The comms crackle. Vael shifts his weight, the Gravemind suit's dark bio-plate absorbing the muted light of the hangar bay. He stands beside the convoy, a hulking shadow among the anxious personnel. The mission brief drones on, a distant hum against the low thrum of his own suit's power core.
A subtle pulse radiates from beneath his armor, a low thrumming that whispers of the unauthorized transformation within him. It is barely visible. A faint, bioluminescent glow. He feels it more than sees it. A constant pressure behind his eyes, a phantom ache that never quite dissipates. The Feral Drift, they called it. His suit, it breathes with him now. A shared organ, feeding on his pain, his rage. He forces the thought down. Focus.
A new voice cuts through the comms static. Lieutenant Sarah Chen. Her Ravelin suit stands a wall of overlapping obsidian plates, wider than Vael's own, a living bunker. She turns, her sealed helm a featureless dome, but Vael feels her analytical gaze. He knows it. She is a Ravelin pilot. Her role is to defend, to shield. His is to command, to control, to kill. Their purpose already clashes. She sees the stillness in him. The way he does not twitch, does not react to the minor jostles of the loading crew. He feels his cold, predatory focus solidify. It is unnerving to others. Good.
Anna Reeves is here too. He sees her near the medical transport. Her Mournclad suit is a grim, cracked shell, red veins glowing faintly beneath the matte bone. She stands apart, withdrawn. Her head tilts slightly, a nervous habit. He knows the self-harm scars spidering her wrists and neck, visible when her helm had retracted last time. The memory flickers. A field clinic. Her desperate attempts to heal, to mend. His suit had bled. His actual blood, on the metal floor. She had seen it. The impossible mutation. The truth of his corruption. It pushes a subtle pressure on him, this memory. He must suppress the monstrous impulses. Keep the hunger hidden.
"GRAVEMIND-7. Ready for deployment?" The convoy leader's voice, flat and official, cuts through his thoughts.
"Affirmative." Vael's voice, filtered through his suit, sounds dead. Controlled.
The internal hum intensifies. A phantom pain slices through his arm, mirroring a wound taken days ago, from the Rindscale gorebreed. The pain enhancement protocols. They are still active. Always active. They feed him combat clarity. But the payment is constant. He feels a metallic taste, the phantom taste of his own blood, even though the external bleeding has stopped. His suit wants to consume. It craves.
He glances at Anna. Her shoulders are hunched. The silence around her speaks of her trauma, the weight of the eighteen dead from the Rindscale and the ones he killed in his escape. The memories, sharp and brutal. The structural collapse. The choice he made. To save her. A flicker of something. Humanity. It felt like a glitch. The suit momentarily hesitated. He pushes it away. Survival. That is all that matters.
"Mission parameters: Convoy escort. Route through Sector 4. High-risk zones identified." The briefing continues. A holographic map expands in the air. Red zones bloom. "Scouting variants of gorebreed confirmed along evacuation routes. Small. Fast. Aggressive."
Vael's suit systems register the data. Scouting variants. Like the ones he led the human hunt squads through. The smaller Rindscale gorebreed, shedding layers, acting as environmental hazards. He remembers using them as cover, distraction. A dry thought pushes through: Good hunting dogs. Not loyal, but useful.
"Reports of larger bio-masses further along the path. Unmoving. Corpse-rooted tree-masses." The convoy leader's voice gains a grim edge. The Thrashgrove gorebreed. Vael feels a subtle shift within his suit. A low growl, not his own. The foreign consciousness responds to the mention of such a creature. A deep, primal hunger stirs.
The convoy starts to move. Heavy rumbling of armored transports. Vael walks beside the lead vehicle, his seismic anchor feet pressing into the tarmac. The ground vibrates. He feels the faint, internal pulse of bioluminescent light beneath his armor, a secret glow against the matte black. It's a physical manifestation of his Feral Ascension.
Sarah Chen falls into pace beside him, her Ravelin suit moving with surprising grace for its bulk. "Pilot Rask. Your file's… extensive." Her comms are clear. She uses his operational callsign. "You run cold, Rask."
He offers nothing back. His silence is a shield. He is not here to bond. He is here to control. To conceal. To survive. His detachment is unnerving. He sees it in the slight stiffening of her posture, the way she holds her shield limb a fraction tighter. She watches him. A sentinel. Protecting the convoy. Questioning him.
"Sector 4 is compromised. Heavily. Civilian casualties expected. Secondary sweeps for survivors are mandatory." Sarah Chen's voice holds a hard edge of conviction. Survivor's guilt, the file states. She prioritizes thoroughness over tactical efficiency. A liability.
The hunger for bio-matter gnaws at him. A low, insistent thrumming in his suit's core. His systems flash. A brief, jarring hallucination overlays the grey concrete of the hangar with decaying organic tissue, twisting, pulsing. His father's laboratory experiments. The Fracture Event. A fleeting glimpse of a sterile white room, then a crimson tide, consuming the steel tables. The image shatters. Gone. He blinks, or rather, his suit systems recalibrate. Just a flicker. He forces himself to breathe. Steady.
"Protocol dictates securing the route, Lieutenant." Vael's voice is clipped. He cuts off any further debate. He knows what they expect. A commander. Nothing more.
"And casualties?" Sarah Chen pushes. Her voice is low, but sharp. "Are they acceptable?"
Vael does not answer. The mission. The convoy. That is his priority. And his secret. The willingness to sacrifice others for his secret has become a chilling shift in his priorities. He feels no remorse. Only a deeper sense of purpose.
The convoy pushes through a checkpoint. Guards in light armor nod them through. The air shifts. A heavy, humid scent. Decay. Vael's suit filters the air, but he senses it. The city. A dead zone. Abandoned urban sector. The source calls it a "scarred sanctuary". It is scarred, but no sanctuary.
Anna Reeves is now in her own transport, a medical vehicle, its lights muted. Vael hears her breathing, ragged, through the squad comms. She is jumpy. Every groan of stressed metal, every distant, unsettling sound, makes her flinch. Her trauma creates an anxious atmosphere, a fragile tension that rubs against Vael's own hardened resolve. He must maintain control. He must suppress the impulses. The suit constantly whispers, a subtle, invasive suggestion. Consume. Grow. Become.
The road is cracked. Rubble chokes the alleyways. Derelict vehicles, skeletal and rusted, line the route. Vael's optical sensors sweep the shadows. The suit's internal systems constantly monitor, analyzing threat vectors. He feels the phantom pain in his elbow, a sharp jolt. It feels like a blade sliding through bone. The pain enhancement protocols. He presses into it. The suit hums in response. A deeper thrum. He can feel the power building.
"Movement. West flank. Unconfirmed." Sarah Chen's voice, sharp.
Vael's sensors highlight a distant flicker. A scuttling movement. Too small for a full-grown Gorebreed. A scouting variant. Probably a Scarp Maw gorebreed. They mimic sobbing. They hide in corpses. Cowards.
"Hold position. Stay tight." Vael's command is instant. Unquestioning.
The convoy halts. Engines idle. The silence descends, thick and heavy. Only the low thrum of the SymSuits breaks the quiet. Sarah Chen's Ravelin unit shifts, its shield arm raising. Her protective instincts are on high alert. Vael observes her. She is a true defender. A stark contrast to his own evolving nature.
He scans the ruins. His vision flickers again. Another image. Not a memory of his father's labs, but something else. A flash of a huge, unmoving entity. Corpse-rooted. A massive, pulsing core. The Thrashgrove. The suit wants him to find it. The hunger within him intensifies. It's a physical craving. For bio-matter. Raw. Living.
"Negative contact. All clear." The scout pilot's voice on comms.
Vael doesn't trust it. The phantom pain in his arm twists, becomes a deep ache in his gut. He focuses. The bioluminescent pulse under his armor brightens for a second, then fades, a subtle physical manifestation of his Feral Ascension.
The convoy advances. Deeper into the grey, cracked landscape. The abandoned buildings lean against each other, concrete skeletons against a bruised sky. Vael sees the signs. Overgrown vegetation, oddly dense. Strange, peeling organic matter clinging to the walls, like discarded skin. Rindscale gorebreed remnants. The pervasive threat.
"This sector feels wrong." A squadmate's voice, quiet. Fear.
Vael's suit hums. His systems register a low, resonant vibration. Too deep to be natural. Too regular for any known Gorebreed. It pulses beneath the ground, faint, fragmented. A psychic echo. Not from the suit. Not from the area. A sensation of profound grief and memory, sharp and cold, tied specifically to his inherited memories of his father's experiments. His father's voice, distant, echoing in his head: Complete what I started. The current mission path. It intersects with his traumatic past.
The vibration beneath his feet intensifies. The suit's bioluminescent glow pulses. A new, terrifying evolution beginning within him. A forbidden path. He feels the deep thrumming, the psychic echo, the sensation of grief and memory. His suit's systems strain, pulling at the fragmented signal. He knows. He is on the verge of accessing something vast, something terrible, something that connects his very being to the world's deepest wound.
His suit's internal comms suddenly crackle, not with human voices, but with a distorted, raw resonance. It is a voice. But it is not his father. It is something else entirely. Something ancient and hungry. The connection snaps. His vision blurs. His suit screams an internal diagnostic error. His body tenses, then locks. He can't move. Not even a twitch. He stands frozen, mid-stride, as the convoy rumbles past him, oblivious to the fact that their gravest threat is not ahead, but within. His systems overload. Something in his mind breaks.