LustForDecay

Age of Broken Shackles 2.0

Abyss Front Fleet Distribution

The Eastern Front of the known galaxy was a violent place.

The Eastern Front of the known galaxy remained a violent place.

The scars across the carapaced architecture spoke of its violence bestial and unseen. Wounds like trenches, stretching along the colossal length of the dreadnought fleet, glowed and glared under the sight of the Augustan observation systems. One could almost imagine a few fighters and gunships flying into those cavernous maws, if not for the cloud-like swarms of claw-winged masses that swarmed over the wounds. The red eyes glaring within blinked wildly as their winged shapes flew in coiling patterns like a living curtain giving privacy to whatever delicate actions transpired beneath.

There were at least five of them, dreadnoughts by any reasonable stretch of the word, but intelligence on the Front's rearmament programs were hard to come by. Were these really "dreadnoughts" or simply standard battleships? They were not flattened and rigid like the Augustans - their topographies curving and bumpy, laden with overlapping plating and outwardly radiating claws on sloping, arthropod bodies. One could almost imagine such a thing, skittering in a dirty room after flickering lights activated but no boot was big enogh to crush them. They appeared more lumbering predatory in many ways than ship of war.

Some semblance of familiarity could be found amongst them. Something that appeared like wreckage from tales of old Yrranian history - mighty capital ships from the apex of their rule, puppeted by coral-like clumps of inky, sickeningly rotted biomatter that quivered and teemed with machine and organic life intertwined. Enormous, hungry masses of contorting carapace and shimmering, bioluminscent biometallic fungi seeped out of and settled around ancient wounds older than many of the surrounding warships.

Seated amongst the Abyssic fleet, it was morbidly humorous - the puppeted carcass of a long-fallen oppressor's might guided along by what were once its subjects.

It wasn't a secret that the Front viewed the majority of its neighbours with a degree of suspicion. The Augustans were an empire and had not expressed much in the way of rebelliousness against the Yrrani. Some particularly bitter council heads would say they were inheritors of the Yrrani.

Today, they were a necessary, hopeful partner and no doubt, they would recognize the battle damage inflicted upon the Abyssal dreadnoughts. It wasn't that of precision magnetic weaponry, laser lances, or armour-piercing weapons. Those were the wounds of creatures on the hunt that had spotted their quarry, the same ones that hounded the boundaries of both Front and Empire as the lurking terror of the Eastern Arm of the galaxy.

There were other battlegroups that had lately been moving beyond the Front's somewhat shaky boundaries, a smaller one patrolling near the outskirts of the Iterae infestation between both territories, but that was the only one that was public knowledge. The Front had ghost fleets prowling, many of which were said to not even be present in realspace but creeping beneath it like parasites.

This one had a more diplomatic mission in mind.

It awaited a response as it hailed the Augustans.

++++++++++

"We are informed that your masters are a demanding lot. Your factories sweltering, your royal houses hungering, your bones aching, your ears deaf with the echoes of their demands."

"We may be of a different breed but the pressure of an iron heel is the same across all species. We have long since severed the limb to which it is attached."

"Your house stands divided. Their aims are those of expansion and power. That makes them callous, arrogant, and they understand not what their power rests upon."

"The name of the Mother is known here. The winds of change bear the scent of familiarity. We will discuss more in time."

In the private chambers of a hidden hideaway, away from the scouring eyes of Hawkrose authorities, a quiet message played across a screen. Fragmented scrabbles and glyphs rehsaped into text.

Far above, deep in the stars, a fleet of beasts accelerated towards the southern end of Prydwenite space. It blended into the flesh of the night yet it made no effort to conceal itself, its quiet private message aside.

Its comms channels hailed the regional powers and its data relays transferred a mixture of docking information, itinerary overviews, and diplomatic files.

The Front, for all of its miltiaristic aggression, had an eye for potential allies and there had been talks of dealings between the Pyrdwenites and its the Front. They had no history together but in a sense this was liberating; no prior emnity meant nothing to particularly impede any sort of dealings. The pyrdwenites had gotten off easy under the yoke of Yrranians but they hadn't emerged as inheritors of thier power

It wasn't hard to imagine why they might; they were not pure altruists. The Pyrdwenites were beset with growing internal tensions and also were not particularly far from the Tar Yarra. It was openly discussed in some public Abyssic holo-broadcasts that the Pyrdwnenites, even with their ideological differences, would be a useful ally to have and that the galaxy was better with stable, united assortment of houses rather than a shaky one.

Fears of becoming the plaything of Empire were echoed in the Far East, with skepticism towards the Augustans and House Eaglesworn frequently echoing btween the Abyssals and Pyrdwenite masses.

A Front diplomatic envoy however, was not a tool of formenting revolution. Morality was a poor substitute for geopolitics and fervor held less weight than mutual strategic and economic benefit. Before it was the Abyss Front, it was the Wellspring Expanse and to many an entreprenur, that was still true. Their outward trade was not particularly well established, but the Pyrwenites were planned to be the first to truly enjoy the wealth that lay hidden behind anomalous rifts and swarms of ethereal creatures.

Granted, preferences were towards House Hawkrose but there had been no rebukes towards the rest of the Empire.

At best, maybe the Pyrdwenites had seen the people of the Abyss in old newscasts and now dated Yrranian illustrations; a strange and savage people that was mostly known for having forced out what was once the mightiest empire in known space. That was when it was still a collection of planetary insurrections and rogue militaries. What were they to expect now however?

Age of Broken Shackles 2.0

Abyss Front

Flag Description

The flag resembles a circular 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.

Location on Map

Green area on far right

History

What is now known as the Abyss Front was once simply a collection of stars and systems comprising the eastern front of of the Yrrani Imperium. It had no real formal name but was typically was referred to as the Periphery or the Wellspring Expanse, the latter of which referred to its massive stores of natural and supernatural resources.

Of lesser significance to the Yrrani were the people living there.

For as long as people have known, the Wellspring had always been inhabited not necessarily by some great civilization but various species that often did not travel inward to the centres of Imperial power. They did not often build colossal cities or monuments to their glories; many were functionally nomadic and few of them were even united. It was known to be a hotspot of longstanding territorial, ethnic, and religious tensions but the contained scale of these conflicts meant that they could not spill outwards.

The Wellspring was also known as a “wild” and “uncivilized” part of the known galaxy. Gigantic rifts and “aberrated” areas made realspace itself unstable. Strange, supernatural phenomena occurred and legends of explorers encountering and falling prey to gigantic starfaring monsters were common. It was somewhere that the light of the uplifted could not reach.

This would change over the course of a few decades as Yrranian diplomatic fleets began to make contact with the inhabitants of the region. The treacherous nature of the Wellspring meant that it was dangerous to bring in the full might of the Yrranian fleet. Instead, they made due with finding allies amongst the disparate kingdoms, polities, tribes, and other such sub-factional organizations common in the area. Trade agreements were established; Yrranian technical expertise and military hardware in exchange for indigenous territory and resources.

The first signing was the result in the radical transformation the Periphery. Once independent kingdoms, cities, starports, and tribes found themselves as either the proxies of the Imperium or their targets. As once local conflicts began to sprawl outwards and spread to neighboring worlds, militaries armed with Yrranian technology began to turn their violent gaze upon one another and the very creatures that once were plentiful. Yrranian warlords, industrialists, generals, and leaders began to turn the populace against one another as compradors became puppets dictators. The roiling savagery of the expanse was brought to heel, space itself stabilizing as the colossal creatures that once dissuaded outside interference found themselves driven to the lowermost depths.

The Yrranian Occupation truly began and by that time, armed resistance was too late and too fractured with still open wounds further expanded by foreign manipulation. A massive campaign of settlement and development ensued as worlds and regions not deemed to have been in use by their inhabitants fell to the hands of corporate houses now given a blank check and seemingly boundless resources. A populace already fractured, its symbolic resistance rendered futile, and a massive swathe of territory gained - the Yrranian Imperium experienced a massive boost in its standard of living and growth, carried a large part by the Wellspring’s subjugation.

As new cities, starports, military outposts and other signs of the Imperium spread, the increasingly divided populace began to agitate. They had already been defeated in their initial efforts at defiance, but the Expanse was not so easily tamed. Where conventional militaries would fail, they would also provide lessons and survivors - veterans of these conflicts who had tasted bitter defeat and were hungry to repay the favor.

These were the seeds of what would eventually become the Abyss Front; a series of insurgencies and direct military engagements during a gilded era of Imperial rule. Just like with the first direct assaults on Yrranian fleets, they were unsuccessful yet victory was not without cost. Forces needed to be trained, divided, and assigned to various theaters, the still volatile environment traversed, and the tenacious natives subjugated. Each time, the violence would be looked upon with equal parts horror and anger as it lead to further environmental degradation, mass conscription, and siphoning civilian resources to feed the war machine.

The many anticolonial forces were well aware of this and came to a simple conclusion; they did not need to summarily defeat the Imperium entirely. They were not fighting a direct, conventional war but a hybrid one and increasingly, the soldiers crept up vine-paths in fungal cities as much as they lay in wait in the husks of burnt out civilian transports. The home field advantage was one that the Yrranian occupation, in all its chauvinism, continued to underestimate.

Roughly a century and a half into the Yrranian occupation and the once iron grip was faltering. Conventional wars had been replaced with system-spanning riots, unrest, and terror attacks as sorcerous knowledge was used to summon gigantic capital ship sized beasts from hiding. All but a relatively small slice of Expanse space now was embroiled in some sort of civil war and anticolonial conflict, of which counter-insurgency theory struggled to adapt to with the speed and variety with which discontent was turning into violent opposition. Even in the corridors of power, networks of spies, saboteurs, and agitators worked in the shadows to ensure that no appointed leader or colonial overseer slept in peace.

By the century’s end, the occupation had turned to the harshest methods possible. The destruction of not only cities but entire planets, razed with orbital bombardments rather than letting them fall to uprisings. Experimental psionic super-weapons ravaged systems, turning space itself into swirling distances of immense chaos. Racially targeted bioweapons hidden in relief supplies sent by compassionate NGO’s spread disease and plague among the populace. It was quickly turning into an extermination campaign, targeting civilians where they failed to hold back a now resurgent resistance that had taken on its now iconic moniker, increasingly able to repel and severely damage veteran Yrranian battlegroups on their own terms.

Faced with mounting costs and losses, disruptions to logistics chains and extractive practices, the occupation and its sycophants had dropped to rock bottom in popularity. No longer could it be said to be protecting “helpless” populaces and uplifting civilization and its effectiveness back in the courts of Yrranian power was viewed with skepticism. Pax Yrranus was in its waning years and Yrranian power was fading where it was once insurmountable. The natives knew and they were waiting for the moment to wrest control.

When the occupation came to an end, it had left a ravage region of space barely recognizable from when they had first arrived. In its wake however was a renewed vision of a now united, resolute people who were far from done with their oppressors. The Yrranian retreat took with it countless spoils, artifacts, and artifacts of immense power deep into the vaults of Tar Yrra. With the ashes finally settled, even as their home continues to be tormented by the dimensional ravages of superweapon after-effects, the Abyss Front has set out to ensure history will never repeat itself by whatever means are necessary.

Government Type

The Abyss Front is a combination of various smaller alliances that form a larger political bloc, organized around a broad series of revolutionary principles from the powerful military alliance that drove out the Yrrani occupation in the waning days of Pax Yrranus.

It is broadly a council-based republic system, based primarily around governing bodies of interplanetary coalitions and singular worlds. These are generally built around ground-up organization based around worker councils and specialized interest group political alliances, emphasizing a high degree of internal autonomy with some planets being essentially gigantic interlinked communes.

This is not to say it is uniformly socialist; there exist anarchic communes and tribal coalitions of which some are starfaring nomads or even based on massive space stations or the corpses of enormous star-titans. There are even areas where corporate and private enterprise are still prominent, albeit leashed and controlled as part of anti-privatization reforms that limits their power while leveraging their profits for growth and internal investment.

The higher one goes on the Abyssic command chain, the more abstract it becomes. The “heads” of this alliance are not so much individual people but almost deity-like gestalt entities of arcane, esoteric sapience. Gigantic clouds of constantly morphing insectoid limbs and self-replicating electronics, assembles of mind-linked cyborgs joined together by individuality-suppressing implants, worm-infested spores the size of moons - the true “leaders” of the Abyss Front calculate, amalgamate, and sift through oceans of information not just from their eldritch perception but sent upwards from its various councils and administrative bodies.

Their authority, while immense, is not necessarily the final word. A healthy civic culture is encouraged via mass demonstration and assembly, with participation in local governing bodies being aggressive and direct. Governing bodies in some settlements have been voted out collectively and individually replaced sometimes in matters of hours and there could be said to be a “dual power system” with various political organizations that exist outside of official state control, even if they often possess the same ideological base.

Demographics

Czlozekostra

Visual References

Their name translates to english as "complex external skeleton" and to many they are the public face of the Front. The "zekts" as some call them are 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 its borders 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 dropped heavily during the Yrrani occupation from extermination campaigns and exiles beyond the known galaxy. In the centuries since, it has grown considerably as independent czlozekostra fleets and worlds begin to join their cause in massive remigrations.

Resembling a variety of arthropods, they tend to come in three distinct forms with various shared characteristics. Regardless of specific subspecies, they are typically between 7'11’’ to 12'5’’ tall, with some capable of growing to 25'30’’. 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 tend to hunch and compress 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 are 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 various carnivorous beetle, crab, amphipod and phronima species. Their mouthparts are complex with around 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 frequently emerging from behind or above domes containing many smaller eye-like organs beneath faux-opaque exteriors.

Living between 130 to 200 years, centuries longer with augmentations, they nonetheless begin life as mere larvae. Young czlozekostra can look like lengthy worm-like creatures lined with pointed limbs, something akin to curving shrimp like creatures, or sometimes smaller versions of adults. 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. Metamorphosizing czlozekostra mature into adults sometimes in a little under a year while those with a nymphal state might take between a year and a half.

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. Some species, particularly the transparent phronima like ones, are naturally gifted with psionic capabilities and the ability to survive in vacuum conditions, even known to inhabit the still-living carcasses of centuries-old starfaring titan-organisms.

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 navigate 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, sciences, ideology, and recreation 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 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 gestalt mind amalgamations. 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.

Tiarncnoic

Visual References

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 was exiled beyond the known galaxy during the Yrrani Occupation, joining the czlozekostra in large independent fleets, but recent political developments has seen many returning.

Evolved from Tiorgreilig's large eels, they have a relatively slender appearance (next to their hulking biomechanical allies) 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 and many can change the colour of their skin in order to better conceal themselves. They average between 6'11’’ to 10’ in height, with a few instances of 11 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 predatory, though with somewhat 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.

The most well known aspect of their biology is a "third eye" known as the tarfaire - 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, capable of “seeing” through certain surfaces and capable of being augmented to further improve its range of perception. This was likely an evolutionary adaptation to protect against and predate upon creatures that hide in the fog of Tiorgreillig and blend into its deep, rocky chasms.

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 or as regenerative as the salibughri, their mobility and reactivity gives them unparalleled default agility within the Front. Their technology remained the most advanced for centuries 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, as many robotic components form the basis for bodily modification.

These 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 possess the most psionics or "etherealists" as the Front calls them, with their "third eye" believed to be an evolutionary response to the arcane powers of the region. 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 the colossal eel-like creatures that inhabit the areas around their homeworld and surrounding planet and the (super) naturalistic forces that they represent. 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, fangs, 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, though it takes many forms and was never standardized into an organized religion. 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 fetishization 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 decolonization movements, sometimes threatening even intervention on the side of those they perceive as living under the boot of exploitative leaders.

Salighburi

Visual References

The most populous species in Abyssic territory, they are known for their literally rotten appearance and overgrown fungal 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 or Kahdoulfarati - 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 Front. 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 with a general body layout equivalent to humanity’s. 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 frequently and deliberately infested with a variety of complex symbiotic organisms though unlike the zlozekostra, much of it is more fungoid, plantal, or worm-like. They too are heavily augmented though most of it is for general purpose civilian use. These include retractable feeder-branches for higher levels of nutrient extraction, neuromycelial roots for telepathic data absorption, and hygiene worms bred to clean their bodies and fight off diseases.

Some of it can converge on similar territory as their arthropods 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 the most religious species in the front though recent reforms and introduced civil liberties has seen an increase in non-religious as well as non-practitioners of . 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 been a part of various territorial, ethnic, and ideological conflicts throughout their history. Much of this was manipulated by the Yrrani particularly in recent history, setting them against one another rather than the occupation.

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 Proclamation or Asaldaiyoul demonstrates through myth and parable the follies and virtues of many of these methods.

It is believed to have been a record of visions recorded in a chemical trance by generations upon generations of ancient mystics and voyagers who used to link their minds to the gestalt consciousnesses of gigantic spore-moons in ages of pre-history.

The 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 or Tafyidani worship not the moon but its coiling parasitoid 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 technicians in the entirety of not just salibughri but Front space.

The Salibughri are master architects and communications experts, having evolved to convert their own biomass into comms networks and sprawling tower-structures. 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 growth 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 perfectly forged components is considered highly advanced. They are specialized primarily in biotech but have implemented conventional "hard" and psionic/ethereal knowledge quite readily.

They are the most social of the Front’s species, in near constant communication due to the innumerable ways including chemical and even olfactory methods they have. Sound is but one way but entering their spaces often results in one being bombarded across all their senses with a bizarre onslaught of unusual sights, sounds, smells, and even touch. While many older settlements are culturally insular, smaller enclaves and towns are rapidly expanding into some of the most creatively volatile centers of artistry and philosophy throughout the Front.

They are subsequently also associated with theorists and philosophy, with much of their beliefs informed not just by the Proclamation 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, but they have perhaps the highest investment in education of all known species here.

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 important insofar if one is an actual salibughri 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.

Military

Planetary

The planetary forces of the Abyss Front can be understood as in reality being two different military forces; one conventional and the other bestial. One of these is a rapid-attack mechanized army and the other is an overwhelming swarm of biomechanical horrors. Both of these work in tandem for an agile form of overwhelming hybrid warfare, developed over the course of centuries of anti-Yrrani resistance. It unites traditions from a wide array of species, military traditions, and insurgencies to formulate an aggressive and deceptively precise series of doctrines that have made the Abyss Front feared by those unfortunate enough to oppose it.

This strategy can be simplified as using gigantic swarms of extradimensional monstrosities and bioengineered skittering terrors to distract and tie up vital enemy forces. While losses suffered by these hordes are immense, these are easily replaced and replicated, preventing enemy movement as vehicles and deceptively fast, tough infantry maneuver into position to maximize effectiveness of hard-hitting weapon systems, of which even a single trooper can carry on or integrated into their bodies, sometimes even “encoded” into their very biomass, concealed until it is morphed and reshaped out of their very cybernetic physiologies.

These elite infantry forces can rapidly reposition with many of them being quite speedy themselves thanks to multiple limbs and movement enhancing modules, on top of a wide variety of transports. Adding to this lethality is their augmented biologies often allowing them to use standard issue infantry weapons equivalent to crew-mounted weaponry from less hulking species. Just a handful of them can output an immense level of destruction, with various munitions whether high explosive armour piercing, gravitationally accelerated plasma, psionically volatile electrocuting, and other forms of grievous injury.

Training and firepower is never in short supply. Neither is durability, with the Abyss Front fielding layered armor and naturally resilient species as standard infantry. Czlozekostra troopers regardless of species are born with tough carapaces which after military augmentations, turn them into small mech-walkers. Salibughri are the smallest of them and the closest to humans yet their fungoid biologies are unusually resilient, able to survive decapitation and bisection, while having rapid generative capability. Tiarncnoic forces meanwhile have a variety of protective energy fields or “shields” specialized in resisting various forms of fire, allowing them to layer additional protection without having to take on much more weight.

These infantry are backed up by a variety of autonomous and networked drone-like platforms. These can range from hawk-sized antigravitational drones that observe and suicide-dive towards targets to detonate explosives to large arthropod like entities between the size of heavy infantry and infantry fighting vehicles, carrying additional firepower on nimble, tough bodies. Redundant systems including but not limited psionic and electronic ones allow them to network with one another, ground forces, and distant command units while advanced intelligences (not all of which are entirely cybernetic or “artificial”) allow them to retain cohesion even if separated from their controllers.

Abyss Front vehicles are quite fast, even the ones that use multiple insectoid legs rather than wheels, and quite a few of them have transport capability. Many of them are of a similar biomechanical design as their species, capable of rapid modification and able to mount a wide variety of weapon systems. Tiarncnoic ones tend to be purely machine but they share the same focus on precise, long-range weaponry focusing on armour piercing and disruptive explosive power. Particle cannons, bioelectro-thermochemical guns, and gravitationally accelerated munitions are their trademarks as are complex multi-missile launch systems, focusing on targeting high value targets that heavily armed infantry can’t blast away.

They have somewhat lighter armor than is expected, save for the larger mecha, but their speed and capability to network and augment allied forces makes them highly dangerous if they can stay on the move. Their missile systems are supported with a variety of smaller artillery systems that when combined with the redundant networking systems uniform across their forces, allows for extremely rapid target acquisition and the ability to provide quick artillery support. They can also often generate and “attach” energy shields to infantry squads, further increasing survivability and support capability.

Perhaps the most powerful weapon at their disposal are the strange “spells” and “sorceries” they can implement on the battlefield. The most infamous of these is a thick, roiling fog that doesn’t appear to be heavily affected by wind currents or atmospheric disruptions. This supernatural gas obscures their forces and tampers with electronics, hiding their true numbers and force disposition while its ethereal composition can be used to teleport forces across where it manifests. It also causes their swarm armies to take on a renewed savagery, sometimes seeping into the remains of destroyed biomonstrosities and violently reanimating them.

Others have observed guided missiles flying in erratic, twisting patterns suggesting that they casters of some sort are deliberately altering their trajectory to target weak spots on enemies. Disruptive rifts have been known to manifest abruptly in hidden heavy weapon positions after having been scouted by burrowing Abyssic drones. Heatwave-like visual distortions manifest before their forces, causing illusions of more forces than there truly are to appear. Even amidst dense swarms of shrieking, gnashing, biting terrors, larger spectral predators will emerge and erupt out of their putrid masses, suddenly tossing disruptive terrors into lines of unprepared infantry. The Abyss Front is many things but violently unpredictable is what most fear the most about them and their myriad abilities.

Space

Unlike their ground forces, the Abyss Front’s starfleet is a far more brutish force. Much of it is even more feral in nature, including gigantic yrrani dreadnought vessels thought lost in ages past, fused into the semi-living remains of colossal star-titans they once hunted. They still make use of enormous screening swarms across their fleet but these dreadnoughts (of which more are still being created and others prowling in the depths) are their most infamous.

As a whole, the Front’s fleet is an overwhelming battering ram, combining high tech shielding and living biomechanical systems with heavy duty beam, particle, and even fusion weapons. The technological expertise of three races and their associated subspecies has been combined to create a highly durable fleet specialized in overwhelming violence. Most concerningly, psionic power has been fully standardized as both a defensive and offensive capability.

When combined, this makes them incredibly troublesome to deal with. While their starfleet is not particularly fast, it is quite durable yet not just in terms of self-repair and ablative metal-woven carapace plating. Abyss Front ships are known to create and manipulate fields of gas-like clouds, made of nano-entities and strange chemicals, they can manipulate through psionics and esoteric technology to both diminish incoming energy weapons and even interfere with targeting systems. They can launch flurries of bio-debris that conceal hidden living bomb-drones and ECM beacons. Miniaturized aberration-rifts summoned near enemy fleets flood scanners and observations systems with faulty readings, tamper with biosystems, disrupt electronics, and even cause psionic malfunctions also make them a nightmare to fight against.

A doctrine of constantly forcing the enemy to juggle multiple problems has made encounters with them often take on the maddening exaggerations of sailors’ tales of encounters with dreadful beasts of the deep. This is assisted by the fact that their vessels seem to press the attack with a maddening, uncaring resolve. Crewed primarily by creatures adapted to harsh, vacuum conditions, their vessels often possess minds of their own. Numerous redundant systems and a need for far less to no real life support allows them to fight on zombie-like even when they should reasonably be no longer functional.

Their weapons also tend to cause a variety of additional effects to happen beyond damage to shielding and hulls. Massive energy blasts cause wraith-like creatures seemingly made of eldritch energies to corrode and tear into vessels after the beams that sent them vanish, allowing them to damage them long term. Missiles that teleport seemingly at random before slamming into a target leave clusters of miniature insectoid drones, lighting up areas for faster target lock on while causing localized glitches and malfunctions. Storms of biomunitions impale and splatter volatile fluids causing follow-up strikes to cause catastrophic secondary explosions.

Even worse are rumors of colossal creatures not known to any bestiary but seemingly drawn from ancient religion and myth alike. Summoned by otherworldly forces said to reside within the massive beacons the Front has constructed deep within their territory, these gigantic eel and crustacean like organisms are said to prey on capital ships. Engagements with them have been rare but it is believed they are lurking outside of the Front’s boundaries, in the blackness between stars and quietly watching the unfolding events of the new era.

Age of Broken Shackles 2.0

Abyss Front

Flag Description

The flag resembles a circular 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.

Location on Map

Green area on far right

History

What is now known as the Abyss Front was once simply a collection of stars and systems comprising the eastern front of of the Yrrani Imperium. It had no real formal name but was typically was referred to as the Periphery or the Wellspring Expanse, the latter of which referred to its massive stores of natural and supernatural resources.

Of lesser significance to the Yrrani were the people living there.

For as long as people have known, the Wellspring had always been inhabited not necessarily by some great civilization but various species that often did not travel inward to the centres of Imperial power. They did not often build colossal cities or monuments to their glories; many were functionally nomadic and few of them were even united. It was known to be a hotspot of longstanding territorial, ethnic, and religious tensions but the contained scale of these conflicts meant that they could not spill outwards.

The Wellspring was also known as a “wild” and “uncivilized” part of the known galaxy. Gigantic rifts and “aberrated” areas made realspace itself unstable. Strange, supernatural phenomena occurred and legends of explorers encountering and falling prey to gigantic starfaring monsters were common. It was somewhere that the light of the uplifted could not reach.

This would change over the course of a few decades as Yrranian diplomatic fleets began to make contact with the inhabitants of the region. The treacherous nature of the Wellspring meant that it was dangerous to bring in the full might of the Yrranian fleet. Instead, they made due with finding allies amongst the disparate kingdoms, polities, tribes, and other such sub-factional organizations common in the area. Trade agreements were established; Yrranian technical expertise and military hardware in exchange for indigenous territory and resources.

The first signing was the result in the radical transformation the Periphery. Once independent kingdoms, cities, starports, and tribes found themselves as either the proxies of the Imperium or their targets. As once local conflicts began to sprawl outwards and spread to neighboring worlds, militaries armed with Yrranian technology began to turn their violent gaze upon one another and the very creatures that once were plentiful. Yrranian warlords, industrialists, generals, and leaders began to turn the populace against one another as compradors became puppets dictators. The roiling savagery of the expanse was brought to heel, space itself stabilizing as the colossal creatures that once dissuaded outside interference found themselves driven to the lowermost depths.

The Yrranian Occupation truly began and by that time, armed resistance was too late and too fractured with still open wounds further expanded by foreign manipulation. A massive campaign of settlement and development ensued as worlds and regions not deemed to have been in use by their inhabitants fell to the hands of corporate houses now given a blank check and seemingly boundless resources. A populace already fractured, its symbolic resistance rendered futile, and a massive swathe of territory gained - the Yrranian Imperium experienced a massive boost in its standard of living and growth, carried a large part by the Wellspring’s subjugation.

As new cities, starports, military outposts and other signs of the Imperium spread, the increasingly divided populace began to agitate. They had already been defeated in their initial efforts at defiance, but the Expanse was not so easily tamed. Where conventional militaries would fail, they would also provide lessons and survivors - veterans of these conflicts who had tasted bitter defeat and were hungry to repay the favor.

These were the seeds of what would eventually become the Abyss Front; a series of insurgencies and direct military engagements during a gilded era of Imperial rule. Just like with the first direct assaults on Yrranian fleets, they were unsuccessful yet victory was not without cost. Forces needed to be trained, divided, and assigned to various theaters, the still volatile environment traversed, and the tenacious natives subjugated. Each time, the violence would be looked upon with equal parts horror and anger as it lead to further environmental degradation, mass conscription, and siphoning civilian resources to feed the war machine.

The many anticolonial forces were well aware of this and came to a simple conclusion; they did not need to summarily defeat the Imperium entirely. They were not fighting a direct, conventional war but a hybrid one and increasingly, the soldiers crept up vine-paths in fungal cities as much as they lay in wait in the husks of burnt out civilian transports. The home field advantage was one that the Yrranian occupation, in all its chauvinism, continued to underestimate.

Roughly a century and a half into the Yrranian occupation and the once iron grip was faltering. Conventional wars had been replaced with system-spanning riots, unrest, and terror attacks as sorcerous knowledge was used to summon gigantic capital ship sized beasts from hiding. All but a relatively small slice of Expanse space now was embroiled in some sort of civil war and anticolonial conflict, of which counter-insurgency theory struggled to adapt to with the speed and variety with which discontent was turning into violent opposition. Even in the corridors of power, networks of spies, saboteurs, and agitators worked in the shadows to ensure that no appointed leader or colonial overseer slept in peace.

By the century’s end, the occupation had turned to the harshest methods possible. The destruction of not only cities but entire planets, razed with orbital bombardments rather than letting them fall to uprisings. Experimental psionic super-weapons ravaged systems, turning space itself into swirling distances of immense chaos. Racially targeted bioweapons hidden in relief supplies sent by compassionate NGO’s spread disease and plague among the populace. It was quickly turning into an extermination campaign, targeting civilians where they failed to hold back a now resurgent resistance that had taken on its now iconic moniker, increasingly able to repel and severely damage veteran Yrranian battlegroups on their own terms.

Faced with mounting costs and losses, disruptions to logistics chains and extractive practices, the occupation and its sycophants had dropped to rock bottom in popularity. No longer could it be said to be protecting “helpless” populaces and uplifting civilization and its effectiveness back in the courts of Yrranian power was viewed with skepticism. Pax Yrranus was in its waning years and Yrranian power was fading where it was once insurmountable. The natives knew and they were waiting for the moment to wrest control.

When the occupation came to an end, it had left a ravage region of space barely recognizable from when they had first arrived. In its wake however was a renewed vision of a now united, resolute people who were far from done with their oppressors. The Yrranian retreat took with it countless spoils, artifacts, and artifacts of immense power deep into the vaults of Tar Yrra. With the ashes finally settled, even as their home continues to be tormented by the dimensional ravages of superweapon after-effects, the Abyss Front has set out to ensure history will never repeat itself by whatever means are necessary.

Government Type

The Abyss Front is a combination of various smaller alliances that form a larger political bloc, organized around a broad series of revolutionary principles from the powerful military alliance that drove out the Yrrani occupation in the waning days of Pax Yrranus.

It is broadly a council-based republic system, based primarily around governing bodies of interplanetary coalitions and singular worlds. These are generally built around ground-up organization based around worker councils and specialized interest group political alliances, emphasizing a high degree of internal autonomy with some planets being essentially gigantic interlinked communes.

This is not to say it is uniformly socialist; there exist anarchic communes and tribal coalitions of which some are starfaring nomads or even based on massive space stations or the corpses of enormous star-titans. There are even areas where corporate and private enterprise are still prominent, albeit leashed and controlled as part of anti-privatization reforms that limits their power while leveraging their profits for growth and internal investment.

The higher one goes on the Abyssic command chain, the more abstract it becomes. The “heads” of this alliance are not so much individual people but almost deity-like gestalt entities of arcane, esoteric sapience. Gigantic clouds of constantly morphing insectoid limbs and self-replicating electronics, assembles of mind-linked cyborgs joined together by individuality-suppressing implants, worm-infested spores the size of moons - the true “leaders” of the Abyss Front calculate, amalgamate, and sift through oceans of information not just from their eldritch perception but sent upwards from its various councils and administrative bodies.

Their authority, while immense, is not necessarily the final word. A healthy civic culture is encouraged via mass demonstration and assembly, with participation in local governing bodies being aggressive and direct. Governing bodies in some settlements have been voted out collectively and individually replaced sometimes in matters of hours and there could be said to be a “dual power system” with various political organizations that exist outside of official state control, even if they often possess the same ideological base.

Demographics

Czlozekostra

Visual References

Their name translates to english as "complex external skeleton" and to many they are the public face of the Front. The "zekts" as some call them are 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 its borders they are well known for their mysterious fleets of roaming habitat-ships and patchwork nomad vessels, others dwelling within the bodies of enormous void-dwelling creatures large enough to prey on capital ships. In spite of their fearsome reputation and political power in the Front, their population dropped heavily during the Yrrani occupation from extermination campaigns and exiles beyond the known galaxy. In the centuries since, it has grown considerably as independent czlozekostra fleets and worlds begin to join their cause in massive remigrations.

Resembling carnivorous beetles, large crabs, and plankton-like shrimp, they tend to come in three distinct sub-variants with various shared characteristics. Regardless of specific subspecies, they are typically between 7'11’’ to 12'5’’ tall, with some capable of growing to 25'30’’. 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 tend to hunch and compress 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 are 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 various carnivorous beetle, crab, amphipod and phronima species. Their mouthparts are complex with around 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 frequently emerging from behind or above domes containing many smaller eye-like organs beneath faux-opaque exteriors.

Living between 130 to 200 years, centuries longer with augmentations, they nonetheless begin life as mere larvae. Young czlozekostra can look like lengthy worm-like creatures lined with pointed limbs, something akin to curving shrimp like creatures, or sometimes smaller versions of adults. 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. Metamorphosizing czlozekostra mature into adults sometimes in a little under a year while those with a nymphal state might take between a year and a half.

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. Some species, particularly the transparent phronima like ones, are naturally gifted with psionic capabilities and the ability to survive in vacuum conditions, even known to inhabit the still-living carcasses of centuries-old starfaring titan-organisms.

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 navigate 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, sciences, ideology, and recreation 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 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 gestalt mind amalgamations. 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.

Tiarncnoic

Visual References

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 was exiled beyond the known galaxy during the Yrrani Occupation, joining the czlozekostra in large independent fleets, but recent political developments has seen many returning.

Evolved from Tiorgreilig's large eels, they have a relatively slender appearance (next to their hulking biomechanical allies) 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 and many can change the colour of their skin in order to better conceal themselves. They average between 6'11’’ to 10’ in height, with a few instances of 11 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 predatory, though with somewhat 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.

The most well known aspect of their biology is a "third eye" known as the tarfaire - 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, capable of “seeing” through certain surfaces and capable of being augmented to further improve its range of perception. This was likely an evolutionary adaptation to protect against and predate upon creatures that hide in the fog of Tiorgreillig and blend into its deep, rocky chasms.

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 or as regenerative as the salibughri, their mobility and reactivity gives them unparalleled default agility within the Front. Their technology remained the most advanced for centuries 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, as many robotic components form the basis for bodily modification.

These 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 possess the most psionics or "etherealists" as the Front calls them, with their "third eye" believed to be an evolutionary response to the arcane powers of the region. 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 the colossal eel-like creatures that inhabit the areas around their homeworld and surrounding planet and the (super) naturalistic forces that they represent. 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, fangs, 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, though it takes many forms and was never standardized into an organized religion. 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 fetishization 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 decolonization movements, sometimes threatening even intervention on the side of those they perceive as living under the boot of exploitative leaders.

Salighburi

Visual References

The most populous species in Abyssic territory, they are known for their literally rotten appearance and overgrown fungal 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 or Kahdoulfarati - 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 Front. 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 with a general body layout equivalent to humanity’s. 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 frequently and deliberately infested with a variety of complex symbiotic organisms though unlike the zlozekostra, much of it is more fungoid, plantal, or worm-like. They too are heavily augmented though most of it is for general purpose civilian use. These include retractable feeder-branches for higher levels of nutrient extraction, neuromycelial roots for telepathic data absorption, and hygiene worms bred to clean their bodies and fight off diseases.

Some of it can converge on similar territory as their arthropods 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. This is to the extent that they have created specialized neuromycelial forms that are capable of interfacing with digital and even psionic sources, which has long since been integrated into the Abyss Front at large.

They are on average the most religious species in the front though recent reforms and introduced civil liberties has seen an increase in non-religious as well as non-practitioners of . 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 been a part of various territorial, ethnic, and ideological conflicts throughout their history. Much of this was manipulated by the Yrrani particularly in recent history, setting them against one another rather than the occupation.

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 Proclamation or Asaldaiyoul demonstrates through myth and parable the follies and virtues of many of these methods.

It is believed to have been a record of visions recorded in a chemical trance by generations upon generations of ancient mystics and voyagers who used to link their minds to the gestalt consciousnesses of gigantic spore-moons in ages of pre-history.

The 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 or Tafyidani worship not the moon but its coiling parasitoid 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 technicians in the entirety of not just salibughri but Front space.

The Salibughri are master architects and communications experts, having evolved to convert their own biomass into comms networks and sprawling tower-structures. 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 growth 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 perfectly forged components is considered highly advanced. They are specialized primarily in biotech but have implemented conventional "hard" and psionic/ethereal knowledge quite readily.

They are the most social of the Front’s species, in near constant communication due to the innumerable ways including chemical and even olfactory methods they have. Sound is but one way but entering their spaces often results in one being bombarded across all their senses with a bizarre onslaught of unusual sights, sounds, smells, and even touch. While many older settlements are culturally insular, smaller enclaves and towns are rapidly expanding into some of the most creatively volatile centers of artistry and philosophy throughout the Front.

They are subsequently also associated with theorists and philosophy, with much of their beliefs informed not just by the Proclamation 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, but they have perhaps the highest investment in education of all known species here.

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 important insofar if one is an actual salibughri 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.

Military

Planetary

The planetary forces of the Abyss Front can be understood as in reality being two different military forces; one conventional and the other bestial. One of these is a rapid-attack mechanized army and the other is an overwhelming swarm of biomechanical horrors. Both of these work in tandem for an agile form of overwhelming hybrid warfare, developed over the course of centuries of anti-Yrrani resistance. It unites traditions from a wide array of species, military traditions, and insurgencies to formulate an aggressive and deceptively precise series of doctrines that have made the Abyss Front feared by those unfortunate enough to oppose it.

This strategy can be simplified as using gigantic swarms of extradimensional monstrosities and bioengineered skittering terrors to distract and tie up vital enemy forces. While losses suffered by these hordes are immense, these are easily replaced and replicated, preventing enemy movement as vehicles and deceptively fast, tough infantry maneuver into position to maximize effectiveness of hard-hitting weapon systems, of which even a single trooper can carry on or integrated into their bodies, sometimes even “encoded” into their very biomass, concealed until it is morphed and reshaped out of their very cybernetic physiologies.

These elite infantry forces can rapidly reposition with many of them being quite speedy themselves thanks to multiple limbs and movement enhancing modules, on top of a wide variety of transports. Adding to this lethality is their augmented biologies often allowing them to use standard issue infantry weapons equivalent to crew-mounted weaponry from less hulking species. Just a handful of them can output an immense level of destruction, with various munitions whether high explosive armour piercing, gravitationally accelerated plasma, psionically volatile electrocuting, and other forms of grievous injury.

Training and firepower is never in short supply. Neither is durability, with the Abyss Front fielding layered armor and naturally resilient species as standard infantry. Czlozekostra troopers regardless of species are born with tough carapaces which after military augmentations, turn them into small mech-walkers. Salibughri are the smallest of them and the closest to humans yet their fungoid biologies are unusually resilient, able to survive decapitation and bisection, while having rapid generative capability. Tiarncnoic forces meanwhile have a variety of protective energy fields or “shields” specialized in resisting various forms of fire, allowing them to layer additional protection without having to take on much more weight.

These infantry are backed up by a variety of autonomous and networked drone-like platforms. These can range from hawk-sized antigravitational drones that observe and suicide-dive towards targets to detonate explosives to large arthropod like entities between the size of heavy infantry and infantry fighting vehicles, carrying additional firepower on nimble, tough bodies. Redundant systems including but not limited psionic and electronic ones allow them to network with one another, ground forces, and distant command units while advanced intelligences (not all of which are entirely cybernetic or “artificial”) allow them to retain cohesion even if separated from their controllers.

Abyss Front vehicles are quite fast, even the ones that use multiple insectoid legs rather than wheels, and quite a few of them have transport capability. Many of them are of a similar biomechanical design as their species, capable of rapid modification and able to mount a wide variety of weapon systems. Tiarncnoic ones tend to be purely machine but they share the same focus on precise, long-range weaponry focusing on armour piercing and disruptive explosive power. Particle cannons, bioelectro-thermochemical guns, and gravitationally accelerated munitions are their trademarks as are complex multi-missile launch systems, focusing on targeting high value targets that heavily armed infantry can’t blast away.

They have somewhat lighter armor than is expected, save for the larger mecha, but their speed and capability to network and augment allied forces makes them highly dangerous if they can stay on the move. Their missile systems are supported with a variety of smaller artillery systems that when combined with the redundant networking systems uniform across their forces, allows for extremely rapid target acquisition and the ability to provide quick artillery support. They can also often generate and “attach” energy shields to infantry squads, further increasing survivability and support capability.

Perhaps the most powerful weapon at their disposal are the strange “spells” and “sorceries” they can implement on the battlefield. The most infamous of these is a thick, roiling fog that doesn’t appear to be heavily affected by wind currents or atmospheric disruptions. This supernatural gas obscures their forces and tampers with electronics, hiding their true numbers and force disposition while its ethereal composition can be used to teleport forces across where it manifests. It also causes their swarm armies to take on a renewed savagery, sometimes seeping into the remains of destroyed biomonstrosities and violently reanimating them.

Others have observed guided missiles flying in erratic, twisting patterns suggesting that they casters of some sort are deliberately altering their trajectory to target weak spots on enemies. Disruptive rifts have been known to manifest abruptly in hidden heavy weapon positions after having been scouted by burrowing Abyssic drones. Heatwave-like visual distortions manifest before their forces, causing illusions of more forces than there truly are to appear. Even amidst dense swarms of shrieking, gnashing, biting terrors, larger spectral predators will emerge and erupt out of their putrid masses, suddenly tossing disruptive terrors into lines of unprepared infantry. The Abyss Front is many things but violently unpredictable is what most fear the most about them and their myriad abilities.

Space

Unlike their ground forces, the Abyss Front’s starfleet is a far more brutish force. Much of it is even more feral in nature, including gigantic yrrani dreadnought vessels thought lost in ages past, fused into the semi-living remains of colossal star-titans they once hunted. They still make use of enormous screening swarms across their fleet but these dreadnoughts (of which more are still being created and others prowling in the depths) are their most infamous.

As a whole, the Front’s fleet is an overwhelming battering ram, combining high tech shielding and living biomechanical systems with heavy duty beam, particle, and even fusion weapons. The technological expertise of three races and their associated subspecies has been combined to create a highly durable fleet specialized in overwhelming violence. Most concerningly, psionic power has been fully standardized as both a defensive and offensive capability.

When combined, this makes them incredibly troublesome to deal with. While their starfleet is not particularly fast, it is quite durable yet not just in terms of self-repair and ablative metal-woven carapace plating. Abyss Front ships are known to create and manipulate fields of gas-like clouds, made of nano-entities and strange chemicals, they can manipulate through psionics and esoteric technology to both diminish incoming energy weapons and even interfere with targeting systems. They can launch flurries of bio-debris that conceal hidden living bomb-drones and ECM beacons. Miniaturized aberration-rifts summoned near enemy fleets flood scanners and observations systems with faulty readings, tamper with biosystems, disrupt electronics, and even cause psionic malfunctions also make them a nightmare to fight against.

A doctrine of constantly forcing the enemy to juggle multiple problems has made encounters with them often take on the maddening exaggerations of sailors’ tales of encounters with dreadful beasts of the deep. This is assisted by the fact that their vessels seem to press the attack with a maddening, uncaring resolve. Crewed primarily by creatures adapted to harsh, vacuum conditions, their vessels often possess minds of their own. Numerous redundant systems and a need for far less to no real life support allows them to fight on zombie-like even when they should reasonably be no longer functional.

Their weapons also tend to cause a variety of additional effects to happen beyond damage to shielding and hulls. Massive energy blasts cause wraith-like creatures seemingly made of eldritch energies to corrode and tear into vessels after the beams that sent them vanish, allowing them to damage them long term. Missiles that teleport seemingly at random before slamming into a target leave clusters of miniature insectoid drones, lighting up areas for faster target lock on while causing localized glitches and malfunctions. Storms of biomunitions impale and splatter volatile fluids causing follow-up strikes to cause catastrophic secondary explosions.

Even worse are rumors of colossal creatures not known to any bestiary but seemingly drawn from ancient religion and myth alike. Summoned by otherworldly forces said to reside within the massive beacons the Front has constructed deep within their territory, these gigantic eel and crustacean like organisms are said to prey on capital ships. Engagements with them have been rare but it is believed they are lurking outside of the Front’s boundaries, in the blackness between stars and quietly watching the unfolding events of the new era.

Age of Broken Shackles 2.0

I might be down again.

The Envenomed: Military Science Fiction Deniable Operations

As the voidhangers spoke, their bodies would feel something akin to a tingling warmth wash over them - subtle enough that it could have been mistaken as heat adjustment from their armor but a little too pronounced to have been entirely a byproduct of regulative systems. It wasn't ethereal in nature. In fact, Echo detected it as well when it pulsed out from the impaling spike, sweeping over the area. HUD's and visual overlays blurred, fizzled, then continued as if nothing had happened.

It came as a wave, washing over the area and temporarily interrupting comms channels - shutting, opening, shutting, opened again. King would feel his body seemingly shudder... or was it some figment of the imagination? Almost like an itch that vanished just when one was about to scratch it.

The pod-head camera was holding still, its sight locked onto an empty space over the trench where the impaled creature lay.

Kleo and Ilshar's observations were proven correct - scans of the lance demonstrated a few seconds after the interference that it was sending information back the way it came, right towards the camera-drone and likely the shielded facility built into the Sargasso.

The tarrhaidim reached out beyond the bounds of the corporeal, into the gelatinous mass of the bisected sea cucumber-worm like entity, and felt a suction-like flow of ether. It came in sudden stops and starts, like someone drinking, pausing, then sucking through a straw. The corpse itself was of chasmborn origin, yet the bisection wasn't bleeding out much in the way of qillatu or ether. The wound has been closed shut by the same slime they had seen in the area.

It was a savage cut but there was only the echoes of intnse physical trauma present. Ilshar wouldn't be able to detect any energies of a foreign body present. Whatever did this hadn't relied on ether.

The ground shuddered and rumbled. Stray fragments of the exterior flaked upwards in floor-tile sized pieces from the exposed surface and within the trenches.

"Seismic activity picked up on station warning systems and scanners. Multiple maintenance tunnels collapsing from kinetic impacts within. Unlikely to be pirates. Toggling controls to-"

This time, they all felt what was like the aftershocks of a massive crash, sending more fragments shooting upwards. It was tempting to say it was like a localized quake but this was like a drilling pulse vibrating beneath them, traveling outwards and away from them before abruptly stopping.

Just as the macabre javelin pulsed again, stronger this time and causing most of their HUD and scanning tech to blur then stop - a reboot would be needed.

This time, King's body felt something like partial, stinging cramps. Not enough to be crippling but enough to be unpleasant. A warning almost.
Visual zoom-in fine was fine on all visual/camera/ocular systems.

The camera drone's head had turned away, towards where the trailers where Kleo had seen the floating helmet. It turned and slowly looked towards them, settling on the middle of the group.

A flicker of motion behind one of the trailers - a flash of something twisting and vanishing as a cloud of particles kicked up from behind them.

The comms would take a minute and a half to re-establish. Whatever had appeared re-appeared, this time in a flicker of something vaguely purple out from the side of one of the trailers. Too fast to see exactly what it was but fast enough that it would easily be able to make it to the edge of the abandoned League structures attached to the base within the next 30 seconds or so.

The Envenomed: Military Science Fiction Deniable Operations

"Accurate. Scanners can and will be linked to HUD's and overlays. Preliminary observation uneventful, beyond biodebris readings."

The vrexul's voice somehow managed to sound more pleasant as it spoke to King, almost as if it was human. Whatever software it used to communicate had been calibrated perhaps a little too closely towards something moderately presentable and less gravelly. It still had enough of the gravelly grit and scraping, almost metallic tone but now it sounded like it came out of a throat rather than brokn cement chunks grinding about inside of a rusty vent.

An uplink request popped up on the visual displays of the entire Envenomed Team; accepting it would cause a momentary superimposition a green line horizontally arranged across eyes, ocular bacteria, biolinked cameras and other such methods of sight. Objects it crossed over would faintly flash in a highlighted emerald green for physical objects of note - the hovering chunks of station, a few clusters of debris, but in a pinkish hue, a series of speckled patches representing something living or biological.

Some of them overlapped the emerald colour, specifically on the floating chunks.

That meant they were on the underside of them, as if they were hidden from sight.

Thin lines of pink stretched between a bunch of the floating plates as well - something was holding them together.

"Fire support vessel is independent, but within reason, they can be directed. Currently, they are attmpting to scan the base of tower at far end. There is a field of some sort enveloping the base of the structure and it is slowing down accurate scanning."

Not stopping - a small camera feed invitation opened and when opened, showed dual-screen footage. One of the on-board cameras of the disguised gunship viewing the base of the tower and another of a camera designed for scanning targets - from one of the vrexul infantry.

The former was practically identical to the Envenomed's own sight. The latter however resulted in heavy blurring and crackling, static-ridden footage. A progress bar on the bottom slowly filled however, ambling towards a full scan but most of the data coming back was not of the structure but of the field.

It wasn't ethereal; some sort of anti-electronic warfare shroud perhaps, or some techno-disruptive veil. Not enough to entirely prevent the vrexul's examination in its tracks however.

+++

After having exited the slimy and foggy interior of the Sargasso, its outside would be refreshing for the voidhangers if only because it wasn't anywhere near as filthy and laden with obscure, perverse energies. It would typically take a few minutes even for voidhangers to acclimate their senses to a less clutterd, ether-concentrated environment but for the duo in the Envemomed squad, half a minute was more than enough.

A vague ethereal presence began to define itself with more specificity. It wasn't nebulous ether but something... living, or it had been living. A faded aura, soft and diminished, something vulgar and almost malleable, inviting their grasp and their curiosity. A peer down into the first of the trenches and they notice rather than immediately perceive.

Down there, what looked like a still pile of debris was illuminated with the same familiar pinkish hue from their visual overlays - it wasn't actually pink but with their own actual eyes, drab and greying like the rest of the exterior.

If they peered closer, whether with magnification, scopes, or otherwise, they would notice that the debris was packed together tightly. Very tightly; moreso than artificial gravity would allow, and that there were thin threads of a mucus-like substance trailing out of it like ghostly stems, drifting in vacuum.

Rooted to the pile, out of little gaps, in which they could intuit the source of the ghostly, faded sensation. Something had made these piles for the purposes of storage.

From the corners of Kleo's sight, she would notice something about the trailer-like structures sitting on the surface of the Sargasso just a short zero-gravity leap or two away. There was little about them that immediately caught the eye; it wasn't uncommon for large stations or vessels to have temporary structures placed upon them for prolonged maintenance periods.

These weren't fully sealed however and her scans didn't suggest any oxygen-tank storage. They were old, older than the actual current station they were on and didn't have the brutalist bulk of Yrrkradian construction. She could recognize that faded yellow, once white, from her days in the League.

See the blocky outline of a helmet drifting behind one of the windows - post-Veiled War era, long since phased out, a black square visor attached to a white suit lined with primitive anti-kinetic and chasm-resistant gel padding. Staring at her almost, waiting, drifting.

No life signs detected. Yet it was clear these external structures had been placed there well after the station's construction and its dissappearance into the unknown.

+++

"Half-click ahead - we will rendezvous at a maintenance tunnel near the base of the tower. Original suggested travel route was through a larger series of corridors, but you had rerouted to the bowel-region of your immediate deployment. Progress hass been accelerated. You avoided an area of concerning activity."

The arthropod's voice paused for a moment as it spoke to Rasch.

"Pirate comms intercepted suggest your original path would have experienced a considerably higher degree of conflict; I detect multiple platoon-level depoyments of infantry. Weaponry and equipment detected not typically available to freelancer and raider elements within this sector."

They had seen gunships scouring the station, scourging with cannon fire, and the creatures that fled in their wake - not out of fear, but knowing that their quarry would come to thm in the labyrinth of crevices where they waited with hunger or hatred.

As Ilshar's body leapt over the debris, the pinkish threads illuminated in their visual display flashed. A visual indicator pointed downwards as the shared scanning detected something else in the trench. A trail of near-transparent slime, unsurprising except for what it lead to.

The corpses they had seen previously were of creatures, sapient alien species, of the material world. The way they had been festered, mutilated, and infested was foul, if logical in their perverse transformations.

In this second trench, a lightly pulsing mess of organs, dried-out membranous structure, and lighly pulsing colours lay impaled into a corner. A jagged metal spike held the horizontally bisected body of some enormous cylinder-shaped creature, life long since snuffed out but the cells comprising its body shifted from an electric blue transparency to a mottled spinach-green and mud-brown. A star-like arrangements of limbs circled the eye-like end of its presumed face, each one twitching from a residual electric pulse.

A quick look at the spike and it was not random debris. Multiple lights ran along its length as did deep scratch marks. The end of it sticking upwards pulsed with a faint, reddish light.

For Echo, it was not a weaponized lamp-post.

A preliminary scan showed that it was meant to receive signals.

In fact, it was actively doing so, pulsing them to and from itself to the base of the tower.
It was amplifying signals and if anything, seemed to be a scanning device of some sort that had been weaponized, yet not randomly.

Far over at the end of the trail, Echo would notice something. Movement, not of a living creature, but a mechanical swivelling. Enhancing the feed, they would see a bulb-like camera of sorts sitting at the top of the sloping structure's roof. Four wheels, anti-grav locked to the station, and slowly moving back and forth in a straight line.

It wasn't looking at the squad, not directly, but it was actively receiving whatever information the spike was sending it. Somehow, the field interfering with the vrexul's scanners didn't seem to affect it at all.

Oddly enough, it didn't seem to have the makings of something void-hardened - the material was likely for in-atmosphere use, perhaps why it was behind the distorting field.

The area was being observed and it had been used by at least two different groups over a very long stretch of time. What was it being observed for and what were they intending to get out of a corpse that had been sitting there for likely at least a month now?

The Envenomed: Military Science Fiction Deniable Operations

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."

---

BGM: Breidablik - Penumbra Pt. 2

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.

Station Exterior

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.

The Envenomed: Military Science Fiction Deniable Operations

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.

Enemies

Cadaver Puppet 1:
Light Damage
Unshielded
Dislocated Arm
Charging at Alice and Kleo (too unhinged to care)
Berserk State

Cadaver Puppet 2:
Full Health
Unshielded
Recovering from stumble, targeting Kleo
Confused (unintentionally intercepted comms)
Berserk State

Cadaver Puppet 3:
Full Health
Shielded
Preparing Heavy Melee Attack against Alice
Berserk State

Cadaver Puppet 4:
Health Critical
Unshielded
Horizontally Bisected
Attempting to grab Savlatore's legs
Berserk State

Cadaver Puppet 5:
Light Damage
Shielded
Bashing the back of Echo's shoulders and neck.
Berserk State

Cadaver Puppet 6:
Light Damage
Shielded (Critical)
Critical blow aimed at Salvatore.
Berserk State

The Envenomed: Military Science Fiction Deniable Operations

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.

The Envenomed: Military Science Fiction Deniable Operations

BGM: Ecoplasma - Infestation of the Extraneous Ones

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.

Colonized Cadaver Puppet

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.