[Xios]

The hunt was something he had been missing.

All his life, he'd wished for it. Dreamed of it, even, while in it's place had been a gap he presumed to be natural. Empty and artificial, it had kept him in check, kept him in line... but now it was filled. Xios was complete in ways he had never dreamed of. As the misty sky swirled with currents above him, and the trees of the foreign world swayed with a rhythm, Xios found that he had obtained a tainted nirvana. That enlightenment was his for a time.

If he had always needed the hunt, he had also needed the chase.

The feeling of thrill that came from taking down his prey, his kill. This was what life had been like! What it had evolved to be! The strange lives they lived in the stars beyond the veil were pale in imitation to the real thing. He was free!

For the first time in his entire life, Xios was experiencing true control. He had become the king of this world and it bowed before him.

His massive limbs crushed the undergrowth, his powerful jaws crunched through bone, carapace, and tendons, all while his skin felt the lightest grace of the wind- despite being stronger than armor. Being alive in such a way was ecstasy, and his life before this was just a long stretch of dark and repressed memories.

One by one he had found survivors that first night of their arrival, and one by one he had taken their weak and pathetic bodies between his teeth. The way even the strongest of them were nothing in comparison to him now... it gave him a true thrill. The desperate struggle of a dying Rullah between his jaws had given Xios more satisfaction than anything he had first imagined.

His host had not been taken immediately. Only slowly did he consume the monster, while leaving himself in it's place. Xios was a network of long nerves and tendrils now, and his consciousness spanned every unit of it, stretching out far into the body, in which his new form did abide. Still, something was lacking.

The behemoth was impressive. A massive predator from an untamed world: it was powerful, surely. Yet, it had not been even remotely intelligent. From what he now understood, the creature's most impressive thoughts had been on what it wanted to eat, and that the light was fading. That knowledge was quickly being consumed from the inside, as it struggled.

Xios was actually impressed by that. It had tried to fight him in the end, clawing at the base of it's own skull, not giving in until the least bits of it's outer cerebrum were consumed, and it was no longer capable of fighting in any true way...

Oh, how it had struggled, as Xios devoured it.

What a thrill.

As the wind shifted, a foreign scent carried with it. Of metal and unfamiliar flesh, not born from this world. His hunt continued, although for what ends he had not quite decided.

Perhaps he should find a way to leave this planet for another, but in the current state of things, he doubted there would be many opportunities presenting themselves. Of all the pods that had landed, only one survivor had walked away alive, and that was more due to Xios's own carelessness than skill. Distractions were everywhere, and in his excitable state, he was hard pressed to keep to the task at hand.

The tracking of the lone survivor, though, had taken surprisingly long. Xios rationally blamed his unfamiliarity with the new senses he possessed, as they were far better at perceiving the realities around him than his previous synthetic bodies. It was almost as though he could chase any observation down another level, and then another beyond that. So many smells, shapes, and signals perceived just came in a never ending rush, and he was hard-pressed to focus on any one of them in particular.

That hadn't mattered much for anything else on this planet though, and it was only this one that seemed to give him trouble. As Xios followed, he found a trail of dead and dying predators, all of which had been impaled or slashed in some matter. None of these creatures had his prey with them either. In a world where the natural creatures seemed to be stronger than anything he had ever witnessed in the Union, the lone survivor was doing quite well. That made the hunt more of a thrill, though.

Perhaps, just perhaps, Xios had found a more interesting host.

Still, it had become obvious where the lone warrior was heading. All Xios had to do was notice any of the long metal cords that were scattered about, block whole swathes of jungle. Those all lead to one place, and that was likely a giant pile of scrap and ruin. His prey would find little salvation there.

As tempting as it was for Xios to bound ahead, though: he resisted. There may have been some factor he'd missed, and if he left the trail, the survivor might slip away for good and be consumed by something else on the planet's surface.

He had ultimately decided then, that unlike the others, this unlucky soul was not meat for the sake of meat, or prey for the sake of prey. This was a new host, waiting to be plucked. This was to become his own.

As Xios broke from the cover on the top of the hillside, his eyes peered down into the valley below. A massive network of cables stretched out like a web in all directions, and in the distance they met at a metallic structure.

It seemed that despite the odds, the ground tethering base had survived.

As his eyes strained into the distance, through the humid air that circled above the terrain, Xios found himself making out several moving shapes along the walls. Survivors. It seemed there would be more options than originally anticipated. Yet another challenge had presented itself.

Teeth glinted in the dull light of the surface as Xios felt the thrill return. Yes, this was the life he had been waiting for.

[Ground Base]

2nd division Engineer Hico shifted her limbs anxiously as she paced the walkway along the walled battlement of the station. For thick metal sheets, so massive that 8 of her standing on top of one another would not reach their limits, it seemed that the walls were doing them little good. Her many eyes remained glued on the treeline as her shell collected the faint, humid heat that reached through the cloud cover. Her claws clutched on a bolt rifle.

It was made of pale alloy, and weighed far more than it's energy weapon counterparts that had been stored in the armory. With a long, dense, barrel, the weapon was so heavy it actually pained Hico to lift it, and even more so to carefully hold it while she aimed. None of that mattered though, because it was the only thing that seemed to be doing them any good.

She needed the firepower.

Bolt Rifles were the only true infantry style projectile weaponry left in the Union, and they were banned for anything but military use. Completely outlawed for all but the highest-rank civilians. So much so, that even their designs were held under heavy restriction, and their only manufacturers operated under level 5 security clearance. Most of those in Union Service would only witness the things in person on rare occasions- and that was during training. Typically, as a simple mounted weapon, during a live firing drill on basic targets.

This wasn't training, though.

To make matters worse, Hico wasn't even in the active combat section of the Union military. No, she just happened to be one of the only survivors left that was physically strong enough to lift and fire the weapon, and she had done so now far more than she had ever expected to need to. Ever since the elevator and associated station came down, the world they were on had proven, several times over now, to be death incarnated to planetary form.

Movement along the treeline drew her attention as she brought the weapon up to face it. Slowly she shifted her limbs to lay torso prone along the flat walkway of the security wall. The holoscope began to magnify as she sighted in the target, and waited. If the creatures were going to start coming in the daylight... she hoped whatever this was, it was a fluke.

The foliage broke and she inched her claw closer to the trigger, before leaning back and clicking her mandibles in shock. Perhaps there was hope after all.

…

When the survivor had stumbled into sight from the tree line, they had been on the brink of giving up hope. Twenty three escape pods had been counted breaking the atmosphere after the massive incident along the 33rd line, but after three days on the surface there had not been a single survivor to make it to the base.

For all the life this planet possessed: it was all death to them.

Those currently abiding by the safety of the thick tall walls of the ground structure had truly only made it out alive by circumstance. Hanging on the good fortune of being on their way down the space elevator when the shock-waves landed, the emergency drop had activated. As the platform above began to creak and groan in stress, the elevator's tethers had just passed through the final contained section and was well within the planets habitable atmosphere.

When the entire structure above them collapsed, they had been on the ground, under it in fact, crowded in the lowest bay of the ground facility they could reach. It was there the survivors had stayed until they could no longer feel impacts. Coming back up, they had found that the ground station had made it out relatively unscathed. Certainly there was some major damage to it in some places, where coils of elevator happened to backlash. Many systems were ruined beyond repair- but the core of the structure and most of it's automation had survived.

What had not survived was the defensive systems. Their first few days on the planet had been spent in blissful ignorance of the fact. The true awareness of their situation had come from the creatures that began hunting their facility grounds at night.

From the earliest days of colonization and planet taking during the initial expansion, the Union had all of it's planet side outposts equipped with weapons. Automated plasma turrets, and even small-scale bolt turrets. These would guard the facilities from threats, and repel any attempt of indigenous life tht was deemed hostile. So far, in the background and mundane, the surviving crew hadn't even thought to check. Now, of the twenty that had survived the trip down from the orbital platform, only eleven remained.

Certainly this planet was death, but as Hico watched the soldier stagger from the jungle, towards the relative safety of the walls, she felt they might get out of this yet.