Unseen eyes watched the Landrover screech to a halt outside the gates of Kadary, raising a cloud of sand that obscured the sight of the strange crew that emerged from the vehicle. The guards of Kadary reacted to its arrival, which they immediately spotted due to the noise of its roaring engine, the occasional rounds accidentally fired from its main railguns, the yelled arguments in both Motavian and Palman, the drunken swerving path that it made across the desert and the fact that they had been told specifically to look out for a vehicle of that particular description and markings. Vehicles of such advanced technology were rare but quite often seen coming to and from the strange machines on the outskirts of Kadary that were suddenly so active. The Rogues tended to customise theirs with new paint jobs, this particular one being of a woman dressed in rather revealing Rappy-themed outfit complete with antennae and tail feathers, loudspeakers with a selection of theme music and added guns. Orders given to the gate guards were to allow the Rogues free access to the town but not to encourage them to longer, to keep track of their movements at all times and check the inventory of all the shops they visited for any suddenly missing valuable items. Mostly they only bothered entering the city to buy more supplies, to advertise for more work or to go to the pub. For reasons unknown to the town officials, the Rogues preferred Kadary over any other large settlement on Motavia when it came to plying their trade. Maybe the town's shady history made them feel dark and edgy, even though it was mostly peaceful these days, or maybe it was that it was sufficiently close to Aiedo to actively compete with the Hunters but there was still a large mountain and a tunnel infested with giant, aggressive blue slugs between the two Guilds if the much larger Guild did decide to take strong exception to their presence. Whatever the case, they were also rowdy when drunk, they had been known to steal from shops and there were suspicions that at least one of them was practising black magic, so it was considered one of the duties of the town guard to keep an eye on them.
Today, only one of the Rogues who stepped out of the vehicle headed towards the town gates after they had finished discussing their next move and bidding their farewells. The dark-haired young man with the shortsword didn't usually visit the town on his own. He was the second least experienced Rogue and the rest of the Guild were worried that some of the locals, who were often distrustful and hostile towards the Rogues, might see him as easy prey if they wanted to discourage them from visiting. His social skills were poor and he wasn't good at bartering so there was no point in him participating in the shopping trips or looking for work. Instead of looking nervous, however, he looked straight past the guards with a determined gaze, not even trying to excuse his presence, as though he had an important mission to run that couldn't be held up by bureaucracy. There was a look about him that made people step out of his way. Psychically sensitive people in the crowds, however, found themselves unable to stop staring at him.
There were certain individuals who even began following him to his destination at the other end of the city, although it was no simple charismatic attraction. They hadn't planned to be here today but other forces had been planning for them, strange visions, often in dreams, inspiration or sudden life revelations, arranging them to have subtle mental compulsions to come to Kadary. These were often twinned with sudden increase in ability in the use of psychic techniques but these individuals had known they possessed some exceptional innate ability in that area already. In fact, they often attributed their latent powers to the strange dreams.
Then there had been others who were trusted with the direct knowledge of why they were supposed to be in Kadary at this particular time. Most of them hung back, acting more subtly, or had also joined the Rogues and were thinking up their own individual reasons to enter the town.
While Azda was about his business in the town proper, Demi, the passenger they had been paid extra to escort, headed back to Nurvus. The rest of the Rogues returned to the current Rogue Headquarters to organise the Guild into what would be an ongoing campaign that required everyone to co-operate, treating any other assignments as secondary priorities to the new mission. They were being watched, too. While they were all of interest to the owners of the invisible eyes, two in particular caught their attention. The Wren android who had been so badly injured in the last battle already began preparing himself for the next. Demi had used her unique repair functions to fix the most obvious of his damage, then loaned him some tools to finish the job once he was back in the workshop. Still, there were some more delicate parts of his circuitry that would take a little time to repair. His role in the upcoming battle would not be one of direct combat, however, although there was always the chance he would need to assist in their efforts to protect him on the way there. Hacking a hostile machine complex and overriding the malicious orders yet again would be dangerous, not only because of the physical defences, but because of the risk that he, an older model that still contained parts created during Motherbrain's era and therefore at increased risk of hacking, might be controlled in return if the job went really badly. A Wren-class android working for the enemy would be disastrous but he was the only person who could have possibly pulled off the operation.
To the silent observers, he was not the most interesting person in the Rogue Headquarters. Digo, bored of the tactical lecture that his trainer was giving him, had drifted off. The place where his mind went to when he drifted off was particularly vivid today.
Meanwhile, other eyes on Dezolis were watching the tall Esper and the grey-haired man operating the mechanical giant as they fled from the mines. Before they reached the entrance, the shuttle had arrived on the icy plateau, making a difficult landing without a proper docking bay. The heavily armed android who emerged from the shuttle door then headed into the gap in the wall to clear a path for them. An hour later, they emerged together, leaving a trail of destruction behind them. The restored Cooley-61 rained down volleys of missiles upon the rogue machines while its twin electrified claws swung like the scythes of two Grim Reapers, tearing through the deranged, diseased rabbits that had been waiting in the darkness and growing in number. Wren's Photon Eraser flashed blue and unleashed a photonic pulse at an Aerotank that had tried to drop on them from a shaft overhead, punching a hole straight through its armour and out the other side and deactivating it instantly. After they had emerged from the mine, the stranger sped off down the hill to the town while Wren and Rune returned to the shuttle.
The eyes kept their attention on the man with the ancient machine as he approached the gates of Reshel. The townspeople had not seen the robot before and the guards instantly drew Laconian swords in defence of their town. He drew back the cockpit to reveal his identity, then pointed to the hill and told them to start gathering weapons. Someone began running to Meese to warn the Espers and get a message sent to the Temple.
He had seen them before but they chose not to reveal themselves to him right now. They had their own part in this. They flocked into the central chamber of the network of natural caverns underneath Dezolis that were their homes, each taking a place around the central raised dais where their leader curled up in meditation. Their thoughts reverberated around the cavern as they psychically linked themselves together, their mixed excitement and apprehension vibrant and difficult for them to dampen out of respect to its volume in the heads of the others. Their leader, the Old Man, projected a formless mental signal that caused the front of the hollow dais, its seam too tight to spot its existence, to rumble away, revealing their secret that had been hidden for millennia.
Apart from their own comfort, there had been another motive for them to hide away in the warm, dry caverns that were easy to defend from the few predators. Nowhere else would be suitable for them to store their treasure over such a long time. Each of them picked one of the small, smooth, acorn-shaped nuts and placed it inside the Laconian pot they wore on a Laconian chain around their necks. It had been a long time since the most famous of their species had struggled to unscrew a bottle that had been tied around their neck by a Palman hero of similar legendary stature. By now they had evolved solutions to problems like that, and had survived a lot worse. Now was the time for them to show how much they could contribute to the defence of their solar system.
Their baskets filled, the cats formed a line and walked in a slow procession towards the cave mouth before heading out across the wide plateau and onto Dezolis' highest hill, where the moon was about to rise despite the aberration blocking the sight of its passage through the sky.
At the same time, the Dezolisian priests and monks of the Temple paused in their duties. Each of them had felt something at the same time, an inspiration, a silent call, a strange notion. Their intense spiritual training meant that they often picked up the unseen phenomena behind Algol almost immediately and had these thoughts in unison. Most of them had already been praying for Algol's safety or forming a ritual circle and preparing protective magic to cover the Temple and their revered Bishop. They understood the import of the twisted light in the sky. While it was still referred to as the Temple and treated with the same respect, the original building had been destroyed in the last battle with such a gigantic threat to the solar system. Even with all the monks working around the clock together with a team of builders from the neighbouring town of Jut, they had no chance of rebuilding it to its former majesty in time, so they had to make do with a humbler chapel to protect the inner sanctum, the vaults underground where the leaders of the Church and the most holy relics were protected. The freshly unbanished Priest Raja always joked that he preferred the more modest building as it was less effort to cast protective magic over a smaller surface area. They had no time to rebuild now in any case, only to pray and to wait. And now to sing.
Every one of them, down to the youngest disciple, had been given the mental urge to step outside under the stars, raise their voices to the heavens and sing of times gone past, times that would remain immortalised by collective memory, a spirit that would only grow stronger through their unwavering faith. Some of them hadn't even taught the traditional songs that they were singing, some hadn't been told of the legends of the First Era yet, none of them except possibly the Bishop were old enough to remember the events that inspired the songs. However, as their collective voice reverberated across the ice wastes, they felt the veil of warm darkness, of eternity, of stories whose origins were older than the stars.
The light in the sky writhed, its tentacles lashing out at the sudden pain it did not understand.
On Rykros, Sa-Lews and De-Vars battled on. As one had been forced by the possessing influence to remove all limiters, the other had followed suit in order to have a hope of defending itself. To prevent the corrupted entity from trying to destroy Le Roof or making a mess of the scenery, De-Vars' first act was to drag him to a nearby flat basin of shimmering crystal dust, formed by a meteor that hit Rykros the last time the shields failed. The celestial archivist himself devoted all His spare power to preserving the integrity of its data banks against the presence that forced its will into the world through the gap where Sa-Lews was, threatening to fill Le Roof's data banks with a series of warped events and images that were of something wholly unlike the world that the minds of Algol's people could inhabit.
However, this was not his primary action. His mind was foremost engaged with transmitting a signal across Rykros, a spark of activation that would find any remnants of the fallen, almost destroyed fourth Rykrosian and bring Her back into full existence. He had been capable of doing so and possessed the authority, as the ranking Warden, for a long time now, but had been waiting for the most appropriate time, so that the enemy did not know that the option was available. Of course, most of the essence of the entity that had once been Re-Faze had been consumed by the Elsydeon when it had been struck by the blade in a desperate attempt to free it from corruption. The ploy had worked, but not enough of Re-Faze remained to incarnate them as the same entity again. Fortunately, quite a lot of the essence still existed in another form in the Elsydeon. Extracting it would be easy.
Extracting it without waking the Other would be more complicated...
(In the inner sanctum of the Esper Mansion, where the Espers were preparing to move out, the Elder felt a sudden surge of magical power and sensed an unusually strong psychic signal from the vaults. When he went to check, he saw the Elsydeon flare with a deep red aura.)
Red vortices of energy whirled, collecting with them wind, fire and stone, gathering them into an increasingly violent tornado until they could no longer be seen, until everything crashed together and then fused into its rightful place – a new body of darkness, flame and stardust, an entity born of the very essence of Algol.
"Re-Faze! An intruder is present that must be driven away," said Le Roof.
Spinning around on Her axis, the newly risen Re-Faze unleashed a beam of pure destructive psychic energy, a living Megido technique, from the ruins of the Anger Tower on one end of a mountain range to the arena-like clearing on the other.
Half an hour later, everyone in Motavia who had the potential to use Dark techniques was assembled in the old Church in Kadary. It had been turned into a museum and memorial centre so that the people of Kadary would know not to be corrupted by evil supragodlike entities again, presumably because they thought it might help, but everybody thought it was creepy so nobody visited it. The curators were satisfied by the explanation that it was a group of students as most of the visitors really were in the middle of studying at the Piata Academy when they heard the call. It was mostly the younger, mentally gifted generation who learned unusual techniques.
As they gathered, now a little unsure what they were doing in Kadary or what was happening to them, a too-bright cloud opened and a bolt of darkness hit the spire of the Church, sending energy crackling through the ground. Tremors shook the Earth as the magic that saturated it flowed up again in invisible wells, flooding the senses of the waiting crowd.
They realised just in time what kind of power had been unlocked within them by the sky and earth as the first wave of monsters were sighted by the lookout up on the watchtower, converging on Kadary. The monsters were truly alien shapes, so slick and strangely rendered in the physics of the Universe that they were almost gelatinous in appearance, glistening with a pale, sickly light, their features half-formed and asymmetrical, one limb a pseudopod with a mouth, another a short, stubby leg with a claw. Some flew on skeletal wings, others loped along at speeds they didn't look capable of. This was not the first time they had been sighted and bands of Hunters already sent to track them down. However, they now had purpose other than random killing and draining the life out of their surroundings by existing in a world that couldn't support them. Kadary was their goal. Drawn to their antithesis in order to consume it, they did not realise it was wielded by a myriad of intelligences who would use it to kill them.
In the sky, a flock of golden-furred, white-winged felines twice the size of jungle cats, never mind the house pets they had once resembled, spiralled towards the maw of the pulsing white void. Clear it of the invaders that came through but keep it open, had been the orders of their ancestors, whose spirits still lived on. Keep it open for the ones brave enough to fly through.
Meanwhile, the first voice of the falsehood had been heard, the Mother of the New Order, the false voice of Alis who would replace her. The minds rose up to defy her: the thousand year old man from Skure, the child Digo and the ageless Doran.
All the pieces were in place, the next stage was ready to start, so the eyes changed their focus again.
