Interlude: Reclamation

((Author's Note: Apologies for the delay, it was caused by an unforseen medical need related to my wife's pregnancy. Everyone is fine, unborn included, but it ate up a lot of time. It should not, however, impact the future chaptering schedule in and of itself, but the actual birth almost certainly will, as I'll take this opportunity to remind you of. Apologies for the inconvenience.

If you would like to support my work, or just want to read more than one chapter today, feel free to check out my Patreon))

Something was wrong. Very wrong. Tio could feel it in his bones. He didn’t know what was wrong, didn’t even have a vague but communicable sense of where to start looking so his team or the other security squads could look into it and either confirm a problem or put the worry to rest. All the same, his gut was screaming at him to run away as fast as he could and not look back.

He probably would have, if he hadn’t seen the punishment for desertion first hand. As a security officer at a secret Neo Aztlan facility, a sample of his blood was kept on file specifically for the purpose of handling deserters and turncoats. Being puppeteered by the Sanguine Priests to flay himself alive with an ice knife was a horrifying end not to be lightly risked.

Instead, he had been checking in with the other perimeter teams more often tonight. It was clearly annoying them at this point since he could give no good reason why, but that was a minor concern at the moment. “Perimeter Team 6, requesting update.”

‘All clear’s ticked in along with weary sighs until only one was unaccounted for. “Team 3, Sanchez, are you there??”

Static, for a moment, then, “Affir-choo,” the response was cut off by a sneeze. “Affirmative, if I can have a moment to fucking sneeze. And seriously, I don’t know if you forgot your security briefs, but they’re bleeding 700 lessers a month to power the wards. Even Romulus wouldn’t have been able to break in without making a racket.”

The fact that the captain didn’t reprimand Sanchez for getting chatty on the comms spoke volumes. But Tio’s focus was elsewhere. While Sanchez’ voice didn’t sound any more unusual than a stuffed nose would do, the fact that it sounded different than normal at all had the hair on Tio’s neck stand on end.

He scratched his neck, and barely had time to register that the fingers came back bloody before his consciousness faded.

He was… not tossing and turning in the hospital bed, but as close to it as was possible with no arms and legs. Hector had long since lost grasp of the difference between nightmare and reality. The fever wracked his body and mind regardless, and the triple beat never left him alone.

BA-DA-DUM, BA-DA-DUM.

Drums one moment, inhuman heartbeat the next. Shattering his thoughts and making way for the whispers. He couldn’t tell what they were saying, the next drum beat tore through him before he could make sense of anything, but somehow they felt both horrifying and compelling all the same.

Darkness. Power had gone out suddenly, vanishing for a moment before red emergency lighting glyphs came on. Instantly, the staff at the security center was on high alert. Fritz scanned his section of security video feeds, delivered by scrying windows in absence of electricity for the cameras.

Others were trying to call up the perimeter guards, but the sound of static suggested little luck there, despite their radios being battery powered. With no visual or comms contact to the perimeter, the facility went into lockdown. Enchanted gates closed, sectioning the facility in parts, blood golems were activated and extruded into the hallways, and spellturrets came online. All subject containment units locked and sealed, and squads of security personnel suited up in heavy arms and armor to do a full sweep, or repel attackers. 6 minutes after the power outage started, threat response teams started sweeping from the security center and 2 other security hardpoints.

“Response Team 6 at gate H-K.”

“Affirmative.” Fritz pressed the button to let the team through, after verifying on the video feed that they were where they said they were and that there wasn’t a pressing reason not to on the other side of the gate.

Passages through gates in Fritz’ section repeated a few times, with no sign of whatever caused the situation. Then Team 4 passed through a gate and didn’t appear on the feed from the other side.

“Team 4, status report?” There wasn’t enough of a blind angle there for a single person to stand in, let alone the whole 6 man team. After 10 seconds of silence, he turned towards the commander. “Lost comms and visual on Team 4 on transition between cameras K-12 and K-14. Retrying comms.”

Over the course of the next minute, he tried another 6 calls to the missing team, to no avail. Meanwhile, similar reports came in from other camera sections.

“All teams, hold position and indicate.” The command had gone out on all channels. The main screen switched to an overview of the security teams, indicators flipping to green as ‘all clear’ clicks came in. And then stopped coming in. 5 seconds of nothing, with half the dashboard still red. The perimeter teams were expected, but this… ‘We lost contact with a third of the response teams in the span of a minute. And no signs of struggle, just vanished in thin air. Even the stories from the Fall of Berlin weren’t like this, what the hell is going on?!?’

While scanning his camera section for something, anything, useful to report to the commander, he caught something odd out of the corner of his eye. “Inventory check, containment unit B23.”

“Occupied: Lesser, Hispanic male. 63 years old. Past 19 days in coma.”

’Not anymore. There’s no blind angles in the unit and no subject in sight. Munda- lessers don’t have magic, and he’s far too old to Late Bloom, so it can’t be invisibility or discorporating or anything. He’s just gone. Like the response teams...’ He flagged down the commander. “Missing subject from containment unit B23.”

“Roger.” The commander switched to address all surveillance operators. “Operators 1 through 5, full subject inventory. Operators 6 through 10, take over their hallway sections in the meanwhile.”

The inventory found another 21 missing subjects. All mundane, all vanished without a trace. Nothing happened in the hallways in the meanwhile, but when Fritz’ bottom rows of feeds returned to the usual containment units, something was off. “Commander, the subject in B11 has vanished since being inventoried as present.”

“All units,” the commander was back on global comms, “fall back to the nearest hardpoint. Dr. Schultz, Dr. Garcia, if your people aren’t in the bunker room already, get them there immediately. Automated security is going to **** prejudice in 5.”

The remaining response teams fell back in good order. Then they vanished. Not even while transitioning from one scrying window to another, they were just there one moment and gone the next, while spell turrets and blood golems remained in place.

This sparked a flurry of activity in the security center, as identical reports came in from the other camera sections and fruitless attempts to hail the missing teams rolled in. At least the research staff confirmed a full tally in the bunker room.

Then the scrying windows flickered, and suddenly the rooms and hallways were not pristine anymore. Bones in security **** equipment lay in pools of putrescent liquid, more of which was sprayed on the walls. Spell turret circles were disrupted or fully overtaken by irregular lumps of fungal matter.

Only the blood golems remained, standing exactly where they had been from the start. And then they turned towards the scrying glyphs. The crimson surface of their featureless faces rippled, and from the thick vital fluid emerged slick, black blotches. The blotches formed a crude face, like a small child’s crayon drawing, but somehow their simplistic asymmetry felt more menacing than anything Fritz had faced when he still had a combat posting. “Uh, Commander. I think you need to see this…”

Fritz pushed the button to forward one of the golem video feeds to the big screen. The crooked smile and irregular black blotch eyes were the last thing anyone in the room ever saw.

Debora pinched the bridge of her nose. The research director’s insistence to attempt to call up the security chief every five minutes was grating on nerves that were already fraying from being pulled from her work and herded into the secure bunker in the facility basement and locked in.

It wasn’t like calling more was going to do anything anyway. If there had been no answer by now, then an answer wasn’t coming. All they could do was trust in the measures sealing the bunker and concealing the entrance to keep whatever intruder was here out until the Sanguine Sovereign’s wrath came down upon them.

Suddenly, a foul stench spread from the back of the room. Everyone turned towards it and saw a streak of thick, black liquid drooping from an air vent.

For a moment, everyone was processing what was even going on. Then someone concluded, “It’s the intruders!”

“Impossible,” someone else argued, “the bunker ventilation is on a separate, closed system. The only way into it is through this room.”

Whatever it was, the flow increased rapidly, causing everyone to back away towards the door. Someone tried to dam the flow with a magic wall of some sort. Almost immediately, pale, branching cracks appeared from everywhere the liquid touched the spell.

The flow increased unabated while everyone backed up into a cluster in the opposite end of the room. Soon, Debora was pinned in place, the armored bunker door at her back and colleagues in front of her. The walled-off bit was filled with fluid, and the strange cracks had filled it out so much that the originally transparent spell was nearly opaque.

Then the spell shattered, ‘cracks’ somehow continuing to exist and fall in sheets as the deluge of sludge was unleashed. Another magical wall went up, but this time instead of whatever the cracks of veins had been, a mace-like pseudopod rose from the putrescent ooze and slammed into the obstacle, smashing it to nothing.

That spurred the group as a whole into action, researchers summoning familiars and simple constructs, launching bolts of elemental energy or conjured matter and the like. While none of them were soldiers, some did have a combat role in the past and nobody in the Abyss was wholly unfamiliar with self defense.

Summons and conjured projectiles proved useless, being consumed by the fluid like candlewax thrown into molten steel. Energy blasts fared slightly better, evaporating, disintegrating or otherwise stalling part of the fluid, but the combined efforts of the Abyssal scientists was not enough to match, let alone reverse, the flow from the vent which at this point came out fast enough to describe an arc through the air.

Ten minutes of a losing battle later, the sludge reached the first of Debora’s colleagues and the screaming started. She had thought both herself and the other researchers numb to human suffering, considering that their work was sometimes more agonizing for the subjects than even the public executions Neo Aztlan imposed mandatory attendance of.

This time, the screams tore at her nerves for some reason, perhaps because she was minutes at most away from the same fate. She wasn’t alone in being affected either. While those touched collapsed into more of the stinking ooze, not much slower than the familiars had, the remaining researchers’ attempts to stall the inevitable became more erratic and ****, and less effective.

An object emerged from the vent. At first it looked like an off-white, mostly-oval lump. Then Debora realized that it was a disembodied, deathly-pale face, floating close-eyed on the sludge that was rotting people to nothing a few meters away. It felt vaguely familiar, and desperately grasping for anything to distract from the rising panic, she tried to think of where she had seen that face before.

’The subject from D18. One of the few Abyssal subjects in the facility, brought in after a necromancer that claimed connection to Project Trent rotted away his arms and legs. What was his name again…’ Only when she was the last person untouched by the sludge did it click. “Hector! Hector Cadaval.”

The ooze quivered at her exclamation, and in defiance of physics the fluid stopped advancing. Then the face rose on a tentacle of sludge and Hector opened his eyes. “Hector?” The face contorted into a feverishly mad expression, eyes too open and grin too wide, while it tilted enough to the side to break a human neck. “Hector, Hector, Hector. Yes, I used to think I was Hector.”

As the last of Debora’s colleagues were subsumed by it, the ooze-creature emitted a shrill, maddened laughter in the voice of Hector whom it apparently used to think it was. “Not any more though. Because She showed me the truth.” The face turned upside down entirely. “I’m not Hector. I’m Trash. But maybe, I can be Useful Trash.”

It giggled erratically for a moment, then cut itself off as it snapped upright and close enough to Debora’s face that their noses almost touched. Bereft of mirth now, its theatric whisper was left only with deranged intensity. “We were warned. You were aaalllll warned. But you didn’t listen, and now She’s here.”

“She’s here, and all that is left for you-” The seriousness broke into a fit of hysterical giggling as it pulled back. “-is to die.”

The sludge surged forward, touched her, and the screaming resumed.

With a loud, ringing impact, the adamant-alloy bunker door was dented like cheap sheet metal struck by a ram. Two more impacts rang out, then a screeching sound as a hole was torn open and She walked in.

She was as alluring as She had been when he’d first laid eyes on Her, and twice as terrifying. Trash immediately curled into the position that felt most to his new mycelial form like kneeling prostration would have done to flesh and bone. “Welcome, Empress of Graves, to the depths of this den of thieves. Your humble Trash is most delighted to serve. It has let Your Highness in, it has crawled through every crevice and nook and cranny of this nest of blasphemers and sown spores in their spells and enchantments, it has slain the sacrilegious curs and fed their flesh to Your domain. Has it been… Useful?”

“Yes, quite.” She plucked Useful Trash from the fungal mass, reducing him to an isolated lump as he quivered in wretched delight. “I would say this makes up for your earlier transgression against me, I might even have considered a small reward.”

Her tone shifted from amicable to cold in an instant, freezing Wretched Trash with dread. “Unfortunately, I was far from the first person you targeted, just the first one where you bit off more than you could chew. And there are few things I despise as much as a ****.”

She waved her hand through the air, willing the crushed remnants of what used to be a Neo Aztlantean goon and **** named Hector to slide off into the general sludge. Between what she had put him through to get in here and the agonizing process of regrowing his soul enough to continue the Cycle, she saw no reason to exert herself with further punishment.

Instead, she commanded the putrescence in the ruined facility. Free flowing mycelium corded into ropes further strengthened by her will, prying expensive equipment and personal valuables from the facility and what little remained of its staff and subjects. Microbial sludge, meanwhile, dissolved even the bones at supernatural speed, before flowing towards her, wealth-laden fungal tendrils in tow.

The haul, it turned out, was a bit of a disappointment. Most of the valuables had fallen below her hoarding standards centuries ago. Clearly, this new Sanguine Sovereign was still far from the heights of his predecessors’ golden age. There were a few choice bits with enchantments of a worthwhile quality, though.

No matter, the baubles were a side benefit anyway. The real goal was claiming and lancing the abscess before the blood enthusiasts could harness it, and she had succeeded in that much. Even if they had gotten far enough towards weaponizing it to render the infected beyond saving.

Ironic, in a way, that a project walking in Hyde Skaven’s footsteps would count so many participants from a group that had risen to prominence by fueling the hate aimed at his legacy. But then again humans were often a self-contradictory lot.

With another simple act of will, she called the ooze of rot to condense and compress before her, turning into a clutch of flawless diamonds, encasing double helixes of black and white.