Their spoils collected onto a scavenger sled. Cantwell pulled out his assortment of ropes and rolled sheet metal and sorted through their conquered goods before placing them onto the cart for the return trip.
The group was drunk off of victory. Cantwell was whistling a tune that Aurelio wasn’t familiar with while hacking away at salvageable components from the corpse and the immediate area. Phineas tossed Oja’s head around lightly while conversing with them, their jubilant yells echoing through the marshlands.
Even Elena, as ornery as she was about having to attend an excursion without the commander by her side, was in high spirits.
And unlike their last venture, she was gracious enough to acknowledge his contributions to the slaying of the beast without spoiling the moment.
“Nice work out there,” Elena admitted rather quickly, “And thanks for taking charge when it was needed.” She didn’t offer him a window to respond, urgently removing herself from his vicinity to assist Cantwell with the heavier pieces of salvage.
Aurelio looked at the carcass of their recently slain opponent and reflexively winced.
It was trying to run away. It was smart and capable of thought and reasoning.
And it had chosen to attack them upon noticing their presence.
And that one caveat made his guilt on the matter so much more complicated to deal with.
“Why so glum, newbie?” Phineas approached him with the severed head of Oja held to his armpit like a basketball.
Aurelio eyed the now disgruntled automaton before looking at the scout, “I kind of feel bad about killing this thing.”
Phineas scoffed, “Why d’you care about something like that?”
“It tried to run away when it knew it couldn’t win. It was sapient, unlike the last one. It-”
Phineas got on his toes to place his hand on Aurelio’s shoulder, “And who told it to mess with us, hm? You’re feeling the wrong feelings here, boyo. That bucket of goo and gizmos fucked with us from the moment we crossed paths with it, spewing that black smoke everywhere for an advantage and we responded to that violence in kind. Regardless,” he leaned away, “We needed the components on this thing anyway and it was more than happy to hassle us for the trouble of taking it down by starting the fight.”
Aurelio wanted to argue but the fight in him to do so wasn’t strong enough to begin with.
His stomach just felt knotted about that one moment.
“Alright,” Aurelio shifted away from Phineas, “I’ll drop it.”
Oja chimed in, “If it makes you feel better hearing this from a rather long lived scavenger, you’re right to at least consider the level of cognitive thought those Vessels are operating on. I’ve had a number of bleeding hearts and curious scientists like you investigate the Binary world and the colonies those things plug themselves to and the results are always disappointing. It’s gibberish commands all the way down. Their thoughts are corrupted and infectious and I hope that you don’t end up catatonic in my clinic once I get out from under this cretins pits.”
Phineas snorted out a laugh, “You’re fine! You shouldn’t be able to feel any of this anyway!” He made a show of juggling the head around in the air for emphasis.
“Touch. Receptors. Are. An. Important. Part. Of maintaining. A healthy. Mind!” Oja attempted to argue back, their sentences oscillating in volume as they were launched up and down.
In the throes of returning joy, Aurelio shifted his attention to the fungal stalks on the horizon and watched a curious diminutive creature perched on a mushroom cap.
Its body was black and bulbous, feathers glimmering like an oil slick caught under the light. Silver thin spikes lined its back with tangled cables coiled haphazardly around them.
Its head was not bird-like, much to his dismay, but an incongruous ball of metal with an old school cathode style screen. A giant, singular bird eye buzzed with life inside of the screen, rarely shifting into a blindingly white disconnected channel before flashing back to the corvid pupil.
There was a flock of them now that Aurelio was looking above himself. Five, no, six of them perched on stalks of various heights.
“Wait! Wait, put me down! Now!” Oja started to yell, cutting through their celebrations with an ear piercing shriek. “Take out those Monitors! Now!”
The group was puzzled by their request.
“Archivist! The Monitors! Take that [Ember Lance] of yours and dispatch them! Don’t look at me like a gormless idiot, fucking hurry!”
He scrambled to respond to the request, fumbling the [Ember Lance] into his hands. The weapon whirred to life and he began aiming his sights on the furthest target.
The Monitors, the birds, responded with panicked shrieks. Their bodies pulled apart long, sludge-soaked wings, the tips hardening around the feathered patterns before his eyes.
Aurelio took a deep breath and fired his first shot.
The furthest Monitor exploded in a display of sparks and salvage.
He swiveled his body to the next target and took another deep breath.
Miss.
“Fuck! Does anyone have a ranged weapon here?” Oja asked. No one else in the group responded.
They knew the answer.
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He focused on the task at hand, their wing hardening process an encroaching timer towards some unknown bad outcome that only Oja was privy to.
Aurelio emptied his mind. He pulled the trigger.
Hit.
The next target fell under his sights and bursted into a ball of fire and metal with his fourth shot.
The three remaining birds were finished with their hardening process. One flap of their gleaming winds lifted an otherwise clumsily constructed creature with a divine grace.
They were coordinated as well.
The three birds separated into three opposite directions.
Aurelio caught the fourth Monitor under his sights and successfully dispatched it but the others got away.
“What are those things?” Phineas asked Oja.
They clicked their tongue, “Fucking spies. We’re not safe here. Get us back to the outpost. And fast. I don’t want to repeat myself when I debrief you all on those things.” Oja commanded.
No one argued with the elder scavenger. They double-timed their way through the Metal Mire in silence, Aurelio making the conscious effort to look above the fungal stalks to spot any unwanted onlookers now that he was aware of a new presence.
---
Despite the sunken mood, Aurelio was in moderately high spirits. Oja was a source of knowledge the rest of the crew could also tap into and the addition of a Sawbones to the squad was invaluable if they were going to face off against the likes of the Malignance and the Fountainheads that prowled around the Metal Mire and the Catacombs that shifted beneath their feet.
He was also happy about being aware of the event to ‘surprise’ their crew on the return.
Aurelio warned Kalani about the fourth event ahead of time while he organized her tomes in the archives.
She was quick to believe him after the previous intrusions into their mind, accepting that another event made to torment a singular Scavenger was best left to an individual who could handle the responsibility and respond with a calm and capable demeanor.
The ‘Burden of Comprehension’ event was the capstone to the scripted events that the game provided when acknowledging the vestigial T.E.A.M. system, and one that brought a lot of scrutiny by the literary minded fans of the community like himself.
Images of Atlas holding up the world or in the case of the promotional art for the event, a half formed skull having a divine beam of light twist into their mind in a labyrinthine shape, were often accompanied with speculative fiction on what exactly the ‘universal truth’ referred to in the text was in reference to.
The game made no qualms with poking at the eldritch influences, going so far as to have that alluded to veil lifted at the mental risk of the scavengers in the tutorial event, and the events were no different.
His theory assumed that the universal truth being provided was one linked to the source of Ignition and the presence of-
The Voice.
A wave of nausea washed over him.
“You okay there, Aurelio?” Phineas asked in sudden concern.
“Try to hold out till we’re at the walls. I can see them from here.” Elena chimed in through her comms ahead of them.
Oja inspected his body, “I’m picking up raised vitals from my limited glance, young buck. Don’t suppose you’re choosing to have a panic attack now?”
Their words were like indistinct chatter to Aurelio’s mind.
He’d forgotten the Voice.
The central antagonist of the game. The usurper of Ignition.
The secondary backer of the crew.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!
He concentrated his attention to the tips of his fingers, bringing his frantic mind to a momentary still point in an effort to rationalize the situation.
There were a lot of threads to pull at now that he’d properly unraveled his interlinked chain of thoughts. The first one he reconnected with was-
The Voice is the source of their Ignition.
The burden of information likely given to Kalani was going to be about the Voice. It had to be about the thing that lived in the astral graveyard above them.
The implications of the Voice’s presence and its potential effects on the crew were slowly labeled as paranoia-laden over the final stretch of their trek.
He was being manipulated by the Monolith in an overt way. The commandment bestowed upon him by the Monolith was to fill in the shoes of a leader and grow in strength to-
Dispatch the Light.
It felt unnatural the way that his thoughts were connecting pieces of information together to the nuggets of knowledge he had of the game.
The Light referenced by the Monolith had to be this Voice or another entity in the stars that he was just unfamiliar with. But that felt unlikely. Those were the two prominent named eldritch beings beyond the inscrutable Black Sun aiming to consume the scrap planet and everything else in between.
At the very least, the Monolith and the Voice, or this Light as his unlikable patron referred to them as, were prominent influential titans within the campaign.
He could count on one hand the number of times that his brother and he had gotten to the end of a campaign and Aurelio was cursing himself for not being diligent in adding more completions to his belt.
It was a nonsense notion, as was the situation he was in, but he kicked himself about it nonetheless.
No.
They approached the gates and saw Kalani open the double doors with open arms.
It would do him so much more harm than good to assume that his crew mates were under the influence.
He did his best to assure himself that his decision was the correct one.
“You’re all back!” Kalani yelled. She sprinted towards the crew and wrapped Elena in a loving embrace.
“Glad to be back.” Elena whispered warmly away from the others to hear.
“Elena did great. Aurelio did too.” Cantwell offered as he walked into the outpost.
Phineas rolled his eyes and trailed behind his friend, “You couldn’t have told the commander that I did great too, huh? Nothin’ about dear old Phin taking a chop to the head and saving our dear soldiers life with the power of my personality? Nothing?”
He watched Oja’s head bob along the man’s hip. Cantwell would take care of situating the Sawbones in the junkyard for a reconstructive process. They’d talk to each other about it.
Aurelio removed his helmet to greet Kalani.
“Hello Commander. I take it your time in the archives went well?” He asked.
She looked at him for a long moment and smiled, “My time alone in the archives was invaluable. I might even sit down to talk to you about my discoveries when you come in to give your report on the expedition.”
There was nothing to worry about.