There was nothing for an awkward few moments but the sound of grinding gears and ripping dirt. The enormous walker had taken a comically large stumble down the slopes after having had multiple weapon and movement options crippled. None of the damage was inflicted was to core systems and as much as it had smashed and rolled its way down the hill, but it had probably done far more damage to the stones and the trees that had dotted the ascent. They would have heard bark and stone shattering alike between the groaning and screeching of tormented metal and they did, breaking the silence of the whirring rumble of a distant battle falling away into the distance.

The Envenomed heard all of the carnage layered beneath a sound that filtered into the air like the creeping ring of tinnitus. No sooner than Salvator had made his call had it began to appear, easily mistakable for residual electronics interference or the return of clear communications. At first it was only from their coms, near smothered by the sounds of the horrible machine they had felled no doubt rising to its chunky legs, stripped of wheels and pilot no doubt pride, but it grew too loud and insistent to be incidental. Where there was once just silence from command soon there was its pulsing hum, soothing the pastiche of shattered bodies and scenery they awaited.

Light fluctuated, blinked, not with the passage of absent clouds upon a clear sky but curving trails of yellow beams bent into shapes expected of glass sculptures that might filter them. Beams that once would peak through the foliage landed a few feet off and visually trailing them upward saw them curve and splinter around and against unseen turns and forks. There was a shape implied, one that covered much of the area of operation they had previously battled in even if it cast no shadow amongst the wreckage of being and machine. It was an aberration and it neared, the tops of trees and their leaves leaning away from it as if pushed by unseen barriers, scans of which soon were revealed to be sustained antigravitational force.

Closer now; shape manifested to augmented sight whether by HUD's, specialized biology, or internal computer systems if not combinations of such. A vessel of sort clad in the appearance of reality itself; see-through, invisible, the world as it appeared stretched over it like a stolen skin for a shape censored for the sensibilities of the squeamish. It was a long vessel not long as a typical jet or plane like aerial transport would be like, its body was enormous in its dimensions turning the space above them into a realm of distorted texture and bending sky. Segments lined its body, a long and predatory shape, large enough to fit at least a handful of tanks. Heat-like distortion near its end suggested the shape of tails and where realspace bent around sufficiently revealed the implied presence of a cockpit head - the entire thing was akin to some enormous predator lurking beneath the mundaneness of the sky, now hovering above them.

The visual consistency of distorted vision was broken when black lines manifested across the false sky in their sight. Where was once the calm blue above split open and the body of the beast was revealed; a rectangular entrance blacker than the afternoon of the day that stared back at them with the intensity of its murk. Shapes were visible within; long appendages of irregular jagged joints that twisted themselves into strained patterns, all receding as the doors spread, retreating from what light was outside. The faint red of visored, goggle-like eyes - infantry, Intransigent, species unknown and specific loadouts difficult to perceive. A growing purplish glow emerged from the ceiling as dirt, rock, rubble, and leaves began to float and bump amongst themselves in a wide radius beneath - wide enough they could have taken likely two warforms in there.

"Low-gravitational well established. Board then depart."

The voice spoke as easily as one completing a purchase for an order, unfazed by the shapes moving through the foliage in the distance. Shapes bearing the same red eyes as the ones in the vessel, hidden behind cloaks over armored bodies - Intransigent forces, some enormous arthropod-like things of claw-hand appendages thicker than human bodies and torsos like inverted triangles broken off into almsot disjointed, incongruent segments some holding weapons that were autocannons rather than rifles in spite of their fitting size. Others were clad in armour seemingly made from night itself, not flat colours of endless dark but criss-crossing complexities of hard padding, magazines, and reinforced collar protection. Weapons ponly spoken of in the tall tales of veteran insurgents and security forces, those who had survived strange incursions they were told never happened, aimed towards the slope where the enormous walker no doubt had returned to its feet.

"Do not remain nor interfere with the rest. This is where your mission ends."

Vrexul, definitely vrexul, each of them a foot taller at least than the endoform band bearing weapons grotesque in their combination of innumerable, independently moving parts and savage in how it had been molded into jagged, pointed forms took up a perimeter position. It was deliberate that they moved past the Envnomed, not so much as even turning one of their living symbiote-limbs to peer or point at them. The entire group of reinforcements did not appear to even notice or acknowledge them, only the slow and rhythmic thud of the slowly approaching armored thread.

As the Envenomed ascended the gravitational column, flashes of light and missile trails streaked underneath. Projectiles that would have struck the ship detonated harmlessly beneath, vanishing their allies beneath the angry glare of explosions. A sound like a hammer, pounding in the depths of a mythical place of post-mortem soul punishment, responded in turn to the roar of mecha weaponry. It dimmed and dimmed as the vessel's body closed and Zanovia became another memory in a legacy of quiet shame and unspoken deeds.

---

Time had turned into a standstill on the biomechanical vessel. The carnage that once surrounded them and which was visible just a turn of the head past a cliffside was gone and in its place the dull drone and meditative pulsing of the living cybernetics of the strange vessel they found themselves on. The lights were low but their eyes adjusted to it, the faint purple-white of ambient dome-like growths along the ceiling and walls draping their surroundings in the nocturnal glow of an imagined evening. The metal of the floors clanked yet shifted beneath their weight just so slightly, as if generously accomodating them, and in little slits and crevices in the shell-like material of the walls, shapes skittered faster than shape could be determined beyond carapaced and multi-sectioned.

Whatever sounds of battle they might have wondered about were absent. At most there was the slight rumble of the vessel as it presumably left the atmosphere... but then there was nothing but the alien mundanenity of it; long corridors that widened until rooms of hardened biofilm windows, behind which figures human and inhuman paid little attention.

It was tempting to think some of them were elite commando forces but they were not like the reinforcements from earlier. Mismatches of weaponry from across the hegemon across armore painted colours fitting for the Intransigence yet not concealing of the smoother shapes of League issue hardware, the mismatched jaggedness of the Black City's rank and file, the ballistic living padding of fungal-kevlar worn by many Yrrkradians... it was familiar in an odd sense. It was not often one might see scielto not draped in the heavenly splendor of their ethereal nobility but clad in the same bandoliers and infantry-issue shield generators as the celaderaka next to them, clutching at where once was a quarter of their skull, the rest of it silently hovering around his skull connected by lightning-beams of tenuous, faint energies green and sickly.

The infantry that had been leading them said nothing, clad in the general infantry armor of Intranszjednota bipeds, having said nothing but merely motioning for them to follow. Yet they stopped at the corridor, shaped like a gigantic spinal column ribbed and lined with matter that resembled muscle beneath where bones did not fully connect. At its end was a figure no less skeletal.



It was more human than the rest of the assortment of species they had seen yet something more than that. In spite of being a mimickry of structured bone, it was greater than what a human skeleton would have been. There was volume to its mass, not spindly and crackling but rife with vigour in its motions, the striding of its six-feet-seven-inch height as vigorous as whenever it once had flesh and organic strength. It was not a skeletal grin but a harsh grimace hidden behind the tinted visor, steeled to whether coming trouble and terror alike. Intransigent forces did not often salute but the two that had lead them paused for a moment and muttered something inaudible and likely non-verbal, almost as if verses of a song.

An affirmation in the form of a buzzing pulse emerged seemingly from the walls itself, the air, or the very space around the skeletal machine as the two soldiers left.

"Speak, freely. There is much to discuss and others to meet. The vessel has docked and you are to be briefed on what is to come. I had expected little given the constraints of time, but my decision had been correct. There is little time to rejoice. We are expected soon. Yet not so soon I cannot gleam a few things. With me."

Its voice was difficult to determine; it was not the voice it would have had when it was of flesh and blood but there was something distantly buried beneath the layered echo-speak that seemed to emerge both from its body and the very space around it. As if it was a singular being who was the vessel of an audience they could not see save for itself. It had not even introduced itself and its voice was still hurried. Attempts to scan it returned fragmented false readings from its ambient electronic warfare security measures but they were busy with an agenda of their own, too much to care for little prods like that.

All they got out of any scans was that they were designated as INVICTOID AUTHORITY NODE 04/10

Soon it lead them to a chamber, one at the very least had recognizable furniture not merely for humanoids but based on the enormous cushion-like memory-moss clump on the floor, it was meant to be comfortable for the endoform and any other sufficiently large as well (the warform had to be parked in a vehicle bay from earlier). The ceiling still resembled flattened insectoid features glazed over and laminated, the floor did not shift so much (it appeared to be solid tiles for once), and the table was... a table. A wide, circular table with chairs that bore no biomechanical perversity, even having cushions of the actually-a-cushion variety with a few neon lights above that aggressively clashed with the rest of the dead-yet-dreadful decor.

"You have questions. I have questions. Speak your mind. Then I will speak mine."

Everything he did not see was a waking nightmare to him.

The nonsensical paradox was quite literal. The sophisticated mechanism at the core of his body that measured the parameters of his phantasmagorical skin in order to provide him with sensation had a fully spherical field of view and never turned off. Before, when he had still been alive, he could simply constrain his field of view to something Human-adjacent for a more digestible experience.

Now though, dead and buried, if he closed his one third eye even slightly, in the writhing darkness beneath its synthetic eyelids he could instead - see the festering, putrescent, monstrous beings pupating inside what remained of his entombed corpse. He swore they moved. Every time he dared to try and examine them he swore their everting maws and pulsating, grime-lathered ventricular pores had pulsated in some edacious fashion that he could not quite commit to memory.

The alternative of a full field of view without end, warped and blown out of proportion by his limited Human experience, reigned as a seductive siren's call promising an end to the fitful night terrors. He knew, however, that is was but one of the many self-imposed facets and aspects of his new form that if he embraced too fully, all pretense of Humanity would abandon him. He would lose sight of what-was and drown in the metamorphic numen, reverse transubstantiation of the mind and soul to mirror the state of the body - the placid, inert fluid being reshaped and molding to the form of its new container. While that might not have necessarily been a bad thing, per se, there was always then the forlorn, insidious notion: If he adapted too well to his new form, he would never be able to return to what remained of his corpse.

Make a heaven of hell to find damnation in paradise, or endure an unending continuation of freakish misery for the distant promise of far-flung catharsis and absolution? The classic dilemma in a new, modernized experience embodied in an exploration of phantom sensation. In their magnanimity, his current hosts had even arranged his living conditions to neatly mirror his sleepless, daylight horror. The Tarrhaidim​ and Vrexul dominated aesthetics of the vessel he had been reassigned to charming him with its rancid, fungal aesthetic at every turn, as if the whole ship was a corpse with industrial-sleek and glittering mold covering every relevant surface. He was not certain whether the convergent aesthetics on display between the two alien species and his own personal torment were incidental or deliberate - all he knew for certain was that they almost certainly saw him in just a distasteful light as he saw them. The so-called bunking arrangements at general quarters aboard the ship, in particular, were insufferably claustrophobic and altogether too similar to the writhing torment that occupied his blind spot.

It was thus no surprise that he instead spent the majority of his time 'patrolling' his new host vessel for the purposes of finding the single least visually offensive vista where he could ineffectually bang his head against the metallic hydrogen facade of contemplative normalcy he tried to maintain if only for the sake of his own withering sanity. There was no salvation to be found - practically every squirming centimeter of the alien vessel churned and seethed with the rush of biomechanical life. The company he had to keep, of course, was even worse. It was as if every single asshole inside of twelve AU wanted to put their own mutagenic excess on display - that most of them were bent and twisted into rough approximations of Humanoid form almost seemed condescending.

Needless to say, after having run what passed for his mouth a few times, the majority of the crew and passengers had come to view him with precisely the same disgust he held for most of them. He had already been disciplined ^{(Ha! HA! AHAHAHA!!!)} multiple times for 'speciest proclivities and discriminatory sentiment.' He could clearly see how indulging in such base and distasteful behavior was hindering his ongoing efforts, but what else could he do? He did not even have the relative oasis of his own body to find respite in - or to find the rudiments of civility in. He needed something to ground his Humanity in, and if it won him no favors from his erstwhile 'allies,' they could go find a large mass of anti-neutronium to kick.

“King.”

Yes. That was him. The not-name for his body anyway. He shook off the passing, questionable entertainment of his reverie to continue arguing with the bay quartermaster. He glanced off to the side, behind where the Quartermaster stood, to look at the security-feed displaying the counter-side view of the desk and whoever happened to be on the receiving end of it. It was still him he saw. Approximately 1.78 meters in height and still looking a little too thin, even with the bulked-up ballistics suit he had projected over the display for his skin. His auburn-colored hair was presently being worn in a loose ponytail until he could be assed to devise something really eccentric. The expression on the angular features of his face was still one of vague disinterest however - only the deep-green coloration of his eyes really stood out at the moment. Conjuring up a bid of concentration, he managed to twist the external photon-curtain for his face to resemble an approximation of scornful expression.

"That's my name, don't chew on it too much before spitting it out." He retorted.

He was King.



"Your requisition request has - once more - been denied." The Quartermaster wheezed through the biomechanical equivalent of a respirator. Like everything else on the ship, they were a little too tall, spindly, and corpse-like for King's taste.

"What, all six thousand of them?" King asked plaintively as he leaned elbow-first on the commissary counter.

"It was impressive that you had the patience and commitment to press the 'Confirm and Send' button six thousand times. I can only imagine how much time that took you. However, all the duplicates were filtered and omitted by the governing system."

"So why was the one application that got through rejected?"

The Quartermaster leaned down from across the commissary window, practically butting head to head with King in the process before answering.

"I took such apoplectic offense to your attitude from before that I, in my rage, lost your form. I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you personally."

"Nothing to it, scatterbrains, pretty sure they make a pill for that." King made a show of gritting the teeth he did not have while locking what currently passed for his eyes with the quartermaster's own beady, optical lens. "Look, I ask for so very, very little. I do not even eat. Is it so much to ask that you actually do your job and requisition the one, singular item that might make abiding your creepy, insufferable countenance otherwise tolerable, which I have been asking you to get for the last fourteen billion cycles?"

The quartermaster leaned back from across the counter again. "Without even having looked into it, you are asking for a form of physical media that could be perfectly viewed digitally. You could even look at it right now, if what I know about your apparatus is right. Obtaining a physical copy is redundant, risky, expensive - and unnecessary. Do not file a similar request again."

"So on top of being lazy, ugly, and dim-witted, we can now add 'inept' to the lengthy list of your many physical failings." King made a concerted effort to twist the photon-curtain of his face to approximate a contemptuous sneer. "I, for one, cannot wait to get to know you better so I can figure out what is also wrong with your personality. I'll resubmit the form another six-thousand times with unique modifications each time if that's what it takes. Just get it for me you complete waste of my time..." He banged on the commissary counter with the project for his right fist before turning around with a somewhat over-embellished sweeping gesture. Then he made to strut away, taking care to make sure his feet were actually touching the floor and to throw in some exaggerated nigh-drunken sway to really sell the picture of barely-contained indignant rage. He had no idea if the alien quartermaster could even read Human body-language, but it was not for his benefit regardless.

The quartermaster threw something wet and viscous at the back of King's head. It struck and splattered itself against the contours of the photon-curtain for King's hair, neck, and shoulders.

'Get mad. Get really mad. Hormonal, impulsive, completely reckless rage. You are incandescent with hate. Let's go. Get mad. Just imagine it as if it had happened to you for real. Get mad. Get mad. Get mad.'

King's form stood still and rigid for several moments, but he failed to properly approximately the still-but-livid shock that he remembered as coming with being struck by something filthy from an unseen angle. He couldn't quite bend the eyes projected by the photon-curtain to swell with visible hate. He couldn't quite get the photo-curtain's skin to ripple with reflexive shock. He couldn't quite get the set of his jaw to broaden and lower in animal ferocity.

Most damningly, though: He also couldn't quite bring himself to care.

King shrugged faintly, and the surface of his entire body shimmered with iridescent waves of scintillating light as his photon-curtain remodulated itself. He applied a faint burst of ablative-kinetic shock to the residue of whatever the Quartermaster had thrown at him and sent it scattering across the walls and floor. Utterly defeated, he then drifted off - literally. His feet did not even touch the ground as he pulled his host mechanism across the bay and to the nearest juncture, ignoring the alien curses the Quartermaster was flinging at his back.

Before he could ruminate for too long on his failings and contemplate jettisoning himself out the nearest airlock to scream in space for the rest of forever, he received a communique from the Invictoid Authority. The strike team was back. Time for mission debrief and introductions. Time to pretend to care about another mishmash of random assholes out here in the back end of nowhere, space, running aggrandized wetwork for the interstellar political equivalent of a howling infant. There was always the possibility some of them might be Human of course. Or at least look passably Human. He could have reviewed the strike team's profiles in advance but had elected to savor the disappointment in person.

As he made to enter the briefing room, resplendent with its insultingly mundane table and chairs, he was genuinely shocked for the first time in months when he heard a Human voice stained with the very indignant rage he had just attempted and failed to conjure up - and then he beheld the frazzled countenance of one Kleo Alves, attempting to chew out the Invictoid Authority as though she did not know it had been dealing with him for long enough that she would be unable to faze it even if she had spat in its face.

He frowned when she visibly coughed blood on the ground. Did she have internal bleeding? Had the medics not tended to her yet? Typical. Still, she was healthy enough to scream at an authority figure, that meant she was healthy enough to humor a little hazing.

"𝙱𝚊𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚛𝚍, 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚎𝚟𝚒𝚕 𝚏𝚞𝚌𝚔𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚋𝚊𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚛𝚍. 𝚆𝚊𝚒𝚝 '𝚗 𝚜𝚎𝚎, 𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚙𝚊𝚠𝚗 𝚑𝚎𝚛𝚎? 𝚂𝚑𝚎'𝚕𝚕 𝚋𝚎 𝚘𝚗𝚎 𝚝𝚘 𝚝𝚊𝚔𝚎 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚔𝚒𝚗𝚐, 𝚠𝚑𝚘𝚎𝚟𝚎𝚛 𝚢𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚔𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚒𝚜. 𝙸'𝚕𝚕 𝚙𝚞𝚝 𝚑𝚒𝚖.. 𝙲𝚑𝚎𝚌𝚔𝚖𝚊𝚝𝚎."

"That..." He said, putting a bit of a spinning, exaggerated drawl in the intonation of his voice as he strutted into the room, "Would be me!"

He made directly for the seat nearest to where Kleo was standing, spun it around, and made a show of heaping himself in it before propping his boots up on the table directly in front of her.

"The name is King, don't forget it." He drew up a hand right beside the temple of his brow and snapped his fingers while twisting the photo-curtain of his face into a familiar, savage smirk. He could not quite manage to perfectly mimic the friction of flesh on flesh to approximate a snapping sound, so he instead emitted the faintest of laser-pulses to generate a plasma-mediated vacuum around the tips of his fingers that would simulate a snapping sound. "And you can checkmate me any day of the terrestrial week you like, Queen, but kindly refrain from coughing blood all over my boots."

Externally, everything about King would have screamed 'civie' to the others looking at him. He was wearing a flagrantly ineffective and eye-catching overcoat over a very light ballistic suit that would not have saved him from a single shot in an actual fight, and he had close to no muscle mass or definition to speak of. He seemed like some 20-somethings spoiled Human brat, for the most part - except...

There was something off about his appearance. An eerie stillness to him - as though he was not breathing. As if no part of him moved unless he wanted it to. More than that, he was a sensory dead patch in the room. Beyond infrared and thermal picking him up as a colder than cold Humanoid-shaped patch, everything else would return a scan of being either completely overloaded just from looking at him, or else make him out to simply not be there at all. To the Etheric sense particularly, it was as though he did not exist.

"Task failed successfully, team?" He laughed.

The trip back to the ship was a mundane one, which after such harsh fighting was agreeable. The unztadtlige was a creature of war, but lulls in the conflict were to be enjoyed as well. The Warform was left behind in the great bioship's hangar, awaiting repairs and servicing as it had took the brunt of the damage Echo had sustained. Not to mention the hulking figure of the Warform wouldn't have fit in the corridors anyway.

Instead, the Endoform plodded heavily behind the rest of the squad as they slowly filtered into the semi-organic conference room of the ship for their debriefing. The Endoform didn't tire like natural humanoids did, so it didn't see the need to sit down and 'relax' but it did hunch down on its legs in the equivalent of 'taking a knee'- mainly so the Endoform would not obstruct the view of others. The human of their group had already begun conversing with their commander, though much of her speech made little sense to the colony. Echo's best guess was that the humanoid was upset about taking damage to her exterior shell.

Before Echo had fully finished processing their compatriot's vitriol, another entered the room, one not originally with their strike team. Introducing itself as King, Echo's visual scanners found it incongruent with the typical human norms, despite its similar shape. Multi-spectrum scans of the figure illicted something close to discomfort. Echo quickly switching back to its standard camera. The Endoform emitted a short mechanical whine that could be best described as frustration. Like Kleo, this one spoke in strange sentences.

"Report. All directives completed successfully." The Echo platform corrected over its external speakers, both the command unit and the newcomer not yet added to the squad comm network. The head of the Endoform turned to the biomechanical commander. "Acknowledged. No current inquiries."

Finally, this shitfest of a mission was complete. All in a day's work with the Intransigence, really. He didn't relax until his feet hit the ship's deck, though relax was a rather strong term in this instance. More along the lines of he wasn't prepared for imminent death at any second now. Salvator just dutifully followed along as the commander unit escorted them, more than familiar with this outfit's debriefing procedures at this point. Once they were within the meeting room, he held his questions as Kleo decided to speak up first.

...Alright, speak was a bit of an understatement. Should've figured that the kid was a human supremacist, considering how she'd acted on-planet. Not the rarest thing in the galaxy. Every species had this sort, and it didn't make any one species more or less racist than the rest. The kidnapping claim was more interesting.

Salvator gave the odd human in the civvie outfit a curt nod before stepping forward, placing his palms down on the table as he stared the commander unit down.

"Go easy on her, kid's lost a lot of blood. Though I have to ask if her kidnapping claims are true. Are they? Because at the end of the day, we both know that unwilling soldiers aren't efficient." He didn't even bother trying to make a moral argument at this point. It'd just be brushed off anyway.

"And speaking of whys..." Salvator reached up to pull his hood down and remove his helmet, revealing a bald, blue-skinned voidhanger with a rather well-kept beard. He narrowed his eyes. "Last I checked, we were supposed to be on-planet to help the local population. So why were we ordered to do the exact opposite? Explain how this benefits the cause."

The approach to the dropship put Ilshar at ease. The sight of something so large under an optic cloak was always somewhat offputting, calling to mind an imitation of some Abyssal presence - something that was not supposed to be seen being forced into an approximation of a visible presence - but the smell of metal-melded biomass and, above all, the etheric breeze he could feel from it if he focused were soothing. All that living matter, fated to rot one day. After the hectic tides of danger of several battles, this mass of coagulated certainty was a refreshing sense of firmness, helping still his mind like a tree-stem it could latch onto. He unlatched his helmet and let it dangle from his fingers, air whistling through the grille of his exposed teeth. Great Spiral, whatever he might have done on this planet, it felt good to be finished. His hands interlinked in the sign of the twofold ring in a gesture of thanks.

Onboard the craft, the visible world reasserted itself, getting rid of the jarring sensory mismatch. Ironically, this left Ilshar’s thoughts free to wander to unpleasant places. What the Yrrkradians had been to Enthuur, he had been here. Was this some kind of jest of fate, a turn of the concentric folds in the Nexus’ bottomless gulch? More likely, it was simply on him. To distract himself, he shaped more eyes and tasting orifices as he walked, drinking in the pulse of melded life from all around and idly dwelling on the oddities that lined his passage. Now and again some trooper’s salvaged Dominion gear stung him like a sore spot in the eyes.

The new, or was it, handler the Envenomed came across was a welcome distraction for the time being. He was even ready to bear with it being a cyborg. If nothing else, it had some biomatter around its dead metal, though he suspected all of it was synthetic. That still put the Authority Node above the other newcomer that joined the squad in the debrief room. Not being able to feel anything from that apparent human was ever so slightly disturbing. Even a mechanoid would have smelled of steel and plastic, but this “King”, nothing. Ilshar could’ve thought he was a hologram, but he was clearly solid. He leaned away from the eerie presence in the chair he had perched on, answering his jibe with a hostile growl of “Looks like we’ve got a laughing one here.”

Kleo’s delirious ramblings flew by without shaking him from the wary contemplation of King, but then Rasch voiced what had been looming grimly in the back of his mind.

“It’s never about helping. Not in this business.” Ilshar’s finger traced the rust-coloured spiral pattern on the bared livid, rubbery membranous skin of his forearm. “Whatever our employer’s after isn’t going to align with anyone else’s goal forever.”

He turned his eye-ringed mouth to the Authority Node.

“But I still wouldn’t mind knowing what it is. What’s the Intransigence’s angle on Zanovia? It can’t just be messing with the League for the fun of it.” Why did he do it? There better have been a good reason, for what little that was worth.

*CLANK*

The air around the skeletal being shimmered, pond-like if a stone had splashed into it, but no such sound emerged. A hard thud sent the projectile bounding back, clattering on the tiled floor.

There was no response from the commander, far more interested in what pressing questions had demanded.

"Nobody here can say they are being granted a mercy being placed under our command. Elsewhere, your comrade may have simply been made to face a wall with their hands behind their back. Mere service to the League in some circles is the greatest transgression. Truthfully, I cannot blame them; many bear the scars of the League's humanitarian generosity even before it was a single imperial alliance rather than two. I can however, veto certain complaints and injunctions. Consider this a sentence with more leeway for her than was originally intended; even command level accusations of reactionary belief have their limits in our domains. If she wants it further shortened, I am sure the rifles of those you are sent against will gladly oblige."

Echo would detect an electronic flicker as a signal was transmitted from the cyborg to a wall adjacent of them. Four corners formed those of a rectangular shape and holographic light extended, a luminescent and soothing green-blue that resulted in the formation of a screen of raking lines and fizzling static. Definition gradually overtook them and it would appear to gain an entirely solid construction as if light itself had become tangible. It blinked; a news channel manifested, League in origin based on the quad-winged x-shape of wings and the eye-hilted blade that stabbed down the middle that flashed before the screen. It shrunk into the corner and, next to a capitalized stream of pressing news, but far less so than the footage of a familiar, half-sizzled, planarian-headed creature stumbling forth on the screen. Stumps where tendril wings should be were visible on its back and its once majestic figure rested with its arms draped over two shades-wearing human bodyguards. Low-light camera flashed serenaded its return as a voiceover spoke.

"The Solar Broadcast Federation news has learned that roughly 30 terran hours ago the ZRF completed a series of high-profile prisoner exchanges as part of the ongoing territorial negotiations with the New Prosperity planetary government. After the recent Front offensive in the Rhodes Valley, which has resulted in massive losses for the Intransigence-armed rebel group suspected of multiple terrorist offences, a number of captured personnel were exchanged to enforce renewed ceasefire talks, believed to be pushed by more moderate members of the Front leadership. The death of Commandante Sazan, which insurgent leadership has refused to comment on, is believed to have forced them to the negotiating table.

"An impressive piece of the free press serving the iron boot. I believe I do not need to lecture on you which details they left out; details that you no doubt painted by your hand. You have helped; the peace talks are in full effect... but 'peace talk' is doing quite a bit of heavy lifting."

The news-reel continued; scenes of the Artelesia Nation Sector governor wiping the sweat on his bald head under the sun, a distant fire off in the background as heavily armored League marines stood just within peripheral sight of the fish-eye camera lens - a scielto broadcast. His words were subtitled in the alien cursive of the seraphic aliens but his words in the meantime were resolute or bluster depending on the inclination of the viewer; the radical factions that had undone years of benevolent market development and post-Yrrkradian reform but especially that a narrative of 'economic apartheid' based on the productivity of individual city-sectors and economic zones, was little more than foreign interference from Intansigence propagandists and inner-system college protesters blinded by authoritarian trickeries.

"I suppose I have just earned myself the ire from more fanatical of those we ally with for not a single yet two feeds of market-profitable disinfo-news sludge, but an ex-League economic policy greaser like that does not sweat like that when he merely needs to rouse the ire of the foreign-imported business owners and bourgeoisie against a threat. They could not even find an angle that would not hide the smoke in the distance; what's that they called it again? Minor damage from a failed rocket strike? I'll switch to proper news eventually, but tell me, what do you think you were ordered to actually target? A command centre is one thing, but what do you think prompted the peace talks to accelerate? The vassal-state of the League could never retain control forever and this was merely a wake up call. Yet for a most favorable outcome, someone had to go and you have yourselves to congratulate for that. Connect the dots; some of you are special forces, yes? I would fail you now if you could not."

In the meantime, he glanced over to Kleo then to Alice.

"Relocate her to the medical bay, follow the directions on the signs or your personal handheld device. Your comrades will fill you in on the rest when you return. Kleo reeks of a certain sort of Celestial arrogance that would typically cause her to become the subject of re-shared interpersonal media controversies; I can already feel the perversity of her kind's culture vultures ready to pounce on every word. Perhaps that would be a more suitable punishment than death; participation in their discourse of emptiness. In the meantime, I have acquired an additional asset for your assistance." Their smoothly metallic head turned over to the so-called King. "A construct as some of you must have surmised or sensed, hardlight and ethereally near-untouchable. Consider this an exception to our policy on monarchial rule for the convenience of your missions. Something we shall get to sooner than later."

Rho-Hux

*The unreliable narrator is strong with this one*

As Rho-Hux walked through the station, he felt like a fresh elver recruit all over again. His old rank of Major meant nothing here; he recognized no officers or soldiers, and most information was closed off to him as he had only been recruited…some time ago. Rho-Hux rubbed his temple as he tried to organize dates and times, but moments and people blurred together more often these days. He remembered talking to someone. Was it in a bar, a shooting ring, or an abandoned mining base on a rogue planet? Regardless, they spoke about Rho-Hux's actions during the Veiled War and Reckoning of Empires with respect and reverence, something his own nephews and nieces had failed in. They wanted, no, needed the Constrictor of Caddadast to return! They said they were from the Intranszjednota, no, the Intransigence, no, that wasn’t right either, …that couldn’t be right. They were the Empire’s intransigence! Yes, that was it! It was a secret organization dedicated to maintaining peace in the galaxy for now and weakening the galactic powers until the Empire was ready to reemerge properly. Now, sometimes, this would mean going after Empire supporters, but Rho-Hux knew these were nothing more than self-obsessed fouls stirring up trouble. Like tending to a tree, the wild branches must be cut off from time to time. That was Rho-Hux’s view, and he was glad he found like-minded people.

So here was Rho-Hux, back at square one. His bones ached, his eyesight had worsened, and his skin looked like it was about to fall off any moment, but he was just as excited for his first mission as he was all those years ago. He had been told he was to be assigned to a relatively new group that had just completed their first mission. As the newcomer, he couldn’t get full access to the mission details, but he could make a few educated guesses. A Commandante Sazan was dead, some high-profile prisoners were exchanged, and Rhodes Valley now had a lot fewer terrorists. That was the one part of the news broadcast Rho-Hux disagreed with. Those rebels were just children having tantrums to get their way. Solar Broadcast Federation would call anyone a terrorist these days.

“What would they have thought of me in my prime?” Rho-Hux thought to himself.

Salvator's frown didn't fade. He should've figured it'd be something like this, but that didn't make the bait-and-switch any less galling. To say nothing of the fact that while he understood the objectives and outcomes of the op, he didn't agree. Peace talks? He wanted the occupiers and colonizers gone.

Of course, what Salvator wanted was far different from what he understood was realistically achievable. Which was just about the only reason he didn't protest further. This sort of outcome was the best the Intrasigence could hope for on an average day. So he just gave the command unit a curt nod, showing his understanding of the matter. Moving on.

King, eh? Hardlight construct was interesting, and-

Did the commander unit just make a fucking joke? Wonders never ceased, apparently.

Getting back on topic, the hardened insurgent inclined his head towards King.

"Salvator Rasch. Good to have you on. Evidently I'm in command, since no one protested otherwise."

Kleo wasn't sure who the fuck this lick was beside her but she didn't care, before she could rage or protest anymore she was picked up and escorted to whatever-medbay existed on this insectoid hellhole of a ship. Though before her departure she turned to this plastic-looking silicone motherfucker of sorts, and spit some blood towards him and his shirt. "Fuck you, weird - looking.." Then she passed out in the arms of the capable medics (or bug/squid medics?) as she was hauled away to the medbay for much-needed R&R and blood transfusions, as well as some bullet pulling.

She had a full day ahead of her!

"Nice to know I can still make all the ladies swoon." King preened where he sat as Kleo was bodily hauled away, not even so much as flinching as the blood she spat all over his shirt dripped down his chest. Abruptly, his entire body seemed to ripple with undulating waves of scintillating, iridescent color - and the blood covering his shirt and boots were both violently flung away from him, some of it even splattering against the Invictoid Authority's own shield, causing it to shimmer once more as it deflected the bloody droplets.

"As for our erstwhile Commander - rest assured sir, protesting frequently and often is one of my most developed skills. I will be sure to forward all of that to you in the future." He flicked a lazy two-fingered salute Salvator's way. He did not otherwise make to move from his seated position, with his boots - or the seeming of them at any rate - still propped up on the meeting table. "Otherwise, I am something of a close-in fire-support specialist. Covering and suppression fire, wide-variety energy frequency munitions, aerial, amphibious, and space-capable environmental maneuvers. All of which will mostly be limited by how slow and inept the rest of you are, but I imagine somehow we will be able to muddle our way to realms of disheartening adequacy all the same."

Peace talks. So, that was it. Ilshar leaned back in his seat, retracting a few eyes as he considered what the Authority Node had just somewhat circuitously explained. The first thing to come to mind was that this did nothing to dislodge the UCL from Zanovia. Quite the opposite, it gave them room to tighten their grip on their proxies, though probably in a more reduced way than they would have liked. But then the conflict was not going to die out because of this. If the League wanted to keep that hold, they would, as he had thought, need to keep their forces locked to the ground for at least a while…

What did he know about the Intransigence and its goals, really? From the start, he had assumed that it ultimately wanted the same things any such body with a large armed force always did - more space, more influence, more worldly power. From what he’d heard, supposedly it had folded into itself remnants of the Expanse’s own interplanetary Liberation Front, but Ilshar’s knowledge of happenings in the wider galaxy before the end of the war had always been hazy. The one thing he could be sure about was that whatever game his employers were playing, it was a long one.

More pressingly, the strange and irreverent hologram was here to stay. Great. At least the loud human was out of it for the time being.

“Don’t you worry about us, we’ll keep up,” he passed his flexile tongue along the tips of yellowed shardlike teeth, a cluster of eyes fixed on King, “Ilshar. Or Teffn, I’ve gone by that. Seems we’ll be sharing suppression duty while the walking hive strikes the hammer.” He motioned at Echo, before inclining his head to turn most of his eyes at the Authority Node.

“But if it’s time for us to know, what will it strike next?”

The gealtirocht alone in his thoughts and in the bowels of the biomechanical vessel soon would be interrupted from his increasingly distorted thoughts by a notification on their personal communications device - MAKE YOUR WAY TO THE DESIGNATED ROOM.

Within separated rib like construction of the wall lights flashed just brightly enough for their eyes to spot their flicker, a linear pattern trailing down the hallway, past a windowed room, towards a series of automated doors visible to their honed sight. The little trilobite-esque creates flittering within their elongated crevices flashed their lights as if directing a plane to land.

Behind those doors the Invictoid's digital systems flicked through the channels on the television; flashes of jarring and increasingly alien text, channels intended for those whose perception of the world was of a more amorphous and ambiguous nature, before a different broadcast was settled on. A symbol covered the screen for a moment. It was a coiling creature of centipede appearance... no, not one but two emerging raised heads and triumphant in posture from a tripartite skull of curving ridges and upwards gazing eyes - impaled from all their would-be flat sides by long lances, some of which resembled insectoid limbs and others tribal weaponry.

It vanished not even leaving an afterimage. In its place was the familiar sight of the Rhodes Valley not as a distant rolling tapestry of a besieged but relentless armored advance but the beings who had stormed its length and driven out the foreign occupation. It was not a pleasant scene; the camera flickered on occasion, blurred artifacts clinging to the screen before it was wiped down in a wave of gentle light-teal light. The channel was no doubt one associated with the central Intransigence planets if that was all was needed to counteract the backwas of ethereal radiation interfering with electronics.

It could not however hold back the strange mixture of jubilation and anger that shoved, howled, celebrated amongst, and clung to the deceased. The armor of those they had seen scurrying and sprinting amidst blasts of cannon fire and machine gun spray now with rifles clacking against the biometallic armor plating and laden bandoliers, hanging limply on their shoulder straps. There was skin visible; human in its many colours or motttled-rotted green-brown-yellow amongst them - the great numbers of tarrhaidim present brilled with explosive emotion no different from human counterparts.

There was no real conversation towards the camera-holder; some of what was uttered were the mumbles of the mourning through the tears that poured from eyes adapted to see further and more precisely than a human normally might. One human desperately pulling out another mottle-camo patterned body, furiously shaking it by the shoulders, their tongue some bizarre mish-mash of adapted local tarrhaidim and English - "Not your time to rot. Not your time to rot. Not your time to rot." The specifics were difficult to make out, some local mantra, but the words became indistinct. The sorrow verbalized as hands placed themselves onto the now unrecognizable remains, extracting keepsakes and supplies alike of a fallen friend, clashed against the resonant howls and uproarious celebration the camera swung to next.

Upon the shattered body of some of the huge walkers, with the faint blue glow of where the stadium-esque League command center once stood in the background. The air blurred and the space around it undulated and twisted, sickly pinkish colours bruising into the strains of realspace sitll recovering from the Envenomed's horrific artillery strike. It was as if a fire burned there not with flame but colours that warped in and out of the visible spectrum, bending the image which they could see. Tattered walls and smoking gun emplacements stretched and blurred as if some gelatinous, invisible substance was being pulled and compacted around them yet one that took on strange and foul colours as it did so.

It was not an unearthly bonfire that the soldiers, rifles grabbed around their receivers and held high as if offerings, were celebrating. The camera closed in, shaking as a civilian figure - tall, gealtirocht clad in white-purple ballistic padding around its broad torso, striding with ease over the debris unlike the camera operator - walked onto the field. They were not alone; craggy skinned celaderaka, a tarrhaidim clad in overlapping robes fluttering as it walked with ceremonial moon-shaped medals pinned to the ballistic armor-implants beneath, and a berreted human whose darkened skin bore a series of bruises next areas of strangely lighter colouration, all raising their hands and welcoming the cheer.

The gealtirocht turned, cranial-mounted microphone letting them gesture and point as the audio mix momentarily diminished the sound of whatever meeting or reunion was occurring.

"Live here from the scene of the recent Rhodes Valley Offensive, where all constituent members of the Zanovia Reclamation Front participated. As you can see, the price paid is steep and the wounds on the people and the land will remain long after even the colonial occupation departs."

The digitigrade alien's actual tongue seemed far harsher than the english of the subtitles, live-translated with some sort of specialized digital intelligence program, popping up at the bottom of the screen. Its features were anguillid, predatory even with its semi-elongated head and the visible slightly curving knife-teeth it spoke through, but the rush of emotion on its features were kept barely in check. Something between a proud grin and a heavy emotional weight played across its features.

"Front infantry, many of which are veterans of multi-continential conflicts dating back to before the forceful renaming to New Prospery, even before Sazan's rise to planetary leadership of the umbrella organization, were deployed en masse. As one can see-

The camera swept this time to behind where they were all situated - far, far behind the mountain that the squad had been battling upon during their short stay on the planet. If the destroyed CivSec command centre looked like an invisible jellyfish wearing reality's skin ready to burst from expanding pressure, then the expansive of anomalous swollen wounds in the fabric of space was a whole field of pulsing wounds in the visible spectrum of realspace itself each one still seeping a sickly purplish-pink gaseous light.

"A massive level of void-artillery was used to try and stall the advance but soldiers report that the weapon later on ceased its firing, before firing again, destroying the main stronghold in the area and a mobile command centre, then a nearby bunker."

The alien paused for a moment, exchanging unclear words with a pair of soldiers, one whose fungoid skull was reduced to a lower jawbone at most and the two human troopers underneath both of its arms, hauling the hole-marked torso gurgle-intoning some sort of distorted prayer. Two optical-tendrils with bulbous ends peered at the camera before their comrades, grinning ear to ear looked away from the reporter to say some sort of half-blurred ring of expletives - something to the effect of bleeding the colonizers dry and mailing their distant League backers the fear-induced excrement of the nation sector's governor as a parting gift, to be mailed courtesy of a Sazan Kal-Hayalat .

The gealtirocht turned to the camera, their words momentarily muted by a roar of jeers and howls of violent support. Bodies laid upon stretches coughed and hacked, raising fists or clanging knives against armor plating. A joyous cacophony, one that even the anguilid xeno could not help but curl its lips into a smile with, revealing rows of teeth that began to curve backwards - it looked not hungry but smug in its satisfaction with the enthusiasm.

Slowly the energy died down.

"In more pressing news, a recent prisoner exchange was completed as part of the ongoing negotiations wherein the foreign-backed settler government was forced in exchange for the eldest son of a noble scielto househood, release a number of major leaders of the ZRF coalition - as you can see-"

He gestured off to the trio from earlier, now appearing to hold a small conference of their own. A private military channel with the crews operating the various forms of recording equipment all in much of the same motley uniforms and aggressively dated armor patterning. One did not need to hear or understand a word of what was spoken in order to see the vigor and hopefulness in them; the way their hands rose as if commanding not an army but an orchestra, the assembled soldiers behind them grinning through their battle scars, some of the wounded ones even hoisted up by allies, made it appear to be the least professional confefence possible.

"With the unfortunate loss of Sazan, means that negotiations are still ongoing with the remaining leadership, many of which are of ex-Dominion origin as well as trained by Intransigent forces. Face-saving measures including talks of a 'transitional government' have gone well in the hours leading up to the makeshift battlefield conference, with similar talks happening elsewhere on the world. For once, the native inhabitants have the position of power not only over the tables of diplomacy rooms but the very soil of they and their predecessors. I believe it is fair to say that-"

The screen flicked off and the skeletal machine turned back to the squad they controlled.

"Now, who among you would have preferred the bloodshed to continue? Purely on my own terms, I would not have minded - strategic possibilities were endless. These are not however, my people or my planet. Did you know that it was not even Sazan's? You do not need to read intercepted coms and intelligence to know that he was not even a native of Zanovia. Why, there was a televisted broadcast a day or so ago while you were on the way to be dployed; a vrexul veteran mentioned his work writing speeches for Yrrkradian leaders, went so far as to say that tarrhaidim was not our friend. Truthfully, he was not wrong about him."

Its movements were sudden. Machines were not of flesh, blood and skin, and its steps were strides that brought it before Alice. There was no shadow to loom over her, only byzantine details of advanced cybernetics to stare back.

"Sazan was useful but not a believer in revolution; neither are the others who back the Front. He knew warmaking but his desire to prolonging the conflict for a distant total victory would mean drawing in the League and the Dominion alike as things further escalated. An expansion of the conflict and the diminishing of Intransigent allies there; cruel as what we did was, crueller still would have been the cost of throwing our prayers to wind. A transitional government may not sound glamorous, but I would prefer the transfer of power into the hands of the liberated masses. It also gives us time to sort out issues with the Dominion-backed elements in the Front and less trouble transitioning into popular governance; we are completing our goals with a lesser body count."

One of the Invictoid's hands raised, a single digit pointing at her between her eyes.

"Know this; the very nature of what you are here for crosses more lines of interstellar relations than you can even begin to fathom. You are not fighting a war of right and wrong; right and wrong exist, but they only exist because of the presence or absence of armed power and implicit threat. You are not speaking out of line, but I will advise you now; we fight within a grander series of interconnected causalities and phenomena where the fate of a single world echoes far beyond its atmosphere. Your reservations are dangerous moreso to yourself than anyone else and I will only ask that you guard them closely from what is to come."

He walked to the door and motioned for the rest to follow.

"Take Kleo to the medical bay, then follow the navigational marker on your personal device across the connector-bridge to ship we've docked to. We have a rather unpleasant group of people to attend to."

---

The medical bay of the vessel was best described as oddly green, soothing even. From a first glance it resembled some sort of mossy chamber where the expected curtained partitions and blocky medical equipment stood. The more traditional elements of a hospital room felt incongruous amongst the fresh smell of a rain-soaked forest and the crab-like drones that walked across the ceiling, each of them moving about various tubes, casts, and monitors with long spider-leg claws ending in many fingered appendages, gingerly ensuing the comfort of all visitors.

A semi-spherical rock-like thing floated towards them. It was a gealtirocht, craggier upon closer inspection almost as if a series of cubes crushed into the imitation of a spherical shape, multiple complex cybernetics jutting out of its body and no doubt keeping track of the silhouetted figures behind the biofilm curtains. Arms like cranes emerged from its body as its ball joints whirled and it seized a variety of tools from various night-tables. One of the crab machines pulled back the curtains and a bed, just a normal mattress, was revealed.

It motioned to the voidhanger to puts its human compatriot there before it would get to work with the rest, silent and its various jutting camera-ports on its "face" visibly focused all throughout the room.

---

The docking-bridge was the last of the vessel they would see before they stepped into something more conventional. Sleek corridors of a grayish and light reddihs tint, jutting supports that arched from the ground to brace against the walls, and personnel all in a variety of reinforced silk-weave naval officer gear walking about. They were not in a living beast but a mechanical equivalent to one and based on the Invictoid's rapid gait, in a hurry as well. The doors were not some sort of elytra that retracted as if trying to conceal themselves when they neared; instead they split apart like blades being sheathed.

Past one more set of these sharp and imposing if starkly professional and proper doors and they found themselves within a wider space; multiple computer stations along its side, multiple large projector modules rising from the floor to waist level, and high ranking uniformed personnel dour and stringent in dress and expression calling out orders when not marching past. Three-dimensional images of worlds distant and near, camera feeds of goggle-eyed armored helmets speaking with mission control operatives, handheld devices flicking in the laps of headset wearing personnel as information updated in live time - before the Invictoid sped up in long strides up a set of stairs towards a large blade-door. Fast enough their compatriots were nearly left behind.

The door opened and the connecting room's purple hues and faint lighting emerging from the glowing doors on all four of its sides did not prepare them for the fury that greeted them.

"YOU! Just the treacherous swine I wanted to see!" A voice wet with phlegm and bile shouted out, a finger jabbed accusatorily into thet orso of the Invictoid. "The stunt you ordered back on Prosperity should have you stripped of your rank and sent before a tribunal! Don't think that show of force you had hiding at the artillery platform, just waiting for your pawns to leave, means anything to me!"

It was a human who spoke, tall but not towering, gruff and white haired which his commander's hat did not wholly hide, and of which the medals that adorned his uniform seemed to take on an almost sickly glow with the light around them. Two massive vrexul soldiers, each one bulkier than Echo and their rifles thicker and denser than any of the other bodies in the Envenomed squad, stood at off to the side impassive but watching the Invictoid's retinue closely with swivelling, stalked eyes and ocular domes.

"We should not even be in conflict! The outcome even the Dominion reformists agreed on was-"

The air around the Invictoid flared as light itself diminshed and recovered around them but the human flinched not an inch. If anything he grew angrier at this display of whatever ethereal power the Invictoid contained, the white-red glow of its cybernetic eyes failing to make him even squint.

"I seem to remember, no we seem to remember that there was meant to be a vrexul support squad to assist us in the taking of the artillery platform. A team that had been prepared for weeks in advance, that from what I had learned, had been moved out an hour ahead of time to greet my assets. What a shame their position was revealed so quickly; the show of force I had cover the exilfration will not be pleased to learn they now have to deal with that as well."

The Invictoid had gestured back to the rest of the Envnomed with a wave of its hand, its voice oddly calmed. If previously it was akin to a series of people speaking entirely in synch now its tone of voice was dense but almost relaed... smug even, but steeled by a resolve every bit as unbending as its torso's armor.

The human seethed through his teeth, glancing towards them from the corner of his eyes before turning back to the machine-biped.

"Tit for that is beneath a hero of your stature, so is the poor instruction towards the branches we operate in conjunction with! I cannot account for all of your personal inconveniences, especially not when I have to live-feed intelligence to a multi-hegemon rebel army! It is uncharacteristic to suddenly make a fuss about the loss of a handful when you may have handed the world to the worst kind of revisionist scum."

A sound like a snort emerged from the skeletal giant; unfiltered of cybenetic enhancement, biological in nature.

"And how out-of-the-blue it is for you to have suddenly acquired such fervor for the grip of ideology's blade. You are an adaptable man, General Trelevoss, but I believe it is best if you air your complaints to the ixaxxar node, not a mere upstart like myself."

The human's anger did not subside but he soon turned to the Envenomed.

"If you all have the slightest ounce of sense, know that you are just as disposable to him as the vrexul squad splattered and rotting back on Prosperity. You've every right to be upset, but it will mean nothing if you do not realize what this fool has gotten you into."

Without a word, he stomped past them all, the vrexul following suite somehow quieter in their lumbering footsteps but no colder as they brushed and pushed the rest of the squad out of their way. The door sliced shut behind them.

"That was the easy part. The next is easier." The Invictoid lead them through another room, this one quieter and even more poorly lit but eyes that had adapted to the dark noticed flurries of movement. Flickering streams of hundreds of swarming pieces and forms, all small by themselves but flowing like rivers across the ceilings and walls. Faintly lit computer screens watched by figures of concealed features beneath blocky visor-like headsets and wire-ridden full body cybernetics, others vaguely scielto in nature hovering or rather suspended above the ground on floating platforms of holograph screens.

All of which seeemed to centre around a strange mass receiving the flow of strange particles. It was a roughly spherical thing at least when its form did not fluctuate like television static. It was at least 10 feet in diameter, not of singular components but a swirling madness of arthropod limbs and shells linked with splintering fragments of cybernetics, behind which fluctuations of pinkish-red ethereal power swirled and morphed into an almost organic and fleshy redness. The lunacy of its surrealist appearance was contrasted with the near silence of its operation, at most making at best a rustle amidst the ambient throb and hub of the chamber.

The invictoid stood before it and then turned to the Envenomed squad.

"Echo, turn on a camera feed. I will link it to Kleo's handheld device. The ixaxxar node will be taking over. We'll be getting information on our next mission soon."

As he stepped off to the side, the light that seemed to try and escape the pseudo-spheroid's body congealed into a shape almost akin to an eye. An eye whose gaze was so dreadful in its power it did not feel as if it looked at any one of them as much as through them; not at personhood and individuality but some realm of unknowable possibility and knowledge.

The voice that emerged did not radiate outwards from a central source. It started off quiet but amplified in volume never an unpleasant level as if the very words took time to travel towards them, almost bassy as if from underwater, but with a clarity edited to remove any unneeded distortion or ambiguity.

"Envenomed Squad - designation to be determined - mission completed under subpar conditions - assessment of initial performance is as effective. Mission ready; deployment to be determined. A question awaits before selection."

Light flowed from beneath the blinking gaps in its swarming body, forming a three-dimensional holographic image before them of a familiar face they had met during the mission. It was the messenger in the village, the one who had left soon after they had filled them in on their mission.

"This figure asked of you to destroy League artillery cannon or capture it? Were they accompanied? They had something with them and another accompanying them. Materials confidential in nature; there were supposed to be two. Recount any relevant information from when you encountered them."

While it should be uneventful it wasn't, Kleo was taken down to the medbay and given preem treatment for her injuries and wounds. The docs were even so nice to fill her back up on that red kool-aid she was living on, no one else here was bleeding red kool-aid like Kleo! Laid out on the table some minor work occurred before she was swiftly taken away, for anyone lingering in the medbay they wouldn't get to witness the rebirth and fixing of Kleo's wounds but rather heard the sloppy and evil sounds of saws, beakers and the like working away. After it was all said and done she was plopped in a tank for 'healing' as various chemicals for recovery filled up the tank. Kleo slept in a dream like state (again) with a rebreather strapped up to her mouth, she'd be tucked away for now.

Why the hell did every digital-based life form have some inane sense of overweening superiority? Salvator had seen it no few times throughout his career spanning decades, and it had stopped being even remotely amusing long ago. At least extra fire support was welcome.

Regardless, he followed after the commander unit with the rest, keeping his opinions about the entire shitshow they'd just went through to himself. It was always a lesser evil, a technical victory for something greater down the line. That was how they strung people along. Shame that it worked, too.

They linked up with a human general and his escort, and the mystery of what that squad of dead vrexul had been doing planetside had been answered, at least. The heavy shotgun Salvator looted off one of their bodies still clanged against the magnetic holster on his back.

"We're all disposable to someone, somewhere up the line." Salvator replied wearily to the human, his tone resigned. "Every groundpounder is, special ops or not." He didn't vocalize that someone of the human's apparent rank ought to be very well aware of that. No, this was just some pissing contest that he didn't feel like being dragged into.

What came next was more interesting: the first contact they'd had on the mission, asking about the one that had given them marching orders? Great. More right hand fighting the left. Regardless, he'd answer.

"The informant? No, he was alone when we came across him. Gave us a communicator to the other squad that he swore up and down was secure. Wasn't. Locals hacked into the channel almost immediately. Was real eager to leave after he said his piece. Carried a backpack with him, but we didn't get a visual on its contents."

Rho-Hux

*The unreliable narrator is strong with this one*

For a moment, as Rho-Hux wandered the twisted halls of chitin and metal, a thought crossed his mind. This wasn't something the Empire would design. Then again, he hadn't been in an official Imperial vessel for years, but just how many years alluded him. Two, five, ten, more than that? Just then, in the corner of his eyes, there was an enemy! It was human wearing Intranszjednota armor. He had somehow infiltrated their vessel! Even worse, he was mocking Rho-Hux by waving at him! However, just before Rho-Hux could reach for his weapons, he reminded himself of the mission. *They were pretending to be part of the Intranszjednota. To throw off any unwanted attention to the Empire. * Rho-Hux looked back at his human ally only to see he had disappeared. Did he just walk off rudely, or did he have a job that required his attention? Was there ever even a human there, or was Rho-Hux remembering a lost soldier he once worked with? How many humans had Rho-Hux served with, how many did he command, how many did he kill on the other side of the war, and which war? Rho-Hux stopped thinking when he looked around again and asked a question he should have asked a long time ago.

"Where am I?"

MAKE YOUR WAY TO THE DESIGNATED ROOM.

The lost and confused gealtirocht transformed back into Rho-Hux as he remembered all the locations of the base that had been provided to him. He was going to be given a mission, another chance to display his family's generations of efforts to train scouts, killers, and commanders. He ran past the med bay, only briefly noticing the human in there as he crossed the docking bridge into the new vessel. The closer he got, the more he overheard. Shouting. Someone was upset about a conflict. Perhaps it was a stealth mission that went astray. A new voice spoke of a vrexul support squad that arrived an hour earlier than what had been planned weeks ahead of time. So we had Commanders who disagreed and squabbled with each other, plans that fell apart almost instantly, and an operation in which stealth was more of a suggestion than a requirement. It was just like that when he was first drafted. Clearly, the commanders brought in through nepotism alone had yet to be weeded out. The fallout was always messy, but the warriors that survived and proved themselves would be capable of moving the Galaxy. How old was he when his sergeant had his head blown off mid-way through a speech about his medals? Oh, that didn't matter; what Rho-Hux remembered was that he had used his etheological powers in true combat for the first time not long after that.

It had been some time since he had done so, and he wondered if he could still do it. Rho-Hux forced his body to tighten and his circulation to slow down as he channeled his Ethereology powers to silence his movements. No heartbeat, no footsteps, no breathing. He could have activated his Octopus armor, but then he would risk looking like a spy. Right now, he was where he needed to be, he just hadn't caught anyone's attention.

Rho-Hux watched the end of the argument from a distance. He was missing too much context for his liking, but time would tell if the Human or the Invictoid were in the right. When the Invictoid invited the group to follow him, Rho-Hux snuck behind, waiting to see if someone would notice him. He would make his presence known soon, he just wanted to exercise his powers and see if anyone was able to spot him. It would be useful to see any weaknesses in his technique and his new squad's capabilities. They were brought to a room with a strange device that asked questions about the team's last mission. A middle-aged male Voidhanger answered. From the way he talked, Rho-Hux could recognize he was another seasoned veteran. This organization seemed to have an eye for experienced talent after all, although Rho-Hux questioned the OSLF patches. The others in the group included an Unztadtlige​ who was recording this meeting, a Tarrhaidim, a female Voidhanger, and some odd black sphere that Rho-Hux wasn't sure about.

Regardless, he had been a ghost for long enough. He returned his vitals to normal, and his body and mind relaxed as he acted as though he had just entered the room.

Rho-Hux stepped forward and gave his family's traditional bow, which involves kneeling on one leg while bending one's head to the ground.

"Former Major Rho-Hux of house Lorreas. At your service and mercy. Pardon my abruptness, but I was ordered to arrive here, and I have a few questions. Did this informant go by any names or alias? Were there any checks involved to ensure they weren't a spy? Had the party been informed they would be meeting this supposed informant before the mission? Either way, it is very concerning to hear someone had hacked into our channels when we're supposed to be an undercover operation."

Stability, then, had been the goal, assuming the Invictoid was telling the truth; the events back on Zanovia seemed at least to be bearing out its words. It did not so much surprise Ilshar that the Intransigence’s intentions were to all evidence so far indeed quite altruistic, since any number of deeper motivations could have been hiding behind them. What did strike him as strange was that it genuinely had aimed to stabilize this conflict, an unusual thing given that chaos was usually where such organisations thrived. At the same time, the ones he had seen in the past were localized to a single planetary region, perhaps a world at most. On the interstellar scale at which the Intransigence operated, it could very well be that things were very different. Could a spiral of orderly folds taper to an even greater state of flux? Fine thoughts to keep him diverted, but he was glad to leave solving them to the minds behind thinking nodes such as this one.

Far more pressing was the fact that, with the squad moving over to its next order of business, he now had an opportunity to see to his wounds as Alice dropped her charge at the medical bay. As the Invictoid led the greater part of the group towards the vessel connection ports, Ilshar rapidly strode towards the facility. If the Nexus favoured him in this small thing, he would not miss too much of whatever briefing remained in store on the adjoining ship. Looking in remotely was rarely a good substitute in cases like these, especially with how fond their handler was of weaving its wealth of collected footage into its explanations.

There was no point hoping for too much; considering the nature of this vessel, the medbay being busy around the cycle was a foregone certainty. It was at least a pleasant enough place to wait around in, reminiscent of the subterranean gestation creches of Ilshar’s far infancy. Almost regretfully, he shook himself from imbibing the humid atmosphere as fine mechanical claws pulled the shrapnel from his limbs and sealed the gaps left behind in his spongy flesh, and then he was off hurrying again into the humming bowels of the spacecraft, shuffling his shoulders in a cautious test of his arms’ integrity.

The connected ship greeted him with a near brush with new and fanciful mutilation as he narrowly dodged out of the way of two gargantuan vrexul escorting an irritated-looking human. Ilshar was certain the uniformed man had glowered at him as his bodyguards trampled ahead with deliberate obtuseness. In this one thing it seemed the Intransigence was quite typical - one was quick to make enemies, whether one knew them or not.

Guided by his navigation tracker, Ilshar eventually found his way to the remainder of the squad and the presence that was debriefing them. Ixaxxar, the Invictoid said; it was not a word he knew, but clearly this was a nexus, of information and perhaps even consciousness. It certainly knew something about what had been supposed to transpire on Zanovia, though by the sound of it, not everything that had happened had been according to plan.

He was about to speak when another newcomer made his presence known with a somewhat surprising suddenness. New reinforcements for the Envenomed? Time would tell how well that would turn out, though at least the Major did not seem to have shed his discipline with his rank.

“The groundside contact did not name itself, no, but it sounded like it knew something about Intransigence operations,” Ilshar replied, more for Rho-Hux’s benefit, before turning his full attention to the ixaxxar and pointing at the projection. He remembered the look in that single exposed eye - it had fixed him closely for that one moment. “What I can tell you is that it wanted the League cannon secured. Insistent that we don’t blast it to pieces. But if it thought we could hold it, it couldn’t have known what forces were active in the area all that well.”