Iktan looked upon the burning waste of the Lead Cave with disappointment. He had truthfully, expected more of the rebels who were first to break away from his grandfathers Khanate. He had heard horror stories of their Sectmaster, a vicious cannibal who would terrorise those in the south for the crime of daring to seek to be more than the reduced shadows they were left as in the wake of the Jackalopes rising. Now though, nothing remained of the fearsome flesh-tearing lizard. Not even a corpse.
Such befitting the scion of the first traitor. A petty tyrant to the very end, the only thing somewhat admirable of the man being his dedication to his philosophy. After all, the strong had the right to devour the weak.
He walked into the circle of molten slag left in the wake of the death of Phagos, and breathed in the toxic fumes suffused with potent Si. Centuries of cultivation, much of it torn out of the very bodies of those who had been devoured, washed through every inch of his body. yet more was destined to escape into the great vastness, poisoning the land and the world until scavengers, be they beast or cultivator, would glut themselves on the scraps. Such was the nature of this world. Perhaps this too was part of the grand thesis of the abomination. Already his men were carting out all the valuables that could be salvaged from the ruins of the Lead Cave, the mortals ransacking the servant’s quarters and some of the more mundane treasures while the cultivators tried their luck at discovering various reagents, books and relics. Like scavengers tearing apart the body of a great beast slain in battle, he thought to himself.
“Great Khan.” Grand Marshal Diego addressed him with a respectful bow, the plates of bone on his back clinking with the movement. A steady stream of sickly green light streamed from his face as usual, but tinged with light blue. Bad news then.
“Speak. What bothers you, my loyal servant?” He asked.
“Well… despite the fact our victory has been total there appears to have been complications with Gabriel…” Diego answered with a hint of worry in his usual monotone. Iktan unconsciously felt his aura rise to the surface, his gills flaring into a crown on his neck to match the crown of horns, furs and jewels on his head. Above Cipactli grumbled to match his father’s displeasure, rolling thunder tinged with a territorial, bestial growl.
Of course, he had been too distracted by his victory, he neglected the fact the usually punctual Gabriel had failed to report to him in a timely manner. How could he possibly have forgotten? There was a reason for his presence here besides petty vengeance after all.
“What. Happened.” He growled harshly, at nearly 20 feet tall without his horns he was certain he struck an intimidating sight. Now, livid with inwards-directed rage and pulsing with outwards directed power even the ever stoic and emotionless Deigo seemed to let out a little shiver.
“Forgive me my lack of detail… It would be best if you see for yourself, my Khan…” He replied before shuffling away with another bow. Iktan quickly commanded Cipactli to stay still where he was in the sky and followed his marshal, taking care not to overtake him in his haste with his far-beyond-average legspan. Eventually, he felt Gabriel’s Si signature, tasting of freshly burnt coals. Outwardly the loyal marshal did not appear any different, he even gave a salute, stiff as usual, as he saw his Khan approach. But something was missing.
“Gabriel, do you have a mission report for me?” He asked.
“Mission report?” The old cultivator asked, the usually orange to red hot pits in his coal skin where flared a bright yellow with confusion. “I… I must apologise my Khan… I don’t remember…”
“Don’t remember…” Iktan muttered to himself and scowled. “You aren’t the type to forget Gabriel… I may not be blessed enough in the psychic arts to read your mind but something is tampering with you. Go see the Spider and see if we can have it removed, in the meantime you are dismissed from duties until you recover.”
“I- I understand my Khan.” Gabriel said with a flinch. A hint of guilt found its way into Iktan’s steely heart, nothing displeased the old man more than feeling useless. But he would not have a potentially compromised marshal leading his troops, not without at least understanding what has gone wrong.
“Tell the men, all of them, to search the ruins.” He barked to Diego as Gabriel moved out of sight. “He must have come across something for them to place such a psychic block on his mind! I am no fool, if there was a secret valuable enough to hide like this, the old stories of the hidden wealth of the Lead Cave must have some merit, and I intend to rip it out if need be.”
“Understood my Khan.” Diego said with a moment’s hesitation. Clearly, he had a thought for a moment of arguing against one of his points, but had evidently wisened up in time.
Iktan looked at the smouldering mass of shattered metal, crushed stone and still smoking slag before him and felt an all-consuming annoyance bubble to the surface of his mind. Rebels, it seemed, didn’t change much over the centuries, even past the end.
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John awoke gasping for air in pitch darkness. He could feel every single one of his nerves, they burned in his body with every movement conscious or otherwise. He coughed loudly and viciously, and felt some loose strands of long, shaggy hair fall from his head. The pain, while awful, did tell him one thing. He was alive, despite it all. Alive and back in reality as he knew it.
“Cobalt!” He croaked out in a voice that felt like it was torn by razors.
“Here!” Cobalt responded much stronger than he could manage, but still uncharacteristically weak. Still, she was present. They were alive.
John laughed, a mixture of desperate relief, and of countless different emotions thus far drowned out by adrenaline bursting through the dam in his mind. The laughter turned to hiccups, turned unwittingly to small sobs before he could contain them. Memories that did not feel quite like his own flooding into his mind, confirming what he knew in his heart to be true.
He was no stranger to loss. He didn’t even really remember his parents, so early they were buried during the Great Famine that their faces were an indistinct blur in his head. Alexander was a good Supervisor, but he could not fit in every crevice, and no shortage of children would get trapped somewhere they couldn’t escape, or get ill from the Si pouring off some relic, get devoured by some Spirit Beast out of sight. Even once or twice, get old enough to no longer fit in the tight tunnels of the Rats and leaving to seek out a life of their own and simply never coming back or sending even a word. But the scale, and the fact even through the eyes of his passenger he had largely missed all of it…
He didn’t get to say goodbye. It still didn’t feel real. He wanted to deny it. But his heart knew the truth.
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He fought against his emotions to the best of his ability, battling the confused feelings tearing out of his body. But even through the fatigue, the pain blossoming through every part of his flesh, the incessant itching on his now dry skin, what he felt in his heart could not be so easily ignored. Such was its intensity he hadn’t even noticed the silence of ARTOS, the machine having either burned itself out for now with the amount of electricity he had sent through it earlier, was keeping silent for reasons it wasn’t willing to share yet, or some third thing John had not the capacity to consider at the moment.
He felt large, warm, scaly arms wrap around him as his emotions reached their climax. No words were exchanged, in the silence a simple mutual understanding, a shared sense of loss and denied closure that made the fresh wounds sting just that little bit less. Eventually, the ugly, choking noises mellowed out back into little hics as John let himself fall into the artificially inflated warmth of Cobalt’s embrace. When he opened his eyes the only light in the pitch black was from her body, bioluminescent pigment swirling around her skin as she shifted herself not to be disguised but to allow them to see.
“T-thank you…” He managed despite everything.
“Don’t mention it.” She said weakly, halfway between reassurance and a genuine request. He nodded all the same.
A long period of silence followed before he wiggled his way out of the hug and swallowed his grief long enough to try to be productive about their predicament.
“I- where are we?” He managed to ask.
“That.” She responded, looking around slowly at the cave overgrown with sprawling roots and ruined bits of scrap, besides the conspicuously intact ring they were presumably spat out from. There was a thick, lively Si in the air, as well as a bitter almost herbal scent in the very air. “I have no idea.”
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Across the ruined landscape of cinder and slag that defined the Corpse City of Neo Yurk, endless war had been waged in various forms for months. The entire East Coast in fact was besieged by Machines in various forms, but this particular pile of rubble was hit especially hard, and that had always made Packmaster Dakota Gretchen of the WILDHUND Guild suspicious. Even before they received that fateful data packet that gave them some hint about the overall plans of the Machines, the land they seemed to have been trying to conquer was too sparsely populated, too devoid of useful resources, too strategically useless, and too distant from the main population centres of the Kingdoms to make any sense by human standards. Of course, that could be brushed off as being part of the idiosyncrasies of the rustbuckets, but now that they had some of the pieces it was painting a very different picture.
Tech caches, various pockets rich in Relics from the Golden Age, home to miracle and horror in equal measure. Many a hero had made their legend in the past by cracking one open, and many a monster had been made in the battles over who got to own them. Most were well known and guarded jealously for reasons holy and mundane, others remained undiscovered without any hint of their existence or potential location, remaining untouched through the centuries secrets never to be touched again by mortal eyes. Suddenly the targets of the damned rustbuckets made a whole lot more sense, and the implications became much more terrifying. They were targeting caches, including some that not even the goddamn Atomic Priesthood knew about, ancient and buried secrets hiding god knows what else.
If a group of humans found an undetonated bomb the power contained within could shift the balance of power in a Kingdom or a province of the Empire. It did not bear thinking what a soulless automaton would do given those same secrets.
So she was given the task of leading her elite force, the Bull Pack, to the labyrinthian tunnel complexes underneath the ruined corpse city to find this cache before the Machines could and either secure it for mankind or burn it into cinder. They weren’t the only team sent down here for this purpose of course, but most have returned empty-handed or like the team containing her blood-brother Micheal Buaer simply went missing without a trace. This probably should have dissuaded her and her group, but like the ancient supposed ancestors of the Dox that were the namesake, her team was made of stubborn idiots defined by a singleminded drive to get shit done no matter what, and that applied double to the loyal Jersey Devils she had attached to her leash. From the rat-like Ford to the boar-shaped Huell and the half dozen winged menaces practically vibrating with the force they were sniffing the stale air with, all of them were ready to put their lives on the line. Besides, she had her own selfish reasons too.
If there was one place to find any sort of answers or closure about what happened to Mike, it would be in these accursed tunnels.
“Packmaster! Look at this!” Ford called out, pointing at a strange metallic protrusion jutting from the ancient cliff face.
“Good work Ford! Now let’s get to digging befor-” Dakota began to congratulate as she turned on the recording relic she brought along to pass on this information to the superiors before the leashes she was carrying snapped tight as the Jersey Devils began to screech with their signature ear-piercing screams. Danger was near, and whatever it was, it scared the krack out of the poor Devils. Immediately her quills stood on edge, and Ford and Huell sprang into combat positions. For a moment there was silence, then from the dark, mocking clapping.
A figure emerged, initially she thought it was a person, but as they made their way closer to the team and their lights the truth became blatantly obvious. Mismatched limbs were grafted together by ugly stretches of metal, twisted wires ran through the meat giving it an air of a puppet on strings. There was most of a head attached to steel shoulders on the thing, but half of the face was replaced by ugly plates of metal. The other half was the unmistakable visage of her friend, at least what remained. Stretched in a twisted parody of a smile, animated by false life and inhuman technology.
“Be proud, humans!” It declared in an arrogant, metallic voice. Taking a deep, theatrical bow. “You witness the next stage in your evolution, Homunculus Unit Q-12 at your service!”
Immediately she let five of the Jersey Devils off their leashes, the spirit beasts screeching loudly as they soared towards the target on leathery wings. For a moment it seemed to have worked, the horrific abomination getting knocked on its back, before razor sharp ribs ripped free of its chest impaling half of the beasts instantly. It raised a twisted, corpse pale hand and the skin tore viscerally apart, revealing a laser rifle that fried the remaining two with pinpoint accuracy. By this point, Ford and Huell were already moving, but the thing was faster, laughing manically it dodged the bullets from Ford’s weapon and Huell’s stone shattering fists before delivering blows of its own. Snapping off its own sharpened ribs with its still flesh covered arm and using them as deadly spears reminiscent of Dakota’s own mutations.
She was experienced enough to know when she was outmatched. This thing, it didn’t move like a machine. Hell, it didn’t act like a machine either. The machines had committed a true triumph of a crime against nature, they had sought to steal the human form… and it looked like they had succeeded. She realised, in all likelihood, they were not making it out today.
But something had to warn the others, something had to return to the surface.
She ejected the core of her recording relic and rubbed it with a length of scented cloth to give the order to return. Handing it to the creature who understood immediately, she snapped the leash and dove headfirst to join her comrades in battle against the horrid thing that wore her friend’s face.
“HOW FUCKING DARE YOU!” She screamed, filling her quills with acid as she rolled forwards and slammed into it while it was distracted. Flesh and metal began to melt alike, but the thing didn’t react to the damage like a human would. Why would it, after all, there was nothing fucking human at all about it.
“Very interesting.” It noted clinically. Its stolen face began to melt off revealing a mass of wires, blood filled tubes, and plating. “Yours will be an excellent mutation to sample.”
Before she could pull herself away the vicious ribs extended at ludicrous speeds, growing faster than the acid could melt and straining against her fully extended quills. Eventually, though the abomination won, and a sharp pain ripped through her organs. Her vision began to swim, dark spots danced at the edges of her eyes as all sound and memory grew more and more distant.
The last thing she heard before she knew no more was the machine saying in mock sympathy. “What an utter waste…”