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Chapter 4 - Behemoth

Indy’s eyes snapped open as brilliant flares lit up the darkening sky, painting the world around him in shades of crimson and gold. Confusion swirled through his veins like a hard liquor, burning his senses awake. His heart pounded in his chest, each thud shaking his very core. Emergency flares, signaling for immediate R.E.D. support.

“Indy to the Hermit,” he barked into the radio. “What in the crimson hells is going on up there?!”

“Indy!” Shine’s panicked voice crackled over the radio. “What in the crimson fuck are you still doing down there!? Our grave-shift sensors are going wild. We’ve got a Behe,” - static squealed, cutting the rest off with interference.

“Repeat. Shine. Repeat.” Indy demanded, disbelief creeping into his voice. “Did I hear you say Behemoth?”

“A Behemoth-Class Sin-Eater,” she repeated, clipping each word with sarcastic annunciation. “You know, a giant tower-spawned bastard made of unbreakable obsidian, capable of ripping through steel like its paper. Fond of devouring souls. Headed in this exact direction. T-minus ten minutes till contact. Get your ass up here now!”

Indy felt like he was living out some nightmare. A Behemoth-Class Eater at this altitude? It was simply unprecedented.

“Alright,” Indy said, attempting to keep his voice steady. “Everyone, listen to me carefully. Gage, are you on here?”

“Ye…. Yes, Captain,” came the timid reply.

“I need you to go down into the Hangar, find the smallest corner you can fit into, and do not move; your job is essential, okay?”

“To… sit in a corner?”

“Bring ExEm with you; there’s no way it’ll be able to maintain synchronicity with a Sin-Eater on its own. You’ll have to find it, maintain it manually, and broadcast it as wide as possible.”

“I don’t know if ExEm can handle…”

“Maybe not, but you can. Go, now. Trigger every lock you can see on every door and do. Not. Move.”

“Okay. I’m on my way now.”

“Shine.”

“I’m here.”

“Meet me in my bunker, five minutes.”

“Five minutes? How are you -“

“Just be there!” Indy barked, then, like a spider ascending its web, he began scaling the remaining chain that tethered the Hermit to his harness.

Upon reaching the top deck of the Hermit, his gaze fell across the steam-powered winch mechanism near the edge of the top deck. The machine lay dormant, waiting for the drill to return from the depths below. On a whim, he powered up the steam winch, the slow click of the spooling chain confirming the drill’s slow ascent. Then, he opened up a nearby hatch and dropped into the dimly lit room where Shine stood; her arms crossed as her eyes scanned the small space with disdain.

“Never thought I’d be back here again,” she muttered.

“Desperate times,” Indy replied. He moved toward a hidden panel in the wall and yanked it open, revealing a stash of weapons from his days at the military academy. His fingers traced the cold metal of a R.I.G. .50 Magnum Revolver, its weight reassuring in his hand. Next, he lifted a modded Bolt Action Rifle, its weathered, wood-stained paneling a testament to his past life.

“R.I.G. .50 Magnum packs a hell of a punch, but it’s slow to reload and lacks the piercing power required to break the ember.”

Shine watched him, her expression unreadable. Indy knew about her history as a military sniper, and despite the restrictions on her handling firearms, he thrust the rifle into her hands. “You’ll need this,” he said firmly. She hesitated momentarily before taking it, her grip tightening around the weapon.

“You better not bring up that damn court martial document ever again.”

“What document?” Indy said as he rooted about for the most critical piece to the whole puzzle, sighing with relief as his hands closed around a dark box; he opened the case to find six black bullets resting in black foam. Disorientating nausea washed over him like a flood.

“Do you mind?” Shine asked, her pale skin showing shades of sickly green.

“Sorry,” Indy said as he clamped the box shut. “Just…close your eyes.” Indy did the same, re-opening the ammo box once more, loading six bullets into the cylinder by feel, and then shutting the chamber.

“Hold out your hand,” He instructed, and he placed the last bullet in Shine’s hand and closed her fist over it. “You can open your eyes now, but you’ve got a dark-sign slug in your hand; just a heads up.”

“One bullet,” Shine said flatly. “With a bolt-action rifle older than King Joten’s mother, and you’re going to go out there alone to find the ember with what? Five shots with a R.I.G. 50.? That’s your plan?”

“That’s the gist of it, yeah.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Shine snapped. “R.E.D. has been put on alert. We’ve done our part. Protocol mandates we should get as far away from here as possible!”

“And just what? Leave Gage behind?”

“Yes!” she said emphatically. “Leaving Gage behind is protocol. His bloodline is nothing compared to mine, to yours! The gold-blooded Prince, the genetic envy of an entire nation, wasted for a thick-scarred nobody who can barely stand halfway down the well. Neither of us has children to carry our blood inheritance forward if we die; this goes beyond senseless death; it’s generational suicide!”

“I won’t leave him,” Indy said flatly.

“Fine,” she spat, anger flashing in her eyes. “Risk your life for some mid-blood if you want, but you do it alone.” And with that, she turned on her heel and stormed off, taking the rifle and Indy’s sixth bullet along with her.

Indy growled, anger flaring hot in his guts. She was right, too, about all of it. They would be lauded for abandoning Gage to protect their bloodlines and following protocol. He wasn’t angry with her but at himself. Unable to rid himself of the thought of leaving Gage alone, like a lamb, left as bait while he made his getaway.

Indy threw his hat to the floor, hands running through his shock of unkempt hair. The same indecision tore at him while he tossed and turned in his tent during his days at the war-front. He knew what he was supposed to do, what they would want him to do. The problem was that he didn’t understand why.

“Argh!” He shouted as he cocked his fist back and let loose a thundering punch, leaving a sizable dent in the shoddy panel. “Damn it all!”

Then he took his R.I.G. 50, picked up his hat, put it back on his head, gave the brim a twist, and climbed back up to the top deck.

The gold-blooded Prince. Shine had called him his nickname since his first days at the academy.

Indy shrugged it off. If he knew one thing for sure, it was that one of the Eater’s bladed appendages caught him off-guard; he would bleed out in a pool of red just like everyone else, ancestry be damned. 

He had made his decision. Now, all that was left to do was wait.

==========

The Eater loomed at a staggering fifteen feet, its matte black skin absorbing all light like a living void. Its elongated legs tapered into sharp points, and its arms dangled low, nearly scraping the ground as it slowly crossed the fifty-foot track span between itself and The Hermit. At first glance, it might have appeared slow, even clumsy—but Indy knew better than to judge tower spawn based on superficial outward appearances.

There was only one way to gauge the threat level of an Eater without engaging it directly: the Class system. As a requirement for a permit to operate within The Well, the Hermit was outfitted with a R.E.D.-sanctioned, reso-shift detection alarm. The mechanic who installed attempts at explaining its inner workings nearly had Indy’s brain leaking out of his ears. But he understood enough. It was something similar to how Gage’s automaton, ExEm, could detect condensate by honing in on the frequency generated by minuscule vibrations within the crystal itself. It was the same with Eaters, except unlike condensate, their resonant frequency was not static but in constant flux. The higher the variance, the more chaotic and unpredictable the shifts in frequencies became—the higher the danger class. According to Shine, this one was a Behemoth-Class, the seventh deadliest of the ten, and typically requiring a strike team of at least three seasoned R.E.D. veterans to confront.

Indy was a team of one, maybe even a team of .5 if you deducted points for the missing hand,  the wrong type of veteran, with the wrong expertise. He was used to facing enemies made of flesh and bone, not abstract, soul-consuming monstrosities.

A sudden, bone-chilling cold swept over him, freezing his breath as it left his lips, turning it into mist. The frigid air bit at his skin, his teeth clenched, and his stomach knotted with dread. But it wasn’t the cold that made his heart seize—it was the sight of thick tendrils of fog-like mist appearing from around the bend, swirling with an eerie, unnatural speed, more like rushing water than any fog he’d ever seen. The mist coiled around the Eater’s feet, spiraling faster and faster, rising into a cascading vortex with the Eater at its center.

“Smoke and sulfur,” Indy muttered through his frosty breath. “There’s no fucking way…”

Indy’s knowledge of specific R.E.D. protocols for each Danger Class was limited to what he had been forced to memorize as a cadet at Black-Peaks Academy. But even he knew that while ten designated classes existed, there was an unofficial eleventh. A scenario that warranted a full-scale evacuation of The Well and an emergency summons of the King-Regent requesting the immediate deployment of Indy’s father, Zero-Agent Asher Ironsights—the only one capable of confronting such a highly specific threat as this one.

It was a clause written by Asher himself before he left R.E.D., HighWall—and a fifteen-year-old Indy—behind, as he had been the only one who had ever encountered the malevolent sentient entity known as the ‘Sin-Shroud’. 

Indy felt little pride at being able to add himself to the list of first-hand witnesses. As the mist coiled around the Eater, a shape emerged. Just above the Eater’s featureless visage, two dark circles hung above an oblong shape that curved upward like a crescent moon. Then, Indy remembered Asher’s original moniker before the Director-General ‘truantified’ the term for official distribution. 

The Smiling Death.

Danger-Class: Annihilation

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