Author's Note: Alright, I know that I am long overdue a fight, but I promise, this will be the last downtime chapter for the rest of the story, os for as far as I can see in the plotline. Anyway, I've a couple things to address:
Thank you to all for your comments, truly, I thrive on them, so keep reviweing and telling me what I'm doing wrong so hopefully I can do it right. As for the lack of battle and own-side losses, that will all be fixed in the next chapter, which will se an equal amount of soldiers being slaughtered on both sides, and Or'es will be taking a lot more of the heat as well, thank you Furios0, for rightly pointing my biased writing out. To Links, the Tau speech is rather hard to write (Though it's getting easier for me), and The Lone Hunter has also pointed this out, and has given me pointers on what NOT to write. If I make any more speech errors just tell me, all of the reviews will help me to improve my Tau writing capabilities.
Also, thanks to Gree and exitus10 who reviewed as well, all comments/reviews/criticism is greatly appreciated.
Chapter Four – A Disturbance
Tau'cyr M41 936.12_Kai'rotaa 1/6_Rotaa 64/80_/_Dec 0/10_Rai'kor 1:37_ Pathfinder Shas'Ui Vior'La Shaserra-Mission group 1_Log...
Shas'Ui Vior'La Shaserra sat watching the forest speed by as he skilfully piloted the Tetra through the dense forest of the Visceral Highlands.
"Shaserra, I've spotted something, five miles north. Take us to the green blip on your radar that's just appeared," Shas'Vre Vior'La Kayon said, having to raise his voice louder than usual because of the speed Ui'Shaserra was driving at. Shaserra silently complied, and began pushing the Tetra as fast as it could go.
Minutes later, Shaserra flipped the first two switches off, before flipping the last switch on; activating the Flechette Discharger. Climbing out of the Tetra, Shaserra took with him the black bag of equipment Vre'Kayon had instructed him to bring, along with Monat, the sniper drone of his Pathfinder team, activating it as soon as he could. The small drone with attached Rail Rifle hummed into life and began floating around the Tetra with Kor'ves, the Shield Drone of the Pathfinder team. Shaserra felt a light tap on his shoulder, and turned to see Kayon standing with his Pulse Carbine held in his hands. "You ready?" He asked, gesturing with his Pulse Carbine to his left, towards a large outcropping of rock on the hillside. Shaserra took his Pulse Carbine from its straps on his back and grasped it with both hands, before nodding.
The four members that made up Silent Whisper Pathfinder Team - Vre'Kayon, Ui'Shaserra, Monat and Kor'ves – all made their way east towards what looked simply like a large boulder, however was actually built into the hillside. The large entryway had moss covering the whole of one side, and the other side was blocked from view by a large cluster of trees.
The whole team swung round to the front of the outcropping, to inspect it closely.
One large, cave-like entrance faced the team. What used to be two doors was merely a heap of ten-foot tall rubble, covered in blackened moss.
"Kor'ves, inspect the area past the rubble, then return," Kayon commanded the shield drone, which complied, and hovered away into the darkness of the millennia-old labyrinth.
"Vre'Kayon, is there really a point to this? The end of the river is only three kilometres north, and we will be finished of having to wake up early," Shaserra complained. Kayon turned his head towards Shaserra, and even through the helmet, Shaserra could see the quizzical look he was being given. "I mean, we've checked over thirty entrances along this river over the past four days, and every single time, we fail to find any entrance that hasn't caved in, yet we still look. I mean take this for example: even the doors have been knocked down, what chance is there that the whole passage hasn't been blocked off?" Shaserra finished, and just at that exact moment, Kor'ves came flying over the rubble, to stop abruptly in front of Kayon. "The area beyond the rubble is passable," said the Shield Drone in the usual computerized AI voice.
"Quiet," Shaserra said, before Kayon could start speaking. Laughing, Kayon began to climb up the rubble, closely followed by Shaserra, with Monat and Kor'ves hovering overhead.
As they reached the top of the rubble, Kayon slid down the steep rocks to land lightly and roll at the bottom, while Shaserra remained atop the rubble. He activated his hardwired Blacksun Filter, and at once, the whole entrance became visible.
"It looked so much smaller from outside," Shaserra mused as he gazed round at the forty foot-high walls, lined with unrecognisable symbols etched into the stone. Fifteen metres ahead, a door roughly ten feet in height that was dwarfed by the massive entrance and walls sat open. Shaserra slid down to the bottom of the rubble and rolled, scattering small pieces of debris and dust as he did so. He and Kayon followed the two drones, who could see further into the small doorway.
They entered the doorway after Monat and Kor'ves, to walk into a small room with stairs at the other end. "Looks like we're going deeper," Kayon said plainly, before he and the rest of Silent Whisper Pathfinder team began the long descent down the stairs.
"Look, the stairs are ending," Shaserra said as he pointed to the abrupt ending of steps twenty feet down.
After fifteen minutes of traversing down the stairs, Shaserra and the rest of team Silent Whisper reached the bottom, where they emerged into a long corridor with a faint glow of light emanating from an archway at the end, sixty metres away. "You see that?" Kayon said excitedly to Shaserra.
"It just got interesting," Shaserra said, uplifted about finally having found something. Shaserra, Kayon, Monat and Kor'ves began the journey towards the end of the corridor, before Shaserra tripped on something, nearly losing his balance. Quickly straightening himself out, Shaserra bent down to see what he had tripped. He picked up a chest-shaped piece of metal and examined it. He squeezed lightly, and to his amazement, the metal folded inwards with his fingers. As he loosened his fingers, the metal reformed to the exact shape it had before. Dropping it noisily, a few gasps were heard coming from the end of the corridor, and the glow disappeared and reappeared as shadows flitted by the archway. Shaserra stood up as he and the rest of Silent Whisper continued down the ancient corridor, Shaserra and Kayon making sure not to trip over the pieces of strange metal.
As they entered through the archway, a voice from across the room halted their movement, "Stop right there, intruders. What purpose have you here?" Shaserra and Kayon stared at the five grey-robed figures crouched at the opposite end of the room, all wielding exotic blades and small firearms. Shaserra took a moment to look around the room; a waist-height, cylindrical structure sat in the middle of the small room, from which an eerie green glow was pulsing from; to the left side of the room, five bed rolls were laid out on the ground, all surrounding a wooden table covered with an assortment of items.
"Answer, I say, or we shall slay you for attempting to disturb our master's sleep!" The same voice urged with a tinge of panic present in his voice.
"I don't think I will be answering anything, Gue'la," Kayon replied menacingly in low gothic, just as Shaserra saw what Kayon had already noticed: the five humans' faces. Each of them had dark grey-coloured skin, metal in appearance, with sharp red eyes that flitted from Shaserra to Kayon incessantly. "What!?" The same voice said incredulously; fear now creeping into his voice as he continued, "You can't talk to The Protectors like that!"
"Of course I can. I'm not answering any of your questions till you answer mine," Kayon replied calmly.
"I will not answer your questions, you...you...alien-speaking filth!" The metal-faced man responded, before Shaserra and Kayon opened up on the five men with their Pulse Carbines, quickly joined by Monat, and protected even faster by Kor'ves.
The fight lasted all of five seconds. In the first two, Shaserra and Kayon had melted two of the men's chests into pulp, just as Kor'ves had instantly shielded them. In the last three, Monat had decapitated the leader of the group as the superheated plasma bolt passed through his head and rebounded off the wall, burning the last two closest two the wall, which Shaserra and Kayon had subsequently killed off with two well-placed shots to the heart.
"Well, that was enlightening," Shaserra joked humourlessly as he moved to inspect the table, while Kayon stood over the circular stone structure. "What do you think they meant by 'The Protectors'?" Shaserra asked, not turning from his inspection of the table. Kayon did not answer; he was mesmerized by the swirling green energy inside the well.
"Kayon!" Shaserra said, louder this time. Kayon was broke from his trance and began to join Shaserra in searching the table for anything important. "I...um, I don't know," Kayon began, for some reason a little dazed after staring into the pit of green energy, "Maybe there's something deeper they're protecting?"
"Well, that's obvious, but what you think they're protecting, and did you see their faces? What was with the metallic look?" Shaserra replied, half-interested in Kayon's answer.
"We have to continue, to see for ourselves what it is that the gue'la were protecting," Shaserra said as he turned to the only other door in the room, situated behind the five dead bodies.
"NO!" Kayon exclaimed, stopping Shaserra in his tracks, "We don't know what's down there. I'm not risking my life just to see what the gue'la were protecting, we're going to return to command and report what we found back to O'Da, we haven't been sent on a suicide run!"
"What are you talking about!? We've came this far, we can't just turn back now. We've spent the last four days searching the whole river for something and now that we've found that something, you're just going to walk away from it? Well I'm sorry, but I didn't come here to walk away from it like a coward, I'm going deeper," Shaserra said proudly, before turning round and moving over the dead corpses and through the doorway, deeper into the labyrinth, leaving Kayon with Monat and Kor'ves, standing dumbfounded.
As Kayon reached the top of the stairs, cursing and muttering to himself about Shaserra, with Monat and Kor'ves following faithfully behind him, what he saw shocked him to the core. Standing between him and his only exit, was a seven foot tall human-shaped machine, wielding a long, ancient pole with a bronze, curved blade at the top. A long tattered robe hung from its shoulders, brushing lightly against the hard stone floor. Unprovoked, Monat fired at the machine, only to have the bladed-pole penetrate its armour seconds later, before it reappeared in the machine's hand.
Kayon slumped to the ground, kneeling, and dropped his Pulse Carbine, before the scythe was flung at Kayon, sending him flying backwards and impaled him against the wall behind him, cracking his ribs as it held him against the wall. Gasping for breath, Kayon watched helplessly as Kor'ves was shattered to pieces by another machine that had recently appeared, sending a deadly burst of green energy from its similar-looking weapon to the other machine, to obliterate Kor'ves without any difficulty.
Kayon's vision began to fade as his futile attempts to breathe in air left him dying. He cursed as he realised that this was exactly what he had been trying to avoid by leaving, but instead, he was dead, and Shaserra was still alive. As he watched the scythe that pinned him to the wall disappear, only to reappear in the first machine's hand, he felt the painful impact as his head connected with the ground, cracking his skull with a crunch. The feeling of warm liquid against the side of his head soothed him as he slipped into unconsciousness, before dying in the entrance to the labyrinth, taking the secret of the labyrinth's occupants with him.
After an hour of aimless wandering, Shaserra was close to giving up. After having found nothing, Shaserra wished he had left with Kayon, to be back with the Kor'vattra, safe and warm in his private room. Instead, he was stuck in this damp, cold, impossibly dark labyrinth, with no means of leaving. The sound of small clicks resounding in a staccato rhythm startled him, and he immediately pressed his back to the wall as it turned sharply to the left. He waited a few seconds, before rushing round the corner and through an archway into a massive hall with large, green rectangles lining the walls. However, the green energy doors were not what caught his attention; instead, at the very end of the massive hall, sat a massive crypt, dotted with strange alien symbols. A flicker of movement in the corner of his eye caught his attention, and he swivelled round, pulse carbine aimed in the direction of movement.
All of a sudden, the sounds of hundreds of screaming beings filled his head, though he could see nothing as he spun round. He dropped his carbine to the ground and ripped off his helmet and began clawing at his head, trying desperately to make the sounds stop. Then horrible, gruesome images of dead carcasses, disfigured in many different ways, began to flash in his vision, over and over again, till Shaserra was nearly screaming. He couldn't take it, the images, the screaming, and to end the nightmare that was reality, Shaserra unsheathed his pulse pistol and opened his mouth, weeping vehemently as his mouth closed round the barrel of the pistol as it pressed against the top of his mouth.
A pulse pistol shot rang out in the silent labyrinths.
Author's Note: Were you expecting this? I was. It was funny because Furios0 made his comment just after my first draft of this chapter, in which I had Kayon killed the same way as he is in this final edit, and Shaserra was stripped of his body and encased as a dull Necron warrior, where I could actually write from a necron perspective without it being completely null of talk. However, this option - I think - seems to suit Furios0, and with the part about Shaserra becoming a necron warrior, I knew that there would be subsequential reviews of endless flames and complains saying that that isn't how it is done. I have no way of knowing whether that can be done or not, which is why I decided to write that at first, though I came to my senses and edited it out in the later draft. I won't have any complaints about me merely mentioning this, as that really annoys me. It's not in the story, so I don't want to hear about it. End of story.
Anyway, the first battle of Battlegrounds: Awakening, takes place in
Secure...At Last
I know, it's a bad name, but at least it has some action.
