New Blood (multi-series fusion)

[LadyTevar]

Oh that was just fantastic

[Academia Nut]

This one got away from me, but it still fits into the framework of the universe already established, just not on the surface. Thus its more than a little weird.

---

Chandler had to grit his teeth in frustration. He knew that the corruption in Chrysalis went deep, but the megacorp had the resources and pull that they had basically cut ties with everything on the British Isles and parts of Northern France in exchange for not plunging the NEG into a civil war it really did not need. He had actually somewhat expected that once the degree of what he had discovered became clear. It was irritating, but the blow to Chrysalis would be a lasting one, and their public image was going to take a hit even if the public would never know the full truth. However, Chandler was not happy with his own situation.

He had not expected to make friends with upper management with his actions, but he had not anticipated being hauled off the case he had broken so suddenly and put on administrative leave. He had already filed a complaint, but he had been intentionally thrown into bureaucratic limbo as his former boss was out on his ass and he had yet to be assigned a new supervisor. So he and his team just had to sit and stew while the noose tightened around Chrysalis-London.

His idle shuffling of files on his OIS terminal and active raging against the stupidity of the system was interrupted by the arrival of a man to his office unannounced. A little under average in stature, he had a dense build somewhere between scrawny and wiry. Despite that, there was something about the man, from the way wore his non-descript uniform to the tilt of his mirrored AR glasses beneath his short cropped blonde hair that whispered that he was more than he seemed. A flick of the eyes sent a data request to his PCPU, but all he got was ‘Agent Engel’ and a classified stamp.

Raising an eyebrow, Chandler asked, “Can I help you with something?”

Entering his office and closing the door behind him, Agent Engel said, “You can, but only if I help you with something first.”

Narrowing his eyes in irritation, Chandler demanded, “Okay, start explaining your presence here right now before I summon my best leg breakers in here.”

The man chuckled and said, “Agent Kolya Engel, of the Office of Special Services.”

Chandler’s lips pursed for a moment before he said, “So you’re here to either kill me or recruit me.”

“There’s a difference?” Kolya asked with a sly grin.

“Quite,” Chandler replied while hiding his distress. This was not a situation he particularly wanted to get into.

Taking a seat and lounging back, Kolya said, “Oh don’t worry, this is for your own good. You see, you made quite a few enemies who are not particularly fond of that perfect combination of loyalty, stubbornness, and competence that tends to roll over their careful scheming and plotting. The thing is that the OSS on the other hand is fond of such folks.”

“So I join up with you and you make these problems go away?” Chandler ground out.

“That’s the long and short of it, yes,” Kolya replied.

“No,” Chandler answered.

“No?” Kolya asked, curious.

“No,” Chandler repeated.

“Perfect,” Kolya said while sitting up. “Welcome to the OSS.”

“I said-” Chandler began before he was cut off.

“You don’t choose to join the OSS, you’re told to do so. There are two kinds of members: Employees and Agents. Employees are muscle and brains brought from elsewhere, either other agencies or OIS cells, and are where the rather more unpleasant rumours of our behaviour tend to come from. Agents on the other hand are held to higher standards. None of us are brought in wanting to be a part of the OSS, but we do it anyway,” Kolya explained.

“So I have no choice in matter?” Chandler asked with a growl.

“Well, officially you are scheduled to die at the hands of a cultist within the next ten minutes. Now, I can shoot you for real if you really want…” Kolya stated casually.

Sighing in frustration, Chandler pinched the brow of his nose and asked, “I really have no say in all of this, do I?”

“Nope,” Kolya said cheerfully.

“And what exactly will I be doing in all of this?” Chandler asked.

“Well, your first mission is pretty simple. As part of the deal amongst the bigwigs, the OSS will be the ones who kick in the doors for the main office of Chrysalis London, that way anything politically inconvenient can quietly disappear. We also get to show off some of our new toys. It’ll be fun for the whole family,” Kolya explained.

Grunting in assent, Chandler still had to add on, “You’re being pretty blasé about corruption.”

“Welcome to the OSS. We’re the ones with the privilege of knowing just how deep the rot goes in places and having the fire to cleanse it, but we’re kept on a tight leash for the most part. All the frustration is worth it for the days like now when we’re let loose and get to remind the things that go bump in the night that they’re hiding,” Kolya said with a huge grin on his face.

“Alright, that sounds slightly more satisfying than my current job. And after the current spat with Chrysalis has been swept under the rug?” Chandler inquired.

“You’re that combination of straight shooter and bloodhound we like to call a Yeager in the OSS, due to some sort of institutional fetish for the German language. And due to some inter-institutional poaching after a major disaster for another project my own department is missing a qualified Yeager for Project OSIRIS. We’re looking for someone dedicated, hardworking, and with a known willingness to shoot things that get in his or her way,” Kolya explained.

“Wait… did you just italicize a word verbally?” Chandler asked in confusion.

“Ah yes, the speech patterns. It’s a bit of a verbal tic amongst OSS agents. You’ll get used to it. Project OSIRIS is all caps, while something like the shadowlight is italicized. Note the difference. For some inexplicable reason German words don’t fall into that pattern the same way, which is possibly why they are so popular. There’s a small possibility that the whole thing is a form of memetic virus, but Project LOGOS still needs further study,” Kolya elaborated.

“Wait… wait… wait! Why the fuck are we talking about this?” Chandler cried out, clutching at his forehead.

Kolya shrugged and said, “It’s either the first stages of infection, or just your brain trying to come to terms with the absurdity of the universe.”

“Absurdity of the universe?” Chandler asked incredulously.

“Look, I was in the London Arcology Police before I saw some weird shit in Sandford and the OSS recruited me. I had to either accept the absurdity of what I witnessed or be driven insane by it. I accepted the fact that the cosmos is fundamentally a very stupid place and just decided to run with it. It’s kept me alive and mostly psychologically intact since then,” Kolya explained.

“Mostly?” Chandler questioned.

Kolya shrugged and said, “Standard human psychology demands that the universe makes sense. I suppose I just hit a point where I no longer get crazy.”

“Uh-huh,” Chandler stated, suddenly not so sure about what he was getting in to.

Twelve hours later, Chandler found himself taking cover behind a nanoformed marble slab with Kana and a platoon of OSS troopers while Agent Engel went diving and rolling forward into a storm of assault rifle fire from Chrysalis security forces, firing a pair of pistols with inexplicably deadly accuracy the whole way. Chandler could only boggle in between seeking refuge from the lead rain. Over the roar of battle he asked one of the more veteran sergeants, “How is he not dead yet?”

The Nazzadi just shook his head and replied, “We have no fucking idea sir.”

There was an inhuman howl as one of the monstrosities mixed in amongst the Chrysalis formation somehow had its thumb shot off while it was handling a grenade. The oversized lump of metal dropped from its hand, eliciting more human screams as the troopers around it realized what was coming. A moment later Kolya dove from cover as the incendiary went off, perfectly backlighting his silhouette as he fired his guns through the at those not caught in the blast.

Seeing the appalled look on Chandler’s face, the sergeant stated, “You would not believe how badly Herkunft wants him on their team.”

Once the shooting stopped, Kolya emerged from his current bit of cover, a huge grin on his face. Wiping away some of the soot, he glanced at the carnage all around him and noted, “Well this is going to be a bitch to fill out all the proper paperwork. Come on lads, the sooner we bust this open the sooner we can get to the pub.”

The men who had served under him cheered enthusiastically and charged forward, while Kana and Chandler just tried to work out what they had just seen. Finally Kana asked, “Did you ever see him reload?”

“I… I don’t know,” Chandler replied. “All I know is that none of that should have worked!”

“Maybe he’s some sort of parapsychic?” Kana suggested weakly.

From another room further up ahead a fresh batch of gunfire erupted and Kolya could be heard screaming, “Little hand says its time to rock!”

Abruptly one of the walls of lobby exploded inward, showering bits of artificial stone everywhere as the hulking frame of stocky suit of powered armour that was actually decorated like an Egyptian sarcophagus ploughed through the building, some horrid outsider clutched in its fists. In a deep, mechanical voice it announced, “I HAVE COME TO DESTROY YOU!” before it activated a built in flamethrower and roasted the abomination.

Chandler and Kana watched it lumber past towards the rest of the fighting before Kana said, “That or the OSS is staffed entirely by maniacs.”

“I’m already beginning to question my own sanity,” Chandler announced while blinking repeatedly.

Another platoon advanced into the lobby, another OSS Agent at their head. Despite being in full NaNBC gear, the body language communicated what facial expressions could not and the woman asked, “Are you with Agent Engel?”

Chandler and Kana nodded in a stunned sort of way.

“Yeah… you learn to ignore that eventually. You learn to ignore a lot of things about your fellow OSS Agents. We care more about results than methods,” she explained.

“Will I be that crazy one day?” Chandler asked, practically begging for the answer he wanted but dreading the truth.

“If you’re lucky,” the woman replied before she turned to her own troops and cried out, “Come on! Full power total annihilation!” She then led her troops into the increasingly wet sounding fray elsewhere in the building.

Chandler and Kana looked at each other for a long moment before Chandler shrugged and said, “You know what? Fuck it. Let’s go shoot something.”

“Sanest thing I’ve heard all day,” Kana replied.

[Skyfox120]

DId..... did... you just make the higher ups of OSS a entire corp of DEADPOOLS????? O_o

[LadyTevar]

Sounds that way

[HSRTG]

It's worse. I think the OIS are all PCs and our dear, temporarily sane, heroes have stumbled into the middle of one of the classic clusterfucks that PCs are inevitably involved in.

[Academia Nut]

Seras watched Mercer with some interest, for she had not seen anything quite like him since her sire had disappeared nearly a century ago. There were a number of large differences, but she suspected Alucard would have at least had some respect for the being. Where Alucard had been primarily defined by boredom, Alex was defined by rage, but even then there was a spark of something grander within him. From her sire’s philosophy, Alex was unequivocally a monster, but he was a monster with the heart of a man. He wished for redemption despite knowing it was impossible and he fought against his own nature.

Experience with her own choir of souls let Seras see the damned hiding behind his facial features. How many thousands had he consumed? He much pain and suffering was locked in his mind from those he had slain? Yet, he still had the strength to care about family, to place the well-being of a stranger over his own because they were related. It was relatively petty and shallow, but it was more than most monsters had the capacity for. Seras found that she liked him.

Trust on the other hand was a completely different issue. Alex wore the fact that he was a predator more openly than even Alucard had, and there were no mystical bindings to tie him to the mistress, just sentiment. Worse, she could see how he never relaxed around Ellie, at least not inside. He was expecting betrayal and rejection, which were unfortunately not unreasonable expectations. Ellie really was not prepared for having a pair of monsters following her about.

Seras felt equal amounts of respect and pity for the girl. She was about the same age as Seras had been when she had been turned, but was still managing to deal with everything better than Seras would have in her shoes. Seras could terrify immortals when she wanted to and Mercer had his own brand of intimidation, yet the girl was still functioning, albeit with noticeable strain. The fact that Seras and Alex were now her only allies and everything else on the planet wanted to kill, vivisect, enslave, eat and/or rape her in some combination spoke volumes for the girl’s psychological fortitude.

Seras’ musings were cut short by Alex tapping on the window of the car they had ‘acquired’. When pressed, Alex had explained that he had generated a large amount of anonymous funds via short selling Chrysalis stock, which was technically a form of insider trading but at least he technically had acquired the vehicle legally. The identity it was registered under he had been even less forthcoming about, just that it would hold up for quite some time. Looking up from where her new master slumbered fitfully in the backseat, she saw Alex gesturing for her to step outside.

Phasing through the substance of the vehicle, Seras asked, “Yes?”

“Elizabeth is still asleep?” Alex whispered quietly, conspiratorially.

Seras nodded, not quite sure she liked the tone Alex was using. “Yes, but she’s having bad dreams right now.” If it got much worse, Seras would have to guard the girl from nightmares both in the waking world and in the dream realms, which would not be particularly fun since it risked escalating conflict.

Alex checked on Ellie before he nodded and said, “One of the Chrysalis soldiers I consumed knew about a logistics cell in this area, a small cult that tends to resource stockpiles in case a unit has to go to ground without official support. I found and neutralized them.”

“Why does Ellie being asleep matter then?” Seras asked suspiciously.

“Because of our unique dietary needs,” Alex replied quietly.

Seras blinked and then growled, “Mercer…”

“Look, the memories I got paint them all as the worst sort of scum, the sort who the world is better off without. If you don’t want them I’ll go back and finish them off. I just thought you might want a meal too, especially if we can keep it secret from Elizabeth,” Mercer replied.

Seras thought it over and then said, “That’s charitable of you, I suppose.”

Alex just sort of grunted before he leaned up against the side of the sedan and said, “If you’re going I’ll stand watch here.”

“Where is the place?” Seras asked.

Alex held up a hand drawn map of the area that Seras quickly oriented around. Grinning, she said, “I’m already there,” before she vanished into the darkness.

Travelling at the speed of darkness was always a touch tricky simply because if she was not careful she could easily end up staring at the dark side of the moon before she realized she had made a wrong turn at Albuquerque. The fact that there were orbital assets that would not appreciate her in their exclusion volume made it so that she needed to focus on what she was doing even more important. It took only a few dozen microseconds to travel the necessary distance, requiring very fine timing.

Arriving in the shadows formed by an old barn in the moonlight, Seras scented the delectable aroma of freshly spilled blood. Some parts of her were still human, the important parts at least, but she had long ago come to terms with her own cravings. Blood was her only wine now, and she had become quite the connoisseur. Like most she had ever tasted the bouquet in the air was spiked with the sharp tang of adrenaline and other fear hormones, but there were other, subtler aspects to the scent, including something she could not place, much to her surprise.

Moving in to a nearby farmhouse, she found a few spatters here and there of congealed, rust brown blood from Alex’s initial attack, along with a few gouge marks from where his claws cut through the objects around him. Her sensitive ears also picked up the terrified heartbeats of four people somewhere in the basement.

Phasing through the floorboards and leaking into the darkness, Seras found three people in total darkness, tied together and sitting at the base of a stone slab that had probably at one point been a butchering table in centuries past but had the aura of something used for far more sinister means. Seras had to take a few seconds to sort her senses out, at which point she muttered, “Oh this is all sorts of fucked up.”

The terrified humans frantically searched the darkness that blinded their eyes while Seras prowled about, not even breath betraying her position. She was still trying to figure out what to do when one of the men demanded, “Whatever is the dark, are you mortal or immortal?”

Seras loomed in close to the man and let the light from her eyes glow, bright enough for the man to see the outline of her face in the crimson illumination. The man jerked back with a strangled scream and Seras said, “Guess.”

The other two were not angled correctly to see what happened, but they had definitely picked up on the ominous glow and the reaction of their comrade, but held their tongues. The man looked horrified for a second before he said, “Ah! I am glad you are here. Some slave of the NEG attacked us. I do not know what happened to the others, but we seem to have been left here for interrogation.”

Seras grinned and said, “That was no slave of the NEG.”

The man looked curious for a moment before he said, “But… but we are protected by pacts! The other cults would not dare raise their hands against the servants of Nyarlathotep!”

Seras gently laid a hand on the man’s head and said, “Thank you for confirming that you are a bad guy.” Before he could properly respond Sera’s hand tightened about his skull and she pulled up. With a wet sucking noise and a crunch of bone the man’s head and upper spine were torn from his body in a shower of blood and snapping gristle. Lifting the head above her own, Seras let the blood from his skull rain down on her impossibly elongated tongue and face.

The first iron flavoured droplets struck her tongue and the sensation was so intense and incredible after her long slumber. She had not even realized how thirsty she truly was until she tasted that crimson elixir. Blood was her wine, her steak dinner, and her heroin all rolled into one. She shuddered as the last drops leaked out of the severed blood vessels, her tongue roaming across her lips and chin to draw in the blood that had missed her maw.

More than just blood, she also fed on the man’s soul, drawing the diseased thing screaming from the void it had wanted to naturally flee to into her personal domain. In an instant everything that Harold Walker had been belonged totally to Seras, his memories, hopes, and dreams all hers to peruse at her leisure. A few seconds later and Seras paused in her ecstatic feasting to contemplate a set of memories her familiars had discovered.

“Oh this is all sorts of fucked up,” Seras exclaimed as she examined the memory in depth. Instead of enjoying her meal, she simply ripped apart the second man, devouring his blood and soul as quickly as possible. Examining the memory from two different angles, she only had one possible course of action to take with this knowledge.

A gentle psychic probe reached out for the dreaming Ellie and quietly asked for permission to reduce the restrictions binding her temporarily. Seras needed to draw this out for any sort of justice to be done. The response took a second, but in her unconscious state Ellie did not know how to forbid the control release. Grinning, Seras said, “Control Art Restrictions have been released to Level 1. Hold until target is silenced.”

Seras felt the mystical bindings that locked away her higher level functions loosen and her form dissolved, spreading out across higher dimensions even as more of her true mass protruded into reality. The last survivor of the cult, a woman, could only whimper in terror as the cawing of crows and the flapping of wings was heard all around her. She knew her fellow cultists were dead, the remains of their corpses still tied to her, but she had no clue what was in store for her. Then Seras stared to open her eyes. First one pair, then another, then another, and so on until hundreds of eyes glowing hell red all glared down at the woman.

Another great fluttering of wings heralded Seras striding into view, the human part of her form now soaked head to toe in blood and drenched in shadows. Her face was screwed up into a malevolent, shark toothed grin while her eyes promised murder and she gave a slow clap as she approached. Approaching with glacial stillness to the panicking woman, Seras loomed in and said, “Congratulations, you managed to make the list of people I actually hate. A rare privilege indeed.”

The woman was screaming and babbling, imploring her god for protection and salvation even as hands reached out of the darkness to pick her up and drag her on to the stone that had become a sacrificial altar. Seras ignored it all and said, “You thought that any price was worth it for your own gain. You thought that worthy sacrifice would earn you favour and protection. You thought wrong.”

The hands of hundreds of damned souls pinned the woman down and choked off her screams. Seras leaned down and placed her ear over the woman’s belly, listening to the heartbeat within. For several long seconds, the only sound was that of the woman’s futile struggles until Seras said, “My mother died protecting me and I got to watch her corpse get raped while I lay nearby suffering from a bullet wound, so I have rather opinionated views on how mothers should behave. Sacrifice to alien gods is not included in the list of acceptable behaviour.”

Straightening up while leaving a hand on the woman’s stomach, Seras added on, “Especially since this is your third pregnancy.”

The woman quivered in absolute terror, her eyes starting to glaze over as her higher brain functions shut down in the face of what was happening to her. Seras judged just the right time to act before she began to slowly push her hand into the woman’s abdomen, seeking the organs within. The woman tried to scream, but dead hands kept her mouth shut and the sound muffled.

“Not one drop, not one microlitre… from you,” Seras replied as she dug deeper until she had her hand around the right organ and began to pull it out carefully but with inevitable and irresistible pressure. It took another half a minute, but the woman’s uterus was torn from her stomach. Prying it apart while crying blood, Seras extracted the foetus from within, safely ensconced in its placenta.

“I’m sorry… you were just too young,” Seras cried as she opened her mouth wide and devoured the tiny soul. It would never grow up, never know anything, but it would join in with her collective, to have a chance at an existence of some sort. Far more than its mother would ever allow. Seras had seen the woman through the eyes of her fellow cultists, had seen her take her own children straight from the birthing table to the altar and cut out their tiny hearts on her own. She knew even if taken captive she would find any method to abort the child rather than let a soul go unclaimed by her god.

Seras watched cruelly as the woman slowly bled out, letting the newest piece of her soul flit and play above her head, so that she might know the insult offered. Just as the twitching death rattle started to set in, the hands holding the woman down began to pull in all directions. In an explosion of gore, the bitch came apart into dozens of pieces.

Letting her restrictions lock back into place, Seras wiped away her tears, the gore dissolving into her constructed clothing as she disappeared into shadows to appear in the stand of trees near where they had parked their sedan. Mercer was still standing watch over Ellie, who still slumbered. Seras looked at her fellow predator and had no idea how to feel. Finally she said, “You had to have known.”

“I… I figured it would be best if you made the call on that one,” Alex said in a non-committal tone.

“Why?” Seras snapped.

Alex shrugged and said, “Because frankly of the two of us you are the more moral.”

Seras growled a bit and asked, “What would have done if you had made the call?”

“Consumed them both,” Alex replied honestly but nonchalantly.

“I tortured her to death and ate the kid’s soul, such as it was,” Seras replied angrily before taking her seat in the car again, rubbing her forehead in frustration.

Alex opened the door and sat down in the driver’s seat with the strangest look on his face.

[LadyTevar]

Yeah... "more moral".
This is going to be a lot of fun

[Academia Nut]

“You have a secret base in the middle of the Sahara desert?” Chandler asked incredulously.

“We have an image to uphold,” Kolya replied dismissively.

“Most NEG officers don’t know you exist!” Chandler pointed out.

“Exactly!” Kolya stated enthusiastically.

Chandler just shook his head. There had to be some sort of insanity field in the OSS, or at least this branch, because once the rush of adrenaline wore off he felt a headache caused by the logical and tactical nonsense he had witnessed. He was actually rather worried that there was in fact some sort of sorcerous effect at work, but thus far he and his associates had yet to notice anything of the like. Fortunately the headache had subsided as Kolya did in fact do all the paperwork after his stunts, but Chandler was glad he would not have to actually go over any of it, as the descriptions of events were colourful, to say the least.

The trip from London to join up with the rest of Project OSIRIS had mostly been uneventful, with just the quiet murmur of reports being filled out, but Chandler could already feel the precursor of a migraine approaching. It wasn’t so much the secret base, which made sense, but how Kolya treated its existence like it was something expected to the point of cliché. There was something fundamentally disturbing about an otherwise professional man who took his job so lightly.

Climbing out of the transport craft as it settled into its docking cradle in the hidden underground bunker, Chandler panned his vision across the massive hangar. There was quite a number of aircraft in similar cradles, but about half of them appeared to be in storage, and about a third of the remainder were under maintenance. Kolya seemed to notice the stares and said, “Part of the Project involves experimental aircraft design. We have a number of prototypes and experimental refits always on the go, but that means we have to mothball a number of them to keep our effective air fleet below what we’re allowed to have operational at any given time.”

Chandler furrowed his eyebrows at that and asked, “Why?”

“All OSS Projects are considered a potential coup risk, so we’re kept deliberately under gunned to make it harder for rogue elements to amass sufficient power to make such attempts feasible,” Kolya explained.

“That’s insane! How can you do your job if you’ve been crippled?” Chandler demanded.

Kolya shrugged and said, “Welcome to the OSS! It’s not all bad though, we have more than enough for the day to day work, and we can get most of the birds up and flying in fewer than twelve hours if an emergency release of resources is issued. The biggest issue is that the D-Engines are locked out without proper authorization codes.”

“Why do you keep so many surplus craft around then?” Chandler asked while following Kolya down the ladder, both their associates trailing behind quietly while the Agents talked.

“Some are still being worked on, some have specialized use, some have unique components we really want to have a working copy on hand to examine while in use, and then we have the vehicles we use for field work, like the bird we just stepped out of. They all get used in some way, just most of them not actively,” Kolya said while he went over to one of the unoccupied cradles, taking up a casual waiting stance. Chandler nodded to his associates, who left with their gear to set up in the barracks with the other soldiers and analysts.

Chandler craned his neck up and watched as a craft descended from a hatch in the ceiling. Waiting silently next to Kolya for a few moments, he finally asked, “Who are we waiting for.”

“I want you to meet Osiris, one of the key members of Project OSIRIS,” Kolya replied.

Chandler blinked and then replied, “I don’t know which of the possible explanations for why there is name sharing involved disturbs me more.”

“It could be coincidence,” Kolya replied, to which Chandler just glared and Kolya admitted, “Yeah, fat chance in this place of anything ever being coincidence.”

A few moments after the craft finished settling on the docking cradle the rear hatch swung open with a hydraulic hiss, revealing the suit of power armour that Chandler had seen during the assault on the London Chrysalis branch. Elaborately decorated with gold and blue with gems interspersed, the war machine looked like a gigantic Egyptian sarcophagus made animate. The hands in particular had received a great deal of attention, the fingers showing an enormous amount of precision machining.

Chandler’s eyes widened as his mind worked out the implications of such excessively manufactured components and he said, “This is Osiris, isn’t it?”

The war machine turned to Chandler while it towered over him and said in a resonant, mechanical yet subtly masculine voice, “I like him, he’s quick.”

“Most Agents are,” Kolya replied.

“You waited ten minutes for me to get out of my armour before you spoke up,” Osiris replied, irritation evident in his tone.

“So Project OSIRIS is AI research or…” Chandler began to ask.

“Cybernetic resurrection,” Osiris provided.

“Before you ask, Osiris here and few others in the Project and its various offshoot Groups have various conditions that make arcanotherapy impossible. Its how we get around the anti-MMI laws,” Kolya added on.

“Other than the military hardware, that sounds decidedly less black ops than I was led to expect, which leaves me intensely worried about why the OSS has an elaborate underground base dedicated to it,” Chandler stated.

Osiris shifted subtly so that he was distinctly looking at Kolya and said, “I like him.”

“We should have picked him up years ago… then again maybe one of the other groups would have got him and he would be dead or a vegetable right now,” Kolya said. He then paused and said, “Speaking of which…”

“The shipment from Herkunft has arrived, if that is what you’re asking,” a female voice announced from behind, causing Kolya and Chandler to turn to find a middle aged Nazzadi woman approaching them, dressed in a conservative work suit with a lab coat thrown over the top.

“Group Director Zeny. Fancy seeing you here,” Kolya beamed, although Chandler was subtly curious about the sincerity.

“Since you lot were taking so long in bringing the fresh meat in for inspection,” Zeny replied. She then smiled just wide enough to show off her sharpened incisors but not quite enough to make it totally blatant that she was doing it and said, “Director Zeny, leader of the Seth Group.” She held out her hand for Chandler to take and he immediately found himself in a death grip match between the two of them.

Not one to back down, Chandler maintained his composure while increasing the pressure and stared Zeny dead in her red eyes while he said, “Agent Chandler Jackson, pleasure to meet you. As Seth was the deity that slew and dismembered Osiris, your job would be…”

“Acquisitions,” Zeny replied, backing down from the confrontation by being the one to initiate the release of the handshake. Somewhere behind them there was a mechanical sound that could have been servos realigning, or something approximating a chuckle.

Chandler refused to even quirk an eyebrow at that, especially in light of the ‘fresh meat’ comment, but he instead said, “I was informed that I would be working primarily with the Amunet Group and that they were the ‘acquisitions’ branch of Project OSIRIS.”

“A different sort of acquisition. You will be seeking ‘exotic materials’ to improve our processes, whereas my group obtains the individuals who could benefit from our processes,” Zeny replied dismissively.

Chandler felt a shadow pass over him and he knew that Osiris was now standing directly behind him. The cybernetic war machine stated, “Speaking of exotic materials, has Project Director Kamina approved my transfer to Amunet yet?”

“He did not mention it before he left for Poland,” Zeny stated.

There was a slight hiss of static that may have been a growl of annoyance before Osiris asked, “He is still not back yet?”

“There was something that interested him in Old Warsaw. You know how he can get,” Zeny said with a shrug.

“Yes, well, not to interrupt, but since a round of introductions is in order, perhaps we could find Group Director Williams so that Agent Jackson can meet his boss,” Kolya suggested.

Shrugging elaborately, Zeny replied, “Last I saw he was talking with Group Director Xena and the triplets. We can talk later.”

Watching as Zeny moved off, Chandler leaned in close and whispered, “Your boss?”

“No, but she often suborns me for her own purposes. Bit of a bitch, but utterly brilliant doctor,” Kolya whispered back. He then said more loudly, “So Osiris, would you like to accompany us in meeting the triplets?”

The cyborg considered the question for a moment before he said, “No, I think I shall bypass the bullshit this time and go talk to the Project Director’s secretary directly.”

Kolya nodded and replied, “Good luck with that.”

Osiris seemed to sigh before he marched off, his enormous footsteps barely making a whisper as he moved with incredible fluidity despite being bulkier than most power armour his size. Chandler waited respectively for a moment before he asked, “The… uh… decorations are…”

“Occult wardings. Osiris could probably punch his way from one side of the Rapine Storm to the other if he really put his mind to it, assuming he didn’t draw the sort of attention that could undo said wardings, which is of course rather unlikely,” Kolya stated. He then said, “Come on, you need to see the Horus Group to really appreciate what we’re doing here.”

Kolya led Chandler through the hangar to where a trio of enormous yet sleek aircraft sat brooding in their cradles. Just looking at the dull charcoal hulls, hawk-like swept forward wings, and numerous weapons Chandler could only apply the term ‘brooding’ to them as they clearly were meant to be in the sky killing things. The cockpits were positioned rather strangely though, set a touch further back and flush with the hull, which would totally kill visibility. Approaching a bit closer, Chandler noted that the dark, slightly mirrored glass was really better suited as a laser housing than as a cockpit and that it was also present on the undercarriage.

Chandler stopped dead as realization hit him, and Kolya just turned around to grin. “And now you see one of the biggest reasons why Project OSIRIS is under OSS auspices. May I present to you the triplets: Raquel, Jason, and Tobin.”

The trio of fighter craft all gave off a series of happy trills and whistles at hearing their names, to which a female voice chastised, “Use English please.”

A trio of strangely childish if also terrifyingly brutal voices all announced, “Sorry.”

“What the fuck did you do?” Chandler demanded.

“We gave them back what was stolen from them,” a dusky skinned woman of obvious Mediterranean descent said while she walked out from behind the cradle of one of the fighters, adjusting her AR glasses disapprovingly.

“Group Director Xena Logotheti, I would like you to meet Agent Chandler Jackson,” Kolya said as introduction.

Chandler stood agape and appalled before he asked, “No, seriously, this… this…”

Xena frowned and said, “Raquel, Jason, and Tobin were all suffering from severe psychological and physiological difficulties that did not respond to standard therapy techniques. The only way to give them their lives back was complete anima-neural reconstruction.”

“Anima-neural… you did this to their souls too?” Chandler exclaimed in horror.

Xena gave a disapproving glare to Kolya, who grimaced and said, “He’s former OIS.”

“Ah yes, they are always so disapproving of the Horus Group. You should know that thanks to advances in medical technology pioneered by Project OSIRIS we are able to communicate with all volunteers despite their locked in states and get their approval before we proceeded with the alterations,” Xena stated.

“Xena took the pain away and let us fly and kill,” one of the fighters said in a voice that was perhaps slightly feminine in tone despite the weird trills and machine modulations in the speech. The other two inhuman cyborgs all began to coo and chirp their approval of the word kill.

“What the fuck is wrong with them?” Chandler demanded.

Xena quirked a dark eyebrow upward and replied, “From their perspective, nothing is wrong. From our perspective, the issue is that psychologically they are war planes.”

“What,” Chandler said flatly.

“We fly! We hunt! We kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!” Another of the trio, this one with a voice simultaneously gravely and high pitched that was filled with static pops.

“They were not responding to even standard OSIRIS treatments, so we completely removed their brains from their original bodies and performed several different grafts before inserting them in their current bodies. Various nano and genetic treatments along with an influx of fresh stimuli and a lack of Operator Effect shielding altered their anima-neural waveforms such that they stopped thinking like humans and started thinking like war planes,” Xena explained.

Chandler breathed out hard and tried not to explode. This went against everything he believed in, everything he had been taught to uphold, and now he was in the thick of it. Before he could say anything, the third plane said in a soft voice that somehow dripped with innocence and blood simultaneously, “Don’t worry mister. Mother took the pain away.” The other two immediately began to twitter and coo in appreciation.

Rubbing his forehead, Chandler asked, “Why do they talk like that?”

“Part of the treatment involved grafting in segments of brain tissue from predatory birds and cybernetic interfaces. Much of their speech amongst each other is a combination of machine code and bird calls modified by human symbolic logic. It is essentially a language they speak amongst each other, and they prefer it to English for the most part,” Xena stated with a shrug.

“Except kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!” The dual pitched plane exclaimed, and the other two also started chirping the word.

Chandler looked appalled but Kolya cut in and said, “War planes. They have integrated weaponry and the Operator Effect means that they have lasers, plasma cannons and charge beams not just in their bodies but in their souls.”

Xena nodded and said, “We have just the three of them right now because of extreme difficulty in producing viable results, but each one of them is worth a squadron of Spitfires and working in concert they have achieved air superiority against twenty to one odds against Migou fighters.”

The three war planes giggled and hooted evilly amongst each other while Chandler sputtered in disbelief at the outrageous claim. “Twenty-to-one? You’re bullshitting me!”

“Admittedly it wasn’t all at once, but their stealth systems and coordination allow them to pick apart much larger forces in detail. That air battle took place over a period of two hours with no individual skirmish involving more than five Migou craft at a time,” Xena stated proudly.

“Burn, burn, burn,” the more feminine plane hissed.

Xena had a strange look over her face and she said, “Raquel, it sounds like you need another session with Dr. Tam. You’re talking about fire again.”

The plane grumbled for a second before she complained, “But… but…”

“You know how you are with regards to fire,” Xena scolded.

The plane let out a high pitched whine before sighing and rocking in her cradle. Finally she asked, “Can I kill Dagonites after?”

“If Dr. Tam thinks it would do you good I can put in a word for a submarine suppression mission,” Xena promised.

All three planes seemed to flutter slightly and whistle amongst each other. Xena looked at Chandler and said, “One of the neural grafts was that of ospreys so they like hunting in the water almost as much as in the air.”

“This is insane,” Chandler replied, holding his head.

“And you’ll help us make more,” the deep voice of Osiris said from behind him. Turning around, Chandler found the cyborg approaching with a short, tweedy looking man a step ahead of him.

“Welcome to the Amunet Group, Agent Chandler. I am Group Director Williams Smith,” the short man replied, wiggling his large moustache as he spoke.

“Making more?” Chandler asked.

“An essential component to the process is an extremely rare serum first isolated nearly two hundred years ago by an American medical student. Osiris was exposed to a highly refined form, which is both why he was ineligible for arcanotherapy and why he adapted so well to cybernetic transplantation. All stable forms of the compound have been lost to war and disaster, and attempts to replicate with incomplete sets have produced undesirable results, but we just picked up a new trail,” Williams explained.

Despite not having a mobile face, Chandler could tell that Osiris was grinning inside when he said, “When you swept the Hellsing manor for extra normal traces you unwittingly detected inert forms of a virus that no one has seen for almost fifty years. We did a back check and it looks like transit filters have noticed similar results across Europe. There’s a supernatural plague carrier running around the NEG that we need to put down before he unleashes an active form of the virus, and if we can bring him back relatively intact we can make more Horus Fighters and sweep the skies clean of Migou.”

Chandler considered this for a second before he said, “I would prefer to focus on the first goal rather than risk compromising it in favour of the second.”

“I agree,” Osiris said, and Chandler had the distinct feeling that this mission was personal.

[Skyfox120]

Directer KAMINA???? O_o;;;;

That.... that....actually explains quite a bit... including how they managed to pull off having their main base practically in ol Nyar's backyard.

[Academia Nut]

Over the past few days of sneaking along the back rounds of the British Isles, crawling steadily north, Ellie had learned to tolerate the presence of the creatures around her a little better. Of course, the two were like night and day, which made adapting to their combined presence more difficult than if she just had to get used to one alone. Alex was not much of a talker unless he had some sort of goal, but it was easier to forget he was inhuman. Seras on the other hand was talkative and friendly, but one look at her glowing red eyes confirmed that she was inhuman.

The last two days had been rather gruelling as they had ditched the car in favour of going overland on foot, moving across the Scottish Highlands, skirting the north eastern coast. It was a hard slog, especially since they were moving into military controlled territory and had to keep evading patrols, but between Mercer and Seras they easily slipped through gaps so tight Ellie had no idea how they did it.

Now they were camped in a cold, damp cave carved out unknown millennia prior by geological forces. Seras had reported that they were almost to the Index and had gone out to scout the area while Mercer and Ellie waited. The low, rhythmic pounding of the North Sea on the rocks outside was occasionally punctuated by the whip cracks of distant supersonic booms from NEG fighters on patrol high above. Working by the soft yellow glow of an electric lamp, Mercer added a quieter, metallic sound to the continual noise all around.

Ellie only watched him with eyes half open, wrapped up in a sleeping bag. He was working on several of the guns they had taken from the battlefield and had been doing so for the past several days, constantly tinkering with them, pulling them apart and putting them back together again but with different configurations. Ellie was not entirely sure what he was doing, but she figured he was somehow optimizing the weapons. Tonight he surprised her when he spoke up.

“You know how to use guns?” He asked.

Ellie blinked the tiredness from her eyes in surprise at the question but answered, “I know how to use pistols…”

“Good enough. Come over here,” Alex said, motioning for Ellie to comply.

Ellie had been under a great deal of strain lately, and something within her had already snapped, which was why she had willingly gone along with this insane idea to trek to other side of the British Isles. She was not quite sure why she did it, but instead of getting out of the sleeping bag she instead said, “No. I’m tired, and why should I do what you say?”

The look Alex gave her nearly caused her to leap out of the sleeping bag, salute, and then drop to the ground to do fifty push ups, but it softened a second later and Alex just shook his head. Instead, he amended, “Come over here so I can show you how to better defend yourself.”

It was worded slightly less like a demand this time, and even though an apology for the first time and a ‘please’ would have been nice, Ellie decided not to push the patience of the killing machine too much today. Crawling out of the sleeping bag into the cold, salt tinged air, Ellie went over to where Alex was and was promptly handed the firearm he had been working on. It was remarkably light in Ellie’s hands although she could feel that the balance was just slightly off, too forward heavy.

“It’s not loaded,” Alex stated, informing Ellie realize why the weight was off.

Bringing the weapon up to her shoulder, Ellie checked the sight and found not just a basic red dot sight but an option to integrate targeting with her AR glasses. Blink clicking on the ‘Yes’ option, she found a reticule on her AR glasses along with range finding data and limited light enhancement. Alex noticed her carefully swinging the gun about and said, “Chrysalis had some nice toys.”

Thinking about it for a moment, Ellie asked, “Could they track us with their hardware?”

Alex nodded and said, “Yes, but I already disabled and removed any such components. I also made your PCPU anonymous so that the NEG can’t track you either.”

Ellie nodded at that before she went back to the gun and after a few moments of chewing on her lip she said, “It seems short.”

“That’s because it is. It was originally an assault rifle but I stripped it down and used other parts to convert it to a bullpup configuration. Chrysalis parts are incompatible with any other company but fully hot swappable with each other, which means you can make some nice Franken-guns with enough parts. I also managed to integrate the recoil compensation mechanism from one of the sniper rifles, which wasn’t easy, but that gun should kick like a kitten,” Alex explained.

Ellie frowned at that and said, “If you’ve done that much work shouldn’t you need to fire it a couple times to zero the barrel and make sure it won’t explode?”

Alex nodded sagely and said, “You know your guns. Under normal circumstances, yes, but I have the tools and knowledge to know how to get it right the first time.”

“Don’t these things have micron sensitivities?” Ellie asked.

Alex held up a hand and let his fingers split into incredibly fine tendrils for a second before he replied, “I have the tools.”

Ellie repressed her shudder, and then had to repress a second, stronger one when she realized that she was getting used to the inhuman monsters around her. She went back to looking down the sight of the gun at the wall of the cave, trying to ignore the monster in the room. She gulped and then took a deep breath before she asked, “Do you have a magazine so I can practice loading?”

Alex tossed her an empty block of metal and polymer that Ellie adroitly caught. Examining over the loading mechanism for a moment, Ellie carefully inserted the magazine into the receiver to see how it worked. She then ejected it and repeated the action, going over it a few times before she brought the weapon to her shoulder. The balance was still slightly off, but she figured once she had a full magazine in it would be as true as possible.

Ellie worked with rote, mechanical precision as she loaded, brought to ready, disengaged the safety, squeezed the trigger with a hollow click, and then ejected the magazine so she could repeat the process all over again, in-graining the motions into her muscles. Mentally the process was not that different from practice with her pistol, but the positioning of her limbs was the big issue. After she did that a few times Alex tossed her another empty magazine and said, “Practice reloading without looking away from your surroundings.”

Ellie nodded, and after a few fumbles was soon able to take a magazine straight from her belt and load it without dropping the gun from the ready position or looking away, a process that sped up her load time considerably and improved her awareness of things going on around her. After a few more practices like that, Alex spoke up again and asked, “Where did you learn to handle guns?”

“My father taught me. He doesn’t remember how…” Ellie paused in sad recollection before she shook her head and continued on, “…but he taught me everything he felt I needed to know about firearms.”

Alex nodded and said, “He was clearly military trained and passed the philosophy down to you. Not surprising I guess considering his family was apparently some sort of hereditary black ops group.”

“I guess that’s how he survived the First Arcanotech War so well,” Ellie noted with a touch of melancholy.

“I think I found out what happened to the Hellsing manor, if you want so clues as to your family,” Alex suggested.

Ellie brightened up a bit and asked, “Really? What happened?”

Alex nodded and said, “The whole place was a fortress, especially after the attacks in 1997. While they weren’t expecting aliens, when the Nazzadi landed in the suburbs, they expected to just roll over the civilians. Instead they stalled. There is no ‘official’ explanation, but from what I saw the Nazzadi ran into minefields, entrenched AT guns, and professional soldiers trained to deal with overwhelming odds. The delay left a gap in their advance and NEG regulars managed to get into their rear lines, collapsing the entire offensive and allowing for London to be reinforced.”

“The Hellsings would have been left alone,” Ellie said, filling in some of the gaps.

“The fact that the manor wasn’t flattened means they probably pulled out from the position. It would have been a vicious retreat though,” Alex pointed out.

Ellie could feel tears welling up in her eyes. Her dad must have been in the thick of things, watching as his home burned and his family and the people he grew up with died, then been forced to flee across open country while the Nazzadi hounded them out of spite. He would have been then stuck in London during the Siege. In all probability the stress caused him to suffer psychogenic amnesia and just forget who he was and what he had seen. In between sadness over her father’s loss, she felt a creeping terror grow within her. She was under an enormous amount of stress and she could feel her own psyche buckling with the strain. Would the same fate befall her? Would she forget who she was?

Alex just stood by, looking distinctly uncomfortable. He looked like he wanted to say something but knew that he shouldn’t; that he should do something but he had no idea how to properly do it. Instead he just stood to the side. Ellie wanted to scream at him for being so cold, yet she was also glad he stayed away. Setting the gun down, she crawled back into her sleeping bag.

Alex glanced down at her and then said, “If you want to talk about it, I will be over here.”

Ellie watched him sit back down to begin tinkering with the weapons spread out before him and she wanted to scream at him. How could he be so insensitive? She wanted to slap him for being such a jerk. Instead she just buried her face in the sleeping bag and let her tears soak into the material.

After some interminable period of sitting and stewing in her own angst Ellie heard Alex grunt and put down whatever he was working on, followed a few moments later by Seras asking, “What did you do now?”

“Nothing. Ellie’s just overstressed and tired,” Alex answered.

There was a huff of feminine annoyance and Ellie felt Seras settling in next to her. After a moment she asked, “What’s wrong?”

Ellie took a long time to answer before she asked, “Will I lose my mind like my father?”

There was a long, awkward silence almost interrupted by Alex going to clear his throat in preparation to speak, but whatever it was he had to say died before he could go any further. Finally Seras said, “Ellie, I’ve seen thousands of people under enormous amounts of stress, and they all react differently, even within families. You’ve seen things that would have left most people shattered, gibbering wrecks, yet you’re still here. If you haven’t broken by now, I don’t think you will break.”

Ellie sniffed for a moment and then asked, “You think so?”

“Well, unless you see the true form of a Great Old One. Bets are off on that,” Alex butted in.

Ellie could feel the glare Seras directed at Mercer like heat back scattering from a laser, but he responded, “What? I’m just being honest.”

Instead of breaking down again, Ellie snorted and asked, “So the only thing that can break me would be the sort of thing that would kill me anyway.”

“Probably,” Alex stated casually.

Ellie snorted and laughed. Pulling her head out of her sleeping bag she asked, “Any other good news?”

Seras pursed her lips and looked a little shifty eyed before she said, “Yeah, about the Index, that thing we’ve been looking for…”

“It’s under an NEG military base now?” Alex asked dryly.

“The island it’s on appears to have been claimed by the Esoteric Order of Dagon as a staging point,” Seras answered with a grimace.

Alex shrugged and said, “Well, this was a bit of a waste of time, although sticking to the Scottish Highlands for a few more weeks should let us shake the trail of anyone looking for us.”

Ellie blinked and said, “Wait… you told me that the Index was a sort of magical repository.”

Seras nodded and said, “Yes, it is where the Hellsing family and the British Crown stored arcane lore and various artefacts that they wanted far away from London instead of stored in the British Museum or other such hiding places.”

“So it is dangerous?” Ellie pressed.

“In the wrong hands, it can be. But it’s warded against detection and unauthorized entry,” Seras replied.

“Could a sufficiently powerful sorcerer break the wards?” Ellie asked, scared at her own line of thinking.

“Well, yes, but…” Seras began.

“Could a Star Spawn do it?” Ellie pressed.

There was a long pause before Seras replied, “Of course, but…”

“If the Dagonites control the island they’ll notice something is amiss eventually, or NEG shelling will expose something. If they realize the treasure trove they are sitting on, they will call for allies to break the wards. And then… and then…” Ellie trailed off in horror.

Alex glowered and asked, “You want to attack?”

“We… we can’t let the Dagonites get their hands on any more firepower than they already have,” Ellie stated.

A neutral look settled over Seras and she asked, “Mistress, do you wish to assault the island with just the three of us, driving the enemy back into the sea, so that we can take control of the Index and its artefacts?”

Ellie looked between the Seras and Alex before she suggested weakly, “We could tell the NEG about it?”

Alex grunted and said, “That’s probably a bad idea.”

“I… I… we have to do something!” Ellie protested.

“Command me and I will obey, mistress,” Seras responded.

Ellie hesitated for a long time with those two pairs of inhuman eyes staring at her before she struggled to rise as her knees protested the insanity of her brain. She felt crystal clarity in what she had to do. Letting the sleeping bag slip away, she marched herself over to the gun that Alex had made for her, and picked it up with shaking hands.

“W-we t-t-take b-back-k-k th-th-the i-island-d,” Ellie stuttered out, aware of how little confidence she had to inspire.

Seras beamed and her eyes glowed fiercely with inner light that promised bloodshed. Alex on the other hand was silent for a long time before something seemed to rise to the surface of his soul, something buried for a long time. He sort of half smiled, half frowned before he said, “The whole world wants us dead, yet you wish to risk everything to save them all. These creatures have not wronged you personally, so there is no revenge to be had here. The only danger is still distant and may not come to pass. You wish to fight only for an ideal.”

Ellie quivered at the accusation and asked, “Y-Yes. What is wrong with that?”

“Fighting for an ideal ends with either disillusionment or corruption of the ideal,” Alex stated with utmost certainty.

“We still need to do this,” Ellie replied.

Alex nodded and asked, “When we hunt, do we kill?”

“We gut every fish and fish fucker there,” Ellie replied.

Alex grinned and said, “You’ve got steel in you girl. Alright, let’s figure out how to do this.”

[LadyTevar]

She's a Hellsing. She's got solid titanium for a spine.

Now, let's gut some fish

[Academia Nut]

Hurtling through the cold, damp air of Northern Scotland at night, Alex mused on the irony that assaulting the Dagonite base had turned out to be a considerably trickier proposition than originally anticipated. He and bodies of water had not got along very well, but he had been somewhat surprised to find out that it was considerably worse for Seras. Apparently just being over a large body of water drained her of the majority of her abilities and left her vulnerable. If they wanted to get her over to the base that unknowingly housed the Index, Seras had to have someone else steer the vehicle until they hit land. Considering that trying to take any vehicle across the water without a strike force as back-up was an excellent way to get said craft shot out from under you, someone had to go in ahead and disable the local defences.

Alex had evolved some defences over the years against immersion in water that kept his osmotic balance intact, but they were rather uncomfortable and inefficient. In any case trying to swim through Deep One infested waters was asking to get mauled by sharks and worse things, which ran the risk of alerting the base and getting anti-material weapons trained on him, which would be a death sentence. As such, a little creative thinking had been required.

Eventually they had settled on Seras simply throwing Alex to the island. They had worked out that if he formed a solid sphere she could actually shot put him the required distance, but then his entrance would be decidedly lacking in stealth. Instead, he had reinforced his spin to become stiff as a javelin, and then after he reached the apex of his arc he had spread out for a maximum glide. This let him come in on the base flat and low. Of course, he was horrifically exposed gliding like that, so he pulled out two of his more specialized abilities for this.

The first was to pull off some tricky biochemistry to extrude a variety of inorganic ferrocarbon compounds that were excellent radar absorbers. The second was to constrict his active biomass into his core, leaving his exterior a dead shell that he actively pumped heat away from. He really hated using the stealth material because it was expensive in terms of biomass since he had to digest the extruded anti-radiation material to use it again, and it was extraordinarily brittle so he actually took more damage with it active than even in his squishy human form. Using the anti-thermal trick was even worse since the dead shell could only be maintained at room temperature for perhaps a minute or two, depending on conditions, he very rapidly overheated his core, and again it was expensive in terms of biomass. Still, for the times when he absolutely needed to maintain a low profile, he had those tricks, and this was one of those times.

Gliding in a few metres above the dark waves below, Alex watched the base approaching with thermal vision and knew that he would not need to worry about the lost biomass for long. Seras’ throw had been perfectly angled and timed and he was on a course for a lone guard strolling along the sea wall on patrol in the miserable damp and rain. The man did not even have time to notice the shadow looming out of the night before Alex was upon him, and then he was added to the chorus of screams and Alex was casually strolling along in his place.

For two full hours Alex maintained the ruse, grumbling with his fellow human Dagonites about the weather and the stupidity of posting guards when the monitoring equipment and automated defences were more than enough, but the hallowed Deep Ones were not particularly comfortable with relying on the technology and demanded personnel actually walk out a beat. Alex even joked, “It’s a good thing the NEG doesn’t have any shape shifters of their own!” Technically it was true, but he had to suppress the evil grin that threatened to break out with every fibre of his willpower.

Alex was not a nice person.

Decades of experience with infiltrating past the best security on Earth, including a considerable number of years in places designed off the planet by inhumanly intelligent minds, let him quickly map out the security cameras and stations. The base was positively ancient in its security design, using distance created by barriers as its primary means of keeping things secure, which was laughably inadequate, especially against Mercer. He ghosted quietly through the dead zones, switching identities like a spy in a pulp thriller switching costumes.

By the third hour into his infiltration, absences were starting to go noticed. No one sprang immediately to ‘shape shifting cannibalistic nightmare’, which was actually what the NEG or Migou would have probably done, but then again the Dagonites thought that they were the monsters. While he was strictly professional about his business, Alex could not help but revel in getting to indulge in the pleasure of teaching dumb fucks a lesson on how tiny of fish they really were.

“Where is Henderson?” The Deep One commander of the base growled irritably in the phlegm-filled tongue of his species, the language not particularly suited for use above the waves.

Alex shrugged in his current form and replied, “I have not seen him in an hour Hallowed One, and he was at his post then.” The statement was technically true, even if Henderson had ceased to exist a minute after Alex had first seen him, after which point it was impossible to ever see him again, even if a remarkable likeness of him had walked away shortly after.

Blinking a large, fishy eye ill-suited for life on land, the commander replied, “We can’t afford lax security tonight! The Emissary arrives tonight!”

Alex quickly trawled through his stolen memories and found that an important Deep One delegate was supposed to arrive soon. While he was relieved that nothing more potent was going to show up, considering the lack of strategic importance to the base, that strongly suggested that they had discovered something rather important, like say the hidden cache of arcane lore that was supposed to be buried beneath the oldest strata of fortifications in this place. Of course, Alex’s currently assumed identity did not have the sort of clearance to know enough to ask the important questions, so instead he simply replied, “I will inspect this flagrant breach in protocol personally and at once, Hallowed One!”

“Do so,” the commander grunted, and Alex immediately departed.

Along the way he stopped by the operations centre, which for some insane reason was a separate room from where the commander was stationed while on duty. It was probably a Deep One thing again; they had a general distrust of human technology and preferred to rely on their own senses, which were worse than human senses when they were out of the water. It was sad really.

“I want a general report in at all posts. There have been reports of slacking off and men missing their patrols. I don’t care if it is rainy outside, the Hallowed Ones care not for a little water, and we have a very important visitor tonight. I will be making a patrol of all stations, in random order, and anyone I catch away from his post will face my wrath personally, which will be a mercy compared to what the commander will do when I report to him,” Alex ordered imperiously. He then waited as the communications officers passed along the message, looming over them like the Sword of Damocles so that they would be properly motivated to pass along his message properly.

Once satisfied that they had sent out the message correctly, Alex smiled as he moved into the optimal position before he grinned and said, “Oh and I have one more order for all of you: die.”

The circle of razor sharp tendrils burst out so fast that no one in the room had time to scream before their lungs and other internal organs were shredded, and then their biomass was consumed by viral infection and transformation, so that as the tendrils withdrew back into Alex only the ruined machinery and a few splatters of blood at the various workstations gave any indication that something horrible had happened.

Grinning, Alex slipped out of one of the windows into the night, making sure to punch the armoured glass into the ruined operations centre for that extra touch. Slinking into the deep, brooding shadows of a concrete wall that had been built during the Second World War as reinforcement to this constantly renovated fortress, Alex waited for a good five minutes before he heard the wail of an alarm ring out into the night.

The operations centre had contained the central servers that coordinated the various weapons systems, so they were all running independently now and most of the automated systems were essentially useless as they had to fail safe lest they do more damage than an enemy by accidentally engaging their own forces. Alex took the time to pull the detonator he had submerged in his biomass out, listening to the klaxon ringing out in the night before he casually pressed the big red button.

There was a distant thump as the explosives Alex had planted among the generators went off, followed by the base plunging into total darkness, followed by a dim red glow from the interior as the weak emergency lighting came up. With the servers shredded and the primary generators suffering from a terminal case of ‘blown the fuck up’, every defensive system was completely isolated from the whole, leaving the base was ripe for an attack that it could not possibly hold off. The Dagonites cowering in their NaNBC shelters where they remotely controlled the various weapons all knew this, but they were expecting an NEG attack.

Well, at the moment the majority of them were expecting an NEG attack since Alex was not yet done setting the horror movie atmosphere just right. People were going to want to know what was going on, they would be frantically asking operations for information, but unfortunately none would be forthcoming, just rumours floating from one mostly isolated pocket to the next. What was happening? Who was attacking? Where were they attacking from?

Stealing from shadow to shadow, one eye tuned to the visible spectrum and the other to the infrared like the mature Deep Ones, Alex watched as a squad stormed past, trying to bring order and control to the situation. He was upon them before they knew what hit them, his claws flashing out and disembowelling the group in seconds. Ripping off a head, he consumed the brain inside the skull and then plopped the still wet helmet on his own head, quickly accessing the radio gear using the previous owner’s pass codes and biometrics.

He then proceeded to scream and blubber with all the panic of his thousands of victims in their final moments. He picked up the assault rifles of the squad and fired them randomly into the air on full auto, adding to the noise and confusion. He then discarded the gear back among the pile of offal and gore that had been the squad and slipped back into the night, to wait for the next response.

Someone panicked and pulled a trigger somewhere, causing the night to light up with coherent photons backscattering off of rain as an anti-aircraft laser fired into the sky. A few seconds later shells, plasma, and charge particles also lanced out into the night as the various gunnery stations started shooting at spooky shades, all sure that the tiniest ghost of a response was the enemy they were imagining was out there.

Despite the rain that drizzled down and soaked everything, Alex could smell the heady mix of fear pheromones, both human and Deep One, being released into the night. He enjoyed hunting Deep Ones, they could easily be assimilated into his biomass, but their minds were different enough that it was a pleasurably exotic experience to eat one. With their incredibly long lives, durability, and immersion in the occult, the Deep Ones were remarkably hard to rattle, but when they did, their fear was so much more primal and animalistic. Humans were terrified of death, but all were mortal and had to accept it somewhere at the core of their psyches. Deep Ones on the other hand could live nearly forever except by violence, so their fear of death was the fear of the alien and unknown, the part of the universe that should not be but despite their denials remained a fundamental aspect of the cosmos.

The season was wrong for lightning, but the energy weapons stabbing into the sky made an acceptable substitute for the inconstant, flashing illumination that only revealed part of Alex’s movement through the base. In the brief moments of revelation he allowed his selected targets to witness, he made sure they got to see the grin he wore on his face.

He was, after all, having a great deal of fun.

[White Haven]

Did...did AN just continue a dormant fic?

*clutches chest and staggers*

Weird and spiffy timing, too; I just re-read New Blood not two days ago.

[Academia Nut]

I got bitten by a weird bug I suppose. I have no idea how long this fey mood will last, but we'll see.

[Lerryn]

*glee* I do love it when someone shows the monsters that there's always someone bigger and badder out there.
Alex Mercer can pull off some ridiculously cool tricks. But when is Seras going to get into the mix? It would be rude of Alex to hog all the fun, wouldn't it? Unless she's decided to pull baby-sitting duty, I suppose.

[Academia Nut]

For not the first time in the past few days, Ellie wondered what the fuck it was that she was thinking, but this latest stunt was going beyond the pale. Not only was she running with a pair of abominations, not only had she been convinced by said abominations to go looking for a repository of arcane lore, and not only had she decided to convince said abominations to assault a Dagonite fortress sitting on top of the repository, but now she was running headlong into said assault before it finished.

To save a bloodthirsty abomination against humanity.

Ellie was fairly certain she had gone insane some time ago and not noticed, but she was not quite certain if sane people felt as terrified as she was as she piloted the small inflatable hovercraft across the rough North Sea in the middle of the night while it was raining and a military installation was firing anti-vehicle energy weapons into the air. She was fairly certain that a sane person would not have stepped into the hovercraft in the first place, yet here she was, trembling with terror as she guided the tiny, fragile transport with a bloodsucking monster laid out on the rubber floor towards the now burning island.

In all the steps that brought her to this place, the last was by far the most insane. The plan had been for Mercer to ensure that the base defences were down so that Ellie could transport the incapacitated Seras across the water in the hovercraft, and then the two of them would mop up while she stayed in some place secure, then they would locate the Index at their leisure. Instead, four hours in to Mercer’s infiltration, an hour after the explosions had started; there had been a brief radio transmission with his voice.

“Uh… I’ve got a bit of a problem here that I could use just a touch of help with…” There was then an enormous crash in the background and the line had then gone dead.

For some reason Ellie got in the damn hovercraft, Seras climbing in obediently, not saying anything to encourage her or to rein her in. It was only after she had set out towards the distant fires and energy pulses that Ellie realized what she had done. She was rushing into the maw of death to aid a creature that ate people, mind and body. It was stupid, foolhardy, and again, insane. She had lived all of her life hiding in the shadows, staying away from the things so much more powerful than her that could crush her like a bug.

That was what she was, a bug. She was a cockroach, skittering among the ruins of civilization, scavenging on the litter left behind by those more important than her, be they living or dead. Cockroaches didn’t pick fights with things that could step on them without even noticing. They couldn’t pick fights with such beings.

Yet despite her fear, Ellie found that she could not turn the tiller away, that she could not return to the not so distant mainland. Her whole body shivered with fear she could not describe in its enormity, yet her arm kept the tiller adamantly pointed at the island. She was going to get Seras there, and she in turn would aid Alex.

By the light of fires burning and weapons fire flashing into the sky like the thunderbolts of furious gods of old, Ellie watched as the island began to loom up larger and larger, absorbing more of the horizon and sky as she neared. She could hear the waves breaking against the sea walls and cliffs, and she knew that if she missed the docks in the darkness she could easily find her craft dashed against rocks or wander into the killing zone of a still active weapons emplacement. Fortunately, like bunkers that contained the weapons emplacements for the docks burned like hellish lighthouses, guiding her in.

Ellie received no warning for what happened next. One moment she was navigating towards a long concrete sea wall that jutted out into the rough waters, trying to keep it close so as to let it guide her in but not get to close as to be swept into it by the waves, the next everything exploded. Fully half the island suddenly went from sullen fortress expanded upon by generations of soldiers, to an expanding wall of rubble and shrapnel carried along by a shockwave.

Somewhat belatedly Ellie registered the whip-crack noises of a flight of supersonic missiles screaming through the air, but then the rapidly expanding cloud of chaos consumed her position. The sea lurched and the hovercraft went with it, a wave kicked up by the unnatural wind washing over the bow, threatening to swamp her. Ellie screamed and held on, feeding maximum power from the D-Cell into the fans to try to clear the skirts and keep them afloat. Miraculously, the bow then breech the water once more, but in the great scoop of water it had picked up Ellie could see Seras floating along with.

Ellie didn’t think; she just reacted. She let go of the tiller and lunged for Seras as she was being carried over the inflated sides of the craft. The vampire – she – was remarkably heavy for her size, and despite her archaic uniform offering more handholds than a modern one, Ellie could feel her grip slipping, both from her hands upon Seras and her feet upon the craft. She let loose a scream within her helmet that only she could hear; a scream of panic and desperation.

For a brief flicker of a moment she considered just letting go. Seras would sink into the water and hopefully be carried by currents out to the bottom of the middle of the North Sea, or even into the Arctic, to never be found again. She could survive immersion, she was just inactive until she got back on land, but it could be centuries or millennia before that happened by chance. Ellie would be rid of her and with any luck Alex would be destroyed by the attack on the island and whatever he needed help with.

Then the next volley of missiles arrived, closer this time, and the air reached out to smack her like a fist to her entire body, causing everything to go black.

Somewhere in the blackness, a voice chuckled. It was a rich, dark chuckle filled with amused contempt and infinite malice by its very nature, yet it felt almost warmly affectionate, in a patronizing way. In fact, Ellie immediately thought that the temperature of the sound was 35°C, just below body temperature – like a freshly killed corpse, not yet cooled.

“You have quite the spirit,” the voice in the blackness stated in a pleased, almost nostalgic manner. Given expression through words, the voice was aristocratic in all the very best and very worst ways that word could be applied. It spoke of enormous yet casual power, and a willingness to use it upon any passing whim or fancy.

Ellie had no voice with which to reply, so she kept staring into the abyssal dark, terrified by the voice so close to her.

“Still much to learn, I suppose, but that will change with time. It has been so long since I last saw such… potential,” the voice stated in a way that made Ellie’s skin crawl. Somehow, despite the fact that the voice made neither footstep nor the sound of breathing, she could tell that the presence behind it had moved closer, so that it was right behind her, hovering somewhere just behind the base of her skull.

“Daughter of monsters and the masters of monsters… you will go far, very far indeed, and put on a grand show for the watchers and judges. Tell me, what do you fear more from the universe: insignificance, or significance?” The voice inquired, sending centipedes dancing up and down Ellie’s spine.

Despite the fact that she had not said a word, the voice answered for her with an amused, “Both? Rare wisdom from one so young! Ha! Well, you should know that all of your species current woes stem from the fact that you impressed Fate itself several times in the past two centuries. You went from insignificance to significance, and were made to dance and prance, to suffer for the entertainment of beings as old as the cosmos itself, just to see if more flashes of brilliance would manifest. Then again, for all of your suffering, you have also been allowed to keep your civilization for a few paltry decades longer than originally allowed, just to see what you would do with it. So the question remains as to which you fear more.”

The presence behind the voice remains, hovering where she blessedly cannot see it, but she knows that it will wait patiently for her to actually vocalize her answer. It had the time to wait a meaninglessly short period like until hydrogen fusion ceased in the universe. Ellie found she had no voice, and yet she still somehow, strangely, vocalized her thoughts and said timidly, “Insignificance. I fear insignificance more.”

“Ah, but you have spent your whole life being insignificant, have you not? Then again, perhaps you have tasted why it is that even though there is no such thing as a worm skin rug, there are still tigers in the world. Oh wait, I suppose from your timeframe the Rapine Storm finished them off,” the voice said, suddenly diverging, before there was the sound of fingers snapping somewhere behind Ellie. The voice then continued and said, “My analogy is now correct. Incidentally, if you want to see something hilarious I suggest visiting the Indian Storm Front.”

The voice chuckled with insane glee at whatever mad prank it had just pulled that somehow involved tigers before it said, “So you have chosen the path of becoming something the universe acknowledges. Well Young Queen, since you have decided to open your eyes, it is time for you to see.”

Ellie blinked, and suddenly she realized that she was not staring into blackness. She was staring into all colours of the spectrum, from the deepest depths of gamma radiation to the kilometres long waves beneath radio, and other stranger forms of radiation, a tiny fraction of which humanity called ‘colour’. This incomprehensible admixture of radiation all shone from a great sphere extending out into higher dimensions so enormous that it was parallel to an infinitely long line and yet still curved. She had seen blackness before because she had not had the truth pointed out to her.

She also knew that staring at this incomprehensibly huge thing that it was staring back at her. It had no name of its own, for it did need a way to describe itself to itself. The infinitesimal creatures that moved within had various names for it, but few had actually been forced to behold it from this perspective. Ellie knew that other intelligences had names for it that had been debased into English, but no language held any particular value for this entity. It Was. It Is. It Will Always Be.

It was the Cosmos. It was everything and everywhere and everywhen, and yet nothing and nowhere and nowhen. It had neither beginning nor end nor centre, spatially or temporally. It had no boundaries, and yet she was outside, looking in at the reflection of everything that was not.

Drawn by tremendous tidal forces, Ellie was brought into the membrane that separated it from itself while the voice laughed behind her, growing increasingly distant as she was swept across the event horizon. For the briefest of moments she heard a mournful viol playing, the notes strangely interconnecting to produce a weird threnody fit for the passing of galaxies, and then the blackness she had never left returned.

All was dark and weightless, yet not without pressure. For a brief, confused moment, Ellie had no idea where she was before the frigid salt water began to surge up her nostrils. Confusion was immediately transformed into thrashing panic as Ellie realized that she had gone overboard and her filter mask was filling up with the sea as she sank. Even as her eyes started to burn with salt she managed to keep them open long enough to orient herself towards the diffuse yellow-orange of fires burning in the air above.

In the initial panic, she also noted that her hand was still wrapped in a death grip around one of Seras’ arms, the vampire as still and inert as a corpse while she was forced into contact with the water. For half a heartbeat Ellie considered just letting go, letting the vampire sink into the deeps while she saved herself, but she savagely kicked the idea away. She was as good as dead if she surfaced alone, so she might as well drown heroically in the attempt.

Ellie grabbed Seras with her arms locked under her armpits and then began to kick towards the surface. Her frantic attempts at propulsion were greatly stymied by the fact that not only was she dragging Seras but she was also weighed down by her survival gear, gun, and ammunition. Everything felt heavy, and even as the meagre supply of oxygen that had been in her lungs and not displaced by water when she fell in was rapidly burned away by her exertions she found that she was making no progress.

Ellie was going to die. She could feel the reaper perched on her shoulder as the light from above faded. Had that strange interlude, the details already fading fast like a vivid dream in the morning, been the reaper taunting her with a taste of the other side before she ultimately succumbed? Despite being underwater she could almost imagine that she could hear discordant piping and ethereal strings in the great distance.

…better to live five minutes as a tiger than a lifetime as a worm…

Ellie wasn’t sure where the antiquated expression had come from within her mind, but she grabbed onto the idea. This was her five minutes. Alex needed help. Seras was useless in the water. The Dagonites would find the Index eventually if they were left to their own devices. It was all down to her, and so she kept kicking long after she would have normally bowed to the inevitable.

Abruptly her head burst through the surface of the water that she had not realized she was already close to, causing fresh energy to flood her system as hope spiked through her. Vision blurred with the water burning her eyes and still choking her beneath her mask and copious amounts of smoke obscuring the world around, Ellie picked the closest seeming fire and started to kick towards it while desperately trying to clear her mask of the water that had seeped in. She would probably get dashed against rocks or a sea wall, but it was her best bet considering the circumstances.

Time slowed and stretched, going rubbery and viscous, every kick a lifetime as her oxygen continued to run low. The temporary boost from the extra spike of adrenaline and other hormones quickly gave way against the limits of human endurance. Ellie was slowing, her head starting to dip back beneath the waves. She… she had to find a way. She had… had to… to somehow… keep… keep going.

Ellie sank beneath the waves once more, but this time her feet connected with something solid. Acting on principle no longer, but pure survival instinct, Ellie finally let Seras go. The body of the other woman drifted beneath the water but came to settle next to Ellie’s exhausted legs as she violently ripped her flooded mask off so that she could spit out the sea water in her nose and mouth and inhale fresh air.

Her first breath caused her to nearly black out, and with her vision spinning and whole body feeling like she had been beaten with rubber hoses she stumbled through the water, up the concrete slope of the docks. Soon her body was wracked with coughs as her lungs protested their mistreatment. The rain falling through the smoke and pulverized concrete dust was dirty and freezing, and Ellie soon found that she was starting to shake uncontrollably.

With one last step she got far enough out of the water so that when she collapsed she was not face down in the surf, to drown in a centimetre of water after having swum her way out of the waves. The whole burning world spun crazily about her, but she could swear that she heard slow applause faintly in the distance. In response, she raised a defiant middle finger to the muddled night sky, and the clapping faded into delighted laughter that soon too disappeared into the lap of the waves, the patter of the rain, and the crackle of the fires.

She could die here and she would be content at having spit in the face of the inevitable just this once. It was fun.

As her arm fell exhaustedly back to her side, the universe decided that it was not done screwing with her yet as dark shapes began to emerge from the water. Fuck. Deep Ones. She felt that she should be absolutely terrified right about now, shaken to her core by the prospect by being taken alive by the fish, but she found that she was probably already going into shock and could not give a damn.

She looked up at the glassy eyes of the closest one as it loomed over her, dispassionately leering down at her with its perpetual frog grin. Drops of weak cement pattering against her face, Ellie glared at and said slowly and weakly, “Same to you as the universe.”

The Deep One did not get the joke and instead simply reached down with clawed hands and grabbed her by the front of her survival suit with its webbed, clawed hands and began to drag her the rest of the way up the docking ramp. Some part of Ellie remembered all the things said about what Deep Ones did to captured women, but she just did not give a damn. For no particular reason she started to half-laugh, half-cough at the situation.

She remembered the reason she was laughing a moment later when a Deep One emerged from the water carrying Seras’ limp form, and she redoubled her hysterical laughter as she raised her middle finger once more. The Deep Ones looked confused amongst each other for a moment before one shrugged and they kept going, the one carrying Seras taking one last step before he cleared the boundary of the water.

The rain stopped falling. Not in the sense that the supply ran out, but that the droplets actually became suspended in midair as the law of gravity took a breather in abject terror. Nearby fires went strange, burning as bright blue semi-spheres and a sense of weightless anticipation overcame the scene. All went silent and timeless.

“Fuck ‘em,” Ellie whispered, and Seras’ eyes snapped open, burning a brilliant crimson like an unnaturally bright pair of lunar eclipses.

Ellie smiled and closed her eyes in satisfaction. The rain abruptly became warm against her skin, warm as a body pressed up against her. When her eyes next opened it was from the prick of pain from a hypodermic needle designed a century ago for horses punching into her heart. Her whole body jerking up, she found herself in an explosion distorted room with a small bonfire, Seras pulling an enormous injector away from Ellie’s chest.

“Sorry Mistress, the instructions mention that the machines in the mix are too large to use less painful methods,” Seras replied apologetically.

Now feeling considerably more energized as the massive dose of emergency revivification chemicals, super oxygenation nano-capsules, painkillers, amphetamines, and repair nannites were flooding her system, Ellie recognized one of her emergency injectors from her medical kit in Seras’ hand. Wincing away the nauseous feeling that washed over her as the machines and drugs began to purge her system of the toxins generated by a near-death experience.

Rubbing her chest while coughing up blood stained with unpleasant black bits, Ellie said, “Let’s not do that again. Ever.”

“I agree. Where in the bloody hell do you think Mercer is?” Seras asked in irritation, bringing up the reason they had to make the near suicidal crossing.

Right on cue one of the doors flew open and was abruptly closed by Mercer, who saw the two women sitting inside and he blinked in surprise. He then blurted out in gobsmacked nonchalance, “They have a shoggoth.”

The room then exploded.

[Singular Quartet]

You're a dick. I thought I'd mention that, given your cliffhanger. Just so you know.

[Academia Nut]

Blame Robo Jesus. He's the one who suggested that the last chapter was missing cliffhangers and mindfucks.

[Singular Quartet]

Blame Robo Jesus. He's the one who suggested that the last chapter was missing cliffhangers and mindfucks.

Well clearly Robo Jesus needs to be punched in the balls.

[LadyTevar]

WOOHOO! It's Alive and Kicking!!

[Robo Jesus]

Blame Robo Jesus. He's the one who suggested that the last chapter was missing cliffhangers and mindfucks.

Well clearly Robo Jesus needs to be punched in the balls.

Your appreciation of my constructive criticism contributions is noted.

[Singular Quartet]

Blame Robo Jesus. He's the one who suggested that the last chapter was missing cliffhangers and mindfucks.

Well clearly Robo Jesus needs to be punched in the balls.

Your appreciation of my constructive criticism contributions is noted.

Your welcome!

[White Haven]

"They have a cave troll shoggoth."

Heh. Eheheheh. Eeeeeheheheh.

[Academia Nut]

“Okay Ellie, let’s take stock of the situation. You have, by your own completely willing actions, successfully inserted yourself into a Dagonite fortress; and an active Dagonite fortress with trained soldiers and Deep One warriors at that. The fortress is currently on fire in places and has repeatedly been bombed, no doubt the opportunistic attacks you suspected the NEG might make once the air defences went down, which was one of the many reasons that you decided to wait for morning before making your approach. However, you decided to play the part of the air cav and come running to the rescue of your viral abomination great-great-uncle, which caused you to clinically die for a minute or two before your heart was chemically restarted by the vampiric abomination that also follows you around. Shortly after that the previously mentioned abominations were drawn into a fight with a third abomination the size of a small train, which you are now running from as quickly as you can because fuck getting anywhere near that thing. Just its entrance nearly cost you your left eye, which you currently can’t open because of the blood pouring down the cut in your forehead from all the stone shrapnel. Also, you think you’re hearing things. Also, you’re talking to yourself, and you’re really kind of rambling,” Ellie muttered quietly to herself as she limped through the dark corridors of the base.

A small portion of her mind that was self reflective on this sort of thing was telling her that the narration was probably an acute response to stress, the biggest one being less than an arm span from a fucking shoggoth at one point. She thought being around Alex and Seras had inured her to such nightmares, but she could not shake the image of that great black wall of tar ploughing its way through the stone and concrete wall like it was made of paper. If anything being around those two had made it worse as seeing Alex scooped up into the churning protoplasm as it grew jaws just for crushing him let her know just how fragile she truly was against it. She could distantly hear the battle Seras had thrown her away from, but every once in a while she would hear a clear, trilling cry ringing through the damage twisted halls and nearly have a heart attack. Just the thought of seeing that thing again sent shivers up and down her spine.

Carried along by terrors both imagined and real along the path of least resistance, Ellie found herself in darker and darker halls of the base, deep into the bedrock of the island. She could feel not only the weight of the fortifications pressing down on her, but of the history of this place. The Dagonites were only the most recent tenants, the lonely island just off the coast of Scotland having been in use for well over a millennia. Ellie had already seen where the character of the walls around her had shifted to the steel and concrete of the mid-20th Century. Seras had explained that the island had been upgraded shortly after the Second World War to serve as a repository, having previously been a medieval castle used as a prison. As for what it had been used for before that, Seras could only say that there was a reason the island had been handed over to the Hellsings.

Ellie abruptly found herself standing at the threshold of a staircase cut from the stone of the island unknown centuries before. Portable LED lamps had replaced the flickering torches that had once been ensconced in the holders, but the illumination was insufficient, almost as if the ominous structure was actively absorbing the light. From somewhere deep within, she could smell something dank and musty and unwholesome, and she was sure that she could hear distant scratching noises.

Knowing a bad idea when she saw one, Ellie was just about to turn around and find another path when she heard an abnormally clear piping of “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” Before her conscious mind had a chance to catch up, she found her feet carrying her down the stairs in a blind panic. Whatever was down here was preferable to what was above. Still, she soon slowed her pace and made an effort to still the noise of her passage and breathing. There was certainly something alive down these stairs.

She gulped as she realized almost instinctively that there was something living down these stairs.

The cloying scent of some great mouldering thing assaulted her nose, but there was also a sickly, salty smell like rotting fish. While far too exhausted to care at the time, the smell immediately brings back the encounter with the Deep Ones, and Ellie nearly collapses then and there. She barely had time to process the event before the shoggoth arrived, but now that she is alone in a dark staircase, descending towards a place for storing things deemed too dangerous by a group that held the leash of vampires, Ellie found that she could barely move. It was all too much.

It was ironically her own fear that gave her the strength to overcome. She could hear her breathing becoming increasingly laboured and ragged as the cold hand of terror wrapped its crushing fingers about her heart and lungs, and the possibility of betrayal of her position forced her to rein in her panicked breaths. The act of forcing the air to come in and out of her lungs quietly calmed her enough that she pushed aside the jagged sliver of horror that was growing in her mind. She was too scared to give in to her fear.

Ellie pressed onward, the gun Alex had cobbled together for her at the ready, silently hoping that the beating it had gone through in the water would not cause it to explode if she had to fire it. Her AR glasses and PCPU had taken quite the kicking, but she had bought her models based on durability and longevity, not raw computational power or fancy gadgets, so both devices were still mostly working. This meant that when it came time to emerge from the stairwell, the barrel of her gun went first so that she could look around the corner without exposing herself.

She nearly screamed, but bit down on her tongue before a sound emerged.

Sitting beneath the island was an enormous cave, formed unknown eons ago. There was a great, central plateau surrounded by a seemingly bottomless, black abyss, with a natural stone bridge connecting to the wall where the stairwell ended. Sitting… nay, brooding, at the centre of the plateau was a large cube the size of a large house, inscribed with arcane patterns that had a shifting, fractal quality to them. Standing at attention in a circle around the front door of the cube were a half dozen Deep One warriors, all protecting what had to be a Deep One sorcerer. The Deep One had to be a sorcerer as the creature was cloaked in white robes bedecked with various strange fetishes and with an oddly twisted bident staff made of some strange purple-gold metal that seemed to glow with the light of unseen and unknowable stars.

Still holding her tongue with her teeth, Ellie sank down in despair as an almost palpable feeling of dread and violation washed over her. They had been too late. The mystic wards designed to keep people from even noticing the Index existed had failed in some way and they had called in a sorcerer to examine things. A Deep One sorcerer. Not only did the fish men possess a greater depth and breadth of mystical knowledge, but they lived long lives so those that travelled arcane paths could do so for dozens of human lifetimes. In fact, judging by the size of the brute and the fact that Deep Ones never stopped growing, the sorcerer was quite possibly older than the structure they were in.

Ellie felt her mind shutting down as she folded her body in on itself. She was fucked. There was no doubt about it. There was far too much arrayed against her. If she was lucky they would just kill her. If she was unlucky, they would drag her off and… her mind shied away from what had already almost happened. She considered turning her gun on herself right then and there. It would be so much simpler if…

…better to live five minutes as a tiger than a lifetime as a worm…

The antique phrase echoed once more through Ellie’s mind, and some part of her that was harder than she ever thought possible clamped down on her fear. She asked herself a simple question: why should she save the Deep Ones the bullet? If she was going to die, should it not be to their bullets or blades or claws? If she was going to die, she was going to drag at least one of them screaming into the long night with her.

Of course, they were Deep One warriors – and likely elites at that if they were guarding a sorcerer. Peeking the camera on the end of her gun around the corner once more, Ellie took a long look at them before she noticed a rather pertinent fact: the warriors were turned inward, toward the sorcerer, rather than outward. They weren’t protecting him from ambush; they were keeping an eye on him in case anything went wrong with the spells he was working. Ellie supposed it made a certain amount of sense, since even if the base was in tatters the only being that could command a shoggoth was a sorcerer of immense power, so they probably felt that any outside threat had already been neutralized.

Ellie considered that the Deep Ones were more scared of what the sorcerer was doing than what Alex was doing and decided that she would shoot him last. She knew enough about general arcane theory to know that spells that abruptly went out of control were an incredibly bad thing. The sorcerer likely couldn’t move from his position anyway, so despite being by far the most dangerous threat, he would have to go last.

Turning away from the archway once again, Ellie took a deep breath. This was objectively the most insane thing she had done in a week that defied rational comprehension. She was a dilettante planning on fighting a half dozen elite fish monsters, alone. She was quite literally committing suicide by doing this. Given that, she supposed that if she was going to commit suicide she might as well be thorough.

Opening up the emergency medical kit strapped to her thigh, Ellie pulled out the second of three auto-injectors. Seras had already used one to restart her heart and undo the effects of shock and hypoxia. Just using one of the military grade stims was considered a risky, emergency procedure. Aside from just being dangerous in general, the injectors were heavily regulated due to what Ellie was about to do. Twisting around the manual dose meters, Ellie set the injector to ‘Male – 200 kg – >5min since collapse’, which was the maximum possible setting and could theoretically cause her heart to explode.

The resuscitation drugs could also be abused to make ‘berserker sticks’, as the street name had come to call them. The nannites in the mix meant that Ellie probably only had a 50/50 chance of total cardiac arrest, an aneurysm, or an exploded aorta. Internal haemorrhaging and blindness requiring arcanotherapy to correct were probably inevitable though. Considering what she was doing, she liked those odds.

Holding the auto-injector before her, hovering just above the point just beneath her sternum pointed at an upward angle, Ellie considered what she was about to do one last time before she pressed it against her chest. The computer controls within detected a triggering event and fired the oversized needle through the layers of material that composed her hazard suit and then through skin, fat, and muscle, to stop just short of penetrating her heart. The contents of the injector flooded into her system, and what was supposed to try to revive a near dead male soldier over three times her mass hit her like a runaway train.

Ellie suddenly felt like she was on fire, from within and without, and like she was going to explode. A few seconds after the excessive chemical cocktail hit her heart it spread to her brain and then time slowed to a deliciously agonizing crawl. Ellie knew that every part of her hurt, but she was so enraged by the stimulants that she failed to give a fuck. She could practically feel the blood vessels in her eyeballs bursting from her skyrocketing blood pressure, but it was a good pain.

Moving with lazy slowness from her perspective, Ellie swung her gun out so that she was still protected by the rock but that her AR sight was resting perfectly on the head of the Deep One warrior closest to the bridge leading to her position. She gently squeezed the trigger twice, and the recoil compensator worked just as Alex had said it would so that the weapon did not go flying out of her hands with the awkward hold. The Deep One she had targeted responded in a considerably more violently energetic way, his head exploding into a red mist that splattered all over his nearest fellows.

The Deep Ones responded quickly, their assault rifles already at the ready in case anything happened to the sorcerer. Unfortunately for them, they were moving in syrup compared to Ellie and she did not need to move much to switch to the next target in their tightly spaced group. Another head exploded. And then another. And then the Deep Ones were moving just ahead of where Ellie could track them. And then they opened fire.

If Ellie had proper training she probably could have kept her cool, considering the fact that she was almost entirely concealed behind the rock wall, but instead she instinctively flinched, not just pulling her gun back but also accidentally jerking the trigger, causing a round to go off. Ellie did not see what exactly happened in the spastic motion of her gun camera going wild, but for some strange reason her left leg exploded in pain and she involuntarily dropped to one knee as she lost her balance.

The pain was fleeting though in the face of drug fuelled aggression and Ellie had soon forced herself shakily back to her feet, just in time to turn and see a matte black spheroid tumbling slowly through the doorway. In a rather strange impulse, Ellie wished that she had access to grenades too as that would have made a much better opening statement that just shooting. The thought was quickly shoved aside by survival instinct, as she had only one path to avoid getting blown to bloody chunks.

Ellie burst from the archway and into the storm of bullets trying to keep her pinned. The Deep Ones had her in a vicious crossfire, but by pure chance had anticipated someone slightly taller and less crouched down to emerge. Ellie could work with pure luck. In the heartbeat between them dropping their aim ever so slightly, Ellie had focused in on the closest Deep One, having stepped out onto the stone bridge to get the proper range to throw the grenade accurately.

With a tiny flick of her thumb Ellie switched the shot designator from semi-auto to full auto and then depressed the trigger. The Deep One was big, tough, and wearing tactical armour. So Ellie shot him a dozen times in a spot no bigger than the circle made by her fist. The Deep One was resilient, but not that resilient and soon it was jerking spastically with the bullets punching into its torso.

Still running forward as fast as the pharmaceuticals could carry her damaged legs and still miraculously keeping ahead of the bullets of the other two Deep Ones, Ellie went low and kicked out the legs of the toppling fish, letting the mass of its body land on her. To their credit, the warriors checked their fire before hitting their comrade and then almost immediately resumed firing once they realized that he was dead. Ellie could feel the bullets punching into the corpse, but the armour worked just as well in death as it had in life.

Not needing to see her enemy with her head to shoot them, Ellie swung her arm out from behind her impromptu shield and sighted on the Deep One to her right, pulling the trigger until the gun clicked empty. Half her shots missed, going wild into the darkness, while most of the other half struck the Deep One in the torso, doing minimal damage. By pure dumb luck one of the rounds caught the warrior in the mouth, where its armour did not cover, and caused the head to explode like an overripe melon struck by a hammer.

Ellie distantly noted that she was feeling rather faint, and that propping the dead Deep One up so that it did not completely cover her and pin her to the ground was getting rather hard to do. Gritting her teeth, she pushed and toppled it back over, exposing herself to the final Deep One warrior. In her sped up state she could see that the box magazine was in the process of dropping out into his hand, to be spun around to load the other magazine strapped to the first. They were both out of ammunition for their guns, and it was a race to reload.

Ellie dropped her rifle, bypassing the race by pulling out her still fully loaded pistol. The enormous 15mm rounds normally required two hands to shoot without having the recoil send the butt of the gun into her face, but Ellie was so wired that she did not care and just fired one handed. The muzzle rise was ridiculous on the barely controlled weapon, but she managed to hit the Deep One centre of mass, shocking it enough that it stumbled back, its reloading interrupted. Ellie grabbed the grip with both hands and fired again, this time more steadily. She hammered round after round into the Deep One. In her excitement, at least three missed. She did not care. She just emptied the magazine into the thing.

Vision blacking out around the edges and going red in the centre, Ellie turned to the last Deep One left alive, the sorcerer. The thing was still standing where it had last been, but this time a shimmering layer of light rippled across its surface in strange quasi-patterns. Ellie barely even registered that. She had an enemy in front of her. She did not even pause to reload. She had an enemy in front of her. She rushed the target, and struck at the area on a human would have a kidney with the butt of her pistol.

Ellie’s world exploded in pain as her right side protested the abuse applied to her kidney. Whipping about seeking her attacker, Ellie found nothing alive but her and the sorcerer. A tiny part of her rapidly dwindling rational mind told her that the sorcerer had to have some sort of spell up that reflected damage back at the attacker, which was probably why her left leg was bleeding.

As she twitched and trembled with barely suppressed energy as she tried to think, the Deep One sorcerer decided that it had enough of Ellie’s bullshit and casually reached out with its staff to whack her left ankle, tripping her. As she tumbled through the air, she felt herself go strangely weightless, and for a moment she thought that Seras had arrived. Instead, she just hung in the air in defiance of gravity so that the sorcerer could get in a proper follow through.

As she sailed through the air, Ellie wondered why she had not been stabbed or knocked into the chasm along the perimeter of the cave and decided that the angle was wrong for either with the way that the sorcerer was standing, and presumably it could not change its facing for ritual reasons. Also, she supposed that the sorcerer would want to be able to see her die so it was best to throw her in front to finish off if necessary.

However, when she reached the surface of the cube, instead of striking the stone surface with bone shattering force, she instead passed through what felt like a layer of what felt like honey before she hit a stone floor hard and started to roll. Dizzy and with pain starting to leak through the chemicals in her blood and brain, Ellie roughly staggered to her feet and found herself on the inside of the cube, looking out through a newly appeared door at the sorcerer, which looked rather confused for a fish man.

Glancing around as the world stopped spinning Ellie found that the dark interior glittered weakly with gold and orange, intricate mosaics covering every surface reflecting unseen sources of light. In the centre of the structure there was a great pillar covered in shelves that were in turn filled with leather bound books and scrolls, while around the perimeter there were dozens of glass cases filled with strange artefacts. The whole place seemed weighted down with eldritch lore and power, like the mere presence of this many artefacts was thinning out reality.

Then Ellie noticed that the Deep One was coming right at her, the twisted points of its bifurcated spear glinting ominously as they drew closer. Ellie knew that she could do nothing despite her accelerated perspective. The beast was bigger, stronger and had far more experience than her, while she was unarmed, exhausted, and no longer thinking clearly. All that she could do was to wait for death to come.

And yet… and yet…

She had come this far by not giving up, not just in the past minute or day or week but since her parents had died. Beneath the terror and drugs, some part of her screamed that despair and death were not the same thing. She had been walking with death for so long, but it could not catch her because she refused to despair, she refused to do death’s job for it. Even if it was futile, she still had to look for some way to defeat the enemy.

The tiniest glint in the corner of her eye caught her attention and she shifted her gaze from the now frightfully close spear points to one case in particular. Sitting in a long glass box was a spear, about as tall as an adult man. Despite the lack of time before the Deep One struck making the distance as great as that between the stars, Ellie still reached out her hand in longing as she tried to make the run anyway. Even if she had no idea how to use it, she longed to die with a weapon in hand anyway.

The spear folded up on itself, squeezing through paths in higher dimensions and then unfolded in her outstretched hand. The spearhead was excessively heavy and immediately the spear began to tip and rotate in her grasp. The Deep One surprised as she was, faltered for just a second, and then was enough time for the spear to get into position, almost magnetically attracted to the sorcerer’s own spear.

The two weapons collided and there was a sound that was hard to describe. It was like a bolt of lightning striking a massive bell, but heard underwater. Whirling vortices of colour swirled off the point where the polearms collided and were quickly drawn into the mosaics lining the walls, causing them to light up like candles surrounded by honey.

Ellie and the Deep One sorcerer stared at each other in mutual shock. Ellie recovered first, drawing the spear back, the weapon now light as a feather in her hands. The experienced sorcerer swept his own weapon back into a mid-range guard just in time to catch Ellie’s own aggressive strike. Again the collision produced a strange resonance of energies and caused the mosaics to light up even brighter than before, shedding warm light on the various items in storage, which seemed to stare on in silent audience.

Again and again the two struck at each other. Ellie was clumsy and inept, but the weapon in her hand seemed magnetically attracted to the sorcerer’s whenever it got past her weak guard, while the sorcerer was simply too damn good to let Ellie strike it. Finally she saw her chance when it spun its bident out two far after a flourished strike and she lunged forward, intent on plunging her spear directly through the Deep One’s heart.

Belatedly, once it was too late to halt the strike, Ellie remembered the reflective warding surrounding the sorcerer. Despite the fact that the fish-frog mouth was always grinning, she was fairly certain that the Deep One had remembered this well in advance of her. She guessed that opening had been a bit obvious in hindsight.

As such, when her spear punched out the back of the Deep One’s chest, she was not certain which of the two of them was more surprised. The sorcerer looked down at the wooden shaft that was impaling it through the heart, lungs and spine and had an expression of utterly gobsmacked confusion on its grotesque face. As its knees gave out, the control from the brain severed, it also started to watch in horror as the lights of the ward surrounding it began to collapse inward, unravelling the structure of the creature. It tried to scream, but no longer had the capacity as it disappeared through millions of cracks in reality, the walls now glowing with the light of thousands of torches.

Ellie smiled faintly for a moment before she keeled over.

[LadyTevar]

Not the Spear of Logos.. LUGH's Spear. This is Tuatha magic.

OH! I didn't notice she's lost an eye.
And Died. And might die again.

Shit, that really changes things...