Brann and the others had breached the upper level of the relay station. At the center of the chamber was a slumped figure in a white lab coat, collapsed over a console. Nikola Diens. What was left of him.
His eyes were wide, unblinking, and his mouth was caked in dried foam. Veins had burst along his temples. Whatever took him, it wasn't quick, and probably wasn't natural.
"Target confirmed," Brann said, stepping closer, his exosuit humming low. "Dead. Shit. Sela, pull the data."
"On it," she replied, already moving. She holstered her rifle and jacked a decryptor node into the mainframe. Blue lights raced across its surface as her HUD synced.
Kharv scanned the rest of the chamber with tight eyes, weapon raised. "What about the other message?" he asked. "Diens mentioned a second packet. Could be more intel."
Sela didn't even look up. "Not what we came for. The bounty's tied to Diens. That's the payout. Everything else is a footnote."
The comms hissed and Kali's voice carried through. "Brann. I've got six… no, eight—dammit—more than that. Incoming anomalies. They're getting... smarter. Coordinating. We poked a nest and they're waking up."
Brann turned to Sela. "How long?"
"Two minutes for a full core pull," she said, hands flying over the data pad. "But I can cut it short in sixty if you want to skip integrity protocols."
Brann's jaw tightened. "Do it. We're not dying for clean code." Then he spoke into the comms. "We have the data. Extraction in two minutes. Hold your ground."
Kharv knelt beside the corpse of Nikola Diens, slipping on a pair of synthweave gloves. "Grim bastard," he muttered, then began securing the body in a polymer stasis shroud. It hissed softly as it sealed around the remains, locking them in temporal stasis for extraction.
That was when Kali's voice burst through the comms again, strained and edged with urgency. "Clock's ticking," he hissed, breath heavy with exertion. "I need evac soon."
Brann responded instantly, voice sharp and unwavering. "One minute. Hold!"
Sela yanked the final drive from the console and slotted it into her chest rig. "Data secured."
"Then we're done here," Brann said, rising to his feet. "Move!"
The team stormed out of the facility, weapons drawn, feet pounding across the cracked metal decking. But as they exited the structure, the full extent of the situation hit them like a blow.
The valley had transformed into a writhing battlefield.
Dozens—no, hundreds of Fade anomalies slithered, stalked, and shambled through the ruins. Some crawled like starved beasts, others hovered like wraiths, half-phased in and out of reality. Distorted forms, semi-liquid and pulsating, twisted themselves around remnants of long-dead structures.
They hadn't been this many before.
"Hells," Kharv muttered, leveling his rifle.
Brann's voice cut through the comms with command-etched clarity. "We link with Kali, form a wedge around his position, and push toward the Helion. We don't stop. We don't scatter."
A scream erupted in the distance, inhuman and wrong, like a transmission twisted into pain.
Kali's voice snapped back online, barely audible over the fire of his longneedle. "I'm holding your flank, but they're trying to cut off the ridge. Move fast or you're walking into a kill box."
Brann didn't hesitate. "Sela, Kharv, on me. Weapons hot. Let's bring our boy home."
They hit the valley floor running.
The air was thick with phosphorescent mist, Fade residue, clinging like chemical fog, and the silence shattered under the staccato roar of gunfire. Brann was first to open fire, his kinetic repeater sending white-hot streaks into the darkness. Every round exploded into shrieking things that bled oil, smoke, and writhing strands of impossible geometry.
"Contact left!" Kharv bellowed, spinning with his pulse rifle and unloading into a swarm of twitching, centipedal horrors. The creatures cracked like porcelain when hit, spraying viscous ink that steamed on contact with armor.
One of them latched onto Sela's leg, a sinewy whip of tendrils coiling around her thigh. She shrieked and slammed her knife down into its head, if it had one, again and again until the thing dissolved into a puddle of twitching static.
"Don't stop!" Brann roared. "Push forward!"
The shadows around them pulsed, and the Fade came in waves.
From the right, a quadruped mass of glistening flesh and jagged bone erupted from a wall, shrieking with a mouthful of sideways teeth. Kharv caught it in the chest with a grenade launcher, detonation thundered across the basin, blowing the creature's upper half into a blossom of gore that rained down in wet clumps.
"I see you," Kali's voice crackled in. "Three targets on your six."
Three pin-sharp cracks echoed from above. Brains, if they had any, blew out like liquified crystal. One of the creatures fell so close to Brann he could feel its death-spasm twitch against his boots.
"Thanks for the cover," Sela panted into the comm.
"Keep moving," Kali replied. "I can't hold this perch much longer."
From the cliffside, Kali's cloak flickered faintly in the mist. He knelt in a depression between ruined blastcrete, longneedle rifle blazing with slow, precise fury.
Brann spotted him and pointed. "There! Fan out and cover—get him out of there!"
They sprinted across open ground, dodging warped debris and broken piping, while a screech from above sent their blood running cold. A new Fade, tall, humanoid, arms longer than natural, its face a smear of shifting eyes, plummeted from the hills.
It landed in front of Brann.
Too close. Brann fired instinctively, but the anomaly bled through the space between bullets, flickering in and out of position like a glitch. One of its claws raked across his chestplate, throwing him into a wall with a crash of metal and blood.
"Brann!" Kharv screamed.
Sela lunged, planted her shotgun into the thing's gut, and fired. The blast blew the creature's midsection into a void of meat and smoke. It didn't scream, it simply unraveled, peeling back into some unseen fold in reality.
Kali had risen to one knee now, reloading manually, the longneedle's barrel steaming from overuse. Two anomalies breached the ledge behind him—one darting like a mantis, the other hunchbacked and twitching with erratic limbs.
"Kali!" Sela shouted.
"I see them—"
He spun, backpedaled, fired.
The round went clean through the mantis-thing's eye cluster, but the second one tackled him, jaws unhinging like a snake's.
Brann was already moving, emptying his repeater as he leapt onto the cliff. Kharv wasn't far behind, swinging his power-axe low and catching the hunchback mid-stride, splitting it in half in a spray of rotting stink.
Kali rolled free, coated in ichor, panting.
"You're late," he growled, voice rasping.
"And you're welcome," Brann grunted, dragging him to his feet.
The moment they were upright, the comms lit up again, Sela's voice, grim. "They're converging. Too many. We need evac now."
The earth rumbled beneath their feet, subtle and low. "That wasn't thunder," Kali said, eyes scanning the horizon. "Something big's waking up."
Brann looked toward the ridge they'd just ascended. Fade anomalies were pouring from the craters like a ruptured nest. He clenched his jaw, blood trailing down his side. "Then let's make sure we're already gone before it gets here."
The valley was collapsing into nightmare.
The sky had shifted. What once was ash-gray now pulsed with veins of violet and black, like bruises blooming across the heavens. The wind howled with a strange pitch, too high, too shrill, like a machine screaming underwater.
"Sela, status on the Helion?" Brann barked into the comm as he slung Diens' body bag over his shoulder.
"I'm remote powering her up now," came her voice. "Engines are warming."
They broke into a run, Kali limping slightly, covered in drying ichor, rifle strapped tight to his back. Kharv kept watch over their rear, barrel hot from constant fire. The Fade were swarming, the ground behind them blackening as if infected. Anomalies burst from broken crevices and shattered walls like termites in a rotting hive.
One of them, a serpentine thing with too many limbs and a face like dripping wax, lunged from the left. Brann pivoted, dropping it with two shots to its twitching skull. Another emerged from the corpse, smaller, faster.
Kali didn't even break stride. He spun mid-run, the longneedle roaring once. The thing burst like a sack of tar.
"More incoming!" Kharv called out. "They're everywhere!"
The air thickened with the stink of ozone and rot. Each step was like running through syrup, boots slipping on slick, corrupted terrain. The valley floor heaved once, then again. Cracks spidered out like veins beneath them, and a deep, guttural tremor rolled up from the abyss.
They pushed harder, vaulting over broken piping and collapsed scaffolds. Kharv tossed a satchel charge behind them, an explosion lit the air in a blossom of fire and gore, briefly stalling the swarm.
With that time, they retraced back to the LZ.
Ahead, the Helion-9 gleamed like salvation, its engines flaring to life in the fading light. The ramp was already dropping, steam hissing from its pressurized joints.
Brann stumbled, the body bag on his back throwing off his balance. Kali caught him, dragging him upright.
"You drop him, and this was all for nothing," Kali hissed, pulling the strap tight.
"I've got him," Brann growled, teeth gritted. "We've also got the data."
Behind them, a thunderous shriek split the sky.
A colossal silhouette was rising from the heart of the crater. It had no face, only rings of yawning void, and its limbs bent in ways no living thing should.
"We are not fighting that!" Kharv yelled.
"No shit!" Sela screamed. "GET. ON. THE SHIP."
The final sprint blurred. Bullets tore through the dark. Claws raked the air inches from their backs. The ramp groaned under their boots as they leapt aboard. Sela was already in the cockpit, eyes wide, hands moving over the console in a blur.
"We're sealed. GO!" Brann yelled.
The ramp closed with a deafening clang, sealing out the chorus of horrors. A Fade slammed against the hull, snarling, then was blown apart by the liftoff thrusters as the Helion roared upward.
Through the viewport, the valley twisted into madness. The entity in the crater reached skyward, howling with a mouth that wasn't a mouth, as the Helion broke free of the atmosphere.
Inside, the cabin was deathly quiet.
Kharv slumped against the wall, chest heaving. Brann set down Diens' bag with shaking hands. Sela didn't say a word as she guided them out of the dead zone.