The towering surge of corrosive bile shimmered with green phosphorescence, casting a sickly sheen across the basalt vault. It gathered, a liquid ridge poised to scour the platform. Oblivion, the traitor had promised. Not if Kassur had a say. He had no barrier, but he held something better: fresh scrap.
“Oi, Commander!” Kassur yelled, gravel catching in his throat. “You think a little acid bath stops a Zinn? We bathe in sewer runoff back in the tiers. Just polishes the chrome!” He clutched his revolvers, twin barrels aimed at the dock floor. His mind raced, pulling at the threads of death lingering everywhere. Dozens of fallen dock-hands, Enforcers, and alien husks littered the metal, casualties of the breach.
[Ereshkigal-Echo: Processing… Host intent: Mass Reanimation. Mana expenditure: Extreme. Risk of systemic overload: High. You absolute lunatic. Initiating…]
Kassur didn't wait for the prompt to finish. He hammered his willpower through the fractured HUD, venting a blue pulse across the deck plating. A ghostly blue aura pulsed from his hands, arcing across the dock. Corpse after corpse spasmed. Limbs twitched, joints popped. Groans echoed, a chorus of fresh damnation. The acid wave began its descent, a slow, inexorable cascade of doom.
“Up, you useless lumps!” Kassur bellowed, adrenaline scorching his throat. “Shield wall! Now!”
The corpses dragged themselves upright like hooked marionettes. Boots scraped rusted iron as they jammed together, forming a jagged barricade of flesh and bone three rows thick, bound by sparking pale thread. They met the initial spray of the acid wave with a sickening sizzle. Green mist erupted, flesh dissolving, bones cracking, but they held. They were dissolving, yes, but *slowly*.
“A meat shield, Zinn?” the commander's voice rasped across the comms, his features twisted in fury atop the behemoth's spinal rig. “This is a drop in the ocean!”
“It’s a thick drop, officer! And it buys seconds!” Kassur shouted back. The acid chewed through his makeshift redoubt, hissed into gray vapor, and pooled among melted rib cages, sparing the platform's load-bearing trusses.
Zadira was already kneeling into recoil. Her rifle snapped, spitting a crimson tracer through the chemical smoke. A fleshy node beside the commander's elbow—a neural tether anchoring him into the carapace—burst into milky bile. The officer shrieked, losing purchase on the controls. The sea beast listed sideways, its acid spew sputtering out.
“Nice shot, Kosh!” Kassur yelled, reloading with practiced ease. “Keep him busy!”
“I’m always busy, scrap-rat,” Zadira muttered, cycling the bolt with dry mechanical speed. Her next round severed a second tendril rooted behind the commander's ear. His head jerked, a howl ripping from his throat. The behemoth thrashed against the stone retaining wall, flaking rust from the piers.
Ignoring the phantom burn in his own nerves as the front rank dissolved, Kassur looked past the foam into the black brine. Drowned dock workers and bloated scavengers drifted among the pylons. He cast his tether downward.
[Ereshkigal-Echo: Drowned. Reviving… Arming…]
Pale knuckles broke the foam, hauling rusted pneumatic spearguns from the sludge. Salt-crusted eyes fixed on the target as eight reanimated divers vaulted onto the lower catwalks.
“Tether the beast!” Kassur roared, leveling a revolver toward the crest. “Strap it down!”
Steel spears punched through scale and blubber, uncoiling braided steel cables that locked into the dock's iron bollards. The creature bellowed, the vibration rattling the fillings in Kassur's teeth as it wrenched against the anchors.
Spine cables smoking from Zadira's marksmanship, the commander twisted around. His blackened pupils centered on her perch. A chitinous appendage as thick as a dredge crane whipped free from the mount, snapping directly toward her ribs.
Zadira raised her barrel to counter, but the stroke arrived too fast. Kassur hurled his shoulder into her armor plating, pitching her off the raised platform. “Down!”
The barb took him through the left clavicle. Steel decking buckled beneath his spine as the point skewered him to the grating. Both revolvers clattered into the grease. Black fluid dripped from the spike into his collar, hot and reeking of copper.
“Idiot!” Zadira scrambled across the grating, her monotone cracking as she brought her blade up to saw at the spike.
The limb wrenched backward, pulling free and leaving Kassur shuddering against the floor. Up on the dorsal harness, the officer bared pointed teeth. “A sewer scavenger playing martyr. You die on my deck, Zinn!”
Gasping against the wet iron, Kassur forced his fingers into the glowing projection of the interface. The phantom static stung his palms, thick with the officer's bio-signature. Kassur clamped down with pure necrotic siphon.
[Ereshkigal-Echo: Initiating… Necrotic Drain: Biotic Absorb. Target: Commander Vane. Warning: Extreme risk of cellular corruption to host. Proceed?]
“Proceed,” Kassur spat, coughing up red grit. He latched onto the feedback loop. The projection strobed wildly. Atop the creature, the commander seized, skin peeling away into iridescent ash. The screams choked into dry rattling as connective tissue dissolved into gray powder. Within three seconds, the harness held only empty straps and a heap of smoking cinder.
[Ereshkigal-Echo: Commander Vane neutralized. Biotic Absorb successful. Host health critical. Reward: 1000 Kills. New Skill: 'Xar-Kutu Conduit – Passive: Increased resistance to bio-spores. Active: Transfer of Xar-Kutu mutation to target via direct contact.']
Severed from the neural harness, the sea titan bellowed until dust showered from the grotto ceiling. Unlidded yellow eyes rolled downward, locking onto Kassur. Its lower mandibles unhinged, revealing rows of serrated obsidian plates.
Kassur reached for his empty holster as the shadow descended. Zadira shouted his name, drowned out by the roar of displaced water as the maw slammed shut around him, plunging beneath the oily black surf.