"Starting to think your friend spraying like severed neck might be a liability. Maybe we should take them off of you."
A sound like a mag snapping into place played over the communicator-panel with a long but ultimately empty pause. No crack of the rifle nor spray of blood. Just the echo of submachinegun fire and cold tension, fading into the backdrop of distant battle with its volcanic roars of artillery. The desecrated and re-tooled cadavers rattled dry and crunchy; the thump of the heavy cannon the squad was sent to wipe out shook the entire area, silencing the last of the residual weapon report.
"Your tarrhaidim associate had the right idea. The unztadlige's cannons as well. All teams, stand down."
The surrounding wilderness remained quiet but the microforms had managed to pick up the traces of the sniper's fire - a pile of rubble covered by greenish-grey camo netting, one that stretched its fabric and shifted its colours ever so slightly to the various shifts in lighting throughout the smoky day. Far, far away from the area they had walked through, enought hat without patience and a sharp eye (plus visual manigifying capabiity) it would have remained a well-kept secret.
"You mentioned an objective. I presume it is large, stationary, and causing problems for us down in the valley." The voice continued as the sound of rumbling anti-gravitational engines neared. The thick silhouettes of some sort of aircraft could be seen among the clouds, gliding overhead the way the Envenomed squad had been heading.
"You may have an unztadtlige but they have something worse. You have seen the results; even a main battle tank would have trouble with this many vrexul. Yet you do have an unztadtlige-"
The communicator panel flashed red, green, then blue. The insurgent's voice fanished as its screen lit-up and the static vanished. Video-uplinks connected to the Envenomed squad's individual HUD's or equivalents as a flash of light lit-up the screen, revealing a scene of carnage and confusion.
Scores of infantry, clad in armor far heavier than the insurgents they had fought alongside, surging forth amidst a creeping wall of fiery blossoms from scores of missiles and pulse-beam blasts raining from above. Heavyset automata, not military in origin but their civilian construction origins obscured behind reinforced armor and integrated heavy weaponry, stormed forth with blazes of rotary-cannon fire and shrieking trails of missiles before staggering or storming through scoring blasts of magnetically accelerated rounds and near-miss missile blasts.
The same squad they had seen in the foxhole viciously advanced, unfazed by the onslaught as augmented bodies snapped their weapons to distant targets shrouded in the haze of carnage and fire. Distant blasts where their rounds connected signaled their precision accuracy, flashes of shadowed bodies distorting and dismembering in the blaze speaking for their efficiency.
It was not long before they crashed behind the hole-gouged carcass of one of the walkers before one of them swung the camera to face themself.
"When this mission finishes pray that I do not take up your lack of disicpline with your handler!" They called out, crunching forth as their cover rattled, spraying bits of metal fragments that caused the camera to blur momentarily. "But you've finally picked up. Just in time, we're a little over halfway to our targets but resistance is stiffening. Are you anywhere near the artillery platform?"
The communicator panel Salvator had on hand began to bleep and blink as its small glassy screen flashed alive. IMMINENT MESSAGE: TRANSMITTING IN 10... 9...
The team in the valley had been attempting to make contact for a while now but they had been intermittent with the beeps. This was sudden and unaffected by radio static; the signal was strong, too strong, pulsating in a way that coincided with the hollow droning that emerged from the same carcass he had looted the shotgun from. It was a resonant, sonorous tone even as if intoned out from within a massive hallway yet emerging chant-like and deep. The carcass shifted, its armor plates creaking as the dying things that cowered within shuddered and twisted within, a half-torn head swiveling his way as connector joints and torn biomass tore itself to fac ehim.
And it was not the only cadaver that did not rest. The drone that Salvator heard was joined by a bassy thud, easy to mistake for solid impact on the soil itself but synthesized from sources not entirely digital. The very augmentations implanted in Ilshar's body picked up an influx of signals washing over them; a wave of biolectrical readings, the sort that were associated with targeting, radar, and mass-detection type systems. He'd made his way over to the cover but not enough that his enhanced body did not feel itself tingle and quiver, as if the many things hidden within now realized they were in the sights of an unseen threat.
The broken corpse scavenged by Kleo produced some sort of spherical objects tennis ball sized in shape and overlaid with a series of ridged rims, partially squeezable in her palms but with a satisfying weight behind them. They were some kind of tossable device, but it was difficult to tell if they were actually explosives of some sort. Some sort of priming system was around its top like a grenade but not a pin; a hole of some sort, easily wide enough for her finger to go in. It smelled of wet soil and leaves.
Maybe that was from the spindly and glistening appendages now beginning to emerge from the cadaver; auxiliary limbs alive and well unlike their now deceased owner. Simple at first until the multi-jointed and angular protrusions began to split at their tips, revealing a mess of smaller manipulator-arms, sensor-antennae, and cutting implements. One of these limbs was larger than the others, easily bigger than any human arm as it jerked and twitched. The creature itself appeared to have had four limbs, this one appearing to have been hastily reattached into whatever part of its body it was torn from, yet the double-barreled underslung wrist-claw gun, while not aiming steadily, still pointed Kleo's way.
8... 7... 6...
As the drone traveled, Echo would be able to notice the targeting beam move off of the drone and travel towards the rest of the team, before it abruptly flipped off. Yet it had been active long enough they would be able to trace it back, far back, past the large stones and through the fog to elevated, bushy ground at the outskirts of the area; near a series of heavy bushes and rubble piles.
If whomever was targeting them was smart, they would be focused on Echo. That coincideded with a hailing request over their coms; the source was vrexul, the IFF codes marking them as deceased, and signal tracing lead their multi-bodied sight to barely even a corpse. A scattered selection of armor chunks and limbs surrounding a crater, its severed insectoid head blinking with LED's as it attempted to communicate.
So, rather than directly hailing them, their unknown watcher was doing so through the corpses. The pulse earlier had been some sort of radar scan.
"Odd way for Zanos to be headed, platform." The voice was garbled intentionally, yet it did not sound vrexul. Whatever was contacting Echo was speaking through the corpse but it was both firm and rigid. "And so well dressed for the occasion. Is that human of yours your guide? She's very well dressed; that supplier just happens to deal in recent League antiques, don't they?"
It was a closed channel yet it might be possible for the rest of the party to listen in or for it to be broadcasted. But at the same time...
3... 1... 1...
The communicator panel's screen went black but the lights indicating a message was receiving came through.
Or it would of anyways, if one of the withered trees still standing suddenly jerked. Burnt bark and wood chips burst out of a small human finger-sized exit wound in its back, a bullet cleanly passing through and whizzing past Kleo's side and smacking into the dirt.
Standard rifle cartridge, armor piercing, still smoking - enough to be a threat to medium to light augmented armor but Kleo was the only one whose armor probably would face any major issue from.
The thing is, whoever had fired hadn't realized that that Echo's drones would be able to trace it... back to the rubble pile from earlier.
Not long after, the communicator panel spoke.
"It is not often I grant leniency to swine, especially those bearing such familiar kit. My squadmate is eager for action after what happened here hours earlier. Perhaps you should help me with that. Suspicious lack of markers on you... just new here, let's hope no?"
This was an alien voice, charismatic yet almost hissed not with vitriol but from the mere nature of the voice. An accent that fit the English language yet slightly bent and strained its various syllables. Almost sounding Irish yet the words slurred together slightly with a sonorous tone. Likely gealtirocht, especially from the cocksure swagger it possessed.
The thing is, this one couldn't be so easily traced and somehow, it knew there was a communicator panel here. How exactly it had gotten into the system was anyone's guess. It appeared that for all the informant's talk of the communicator panel's "[e]ncrypted secure coms", it had been bypassed in a matter of minutes.
The OSRF's flag resembles a circular human eye surrounded by the sharp ridges of a crown, impaled from multiple sides by angular claws and hands - some human, others arthropod like, and many clawed, for some even skeletal in their robotic nature. These stabbing limbs dig through the borders of a six-sided diamond. On each of its sides, six rigid insectoid limbs ending in scything claws emerge. The "head" of this insect can be placed on top or bottom of this long formation, resembling that of a carnivorous carabid or staphylinid beetle.
See the red circle with question marks within its borders.
The OSRF features three large blocs of powerful aliens who each have their own general governmental structures. As they are more of a pact than a singular government, much of the higher level decision
The arthropod czlozekostra ("Complex External Skeleton") are run by a combination of lower level directly elected officials at local and sometimes national levels and higher up features advanced AI's and councils of mentally-linked cybernetic individuals. The third is joined together as a gestalt consciousness and at that point working directly under the supervision of an arcane super-computer cloud-like entity formed of psionic, biomechanical, and cybernetic components simply known as the Egregor. While the entity has a prominent position in the primary czlozekostra leadership, it is primarily in an advisory role - the AI's and gestalt-councils are obligated to consider its words more heavily but their collective power holds more sway.
Ordinary czlozekostra enact higher up decision making directly through petitioning, demonstrating, and collectively communicating to local leaders and can even vote out gestalt-council members, replacing them with their own candidates. They can vote to even modify parts of the AI-councils, changing the parameters of their decision making and introducing new components to them. While it is difficult to replace individual AI's due to the highly advanced nature of their construction, they can be molded to change the parameters of their decision making to better suit collective czlozekostra needs. The interconnected cyberbiological intelligence of both AI councils and the egregor allow for rapid decision making and information analysis, allowing them to absorb information provided by entire planets of voters to tailor craft policy.
The rotting fungal Salibughri ("Spore's Scions", "Sally-boor-E") have a similarly joint-consciousness oriented leadership, with their highest sapient leaders connected to gigantic neuromycelial networks, allonwing for rapid information transfer and discourse. Rather than "depersonalizing" their leaders, they are able to operate independently and with individual Egregors for differing sections of their territory rather than a single large one like the slozvnesikostra. While both allow for a high degree of direct democratic involvement, the salibughri emphasizes a great deal of aggressive populist action. While they also lack individual political parties, they do posssess societal interest groups, known as Citizen or Specialist Assemblies. These represent groups such as artists, cargo haulers, industrial workers, void-tech scientists and so on and as they are note voted into power, tend to collaborate rather than compete.
Depending on the situation, these Assemblies are often temporarily mind-linked to the neuromycelial networks. This results in direct involvement of specialized (often civilian) knowledgement for larger scale government initiatives. As salibughri leaders use essentially a high tech biodigital information network to communicate, the assembly of such a governmental body is treated as a single "entity" as opposed to individual. It too is a gestalt with a higher range of "individual" autonomy, and like with their athropod allies, they can frequently "swap out" individual members albeit even more quickly allowing for faster decision making. The massive data stores generaitons of politicians have left in the neuromycelial network allows them a massive wealth of information as well as the creation of biogintelligences that can serve in advisory roles, similar to AI's though made primarily from living sources.
The tall and eel like tiarncnoic ("Lord of the Hills") in spite of their advanced antigravitational and energy-manipulation technology have the most primitive system of governance. They are still often nomadic tribespeople who deliberately maintained a series of elder councils though it is a mistake to assume they have remained static politically. The word "elder" has come to mean as much senior leaders as it has wisened youth who have stepped up to the task. Much of their decision making since their liberation from the Federation and barbarian incusions is focused on these councils though the individuals who comprise it in many cases are linked to long family lineages associated with rulership. Voting however is based on "family units" and collectives of individuals, whether friends, craftspeople, or even religious practitioners, much of it taking place at a very local level however.
For larger scale geopolitics, the tiarncnoic organize their individual tribes into alliances. A ruling council of tribal chiefs is set up along with their varius assistants. Yet its power is balanced out by AI collectives made by the "heads" of various individual collectives and family units, representing the interests outside of the ruling leadership. While they tend to not really have a class system, even the vague semblance of one in leadership necessitates such an anachronistic usage of technology. In some cases, the "ancestral intelligence" (ANCINT's) even have more political power than the still flesh-and-blood council members. However the people themselves organize as efficiently as anyone else to keep either in check and most council members see themselves as of their specific tribe first and foremost.
The OSRF has three primary species that inhabit it listed below, in order of rising populace. Humans comprise the second largest aspect of its populace due to Federation economic policy having relocated many to the area for economic growth. Though once they were the dominant power in what is now OSRF territory, they have since receded in that field to let aliens take a more promiennt role. Their political, economic, and military power has a large part been absorbed into the front though exclusively human settlements have long since been banned. They have otherwise demonstrated themselves not just as victims of the same imperial oppressors yet also beholden to the same revolutionary fervor as any of those they once saw themselves as the betters of.
A variety of miscellaneous minor species also inhabit the region, sometimes in great numbers yet never to the extent of becoming major power blocs in and of themselves. The majority of them are also quite unususal: demonic rocky-skinned creatures, living cyborg coral colonies, bony membrane-covered creatures of skeletal frame and x-shaped shovel heads, as well as certain wraith-like beings inhabting the "gulf" between systems. The dwellers of said gulf, simply known as voidhangers, are quite cryptic and the Front technically does not count them as members if only due to the fact they have not collectively agreed to membership. Some of them resemble the czlozekostra albeit with transparent, plankton like bodies and a semblance to eerie deep sea amphipods and isopods, freshwater remipedes, and phronima. Not much is known about them only that diplomacy between them and the Front has been going on even before they had fully manifested as a galactic power.
Their name translates to english as "complex external skeleton" and to many they are the public face of the OSRF. The "zekts" as some call them are a arthropod-like species originating from the periphery world of Zelenzarostle ("Zelen-zarost-leh", Verdantly Overgrown in English) but have since spread throughout the region. Even beyond it they are well known for their mysterious fleets of roaming habitat-ships and patchwork nomad vessels. In spite of their fearsome reputation and political power in the Front, their population level is below those of the humans and of the region. It is however growing as more and more independent czlozekostra fleets and worlds begin to join their cause, expected to reach population parity in as fast as two years.
Resembling staphylinid and carabid beetles with some mantis shrimp characteristics, these unusual aliens are enormous with an average height beteween 7''11 to 11''5, with some capable of growing to 25''. Their broad and segmented bodies feature multiple abdominal and thorax components, making them deceptively flexible in spite of their lumbering and dense forms. A complex shell of interlocking carapace plates, underlying malleable connective biomesh, and film-like shock-absorbant dermal layering keeps their bodies well protected. Their bodies can extend quite notably but they tend to hunch over to obscure their true size.
A czlozekostra has at least 16 limbs they use for movement and manipulation, typically having at least two for either task. Their complex brains and neural-clusters, distributed in both cranium and torso, allow them to not only use all in tandem but also focus on and interact with multiple things at once. These limbs can often be specialized for many tasks whether building, cutting, digging, crushing, and so on. In some cases, they may have long elongated abdominal sections similar to tails, wings, or even stingers. All of this is draped in often dark, murky colours frequently likened to the rotting undergrowth of forests and jungles. They appear camouflaged by default though for an environment very different from the civilized world.
The visages meanwhile are best described as helmeted, mask-like, and difficult to read. With no real soft flesh immediately visible, a zekt's face often slopes forwards with a semi-flattened appearance, shield or shovel in a manner similar to rove beetles or longer and distinctly hungry looking as in ground beetles, both ending in complex overlapping mouthparts. The most notable are their four to eight larger mandibles, frequently serrated and curving, surrounded by smaller maxxilia, palps, and labium along with other frequently claw-tipped appendages. All of this can retract behind oral plating that further masks them. Some species have lengthy retractable antennae frquently emerging from behind or above domes containing many smaller eye-like organs beneath faux-opaque exteriors.
Living between 130 to 200 years, longer with biological modifications, they nonetheless begin life as mere larvae. Young czlozekostra are born as large armored grub-like creatures, resembling carabid and staphylinid larvae with longer limbss and ridged, almost bladed carapaces. While they retain animalistic survival instincts and even knowledge such as social interaction and language, their brains are still developing. They cannot necessarily make use of all of this as still highly feral animals omnivorous yet vicious all the same. They stay in this stage between seven to ten years, pupating into a juvenile state of pale carapace and lethargic motion. They do not mature as fast as actual insects but as it takes at most four years to reach adulthood from the juvenile state, this is still impressively fast.
Combined with genetically inherited bestial instincts, zekts can come off as feral and difficult to read. This belies their impressive intelligence, being masters of augmentation. So prolific is their usage of biological, cybernetic, and even psionic/supernatural methods of augmentation many populaces feature a complete absence of unmodified czlozekostra. A single zekt can possess multiple layers of additional enhancements. These can range from grafted carapace plating, additional limbs, and energy-absorption and storage carapace-pods to whole internal habitats of symbiotic parasites that can serve as redundant organs, eldritch engram-sorceries woven into their underlying subdermal biomass and organs, even artificial automata-drone and hive creature spawning manufacturing plants.
Czlozekostra technology is defined by this unity of conflicting metallic and organic components with psionic or ethereal elements becoming very commonplace. While their biotech is considered their primary specialty, their ability to fuse all three or four is increasingly seen as their defining feature. This results in highly adaptable systems that can interface with a wide array of technology on top of being practically made for modifications. Aggressive research into ethereal "voidtech" has helped provide an alternative to conventional "hard science" FTL, utilizing the scientific study of the occult beliefs popular among large numbers of the populace. Zekt ships and those who have integrated their tech can often travel through a sort of eldritch "sub-dimension" layered under reality like the meat and blood beneath flesh, difficult to navigatee due to its mysterious void-life but discrete and fairly cost effective.
The culture of these arthropoids can come off as very cold and distant. Zekts do not have child-rearing instincts, something left to the nursery-acadmies, but they do have an extremely strong social security net and strongly emphasize involvement in the public life. While individually they can come off as uncaring and solitary, they view individuality as an extension of collectivity. Every zekt is simply the echoes of their predecessors and environment. They may lack the idea of biological family yet the power of unity and mutual cooperation is unrivalled, with interest groups for arts, sciencies, ideology, and faith forming very quickly.
They are known to be highly critical of those outside of themselves, being near disdainful of conventional democracies and especially corporate interests, sometimes leading to an understated arrogance in their manners. They are however, very blunt and to the point, extending this not just from ideology but to interpersonal relationships. If they count you among their own, even if you are a different species they believe you have an objective right to the same benefits and liberties as the rest of the collective hive.
This collective way of thinking even extends to how they approach work and labour. In most reasonably large settlements, everyone is guaranteed group habitation and vital supplies such as nourishment and entertainment-stimulation. Many czlozekostra regardless participate in labour as with just particular exceptions, labour has is collectively owned by participants and thus collectively benefited from in terms of profits. Conventional "leadership" such as CEO's and company heads is occasional and often done with scaled down egregors. Rather than working for a living, most labour is meant to acquire additional credits for luxuries and just as frequently, out of genuine interest in the work. While much production is solely for sustaining their needs, they have geared more towards commercial production to stay competitive with the rest of known space as of late.
Their name means "Lord of the Hills", a reflection of not just their hilly homeworld of Tiorgreilig ("Solar Tyrant's Graveyard") but their imposing stature. They are longtime inhabitants of the eastern stretch of the periphery, known for their anachronistic technopaganism and roaming, nomadic lifestyles. Their population is higher than that of the humans by a moderate margin, making them the second most populous species in the region. A large part of their populace has ventured outwards past periphery space, joining the czlozekostra in large independent fleets, but recent political developments has seen many returning. In turn, it is possible their numbers may almost near those of the salighburi.
Evolved from Tiorgreilig's large eels, the people of Tiorgreilig are almost slender if not for the dense-looking bone and tightly packed muscle visible on their tall bodies. Vestigial tails in some population groups hint at their distant ancestry with more searfaring ones retaining the anguilid characteristic. Digitigrade legs beginning their bend mid-thigh end in talon-like feet compliment tri jointed arms of jutting bone and the long, curling digits of their six figured hands. Their often bluish-white and very slightly purplish, faded skin colours were likely evolved to mimic the fog of their homeworld. They average between 6''11 to 9''9 in height, with a few instances of ten foot tall older "noikz" as they are sometimes colloquially called.
Their torsos feature broad shoulders but they taper out past their midsection, with prominent thigh bones that help emphasize their long fin-evolved legs and arms. Some species have smaller fin-like growths between their waist and arms, others small skeletal arms capable of grasping and fine manipulation. Complimenting this feral appearance are their heads, elongated and eel like though with partially wider foreheads. Below is a maw of sharp teeth with a complex lower "double-jaw", one overlapping the other and combining with an upper jaw to form a second row of teeth. These can be shifted forwards to better grasp prey and mulch meals, almost like the detaching jaw of a dragonfly nymph yet from within their mouth. They also have a "third eye" - an organ emerging from the front of their brain that they use to detect sources of energy such as heat, electricity, or even psionic and ethereal power. In spite of their evolved nature, it is still heavily used for a variety of everyday tasks.
Even just standing normally, due to a slight hunch and the bend of their limbs, they often look ready to chase down prey, with impressive running speed and leaping capability owing to their strength. While they are not as powerful as the zekts, their mobility and reactivity gives them unparalleled default agility within the OSRF. Their technology is also seen as the most advanced with antigravitational or "hover" technology and energy manipulation being their hallmarks. The ability to create and maintain barriers of shimmering teal-purple energy and have even massive city-sized land-vehicles hovering above the ground are common testaments to their crafting skill.
They have also crafted a number of high tech robots frequently outfitted with both forms of technology, most famously for military purposes but frequently used for exploration, construction, repair, and even research in vacuum-type gravity-free environments. The study of robotics is tied to their growing field of cybernetic and ethereal augmentation, with many robotic components form the basis for bodily modification. Meanwhile, said robotics help regulate the sorcerous powers they can imbue into their forms, fulfilling a similar role through scientifically applied occultism. Biological augmentation still is fairly rudimentary but with the assistance of their allies this is changing.
On average they possesss the most psionics or "etherealists" as the OSRF calls them, with their "third eye" believed to be an evolutionary response to this. Their etherealism however takes on a very spiritual air to it as generations upon generations of near-unbroken polytheism inevitably would. In spite of their level of advancement, they worship or revere and centre the colossal eel-like creatures that inhabit the areas around their homeworld and surrounding planets. While the czlozekostra have a more cryptic, even esoteric form of supernatural belief (in the instances they even do believe), their piscine counterparts are fairly explicit. While their faith is hardly structured and is a continuation of the paganism of their origins, it is united in the solar predators that it centres around.
They believe themselves to have been born from the bones, shedded scales, or sometimes even the remains of their mighty carnivore deities. In the whirling cycles of battle, hunting, and sorcerous power these mysterious god-beings engaged in, the cosmos is shaped on a spiritual and metaphysical level. Their own tumultuous history of inter-tribal conflict and survival in a harsh and mysterious land is but a reflection of the cyclic, divine existences of those that swarm and battle above their atmosphere. Their belief is quite fluid and doctrine varies wildly, sometimes within a tribe, but they are one of the most religious groups within the OSRF. This does not manifest in them being socially outdated and entrenched in their ways; they simply see the divine as an ever-present part even of purely scientific endeavours.
The tiarncnoic are viewed as a free spirited people culturally, with a tendency for wanderlust and adventurousness as much as communal activity and reverence for ages old custom. In spite of the prominence of their native traditions, they are hardly adverse to change, welcoming new art and scientific knowledge, culture even. They can be skeptical to judgemental of "civilized" people and dense bureaucracy, finding the fetishizaiton of enlightened knowledge and constant techno-economic progress to be reflective of a hole in people's spiritual and communal lives. They are not very dogmatic, caring little about the "sanctity" of their polytheistic belief, but they hold their ageless ways in high regard a large part due to a brutal history of colonization they had to endure. This informs their support for national and indigenous liberation and decolonizaiton movements, sometimes threatening even intervention on the side of those they perceive as living under the boot of exploitative leaders.
The most populous species in the OSRF and surrounding systems, these highly religious creatures are known for their literally rotten appearance and overgrown cities. Their world of origin is unknown but as multiple populations "evolved" across a variety of worlds, it is believed they were spread by some external force. Their faith believes it to be a mythic "Gnosis Vault" - a massive living spore believed to be inspired by the giant solar fungal masses endemic to the region. Many of them have begun to move outwards towards the galactic core in the wake of the recent civil wars and the formation of the OSRF. A massive number still remain within the Front's boundaries and they are arguably its most established species.
Of the three main species of this alliance, they are the smallest and the most humanoid. Their general structure is two arms, two legs, and a head. It is everything else where they wildly differ. "Boori" flesh looks like rotten, dark pinkish-brown meat that might turn into a sludgy slop any minute. Visible veins and subdermal parasites thicken and pulsing beneath, sometimes causing their biomass to darken with grey and mottled green colours. Their seven fingered hands (three on one side, two on another, two "thumbs" at the top and bottom) are skeletal and covered in a layer of retractable rubbery muscle-membrane while their legs end in root-like protrusions that grip like claws. Their mouths are cavernous, craggy caves in their lower faces filled with pointed, triangular rock-like teeth hidden behind membranous flesh with adjustable translucency. They average around 5''10 to 8''10, with the tallest being around 10''5.
Their bodies are sometimes infested with a variety of complex symbiotic organisms though unlike the zlozekostra, much of it is more fungoid or plant than it is living beyond the aforementioned worms. They too are heavily augmented though most of it is for general purpose civilian use. These include specialized feeder-branches for higher levels of nutrient extraction, neuromycelial roots for chemical-communicaiton data absorption, and salibughri-adapted worms bred to clean their bodies and fight off diseases. Some of it can converge on similar territory as their insectoid counterparts though they do not have as strong of a cultural background of this practice. They are still every bit as adaptable however, with their technically fungi-derived forms in some ways even more adaptable than that of a conventional animal.
They are on average highly religious though recent reforms and civil liberties have seen these numbers diminish. A growing number practice other faiths or simply abstain from spiritual belief yet they remain a minority. Their system of belief is canonized and with its own scriptural and supportive texts, closer to an actual religion than occultism and animist polytheism like their comrades. It is diverse enough to have taken various forms as well have been a part of various territorial, ethnic, and ideological conflicts throughout their history. Much of this was manipulated by both the barbarians and Federation in recent history, setting them against one another for their own goals and control over the area.
As previously stated, the Gnosis Vault is the prime figure of their belief, to whom they desire a transcendence towards. How exactly can vary wildly; through asceticism and self purification, the totality of collective unity, the uplifting of the misery of those surrounding them - their central text the Antediluvian Utterance demonstrates through myth and parable the many ways to demonstrate this. Yet its ambiguity surrounding the nature of the Vault's divinity has resulted in many differing denominations of faith, the most prominent of which known as the Worm Sect worship not the moon but its inhabitants. While many salibughri voluntarily let worms settle into their bodies, these controversial practitioners take it to a further extreme. So wormridden can they become that their consciousnesses reside in the squirming creatures than their own bodies.
After all, if the Gnosis Vault itself is the land from which the worms originate and it is a "dead moon", is it not its flesh and viscera that truly live or the life that gestates, reproduces, and ravages amidst its oceans of churning flesh? While they were a heavily persecuted group in the past, the recent decades have seen them begin to be accepted among the wider whole. The stigma surrounding them and their beliefs once viewed near-universally as heresy is not absent. Yet it no longer stops them from positions of leadership and religious wisdom. This is important as their grotesque practices have been vital in making them some of the best technicains in the entirety of not just salibughri but Front space.
The Salibughri are master architects and communications experts, with the the worm sect having helped further propel both of these fields. The neuro-mycelial networks they use are their invention, relying heavily on fungi colonies cultured by the usage of specialized worms who can manipulate the growt of certain fungoid species. The usage of enormous bioengineered worm creatures in construction is another masterpiece of theirs. These creatures' shed skin can be molded into various materials, laced with complex metals and biocomponents. Their ability to process materials in their semi-robotic innards to combine, breakdown, fuse, or even forge materials, before vomiting or excreting it as perfeclty forged components is considered highly advanced. They are specialized primarily in biotech but have implemented conventional "hard" and psionic/ethereal knowledge quite readily.
As a heavily religious society, their culture can come off as insular and ignorant at first but reveals itself to be highly communal and generous. Salibughri are ambvialent to many of the shifting tides of culture across the stars but they welcome variety into their lives regardless. The best way to express this is often with a variety of celebrations, many of which relate to major historical and religious events. Yet many of them are increasingly secular or otherwise take on a less devotional air; they celebrate with dance, cuisine, neuro-mycelial communion, and ritual. This is to the extent a particularly noteworthy party can become memorialized as a day of celebration simply because everyone enjoyed it that much.
It is not a mistake to assume they can be somewhat skeptical of a galaxy that for the most part does not follow a similar way of thinking. They believe that one can find underlying similarities and thematic currents of belief that unite beyond pure dogmatism and doctrine. They are subsequently also associated with theorists and philosophy, with much of their beliefs informed not just by the Antediluvian Utterance but an explosion of philosophical and political literature and other media. This is knowledge they like to share and debate amongst themselves with, especially with hyperspeed neuro-mycelial networks. This emphasis on knowledge can make them feel somewhat pretentious especially for outsiders.
Truthfully they might believe the same about those outside of their core systems yet they are known for their generosity as well. While the tiarncnoic may be more obviously outgoing, the salibughri are more generous as a whole. There is a spirit of community that is present even among strangers, augmented by pseudo-telepathic communication and various social cues. For outsiders this layer of subtlety is hard to detect but it is only imporant insofar if one is an actual calibughri or truly adapted to their ways. They believe that if you are a part of their settlements and organizations, then your biological differences mean little, with their Gnosis Vault seeing them not as "beings" but simply reflections of greater metaphysical ideas. In its churning tides of mystery, our differences simply melt into nothingness.
(The fun part! What’s defending your nation in these uncertain times? You can provide as much or as little detail as you like. Can’t also forget, showing tons of pictures of what their soldiers, vehicles and ships look like :P)
The OSRF as a whole is a military focused on tough, resilient infantry capable of rapid movement and mechanized coordination rapidly shuttling them into engagement range with enemies. While they tend to lack as much heavy armor (primarily tanks and land cruisers) as others, their baseline infantry on average are armed, armored, and augmented to a much higher degree. They are further reinforced by powerful psionic/ethereal units primarily focused on improving their performance. These "etherealists" can protect via psionically distorting the space around comrades to obscure their profile, create barriers of solidified psionic energy, or even momentarily distort any heat or electricity readings around them. They are capable of more destructive feets, manifesting disruptions in space itself to blast reinforced positions, creating exit-fields around weapon barrels to augment their rounds, and even warping in extradimensional creatures to fight alongside them.
The majority of their ground armor is focused on rapid deployment and long distance engagement, with high velocity cannons and multiple missile launch systems being their iconic weaponry. They have a variety of mecha that while not meant for the same role of tanks can often be their conventional mainline heavy armor. Most of these may not have a tank's devastating long-range main cannon but they do have various auxiliary energy, missile, cannon, and sometimes even psionic weapons. Typically they do not try to out brute force enemy armor as much as to out-manoeuvre them, manipulating them into crossfires and killzones. Infantry play a vital role in this with a variety of advanced anti-armor weapon systems used to harass heavier vehicular threats into repositioning; sometimes by chasing soft targets and other times by forcing them from their positions. Advanced target-painting systems and weapons designed to stun or disrupt the systems of enemy heavy armor further makes them vulnerable to their own vehicles.
Their tanks reflect this mindset of speed, range, and aggression. They feature prominent high velocity cannons (with both solid synthetic/biological and energy-type output available) but a number of additional weapon systems, primarily aimed at targeting infantry but also light long range artillery. Missile systems are typically reserved for lighter IFV's and other AFV's but frequently find their way to their tanks in recent years along with light mortars/heavier grenade launchers. High velocity machine guns, energy or solid round based, to even light autocannons are also prominent. Yet tanks are also capable of highly encrypted direct communication and coordination with friendly forces, with the ability to transmit and examine data for positioning, targeting, and coordination. Combined with features such as anti-gravitational movement, adjustable tracks, or even arthropod limbs, their ability to move over tough terrain at rapid speeds lets them take up advantageous positions normally impossible for most vehicles to acquire.
Most unusual is their usage of various bioconstructs and robots. The first of these can include domesticated organisms modified for combat or essentially biomecha. This is a somewhat misleading title as they tend to a;sp feature prominent cybernetics in their construction, but they tend to prominently feature as support units for their infantry alongside "drone" type automata. Both will often provide support for squads with additional fire capacity but also the ability to create energy shields, scan and track targets, dig into the ground to rapidly create cover or hiding spots, or even forwards reconaissance and heavy weapons ounting. This is useful for smaller squads of more powerful infantry, augmenting their capabilities with cost effective, comparatively expandable units.
Larger versions of both can frequently take the part of armored vehicles, often controlled via telepathic, cybernetic, and neuromycelial means and specialized "communicator parasites" between handler and host. The majority of these fulfill roles between those of support drones and IFV's to medium AFV's, having high movement capability and often a variety of light to medium type heavy weapons, letting them put out impressive volumes of firepower typically for harassment and suppression purposes. Some have limited flight or gliding capabilities, others can burrow below fortifications, and some can leap massive distances, gaining on targets in ambushes before they can blink. Some are large enough to function as tanks though they tend to have shorter ranged weaponry while retaining high mobility and versatility. Their speed combined with ability to mount lighter artillery such as rocket/mortar options makes them excellent for providing rapid though not dedicated long range support and harassment opportunity, even if they will not be as powerful as dedicated bombardment options.
Their space fleet focuses on long range energy weapons with select gravitationally accelerated cannons being retrofitted onto newer ships. While the latter are more common on newer ground vehicles, they have seen prominent adaptation after roughshod retrofits during the independence war demonstrated their might. Complex missile systems let them focus down multiple targets as well as giving CIWS and anti-missile systems a struggle. Not merely by volume of missiles launched but their ability to "blink" in and out of realspace, jammer arrays, and their stealth capabilities of "dead" launches and low-emission gas propulsion (before using rapid bursts to close in) make them very tricky to fight. Even worse, many of their primary cannon type weapons can have additional effects on their targets, creating "reactive fields" from pent up volatile energies that amplify the effect of additional beam/plasma/pulse type wepaons for example. Other time sthey may diminish scanning/targeting capabilities or even cause psionic anomalies.
This comes at the cost of their heavy hitting damage options being somewhat limited, focusing on disrupting and debilitating fleets very heavily. The idea is to soften or overwhelm them with all kinds of interfering effects, making them easier to then pick off. While this is not necessarily very efficient when it comes to pure kill ratios, it can frequently force fleets to retreat or make force them to awkwardly split up their forces as major enemy vessels quickly struggle to bring their full power to bear. However, for genuine raw killing power, the enormous void-creatures (and the retrofitted husks of such) found in the "gulf" within OSRF space possess that in great number. These enormous predators (and their reanimated cadaveres), sometimes greater in size than capital ships, possess various parasites, anatomy, and mutations serving as weapons and munitions. Mythic starfaring serpent-eels, horrific mantis-centipede leviathans, pustulent spore-masses of bristling filth, all frequently augmented with conventioanl weaponry - to face these incrasingly common monstrosities is the stuff of many horror stories emerging from Front space.
The eastern periphery systems of what was once the Federation have historically been rife with conflict, dissatisfaction, greed, and exploitation. Resource rich yet marginalizedin galactic politics, it was at once a jewel in the empire's crown and an unwilling servant beneath its boots. Its absorption into the the Federation, accomplished via the manipulation of pre-existing ethnic, ideological, and territorial tensions and "justified" humanitarian intervention, has only recently served as a frequent topic of discourse when discussing the great decline of empires.
The Orion Sphere Revolutionary Front had many names in its infancy, battling against as much reactionary terror cells and militant groups as it did the Federation and its crony-states. Many times had it been crushed yet just as many had the desire for liberation both ideological and territorial ignite again and again. As the overburdened mechanisms of rulership began to buckle under their own weight, a distant threat of alien invasion began to become increasingly tangible. It is from the ensuring war that the veterans of many insurrectionary actions and the few independent planet states in the area began to prepare for a shift in the geopolitical paradigm.
The brutal liberation war was a chaotic one responsible for some of the most hellish fighting on the eastern front of the sphere. Conventional wisdom sees it as a maddening war of all against all yet in reality, the barbarians and the Federation frequently employed the same strategies. As Federation control over eastern sphere worlds weakened, the barbarians swept in to fill the power vacuum. Both would manipulate the individual worlds against one another to protect their own holdings and engage in proxy wars, saving their main forces for gaps in one another's defences. Yet the OSRF was aware of this and the growing discontent among the civilian populace. The foreign "liberators" quickly proved to be as cruel of masters as the enlightened cruelty of those they had replaced.
From the cry of frustration and subjugation of the imprisoned masses came an uproar of anger and defiance. As once civilian masses began to organize en masse, protesting then rioting against the slavish exploitation of their labour, the destructive resource extraction of their homelands, and the fattening of the all-too-willing collaborators of the ruling classes, both superpowers saw a common problem. Temporary truces between warlords and generals to "sort out" civil unrest however, turned out to be the powder keg lighting the OSRF had hoped for to galvanize mass resistance. When the war was revealed as a glorified sham to the masses with these two great enemies working under the table with one another, the blowback was colossal.
It was enough to kickstart the fires of revolution that had smouldered in the background, devouring isolated and ruined worlds, now angrily spreading to the more prosperous and internally divided of worlds. Insurgencies and guerilla campaigns, once isolated to individual systems, began to spread as the populace of the worlds became hostile. Outer worlds were the first to fall, ignored as the Federation-Barbarian war heated up again, forcing one another's hand and trying to capitalize on one another's instability. Like a storm of pickaxes, batons, knives, and IED's, a once captive populace immediately seized the opportunity. Combined with the gradual transformation of full blown rebellions into interplanetary military groups, the once great powers found themselves stretched out, wasting personnel and supplies on one another, and now the prey to the vengeful people they once thought of as resources.
Devoured and decimated by a once maligned populace, the great powers were forced out of the eastern territories. From the ruins, a grand unification emerged. The revolutionary fire had not merely scourged the mark of the hated colonialist and and imperialist, it had reduced the boundaries that once divided the various inhabitants of these systems to a withered husk. With massive spoils of war left from the driven enemy, a collaborationist ruling class now forced into chains, and a fervour to never again bow to corporation or empeor, the OSRF had truly been materialized.
With the Federation's fall and the reduction of the barbarians to at best scattered warbands and holdouts, the Front has considerably expanded. Its current actions see this now solidified alliance expanding its ideology to surrounding systems as those who once fleed from the war encouraged to now return. A great influx of foreign capital and resources has begun. It fuels the growth of increasingly pro OSRF sentiment in surrounding regions, spreading even into the galactic core as its ideological expansion outstrips its physical one. Many potential candidates are wracked by tumultuous politics, reeling from the aftermath of a brual inter-imperial war, yet the promise of a new possibility away from the realm of empire remains tantalizing. Even those absorbed into its fold still struggle but an expansion of its geopolitical power in a calculated ppush is bearing fruit in stabilizing its fresh, still somewhat tenuous allies.
At the same time, mysterious research into the fields of the arcane, the psionic, the occult, and the eldritch have begun to make waves past its boundaries. Manifestations of unearthly power and the presence of mythic void-borne creatues, some not believed to be of this reality, drape it in an air of danger an dmystery. Research into the unity of the unearthly knowledge with cutting edge science has resulted in a boon of experimental technologies and Front leadership hopes to be the torchbearer for a new paradigm of technopolitical development. While its alliances with many nomadic groups, independent systems or planets, and NGO's does not result in direct control, it is growing its strength in a tangible fashion. It can no longer be written off as at best a resource rich backwater; it is a rising force and its message is beginning to resonate with increasing volume across the stars.
I was thinking a human smuggler/gun slinger who made a lil (big) fucky wucky on a delivery for an Yrrkradian warlord. Maybe said warlord might've been a bit closer with the emperor than smuggleman assumed. Big bad consequences for failure IE whole crew gets merced to make an example. So now he's officially in the shits with a highly influential Yrrkradian politician or two due to the consequences of said delivery not making it. Likely something that screwed a loyalist war effort or left them lacking supplies of some kind. He wants vengeance and they think he's dead kinda thing.
100% workable. I look forward to the character sheet. I am a bit busy right now but you can jump on our discord too.
The ground beneath was dry and crusted with a mixture of what was definitely blood but other fluids had intermingled, turning into a layer of scraping, staining crust like a mixture of scabs and solidified pus. The shotgun was no different other than the crusty, grainy pieces of meat encrusted with exoskeletal growths, the weapon's targeter lights blinking as if awakened by Salvator's hands. The weapon was heavy, even for an experienced and augmented soldier, yet its weight was unusual; it shifted and shuddered as if reluctant to face whatever hellish force had scourged the life from its prior owner.
As if out of some primal fear, the weapon itself reached out.
Salvator would detect it on his HUD; notifications of attempted communications channels opening and preview messages in an almost hieroglyphic language. As if someone had ground up a collection of insects and arranged them into stark geometric characters. It was a vrexul language specifically, one of many and rendered in some sort of cold character of weapon permisison and targeting system calibration.
This meant a number of things:
1) This shotgun was likely from a gun-platform type biomechanical drone; something it was common to see deployed as a part of vrexul infnatry squads. Yet if it was a size and shape that a voidhanger could use it, it was likely manufactured with the intent of giving it to local rebels.
2) Its lethality was considerably higher than a conventional shotgun. Unlikely to the same degree as one properly scaled for its creators but the tips of the slugs almost stared at Salvator. The bandolier of rounds had a threatening weightiness to themselves; perhaps one could simply beat someone to death with it like a flail. This thing could probably punch through a fully power armored UCL trooper with a direct hit or two to the chestplate.
3) The ability to do so had not stopped what were at least four vrexul soldiers (plus an indeterminate amount of biomechanical drones) from being slaughtered into festering slag. Given by the scourged rocks and the chunks of rubble surrounding them, they had put out quite a bit of retaliatory fire.
4) Apparently it was also sending a transmission to the communicator panel, silencing the beeping if only to replace it with a reverberant, crackling drone.
5) In short, the weapon like many vrexul technologies primarily associated with the Intransigence, it was essentially "alive" and if it did not shut up, there is no telling who might hear them.
The rock slab that Kleo had stuffed herself behind was somewhat misleading. It had looked like a single large jutting rock formation but the actual "rock" part of it was maybe less than half of its actual bulk. There was solid natural formation there but a huge part of it was shorn off; the whole upper part of it looked as if someone had hacksawed it away with the uneven and even near-toothed, raw way it had been forcibly removed.
And by the grooves that were cut into it, it had been with a solid round weapon of some sort. A smell of slightly stingy, metallic odour wafted from behind her cover and if her eyes followed it, she would see the circular back-end of some sort of shell embedded in the ground. A circular back-end larger than what one might even load into a vrexul autocannon.
Like the one that lay cracked and bent, nudging up against her knee like some dying animal begging for release or relief. The weapon itself was a broad, semi-rectacugular prism shape simple in structure yet lavished with shifting carapace and slithering bioelectronics, bent at an awkward as if it had been forced into a 45-degree v-shape. Its barrel was torn off with serrated wounding patterns and the creatures that lived inside to maintain it could be seen in the little gaps within its battere shape, life leaving them as it did the weapon.
It belonged to the other part of the "rock" she had been hiding against; the slouching cadaver of an enormous vrexul. Undergrowth camo-pattern body, covered in a layer of dust likely from the rock it had unsuccessfully used to shield itself from its foe, half of its skull torn open, leaving her with the empty pupil-less ocular dome stare of its one remaining primary "eye" and the imperceptible emotion of its incompete mandibular array; perhaps horror, perhaps hatred, perhaps some sort of empty machine-apathy many were stereotyped as possessing.
She could see shapes moving within the various other holes in its body; glistening in the thin rays of light that peaked through the flog and the flares of light from the distant-yet-ever-present battle. Shapes not of native scavengers but living things carrying out whatever tasks they could to maintain a long since deceased form, perhaps in denial or they simply were not biologically programmed for anything else.
Ilshar's guerilla career informed him of some of the patterns and marking not on the front of the various shorn-off vrexul armor chunks but their underside. Patterns inscribed almost as if they were runes seemed to speak to the distant memory of far more violent years; symbols that seemed to gnash at the mind with scything mouthparts laden with teeth, eyes that stared not at but through the psyche in pseudo-geometric patterns on shield-shaped faces. At once militant in severity yet occult in the specifics of construction; hardline militant groups no doubt possessing a similar hatred as the ZRF for its foreign oppressor.
The piece of carapace he held was inert yet he could feel something within; maybe some sort of wiring and electronics preparing to link up to a full-spectrum combat suit, or something that squirmed and crept in its little dark realm of bioengineered robotics-intertwined complexity. He was not merely picking up supplies for repair but something that almost felt like the living, hateful will of another hardened insurgent.
There was something... odd about the body however if he looked closer. Parts of it were shattered and a gruesome labyrinth of annihilated anatomy, yet there were certain components that were missing. The tarrhaidim had no doubt seen the bodies of vrexul before (perhaps he had been responsible for a number of them), and it was rather telling certain components had been removed. Not just organs but something else. What exactly was difficult to discern yet there were parts of its lumbering corpse where connector veins, internal limbs, and claspers were rather delicately pulled away or excised, laying on the viscera-strewn grass or sliding around in its shell.
There was something off about some of the organs that weren't removed however, as if they were bereft of the hellish trauma visible and tangible on the others.
Almost as if they had been planted in the corpse after the fact. Like clusters of fleshy grapes, worm-like veins laced through them, and very slightly growing and tensing as they they traced like trails through their bulbous mass. It was biotech, perhaps not vrexul, but it looked like it had been implanted in the body after it had been averted from living unto death. What was its purpose exactly though?
As the microforms traveled across this landscape, the severity of the scene grew clearer. Some of the shell casings here were almost as large as the little drones themselves and these were not Veiled War era suprlus ones. They were at least from three to five years ago; a few could be seen embedded in a particularly large 12 foot long vrexul slumped face down in the dirt; exit wounds on its back as massive as the dinner plate sized ones they saw punched through the trees earlier. At least nine of said wounds on its body; likely some on the shattered sideways-earwig shaped autocannons that were attached to the underside of its arms but those had been cracked in multiple spots and-
Signal interference, connection fizzling, warning signs; Echo's on board systems were detecting some sort of signal passing through the area. No, it wasn't passing but bouncing about, multiple points of contact - including the corpse that Ilshar had procured an armor shard from. The digital feed faltered yet control of the drones wasn't being affected. It wasn't jamming but some sort of ambient static in the air, the drones unintentionall picking up some of it.
Investigating further, it was connected to the vrexul bodies. Not the corpses in and of themselves; multiple HUD-markers indicated it was something inside of them that was generating the signals.
One drone, the one furthest from the others however, was picking up a sort of light invisible on the physical spectrum. A laser of some sort; stopping right on its body.
Something was targeting the drone but it wasn't firing.
It was hard not to feel the glares against their backs as the smoking wreckage of civilian architecture slowly retreated back into the distance, joining the protests of the scielto commander as still-piping hot barrels were pressed against their back. Soon it was but smoke visible through the envelopment of the forest green as it trembled from the raging violence in the valley.
Every few minutes, a great light would erupt in an explosive blast from the valley or the mountain opposite to their own, the pinkish-white light overwhelming the pure gold of the mid-day sun. Branches would tremble, the dirty leaves that had replaced foot-trails fluttered from the blast-waves that washed over them. The worst was the light however, as if a small sun had blossomed off in the distance yet whose shining splendor greedily overrode that of the planet's primary star, silhouetting the foliage that enshrouded them from the world in streams of black, slihouetted shadows.
Rather than illuminate and reveal, the lack of paths through the uneven, wooded mountainside with its logs, vines, and rocks became hidden momentarily in near-blinding flashes. They were diminishing in frequency and ferocity as they progressed and one could see why with a glance off to the side. Down in the valley, sloping fronts of dark-green armored personnel carriers, top-mounted autocannons spitting as digitigrade-legged bipedal mecha stalking forth ostrich like sent storms of missile and minigun-spray into bonfire-raging blasts of CivSec positions.
Storms of flashing energy-jacketed rounds and piercing flashes of condensed beam-energy responded in kind as they seared and scored scars and hits along tanks that had last seen active service in the Veiled War. The ensuing energy-splash or detonating armor cast black shapes against the erupting flames as infantry rapidly disembarked mere feet from rumbling, boxy vehicles and stomping bipedal warmachines. Far heavier vehicles lay in wait, entrenched in camouflage of repuroposed trees and heavy netting or sniping them down lengthy sightlines extending over trenches and between bunkers.
It was easy to miss out on the buzzing of the communicator-panel in its reinforced carrying-case. There was so much going on that even when the savage judgement day knell of the artillery-cannon's blasts died down, that left the shrieking of aircraft and multi-targetting missiles in its place. It was not enough to drown out the nagging buzz of the device, nor was the smoke that began to creep forth enough to hide the extravagance of the raging battle that consumed the region.
It was more akin to a fog with how it crept from deeper into the woods where the light was forced to not only navigate the dense leafy cover but also the wafting white that rolled out from within its depths. The roads were entirely absent now and the only real way to visually orient themselves was where the light of explosions and energy beams shone from. It was further away from the mountain edge, moreso on the spine of the enormous formation, and getting harder to see without some sort of scanning or imaging capability that was unaffected by such visual obstruction.
All the while the communicator buzzed naggingly, awaiting for anyone to respond. It was clear for once as the sounds of battle grew distant, almost as if respectful of the sombre and somewhat pungent fog that crept in. Where trees once stood tight and clustered they began to slouch and lean; dinner-plate sized holes punched through their bodies or having gutted their circumferences caused a few to keel over, resting upon one another or the forest floor itself.
It made the area somewhat easier to navigate yet more and more of the trees were increasingly fallen, some torn into smaller log-chunks, their leafy tops crumpled and burnt as they wreathed their own remains. Spent shell casings flashed at the Envenomed squad's sight, all of them the sort reserved for anti-material rifles others withered and crusty, shaped like the pupae of flying insects yet laced with deliberately implanted metal firing mechanisms - those ones were at least for light autocannons.
They were in a clearing in the woods, the fog heavy yet not entirely obscuring - they could see the blast-craters upon the ground, the trees that had been sunken along with the large, chunky and lump-like shapes laying scattered all around, limbs of some large, monstrous, multi-digited sort and blackened bio-metallic acrmor could be made out through non-enhanced sight as both the main recipients of immense violence and the source of much of the smoke. So too could be areas of elevated terrain; jutting rock-heads slouching off before the congregation of massive, shattered forms, their sides torn and desecrated by retaliatory fire.
Piles of rubble stood in front of these natural formations, having violently deformed them but far lesser than the now brutally deceased who who had fired upon some unknown aggressor. A few larger, older trees sat proud and looming, extending past the fog and scourged with puncturing wounds but none of which were anything like the massive holes punched through the trees prior or the arthropod bodies in the area. The latter two were large enough sometimes that a human could fit its body through the wounds torn through them; these would be a much tighter to impossible squeeze to make.
With the team nearly halfway to the artillery emplacement, it was clear that they would have to cross a treacherous and eerie stretch of the mountain where some sort of battle had taken place. The bodies appeared arthropod like and most of them were facing towards the bulging rocks that jutted from the earth, yet what exactly had slaughtered them so thoroughly?
And why was the communicator-panel they were handed starting to beep and blink a red warning light, then a green signal-transmission one?
The creature's digits clenched tighter, scraping armor and the first audible signs of wear and tear made themselves clear. The huge creature even with such injuries was pumped full of anger and adrenaline. Its eyeless attention turned to Salvator as it hesitated for a moment. It spoke but this time the words were not the swamp-murk rumbling of its native tongue but English, words fogged by the hazy intonations of its deep, frothing vocalization.
"You do not know my fight; OUR struggle," He paused to make a deep sound; sucking inwards with a flanging, mud-bubbling gargle. "If you think we expect such mercy from the enemy. Do you not know the value of a hostage of an enemy with an image to keep? Their sapient rights and sapientaraianism; the luxury of the oppressor to parade their righteousness. Empty words for burned down ghettos."
His grip loosened only slightly. Like worms his digits still coiled even if the pressure was far less bruising.
The footsteps of other tarrhaidim drew nearer, measured and careful as if approaching a potential landmine. He motioned over to the gathered Envenomed, stone-spire teeth clenching as his hands waved - he needed them to make some space but he was careful to keep his mouth shut. More voices were more fuel to the fire.
More human voices that was. The ZRF's squad leader looked to Ilshar and decided that whatever the fellow fungoid had on mind was good a guess as any, motioning his hand over his mouth as he looked at Echo. The enormous Unztadtlige alone was a walking death threat even if it was not actually expressing any aggression.
As Ilshar spoke the fingers slid off of Kleo's arms and it turned to face him, sliding back into the archaic tongue of his kind.
"My anger has been tended to well for over a decade of subjugation; countless habitations under the claw of suited barons and their lackeys' armored bootheels. You speak as one of similar sufferings. Similar hatreds."
His head turned to the fallen scielto, glaring from the corners of what one could presume were its eyes at the rifle barrel pointed at the side of its face. The soldier stopped as the ZRF squad leader's hands motioned him to stop his little escapade of anger, leaving promptly without a word to rejoin his comrades.
He turned to the rest of the squad, his own wounds less gruesome but his ballistic padding armor torn and multiple burns traveling up his sides and back. A part of his face bubbled from a residual energy burst of some sort and shapes squirmed beneath in torment or in desperation to repair badly damaged biomass.
"You fight well. That is noted," He paused to glance at Kleo, his teeth half-clenched with some sort of frustration, but turned then to the human informant while he addressed the rest. "But our mission ends here. Too many wounded, much already lost. You make your way wherever-to now."
It was not much but as he left, the informant was already clenching his teeth and lightly banging his forehead against a half-broken doorway. He did not hide well the curses uttered as whispers.
"Well, I was hoping that could be the backup but it seems you're on your own... but right, where was I huh... the mission. Well... you remember that massive blast from earlier? Not the one that unlucky scielto fellow made. The massive one, artillery blast, the one that shook the whole hillside."
He walked out and pointed off in the distance, along where the trees gradually sloped upwards, rustling in the wind and in the wake of massive blasts. Blurs through the air, slamming along the hillside, sending up clouds of dirt and mushroom clouds of flame.
Little more than the barks of hounds as the massive beast roaring in Hades' depths roared from off in the distance, a massive plume of blue-yellow fire erupting far off near the peak of the mountain they stood upon. Not long after, another massive blast off in the distance on the opposing hill, gouging out an enormous bite of an opposing mountainside. The very report of the weapon made trees tremble, the village shudder, and the ground quake beneath their feet.
"... Yeah, that? Artillery, off-world from the UCL. Some sort of test-run for it, multi-drone triangulation-targetting and live battlenet-feed coordination with on-ground elements. That opposing hillside? That's our artillery. As in 'Definitely-Not-Intransigence' artillery. Pathetic, yes, but that's what happens when you don't control the space around the world and have to rely on informal smuggler networks to sneak in anything that won't catch the actual regional League fleet's attention."
He put a hand on his chin, looking upwards for a bit before remembering something, immediately disappearing back into the house. A few bits of the ceiling were flaking off onto his head, making him curse as he disappeared inside. Something heavy dragged along the floor and the man audibly grunted as clips of some sort were undone, zippers opened, and contents rummaged.
Returning, he held a blocky square-like device with an antennae poking out one corner and various switches and buttons adorning its face. It was held in a sort of reinforced case and with clawed grasper-straps allowing for attachment to one's back. Currently it was open and he was pressing a few buttons.
With a bit of fidgeting, he managed to slide what appeared to be a button/switch/knob covered panel and reveal a screen, before fumbling some more to activate a quartet of small LED's. Immediately, a holographic projection emerged; four beams of light splintering into countless smaller ones, projecting an image of a video feed through a light blue filter.
A group of faces were visible; armored, sloping helmets, curving lines across the sides of their ridges and a rough, dense appearance. Augmented combat suits ("power armor" if one wanted to be blunt), Intranszjednota issue, early Reckoning of Empires period; a squad, bipedal and humanoid, showered with dirt and cautiously looking over their shoulder in whatever foxhole they were huddled in.
"Oi, before you start, yes, they're here! Look, just get going, I'll fill them in fast and it won't be long alright? Thank you."
Before any of them could respond with more than a flicker of motion and the loading of their mags, he closed it and handed it to Salvator.
"I'll be frank, there's not much to say but there's two things you gotta do. First, get to there-"
He pointed off in the distance where the massive blast from the artillery cannon had spouted out, also cursing as he fumbled around with a few more contents he'd extracted from the house.
"That fancy CivSec artillery canon? We need you to secure it. Not destroy it-" His eyes glanced at Ilshar and Echo. "Secure it. That device I handed you? Encrypted secure coms and a battlefield computer-suite. It's got a map and navigation program but really, it's a straight shot there; can probably make it there in the next hour or less if you get going soon."
The encased device was buzzing; any attempts to network with it via digital systems revealed that it was updating something related to their current location and distance to the targeted area.
"Second? You actually should get going real soon because those guys you saw on the holo-feed? They're on the move and you're working with them. They're getting close to a target and fighting the UCL suckers in the valley at the same time. They're going to paint the target once they get close enough to them. Once they let you know, you guys get to help the League uh, test out their new product's accuracy when they do that. Assassination but with a knife you can level a mountain with."
He nodded before returning into their house, grunting as he pulled something heavy then returned with a backpack. Bits of fluid coloured its tough nylon like material in hues of blue and green. A slight odour wafted from it, one that was wet and slightly dirt-like, something he pretended he did not smell.
"That's my end of this deal held..." He muttered under his breath as he started to move. "Have fun, I'm getting off this clusterfuck."
As he left, the ZRF the squad had fought alongside began to take their leave. Many of them hobbled, some fashioning crutches from large branches or were held from under their arms by comrades. Their wounds were horrific but there were a number that in spite of that, seemed none the worse off. The tarrhaidim obviously, but they were occupied with their prisoner, now on a slow march back away from the frontlines of the conflict.
The informant joined them, exchanging a few words, before the Envenomed team were left with their task.
A spray of bullets shattered chest plating and the reinforced dermal layering beneath, turning torsos into spouting holes and dropping the fallen soldiers to the ground. The scielto commander jerked forward, a sound like a shriek being sucked inwards and reversed, trembling the air around itself before a booted foot kicked into a burn-wound. A gargling hiss replied as it curled up and clawed at the ground, dirt clumping between its lengthy fingers as a series of curses and warping, frothing noises emerged not from a seemingly absent mouth but the very space around itself.
The hatred the battered, bruised infantry human and tarrhaidimm alike however soon turned from their deceased captives to the sole human of the Envenomed team. Even before the first angry shouts broke, one of the fungoids stomped over her way, its gnarled hand swinging angrily to knock the lighter from her hand and grabbing her by the shoulder. Its fingers were long like straightened, bony roots easily long enough to wrap around one's biceps. Tarrhaidim were not considered particularly large but even an average one like this was at least half a head taller than considerably more powerful in its bulk.
The various holes in its body and even the trenches torn through its face, squirming with nerve-worm-things and twitching regenerative biomass, seemed to speak themselves not with anger but a squirting, hissing ambience.
The other tarrhaidim who had been driving the jeep earlier audibly cursed as he shouted at the others to cease their jeering and howling to focus on the still living scielto prisoner. Yet even as he made his way, his squadmate was already giving Kleo a piece of his mind.
"You thoughtless detritus of atrophied un-being, festering in your arrogance!" Its mouth was a cavern-grin, transparent membrane muscles closing over its stalactite-stalagmite 'teeth' yet the sound boomed seemingly out of its still bleeding wounds all over. Kleo could see the reinforce biometallic armor it was wearing twitching and recoiling around the holes blown through it. Worse, it was speaking its own language, not English or any other human tongue. "We had the oppressors in our grasp! We had leverage, an opportunity to force the sky-squirming scum to acquiesce to our demands, and this foreign joyrider denied us such a weapon!"
It said those words with a particular venom, enough that its skin seemed to quiver and tremble with some potentially volatile anger. Its head swivelled as it looked to its compatriots, the squad's leader before it turned back to Ilshar. It was difficult to recognize but this bloodied tarrhaidim was the same one who had blessed Ilshar earlier.
It would attempt to keep its grip on Kleo's shoulder/bicep area uncomfortably tight before it looked to its fellow fungoid in Ilshar.
Its grasp was tight enough that the partially revealed bone of its fingers were starting to constrict and bend the armor around that area.
Now what might that do to human bone if they got harder?
"Spore-progeny-kin, how do you tolerate the arrogance of the unrotted homo-sapien, no better than the servant-sludge counterparts of their scielto masters, the same she has just killed? You must be of same background of battle and resistance as I; do you not see the foolishness of this failure of a comrade?"
"HEY HEY HEY, hands off the backup, it's a fuck-up, I get it but please let's just-"
The informant was silenced as the angry soldier opened its mouth and spat not spittle but a clump of squirming brownish-yellow squirming. They resembled tubifex worms covered in a cloud of mucous, seemingly melting as they were exposed to an environment outside of their decomposing compatriot.
The rebel squad leader paused for a moment as if hesitant. It was not hard to *feel* the anger he felt, the way his eyeless face seemed to burn with all the restraint needed to barely contain how much the opportunity had not only been missed but taken fromthem.
The cries of their wounded could be heard not too far off as a few of the soldiers looked anxious; could they hold down a single scielto? Horribly wounded but its power had been well demonstrated. Someone had to tend to those nearly slaughtered by it... and there was no body count of how much they had lost yet.
Either way, the informant was not exactly in a position to spill any mission details yet. Not when they had all been thrust back into the fire.
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