“Just a few dozen more…”
“Colonel Graves.”
His head lifted when he was called, glancing to the side and seeing Colonel Jasmine walking over.
He nodded to her with a smile, the scar across the side of his face making it look more menacing than friendly. She smiled at him despite that, playing with the spatial ring on her finger.
“Colonel Jasmine.”
“Here are some more details on your mission. I know it’s short notice but we’ve had to be more careful lately with everything happening on the front.”
“It’s no problem. We’ve only got so many more before we’re done. I’m just glad to be getting this over with.”
“As am I.”
They both sighed, Graves taking an Orb from her hand and letting it infuse its knowledge into his mind.
He nodded once it was done.
“Very well. Standard enough.”
“Just be careful. I know you’ve been on a few hundred of these missions by now but things are changing fast. The Commander has already told us to keep an eye out for something happening. He even went so far as to get all the helicopters and cargo planes staged. It’s just a gut feeling for now, but the last time he had one of those, we lost two hundred thousand people during the fall of the Treehouse.”
“I’m more than willing to heed the Commander’s warnings. I’ll up the caution for our next missions. I’m guessing the Scourge wants to roll out something new. In that case, we need to eliminate any opportunities we might present.”
“Sounds like John’s logic. And speaking of upping the caution, all teams are required to have a handler again. The Legion has helped Wonderland get past field tests, so the latest Beacons are going to be installed on your armors. They’re required to be active at all times and they’re going to relay both communications and biometrics. The instant that anything happens, we’ll know and react to it. The nerds over there also said that they should be undetectable even while active in full stealth.”
Jasmine handed him a small device, Graves recognizing the plug type as one that would fit the existing Beacon socket on his helmet. There was no need for new armor. They would just swap the Beacons and run it.
“Thanks.”
“Sure. Again, be careful. I’ll see you when you get back.”
Graves nodded to her, unable to find a response as she combed her hair behind her ear and walked away, leaving him with one of those small glances as she did.
Once she was out of sight, he grunted in embarrassment and went the opposite way, heading to the armory.
He found the rest of his team already there. There were five of them. Although smaller numbers like pairs were better for stealth, part of “upping the caution” was bringing more people and preparing for everything to go horribly wrong. Graves had already started acting on his worry for the past week, all the people before him being other teams under his charge that he simply brought back together.
The Commander wasn’t the only one who could guess that the Scourge might be preparing something. Iron Legion’s progress across the continent was no secret to those in Sector 4 and all of them were intelligent enough to read between the lines. The Scourge was being backed into a corner, and cornered dogs fought back.
Graves didn’t intend to be the one whose team brought everything crumbling down. As they reached the end, it was becoming even more imperative that no mistakes be made. Just one small slip-up at any level and the entire operation would be blown. Graves could imagine the horrifying reaction they’d have to endure if that happened.
The only silver lining was that they had already rigged the most important vaults. The rest were both smaller yet riskier. Technically, the Paragon corpses in those vaults weren’t the most valuable items within. Knowing that there was far more loot to be had, protocol had gradually shifted to rigging both the corpses as well as anything that looked particularly worthwhile.
The point was to rob the corrupted nobility of any assets that would empower them. Most of the time those Corpses were the most prominent of those assets, but not always.
There was little need for words as everyone made final preparations. They had all run these missions so many times that it was boring.
After making sure everyone was equipped with the new Beacons and synced to the TACNET, they left the armory with their cargo and boarded a silent helicopter. Wonderland had been consistently improving the design. You couldn’t hear the chopper blades when they were only a foot away from you. There wasn’t even a downdraft. How it flew and worked was beyond him.
After all, despite being a Colonel, Brigadier Derrion Graves was still a Knight. He’d learned a lot of things that many might think a knight was too stupid to grasp, but the technology that came out of Wonderland was something he had no interest in even trying to wrap his mind around no matter how stupid it made him look.
Before long, the helicopter took off, heading toward their target.
This time the target was a massive complex of warehouses. The entire facility was covered in a huge canopy of camouflaging nets, props, and magical illusion arrays to make the place look like a forest from above. It had been renovated a year ago after John Cooper’s planes started becoming common. With eyes in the sky now being a genuine problem, a complex could no longer hide by simply burying itself deep in a forest.
It had been too little too late however. This particular complex had been pinged by penetrating aerial scans from some planes that didn’t exist in the early days of the operation. After that it had been put on a list and continuously bumped down. The renovation had bumped it back up, but due to its size, leadership wanted the teleportation tech to be refined a bit further before deploying it on such a large scale. Now the time had finally come. They wanted the entire complex to be under their control.
The only issue was that they couldn’t see inside of it, even with a more recent scan. That extra bit of intel handed over by Jasmine was in regard to a scan done last minute. Not much had changed. They couldn’t see inside the buildings and based on what they could see about exterior activity, there were more than likely underground facilities as well.
It was going to be a mission that would take all day and another reason why Graves wanted more people with him. They’d be able to get it done faster, even if he would only split them up in half.
They landed silently, Graves taking a deep breath and looking around. He flicked through the various optical filters, seeing nothing out of the ordinary. Now that they were at ground level, they could see underneath the canopy, and their suits’ enchanted lenses could see through the illusion arrays without complication.
It always made him smile, seeing some rudimentary Iron Legion tech topple the best enchantments the Kingdom had to offer.
Graves glanced at the indicators for the rest of his team. A new feature of the new Beacon he had installed was a window that showed off everyone’s vitals. It pleased him to see everyone perfectly calm, not that any of them had any reason to be nervous.
He double and then triple checked the chatter channel afterward, noticing not a single sound coming from any of his team, all silent.
He smiled, and then a voice suddenly chimed.
“You guys know you can talk with these new Beacons, right?”
He recognized Jasmine’s voice. It seemed like she was going to be their handler. With her word, everyone suddenly spoke.
“Still makes me feel a little nervous.”
“Honestly though, it took those Wonderland guys long enough. Beacons have been out for how long and they only just got our suits equipped with them?”
“Eh, they were probably performing exorcisms on the shit. The stuff they come out with can be freaky sometimes. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a soul in these things.”
“You and your fucking superstitions. Keep talking like that and you might actually summon something.”
Graves chuckled as everyone lit up the previously dead channel. Pure reflex had kept their mouths sealed. After all, these missions were particularly sensitive. Under normal circumstances, they barely even used active enchantments and spells just in case they gave off any signals or residue. Even talking posed a risk. Nobody knew if there was some freak monster that could pick up their voices through whatever structure they were walking on while speaking.
Graves had learned some of the science. It made him appreciative of just how incredible the tech he wore was, as well as eerily paranoid about how many avenues of exposure there were that they didn’t even realize existed.
Because what the fuck did that one scientist mean when he said that some species of Scourge could taste magical activations?
Shaking his head of those thoughts, Graves lightly cleared his throat.
“Alright, button it up. We all know what to do, but I’ll give the warning one more time. Stay. Fucking. Careful. The Scourge is increasing security and the rules of warfare dictate that enemies will innovate if they can’t win through force. Keep an eye out for anything different, and take no chances. We’ll retreat if we have to, but exposure isn’t an option. Just remember that we’re the ones with the time, not the Scourge. No reason we can’t just come back another day if we find something we can’t handle. Copy?”
Nobody responded with words. Instead, Graves saw all their indicator lights blink in acknowledgement. With that, he started walking toward their target.
“Alright. Team Two, you’re green. Team One, on me.”
The two groups of three split off, Graves taking his team down one route that would bring them to their first warehouse and underneath the canopy.
Graves walked to the door, the other two by his side keeping a surrounding eye while he popped a scanner onto the wall. It pinged once and filled his view with a skeletal picture of the inside. It went so far as to detect and classify all of the enchantments.
Unsurprisingly, there weren’t many, and they weren’t incredible. The fatal weakness of places like these was the relatively low security. They believed that because they were already in the middle of nowhere, there was little need for internal security. Sometimes the only measures they had were against their own members, such as security levels so someone didn’t go walking where they weren’t supposed to.
This facility clearly had a bit more security, but once again, Graves only saw the common security levels. Give the enchantment the right code associated with a specific security clearance and it would let you through while logging your name.
And of course, there was a set repository of names and codes to match. Not that Graves needed it. He attached another device to the wall where a enchanted conduit was located. The device cloaked itself right after and connected to his Beacon, letting him control it from afar and give the command to simply unlock the door.
It clicked before long, the sound blocked by a portable mute field momentarily. Since the scan showed nobody around the door, Graves dropped an illusion device, grabbed the scanner, and walked through with his team.
Once they were inside the door returned to normal and the illusion device retracted. Graves then finally laid eyes on one of their prizes. A massive Dragon corpse sitting in the middle of the facility being actively harvested for parts. Although the most valuable parts of a Dragon could be used for Crowns or the like, they were also brewed into potions. The blood, and tissues were exceedingly valuable even if simply for the magic in them. They had marvelous effects on the human body, and if they were potent enough, those effects could turn into a permanent boost to magical ability, like magical steroids.
Graves knew of several noble households that received those kinds of potions. Although they regularly had great talent depending on the level of the noble, those potions were usually used as a guarantee so their lazy children could meet that same potential.
But such a large corpse wasn’t anything new. It wasn’t even the largest Graves had seen, so he sent his team to rig the teleporter while he went looking around.
He scanned around for anything out of the ordinary. There were plenty of both Nephilim and humans around, as well as some Royals. Nothing he hadn’t seen before, though he had noticed a trend of the Scourge being more brazen. There didn’t used to be Royals openly walking around in facilities like this. That had changed over the past year or so.
Nothing caught his eye as he made his round. It wasn’t long before his team returned either, so they quickly moved on to the next warehouse. Their TACNET, as well as Jasmine, updated their maps and sent back video feed in real time. Now that they could remain connected, they had access to a few more niceties.
Jasmine gave any coordination or guidance that she deemed necessary, but largely remained silent. Although handlers were mandated now, that didn’t mean they needed to be constantly active. She knew that Graves could handle himself and his team just fine, so she saw no need to intervene unless to provide some convenient assistance.
Like that they bounced from warehouse to warehouse. Graves got three done in just 15 minutes or so, same as the other team. That was about half of the above-ground complex, and all seemed well.
Until Graves noticed something wrong with the map.
“Tombstone One to Handler.”
“Go ahead, Tombstone.”
“I need a double check on the map. It says there’s a building here, but I’m standing right in front of it and I’m not seeing anything.”
“I’m seeing the same through your feed…”
Jasmine went silent for a moment, then came back with an edge to her voice.
“Handler to all units, regroup at the point of entry. I’m tasking a nearby plane to the target. ETA two minutes. We need to rectify map discrepancies before proceeding any further.”
“Tombstone copies.”
Graves didn’t need to say anything else. Backtracking, they started making their way back to where they landed.
That’s when he noticed something in the corner of his eye.
With a glance, he saw two figures. One of them was a Royal that he didn’t immediately recognize, its image distorted in his vision. The other was a grotesque looking monstrosity, a fat and rotund mass of thing on two legs. It should’ve been humanoid, but to Graves it looked like the fattest person he had ever seen ate a thousand too many meals before becoming pregnant, then getting corrupted.
It was outstandingly nasty, as well as alarming. The hairs on his neck stood up when he noticed that he couldn’t feel the Authority of either of them.
With a quick signal, he and the other two in his team froze in their tracks, not daring to get any closer or move. They were still outside, walking along the wall of a warehouse a hundred or so meters from the newcomers.
They definitely hadn’t been there a few minutes ago. They had only just passed through, and Graves was pretty sure he would have noticed them.
Especially since with another few seconds to look, he saw that the Royal standing there was of the Despair bloodline.
He felt his heart race while slowly backing away.
“Handler, we’ve got a problem.”
“I see that. Get out of there.”
“What’s that thing standing next to the King Blood?”
He asked subconsciously while walking backwards, Jasmine responding with the last answer he wanted to hear.
“I don’t know. It matches nothing in our database. Team two is going around. Focus on escaping, Tombstone. Your exfil is already waiting.”
Graves didn’t respond, feeling his heartbeat getting faster as the two new enemies started glancing around their area. They walked along the wall, heading for the corner they could turn, but as they got closer, Graves felt himself moving slower.
Until eventually, Graves made eye contact.
It wasn’t the King Blood, but the fat one who focused on him. He went still on reflex, stealth systems already at full activation as everything else went to dormancy.
For a moment Graves wanted to believe that they hadn’t been caught. There had been plenty of times when someone would look directly at them. Every time, it had either been a coincidence, or the person was looking through them at something behind them.
Graves could feel it in his gut though.
He spoke, his voice going to all channels.
“We’ve been made.”
There was a reaction the instant he said that. Fog suddenly flushed through the area from sources unknown, and Graves heard a shrill scream that made his nerves go numb with fear.
Everything started going dark, and lights started appearing through the thick fog, his Aura being suppressed. Nevertheless, with a unhesitating reaction, Graves threw out a satchel before diving toward his team, grabbing them and launching them away with a burst of Authority 10 strength.
Graves barely waited for them to reach a safe distance before detonating the satchel. From it, massive Psykic arrays exploded, shooting through the entire complex and annihilating every enchantment it came across. Then it exploded again, the Mana and Vigor within it following the trails of Psyka and aiming themselves at anything with poisonous Magika, aka every Scourge presence in the complex.
Graves felt the atmosphere ignite, his armor protecting him as lacerating heat shot around his body. More screams echoed across the complex as everything of a sufficiently high Authority was maimed and incapacitated. Everything else died without ceremony.
Yet the two targets that most of the satchel’s power was focused on were nowhere to be seen, Graves’ brain lighting up with so much paranoia that he felt the urge to detonate the spatial explosive in his helmet, a surefire suicide device.
He nearly bit his tongue off in concentration, resisting with everything he had as he took three more steps across the complex, crossing half of it and coming in view of where his exfil should’ve been.
He barely noticed the anomaly by that time. No longer was he carrying his team, and no longer were there any buildings around. The fog still filled the atmosphere. Graves could barely see his own body.
Yet, one thing still worked. His Beacon blared alarms as it took control of his other systems, unknown functions within it going to work and exposing the area around him.
That’s when he saw the fat one, gradually walking toward him. A glance off into the distance showed the rest of his team running in circles, fighting off skinny monsters with claws that jumped out of corners and shadows, the King Blood lurking right next to them without their knowledge.
Graves was forced to focus on his enemy, Jasmine’s voice in his ear, crackling from interference.
“Tombstone! It’s a Death Shrine! DO NOT GET CAPTURED! I REPEAT! DO NOT GET CAPTURED! SUICIDE BEFORE THEY GET YOU!”
Graves heard her screams, as did everyone else in the channel. He noticed two of them and their immediate reactions, he and the Despair King Blood watching as their heads exploded into spatial fissures.
He didn’t blame their decisiveness in the slightest. They knew what a Death Shrine was. Nobody had seen one except the Commander who had come back with intel about it one day. Nobody knew where or when he had seen it, but that wasn’t the important part.
It had been repeated for months at the time that a Death Shrine was the absolute last thing any of them should desire to hear. If there was a Death Shrine, killing yourself as fast as possible was basically the only answer to the situation unless you were already ten miles away from where it was located.
Killing yourself wasn’t even done purely because a Death Shrine could extract information from corpses either. Their spatial explosives would handle the brain just fine, preventing any information from being extracted. No, everyone was well aware about the kind of horrific experience one would go through should they get captured alive.
Horrific wasn’t even an apt description. The experience was so far beyond the concepts of terror and pain that it belonged to a category of torture outside of what they could understand.
The compiled details about the Death Shrine were abundantly clear on what they didn’t understand about it as well, including just how bad the torture was. Basically, nobody could know how bad it was because nobody who had ever gone through it survived. And not because they were killed. Quite the opposite, they were kept alive, and what remained after being stuck on that metal tree was but a soulless husk of withered flesh.
It was to be considered the physical manifestation of literal Hell, and to be captured by it was a fate incalculably worse than being corrupted.
And unfortunately, Graves hesitated too long.
After seeing those two soldiers' suicide, both the fat one and the King Blood instantly reacted. Graves couldn’t see what happened to his other soldiers, because as soon as he realized the fat one moved, he felt a weight be relieved from his body.
He looked down, seeing his arms fall to the ground. Then the fat one’s stomach churned, something shooting out of it and sticking into his neck.
He tried to scream, tried to speak the activation words so he could annihilate his brain and escape what he knew was coming, but failed.
The spike in his throat pumped fluid into his body and spinal cord, and it reacted instantly. His heart slowed, but didn’t stop, his eyes drooping, yet no sleep came to him. He went slack, paralyzed out of the sheer inability to muster the energy to move or react.
His Vigor screamed through his body with every ounce of willpower he had, yet all he could do was watch as the fat thing shot its hand out toward his face.
It grabbed his helmet, then its fingers curled through the metal with sheer strength, grabbing the Beacon and ripping it out. The instant it was disconnected, the enchantments destroyed themselves, the device becoming nothing more than a fancy piece of inert metal.
Realizing that, the fat one tossed the metal away. Graves just lay on the floor, and it looked down at him with a sinister smile before grabbing one leg. With a swift swing of the blade it cut off his other at the thigh. Now left with a single leg and mysteriously not bleeding from any of his missing limbs, he was brought to one of the warehouses.
He watched the fat one, suddenly coming to a conclusion.
It must’ve been a Brood Father, another entity they’d never seen before and supposedly the only thing that could plant a Death Shrine. It was too powerful not to be, being at least Authority 11 and on the level of a King Blood, not far below a Sovereign.
Graves prided himself on his talent. He was Authority 10 at just 34 years old. More than that though, he had intentionally held himself back from breaching the Great Barrier and advancing. He had been capable of easily breaking it for some time, already grasping the surface Concepts that he would wield once he reached the Horizon.
But he refrained for the sake of Sector 4. Instead of becoming a massive powerhouse that could shake the world, a pillar of Iron Legion that would control the flow of entire battles, he remained covert, refusing to reach a level of power that would expose him to the great powers beyond. He was incredibly powerful, but remained a force that his Commander could wield like a scalpel.
Yet before this Brood Father, he was worse than helpless. He wasn’t sure what came over him, why he hadn’t been able to react. The fat tub of flesh hadn’t even moved that fast. Something had hindered him, hindered his cognition. That was likely the effect of Despair, a rare King Blood that excelled in the use of mental magic.
Could he blame himself for not being prepared for it? When all of Wonderland’s esoteric technology lining his suit failed, was he at fault for not being decisive enough to kill himself with mere fractions of a second to make such a choice? Did he fail as a leader by not recognizing how powerful the enemies before him were?
Was any of that going to even matter to him? It wasn’t long before he was dragged underground, and soon after he laid eyes on the only thing in this universe that could make him beg for mercy.
That horrifying image of a metal tree, human bodies lining every serrated metal branch and screaming in unknowable agony.
Then there was the thing standing at its base, an entity of spikes and blades. It looked at them with a gaze of distilled malice, the walking manifestation of sadism itself.
Graves was barely self aware enough to realize the soul-carving level of fear that he was feeling in that moment, had barely the mind to look at his soldiers being stuck on those branches, spikes entering and exiting their bodies, not one of their limbs remaining unscathed. His eyes burned with the images of those branches growing through their flesh, metal blooming through muscle and bone.
Their screams didn’t register in his mind. There were too many of them. The level of torture being carried out was so potent that it infected the very Magika through the atmosphere and pricked at his skin, making him feel a tiny fraction of the terror coursing through those people. It made him cry, something he hadn’t done even as a child.
And yet, what escaped him wasn’t the begs like he thought they would. There were no pleas, no calls for death to escape what would inevitably come.
Instead, Graves felt a part of his brain sear, the deepest parts of his desperation and righteous conviction tearing through his neurons and rewriting his very mind.
The Brood Father looked at him, noticing his desire to speak, and smiling.
It spoke guttural words.
“Let me hear your wonderful chirping of solace.”
The thing on his throat morphed, and Graves felt his voice return, his screams finally making noise.
“YOU MAY TEAR THROUGH MY MEMORIES! YOU MAY DESTROY MY BODY AND SOUL, AND I MAY BETRAY MY LEGION WITH MY WORDS! BUT MY COMMANDER WILL COME! MY COMMANDER WILL UNEARTH THIS PLACE AND ANNIHILATE YOU! IN THE END, MY COMMANDER WILL SAVE MY SOUL! THE PALE HORSE IS INEVITABLE!”
“HAHAHAHAHA!”
The Brood Father cackled in glee, a euphoric smile on its face. Then it lifted him up, its mouth unhinging and biting off his leg, its guttural words coming out while chewing.
“Wonderful! Wonderful! You have such a soothing song! I wish to hear more!”
The Brood Father carried his torso, and ever so gently, slid him onto a branch on the Death Shrine.
After that, Graves cried out, joining the rest of the people on the tree in a distorted song of Hell.