Lance led Hoplite through the forest, the chorus of insects and animals helping to dim the deafening silence between the two men. The green moon overhead hung full, its light shining down between the thick leaves above. Despite the added light from the moon, however, the woods still seemed as dark as pitch. The thick foliage above served to block most of the moonlight from reaching the forest floor.

The civilian had thankfully not attempted to make any small talk as they walked, seemingly content to remain as silent as Hoplite. Whoever Lance was, it was clear to Hoplite that he knew these woods like the back of his hand. Even with the darkness of the forest Lance seemed to recognize landmarks that seemed insignificant to Hoplite's greater perception…

Lance would nod to a rock here, stare at a tree there and simply continue on as if prowling the halls of his own home. This ‘watcher’ classification and Lance’s state of dress implied that he patrolled these woods for his superiors, whoever they may be.

Surely these humans had to have access to bionics, for how else would Lance have been able to leap off that branch without breaking anything? At the minimum Lance would have reinforced joints… but then why was his movement so smooth? Civilian augmentations usually had downsides; reinforced joints caused stiff movement, synaptic stimulators caused random bouts of violent twitching, and adrenaline pumps came with a high risk of heart failure if overused, and that was just to name a few.

Of course, those were just civilian augmentations, military-grade augs performed better and lasted a lifetime… and even compared to those, Hoplite’s own bionics were superior in every way. So why was it that Lance’s walk was smooth and not jagged like a cheap labor droid? Was there a military installation on this world? Perhaps Hoplite should begin asking questions instead of letting this silence drag on, despite his preference for it.

“What kind of augmentations do you have installed?” Hoplite asked, causing Lance to nearly jump free of his boots.

He took a breath and turned back to Hoplite, his green eyes conveying confusion as they both halted their march.

“What do you mean?” Lance asked, his tone confused.

It was possible that -if he was somehow unaugmented- that Lance had never heard of bionics. They weren’t commonplace among civilians and only a few soldiers were chosen to receive military-grade ones. It was also likely that this world had been cut off from greater humanity since before bionics became more widespread. If Lance wasn’t augmented though, how had he withstood that fall? Hoplite supposed that this world could have a lighter gravity than normal, but it certainly felt Earth standard.

“You don’t have reinforced joints?” Hoplite asked, continuing to walk.

Lance then turned, continuing his lead as they conversed.

“No?” Lance said, still seemingly confused “I know not what you mean.”

For a man, Lance’s voice was unnaturally high-pitched, Hoplite realized. Well, he was definitely on the slighter side despite his decent height, so the higher pitch wasn’t too strange.

“When you fell from that tree,” Hoplite said “You didn’t break anything.”

“Well of course not, I am what I am.” Lance said simply.

“The human body cannot sustain a fall like that without injury unless augmented.” Hoplite replied matter of factly.

Lance slowed his pace, turning to look at Hoplite with brows creased “Ancient one, do you think that I’m a-”

Whatever Lance had been about to say was cut off when Hoplite quickly turned his back to him, aiming the Magnus at a tree. Out of his back camera Hoplite had spotted a shadow dart between a pair of trees, silent as a whisper. Another one of these watchers perhaps? Or something more nefarious?

“I know you’re there.” Hoplite said, mustering up all the menace in his voice as he could “Come out now or I will open fire.”

“Did you hear something?” Lance asked, stepping closer to Hoplite and drawing a pair of broad daggers from his belt.

As if on cue, a small chittering creature stepped out from behind the tree. Hoplite shone his light upon it, revealing a disgusting monstrosity with crawling, warty pink flesh and dead milky white eyes. The dripping thing was the size of a large dog, its muzzle open to reveal two sets of jagged rotting teeth. It lacked any kind of hair, leaving the countless bubbling blisters and pustules on full display, much to Hoplite's displeasure. This dog mutant disgusted him.

The creature lunged for Hoplite then, salivating maw open to bite down on his leg. Hoplite reared his leg back from the bite, and calmly lashed out, kicking the mutant in the skull. Its head exploded into a pinkish miasma, sending the corpse flying back and splattering rotting gray matter all across the forest floor. He saw Lance from his back camera step away from the carnage, retching as he fell to his knees and undid his black mask…

To reveal a distinctly feminine face.

Hoplite blinked in surprise. He could have sworn that Lance had been a man… He took a second to re-examine Lance, seeing that yes, there were indeed curves there; hidden as they may be beneath the thick dark clothing. He briefly berated himself for not being able to tell the difference before he realized that this information changed nothing about his current objective. Lance's face was pale, with high cheekbones and a small nose set over a pair of full lips and a tapering chin. She vomited on the dirt, spitting and cursing in a way that reminded him of how the marines on board the Sparrow spoke to one another. She looked up to him, wiping her mouth clean with her wrist and struggling to her feet. Lance lifted up her mask once again, leaving only her bright green eyes visible.

“This is bad…” She said, staring at the rotting corpse of the mutant “They’ve never gotten this far into the Faewood…”

“What are they?” Hoplite asked, scanning the surrounding forest via his thermals.

“You must be from farther up north, whatever you are, to not have heard of the fiends.”

“What are fiends?” Hoplite asked.

The colony of this world clearly had a mutant problem. He couldn’t tell if this creature was the result of radiation or genetic manipulation. Those powerful jaws would have likely torn into Lance easily, he’d need to be ready to intercept any further hostiles before they reached her. Had that thing managed to sink its rotten teeth into her, that would have been the end.

“The risen dead,” She answered, breaking into a run and gesturing for him to follow “At least these lesser ones are... We have to hurry, there’ll be more of them around here soon and I have to warn my people.”

Hoplite easily kept pace with Lance, scanning the forest for any movement from these ‘risen dead’. At first, she seemed to be holding back from running at her full speed, but quickly upped her pace once she realized that he had been easily keeping pace right behind her. He wasn’t sure why she had referred to these ‘fiends’ as the risen dead; mutation didn’t reanimate living things. Certainly, it had appeared to be a dead thing walking, but corpses didn’t have the capability to move.

That pink miasma was something he had never seen however… Was it some kind of cloud of nano-machines? Those were incredibly rare and unless one had authorization from the First Arm, they were absolutely illegal, but if anything could puppet a corpse and make it mobile, it would be nano-tech. Yet Hoplite sincerely doubted that these people had access to that kind of tech if they didn’t even have bionics…

After a few minutes of uninterrupted sprinting, Hoplite saw a group of three fast-moving orange blob creatures gaining on them from his rear thermal camera. They snarled and kicked up small clouds of dirt and grass as they approached on four legs. Soon, he was able to make out more details on the fiends as they further closed the distance. The same as the first fiend he had killed, four-legged rotting canine mutants, still looking akin to orange blobs on his thermals. Small pieces of fetid flesh fell from their bodies as they ran, revealing sections of yellowed bone and exposed intestines here and there. Hoplite could easily outrun these things if he had really wanted to, but he didn’t want to leave the civilian behind to fend for herself. It shouldn’t be a problem dispatching them anyway. He slid to a halt and quickly pivoted, aiming his shotgun at the approaching fiends and pulling the trigger.

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The creatures had been very close together when Hoplite had opened fire, the shot rendering the three fiends into nothing but a pile of rotting goop. Lance dropped her dagger, clutching her ears as the sound of the blast echoed through the forest like thunder. The shot punched through the trees, sending shards of wood flying through the air before the rounds finally buried themselves either within the bark of the trees or a few feet deep in the dirt. The strange pink miasma flowed from the holes created in the fiends, and for a brief instant, Hoplite could swear that an almost… demonic face had formed in the colorful mist to glare at him. It was gone almost as soon as it appeared, leaving him questioning if it had actually been there.

Surely not… it had just been his imagination. There was no such thing as the supernatural, the cloud had just happened to form the image of a face based on the pattern of the swirling mist emerging from the bullet holes.

Lance turned to him, still clutching her ears as she saw what his shotgun had wrought. Hoplite then turned around, running to her as fast as he was able. He needed to kill it now. Lance’s eyes widened in terror as he bore down on her, fist raised to deliver a killing strike. She fell on her rear, hands raised in anticipation of the blow to come. He swung then, his massive fist crashing into the skull of a fourth fiend that had been mid-lunge. His punch went straight through the dog-like creature's skull, his fist connecting with the roof of the fiend’s open mouth.

It slid down his forearm with a sickening squelch of brain matter, latched on like a worm on a hook. Lance had screamed when he swung, shutting her eyes and looking away when his fist had cratered the fiend’s head. Probably a good thing, considering the brown fluid and bits of brain dripping down on top of her. When she looked up and saw what hung just over her head, she scrambled away, retching again as the pink miasma flowed over her.

Whatever this pink mist was, it had to smell horrible to prompt that kind of reaction. Thankfully his suit could filter out the stench, but he had been trained to ignore such smells should his suit fail him. Even if it did fail him, the air filter implanted in his throat would automatically purify any airborne contaminants. Hoplite checked his cameras for any more incoming hostiles, but saw no more, at least not yet. The sound of his shotgun would have alerted any more fiends in the area to their location, if he was going to get Lance safely back to her home, then he couldn’t afford to stay at her pace.

He then scooped Lance up from the ground with his free hand as she finished retching, the woman gasping with surprise. She struggled for a brief instant before he started running, picking up more and more speed as he went. Soon, it was all she could do to not clutch onto him for dear life.

“Just- ah just go straight ahead until you see the Bastion!” She shouted as if she couldn’t even hear her own voice.

Well, she had just heard the equivalent of a grenade exploding right next to her ear, she likely couldn’t hear anything at the moment. Hoplite didn’t know what this Bastion looked like, but he had a feeling he would know it when he saw it. He ran faster, kicking up chunks of moist dirt behind him as he went. Lance squealed as he reached fifty miles per hour, the servos in his armor and legs working in tandem to speed his flight.

He had to carefully weave between trees and hop over rocks to avoid splattering Lance by accident. Normally he wasn’t quite this careful in the fridge suit when he reached top speed, but if he made any kind of collision right now while holding Lance she would die instantly. Thankfully he didn’t have to maintain this level of caution for that long, as he came upon what had to be the Bastion…

He slowed his approach as he and Lance came upon a massive wall of gnarled roots. Several thousand arm-thick ones overlapped one another with the pattern only broken by a man-made dark-iron palisade gate in its center. The root wall had to be well over fifty meters in height at its lowest point and it stretched in either direction farther than he could see.

This alone would have been a baffling sight… but there was more to this strange construct. These roots writhed and stretched over one another, barely covering a deep emerald glow from within the root wall. This hue illuminated the whole of the Bastion from bottom to top, glowing like a dim beacon in the dark. What sort of tech did these lost colonists have if they could manipulate plant life in this way? Hoplite had been to dozens of worlds over the last two-hundred years, and he had never seen anything like this.

He knew that there were some incredibly talented people in the milky-way that were capable of growing plant life to be shaped in bizarre and unorthodox ways… but he wasn’t sure if any of them could even recreate even a fraction of this achievement. He then set Lance down, her legs shaking as she braced against him, wiping sweat from her brow.

“I’ve…” She huffed “Never seen a construct, not even a golem, move as fast as you. What mage binds you?” She asked, looking up at him.

“Mage? Construct? I’m a Hoplite, not a machine.” He told her “We need to get moving and warn the other colonists.”

Lance then took a deep breath, standing up straight and looking at him with a scrunched brow before yelling “What?” her brow scrunched and eyes narrowed.

Her ears couldn’t still be ringing that bad, right? Hoplite shook his head, pointing to the gate and making a bee-line for it, Lance trailing just behind him.

“They need to see me first, they won’t let you in unless I say you mean no harm.” Lance said loudly, pulling up in front of him as they neared the palisade.

Why would they not let him in without Lance’s say so? He was military personnel and this was an emergency. If they denied him access then he would have to use force to get in. Hoplite needed to warn the colonists of the fiends and then use any comms equipment they might have to establish contact with the survivors of the Sparrow.

Two men -and they were certainly men this time- stood on the opposite side of the gate, clad in some kind of ornate combat armor. It was a suit of sleek cobalt metal, the interlocking plates engraved with ornate images of leaves and feathers. The green glow of the root wall overhead lit the guard's faces, and Hoplite could only describe them as… What had that one older marine called the younger one with the long wavy hair?

Ah yes, pretty boy. They didn’t look like soldiers at all. These two had that same kind of long flowing hair, the kind that covered their ears on the way down to their shoulders. This was technically allowed in Eighth Arm military branches, but doing so opened the common soldiery up for mockery from their more traditionally cut colleagues. Their faces were completely smooth, with nary a wrinkle or scar on them. Where were their combat helmets? He looked, seeing that both men cradled open-faced metal helmets in one arm while clutching what appeared to be…

Why were these soldiers only using spears!? Where were their battle-rifles? Did they think that a spear would be enough to stop a charging yugoro?

As Lance approached the gate, Hoplite's mind ran at a top speed. If these colonists only had spears that could only mean that they had lost any means to manufacture ammo and had to resort to more primitive means for survival. After all, when he first encountered Lance in the forest she didn’t even have a pistol, just a couple of daggers. Those hadn’t been factory-made combat knives; they looked hand-made, just like the ornate plumed spears the two guards wielded.

The ground here before the gate was just well-trampled dirt, nothing grew in this little tunnel besides a stray weed here and there. From what he could see from behind this palisade, the forest simply continued on, unbroken by any sort of road or buildings. Wait a second… he noticed as one of the trees behind the palisade began… moving. It seemingly uprooted itself, and on writhing green glowing roots, scampered along the forest floor like some kind of deep sea octopus.

Hoplite saw what appeared to be a balcony, built high up into the side of this creature. A warm orange glow could be seen from a hallway leading from the balcony, like one of those seasonal glow-globes that had been on the Sparrow. He saw a man leaning over the balcony, looking bored as the tree scampered deeper within the forest to parts unknown.

Never.

Never in all his time alive had Hoplite seen a creature like that. It was simple, that thing could not actually be a tree. He didn’t know how evolution would cause a creature to take such a form, but that was the only thing he could think of… that or genetic manipulation, which these people most certainly wouldn’t know how to do. These colonists had seemingly tamed these creatures, based on how that man rode atop it without issue.

Hoplite had been so distracted with the moving tree that he hadn’t noticed that the root wall had begun sucking up the entire palisade with its entangling roots. He almost raised the Magnus to start blasting when one of the roots drooped down a little too close to his helmet before redirecting toward the palisade to assist in the gate's ascent.

Would there be any more baffling sights today?

“You better get running Lance.” One of the guards said “The Harkhall will want to hear about this. So many fiends in the Faewood at once…? A dire omen.” He shook his head, brushing his hair over one of his pointed ears.

Pointed ears?

Lance removed her mask then, revealing her face once more and pulling down her hood to reveal a long head of pitch-black hair. She too, bore these deviant ears.

[https://i.imgur.com/bLbOcHC.jpg]

These colonists…

They were mutants.