"FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!"
The command was a raw, desperate scream, swallowed by the deafening roar of automatic rifles. Muzzle flashes strobed against the sterile, gunmetal-gray corridors of the underground base, each burst illuminating the nightmare advancing toward them. Four soldiers, trained for combat against men, not monsters, poured their ammunition into the shifting darkness ahead. The air was thick with the acrid smell of cordite and a deeper, coppery scent they all recognized but dared not name.
Sergeant manny, his face a mask of sweat and grim determination, yelled over the cacophony, "Keep firing! Don't let it—"
The sentence died in his throat. There was no sound, no visible weapon. One moment he was a solid, shouting mass of muscle and will; the next, his body was geometrically deconstructed. It was sliced vertically, then horizontally, then diagonally, his form collapsing into a stack of perfectly cubed, bloody meat that hit the floor with a soft, wet thud. In less than a second, their leader was reduced to human sushi.
Private Hossein stared, his brain refusing to process the red cubes that had once been his sergeant. His training evaporated, replaced by primal terror. "G-god! N-no! I'm out of here!" He fumbled with his rifle, the hot metal burning his hands before he finally threw it clattering to the floor. He turned to run, but he only managed two stumbling steps before the same invisible, razored force found him. His body underwent the same horrific transformation, his parts landing with a nauseating squash.
The last two soldiers, Ali and Hasan, were left in a ringing silence more terrifying than the gunfire. Their ears buzzed. They could see that fighting was a futile gesture, and running was simply a faster way to die. A cold dread settled in their bones.
They gripped their rifles, their knuckles white, and pointed them uselessly into the impenetrable blackness of the corridor. They couldn't see it, but they could feel it—a predatory presence that watched them from the dark, drinking in their fear.
"What the hell is happening?" Hasan whispered, his voice cracking. "One minute, routine patrol. The next... this."
"W-why won't it attack?" Ali asked, his voice a tremulous thread. He edged to the right side of the corridor, seeking cover behind a structural support beam that felt laughably flimsy.
"I don't know," Hasan hissed from the left side, pressing his back against the cold wall. "M-maybe it forgot about us?" The hope in his voice was pathetic.
"N-n-no. N-no-o, it didn't." Ali's reply was a choked gasp. His eyes were wide, fixed on the darkness where two pinpricks of light had ignited. They glowed with a sick, malevolent purple, like the eyes of a deep-sea abomination.
"I think I know what it is..." Ali murmured, a half-remembered rumor about black-budget projects and breached containment flashing through his mind.
"Ali?" Hasan called, but received no answer. The purple eyes remained fixed, unblinking.
"ALI?!" Hasan shouted, too terrified to look away from the glowing lights. He knew, with absolute certainty, that to look away was to die.
"Fuck it!" he finally screamed, wrenching his gaze to his left to find his friend.
He did not find Ali. He found a pillar. A grotesque, pulsating column of meat, sinew, and shattered bone, wet and glistening under the emergency lights. It hadn't been there a second ago.
"W-w-w-wh..." His mind shattered. His bladder let go, the warm spread unnoticed against his fatigues. His knees buckled, and he collapsed to the floor. His eyes, against his will, traveled up the impossible pillar. It reached all the way to the high ceiling, and there, impaled on its sharpened peak like a grisly trophy, was the torso of his comrade, Ali.
A sound then. Light, airy, and utterly insane.
"Hehehehehe."
It was a child's giggle, but it came from above him. Carter tried to move, to scream, to do anything, but he was petrified, every muscle locked solid by a fear so pure it was paralytic.
"I-I don't want t—" he managed to whimper.
A maw of impossible size, lined with rows of needle-sharp teeth, descended from the darkness above the pillar. It was his last sight before the teeth sank into his neck, and the world went black.
.
.
.
The desert air shimmered with spent energy and heat haze. Two figures stood in a vast crater of glassed sand, the aftermath of their battle.
"I'm surprised you're still alive," V-1 stated flatly. He clutched his left arm, where the armor was rent and twisted. Beneath the gaps, emerald fire gushed and coiled, a contained inferno seeking release.
"Don't underestimate me, V-1." Zahak stood opposite him, his own suit in tatters, hanging off him in scorched ribbons. Yet his body beneath was pristine, unmarred. The art of biomancy had knit flesh and bone back together faster than any damage could be inflicted.
"This is taking too long, Zahak." V-1's voice took on a new, resonant tone. A wave of viridian fire erupted from his core, engulfing him entirely. The chains draped over his shoulders and back glowed white-hot, slithering around him like awakened serpents. "Let's end this."
Zahak smirked, a flash of arrogance in his eyes. He clenched his fist, and the air itself compacted, whined, and solidified into a shimmering spear of condensed wind and force. "You're speaking my mind."
He hurled it. The spear tore through the atmosphere with a sonic boom, a hypersonic lance aimed at V-1's heart. V-1 didn't even try to evade. He braced, and the spear struck true, punching a clean hole through his chest plate.
There was no blood, no organ tissue. Only a vortex of raging green fire, momentarily parted before swirling closed again. V-1 looked down at the hole, then back at Zahak, a jet of flame puffing from the vents of his mask like a dragon's snort.
Zahak was already hurling a second spear, then a third. But V-1 moved. A concentrated beam of fire erupted from the hole in his chest, intercepting the second spear in a blinding explosion of light and force. The third spear he dodged, using the concussive force of his own blast to propel himself forward at an impossible speed, a comet of green flame closing the distance.
"What the..." Zahak's confidence flickered. His psychic mind calculated trajectories and probabilities, but V-1's new movements were erratic, unpredictable.
In a blink, V-1 was upon him. The superheated chains lashed out, not to strike, but to encircle, creating a spinning cage of incandescent metal around Zahak. The heat was immense, blistering the air. From every broken seam in V-1's armor, the green fire licked out, eager to consume.
Time dilated.
For Zahak, the world froze. His psychic abilities accelerated his perception, granting him microseconds where others had nanoseconds. He analyzed the trap.
The chains are a kinetic and thermal cage. The fire is a secondary containment field. A portal behind me? No, the chain is 0.4 meters from my spine—insufficient clearance. Left, right—same calculation. The only vector is down. But the energy discharge would vaporize my legs before the portal fully stabilized... The exit strategy has a 98% fatality rate.
A strange calm settled over him.
There is only one play. A mutual guarantee of destruction.
I guess this is it.
His decision made, Zahak exerted his will one last time, not to escape, but to overload. The chains, superheated by V-1's own fire, were the perfect conductor. He poured a massive surge of pure psychic energy into the nearest link.
The chains glowed, then turned blinding white. They fused together into a single, critical mass of energy.
Silence.
Then, light.
The explosion was not merely fire and sound; it was a reality-warping detonation of psychic and supernatural energy. It swallowed the desert, turning night into a false, furious day. The sand beneath them didn't blow away; it vaporized, replaced by a vast, bowl-shaped plain of glass.
When the light faded, V-1 rose from the epicenter. His armor was gone, blasted away. All that remained was his true form: a tall, bipedal silhouette of intense, intelligent green flame, his features suggested only by the flickering outline of a head and limbs.
He walked across the molten glass to the ground zero of the blast, the place where Zahak had made his last stand. There was nothing. No body, no energy signature, not even ash. Just a deep, smoldering pit that had excavated down into the buried levels of the secret base they had fought over.
"I̷t̸'̴s̵ ̵o̷v̵e̸r̶."
The voice that emerged was a distorted crackle, a radio transmission from the heart of a star, utterly inhuman.
Before the echo of his words could fade, the ground beneath his feet trembled. Then it shook violently. The glassy crater floor cracked like a dropped plate. Something was rising from the depths he had unearthed, something of impossible scale and malice.
A hand erupted from the shattered earth. It was the size of a commercial building, all bone and dripping, conglomerate flesh. The flesh itself was a horror—it wasn't uniform, but a seething, screaming tapestry of countless human bodies fused together in a blasphemous mosaic. Faces pressed against the surface from the inside, mouths open in silent screams, hands clawing futilely at their own prison walls.
V-1, a being of ancient fire, stared in genuine shock. He had seen much, but this was an abomination of a different order.
Another hand burst forth, then a head, and finally a torso. It was a giant, a leviathan built on a human skeleton but warped into a thing of nightmare. It had no nose, only a gaping hole above a maw lined with rows of triangular, shark-like teeth. Its eyes were empty, weeping sockets that seemed to bleed shadow. Its body, a mountain of tormented flesh, stretched nearly 500 meters into the air (Author note: that's about 4 million hamburgers tall, for my American readers).
The creature stood to its full, terrifying height, and the empty sockets fixed on the green flame of V-1's form. A gaze of pure, ancient hatred.
V-1's form responded instinctively. The green flame compressed, intensified, and turned a searing, blinding white. The heat radiating from him melted the glass at his feet into a boiling lake, but he stood upon it, unyielding.
From the monster's maw came a sound—a chorus of a thousand agonized screams woven into a single, world-ending roar. It drew back its colossal, body-stitched arm and swung it down in a fist aimed to extinguish V-1 like a candle.
The fist moved with impossible speed, breaking the sound barrier, and...
BOOM