SYSTEM/EXPUNGE - CHAPTER I
"War is not a state to be entered into lightly. If purity is the penultimate state that all Tenno strive towards, then that must be a doctrine exercised to its maximum in that which we were created for – battle.
The aim of the Tenno warrior-monk must therefore be to attain purity in war, for the two are one and the same. The blade is the extension of inviolate spirit; the rifle a manifestation of holy will. Be unto your foe as heat unto ice.
If any lapse is to be found in martial discipline and commitment, this impurity must be expunged wholly before it poisons the balance of the Focussed Path. Eliminate it. Annihilate it. A moment of laxity breeds a lifetime of heresy. This is the application of war in its purest form."
-Sunt'zu, Reflections on Tenno Martialism
Enormous security gatelocks, as tall as a man and then half again, groan. Fire-blackened steel buckles, crumples, and is blown clean off its hatches as easily as a rotten wooden door folds away.
Castellan Khanda, broader than two adult athletes, taller than the gatelock itself, strides through the gaping hole where a meter-thick slab of metal used to be. The light inside the courtyard finds him clad in the burnished smoke-and-pearl of an Excalibur warframe. The noble anatomy of a killer ripples lethally beneath the muscle-weave fibre of the suit.
Oudh and Himachal follow after the Seneschal, stooping low to fit through, their skull-close and eyeless helms in place. The Tenno are both Seneschals – lower in rank than Khanda, but no less deadly. They, too, bear the lethal physicality of the Excalibur. Hung from their warframes are ceremonial tassels and half-kilts; in the sickening wind, they brush against the silk gleam of armour shaped expressly for war.
"Here they come," grunts Oudh. He raises his tulwar into the ready position. The wickedly curved blade glints like glass in the pallid light.
The Infected slither out of the smoke, filling the air with their gurgling jackal-growls. Fast-moving chargers, quick as darts, run like wild dogs ahead of the shambling and tumorous leapers. Their multi-jointed limbs twist violently in ways that nothing natural can mimic.
"Meet them! Deny them!" Khanda orders. Even as Oudh and Himachal leap into the fray, he draws his own weapon from his back. The Orthos snaps to its full length and sings as it cuts through the air.
No light catches the Infected onslaught. It's as if even the sun is loath to look upon beasts as vile and unholy as these. Where they slobber across the dusty ground, shadows lengthen and yawn.
The Seneschals have buried themselves deep in the horde. They have time to empty just a clip from their Boltors before the fight devolves into a swirling, furious melee. Where the Infected scrabble and claw with the mad instinct of predatory beasts, the Tenno are a thin, pale line of deadly finesse.
Oudh's tulwar carves chunks of cancerous flesh with every swing. His swordplay is fast, graceful, precise; he bisects and portions the enemy like slabs of meat. Himachal, instead, has foregone the elegance of bladework for the sheer output of his Fragor. The massive hammer, ridiculously oversized, pummels bluntly into an assaulting leaper. The Infected burst into blossoms of ichor and tumour. He swings left with effort, then brings it about, using the momentum to catch the bulbous heads of three chargers in a downward arc. They explode in wrecks of ruined flesh. The atmosphere itself shakes in ruptured shuddering for a split second. Bodies are sent flying, burst like ripe melons.
Khanda is still running. He lofts out of the smog bank wafting about the courtyard, and plunges down into the screaming horde of Infested like a marble bolt. His Orthos tears into the press of flesh and weaves arcs of destruction at either razor-clean end.
The Infested are dying in their droves, but they refuse to retreat. They come on in waves like wolves. There is some sort of hive mind driving them, a ravenous pack mentality that gives them the unthinking savagery of a mob. When they fight, they fight as one howling, mad tumult. A leaper rushes at Khanda as he makes a wreckage of a charger's mouth, only to be cleaved in half with the backswing of his polearm.
The Tenno by contrast are warriors. Their heroic skill pitted against the worthlessness of their enemies, they fight individual wars in the broken, desolate courtyard. Lions, among wolves.
The Seneschals and their Castellan whittle down the horde, when Himachal suddenly swears. A charger has his right arm in its slavering jaws, and it drags him to the ground as it savages his armour. Other chargers begin to pile on, pinning him in place, until Oudh and Khanda sink their blades into their flesh and hurl them off.
As the last Infected slobbers and falls, Khanda pulls Himachal to his feet. "You're getting sloppy," he admonishes.
Himachal is not in a good way. The charger's maw has eaten straight through the fibre of the warframe, down to the Tenno's skin. Deep gashes and bite marks line the bare flesh that shows through the ruptured armour. The skin around the injury has blackened.
The Seneschal winces and clutches his arm. "The wounds burn, Castellan," he says as he retrieves his hammer. "But I acknowledge my laxity and will be sure to correct it."
Khanda nods. "Let's advance beyond the Elephant Gate. We've got hordes to clear."
Khanda digs his Orthos into the ground and takes stock of his surroundings. Soaring above the courtyard are two great stone elephants from which the gate takes its name, locking tusks in a feral dispute. Though they have remained relatively untouched by the fighting, the walls that line the rest of the patio are broken in places. Crumbled masonry sits fallen and forlorn on the ground. The sound of more fighting can be heard in the distance – other Tenno kill-teams, undoubtedly, going about the business of expunging the Infested from the city. Their transhuman genetic code shields the sanctity of their flesh from the parasitic claim that the Great Plague had laid on the rest of humanity.
The Great Plague. How bitterly natural the term sounds, he reflects. Just over four years ago, the Orokin bio-weapon had spread uncontrollably from the hinterland testgrounds to the cities. Its initial effect, whilst inconvenient, was hardly harmful – it turned cold metal and circuitry into steaming, organic piles of meat. It took over guns, vehicles, walls; anything metallic could be consumed.
But in time, as it had been intended to do, the virus evolved to eat living flesh as well. Originally intended to be employed in controlled dosages against the Sentients, it took on the dimensions of an epidemic but worse than an epidemic, an epidemic is coldly neutral, not possessed of a kind of endless, void-yawning malice+and started to spread.
"Did you feel that?" Khanda asks. Oudh nods slowly. He was about to sheathe his tulwar, but now keeps it clasped in his hand.
The plague eventually grew to target the Orokin genome, even quicker than it identified metal. Its horrifyingly quick evolution saw scores living in the sprawling cities +all of them screaming as they choked on their own haemorrhaging tissue, nowhere to run to, nowhere to escape, trapped in the meat-cage of their own bodies as flesh filled ears, filled eyes, filled throats, stewed brains and smothered tears+ succumb. Before long, millions had been transmogrified into the slavering bio-forms that Khanda and the Tenno had just massacred +which are but preliminary tendrils, exploratory, probing fingers, not even a fraction of the unbound, relentless darkness spilling in from the inky fringes of black space, so unimaginably vast that it regards humanity as a whale might regard a plankton before it gets wholly consumed in its colossal maw+
Himachal doubles over. He rips off his helm and retches onto the ichor-stained ground. Oudh and Khanda are driven to their knees, coughing and dry-heaving under the shockwave of the psionic blast.
"Get up, Tenno," Khanda is rasping as he struggles to rise, to meet whatever this new threat is. "Get up and form on me."
Oudh has caught the weight of a limp Himachal in his arms. "Castellan," he calls desperately, "Himachal is down!"
"I saw it," Himachal breathes. "I saw into its head…I saw everything…"
Khanda rushes to help support the wounded Seneschal.
"Wait," he says as he catches sight of the Tenno's helm-less face. "His eyes –"
Castellan Khanda has no time to complete his sentence. The Elephant Gate erupts in a colossal explosion of crumbling stone and masonry dust, sending chunks of marble and limestone sailing into the courtyard.
to be continued