and when it wakes up, the first thing it will do is assimilate our universe. And the bomb? That's one of the other breach operators. The traveler looked at him. A contingency to ensure the purity of our blessed reality, said the traveler. The smallest dioder of corruption is as much a threat as the largest,

but the destruction of this divine cosmos is not a matter that we take in stride. The elemental endures a cycle of death and creation that is bound to follow, marked by two cataclysmic events. Just as you require oxygen to survive, it must require the essence of its making, and the cycle ensures that it always has room to feed, for death begets life, when life requires a garden to flourish. You were blessed to have been invaded during the first of these events, which severed his grip upon this universe. You are not so fortunate, however, to have harbored the presence of ascendance on this planet, but they indeed have the power to draw this universe back into the mindless jaws of the enemy.

And what are the ascendants? asked Jeffreys. What are we fighting? There are living embodiments of whatever profane aspect this element represents. In this case, it is surrender, said the traveler. Thanks to the Prometheus mandate, the elemental never strictly invaded us, per se. Secomat. It's only a matter of time before it traditionally did so, but it was only here because of their meddling. The town use secured on Bloodsiren was a side of their experimentation.

They exposed the entire population to the psychic proximity of the elemental, destroying their minds and compelling them to create the portal within the Suez. The smaller breaches were merely incidental. The portal was weak, however, and only three ascendants managed to cross. Any number must be purged, said the traveller. A lone ascendant could conquer this universe without effort. Quite right, said command. And thankfully, we now know exactly where they are.

This attack was a bit of desperation on the part of Prometheus. I imagine they were only granted darkening assets for the sheer amusement of the ascendance. They wanted to capture the foreign paladin in your previous operation and use his knowledge of souls to disarm the bomb, but thankfully you were able to get to him first. Prometheus was very much under the darkling's thrall, but they were more of a plaything than a resource. The Darklings do not need help, assimilating a universe.

So, you know where they are, said Jeffreys. Then what's next? Simple, said Kumar. When we have recovered and prepared, we'll launch a full-scale assault on the Darkling stronghold in this world, with the aim of assassinating the three ascendants and permanently sealing the portal that they are trying to open. The travelers are willing to be able.

to combat the three ascendants on our behalf, but they'll need our force apart if they're to stand a chance. Do they really? Ask Barry in disbelief. Do not forsake your value, said the traveller. None of your kind have ever slain an ascendant in single combat, and even when our numbers are great, and moments lapsing concentration can spell our doom. You must cleanse the lesser darklings that defend them if we are to be effective.

and that we will say command we'll be enlisting the aid of several countries in our attack to cover for our weakened numbers and will strike our land and sea but as i said success is not guaranteed if that portal opens there's no telling what might be waiting for us on the other side if our benefactors so much as get a hint of a full-scale invasion they motioned to the bomb our universe is forfeit Some time after that, before we deployed, we were each given a device of sorts that we were told would seal the portal forever. All we had to do was cast it inside as soon as it became active, and, assuming that the travellers could kill the ascendance, all this would be over. The thing about plans, though, is that it is not always about the destination. Sometimes it is about the journey, and that journey can be more cruel than you can imagine.

I fiddled with a little sphere in my artificial hands, watching the violent light of the sky reflect upon its metallic surface. We passed over a fleet of destroyers, headed in the same direction, while several other transports flew alongside us, the blades of Ospreys and UH-60Ms chopping upon the air. Sometimes we'd hear the roar of a jet engine, and a sonic boom would crack through the atmosphere in the wake of a B-1 Lancer. The travellers were flying at a safe distance from the rest of us, because the proximity of their ship would give us brain damage, but they would support us as soon as we made landfong,

who were all equipped with as many electrical cannons as possible, but only a handful had been scavenged from the off-wall bunker, so most of our forces were still using railguns. In our fire team, only Jeffries and myself had the ability to seriously harm the Darkling legionaires. The rest could only do what they could, because R&D had no way of replicating the Crest technology, and the weapons of the travellers weren't meant to be wielded by the human body. Sprite was being unusually close with Jeffries that day. He actually let Jeffries hold him, sitting next to me in the Osprey, while my eyes were locked

on the darkening sky behind us. The red glow began to shine through the interior. I turned to see a full moon break through the clouds from the cockpit window, shimmering with crimson light beyond the purple, noxious myasma. It was like we were staring at the moon of another world, and yet somehow it was here. The radio crackled to light. Command to all fire teams. Drop ETA in two minutes. Take the beachhead and mark strike locations. Over.

We've got a visual, said one of the pilots. We all look to see the island in the distance, set beneath the glow of the red moon tangles of meat wound up from the water to form living beaches coalescing around a towering ascent of shifting flesh bizarre structures jutted up from the mountainous viscera forming walls and fortifications of ebony stone their architecture caught between an other-worldly eroticism and a nauseating horror the curvature of every surface and every spire of blackened razors seemed to hint at some perverse, carnal equivalent, vicious thorns lining the ruinous battlements as though set to hang the flayed corpse of any would-be intrudence. And that was when everything went wrong. I watched his three figures rose into the air above the island, their dark cloaks riding the wind like oil upon water, until at last they fell still.

Even from so far away, I recognised one of them as the ascendant beneath the town in Blood Siren, instilling that very same sense of other-worldly fear. They gestured each of them with their hands, as though performing a dread ritual, and the air around them began to ripple and bend. They heard the radio crackled alive, but before another word could be said, an immense shockwave ripped outward from the three ascendants, throwing back the clouds and sweeping across the ocean. The concussive blast slammed into us,

and I was knocked back against my seat as the metal interior caved in around me, and the osprey swung into an uncontrollable spin. Through the back of the aircraft, I could see the remainder of the shockwave overtake the fleet of destroyers, overturning them all in a massive tidal way as the other ospreys and transport ships plummeted from the sky. I almost thought I'd pass out from the sky, a G-force bearing down on my body, as the world spun violently around me, my friends holding

on for their lives at my side. With a deafening crash, I was suddenly thrown out of my seat, and up against the tattered ceiling of the Osprey as we smacked straight into the ocean, a flood of water rushing into the interior. I tried to gain my bearings, but the oncoming waves slammed me back against the cockpit. The blood of the severed pilots dancing across my vision while we ran. rapidly sank into the murky depths. The water failed to penetrate my armour, but I couldn't breathe, and I was so flooded with adrenaline that I couldn't tell which way it was up.

Then Jeffreys grabbed me by the arm and pulled me back into the interior. Getting my mind on track, I saw the others swimming alongside me, and apart from the pilots we had no casualties among our number. Emerging from the sinking wreck, I saw the violet light of the clouds shining through the surface in great sea, insinilating rays, and I followed my compatriots up into the globe. I surfaced above the crashing waves, taking in a deep breath of air as the sound of battle immediately met my ears. A B-1 Lancer tore overhead and loosed its payload upon the island

beyond, consuming the unseen distance in streaks of billowing white phosphorus. Swim to the shore, your Jeffries. Hurry! I began to swim through the sea. crashing waves that threatened to pull me under at every advance, while sprites surfaced ahead of us and tore forward above the sea, unleashing a volley of laser fire across the flesh-hewn beach in a streak of pluming flames, where several legionaires fought with the landed forces. Each clad in a full plate of blackened razors, they cleave their vicious, medieval

weapons through all who assailed them, while the breached fire teams unleashed electrical shockwaves from their cannons that disintegrated them. in bursts of flaming gall. I soon felt my boots hit the earth beneath the waves, and I crawled forward onto the shore, rising to my feet on the blood-soaked surface of knotted viscerate.

A legionaire immediately charged toward me, great sword raised in the air, only for Sprite to lash his lasers around his face, knocking him back and giving me enough time to raise my electrical cannon and pull the trigger. The weapon kicked back against my shoulder.

and loosed a thundering shockwave that instantly vaporized the Legionaire's upper body, the remainder of his corpse collapsing to the ground. Command to all units, crackle the radio. Naval bombardment has been compromised. Move forward and support the travellers wherever you can. Closure of the gate is our number one priority. Do not fail us. Our universe depends on it.

Ahead of us, twin spires of blacken razors stood atop a range of mountainous flesh, creating a white chokepoint that marked the ascent to the center of the island. Contingent of legionnaires rushed down from the steps of winding meat and dark hexagonal tiles, where el-gun blasts uselessly sparking against their armor from the advancing soldiers at our side. The legionaires began to conjure Eldridge spells within their grip and quickly lashed them at us, volleys of fireballs exploding against the wicked terrain and blasting men to pieces while a bolt of lightning struck me dead on, knocking me to the ground, and seizing every body in my muscle in a surge of overwhelming pain.

My armour was burnt, but not broken. And I watched as Jeffries, Barry, Tanner and Sprite opened fire with the other breach operators, bombarding the darkling forces with a cascade of electrical shockwaves. Then a legionaire conjured a freezing wave of ice that rushed against us, unlocked the others where they stood, chilling tendrils of crystallizing water vapor, ensnaring their armor. The strength of their exoskeletons began to free them, and I rose to my feet to lend my aid, breaking chunks of ice off Barry's joints while Sprite started to carefully burn the frost away from Jeffreys and Tanner. The legionaires were advancing, however, and quickly closed the distance, charging into the soldiers

and breached fire teams with their weapons swinging. Then a piercing wine cut through the air And a seething light shone down from above I looked up and saw the flowing arrow-like ship of the travellers Descending from the clouds Waves of crackling electricity flowed down the arcs of the vessel Before lashing forth at the choke point ahead of us Streaking through the legionnaires

And a flash of blinding radiance I felt the heat of the blast rush against me But when I opened my eyes the legionnaires were gone, wisps of ash drifting upon the howling wind in their wake, while the flesh of the train had been scorched into charred blackness. I look back at the ship, struggling to maintain eye contact with the shuddering and painful sight.

Twelve travellers dislodged from beneath the craft, floating down through the air as though gravity had no meaning, before landing in the unseen distance ahead of us. The ship began to turn, but before it could, a dread shape shot forth into the sky. It was an ascendant, and yet it wasn't, as though it had abandoned any pretense of humanity,

shedding its skin for a form of fluidic, smoke-wreathed teeth and coalescing insectile limbs that refracted through a thousand angles at once, appearing and disappearing in several different places around the ship, before ensnaring it in its winding grip. With a resonating groan and a thunderous explosion, it ripped the craft in two, hurling its remains into the ocean. The ascendant whirled back into its earthly visage,

its cloak dancing in its wake, while a staccato of sonic booms cracked through the air, and three F-16s rapidly flew toward it, loosing a volley of missiles. The mast ascendant raised its hand, and the flight of aircraft instantly disintegrated in clouds of billowing dust, the missiles harmlessly detonating against it in a series of fire.

We moved up through the passage, several fire teams of soldiers advancing ahead of us, while just above, insectile horrors swept across the sky, like shrieking airborne spiders kept aloft by their tattered bat-like wings. I almost thought I could hear drumming in the distance, beneath the echoing booms of combat, beating through a fevered, ritualistic chanting. The moon burning overhead, we emerged upon a field of ruined other worldly structures. While beyond, a massive ring of woven corpses stood at the highest peak, a gem of void hovering within it, while two ascendants poured their energy into its design.

The weapons of the travellers flared and thundered in the distance, but their battle was obscured by the walls of flowing ebony metal, entangled by roots of sinew and thorns. Gunfire rattled upon the air as the soldiers met with another contingent of legionnaires on the right side of the ruins, and two breach fire teams moved to support them, while we and another group moved to the left, taking what little cover we could behind the blasted walls, but for all I knew looked like they'd been indiscriminately teleported from an alien world. Braziers burned with violet fire, while smoking tents of flesh were stricken across the expanse, like the demolished campsite of an occult gathering brought together to witness the apocalypse cages of bone and runic

metal held the burnt cadavers of the darkling captives felled in the bombings that preceded our arrival or crosses jutted up from the wicked landscape displaying the crucified and disembowed remains of innumerable men they had been bringing people there to feast upon their suffering and feed their souls to the portal yet still those adherents writhed beneath the seas moonlight, scorched, bleeding, and on the verge of oblivion, countless celebrants beat their drums and danced across the battlefield, naked and scarred with vicious ruins, while others joined in blasphemous orgies, moaning in delirium as their flesh melted and boiled upon their bones. The soldiers gunned them down without pity, yet the adherents didn't seem to mind,

welcoming the pain of death as though only a step on a long and terrible journey to come. One of the massive flying arachnids descended from the sky and slammed down upon the team ahead of us, impaling two of their number on its sharp and skittering limbs. The others opened fire on it, knocking it back with electrical shockwaves that tore against it in burst of vaporizing gore. But then it recoiled and loosed a spatter of vicious spit that ignited and exploded upon everything it struck, blasting us all back against the ground and outright killing several men shaking the flaming saliva from my armor i snatched my weapon off the corrupted earth and fired at the advancing aberration the others joining it until the beast finally collapsed to the bleeding earth i moved forward and started to help tanner up while spryed attack to legionaire blinding it for a fire team of soldiers that slowly brought it down with their concentrated rail gun blasts Tanner buckled down under his own weight, falling against me.

That's when I noticed that he was missing his legs. Stop, Tanner said. I can't. I carefully set him back down. Barry and Jeffreys quickly joining us, but they were only stricken with superficial burns. Jeffery swore, examining Tanner's injuries. You're not bleeding, said Barry.

burn the wound's right shut. Don't worry, man. You're going to survive this. I can't feel my lower body, said Tanner. Everything's numb. It's just a shock, said Jeffreys. We'll get you back down to the beach. Don't worry.

Just stay awake, okay? No, said Tanner, shaking his head. You move up and you don't look back. You need to do this, all of you. If I'm going to live, and I'll be right here. Yeah, give him hell. Jeffries nodded, gripping his weapon tight. Oh, you can count on that, he said, rising to his feet.

These things fucked with the wrong planet. Leaving Tanner behind, Jeffries led us forward through the twisting ruins, gunning down several legionnaires as we quickly approached the center of the island, and the rank corpses of three travellers slipped into view. It was beyond disturbing to see them dead. when I had witnessed one of them single-handedly save us from the Pyrethius at HQ. In the distance ahead, an ascendant fought with four travellers, flashing toward each other in a melee that moved so fast it almost appeared like a skipping film.

The combatants teleporting through the air as their armoured fists cracked against the ascendant so hard that concussive shockwaves were loosed from every blow. The ascendant wove through their attacks like liquid, dodging the majority of their attempts, before retaliating with a blast of burning antimatter, knocking one of the travellers back. It snatched another up in its grip and effortlessly ripped him in two, casting his remains against the earth in a splatter of blood and cybernetic organs. Another traveller engaged the ascendant in melee, while a second raised his hand to it,

projecting a beam of void that sliced through the air and cut through the distracted ascendant in a spatter of indigo blood. The ascendant stumbled, and the traveller next to it rammed his fists into its skull, striking it again and again in a cascade of thundering booms. The ascendant split open where it had been cut, revealing a vertical moor of razor-sharp teeth that clamped down on the traveller and swallowed him whole. While it messily chumped upon the armoured corpse,

it raised its flayed hand to another traveller and telekinetically suspended him in the air. It cleansed his fist, and the traveller imploded with a sickening crunch, blood squirting out of his shattered exoskeleton. The flesh is weak, whispered the ascendant in a voice that paralyzed every nerve in my body. But the soul is eternal. You shall be remade in our image. Another breach team reached the battle before us, an open fire on the ascendant, with their electrical cannons, momentarily distracting it while the surviving traveler. flashed forward to it and grabbed hold his armor glowing with crackling power while he screamed with rage raising his fist he plunged it into the ascendant's flailing more and the ascendant exploded with a shockwave that knocked everyone to the ground my ears ringing as the toxic clouds were thrown back over me shaking off the disorientation i scrambled to my feet and saw the strewn remains of the ascendant and the traveler who'd sacrificed himself to kill it It splattered flesh bled into the earth like starry wounds in reality, but ultimately it had been destroyed.

These creatures were not immortal. Our rallied forces advanced toward the summit, where the second descendant fought five of the travellers' back, and the third guard of the portal while the hovering gemstone gathered its power, the air lensing around it like a well of tremendous gravity. Silence! Once, rasped the second descendant in a thousand scraping voices. It loosed a telekinetic shockwave that slammed into the travellers with a vicious crack, and knocked them back across the bleeding earth.

You are not our prey, mortals. You are the recipients of our gift. Open your eyes and let them burn upon the gates of paradise. The third ascendant raised its hand to the air, and the gem burst into an infinite blackness, spreading out across the frame of the portal until it was little more than a slate of utter darkness. But that darkness called to my mind,

drawing it in with an unshakable gravity as the world around us began to shimmer and blur. Time seemed to slow, and a horrifying sense of dread overwhelm me, until everything came crashing together at once. As though the island itself had been catapulted across the ocean at the speed of sound, the sky ripped back into a stellar void. With a deafening boom, a dread fortress shunted into existence from across the distant waters.

It was like an occult citadel of bleached white stone, set upon a backdrop of absolute darkness as the stars shuddered deliriously above, and at its farthest peak, a crescent of marble framed the full pale moon, burning in the sky as though superimposed upon the world. I beck in thee, Lord in white, rasped the ascendant. the wave of existential dread overtaking me. Wake our sisters for the treacherous flesh yearns to be tempered. The moon split open into a massive dilated eye that locked upon us with a ravenous hunger.

His iris stained with all the colours that broke my mind and burn my skin for even existing in their presence. Then it was like time stood still around me. Pebbles and dust began to rise above the ground as though suspended within unnatural gravity and as the terrain beneath me started to blur and sink into an inky viscosity the scourge of tiny ebony roots pierced the veil of reality slowly poking up through the hellscape that surrounded me

began to cry uncontrollably like my mind was suddenly flooded with emotion I wanted nothing more than to escape from whatever was coming but my brain was so overwhelmed with stimuli that I couldn't even crawl away if I wanted to The other soldiers and breach fire teams started to charge the portal, clutching the objects that would seal it forever, but it was useless. The air itself seemed to rush into the third ascendant, and with a deafening boom it loosed a psychic shockwave of staggering power,

surging toward us in the blink of an eye. Yet, in that moment, Sprite swept down before us and summoned a shield of flickering energy. The shockwave hit, and the other fireteam, were instantly disintegrated, made gore splattering across the earth. We, however, were unharmed, save for Sprite, who laid motionless upon the ground. He was gone. I stumbled back, rivers of blood flowing beneath my boots, while Jeffreys looked down at Sprite in shock. The second ascendant exploded nearby with a deafening boom as the travellers overcame it,

nearly knocking me off my feet. But the final ascendant, was still alive. Irrelevant, it said, unbothered by the death of its kin. One of the remaining three travellers tried to slip past it and seal the portal, but the ascendant snatched him out of the air with its mind and ripped the soul from his bones,

devouring it with a rasping hiss and tossing the empty shell of his body to the ground. It turned to us, then, raising its hand and paused in a brief moment of recognition. I knew, in that moment, moment that it was the one we'd spoken with. Fear not, it whispered through my thoughts. Death is not the end.

Middle loosed a psychic shockwave and Barry vaporized right in front of me. His blood splattering against my armor as I was knocked to the ground. And every bone in my body shattered instantaneously. I screamed in absolute suffering, the taste of blood flooding my mouth. mouth. It hurts so much that it was almost numbing, and nearby I saw Jeffries in the smoking ashes. His armour had been blasted away, and his wounds were gushing blood, but he'd been knocked aside by the blast, and was still well enough to move. He crawled to his hands and knees, looking over at me with tears in his eyes, and with a single, uniform purpose, he snatched

Barry's discarded comms, equipment off the ground, and sprinted toward the open portal. The ascendant never noticed. It was too occupied with fighting the two remaining travellers, sucking the soul out of one and blasting the other back in a burst of antimatter. My vision began to darken, blood leaking from my wounds. But the last thing I saw was Jeffreys, leaping headlong into the blackness of the portal and disappearing within. The void imploded in his wake, as though everything were collapsing upon a single point in space. And then the loudest sound I ever heard shot through the air. And the world went dark.

I didn't expect to survive. I shouldn't have survived, but I did. I woke up at what's currently passing for HQ, but now it's mostly just a holding cell for the bomb. Breach is dead. Everybody's dead, except for command. Nobody's told me anything. I can't describe the level of pain that I was in when I came to.

Physical pain is one thing, but I felt like I'd been hollowed out from the inside. My best friend was killed right in front of me, and I can't get it out of my head. It's like it's been burned into my mind forever. It's just so sudden. Jeffreys is gone. Sprite is dead. Only Tanner and I are left. Tanner's paralyzed and will never walk again, and neither will I.

I'm being kept alive by the things they did, to me but I don't feel like describing it. I don't feel like doing anything. I don't know. Other than that, I'm stuck here. Tanner and I are confined to a comms room and writing this out while we wait for any sort of signal from Barry's Navgear which Jeffreys took with him into the portal. I doubt that Geoffrey survived, but it's the only thing keeping the two of us going, keeping us distracted. Otherwise our thoughts can get a little too dark.

In any case, our mysterious benefactors are all dead. And as for the darklings, I'm not entirely sure what happened. There was one surviving traveller when I was knocked out, but I find it unlikely that he was able to kill the last descendant. And nobody's telling me anything. Even if he did,

they seem to be quite unconcerned with dying, so a part of me is afraid they see. still exist in some incorporeal form that only needs another body to possess. We don't know what's going to happen with the bomb either, but it's not like the travellers will be reporting back, unless it turns out that command was one of them. A handful of survivors were evacuated, along with any traveller tech that could be salvaged, and then we nuke the island with one of the crest cobalt bombs. You won't hear a whisper about it on the news, so don't bother.

But I'm guessing some sea life is about to die. Hold on. Something's beeping. It's him. I don't know how, but we just got a message from Jeffries. The brass is coming in here right now, so I'll have to go. But I will keep you posted. I promise.

Part 13. Coda. Here we are. Well, I promise that I'd be back, and I am, but, well, this is the last you'll probably. hear from me. I have a feeling I'll be going somewhere different soon, somewhere far away from here. Tano and I have received a series of messages from Jeffries, who as far as I can tell, was contacting us from inside the elemental. I don't know if I'm allowed to post them, but I don't really care. Not that I can make any sense of them anyway. Command's gone silent,

and nobody else will tell me anything. So, here they are. Entry 1 I don't know if you guys can see this or if I'm just typing in the dark but it says I've still got network access So I was to assume that these are my last words I'll keep writing for as long as I can still send these but I don't expect it to go on for very long Guess this means that we won or at least I hope we did Fane Tanner I hope you get the chance to read this

I'll miss you guys I'll miss Barry and Sprite, I'd like to think that they're in a better place right now, but I guess anything is better than here. Don't feel bad about what I did. It had to be done. We saved the universe, and you guys were a part of it, so don't ever feel guilty about what had to happen. Anyway, enough of the sappy shit. I guess I'm on your side of the fence now, Sprite. I can see why you left. I don't remember as much about this first part. I woke up face down on the ground, covered in something that looked like blood, but while I knew that it wasn't, it smelled like gasoline.

I could barely see, and every nerve in my body felt like it was on fire. My ears ringing until everything started to come back to me. When it did, all I could hear was the silence. It was so quiet that I could hear my own heartbees, every little movement that I made. I was in the place that we saw before the end, the lunar fortress, right? Well, I remember the brightness of every surface, like I was stumbling around on a coct citadel of the whitest stone I'd ever seen. These spied arches and pyramidal spires towering into the dark. Every sense I had was so scrambled that all I could do was wander aimlessly and follow my intuition.

I couldn't even think. It was like I was running on autopilot through a horrible fever dream. Looking back on it, I don't think that portal was meant for human beings, and whatever the transference did to me, I can still feel it. In the flashes, the sky was a void. No stars or anything. I remember finding my way to a beach, where the waves were just as dark, and I just kept my eyes locked on the moon, moving forward and never looking back. I was walking on the water, out onto an ocean of nothing. I don't know how long I was out there for, but eventually my mind started to come back to me. As soon as I was lucid, I saw a shore of pitch-black sand in the distance, and what looked like a forest beyond it.

My boots hit the ground and the ocean disappeared behind me. I was standing in the middle of the wood. The bark of every tree was like a petrified, ebony meat, spongy and cake with dry blood, but still somehow alive. Their roots were everywhere, crowding the earth like fleshy tentacles that twitched whenever I touched them. The sky is just a battlefield of violet clouds, all clashing into one another, like at that town in North Dakota, but so much more vibrant in every way. Well, it shouldn't be. I don't know where the light's coming from, but everything is covered in this purple glow that sticks to your skin even in the shade.

Like it's some sort of living liquid that doesn't want to let go. The farther I walk, the less the terrain seems to conform to any sense of logic. I watch what I thought was a tree disassemble itself into thousands of black centipedes and crawl away into the dark. There are plants that try and stab you if you get too close. Well, they can't pierce my armour, but they're dripping with venom and breathed fumes that make me hallucinate. There are three moons that drift through the sky, but in the corners of my vision I can see them watching me. I think they're following me and no matter where I hide

they're always waiting on the other side I'll try to ignore them while I rest and type this out but it's difficult when I'm not falling asleep for even a second in this place I'm starting to get hungry though I don't know what passes for food around here

but all right again when I've made more progress and I'll keep a close watch on the signal I'm not optimistic that I'll ever see you guys again but I have to try. Entry two. I met a cat, or at least I think she's a cat.

When I see her in the corner of my eye, her face starts to change into people I've known. I even saw Euthane. She told me to call her Cleo, and though I'm not entirely convinced that I can trust her, she's the best I've got. We're staying in a place called Bastion, a section of the woods that's been warded with ruins

that won't let you pass until you're off. and the list, as she says. She gave me a canteen of blood to drink because pure water no longer exists and a bunch of cured meat that came from something called a soil bore, which apparently live in all dirt at all times, or drill through your feet and up into your brain

if you don't wear boots or socks. I'm staying with Cleo in her cave, but we're not alone here. There's a guy that lives in a hut and carves little statues out of wood all day. Who won't tell me his name, or speak to me at all beyond claiming that he's been here before. Some kind of merchant that comes through and sells everything from swords to automatic rifles and plasma guns.

But you have to trade in fresh organs if you want anything. I'm not sure that one of my kidneys is worth a decaying matchlock. Last but not least, we have the northern Munin who lives in a tree fort. He looks like what would happen if a human was half transformed into a raven, crawling around on four unnaturally long feathered limbs with a dark beak sticking out of where his lips stretched and his cheeks split open to accommodate it he uses his tongue like a hand

and wraps it around the branches to hang from the trees for fun which is how I first met him and how I first pissed myself despite being terrifying to look at him he's a rather nice guy he says he's a raven knight and follows the teachings of something called Cayley but I didn't ask him to elaborate.

Everyone tells me about some sort of cataclysm that happened over a century ago that made the world what it is today. And even if the time frame is way off, the details seem to correspond with the severing of universes that originally ripped the elemental away from us. The only conclusion I can draw is that time flows much differently here. Nobody seems to know what the cataclysm was, only that it's happened before and will happen again.

which matches the life cycle that the travellers were talking about at HQ. I told Cleo about my whole situation and asked how I could get back to our universe, which she didn't seem to know. She told me that the only thing that might have that power is a tree called the Red Willow. Every time I think of the name, I feel like I'm being watched and all I can remember are those sigils we kept finding on our rocks, the ones that depicted a weeping Willow. I tried to ask Cleo what it was, but she wouldn't give me a straight answer. I'm going to try and find it, though, wherever it might be. I'll find my way back to you guys if there's even the slightest chance.

Entry 3. The signal's getting weaker, so I have a feeling this will be my final entry. Cleo gave me some provisions for the road, and I've passed you in with Munin, who seemed to want to help me. Or, more accurately, he's searching for his fellow Raven Knights and has no idea where to start, so he figures my direction is better than any. His memory isn't the greatest, but he tells me he was on an expedition to a city called Sonner, that his party was ambushed by the fallen ones,

who meet the description of the Darkling Legionettes. The others were killed and he survived, but apparently they were only a small group of a greater hole that he hopes to rejoin. Either way he wears a suit of armour, carries a rapier and moves faster than anything I've ever seen, so the protection is appreciated given that I don't even have a weapon. When I told Munin that I was looking for the Red Willow, something about it seemed to bother him. I asked him if he knew what it was, but he couldn't tell me much more than Cleo.

He said that it grew within a place called the Glade, but he wasn't sure how to actually get there, only that I should seriously reconsider finding it. I'm not giving up that easy, though. He says this world has a pull to it, where so long as you're thinking of your destination, you'll eventually find your way there. And now that I know where I'm going,

I guess it's only a matter of time. It's strange, though. Everyone I meet seems so afraid of the darklings, but it's been several days, and I haven't seen a single legionaire since I got here. I always had the impression that this was their world, but it's almost like there's some sort of half-remembered legend here. A story only told to scare people.

We're resting now, at the top of a tree. The ground isn't safe at night, and there are parasites everywhere that'll try to crawl into your mouth and take you over. We already had to kill a guy being controlled by them. Moonin told me to stop staring at the moons, which he called Apocalypse Stars. But I'm not going to seriously use that name. He said it was bad luck to look at them and people who do it too much tend to go missing. I've seen what happens to them and all he told me was that nobody knows. We haven't seen anything but the forest in a couple of old ruins,

but Moonin tells me that the air is changing and that he smells flesh upon the wind. He doesn't know what that means but I have a feeling that we're about to find out. Anyway, if the signal keeps up, I'll send another end. but I'm not counting on it. I'm hoping I can find a way back to you guys, and I'm hoping that you're all okay, and I'm not just sending these into space. All I can say is that it's been a ride,

and no matter what happens, I love you guys. The sacrifices you made to save more lives than you'll ever know. So never think that it hasn't been worth it. See you in another life. Jeffreys. That was the last message. That was the last message we got from him. I hope that means that the elemental is gone for good,

but I find it hard to be hopeful these days. I was keeping in regular contact with Tanner. He'd been living alone in his apartment after the comms line with Jefferies went dead. He was depressed about his legs, but he was coping, or at least I thought he was. He started telling me that he was seeing things, something about roots growing beneath the wallpaper

and beneath his floorboards, but whenever he touched them they felt more real than anything. The air reeked of gasoline, and when he looked out of the window, all he saw were violet clouds that warred and clashed across the sky. I don't know what the ascendants did to him, but he was convinced that none of us were actually on earth, that none of this was real. Personally, I'm not sure what to believe.

He was losing himself, and his emails were starting to become incoherent, but he was the last anger I had left in my life, the last person still keeping me grounded. And then he stopped writing. A few days later, and I heard that he jumped out a six-story window, snapped his neck on impact. Everyone ruled it as suicide.

When I was told, it was like the last part of me, it finally died. The last thing that was keeping me here. I'm not sure why I'm even writing this. I suppose I feel like I have to, but it doesn't really matter anymore. I woke up in the hospital yesterday. They said it was alcohol poisoning. I don't even remember how it happened.

I just ripped out my IV and walked away when they weren't looking. No sense in wasting other people's time when I'm just going to wind up there again. My day is just sort of blur into the next. And if I'm not sleeping, I'm drinking. And if I'm not drinking, I'll cry. Sometimes when I'm alone at night with nothing but the ringing in my ears All I can think of is what it would be like to shoot myself in the head To end this forever

I can see the roots beneath the walls This awful light keeps spilling through the cracks And all I can smell is fuel I don't know what's happening to me I'm at HQ but the air keeps getting thicker Like in breathing molasses nobody else seems to notice them well the only thing I'm certain of is that I don't want to go back to working for breach

and I'd rather die than be forced to do so the only thing that was keeping me sane was taken away from me and sometimes I can't help but think that I should have gone with them why do I deserve to live they suffered and died but I was spared I'm not convinced that there's even a point to it I got lucky, but I don't feel like it. I don't know. I just miss my friends.

And so once again, we reach the end of tonight's podcast. My thanks as always to the authors of those wonderful stories and to you for taking the time to listen. Now, I'd ask one small favor of you. Wherever you get your podcast wrong, please write a few nice words and leave a five-star review as it really helps the podcast. That's it for this week, but I'll be back again, same time, same place,

and I do so hope you'll join me once more. Until next time, sweet dreams and bye-bye.