[color=f7941d]"Noted friends - have fun in there."[/color] The tarrhaidim soldier mused as he lay rooted in position, not before turning to Ilshar, his voice turning into a deep gurgle in a foreign, alien tongue far removed from English.

[hider=Translated from tarrhaidim language]
[color=f7941d]"May the Worm-Totality's coils wrap around the neck of the enemy and the grip of your rifle."[/color]
[/hider]

Ilshar, Echo, and Salvator were near the centre of the settlement.

It wasn't in the most wartorn state it could have been, hardly what one would use for a convincing charity pleading commercial. Visible trails half-obsured by the mud and what appeared to be some rain from the night before lined across the muddy paths. Some wheeled and others uniformly flattened - antigravitational hover vehicles for the latter. Most of houses had a sort of ramshackle approach to them; geometrical and sensible in their shape yet whatever symmetry or sense that might suggest interrupted by slightly-pulsing, stiffening biomass like a mixture of moss and wood. 

A few bullet holds dotted them, shrapnel wounds, windows dotted with tiny holes - few signs of break in or entry. The boot-prints lead towards one partiular house in the middle, mud smeared on the front steps and the door slightly ajar. From the gap and nearby window, they could peek inside to see the light peering in from the windows further illumating the footsteps. A living room was visible off to the side yet the footsteps lead down the corridor adjacent, towards a closed door. A door large enough for the Endoform of Echo to move through; its inhabitants were clearly not human given the relative size of everything inside. 

Around them, most of the windows had been tinted black, covered with bio-film from the other side, or boarded in a few cases when they could not afford glass. This was one of the few that lacked such and given by the fewer bullet-holes on it, perhaps it had simply bee a less appealing target for whatever stray fire had punctured its walls.

Off in the distance, something massive thudded and rumbled with the crackling roar of a massive artillery blast in the distance and the settlement quaked in response. Windows wobbled, doors rattled, and the door creaked against its hinge as if beckoning entry into the structure. As far back as where Kleo resided, the forest shuddered not merely in fear of the shockwave of force, but as if in fear of when the next one would fall.

Movement again; rapid shapes bestial and low to the ground, skirting around the edges of the woods opposite to the way they entered. Their allies' weapons followed; the ground they stood upon was higher in elevation. 

As the reverberation diminished, a ping manifested upon Echo's comms - the signal was nearby and data-crunching combined with tracking situated it roughly 45 feet to the northwest of the house, roughly diagonally off to the left - somewhere near the front of another house. It was the faded grey-white one, a few muddy stains along its walls, patched up holes filled with tarrhaidim bio-mesh hardened in the case of blasts, and a silhouetted figure in the window who raised a hand then vanished back into the unlit, shadowed room.

The ping repeated - a series of bleeps and blips, roughly congruent with the ones the ZRF would use, though it was far away from the coms-code they were supposed to use to identify and reach out to the informant with.