Sergeant Dasa of the Death Miners stared at the three-dimensional map floating above her cyberboard. With a finger, she tapped one of the quadrangular lines. It turned orange, and with a flick of her fingers, the image zoomed in, displaying only the selected quadrangular line and some notes in text form on the right.
"If my calculations are correct, we’re already here..." The sergeant lowered her gaze and reread the notes to herself. "Connection door opening mechanism damaged, cannot be opened... Columns stable. Malfunctioning rune lamps and no trace of arruk tunnels."
“Alright, short-sticks,” the sergeant said firmly over the general channel. “We’ve reached the door we need to fix. Supposedly, there are no arruk tunnels around here, but the last report was a month and a half ago. So, everyone to your positions and stay sharp, just in case.”
The convoy started moving again, continuing slowly through the tunnel stretching out before them. Despite its age, the palm-shaped stone columns remained as splendid as on the first day. According to the records, only one of them had ever needed near-total restoration, but the work had been so masterful that only the regiment’s stonemason masters could tell it apart. The rune lamps that still worked provided enough light for the drauo eyes to see in the dimness almost as clearly as a human would in daylight. Numerous shields of ancient drauo clans and kingdoms lined the walls. The domesticated idars they had released flitted about, glowing with a bluish light, signaling the absence of corruption.
Then, all the beauty and splendor of the ancient tunnel vanished in an instant. A trail of dismembered bodies stretched out ahead.
“Stop!” the sergeant ordered, and the convoy obeyed as if it were an extension of her will. “Possible contact. Stay alert.” After a few tense seconds of silence, the sergeant continued, “Bermag, any reaction from the moles?”
“None, ma’am,” replied the miner corporal.
“Alright, moving on. Machine gunners, stay sharp,” the sergeant commanded.
The moles hadn’t detected any arruk presence, but Dasa’s experience had taught her they weren’t always right. Sometimes, even when they did detect something, it was already too late. In the depths of the earth, vigilance was everything.
Sergeant Dasa often wondered if, during the days of the ancient Drauo Empire or the Drauo Kingdoms of Ibelir, the roads had ever been safe enough for her kind to travel without fear.
The convoy continued its slow march, alert to any possible attack as the soldiers observed the massacre that had taken place. The paved ground of the path had split into small streams of black and purple that converged into a hardened, dry sea reeking of decayed earth, minerals, and flesh. Scattered across it were what seemed like hundreds of limbs and heads from all kinds of arruks, violently torn or cut off. Some had been split in half or gutted, while others had been crushed as if someone had tried to squeeze the juice from a piece of fruit.
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The towering columns rising above that sea of death were stained with dried blood and bore impact marks, as if arruk bodies had been hurled against them. In the distance, the massive door—broken and left untouched for what could have been hundreds of years—stood wide open. Yet that striking detail faded into the background, overshadowed by the gruesome feast of flesh and dried blood.
"By Ibelir… What the hell happened here?" the sergeant thought to herself. In all her years, she had never witnessed such brutality.
“Could it have been a fight between different colonies?” Bredog suddenly asked. The sergeant noticed he had loosened his grip on the auxiliary machine gun controls. Like the rest of the platoon, he was a drauo.
“Looks like we showed up late to the party,” commented old Bali from inside the mechanized golem. But there was no trace of his usual bravado in his tone. The igneous drauo had clearly lived long enough to recognize that this was something unheard of.
“There are no records of two separate hives in this area, and they all seem to share the same color and form pattern. So, I doubt it,” Dasa replied. “Besides, there are too many mutilations, contusions, and precise cuts. Arruks prefer to tear, bite, and pierce.”
“I don’t know who or what did this, but I’m glad they did,” Brologa said from one of the protected turrets, shaped like a pilot’s cabin, on the right side of the S-12.
“Same here,” added Brakia from another turret on the opposite side. “They did us a favor.”
As the sergeant’s truck passed by one of the columns, Dasa spotted the body of a droka with its head smashed and deformed as if a spiked mace had crushed it. Beside it lay another with a gaping hole in its chest, as if someone—or something—had violently ripped out its heart. The sergeant turned her gaze away, but a little farther ahead, atop a dozen dismembered bodies of smaller arruks, was another droka, split wide open.
The drokas were creatures belonging to the warrior class of the arruks. Their bodies, raised on beast-like legs, stood as tall as the groks. Their muscular arms ended in sharp claws, and from the back of their bodies extended four long, jointed, and pointed limbs, along with a tail. Their tough heads had four eyes positioned to give them nearly a full 360-degree field of vision. Their large, elongated mouths were filled with sharp teeth. Bony plates and scales covered much of their bodies.
"Who or what..." Dasa wondered. For a moment, the sergeant had also considered the possibility that the massacre had been the work of another Death Miners platoon or a group of mercenaries. But none of the bodies showed any marks from rifles or machine guns. If this wasn’t the result of a clash between different arruk colonies, nor the work of Death Miners or mercenaries, then what could have caused such carnage? Savages, perhaps? The sergeant had seen more than one of them in action and had heard stories of brutal wars between arruks and savages. But even before she was born, no savage groups had been sighted in the State’s tunnels…
And then, the sergeant remembered a miner they had found four years ago. He had been unconscious beneath the gutted body of another miner, surrounded by a pile of mutilated and disfigured miners and soldiers. When her platoon managed to revive him, he had a psychotic breakdown—punching, kicking, and biting anyone who got close while desperately screaming, “I have to run! The being from the abyss is here! It’s going to kill me!”
A drop of cold sweat slid down the sergeant’s neck. For the first time in a long while, Dasa felt a deep, overwhelming fear.
“Sir, I think I’ve spotted a humanoid body!” shouted Drokek from the machine gun platform in the front cabin.
“Stop!” the sergeant roared.
The convoy came to a halt again, and the sergeant scanned the faint beam of the machine gun’s light. In the distance, the head and arm of what seemed to be a man or a woman—with long hair, and either human or aehul—protruded from a pile of erukidos corpses.