The first thing they noticed was the overwhelming stench of death. It wasn't the fresh, metallic scent one might encounter on a battlefield strewn with recent casualties ,it was an ancient, dense aroma, as if the very essence of decay had seeped into the earth and fermented unnoticed for centuries. This malodorous presence seeped insidiously through the cracks of the shattered ancient world temple, like a festering wound long ignored, finally breaking through the surface in a slow, agonizing revelation.
Ava Riven stood poised at the edge of the breach, her steel-grey eyes scanning the desolate horizon, each breath filtered through the hiss of her gas mask. The carbon fibers of the mask almost seemed to bite at her skin, a constant reminder of the toxic air around her. The rifle she held was a masterpiece of carbon-forged engineering, its sleek form fitting seamlessly into her grip, feeling more like an extension of her own body than a separate weapon. Black fog surged and roiled across the devastated ground, thick and viscous like oil, twisting ominously around the decaying remnants of a world that once pulsed with life. This suffocating shroud choked the half-dead landscape, engulfing anything that dared linger beneath its oppressive cover.
Behind her, the rest of the squad crouched low, clad in tactical suits that clung to their forms with an almost predatory grace. The visors of their helmets glowed faintly, casting a menacing ultraviolet hue in the encroaching darkness. Even with their enhanced optics, the world around them appeared fractured and surreal, shapes flickering like shadows caught in a flickering candlelight. The architecture surrounding them was a grotesque parody of humanity's once-grand ambitions, structures that shifted and writhed as if imbued with a malevolent life of their own, dripping with impossible geometries that defied the natural laws of physics.
"Readings?" Ava asked, her voice sharp and clipped, resonating with a synthetic reverb as it curled behind the mask's edges. She strained to hear over the persistent low hum of the enveloping darkness.
"Hostile environment confirmed. Bio-signatures: unstable. Air quality's down to 4%. Recommend retreat," the squad's obsidian-armored tech specialist responded, his voice vibrating with a hint of urgency.
But retreat wasn't an option. Not when her sister was trapped somewhere within, swallowed by the cursed remnants of whatever malevolence had taken root in this forsaken place. A fierce determination ignited within Ava, a burning resolve that flared brighter than the surrounding desolation. She adjusted her grip on the rifle allowing the neural pathways in her gauntlet to sync deeper with the feedback pulsing through her advanced nanotech armor. Her vision sharpened, the world around her snapping into razor-sharp focus. Her HUD flared to life, red markers mapping the treacherous cracks in the old foundation with each heat signature sending a warning shot across her consciousness, all converging ominously around a central chamber buried deep within the ruins.
Suddenly, there was a foreboding shift. Silhouettes appeared within the oppressive darkness, unnaturally tall and slender, disturbingly alien. Though not human, their forms eerily hinted at something recognizable, evoking a haunting sense of secrets that should remain hidden. Ava's heart raced as a wave of anxiety washed over her. At the periphery of her sight, something glimmered- a faint gold flicker, a dimly glowing chain of light fighting against the decay that had overtaken this place.
In that instant, amidst the choking fog and oppressive silence, it reached her; the haunting cadence of chanting. A rhythmic incantation reverberated through the air like the relentless beat of a dark heart.
"Kha'tor… Ur'Dath… Selem Var…"
The syllables twisted and entwined, each word a thread in the night's sinister tapestry, vibrating with ancient, forbidden energy. It beckoned her, a siren's call clawing at her mind, promising knowledge and power while whispering of danger and despair. Ava swallowed hard, instincts screaming to retreat, yet her sister's face flashed in her mind, eyes wide with terror. The urgency to save her clashed with the fear of what lay ahead, leaving Ava teetering on the edge of indecision.
"Let's move," she commanded, her voice slicing through the encroaching dread with fierce determination, though doubt lingered beneath her resolve. The squad rallied forming a tight formation behind her as they plunged boldly into the unknown each step a fusion of fear and resolve but pressing deeper into the heart of the darkness.
"The seal is breaking," Ava declared softly, her voice steady but her heart wavering over the static of her comm. "Inform Command that the temporal field is about to rupture."
A tense silence followed.
"Ma'am… what happens if they wake?"The squad captain stammered putting all their trust in this half-crazed almost unidentifiable human.
Ava smiled beneath her mask, her teeth glinting like a jagged shard of a broken promise.
"Not under my watch."
Her polarized lenses mirrored faint glimmers of the ultraviolet storm raging overhead, an electric tempest painting the sky in violent shades. "…or else we'll be completely doomed!"
Without warning, the atmosphere darkened as fog rushed at them, as if welcoming these outsiders.Lightning didn't just split the sky but it tore the world's stitching. The heavens were an open wound, ultraviolet lightning peeling the fabric of reality into ribbons of bleeding light. The clouds twisted like skin peeled from a corpse, revealing a raw, electric underlayer of something that wasn't supposed to be seen.
The fog crawled now, slow, predatory, intimate. It moved like an executioner's hand running down the back of a prisoner's neck, savoring the moment before the axe.
Shapes staggered out of that creeping oblivion, broken marionettes dancing on invisible strings, their joints bending inside out. Arms snapped backward, femurs twisted sideways, and kneecaps were on the wrong side of the legs. Each twitch was a wet crunch, every motion a violation of anatomy.
Crystalline armor reflected the UV storm in fractal distortions - sick halos, shimmering like infected jewels. And beneath those plates were bodies: flayed, stretched, meat growing into armor, fused with crystalline tumors like living sculptures of agony, every movement accompanied by the faint wet slither of tendons catching on broken shards of glass.
Then the butchery began. Not from the witches but from the men who thought they were soldiers.
The first guard didn't scream because his lungs were the first thing to go. Something stabbed through his open mouth, crystalline limbs ramming downward until his ribcage burst outward like a cracked lobster shell.
His spinal cord was pulled out, not sliced but dragged through the ruin of his chest cavity, nerves still twitching, trailing like obscene puppet strings. His arms twitched reflexively, fingers curling into bloody claws as if trying to grasp life while his skeleton was unzipped from the inside.
The blood didn't spatter. It flowed upward, thick violet tendrils spiraling in perfect spirals, obeying laws that didn't belong to this reality. Every droplet gleamed like liquid amethyst, catching in the lightning strobes like royal jewels spun in gore.
The second guard was taken in pieces. One leg first, torn at the thigh, femur exposed like a chewed bone. Then an arm, ripped out of the socket with such force that the tendons came out with wet, stringy pops, slapping against the crystalline attacker's limbs like decorative entrails.
He tried to crawl. Tried.
One of them reached forward and peeled his face off. Not with claws. With fingers.
It grasped under the cheekbone and pulled, skin separating like warm dough from bone, leaving his face a red, weeping, screaming skull. His teeth chattered, his tongue flailing in shredded muscle as the exposed eye rolled, seeking help that didn't exist anymore.
By the third, there was no sense of order. One of the abominations vomited a stream of glittering crystalline needles, not a few but thousands of them, embedding into armor, into their exposed skin and punching through cheeks, lips and eyelids. One poor bastard had his eyes burst as the needles found their mark, thick streams of vitreous gel pouring down his cheeks; mixing with teeth fragments and splinters of helmet.
Ava's smile faltered beneath her mask. For the first time in years, doubt crept in like rot beneath armor. This wasn't a war. This was wrong.
I should've refused this contract.
The thought hit her like a knife across the mind, her combat HUD glitching as panic signals spiked through neural implants. Even I wasn't briefed on this.
Around her, the squad tried to hold.
"Circle up!" Captain Rorik barked, voice hoarse with rising panic. "FORM CIRCLE ALPHA!NOW! DEFENSE SIGILS! WEAPONS HOT! I WANT EVERYTHING GLOWING OR I'LL RIP YOUR GODDAMN SPINES OUT MYSELF!"
They moved like trained soldiers, snapping into formation, shoulder to shoulder, weapons crackling as mysterious ancient tech interfaced with modern machinery. Glyphs shimmered across barrels, low chants vibrating through their helmets as the circuits interwove with forgotten languages,war-spells wrapped around plasma cores, holy inscriptions on molecular blades.
They looked powerful.
They should have been powerful.
And yet… in that sick ultraviolet storm, they looked like children in plastic armor playing war.
The fog didn't rush them but it stalked. Slow. Deliberate. Mocking.
Shapes lunged forward, stuttering movements punctuated by that grotesque sound of glass shattering from inside their own bones. The crystalline horrors twitched violently, like they were being rewound and fast-forwarded at the same time by some sick cosmic hand pressing play/pause like a broken toy.
And then they attacked.
The circle broke in less than three seconds.
One operator was lifted by the jaw. The crystalline appendage drove upward, hooks flaring outward, dragging his entire skull clean off the spinal column like an obscene trophy, nerves dangling, blood pouring in thick ropes as his decapitated body flailed on muscle memory before crashing to the ground.
Another screamed as his chest imploded, machinery and runes sparking uselessly while sharpened limbs ripped into his gut, pulling loops of intestine outward like sausages tossed lazily over crystalline forearms.
"WHAT THE FUCK, AVA?!" Captain Rorik screamed, eyes wide behind cracked visors, veins standing out on his neck. "WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?!"
Ava didn't answer.
Couldn't.
For the first time since she was trained as a black-site operative, she was outclassed. Not by skill. By scale. This wasn't just murder. This was irrelevant.
One of the operators tried to deploy a grav-mine. It detonated mid-air, sending a burst of gravity shock outward but the fog ate the shockwave, bent it, and fed it back, snapping the operator's limbs outward like a puppet being yanked by all four strings simultaneously. His arms and legs separated at the joints with wet cracks, and his scream cut off mid-breath, throat spraying pink froth.
Captain Rorik fired blindly, screaming obscenities. "FUCKING STAND! STAND!STAND, YOU BASTARDS!"
His words ended with a shriek as three crystalline limbs impaled him through the chest, lifting him like a pinned insect, his feet dangling, blood pouring from his boots. His visor shattered, revealing one wide, betrayed eye before a crystalline claw slid delicately into the socket and plucked it free like a grape.
Ava moved. Not because she could win, but because she refused to die like a whimpering child in a collapsing playpen. Her claws sang with ancient disruption code, fractal blades screaming equations in forbidden languages.
One.Two.
Three abominations fell, torn apart in recursive spirals of static and gore — but it wasn't enough.
The squad was gone. Slaughtered.
Armor,blood and limbs all strewn on the ground. Screams echoing on loop like broken recordings.
Ava stood in the eye of the storm, armor glitching, claws dripping with steaming black static. Breaths shallow. Muscles burning. Alone.
The crystalline fog watched her. Patient. Amused.And somewhere inside that storm of mutilation, something laughed.
However, this wasn't the reason she had come.
Not for the grotesque voidspawn, with their twisted forms and hollow eyes.
Not for the bloodbath, the slaughter that painted the ground red.
Not for the piercing, heart-wrenching screams that echoed through the desolate land.
She came for the one who shattered the world.
For Niraya, the harbinger of chaos and destruction.
For the Seal, the ancient artifact that held the balance of realms.
For the cataclysmic war that would turn blazing suns into cold corpses.
Beneath her boots, the ancient floor of the Temple of Shackled Gods quaked and cracked open -chains stirring far below, like serpents awakening from slumber, glowing veins of molten gold coursing into impossible, spiraling geometries that defied logic and reason.
Ava took one deliberate step forward. Alone.
Through the ultraviolet rain that fell like shards of glass from a turbulent sky.Into the apocalypse her sister had foretold, a doomsday tapestry woven with threads of despair and inevitability.
And far, far beneath the earth, something smiled with dark anticipation, a malevolent presence relishing the chaos to come.