Apocalypse System Reborn Of The Shadow King

Chapter 4: The Thing Below

It came up through the floor like a nightmare surfacing from sleep.

First came the claws. A hooked black blade, longer than a man, curled over the edge of the crack and dug into the stone with a sound like a knife dragged across glass. Then another. Then a third. Then the rest of it hauled itself upward in one smooth, terrible motion, and the cavern, which had seemed so vast a moment ago, suddenly felt small.

It was taller than the cavern was wide, so it had to fold itself beneath the ceiling, and when it unfolded, Kael forgot how to breathe.

Its body was a shell of overlapping black plates, glossy as wet tar, laced with seams of glowing red that pulsed slowly like a heartbeat. It had too many arms, six, perhaps eight, each ending in a curved blade as long as a spear. Its legs bent the wrong way. Its spine rose in a ridge of jagged bone. And where its face should have been, there was only a smooth white mask with a single vertical slit running from brow to jaw, and from within that slit, something *looked* at them.

The temperature in the cavern dropped. Kael saw his own breath curl in the air.

"That's not a C-rank," Tobin said, in the small voice of a man stating the obvious to no one.

"That's not *any* rank," Hale whispered.

For one suspended instant, nobody moved. The monster stood in the center of the cavern, its blank face turning slowly, taking them in one at a time. It did not roar. It did not charge. It simply *looked*, with a patience that was somehow worse than hunger.

Then Hale broke the silence.

"Positions!" he roared, and flame exploded from both his hands, a wall of fire that lit the whole cavern orange and sent the crystal shadows leaping. "Tobin, front! Mira, behind him, keep your shield up! Elara, find me a weakness, *now*! Veyron, with me!"

The fire struck the monster full in the chest. The creature did not flinch. It stepped through the flames the way a man steps through rain, and where the fire touched its plating, the red seams only glowed brighter, as though it were being fed.

Tobin planted his feet and braced. His skin hardened from his neck to his fists into dull gray stone, and he drew a breath and bellowed, a roar of pure defiance that rang off the crystal walls. The first blade came down.

It struck his forearm with a crack like a falling tree.

Tobin screamed. He did not move. He had never moved. In all the years Kael had known him, Tobin had never once given up a single step of ground. The second blade slammed into his shoulder, and the stone skin shuddered. The third swept in from the side, and Kael saw a long white crack run up the length of Tobin's arm like lightning across a window.

"Hold, Tobin!" Mira cried. Her hands blazed white, and a pale shield of light flared over the big man's body, flickering at the edges. "I've got you! I've got you!"

"Elara!" Hale shouted.

"I'm trying!" Her hands were pressed to her temples, and blood ran from her nose in a bright thin line. "It's too dense! I can't read it! There's nothing, it's like trying to see through a wall..."

Kael had both hands out already. He did not remember lifting them. Shadows poured from his palms, thin black threads that lashed across the cavern and looped around the monster's nearest leg, and he *pulled*, with everything he had.

It was like trying to hold back a landslide with string.

He felt the pressure bloom behind his eyes. Three seconds. Five. The monster's leg barely trembled. Eight seconds, and his vision began to gray at the edges. Ten.

The monster turned its blank white face toward him.

For one heartbeat, the red seams in its body brightened, flaring from dull ember to molten gold. And Kael felt it, deep in the marrow of his bones: a cold, impossible certainty that this thing had looked at him and *known*. Not known his name. Not known his rank. Known what he *was*, in a way that he did not know himself.

It was as though a door had opened somewhere inside him that he had never known existed.

Then one arm lashed out, and the threads snapped like cobweb, and the backlash threw Kael across the cavern. He struck the wall hard enough to white out his vision.

---

When the world came back, it came in pieces.

The smell of smoke. A ringing in his ears, high and thin. Mira screaming Tobin's name. A wet, heavy thud, and the crack of stone shattering, and Tobin's armor-skin falling away in gray chunks as he crashed to the ground and did not get up. His chest was still rising, but only barely, and a dark pool was spreading beneath him. Mira threw herself across his body, her hands blazing with white light, shielding him with her own.

"Stay with me," she was sobbing. "Stay with me, stay with me, don't you dare..."

Kael tried to stand. His ribs screamed, and something warm ran down the side of his face. He got one knee under him, then the other, and he pressed his back against the crystal wall and forced his eyes to focus.

Hale fought on alone.

The captain had thrown aside every rule he had ever taught them. His left arm was blackened to the elbow, burned by his own flames, and his right hand was raw and trembling. Fire poured from him in a ragged, desperate torrent, and he moved with the terrible calm of a man who had stopped counting his chances. He ducked one blade and rolled beneath another, and when the monster's third arm caught him across the ribs, he spat blood and kept going.

"Veyron!" he gasped, without turning. "Find the way out! *Find it!*"

*There is no way out,* Kael thought wildly. *The gate is gone.*

But as his eyes cleared, he saw it.

The monster's blades had gouged the far wall in its fury, and where the stone had cracked, a thin ribbon of violet light was bleeding through. It was faint and flickering, like a dying candle, but it was *there*, a seam in the sealed rock, narrowing and widening in time with the monster's heartbeat. The gate had not vanished. It had only been *closed*. And closed things, Kael realized, could be forced open.

"Captain!" His voice cracked. "The wall! There's light behind the wall!"

Hale's eyes flicked to the seam. For half a second, hope crossed his face. Then the monster's tail whipped across the cavern, and he threw himself flat to avoid it, and the moment was gone.

Kael turned back toward the others, and his blood turned to ice.

Elara had stepped in front of Mira and Tobin.

She had no weapon in her hands. She had no power that could stop what was coming. She was only standing there, her arms spread, her red-streaked face lifted to the monster that towered over her, the way she had stood between Kael and the whole indifferent world since they were eight years old.

"Elara!" His voice came out as a rasp. "Get back! *Elara!*"

The monster raised one blade.

She did not run. She looked back, just once, over her shoulder, and her eyes found his across the burning dark. She was trembling. She was terrified. And she was smiling, a small, crooked, impossible smile, the same one she had given him in the briefing room when she wanted him to know that it would be all right.

*Stay close behind me,* her eyes said. *You promised.*

Then the tail struck her from the side.

Kael never saw it. A whip of black chitin, faster than thought, and Elara was in the air, flung across the cavern like a doll, and she hit the crystal wall with a sound that he would hear in his nightmares for the rest of his life.

She slid to the floor.

She did not move.

Something inside Kael went completely, terribly quiet.

---

He did not remember crossing the stone. He did not remember the pain in his ribs, or the heat of the fire, or Hale shouting his name. He remembered only Elara's hand lying open on the ground, palm up, her fingers curled slightly, the scratch on her knuckle still bright against her skin.

He fell to his knees beside her.

"Elara," he whispered. His hands hovered over her, afraid to touch, afraid not to. Blood matted her hair at the temple, dark against the auburn. Her eyes were closed. Her face was very pale. "Elara. Hey. Look at me."

He pressed two shaking fingers to her throat.

A pulse. Faint. Thready. But there.

A sound escaped him, half sob, half laugh. "Okay," he breathed. "Okay. Okay. You're okay. Stay with me."

Boots scraped the stone. Hale staggered to his side, dragging one useless arm, his face gray, blood running freely from a gash above his eye. He looked down at Elara. He looked at Mira bent over Tobin, at the monster turning slowly back toward them, at the thin violet seam bleeding light into the dark, and Kael watched him make a calculation that no commander should ever have to make.

"I have one blast left," Hale said hoarsely. "One. If I use it on the wall, I can open the gate. But I can't fight, and I can't carry all three of them at once."

"You don't have to."

Hale stared at him.

"The seam," Kael said. His voice was steadier than he felt. "You open it. You carry Elara. Mira drags Tobin. And I hold the monster."

"Veyron." Hale's voice was low, and something in it was almost pleading. "You have twelve seconds. You've never held anything *half* that strong."

"Then I'll hold it longer."

"That's not how it works, and you know it."

"I know." He looked down at Elara's face, so still, so pale, and a strange calm settled over him, the calm of a decision already made. "I know it's not. But I'm the only one who can. You're burned, Tobin's down, Mira can't leave him. If somebody doesn't stop it, none of us gets out."

"Kael..."

It was the first time Hale had ever said his first name.

"Please, Captain." Kael smiled, and it was a crooked, trembling thing. "I've been following your orders for two years. Let me give one."

The silence stretched between them. Behind them, the monster's blades scraped slowly across the stone, in no hurry at all. The red seams in its body pulsed, steady and patient. It had all the time in the world.

Hale looked at Kael for a long, terrible moment, at the blood on his face, at the hand he kept pressed against Elara's wrist as if the pulse might leave if he let go. And Kael saw something break behind the captain's eyes, something that had been holding for twenty years.

Then Hale bowed his head, just slightly, like a man receiving a verdict.

"Forgive me," he whispered.

He gathered Elara into his good arm.