NOVEL NEXT B2 Chapter 4
Angar scoured the buried station's accessible wings, rooting out cowards cowering in shadowed corners. Their pleas for mercy went ignored as their blood pooled on the rusted floors.
The Void Reapers and cultists he'd felled in the hall and hiding beyond included few women. Curiously, so far, he had found no children at all.
He had found sprawling bays of bedrolls, blankets, and hammocks. He should've found children harboring somewhere.
For his own sanity, he wouldn't kill children, even those marked by Hell's corruption.
Regardless of how equally the Holy Empire claimed to view women, he had decided to spare at least the mothers with children he could, the ones whose Hellsign wasn't so obvious, and were possibly not lost to the darkness.
He'd hoped to find an alternate exit, a path to lead any spared souls to safety. Outside, his comms would reconnect, and he could direct the Peregrines to collect the prisoners.
But no such souls were found, nor a new exit, and he was left with only the eerie absence of life in the station's hollow chambers.
Returning to the great hall, Angar stuffed his cybernetic leg's and armor's back storage with the choicest loot.
The station being rigged with explosives was a worry, and he wanted to ensure he left with as much loot as possible in case he couldn't go back and collect it all.
He checked his XP and was 4% away from level 38 and a new Feat. He already knew which he'd select.
He approached the main exit, stepping from the hall into a vast chamber where wide, circular ramps spiraled upward and downward like coils.
Before him, steep stairs plunged into the station's depths. His HUD didn't detect anything living in any direction, but he felt a foul presence, like a festering wound in reality itself, pulsing from below, beckoning him toward the darkness.
The air thickened as he took the stairs, each step sinking him deeper into a miasma of corruption. The station's faint hum grew discordant, a low whine that clawed at the edges of his mind.
Halfway down, the lighting shifted, strobing erratically, casting jagged shadows that seemed to writhe with some malicious intent.
He was certain the environment had changed, and it seemed like his suite adjusted. He pulled up the logs. His armor did auto-tune to new settings for gravity, pressure, and an increased need for air filtration, a grim confirmation of the wrongness seeping into the world.
The stairs ended abruptly, spitting him into a cavern shrouded in fog so dense it clung to his armor like damp rot. The reek of unholiness assaulted him with decay. And something sweeter, more sinister, like honeyed poison.
His boots crunched on brittle fragments, and he glanced down to see a carpet of splintered bones, some human, others grotesquely malformed, stretching into the haze.
He walked forward, a kernel of dread growing in his chest.
A shape formed ahead, piercing the foggy cavern's crimson-tinged bloom. Angar advanced, his maul gripped tightly, ready.
The air grew heavier, pressing against his chest. Faint and sibilant whispers, not quite words, slithered through his mind, probing for weakness. He crushed them with a silent prayer as he performed the sign of the trey, but the effort left a chill in his bones.
Closer now, the shape resolved into an altar, a blasphemous monument of skulls fused into a towering, grotesque form.
Their empty sockets seemed to track him, their jaws locked in silent laugh. Blood, still wet, trickled down its surface, pooling in obscene runes that pulsed with a sickly glow.
The fog swirled around it, as if drawn to the relic's malevolence, and the cavern's walls seemed to flex, breathing with a rhythm not of this world, like it was alive.
Angar's heart thudded, not with fear, but with a primal revulsion, an instinct screaming that this place was an affront to the Holy and all that was righteous.
Before the altar, a second stairwell yawned downward, its steps descending into a blackness that felt sentient somehow.
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The darkness pulsed, alive, and from its depths came a sound like a wet, gruff rasp, as if something vast and hungering drew a breath.
Dread of a sort never felt before, something new, unbidden, and alien, coiled tight in his gut. It was something like fear but different, a deeper, existential horror, as if the stairwell led not to a place but to an unraveling of reality.
The whispers grew louder, forming half-words, "Come, see, kneel," and the altar's runes flared, their light searing his eyes. His mind groaned, as if recoiling from this profanity.
But this was what he was here for. His purpose was to purge the darkness, to bathe it in the radiant light of the Holy Trinity through righteous slaughter.
He stepped closer, and more bones crunching underfoot as he raised his hammer, ready to face what lay ahead. The altar seemed to shudder with anticipation as the skulls' sockets wept black ichor.
Angar steeled himself, his oath a burning shield against the encroaching horror. Whatever festered here, he would face it. He would end it. This was his purpose, his sacred charge.
The Lord thirsts, he thought. He would quench it with whatever he found below.
And he descended into the darkness.
It swallowed him like a shroud. Moving through it was like wading through oil. It pressed against his armor, seeping into the crevices, whispering of surrender and the inevitable. To clear his mind, he focused on the violence he'd soon deliver, rebuking grave evil.
A life raised in Vefol's haze, coupled with his Cognizance score, helped him pierce the gloom. The air grew colder, sharper, laced with a metallic taste that coated his tongue, something like blood or rot, but mixed with something fouler.
Shapes began to resolve, faint at first, then stark. The stairwell opened into a massively yawning chamber of flesh and bone.
The walls were ribbed with bony growths, glistening with a sheen of mucus, as if the chamber were the hollowed chest of some titanic, profane beast.
Veins of crimson and black threaded through the bone, throbbing in time with the rasp that now filled the air, a sound like a dying giant's breath. This floor was uneven, slick with crud, and littered with fragments of shattered bones, some human, some not, the same as above.
Along the chamber's sides, cells of twisted bone and sinew lined the walls. Within each, women and children sat, their eyes vacant, their faces slack. Their stillness was unnatural, as if their souls had been leeched away, and their bodies left empty vessels, just sacks of meat. Many of the women and at least half the children had clear Hellsign.
At the chamber's far end, a lumpy bulb of flesh throbbed, poking out of the floor, its surface slick and translucent, revealing shadowy forms writhing within, set upon a pentagram painted in red.
It was caged in a lattice of blackened metal, the filaments intricately wrought, like something crafted by a master smith. The bulb pulsed, each beat sending a ripple through the chamber's flesh, saturating the air with a reek of corruption.
Around the bulb stood seven figures, each a blasphemy against all that was natural.
It was hard for Angar to distinguish between certain types of things. Demoniacs warped by maleficia into some Hellish creature often looked the same as creatures born of Hell, at least to him.
Five of these monsters fit this general form, their bodies a chaotic and warped amalgam of claws, spines, and oozing flesh.
But two stood apart, towering over the rest, distinct, more. These were Trium Crucesignatus Lapssi, fallen Crusaders, called Fallen, their once-Holy armor now a monstrous extension of their infernal forms, marking them, making them easy to distinguish.
Those who fell as Seraphs were named Nofelim, the mightiest of the Fallen.
For Crusader Armor to warp along with its wearer, becoming part of their new infernal form, the wearer had to be a Seraph, level 200, or close to ascending as such, depending on how powerful they were at their fall.
The first Fallen's armor, originally a sanctified bulwark, had fused with its wearer's flesh, becoming a living carapace of blackened bone and molten metal.
Its helm was a snarling maw, with jagged teeth where eye-slits should have been, and a crown of horns sprouted from its brow, each tipped with a glowing ember that wept sparks.
The pauldrons, once adorned with sacred sigils, were now swollen with tumorous growths, pulsing with veins that glowed a sickly green.
Its chest plate was cracked open like a ribcage, revealing a throbbing, exposed heart that beat in defiance of death.
One arm ended in a claw of fused metal and bone, dripping with viscous ichor, while the other clutched a warped pistol, its barrel twisted into a fanged orifice that hissed with every breath.
The legs were digitigrade, bent like a predator's, each step leaving scorched prints in the crude-slick floor as it shifted its weight back and forth, as if excited, barely containing its anticipation.
The second Fallen was no less horrific. The galvornium steel had melted into a flayed, muscular hide, like the armor itself had been skinned and left to bleed.
Its helm was fused to its skull, the visor replaced by a single, cyclopean eye that burned with a baleful red light, its gaze searing into Angar's soul.
Barbed and rusted chains dangled from its frame, each link moaning as it swayed, as if imbued with tormented spirits.
The Fallen's arms were asymmetrical, with one a bloated, tentacle-like limb that writhed with a life of its own, tipped with a cluster of snapping mouths, and the other a massive piston-driven fist, its knuckles studded with shards of shattered runes that glowed with a profane light.
Its back was hunched, sprouting jagged spines that pulsed flame, and its lower body was a mass of coiling, serpentine tendrils that slithered across the floor, leaving sizzling, corrupted ooze where they touched.
Angar was uncertain how powerful the five others were. And how powerful those five others were didn't matter.
The two Fallen, being Seraphs, or close to it, when they fell from grace, meant they far exceeded him in power, an impossible gap to even dream of closing.
If those two failed to turn Angar to the darkness, corrupting his mind and soul, he'd die this day, and horrifically so.
One of those outcomes was inevitable.
A massive stone door crashed down behind Angar, blocking the exit.