"Okay, now that we're crash-landed here in the middle of nowhere, let's do a little vote," Hare said, which drew glares from the other three who were with him. Contrary to flying in any way toward Greece, upon taking off from the airstrip in Cuba he instead pointed south and kept going until the fuel ran out, before making a none-too-gentle landing in a deforested section of what Delilah guessed was probably Venezuala.
"Are we voting you off the island? 'Cause I can get behind that!" One said, raising a hand.
"You're such a Boomer," Delilah noted.
"Fuck you, Zoomer," One said, but he seemed to be saving most of his bile for the one who kept getting them into these situations; Hare.
"I'm serious, we'll be heading to Greece just as soon as I get this vote done, because it's literally about that," Hare said, having switched back to his punk-rocker look away from his Gothic Queen persona which had preceded it. "Who wants a fancy ass ride to bring us to Greece in a flash? Or should we skimp and take the slow boat over?"
"How slow is the slow boat?" One asked.
"And how fancy is the fancy ass ride?" Delilah asked.
"I'm glad you asked," Hare extended a hand and had a slightly more than hand-sized model in aluminum appear in it. He tilted it to and fro so that Delilah and One could both get a look at it. "This," said Hare, "is the Bowing XM-45 type 12."
"Yeah that looks like a plane to me," Delilah said. Well, it didn't look like the plane that they'd more or less crashed here; that one was being dissolved away from where it had come to a halt pitched nose down when its landing gear caught on a tree-stump. It had been a bit of a tumble to get out of the fucking thing.
"What's the big idea? We already had a plane!" One gestured broadly to what was left of their earlier conveyance.
"Please. That does not qualify as a vehicle. Not really," Hare said with a chuckle. "This is one of the finest pieces of aeronautics to be developed by Bowing since their reconstruction after the Pillar of Dawn. It's got a full hull sealant system with multiple redundancies, powered by a Vight-Barry 60 Mini Fusion Engine, capable of generating nearly eight thousand kilometers per second squared of Delta-V from a reaction mass tank of five hundred kilograms, fully heat-shielded and with vectoring thrust for ease of transit…"
"I get it, it's a fancy plane," One said.
"No, it's not," Lu said. She was holding an ice-pack to her head, which was currently short-shorn brown and her features clearly Slavic. "You don't talk about Delta-V with planes. You talk about Delta-V with spacecraft."
Hare grinned.
"You're asking to… fuckin' build a spaceship?" One asked.
"It's a significant outlay of our materials, both what we've gained from Cuba and what you were courageously able to salvage from that shit-show in Bangor. It's only fair that we vote on how it's used up."
"A spaceship, Hare?" Delilah pressed in.
"Yup. A piece of tech usually used to run freight between Mars and The Belt, hence the bloated Delta-V budget. I figure something designed to fly in the paltry atmosphere of Mars can practically dance in Earth's."
"Have you been to Mars, Hare?" Lu asked, looking more incredulous than she usually did, and Delilah was right there with her.
"Not me personally. I've known some people who took The Long Flight, but I stayed closer to the ground," he shrugged. "I did run a few missions on the Moon, though. That was fun."
"And you did it in things like this," One motioned.
"I figure if we're gonna have a bitching ride, we might as well have the bitching-est ride that there was, at any price and for any buyer," Hare said with a shrug.
"Whhhhyyyy do you want a spaceship?" One asked.
"Suborbital hops are the fastest way from point A to point B. It's not like portals were commonplace, you know?" Hare said with a tone of forced-patience.
"So you make a spaceship to do it," One said.
"Why are you so hung up on that? There's a dozen other things the XM45 is even better at. Frankly, I wouldn't want to take this thing on The Long Flight. It might be roomy for a couple days, but it's way too cramped to pull a year long transit," Hare said.
"It's just… it's been almost half a century since anybody's stood on the moon," Delilah pointed out.
"Oh. Yeah, I forgot about how much the '20s sucked from a spaceflight perspective," Hare shrugged. "Wanna go to the Moon after this?"
"I vote spaceship," Delilah immediately said.
"What, he can just bribe you that easy?" One groused, crossing his arms before his chest.
"I want to be the first woman to step foot on the moon," Delilah pressed.
"...Fine. Make your fuckin' spaceship," One muttered. Hare grinned, and immediately turned to one side, and a building appeared in the Venezuelan brush, building itself from the frame out. It wasn't a big place, just two rooms with stacked beds, a kitchenette and a bathroom hidden somewhere out of immediate sight when the thing was called into being. "...that ain't a spaceship."
"No, that's where you three are going to be while I build the spaceship," Hare said. He shrugged. "I'm good. I'm not a miracle worker. I'll have it done by this time tomorrow."
One sighed, rubbing a hand down his face.
Delilah, though, was doing a little boogie as she went for the doors of their shelter. "First woman on the moon, first woman on the mooo~n," she sang to herself as she went. Hopefully Greece would be a big nothing-burger and she could get to go to the Moon all the sooner. It was things like this that gave her some peace with regards to her decision to kill four cops.
Helldiver V
Astral Reality Bleed; Greece
Whoever designed the XM45 should have lived in luxury and died surrounded by solid gold.
While having roughly the profile of a private jet, it was more broad-beamed and thick winged, and the jets on said wings were merely 'coasters', which allowed the machine to transit effectively while in the lower atmosphere. And what Hare considered the 'lower atmosphere' was the same level typically taken up by spy-planes, or perhaps spacecraft on their way back down to Earth. 'Higher atmosphere' he reserved for the fatally thin climbs where one could essentially forgo concepts of lift, in favor of naked thrust.
And they did it all in comfort, with seats that seemed to somehow mitigate through squishy permission the massive thrust that the craft used to get where it was going. Delilah had looked out of the window at one point of their journey, when the engines were still humming contentedly behind them and before they stopped their ascent, and saw that the blue sky had given way to black, and to stars. Only a few, as the sun was overhead, and it still drowned out much of the sky-scape of easy viewing, but she was still sitting in a comfortable chair, watching as the bonds of Earth gave way to outer space, riding in a ship which wouldn't be even designed for another sixty years.
The humming dimmed, and she found herself start to feel different. She watched in delight as the cushion on the seat that neither she, One, or Lu had used began to float its way out of its place, drifting lazily as they began their descent back down to the other half of the Earth.
"This is amazing," Delilah said, grinning like a child. And Lu seemed to be smiling despite herself. "First time for you, too?"
"I thought I'd be terrified, honestly," Lu admitted. She'd changed into somebody who looked like they could have lived a hundred generations in the Peloponnese, a short and middle-aged woman of swarthy complexion and dark hair and eyes. "And this is the furthest I've ever been from my home."
"We'll, we're going to the Moon next, so that will probably set your record for a while. Unless we have something that can go even faster?" she asked. Hare, who was present as a hologram since he was needed to actually fly this thing, gave a chuckle and shook his head.
"Sadly, we have not yet annihilated Einstein. Merely given him a sound beating. We're still more or less beholden to the speed of light and the tyranny of gravity," Hare said.
One, sitting in his own seat and looking out the window, said nothing. He only had a deeply troubled look on his face during the entire flight. Not one of terror or disgust, but as though he were realizing something that he wished he had never learned. But since he didn't share with the others, they were no further ahead and she didn't bother pressing.
"Okay. We're coming to the tricky bit," Hare said. "The vector is good, but turbulence is a thing and I might need to start making adjustments on our way down into civilian air-zones. It's not like the local radars can see us; we'll have to make sure we don't accidentally t-bone an airplane on our way to the ground."
"Why won't they see us?" Delilah asked.
"Remember that plastic you stole? I used some of it to coat the craft. And by some I mean more than half of it," Hare said. "What? You wanted a bitching spaceship, I gave you a bitching spaceship."
"A stealth spaceship," Delilah clarified.
"Oh, this doesn't qualify as stealth. You can still see this thing with the old Mark 1 Eyeball," Hare scoffed.
Delilah rolled her own Mark Ones and considered the experience of undoing her restraints and just floating for a bit. But considering they were going to be plunging back into the atmosphere rather soon, she decided against it. "Are you able to talk about what we're going into down there?" Delilah asked.
"Should be," Hare said. "The monster of the week are the Astral. Creatures which you could perhaps reductively call 'the living dead'. The reality of the situation is a lot weirder than that. It's not a viral infestation that makes people die and then rise back up. More of a horrifying trans-dimensional parasite that has a yen for rotting meat. I'm pretty sure that there are some gnarly meat-shops in the Madlands where even cows have Mortigrades in them."
"It's not just the undead. It's also the ghosts," Lu piped up. Delilah and one turned to her. "Human beings have a sort of… reverberation… that is attached to them. And when they die, that reverberation flies free of its body. The Shadow sometimes intercepts those echos of a life now lost and kind of… reanimates them. Makes them live on without the body. And that's usually a bad thing, because I'm pretty sure that people are supposed to go to either Heaven or Hell when they die."
"I'm still shocked that Heaven is a thing which exists. I thought reality was too unfair for that," Delilah noted.
"Well I can personally vouch for the existence of Hell, and so can both of you," Lu noted. "So depending on we're heading toward, it could be Night of the Living Dead, or it could be Ghostbusters. And we'll have no clue which until we get down there."
"So what are the rules? How do we fight something that can't die? Are the movie rules in effect?" Delilah asked.
"Simply put, yes," Hare said. "While taking the head off of a Gravekind won't kill it, per se, it will stop the thing from being able to be useful to its masters in The Shadow. And depending on how advanced things are, it could be anything from a few shambling dead, to a nest of Hematophages, to, and god-help-us if this is the case, a Ruinous Apostle. If it's those first few, aim for the head, don't let them bite you."
"What happens if they bite you?" One finally broke his silence.
"They're infected with a malignant disease that would kill most everything. Everything but us. To us, it is merely torturously debilitating," Hare said.
"And what happens if it's one of those Apostles?" Delilah asked the next reasonable question.
"...we run, write off whatever corner of Greece they're based in, and I use some of that uranium I bought to nuke the area into oblivion. And that still might not work," Hare admitted.
"Christ," One said.
"What about the ghosts? How do we fight something if we can't touch it?" Delilah asked.
"For that we have you," Lu said. "Your Elohim Array has everything you need to punch a ghost to death."
"...neat," Delilah said. Honestly, she hadn't done a lot of messing around with that 'Elohim Array' that they'd grafted onto her. She didn't have the first clue how it actually functioned. There were probably vast swathes of utility in it that she was utterly oblivious to. But she knew that it could make her skin practically bulletproof (if an odd shade of blue), it let her punch like she was a jackhammer... Oh and she could fucking fly. And teleport. If there was more to this thing, she'd yet to figure it out. But she would in time. In time. It wasn't like she could just deliberately putz around with the bits of it while surrounded by drunken vacationers in Cuba.
"So be on the lookout for any of those things which we typically consider dead that are nevertheless still upright and swinging," Hare said.
The rest of the flight was just talking about the standard rules of engagement for the Gravekind, and what their kind did when they got too infested into an area. It didn't sound nice.
As the fuselage began to rattle again and the craft began to plummet through thousands of meters of freefall, Delilah allowed herself a glance out the window, and saw the deserts of West Africa under her wings. That had taken no time at all. And Greece was only a quarter hour ahead of them.
She settled in as Lu was scowling at the floor in front of her. "Lu? Are you alright?" she asked.
"This is the second time I've ever been in a plane. And the first time I've left the atmosphere," she said.
"Wow. You really had short legs back before, didn't you?" Delilah asked. Come on, gimme something, she thought. Lu had been legendarily tight-lipped about her own past, unlike Hare who gave strange and mortifying tidbits of his own at the slightest (or in fact no) provocation. The only thing that Delilah knew about her was that she was either British or a particularly misguided Canadian, because she had spelled the word Color with that extra 'u' in it.
"You could say that," Lu answered, focusing perhaps on not losing her lunch. Damn it all. Her reticence was starting to bother Delilah. That was breaking Hare's own rules! How could Delilah trust somebody whom she'd never even seen the actual face of? Or learned the actual name of?
"Eh, leave her be. I don't wanna be the one to clean up if she yarfs onto the floor," One cut in. Delilah wished she could glare at him, but he was sitting in the seat ahead of her so her eyes would have to merely suffice boring into the back of his headrest.
"Final descent beginning now. Expect heavy turbulence and a bumpy landing," Hare finally said.
Fifteen minutes from Morocco to Greece.
She was gonna be the first woman on the moon.
One had never been to Europe in his life, but that had mostly been because he couldn't be arsed. He didn't exactly have a surplus of money growing up, so his vacations were usually to 'another part of New Jersey' rather than more distant locales. But there was something vaguely familiar to the town that they had ambled into upon that admittedly bumpy landing. Something almost American.
He wondered if Two had seen this when she went with her family to that wedding. That had to have been eight years ago, now. Where was the time even going?
He'd paired off with Lu to go through the initial recon of the town. Frankly, it suited him. Delilah was alright, but she was a weird one, and way too kinky for his liking. Lu kept it in her pants, and kept things professional. He could work with professional.
"So I know we're lookin' for ambling dead and whatnot," One said, eyes laying across signage that, despite clearly being in Greek, he could nevertheless still somehow read. He could even understand what was being said to him by the locals, which was all the more baffling. Hare said that his most recent Reset had 'caused a gyre to form', whatever the fuck that meant. Well, who cares? He can read the signs. Doesn't matter in the long view how. "I'm guessing there's gonna be more subtle shit we gotta keep our eyes on?"
"Yes. And if you were paying attention, you'd already see that there was something wrong," Lu said, her gaze sliding across the crowds of locals who didn't give either of the two of them a second glance as they utilized the sidewalk. "For example, notice the temperature; where are the homeless people?"
"I thought these Euro Elitists got rid 'a homelessness in their little kingdoms," One joked.
"The old logic was that PIGS was the weak-man of the EU. And that G does stand for Greece," Lu said. "But old logic was before Russia had to go Russia. Now the dog-house of the EU is Hungary and Croatia, and that's because they're abetting the aforementioned Russianing."
"Look at you, scholar of international politics and shit," One said. "Forgot Turkey, though."
"If we're going to be operating internationally, we need to know what quagmires we're jumping into. God knows that Hare can't bother to look before he leaps," Lu grumped.
"I'm gettin' the feeling that he don't exactly want to be in charge of this whole bullshit we're doing," One noted.
"My point is that even though the EU is a fair bit ahead of America when it comes to most metrics save for incarceration rate and gun-violence, Greece in particular has a long history of having problems with its social safety-net."
"Wait, I heard about this one," One said. "Didn't they have riots and shit 'cause of 'austerity measures'?"
"Yup. Austerity makes sense when you impose it upon yourself. Not when you impose it on a nation," Lu said. She then gestured around her. "And you can attest that the Mediterranean climate certainly allows for people living a bit rougher than would the inner United States."
"Don't even joke about that Montana bullshit. I get nightmares," One said. He'd gone on an assignment there once in 2019. During a polar vortex. It was sheer hell.
"So where are they?" Lu finally pressed. One looked around, and though he saw locals aplenty living their lives, moving around and getting things done, now that he was trying to spot those just sitting, or panhandling, he saw none of either.
"...I'm guessing that them what can't hide behind a door are easy pickings for the undead," One finally saw her point.
"Frighteningly," Lu agreed. "They typically start with those people don't see. And few are as unseen as the homeless."
One gave another glance around. There was another thing about this town that suddenly twigged him as off, having just come from Cuba with a similar enough climate. "...where are the cats and dogs?"
"Good spot," Lu said, guiding One to take a corner with her. "Humans aren't the only things which the Mortigrades infest, as Hare tells it. They take anything with living biomass. Cattle, usually, but sometimes smaller things."
"Like stray cats and loose dogs," One said. The more he was walking around, the more the hairs on the back of his neck were standing up. "This place is infested."
"Hare's leads are usually good, but nothing beats eyes at ground level," she said. "The question is where is the dying-ground?"
"I'm guessin' that's where they store their zombies until they need 'em?" One prompted.
"A good enough explanation that I don't feel like correcting it," she said. "There's a lot more to it than that, but yes, it is where the Shadow keeps its living corpses when they aren't needed."
"And they probably have a few," One gave a pointed glance at a bulletin board in front of a tiny police station. On its face, dominating more than half of the space available, were missing posters for people from children to elderly.
"...very likely, yes," Lu said. She quickly zipped her eyes along all of them, as though using her eyeballs like a scanner. "Okay. If we see any of these people, the plan is wing them with something damaging but not immediately fatal, and see where they run."
"Whoa, whoa whoa whoa," One grabbed Lu and pulled her to a stop from where she was about to continue on. "You're tellin' me I'm expected to just shoot any poor fuck that looks like one of them?"
"Non-fatally," she gave a nod.
"That's a fucking crime! What if they're actually just runaways or old fucks having a seniors' moment?" One pressed.
Lu was quiet for a moment, staring at her feet for a moment, before turning those eyes back up at Hare.
"They aren't runaways. And they aren't having 'a seniors' moment'. If you see them. You shoot them," she pressed.
"This is insane," One noted.
"We're hunting a deathless hivemind. Speed, precision, and violence of action are critical," Lu said, and then began to move the two of them down the street by essentially walking and either making him look like a creep and holding her against her apparent will, or relenting and walking with her. He chose to relent.
"And where will you be durin' all 'a this? I didn't see you when those douches in Maine were up in our business," One said.
"I was dealing with something you couldn't," Lu said, and refused to elaborate.
"Greeeat," One muttered.
The further along these side streets of the city of Veria they went, the more unsettled One began to feel. Like there were eyes on him from every possible direction. Like there was always somebody a hair's-breadth from touching the back of his shoulder but never quite committing. Despite the sun being bright and clear in the sky, there was a pall of dread that he couldn't really rationalize that hung over the Greek city, one that sat heavy in his stomach like a brick.
"...Lu," One finally said, when the encroached-upon feeling became too strong and his ability to stay silent and not bitch about things which might not be real finally failed him, "do you feel like somethings breathin' down our necks?"
"Yes," she said quietly.
One panned a look around, past the convenience store that they were currently walking past. Within, he saw somebody who looked about Delilah's age, who was watching back just as intently. One considered walking on, but this was the first tangible thing he'd seen. So he tapped Lu's shoulder, and when she gave a glance back, she then followed his gaze to the shop clerk, then turned a look asking 'are we following this?' to One. He gave a minor nod. And then in they went.
There was a cheerful chime which somehow sounded muted and mocking considering the tension in the air announcing their arrival into the brightly lit corner store. The man at the counter narrowed his eyes a bit as they entered, leaning forward with one arm on the cashier's desk, and the other dangling out of sight. He had a weapon down there. Given this was Greece, probably a baseball bat or the like, and not a gun.
He didn't say a word. Just watched them like the mouse trying to out-guess the cat.
Lu moved to the drinks-cooler on the back wall, grabbing a couple of drinks for the two of them and a single serving of yogurt, pausing as she turned to look at the door into the back area. One didn't see what she was looking at. So he asked her.
"Corner store, one early-twenty's clerk, unshaven with neck tattooes and track-marks on his arm," Lu said. One gave a glance at the man, and fair enough there were scars of injections at the crook of his visible left arm. "...why are the corners so clean?"
"Maybe he's got OCD," One whispered back.
"Maybe. Maybe," she admitted. She handed him the beverages and yogurt. "Go pay for these. I'm going to check something."
One gave a minute nod, then started toward the clerk with the two bottles in on hand and the tub of yogurt in the other, while Lu departed between the shelves, eyes clearly on something that One had missed. Standing up close to the clerk showed that he didn't look in the best of health, his skin slightly pallid and sometimes giving twitches as though it were fighting itself. Ordinarily that would have set off 'oh shit' bells, but he'd seen enough dope-heads in withdrawal to know the signs when he saw one. And this guy was a heroin junkie.
"Just these," One said, and somehow what came out of his mouth was Greek. He wasn't sure how he did that. It had shocked him when he did it the first time. It still surprised him a little bit now. He pulled some hand-forged Euros out of his pocket and slid them over. He then gave the clerk a look up and down. "Is there something wrong, bud?"
"That's not the voice I'd have expected out of you. Where are you from?" the clerk asked. "You from the Peloponnese?"
"Family's from there. I'm from further west," One repeated the lie that Hare had given him. The clerk gave a distant nod.
"Maybe down south things are better," he muttered.
"I'm getting that. Is there something going sideways up here?" One asked.
"I don't know," the clerk said, quickly making the cross on himself and tapping the crucifix that hung from his neck on a chain to his cracked lips. "I just know that it's not safe in Veria anymore."
"Gangs?" he asked.
"...I don't know," the clerk said. One finally leaned a bit aside to see the man's name-tag, which read 'Theodore'. He leaned back from the table, quickly taking One's money and cashing him out, before turning his back to the camera that oversaw the till, pulling a vape from his pocket and taking a deep puff from it. He let it stream slowly from his nostrils like a dragon, before turning bloodshot eyes on One again. "You want my advice, tourist? Don't be out in the streets at night. They mostly come after dark. Mostly."
"Who is they?" One asked, accepting back what he'd bought.
"Before God I do not know. I do not know," Theo said. One heard Lu approaching, and turned to her. He was about to ask her what the next move was when she gently displaced him and stood before Theo.
"How many have you had to kill?" she asked, then pulled out a badge of some kind. One blinked at it, seeing it declaring the existence of something called the AkD.
Theo glanced from her to the badge and then back to her. He puffed out a deep breath, which dislodged some last vestige of vape-smoke that his previous exhale had failed to. "Too many," he muttered. "They were already dead before I hit them. I swear."
"I believe you," she said. She gestured to One. "We're here on behalf of the Aegis kai Doru. Where did the attack take place?"
"Not here, obviously," One noted.
"No. No, it wasn't here," Theo answered. He gave a glance at the camera that was watching him. He then sighed. "Well I'm probably gonna die today so who cares if I get fired?"
"It's not our intention to allow you to die," Lu said. Theo offered a sad laugh, then without a word started back around to leave the clerk's area. One leaned in to Lu.
"Do you got that translation thing going on in your head, too?" One asked.
"My family is mostly Greek and Macedonian. I actually speak the language without cheating," she said.
"Fair enough," Lou said. Now that he could see the back of Theo's shirt, there were raking tears in it and he could see gauze underneath. Oh shit. This guy was probably gonna die after all. Just not of what came next, but of what came before.
"Scratches don't transmit the infection nearly as well, and if the attack was more than six hours ago he would have died from it by now anyway," Lu pointed out at his pointed glance. Theo joined them, having locked a few things, and flipped the sign at the door to the Greek equivalent of 'closed'. He then leaned past the counter and pulled out what he'd had under there. It was a goddamned mace. A fucking wooden-handle, flanged-metal fins built to smash armored people to death mace. And there were bits of hair and scraps of something fleshy trapped at the crooks of some of those flanges.
"It happened out here, on Dimosthenos," Theo said, and ushered them through the doors, locking them on his way out. Some of the locals looked somewhat askance of the dope-head convenience store clerk with a fucking mace under his arm, but nobody said anything. Some of them even made the cross on themselves and nodded, as though he were being only reasonable. He lead them through the winding streets of this very, very old town, toward a less-built up area where as though the finger of God had reached down and erased buildings, leaving a skinny, tiny forest in their place.
There were no people on this street. The pall of dread hung heaviest yet over this street that was abutted by old stone-and-mortar buildings, a strip of parking, and then drop off into trees. Theo motioned with his mace toward the trees. "They came out of there when I was taking my shortcut. Two of them. I didn't see where from. I thought at first they just needed a fix, but… but then they tried to grab me. Right over there," he pointed to a spot where there seemed to be a path through the trees. "I ran, they chased. I got over to here, picked this thing up," he hefted the mace, "and when I saw the face of the first one under that streetlamp… I just swung. I swung as hard as I could.
"The lack of hesitation probably saved your life," Lu said with fairly cold tone. He nodded, then took a few steps past the abrupt line of trees, and with a crumbling sneaker shifted a tree-bough aside, revealing underneath it two rotted bodies, their skins grey and green and purple, heads bashed in all the way to their jaws. The smell of old rot was clear in the air, but under it was another smell. A smell like kerosene or jet fuel, and there was clearly lines reaching down through the necks of these carcasses as though a blood-poisoning were traveling down from the skull toward the heart.
"These were the only ones you saw?" Lu asked.
"Yes," Theo said.
"There were more," Lu said. Both One and Theo turned to her. "How often do you ever hear of a 'zombie couple'. It's always a zombie horde."
"You said 'zombie' way too casually. Like they're…" Theo began.
"You beat them to death with that mace. You tell me they're not real," she said.
One, though, raised a brow at something he just realized. "Where did you get that mace, anyway?"
"Back there. On the ground. Like it was waiting for me," Theo said, distantly. Well that couldn't possibly be a more ill-omened thing to happen.
Hare used a stick to turn the hairy lump over, revealing gore and ruin underneath. It was only the size of a large dog, but from the shape of it, was clearly no dog. There was no head. It had horns. And it had at least two mouths filled with shark-like teeth.
"What the fuck is this?" Delilah asked, because she'd never seen the like of this before. "Some kind of hellbeast, maybe?"
"Greece has got a bigger problem than I thought," Hare said. They were both stooped at the foot of a short bridge over a tiny brook that separated the center of Veria from its western reaches, right where the overhang shielded things which wished not to be seen from the light of day. A more childlike Delilah would have expected a troll to be down here. What they found was weirder.
"How so?" she asked as he continued flipping this inchoate mass of limb-stumps, mud-colored hair, teeth, and randomly-placed goat eyes onto what she could only guess would be it's 'back'. If what it was laying on was it's back, that made it's belly a gaping wound into organs which almost gave her a headache to look at; she could see something which clearly was meant to be a heart but there were enough details wrong that her mind rejected it, three lung-like objects in various degrees of ruin, something that might have been a ruptured liver, and then a strange biological zipper that plunged into the savaged meat of this thing.
"Smell it," he ordered. She gave him a look. "I'm being serious. Smell this. What does it smell like?"
She took a sniff, and the stink of dead animal reigned. "It smells like a carcass."
"Yes, but does it smell rotten?" he asked. She gave him another, similar look. "Here's a little lesson on the Astral Noumenon. They feed on the entropic decay of biological matter entering lower energy states, which happens in abundance when meat rots. They latch on to matter just starting to decay, either because they killed it or because they discovered it just after it died, and then they use it to find more food. But this," he gave the thing a prod with the stick he'd found, "was torn apart, making it useless as a rotting servitor. Where are its arms and legs?"
"That's a good question," Delilah said. A glance to the creek they were next to showed no evidence but was still a convenient answer. "Wait, arms?"
"This thing wasn't an Astral xenoform. This is one of the Endless Young," Hare stood up, and then kicked the dismembered torso so that it was half-submerged in the water. "And it's a mutated Endless Young as well. Those things don't come down to places this warm willingly."
"If this isn't a zombie, what it it supposed to actually be?" she asked.
"Three meters tall, hairy, ambulatory, freakishly strong," he rattled off. "Usually clannish, living in groups of seven to twelve; natural enemies of the Xenomycorrhiza, who are also from Genesis like the Endless Young."
"Are you describing Bigfoot? Because if you're pulling my chain with a Bigfoot…" Delilah began.
"Delilah, there is a literal corpse in that creek. Go and look at it again," Hare thrust an arm back, his usual humor missing entirely. "Tell me that torso wouldn't be right at home on a three-meter tall furry humanoid."
She stared at him. "Bigfoot is real."
"Bigfoot is a cultural cryptid that is only correct by accident," Hare said. "The Endless Young shouldn't be here. Not in this universe, and certainly not in fucking Greece during the summertime!"
"Okay, okay, fine," she said, not wanting to inspire any more pique than she had to. "So why is the presence of a Bigfoot so bad that it's here? Beyond the obvious, I mean?" Delilah asked, as she pulled Hare up onto the street that this creek slipped under.
"I sensed Astral signatures in the 'Tarium. I didn't sense anything from Genesis. Which may be because the Xenomycs aren't here, admittedly," he paused, rubbing at his chin. "The Endless Young were always a lot more subtle than the Xenomycs." He gave his head a brisk shake. "My point is that any time two Synergies ram into each other, it can result in anything from collaboration to outright war. And either of those would be really bad news for us.
"So let me see if I'm reading this right," Delilah said. "There are undead zombie creatures, who are sneaking around Greece, hunting Bigfoots. Bigfeet? What's the plural of a Bigfoot?"
"You're about a third of the way along the path but I don't have time for you to deduce it out so I'll make things rather simplified for you: the Endless Young have been displaced into this town, otherwise they wouldn't come down from the mountains. Which raises the obvious and worrisome question of what is doing the displacing."
"Maybe they were displaced by the undead, who are following them out of the mountains and toward the sea?" Delilah offered.
"A possibility, but there's something we're not seeing here," Hare said. He rubbed at his jaw for a second. "Okay, just got a message from Lu. They've got a lead just south of us. Talking to a guy."
"Should we link up?" Delilah asked.
"Soon," Hare said. He scowled and began to pace along the strip of street that connected Veria to its outgrowth. "This is bothering the hell out of me. What could displace the Endless young? No, better question: what would displace the Endless Young? Because if you're not gobbling up their food or imposing yourself on their hedge-lodges then they're typically surprisingly good neighbors… so long as you're not a human at least. So what would want to?"
"I'm guessing that 'the undead' doesn't answer that question?" Delilah asked, leaning against the rusty guardrail that prevented drunks from taking one too many staggers and falling face-first into the creek. Hare shook his head.
"Cold slows cellular decay, which deprives the Gravekind of their energy source. They stay out of areas which turn their advantages into disabilities. They aren't 'smart' by the typical signifiers that people like us could recognize, but they're also not morons," Hare said.
"So if the Undead aren't behind the forced-migration of the Yetis, then what is?"
"Something that can survive low temperatures and is freakishly strong and oh my fuck I just realized what's in the mountains," Hare said, his tone changing when the realization hit him.
"Share with the class?"
"Hematophages," he said.
"Blood eaters? Like, as in vampires?" Delilah asked, grabbing Hare's jacket and pulling him to a halt.
"The Hematophage is an evolution of the Mortigrade. It can handle low temperatures because it doesn't convert rotting meat into sustenance; it finds a way to utilize blood instead. Don't ask how, I never asked when I had the chance," Hare said. He gave a nod, glancing to the rising mountains of the northwest. "That explains the Astral signature. They have leaches all up in those mountains."
"Does this help us?" Delilah asked.
"No, it doesn't. It explains things, but it's still bad," One shrugged his way free of her grasp. "And that raises a new question," she prompted him to continue. "Why haven't the locals been giving yeti sightings if they're forced down and into an actual city?"
Delilah hadn't thought about that.
"Wait a second. Bigfoot is always blurry in photos. Maybe it has some sort of invisibility cloak?"
Hare gave her the flattest stare.
"I'm just spit-balling! I didn't think that Bigfeet were real this morning!" Delilah pointed out.
"Valid," Hare answered her. "No, they don't have camouflage, they're just snapped by people with shitty cameras and shittier photographic skills. No, they're getting sniped as soon as they enter the city limits…" he paused, then he turned to the mountains again.
"What?" she asked.
"They're being sandwiched," Hare said. "Something driving them out of the mountains, the hammer to the anvil of the Gravekind. There's something up there that's the root of this problem."
"So what? Are we hiking?" Delilah asked. While she didn't really like her new body, it was an improvement over the one she had been on Cuba with; that one was too dainty. It didn't feel right. This one at least seemed like it could contain her own strength. Hare nodded.
"I'll send a message to the others to find out the status of the Gravekind infestation. We're going up into the Vermion Mountains to see what's up there," he said.
"That's… a long way, Hare," she pointed out.
"Well, our spaceship can't do VTOL, so it's schlubbing on the ground like primitives for us," he said. He then blinked and tilted his head slightly. "I've just ordered a cab to pick us up in Prometheas. Come along, Delilah. Whatever's up there has cloaking technology and I may need you to punch it into submission."
"You're way too enthusiastic about that prospect," Delilah noted.
"Cloaking technology means resources which we can use to build that hell-gate that I'm going to have to get around to manufacturing at some point," Hare noted.
"Oh. Oh that's why you offered between this and Hell," Delilah suddenly twigged. Well that made her feel dumb.
"I could have probably said that better, in retrospect," Hare noted.
One turned the skull-smashed cadaver over, so that the light filtering through the thick, close-netted trees of this tiny strip of wild territory could shine down the wound. And it was clear that there was something really, disgustingly wrong with the head of this thing, before it had been rendered into pudding. Like something had bored down through the spinal column, eating the spinal cord as it went.
"I just got a message from H," Lu said, glancing at her phone. "We're to localize these things and to observe, and to not engage. He and D are heading out of town on a lead."
"So it's just the two of us against a zombie horde?" One asked, pulling the collapsed S-46 from where it had been riding somewhat uncomfortably betwixt his shoulder-blades between his jacket and his shirt.
"Three," Lu said.
"Theo don't count. He's a civvie!" One pointed out.
"A civilian who's already survived an attack by two Gravekind," she said.
"What are you two talking about? I thought you were Greek," Theo said, pointing between the two of them.
"Apologies. Shop-talk," Lu said, and One almost tripped over himself realizing that she'd moved to English. It was so weird hearing words in other languages as clearly as if they were good old American. "Can you show us the first point where you noticed these two creatures?"
"Yeah, it's just this way," he said. He started to walk down the street, past buildings which crowded the slender road and left little room for cars, such that the way was likely unidirectional. The whole section of town felt ancient, claustrophobic, entirely too hemmed in for One's more American sensibilities. Though the buildings were on the face of them fairly modern, there was just something so steeped in ages that it left One uncomfortable. That made him feel small. Fleeting, even.
Theodore stopped at a gap between two houses, and pointed in with his mace at the hovels that were stacked against the buildings and ran into the short 'alleyway' that was capped off by yet more hovels. All of them were so overflowing with garbage that they almost seemed like a tiny dump. "They were there. One was over at the back door there, the other came out of that hut when the first one saw me."
Lu narrowed her eyes, as though spotting something. She left the street, heading into the piles of garbage and foetor, with One right behind her. She shifted a bag of trash aside, and saw that there was a dead homeless looking man with his neck ripped open, starting to rot in the heat. She gestured for One to look into the shack. He unfolded his gun and followed it into the 'building'. The hovel, which should have been about a dozen square feet with a corrugated metal roof and the foundations of a building for a back wall, ended up being something of a foyer to a bored out entrance that dug directly into the building next door.
"Lu! Take a look at this," One said, moderating his tone so that it didn't outright shout but made his urgency known. The light around him darkened as Theo was the first to reach him, and he beckoned the lookie-loo to get out of the fucking way so that Lu could come in. And she did slip around both men before holding up her phone-light and shining it into the building. The tunnel lead to the bottom floor of the building, which was little more than a water boiler and heating system, a door, and then likely a stairway up to the apartments above. The door was askew, but for the angle they couldn't see through it.
"Do they usually do this?"
"Dig through concrete? That's more of a Vore thing, but they'll do it if they need to get somewhere," Lu said. "It's not like they get tired, or care about the state of their bodies when they're done."
"Do you think that…" One began.
"Oh shit. Is the entire building filled with them?" Theo asked, and both of them turned back to shush him. Still, he had put words to One's barely begun worry.
"It is possible," Lu said. "Keep that mace ready, and you do the same with your gun."
One didn't like that. It always felt wrong to have to walk in on people who had been doing nothing wrong then got swept into the maelstrom of bullshit. It was why he hated doing any work involving Mexico. There was no limit to the amount of collateral damage that some people thought was 'acceptable'.
With Lu's light shining the way over One's shoulder, he took the lead. It felt damned precarious being front and center, always did. Back when he did field work, way at the very beginning of DHORKS, it always put the fear of god in him to be the one with his neck on the line. Maybe that was why he hired so many guys. So that the ones that had to go through that shit would have a nice long cycle of not being in danger before their time came up again.
Well, it all fucked in in the end, regardless of his reasoning, didn't it?
The stairs up immediately socked him in the face with the smell of damp rot. He winced and tried his best to hold his nostrils shut with his facial muscles alone, so unwilling was he to remove a hand from his carbine. The door to the stairway-atrium was as dark as the boiler room, and the stink of rot was stronger here. It wasn't a massive, there's a dead cow in your living room kind of rot. Just enough to make him notice and make him nervous. The lights to the hall occasionally flickered on, just for a moment, cutting the darkness, but always failed again.
And the doors to the apartments, one on either side of the stairway, were open.
One gently pushed the door to one of the apartments open, and the smell of rotting fat intensified. The entire room was covered in some sort of organic black-brown substance, that looked like sinew or gristle mounting up from the floor. It covered the windows, choked out all of the ordinary landmarks of apartment living, and only allowed thin portals into other rooms, which were likely just as overtaken with this rigid material as this room was. There were bony growths in the floor, which was raised more than a foot compared to the hallway; the black stuff ended abruptly just before the door frame. One gave a glance back. A beam of sunlight from outside shone through the exterior doors, currently painting one of the walls of the hallway. In the morning it would have been pointed at this wall instead of that one.
And then he heard a crackling sound, a wet popping crunch noise, and saw some of that black-brown gristle shift. From a section that buttressed the now artificially low ceiling of this apartment, he saw a crack from, and bones stained brown and black fall to the floor, where they began to sag and dissolve into more of the same rippling brown-black matter.
"Lu?" One whispered, backing away from the door.
"Here, too," Lu answered, likewise at a whisper. One turned, facing the door on the opposite side of the hall, and saw that it too was choked with that chitinous bullshit. Theo was gripping his mace with knuckles so tight that they were white against the wood.
"We're gonna need to burn this building," One said, backing away from both doors and reaching behind him for the exit to the outside. There was a hiss from Lu, and he immediately stopped. He glanced at what she was looking at, and spotted at the top corner of the door a sort of translucent black-grey bulb. Lu gestured for Theo to pull it off, and he gave her an incredulous look, but when she motioned again he did so, barely reaching it and snapping it off. It rattled shockingly loud for even that small amount of movement, and let out loud rattles again any time it shifted in his grasp. With that, One opened the door and all three of them retreated into the daylight, the gentle breeze pushing the stink of old rot away and leaving them exactly as they had been before, but now saddled with the knowledge that an entire three story building was infested top to bottom with… well he didn't even know what the fuck.
"Lu, send a message to Hare and Lila. We're gonna have to burn this sucker down," One said.
"One," Lu cut him off.
"Wait a second. Burn it down? That would spread to the whole town! And what even was that stuff in there?" Theo asked, now offering a full voice that they weren't surrounded by the stink of death.
"We're trying to find out," Lu said, quickly thumb-typing a message to Hare. "This isn't what we expected to find here either."
"Jesus Christ and the Immaculate Virgin," Theo said, crossing himself with the hand still holding the bulb. Then he gave a yelp of alarm and threw the thing away. When it hit the concrete of the road it split with a very loud pop, somewhere between a robust firecracker and a low-caliber gunshot.
There was a cracking of glass from a building across the street and down a short ways. One quickly glanced over to it, then sighted it through the magnifying optics of his carbine. There was something dark pressed out against the glass. He blinked. Then, with a chill in his skin and a rock settling into the base of his stomach, he swept his gun across every window he could find.
All of them, every single one, were blacked out.
He couldn't see into a single room, not even by an inch, not in any building. He turned around, sighting the town of Veria behind him. He only needed to skip one curtained window to see somebody lounged on a couch over there. He snapped back, and started to look at the other buildings, further ahead.
And there, near the center of Prometheas, he saw a tall building with columned balcony. And there was black-brown matter paused in crawling through the windows to the outside world of that distant, central building.
"Lu… we got a problem," One said.
"They've infested all of Prometheas, haven't they?" Theo asked with a wince.
"Would you prefer I lie to you or tell you the truth?" One asked.
"Fuck," Theo said.
Fuck indeed. He heard a creak behind him, and on sheer instinct spun and fired. There was a loud crack as the carbine launched a slug through the point of the body where the neck met the torso, decapitating the shambling corpse of a naked middle aged woman before he could even register what it was. And even as it fell, two more diseased, rotting, naked corpses pushed out of the building they had just exited, and he retreated two steps firing slugs into each of them. One blew a rotting teenaged boy in half. The other who might have been his mother had her arm and half of her chest blown off by the second shot which was off of its track.
The walking corpse began to run.
"FUC–" One began, but Theo stepped up with a home-run swing of his mace, catching the woman right in the nose and sending her flying onto her back, whereupon he swung again down hard, staving in her skull. The other carcass, the bisected teenager, tried to crawl toward them, but with only one arm that was partially rotten, they were easily able to backpeddle away from it.
"What do we do now?" Theo asked, resetting his grip on his bludgeon.
"We get away from the building they're coming out of," Lu gestured down the street. A street which was thoroughly parked by cars, but utterly devoid of people. They hustled, with One taking a moment to line up another shot on the half-teen and pop his head with a hypersonic slug. They darted around a street corner ahead, with One glancing back. Another carcass lurched into the street, swinging its head to and fro, but then gave a full-body shake and returned to the house. "Why are they acting like the sun hurts them? The sun doesn't hurt zombies…" Lu asked.
"What the fuck world did I wake up into today?" Theo asked.
"That's a good fuckin' question, pal," One said.
'The mountains' were somewhat ambitious names for some hills that peaked out in the distance beyond Veria, but considering that the true mountains of Greece were apparently south from here, these were what the region had to work with. "So we're out here. What are we looking for?" Delilah asked.
"I'm not sure yet," Hare admitted. "It's weird enough that the Brood and the Gravekind are sharing the same stomping grounds. That is a combination I've never seen outside of a Storm King lair."
"A what?"
"Long story, lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth. I'll tell you about it when I'm not concerned for the fabric of reality," Hare said.
"So never, then."
"You wound me, Delilah," Hare said with teasing tone. He then shrugged. "Long story short, the Storm Kings are kind of the reason the Downfall of Oedipus even exists. Call it an omnipresent turf-war if you have to."
"Fair enough," Delilah accepted the short version, and turned a look down to the villas and condos behind and below them. "I've never been to Greece, you know."
"You've mentioned," Hare said, finally settling his backpack onto his shoulders and starting to walk into the brush with she on his tail. "I've got worries. Veria is one of the oldest cities in Greece. The Noumenon have had a lot of time to fuck with it."
"Didn't you say that these Noumenon have only been here recently?" she asked.
"Trying to nail down timelines when the Noumenon are involved is an exercise in futility," Hare said. "They could arrive in Creation tomorrow, and the first sign of their presence would be discovered in 200 BCE. The Noumenon themselves are fucking dangerous, Delilah. They can rewrite reality. They can rewrite history!"
"You know that for a fact?" she asked.
"I certainly do. I've seen what the Djinn do. If that isn't Retconning the course of a person's life with something more pleasing, then I don't know what else I can call it," Hare said.
"So how would we even know if these 'Retcons' even happened?" she asked.
"It's tricky, admittedly. But there's always evidence, usually lost in places you least expect," Hare said. "Rumor has it that both The Downfall and Wright managed to discover how to do it themselves. You know, before they went back to their own universe on a warpath."
"Again, you say that so casually," she said.
"What? The inter-universal warfare thing? Oh that's old hat. You should'a seen what was going on in India where I'm from," Hare said.
And then the ground collapsed under them. The cracking of stone and plummet out of the light and into the darkness shot a spine of utter terror into Delilah, and without thinking she shifted the Numen inside her and felt the spans of her metal wings sprout from her back, her skin shifting into the strange metallic blue color as she failed to plummet as Hare did and simply remained hovering over an open pit.
Hare, who had landed on his back, blinked a few times, then looked up at something obscured by the wall of the plummet. Then he slowly began to put up his hands. "Okay. Let's all be nice and civil, now."
Delilah cut the glowing energy that made her float and dropped feet first into the dark hole, landing just in time to spot a nearly-unnaturally pale man holding a sword. Without giving him a chance to think, she drove a brutal left into his jaw, doing exactly nothing to pull her punch and letting it land with all of the force that her body allowed. It was a blow that she knew from experience could dent steel. And the guy she punched merely staggered a few steps back, looking incredibly confused and a little pained.
"Behind–" Hare began, and she turned just in time to see a crossbow-bolt zip out of the dark and hit her right in the forehead. It felt like somebody had beaned her with a hammer, staggering her and narrowing her vision a bit, but somehow the bolt which looked like it should have punched clean through plate armor failed to get through her skin. When it landed on the floor, it was deformed by the impact.
"Dura kai sidisi finastra!" a voice from the dark said, advancing and turning the crossbow which had two sets of arms held perpendicular each other so that the second bolt was now leveled at her.
Delilah glanced to Hare, who gestured up with his hands, causing her to open her fists and make something approaching a placating gesture. "Why can't I understand them? I thought that thing in my brain let me understand every language."
"Almost every language," Hare said. He cleared his throat, sitting up with his hands still up and away from him. "Not violence mean. Answers; seeking."
The pale man, who was still holding his sword as though intending to lance Hare with it, turned to the woman. "He speaks to Elder Tongue. I thought only the Anointed could do that," he said, which was clear to Delilah. He was speaking Greek. Modern Greek. Whatever she was speaking obviously wasn't, therefor.
"He is not Anointed. Feel the heat of him," she said, her words strange, clustered together like cars down a country road, where there were long silences followed by clusters of five to seven of them at once.
"He is human," the man said. "And he does not scream in pain from legs which should be broken."
"I drank a lot of milk as a child. Plenty of calcium," Hare joked. The man blinked at him, then looked to Delilah. "And that… that is something that bodes very bad for us."
"A wizard and an angel. I thought Heaven forbade such communions as these," the woman said. She beckoned up, and Hare got to his feet. "Why have you come here, wizard? And by what reason should we allow the angel minding you to live?"
"May I answer the second question first?" Hare asked. She narrowed her eyes, barely visible in the darkness where she stood, but seemed to allow it. "Because deaths of angels are not a thing which are lightly overlooked. And from the stealth of this little trap, I can tell you value your secrecy. To spill the blood of one is to invite undue scrutiny."
"This is truth," the woman said. She stepped a bit closer, into the light, and finally revealed more of herself. She was pale as the man was, essentially the color of clean ivory, with hair almost as pristinely black tied back in a style that probably belonged in the 17th century, with eyes that were red as blood, devoid of schlera or iris. The sneer on her face revealed that she had fangs hidden behind her red lips. "So what of you, wizard?"
"As mentioned, I seek understanding of the situation of Veria," Hare said. "May I drop my hands? My arms are getting tired."
"Stavros?" she leaned over to the man. Stavros laid his sword on Hare's shoulder with its blade against Hare's neck. Hare let his arms dangle.
"Don't try to be quick. I am quicker," Stavros warned.
"I can honestly say I didn't expect to find your kind here," Hare admitted. "But given that the dead walk in the city of Veria, and malformed beasts were driven into a city of Men, this has become a situation requiring careful planning."
"What aims do you seek here, wizard? No good can come of the walking dead," the yet unnamed woman said.
"I seek to destroy what animates them. I have seen many enclaves fall to these plagued demons. I would not like to see another do likewise," Hare said, even emulating her tone.
The woman glanced to Stavros. "We take them to Father. He will decide."
"Yes. To Father, then," she said.
"Forgive, but we haven't introduced ourselves," Hare said. "I am Hare, sorcerer and world-walker, Alchemist and skin-changer. My minder is Delilah, ensuring that I do not stray too far in my practice."
The woman nodded, looking between the two of them, then to Hare again. "I am Calliope Athanasiou. And my brother, Stavros."
"Well met. Please. To your father," Hare said. Calli gave a distant nod, as though all were in order, then jerked her head to one side, and Hare was marched into the dark. Delilah, who was emitting the only light that could be seen down here, was forced to essentially hover just above the floor of this cavern cut into the stone of the mountain. She leaned a bit closer to Hare, and forced herself to speak a language she doubted these Hellenistic whatever-the-fucks spoke: her second tongue of Urdu.
"What kind of Nemesis are these?" she asked.
"They aren't," Hare answered. She gave him a look, but he refused to look at her, still heeding the sword pressed edge-to-neck. "I have seen all manner of Nouminal invader, and even a fair few I didn't expect to see today. But these things, for all their power, aren't Noumenon. All of the puissance that they have comes from this plane, not from those Realms Outside."
"Silence this conspiracy, lest I get an unsteady hand," Stavros said.
"In Greek, then," Hare offered. "If you will observe my current warden, you can no doubt see their coloration, their abandonment of the surface, and their low body temperature. Not to speak of their dentistry."
"Are you calling these things vampires? Hare, one stood in the sunlight," she began.
"The weakness to sunlight was given to vampires by ill-educated masses to allow themselves to feel they had some period of time when the blood-eaters couldn't prey on them. Isn't that right, Stavros?"
"You are a bold one, speaking so brashly with a blade to your throat," Stavros said.
"I don't deny. But am I correct in my boldness?" Hare said.
"...These two will be trouble, sister," Stavros muttered.
"Obviously," Calli answered.
"Folklore has doubtless given them innumerable 'weaknesses' and banes that have no basis in truth, everything from the crucifix to the counting of grains," Hare continued. "But likely the only truth is that, some time in the very ancient past, there were human-like beings who consumed the blood of the living and had 'magical powers'."
"I feel if I were to cut off your head you would continue speaking regardless," Stavros complained.
"I might," Hare admitted. "I admit, I am somewhat excited to meet a creature which to me is straight out of legend, and not some filthy, shambling Hematovore Gravekind. Those can fuck right off."
The slender corridor they were walking down opened up into an area which was dimly lit, but nevertheless did have some lighting to it. It wasn't a cave, for it was too clean-edged by a half for it, bearing the clear signs of thoughtful craft to it. It seemed to be the opening that one would find in an old piece of Roman estate architecture, a courtyard surrounded by stone railings and set with a mosaic on the floor in stones of varying colors displaying a white-skinned being holding back a portal full of pink-skinned, horned humanoids, while other pale ones fled away from him.
"Keep walking, angel. Don't do anything suspicious," Stavros said, glaring hard at her as they continued to walk. Delilah noted how they all walked around the mosaic rather than across it. It was probably important to them, a piece of their history.
They entered the stone-entombed villa, directed toward a room with a decent, if still low, amount of light. It was a sitting room, and there was a single pale-skinned being at the desk. Despite notable similarities to Stavros and Calliope, he appeared a fair bit older, lines etching into his face from long worry. He was completely bald, or else shaven-headed, and his face was bore a sharp-edged goatee and his brows were thick over his red eyes.
"What is this you bring before me, children?" the elder said, sitting straight and abandoning whatever it was he was doing before. "A human and this shameless display?"
"We trapped them with the deadfall. And any man who can fall ten yards and not have his leg bent is either a strong one, or a magical one," Calli said.
"And instead of simply opening them or eating them you bring them to me?" the elder's face was set with disappointed frustration. "These are not the misbegotten horned things, who are useful for little. I taught you better than to play with your food."
"May I make an introduction, o keeper of the house?" Hare asked. How was he making his face do that?
The elder turned an unamused look at him, then to Stavros. "Put that away. There is no harm he can do to me in my own house. And next time have some common sense; we are kept safe by our secrecy from the angels. If that was actually one of them, you would be tasting the back of my hand," the elder said, miming a striking motion as he did.
"That isn't an angel?" Stavros asked.
"No. You are young, my son, and have seen little that I have. That is a human melded with an interesting armor. A true Angel is a different beast altogether. Pray to the blood you never have to face one," he said. He stood, wearing not the kind of kingly robes that one might have expected from an elder vampire, but instead a shirt of flannel that had faded almost to stark white and slightly damaged, worn cargo-pants in khaki. It was so incongruous with what Delilah was expecting that she had to restrain herself from goggling at it. Stavros and Calliope were wearing about what one could have expected from a vampire. But their father? What? "Identify yourself, intruders on my house."
"I am Hare, sorcerer and alchemist," Hare gave a formal bow, which took the elder somewhat aback. And Delilah as well. It was as though he knew this guy intimately or something. "And this is Delilah, my minder."
"I mind because he often doesn't," Delilah took up flatly.
"You are no sorcerer. I can smell that your blood is plastic and metal from here," the elder said. "And I can smell nothing but metal from her. I would call you both automata, but your eyes are not nearly so dead. So tell me truthfully, or invite my wrath."
Hare blinked a few times, then glanced to Delilah. She shrugged.
"Very well. I am indeed Hare, but as to my titles, the more appropriate ones would be 'resource acquisition', quartermaster, and manufacturing expert. As for my duties, I could say I am an exterminator of Outsider pests. Delilah is an ex police officer who has as little idea what's going on right now as I do. And the plastic and metal your smelling is my blood. It's just very well optimized blood."
"I should not think I would like to taste it," the elder said. He glanced to Stavros, then to the door. Stavros nodded and moved to the side of the entrance to this room, giving them all a bit more space. Calliope needed no signal to come to the opposite side of the desk from where the elder was now standing. "I am Alexander Athanasiou. What has brought this strangeness to my house?"
"Exterminating pests from Outside. Which you seem to grasp does not include you, so that saves me some explanation time. You were born here, weren't you?" Hare asked, making particular gestures as he spoke that seemed almost ceremonial. What the hell?
"During the year of 1389 was I born to my parents Philip and Penelope," Alexander said. "This world has been the home to our kind since our flight from Whence We Came. And I will not be displaced from it. Not by you. And not by these strange beasts."
"You have been driving The Brood into Veria, haven't you?" Hare asked with one finger raised up to his chin in a patrician gesture. Alexander glared at him. "It's not an insinuation or accusation. I'm saying so because it's the only possibility. My question would be why? What benefit is there to sending the Endless Young – even horribly mutated Endless Young – into a place filled with humans?"
"We do not send them into a place filled with humans," Alexander said. He reached for the table and grabbed a ball-point pen, and with a flick of his wrist hurled it across the room, embedding it into a wall-mounted map of the entire area of northern Greece, with a cut-out of the city of Veria. The pen lanced into the westernmost district of that town. "We send them to slow down a horde of the ambling dead."
Delilah glanced between them, and finally twigged to something that she should have noticed earlier.
These 'vampires' were breathing.
"Wait a moment," Delilah held up a hand and allowed her wings to shut off, settling her boots onto the floor. "If you're sending these beasts to Veria… aren't you just giving them more corpses that they will eventually use against you?"
"The town east of here is lost, all of its humans lost to Sebastian's…" Calliope began, but was silenced when Alexander turned a withering glare at her. She couldn't blanch, her coloration being what it was, but she did shrink back from it.
"Ah. I see," Hare said, with a slight bow that skirted the edge of being obsequious without quite crossing the line. "Forgive Delilah, she doesn't know the intricacies involved. Of course sending the beasts was prudent; their flesh is not useful to the Gravekind. I'm presuming that your own is not so immune. So you're using The Brood as a buffer force to keep the Gravekind contained in the district of Prometheas."
"So you have a basic grasp of tactics," Alexander said flatly. He then seemed to shimmer in the air, and then was standing directly before Hare, glaring down at him with blood-colored eyes. "I cannot say I appreciate your tone. I do not need to eat you to destroy you."
"I mean no offense," Hare said with a placating gesture. He glanced at the table. "Are you mustering support from your kind?"
"You've eyes like a thief, pest-killer," Alexander noted. "And you are giving me little reason to abide you."
"Who was Sebastian?" Delilah asked. Alexander snapped his glare over at her. "Did the Gravekind kill him?"
Alexander's glare smoldered for a long, pregnant moment, before he slowly shook his head.
"They have done something far more insulting to my young brother."
"Oh. Oh fuck me," Hare said, starting to go pale and his gesturing hitting a pause. "They have a Ruinous Apostle."
"Share with the class, Hare!" Delilah prompted.
"A Ruinous Apostle is a Cultivator for the Gravekind; they infect the most powerful vessel they can find, and when the infection bears fruit it starts to rot reality around it. Delilah; a single Ruinous Apostle is all that it takes to start a full blown Reality Bleed!"
Alexander laid his hand on Hare's shoulder, and with almost no effort pushed the man down so that his knees had to bow to keep him upright.
"You speak in strange tongues in my presence, which is disrespectful to the keeper of the house," Alexander said. "And you speak on the topic of a family not your own, which is doubly disrespectful. Why should I not rip you apart for this insult to me and my own?"
"Because it won't bring you Sebastian back!" Hare said rather hurriedly, instantly returning to his ceremonial gesturing and making himself seem a minor partner in the lives of these living vampires. "Nothing will at this point. If there is a Ruinous Apostle, one of the gravest threats to the world that I can name, then the only response is to destroy Veria before its infection can spread!"
"Hare!" Delilah exclaimed.
Alexander was quiet, but nodded. "You understand that much at least. You may be too glib by a half for a human, but as you stink of materials not flesh nor bone, I have trouble calling you one. Yes, my young brother Sebastian has been lost to the Walking Rot. And now he has been seen spreading that rot, its slave and pontiff in equal measure. I would call him a traitor, but I looked into his eyes. There is no Sebastian left."
"He's gone? But..." Stavros asked.
"Yes, son. Sebastian is gone. He was gone weeks ago," Alexander said. He turned his attention to Hare again. "We have not the numbers to take the ten-thousand shambling, infectious dead before their vile ichor corrupts us as it corrupted Sebastian. We need more. And more resources. And I feel you are a source of such things."
"I have a number you can call," Hare said. Wait what? He flicked a card from his pocket and held it toward Alexander, who glared at it and waited for Calliope to take it from his hand. "That will put you in contact with Aegis kai Doru, who are the local beast-hunters. Just don't mention what you are unless you have a means of concealing yourself. Which you obviously do if I've never seen one of you before today."
"There is bad blood with the Shield and Spear amongst The Families," Alexander noted.
"Then use them as cannon fodder until your Families get here," Hare said with an off hand shrug. What the hell, Hare?
"Perhaps. Perhaps," Alexander said. He leaned in on Hare, practically touching nose to nose. "Look me in the eye and swear upon your own life that you seek not to steal the power over death that has come to the city of my forefathers."
"Had I the strength I would destroy it on my own. Since I don't, I will have to depend upon what aid I can find," Hare said. Alexander nodded slightly, turning away. How in the fuck were you doing this, Delilah thought? He literally fell into a nest of Vampires, and without even seeming to try very hard made them cordial and then got them to do his job for him. It seemed utterly impossible. And yet he had just done it. "Delilah? We should probably go save Lu and One from the undead."
"Yeah. Sure," she said. He nodded, gave a courtier's bow to Alexander, then walked to the door before waving his arm ahead of him and having that doorway not open to dark hand-hewn cave, but to sunset and stone. She followed, leery of it, but when she walked through it passed as thin as air. She turned, and saw the portal sliding lazily shut behind them, having deposited them on the surface of the mountain. "What the hell, Hare?"
"It's lucky that guy's a fighter and not a talker, or that would have gotten messy," Hare said. He then gave a nod. "And if he'd actually been dead, then my targeted pheromones wouldn't have worked, and it also would have been messy."
"You have pheromones?" she asked.
"So do you. Mine are just living machines that make it seem like I'm more relevant, more important, and more beautiful than I am," Hare said. "No. The tricky part was finding out how to Mirror him without making myself seem 'arrogant and upjumped' in the presence of somebody a few centuries older than me. It's lucky that the Mirror Neuron Gyre is as good as it is. That could have gone bad very quickly. Come on. There's no telling what trouble our people have gotten into in Veria."
"Have you ever used those on us?" she asked, beginning to trot down the decline with Hare.
"I use them all the time. I actually have to think very hard to not use them," Hare said.
"You aren't secretly a deformed homunculus tricking us with your BO, are you?" Delilah asked.
"They add weight and suggestibility to my opinions, they don't overwrite your perceptions," Hare said. "You're starting to overestimate what I'm capable of. It's good. It means that you're starting to grapple with the realities you now live in. Now we should hurry before One gets mauled to death."
"Not Lu?" she asked.
"Lu will be fine," Hare said, as they spotted their rented car down and in the distance.
Lu was not fine.
With the sun beginning to set in Prometheas, the three of them had been forced to move with great haste to get away from the district center, which was no doubt overrun with these ambulatory dead. She could see the Gravekind everywhere, in places that she didn't point out to One because it'd make him waste ammunition and possibly cause a bigger problem by trying to solve the immediate than they could survive in the long-term.
"Any word from Hare yet? I'm startin' to get real fuckin' worried," One said, keeping his carbine now forever-to-his-shoulder. Theo seemed like he was starting to crash, as well. Considering the amount of 'medications' he was withdrawing from, the adrenaline long ebbed from his system, and the fact that he hadn't gotten a wink of sleep since his spectacularly long day had begun, it was not surprising to Lu. She herself didn't keep weapons in her hands. Because for her it would be pointless. Even with the chance to reinvent herself, she hadn't reinvented somebody who knew how to throw a punch or use a gun.
She turned a glance behind them, to the lazily bending streets of Prometheas, and saw that the Gravekind which had been ensconced in that strange chitinous material were starting to emerge, rotting and fetid, and stay emerge briefly into the light before slinking to the lengthening shadows. They were hunting, now. Lu didn't need much in the way of training to understand the basic premise that they had gone from hunter to prey, and the Gravekind, operating as a single organism staring through hundreds of putrifying eyes, could track them no matter where they went.
"I've sent another message to Hare. Until we hear from him, we keep looking for a way out of the perimeter," Lu said.
The Gravekind were hemming them in. Well, the Gravekind were hemming One and Lu in, whereas Theo was likely simply on the platter as an amuse-bouche. In its way, it was a pity that Theo wasn't worse off. For all his drug withdrawals and fatigue, he was still entirely intact. If he'd actually started Soul Bleeding, then they would have been able to recruit him. It seemed if he survived this, he'd simply have to go back to his mundane life.
Which now, looking at a mundane life from the outside, seemed an unfair sentence for having survived a zombie upswelling.
The sun was coming perilously close to falling behind the mountains and washing Veria in dark. She knew from how the Gravekind were acting that the moment that daylight died, the dead would walk in number. And that the three of them would immediately be swamped if they were still in the town when that happened. So she pointed One toward a particular alleyway, one already lost to darkness. Through it, she could see the mountains instead of more villas and condominiums.
"We need to get to the outskirts as fast as we can," Lu ordered.
"Don't need to tell me twice," One said. But as soon as they left the road, Lu could hear shuffling, meat sliding across meat. And she let out a hiss as a body plummeted from an unseen upper floor, almost tackling her as it plummeted from nearly roof level. Theo gave a shocked yelp of alarm, even as he slammed the mace down onto the skull of the fallen victim, who was still wearing some clothing meaning he likely wasn't as long deceased as some of the others. Lu shuddered as she felt a ripple pass over them all, shuddering out from the heart of Prometheas. She turned her head around, and she could see what seemed a pillar of necrosis and ruin reaching into the sky, bleak and black against the red of sunset.
This place's Cultivator had just awakened. And as she watched, that pillar grew slowly, steadily fatter, less a pillar and more of a tube that fought to engulf.
"Lu come on! Don't just stand there starin' at the sky!" One said, grabbing her arm and tugging her along. She gave her head a shake. Of course he couldn't see it. For all he was a good fighter and a decent leader, she had The X-ray Eyes. Through her Fractures, she could see that entropic ruin not just in this reality, but in every reality that this one touched. The gloom of Prometheas was quickly becoming as much a fact of reality as gravity or evolution.
She allowed herself to be dragged into the dark, and when she got her feet under her and started her brisk jog (because One couldn't be faster than that while still shooting every Mortigrade that he saw), and was grateful at least that One's gunfire broke the quiet. The shuffling of bodies in the dark was growing louder. Theo let out a yelp and spun hard. Something smashed into Lu, sending her to the ground. A loud splat sounded, and Lu had to hold a fallen Mortigrade away from her, and winced deeply as the neck-wound shifted, and a horrific yellow-blue leech creature chewed through the ragged injury and tried to fall onto her. She shifted the body so the arm-length slug landed beside her, and then quickly dropped the body so that the now empty Mortigrade was between her and the Dreg which had animated it.
She was hauled to her feet by Theo, who backed away from the wall of dead who were filtering in, walking calmly, their glassy eyes on Lu and One. One only allowed them to follow and stare because he was busy reloading. Once he slammed a new clip into place, he began to send slugs flying, and causing rotting meat to explode in grisly displays of death and ruin. The ones who were at the back of the line began to pick up their pace.
"Run, Theo! Run!" Lu prompted.
The sun touched the mountaintop, and the shadows stretched like claws raking across the world. And in every place the shadows touched, the undead stirred, not making a single noise. She had been warned that the creatures of the Astral were not 'zombies' in the pop-culture sense. But to see the dead silently pursuing them made the distinction very clear. Zombies were an invention designed around human fear of the corpse and the uncanny valley. The Gravekind were something far more alien.
She had to duck behind Theo as a particularly fat ghoul lurched out of a doorway, arms out in a grasping pose and mouth opened wider than a human's allowed. Through the split skin there were rings of sharp spikes with channels dug into their centers, and when it strained against Theo's mace, the 'proboscis' lashed forward almost a foot beyond the reach of the undead's head. Theo only just managed to weave his own head out of the way of that thing, shoving it back far enough that its next attempt was an inch from his face instead of sailing over his shoulder. "ONE!" Lu shouted, knowing that she had nothing herself to save Theo from the grapple of the Hematophage.
One turned and fired in a smooth motion, nailing the Hematophage in the side of his head. And still it stood, straining against Theo. One snarled and fired two more times, the crisp cracks cutting through the noise of shuffling to first drive the Hematophage's head all the way to one side, then impact under his jaw-bone, deflecting up through soft-tissue past the armored necro-chitin that the Hematophage used to reinforce its skull. The Hematophage vomited up a spray of chunky, dark, partially de-entropized blood, then fell to one side.
Lu was running, and Theo wasted no time following. While the dead could not sprint the way that humans could, with their rotting limbs structurally hampering their movements, they could certainly keep up a brisk trot. One flicked the spent clip of his carbine away and slammed another into its place. "Running out!" One shouted. They just had to get a little further.
The sun stopped toying with them, stopped offering them the illusion of safety from the encroaching horde, and began to slide behind the mountains. And the buildings around them no longer oozed the undead; they vomited them forth. One swore viciously as a pair of bloated undead tried to head them off, to corrall them back into the city. One answered that attempt by blasting holes in them. Individually, the Gravekind were little threat, even to a non-Integrated mook like Theodore. But they were never alone, as the hundred that were following them attested. Ahead, the buildings abruptly ended, stopping not with the petering out of suburbs and semi-urban structures, but with a line drawn in narrow street and then a fall into brush and unused land.
"Where do we go now?" One asked, looking north and south along the street and seeing the undead spilling from the buildings in both directions. She answered him by grabbing his sleeve and continuing straight forward. The street gave way to a steep incline, and though she was prepared for a hard-scrabble down, she wasn't expecting it to be quite as rough or hazard-filled as it was.
She quickly lost her balance, and fell face-first into a tree, which stunned her and left her rolling down the hill with vision narrowed. Still, she grit her teeth and forced her body to heal the damage done to it even before she finished rolling. She landed not with the grace that she had hoped but in an inelegant pile, laying on her chest, staring at a small scrum of massive, hairy, horned beasts with grisly mutations such as extraneous eyes, secondary mouths, and vestigial and accessory limbs.
Theodore landed much as Lu did, without grace and in a pile. He scrambled to his feet, holding his mace up before him as he stared at nine feet of pelt-covered muscle and mutation. "The fuck?" he asked.
One landed with all of the grace that the other two lacked, sliding to a halt on both feet and with his carbine slung on his back; he held that machete he'd gotten in Bangor in its stead. "Mother fuck is that a Samsquanch?"
Then there was more crashing from behind them. One glanced up and behind them, then grabbed Lu and pulled her to her feet. Lu needed little encouragement, because a few seconds after One made his entrance, the first Gravekind fell into the defile, landing as indelicately as Lu and Theo had. But it quickly was followed by a second and third, then a fourth, fifth and sixth. The hairy beasts rose to their full height, throwing up their arms in a threat display, and emitting a loud, air-shuddering roar. Lu and One essentially shoved Theo out of the way, so that when the hairy things charged at them, they instead fell upon the undead, and started to savage them instead of humans. And when the three still-living immediately beat feet away from what was becoming something of a donnybrook, none of the hairy mutants bothered to follow.
Still, One and Lu didn't bother to slow down in their reckless flight toward the west until the sounds of rage started to turn to fear and pain. They had been rising for some time, and finally came to a halt. Lu looked toward the city again, visible through gaps in the brush. The whole of Prometheas had an alien pulse to it in her eyes, as though a fiendish gland were pumping malign venom into it. The city of Veria was likely lost, she recognized. Forty thousand lives, now helpless before a bleed in reality. Those in the other parts of Veria were already dead and didn't even know it yet.
There was a car-horn that sounded nearby, slightly above them and to one side. Lu looked to One, who just nodded, and despite them all still being out of wind, staggered and stumbled up until the brush opened and they could see a slender roadway that reached up toward the mountains and the border with North Macedonia. They limped toward the car, and found Hare sticking his body out of the passenger window and waving them to come quickly.
Well, they needed no more prompting than that. Lu essentially flopped against the car, which One threw the back doors open to and pulled himself inside. Delilah, who was driving, opened her window. "Are you alright, Lu? And who is that?"
"I think we got out alright," Lu said as she sucked wind. Theo had to maneuver himself rather carefully because of his mace and the fact that he was taller than this car made convenient. "That's Theo. He didn't get bit."
"Yes he did, but I can fix that!" Hare said as he pulled himself back into his seat.
"Alright so he did," she said, breaking off to be the last one into the car. "Hare… it's a Reality Bleed. They have something incredibly powerful that they're using as a Cultivator, and…"
"It's a vampire," Hare said.
"...I thought Hematophages were just more advanced Dregs," she said.
"No, not a Hematophage. Actual, mythological vampires, Draculas, you know?" Hare seemed entirely too happy with himself. "So anyway I essentially convinced them to rally their vampire people and contain Veria until we have what we need to purge it."
"You didn't say any of that to them," Delilah cut off.
"Right, you couldn't tell they are partially telepathic," Hare said. Delilah was already driving toward the streets that allowed them to circumvent the town of Veria rather than risk driving through it when the dead were walking. Hare turned back and looked at Theo for a second before beckoning him to lean forward. "Let's see the bite."
Theo extended his left arm, showcasing that the heel of his hand and the side of his forearm both had chomps, one merely the half-moon of teeth cuts the other actually missing a chunk. From the smaller bite red lines were extending away from the wound and toward his torso. Hare pulled a plastic packet and ripped it with his teeth, pouring the grey powder onto the injuries. He held the arm for a moment longer, eyes narrowing, then nodded. The powder had been colored sugar, Lu could tell that much. It was just to hide the fact that Hare had used an Endeavor to undo the damage, and in fact the infection that the bites had caused that otherwise would have killed him an hour from now.
"Theo, this is how it's gonna go," Hare said, as Delilah drove them past the edge of the darkened Veria and to the north east. "We're not the heavy hitters. We're recon and investigation. We're going to put in a call to the people in Aegis kai Doru who deal with these things. And when they arrive, you're going to liaise with them. Tell them what you saw, where you saw it. Tell them about the beasts in the scrub. And don't let them take that mace from you. You've earned it fair and square."
"What, is the mace special?" he asked, hugging it a bit closer to his chest.
"You found a medieval implement of skull-crushing exactly when you needed to crush some skulls. You tell me," Hare said. He whispered for Delilah to pull to the side of the road near a bus-stop that had been added to the perimeter road very much after the fact, before turning to Theo again. "Be truthful. Be firm. And keep them focused on Veria. They're gonna want to scatter over hell's half acre, but as you can tell the problem is here. Good hunting Theo. I hope to see you again."
"You're just leaving?" he asked.
"We've reached the horizon of our ability. Now we hand it over to the people suited for such things," Hare said with a nod. Theo seemed dismayed, but after a moment nodded. Lu had to shift to allow Theo out of the car. Hare let out a whistle, manifesting a wad of American dollar-bills and holding it past Delilah out the driver's window. "You've had a rough day. It's not much but it'll see you right until the cleaning crew gets here."
Theo nodded, accepting the money before Delilah started to drive on. Hare pulled out his phone.
"What do we do now?" Lu asked.
"Exactly what I said we were doing to Theodore. We call in Aegis kai Doru, and we hope they can hold the line long enough to come up with a more permanent solution to this," Hare said. "They have a Ruinous Apostle that wasn't built off of a human being, but off of something that is innately more powerful. Even if that thing and me have the same Resonance – which we probably don't – that doesn't mean I can fight it. I mean… in a fair fight against Delilah here, she'd kick my ass!"
"Isn't it against the rules to involve outsiders?" Lu asked.
"Fuck the rules. The Downfall isn't here to bitch about me playing my audibles," Hare said.
"So what? We just… leave?" One asked. "Leave an entire city overtaken by fuckin' zombies?"
Hare sighed and nodded. "That's exactly what we do. For now. We hand it over to the monster-hunters of Greece, and the swelling forces of Macedonian vampires – which I've come to discover are a thing – and think of a way to deal with it in a more lasting manner. You two getting stronger will be a critical part of that."
"You're putting this on us?" Delilah asked.
"Well I can't put it on Lu's shoulders alone, now can I?" Hare asked.
"This feels like a failure to me," One said.
"Not every mission ends in glory and grand larceny," Hare admitted. "Sometimes the one you walk away from is all the victory that you're going to get."
"So where do we go now?" Lu asked. "There's still a lot of activity back in America."
"I was thinking that," Hare said. "Florida or Alabama?"
"Florida," both Delilah and One said at the same time.
"Nobody ever chooses Alabama," Hare said, and then began making a very important phone call. He paused before connecting it, though, and turned to the people in the car with him. "For what it's worth… I'm glad everybody got out in one piece. Last time we didn't get so lucky."
"How many people got out last time?" Delilah asked, as they finally broke with the roads clinging to the skin of Veria and departed out into the rural reaches. Hare was quiet for a moment, then looked at her with heavy eyes.
"Just one," he answered.
Reality Bleed
The worst possible scenario of a Noumenal infestation, a Reality Bleed is the result of a Cultivator operating without interruption or impingement for a protracted amount of time. While the superficial trappings and more obvious effects of an ongoing Reality Bleed vary wildly depending upon which Synergy caused the Bleed, the overall effect is the same; reality is rendered a bit less real, and the rules that govern our universe are undercut just a little bit more.
In the area of a Reality Bleed, Noumenon Vessels and Xenoforms can often manifest out of weakened reality, and those by themselves are reason enough for the Integrated to land on any existing Cultivators like the fist of an angry god the moment that Reality starts Bleeding. But far more grisly and horrifying than those are what happens if a Reality Bleed is left alone for far too long. If the Cultivator manages to damage the local reality to such an extent that it is no longer locally real, they can allow through one of the Noumenon bodily.
The last time that a Reality Bleed was allowed to swell to such an extent was when the Eradication Engine destroyed Warsaw.
Yes, that Eradication Engine. It took six days, fifty seven dead Integrated, and all of the might that humanity could muster in the European continent to kill that thing. And that is considered to be nothing but a taster plate of what the Noumenon could do with a fully weakened reality. If a Reality Bleed is allowed to remain, we are likely to face something far worse than another Eradication Engine. We're likely to face the ones who built the Eradication Engine. And to be frank, we don't have the manpower or the Integrated to fight something like that.
Not since the Founders disappeared, at least. God damn you, Adams. Why did you have to leave us?
– Discussion of Reality Bleed Phenomenon with Jordan Ashe, AEGIS, 2072
