Chapter 11: All that we are, all that we need, They're different things
"No supplies. Armor in tatters. But the refugees had asked for help. And she had given her word." - Tale of the Six Coyotes
Morning protocol: Wake up, check surroundings, check gun, check Void-tripwires, check radar, get something to eat. Particularly in that order. Therin wolfed down what remained of the previous day's nutrient bar and stretched. The calm of the exotic, alien environment was getting to him. He felt better rested right then than he had in years.
"That's kinda sad."
"True though," Therin muttered. "Now... best get some exploring in. Gotta look for the guys. Any signal?"
"Not really," Smudge admitted. "Can't pick up on the Kaliks-Fel at all. They're... far, maybe. I'm not sure."
"We came through-"
"We fell away. The Skiff pretty much came apart, remember? We fell, Therin. We're... I don't know."
"But Grayris fell too," he pointed out. "And Gaelin. I think."
"I'll try to get a call out. If either of them still have their radios, they'll hear it eventually.
"Good, right." Therin nodded, mostly to himself. He stood and stretched, fighting the groggy ache of having recently woken up. His body was a battered, exhausted thing put through far too much hardship to be healthy, but there was still so much to get done. "Anything from the drone?"
"Not much. Last ping said there's lot's of vegetation further inland. Nothing extra unusual yet."
"That's... yeah, that's good too."
"Suppose so." Smudge huffed noncommittally.
"Well, it means no one lives here."
"As far as we know. The Crow hasn't exactly mapped the entire world yet - just a smidge of it, and even then only cursory scans."
"You want to make me nervous?" Therin groaned. He yawned and pulled his hood up over his helmet, Symmetry pressed against his chest. Everything else - sleeping bag, canteen, heater - was dragged into transmat.
"Keeping you alert, is all."
Oh, he was alert. Not a minute went by that Therin didn't scan his horizons for the barest glimpse of something predatory. Fear and paranoia were constant traveling companions of his - useful in some cases, needlessly exhausting in others.
Such was his focus on gaging any living threats that he almost missed that which his mind automatically scrubbed off as 'unthreateningly not-living'. The rest of his brain caught up a moment later, and Therin's eyes snapped back to the idly twitching form of the cat-mantis half a klick away, back to where the red grass ran in great swathes at the bone-trees' expense. It was poking at something with its grasping arms.
Therin quickly walked over. As he neared, the upsized mantis splayed its arms out in a threatening manner; it wanted to keep what it had found. But Therin wasn't in a mood to humour the creature. Not again. "Move on," he gruffly ordered.
The not-mantis flexed its mandibles, not unlike an Eliksni warrior preparing to strike, yet the knee-tall animal had no shock blades or shrapnel launcher to speak of. Therin put a hand on his hip, unimpressed.
"Move or I'll make you."
It hissed a third time.
"Right, now don't say I didn't warn you." Therin pointed at the space in front of the small predator. A thread of Arc struck forth, leaving a sooty mark on the ground. At that the mantis wisely, and not a little begrudgingly, dropped its aggressive stance and slunk off back into the tall grass.
Leaving him with a motionless lump of fur and leathery skin.
Therin picked up a tiny rock and tossed it at the maybe-dead animal. No reaction. He sighed, the sound lost to the emptiness of the primal landscape, and nudged the thing with his boot. Nothing happened. Bolstered with confidence that yes it's dead, he turned it over.
He wished he hadn't.
The creature was hideous in death. Probably just as hideous in life too. It looked, however vaguely, like someone had sculpted a bat into a more human-esque form. The fur was short, choppy, and utterly filthy. Where it faded away to bare skin, a pallid and mottled surface was revealed - particularly around the neck and arms. And oh, the arms; they spread out with too-long fingers with stretches of thin brown skin between them. The legs were attached to the end of the wing flaps, but they were longer and more dexterous than those of any Earth-born bat - the knees and heels were in the same place as they would for a human. It even had the same number of short, clawed toes.
The worst of it was the head. The face. Like a monstrous un-child. It had a squashed cranium complete with a flat, piggish nose and a wide, thin-lipped mouth from which jutted a myriad of yellowing fangs, teeth with tiny black channels behind the enamel reaching towards the tips. Ingrained venom glands, maybe.
The ears were large and backswept, though torn as if the creature had been in a savage scrap right before its death. Scars crisscrossed its entire body, and a single jagged bitemark ran over its pinkish throat. Therin stared at it, disgusted and intrigued in equal measure. It was a thing of dark dreams, and yet it was... too mammalian for his liking.
"Convergent evolution's one hell of a thing," he muttered, remembering an old Warlock lecture he'd had the misfortune to be cornered to. Oh, how she'd harped on and on about how strange it was that almost every dominant sapient lifeform - or at least those known to humanity - assumed a humanoid form. Just went to show how powerful the bipedal stance was.
Well, the creature before him definitely had a humanoid form. The legs were too well built for a flying rat. It could maybe have stood up to his naval, again not unlike a child. And the face...
Traveler above, the face.
Therin came to the abrupt conclusion that he didn't want to know if the thing before him was the resident native sapient of the very world he stood upon. It was so... wrong.
"This isn't... natural," Smudge murmured.
"I know, it looks-"
"No, it's... Let me have a look."
Therin swept his head around and, having found nothing nearby appearing even remotely threatening, held out his hand. Smudge materialized and flew over to the dead creature, a blue flash of light shooting from her eye and roving over every inch of the corpse. "This..." she started to say. "This is broken. This... oh no."
"What?" Therin pressed, sensing something was amiss - aside from the obvious, that was.
"Therin, this..." Smudge turned his way. "This... this used to be a human."
Oh.
Oh no.
"Oh fuuuuck," he breathed out, eyes bulging. "What do you mean, it's human?"
"It used to be human! I don't... it's messed up inside, every way possible, but the DNA is human! Altered, mutated, warped, but this used to be a person!"
"Wrathborn?!" Therin demanded, almost hysterical.
"No, it's..." Smudge looked the thing, the mangled person, over again. "Something changed them. This... this wasn't natural. I'm... yeah, there's... oh, this is sloppy work. They didn't care that this was a person. This... there's some traces of a weak acausal force. Maybe paracausal - but only just. Not Light. Not Dark. Something else. This is just..." Smudge whimpered. "There's no order to this, just... some vague idea. A shoddy job, more for the notion of having done it than any true result. This is torture. This is... this is chaotic."
"How'd they die?" Therin pointed to the torn throat. "That?"
Smudge paused. "They were dead a long time before that," she admitted. "Brain's all... messed up. Nothing left but anger and rage - so yeah, maybe not all that different to a Wrathborn."
Therin looked around again. "We should move."
"What about-"
"We're moving, Smudge. Now."
He'd made it all of five straight miles before Smudge interjected and said, "Stop. Wait. The Crow... crap."
"What?"
"Something's hit it. It's going down, seven klicks... that way."
Therin drily swallowed. "What do you mean, it was hit?"
Smudge hesitated. "Impact. I don't know; sounds like its central heuristics were jostled. What are we doing?"
"I don't think..." Therin trailed off.
"It's good tech," Smudge grimly pointed out. "Reef-tech. We won't be able to make another."
"Dammit," Therin cursed aloud, hissing through his helm's rebreather. He clicked his Symmetry's safety off. "Fine. If this goes bad, I'm blaming you."
"That's more than fair."
"And if there's something there - something bad - we're heading the other way."
"I'm not going to argue that. Look, we can turn around here and now and I won't complain."
"You made a good point," Therin sighed. "Look, let's just take a gander, grab the bird if we can, get the hell out if we can't."
The Crow-drone they found at the bottom of a bubbling creek. Wings twitched and legs kicked at the air just above the water's surface, still in its death throes. Its head was missing - torn clean off, looked like. Therin scanned the place, ran thermal detectors and pressed cheap motion sensors against the bark of nearby fungal trees before drawing a veil of Void over himself and darting out towards the trickling stream as little more than a faint distortion in the orange evening light.
The cut was more than clean, Therin noted just as he closed in. It was perfect, as if someone had taken a monomolecular edge to the small robot in midair. And that, he knew, meant that it was no accident - Crows were too smart to fall prey to simple geographical dangers, and no wild beast could kill so smoothly. The sabotage was the work of an intelligent creature.
Not so alone then.
"Smudge," Therin whispered, crouching low and tightening his hold on his rifle. "Have we anything-"
"Not that I can tell. No motion, no heat, nothing. We could just be alone."
"No. This stinks of bait." Therin shied away from the water's edge, careful that each step he took didn't indent too deeply into the soft earth or flatten any length of coarse red grass. He moved as silently as he could, pulling the Void blanket and forcing more and more Light into it to reinforce his ethereal cover. "If you were an ambusher, where would you be?"
Smudge grunted, "No great sightlines; no sniper at range, I'm thinking. Something closer, to watch the creek - and the Crow. Tree-cover is dense, so even medium range is... If there is anything, it's close."
Therin turned around and around. "I can't see anything."
"Bushes?"
"Maybe, but... I don't think so. Easy to be snuck on in a shrub. No one likes that."
"Then-"
"Up," Therin realized, and glanced above. "... Ah. There you are."
It was a shadow. That was all he could see - a stray shadow, almost entirely hidden among the fronds and brain-fruit of the fungal-trees, perched between a crown of thick bone-coloured branches. Motionless, indistinguishable, but Therin's Hunter instincts kicked in - and he knew it was something else, something at least approaching alive. Not like any of the native beasts he'd come across before, either. None of them had displayed any gift for this kind of level of subterfuge.
"It's watching," Smudge noted.
"But not us. It can't see us."
"How do you figure that?"
"Because we're not dead."
Smudge said, "Ah. Well then. What now?"
"I'm... curious," Therin admitted. He smiled thinly, unseen by all but his Ghost - but then, that was the point of being invisible, wasn't it. "Want to spring the trap?"
"You're nothing but bad ideas, you know that?" Smudge groaned. "Yeah, why not."
"Here we go."
Therin knelt down, looped his fingers around a stray pebble, ran his fingers over its smooth surface... and with a brief diversion of his thrumming Void Light, forced it to reappear over the stream by the downed Crow and quietly plop into the water. The effect was instantaneous; the shape above dashed out of cover, swooped down in a blur of green and black and silently leapt towards the creek - almost faster than Therin could believe. It stopped by the lip of the bank, dead quiet, and stared first at the pebble, then craning its head all around in obvious suspicion.
What struck Therin most was that it was humanoid. Not just humanoid in the fashion that Eliksni or Cabal were; it was humanly humanoid. More, even, than a run-of-the-mill Psion - it had a physique scarily like a human being. Long-limbed and slender, tall as well - but not crazily so, like most alien races were prone to be. It had two arms, two legs, each of which had an elbow or knee in the spot he expected them to be; it had five long, thin fingers on each of its two otherwise normal-shaped hands and it had feet - hidden as they were within sabatons. The entire creature was clad in strange armour, for that matter, obscuring its more telling features beyond its basic frame.
It wore a light synthetic bodysuit complete with rigid plates of some odd resinous material, not unlike City-grade plasteel crossed with - and Therin hesitated to even think it - bone or chitin. Said plating was largely smooth and even at a glance looked flexible, but was occasionally dotted with strange, almost organic-esque blisters and rises that may have housed the components of some internal technical system. A strange, twinkling ruby hung from the left breastplate of the creature, built into the plating with the utmost care. Other than that, their entire suit was coloured green - save for some stray black or, even more rare, yellow accents.
The creature's helmet was tall and swept back, with a crest of loose tassels falling from the tip behind it to hang in the air. Two blood-red visor-eyeholes stared out at the world, polarized at least on the outside. Two strange bulbous contraptions blanked the bottom of the helm on either side of where the mouth would have been on a human and pointed forward - an extraneous sensor, perhaps, or even a somewhat hidden weapon. Its other weapons, held tight in both hands, were far from subtle, however; one was a long jagged-toothed sword and the other a dark pistol built of a material at least superficially similar to that of the alien's plate armour.
"Therin," Smudge whispered.
"Yeah?" he asked, scarcely managing to breathe. His heart hammered in his chest; the thing before him radiated a cold killer's efficiency, coupled with an unearthly physical capability. It moved with an almost felid grace, and carried all the unassumingly-suppressed power of a great wildcat.
"There's another one behind you."
Therin slowly, painstakingly, turned his head - and indeed there was, just a few feet away, another green-garbed alien staring at him. No, he realized with a trace of relief - through him. At the small, porous pebble only just landing at the bottom of the shallow waterbed. It wielded the same pair of weapons, held them in the same familiar grip that the first creature had, and it stalked forth with a wraith-like effect towards the other. Therin leaned back, wanting to get out of the way but knew that if he took a wrong step - or any sort of step, for that matter - they would realize he was there. Something about them struck him as being predators bearing the finest of senses - and why not, if they moved so quickly, so fluidly, so purposefully?
Predators, the both of them. And he could very well have become their prey - if not for his deceptive Light.
Still, the second one was closing in and was sure to brush against him, and still he didn't dare move. He couldn't risk it, couldn't-
The second stopped. The first, on the edge of his vision, perked up. They turned in the same direction, to their right, in perfect synchronization and shot forth - bounding mutedly over the creek and disappearing once more into the forest.
Therin waited for a few seconds, then let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding in.
"What are you waiting for?" Smudge suddenly cried out, making him flinch. "Follow them!"
The Crow's remains disappeared in a tiny flash of transmat. Therin softly exhaled, anxious and exasperated in equal parts, and he took off after the alien pair.
The forest flashed by. The aliens were fast, tearing through the woodland like sharks having caught the scent of blood, but Therin pushed himself to keep up - and he did, always trailing behind on the periphery of the two warriors, his own muscles enhanced with heightened Awoken reaction-times and Light empowerment. It was times like these that he felt sorry for Norovoi all over again; a bitter, cold and outright violent woman she may have been, it never stopped him from thinking... no one deserves to lose this. He was stronger and faster than a baseline human, than even a trained Awoken soldier, and he could go on and on for far, far longer. All the better to fend off the Traveler's many enemies, he supposed.
How well had that turned out?
"Wait," Smudge said after a time. "I'm picking up on something."
Therin slowed to a halt. The aliens, he noted with some suspicion, had done the same - barely visible through all the vegetation and halflight of dusk, crouching by the edge of where forest gave way to open meadow.
"Radio chatter," Smudge explained, almost giddily. "It's secured, and coded, but it's there. Radio!"
"Which kind? Any familiar signatures?"
"I... I don't know. Not ours, anyways." Smudge hummed suddenly, troubled. "It's building up, getting closer."
"Maybe we're not the only ones they want to ambush."
"Yeah, maybe... ah. It's reeeeaaaally ramping up, too. Distress signal. Oh, so they know they're in a bad way."
"Any idea what we do ne-"
A roaring crash from above stole away Therin's line of thinking. His head snapped up; fire billowed ahead, somewhat above the tree-line, and something massive, something grey splashed with pink, crashed down onto the ground beyond the forest. The noise didn't stop there - he heard shrill screaming, the bark of heavy gunfire, the twang of energy bolts, the shhick of bladed metal tearing through the air and the bloodcurdling warcries of some inhuman creatures. Not a moment after the din had begun, another sound ripped through the air - a cacophony of pure noise, loud enough that even Therin, so far out of the way, cringed and made to cover his ears. Smudge hastily dampened his helm's audio-receivers.
"WHAT was THAT?!" he yelled into his own mind.
"I have no idea," Smudge replied, obviously shaken. "Something's happening. There's fighting. Wha- Look, your guys!"
Therin glanced at the green-clad aliens - and found them slinking out into the open, quietly flanking around the massive object torn from the sky and charging into the fray. He moved to follow on automatic, delicately stepping through the forest even as what sounded like a veritable war was being fought outside the confines of the woodland, and peeked out beyond the flimsy safety of the treeline.
A ship. That's what had fallen; some sort of blocky factory-built gunship, resplendent with strange flowing designs on its hull and four small broken wings. It had crashed at an angle, a rent torn in its side, and from that wound staggered out giant humanoid warriors clad in massive suits of heavy pink-plated armour. They wielded sword-like chainsaws, colossal pistols that thunderously spat forth massive brutal shells of immense killing potential, and some of them eschewed those in favour of huge portable speakers - the kind that spewed forth sonic energy with such velocity that it shredded the earth bare and tore the armour and flesh from the bones of any unfortunate to stand in its path.
And there were many that did so.
They were under attack, the giants, by other humanoids more like Therin's green assassins - but clad in different regalia, bearing vastly different colours and garb, though they all apparently worked in tandem to pull and tear at the pink ranks. Three charging figures in bone-ivory and bearing impressive red manes behind their terrifying helmets leapt at the giants with long, slim swords - eviscerating one titanic soldier, and crippling another before more turned to face them. The slim fighters screamed - with such magnitude that some of their assailants went rigid and froze on the spot, but not all. A speaker-wielder bellowed with ecstatic laughter and unleashed a barrage of violent noise, reducing two to frayed gore on the spot and merely bringing the furthest one to their knees. They clutched at their head in agony, right up until one of the pink soldiers grabbed it from them and crushed it in their hands. Red blood seeped out from the cracks in the otherwise pristine white helm.
That was only a fraction of what was going on. Vehicles like overbuilt Sparrows tore through the air, led by a red-robed figure, and cut deep into the loose, shocked formations of the pink warriors. A pair of slender aliens darted down on hovering boards resplendent with inbuilt blades - hooking long glaives into their foes, tearing at limbs and necks and then shooting away, bearing wide grins on their... their human-esque faces.
They looked human. Oh, there were differences - but the kind Therin reasoned could have been a result of diverging neohuman adaptations, like his own people and the Jovians had. They had noses, a mouth, two eyes and two ears - though the latter were pointed and their eyes angled. Lush hair tied tightly in uniform braids and bindings trailed behind them, one being blond and the other having dark blue - possibly dyed, possibly not. They were thin and slender, and both so finely built that he could not tell at a distance if they were male or female or neither.
Therin watched, clueless and transfixed, bewildered and utterly helpless - and took note as the slender humanoids, for all their strange differences with one another, began the painstaking project of dismantling the rushed defensive line of the pink ranks and massacred those within reach. It wasn't quite a one-sided fight, as the giants brutally murdered any of their assailants they could and with obvious relish too, but it was decidedly in the favour of the attacking force. Even the green-garbed creatures he'd first encountered partook of the bloodletting - cutting off a warrior at the edge of the fight almost unseen and cutting them into five separate pieces in the span of a second before moving on to the next.
The skirmish progressed quickly - if only for the inhuman speed at which the combatants fought and the unerring accuracy with which they gunned down their foes - and the ranks of pink giants began to run very, very thin. Then, though, another pink-clad warrior stomped out of the downed ship, carrying in one hand some strange bleeping device and in the other the neck of a struggling human.
A human. A man. Looking, for all the world, utterly terrified. And why wouldn't he be - the giant's horrific face was bared, somewhat human if for the lack of a nose, the dark horns splitting out of their purplish skin seemingly at random, and the long, barbed tongue dangling out of their fanged mouth. With a sadistic laugh, the giant lifted the human for all to see and crushed their neck - not break, but actually crushed it, killing the man on the spot. And then tossed the device in their other hand onto the ground in the midst of the savage melee for good measure.
The device bleeped one last time - and a mountain of metal spontaneously appeared out of a chaotic rupture in the air beside it, like the pink giants in that it was clad in heavy armour but for the fact that it stood nearly twice as tall, wielded in one hand a massive cannon that instantly sprayed down the area in front of it with oily flame and the other was bedecked in a huge, gnarled gauntlet bearing extended rending talons, and the whole thing was painted in blue and gilded with gold. Its head bore massive slanted visors for eyes and huge curling tusks from the front of its bestial helm. Lighting - violet, like the unholy progenyof Void blending with Arc - shot forth from its claws to sear and burn an unfortunate slender maybe-neohuman to death. Energy blasts, spinning bladed projectiles and more uselessly bounced off both its reinforced armour and some strange energy shielding, not unlike a ward built of possibly-paracausal energies.
Just like that, just with the appearance of the one (admittedly gargantuan) armoured tank-soldier, the entire momentum of the battle shifted. The pink warriors roared and rallied - and they charged with no care for their own survival, running or gunning down every neohuman in reach. The leading assailant, the robed figure, shouted something - a retreat, maybe, but a swipe of lightning from the titanic construct tore their not-Sparrow out of the air and cast them down to the ground. It turned into a slaughter real quick. Neohumans were massacred here and there, putting up a fight but having lost all cohesion. Even Therin's green warriors were put down, torn screaming limb by limb and dashed against the ground. One of the hoverboarders was snatched out of the air by the stream of the walking weapons platform's flames, and the other was beheaded by a stray oversized bullet - crashing down to the ground without ceremony.
Therin stumbled back, stomach turning. This... was not something he'd wanted to see again. People... dying. Flesh torn, burned, spilled out into the wide open world - no, nonono, not this again, not again, no more!
A blinking light stole his panic for all of a second, and when he glanced back, the blue-and-gold giant was gone - leaving the pink warriors to finish up.
And it wasn't just them alone.
Out of the darkening sky, shrieking, a swarm of winged creatures fell - without warning and to the cheers of the pink-garbed sadists below. They were identical with the bat-thing Therin had found earlier that same day, but most were... larger, and in differing states of mutation. Traveler above, some of them still looked human.
Down they swooped, screaming with animalistic fervour and darting towards neohumans living and dead - falling upon them with fangs, fangs, fangs, so many fangs.
No.
No, he was done.
He wasn't party to this.
Therin staggered back, heart racing, and gasped to drag in enough air to feed his panicked system.
Not again.
"Some of them are running," Smudge whispered, her own voice wavering. "The robed guy, I think... someone's dragging him out. Giants are giving chase."
Therin just braced against a tree and breathed.
"Therin! Therin, someone- People are dying. Therin? Therin! We have to..."
"I'm not-"
"We need to-"
"I can't."
"Therin!"
With a drained, hollowed huff, Therin straightened up despite the little voice inside him urging him to run, run far away and never look back. He double-checked that his rifle was loaded, and took off in the direction Smudge had indicated. Not because he wanted to, no, but because...
He didn't actually know.
All he did know was that there wasn't such a thing as paradise - and he was a fool for having dared to believe otherwise.
AN: Huge thanks to Nomad Blue!
