The world was a blur as Ren careened across the sky, but it still wasn’t fast enough for her liking. She’d been able to hear the team-wide broadcasts – and after Bianca’s response, it was clear that some of their intra-team kin had fallen – but exactly who and how was a mystery. There was one option for getting information though, and she singled out the members of Wing Team One, “What the Hell is going on out there? Why is half our group nonresponsive?”

“Commander!” Was the unanimous answer, and Ravan explained as well as she could, “Something dive-bombed past the Aegis earlier and went straight for the Warp Magi bodies Lord Rylen brought back from the south. We’re not totally sure what’s been going on since, because the Captain sent us into the building to help guide the evacuation. If anyone’s getting orders, comms have been targeted, so only those who need to know, get to know. We were told to come outside…and saw that the Aegis has its forward cannon primed.”

“But it’s just you two?”

“…Yeah.”

“Shit… Hold tight, I’m a bit more than halfway there.”

.

The shuddering in the walls was an unsettling experience while traveling underneath thousands of tons of rock, but they were only a few hundred yards into the tunnel, and it was farther yet to get to the end. The crowd had to split into lanes as the trolley they’d all been waiting for came towards them from further up the track, and watched it pass, heading back the way they’d come. Noticing only then that their numbers didn’t include any of the Myrmidon they’d arrived with, many felt conflicting senses of guilt, relief, and guilt again.

There was a strange purple-gold glow that appeared in the dark, however…and grew larger swiftly, until it revealed itself to be a Fafnir Knight passing overhead with dangerous speed. Corbin and Jense both had to dart out of the way to avoid a collision, and watched their fleeing cohort vanish further up the tunnel.

“Was that Bianca?” Jense wondered.

“No…I think that’s Dishonorable Discharge.” Corbin retorted, “Oi! Bianca! Get your ass back here and help so you don’t get court-martialed!”

There was no answer, and the glow soon faded into the darkness.

Jense lifted his left arm out and shot-off another benign light-orb from his vambrace, and grumbled quietly, “Hey Captain, was Bianca supposed to dip?”

“Not right now. Continue the mission.” Furion answered, his voice strained.

The tunnel shuddered again, and the two Knights could only wonder what the Hell was going on back at the tram-dock.

It was a three-on-one, with each Fafnir giving everything they had to land a single blow against that multi-limbed monstrosity. Each Knight had 19 years or more experience – they were the pinnacle of what a Fafnir could become – and not one of them could get through. Furion was starting to consider the options, but knowing that five of his subordinates had already been taken out by the creature, he was also starting to believe that Scyrexian was just screwing with them.

“It’s only defending.” Sammy noted on their private comms, “It hasn’t done a single thing to go after us offensively.”

“Yeah, I noticed that, too.” Furion replied, “We have to consider this thing as if it’s one of ours. It knows everything Ianori knew.”

“So, what do we do?” Michael asked, “What’s it expecting us to do?”

“Already contemplating how to get out of this, Captain?” Scyrexian taunted, the upper set of hands coming close to its face as if to cup its cheeks, and mockingly tilted its head to the side, “After Donivan, you three are the best your unit has to offer…save one.”

Furion felt a chill, “What do you want? You’re toying with us without aim.”

“Why are you hiding Ren from me?”

That took him aback, “Is that was this is all about? You want her?”

Scyrexian paused there, and lowered its hands. The eerie quiet turned to thrumming in each of their ears – oppressive in its stillness. The scythe-tipped legs that sprouted from the entity’s back seemed to relax their posture, tucking in slightly, and the entire creature ‘stood’ up a little taller. No one was willing to disturb the silence by so much as breathing, but the sound of their own hearts beating in their ears was loud enough to make them wonder if the being could hear it.

And perhaps it could, because two of those hearts stopped mere seconds later.

Furion could only watch as those oily appendages coming off Scyrexian’s shoulders whipped with blinding speed, and flailed straight for the heads of both Michael and Sammy. It didn’t bother with removing their helmets, like it had with its other victims, but rather, swung the two Knights directly at one another. The crunch of Sammy’s cranial-dome colliding with Michael’s visor was enough to make even Furion twitch. The Captain reacted just as quickly, lunging forward with both blades together, only to find it so-easily deflected as to be like a master educating a green student. The hilts were forced from his hands by the blow, and went clattering off into the debris-field, leaving Furion completely unarmed. Scyrexian couldn’t be satisfied with just that, however, and the arms aside its head slammed down on the Captain’s shoulders, pushing him down to his knees with enough force that it cracked the foundation beneath him. He reached up quickly, a hand gripped hard around each of those skinny limbs.

“The annoying thing about diamonds being the hardest naturally-occurring substance within the earth is that the only way to cut them is by using other diamonds.” Scyrexian lectured, and smashed the two suspended Knights together a second time, this time angling them slightly the other way so it was Michael’s helm that mashed Sammy’s visor, “So too is it annoying how strong the armor of the Fafnir is. Tempered to withstand the extreme heat of hypersonic flight…strong enough to endure impact forces that could collapse even the most hardened materials. But, like diamonds…” Another crushing blow – the duo were already battered to unconsciousness, but now, the protruding angles of the ornamental horns on each of their helms was impaling into their faces, cracking and sending blood-spatter flying – and Scyrexian held them up like grim trophies, limp in its grasp as those glowing wings shut down. The entity pulled the two around – their feet and then their knees dragging along the floor as they neared – until their misshapen flesh was directly in Furion’s peripheries, “…Other Fafnir are their weakness. Call to Ren.”

“…N-never…”

“Are you really so willing to die down here? Buried so deep in the rubble that no one will ever dig you out?”

Furion grit his teeth – those frail-looking mummified arms were impossibly strong; enough so that they were still forcing his knees further into the concrete as it held him there. He could only think of one thing, and he spoke privately to his Eidolon, “Fire the cannon.”

Rylen’s eyes widened, “Captain, that would mean-”

“W-we can’t beat this thing…” Furion admitted, “It’s on a level beyond anything we’ve ever faced. We can’t find any weaknesses, we can’t exploit the terrain, it knows all of ours moves… Please, fire it before she gets here… The others are far enough away… I can…keep it here…keep its attention…”

The Eidolon was horrified, and his brow furrowed deeply. But, he lowered his head, and raised his arm, “…Full-bore. Do it now.”

Jense and Corbin were nearly knocked out of their hover by a sudden rush of red from the front of the tunnel.

Ravan and Alexander looked on in horror as the Aegis’ primary weapon sounded-off that unmistakable, crackling-hum as it prepared to cut-loose its gathered power. They quickly fled the line of fire, knowing full-well that someone was still down there, even if they weren’t sure exactly who anymore. The noise reverberating off that intense beam of raw energy was enough to rattle the teeth loose in other people, and those two remaining members of Wing Team Two were sent scattering like leaves against a hurricane. They found themselves pressed against the nearby walls of the cliff, watching that ultra-bright line of light obliterate the facility, digging deeper with each passing second.

Further up the tram-tunnel, people screamed and cowered, and the two guiding Fafnir looked on to see the subtle glow of heat in the distance.

When it finally stopped, and the last bits of plasma fell to the ground like runny syrup, they were released from the pressure and started to fall, catching themselves only moments before hitting the ground.

Ravan roughly landed anyway, rising up on hands and knees as she looked out at the destruction the Aegis had wrought. The rock was smoldering – melted and red-hot in places, cooling rapidly to black as it sizzled against the rush of the river as it returned – and the only thing that was left that once marked the place as a building was the forward lip of the front terrace. The water that fell from its artificial waterfall was gone – cut off from the source by the gaping maw beyond it – and the river it fed drained away. Smoke billowed white and thick as the mouth of the river continued its forward flow from further up the crevasse, pouring into the pit, starting to fill it up.

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But the thing that confused Rylen was the fact that no other Fafnir went offline. In fact, Furion was still very-much online. The Eidolon dreaded to dare, and opened a channel, “Captain?”

“Of all the stupid goddamn things any of you could do…” Ren’s voice was the one that cut through the fog, angry and annoyed all at once, and on a very public channel to the entire team as well as the bridge, “I leave you alone for one fucking day!”

“That was Ren?” Jense and Corbin both said in tandem.

“Commander!” Ravan and Alexander both called-out.

“Dame Ren!” Rylen’s voice boomed, “What…how!? Where are you!?”

She kicked out a section of wall beneath the terrace, and dragged the disoriented body of her Captain out with her, muttering under her breath the whole time. When they were finally clear of the building, she sat the man up and knocked on the top of his helmet like a door, “Hello? I don’t think I hit you that hard.”

Furion just fell back again and groaned loudly, “…You…tackled me…like a freight-train…”

“Well, it’s a good thing then that our armor comes equipped with inertia modulators. It could’ve been worse.” Ren stood up and stuck her fists on her hips, “What the actual Hell was going on out here? First, I get a call from Seth that this place is being exploded, then, I get the distinct impression that my friends are all dying…and then I get here, Bianca’s getting the Hell out of Dodge, and you’re trying to eat a cannon.” She gestured at the man, “I know you believe in the Captain goes down with the ship tradition, but still. Damnit, Furion…”

Rylen locked into her personal comms, “Dame, the rest of the team is ignorant to what they haven’t been present themselves to witness. The thing that took Sir Ianori found this place and transferred itself into the Magi from the Sterling Rose. The cannon-fire was supposed to take it out while Captain Rydell had it pinned…”

“Pinned?” She echoed, “But he was alone when I got here.” She looked back into the hole she’d pounded through the facility, and watched a bit of debris fall in her wake. Her brow crinkled a little, and she immediately went back through it, going all the way through until she found the crater where the tram-station once was. She hovered there in that gaping space, surrounded by steam-fog, hearing Furion’s voice in her helmet begging her to come back, but she just pulled the hilts off her hips and extended their blades, “…It’s still here.”

“What?” Rylen answered, “But…it took a direct hit.”

“No. If the Captain was supposed to be holding it in place, then it had already gotten away before you fired.” She answered, and looked straight up, seeing a peculiar dot in the sky, “…There you are.”

Rylen switched-over to Ren’s P.O.V., and sure enough, as they zoomed-in on the spec, it was evidently clear the Scyrexian had gotten easily clear, “How could it have known…?”

Furion forced himself up to his feet, even with his now-splitting headache, and despite being disarmed, lifted-off to fly after his lieutenant. He got beside her and shook his head, then looked up at the same sight, “…Unreal…that it got away…” He turned to Ren, and spoke with a pained inflection to his voice, “Our observations about it on the Magistrate’s ship were correct; it fights like a Fafnir because it’s pulling insight from one. It knows everything Ianori knew. …And it wants you, Ren, you can’t stay here…”

“Me? …Why?”

“No idea.” He grunted, and put a hand against his stomach, “Fuck that hurts…”

“Sorry.” Ren answered, and quickly tossed him one of her blades, which he easily caught despite his agony, “I saw the cannon’s glow on approach, and had a feeling you were about to do something idiotic, so I came through the tunnel to help. Also, sorry Jense and Corbin…didn’t mean to blast you as I went by.”

“Forgiven.”

Furion drew in a breath and tried to straighten himself out, and spoke privately to the woman beside him, “…Ren, we don’t know what to do against that thing. It’s faster than it has any right being. I watched as it systematically took out seven different highly-trained Knights like it was taking a Tuesday-afternoon stroll. The cannon was our last chance…”

“If it wants me for something then I have the advantage.” She answered, and started to rise up to meet the being. Furion grudgingly went up with her. They both kept a substantial distance from it though, and Ren gestured at it, “Well? I’m here. Now what?”

“You give yourself over to me.” It answered simply, “That’s all.”

“Sorry, you’re not my type.” She answered, and took her singular hilt into both hands. That done, the plasma-edged blade expanded into a much larger design, “You’re gonna have to make it worth my while.”

“You are merely a stepping-stone, child.” Scyrexian pointed one of its fingers at her, “But if you willingly give me Gabriel Lugios…well, I could be convinced not to kill the rest of your friends.”

She sent out a private retort to her Captain, “Chatty thing, isn’t it?”

“It might be able to hear our comms. Careful what you say around it. I don’t know how else it could’ve known we were firing in that moment except that it heard me give the order to do it.”

“…Roger that.” She answered, Gabe’s already on his way here… It’ll take him another couple hours though on Maeve. We have to end this before he shows.

Scyrexian just looked on at her dubiously. In the full light of the afternoon, it didn’t look half as menacing as it did in the dark beneath the cliff, but it was still a disturbing sight, especially with those insect-like legs clicking beneath the two fused skulls. The wriggling tentacle-like appendages behind its back slowed their undulations slightly, until they came together in a singular mass, and fully detached from the main body. The shape it took as it hovered out beside itself looked eerily similar, until two golden orbs within the miasma shone to life in the same place its ‘eyes’ sat in those two skulls.

And a second volley from the Aegis tore through with that rumbling, deafening brilliance.

Rylen took no chances, “Again!”

“Sir, it needs time to cool down-”

“Charge it now!”

Furion and Ren both scattered, seeing the two entities dart out at the last microsecond. The sight of the powered-up weapon would’ve been as obvious as the sun, and the two seconds before firing it weren’t subtle either. Ren found herself diving towards the smoking crater, following after the physical body, as Furion went after the miasma it had broken-off from itself. Furion quickly found himself fending off an all-new onslaught, however, as the evidently-mindless creature thrashed with animalistic fury at him.

That, he realized, made it much easier to fight.

Ren was quick to discover the opposite, and watched it make a calculated escape into the mists. Ravan and Alexander lifted-off to join their Commander, hovering a distance away from the dense fog, but Ren held her arm out to them, “Don’t let it bait you in.”

“Then what do we do?” Ravan wondered.

Ren flipped the hilt in her hand to point the blade out to the side, and aimed her forearm cannons into the smoke, “Rain Hell on it.”

The other two were quick to follow suit, and suddenly six different sets of pulses were being shot-down into the gaping hole. As they fired, they each began to drift apart from one another, making sure there was no single point from which the onslaught originated. When they heard a distinctive shriek from beast trying to chew on their Captain, they had a feeling that maybe – just maybe – they were finally onto something.

Furion watched as the orbs within the oily mass reconfigured, and the shadow of its body began to warp, until the horns above it more-resembled antlers, and the arthropod-like ‘face’ reassembled into something more mammalian. Mandibles were replaced with teeth, and it charged wildly, biting down on the plasma-edged great-sword that Furion swing straight at it. Steam hissed from the contact, and it sparked and smoldered. Furion grit his teeth, “Well, if you’re about to blow-up anyway…” He pulled his left arm free, and pointed his wrist directly at that animalistic forehead. Wings quickly went up – he let the hilt go entirely at the same time - and came down again, like blades that perfectly sliced between them, leaving only the gap for his one arm. With a click, the detonation rippled throughout the sky, sending out enough of a shockwave that it pushed the smoke in the crater away…revealing the charge from the fleshy body.

It went straight for Ren, that deer-skull’s fanged jaws wide as it roared in its approach. Ren quickly adjusted, seeing the charge from far enough away that she could swing her right arm around and down, bounce the long-blade directly between its eyes, and roll across its back in one fluid motion as it careened beneath her. She was quick to follow it up, taking the hilt in both hands as she rushed up behind it with an eye to swing at it again with double the force – Ravan and Alexander banked wide to follow after her. It hadn’t slowed for missing its mark though, and continued that ascent, directly towards the huge black cloud that seethed in the sky. Ren watched Furion swoop out of the fray, embers flickering off of him as he dove to catch the falling hilt and reforge the sword…only for the proverbial wendigo to disappear within the smog in his place.

“It’s gonna rejoin!” Ren yelled, and quickly pitched upward before the smoke could envelop her, too. The explosive fumes seemed to crackle with gold and purple lightning-flashes, and within the illuminated haze, Ren was sure she spied the image of massive bat-like wings form and spread. A piercing shriek thundered through the air, and Ren instinctively clenched her eyes shut, hands up to block her ears as if her helmet wasn’t in the way. She wouldn’t let that make her vulnerable though, and the illuminated gap in the back of her mechanical wings – where the solid light panels emerged - glowed more brightly for the afterburn of sending her further skyward.

Alexander wasn’t so fortunate though, and his blood-curdling shrieks filled their comms instead. That demonic being had launched at and latched onto the man, those massive jaws poised around his head and chest like it would bite it clean in half if not for the armor. The upper, central arms were drawn inward as the lower set clawed for purchase at the Knight’s wrists, spreading those limbs wide before the former thrust out at his elbows. The crunch of both arms breaking at the same time was blocked only by the distance, but Alexander’s pained screams told the story just as well. In vain, he tried to bring his wing-panels around, but just as he tried to wrap the solid light ‘feathers’ through the small gap between himself and the beast’s bulky body, he heard the click of his helmet coming loose…and he was suddenly shaken violently.

All three remaining Fafnir hovered at a distance, daring not approach closer, even with all weapons drawn.

“Captain, the evacuees are safe-”

“Not now, D’Shay!”

Ren held her left hand out, and disabled the plasma-blade, holstering the hilt on her hip again, “Stop!” She called, extending that second hand then as well, “Let him go!”

“Surrender.” It leered angrily, “I grow impatient.”

Furion reeled, “You can’t, Ren! This is insane!”

“What do you want with Lugios!?” She called anyway, “And what’s it got to do with me!?”

“You are merely collateral, child.”

Her brow wrankled, “Collateral…?” She echoed to herself.

“And as collateral, you need not know the rest. You are nothing but a tool, and your cooperation is optional.”

“So, you killed everyone in the unit just to get to me?” Ren asked, “…But…why? If I understand right, you already had Ianori… What could I possibly do that he couldn’t?”

Those eyes narrowed, “You can move the Prime Mover.”

“…The what…?”

“FIRE!”

The Aegis lit-up all over again, and Furion charged to push Ren out of the way before the blast could barrel through. Scyrexian took the hit directly to its back that time, and it shrieked in pain, the flesh of its hosts – and its latest victim – burning away in a violent whirlwind. Alexander’s marred armor was dropped and plummeted to the ground, landing with a wet, earthy thud in the exposed riverbed.