Wreck of the SESV Soft Den, Eight Feet From Hellious's Surface, GC 3478 June 10th, 0730 Hours—
Kevan's eyes swept over the rocky ground surrounding the wreck of the ship. His eyes felt gritty and faintly stung as they moved, but he ignored the sensation, not taking his eyes from the corpse-strewn ground. Of the roughly thirty bodies lying on the slope, he knew for a fact that two of them were still alive, if badly injured and bleeding out. The swarm scouts were not among that number, as they had been massacred, with some being literally ripped into chunks by the main threat on this planet. It's inhabitants.
Two. Just two of those obsidian creatures with a line of spikes along their backs, which Kevan had seen thousands of, had slaughtered over ten times their number in front of his doorstep. No, that wasn't true. Given the moving nature of the battle and the wounds already on all of the fighters when they burst onto the scene late yesterday afternoon, the numbers of the combatants were probably higher at the start. And by the time Kevan started watching the death match, only the larger native creature was still fighting, meaning the odds were thirty to one. From the moment Kevan saw what was happening, he watched the events play out in transfixed amazement from an exposed maintenance passage in the middle of the starship's gaping wound.
Over most of the day before, Kevan was wary of leaving the spaceship, especially with obviously violent and territorial creatures running around outside. His open wound didn't add much motivation to leave either. Though he was able to treat the slash the night he received it with one of the countless emergency medical bags on the ship, meaning, at most, he would be walking around with the dried scent of blood, not fresh. It didn't take much thought to predict how the events of walking around in a predator's territory with a wound would play out. Not to mention, getting to the ground without wounding himself again was a serious problem.
Can't outrun a snail with broken legs.
So, most of the last day Kevan spent… suppressing a shudder at the memory, he forced his mind away from the long day of crawling around maintenance tunnels, searching for a path to the lower decks. On the bright side, as he wasn't toward the front of the ship that crashed into the boulder, the vessel's superstructure wasn't seriously warped, making it possible to open the larger doors. A fact that only made him feel worse, as the security bulkheads along the main passages that could unlock — a fact not all of the doors shared with so many power lines cut on the ship — still had to be moved by his body. Which he couldn't do, forcing him to reenter the maintenance tunnels if he wanted to move to another section to search for usable supplies.
And Kevan would swear that half of the usable supplies he found involved picking up and throwing emergency medical bags into piles as they were everywhere. Not that his search was entirely useless, as he did find some jumpsuits and even a pair of hiking boots that fit him in some of the personal compartments. There was little else he could see a use for at the moment, as this section of the ship was used to house those working in the engineering department. An assumption he made from the subtle clues of the engineering insignia on all of the jumpsuits.
Kevan wasn't expecting to find a backpack filled with supplies for wilderness survival in an extremely hostile environment, as the average crew member on a medical ship didn't tend to need them, but it would have been nice. The thing was, he would never discover anything if he didn't at least look, so he kept on making the attempt. And his effort was rewarded, as on the 19th deck, he found a lounge containing a few couches, coffee tables, drink dispensers, a holo-projector, and some other comforts one would want to relax. And most of all, thrown into a corner of the room was a lonely and forgotten engineering tool bag.
Kevan didn't know how to operate almost all of the tools, but they gave him options he didn't have before finding the useful equipment. And for the things he didn't know the function of, he could find a manual detailing their use on a tablet. How often over the last four thousand years has someone survived something that should have killed them on a starship only to die when they didn't know how to operate a particular piece of equipment? Often enough for it to become a regulation for nearly all tablets on a starship to have schematics and manuals for the common equipment.
So, as he slowly made his way back and forth and down the shattered rear of the ship, hauling his goodies, Kevan marked his path with a viscous gray substance labeled general grease he found in the bag. While lugging it around was a bit of a hassle, the convenience of opening up the stupid maintenance tunnel bulkheads made it all worth it, in Kevan's opinion. And he only imagined its usefulness would only grow.
As he made his way through the tunnels between the 15th and 16th decks, wondering if he should make a scavenging trip, he heard snarls and yips of pain mixed with the sounds of destruction from down one of the passages. Well, he had been hearing the faint sounds all day. But this was the difference between the noise happening blocks over and in the next room, making it too close to ignore for his curiosity. Hesitantly crawling down the passage, Kevan poked his head out of the tunnel into the open air to watch the ongoing fight.
Two swarm hoppers were lunging at one of the spiky creatures lying on the ground, causing what looked like only minor wounds, as their jaws and talons could not get past the creature's hide. Every few attacks, the beast would lash out with its mace-like tail or one of its paws, causing the hoppers to leap back in fear. But anyone could see what the end of the fight would be, and that was the hoppers wearing down the other animal before finishing it off. The fact it was taking so long was something to take note of more than the outcome because a hopper's acidic spit and strong jaw could rip through a space marine's power armor, given a few seconds of gnawing. While their attacks were less effective than Kevan would have thought, they were adding up, and the cries of pain and calls for help the creature was giving off were weakening.
While the three struggled off to the side, the other hoppers and a larger obsidian spiky creature were engaged in their own, far more epic battle. A swipe of the glistening creature's paw could cause a ripple to roll over the surface of the ground. As the bulge approached a hopper, a half-dozen stone spikes would burst out of the mound, impaling a swarm creature.
A moment later, it would spin in place as black flame spilled out of its mouth, which quickly formed into a spiraling serpent tearing through the sky. The fire serpent would swim gracefully through the air before opening its burning maw and diving to chomp down on another hopper. At that moment, Kevan would swear he heard the sudden shriek of hissing steam and saw a red haze around the hopper and black flames for a moment before the fire vanished, leaving a charred tail and head to fall to the earth.
Even with two of the Swarm dead in seconds, the creatures, acting in their nature, didn't care. They used the obsidian creature's distraction to bound forward, ripping at its sides with their scythes, slathering acid onto it with their tongues, and smashing the spears on their tails into its hind legs to trip it up. Then, as one, the creatures would leap back, preventing any counterattack.
Kevan could see the minor injuries on the creature piling up, creating openings that weren't there a moment before. Its wounds would cause it to turn slowly, preventing it from effectively warding off a hopper approaching its side. Seeing an opportunity, the hopper continued its lunge and landed a hit on the native creature's flank, forcing it to stumble to the side. As it stumbled, the hoppers on the other side jumped forward and lashed out with their own attacks, most of which skittered off its defenses, but enough were drawing blood to be visible to Kevan. Spattered among the bright orange of the Swarm's blood, a deep red could be seen dotting the ground, with more appearing with every movement of the creature.
Uncaring of their losses, the Swarm continued to attack, sacrificing one of their number to take a hit to create an opportunity for the others time and again. Some of the hoppers died to swipes of the creature's paws or tail, which would send them tumbling over the ground, coming to a stop in a broken and mangled heap. But most of the Swarm, as the battle drew on, were ripped apart by the earth or consumed by flames.
And yet, whatever the creature was doing to perform such magical, as that was the only word Kevan could think to explain what was happening, feats, they were becoming weaker. Instead of a forest of spikes, it was a trio or a single stone spike. And there were no longer serpents of flame but cones. And then the fire was restricted to a flaring of darkness around its maw when it bit down on the hoppers, getting too close.
The fight dragged on, with the native receiving dozens of attacks for every one it was able to give back. And yet, it was winning. The Swarm died one after another until only a handful of creatures remained standing. For all the attacks and blood on the ground, it appeared to be hardly injured and would soon end the battle.
Or so it seemed, until finally, all the hoppers' hard work paid off, as one of their number skittered forward. The hopper's tail snapped out, and instead of deflecting to the side, the barb punctured the obsidian creature's flank, burying the tail's tip deep into its ribs. The hopper died soon after as what should have been the fatally wounded animal twisted to the side, ripping out half of its neck, but the damage was already done.
Despite the distance, Kevan was sure he could hear a whimper of pain before it released a snarl of rage at its attackers. As all of its attention was fixed on the single hopper, the last two harrying creatures rushed forward, their tails primed to strike out with their own attacks. But faster than he had seen it move since the start of the fight, it pivoted, splattering one into the ground like a bug with its paw as the other was caught in the chest by a stone spike driving up out of the ground.
In the sudden silence of the battle ending, a whine of agony flowed over the land as the other obsidian creature lay in a bloody pool on the ground, with its two hoppers still jumping forward to lash out with quick strikes. Turning at the sound, only to quickly look back, Kevan saw the larger creature bear its fangs at the hoppers. To Kevan's sight, the beast seemed to swell, and the air around it shimmered like a haze of heat had suddenly gathered around it. Then it released a bark so strong it visibly shook the air.
Flinching back and ducking his head as the pressure wave washed over him, Kevan missed what had happened. When he raised his head after a few seconds to look, he saw half a dozen stone spikes sticking out of the two hoppers, their bodies only held together in the loosest sense, as chunks of meat were barely connected by thin strands of carapace and flesh.
But while all of their enemies lay dead, both creatures had flopped onto the ground, their sides only ever so slightly heaving as they struggled to breathe. Kevan expected that soon, both animals would die, and the fight would ultimately end with the mutual death of both sides. Given how the battle went, it only reinforced his decision not to step outside his ship.
Spinning around, Kevan crawled back into the maintenance passage, searching for a ladder leading to the next level of the ship as the sun continued its descent toward the horizon. To his back, he could faintly hear deep thumps and impacts along with roars of rage and pain, suggesting there was a far larger battle taking place outside of his line of sight. One he had no desire to be a part of.
And yet, every time he ended up on the shattered side of the vessel and glanced into the wider area outside, the two creatures were still holding onto life. Which was truly impressive, as so much of their blood had seeped into the ground around them that teardrop-shaped mud pits had formed. It would make anyone think they were dead at first look, but when he sat in his tunnel long enough and watched them, he would see their flanks rising up and down with a halting, hitching breath.
Even when he made it almost to the bottom of the wreck with nothing below him but crumpled steel as night fell hours later, they were still alive. As he huddled in the maintenance passage, willing the embrace of sleep to overcome him, his mind was plagued with thoughts. It wasn't the cold steel floor he was lying on or the bumpy work bag he was using as a pillow, and it wasn't the fact he was stuck inside a tomb of the dead that was bothering him. No, it was those creatures. Two beings that should have long been dead by now, so long as you prescribed to any kind of reasonable understanding of the world.
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But far from being dead, when Kevan woke up in the morning after a night filled with tossing and turning, he saw a line of dark ground behind the larger creature, suggesting it started to crawl toward the smaller one sometime during the night. Like it was getting better or something. Getting better from a head-sized hole punched into its side. A wound that Kevan would be amazed if it didn't puncture an organ or two. Injuries that nobody should survive more than a few minutes after receiving outside of an advanced medical facility, with one exception.
One thing that would explain everything going on with this fucked up place. It explained why the weird lady could project her image into his mind, why there were thousands of unnatural-looking creatures, which he suspected all had similar unexplainable abilities, allowing them to stand up to the Swarm with ease. And then there was the creature that overwhelmed his mind with fear simply by roaring.
They possessed Catalyst. An absurd amount, given the numbers and strength he had seen.
Which meant… a gold mine was sitting a few hundred feet from his current position, waiting for anyone to walk by and claim it. His gut burned with a churning greed, urging him to run over and snatch it up. His desire was so great that it was almost like a physical leash tugging him forward, nudging him into action. To consume the Catalyst and grow stronger. It grew to such an extent that standing still nearly made him ill.
"This isn't just for greed," Kevan whispered to himself so softly that it was little more than his breath coming out of his mouth. “It’s… a necessity. Yeah. I'm alone on a planet with a large amount of Catalyst. One that the Swarm is trying to infest. I have no reason to think anyone will come for me soon, if at all, and if I am going to survive, I need to take… calculated risks. Given a supply of Catalyst… I can activate the Crucible, which should still be intact. So long as this all works out, I might make it up to Tier 1, then… that opens all kinds of doors. Possibly literally."
Kevan nodded to himself once. Then, a few more times, his right hand clenching his pistol with a white-knuckled grip. His words did little to convince himself. His confidence was shit, and a ball of fear was lodged in the back of his mind. He watched the battle. And even one of the swarm hoppers would kill him in seconds in an open field. He was a decent shot, but hitting the same six-inch area on a moving target bounding from side to side was… most likely beyond him.
And with the creature on the brink of death, that only made it worse. You never knew what a cornered animal would do to live. Rounding it all out, Kevan only had a pistol, and he was far from certain it would be able to hurt the creature, even if he shot the thing in wounds already opened on its body. And yet, he was not wrong.
Kevan's greed was great, but the potential benefits he could gain for putting himself in a situation he was all but certain was only a moderate risk was also significant. His circumstances demanded action, or it would grant him death at some later date. And he did not join the Coalition to cower in fear, withering away until death finally got around to claiming him. It was ironic that in a war zone, you could often find yourself in a situation where you must avoid death by performing an action that looked like all but jumping into its arms.
Before he could rethink his plan, Kevan swung his left arm around, tossing his makeshift rope over the ledge. He used the tools inside the workbag to open up the paneling of the maintenance tunnel, ripped out the wiring, and tied it off to one of the exposed beams inside the tunnel. Could Kevan get down without using it? Absolutely, and he could probably even do it without getting hurt.
Getting back up would be a struggle. There were enough broken, jagged-edged spears of steel poking out in every direction that Kevan could do it, but then he would be climbing up broken, jagged-edged spears of steel that could easily puncture his flesh. It was a bad idea. Especially in situations where you have a high risk of tripping, like, entirely hypothetically speaking here, if Kevan was scrambling to get away from a savage animal intent on killing him.
Grabbing hold of the wiring and turning his back to the large animal, which sent a shiver of fear up his spine, Kevan leaned back on the wire, testing his weight again before tipping over the edge. Standing at nearly a ninety-degree angle from the walkway, Kevan looked down at the not-so-long drop and then back to his footing on the jagged metal plate, which he could feel poking into the soles of his now boots.
Shimmying along the rope until his chest and handholds were below the broken deck, Kevan pulled his feet to his chest and gripped the rope tightly as he started swinging toward the ship. He felt when the wiring hit the ledge, bouncing and scraping along its surface, jostling him for a few seconds before coming to a swaying stop. Loosening his grip, Kevan slid down the last couple of feet, his feet thunking into the ground.
"Ahh! What in the frigid Hells!' Kevan cursed, tightening his grip on the rope as the ground beneath him collapsed in a clattering of soil and rocks, interspersed with the heart-shaking wailing and snapping of stringing steel from the bottom decks of the Soft Den. As the ground continued to fall away, the entire spaceship started rocking, swinging him around like a pinata. Afraid that any movements would only cause the situation to grow worse, leading to his death, he coiled around the rope like a snake around a tree. At the same time, Kevan was trying his hardest to peek through the billowing dust around him to figure out what in the fuck was going on. When his vision finally cleared enough for him to see long minutes later, Kevan saw that from five feet behind him, the ground now descended into the earth, forming a ramp leading beneath the starship.
Glancing toward his feet, Kevan saw the soil was only a handful of feet lower than before. Hesitantly, like sap dripping down the side of a tree, he released the burning in his arms, slipping down the wire until his feet were about to touch down. Straining his muscles again, he held himself in place, allowing the tip of his boot to tap against the ground like a feather falling to the earth. When the ground didn't suddenly collapse again, Kevan let his weight slowly settle onto the ground one pound at a time until his arms could finally relax.
Still surrounded by a cloud of dust, Kevan settled into a crouch and waited, hoping that nothing noticed this little disturbance as he looked around nervously. As the seconds passed and nothing flashed through the dust, leaving disturbed particles in its wake, Kevan began to relax, though he never removed his left hand from the wire rope or his right from the hilt of his pistol.
The dust finally settled, and Kevan slowly stood up, looking up at the slight slope of the depression, searching for any movement along its side. Content that the rebalancing of the starship segment went, if not unnoticed, then ignored, he threw one glance at the bodies, ensuring they were in the same places as before. Once his quick check was done, he turned and looked down the new incline he was standing on.
Well, it was, in a word, lackluster. Five feet down the ramp in front of him, the hole was half blocked by a piece of the ship's outer hull, which dropped into it, blocking the left side. From what he could make out as the channel progressed, that trend continued, with pieces of the starship overhead falling into the deeper parts of the ramp, wholly or partially blocking sections; he couldn't tell which from here.
It was disappointing that Kevan couldn't see the purpose or end of this ramp from where he was, as it might have been interesting to know why it was made. And it was made, as even with his casual examination, he was confident that someone had made it, as the walls were too precise to be otherwise. But he wasn't going to clamber under and over the debris that had already collapsed once to solve a mystery he didn't really give a flying shit about at the moment. Especially to discover something that could have very easily gotten him killed. The recent interactions seemed like a bad omen to him, if there ever was one.
Turning from the trench, Kevan faced his current goal. "I got this," Kevan muttered to himself in encouragement before stepping forward. Trying not to step on every loose stone on the ground, his eyes jerked from one side to the other, searching the rim of the depression for anything appearing at its edge.
Though it was only a few hundred feet to the obsidian creature, the rapid thudding of his heart in his ears and borderline panic made it feel like one of the longest marches of his life. The first couple scores of his steps were taken with flighty hesitation, like the sound of gravel crunching under his feet would draw down the wrath of one of the leviathans floating overhead. As he reached the first boulder large enough to cover him, he crouched behind it, holding his gun in front of his body, huddling in place.
"Get ahold of yourself, Kevan!" He hissed to himself. "This is nothing! No different than going for a walk! Yeah, you got this!" In a resolute jerk, he whipped around the side of the rock and stalked forward at a fast walk, no longer attempting and failing to be stealthy. Covering all but the last twenty feet of the remaining distance.
Coming to a stop, Kevan studied the eight-foot-long creature, which didn't include its tail. So much of its blood soaked into the parched ground that he could see that it had turned into a muddy paste for five feet around it. Its lean body slightly resembled a wolf, but its legs and head had small, layered scales like a snake, while its head had a square jaw and flat face closer to that of a cat. On its sides, the scales became bigger, almost coming to the size of his palm, while along the nape of its neck, the scales grew to more than a foot in length, curving to the sides, becoming a small forest of spikes. Spikes that shrunk as you went further from the head. By the time you reached its haunches, the spikes had become all but nonexistent until you moved to its tail. At that point, the spikes began growing again, making the tip of the long tail look like an old spiked mace rather than an appendage of an animal.
While it was one of the sleekest and most deadly-looking animals he had ever seen, the image was ruined by the missing and cracked scales along the upturned side. Its side heaved with long, billowing breaths every few seconds, causing the mud before its muzzle to be pushed out in a rolling cone. After walking around the creature to stop at its front, Kevan lifted his pistol, leveling the weapon at the shattered eight-inch wide section of its scales in the middle of its upper chest.
It was a target that any decent marksman could hit at this distance. The instant he was about to pull the trigger, his body froze, and the ground rippled under his feet like he was suddenly standing on water. But he hardly noticed the ground, as all of his attention was focused on the overwhelming feeling of an unbelievably strong monster standing above him, radiating menace. Kevan knew that if he should move, it would be his last action in this life, as it would kill him the next instant.
As the seconds thumped by, sweat formed on his forehead and trickled down his spine, pooling at the small of his back. His heart filled his ears, causing his vision to narrow, and his body began shaking like it was trying to vibrate a hole into the ground and disappear.
Suddenly, even Kevan's shivering stopped, and his eyes snapped to the side on instinct, making eye contact with the scaled creature. Its eyes were filled with pain, but underlying that, there was an overwhelming amount of malicious pleasure. Something snapped within Kevan, and his lips pulled back in a snarl of his own. With a half-choked scream, Kevan's body jerked as he shrugged off the fear holding him in place. Pulling his eyes away from the monsters like they were glued together, he focused all his attention on lining up his sights as his finger repeatedly flexed, depressing the trigger.
The fear of a nearby apex predator was still filling the back of his mind, but instead of holding him in place, torn between fighting or fleeing, Kevan accepted death, granting him the freedom to act. If he was in the presence of something so superior to himself that it would be his death no matter the choice, then it really didn't matter what he did, so he might as well go down swinging. If not, it was time for either violence or running. The thought of turning on his heel and running to the hills didn't even pass through his mind, as he would rather fight to the bitter end for life.
So he pulled the trigger time after time, firing one round after another at the beast, with most shots being accompanied by a spurt of blood. It wasn't all, but Kevan chalked that up to the beast playing havoc with his mind, making it hard to focus. And as the beast whined in pain and snarled at him in growing anger, the baring of teeth only grew in satisfaction, and he never stopped. "Take that, you son of a—
Slowly lifting up his hand, as he cracked open his eyes, Kevan moaned as he cradled his right side against the internal spikes of pain surging through his body. "What happened," He mumbled, his head lolling around, only to find himself over forty feet from the scaled animal.
A moment later, he looked along the scaled creature's paws and saw a new head-sized pillar of stone sticking out of the ground at an angle, explaining everything he needed to know. Stopping his search for how he got here, Kevan started searching for where his pistol flew off to, but a gurgling wheeze, like the last puff of air forced out of a wet bag, sounded from the scale wolf, drawing his attention. Kevan couldn't stop his lips from twitching upward in pleasure as his foe struggled to breathe. It was what the thing deserved.
Deciding to spend a few moments to scout out the situation, Kevan lay where he was, carefully testing how he could move without experiencing a spike of pain. He definitely didn't decide to lie there because it hurt to move or because he was gathering his will to sit up. If anyone ever said that, it would be total slander against him.
Minutes slipped by, and the smile touching his lips spread over his whole face, growing wider by the moment; as no matter how much time passed, the fucking dog wasn't drawing another breath. Then the smile vanished as he fumbled at his side, lifting up a smashed case.
Apparently, the hard-shelled emergency medical kits couldn't protect its contents from a stone spear. Though Kevan couldn't be that annoyed, as it probably saved his life… But now, he was without medical supplies during a time when he suspected he had multiple broken ribs. If only there was another medical kit conveniently placed within arm's reach… Fuck you, ship designers. Fuck you.
All Kevan had to do now was… get over to the creature. Butcher it. Then, crawl back to the starship before climbing the rope while carrying all his gear and his side screaming at him… "I should have stayed in the ship…" Kevan complained, letting his head drop to the ground as he stared up at the blue sky, silently hoping all this effort would be worth it.