Chapter Nine – Stirring up Nests
“Vehicle!”
Evot looks at the skeleton. Something in the demeanor of the matte red figure is making chills run up her spine. Despite a lack of fleshy face to read, her creep radar is going haywire. Then her attention is back to her surroundings, and she needs to fight hard to prevent the scream from bubbling up her throat. They are surrounded by one of the galaxy’s most horrific sights: fully-formed Reworked. These pristine white beings are a sure sign that containment of infection vectors has not gone well, or that a hive has been let alone for way too long.
Histaff infections usually go down a few paths. If the wealth of an infected planet is sufficient, the expensive overlapping scanning systems pick up the distinct macromolecules before the situation can become dangerous. The closer to the Central planets you get, the less likely it is that Histaff infection vectors will manage to harvest more than a few out of the way ships or small colonies. Halfway to the rim, the infections become a much more significant threat. Large trading corporation vessels often have standard policies to not even enter systems that are suspected of having a Histaff infection risk, so most worlds make damn sure to nip any potential dangerous vectors in the bud.
For a system as far out as Evengi, the best luck any ordinary citizen has when a viable sample of Histaff enters the atmosphere is to flee off-planet. Those planets are then labelled as quarantine zones, a few symbolic ships are sent to patrol the system, and every single person even suspected to have been on the planet in their life is treated with extreme prejudice and put under maximum scrutiny.
The planet is lost until one of the massive cleanup flotillas can get around to the place. For a shell of a planet like Evengi, this will usually take a long time. All the truly precious resources have long since been extracted from the crust as the price for turning the previously barren planet into one that can sustain life. One of the big terraforming fleets had visited this system a couple of hundred millennia ago, letting the small dome-bound population go outside without a suit for the first time.
This did mean that the local economy did not extend to the galactic front. It had become a true backwater in order to become a livable planet. The small bit of trade to the Central planets dried up because the rare elements needed to produce warp drives and other exotic apparatus had all been stripped. Evot never really cared about any of that, though. She knew full well that this was a recurring pattern. Either toil away in dangerous pressure domes and age-old spacesuits or live in comfort and mediocrity.
None of this flashes through her mind as she sees the mountain-sized Histaff Behemoth lift one of its many, many limbs. Only the bit about how and why her birth planet lacks all spaceship engine building materials comes to the surface of her thoughts when she sees that limb shoot towards herself. The bony hand grabbing her neck snaps her out of the terrified paralysis preventing her from moving or thinking clear thoughts. Immediately, she starts screaming. The horror tales that are being told to children in order to eat their nutri-paste and to go into their slumber-capsules without fuss are playing out in front of her eyes.
Evot merely tries to shield her head as she smacks into the ground. She feels pain bloom in her left elbow and in her right upper thigh. She looks down as she flops on her back and sees pristine white bones sticking from her bare arm and leg. She is pretty sure that those wounds should have put her in a debilitating amount of agony, but the sensations coming from her body are muted and far away somehow. The wounds feel more like minor cuts than the compound open fractures they are.
Then a ghostly hand grabs her by her forehead horn, and she goes flying again. She manages to catch glimpses of absolute chaos here and there. A small horde of multi-limbed Reworked are running after her, the mountain towering above the city unfolding more and more limbs. She starts giggling as she realizes that they are actually lucky. If the Histaff Behemoth behind them had had to fight for long periods of time, it would not have formed such an inefficient shape. The bone monsters always adapt to their situation, and living on a planet without any opposition must have caused the massive creature to develop into random directions.
Her own survival instincts surprise her when she kicks out at one of the caterpillar-like Reworked that is getting too close. Another building-sized limb slams into the earth not ten metres from her flailing form. The immediate network of cracks and spurts of red ooze that appear on the white appendage is more proof of unfocused developments. Like a broken clay pot holding jelly, the massive tube sags slowly, oozing with red goop.
[ New skill learned; Kicking lvl 1 ]
Blinking the blue box away, Evot tries to reorient herself. She is dragging through the dirt and sand face-first now, a firm hand still pulling her along by her forehead. Then an explosion throws her into the air, and she feels the cool wind rip at her newly burned and torn skin. Spinning in a dizzying arc, she lands in an undignified heap, loose sand buffering her landing. She tries to buffer her fall by applying some rolling technique she barely even remembers, only the vaguest flashes of training on a mat when she was a child helping her break the least amount of bones.
[ New skill learned; Rolling lvl 1 ]
For some reason, she feels like whooping out loud. She wants to yell at the top of her lungs, like those grav-harness jumpers always did when jumping off the space elevator. Suppressing that super embarrassing impulse, Evot takes in her current situation. She doesn't feel the bone-deep and reality-warping pain that should come with suffering from multiple fractures and massive tissue damage, but she still manages to take stock of her own wounds. One arm and one leg are totally useless. Both her feet are still missing, and the backs of her legs, ass and lower back are fried to a crisp.
Pulling her head from the sand, she sees a messy trail going up one side of the dune. The sounds and noises coming from over the red hill only increase in volume, and Evot wants to at least see her demise coming, she suddenly realizes. Dragging her broken form up the steep sandy slope takes much less time than she expects, and she manages to peer over the edge not a minute later.
The first thing she notices is that the city has transformed into a skeletal tentacle monster. Segmented, folding, articulating, and telescoping limbs are slowly protruding from the shrinking mountain. She recognised the textbook development of Histaff Behemoth in non-resisting territories from what little information she had managed to scrounge up. Temporarily made structures designed for hauling biomass and processing bodies are further developed when specific weaponry isn't required. From what she remembers, it will take the thing at least a day to become mobile.
Worrying about the far-away threats of tomorrow is less than useful with enemies at the front door, she thinks to herself. Looking down from the slowly changing mountain, she sees Douglas duking it out with a dozen Reworked. The skeleton is holding his own surprisingly well. Just when she starts to compliment the bonehead in her thoughts, his left arm lights up with a bright blue flash. The red stone covering his humerus shining with complex and repetitive engravings for a single moment before another Reworked - this one made from three club-like limbs - slams into him, bursting his left arm apart. Red and white fragments scatter across the sand, and the world seems to hold its breath from a single moment.
“MY BONES!” is the outraged outcry that bursts forth from the metal skull’s mouth. Then Evot remembers that the skeleton can do magic. She is not sure why she has not consciously remembered this fact up to this point, but his next move reminders her of his skill in a most graphic manner. Stretching his other hand up into the air, streams of water rip themselves free from every single bit of exposed Histaff slime. Even the large globules of red goop that spilt from the city Behemoth aren’t spared. The closer Reworked with cracks in their exoskeletons all start writhing in pain as their life-goop is stolen from them.
A fireball bursts forth in his skeletal hand, shining with the force of a small sun. Then Douglas sinks to his bony knees, and lunges at the three-arme
d being that broke his left arm. The way the fire covered Reworked squirms, whimpers, and wriggles as a result of the sudden attack nearly causes Evot to feel a bit of sympathy for the poor being. His right arm stretched out, leaving a burning trail of pure flame in his wake, Douglas starts running at the other beasts surrounding him. Only the fastest Reworked manage to escape the furious skeleton, who is coming after them like a specter of flaming death. Falling half the time - as he is obviously not used to running around with just one arm - he leaves more than half of his pursuers smoking on the ground, their innards bubbling out in darkly smoking messes.
“MY BOOOOONES!!!” Projecting his synthetic voice at the top of his non-existent lungs, Douglas arcs his arm back. He then hurls the diminished fireball towards the retreating group of bone-clad monsters. Instead of landing in the midsts of the group, however, Douglas’s arm shines with a fierce blue light for just a fraction of a second, before the fireball launches into the horizon. Instead of the powerthrow Evot had been expecting, Douglas had used his arm like a trebuchet, and she suspects that he didn’t expect to archive the projectile speed that she is now witnessing.
Evot follows the arcing projectile with her eyes, gaping at the fiery parabola. The shining light grows smaller as it shoots away, becoming just a pinprick of illumination in the fading sunlight. It disappears for a single moment, diving behind one of the more complex looking limbs sticking out from the slowly changing Behemoth, before a bright flash is followed by a sizable fireball. The world freezes for a few moments, letting Evot hear the pounding of her slow heartbeat in her ears. Then she sees the shockwave coming, a front of suddenly appearing dust swooping towards her, and is immediately blinded by the front of compressed air blowing sand into her face. She tumbles backwards, her broken body painfully falling down the sandy slope. She regains control of her fall within a few sandy rolls and slides the rest of the way down to the dune valley.
Here, she starts giggling uncontrollably. Her softly started titters of hysterical amusement evolve into rolling gales of laughter, her broken ribs painfully grinding against each other. It’s only when the sky above her is partially blocked by an all too familiar skinny silhouette that she manages to regain some form of control over her own diaphragm. This is also around the time when she feels the thumping in the earth. A deep and hard to ignore rhythm echoes throughout the ground, seemingly shaking the entire planet. Failing to get to her feet, she stops trying to see what is going on. Her vision is blocked by two large walls of sand on either side of her, and looking upwards, she sees that the dust in the air wouldn’t have let her see far anyway. Instead of the green sky, she sees the matte red of the dust and sand.
“Did you avenge your bones?” she asks, suddenly wanting to break the thumping rhythm with sounds of her own making.
“No. One guilty one got away.”
“I’m sorry for you,” she replies on autopilot. It takes her a second to realize that she actually means it.
“Thank you. Where is the capital?”
“At the most central point of the continent,” she replies.
“Where is capital?”
“At the centr-”
“Evot.” Hearing her name said in such a stern manner snaps her out of the weird mood she is in. ”Where?”
Any form of leeway or patience her sympathetic bone-related comment might have fostered is gone rather quickly, she realizes. The blazing fires in the metallic skull shine down on her with growing restlessness. Her levity quickly doused, Evot goes over the route that they have taken so far. She has no idea where she first regained consciousness, just a head and a lot of questions, but she knows where they are now. She had some doubt in the beginning, as the spaceport is honestly way too ruined to be recognizable in any manner, but the massive Histaff Behemoth basically confirmed it.
Where would the most biomass on the planet be? Where would all the panicking people run towards, if not the local spaceport; one of the few places where even poor people can get off-planet? All those panicking people are now inside the thing that is making that awful stomping noise, of that she has no doubt. “The capital is to the north. North-northeast, I think. Harvest lake is between here and there, though. That’s why we need a vehicle. Walking around one of Harvest’s arms will add thousands of kilometres to our trek.”
The stomping continues as Douglas’s eyes don’t stop staring at Evot. “There was a large vein of promethium between here and there, or so the records show, and thus the harvest was extended this way. There was a lot of well-documented fuss about it. It was actually a lot of fun going through historical archives that old. Some fights broke out. You see, this spaceport had already been established, and lengthening the harvesting arm between here and the place where all the dropped bases were, the capital, would add massive costs to land travel. It took a series of anti-corp terrorist strikes before continuing mining in that direction became too costly to sustain, but the future economic damage had been done at that point.”
Evot nods to herself. A learned historian couldn’t have given a better overview of that particular piece of tumultuous history. Terraforming operations are never easy, and Evengi Prime was a very good example of the ever ongoing battle between short-term profit for the contractors and long-term quality of habitability for the locals.
“WHERE!?”
“That way, mister Douglas.” Snapping her arm out towards where she suspects north to be, Evot tries to stand straighter. She immediately falls on her face again before regaining control over her limbs. Her legs are looking a lot better, she suddenly realizes. Her upper thigh no longer had the odd bend in it that made her sick to her stomach to look at. The shard of bone sticking through her skin is also vanished, so the woman slowly tries to stand. She finds her legs in proper working condition, much to her surprise. There is still a rather odd lump in her thigh, but it takes her weight. Her arm is no longer a bleeding mess, so she realizes. Her back is still a seeping ruin of blackened skin, but the pain feels like it is happening to someone else.
Her feet are still missing, though. She frowns at the sand sticking to the glowing open flesh, a basic and deep part of her extremely unhappy with the fact that she is missing bodyparts. Severe body horror is a thing that she seems oddly numb to, she muses. Before, each time she took a step in the dunes, she felt the sand grind against the inside of her legs as she sunk deep. Now, each fumbling stride causes flakes of dry dirt to dig into her open veins.
Sighing deeply to herself, the overwhelmed and honestly rather traumatized woman decides that although her physical wounds may heal in a day or two, at the rate that they are closing, the mental wounds might never fade. But then again, that’s only if she decides to never enter an auto-psych or one of those humanoid-with-central-nervous-system specialized therapy planets that she has read so much about. Rubbing her cheeks with blood and sand-covered hands, she starts to trundle after the skeleton. The dust in the air prevents her from seeing much, and the constant world shaking pounding is preventing her from hearing any of the noises Douglas might be making. Yet she resolutely starts walking after the fellow without seeing or hearing him nonetheless.
It takes her a good half an hour of ploughing through loose sand, stumbling over hidden rocks, and avoiding the sharp bits of the many metal scraps all around before the dust clears enough to see the sun. Picking up her pace, she runs after the skeleton. She had pointed towards north-northeast with the best of her abilities when Douglas had shouted that command, but she had had very little to navigate off at that moment. “It’s this way, actually,” she says out of breath, pointing at a direction ninety degrees from where the skeleton is walking towards.
Douglas doesn’t say a single word. He just turns and starts walking into the new direction. Evot is relieved to see that they will not be trekking back into the dunes. Those red rippling waves of annoying sand end well to the northeast. Instead, it seems like their new route will take them across ordinary wasteland. The crunching of cracked and dusty e
arth under Douglas’s foot bones is a welcome alternative to the constant low churning of sand or the short-lived noises of magical battle. The thumping is still continuing, and Evot doesn’t expect that anything good will be coming from that at all, but at least they are leaving the enormous Histaff Behemoth behind now.
Casting a single glance backwards, she sees the many random limbs still sticking up from the fallen megastructures, a thin tendril of smoke rising towards the pale green heavens. The far away mountains seem like they are trying to cradle the moving mass of slender limbs, their faded silhouettes almost giving the ruined city a crown. Evot muses that it all seems like an oddly fitting monument to the hubris of the galaxy’s thinking sapients. The red dunes rising on one side combined with the endless flatness to the right evoke an illusion of speed, akin to a cloud thrown up by a speeding car. Wondering if that illusion is a sign of things to come, she looks at the horrifically beautiful scene for a bit longer.
Evot feels the same pull again, and she can’t help but turn around and stride after Douglas. Something in her mind is not content with wallowing in the past, and this small spark causes her to initiate a conversation with the taciturn skeleton after half an hour of walking. “How did you make that fireball.”
Douglas holds up a hand aimed at her. Evot doesn’t flinch as she stares at the limb capable of blowing up cities. Vague flashbacks fight to be remembered, but instead of burning her face off, a blue circle pops into being around his outstretched hand. A small flame grows out of nothing hovering in front of his outstretched palm. Evot brings her hand close to the flickering flame, feeling the heat radiate from it with her still slightly singed skin.
“Very nice hologram. So, how did you make it?” The skeleton doesn’t even acknowledge her and keeps walking. “How did you make that fireball?”
The same blue diagram is unceremoniously shoved into her face. Evot peers at it, but can’t make hide nor hair from the complex tapestry of glowing lines and symbols. “I think you did this stuff before, but nothing on that scale. And you can also make ice, right? How does that work?”
GalaxSec: A Sci-Fi LitRPG (Skeleton in Space Book 2) Page 11