It was that weird dream again, deja vu. If it even was a dream. The mysterious asshole in Jian armour was there, as usual, but Iathiel doubted the guy was an actual Jian. Even if he did spout the same kind of babble he'd expect from a Jian.
The mysterious figure waved to him. "It has been a while since you have last been here, has it not? Is it perhaps the case that you have finally discovered the concept of a sense of self-preservation?" Iathiel said nothing, just thrusting his armour-clad middle finger in the figure's face as he stomped past toward the portal, safe in the knowledge that he wouldn't remember anything about this once he was alive again, except in the brief moments after his resurrector kicked in. Assuming this was even real and not just some weird necrocybermancy related thing. It wasn't out of the question.
He could see the corpse of the Mentor by the portal – not his mentor, to be sure, but one of the more influencial ones. Perhaps the most influencial, despite concerns about his loyalty to the Culter cause. Something golden to his right caught his eye, however, as he walked onward, and he turned to get a better look at it.
It was another corpse. That was definitely Culter armour, and heavy stuff at that. He stopped, moved closer to the second corpse, stopped again in shock.
Commander Rimanah's corpse? But the guy was still alive... wasn't he? Was he? Come to think of it, he hadn't seen the commander around much in... how many years now? Weren't there rumours going around about him having a mental breakdown, muttering constantly about cycles of guilt, enacting bizarre conversations where he gave himself orders and reports on missions that had happened oh so many years before...
He shook himself out of it. Probably just another weird thing that just happened in this... dream... or some sick prank by the mysterious guy. Wouldn't put it past him.
Iathiel walked through the portal and woke up in an overgrown, derelict concrete building with a blue sky above. Which, he reflected, was very strange because his last memory was of being cut down by a Federal gunship on Mars.
Althen and Tirren had been trudging along since daybreak, having decided to give sparrow travel a break. Sure, it was faster, but there was only so long you could sit in even the most luxurious sparrow seat before every part of your hips decided it had had enough, thank you very much, and multiple days in a row of that only made things worse. And anyway, this was the last leg of their excessively long patrol route, the last one that they had been assigned. Which meant that once they rendezvous'd with Devrim in Trostland and compared notes, they could be back to the Tower where if they were lucky they might manage to bag some Strikes and see some excitement for once. Excitement that didn't show up in the middle of the night and interrupt their sleep, anyway.
Their easy banter was cut short by a distant whine, the telltale signs of Fallen pikes in the area. Usually they'd ambush them, but today getting as far as possible was the priority. Not getting distracted by a few dregs on hoverbikes and whoever – and whatever – came to investigate all the noise.
Tirren pulled out his ghost, had it display a map. "Well, I don't know about you, but I feel like we might not want to stick to the roads for a little while." He gestured to the map and the winding road displayed on it. "Besides, the road here's really rather rambling. We could just cut straight across, through this bit of forest and past that old bunch of warehouses, save ourselves some time and effort."
His ghost piped up with concern. "I don't know that's a good idea, really. Groups of old buildings like that tend to attract some nasty customers. If we're lucky it'll just be Fallen storing their pikes there, but we could run into a bunch of those spider tanks or a full-blown Taken infestation."
Althen shrugged, a motion exaggerated by the heavy pauldrons of her Titan armour. "Nothing we haven't handled before, right? And if worst comes to worst we can always just charge out the other side and pick them off as they chase us. If they even bother to chase us. Mark my words though, we're not going to find anything that really surprises us. I feel like we've seen every kind of weirdness the EDZ can throw at us already, and the worst of it is behind us." Tirren's ghost chuckled nervously.
"I resent the attempt to tempt fate a little, but yeah, there's not much can go wrong here." Tirren replied. "Besides, if it's pike storage or something, we can just leave a few little presents as we pass." The two Guardians strolled to the edge of the road and jumped down the embankment into the trees, the Warlock floating gently down and the Titan simply hurling herself off the hill, having her ghost patch her legs up a moment later. The pike patrol whined past a few minutes later and were none the wiser.
Iathiel, meanwhile, was still getting his bearings. He honestly hadn't seen much like the place he was wandering around now – it was far greener than anything he had seen, green green as well rather than the muted green of the fog that permeated some places. It hit him that this place simply didn't have any fog, he could see the sky clearly and looking at the sun actually triggered the failsafes on his cybernetic eyes to prevent damage. What kind of strange place was this?
Having wandered around the upper floors of the building enough and stared out through the many holes in it, he decided to head downstairs and encountered a minor problem. The stairs weren't there. Or rather, they were but almost all of them were sitting on the ground in a mangled, corroded tangle of metal. Iathiel sighed and pulled out his medkit, let it charge to a safe level. He'd never been a good judge of what was a safe height to fall from, but at least this didn't look like it'd be fatal.
It might not have been possible for his landing to be much louder. Even the lightest of armour used by the Secreta Secretorum's forces made a very distinct slamming noise upon hitting the ground, and Iathiel was not quite confident enough in his ability to dodge bullets to have been wearing light armour. Quite the opposite, he had been wearing the heaviest armour he could get his hands on to be able to last longer in the hellish crossfire of the Noctis Labyrinth. Landing on top of a pile of mangled scrapmetal only made the impact more loud and noticeable.
When the dust had cleared, Iathiel found himself facing a group of strange four-eyed creatures, staring slack-jawed at the black-and-gold avatar of destruction that had just dropped down behind them. From the looks of it they weren't creatures of the Meta-Streumonic Force – such creatures were badly detected by the EYE-vision implants he had upgraded his eyes with at the earliest opportunity, and these showed up only a little faint, suggesting their cybernetic augmentations were nonexistent, or pitiful at best. One with four arms and a rifle pointed at him and yelled something in a language he didn't understand, before scurrying away. Iathiel returned a one-fingered salute to the retreating creature's back as the rest, two-armed and carrying pistols and knives, began to advance on him. He reached for his BK13s and offered a prayer to the Secreta.
The gunfire was all too easily heard by the two Guardians as they passed the warehouses, skirting around the edges to try and get the lay of the land. Some of the gunfire was obviously Fallen in origin, but a fair amount of it sounded much more like... an SMG, perhaps? Althen brought out her ghost as they hurried toward the source of the sound.
"Whoever's shooting, it isn't a Guardian," the ghost stated. "I'm not seeing any Light from that area. They could be in really serious trouble."
Althen cursed under her breath. "What the hell would someone without the Light be doing out here? These warehouses are obviously bad news from first sight!" Tirren gave no response – he was busy reloading his hand cannon, a rather shabby looking one he had been given by the Future War Cult. It was called True Prophecy, and though there were no doubt better hand cannons to be had, Tirren always found himself coming back to it like an old friend. Something about delayed-detonation explosive bullets was surprisingly satisfying.
The gunshots from the warehouse quietened for a moment, and Althen's ghost whirled in worry. "We have to hurry, they might be badly injured by now!"
The exo Warlock snapped his hand cannon closed and readied a grenade, a whirling mote of Void energy coalescing in his hand. "Or, they're reloading. The Fallen are still shooting, and not everyone has fancy guns that reload themselves. Althen, how's your super looking?"
"Ready, but I'm gonna keep it back for if we really need it. For all we know, it could just be a bunch of dregs and vandals staying the night here." She replied. "I'm gonna go in hard and fast, give 'em a taste of a seismic slam and figure out where to go from there. Feel free to throw the 'nade in ahead of me, soften 'em up a bit."
"Wouldn't be a Titan if your answer didn't involve 'punch them so hard they explode' would you?" Tirren joked as they rounded the corner. "At least that means I don't need to worry about you running out of bullets."
The first warehouse was full of confused Dregs and Wretches with a Captain trying to get them organised. The Captain's shield protected them from Tirren's scatter grenade, but was obliterated along with their body when the Titan's oversized pauldron, charged with enough Arc energy to equal a grenade's destructive effect, slammed into their side as they turned to face the Guardians. The fight was short and one-sided, but the small warehouse was clearly not where the gunshots were coming from, and the Guardians moved on.
The fight was not going badly, Iathiel reflected. He had plenty of ammo, some opportunities to let his medkit charge, enemies who were hanging back just in case he had some trick up his sleeves... it would just be nice to have some more room to maneuver around in, and to know what these strange enemies were capable of. Some of them had tried to sneak up on him using cloaking tech a moment ago, but it wasn't much good as even when his EYE-vision ran out of energy he could clearly see the distortions caused by their cloaking. Still, he knew full well how dangerous an enemy with cloaking could be – too many Fed special forces had gotten the drop on him with smart usage of cyber-cloaking.
A particularly large one hanging back with a blue-ish shimmer surrounding it barked what sounded like a command and aimed a large shoulder-aimed weapon as the creatures scrambled out of its line of fire. Iathiel noticed this in good time, and quickly attempted to navigate through his cyberware's menus to get his dermal sheath online – that would protect him from... well, anything short of having a building dropped on him. Unfortunately by the time the weapon fired, sending a glowing orange ball of fire hurtling down the warehouse toward him, he had gotten the wrong option and ended up turning his sound triangulator on. He wondered why he had even bothered buying such a redundant piece of cyberware as he went flying through the air and past a container. After all, he had his EYE-vision, and figuring out where enemies were was only usually a problem when dealing with enemies with cybernetics.
Disoriented, ears ringing, he ran a quick maintenance check and picked himself up. It was about time, he decided, that he try a different tack. A good display of PSI-force mastery would do more to convince them to back off than his more subtle skills. He collected himself, readied his mind and set about looking for a suitable target to try the Madness PSI power on. Probably not the big guy with the shimmer – with an air of command like that, being weak-willed enough to fall prey to that kind of PSI-force would be unlikely. Perhaps one of the hooded ones with what he assumed to be some kind of shotgun – a weapon like that would wreak the kind of havoc he wanted.
The Guardians had cleared two more warehouses before they heard the noise somehow intensify further. First a loud screaming that couldn't possibly be human, then a cacophony of Fallen yelling in panic, the barking voice of a Captain audible over the chaos. Both of them stopped for a moment, trying to make sense of what was happening.
"What are they saying?" Althen asked after a moment, as they began moving again.
Her ghost piped up. "Mostly they're screaming about betrayal, friendly fire. The Captain's yelling at one of them to 'snap out of it', 'pull yourself together'... not in those words, but you get the gist." It paused. "Oh. One of them sounds even more panicked than the rest, thinks he's surrounded by... oh."
"Oh?" Althen replied. "This isn't a good 'oh' is it?"
Tirren slowed his pace. "It sounds like one of the Fallen just... snapped. Went mad, is having hallucinations or something. This is definitely not a good 'oh', nobody just snaps that badly at the drop of a helmet. Something caused this deliberately. Might even be the person who was shooting, there was a long pause before that racket started."
The Titan considered for a moment as they sprinted toward the building, which several of the less disciplined Fallen were now fleeing, paying little heed to the Guardians. "OK, change of plan. We go in, clean up the Fallen, and take stock of the situation. I want you to stay outside and fire in – you'll be able to get away easier if whatever's in there with the Fallen turns out more than we can handle. Don't know if ghosts can fix a broken mind. Besides, you have the kit for sending a distress signal."
The little PSI distraction had worked a lot better than expected. Iathiel had expected the creatures to just gun down their maddened friend once they started shooting at them – hell, even looters did that without much hesitation once they caught on to what was happening. What had happened instead was that the ranks of the creatures had collapsed into sheer chaos, Iathiel had realised that the shimmer around the big one with the launcher was somehow protecting it from both bullets and... whatever the strange, slow projectiles the creatures' weapons fired were. He briefly considered throwing another display of PSI-force into the mix, just to get rid of the big one's influence, which seemed to be all that held the ones still alive from fleeing outright, but some gut feeling (in what little organic gut he had left) told him to wait for just a moment longer.
It was at that moment that a massive glowing ball of... purple... came flying in through the door (which he couldn't see from where he was) and exploded into a swirling vortex of... more... purple? The creatures caught in it evaporated away, leaving no body behind, and those that got too close to it were sucked in to meet the same fate. He almost dropped his weapons as he stood there, trying to process just what had happened and how to explain it to himself. It was incomprehensible, and he had had far too much incomprehensible in the course of his service to E.Y.E. Then he realised how close he had been to getting himself caught in that maelstrom – using Dragon's Breath to... what was the term, 'telefrag'? the large creature would have left him without enough energy to use his dermal sheath. Hell, would even the power of dermal sheath cyberware save him from that?
Gunshots brought him back to reality. Proper gunshots, from guns that shot bullets, not weird seeking blobs of light. Some of them were followed by small explosions. Gunshots however meant guns, and guys with guns he knew how to deal with. Assuming they were hostile. He tightened his grip on the BK13s as the last of the creatures was finished off and a very obviously human figure in strange armour rounded the corner.
"Alright, stop right there and answer me. Who the fuck are you?" he demanded.
The strange voice took Althen by surprise. It was human, probably, but speaking a language she didn't recognise in the slightest. Her ghost, hiding away, didn't recognise anything about it either. Turning, she saw perhaps the last thing she had expected. A person wearing heavy black armour covered in golden trim, seemingly undamaged by the battle... no, swiftly repairing itself. Their helmet was mostly smooth, with glowing eye slits and what might have been a headlamp that glowed with the same golden light, crowned with a golden metal halo. It did not look like the kind of armour Guardians would wear – it was clearly intended to be worn all as one piece rather than mix-and-matched with other pieces of armour. She tore her eyes away from the armour and took stock of the weapons the strange person was holding... a pair of rather blocky sidearms, their blunt muzzles pointed steadily at her. Well, they weren't hostile at least... not at the moment.
She slowly and carefully lowered her shotgun, raising the other hand in a placatory gesture. "Hello, can you understand me? I'm a Guardian of the Last City, if you're willing to let us we can help you get to a safer place."
Iathiel sighed, and set his cyberware to work on finding any matches with... whatever the person with the shotgun had said. Hopefully it was just an archaeolanguage that had managed to survive until the present day somehow.
The standoff persisted for a couple of minutes more before the cyberware spat out a very close match with a truly ancient language. Shrugging internally, he called up a highly compressed file that when opened would give him enough knowledge of the language to converse, thanking himself for not deleting it after Cilufer the archivist had given him it (among many others) when he'd only asked to know what one particular word meant.
He tested out the new – or rather, old – language in his head a bit before speaking. "OK, how's this. Can you understand this? Right language? Wrong?"
The Titan was visibly relieved. She had been worried that the long pause had been the strange person deciding whether to shoot, but now it seemed more like he had been figuring out language... maybe he hadn't spoken this one in a while? "Seems like it. Listen, I don't know who you are but it isn't really safe here, not for someone without the Traveller's Light to resurrect them."
"Hm. Seems good enough. Right, let's try again. Who the fuck are you, and whose side are you on?" The armoured figure replied.
Althen was taken aback a little. "Well, I'm a Guardian...? And whose side... I mean, you're a human, right?"
She was interrupted by the stranger. "Looters are human too. Underneath all the drugs, anyway... Doesn't make them allies except when risking Secreta forces would be wasteful. Same deal with Feds."
This was not what Althen had expected at all. She made a vague "what do I do?" gesture to Tirren, who just shrugged, then turned back to the stranger. "Well, uh... I don't think you'll find any humans around who'll be your enemy unless you make them your enemy. It's the things that aren't human that are the main prob-"
"Ah, the Meta-Streumonic Force?" He interrupted. "So I take it those... things, they were some new kind of metastreumonic filth? I didn't think such organisation amongst the metastreumonic was possible."
"Uhhhhh. No, not really. They're called Fallen, they're... probably the least dangerous of the threats we have to deal with, at a guess, but by far the most desperate." She didn't bother to ask about the Secreta. There would be time enough to ask questions in a safer place – ideally back at the tower – and the name gave her a slight feeling that asking about it would not be the best idea, especially as the stranger was still aiming at her.
"Huh." The stranger replied, seemingly losing interest for the moment. He gestured with one of the guns to the spot where Tirren had lobbed his Nova Bomb, the sizzling residue of Void energy still hovering around the area. "First off, who's out there that you're gesturing to. I can see them very clearly, they've evidently got high-grade cybernetics but no networking. Second off, what the fuck was that purple shit. Weird explosive ball lightning?"
Tirren moved up near to Althen, having heard all that was said. The stranger shifted his aim so he was covering both of them. "Look, calm down a little, alright? If you're human... or awoken, or exo for that matter... we're more likely than not on your side. And the thing that disintegrated all those Fallen, that was a Nova Bomb. A... blast of Void Light."
The stranger seemed to accept this fairly readily, lowering his guns slightly and removing his fingers from the trigger. He had seemed very, very confident in his ability not to twitch and have them go off... come to think of it, he had barely moved, much like a particularly disciplined Exo. "Alright, I'll accept that you're not hostile. Yet. This... nova bomb. Where can I get my hands on one. Is it some kind of grenade? PSI-force ability? How the fuck does it work?"
The Warlock was taken aback a little. This stranger had a very odd mindset. "Definitely not a grenade... though I guess the principle's similar? Basically it works by calling upon my Light, infusing it with the power of Void, and throwing it before I lose control of it. Now I come to think of it, it really is just a much bigger grenade isn't it..."
Seeing that the stranger was obviously not convinced, Althen interjected. "Look, just call it 'space magic' for the time being alright? Otherwise you'll give yourself a stroke when you try to figure out how the Hive do the sh- stuff they do. Now do you want to come along with us? We're heading back to our rendezvous point, then you can hitch a ride back to the Last City. Assuming you wouldn't rather just sit around in the Dead Zone and see how long it takes for a Fallen dropship to notice you."
Iathiel considered this. A city, even if it was the last one, was a more familiar environment than this place, and moreover it would have people who could provide some answers. He'd probably be able to contact the Secreta from there as well... and there would probably be shops as well. Shops which might even have interesting new guns, cybernetics... He checked his account quickly. The stuff he had banked wasn't there, no connection, but the brouzoufs he had gained since the last time he had visited the Temple HQ were still there. He lowered his guns, and holstered them. "I'll take you up on that offer. Cities at least I'm familiar with, unlike whatever this place is, and I can probably contact the Secreta from there." A thought suddenly struck him. "Shit! My Scrab!"
"Your... scrab?" The Titan asked in confusion, as the armoured stranger walked over to the collapsed staircase and considered the height of the ledge. "Wait, are you going to try and climb up there or- Hoooly CRAP! How'd you do that?" He had jumped up an entire story in a single leap, maybe even more based on how he had collided with the ceiling.
"Leg cybernetics, obviously," came the reply from above. "And brouzoufs. Many, many thousands of brouzoufs." There was the sound of some percussive maintenance on something metallic from above and a brief round of swearing, then footsteps as he returned to the stairwell. "Oh, the Scrabouillor? Nah, I can understand not being familiar with that one. Think a floating armoured security robot with a gun. Those... Fallen, was it? They had a few things like it, but a lot less threatening. A lot less threatening."
"A Shank?" Tirren asked incredulously. "You're saying you have a very tough shank?" The stranger returned to the ground floor with a heavy thud amidst a cloud of dust and rust flakes, followed by a strange floating robot with a gun seemingly just attached to the side of it. "Any other surprises you want to spring on us, or are you done?" He paused, listening to his ghost silently send a question to him. "Oh, yeah, there's also the matter of whatever happened to those Fallen to get them to freak out that badly. That wasn't you, was it?"
The stranger walked toward the warehouse's door, Scrab in tow. He covered the ground surprisingly fast for someone in such obviously heavy armour. "That was me, yes. I decided to utilise some of my PSI-force ability. The technique in question is usually referred to as 'Madness', a fairly apt description of what it does." He paused for a second, realising he had an opportunity to one-up the 'Guardians' with their strange space magic. "From what I know it's a technique most PSI-force adepts should know by the time their basic training's finished, among a few other little tricks. I'm not exactly a PSI-force master myself, but I'd like to think I'm at least sufficiently competent. Now, are we going to make waves here all day or get to this city you mentioned?"
The Guardians exchanged a glance and set off in the general direction of Trostland. Their report was going to be... interesting, that was for sure.