Flickering lasers cut through the smoke and targeted silhouetted bodies emergent from the morass, revealed in a storm of coalescing fog and etheric miasma rapidly diminishing in the wake of King's shockwave. Heat singed and burnt the low-oxygen vegetation as viney branches coiled and anatomy withered, cracked, and scattered to the current. The thin link between chasmspace and realspace wavered as light bent and collapsed as a million micro-rifts ruptured and swallowed it in heatwave blurs across the physical spectrum of visibility.

Where once hung fog instead now loomed an encirclement of figures - six, eight, 10. Floating limbs and and eel-swarm threads of muscle mass half-transmuted into void-matter. Pulsing fluid suspended in air pulsed and intensified a purplish glow in response to the construct's blast of heat as the etheric concentration in the atmosphere steeply dropped.

Pinkish lines flared than diminished yet did not fade, hanging over their forms like undulating tendrils before fading into thin, dusty trails leading back the way the group had come. The space in front of them blurred as if encasements of glass had been revealed that flared white, then pink, then began to crack and crackle like TV static. The three closest to King shattered as qillatu ruptured outwards in a foul mixture of fluid and teeming gas, splattering against the ground as the protective barrier broke, causing them to stagger backwards and their cranial pseudopods to twitch and flail, slapping and dragging against scourged pillars and flooring.



The rest of them hesitated, frozen almost as if blinded by the now-diminishing opaqueness of their flared barriers. Four clung to the walling to their right, three amidst the withered vegetation and leaning, half-broken support pillar to their left. As their glassy barriers diminished, their heads snapped towards the group - eyes darting towards the massive unztadtlige and the sole human.

For all except the unztadtlige, it would feel as if temporary vertigo had descended upon them; for some, a trick of the mind they could stare down. For Kleo, the atmo-ethereal fluctuation would trigger a temporary wave of blurred vision and nausea as her body body adapted to the wild disruption to the sealed environment. King and the Unztadtlige would feel nothing, the voidhangers something akin to a pinprickling cold amongst their skin, Ilshar's own flesh feeling like it was shuddering beneath his armor.

It wasn't enough to interfere with Alice's aim.

A needle round went through the cheekbone and into the center of the skull, jerking its head away from Alice and staggering it if only for a second before it struck at Echo. A massive, overdeveloped fist of bone swung like a hammer, smashing through a pillar in a burst of dust and swinging down towards the coral-cyborg's skull. Its movement was rapid and the second round slammed not into the cranial hole but a hump of flesh above. Skin quivered and retracted against its bonds as underdeveloped limbs emerging from its lower back slapped and thrashed about.

The brute's second blow swung towards Echo with a three pointed multi-segmented limbs jabbing forward like spears but its shaky, gangly legs combined with the effects of the poison worked against it. Its body mass stumbled forward and Echo would see the impaling strike coming well in advance. Yet its massive swing was now headed towards Kleo, with Ilshar and Salvatore in the way of its single-minded rampage.

Slug after slug smashed into its body with near-maximum power; fist sized holes stared back as the outline of something bulbous and glowing manifested could be seen within its centre of mass for a fleeting moment. A moment later and its barreling charge was atop the the voidhanger and the tarrhaidim. Target markers appeared above each one, outlining the threats in an outline of red as the slowly regenerating fog began to seep back in.

The infesting mass on the floor cushioned Kleo as they fell back-first but the nauseating wave hit just as they began to pull the trigger. The target was large; too large to dodge the swarming hunger that slammed into its already pock-marked body and violently detonated in a firework display of meat and chemofungal microblasts. The rounds had limited guidance capacity fired dumb - 15 of them swung into the centre of mass or already blasted holes, tearing out chunks of meat, but the rest faltered and twisted mid-flight. Seven rounds swung off course, twisting to slam amidst the pillar to the left, breaking apart a pair of ether-shields in a burst of putrid qillatu.

Before she could fire off the rest of the magazine, Kleo was yanked off of her feet, face first to the ground, as the whip-limb tightened along their ankle and pulled. To the right, the four corpses stalked forwards out of their stupor, one of them possessing the lashing whip of veins and sinew. The air around their shielded bodies shimmered as one twisted its entire torso 360 degrees, yanking again to pull Kleo along with monstrous strength and the other three strode forward, arms raising almost in praise or to welcome the intruders.

The ulvath roared and tore out more chunks of the enomous hulk as it changed its course, dead-set on dismembering Kleo and crashing through both Ilshar and Salvator as it did so. The dense almost tree-trunk like body diminished and thinned as dense layers of void-gunk and ossified matter splintered and shattered, splattered, and dispersed. All that was left was a bioluminiscent layer of membranous flesh, behind which pulsed a sphere of rot not unlike what they had encountered in the prior room. This one was smaller and within it were honeycomb like structures, absent in its counterpart but still writhing with squirming intestinal shapes. A pinkish trail of smoke-light flared for a moment as its core was revealed, pulsing as it trailed back into the previous room.

Despite this, Ilshar's analysis was correct - the entire ambush was remotely controlled by an etheric presence. As the putrid ambush advanced, the pulses had a variety of effects. Those who clung to the walls hitched up and froze, stumbling and thumping against the ground. The enormous brute barreling towards Ilshar stumbled for a brief moment, banging against a pillar and cracking it to the core, before pushing off and storming towards Kleo, its overbuilt fist hastily swinging towards Ilshar in the process.

The attack faltered again with the one that had seized Kleo's ankle freezing up, cranial tendril masses slapping around wildly as the rest of its body stuttered and paused intermittenly mid motion. The entity controlling them was very close but it was clearly caught in something, unable to fully turn its attention towards fending off the Envenomed intrusion.

The wave of qillatu fallout from the animated corpses struck by King reached Ilshar at the worst possible moment - while his organs processed the internal bleed from his own brush with the ether. His armour and membrane were no barrier against the immaterial energy, and as his glands and diffusion organs had calibrated their effort from his conscious awareness of conjuring the pulse sequence, they found themselves momentarily overtaxed by the outside influx. He took a stumbling step backwards, partially blinded as many of his visual organs burned out and more frantically formed out of their absorbed remains.

When his senses found their focus again, it was too late to avoid the giant amalgam that he suddenly found looming over him. The carrion mass had been shredded by the squad’s fire, leaving open what seemed to be a central node in its nonsensical anatomy, but it still had more than enough bulk to be lethally dangerous. Its swinging limb came quickly, and Ilshar, too close to avoid it, could only throw himself down to the ground under its arc.

Not fast enough - the misshapen appendage glanced on his armoured back with an unpleasant squelching smash, and he was thrown down to his side, a patch of neural ganglia crushed under his dented armour. His legs dulled, all he could do was keep a hold of his machine gun while raising himself on his left hand.

“Not right away,” he replied to Alice in a strained grunt. The voidhanger had the right idea, the disruption wrought by the signal having probably saved him from a second hilling strike from the lumbering horror, but between his recovering qillatu diffusion and the close-quarters struggle he was in no condition to follow through against the hidden mind. “Take down this thing first!”

The puppeted corpses were more numerous, but weaker and incapacitated for the moment. The fused monster, however, was an immediate danger he had already paid for ignoring. If the glowing hive-sphere was indeed its core, a quick strike could be enough, and while the ulvath was not a precision weapon, it was not the only one he had.

With a quiet prayer for the Nexus’ spore-flow to guide his blow, Ilshar raised his right hand and unfolded the opening to the ether-burrow he had embedded in it. It only took the slightest effort to coax the Seraph-Worm from the gap where it lay coiled, and it burst into matter in a blur of teeth and luminescent flesh. For all his doubts about the symbiote’s creators, Ilshar could only admire the fluid lunge of its ringed body as it poured into being, the circle of its hook-fangs primed to bite into the amalgam’s exposed core.

I'm bouncing off the walls again, woooah I'm looking like a foooool again ohhhh..

Kleo got her world turned upside down just not in the fun Bel-Air way, whether it was being slammed to the ground or being attacked by fucking vines around her ankles or FOOD POISONING. How the fuck do you get sick in space? It's like - there's nothing up there to get sick from. Maybe it was the alien slop she had before she embarked on this mission, this was just a soup sandwich. Groggy, sick, and disoriented due to the most perfect ambush being executed. Kleo's first move was to get out of the vine tangle, which was shot by her squid best friend who blew the vines off with ease. She quickly got up and rolled out of the way from danger that was nearby, opting to move in closer hip to hip with her squid bestie.

"Aw fark! Who do we shoot first!? Kleo said, scared, anxious, and looking to drop the next skin sucker while she still could. What was the fabled leader doing during this anyway?

'Targets keep saturating the air with heavy particulate. I can't lase them at distance if they keep doing that!' King signaled out with evident frustration, their limbs and body seeming to contort and snap at arbitrary, abrupt angles in the murk as they drifted across the floor to interpose themselves between Kleo and the four cadaver puppets that had attempted to reel her into their welcoming arms.

'Closing distance to maximize lasing effectiveness at close range.' King began to drift across the floor, seeming to follow the fourth cadaver's severed, muscular appendage still draped across the floor almost like it was a guide rail. As he approached the clustered group, his body began to shimmer with piercing starburst lines of incandescent light that bloomed across the front of his body, starting at this chest and rolling across his shoulders, arms, and head - which then stabbed across the murky gloom to illuminate the quartet of puppets. At first the stabbing, rapidly dancing rays of light seemed to glide harmlessly off of their figures, its intensity diminished by the voluminous amounts of visceral void-gunk being sprayed across the environment. As King closed the distance however, the innumerable starburst rays intensified on contact and would begin to flash-ablate whatever they made contact with.

Upon gliding directly into the awaiting cadavers' arms, evidently completely uncaring of their hostility or actions, King would then bloom like a small nova, violently incandescent brilliance tearing out from their front of their body in every direction to engulf the four hostile entities in front of him - so starkly bright that the rest of the room seemed to visibly darken from the intensity of it, a cone of shadows falling across everything situated directly behind King as everything directly in front of him was caught within the empyrean focus of his fire.

So it was like that, eh? Salvator took the information presented and quick ran through it in his head while maintaining his fire on the larger bastard, for all the good it did. A quick blink got him out of the way of its charge while he highlighted the hive-sphere within the creature's body on the squad's tacnet, the information now showing up in their assorted HUDs.

"Squad, concentrate fire!" He shouted over comms even as Ilshar's worm surged towards the intended target. "King has the corpses suppressed, focus on the biggest one's core!"

From there, he took his own advice, shifting his grip on his shotgun to one hand as he pulled out a frag grenade. The pin flicked off, and Salvator tunneled the grenade through the ethereal pathways he would normally use to blink himself, the frag reappearing into existence jammed right in the hulking mass's chest, practically touching the hive-sphere. Even as the grenade cooked, Salvator dropped to one knee, taking up a position for a more precise shot. Sight. Breathe. Fire. The last slug in chamber went hurtling out, straight towards the grenade.

Etheric threats were well and far out of Echo's wheelhouse, the platform could not properly interact with the things that effected the minds of its bipedal companions and thus, was effectively useless as far as handling them went. Physical threats on the other hand, that was something Echo could handle. Its anti-grav engines flared to life as it slid backward out of the way of the hulking brute, not quite as hulking as Echo itself, but still dangerous. Echo's defensive maneuvers focused on creating distance from the hulk, to minimize damage and so as to not block the firing lines of the other Envenomed team members.

"Confirmed. Concentrating Fire." The Endoform echoed Salvator's command as it leveled its heavy weapon at the hulk. The weapon barked in rapid succession, as Echo laid down a prolonged burst against the creature, shell casings raining at the endoform's feet.

The Microforms opened up with their beam lasers, aiming to tear into the hulk from various directions while still maintaining close proximity to their respective charges- ready to leap into the path of oncoming attacks to body block for their designated companions if necessary.

The clumsily swinging limb would have crushed a normal human's back. Against Ilshar it was only hellishly painful, the raw force buckling knees and crumpling armor, weakening it against future attacks unless repaired. Retaliation would be swift if subtler thatn his heavy machine gun.

In the qillatu choked air, rapidly driving the puppets into a frenzy, the horde of ten were beginning to power through etheric disruption. Fluttering theads of flesh peeled and re-coiled around the doubting, staggering limbs and forced mockeries of flesh forth; barbaric intent defied confused nerves.

Like a singular mass they surged forward. Hyper-extended digit-joints in odd-numbered formations extended, curled, sickle-pointing and swung. Cranial tendrils whipped out wildly, swinging dangerously close to heads. The very ether-shields made skin and nerves chill and shudder as the qillatu that powered them begin to evoke a nauseating collective aura. Alice's sniper rifle spoke first with the corrosive round immediately taking effect - a huge chunk of flesh loosened, twitched, and quivered before falling to the floor a greasy, frothing slop. Limbs quivered and balance staggered as its body shook.

Her handgun whipped out and zeroed in on three un-shielded uppets barreling her way. The nauseating aura assaulted her senses but not before the first three bullets fired, scoring centre-of-mass shots across three torsos. Intransigence munitions tended to be heavier and often with a secondary effect even for sidearms. Each slug cracked bones and ignored stringy flesh, embedding where coalescing mass was at its foulest and thickest.

Then they detonated; blast force gusts spraying a hellish mess of thankfully non-etheric innards and fluids outwards, splashing against armor and boots. The corpses staggered as the aura of nauseation retaliated, sending two of the shots off course and a third slamming into the gut of the middle corpse, blowing open its wriggling contents and most of its spine. Its upper body nearly toppled backwards but the other two pressed on unaffected. Cranial pseudopods whipped forward with a life of their own, lashing at her shoulders and arms.

Before they could lacerate and smack her, her handgun had blown apart the tendril and a half-blink later, turned the head of one of the creatures into a stumpy fountain. The now-decapitated puppet flailed blindly in front of Kleo, awkwardly stumbling closer as its long claws sliced and slashed at air with drunken inefficiency, nearly dead but in need of a proverbial nudge.

A split second later and a spray of smoke and fluids squirted and burst from the hybrid hulk. The otherworldly worm from Ilshar had struck, gashing the core and dealing a nasty wound. The creature's stomping travel path became a stumble as it teetered off to the left. A massive swing of its arm smashed through an shielded puppet, popping its meagre defences then splattering it like a soggy egg against a wall and spraying qillatu into the increasingly ethertoxicated space. The force of its swing dislodged a few of the over-developed bones on its arm as the corrosive bullet weakened their ties, scattering them like steel bars around the gooey corpse slowly sliding down the wall.

The nine remaining corpses shuddered and began to sprint almost as if incensed by the destruction of compatriot, rather the maddening effect of additional qillatu.

From behind Kleo and Alice, three of the puppets (one shielded) descended upon the human and the voidhanger. One leapt, both arms over its head like a hammer aimed at Kleo's body. The shielded one staggered to the side and spun about with fingers cracking backwards in a reverse swipe, pointed like pickaxes at the human's side. Another unshielded one blindly charged at Alice, arms outstretched and aimed at her face and right shoulder.

Meanwhile, the decapitated puppet had the misfortune of nearing King. Moments later, etheric psychedelia erupted from its form. Qillatu around itself dissipated as the mixture of stringy floating meat and fluids rapidly un-created out of realspace. Soft void-flesh matter peeled and vanished off of crackling bone before King struck. A judgement of a miniaturized eclipse eradidcated whatever was left into shreds and strips, blowing clean through the puppet until it was a pile, simply deleting whatever fog was in front of it and reducing three other corpses into little more than gangly, strips of bone and scoured, de-therealized meat.

A few of them, held together with stretching, partially living veins and sinew paused as if to take stock of their situation - more skeleton than putrid imitation of biped, and collapsed into sizzling, dissolving heaps.

The fourth survived - half of it anyways, an upper torso pulling itself across the gound, as its wormy bodily mass thrashed and twitched inside its cage of ribs.

Six puppets were left now, all unshielded and temporarily in a stupor as the qillatu concentration sharply dropped.

The squad leader and the unztadtlige in the meanwhile unleashed a small artillery strike worth of violence into the hulk. Half-melted, hide torn open, carried by little more than instinct and helpless before hungry weapons. It did not register the grenade planted its body, the rain of shells that tore off colossal chunks, nor the massive explosion that ended the window of consciousness it served as and in the process, blasted three cadaver puppets into unrecognizable smears.

The room seemed to grow in size; an illusion of the anchor for the unseen controller's etheric power vanished. The bond that tied the remaining puppets went with it, but not pre-implanted vicious instincts. With reckless abandon, they fell upon Echo and Salvatore, their bodies writhing and seeming to pull apart at the seams - one last attack of mindless, violent instinct.

King's incandescently brilliant form cooled like a dying star, glimmering rays of residual light dancing over the scattered particulate matter still hanging in the air within proximity as the hard-light figure swiveled around to track after the lone surviving husk. The crawling agglomeration had been spared the full blunt of King's eruption by dint of his first impacts neatly searing through its hips and spine and sending it toppling to ground-level while the rest of its gaggle had been shredded and blasted from existence, but the creature had no capacity to meaningfully evade another strike.

'Hang in there friend, I believe in you. You can make it if you just try.' King dryly subvocalized, their shimmering photo-curtain flickering momentarily as they drifted by and above the crawling puppet before casually trailing one lazy holographic finger above the clutching figure and firing a smaller, crumb-sized bead of electromagnetically guided plasma directly into its center-of-mass to rudely splatter and then blacken its remains across the deck plating.

King then cast his gaze back to Kleo and Alice as they were menaced by three of the remaining puppets. He began to hurriedly drift back across the spatially distorted area, his mere presence seeming to visually warp the atmosphere as the illusory influence of the dying hulk clashed with the illumination he cast.

'...and good grief, I try to keep one pack off you and you just get jumped by another. Is that why you are actually here? Are you live horror bait or something?' King bit out acridly at Kleo as he raised his hands. More coruscating spirals of light danced down his arms, the brilliant rays overwhelming the opaque texture of his photo-curtain and eerily mimicking the effect of ethereal light shining through actual flesh and fabric. Eight precision-lasers connected the span between King and the two unshielded puppets, each beam cutting directly through the space around Alice's head, the closest one only scant centimeters away from her. Each ray lacked any of the ablative or explosive power demonstrated by his previous attacks, their impact instead seeming to produce a barely-discernible crack of electrical impulse intended to produce a kinetic shock that would hopefully assist Alice's efforts to etherically repulse her attackers. None of his lashing streams of light made contact with the shielded husk at all, which the hard-light combatant simply did not have a clean line of fire on.

Counting on the rest of the team to hopefully eliminate the shielded husk, King drifted behind Alice as she stumbled and placed a single hand on her back to help keep her upright. 'Steady there, wispy.' He cautioned dismissively as he reached out with his other hand, poised to strike past her and at the shielded husk. The touch of his hand, even through Alice's armor, was unlike any living thing - it was not like a solid mass, but instead the insinuation of formless, continuous pressure. As if a massive gale had been compressed to the size and dimensions of a fist, and its immovably insistent edge suspended at the surface of her back. King's hand was deceptively cool to the touch, verging on frigid.

Then there was his Ether presence - or the lack thereof. It was like a looming void had suddenly sprung up behind her, a wall of inert antipathy almost more chilling than King's surface temperature. This was some manner of abhorrent, unnatural vacuum, and if the physical touch of his hand was not quite enough to make an ethereally-sensitive being want to physically recoil from him then his Oneiric shadow was bound to cause it to happen anyway.

"OHHH SHIT!"

The trigger puller calls out as one of the alien's heads gets turned into some gush mush, meanwhile, another one comes rushing for the locked and loaded killer. Keeping a full mag she rolled out of the way quickly so the charger didn't take her out with intent, like she did before she unloaded into the guy who was running it down onto her. Just like she did to the last goober, the lead goes screaming out of her rifle as she takes the guy down alongside her octopus best friend - what a turn of events, covered in goop and guts from the constant combat and fighting aboard the space-ship-la-fuck you she got up back to back with Alice.

"What now, there's more!?"

Some people around the galaxy thought that tarrhaidim did not feel pain. At this moment, like a few times before in his life, Ilshar found himself wishing that this urban legend were true. The terrible hit from the walking corpse-pile had dented his armour inwards, crushing some neural nodes and cutting into the webs of others, to say nothing of the damage from the hit itself. It spoke to his conditioning that he did collapse when the shock wore off and the full sensation of the wound came flooding in, even as the seraph worm spooled back into its lair of non-space, reluctant after its first taste of live prey.

While a tarrhaidim could ache as much as any cerebrate organic, though, there was no reason for an Intransigence agent to do so while a fight was not over yet. Signalling for implanted glands to release sense-deadening agents into his damaged lower back, Ilshar propped himself up with the stock of his gun, quickly surveying the room with multiple eyes at once while he drew himself to one knee. With the amalgam destroyed, the ether-mind presence seemed to be losing its grip on its dwindling thralls. This was not necessarily good. If the entity slipped away before it could at least be identified, it or its ilk could return for another attack later. In a place like Sargass, one should never be comfortable after an apparent victory.

“I’ll trail it through the ether,” he nodded to Alice, then pointed at the remaining husks, “The rest of you take out those dregs.”

Following the traces of the Chasm presence was harder now that its influence had receded, but luckily there was a clear focal point in the fading core of the fallen monstrosity. Ilshar directed his ether-senses upon it, latching on the imprint left by the worm’s teeth, and probed for a departing wake of the familiar mental force. If he was still favoured, perhaps it could be pinpointed to a physical location somewhere nearby - although that was itself far from certain.

The etheric wave blasted two of the three puppets attacking Alice and Kleo backwards. The one that had leapt flew backwards and slammed against a pillar, dislocating one its left arm before it smashed its clawed left hand into the ground and lunged forward. Its legs were shaky and it pitched forward, letting cranial tendrils whip forward as it drunkenly charged. The other one stumbled backwards mid-charge, nearly tripping if not for the berserk fury carrying it forward towards Kleo.

The shielded corpse however suffered no such inconvenience. The glassy shield-bubble flared an eye-watering pinkish-white before it landed in front of the jellyfish like voidhanger. Unaffected by the blast wave, its sharpened claws bit into her left side. The first few layers slowed the pickaxe-fingers but soon they bit into flesh and raked backwards. A stinging, chilling pain followed as it reared its head backwards and cranial tendrils began to condense their tips into hardened points. A massive attack was being winded up.

A sound like a hundred little firecrackers processed through broken speakers crackled through the oxygen-low room. The cadaver puppets barely hesitated but familiar voices crackled over the comms.

Unfortunately for Kleo, it was Husk.

"How dissappointing, the bigot still walks. Hey, numbskull, switch to dumbfire mode on your new toy, your rounds aren't going to hit anything without integrated guidance!"

Husk's voice crackled out not over just through the team comms but the stumbling cadaver-puppet - an old implant in its head had picked up the voice and it paused for a brief second, its eye-protoplasma sweeping around for a threat.

A smoother, almost melodic voice interrupted, scielto in origin - Flux.

"Pardon my associate, he spent 20 minutes bashing his head against the electronics to get them to work. We have HUD-sharing online, but visibility is poor. Though, ether readings from wall-mounted sensors show a flurry of activity from the room you just came from; clashing signals, cameras shorted out - there's a fight going on."

This time, any sounds remained solely within shared comms.

As Ilshar's powers crept back along the faint ethereal trail, they would come across a familiar ethereal signature - the same as the rot sphere they had encountered earlier. However, it was frenetic and fluctuating, spasms of oneiric power coming, going, shorting out then violently spiking. Other, fainter signals intensified and dimmed along with violent spikes of power - likely energy bursts as they had encountered earlier. The worm-creatures they had encountered earlier were likely keeping the rot sphere occupied.

Fitting given that they appeared to be detritivores.

Corpse-puppet. Approaching Echo; airborne, impact in 1-

Harvest's voice emerged; still entirely synthesized and tinted lightly with distortion, and moreso wafting into the comms as it called out the threat.

A shielded puppet had leapt onto the enormous unztadtlige as numerous intestinal sucker-organisms latched its body to the hulk. Clenched fists and condensing tendrils raised and bashed against their shoulders, clanking and ringing loudly but lacking the strength to break the armor. The shockwaves of impact however were rattling and its violent fury was not getting any less frenzied.

Another puppet, its shields shimmering faintly, wildly charged Salvatore followd by its horizontally bisected ally. Intestinal mass had splintered out and began to push it against the ground like a parade of stumbling legs. Its arms scratched and ripped into purified flooring as it lunged at his legs, just as its still-bipedal comrade closed distance and made a massive diagonal swing with a clawed hand. The little mist and floating particles that remained whisked out of the way as a crushing blow was directed, aiming to split the voidhanger from shoulder to waist.

Contact with the other team. At last, something was going right on this absurd mission.

"This is Rasch, communication acknowledged, reading you five by five. What's your status - belay that!" Was all he managed to get across comms before a flicker of movement in the voidhanger's peripheral vision demanded all of his attention.

There wasn't much of a choice when he was rushed down so quickly and with so crushing a blow: Salvator blinked away on instinct, reappearing a few feet directly above the cadaver puppet that had just tried to disembowel him. He released his grip on his longarm, letting it hang off its sling. Going for his knives would have taken too long, and would be less efficient against these targets than his newest tool.

As Salvator descended upon the puppet in an aerial pounce, a mental command into his armor's neural net triggered his solidified LMD to form a pair of heated hard light blades extending from his wrists. He thrust downwards with both as he fell, aiming to plunge them deep into the cadaver and bisect it with superheated light the same way it had just tried to do to him.

'Ilshar can manage for the moment. They are still moving and their armor is not breached. Stay focused- look out!' King's covering fire at the Husks had abated to avoid catching Kleo with friendly fire, leaving an opening for the closest one that seemingly both of them had failed to repulse with their shots.

'Casualty here!' King barked out over comms. 'Suit breach on Alice!'

Even as Alice discharged her pistol at the attacking Husk, King reached out with an arm to hook it underneath one of Alice's in order to keep her upright.

'Moving to suppress.' He then indicated, drifting to maneuver himself between Alice and the charging Husk itself - extending his free hand and stabbing it at the Husk's center of mass while emitting another shaped bead of plasma directly on impact, seeking to completely blow the creature away. Even as he did so, he turned his head to track the Husk still charging at them, and roiling lines of light raced from seemingly every other extremity in his body to fire out from his chest and bombard the charging creature with another set of rapid-fire ablative kinetic shocks. Unwilling to close the distance, King made to overcome the dense etheric particulate in the atmosphere through raw volume of fire instead, turning the air in front of the Husk itself into a crackling and cascading wall of explosive sparks that rapidly advanced to engulf the advancing entity.

Kleo gets up, slapping another mag into her smg as she charges the handle, sending a head splatter forward into the chamber ready to take out the puppet. She looks to the squid who is attacking one of the puppets, she raised her gun and gunned down the ones that the squid was not actively shooting. "Oh shit they keep coming!" She exclaimed, the sound of the casing hitting the floor echoed out as the bullets ran up into the bodies of their enemies.

"We gotta keep moving, otherwise it's going to be over!"

Following a trail demanded a measure of caution to make sure that one was not sprung upon by whatever lay at the end of it, and nowhere was this as true as in the ether. Between Ilshar’s damaged body and the combat still raging around him, that sort of light mental touch was hard to keep in the moment. Fortunately, precautions turned out to be unnecessary, as the ether-mind responsible for the cadavers appeared to have problems of its own. One less thing to worry about, though as his senses fully returned to his body and he took in the situation, it suddenly seemed like a small blessing indeed.

His eyes sprouted as widely as his helmet’s visor would allow, taking in the broadest angle he could manage. Not good. The corpses had closed in for a brawl, one of the ‘hangers looked to have taken a bad hit, and their partner squad sounded too far to be of immediate help. At least none of the creatures was aiming for him, and as long as their controller was kept busy no more would be coming.

“As long as that fight is going, we’ll have no more hostiles,” Ilshar grit out into the comms, both in reply to Flux and as reassurance for the rest of the squad. He had neither time nor energy to go into more detail - as he spoke, he leaned back from the support of his ulvath and laboriously raised the machine gun while shifting his weight to his still numb legs. It was not the most comfortable firing position, but it would have to do.

There was a wealth of targets, but not as many practical ones. The ulvath was not a precise weapon at the best of times, even less so now. Ilshar took aim for one of the less mobile enemies - the intact but staggered puppet that was threatening the human - and fired a burst in its direction. A compartmentalized anatomy meant his hands were steady enough, despite the recoil shuddering through his torso.

"Alert. Hostile in close proximity." Echo's vocal module was even- almost monotone, even as the massive unztadtlige took a step back from the impact of the puppet that had leapt onto it. What was more concerning was the worm-like organisms attempting to get underneath the Endoform's armor to target the individual unztadtlige beneath. Echo continued to step back, giving room to the rest of the squad as it hefted its arm and planted the barrel of its scattergun against the puppet.

"Alert. Cease aggression." Echo demanded as it unloaded into the puppet. As it gained enough space from the rest of the squad, "Alert. Activating reactive armor. Elaboration. Maintain distance." Echo's voice echoed, as it triggered its Royeni counter-kinetic plating, chemical bursts blasting outwards wherever the devourers were attached to its armor.

The microforms threw themselves into the fray with reckless abandon. The one tasked to Kleo dove at creature charging her, attempting to bludgeon it with its heavy front arms and firing its laser to tear it apart. The one tasked to Salvatore moved to protect him, attempting to pin down the puppet to allow the voidhanger's LMD blade to more easily land its strike. Echo's designated microform used its laser to pick off any remaining worm organisms attached to the Endoform.

The microform assigned to Alice shifted itself to position itself behind Alice as King suppressed the husk. "Alert." The microform's vocal module was considerably more tinny compared to the heavy bass of the endoform of warform, "Environmental protection breach detected. Elaboration. Supply pack includes suit-patches, medical supplies. Further Elaboration. Standby." Small manipulators deployed to provide said supplies.

At point blank range, there was no dodging the pistol. Alice's sidearm spat and the puppet shuddered and jerked moreso as if it had been punched than shot. The blink-long delay between impact and detonation made it spasm to and fro; heavy around crushed bone and dug into organs, rocking it one way, before a small explosive sprayed all contents and jerked it the other. The mag went dry and what had been roughly bipedal in its festering gait could now only be described as a spread of mush and pulsing etheric fumes attached to a parody of a skeletal frame.

"Damn these cameras; they're decades out of date, can't get a scan on Alice - but I doubt qillatu poisoning is an issue for her. She takes her vitamins, goes to bed at a reasonable hour? Your kind are a hardy breed." Flux's voice faded in and out with the atmospheric disturbance bought about by slaying one puppet but worsened by another becoming a roughly bisected diagram.

Salvatore's reaction had been faster than its maddened, bestial consciousness could process, held in place as it struggled to turn around - a microform had clamped onto its legs. It swung down but Salvatore was faster. Molten-hot light, condensed into a sword-like form, silenced the last of its thoughts. Qillatu spilled out in faint, noxious smoke but amounted to little more than a tingling on his skin - degraded, weak, and ephemeral.

"I ask if 'hanger had any interest in pit-gauntlet if this was home." A voice like crunched fragments of rusted junk grated through the comms; English was not its native language and the words were leaden and weightier than necessary. Based on the accent, it appeared to be celaderakan - it hadn't revealed its name when they spoke back in the armory. "Enjoying last 15 or so minute. You making a mess. I'm eating rations. Maybe share if you can speed it up. You have allergy with-"

Something akin to a curse could be heard before a burst of plasma created a cone-shaped sun, straight through the torso of the lashing terror. Cranial tendrils spasmed and whipped wildly, slapping against King's collarbone area and shoulders but they were wild, desperate blows - not of killing intent but desperation. Curled up and blackened, organs vaporized, meat cooked. Head and legs flopped to the ground as the massive trauma overloaded already ramshackle biochemical stability, twitching as the last of its life bled out.

The puppets charging Alice and Kleo stumbled as a microform rammed into one, laser beam melting through knee joints as a stray limb nearly tripped the other. They staggered back, step after step, as bone-crushing kinetic impacts caved in rib after rib, sending them out backwards in conical sprays of bone through its back. Bloodthirst carried it forward, step by step, until it was only steps - where had been an upper body was a withered scarecrow of twitching, squirming veins and flopping parasite-organs, not native to this creature now deprived of flesh and bone to shelter themselves. Rendered little more than an incomplete anatomical image, it flopped to the ground, even less recognizable than whatever it once was, dead save for its helpless passengers.

"-Hear me peabrain? Your shit ain't tracking!" Husk's voice once again crackled back into the comms as the interference dropped and he once again had an opportunity to berate Kleo. "Where did they teach you to shoot? Terran Academy of Unarmed Protestor Incidents?"

For what it was worth, the homing rounds would attempt to roughly go where they were pionted, but they could pivot and change course mid-air rather erratically. A few bits of viscera that had been sent into the air caused a few rounds to veer off and burst in the air, but many found their mark. One flew down with near vindictive spite, embedding in the upper body trailing its organs behind itself, dragging across the ground. The ensuing blast created a crater of meat and melting ether-flesh, slaying another puppet. Additional rounds swung off and blew off the shoulder of another that had been preparing a massive swing at Ilshar, sending it stumbling as its striking arm vanished in gore-vapour.

Two rounds later and so did its stomach, legs, and head. A rickety, smoking mess clattered to the floor.

The ulvath spoke not too long after and a shielded puppet responded with a flare of qillatu, followed by thudding, cutting, incisive sounds. When the burst ended, all it had left to reply with was the thud of the hole ridden, unrecognizable cadaver falling down. A wet splat followed as pulverized organs were crushed under its mutilated weight, squirting and squelching a final response to Ilshar.

The scatter-cannon was even less merciful, as Echo would experience first hand. The sound would have been deafening if there had been more oxygen to carry the sound of one corpse practically vanishing; a solid body one moment, and a flying blizzard of limbs and minced innards smacking and shattering against a wall the next. ERA sounded off mere moments later and Husk audibly cursed as the cameras were blanketed in what was once the puppet that had hopped onto the massive unztadtlige.

The rest of it rained down in fragmented bone, fluids, and mushy gunk, blanketing the team in a psychedelia-covered splatter.

It took a few seconds for the comms to re-establish.

"Performance; satisfying. Reyot's comment of 15 minutes are a side-effect of excessive juvenile-state cranial trauma originating on Celaderakan junta-worlds. Rahadin has disciplined him. Tower systems are under control - continue forward but be forewarned - oxygen levels nonexistent past next 100 meters. Hard vacuum, exposed space, uncorrupted surface but large debris detected - chance of ambushing creatures."

All Heads-Up Displays would notice a superimposed real-time image of 3D prism tipped with a spear-like arrow, pointing down a passageway slowly being covered in the same bioluminescent smoke from earlier.

"Gunship support will be available and has moved to outskirts of area - there is a path leading to an exposed segment of the Sargasso at the end, likely due to a missile fired by the pirates from earlier. It provides the fastest route to the core. We will be making our way to the Yrrkradian control centre as well; stress-tests on neurolink drones to maintain usage of tower systems. Harvest out."

---

The walk through the tunnel leading to the outside had been uneventful but the tunnel itself pushed the definition of the term. "Tunnel" as it wasn't of the Sargasso's origin - the rigid, blocky bulkheads and reinforced plating in faded green was akin to an assault ship and based on its design, it wasn't anywhere near as old - maybe a decades ago, not too long before the Reckoning of Empires.

They couldn't see it but they could feel it; a pulse and a throb that breathed through the walls, ceilings and floor. Glimpses of it in the cracks on the walls as gravity gave out, forcing them to use thrusters, mag-locks on boots, or other such methods, passing by where motley, fleshy texture quietly seeped where ages-old space installation met still-in service model architecture. The Sargasso hid innumerable secrets and the Evenomed drifted through a museum's worth of them with every metre traveled.

Not long after, the corridors gave way as the walls faded into blackened tatters and the hard, metallic surface greeted them again. Endless sky above, a looming tower in the distance, and the superimposed HUD arrow pointing down a narrow strip of passageway that lead towards the blockier segment out of which it rose.



A blip at the edges of their display; the makeshift gunship was marked with a green circle, floating as little more than a distant, barely visible speck over their heads. It was near indistinguishable from the rest of the debris, subtly adjusting its trajectory and drifting left and right to cover the team.

Due to its proximity, Echo would be able to temporarily control the warform within with the assistance of signal-boosting equipment stored within.

The path was longer than it looked and would take them to a wider space of the Sargasso, half disc-like in its shape and emerging from a crumpled mess of protruding half-wall structures and smooth-edged cube-trailers, worn from lifetimes worth of debris collisions. Parts of the station had been torn into raw, jagged trenches wide enough to fit a main battle tank - roughly three of these ran along the surface around and above which floated enormous, lightly shimmering pieces of metal.

Each one was big enough to conceal Echo as they hovered or spun in place above the trenches, some of which were still visible 40 or so feet below in their depths. The trenches looked as if they were clawed on the way to the tower and the sloping roofed structure around its base - as if one could imagine the inhabitants there having watched whatever violent force claw these wounds into the hull of the station, as if it had been trying to extend them towards its otherwise clean exterior.

Almost as if the missiles, chasmdwellers, and debris had avoided that part of the station for whatever reason, somehow.

In stark contrast to before, ethereal signatures were faint but not absent. The void-inclined could see it, subtly, trails that seemed to slide along the larger pieces of detached hull hovering above the trenches. Almost like a path of slime sliding across the largest ones, invisible to the unaugmented eye (or anyone lacking the right visualization software and equipment), curving upwards but growing fainter before vanishing - as if something had been lazily sliding its way upwards for no real reason.

A look into the nearest trench showed them to full of long dead exposed wiring and collapsed maintenance tunnels but they hadn't been devoid of life... or activity. Little bits of fluorescent, almost mucus-like transparent matter drifted like sea-grass in an unseen current - not living things but signs of their presence. Some sort of organisms had been making their home here, but it would be difficult to determine more without further direct inspection.

Still, there were only the faintest signs on the surface the squad walked anything had been here. Little bits of debris with the faintest bits of void signature - near flecks of dust to a few misshapen pieces of long-since qillatu-ridden debris no longer radiating malevolence. Detritus that had drifted out from behind bulkheads and the risen spinal-frills of metal, visible within some hollowed out rectangular structures sitting like trailers parked here and there. As if whatever had lived here had been forced to vacate.