Chapter 78
An Unexpected Battle/Part One
The Eye
Lugrin. Lake Lemac, France.
The tent that served as an infirmary was silent at that moment. Quite the opposite of the hustle and bustle that could be heard outside, where the storm was diminishing in violence and the investigation teams were finally getting ready to continue the work of searching for parts.
“Hey! Are you awake?” asked a barely whispering voice.
Van, sleeping on her side, slowly opened her eyes to find a pair of almond-shaped eyes with crimson pupils staring straight ahead at her, accompanied by a small mouth with pointed teeth. Van knew those eyes and those teeth all too well.
“Mimi?” Van asked, sleepily. “What are you doing here?”
“I came to check on you,” Mii said, running her hand through Van's hair and ruffling it.
“No need, I'm fine now,” Van let out, smiling a little as Mii tousled her long pink hair.
“Yeah, well. You're my friend. On the other hand you're an agent of the intelligence branch. It's been a while since one of our agents has been compromised on a mental level.”
Van sighed, running her hand over her forehead. “I'm sorry.”
“Don't apologize,” Mii said smiling weakly, then wiped the smile away and leaned over Van to whisper in her ear. “It's done, it happened a few hours ago,” Mii said in a sibylline voice.
Van squinted her eyes in confusion, then after a couple of seconds she opened them wide with surprise, waking up completely and looked at Mii with a worried face. “What have you done?”
Mii put a finger to her lips, indicating her to be silent.
Van got up from the stretcher with a worried look on her face, looked around making sure no one was there and took Mii by the shoulders. “What are you thinking? This is going to cost you your job at the very least,” she said quietly, but in a tone that was clearly scolding her, even though technically Mii was her superior.
Mii smiled weakly and shrugged. “Yes, most likely.”
“Why did you do it?”
“It's time to start cutting off snake heads. This fight has taken many decades.”
“And who's going to save you to keep yours on your shoulders?”
“It's something that had to be done. If it turns out well it's likely to be the biggest breakthrough in fifty years.”
Van shook her head and sat up looking for her boots that were lying on the side of the gurney, along with her leather coat and other clothes. “What about what you want?”
Mii looked away pouting and folded her arms. “If you're going to start with the same sappy thing I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to hear it either.”
“I'm your friend and you're going to listen to me,” Van replied, taking off the robe she'd been dressed in and starting to put on the clothes she'd arrived in. “Stop lying to yourself. You can say this is for them, but you're doing it to escape too. So you don't have to decide if you want to give yourself a chance to be happy or move on.”
Mii looked at her and snorted and her black and red bangs fluttered as she braced herself for a scolding from Van. Though the truth was, she was used to it and, all things considered, given the scare she'd just had upon arrival, it was comforting. Van always brought her down to the ground when her head went to the clouds.
They had known each other for more than two centuries after all.
***
Thor, Rein and Noki had been talking for the last few minutes while Mii was with Van. They were in the main tent and had been debriefing with Lefreve about the situation with the investigation and how all the developments in the investigation had turned out over the last few days.
Because an information blockade had been put in place, not everything had been communicated to the island, only certain data that had been shared.
Thor, on the other hand, did not know all the details of the case, but he was more than nervous to know the location of Mai, who was managing the operation to take over the old accelerator facilities. Due to the secrecy and given what had happened with the disappearance of Oxy and Professor Reubens, it was still quite chaotic to put all the data in order for the newcomers to digest in one bite.
At that moment Lefreve was telling them about those rescued by Lizbeth and Shin that morning and how they were passengers on the plane that had crashed on Tuesday. The situation seemed confusing to understand at first, but they could make out most of the facts. Noki and Rein looked at each other as they read some of the research in their Neurowires. The data on what Van had found in Rome was what had caught their attention.
Rein wanted to know if anyone had studied the ley lines that were passing beneath them at the time, but the teams on site beyond studying electromagnetic and climatic anomalies had not detected anything abnormal. Even so, Rein could not shake off the concern that the flow of the ley lines under the ground were behaving strangely.
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Thor was about to ask a question when he was suddenly interrupted. But he was not the only one to be silenced. Everyone in the tent at that moment turned their heads towards the entrance, puzzled.
There was a strange feeling in the air. Noki grabbed Rein's hand on impulse. Rein's tail had stopped moving as her blue pupils contracted until they almost disappeared completely.
For some reason there was something that made their hair stand on end.
That feeling of terror was coming from outside the place. And indeed, there were comments and the voices of agitated soldiers being heard from outside.
The four of them came out of the tent and looked in the direction of the lake. At that moment the sky was still as dark as night, with thick clouds covering in all directions. But the real fear came not from the sky, but from what had appeared over the lake.
Lefreve after a look around went back into the main tent giving orders left and right for someone to tell him what it was and how it had appeared.
Mii was being scolded by Van at the time when it had happened, but that feeling had come over them just the same.
Mii's stomach contracted from a fear that she could not explain, but that she knew her body could feel for some unknown reason. Agitated voices from outside alerted them further and they both stepped outside the tent.
“What is that?” Mii asked, and the question was more for herself than for Van. She didn't need to check, but that feeling was shared by all the people.
Van reached over and pulled her close. Mii was completely frozen in place. Van had never seen that expression before and had known her for a long time.
“What the hell is going on?!” Thor's loud voice distracted Van.
He, along with Rein and Noki, was only about thirty meters away from them, but they were also looking in the direction of the lake. The group looked on in utter bewilderment as an unknown terror began to take hold of them.
They had been in multiple dangerous situations, but nothing had ever inspired them with that feeling. It was absurd and something that compressed their chests and they could not explain. A primordial awe and fear that made their skin crawl. The sensation of being in front of something they had never faced before, but which appeared to have a very simple form.
That was an instinctive fear, one could almost have said that it was something imprinted in the genes.
The feeling was shared by the soldiers and everyone present, even those miles away, although they could barely see the shape due to the fog.
Jen Anderson, still feverish, had awakened in another tent in the medical wing and, although unable to move, felt it too. Lefreve had again emerged from the central command tent in the area and, along with a group of soldiers, had their eyes raised to the sky.
The cold drizzle was still falling intermittently, but that was no longer a problem. No one cared about getting wet.
The problem was a couple of kilometers above the lake. In the low clouds over the lake something was happening.
Before it manifested itself no one there could pinpoint the specific spot, they could only sense that whatever it was, it was something up there. They ran diagnostics with the enhanced telescopic gaze, but could not distinguish it.
After about ten seconds that changed.
The clouds were at that moment between 2000 and 4000 meters above the ground, but soon it was as if a veil descended over the entire region and the humidity increased. A fine mist covered the area and the clouds had lowered and everything became a semi-darkness that covered the entire lake from east to west, even reaching the area near Meyrin, where the battle was ending completely.
With a new diagnosis everyone realized why that fog had descended along with the clouds. Something had begun to appear.
At first it looked like a much denser black cloud, but they were wrong. That spherical shape soon began to grow, making its way through the other clouds. That was no longer a cloud. Where had it come from? Why hadn't the weather control teams in the region detected it?
It was a black sphere that, as it descended, grew to cover what could have been a kilometer in diameter, and was suspended about a thousand meters above ground level were it stopped.
It seemed solid, but on its surface appeared at times something like wisps of black smoke, which moved around, almost forming a kind of irregular rings that dissolved with the surface and then others appeared. It was like seeing a coronal mass ejection from the sun but black
Many were frightened, it had almost the same appearance that almost everyone had seen from historical archives of the Great War and that in the case of Rein, Noki, Mii and Van had lived that time. The hated dimensional distortion through which the fractus had entered the three-dimensional Earth. But it was different at the same time. It did not seem the same. Those irregularities on its surface were something no one had ever seen. Some new kind of spatial distortion?
But there was something else.
That sphere had a single point that glowed from the center. It might look solid, but it was as if it was possible to see all the way to the center of it. No matter where one stood, those present could see that point, so that black sphere must have allowed one to see to its center as if it were a smoked glass marble.
Through the mist and clouds that moved in a circular shape around the sphere, the group saw how that point of light changed. It was as if branches had spread out, glowing yellow. Those branches extended to reach what must have been a quarter of the sphere
The same thought ran through many of the minds of the witnesses. They did not know why, but they all had the same idea.
One eye.
A pupil looking at three hundred and sixty degrees.
That sphere gave them the sensation of being in front of an immense eye that looked at them from all directions and from which they could not escape no matter how hard they tried.
That's when it happened. Those irregular ring-shaped anomalies revolving around the sphere increased and the unexpected happened.
Screams came from that sphere. It chilled everyone's blood. It was as if multiple overlapping voices were coming from it. They were not screams of pain. They were almost howls, the same sensation as being alone in a forest and perceiving the howl of some animal ready to hunt its prey.
The first scream of a soldier occurred near the shore of the lake and in a matter of seconds the research area became an inferno of screams, gunshots and people flying through the air.
Those irregular rings were spreading and when they reached the shore of the lake they finally understood the origin of the screams.
The black smoke was depositing creatures on the ground.
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