Kate rolled in the barrel and steadied the aim.

The smell of gunpowder was refreshing, but the acute vision she’s been getting the past few days had yet to recede. At times, her head hurt and she felt like puking, yet she didn’t eat or drink anything in the last twenty-four hours - it was pure bile. Kate ignored the unpleasant sensation and focused on the task at hand.

-Tsk – she discharged the bullets in a hurry, quickly reloading and nudging her eyes in the middle of the action. It was strange, there was no satisfaction, pull the trigger and that was it, the thing would die, the next would come, rinse and repeat.

Through the corner of her eye Kate saw her father’s shadow, directly behind. Feeling like eyes grew on the back of her head, her vision almost covered the whole perimeter, though sometimes blurry.

Ignoring those changes, her effectiveness in battle was not any short of Milen’s. She had the means and the intent to annihilate those pests, and she wasn’t one bit afraid of death. What she was afraid of was the sense of losing herself. The person she struggled all her life to accept, was it a farce? Was she wrong about her feelings? Her symptoms felt like a punishment, and a phrase constantly spoken by her mother came to mind – to the wicked, retribution.

Kate didn’t know what to believe in anymore, and as the lines that separated dream and reality blurred, she felt the weight of her existence pull her down.

“... Who am I, again?”

“...”

“...”

“...”

“... Maybe I am no one after all”

Eyes cast down, Kate wiped out the warrior ants, but she wasn’t invincible. The bullets were limited, the need to reload and reposition made her unable to dive in. Nathan couldn’t help it either, he lacked both firepower and manpower – there were too many, too strong.

“... What is this?”

Kate felt something in her head, and it told her the movements of a fast-approaching ant. A Royal Guard, the first one she would face. She couldn’t give a damn about it. The bullets contained the white substance made of the crystal’s ether, enough to pierce through their hides and prevent regeneration. In the absence of Natalya, she alone represented the highest offensive power on their side.

“It’s going to move forward, step sideways and lunge... There will be an opening if I hurry a few steps forward”

She absent-mindedly paced through the chaos and readied her gun in preparation for the counter, but her thoughts and feelings were in contradiction. There was a new “command” given to the Royal Guard, and it would now retreat.

What should be a bloody battlefield felt like a game of chess, and she never once doubted why she could read into their movements. She knew where to be and what to do, and on her side, an obvious advantage: no one in need of protection. Once she cornered the King, the other pieces would be forced to step up to defend it, and she struck without hesitation.

It was the first time a Royal Guard had been injured and, incidentally, it was the first one to die. Kate’s bullet embedded not into its humanoid head, but right below its abdomen into the ant counterpart, traveling through its organs and stopping in the digestive tract, where the acid spread and it collapsed shortly after.

On the backline, Nathan analyzed those motions and concluded that the human counterparts were mere appendices of their body, but it was also true that some important organs lied there, as he observed from Milen’s side. Unlike Seven, he didn’t know anything about ant biology, but his exposition to the absurd gave him a plausible explanation.

“They have decentralized systems. Multifunctional organs and the loss of one or another is not important, each capable of mitigating the damage and rebuild”

Nathan grabbed the handle of a door and pushed it.

-...

“It’s been less than an hour, and things are like this...”

As the door toppled over, it revealed a den of workers looking through the restaurant and breaking apart every utensil meant for human use. The wooden tables and broken glasses were particularly noticeable, to lesser degree cans of soda and leaking plastic bottles, frozen food with melting ice, fresh vegetables and first-grade meat. The ants completely ignored him and went about their business.

Nathan walked away and observed the fire at the distance, the workers tore apart the buildings and piled the materials at the center. Some of them were killed by Milen in a split second, others were dealt with by Kate and his team, but their actions were a drop in the ocean in the great scheme of things. He saw some ants heading towards the cave that led to the research lab and undoubtedly looking through the entrances.

“We had our fun, time to leave”

Nathan sent a signal to his teammates and headed to the cave. There was little they could hope to achieve in that situation, now an escape route was needed and the only safe place was the research lab.

“Hmm?”

Nathan squinted his eyes and used the binoculars north from his position.

“That’s where Milen and Seven are stationed”

The surrounding ants left their assignments and headed that direction. Even the workers, who would ignore them even if they walked past and had every mean to kill the prey, joined in.

At that moment, Nathan thought he saw a brief black ray cutting the horizon in two, followed by continuous explosions.

“What the hell is going on there?”

***

In this world, there is love and hatred, life and death, light... And darkness. While they cower and fear the curse, afraid of words blasphemous to their beliefs, only the Naiyid knows true fear, true pain, and what darkness entails. Even as our throats get hoarse and our tongues bleed, our chants will reach the Gods, and they will hear our plea. Once your life has been burnt away and your soul condemned to Ashaiya you will discover true darkness - embrace it, conquer it, for the greatest sacrifice conjures the greatest power.

As the great shaman’s wisdom sang on her ears, sweat ran down Milen’s forehead - she creased her brows as the pain of the mark invaded her through the field spell. Each word pronounced added to the bone chewing pain, blood flowing from her lips as the chants sealed away long ago flew, agonized spirits towards the ceiling.

“Ghost Step”

A dark arrow crept its way up, a pillar of suppressed energy sending thundering bolts to the surrounding area. It did not inflict any lasting damage to even the unassuming workers looking through the debris of scattered buildings. However, once the purplish hue hit them, the strangest things would happen. Some floated in the air, others stood petrified and paralyzed, the most common occurrence being dismemberment, which kept their parts functioning in an absurd display of tenacity – blood gushing out and disappearing in the span of a second as each member twisted and mingled upon the other, ending in a jumbled creature that in nothing resembled the original.

Milen stepped upon the arrow and was immediately rushed to the ceiling, sparks of dark energy latching onto her feet and clinging to her skin, tentacles of impurity that fed the curse. She knew that she couldn’t stay in the lost ground for too long, lest the darkness consumed her.

“Ghost force!”

Storming out of her flesh, physical chains materialized from Milen’s wrists and the palms of her hands, blood running through the mysterious metal as they stretched to cover the limited skies. The shock robbed the woman of consciousness as the chains collectively rained on the floor, most of which disappeared, unable to continue existing through the lack of the caster’s power. What would have erased everything in the immediate vicinities turned out to be as fickle as a spark.

As the effects from the lost ground wore off, Seven had to worry both about the imminent fall and the black miasma that looked to devour Milen’s body. Much like the first time he did it, the curse bypassed that which should be another realm into a completely material existence.

A chain of explosions took place in the area. Chunks of earth, living parts, and brownish blood flew along with glass shrapnel and debris, hitting Milen and scraping flesh off of Seven’s shoulders. The dark matter absorbed all the damage, but there was no time to ponder about Milen’s safety as his own life was at stake.

“Arthur managed to set the traps deep into the subterranean... But this timing is really bad, they should have waited for orders...”

Though severe damage was inflicted, they would most likely be casualties.

“Milen is not waking up through this. I hope the butterfly works this time...”

He had been frantically absorbing Milen’s curse and trying to convert it into useful weapons during the battle, but it rarely worked and, when it did, the effects would be unpredictable and often of little use. Unknown to Seven, the effects of the butterfly and their rate of success were directly proportional to the power of the “captured” butterfly. Had he paid more attention to studying the cryptic texts, it wouldn't have passed unnoticed.

Milen would understand, however, through the Naiyids teachings, that the choice that led to the most pain would also grant the most rewards, and as the black marks penetrated Seven’s body, seeping into his bloodstream, for the first time the butterfly worked exactly as he intended, teleporting the two to the research lab. Had he known of this mechanic, he would’ve reversed time to a point all of this could’ve been salvageable.

A sharp sting on his heart, Seven felt like needles had been forcefully wedged into his body and all incentive to speak was annihilated as the pain paralyzed him to the spot. The snake that had been hibernating for the past few hours grew large enough to encompass his whole body, it stretched and enveloped his belly all the way through his chest, head slithering past the heart. Like an anaconda, it motioned to smother and break his bones, and he could distinctly feel them giving under the pressure.

-...Cough*

His throat itched so much he wanted to carve it with a knife and deal with the problem on sheer brutality, as willpower wasn’t enough to deal with it. Tears formed in his eyes. It was suffocating.

“I knew that we had no chance to win this... But I didn’t think I would be fucked up so hard, hehehe...”

If he managed to stay alive, he wouldn’t be able to do anything for the remainder of his life.

A death sentence.

***

Kyel ended his stay at the healthcare center. He didn’t remember how many tickets he needed to use, but at this point they were a dead currency either way.

-What are we going to do?

-Nothing at all~ - Kyel said – oh, but there is something to be done! Support from the sidelines!

-…?

-Ugh, here are some tickets, buy me ice cream.

-But what about-

-Chop. CHOP!

The facilities were roughly the same around the research stations, with their own touch. HOPE had more advanced biology labs, for instance. WHISPER, a more complete array of information in the Control Room. RAIN, on the other hand, focused on production, and thus on materials engineering, which was not the task at hand.

Kyel easily hacked into the Control Room and through there got access to the area’s secrets, it did not take long for him to notice the strange shapes moving in the dark through the camera lens, outside the gate and roaming through the deserted base. Some of them were hiding in nearby buildings, and it was very lucky for him not to encounter any when he was again unconscious in the healthcare center. The same couldn’t be said about his late companion.

“Another peon is lost, rip”

A message popped up in the hologram. Strange, because no such messages were ever issued to him before when operating this room.

||Shared File 150699 has been modified. Latest version: Today, 17:17:08||

-Huuuuuuh?

Kyel knew this thing. It was an archive shared between all computers in the Advanced Programming Lab throughout all the stations. He originally thought it was Ai’s program, but messing with it didn’t seem to do anything. Once, he changed the lines to try and deactivate it, have her actively help them or change its personality – he went as far as to create an algorithm that would predict her measures upon a specific course of action. Alas, it seemed to be an Ai without a program to run into, strange even for an unknown coding platform.

Accessing the PC through the Control Room, he looked into the latest changes.

-Backup data insertion, administration rights on, minor personality adjustments, backstory mode off... Hmm... HMM! I can also play this game!

Kyel skimmed through the lines and found the one he was looking for. With a dramatic press of a button, he stood triumphantly though there was no one to see his goofy pose.

-Chaos mode, on!