Yosef continued to shout directions and course changes to the group as the formation’s path seemed to wind back and forth, “It’s a challenge to maintain the signal.”
He called out to the Monitor who was parsing the thermal data, “What do you have for me on that data-set?”
“Still unclear, there is a distortive effect that I can’t punch through on the entire set, more solid than gas but lighter than anything else I can think of.”
“Keep at it!” Yosef picked out the Monitor that had called out the second highest scanning range next to his, “Jilan, set your sensor to scan ‘664.114 through 667.532’, we’re going to attempt triangulation.” They each took positions on the right and left of the Tetsudo.
“Clan Head we have the signal triangulated. It’s reflecting back the pings to us, I don’t recognize what it could be reflecting off of but I am sure it is not from a solid.” Jillan’s head shook in agreement, they weren’t able to figure it out either.
The Clan Head had to give himself credit, he’d done a good job picking Yosef. He always did have an eye for talent.
“Ahead!” Yuma’s shout focused the formation’s attention toward the front. It was… water. A pool of water, no. More than that, an enormous mass of water, stretching far beyond their Senses could perceive.
“Clan Head, Ranner is missing!”
“Find out what that liquid is.” The Clan Head eyed it one last time before moving to the other side of the Tetsudo to get a detailed report on what exactly had happened to Ranner.
Yosef moved through the group toward the liquid. There was the back of a large Shield-Guard in his way. “Excuse me, Yanov,” as he pushed the big Shield-Guard aside and stepped toward the water. He hesitated to get closer, the quantity of liquid and its opaque appearance in their dark surroundings were deeply unsettling. Yosef decided to first start scanning it from a distance.
“What? Impossible. No, that’s impossible.”
Yosef tapped again and again at his portable, waving some sort of sensor connected to a port with a wire, he was moving closer to the liquid as he did so.
“Impossible!” he mumbled as a heavy hand landed on his shoulder, it was Yanov.
“I don’t think the Clan Head wants you outside of the formation, Monitor.”
Yosef was too enthralled to bother responding to the relatively significant slight of being referred to as ‘Monitor’ instead of “Head Monitor.”
Yanov shook his shoulder, “Hey, didn’t you hear me?”
Yosef turned with a glassy look in his eyes. Yanov took an unconscious step back as the Head Monitor met his own gaze, “it’s Nano.”
“What are you talking about?" It hit him, "Wait. You mean that isn’t water? It’s Nano?”
“It’s liquid Nano; apparently, in large enough quantities Nano operates under fluid dynamics. Fascinating….”
Yanov heard nothing past “liquid Nano.” There was more Nano than he’d ever seen in his life. It was his lucky day. He accepted this boon, even if he had come at the cost of him being incorrect earlier. To his delight, today, the saying went ‘where there was some Nano, there was a shitton more’.
He was ok remembering it wrong. Very, very okay with it. He grinned and pushed Yosef back into formation, “I will gather samples for you Head Monitor.”
Yanov approached the unmoving waters of the Nano sea and unhesitatingly plunged both hands into it. He extended his own Nano, stretching his capacity to maintain a shell around the huge quantities of ‘liquid’ Nano that flooded and moved around his hands. It was an indescribable feeling, so much potential, so much power. His power now.
He pulled his hands entirely out of the sea and two massive orbs, unstable in their rippling, pulsing rotation, maintained themselves over the surface of his palms.
He turned toward his friend as he grinned, “Told you Regy, it’s my day.”
At the end of “day” a formless mass of Nano rose and dropped over the Shield-Guard before ripping him back into the lake in complete silence. The liquid didn’t even ripple as it returned to its unnatural flatness.
Regy and his flanking Shield-Guard brethren had no training dealing with this particular situation but their actions had long been instinctualized for dealing with ‘unknown’ threats as they simultaneously, and immediately, moved to cover the Head Monitor Yosef and retreated several further steps away from the liquid.
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To his credit Regy’s voice only slightly cracked as he yelled back, “Clan Head, something just swallowed Yanov!”
“What do you mean ‘swallowed’?” Regy tensed as the Clan Head’s voice came from directly behind him.
“It, uh, he uh… Sir, Yanov went to get a sample for the Head Monitor, it’s liquid Nano.” His words were scattered, the crabs he could understand, the Cryo-sick, the mad, the insane, all that he could understand. This was unsettling. “He touched the water and pulled out a bunch. A lot of it. Massive balls of Nano on each hand. Then the water, the uh, liquid Nano swallowed him and he was gone. Not a sound.”
“Did you see what swallowed him?”
“No Clan Head, all I could see was the Nano.” It was the same with the other Shield-Guard on either side of Regy. Yosef confirmed it as well, “I didn’t have the biological scanner up.”
Cura and Telane on the other side of the Tetsudo both converged on a point with their blades and they passed through empty air. Both of the swordbearers stood there, surprised and seemingly confused.
The Clan Head turned to face them and then back to Yosef.
“It does not matter. We’re moving fro-”
Yuma fired a bar of light that popped as it impacted a mass that jumped from the liquid-Nano lake. It hit with a crackling pop and started to violently twitch. The Clan Head followed it up with a flick of his sword and sent a bit of molten-white tip into the edge of a shadow. A harsh, pained scream tore from it as the shadowy mass plunged back into the liquid.
“Yuma, tell me what you saw.”
“It looked… Human-like, but not. It’s covered in shadow or maybe Nano.”
The Clan Head glanced once more at the sea of Nano and shouted to the formation, “Shield-Guard, look for deep-shadow, suspected Nano-shroud tech or effect, flash any you see at your discretion.”
A shadow that wasn’t visible to the majority of the group pulled a Shield Guard into the darkness.
“Did anyone see that?” “Did we lose Ron?” “What grabbed him?” “I’ve got nothing on visual, thermals are acting up!”
That last shout shook something free in Yosef, “Monitors! Use thermal to observe your surroundings! Look for things that look like mild-heat distortion!”
“They’re all around us, Head Monitor!” “They’re fast!” “One of them is coming up, dead ahead!”
At that last warning a Shield Guard fired off a flash from their shield. The overwhelming blink of harsh light overpowered the cloying shadow of the creature. Portions of it became visible in chunks as the Nano surrounding the creature burned out and disappeared. It scrambled and screeched, a crooked creature hunched on the ground on hands and feet.
They were long and thin, unnaturally so. Their starved appearance highlighted their bone structure which seemed to stick out at inHuman angles. Thin, wiry arms were coiled in lean muscle and ended in razor sharp fingers, more claws than fingers. Hendrew focused his palms toward the creature and its skin bubbled and peeled before their eyes.
More flashes fired off from shields and were joined by staccato bursts of repeater fire. Screeching mixed with shouts as some Clan found their targets but most did not. The creatures were faster than their malnourished appearance would lead you to believe.
“I want a bearing! Keep the wat… liquid to the left. Head around it. Head Monitor, I want a bearing. All Monitors are responsible for notifying Shield-Guard in front of you.”
The formation started to move.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Gurey wasn’t sure if Kala was serious when she said, “What the fuck. What killed everything before I could?”
He couldn’t think of an appropriate response. There were piles of Humans, maybe, at one point. His boot sucked as he stepped over more of the diced scraps of flesh and material. The flesh stew had been melted, diced, torn, scattered, and blasted into a deep and wide pile on the other side of the Cryo Door.
When the situation was tense or awful or strange, professionalism was never the wrong call, “Monitor, anything pertinent?”
She started as she ripped her wide eyes from the pile of flesh and stepped her other leg into the stew, “No no. I’m not getting any significant residual feedback. Whatever happened here, happened a while ago.”
Gurey looked around and picked up his boot. The blood had turned dark and thick and the smell was intense. The small woman who was attached to Kala’s hip had already thrown up and kept up regular gagging. Thankfully he had substantial control over his Senses and downregulated his olfactory glands.
Clumps of bodies and metal had started to turn pale or… or started to rot. He grimaced and poked a chunk of what he guessed to be ‘shoulder’ with his foot. It had metal attached to it, more than that though, it looked melded to the skin, he carefully bent down to get a closer look.
“Elra… look at this.” The Monitor moved to join him with sucking footsteps. She bent down and poked at it. “Pick it up for me.” Gurey slung his shield over his shoulder and obliged.
She took out a Magno-Tube and opened it. It sucked out a small amount of Nano from the sample he held.
“Minimal flesh degradation. That’s odd.”
Gurey did know that the more Nano in flesh the more it turned into soup when it was removed.
She took it from him, the scrap of metal in one hand and the chunk of flesh in another and pulled them apart. Most of the decaying from the flesh happened around the prongs that jutted out from the piece of machinery.
“It’s a cybernetic attachment.” She looked around, seeing the scrapped metal and flesh in a new light. “It’s everywhere, cybernetic enhancement.”
She consolidated her things from two bags to one then started picking her way through the dismembered corpse pile, plucking bits based on a metric Gurey didn’t know. Even though it was a pretty gruesome scene, made the moreso by her soft humming that started up. Still, that’s what he had been hoping for. Once she was interested in something she would ignore her surroundings. He could already hear her complaints from afterwards about her sleeves being covered in filth. Better that, than getting lost in the horror.
He looked over at Kala. Her errant, kicking steps strewed cuts of flesh and clanging bits of metal out in front of her as she dragged Uller by the feet. Eilien stepped carefully behind her, avoiding stepping on Uller as she kept her eyes focused on the back of the large woman’s back.
Gurey grimaced as he heard muffled shouts from the Medjel-encased man. He didn’t envy the man being dragged feet-up, head-down in the flesh pile. Gurey’s thoughts about Uller’s plight didn’t reach any deeper beyond basic sympathy, and with Kala, it didn’t even reach that far.
Uller, of course, wasn’t entirely covered in the Medjel shell, he still had to breathe after all. Only his nose and eyes were free of the shell and it was a coin toss whether it was better to smell it or taste it.