The frigid wind howled through the narrow, snow-choked fissure Toma and Bojan squeezed through, an illicit entry point Bojan knew from his days as a Guild runner. Below them, the Weeping Chasm yawned—a gaping maw in the ice, exhaling a mist so dense it obscured the very air. Bojan stumbled, a wet cough tearing from his chest, staining the pristine snow. Toma caught him, his gaze fixed on the faint, rhythmic thrumming rising from the depths. The high-frequency whine of drill bits bit into bedrock below. Ignac was already staging his broadcast.
They descended, rappelling down an ancient, ice-encrusted chain, the biting cold seeping into Toma’s bones, a familiar ache that had nothing to do with the outside temperature. The air grew dense with sulfur, frost-burn, and the musky grease of a nest. They dropped onto an outcrop over the cavern. Below, a dozen mercenaries clad in obsidian-and-silver plating paced through the gloom. Ignac stood before the ranks, helmet speaker blaring toward the broadcast orbs.
“Maintain formation! The Veridian Bloom Core awaits!” Ignac barked, his words echoing off the jagged ice walls.
A subterranean rattle shivered through the floorboards of ice. The squad halted mid-stride. Ignac stiffened, his posture tightening beneath the polished carapace.
A fissure split open. A chitinous aberration lunged from the black crack—an S-Rank apex horror bound in segmented carapaces, brandishing six bladed limbs that scored the rime with iron shrieks. Its faceless obsidian skull pivoted toward the light.
The squad's lines fractured instantly. An operative yelled as an arm blade sheared through his plasma carbine. Ignac stumbled backward across the shale, unhooking a detonator toggle from his hip.
“Retreat! Retreat!” he shrieked, his voice cracking, devoid of the earlier pomp. He slammed his palm onto the device. A deep, grinding tremor shook the chasm. Above them, the ice ceiling groaned, then cracked, impossibly wide. Dust and chunks of rock rained down.
"Ignac, wait!" a soldier shouted, but shaped charges blew along the ceiling struts. Slabs of blue ice tore loose in a pre-rigged blast, sealing the throat of the hall to bury the beast alongside his abandoned rearguard.
Bojan, clutching his chest, gasped. “They’ll be crushed!”
Toma watched the trapped squad scramble under the rockfall. Men who had laughed at his brother's shallow pauper grave now clawed at pinned armor. Shaking off frost, the multi-limbed horror reoriented toward the pinned men.
A shelf of shale crushed an armored soldier flat. The horror pivoted toward the next, raising a serrated talon.
Toma didn’t think. He simply moved.
He pushed Bojan behind a jutting rock and launched himself off the ledge, falling into the chaos, his body a blur. The wind shrieked past him, the collapsing ice a death sentence from above. He dropped toward the monster, his right wrist burning with the protocol's rot.
[Bets placed.]
[Stakes accepted.]
He hit the gravel in a roll, absorbing the shock across his shoulders. The beast whipped its dome toward him, its bladed legs cocking back to strike.
[Wager: Your Soul. Penalty for Hesitation: Irreversible Entropic Decay. Reward: Gravitational Singularity Anomaly.]
“Accepted,” Toma snarled, the word ripped from his throat.
His right arm screamed in agony, the skin blackening, flaking off as if consumed by pure void. But an unseen force, cold and absolute, surged through him. He extended his hand, not at the Stalker, but at the very air above it.
The air above the creature twisted into a tight knot. Pressure dropped, then inverted into a sickening downward focal point. The horror let out a dry hiss as its carapace caved inward. Jointed legs fractured like brittle pine under tons of concentrated mass, flattening meat and marrow into a coin-thin spread of red paste across the permafrost.
Debris rattled to a halt against the slush. The surviving mercenaries, gray with stone dust, stared out from behind the rubble directly at Toma.
His fingers were black husks, knuckle bone stripped raw. Kneeling beside the crushed paste, he disregarded their silence. His sight flickered, outlining the bioluminescent node in the slush: the Veridian Bloom Core. Toma dug his rotting fingers into the muck and dragged out the glowing, fist-sized nodule.
He rose, wiping black bile from the node.
Gun barrels tracked him instead. Shock held the survivors rigid, their aim twitching against their shoulder stocks.
“What… what was that?” one of them stammered, his finger trembling on the trigger. Another, a medic, fumbled with a small, shoulder-mounted drone, its red recording light blinking steadily.
Suddenly, the air above the chasm shimmered. A holographic projection, vast and luminous, materialized against the swirling ice mist. It was Ignac Vran, his face grim, his helmet polished, a theatrical frown etched onto his features. He stood before a backdrop of the Korsak Vanguard standard, the network drones hovering obediently around him.
“Citizens of Krag Bastion,” Ignac’s voice boomed, resonating through the chasm, “I regret to inform you of a grave betrayal. Our heroic efforts in the Tears Chasm were sabotaged by a rogue element. Toma Mirkovic, the disgraced archivist, has revealed his true, demonic nature. We have footage, undeniable proof, of his heinous act – a catastrophic anomaly unleashed, destroying our target and endangering our valiant Guild members.”
Ignac’s eyes, cold and calculating, seemed to bore directly into Toma through the holographic image. “Effective immediately, Toma Mirkovic is declared a Class-X Threat to Krag Bastion. All authorized personnel are ordered to engage on sight. Shoot to kill.”
The red recording light on the medic’s drone intensified, bathing Toma in its incriminating glow, while the barrel of the plasma rifle wavered, then steadied, locking onto his chest.