Brown and Luke walked along the half-buried path towards the mountain summit. They kept conversation to a minimum, both to avoid losing their heat to the frigid air, and also because of the nagging feeling at the back of their mind that Martoff would be able to somehow hear them. And if he heard them talk shit behind his back, they were done for.

A shiver went down Brown’s spine at the sole thought of what Martoff had done to their friend. Friends. That man… he was a monster. He was not okay in the head. And he wondered, Brown wondered every day how a monster of a man like his had managed to get himself appointed as head of this expedition. Maybe it’s because only a crazy person would come all the way up here in search of whatever it was they were looking for. He didn’t know. One thing was for sure, he was going to keep his trap shut. No matter how far away he was from that monster, he would never be far enough in all Fraisburg. He had thought about shooting him, multiple times. And all the time he did, he felt as if the man was aware of his thoughts, and staring at him. Daring him to do it, to see how it would all end. To die in vain.

“Hey!” Luke called him, and he ran towards his crewmate.

He stopped just a few paces away and stared. “What the…”

There was a huge puddle of frozen blood and viscera on the floor. He bent down to examine it, almost against his better judgement and almost puking at the unholy sight. There were pieces of bone, vertebrae, guts, lots of blood. Luckily, he thought, there was no smell due to the cold. Close to the puddle, a few meters away, there was a whole arm in the snow.

“Fuck it. This is it. This is enough.” He muttered.

“Brown. Get your shit together.”

He shook violently, fumbling to reach the radio in his pocket. “No. Nope. This is quite enough.”

He took out the radio. Luke saw him, and tried to stop him. “Are you out of your mind? It’s the fever talking. Trust me. Give me that radio.”

Brown clasped the other man’s shoulders. “Luke! Look at this shit? This ain’t normal. We need to call for backup man. I don’t care if Martoff gets mad or shit. I’m done.”

***

Terry felt the cold metal of the gun’s barrel pushing into his back. Martoff shoved him again, and he recoiled in pain. He whimpered, trying to muffle the sounds so that the man behind him wouldn’t hear his cries. He was a monster in human skin, Terry was sure, with his inhuman mad eyes and burning skin. He kept grunting and shoving, sending the poor Terry deeper and deeper into the ice cave.

All around the ice was a deep blue, crystal clear and unmoving. It felt peaceful, and the embrace of cold was like respite, a landscape that promised his weary soul rest and comfort if he only had the courage to abandon his humanity. Touch the ice, his brain told him, touch it and you will be free. But he dared not touch it, just like he dared not do a single move that could be seen by Martoff as hostile. Looking back on his life, he had always been like this. Appeasing, pacifying. Trying to avoid conflict. The light pulsed and with it the ice.

That’s what led him here, he thought. If only had he been a little bit more assertive, he would still be in Fraisburg, looking upon this mountain with wonder and awe but oblivious as to what was really here. But no, when the expedition was formed and he was chosen, he did nothing to subtract himself from it. He didn’t have the stomach.

The light was stronger now. It pulsed, fascinating him with a rhythm all of its own, and the ice seemed to respond to it. It hummed, like an organ made of glassy tubes, singing the tune of the depths. He found himself humming along, very softly, and the notes filled him with awe and for a moment banished all fear and pain.

There was a man at the end of the tunnel. He couldn’t see him well from this far, but saw that he was not looking at them, but staring into a chasm in the ice. At the bottom of the well there was the light, projecting shadows of green and blue on the ceiling like northern lights. Terry could somehow recognise the silhouette, although he didn’t remember who it was, he was certain that it was a familiar sight. He didn’t get alarmed, but continued walking peacefully, lulled by the lights and sounds. The cold, forgotten. The pain, washed away.

Martoff suddenly shoved Terry aside and aimed his gun. Terry landed on an ice pillar, hugging it. His hands burned, but his face was frozen in a smile and he stared and stared into the frozen water, and inside it he was sure he could see her. His love. He had never had the courage to talk to her, resorting to just watch her life from afar. But he loved her.

He was vaguely aware of a voice coming to him.

“Come with me if you want to live.” The voice said. But he kept staring into the pillar, where the sweet sweet Annie was calling to him. He wanted her, so badly he was willing to give up everything to be with her. He wept.

“Fuck you, then.” The voice went away, and Terry closed his eyes and let the ice take him.

Martoff squinted and saw the man turn around, slowly. It would have been, if Edmund had been here to narrate, a comically slow turn. After a minute or so, however, it clicked.

“That’s where you were. Traitor! You thought you could get it all by yourself didn’t you?” Martoff yelled. “Hey! Look at me!”

Bucky didn’t seem to care about the yelling man. He only stared into the distance, towards the entrance of the cave, as if something of importance was going to happen over there. Martoff felt the air move, maybe it was a current or maybe it was actually someone, but he didn’t dare take his eyes off Eduard even for a moment. He leveled his weapon, and as he looked into the telescopic sights he saw that something about his former crewman was not right. It was too late now, the prize too close to give up. What could one man even do after all, against him?

“Move away from there, fucker, or I shoot you.” He yelled. The cave echoed.

Eduard shrugged at him. He felt his blood boil.

“Son of a—” he felt the rage bubble up inside him, and almost lost control for a moment. He aimed down his gun and fired, aiming at the head.

The bullet flew, but with an inhuman show of reflexes Bucky intercepted it with his metallic arm. He held it between two fingers, and looked at it without much interest before discarding it to the ground with a shrug. His face showed no emotion.

Martoff growled. His head was a mess of hatred, anger and desire. His eyes fixated on the light behind Eduard, his veins bulging and muscles stretching he charged at the man and lunged. As he was in the air, nails grew out of his fingers, fur covered his transforming body and he grew to three times the size he was. He screeched, revealing long and sharp teeth that sent spit flying everywhere.

Bucky stared, unmoving.

Martoff prepared to swipe away at the man, then jump into the chasm. His mind was only one thing: reach the light, kill everything in his way.

He was close. He could taste the sweet scent of human blood dripping from his paws already, the taste of flesh in his mouth as he savored it before going down towards the light, his light, his prize and goal.

But no. He stopped dead, midair, and as he gasped in surprise he realized that his lungs were no longer working and he was struggling for air. He looked down in surprise, feeling the taste of blood in his mouth, what were supposed to be snarls at the sudden intruder in his field of vision only bubbling noises from a throat that was not capable of speech anymore. He fell to the ground, discarded. He died soon after, the last thing he saw as he bled to death on the cold ice of the cave was the two silhouettes of the men responsible for his death. They didn’t even turn to look at him once. He swore revenge on them, there and then, but as his eyes closed for one last time, he knew that it was all in vain.

Edmund wiped the purple ooze from his fist.

“What the heck? Monsters from the Beyond… here?” he turned to Bucky. “Buck, have you ever seen anything like that?”

Bucky shook his head.

Edmund hummed. He looked down into the chasm, where the light was coming from. It was a vertical drop into the heart of the mountain, several hundred meters down, where encased in ice rested the device responsible for the light and the abnormal ice growths of the cave.

“That’s it. The Hume device.”

He stretched his hand, and pulled. There was a faint cracking sound that reverberated from below, and after a few seconds he was holding the device in his hands. The whole cave became pitch black for a moment, until Edmund snapped his fingers and a small light floated above his head. He examined the device in his hand, which then disappeared.

Praetor gave him confirmation that he had received the item. “Nice.”

Bucky didn’t react. Edmund sighed. “What? Underwhelming boss fight? What can I say, this is how the world goes. Epic fights only happen if both combatants happen to be on roughly the same power level. Even a slight disparity and this happens. Let’s get out of here.”

Current Hume production

139.8H/hour -> 189.8H/hour

Pylon upkeep

-20H/hour

Axiom Of Choice upkeep

-79H/hour

Total

40.8H/hour -> 90.8H/hour

Edmund lazily hummed a tune on the way out of the cave. It occurred to him that it was similar to the tune he heard someone hum before, and just as he thought that he stumbled upon the body of the man he tried to help earlier. He was completely encased in ice, dead. Edmund wondered for a moment what was up with him, and why he refused his help. An idea came to mind, and he scanned the man’s brain in search for latent activity. Nothing came up. The man was dead, just as dead as your ordinary corpse, or a rock.

“…okay I guess?”

He left the body there, and moved on.

“I feel like I’m missing out on some backstory here. Whatever, it’s not important. What’s important is… how the fuck did a monster end up in here?”

Bucky stared. “Oh, come on man.” Edmund said, and with a slight tint of annoyance he changed a couple parameters.

“Sir.”

“Better. So, as I was saying…”

“I get what you mean, sir. I don’t know what to say to that.”

“You’ve lived here all your life. Has there ever been something, you know, weird or out of the ordinary happening somewhere?”

Bucky shook his head. “No, sir. Although by your standards it would be considered weird that my world only consists of Fraisburg and a ring of mountains around it. Other than that, however, nothing. No magic, no monsters. Technology works without hitch, and we only discovered strange signs about this mountain six months ago. That’s why the expedition was created.”

“And the monster?”

“He was our mission commander. I can’t say much about him, sir. He was a dick and caused many deaths on the way here, but other than that there was no indication of him not being a human. I just thought he was a big dick, sir.”

Edmund hummed. “Maybe he was killing you all off to get his hands on the Hume device.”

“Maybe, sir. May I ask what the device is?”

“Of course. It’s a part of a larger machine that extracts Hume energy from the Beyond. Would have been a disaster if it fell into a monster’s hands, that’s for sure. Now it’s sitting all snug in the Hume pipeline doing its thing.”

Bucky nodded. “I assume it was never supposed to be here.”

“You have knowledge of the Pylon, right? I should have included that with the nanites.” Bucky nodded. “Then you know that this floor was supposed to just be… a floor. Not a whole fucking realm. Look at the edges,” he pointed. “They’re seamless. This is a whole world, although small, within a Pylon floor. Impressive. And at the center of it was the Hume device. I wonder if I will find more devices on the other floors, hidden away in realms of their own.”

“Do you think Praetor did this?”

Edmund thought about it. “I don’t know man. The AI was pretty much a thoughtless automaton until I revived its higher functions. However, with magic afoot… my idea is that Axiom somehow created all this to protect itself.”

“From the monsters.”

Edmund nodded. “Monsters and magic in general. I’ve seen how aggressive magic is as soon as it detects some Humes. That shit will seek and destroy anything reality-bending related with prejudice. So, the Pylon created these reams to hide the sensitive equipment from the monsters. While those fuckers beyond the portal kept sending the monsters to try and infiltrate the tower.”

“Sir,” Bucky stopped walking and looked all solemn. “Permission to stay behind and exterminate all monsters that might have infiltrated this realm.”

“Alright. But you need to think grander. If I am seeing it right, the lower floors are closer to the portal therefore the lower we go the bigger and more dangerous the realms will get. This was tame and easy, next one could be exponentially harder. What I want you to do is take over this sorry excuse for a place, city and all, and get me a fucking army. Maybe set up a proper industrial base. Ask Praetor for what he needs. Next time I come back we take the army and swarm the next realm with force and numbers.”

“I’ll be on it.”

Edmund nodded. They kept talking about the plan for a while longer, but as they approached the cave exit they began to hear noises coming from outside. There were people talking, dogs barking and what sounded like helicopters.

As they emerged from the cave, Edmund’s suspicions came to be true.

“It’s them!”

A soldier yelled and pointed at them, and another who Bucky recognised to be a former team member turned to stare at him. With a moment’s notice everyone was pointing their guns at the duo.

Edmund sighed. “What a mess. I’ll leave you to clean it up.” He said, and disappeared from existence.

Bucky cracked his knuckles and neck. A smirk appeared on his face.