Chapter 31

“The shikari have a hive-like social structure with a single queen that lays eggs, reproducing through partial parthenogenesis. Some of the shikari seem to have special adaptations that are coded into them at inception, including any future queens that are deliberately spawned only when a colony had overtaken its entire environment, and the next stage of expansion beyond that planetary body is required. The queen eggs have a far greater period of gestation and a far denser shell, allowing them to survive more hostile conditions, such as the vacuum of space.”

—Shikari Dream in Red, Olivan Veilbohr

“Then who’s going to tell us where they were getting their bugs?” She tried to catch onto his sleeve and slow his advance, but it slipped out from under her fingers as though it was slick with blood.

“Malachai can talk to the dead,” he reminded her, “And you can’t run an operation this big without keeping some records. None of them need to live.”

“What about bringing them to justice?” Kaya called after him when it became clear he wasn’t slowing down. “Trials?”

“They committed genocide for profit.” Sylvas tasted blood in his mouth. “This is the only justice they deserve.”

Kaya called back to the others as they rounded the last bend, “Guys! The stanzbuhr’s going to go supernova. Can I get some help?!”

The security teams had abandoned their posts. Sylvas could feel them, the drumming of their feet as they fled deeper into the complex. To his gravity sense, they were a confusing mess of water and solid, but the rhythm of their feet on the solid stone beneath was easy to read. He rounded one corner after another, chasing them down, delving deeper and deeper into the base. They passed by storage bays everywhere they went. The whole planet was a vast warehouse to contain all the Consortium had stolen and planned to fence, using their legitimate shipping operations as cover. 

“Kid, slow your roll,” Hector called after him. “We’re a team.”

Sylvas could see the reason in that, but his anger demanded he keep moving forward. He snarled back at them, “Keep up.”

“I am beginning to see why nobody has ever bonded with a war-affinity eidolon before,” Malachai drily observed from a safe distance.

Hector didn’t give up so easily. “Kid, I really need you to stop.”

“I need them to stop.” Sylvas flushed red as Strife moved through him. “I need all of them to stop, permanently.”

“Told you, he’s going to pop,” Kaya said, also safely behind Hector, the only one even trying to keep pace with Sylvas now.

Then Hector did something entirely unexpected. “Mira, can you do something?”

Sylvas’ legs locked up. It was so abrupt that he almost fell over on the spot. “Mira, you treacherous—”

Let’s not say anything that we might regret later, darling. You are being a little incautious.

Sylvas’ laugh came out as a bark. “Incautious? I could tear this whole planet in half without trying.”

“And since we’re all on this planet, we’d prefer if you didn’t?” Hector weighed in on the one side of the conversation he could hear.

Sylvas’ legs were under Mira’s control. The muscles of them all locked up like he was in sleep paralysis, but he had other means of motion. He lifted off the ground, letting his legs dangle dead and useless beneath him, and he moved forward.

“Kid, stop now, or I’m going to stop you.” Hector’s customary smile was gone, his expression unreadable except for the sadness in his eyes.

“Try.” Sylvas snarled and headed off down the passage.

He had barely made it a few feet before Cookie burst into existence ahead of him, blocking the way with its massive body, snapping at him with those colossal jaws when he still approached. “What happens if I kill your eidolon, Hector?” Sylvas manifested a blade of Gravity Shear from his palm. A warping curved sword like he’d used to level a forest on their last world. “Do you go back to being a mage without a covenant? Or are you so tied together by this point that you die, too?”

Cookie’s eyes shone golden, and Hector’s voice came from the alligator’s maw. “We are one.”

The weight of the eidolon’s gaze hit Sylvas like a hammer, stopping him in his tracks. He let the spell in his hand dissipate and drew in a ragged breath, trying to hold onto his rage without letting it keep its hold over him. “They killed so many people.”

“And they’re going to pay for that.” The voice came from the great beast and the man behind him in harmony. Hector’s hand came down on his shoulder. What should have been a comforting weight felt like it was burning Sylvas’ skin, even through armor. 

Strife howled from within him, but the relentless, desperate need to move, to kill, began to abate. Not like it would ever truly go away, but it was like a tide was going back out, for now. Sylvas had always been calm, calculating, and willing to wait to achieve his goals. The eidolon, Strife, had made him more like it, but perhaps he had started to make the eidolon more like him, too. He would never truly calm it, but he could make it wait, like the wolf it appeared to be in ambush, until the right time to strike arrived.

It felt wrong to say it, but Sylvas forced it out all the same. “Thank you.”

He turned to Malachai and Kaya. “All of you.”

Kaya clapped her hands together, the armor sending a gong-like ringing along the halls. “Alright! Now he’s calmed down, let’s get to the good violence.”

Even Malachai chuckled at that.

“They’re retreating into the facility. Closing”—Sylvas felt the solid weight of the obstacles—“blast doors as they go.”

They don’t expect to stop us, just slow us down long enough for them to prepare. We’ve already shown that a closed door isn’t liable to prevent our progress.

Sylvas explained, “They’re preparing something farther in, planning to make a stand.”

Hector nodded, speaking with exaggerated slowness and calm. “Good thing we aren’t charging right into that, right?”

“I’m not stupid.” Sylvas sighed. “Just possessed by an extradimensional demon wolf.”

The massive, multi-legged eidolon that had blocked their path was absorbed back into Hector with just a touch of his hand, and they formed back up into their two groups to progress, moving at a much more reasonable pace now that Sylvas wasn’t being overwhelmed by bloodlust. They came across the first of the blast doors just a few minutes later. It was a truly impressive piece of engineering, mostly in terms of the sheer size of the doors. Kaya stepped forward. “I got this.”

Sylvas could have torn them apart with a shear or dragged them open by throwing raw mana at them, but Kaya’s affinity was for metal. She reached out her hands, and the doors didn’t open. The mechanisms didn’t turn. Yet in spite of that, an opening appeared as the metal rippled out and away from where it had been. It was several feet thick, solid steel all the way through, and she parted it with a wave of her hands, finally leaving a passageway through to the next hall that was wide enough to fit all of them and low enough to guarantee that Malachai would bump his head. He didn’t make any comment after he did, just a little hiss, but that tiny noise was enough to bring a grin back to Kaya’s face. She grinned back over her shoulder at him. “Careful.”

If he muttered anything rude under his breath, it was softly enough that the rest of them couldn’t pick it out. The next stretch of passages was much like the first. Hall after hall of storage chambers and abandoned security checkpoints. The population of this base must have been substantial, even when there were no ships docked there, and with a full hangar, the Consortium’s numbers must have been in the thousands. Yet there was no defense being staged, no fight being fought for every inch of progress. Whatever plan they’d made to deal with intruders seemed to be opaque enough that Sylvas couldn’t work it out. Perhaps they expected raiders to come in, help themselves to what they wanted from all of these unlocked warehouse rooms, and then head out without doing anyone any harm. Sylvas doubted it, though. The Consortium did not seem like the kind of people who valued the lives of their employees over the potential for profit.

A few of the automated turrets were still left behind to punctuate their journey deeper and deeper into the complex, but between the four of them, they never proved to be anything more than minor irritants. Sylvas was deliberately holding back, letting Kaya take the lead. He could fight at a distance just as well as up-close, so there was no dip in their effectiveness if he wasn’t throwing himself face-first into every battle. Strife was placated by the destruction that he wrought, even if it would have preferred to feel the blood running down its chin. Not that there was any blood to be had fighting these automatons.

They reached another set of the massive blast doors, and once again, a quick pulse of gravity convinced Sylvas that there was nothing behind them, and they were safe to proceed. Kaya ran her hands over the steel, and it parted like rippling mercury.

The lights were out in the next segment of the base. Perhaps the Consortium thought that this would grant their security teams some advantage over the invaders, but that would have required them to deploy their security teams to stand and fight rather than retreating farther and farther underground.

The next blast doors had something behind them. Sylvas stopped Kaya before she could repeat her usual trick and placed a hand on the metal, letting his gravity sense extend out to the passage beyond with a simple pulse. It washed over a mass of bodies, rammed up against the door. It was a very medieval solution, trying to keep the door pressed shut by the weight of its defenders so that they couldn’t make progress. It made no sense to Sylvas, but he supposed that wiping out colonies to steal some dusty old relics made no sense to him either, so perhaps the Consortium simply operated off a different set of rules than he did.

In truth, he had been looking forward to facing off with some actual opponents ever since the last ones dropped dead. The idea of a mass of soldiers waiting to kill him on the other side of the door didn’t raise even a spark of concern in him, only anticipation.

Malachai looked perplexed about something, but he didn’t speak up quickly enough to stop them from opening the way. Kaya did her metal-mastery magic, the door began to part down a seam that hadn’t been there before, and then, just as the way was beginning to open, it began to leak. At first, it was just a trickle, then a stream. Blood came gushing out of the slit that Kaya had made in the door, spreading across the floor, pooling around their feet.

“What in the…” Kaya began.

The eidolon inside of Sylvas was excited by the blood, and the confusion on Malachai’s face was from his realization that beyond the door there was a mass of death. As the way parted wider, the corpses began to tumble through. Sylvas had been callous in the way he’d slaughtered the guards before, but he hadn’t been deranged. Whoever had killed these people had torn them into pieces, then torn those pieces into pieces. He pushed with his mana to clear a path through the heap on the other side and stepped through as soon as Kaya had opened the way, turning around to take in the destruction.

These people had died here on this spot. Judging by the bloody handprints smeared on the inside of the door, they had been pawing at it and trying to escape when they were killed.

It took the others a little longer to wade through the gore and take it all in, though at least the dripping and squelching sounds were interrupted by Kaya’s steady stream of cursing.

Malachai was less perturbed by all of the death, for obvious reasons. He had enough of his wits still about him to ask, “What did this?”

Sylvas and Hector both met each other’s eyes. Hector asked, “Black hole?” at the same time Sylvas said, “Cookie?”

Both shook their heads. Kaya spat on the floor. “Eidolons.”

On closer inspection, there were clear signs that many of the bodies of what had once been the Consortium’s private army had been chewed in places. Teeth marks, ripping of flesh, all the hallmarks of a predator, except brought up to a larger scale.

The Consortium would likely have had eidolons here that they had captured. Is it so unreasonable to think that they may have loosed them to deal with us?

“I can’t feel any eidolons.” Sylvas shook his head, more to try and make the replayed visions of all the mutilated corpses get out of his vision each time he blinked than to say no.

“Shikari.” Hector typically would have groaned, but this time his voice was bereft of all inflection. He was speaking in a near monotone, his mind elsewhere.

All of them had moved together when Hector said that word, readying themselves for an attack, but while it was clear that the monstrous aliens had rampaged through here already, there was no trace of them now, except for the blood spatters heading off along the corridors.

“What is the correct course?” Malachai asked.

If it were up to Sylvas, he’d lock the door behind them and let the shikari devour every last one of the Consortium scumbags who lived here, but they still needed to find out where the aliens were coming from, and that meant finding either someone high enough ranked to know or their records.

Kaya, of all people, piped up, “Fight the monsters, save the day, same as usual.”

Hector sighed but nodded. They moved together in a group for a little while, then seemed to remember the formation that they’d agreed upon, separating out so that there was a front line to hold off the attack and a rear line to bombard it. Hector crept along, keeping Sylvas and Kaya in sight, while Malachai trailed behind.

“Shikari don’t have magic, they’re purely physical, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t dangerous. Everything physical about them is amplified to the extreme. They regenerate from damage as fast as you can cause it, and they’re faster, stronger, and smarter than they should be. There’s a reason they’re considered so dangerous.” Hector still hadn’t managed to muster a smile.

Kaya chuckled all the same. “Thanks for the pep talk.”

“I just want you to be ready. They aren’t like anything that you’ve ever—” He froze in place, head cocked to one side as if listening, then he threw up a shield in front of Sylvas and Kaya. A solid green wall that blocked their view of the corridor ahead for an instant before it was knocked in towards them, rattling from dozens of blows being rained down on it in quick succession, caving in under the force of them. 

Sylvas readied the same arrow of gravity shear he’d conjured earlier and launched it at the same moment that claws rent through their defenses. Both the faltering wall and the first of the shikari were split in two by the sickle blade of destruction with Strife roared in satisfaction that they’d taken first blood.

Then the shikari were upon them.