“Exposure to the particular Argent energy signature of Lazarus Waves has three distinct types of reaction among non-demonic test subjects, identical to unshielded exposure to Hell’s reality.
Type Theta reaction. Most human test subjects, commonly around 90%, expire without further remark. This figure is slightly lower for human brains that have been extracted from their bodies, more so if these have been transplanted into other human bodies, robotic chasses, or chimera platforms. This figure climbs to 100% in all other tested non-human life forms, save demonic. Type Theta corpses exhibit no further animation and do not resurrect as Possessed.
Type Sigma reaction. About 10% of human test subjects will mutate into Possessed or resurrect as such if perished from exposure. However, through psychological indoctrination and neural conditioning on pre-exposed subjects, the UAC has been able to raise this figure to upward of 40%. The exact nature of the Possessed depends on an individual basis, but subjects will predictably retain combat skills and tactical cognizance. Further Lazarus Wave exposure will augment their qualities and result in additional mutation.
Type Omega reaction. An extremely minuscule proportion of human test subjects, less than .1%, will not only survive direct exposure but [DATA EXPUNGED – See Report File ‘Hercules Complex’ 1 ]. For these reasons, Lazarus Wave exposure to subjects predicted to have Type Omega reactions is not to be attempted, and these should be immediately terminated.
1. There is no Report File labeled ‘Hercules Complex.’”
- UAC Report File “Lazarus Waves”
E1M7: Unto the Evil
“Agent, what the hell is that?”
Even with her five years of experience as an Elite Guard, Ruby had no words to describe the scene in front of them and could not answer Reeves’ question.
Having backtracked from the hangar to the hallways they’d previously escaped through, the group of survivors came across the corpses of the possessed soldiers they’d taken down, but these were greatly different from the last time they’d seen them.
The flesh from the fallen soldiers had begun to spread across the interior of the Mars Base, throbbing crimson tissues creeping from the shattered armors and snaking along the clean white surfaces, dendrites and miniature tendrils waving in the air. Even the blood splatters on the walls were spreading like a vicious mold.
“The dead demonic tissue must be reacting to the breached Tower,” she surmised.
And to the three demon lords now on this planet.
“I don’t know what this means. I’ve never encountered anything like this before.”
“Really?” Rogers asked in surprise. “Not even as an Elite Guard?”
“There’s never been a Category Four breach on Mars before. There’s no precedent for a situation such as this.”
And the only Cat Three breach was before my time.
Romero spoke up. “So what do we do now?”
“…Whatever this growth is, it’s bad news for us. Stay clear and definitely don’t touch it.”
She thought back to the corruption spreading across her pulse rifle, and on her own hand.
“Oh God,” Reeves commented while covering her mouth. “It smells.”
Even through her helmet, Ruby could smell the rancid stench of decomposition in the air, filling her nose and hanging in the back of her mouth. It smelled like vomit.
“That’s not just its own stink, it’s releasing something into the air.” Romero surmised. “If we don’t hurry, soon we might not be able to breath.”
Or worse, that’s not poison it’s releasing but spores.
“There’s a weapons division in these labs not too far from here. We head there, get some supplies, and figure out a route to the teleporter deck.”
Her eyes fell upon a portion of the Hellish growth spreading from the corpse of a soldier. The skull had been fractured to reveal pinkish-white brain matter, but the face was likewise a disfigured red mess melted onto the floor. A single white eye lay on the surface of the palpitating tissue, gazing intently at Ruby.
She gulped.
“And we move there fast.”
* * *
The Slayer landed hard on the floor of the Mars Base, sticking the landing and cracking the glowing transporter panel with his knee.
The change in sensations was undeniable. The reality he now resided in was far more stable and physical than the chaotic nightmares of Hell. Low gravity, frigid temperature, carbon dioxide atmosphere.
The Slayer never imagined he’d be glad to be on Mars for once.
An incoming transmission beeped on his HUD. It was Hayden.
“Incredible. I reactivated every available transporter resource in the Base and brought every teleporter array online, hoping against hope that you would find your way back. I thought the chances of you returning were mathematically impossible.
But you did. I imagine you must have fought through many a difficult battle to return here. Welcome back.”
The Slayer ignored the two and stood up. He stood within a loading dock filled with barrels, tanks, and crates of equipment, the breached wall-to-wall window with a view of the Martian Spaceport.
The nightly landscape was incandesced with the amber glow of a thousand fires burning throughout the multi-tiered surface, blazing on the flat tarmacs, control towers, and metallic husks of a hundred scorched ships. Most were small- to mid-sized atmospheric vehicles or landing shuttles, though the Slayer could spot the shape of fighter ships and larger frigates among them. A number of mostly intact ships could be seen taking off from the surface, and he could spot the faint glow of others high in the night sky. There were other points of light blazing across the sky like shooting stars, launching missiles and dropping bombs onto the surface. Attack drones.
“Though the situation is most dire. The Fracture has been breached, and the demons now stake their claim on Mars. The automated defense systems are engaging the enemy but they will not hold for long. The Hell portal must be shut down.
With the Argent Tower destroyed, the Fracture can no longer be closed from this side. The Hell energy flows from a location in their world we call The Well – a nexus that is completely inaccessible to direct transport. We’ve detected the signatures of three minor and two major demon lords exfiltrated onto this planet, entities that the UAC does not have the capacity to neutralize. Though I imagine that won’t be a problem for you.
I have evacuated most of the remaining spacecraft and self-destructed the rest, but there is some difficulty because of the system lockdown, and there is foreign interference present upon the network. Which can only be demonic in origin.”
The Slayer could sense them. Their presence was thick upon the unseen layers of reality, relaying commands to lesser infernal minds and spreading ruin and distortion throughout the physical world. He closed his eyes and reached out with Farsight in an attempt to locate them, letting space and time unfold before him.
His mind quickly became overwhelmed with countless images of barren terrain and desolate compounds, saturating his vision in a kaleidoscope of rock, glass, and blood. Teeth and claws, flesh and metal, but no demon lords. The Slayer frustratedly silenced his Farsight.
Useless power. Even if his mind had recovered its focus, Farsight had never been the Slayer’s specialty, and the demon lords were surely concealing their presence to avoid detection.
Something small. How long had passed since the Argent Tower was breached? If Hayden was still evacuating the shipyards, then surely the Tower was breached recently. He closed his eyes once more and cast his sight towards the past.
The escaping ships returned to ground and the smoldering blazes gradually vanished. His gaze soared past the shipyards, Martian plains, and abandoned sectors of the Mars Base before arriving at the breached Argent Tower, a fiery shattered beacon of infernal energy letting loose innumerable hordes of demonic beasts upon the red planet. The Tower reverted to its whole and unruptured state before exploding in a blinding eruption of flame and light.
Fifteen minutes. A grand sum of fifteen minutes had passed on Mars between the destruction of the Argent Tower and the Slayer’s return. He had certainly not spent just fifteen minutes in the Kadingir Sanctum, but then again, such was the nature of interdimensional travel. The feat of returning to Mars was impressive enough, but to do so within such a short period of departing?
Perhaps he could stop this invasion after all.
“VEGA is trying to access Olivia’s files. If you can get to the nearest terminal, we will provide you with information. That’s all for now.”
He had to keep moving. He turned around and exited the transporter facility while equipping the super shotgun and bringing up his automap, looking for the nearest computer terminal when a distant rumbling caught his attention.
image [https://i.imgur.com/6lJKpYT.jpeg]
An entire space station lay crashed in the outskirts of the installation, scorched and severely damaged, a faded "UAC VALHALLA" visible on its hull while smoking debris continued to rain from the sky. The Slayer stood in aghast realization of the situation when suddenly there was a burst of electronic warbling, and he turned to find a group of six sleek chrome robots illuminated by the crashsite fire, with glowing blue circuitry and carrying light arms such as combat shotguns, phase rifles, or HARs.
“DOOM MARINE IDENTIFIED,” one spoke in a low metallic voice, and the Slayer readily raised his weapon.
The Slayer scowled but lowered his weapon. Besides turning when he arrived, the droids did not react to his presence and remained idle, occasionally warbling and repeating vocal phrases in the same computerized tone.
“READY.
AWAITING ORDERS.
NO THREATS DETECTED.”
A new sound fell upon the Slayer’s ear, a thin whisper of hissing static. He would have brought up his automap to check for nearby movement, but he could already see the faint shadow slowly gliding towards him, a low figure in the smoke directly ahead.
The figure stopped on the edge of firelight and darkness, and the Slayer could just make out a small levitating ovaloid of dull black metal, with no external features save an array of large asymmetrical glassy optics on its surface, unblinking and glinting faintly by the distant flames.
“NO THREATS DETECTED.”
Neither he nor the figure moved. The Slayer could see the transmission icons of Hayden and the computer idly pulsating on his HUD – no doubt waiting to see what happened next.
Keeping his sight on the unidentified object, the Slayer discretely signaled his Praetor Suit to identify.
…SCANNING…
ERROR: ENTITY IS SHIELDED
CANNOT SCAN WHILE ACTIVE
Just as the Slayer tightened his grip on his shotgun, the white noise emanated from the object grew in intensity and the UAC droids jolted in alert, their circuit lights changing to yellow as they assumed combat ready positions.
But not towards the object.
“DROP YOUR WEAPON,” one droid instructed the Slayer. “YOU HAVE FIVE SECONDS TO COMPLY.”
Only some of the droids held their guns towards him. The rest spun around bewilderedly as they searched for a target.
“POTENTIAL THREAT DETECTED. SEARCHING. POTENTIAL THREAT DETECTED. SEARCHING.”
“OPEN FIRE.”
The combative droids opened fire on the Slayer, their flimsy attacks clinking or fizzing harmlessly on the Praetor Suit to leave his HEALTH completely untouched, but he did not react yet. The ovaloid object had not changed its status since first appearing, and he needed to know what it was.
“HSSSSSS!”
The white noise spiked into a shrill buzz as the black ovaloid suddenly rushed down the same direction it’d come from while cloaking itself, losing visibility in the smoke and vanishing, but the droids immediately recoiled and contorted while releasing harsh metallic growls, and their circuitry lights became a sinister red color. They turned and raised their weapons at him once more.
“DESTROY THE SLAYER.”
He raised his eyebrows.
PEW PEW PEW PEW! ZAP ZAP ZAP ZAP! POW! POW! POW!
The droids opened fire and the Slayer winced out of reflex as their attacks pierced through Praetor Suit and ticked away at his HEALTH. 96. 92. 88.
Normal machines would never be able to hurt him or his armor. The droids were being augmented with demonic power!
Diving into action, he raised the super shotgun and fired it at the droids. The closest four droids exploded in a cloud of shrapnel as the buckshot tore them to bits, and strafing around the incoming projectiles, the Slayer reloaded the weapon and killed the remaining two with explosive slugs.
The droids hadn’t been much stronger than zombies, but the Slayer was concerned. The UAC had built autonomous machines of war, and the demons knew how to hijack them.
Plus, now they knew he was back on Mars.
Nothing he could do about that now. He had to find the controlling ovaloid and destroy it before it caused more trouble.
The Slayer raced through the smoke in search for the ovaloid object, but he couldn’t spot it. The thing had camouflage capacities and finding it by sight would be difficult. He turned on his automap and checked for movement. A group of red dots appeared ahead as another red dot rushed past them. He switched to the HAR and aimed as the dozen corrupted droids came into view.
Opening fire on the second group of droids, the Slayer paid close attention to their behavior as corrupted man-made machines. They communicated among themselves through radio frequencies and acted as a single unit, moving out of each other’s line of fire and providing cover support when others reloaded. The Slayer guessed they would resist in-fighting as well.
He shot one’s arm and it broke off, gun and all. He shot off another’s legs and the droid fell to the ground, but even crippled the droid determinedly dragged itself towards him. He crushed the droid’s head with his foot and rushed towards the one-armed droid to bait it into a melee attack. The droid swung its fist and the Slayer parried it with his Bracer, staggering the droid. Moving in for the kill, he swept the droid off its feet and crushed its head against the ground, but the attack restored his ARMOR rather than HEALTH. Hmm.
Another droid aimed its shotgun at him, to which the Slayer raised his HAR and shot it with a precision bolt. The firearm exploded, killing the droid and faltering another beside it, which the Slayer finished off with a well-placed round to the head. The headless droid sputtered and fell to its knees, dropping its plasma rifle and powering down on the dirty facility floor.
POW! POW! POW! A sudden stream of heavy plasma orbs struck his back and reduced his HEALTH to 75. He let himself become careless, again. Damn it.
The Slayer turned to the source of the plasmoids and saw two droids push through the group, but these were different. Thicker with armor plating covering their components and sleek white plasma rifles in their hands, clearly combat units rather than security ones. The Slayer aimed for one of the droids’ head and fired, the bolt shattering the armor plating but not killing it. He rushed out of the way of their incoming plasmoids before aiming for the exposed head and pulling the trigger. The droid’s head burst in a surge of electricity that electrified those around it and the Slayer took the opportunity to throw a grenade into the stunned mob, which destroyed several of the weaker droids and faltered the stronger one, causing it to spin around and reveal the glowing power pack on its back. Thinking quick, the Slayer moved to a safe distance and shot the power pack, watching as the droid exploded in blue plasma that incinerated the last of the robots.
Catching a pale shimmer out the corner of his eye, the Slayer spun the HAR and shot the cloaked entity with a precision bolt, the shot shattering its outer armor and breaking its invisibility to reveal a pale fleshy interior. He loaded another bolt and fired it, gibbing the organic core with the shot.
The Slayer moved in to examine the entity’s remains with a closer look. The aura that lingered on its corpse like a foul miasma – there was no mistaking it. It was demonic.
“It was able to hijack a state-of-the-art assault platform with recursively redundant programming. This is trouble, VEGA. All UAC defense assets on Mars are now in danger of being seized by the enemy.”
“…Protect the Base, VEGA. Maintain the network for as long as you can.”
While the two consulted with each other, the Slayer prompted the Praetor Suit to scan it once more.
…SCANNING…
ANALYSIS: DEMONIC CONSTRUCT POSSESSED BY MACHINE SPIRIT; INJECTS DEMONIC MALWARE INTO MORTAL TECHNOLOGY
TIER: MEDIUM
DESIGNATION: SEEKER
The Slayer scowled at the seeker’s remains before turning to the fallen assault droid behind him. He stooped over and picked up the white plasma rifle it had carried, clearly a more modern and recent addition to the UAC’s arsenal.
M2 PULSE RIFLE ACQUIRED
AMMO TYPE – PLASMA CELLS
PRIMARY MODE – SEMIAUTOMATIC PLASMOID STREAM
SECONDARY MODE – CHARGED EXPLOSIVE ORB
NOTE: PLASMOIDS ARE FASTER/STRONGER THAN THOSE OF M1 PHASE RIFLE BUT HAVE WEAKER ELECTRIC CHARGE AND COST DOUBLE AMMO
As the Slayer primed and loaded the heavy plasma gun, he glanced at the strewn components of the UAC defense droids. They were hardly impressive or worth concern – likely made to defend against minor breaches of zombies or imps – though he’d be unwise to let the demons use them against him. He kept the suit’s scanning system online; seeing how he’d be facing completely unfamiliar enemy types he’d never fought before, the module would help analyze these to better combat them.
A soft electronic chirping a few meters away drew his attention, and looking up the Slayer caught sight of a small spider-like robot peeking at him around the corner.
It was a curious robot, military-green and with a notably mechanical appearance in contrast to the UAC’s usual sleek and digital aesthetic. It was tiny, with an egg-shaped head and four insectoid legs that could easily fit in the Slayer’s hands, and a single red eye gazing intently from the middle of its face.
The Slayer raised his new heavy plasma gun at the robot. If the demons were able to hijack the UAC’s defense droids, then this one might pose a threat as well. The robot immediately cowered and backed away slowly while chirping softly, shaking its head side to side.
He took aim directly at the robot’s head and placed his finger on the trigger. The robot stopped and lowered itself to the floor while looking up at the Slayer, releasing a quiet whirr almost like a whimper.
…
Ugh. He didn’t have time to destroy every last robot on Mars, the Slayer thought as he lowered the pulse rifle, to which the bot warily stood up. His priority was the demons and finding out how to close the breached Fracture. The five demon lords were the real threat, not the UAC’s droids and certainly not a tiny bot. He holstered his weapon and raced into the facility, checking his automap for the nearest computer terminal.
In the distance, the sentry bot looked on at the retreating Slayer before quietly following.
* * *
I walked through the portal and instantly emerged on the other side, stepping onto rocky ground within a dim narrow crevice, from which a smoky red sky gleamed above.
“Wha- That was it?”
I was expecting another stomach-churning rift like all the others I’d taken in Hell, but this one was nothing like that. It was almost like the teleporters back at the Base.
“Huh. That was ea-”
No sooner had the words left my mouth that a loud chittering rose all around, and a swarm of large insect-like creatures crawled over every visible surface towards me.
“Whoa shiiit!”
I raised my hands and released a flame wave, burning away a great number of bugs although the swarm kept coming. Switching to my flak cannons, I opened fire on the writhing crowd and released another wave, and another. The creatures squealed and screeched as they fell to fire and buckshot, but they seemed to never end.
Something leaped at my face, a grotesque bug the size of my head with thick clawed legs and a squirming abdomen. It scratched and bit at me, prompting my shield to trigger.
“AAAHHH!! GETOFFGETOFFGETOFF!!”
Other creatures leapt and latched onto me while I struggled to throw off the first attacker, slimy swollen creatures like overgrown ticks. My overshield turned purple and red before finally bursting, throwing off most of the creatures and loosening the grip of the large cricket-like one on my face.
“UGH! AGGHH!”
I grabbed it by the abdomen and threw it on the ground, shooting and blowing it to bits before my smoking guns ran out of ammo.
“Fly, you fool! Use your damn jump pack!”
“I KNOW I KNOW!”
I fired my jets and soared over the writhing masses, switching to my machine guns and raining explosive rounds on the horde, throwing one explosive fireball after another.
As quickly as they appeared the creatures vanished back into the shadows and left the dark crevice in silence, with only their lifeless husks and steaming fluids indicating they ever existed. I fell back to ground tense and apprehensive.
“What the FUCK was that?”
“Looks like you landed right on their nest.”
“YOU THINK?!”
I looked back at the spherical wormhole I’d taken to this place, half-considering returning to that damned maze only to watch it destabilize and disintegrate with a fading whirr, the bright shimmering surface quickly evaporating away to a dim silence.
“Of course. Why shouldn’t it?”
I took a closer look at the new location I was now stuck in. There were countless cracks and channels on the rocky walls from which more bugs could emerge, and the chasm I found myself in was very narrow and restricting in movement, at least for combat. It was probably four or five meters wide at most, and far too dim to see clearly in either direction, at least until it branched out in irregular patterns.
“I can’t see shit down here, Colonel. I don’t even know where to go. I’m climbing out.”
“You sure about this? John, those walls don’t seem too friendly.”
“Better up there than down here.”
* * *
HELIX WEAPONS DIVISION
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
Ruby pressed her hand against the door panel, which accepted her credentials and slid open with a quiet hiss. The door opened to a clean white laboratory, and Ruby held her arm out before the group stepped in.
“We’re really not supposed to be here, so don’t touch anything, capisce? Some of this stuff’s real dangerous.”
The group grumbled in affirmation, and Ruby lowered her arm as she led the way into the lab.
The Weapons Division was a sterling clean laboratory lined with deck after deck of various firearms, surrounded by abandoned tools and automated machinery. Phase rifles, pulse rifles, and vortex rifles in various states of construction and disrepair. Standard plasma-based UAC armament. There were even ARC Cannons, an uncommon sight appropriately dubbed by personnel as “lightning guns.”
They reached the end of the deck and arrived at a processing desk with lockers and cabinets neatly tucked against the wall.
“Lieutenant,” Ruby addressed Rogers. “You and these three- um, two, patch yourselves up, scrounge up all the supplies you can, and take count. I want a clear inventory of all we have and a clean bill of health for everyone before we head to the teleporter array. I’ll go log in to the network.”
“Copy that, Agent.”
Ruby stepped away from the team both to search for the nearest computer terminal and to clear her mind. After hours of desperately trying to survive the demons and the group, her body and nerves were exhausted, and she needed a moment to herself.
She walked back from the direction they came but soon turned the corner to a different part of the laboratory, putting the group out of view as she entered a more covert section of Weapons Division.
The weapons studied there were no longer conventional firearms but strange and exotic artifacts. She entered a deck holding weapons from Earth’s past. A feathered tomahawk, a wooden club lined with obsidian razors, a sleek katana with a blade scratched and worn with the marks of a thousand battles, a mystifying axe consisting of several fused hooks, their metal black as night and carved with arcane blood-red symbols. Ancient human tools of demon-killing.
A deck of demonic weapons brought back from Hell expeditions, floating behind translucent force fields. A twisted knife made from a gnarled demon claw, a carved bronze icosahedron that occasionally produced black spikes from its vertices, a long cylindrical firearm consisting of dark ridged metal and a murky emerald at the end.
The pain in Ruby’s left hand flared up again, and she breathed deeply as she clenched her fist. She didn’t want to take her glove off and look at the infection, but she knew it was getting worse.
Ruby reached the final deck and slowed down as she beheld the artifacts before her.
A bright steel lance with switches along the handle that would trigger a plasma spearhead at the end. A broad white shield with a blue cross on its face. A longsword with white crossguard and black single-edged blade.
Relics from the human civilization of Argent D’Nur.
She passed these artifacts and stopped in front of the final deck, an experimental weapons area which seemed empty in comparison. There was a matte black military knife with a straight pointed blade and an open handle revealing electronic components. Ruby recognized its type: a neural knife, like the ones the UAC’s Blackwatch operatives used.
Huh, more like Blackwatch “butchers.”
Those soldiers didn’t serve as security on Mars, rather doing the UAC’s dirty work all throughout the Solar System. ‘From the bright blue to Neptune,’ the saying went. Virtually everything about them was classified even for Elite Guards, from their missions to equipment to identities, but rumor was they were augmented too. Probably not for fighting demons but that wasn’t their job. Not that that made their feats any less impressive, or the troopers any less scary.
Ruby had never met a Blackwatch soldier before, but she passed one once in the Lazarus Labs. That helmet….
She shuddered.
Ruby didn’t use neural knives herself. Not that she had need for them. She was more than capable of putting demons down with a gun, and she hated what they did to people. Moving on from the knife, she spotted a different weapon in the same deck. A glossy black rifle with an angular faceted surface and multi-pronged barrel, branded with the UAC logo and carrying a dark munition pack in its stock, not a standard-issue plasma pack.
Despite the branding, Ruby was not familiar with the firearm, and she could not explain the sudden chill she felt as she beheld its sinister shape. That manmade weapon terrified in a way not even the other demonic relics she’d just seen did.
She hurried on towards a gate at the end of the floor, a locked windowless steel door with additional security reinforcements. Ruby didn’t remember ever going through this door, and she didn’t know what was behind it.
She placed her hand on the panel, which loudly beeped in refusal.
“Error,” spoke the automated voice system. “Security credentials not accepted.”
What?
She tried opening the door again.
“Error. Security credentials not accepted.”
I mean, I am a relatively novice Agent, but I’m still an enlisted Elite Guard with top-level Lazarus clearance. What the hell could they be working on that I don’t have permission to access? Why wouldn’t I have access?
She took a closer look at the panel beside the door. Unauthorized tampering with UAC property was a major violation, but she didn’t imagine there was anyone left to stop her.
She broke off the entry panel with a punch and began to rummage about the exposed wiring.
What was it? Red wire on the blue chip? No, that’s for the lights. Maybe it goes to this other switch?
She connected the wire which instantly produced a loud spark and shocked her hand. She hissed and pulled it back.
Damn it. Maybe I had to pull this wire out too and press this button for three seconds? Or was it two?
The circuitry shocked her hand again and she yelped at the stronger surge, glancing at her glove’s seared plating and smoking fabric.
“YOU SON OF A BI-!”
She punched the exposed wiring in fury and stared as the components shorted out and the gate slid open, breathing deeply as mist poured through the crimson-lighted aperture.
What the hell did you just do, Taylor? Get a grip on yourself, for crying out loud, you’re gonna get yourself in trouble.
Ruby’s eyes adjusted to the room’s dim red interior, but soon widened when she saw the object at the very center.
“No. Fricking. Way.”
It was a black-and-red longsword floating within an illuminated suspension field, similar to the Night Sentinel one she just passed, but sleek and digital compared to the other one’s medieval stylings. Instead of white, the slimmer blade and crossguard were deep matte black, and the single straight cutting edge was a remarkably scarlet red. The edge almost looked crystalline. Like the strange black rifle outside, the sword bore the UAC logo.
Ruby was fascinated by the sword. Enthralled. Mesmerized.
Almost by instinct, she slowly reached for the weapon and pulled it from the suspension field, remarking at how light it felt and how it seemed to fit her hand perfectly. She ran her fingers along the edge, immediately noticing the scratches it left on her gauntlet’s plating.
What is this?
She had no idea what the weapon was, but she knew for a fact that she was taking it with her. Her combat training didn’t include sword-fighting, but she had enough skill to make use of the weapon.
At least, she hoped.
Ruby turned to the monitor on the suspension platform.
Project Bleeding Edge. Vorpal Sword? What the heck is this?
She was about to tap on the monitor when she realized she was still holding a meter-long experimental sword in her hand.
She checked the sword’s handle to see if she could somehow tie it to her belt when she noticed a discrete switch on the grip, a small single-finger trigger beneath the guard. Curious, she pressed it. Nothing happened.
Dismissing the switch, she spotted a magnetic holster on the sword’s handle and activated the emergency magnetic weapon holster on her suit’s back, bringing the sword over to it. The sword adhered to it, unusually easy to carry and access from such a position.
Wondering if the sword was built for use by Elite Guards, Ruby tapped on the monitor and brought up the latest data entries.
Titanium-tungsten alloy molding…graphene-reinforced steel blade…aluminum oxide cutting edge...force field matrix…sanguimantic manifold?
She read the latest report, timestamped twenty-four hours earlier.
‘Considering the UAC’s success in the reverse-engineering of Night Sentinel weaponry, such as the ARC Cannons from their plasma spears and the latest combat-ready Vorpal model from their swords, I have suggested we shift our focus to their suits for new body armor designs, but all my research requests have fallen on deaf ears.
For some reason, Doctor Pierce assures that such work is no longer necessary, and Director Hayden seems more preoccupied with the Praetor Suit, perhaps of the belief he can replicate the Doom Marine’s impossible feats!
I even went to that tosser Betruger, ready to offer armor designs for the Revenant drones, the Z-Sec troopers, even his Nightcrawler chimeras, ready to kiss ass and make a good impression to the higherups for a reassignment, but the cunt wouldn’t even see me.
I really don’t understand why everyone suddenly has cold hands for arms tech and would rather play petting zoo with demonic bioresearch. We’re standing on the edge of an uncharted frontier of unimaginable defense technology the likes of which countless agencies would pay out of their bums for, but all these dimwits seem to care for now is weaponizing the demons! As if a retard with half a brain would buy those god-awful monsters! Why have a perfectly effective weapon that reliably makes things you point at dead when instead you can make a weapon that’s just as likely to turn around and bite your bollocks off? That has enough spice to stand out in the competitive market!
Oh, I am so fired when they go through these logs.
Eh, who am I kidding? Nobody ever reads these things anyways.
- Dr. Croshaw’
Ruby was too bewildered by the report’s implications to be shocked by its language.
The ARC Cannons were based on Sentinel spears? Nightcrawlers?
“They wanted to add armor to the Revenants? What the hell could even kill a Revenant?”
“What’s a Revenant?” Romero asked nonchalantly behind her.
Oh shit.
* * *
RATATATATAT!!
The Slayer poured a thundering surge of chaingun rounds into the erratic whirlwind zigzagging across the landing platform, which crackled with infernal energy and picked up great plumes of thick Martian dust. The scanning module on his HUD identified it as a “dust devil.”
No shit!
He switched to the phase rifle and let loose a stream of plasmoids before switching to his new pulse rifle. POW! POW! POW! POW! POW! The pulse rifle certainly had a strong kick, but it was no use. Physical rounds passed harmlessly through the dust devil and plasma orbs merely slowed it down, and it only grew larger as it gathered strength. Even if it continued to grow, he didn’t imagine it’d do more than scratch his HEALTH, but he wasn’t going to let even this measly demon follow him across the Spaceport.
His eyes fell upon the glowing vortex at the base of the dust devil, where it siphoned dust from the ground into its funnel, and he threw a grenade at it. Although it missed in the eddy’s haphazard motions, the grenade’s shockwave blasted through the dust devil, disrupting its structure and stopping it in its tracks. Thinking quick, the Slayer switched to the rocket launcher and fired a rocket at its exposed base. The explosion dispelled the base of the funnel and the demon quickly dissipated with nothing but an echoing screech that faded away into silence.
The Slayer frustratedly holstered the rocket launcher and passed through the airlock leading to a facility comms center, a nexus lined with several rows of abandoned terminals. Blood splattered many of the broken screens and puddled on the floor, drag marks leading through the doors to other parts of the facility. There was a ravaged HAR mounted on a turret pointing towards a breached gate, bullet casings littering the floor and the user – or the soggy red mess that the Slayer presumed was once the user – strewn on top of a nearby table, with infernal sigils glowing in their vicinity.
Poor bastard.
The Slayer grimaced at the morbid sight before turning away and approaching the nearest operational terminal, tapping the INITIATE SEARCH prompt on the screen.
“Olivia has an artifact in her private lab that we’ve been studying for years,” Hayden informed him as the display changed to the scene of some unfamiliar laboratory, a strange stone artifact suspended in the center of a tall circular room with ceiling-high pillars.
“I believe you can use it to find the answers you seek. It bears your Mark.”
What the hell?
His very own Mark blazoned on the surface of the large stone tablet, surrounded by smaller symbols written in some foreign demonic language. The Slayer didn’t understand the entire text – much less at a distance and unable to decipher their mystical meanings – but he could make out certain terms like “energy”, “portals”, “weapons”, “healing”, and “power unlimited.” But perhaps most worryingly, “DO NOT RELEASE” directly beside his Mark.
What was this tablet?! Who created it?! Why?! The Slayer’s mind flooded with questions as the talking computer spoke up and the display changed to a digital map of several Base sectors.
Granted.> “You can access her Lazarus facility from the north sector of the Advanced Research Complex, about eighty kilometers away,” the cyborg explained as the map indicated a location in the Base northeast of the Slayer’s position. Just eighty kilometers? He could easily cross that distance on foot in - … As a map marker appeared in his HUD for the keycard, the Slayer realized the datachip he’d taken from the deceased red guard in the Kadingir Sanctum probably had the appropriate clearance, but it’d be better if Hayden and the computer didn’t know he had it. He would have to find the red keycard indicated on the monitor, but at least that wouldn’t be too difficult. Seeing a map station on the other side of the room, he walked towards it when he noticed a security alert flash on a nearby terminal, a system alarm flagging an unauthorized personnel entry at a certain Helix Labs. Oddly, the notification cleared almost as suddenly as it appeared, with only the briefest blip passing over the screen from one moment to the next. Unauthorized personnel entry? Not a demonic breach, but living human personnel entering a UAC installation without security clearance? Survivors on Mars? The Slayer made no sign of having noticed the alert as he reached the map station and tapped the download prompt before bringing up the automap. There are very few exterior facilities between the airstrips and landing platforms, so I suggest a stealth approach to navigate the sector. Both to avoid alerting the demon lords of your presence and to avoid potential sabotage of your progress…> What was the computer doing? It was blathering information that was either worthless, obvious, or that the Slayer already knew, but for what reason? Suddenly, a notification appeared on his HUD as he studied the automap. INCOMING ENCRYPTED TRANSMISSION …DECODING… SIGNAL ORIGIN: VEGA Huh? He read the message that appeared on his visor. SURVIVOR CELL HELIX LABS 20 KM SE HAYDEN KNOWS WILL DIE SAVE THEM <…once you have the keycard, it’ll be a straightforward path to the nearest tram station. Good luck.> So, there were still human survivors on Mars. Hayden must have known, but it seemed he didn’t want the Slayer to know. Why? It didn’t matter. Those people would never survive the invading legions – let alone the five demon lords now on the planet – and the Slayer wasn’t about to stop trying to close the breached Fracture. But Hayden likely knew that too, which made the Slayer curious as to why the secrecy. Perhaps it was the nature or identity of the surviving individuals? Sighing, he realized there was no point in speculation if he couldn’t confirm the presence of survivors and investigate them without Hayden realizing. Or the computer as well. For all the Slayer knew, it was just Hayden’s puppet and the cyborg wanted to manipulate him through it. Logging into the network was out of the question then, but perhaps his Farsight would work. Mindlessly tweaking some system systems on the Praetor Suit to keep Hayden distracted, the Slayer reached out with his mind in the direction of Helix Labs, passing over desolate runways and barren terrain before arriving in his mind’s eye at a sterling clean installation. There were teleporter rings, the mutating corpses of zombies, a weapons lab…and five human survivors in various locations throughout the facility. Wearing basic UAC security armor, carrying light firearms, and one of them was a red guard. Ohhh. So that’s why Hayden didn’t want him knowing, he thought as he silenced his Farsight and returned to the Spaceport, walking over to the broken HAR turret. Five survivors meant nothing in the face of a full-scale planetary invasion. With the data chip in his possession, the Slayer had no need for the surviving red guard, and he knew for a fact that Hayden would never let them or any of the other survivors escape the planet. Which suited him and the mission just fine. He picked up the usable ammo belt from the HAR and was about to leave when he stopped at the door, afflicted with something he would have never thought possible: second thoughts. No. No! NO! He was not going to let this be an issue for him! There were three Summoners and two Barons of Hell on the planet! If he didn’t act immediately to kill them and seal the Hellgate, they’d amass a fleet powerful enough to survive interplanetary travel and reach Earth in a matter of HOURS! And if he didn’t act to save those five individuals, now that he knew about them, they would die. And it would be his fault. These survivors probably couldn’t even handle a few imps, and he wasn’t about to babysit them the whole way! For crying out loud, the Night Sentinels’ rite of passage alone had them face Hell Knights in a one-on-one battle to the death! With no armor and just traditional Argenta weapons! The Night Sentinels would have saved them. They would have seen the human lives in most immediate danger and acted to rescue them. And just thinking about his fallen Night Sentinel brothers, his comrades on Phobos, how desperate and helpless they would have felt in the face of certain death, made him feel even worse about leaving the survivors to die. Ugh. He didn’t even know if they were headed to the Spaceport. And he had wasted enough time already. Mars was lost; saving the billions of human lives on Earth was of utmost priority now. The Night Sentinels would have understood, and they would have agreed. They’d sworn a blood oath to give their lives, if need be, in the service of Argent D’Nur. How about clearing the Spaceport then? Ridding it of demons so they might have a chance to escape? … Even if he killed them all, the Spaceport wouldn’t be clear for long. Sooner or later, the planet-wide legions would follow and converge on his position. But, he had a Slayer Idol power-up. If he cleaned out the Spaceport and activated the Idol immediately after, the psychic energies might repel the demons long enough for the survivors to reach the Spaceport and evacuate the planet. …That might work. And he would lose a Slayer Idol that he might have better use for later. He scoffed. Whatever. He could always fabricate another Slayer Idol, and it wouldn’t take too long to clear out…how many demons were in the Spaceport? He brought up his boosted automap while checking the Calibrator component of his HUD, which listed the number of active enemies in his current sector. Three hundred fifty-two, mostly zombies and Lost Souls. There were a few Pinkies, Revenants, Cacodemons, and Hell Knights, but the automated attack drones seemed to be picking those off without much trouble. Whatever. At least once he cleared the Spaceport out, he wouldn’t feel guilty about continuing with the mission. Whatever. Turning to his equipped runes, the Slayer disengaged Dark Claw and equipped Lethal Force, seeing how the latter rune’s additional damage would contribute to the mission. The corpses of all demons he killed might become hazardous to the survivors, especially in the presence of the five demon lords, but he wasn’t doing jack shit about that. He was already doing pest control; he wasn’t about to do janitor work! Frowning, the Slayer spotted some discarded shards of armor beneath a desk and walked over to pick them up, only to watch as these revealed themselves to be metallic insect-like creatures that leapt at him and bit through the Praetor Suit, ticking his HEALTH down to 68. Seething with fury, the Slayer ripped the demonic mimics off his Suit and crushed them in his hands before stomping on the remaining ones with his boot, smearing their greenish blood on the floor. Sometimes, it seemed all of Creation existed just to piss him off! Hearing a soft chirping behind, the Slayer spun around to find the small sentry bot peeking at him behind a corner. He scowled at it but stormed off into the hallway, putting the bloodstained room and confused bot behind. * * * “And the soldiers, they volunteered for this procedure? Awake and unanesthetized?” “There were always plenty of volunteers. Many younger soldiers wanted that strength and power. I suppose they always thought they’d be the ones to retain their consciousness.” “Did they ever?” “No.” Ruby stood at a control terminal in a security station by the weapons lab, calculating a viable route to the teleporter array while talking to Romero. She felt somewhat ashamed for having been surprised at the classified weapons deck, and for divulging top-secret Lazarus information to the gunslinger, but it was too late to take back what he’d seen. “God. Cyborg skeletons with jetpacks and shoulder-mounted rocket launchers? How the hell do you even come up with that?” “We didn’t. The idea originated from our ATLAS Pilots that became Possessed.” “ATLAS?” “Armored Terrestrial Logistics and Attack System. The big mechs.” “Ah, those.” “Yup. Those Pilots are already augmented to handle the physical and neural stresses of a six-meter twenty-ton machine, and they carry advanced jump packs for use in urban combat. They’re formidable fighters even without mechs, more so when demonized.” “Wait a minute, the UAC already owns all of Mars and its orbital space. What do you even need ground mechs and Pilots for?” “They’re used in demonic breaches.” “That’s a bit of overkill, isn’t it?” “Quite the opposite, they barely stand toe-to-toe with the big ones.” “Wait, big ones?” Ruby thought back to mottled grey skin, grotesquely muscular bodies, and blank skull-like faces. “Real big ones.” “Well, did they work?” This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. “With some R&D, yeah. Mostly. Demons are very different from infantry, tanks, and aircraft, so the mechs needed to be custom-built, and the Pilots likewise specially trained. We had a contract directly with the manufacturer. Amber Sun would send us specialized chasses and prime Pilot candidates, which the UAC repaid with top money and VIP client rights.” “…This all sounds like very black-book stuff, Taylor. You sure you should be telling me this?” “As things are, we already have a slim-to-none chance of getting off this rock. If it’s not the demons, Hayden will keep us grounded so we don’t tell Earth what really happened here.” “Is that why you took that sword?” He pointed to the Vorpal Sword on Ruby’s back. “Well, why’d you take that one?” Romero rested his hand on the handle of the ancient Earth katana hanging from his belt, which he’d snatched from the weapons lab. A solemn expression fell upon him, and he spoke in a low voice. “Where I come from, it is said that the weapon chooses its wielder, not the other way around.” “…Do they really?” “I don’t know. Maybe?” He said cracking a smirk. “I just made it up.” Ruby snickered softly, raising her hand to her mouth before remembering she still wore a helmet. “Besides, I come from a mining colony in Ceres. I’m pretty sure the deepest wisdom there was ‘finders’ keepers.’” “Cheers to that!” The gunslinger smiled in agreement, but it was a half-smile. She still felt guilty for not telling him that there’d be no evac for the team, and she had hoped events could have played out differently. “Can we agree, to be completely honest with each other from now on?” Ruby turned to face the mercenary. Sounded like an odd inquiry, but if he was willing to make amends, so was she. “Deal.” The gunslinger paused before making his next question. “So, what’s Hell like? Is it really how the old legends portrayed it?” No. No human mind in a million years could have ever imagined the truth. “It’s different. An entirely alien dimension. Everything we know about physics breaks down with it. There is energy and even life in it, but whatever it is, it’s not like us. It’s not friendly.” “Hmm. I’m guessing the people of Earth used this and the other weapons back there against the Hell creatures long ago. So the myths and religions, were they all true after all?”’ Worse. They’re all wrong. “Fact is always difficult to tell from myth, but, evidence does point that many historical societies did encounter the forces of Hell, in one way or another. Whether or not the dimension we refer to as Hell is the actual Hell of legend, the inspiration behind the legend, or just a coincidentally similar analogue, is a question for the academics.” “Like Hayden.” “Mm-hmm.” “And is Hayden really as pretentious and arrogant as they say he is?” Oh, sure. “Oh, sure,” Ruby exclaimed with a laugh. Romero likewise chuckled, and Ruby nodded in agreement before returning to the monitor. “I haven’t been completely honest with you.” And there it is. “I wasn’t here on Mars just to take out a random employee. That was my cover.” “What do you mean?” “Mixom hired me. They were running a heist into an Advanced Research Complex, I believe. With sleeper agents. I was in charge of extraction, keeping the getaway ship running and keeping attention off them. The operation was in a few days so I dropped by the Hospital for a check-up, and it seems the scanner room shielded us from the energy wave. Guess my drinking problem got something right after all.” “So, Mixom in ARC, huh?” It wasn’t impossible, but it certainly would have been difficult to bypass the UAC’s and VEGA’s security protocols, even with sleeper agents. Corporate warfare was nothing uncommon, particularly off-Earth and with mega-corporations such as the UAC and Mixom, but Ruby was impressed they’d made it that far. Mixom must have been playing the long game. “Dunno why you guys were snooping around here for,” she absent-mindedly remarked. “All that stuff goes straight into our product catalog. Lots of people pay good money for the shiniest tech in the system.” “Taylor, I think Mixom knows about Hell.” Ruby typed for a few more moments before freezing, her brain processing and finally realizing the significance of Romero’s words. “What?” She asked the gunslinger. “…I’ve been on and off with Mixom for twenty-five years, hired for one off-book mission after another because of my skillset and experience. I’m not in on everything, but I know they have something going down at a secret base in Europa. Somewhere called Tei Tenga. Never been there, but there’s strange rumors coming from that moon. Stuff about colony madness, mining excavations, and…a trade.” Ruby had never heard of Tei Tenga before, but hearing the name “Europa” brought a sinking – and chilling – sensation to her gut, bringing back memories of ice and fire and explosions. Europa? Why Europa? It took every ounce of her will to pronounce her following words without any discernible quiver. “Trade? What sort of trade?” The gunslinger looked at Ruby with a harrowingly grim stare before replying. “I only heard one thing: ‘We hand them those Revenant demons, and the Deraki give us the key.’” A grim silence followed, punctuated only by the faint beeping from the active terminal. Romero continued. “I figured ‘demon’ was code for some kind of technology, a weapon or something. I never thought they’d mean actual demons. And those ‘Deraki’…I’m guessing that’s someone on the other side. Anyone, anything you know?” Ruby gulped. “N-no.” But demons are always known by so many different names! A trade? Did Mixom make contact with an intelligent demonic race? Do such beings really exist? The computer terminal suddenly beeped and whined as it received an incoming transmission, and both Romero and Ruby stepped back from the image that appeared on screen. “Well, I’ll be…” “Hiro-!” “This has gone far enough, Agent Taylor,” declared Samuel Hayden. * * * I climbed the walls of the rocky crevasse I found myself in at a steady but wary pace. Through careful bursts of my jump pack, I thrust myself upwards while ensuring I landed on solid footing and didn’t disturb any of the free-standing rocks hanging near the edge. I didn’t want to cause a rockslide or wake something unpleasant up. The fact that the chasm was as still and silent as a grave only added to my tension. “You’re almost there. Just one more jump and you’re out.” “All right, give me a moment. I want to check it out.” “Copy.” Instead of jetting out the chasm, I pulled myself onto the edge and cautiously peeked over the surface. I gazed upon a barren desert composed of rolling hills and dunes of dark arid soil, with sharp rocky crags occasionally rising from the ground and deep cracks marking its surface in every direction. Small red fires burned across the scorched land, the ghostly vapors dispersing the only light, and the sky was thick with smoke and ash. I turned in the other direction. “Oh, shit!” Through the smoke and murky sky, I could make out the outline of a massive object casting its shadow on the surface. There was no way for me to deduce its size, but it must have been giant. Probably an entire mountain suspended above the surface of this damned inferno. “My God…John, this is incredible! That is the location of the gate I’ve been directing you to all this time! Those aliens back at the labyrinth really pulled through! They brought you all the way here! That is your ticket home!” “Wait, you’re serious? That thing will take me back home?” “YES!” “But…that thing’s floating miles above the ground! I have a jump pack but not wings! How the hell am I getting up there?” “You let me worry about that. Your job now is to cross this desert and head towards the gate.” I scanned the desert for movement. The landscape was mostly plain with very few obstructions from the dunes or rocky crags, but the smoke was incredibly thick, and I felt reluctant to climb out of the chasm. I slowly holstered myself over the edge and pulled one leg onto the black soil. THUMM. THUMM. THUMM. I began to feel deep reverberation rumble through the ground as soon as I climbed up to ground level. Footsteps. THUMM THUMM THUMM THUMM-THUMM-THUMM!! Feeling the rumbling speed up, I heard something large and heavy charging across the surface in my direction. “AAAHHH-!” I quickly let go of the edge and dove back into the chasm but lost my footing in my frenzy and loudly crashed down the walls to the bottom, landing hard on rocky ground. I was dazed but unhurt, and looking up I caught sight of a large shadow loom over the opening and a single bright red eye blazing with Hellfire peer down at me from above. “RAAARRR!!” As quickly as it appeared, the thing ran off and vanished, and I panted heavily trying to calm my nerves. “I knew it was too good to be true.” “T-that thing…ugh, that thing was huge. I can’t, I can’t go up there.” “No, you can’t. You’ll have to cross the desert from down here. With the rest of the bottom feeders, it seems.” I gulped and pulled myself up, heading in the direction of the hanging shadow in the sky. “I’m fine with that. Like I said, better down here than up there.” * * * Line up a precision bolt. POW! Three zombies down. One grenade, two grenades. BOOM! BOOM! Seven down. Switch to pulse rifle, charge an explosive orb, release. POWW! Five down. Switch to HAR, aim scope at soldier’s plasma rifle. POW! Only one down but fresh plasma ammo. The Slayer rushed through the Spaceport’s runways, shooting at every demon in sight and occasionally glancing at his automap to check for nearby enemies as he made his way to the runestone marker and the weapon icon not far behind. image [https://i.imgur.com/AOYzq7V.jpeg] The first marker lay in the center of a large flat tarmac, a completely exposed clearing with no cover or landmarks besides a single crashed fighter ship from which the signal originated. Glancing at his automap for enemies, the Slayer checked his surroundings and made sure they were clear before sprinting towards the marker, intent on staying as inconspicuous as possible before reaching the red keycard. He couldn’t risk bringing the entire planet onto his position and compromising his access into the Lazarus Facility, He arrived and ducked behind the smoking ship, a uniquely small and sleek jet-like craft bearing marks of demonic lightning attacks, likely from the Summoner he’d slain back at the Argent Facility. The cabin was empty and the pilot nowhere to be found. The Slayer approached the front of the ship where the runestone lay exposed through the hull, coming face-to-face with a strange honeycomb object composed of hexagonal ceramic tiles and casting a warm amber glow, attached by tubes and cables to the craft's inner components. The UAC had likely attempted to incorporate the artifact into the experimental ship's design, though likely without understanding its true function. RUNE ACQUIRED – GOD SPEED RAMPAGE PRODUCES DAMAGING TRAIL AND AREA OF EFFECT The rune might prove useful in wide spacious areas such as the Spaceport, the Slayer thought as he swapped his currently equipped Boiling Blood rune for Godspeed, feeling their symbols flash in his mind as they left or came into effect. Satisfied, the Slayer raced out of the exposed runway and headed for the weapon marker, running around a wrecked frigate’s service tower and finding a security droid squad near an abandoned military LUV, shooting at several encroaching zombie workers. “DEMONIC PRESENCE DETECTED. BEGINNING TERMINATION.” The droids could handle a few zombies, but the Slayer was more interested in the weapon icon marked on the LUV. He took a few steps towards the vehicle when he heard a faint hiss from around the corner, a thin raspy static. The low dark figure of a seeker hovered into view and whirred in alarm upon sighting the Slayer, turning the security droids’ circuitry lights from blue to yellow. His heartbeat immediately spiking, the Slayer focused a Blood Punch and released it on the seeker, eviscerating it with the blow and sighing in relief as the droid’s lights turned back to blue. Walking to the LUV, the Slayer switched to the .45 handgun and put down the last few zombies with well-placed headshots. “NO THREATS DETECTED. READY. AWAITING ORDERS.” Climbing onto the vehicle’s tailgate, the Slayer took a moment to inspect the shielded firearm mounted on the artillery seat. A railgun. An actual, by-God, man-made, manually operated railgun. A sleek silver weapon over almost two meters long with black handles, two shiny parallel rails, and a centrifugal force chamber. The Slayer had used similar weapons before, though always of extraterrestrial or demonic origin. Such designs tended to suffer from insufficient power and inadequate durability, not to mention user safety. The armored shielding on the barrel was likely to protect the user from the weapon discharge as much as from incoming attacks, but if there was anyone who could figure them out, it was the UAC. At least he wouldn’t have to worry about either problem once he entered the weapon into the Praetor Suit’s systems. There were a number of small steel bolts strewn around the floor of the artillery seat. He picked one up. It was a thin needle-like flechette about ten centimeters long and one centimeter wide, with a sharp tip, smooth body, and a glowing blue capacitor on the tail end. Munition for the railgun, with built-in power supply. Collecting the flechettes and grabbing hold of the railgun’s handle, the Slayer pried off the unneeded frontal shield and disengaged it from its mount, flicking on the power switch and watching the weapon hum to life as the force chamber spun up and began to glow a cool cyan color. ‘UAC Gauss Cannon Mk III,’ he read on the side. A gauss cannon would be a type of coilgun, not railgun, but if the UAC’s scientists didn’t care for correct nomenclature, then neither did he. ‘Try Not To Die When Firing This Beast.’ He was sure he’d manage. GAUSS CANNON ACQUIRED AMMO TYPE – FLECHETTE BOLTS PRIMARY MODE – PRECISE SEMIAUTOMATIC SHOT SECONDARY MODE – SIEGE MODE; WIDE AOE AND PASSES THROUGH ENEMIES NOTE: WEAPON HAS SIGNIFICANT RECOIL THAT MUST BE COMPENSATED BY USER The Slayer turned to the distance. There was a resource stache in a nearby service tower, which was filled to the brim with zombies. He would drop in, clear house, and restock before heading towards the final sector of the Spaceport, which contained the target keycard. Ready to move on, he climbed down to the LUV’s trunk when he noticed a large bullet-shaped mortar shell on the floor of the bed. He was about to kick it out of his way when he spotted a startling triangular symbol on its casing. It wasn’t a mortar shell; it was a nuke. A small-scale tactical shell rather than a large-yield bomb that would reduce half the Base to cinders, but there was no doubt about it. Even without the nuclear symbol on both the round’s casing and his HUD, the Slayer could sense the unmistakable radiation emanating from the shell. His surprise replaced by curiosity, he cautiously picked up the reflective silver warhead. A goddamn nuclear artillery shell. What would the UAC even use it for? Ship-to-ship space combat? Excavations? Demonic breaches? Even a single Summoner would already be immune to nuclear attacks. The only practical antidemonic applications of such a device for the UAC would be against large swarms of imps or zombies, or maybe as a last resort against Hell Knights. He tapped the warhead’s casing, listening to the faint chink chink produced. In any case, he’d definitely make better use for the round than the UAC ever did. He signaled the Praetor Suit to enter the shell into its storage matrix. Perhaps he could use it as special ordnance. ERROR: SELECTED MUNITION IS TOO LARGE TO CURRENTLY INGRESS INTO STORAGE MATRIX MATRIX MUST BE REPAIRED OR UPGRADED Oh, for FUCK’S sake! “HSSSSSS!” “DESTROY THE SLAYER.” Immediately looking up, the Slayer laid eyes on the squadron of security droids, now possessed and glowing red, converging towards the LUV as a horde of zombies and imps, Pinkies and Revenants, Cacos and Hell Knights warped into the clearing, the culpable demonic seeker hanging far behind the mob. The construct must have found him as he contemplated the mini nuke and notified the demon lords of his position. The Slayer was about to equip his rocket launcher and leap into action when he remembered he still held a nuclear artillery shell in his hands. He looked down at the warhead, then back at the horde. * * * Romero unsurely backed away from the imposing transmission of the on-screen cyborg, but Ruby held her ground and advanced towards the monitor. “You bastard, it was you! You’re the one that did this!” “I can assure you; I did no such thing.” “I don’t believe you! You’re the one that got everyone on this rock killed, and now you want to kill us too!” “This bickering is pointless. Soon the demons will completely overrun the planet, and there will be nowhere you can hide from them.” “Don’t listen to him, Hiro. We’re getting out of here. Do you hear that, you bastard?! We’re getting off this planet!” “By venturing into the lower decks of the Helix Labs and teleporting to Lazarus? I can think of no course of action more foolish or irresponsible than that.” “Why did you even call, you fucker? Are you trying to gloat? Enjoying our misery from your bunker or escape pod or wherever you are?” “I called to give you the only piece of advice I can offer: Accept your fate. Stop trying to escape, and stop deluding yourselves with the illusion that you will survive. Do yourselves a favor, and put yourselves out of your own misery. Suicide is a preferable alternative compared to the end that awaits you.” “Always the philanthropist, aren’t you?” Ruby hissed. “Always working ‘for the greater good,’ ‘for the betterment of mankind.’ Lots of betterment that happened here.” “What happened here is a grave tragedy, beyond anyone’s control, but it’ll all be for nothing if Earth isn’t warned and prepared for what is to come.” “Atop a mountain of corpses, including ours.” “A terrible but necessary sacrifice. What Earth needs now is a hero, and that is a burden I will solemnly accept.” Ruby felt sick to her stomach. At the carnage that had happened, at Hayden’s indifference to it, at his arrogance, and at his willingness to leave them to die just so no one would tarnish his image of a savior. “Well, I have good news for you, Doctor Hayden. We’ll save you from that heavy burden. We’ll get off this planet, we’ll make it back to Earth, and we’ll tell the whole wide world what really happened here. We’ll tell them that you found a dimension of unfathomable evil and exploited it for your own gain. You used its power to create weapons and monsters, sacrificed countless lives to it, and worst of all, you let it in to slaughter an entire planet full of innocent people. If the world really needs a hero, Director, I can assure you, it WON’T be you.” The cyborg looked down ever so slightly. Ruby thought he almost looked disappointed. “I admire your will, Agent Taylor. It always drove you to excellence, made you a great soldier and an even better Elite Guard. But now, it will only bring you suffering, both to your companions and to yourself. I cannot help you, and I cannot save you from what’s coming. You have my sympathies.” The monitor cut to black as the transmission abruptly ceased, and the facility immediately blared with a flashing red alarm. “DEMONIC PRESENCE DETECTED.” “What’s going on?” Inquired Romero. “We need to move! Get back to the group!” Both of them raced down the hallway to regroup with the others, past the ancient human weapons that burned with bloodlust and the demonic relics that shook violently behind their containment fields. “Rogers! Amanda!” Ruby called out. “Agent! What’s going on?” “ROOAARR!” Something roared nearby. A harsh, guttural, feral roar. “Our position is compromised; we have to move! Did you pick up the supplies?” “Yes! We have ammo but we’re running low on med packs!” “Good enough!” Ruby yelled as she unholstered her pulse rifle and tossed it to the floor, the corruption spread further and faintly smoking. She grabbed a fresh pulse rifle from the deck, primed it and loaded a fresh plasma pack before flicking its barrel light on. “Go, let’s go!” Ruby took the front and led the group out of the weapons lab and back through the winding corridors of Helix, the gore and blood splatters that marked the hallways appearing black under the strobing red lights. “Whoa whoa whoa stop!” The gunslinger held his arm out in front of Ruby, and the team skidded to a halt in front of a convulsing corpse of a fallen soldier, whose glistening fleshy tissue had spread across the floor and adjacent walls. The flesh on top of the corpse burst off into bulbous growths that floated in the air, holes spreading in their front to reveal mouths full of sharp yellow teeth. “HSSSS!” “Shoot!” Ruby yelled. “Shoot them!” POW POW POW!! PEW PEW PEW!! ZAP!! ZAP!! The team opened fire with their various firearms, shooting down several of the flesh spawns but the creatures were tiny and darted between their bullets, closing the distance and latching onto their armor. “Ugghh!!” One of them landed on Ruby’s arm. She ripped off and crushed it with her other hand, glancing at the tiny bitemarks the thing had left on her suit. Romero pried several off his chestplate and Rogers even ripped one off his exposed neck, but the team had no time to stand still. “Keep moving! Keep moving!” “ROOAARR!” They fled past the corpse and passed through an open gate, the sign BIOTECH RESEARCH DIVISION hanging above the door. They entered a deck lined with translucent stasis tubes on the walls, containing dark shapes barely visible behind the fog on the glass. Some of the tubes were cracked and had released thick red tissue onto the floors and walls, which unfurled into long thin tentacles as they approached. “Taylor, look ou-!” Romero yelled before being thrown into a wall, a long seared crack on his armor where a tentacle had slammed him. “Hiro-!” A tentacle whipped out and wrapped itself around Ruby’s ankle before pulling her off her feet and dragging her down the corridor. “AAAAHHHH!!” She pulled her pulse rifle to the front and desperately fired, blindly shooting to free herself but to no avail, and she was just wasting ammo. Wait, the sword! The sword! She reached over her shoulder and pulled the Vorpal Sword free before reaching forward and slashing at the tentacle with it, cutting it in a single swipe. The bleeding tendril retracted with a sharp hiss and Ruby clambered to her feet back to the group. “Help! Help!” The other team members were desperately fighting off the tentacles as well. Reeves was trying to pull the tendrils off a bound Romero, and Rogers was desperately clutching at the tendril wrapped around his neck and chest. Quick as lightning, Ruby raced toward the group, hacking and slashing at every flailing tentacle that crossed her path and noticing a distinct red aura beginning to form around the base of the black blade. Reaching the team, she raised the sword and hacked the fleshy ropes off Rogers, careful not to strike the lieutenant. Rogers raised a free hand and pulled the severed tentacles off himself, gasping deeply as he rubbed his sore neck. She turned around and stabbed the sword into the tendril holding Romero down, reaching out and pulling the mercenary to his feet. “ROOAARR!!” It’s right on top of us! Something rumbled nearby, and the team raised their eyes to see a large shape break free from a stasis tube on the far side of the corridor. A hulking figure about the size of a person with scaly green skin, two brawny arms above another two shorter scythe-arms, and two red reptilian heads. “What is that WHAT IS THAT!” Yelled Reeves from the back. Rogers responded. “SHOOT IT!” PEW PEW PEW! POW POW POW! The four of them opened fire, but their bullets bounced off the demon’s skin and their plasmoids sputtered harmlessly on contact, only slightly slowing it down. The creature growled and stomped heavily towards them. “It’s no use!” Shouted Romero. “We have to fall back and find a way around this thing!” “This is the only way to the teleporter deck!” Ruby raised her rifle at one of the demon’s heads and pulled the trigger. The plasmoid hit and burst against the tender red flesh, searing tissue and splattering blood on the wall. The demon stopped and roared in pain, “Aim for the heads! That’s its weak spot!” The group turned their guns to each of the monster’s heads, prompting it to raise its arms in an attempt to shield itself. “ROOAARR!!” Suddenly, the beast lowered its posture and charged violently at the group with arms over its head. “MOVE! GET OUT OF THE WAY!” The team scattered to avoid the demon’s attack, and as it charged past them and slammed into the wall, Ruby spotted two tumorous growths on the creature’s back. “It has red tissue on its back! Shoot at that if you can!” The rest of the group clambered to their feet and fired at the creature’s exposed back as it pulled itself free from the crater in the wall. “ROOAARR!!” The demon turned around and spit a long black harpoon-like tongue at Ruby’s head, which only barely grazed her helmet. “Look out!” Shouted Rogers. “Don’t let it impale you!” The other head spit another tongue at the lieutenant, which struck his forearm and pinned it to the wall. “AAAAHHHH!!” Ruby loaded a fresh plasma pack and turned the pulse rifle at the monster, but it charged towards Rogers and Ruby couldn’t risk hitting him with the splash damage. She slung the rifle around her shoulders and drew the Vorpal sword. Rogers desperately tried to free his pinned arm while shooting at the demon with his phase rifle, but the demon knocked the rifle out of his hands and withdrew its harpoon tongue before grabbing the lieutenant with two burly arms and bringing him towards its open maw. “AAARRRGGGHHH!!” Ruby leapt at the monster and dug the Vorpal sword into a red growth on its back, causing the demon to roar and stumble around in agony. It slammed her into one wall and another, knocking the wind out of her but she noticed the creature’s blood being siphoned into the crimson blade, the scarlet aura growing brighter and further towards the tip. ‘Sanguimantic manifold’…Blood! The sword feeds on blood! She pulled the sword from the creature’s back and ducked beneath a thrashing arm before slashing at its chest and stomach, the blade slicing through the thick skin and spilling blood all over the floor. “Hiro!” Ruby called out. “Your sword! It’s weak to swords!” The gunslinger nodded in understanding and holstered his vortex rifle, drawing his katana and charging at the demon. The monster lunged at him with a pincered claw but Romero ducked under and slashed at its stomach, the sword passing clean through the entire left side of the beast. She swung the sword upwards and sliced off one of the arms which held Rogers, prompting the demon to drop him. The scarlet aura now reached the full length of the blade and without thinking, Ruby pressed the trigger beneath the guard as she brought it down on one of the demon’s heads, watching the sword become engulfed in bright crackling energy and chopping the head off in one blow. “ROOAARR!!” The monster howled in agony. “ROOAAAAARRRRR!!” The creature punched Ruby with its bleeding stump and knocked her against the wall before spitting a mass of steaming green fluid at her. She fell to the ground before the glob of acid struck where she’d just been a moment prior and began eating away at the wall. Reeves and Romero still circled around the creature, trying to shoot at its exposed red flesh, but the demon now spit thick globs of acid in their direction. One of them struck close to Reeves and struck her arm in the splash, causing her to drop her HAR and fall to the ground in agony. “AAAHHH!!” “Amanda!” “ROOAARR!!” The monster raised a clawed foot to crush her. and Ruby quickly rolled out of the way before the foot landed and cracked the ground. Another foot stomped heavily near her, and the creature ducked to strike at her with a muscular arm, its fist sinking deep into the floor. “Ah!” “Taylor! Go for its ankles!” Seeing the Vorpal Sword had gone dark once more, Ruby slashed at one of the demon’s exposed ankles, slicing its tendons and causing the creature to stumble. Romero slid towards her and brought his katana across the other ankle, cutting the other foot and bringing the demon down to both arms as she flanked the monster from the other side and slashed at its exposed back. The creature turned and shot a hooked black tongue at her, but the harpoon inadvertently struck the Vorpal Sword and bounced off a shimmering energy shield. FORCE FIELD MATRIX! THE SWORD CAN REFLECT INCOMING ATTACKS! Reacting quick, Ruby swung the sword and sliced off the creature’s tongue before it returned to its mouth. “ROOAARR!!” She leapt onto its back and stabbed her sword into one of the red growths, the blade passing entirely through the monster. “ROOAARR!!” The scarlet aura fully illuminating the blade once more, Ruby raised the Vorpal Sword and triggered its power slash before bringing it down onto its neck, illuminating the corridor in a electrifying red glow before slicing the head off and causing the monster to go limp, thudding heavily onto the floor as thick blood poured from its neck stumps. Ruby panted heavily atop the dead monster, the Vorpal Sword dark once more and hanging from her hand as she struggled to catch her breath. “DEMONIC PRESENCE ELIMINATED.” Romero slumped against the wall with Rogers unconscious some distance away. Reeves was bent over on the floor, breathing but painfully clutching her arm. “Amanda?” “Burns…it…burns…” The monster’s acid hadn’t struck her directly, but it had still managed to eat through her security suit. Chemical burns shouldn’t be treated with med packs, but she needed the wound treated immediately. Something crashed in a room nearby, Ruby looking towards the sound of breaking glass. Turning to face her exhausted companions, she stowed her sword and grabbed her pulse rifle while heading towards in the direction of the noise. She reached the first door in the hallway, a broken glass gate whose shards lay scattered on the floor. She passed through the empty frame and held her weapon ready, moving its light across broken scientific equipment, bloodied countertops, and multiple dead workers. Wait…these bodies aren’t spreading in those disgusting growths…Why is that? And my hand…my hand isn’t hurting anymore. Something shuffled behind her, and Ruby spun around with finger on the trigger, but she gasped and froze. White lab coat, wavy black hair, wide piercing eyes, badge of the Global Science Council. What…what the fuck? The woman flinched from Ruby’s rifle light and fearfully huddled away from the Elite Guard, covered in blood but breathing, unzombified, and very much alive. * * * I huddled behind a rock cover, staring at the hive of large wasp-like creatures which buzzed frenzily in a corner of the deep crevice. Their bodies were made from deep brown chitinous shell, but their abdomens were clear and seemed full of a bright orange fluid, which cast a faint glow in the dim pit. The wasps themselves were big, probably the size of my hands, and their hive was a pitted spiral structure that blocked the whole passage. “What are you thinking, John?” “I’m thinking maybe that hive is flammable. And I know wasps don’t like fire.” “No, you’re thinking of bees. Besides, you’re in Hell, not Earth. You don’t know how these wasps will react to fire. Those probably aren’t even wasps!” “They look just as nasty.” There was something crawling on the floor towards the hive, a black metallic scorpion with gnarled pincers and two sharp tails. Without warning, the waspids descended upon the scorpion and began swarming over it. The scorpion fiercely fended off their attacks, ripping waspids apart and stinging at them with both tails, but was overwhelmed and vanished beneath a wave of fluttering wings and glowing abdomens. As suddenly as it began, the swarm flew off to leave only the twitching corpse of the scorpion on the barren rock, dripping with bright orange venom. “Oh, that’s nasty.” “Those things attack in swarms, and that’s a whole nest there,” I whispered while slowly backing up. “It would be better to find another route aroun- Ah!” There was another scorpion at my foot. I stepped on it out of reflex and immediately felt an excruciating pain throughout my leg as if I’d been impaled with a white-hot skewer. “AAHH-!” I screamed in agony but quickly covered my mouth, realizing too late I was within earshot of the waspid hive. The creatures fluttered but thankfully didn’t react and continued buzzing as normal. Strangely enough, the sudden pain faded to leave nothing but a faint ache and a fiercely racing heart. I stumbled back from the scorpion but quickly realized it was unmoving, and taking a closer look I noticed it was just a lifeless husk, empty and split lengthwise in half. I checked my foot. The white armor plating was dirty but undamaged, and my overshield hadn’t even triggered. Did I prick myself on its stingers? I just brushed against it! Stooping down to pick the empty shell up, I briefly hesitated before cautiously lifting the shell from the bottom. Nothing happened. Picking it up, I found its eight legs were studded with sharp glinting spikes. “That’s strange. I stepped on it with full force and it only split halfway. It’s not crushed at all.” “I don’t think that was you, soldier. The critter must have split its shell like that when it molted. It looks like their shells are tougher than they look.” I glanced at the other scorpion slain by the waspids. The husk seemed whole and almost undamaged, with orange venom dripping only from the gaps in the shell. They must have forced their stingers between its body segments to kill it. I slowly reached out and passed my finger over the tip of a spike. My overshield didn’t trigger but it still felt like my finger was sliced opened and the bone pulled out with rusty pliers. “Urrgghh!!” I winced but clenched my jaw shut and breathed deeply as the pain faded away just as fast. I cracked one eye open. My cybernetic hand was completely normal. “See what I told you? You never know what you’ll come across in Hell. The husk of a demonic scorpion whose shell is still saturated with its undying malice, for example.” I took a closer look at its empty leg husks. Four on each side, with joints and lengths that corresponded to my fingers. I tentatively put my fingers inside the shell. They fit perfectly. “No. You’re not ACTUALLY considering that, are you?” “If this power is really in the shell, then I must be able to use it as a weapon, no? I may not be able hit too hard with just my hands, but it’s a better choice in this cramped area. At least it’ll help me keep the bugs at bay if things get hairy.” I held the partially bisected shell in both hands, got a firm grip, and with a strong sideways motion split it in two. I fitted both hands into both pieces, careful not to prick myself with the spines. “State-of-the-art cyber-arcane combat platform, and you make brass knuckles out of the shell of a dead bug. What will you do next?” I clenched and unclenched my hands. The tips of the shell’s legs made sharp claws, and the stiff tails made a spiked bar over my knuckles. I still had a free range of movement, and I would be able to use the Bronze Spear if need be. I cackled and excitedly threw punches into the air before striking a pose. “I’m gonna throw some hands.” * * * The Slayer Rampaged up the service tower’s stairways in a fiery blaze, ignoring the radioactive dust still clinging to his Suit and the mild chunk the bombshell’s detonation had taken out of his HEALTH, though it was nowhere near the size of the chunk it had taken from the Martian surface. He grinned and made a mental note to keep a respectful distance from future nuclear blasts. His Godspeed rune ignited the air around him as he blasted through every locked gate in his path, leaving a charred trail of destruction in his wake and scorching nearby Possessed into smoking crisps. Approaching the technician locker room which contained the target resource stache, he skidded to a halt and stopped in front of the gate, searing its metal surface with a gust of embers and superheated wind. He forced his hands between the smoldering juncture and pried the door open. It was an unspectacular storage area lined with several rows of rusty lockers, dirty benches, and a thick layer of dust over the floor. There were pressure valves on the walls, caked shut with grime, releasing only the occasional trickle of steam. The contaminated air was still saturated with various unsavory but mundane smells the Slayer was grudgingly familiar with, and a wide window to the burning Spaceport illuminated the dust currents swirling through the air. image [https://i.imgur.com/PsK3NkH.jpg] The Slayer walked over to the nearest locker and opened it. A combat shotgun, a wrench, and a turret mount. He shut the locker. Next locker. A rocket launcher, a shovel – a shovel? – and a brown rucksack with spare rockets. The Slayer collected the rockets and moved on. A worn blue baseball cap, a scratched wooden bat, and a carton of non-dairy milk substitute. The Slayer scowled and forcefully closed the locker. Hearing a sudden high-pitched ringing at the window, he turned and found the small green sentry bot sticking to the outside of the window, projecting a red laser beam from its eye to cut an opening into the tower. The circular pane dropped to the floor and the bot squeezed its way inside before cheerfully bouncing onto the window frame, staring at the Slayer. “This is unexpected. No other prototype has exhibited such a level of user compatibility. I’ll have to run additional tests on further versions.” The Slayer didn’t need a fucking companion dog! He needed that red keycard and for everyone to stay the hell out of his way! There was something held between the bot’s front legs, a crumpled white medikit. He crudely snatched the med pack from the bot and crushed it, boosting his HEALTH to 100. Something groaned from behind the doorway, a charred zombie worker that had survived the Slayer’s blaze, slowly shambling towards him. He paid neither the zombie or the startled bot any mind. Next locker. A murky brown bottle of liquor, a black eyepatch, and a military-green revolving grenade launcher. He pulled out the bottle and smashed it against the zombie, splattering its brains on the wall and disgustedly dropping the broken bottle before reaching in for the firearm. The bot jumped in surprise as the Slayer tossed the weapon through the window, leaping onto the frame to look at the falling firearm. He despised grenade launchers. Too slow and short-ranged to be machine guns, too weak and imprecise to be rocket launchers. At least he got a few grenades out of it. More groaning echoed from the doorway as numerous zombies came into view. His annoyance rising into irritation, the Slayer was about to lunge at the demons before the bot fired its beam at them, carving precise holes through their foreheads and dropping them with keen controlled bursts. The bot then crawled through the gate towards the advancing mob, and from behind the door the Slayer could hear the sounds of laser pulses and sizzling flesh falling to the ground. He frowned before opening the next locker. A medical saw caked with dry blood beside a clip of medigel syringes. He fiercely grabbed the syringes and crushed them in his hand to gain 16 HEALTH before slamming the locker shut. The Slayer heard the heavy footsteps of something large and mechanical clambering up the staircase to the locker room, and the sentry bot wailing in alarm as something violently smashed at the walls and railing. A vein throbbing in his temple, the Slayer took a deep breath before opening the next locker, finding a large recurve knife and a sleek white-and-purple sniper rifle with a plasma pack in its stock. Although he had a distaste for exclusively long-range firearms – preferring more versatile weapons like the HAR – he picked up the rifle to collect the plasma pack when he noticed the jars of murky yellow fluid stashed at the back of the locker, several of which were shattered. The shrieking sentry bot rushed into the room wildly firing at something behind the door. The Slayer looked down at the rifle. Its handle and ammo pack were dripping with the yellow liquid. In the blink of an eye he pulled the entire locker from the wall and threw it at the zombie smashing through the door, a former worker wearing a yellow industrial power loader, seared laser marks covering the branding “Grip-Ton Cargo Handler.” The locker struck the worker’s heavy metal frame and knocked it down the stairs, crashing loudly as it tumbled down and away. A livid Slayer focused a Blood Punch and tore the door off the next locker, but relaxed somewhat upon seeing the heavy minigun besides the black munitions box. He unclenched his crackling fist and picked up the rotary machine gun. “UAC Mach 4 Minigun,” it read on the side. Like the one the red guard back at Res Ops had wielded. He had no need for the weapon anymore; it fired the exact same .50 caliber rounds as the HAR, only at a higher and hence wasteful rate, and his D12 was more than ideal for the role, but he collected its long coiled ammo belt to restock his bullet pool. He put the weapon down and opened the munitions box. A moldy sandwich and a small black electric motor. He pushed the putrid meal aside and curiously picked up the motor while signaling the Praetor Suit to analyze it. …SCANNING… ANALYSIS: GATLING ROTATOR NON-UAC MODIFICATION FOR ROTARY MACHINE GUNS OVERRIDES SAFETY RELEASE, ALLOWING WEAPON TO FIRE IMMEDIATELY WITHOUT WAITING FOR MAXIMUM ROTATION COMPATIBLE WITH D12 CHAINGUN Brushing off the rotator, the Slayer extracted his chaingun and began retrofitting the mod onto it. As the Slayer worked, the sentry bot waddled in front of him and began blinking its eye intently at him. He frowned in confusion but continued his work on the firearm. The bot turned to the nearest bench and fired its laser at it, slicing through its metal bars and dropping the heavy panel to the floor before returning its gaze to the Slayer. Wha- Oh! The bot was trying to show off its laser to him! It actually wanted the Slayer to use it! He scoffed behind the helmet, amused if in a contemptuous manner. DELTA-12 30 MM CHAINGUN MODIFIED PRIMARY MODE – FIRES IMMEDIATELY WHILE SPINNING UP TO FULL SPEED SECONDARY MODE – PRESPINS WEAPON TO MAXIMUM SPEED WITH REDUCED ACCURACY Hearing groaning from the other side of the room, the Slayer turned the modified chaingun to the sound’s direction and spun it up, taking in the loud satisfying whirring before pulling the trigger. RATATATATATATAT!! The rounds tore through sheet metal, flesh and bone, and wall with no impedance or resistance, leaving an immense smoking hole of bloody rubble in front of the Slayer. BZZZZ! The loader zombie reappeared in the doorway, its industrial exoskeleton battered but still whole and brandishing a wide clawed gripper on one arm and a spinning buzzsaw on the other. The Slayer switched to the Gauss Cannon and aimed at the zombie’s exposed head before firing. PEWW!! There was a flash of blue light and the wall behind the zombie blew out in a tremendous explosion to reveal the smoking Martian night. The Slayer had anticipated and braced for the railgun’s recoil but was still surprised by the heavy kick. The zombie itself had disappeared into a fine red mist visible through the damaged loader helmet, which stood motionlessly for a moment before stooping and collapsing lifelessly on the floor, dropping one of its electric batteries. The Slayer turned back to the bot and presented the smoking railgun to it. Now THAT was a weapon. The sentry bot was positively dwarfed by the Gauss Cannon, staring intently at the Slayer’s firearm before suddenly standing up and hopping over to the cracked window frame. It looked back at him for the briefest moment before leaping through the opening and vanishing into the amber haze. The Slayer looked on in puzzlement before moving on to the next locker. A scratched tablet-like PDA, a butterfly knife, and a silver wristwatch. He was about to reach into the locker when he felt a strange premonition and turned on his Clearsight, discovering the demonic mimic disguised as the wristwatch. He irkedly snatched at the mimic, revealing it to be a crab-like critter that leapt out of the locker and tried to crawl away before the Slayer drove the knife into its back. Noticing something else in the back of the locker, the Slayer reached in and threw away the worn PDA before pulling out a small folded drone. ECHO DRONE ACQUIRED CREATE HOLOGRAPHIC DECOY THAT MIMICS ACTIONS AND DISTRACTS ENEMIES …Now that could be somewhat useful. The Slayer always had difficulty concealing his presence, so distraction was often a wiser alternative to stealth. Moving on to the next locker, he was about to open the door when he spotted the fresh blood dripping from beneath, and footprints other than his own leading from the storage area to the adjacent room on his right. The sound of a sharp metal edge grinding against the floor suddenly resonated through the doorway, along with the groan of pained raspy wheezing. The hunched shape of a flamer specialist clambered into view, dragging a bloody fire axe behind it and holding the decapitated head of a young man in the other hand. The head was not zombified. The specialist’s bright red heatsuit was torn open in several places and covered in blood, and its black full-head respirator revealed no visage or emotion. The specialist did not react to the Slayer inside the storage area, taking a few more heavy steps before pausing and dropping to its knees, letting go of the axe and head in its hands. The figure stared emptily at the floor for another moment before pulling the flare gun from its hip, raising it to its temple, and pulling the trigger. The incendiary grenade blew the figure’s head off, splashing the interior of the room with burning matter as the headless corpse slumped and dropped to the ground. Accessing his weapons cache, a disquieted Slayer dropped three rockets onto the floor of the burning storage area and tossed a grenade behind him before leaping out the broken window. The explosion thundered behind him and split the service tower in two, its upper half crashing onto the rusty Martian landscape as the Slayer raced deeper into the Spaceport. That had been a huge waste of his time. * * * Romero knelt beside Ruby in front of the woman. “How is she?” Ruby removed the flashlight from her rifle and held it in front of the woman’s eyes, immediately noticing the bright golden tone of her irises, followed by the severe dilation of her pupils which did not respond to the light. The woman’s breathing was rapid and shallow, and she did not focus or otherwise react to any of the other survivors. After the initial discovery, she sat motionlessly on a stool Ruby had brought up for her, saying nothing and staring emptily into space. “She’s in shock. She’s fine but isn’t responding to anything. It’s almost like she’s blocking out the whole world.” “You think it’s trauma from the original attack?” “Could it be? That was hours ago. I’m a soldier, not a psychologist. I can tell a bullet wound from a knife wound and treat both. Whatever this is, is beyond me.” The group huddled quietly inside the room in which they found the scientist, but the team was exposed and Ruby knew they had to move out soon. “Agent. I’ve gotta be honest with you,” Rogers spoke up. “We shouldn’t bring her.” “What?!” Romero yelled. “We don’t know what state she’s in! She’s clearly rattled out of her brains and we can’t drag her along! She’s only going to slow us down!” “We found another human survivor, you sad sack of selfish shit! We can’t leave her here to die!” “She’s not even wearing armor! Gun or no guns, she won’t take a single hit from anything and she sure as hell isn’t gonna keep up with us! Either way, she’s going to die!” “Why don’t we leave you here to die, you bastard?! You’d be right at home with your own people! Maybe they’ll even drag you back to Hell where you belong!” Ruby sighed as the discord escalated behind her, ignoring her quarreling companions and keeping her focus on the scientist. “Yup, this is what I’m stuck with. They’re good boys but can’t stay off each other’s throats. Men, huh?” Ruby was met with a blank stare. She reached out and softly wiped a smudge of blood from the woman’s cheek. Her face, her blouse, her lab coat were stained with it, but it seemed to be splatters rather than her own bleeding. In fact, besides her strange unresponsive state and quiet nervousness, the woman was completely uninjured. “It’s not healthy to stay covered in blood,” Ruby commented as she browsed her pack for a medikit. “Even nowadays, people still carry nasty bugs, and if you don’t clean it off you could catch something.” She found a medikit and opened it, pulling a roll of gauze from beside the vials of medigel. “I don’t have a towel but this’ll work. You don’t mind, do you?” The woman remained silent. Ruby tore a square from the roll and used it to gently wipe the woman’s face from the grime and filth. “The attack was almost three hours ago. How did you survive that long by yourself? With no guns or armor or anything? You wouldn’t happen to be a secret combat specialist, would you?” Ruby jested, but it seemed her joke fell on deaf ears. The men kept arguing behind her, Reeves was applying medigel to her arm, and the scientist made no indication of being aware of their or even Ruby’s presence. She sighed dejectedly, cleaning the woman’s nose and mouth from the splattered gore. “Look at you. When you’re not covered in blood and guts, you don’t look half bad. You’re probably the best-looking nerd I’ve met.” Ruby brought the gauze down to clean the woman’s bloody neck when she spotted the thin chain hanging around it, holding a pendant hidden behind her blouse. She reached out and pulled the pendant out. A simple gold cross, bearing the nicks and marks of time. “Religious, are you? I could never get into that myself. I guess, after all I’ve seen…it’s just a bit hard to believe that there’s a God out there.” Ruby put the crucifix down, unaware of the woman’s tranquil breathing and relaxed posture. “…I’m…I’m…not.” She put the dirty gauze down and slung the pack over her shoulders before realizing the scientist had spoken. “What did you say?” The woman stared blankly at the floor, bearing an exhausted and somber expression. “I’m not…religious. This belonged….to…my mother. It’s all I have left of her.” * * * “Left. It’s left.” “No, go right!” “Ugh!” I was caught in a crossroads between two forks in the crevice, these splitting off in opposing directions and leading to or away from the gateway, but I didn’t know which was which. “Look, why don’t we climb back up to the surface and check our position? Pop up, get a look, and dive back down? Real quick and dirty.” “You sure you want to do that?” But I was already jetting up the steep walls. “Why not? I could use the fresh air.” With forceful bursts from my jump pack I soared to firm handholds and hoisted myself up as my fuel recharged. Before long I was at the edge of the ravine and slowly lifted myself up. Rolling dunes of dark arid soil, rocky crags, and a thick smoky sky completely empty of any shadows or other discernible features. “What the hell? Where’d it go?” I looked around in all directions for the shadow in the sky, but I couldn’t find it. Maybe it’s being obstructed by all this smoke? “I’m gonna look around,” I said as I climbed out of the crevice. “I need to see where I am.” “What happened to ‘quick and dirty?’” “Watch.” I stayed low on the arid surface while heading to higher ground, keeping an eye on my radar for any movement. “Where are you going?” “Just up this hill, now hush. I need to focus.” I hurried up the dune as a mountain range came into view, but as I climbed to the peak I discovered the mountains were floating hundreds of meters above ground, a wide flat plain that stretched unbroken before me. “Whoa whoa what the…WHOA!!” My brain struggled to comprehend the sight before me until I finally understood what I was looking at, and I stumbled back in the weight of the realization. What I thought was a floating mountain range was actually a miniature planetoid suspended high above the Hellscape, a rocky obloid structure that I dreadfully realized was a living entity. Giant craggy tentacles slowly writhed and recoiled from its underside, and its body was marked with great lacerated wounds and sickly gaping eyes, yellow and with horizontal beast-like pupils. image [https://i.imgur.com/J4ADcUf.png] I ambled backwards at a complete loss for words, unable to keep my gaze off the entity but intent on putting as much distance between me and it as possible. “What are you doing? You’re going the opposite way!” Colonel Johnson’s barking snapped me out of my trance. “What?!” “That’s the gateway! That’s where the portal that’ll take you out of Hell is located!” “THAT’S THE PORTAL?” “Affirmative. You see those lights down there?” “Lights?” I hiked up the hill for a better look. Far beneath me in the plains, seemingly right beneath the planetoid, were a series of concentric and radiating pinpricks of light. “Is that a…city?” “It’s where you need to go, soldier. Head down there. That’s how you’ll get to the gate.” Before I could reply or make a gripe in protest, a large white dot appeared on my radar display as the ground began to rumble. THUMM. THUMM. I looked over my shoulder with blood as cold as ice, my eyes desperately searching for movement but only spotting a shimmering mirage and rocky spikes above the sands. THUMM. THUMM. A single localized mirage. I glanced at my radar and found the dot slowly pacing towards me from that direction. I put two and two together and began to back away. “John. The crevice is that way.” “The thing’s not as far as it seems. I have a better chance of reaching those crags behind that I do the crevice.” “This isn’t a good idea.” THUMM THUMM THUMM THUMM! The dot began charging at me as the mirage faded to reveal a giant skeletal creature stomping on two boney legs towards me, with a long dark tail and a black crocodilian head with six red fiery eyes and jagged white teeth. “OH FUUUCK!” I bolted down the hill as fast as I could as heavy slamming footsteps gained on me and the creature snarled with Hellish ferocity. There was another deep fissure in the ground about hundred meters away, but I knew I’d never get there before the monster caught up with me. THUMM THUMM THUMM! “RAAARRR!!” “Shoot the ground! Now!” I switched to my flak cannons in understanding and unloaded them on the ground on my position, picking up a thick plume of dirt and sand. The creature pounced and snapped at the sand, but I was already racing off to the cluster of rock outcrops nearby. “RAAARRR!!” The creature crashed against the slab just as I darted into cover, showering me in a burst of pebbles and rubble as it bit at the crags and forced its claws through the openings. I squeezed myself as far back as I could, my new scorpion claws leaving deep gouges on the rock. “Wait….WAIT!” I threw a hook at the nearest claw, watching my spiked hand connect and spread crimson cracks from the point of impact. “RAAARRR!!” The monster recoiled in pain, pulling its talon back and giving me enough space to scamper deeper into the cluster. “SQUEEEE!!” “OH FUCK OFF!” A horrific long golden spider leapt at me from a cranny in the rock, and I realized I had walked into another bug nest, but I was in full fight mode and not about to be bothered by tiny insects anymore. I punched the spider out of the air and instantly splattered it on the rocky surface while switching to my flak cannons and killing off the others like it that were hiding in the cluster. “RAAARRR!!” The relentless Bonecrawler violently clawed and snapped at the outermost of the rocky crags, which broke under its weight and brought it closer to my position. “OH SHIT OH SHIT OH SHIT!” “John! Your three o’clock!” I turned to where the Colonel indicated and almost screamed. Behind a nearby crag was the decaying husk – that I thankfully realized was dead – of a giant waspid almost as big as me, a swollen and evil-looking creature that might have been a hive queen. “What?! What about that?!” “It might have something you can use! Work that magic of yours and make something out of it!” I would have protested about rummaging through the guts of a giant bug but I was cornered, out of ideas and running low on options. “Okay, I’ll check it out!” I raced over to the wasp queen’s corpse as the Bonecrawler crashed through another outcrop and scraped at the ground only a few meters from where I had been. Kneeling in front of the bug shell, I quickly pored over its husk, searching for a remarkable body part or glowing item in its vicinity. “Come on, soldier! Hurry! No spell totem or embedded weapon? Its mandibles, its legs, its stinger?” “Nothing! There’s nothing!” I tore a clawed spear-like leg free from the body, but the shell was weak with rot and came apart in my hands. The mandibles were too spiky to get a proper hold of, and the “stinger” was a wicked array of blades and spikes, still tainted with venom, that I was not about to put my hands on. “RAAARRR!!” “It’s getting closer!” There was a row of pores lining the husk’s abdomen, and something twitched from within one. I reached in and pulled out a spiky translucent ball containing what appeared to be miniature waspids. An egg sac. “RAAARRR!!” I pulled my bronze knife and stuck it into a gap between two shell segments on the abdomen, pushing the handle down until the weakened shell cracked and broke. I pried the broken fragments off and disgustedly pushed rotting organs aside until I found a hard branch-like structure holding several egg sacs, similar to a bunch of grapes. “That’s insane! You think it’ll work?!” “Let’s find out!” I grabbed my knife and cut the egg branch loose before turning around to the unrelenting Bonecrawler, taking aim and throwing the egg sac in my hand at it. “RAAAAAARRRRRR!!” The sac burst on impact with the demon’s head, releasing a mass of miniature waspids that swarmed all over the Bonecrawler, biting, slashing, and stinging it. Giant as it was, the monster recoiled and thrashed in pain and ceased its assault, all while the wasps frenzied over it. “Go! Go! Now’s your chance!” I raced out of the rock cluster away from the tormented monster and into the open desert. “Look! There’s the fissure!” The long dark crack spread across the surface in the distance, to which I rushed at full speed towards. “RAAARRR!!” “John! You’ve got company!” “I KNOW I KNOW!!” “RAAAAA…!” “AAAAHHHH!!” I ducked into a powerslide and fell into the crevice, hearing a giant set of jaws snap shut inches above me. “RAAARRR!!” I hit the walls of the fissure on the way down and crashed hard on the ground, scratched and shaken but fortunately in one piece. The Bonecrawler violently roared through the crack, furious but unable to reach me. “Ugly bastard.” “Did you get it?” I turned to the organ in my hand, a bunch of egg sacs still whole and undamaged. “Right here.” “And you still remember where to go, right?” “Um…” I hesitantly pointed down the crevice in front of me. “That way?” “Other way.” “Right.” * * * Leaning from behind cover of a parked LUV, the Slayer studied a strange new type of Lost Soul through the HAR’s scope. In contrast to all other Lost Souls he’d ever encountered, which were the demonized organic heads of human beings, this one appeared entirely synthetic. Its metallic structure possessed small rocket engines on its back and bottom, which produced bright yellow flames to keep it aloft. Instead of a skull complexion, it had the upper half of a blank face and a lower jaw mounted beneath, both appearing made of ceramic, out of which long needle-like teeth stuck out of. Where did these new Lost Soul variants come from? Augmentation from the UAC or demonic construction? The Slayer had no idea. The Cybersoul was one in a swarm of six, and the Slayer watched as they fought a trio of white UAC aerial drones, each little more than a plasma rifle mounted beneath a circular levitation apparatus. The drones fired persistently at the Lost Souls, but these were faster and swerved around their plasmoids while taking great bites out of their metal frames. The drones managed to shoot down two of the Cybersouls and landed several hits on another, but the damaged demon avoided their fire and charged at the nearest drone while blazing brightly, exploding and tearing the drone apart. Another Cybersoul bit down on a drone’s rifle and split it in two, causing it to explode, while another opened its mouth and shredded the remaining drone with a stream of white-hot shrapnel as fast and hard as automatic rifle rounds. Interesting. The Slayer equipped the rocket launcher and aimed it at the demons before pulling the trigger and firing a rocket into the swarm, remotely detonating it and killing them all in the blast. But still nothing more than worthless Lost Souls. image [https://i.imgur.com/hz5UPZP.jpeg] A distant POW cracked in the distance, almost like the firing of a HAR precision shot. BOOM!! The Slayer flew backwards as the LUV he leaned on exploded in a swell of blue plasma after a .50 caliber anti-material round went through the vehicle’s power cells. 23 HEALTH gone, down to 92. Quickly entering combat focus, the Slayer landed on his feet and furiously spun around in search of whatever had fired that shot. His eyes fell upon a humanoid shape standing on top the smoldering remains of a light mech, wearing a sophisticated grey combat suit with a heavy assault rifle in its hands. Clearly not an average grunt but a specialist, perhaps the pilot of the fallen mech. The Slayer raised his own HAR at the figure and shot a precision bolt, but the figure astonishingly dodged the bolt and fired another shot, this time at the Slayer’s head. The bolt hit and reduced his HEALTH to 78. A demonized Pilot. It didn’t matter. Specialized or not, it was nothing more than a zombie, and zombies had never been difficult to put down. He headed in the direction of the Pilot, which jumped off behind the mech and reappeared running away into the plains. The Slayer followed and opened fire with the HAR. The bullets struck their mark but passed harmlessly through the Pilot, whose figure sputtered and did not cease running. Confused, the Slayer closed the distance and punched at the soldier’s back, whose body disappeared into a flurry of luminous particles as the Slayer shattered the small echo drone generating its holographic image. A decoy! POW!! Cracked another precision bolt behind him, which struck his back and brought his health down to 67. The Slayer scowled in fury as his blood began to boil. He turned and raced across the tarmac towards the Pilot, which fled in the direction of a multi-leveled aircraft hangar, where his automap indicated the red keycard was located. The Slayer accelerated and switched to the pulse rifle before noticing the Pilot was headed towards a dead end as the ground entrance to the hangar was blocked by the wreck of a crane truck, and it certainly couldn’t outrun the Slayer on open terrain. Nowhere for it to go. The mech Pilot suddenly shot a grappling hook from its left forearm at the vehicle’s crane and slung itself into the air with tremendous velocity, hurling itself into the third level of the hangar facility in a matter of seconds. A shocked Slayer skidded to a halt in complete dismay. The demonic Pilot landed on the edge of the platform and turned around to look down at the Slayer. It did not have the hunched feral posture of most Possessed, instead standing up straight and composed. Calculating. Intelligent. The Pilot held its arm out towards the Slayer and slowly beckoned towards itself. It was challenging him. Motherfucker. The Slayer leapt off from the ground with a powerful thrust and latched onto the edge of the second level platform, hoisting himself up as the Pilot vanished again. He stood up to find himself in front of a pack of standard Possessed soldiers. He switched to the HAR and quickly took down the squad before turning to follow the demonized Pilot. He jumped again and landed on the third platform, catching sight of the Pilot darting beneath the wings of fighter aircraft. The Slayer followed suit and leapt into the air while equipping the rocket launcher and opening fire. BOOM!! BOOM!! BOOM!! The explosions echoed throughout the hangar as the rockets destroyed one aircraft after another, igniting their power cells and filling the air with swells of bright red flame, but the Pilot was already gone. “ROAAARRR!!” A trio of Hell Knights rushed through the flames towards the Slayer, followed by a pack of imps and soldiers drawn by the explosions, but he cleared a path through them with the rocket launcher and left them behind. He’d deal with them later, but first, he was going to beat the ever-living devil out of that Pilot. The zombie shot its grapple at the edge of a breached hole in the wall and slung itself upwards, prompting the Slayer equip the Guass Cannon. He leapt and took aim before firing. PEWW!! The Pilot was too far and mobile a target to hit with the railgun, the bolt merely grazing it as the zombie disappeared behind the edge, and the airborne Slayer was thrown backwards by the cannon’s recoil. Worthless gun. He unequipped the weapon to free his hands and leapt at the wall, digging his hands into the vertical surface and jumping again to clear the hole. He entered a dim portion of the facility occupied entirely by steel beams and scaffolding, the glowing circuitry of the Pilot’s suit visible up ahead. He equipped the HAR and fired a precision bolt, which struck a column. He switched to the rocket launcher and took careful aim before pulling the trigger. The rocket exploded near the Pilot but it fired a lateral jet from its back-mounted jump pack to sidestep and avoid the blast. The Slayer chased after the zombie, barely able to keep his footing as he raced across narrow walkways in the dim environment. The Pilot exited the area through an open construction aperture and entered a different section of the hangar, a tall narrow area lined with the active rocket engines of cruiser ships undergoing automated test firings. The scaffolding ended and there were no traversable platforms between the active engines and the yawning depths. Just as the Slayer raised the Gauss Cannon again at the zombie, the Pilot jumped off the scaffolding and grappled onto the left-side wall, using its jump pack to provide both lift and lateral thrust as it obliquely ran across the sheer vertical surface. WHAT THE FUCK. The Slayer did not stop again but chased after the Pilot, grasping once more onto the walls and leaping off to follow after it. His own jump pack was clearly a more basic model meant for simpler vertical lift, and did not have the wall-running capacities or precise controls like that of the Pilot. The zombie nimbly and almost gracefully darted between the two walls and avoided the firing engines, but the Slayer had no air control and unintentionally passed through several flaming jets, bringing his HEALTH down each time. 62. 56. 49. His rage only escalated. This was only a zombie, a simple demonized operative with mundane equipment, and yet it was managing to outmaneuver and outrun him! Furious, the Slayer pushed on through the flames and chased even faster after the Pilot, determined to get his hands on the zombie’s filthy neck. Looking back to the charging Slayer, the demonic Pilot flicked a throwing knife onto the wall in front of it, which erupted on impact into a small swirling blue vortex. The Slayer pounced at the Pilot with arms outstretched just as the zombie passed the gravity grenade, which exploded in the Slayer’s face. The zombie received a tremendous speed boost from the burst as its shields absorbed the blast while the Slayer lost another 12 HEALTH and was disoriented. The two then left the test firing area and entered a wide flat service platform overlooking a docked cruiser. The demonic Pilot leapt off the walls with the Slayer in hot pursuit, who immediately switched to the Gauss Cannon for a clear shot. He aimed and fired, but the Pilot ducked into a powerslide beneath the bolt and immediately fired its jump pack as soon as it reached the edge of a platform, conserving its forward rush and effortlessly clearing the thirty meter gap to the opposite platform, while the Slayer’s firing action canceled his momentum and brought him to a halt. The Pilot had ceased its fleeing to turn around and face the Slayer, who steamed both from heavy heat damage and rage alike. He had more than 100 HEALTH before encountering the zombie, now he had 37, whereas the Pilot was entirely untouched. It could anticipate his attacks and utilize the environment against him, and it was only a zombie. Something stepped out from the fog behind the Pilot, a group of four Revenants. They shrieked and jerked in contrast to the Pilot’s quiet calmness, which raised its arm up and brought the other demons to silence. The Revenants were a meter taller and undeniably tougher than the shorter zombie in front of them, but they fell back under its command, staring with deathly intent at the Slayer. The Pilot held a fist towards the scorched Slayer, stuck the thumb out, and pointed it down. When he got his hands on that Pilot, the Slayer thought, he was going to reduce it to fucking atoms. The operative turned around and disappeared into the darkness, leaving the Slayer with four Revenants on the other side of the gap. There was no way he could reach the Pilot in time. To jump the distance he’d need too much of a running start, and if he hovered across with his jump pack he’d just make himself an easy target for the Revenants. He could probably take them out with a single siege blast from the Gauss Cannon, but the recoil would be… The Slayer thought back to all the times he fired the railgun and was thrown back by its incredible force. …The recoil would be just what he needed. He took a few steps backwards before charging towards the edge and leaping off, immediately turning around and firing the Gauss Cannon into the air behind him. The railgun’s recoil threw him forward across the gap and directly into one of the Revenants. Without a pause, he dropkicked the demon to break his landing and killed it with a railgun bolt to the face. He turned to the two on his right while charging up a siege blast. PSHEWW!! Two flechettes were ejected from the railgun’s side as the weapon spent their capacitors to supercharge a single third flechette, which shot out through the rails at supersonic speeds and explosively atomized the Revenants’ power cores, showering the area with flaming viscera. He turned to the last Revenant beside him while brandishing the chainsaw, sawing into the screaming demon’s exposed abdomen to recover ammo before charging a Blood Punch and releasing it unto its chest. 51 HEALTH. It would do. He switched to the HAR and rushed into the darkness after the Pilot, bringing up his automap to locate it. There, fleeing away in the level below. He dived below through an open grating and Rampaged in the direction of the zombie, turning on his Clearsight and spotting it some distance ahead in a maintenance deck. He looked through the HAR’s scope and lined up the crosshairs before pulling the trigger, noting the Pilot’s keen reaction by sidestepping the shot and fleeing into the complex environment. He understood. The Pilot’s equipment likely included omnidirectional sensors to alert its user of incoming projectiles or tracking sights. Then it was time for some quick scopes! He followed the Pilot and centered his HAR on it and brought up the tactical scope just long enough for the crosshairs to become visible before pulling the trigger. Successful hit. The bolt struck the Pilot's body and caused a luminous crack to spread across its suit, which the Slayer noticed began to automatically mend moments later. An electroshielded self-repairing exosuit. Not strong enough to count as armor plating and without the ballistic resistance of an energy shield, but effective enough to let the mobile long-distance Pilot quickly regenerate from light and sporadic damage. The Slayer would need to maintain constant pressure or deliver a single powerful attack. Or aim for the head. The Pilot looked upwards and shot its grapple into the ceiling to sling itself into an elevated ventilation duct, but this time the Slayer was ready. He switched to the rocket launcher and fired at the ground at his feet while leaping, wincing from the blast but propelling himself upwards before switching to the Gauss Cannon and shooting it backwards for a forward impulse, thrusting himself into the ventilation duct hot on the Pilot’s heels. The duct was a plain narrow shaft that winded above a surface of crackling electric circuits, but the Slayer knew now how to keep himself in the air and chase after the zombie. Unable to wall run, he grasped at the walls and leapt off as he spun around and shot the Gauss Cannon behind while on straight stretches for the speed boost. As they reached the end of the ventilation shaft into another plain deck, the desperate Pilot lobbed another gravknife into the wall ahead, hoping it could frag boost away from the Slayer, but he equipped the rocket launcher and fired a rocket in the direction of the vortex, which was pulled into its center and exploded directly on the Pilot. With critically low shields, the Pilot jumped onto the deck and activated a trio of echo drones to distract the Slayer so it could scurry away, but he wouldn’t be fooled twice. The holographic drones had been deployed at straight angles relative to the Pilot and moved forward in a stiff oblivious manner while the actual Pilot strafed to the left and leapt onto the adjacent wall, but the charging Slayer had already pounced at the zombie, striking it and grabbing onto its feet. He slammed the zombie back and forth across the floor and walls, shattering its exosuit and throwing it through a window into the exterior of the facility. The Slayer leapt after the stunned zombie and slung it towards the ground, diving after it to land on top and crush its torso before ripping off its helmet, charging up a siege blast, and holding the whirring railgun to the demon’s emaciated face. Say good night, asshole. PSHEWW!! The supercharged bolt exploded on impact with the ground in a bright plasma explosion, bringing the Slayer’s HEALTH down to 34. Three flechettes gone, almost critical health, and when the dust cleared the Slayer could see nothing of the demonic Pilot save for some shards of scorched bloodstained metal in the smoking crater. Absolutely worth it. The Slayer sighed in relief from the kill, putting the fact that he’d almost gotten killed by a simple zombie out of his mind. He’d wasted too much time already. The demon lords surely knew he was in the Spaceport by now, and the survivors in Helix were likely dead as well. Forget the rest of the demons in the sector, he had to keep moving if he was to reach the Lazarus Labs in time. He holstered the railgun and proceeded into the facility he’d just explosively exited from, passing through the gate and checking his automap for the red keycard’s location, which appeared to be…blinking? The entire automap was warbling slightly with small visual artefacts glitching through the display. Hmm. That was odd, though likely just interference on the facility’s network from the demons’ presence. It was unlikely the UAC had designed the Base with this magnitude of breach in mind. He traipsed down the abandoned corridors before arriving at a disheveled security station, in which the red keycard was visible lying on the front desk. He reached out for it and- -missed as the keycard grew legs and crawled away from his hands. What? The red piece of plastic split apart to reveal a narrow mouth of needle-like teeth, which hissed at the Slayer before the demonic mimic jumped off the desk and creeped away into the darkness. The Slayer watched it crawl away and disappear, standing quietly for a moment as he attempted to process what just happened. Then, he snapped. * * *