I stood in the containment area for the obelisk, staring at the stone and the words written on it, questions swirling through my mind. Where did it come from? Who are the Rif'nay'fex? What happened to them? Why did they think they couldn't stop the Scourge from becoming a problem? Why did they leave it to us? I couldn't answer these questions, not by myself.

"Demigod, sir," the Principality in charge came up to me. "Horseman Applewood has returned from the front."

"Thank you, Jinks. I'll go see her now," I said, turning away from the black stone that had begun to haunt my dreams over the last month we'd been here.

I wasn't looking forward to what I needed to tell Carrie. Sarah had found a completely unknown Scourge, one that wasn't in the Warden database and it spelled trouble for everyone. She had taken to calling it a Spitter, because it would spit acidic venom at its target and that venom was powerful enough to eat through the specialized armor plates that made up all Nephilim armor and shields. Sarah had learned that detail when it spat its venom onto her and she lost her armor faster than she could remove it. She'd also lost her arms that she'd thrown up to block the acid, and it had eaten through most of her skin and much of her bone before diluting itself in her blood that had been pouring out. Sarah had nearly been killed by that acid and several of her squad had lost their own lives to kill the Scourge in question and evacuate Sarah. All the survivors were now in nutrient baths undergoing specialized nanite healing.

"There you are," Carrie's voice pulled me from my distacting thoughts to see her walking up to me. "What's up? You wouldn't have called me back without a really good reason. What's wrong?"

"It's Sarah," I started, her eyes widening and fear flashing across her face as I spoke. "She's been injured, she'll be fine, but what injured her is a much bigger issue that I need you to know about and to see what it's capable of."

"What is it?" Carrie demanded, anger replacing her fear.

"Follow me," I told her as I began to make my way to where Sarah and her team were floating in their nutient baths.

Once there I heard Carrie breathe in sharply at the sight of the man that was floating before us. His left arm was gone and still after a full day in the bath, his ribs were still visible to the naked eye; the pale bone standing out sharply compared to his dark skin. He wasn't awake thankfully, he wasn't trying to fight the pain that must have been breaking him.

"He got off the best," I told Carrie as I led the way past his nutrient bath and futher into the room. "I've sent word to the researchers back in the Milky Way and they'll be here as soon as they can, but it will take about four years for the Soaring Dragon to make its way there and back. Sarah's this way."

As I led Carrie further into the massive underground room that had been the first to be constructed nearly a year ago, the sight of the rest of Sarah's squad and the others that had encountered the Spitters was enough to turn my stomach. Legs and arms were gone and many had damage to their torso; some were unlucky enough to have had the acidic venom land higher and on their helmet. Those few had been fast enough to either rip the helmet off before the acid ate completely through it, leaving them with small spots of bone showing on their faces, or they had been close enough to someone with enough water to wash the acid away and save their lives, though not their eyes. Further and further I led Carrie through the mass of tanks that was almost never as full as these were, finally, we reached the tank I'd been leading her to this whole time.

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Floating in the nutrient bath, sleeping from the pain medication that was being pumped into her, was Sarah. Her arms were lost an inch past the shoulder and her entire torso was missing the skin that was supposed to be covering it, with some of her organs showing through the delicate mesh of synthetic muscle and skin the doctors and surgeons had placed to keep them from falling out and having further damage and trauma occur to her body. Her throat was nearly gone, the venom had eaten through the thin layer of armor and been washed away by the small puncture to the jugular the flooded it away before the squad's medic had applied a patch to keep the girl from bleeding out.

"I've ordered her Cyber to keep pain medication steadily going," I told Carrie as she collapsed to her knees at the sight of her little sister. "She'll never see herself this way. I can take command of the offensive lines until she's back in action if you'd like to stay here with her."

"What did this to her?" Carrie asked, tears streaming down her face. "I taught her to move fast and to put the threat down before she worried about saving others, so I know she didn't get this bad from doing something stupid! What did this to her?!"

Her last words were screamed at me as she shot to her feet and grabbed at the collar of my uniform. I reached out and pulled her closer, into a hug, as her crying turned into full sobs at what had happened to her sister.

"She'll be fine," I reassured her. "You can stay with her every step of the way until she's better. And then, if she wants to leave for something safer, I won't stop her. No one should have to suffer this much against the Scourge. This one is so much worse than all the others we know about. It's new."

"What is it?" Carrie asked again. "What did this to my sister?"

"She called it a Spitter," I told her. "We've got corpses in cryo-storage waiting for the researchers to show up. All we know right now is that they have a camouflage ability that puts chameleons and octopuses to shame. They hide waiting to ambush you and then they use an acidic venom that they spit at you. If they used less of it, then we'd never even know what was hitting us, from the numbing agent that spreads through your body as fast as it eats you."

"This is so different from every other Scourge we've ever seen," she said. "They're all trying to bring the Queen more food so they can make more Scourge. This sounds like it destroys all the food."

"Yeah," I agreed. "Makes me wonder why the Queen of this Horde birthed them. I wonder if there's some sort of wildlife that the Spitter was useful for hunting before this planet was all Scourge. I've got Cai scouring the database for anything on this planet but so far he's got nothing."

"Can you bring me a chair?" she asked. "I'd like to sit with Sarah for a while."

"Already here," I told her as I pointed. "It's right there. Do you want me to bring you some food soon?"

"No, thank you," she said as she moved the chair where she wanted it. "Just find out how to wipe these Spitters out and let me hit the button."

"I think there's a line for that," I said as I looked around at the dozens of Nephilim that floated in the nutrient baths, healing from the damage the Spitter's acid venom had caused.

"I outrank all of them and I will pull rank for this," Carrie said as she sat down and looked at me from next to her sister's nutrient bath. "Thank you for not hiding this from me, Rickshaw. I would hate to have learned about this after the fact."

"Just don't take anything out on Sarah," I cautioned her. "I've seen the footage from the squad's Cybers, she was the first one hit with the venom and she was in the middle of the formation they were in. That means the one that got her was watching them go by when it attacked. They knew they were in a Scourge controlled zone and they were searching for whatever Scourge there might have been using the proper procedures."

"I won't do that," she assured me. "Let's just hope that these Spitters are the only ones with this new camouflage ability. I'd hate to have to fight a bunch of Kongs that can hide from me."

"It's the Kamaitachi or the Hellhounds that would get me," I said as I walked away and left to go about my other business that day. A brief break from holding the lines together and advancing to give bad news wasn't a break I wanted but it was one that I had to take.