Treu Krowtzig
Humanity would always need champions. Individuals who exemplified certain aspects of what it truly meant to be human. Courage, selflessness, ingenuity, canniness. If Treu Krowtzig had to guess his own aspect, he would always lean towards to more martial disciplines— not unlike a vengeful angel or a lethal protector. Wrath or possible Zeal. Aspects that were ill suited to his current employment and the relative state known as peacetime.
While he had nothing against peace, nor was he a savage warmonger, Treu acknowledged that warriors had no purpose in the galaxy other than war. 32 years of de facto peace had him ravenous for something to happen, a border skirmish, an incursion, even another rouge AI to hunt down would be enough to sake his primal cravings. Yet the uncaring cosmos gave not a single fuck what a single human wanted, not even one as significant as Treu Krowtzig.
His three day rotation had just finished as it often did, without a single incident. In his 30 odd years with the Outsider Research & Defense Emergency Response force, he could count the number of times they'd needed to send his team of heavy hitting metahumans in on a single hand. Of course, every time he had been called in, it was to stop an extra-dimensional wormhole from destabilizing into a resonance cascade which would have started leaking anti-matter into the prime material dimension; wiping out most, if not all matter and by extension life in this galaxy. Which was an understandable, career high-point for Treu and his colleagues.
ORDER was veritably all that stood in the way of the destruction of all life as humanity knew it and well into the realm of which humanity didn't even have the slightest notions of. If decades of boredom at a time were the cost of vigilance, it seemed a small price to pay considering what was at stake. Which was exactly what Treu had told himself 2,398 times now, his hexagramatically warded, sensory deprivation chambers receiving another tally for another uneventful rotation as he dreaded the upcoming cycle of forced relaxation.
All things considered, Titan's Crest wasn't a terrible place to live. The mundane workers seemed content enough with their daily grind and the standard security forces were able to fend off most accidents until new arrivals got acclimated to their surroundings. The accommodations were all top-notch to the point that he often forgot he wasn't still in a corporate complex buried under the mountains of Das Bergen. The only hint that he was on a hab-station was the periodic ozone scent of freshly cleaned air scrubbers after monthly maintenance.
Of all the mortal weaknesses which had been cut away from Treu, the one he missed most was sleep. It was a pointless waste of time, time which could be better spent on literally anything else, but in his prolonged periods of dormancy he longed to let his consciousness slip away. Instead, he put his muscles to work and once they grew heavy and were unable to bear the strain, he read the latest imported ebooks. But while his body was tasked, his soul would not sit idle.
Energy, the driving force behind more than most realized, could not be destroyed only converted. Excess body heat was used to empower the ambient aura around his fleshy vessel in the material plane, a form of spiritual recycling he used to clean his soul of the low-level ambient negativity mundane humans constantly emitted. Where a mundane human might idly tap a foot, Treu subconsciously manifested psychokinetic anomalies like telekinesis, pyrokinesis and photokinesis. The pair of tablets he was reading with each eye were floating 50cm from his face. His chambers—sealed as they were from the outside—were illuminated by the tablets he was reading and a shapeless, white-yellow glow in each of the room's 8 corners. All the excess heat he was generating was funneled back into his body to keep himself comfortably warm without sweating while the surplus was burned away.
Some might consider his room to be little more than a prison cell, but Treu preferred the slim, spartan confines. He'd known nothing else in his life of applied parasciences. Even after ascending from test subject to living weapon, he'd kept the trappings of his old lifestyle while his counterparts all embraced their new lives of luxury.
Halfway through his forced rest, the sour aura of a mundane outside his chambers encroached on his unnatural perceptions. Without his cell's warding, Treu would have felt half the station in his multi-kilometer sphere of detection, something that would have disturbed his sleep— had he actually been able to do so, that was. He opened the door with a telekinetic hand just as the mundane set his food on the ground. Light, sound, scent and a single tray of what might generously be termed as 'human-kibble' all rushed into the room.
"Jesus!" The orderly cursed, his slow gaze following the tray as it floated towards the man-shaped monster lounging before him a half-meter from the cell's floor.
"Nope, just me." Treu mocked playfully. Such distasteful platitudes helped to ease the straining minds of mundanes when they encountered Treu or his metahuman companions.
Without looking away from either of his books, he sized up this week's meal and the mundane who'd delivered it. The food was as it always was, abundantly nutritious and artificially flavored after all types of animals, which ultimately meant it would taste like chicken— or more aptly, chicken's root ancestor, the dinosaur. The orderly was an unfamiliar soul; young, in so far as this station's staff went. And he was staring.
"You suffer from back pain, don't you?" Treu asked vacantly, finally looking upon the orderly with one of his meat eyes. The man was unimpressive, as were most mundanes. The orderly blinked rapidly.
"B-B-Beg pardon?" The mundane stuttered.
"Pain, in your lower back. Probably when you bend forward?"
"I do." The orderly replied, awestruck. "How did you-"
Treu Krowtzig held up a belaying hand. His tablets drifted aside, forming two floating bodies that were soon orbited by an asteroid ring of kibble. Treu locked one eye on the mundane orderly's face, the other gazing through the his abdomen at something within. Treu set his bare feet on the unpleasantly chill metal floor of his chambers and took his now empty meal tray in hand as he approached the paralyzed orderly.
Treu's right hand darted forward, burying itself to the wrist in the orderly's abdomen as the mundane's eyes widened in terror. Before the orderly could draw a breath to scream, Treu's hand had left his penetrated guts holding a fleshly lump the size of a walnut between his fingers. The extricated flesh was unceremoniously deposited onto the empty food tray. Treu let out an insightful hmm as he examined the lump with his one of his eyes.
"I wasn't aware pancreatic cancer was still prevalent in the galaxy." Treu idly stated before placing the tray and its meaty contents in the orderly's stiff hand, and returning to his cell. "Oh, and welcome to Heaven's Gate, Ralph Goodman of Nova-Kyoto colony 385, Meishin."
Treu sealed his chamber's door a quarter-second ahead of a befuddled scream. On the peripheries of his unnatural senses, Treu watched the orderly frantically strip his jacket, shirt and undershirt while manically searching his stomach. Ralph didn't find anything of course, Treu was rather adept at telekinetically knitting flesh back together— though in truth, his specialization was rending it apart. Surgical extractions were old habit for him, mainly for the extrication of foreign objects—bullets, shrapnel and the like—but differing the malignant flesh from the rest had been an interesting distraction from his boredom. Ralph the orderly donned his clothes and left the muffled range of Treu's detection.
His next interruption was scheduled to be his next rotation. Contented in the knowledge of his relative peace, Treu resumed his passtimes with the added caveat of periodically plucking a piece of kibble from the nebulous kibble satellites surrounding him. They really did all taste like chicken, and more amusingly, dinosaur by extension. It was somewhere halfway through his meal that Treu realized his mistake. He'd used the station's old name when welcoming that new orderly. The older the habit, the harder it tended to stick it would seem.
Some hours later, shortly before his new rotation began, something unusual happened. The largely decorative intercom in his chambers connected.
"Battle group ORDER to rituals, bay 13."
"Threat level?" Treu asked, donning clothing for the fist time in days.
"Level one at present. Escalation probable, two suspected."
"Then I won't need my armor. On my way now."
Specialist Major Psion Krowtzig flew through the halls as he finished shrugging into his form fitting jacket. In actuality, he didn't fly; he was more accurately telekinetically clawing and leaping forward on numerous invisible limbs. Then end result was the same, his body hurtling through the halls fast enough to be a human missile once he'd picked up enough speed. While his body was traveling, his mind was already reaching out towards the rift gathering above him.
The scene was painted in broad stokes before his expanded mind. Mundane security forces were being pushed back, esoteric defenses were holding their own for the time being but that was a stopgap measure. One that ORDER's rookie was using to manifest a meter-long spear of light in his hands.
The telepathic conversation had lasted less than three seconds, limited only by the speed of light and the meta-human minds on both ends. Splitting his attention at high speed wasn't without consequence however, if the thoroughly pulped remains of an unlucky mundane Treu was flying passed was anything to go by. He put the broken body out of mind the instant he saw it, there were bigger things at play than a single mundane human's life. Treu was the last of the team to arrive at ritual bay 13.
The other three members could have handled the small fry amassing at the room's entrance but they'd followed his orders. Only the rookie, Elijah, was suited in the team's full tactical gear. The current model was a blend of functional protection and ascetic amplification for the wearer. Psycho-conductive vanes ran the length of each up-armored limb and jut from the suit's otherwise rounded backplate not unlike a folded set of wings. More traditional materials offered a good degree of mundane protection while insulative alloys of lead and silver formed arcane glyphs of protection and shielding. While the armor wouldn't outperform designs of a similar tonnage in ordinary combat, FAE-SRE-X3 war plate didn't unnecessarily hamper the enhanced capabilities of the wearer, as evident by the radiant, semi-solid spear of brilliant golden light held in Elijah's mechanized hands.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Kaleigh Blair—much like himself and the teams forth, Gram Chatterton—was wearing her off duty plain clothes. Her high class gown set her apart from the other two men's bland utility wear, as did her fiery red hair and freckled skin. As Treu closed in to join his team, he felt the electrical charge she'd already build up, as well as the ambient null around her where various EM signals and waves should have been.
Gram was near identical to Treu aside from the face. Both had broad shoulders, long legs and a musculature that could best be described as god-like; all results of their shared conditioning prior to being sold to Titan's Crest as psionic superhumans. They were both the last of their product line, the secrets of their creation lost to the whims of fate when Aperture Biomedical went bankrupt and the Synthetic Revolution obliterated the planet of their parent umbrella corporation. The two metahumans exchanged a brief empathic connection, eager for a task worth doing, more so for ones such as themselves.
"Standing rules of engagement, if it's not human put it down." Treu ordered his team, using his mouth instead of his mind for the benefit of the mundane security forces nearby. "Show me what you've got Rookie."
"Yes sir!" Elijah's manifested weapon burning brighter in response to his own enthusiasm.
The spear reached an intensity near-blinding and Elijah swung it in a wide, horizontal arc. The strained barrier keeping the mindless dregs at bay shattered and Elijah's manifested weapon cut deep into the closest of the netherborn. Pseudoflesh burned under the cleansing blade, things both unreal and physical screaming their otherworldly screams as they experienced pain for the first time. Once his swing had cut clear, Elijah cross-checked with the full length of the weapon, amplifying the shove with a blast of telekinesis for good measure. Qliphoths went flying at improbable angles, while their larger shambling Shoggoth kin managing to keep their footing against the blow.
Kaleigh pulsed.
The veterans of battle group ORDER calmly walked into the breach as if there wasn't a braying swarm of nightmarish creatures from another dimension howling for their flesh and souls. Lower order creatures often struggled understanding there place in this galaxy, a fact he would educate them to. Treu drew in a lungful of breath and the massive room's temperature dropped nearly thirty degrees kelvin.
A bulky Shoggoth shambled towards him, even as the slimy discharge coating the not-creature was breaking off in frozen chips. Treu extended his left hand towards the thing and exhaled.
A jet of white-hot flame blasted from his palm in a narrow cone, superheating the unstable flesh of his target until thermodynamics reaped its inevitable toll. The Shoggoth's vessel erupted, severing the thing's tenuous foothold in the material plane.
Without its vessel, the Eldritch energy that primarily constituted the Shoggoth tried to escape back to its native realm, but Gram was ready. Metaphysical blades charged with telepathic super-luminal energy shredded the so-call essence of beast, imparting the tiny sliver that escaped to the beyond with some much pain that it would always associate the material realm with agony.
Treu draw in another breath, only this time instead of drawing in ambient thermal energy he ripped into the mulched essence of Shoggoth, recycling it to a far more workable form. Pure electrical energy, or to the mortal eye, lightning.
Treu exhaled with a wide stance and an outreached fist, sending the bolt of electrical energy to Kalaigh, who drank in every amp, watt and volt. The supercharged redhead arced blast after blast into the surrounding masses of monstrous flesh, vaporizing entire swaths of the horde with every breath.
The veterans were a single machine, communicating beyond the speed of sound, moving as one in an ever-shifting dance of raw power and unmatched prowess. The drivel of the other realm were dispatched with all the effort of an early morning workout, all while being used as a teaching point for the team's newest addition.
Elijah complained.
"Like I said, all muscle, no mind." Gram replied idly while finishing off the last of the disembodied creatures.
"Don't be so hard on him. None of us direct chaos the same way either. Just let him swing his swords and spears." Kaleigh said, depleting her ambient charge as crackling static electricity.
"It's not enough to just manifest, Elijah. You need to adapt a more flexible mindset before we can start you down a new path." Treu said, narrowing his senses to a more detailed scope.
"Or I could always poke my head in the beyond and take a shortcut like you did." Elijah pointed in the general direction of the rift deeper in bay 13.
"You give that try and let us know how you make out, boy." Kaleigh sneered, her fiery hair frizzing upwards despite the station's artificial gravity.
"A keg of lite beer!" Kaleigh hollered.
"Eight kilos of blue sirloin steaks, preferably still bloody." Elijah said.
"Blackfanged Salmon fillet, and three pounds of steamed rice." Gram vacantly commanded.
The befuddled trooper looked to his nominal superiors, then to his squad lead who just shrugged and gave a nod. The trooper looked back to Treu, who could have kept the blood from his cheeks but didn't waste the energy.
"A tub of chocolate chip cookie dough. The big one." Treu bashfully added.
The trooper signaled ahead and took off at a jog. It didn't take a mind reader to see that the man who'd just watched a band of metahumans dismantle dozens of Eldritch abominations with their minds, was far more confused by their sudden cravings for a small banquet. The guard was still puzzling how he ranked the cycle's weirdness when Treu stopped his invasive probing of the trooper's mind.
"Think the food will arrive before our guest does?" Elijah asked.
"Doubt it. Why are you so hungry anyway? We did all the work." Kaleigh asked.
"I put more umph into my swing that I thought I did, then you guys hogged all the…" He physically checked his shoulder. "Trimmings."
"Fair, but why steaks? Aren't cows sacred to your people?"
"Don't you usually polish off your kegs with whiskey?"
<"Both of you, Enough!"> Treu drove the point home with his mouth and his mind. "Troopers! Seal the door, now! Our guest is here."
The septegramtically warded, lead lined blast doors sealed behind them with a clang. The wards and insulation lining the rest of the room did an adequate job of sealing the room off from the rest of the station. Without any background distractons, the thing that felt like a black sun deeper in the room was radiating such an absurdly potent aura most mundanes would have probably felt it.
"That's bigger than a level 2." Gram cautioned.
"Rookie, get on the line with demonology." Treu ordered. "Kaleigh, prep for a discharge. We'll support you. Now, let's go meet our guest."
The carnage was thicker the closer the team crept to the final workspace on the left hand side. The remains of humans idly slaughtered by the netherborn as the wandered from one kill the the next. The dregs of the other realm were no better than savage animals, butchering whatever was in their way in a mix of boredom and hunger. The fireteam cleaned up a few stragglers who'd managed to apply a modicum of tactics to their hunting style. Based on the surplus of battle damage, the security teams had contained the rift for some time before being forced back.
"Demonology says summoning team three was trying to make a trade with the goetic angel Y̴̥̗͈̋́͐̄͝u̴̩̞̽͗̅̽u̸̞̻̫͛̈́̉͒̌͝ş̴̀̄̄͌̊͆o̴͎̰̼̚ͅ'̴̢͇̤̯͙̾̽͂͐̐̕G̴̘̰͎̮̼̽͊̃r̶̘͂͐ǎ̵̧̝̥̫̇̒ͅa̴̳̫͖̅̾̚͝w̸̧̬̳̓a̷̢͇̲̙̙͋͑̑̀͗ţ̸̹̰̭̾̇̓̚h̵̨̖̜̩͔̔̏̕͠͝y̵̛̖͛̎͝ͅẻ̷̘̖͍͈͍̓. Aspects are in the masculine: war, grey magic, binding and censure. Links appear back the theurgy practices of old Terra's dark ages. Usual angelic traits in appearance, past dealings with humans and a short temper."
"I won't reason with a demon." Gram stated. "Their thoughts are… strange."
"Understatement of the millenia." Kaleigh added, her body practically humming with surplus energy awaiting release.
The workspace was as one might expect a ritual summoning gone wrong to look. Sigils, circles and lines of otherworldly contours had been daubed on the floor and walls. Like most of the archaic creatures that existed outside the material, this one had called for its pound of flesh, a goat specifically. Where the sacrifice's throat had been slit fresh blood poured forth, spilling upwards into a swirling malestorm of pure insanity, instead of off the plain table at the summoning's center. Lesser minds would have shattered from nothing more than the meta-physical psycho-reactive non-colors gushing into the material plane at the rift's relative front, let alone a single glance through that portal.
The being standing backlit by said maddeningly supernatural colors put the insanity around them to shame. It stood in profile, the shape eerily eidetic yet dissimilar to one of the mangled and dismembered corpses on the floor nearby, only if Treu ignored the massive golden wings sprouted from its back.
"That thing's not a masculine anything." Kaleigh growled around gritted teeth.
The thing in question turned to them, something translucently pink dribbling down her chin from the eldritch composite behind her gore-smeared crimson lips. The demon flashed a million giga-watt smile without a hint of emotion behind it. The black swirling orbs of its eyes further indicating that while this abominable creature wore the guise of a human, underneath it was anything but.
For a long moment, nothing happened. Then a wall of telepathic energy hammered into him with so much raw force Treu felt his hyper-developed synapses misfiring one my one. The others must have felt it too, he could see them weathering the storm in his peripheries.
The Rookie wasn't stunned into a stupor, aided as he was by his armor's various protections. A brilliant refractive blade of crystalline light manifested in his hands and he pressed into the storm, one halting step at a time.
One of the creature's golden wings snaps out, idly swatting him aside as one might an overly friendly hornet. Elijah hurls bodily through Treu's vision, the psychic barrage lessoning drastically at the same time his armored mass smashes through the workspace's dividing wall.
Treu finally pulls enough attention from his psionic defensive to exhale a breath, allowing his gathered recycled energy to flow down his arm into the red-headed woman on his right. The stored charge reached its breaking point in his living capacitor.
The fury of dozens of lighting bolts loosed at once found a suitably conductive path from the fleshy body currently holding them back, straight into the negatively charged thing standing directly in from of her.
The demon's wings flinched, a single eyebrow was raised and all that unbridled power thundered directly into her. The body she was puppeting didn't make a sound, but the world around Treu went runny at the edges and screamed an ungodly scream that left him starved of pity. Reality itself wept under the savage force of the attack. Metal worktables shuddered into liquidity and the mangle remains of the research team underwent a sudden vaporisation into gaseous pink mists.
In the ringing silence that followed while he waited for his eyesight to return, Treu felt the absence of the extra-dimensional rift. He also felt the much-depleted souls of his colleagues around him, all still attached to their worldly vessels. The final sensation his unnatural perceptions detected was an empathic plea, repeating concepts without words. The Rookie was the first one to give substance to the vague concepts and notions.