"Did you hear about the incident at the Istanbul Reactor? Some people are saying a Black Shadow creature caused it to go critical!" Kris murmured.
White wisps of steam escaped through his face mask as he patrolled the catwalks. The snow was relentless, and his fingers were growing numb, clawing around the cold chassis of his pulse rifle.
"I heard as well," Irik replied, his voice muffled by the wind. "They say it slips in and silently massacres entire monasteries. Rumors even say it was the cause of the reactor failure in India—the one that killed millions of us and an entire pod of 'Heaven's Sent'."
Irik clutched a wing-shaped pendant hanging from his neck. It glowed with a faint, pulsing light, as if answering a silent prayer in his mind.
"The one that killed three of them?!" Kris's shout was zealous, but his voice cracked at the end as his faith dimmed. "I-I don't know, Irik. I thought the Angels were invincible."
"Shut your mouth!" Irik hissed, grabbing Kris by the neck of his armor. "We don't dare question them. We have been blessed by the Heavens for them to send us their messengers! Those damn politicians from that stupid, infidelic A.R.C. are trying to convince the rest of the world they're evil, but we know better."
"...Sorry," Kris whispered, his strength failing him. "I had a moment of weakness. Don't tell anyone."
Kris thought of his family and of what would happen to them if word of his heretical thoughts reached the Pastors. He turned his gaze toward the snow-capped landscape below, pocked with hovels where fires were barely visible through the frozen mist.
"Don't let such filth leave your mouth again, Kris," Irik growled, turning the bend of the reactor's catwalk and fighting against the biting wind.
Kris stared at his partner's back for a moment before pulling a pocket watch from his vest. Inside was a picture of his sickly daughter; the Pastors had promised the healing hands of the Angels could cure her. Those words were the only reason he had decided to bear arms for the Angelic Sect in the first place.
Closing the watch with firm resolve, he picked up the pace to catch up. He saw Irik standing right at the bend of the catwalk, motionless.
"Thanks for waiting for me. Got lost in thought for a second," Kris said, rubbing the back of his kevlar with a nervous laugh.
But as he got closer, the sight was surreal. Irik was standing perfectly still, snow piling up on his helmet like he was a statue. It was unnervingly quiet.
"Irik?" Kris reached out, grabbing him by the shoulder. "You alright, bud?"
Slowly turning him, he heard a sickening slurp.
The sight of flash-frozen blood and intestines began spilling from Irik's stomach. The wound was a clinical, surgical puncture that had ignored the reinforced armor entirely.
"Heaven on high!"
Kris recoiled so hard the guardrails rattled against his back, dislodging sheets of snow and heavy icicles. The sight sent a new type of chill down his spine—especially when he noticed a slight green light swaying to and fro in the mist, flickering like a wisp in a graveyard. A rapidly approaching wisp.
The sound of shuffling snow was drowned out by the drum of his heartbeat in his ears. His thoughts went vacant... much like his lungs.
Suddenly, there was the sharp sting of cold air pushing in through his lower ribs. A hand pressed against his mouth—a grip so forceful that not even a muffled scream could escape.
Kris thrashed in a blind panic for seconds that felt like a cold hell of eternity. The last sight he had in his fading vision was a stone-faced man with a glowing green left eye. A gaze colder and harsher than the snow clinging to his now lifeless corpse.
"Go left, Xīn Yuè," the voice crackled in his inner-ear comm. "Intel states there are thirty zealots with potential for six Angels."
"Mmm. Use proper comm etiquette, Razor Actual," Rayleigh answered, his voice a low, clinical rasp.
He worked with practiced efficiency, prying the cover off a thermal vent. He began a low crawl into the duct, moving with ghost-like precision. Every muscle was tense; he had to distribute his weight perfectly to ensure the thin metal didn't pop and alert the guards patrolling just inches away on the other side of the aluminum skin.
"It's what these jackasses are calling you ever since Istanbul, Razor 3," Razor Actual—Yoskovich—responded.
His tone was mocking, a sharp contrast to the gravity of their situation. They were fifty clicks deep into enemy territory with no backup and no hope for an immediate evacuation if things went awry. They were effectively dead men if the Angelic Sect realized they were inside the wire.
"Focus on the feed, Razor Actual," Rayleigh whispered, his breath hitching as he navigated a tight turn in the ventilation shaft.
"Yeah, yeah. Just saying, 'New Moon' has a certain ring to it. Very theatrical. Bastards think you're some kind of ninja, giving you a Chinese name like that. The A.R.C. boys back at base are starting to think you're more myth than man."
"A myth wouldn't have had their left eye fail the augmentation process, nor have his bones supported by bionics unlike the others in the division."
Rayleigh used his replaced mechanical eye—meticulously crafted to appear identical to his right—to scan the area below. Digital overlays flickered in his vision, calculating predictive movement paths and searching for the tell-tale residual energy signatures produced by the Angels.
"Be proud a whelp like you could even survive," Yoskovich remarked, his voice dropping into a darker, grimmer humor. "If those solutions Isabella fed you for years didn't save your ass on the table, you'd just be in the 'burner' like the other sixty percent who failed to adapt."
Rayleigh didn't respond.
He was acutely aware that the men who had shed blood with Yoskovich on the frontlines made up a large portion.
He reached a slatted grate overlooking the reactor's secondary control room. Below, the zealots moved with a frantic, religious energy, their pulse rifles slung over their shoulders as they knelt before a central terminal that pulsed with that same eerie, angelic light.
"I still think you bastards didn't set my eye right—"
"You mean left."
"Shut up. It feels like it's slightly bulging in my skull when I sleep or look a certain way." Rayleigh couldn't help but cave into the banter; it was a much-needed solace in an environment this hostile. "If we aren't here to blow up the reactor like usual, why are we here? Your debrief was more of a 'get your shit, we're leaving.'"
"Can't blow it up, since I can't hoof it for twenty kilometers in three minutes. We—"
"Stop smoking then," Rayleigh cut in.
"Fuck off. We need to show the A.R.C. reps we can take on the winged bastards without excess collateral. So, with the new plasma wires and Implosion grenades and 203 rounds, we need to assassinate the six winged bastards intel told us would be here."
"So it's all about optics and funding then?" Rayleigh questioned, his fingers dancing over the latch of the vent grate.
"Well, we can't have the A.R.C. known only as mass murderers, can we? Not unless you like what the Angels did to the population," Yoskovich answered in a flat tone as he pressed himself against the hallway walls.
In Rayleigh's peripherals, he saw Yoskovich's icon hugging a corridor corner. With a sudden, blurred motion, Yoskovich yoinked a zealot around the bend, a combat knife punching through the man's throat before a single gasp could escape. The body was lowered to the floor with practiced, funereal silence.
"…Yeah." Rayleigh accepted the grim reality. The ends didn't justify the means—the means were the message. "Where is Razor 2?"
"Razor 2, sitrep," Yoskovich barked into the comms. Silence followed, filled only by the distant hum of distant hymns. "Razor 2. This is Razor Actual, respond."
A bead of sweat started to form on Rayleigh's brow, stinging as it rolled near the seam of his mechanical eye. The silence on the line was a physical weight.
"… Razor 3, move with a purpose," Yoskovich's voice lost its mocking edge, replaced by a cold, sharp urgency.
Rayleigh didn't hesitate; he kicked the grate open. The heavy metal slab didn't just fall—it shrieked against the concrete, a cacophony of disarray for the damned.
Below, the thirty zealots didn't just stand; they scrambled. The serene prayer chamber dissolved into a din of mechanical chambering and barked orders. The bulk of them lunged for the nearest cover, their white robes fluttering like panicked moths. Rayleigh dropped into the center of the fray, the impact absorbed by the sickening hydraulic hiss of his leg augments. The plasma wire in his hand didn't just sizzle—it snapped like a whip of solar flare.
Before the first line could even level their pulse rifles, Rayleigh flicked his hand. The wire took the lead man across the jaw, cauterizing the bone instantly, before looping around the shoulder of another who was mid-lunge. There was no spray of blood—only the smell of ozone and charred meat as limbs dropped with heavy, clinical thuds.
"He's here! The Shadow is here!" a zealot shrieked, fumbling a grenade. He never threw it; Rayleigh was a blur of black carbon fiber, a shoulder-check sending the man spiraling into a row of terminals.
The back rank finally found their nerve. They created an invisible wall of lead, pulse rounds chewing into the foundation pillars and sending shards of concrete and rebar flying like shrapnel. Blinded by fear, they began shooting without reservation, puncturing through their own maimed, living comrades to reach their target.
Rayleigh dived, his bionics screaming under a forced overclock. He wasn't just running; he was banking off the walls, his movements jagged and predatory. He slid behind a terminal as a hail of ghostly firecrackers peppered the casing above his head. The smell of iron, dust, and copper filled his nostrils.
A warm, wet sensation flooded over his hands as he braced against the floor, not from the leaking coolant of the broken conduits, but from a rapidly expanding lake of arterial red. The pulse rounds were liquefying the remains of the zealots, the gore pooling so quickly it looked like a bright red, shimmering mirror.
Rayleigh lowered his head, his mechanical eye zooming and adjusting its focal length. In the glossy surface of the blood pooling at his fingertips, he saw them. Three zealots were flanking from the far left, their white robes stained pink as they waded through the remains of their brothers. They thought they had the angle. They thought they were invisible.
Rayleigh didn't wait for them to close the gap. Watching their reflected silhouettes approach the corner of his cover, he yanked the pin on an Implosion grenade and rolled it across the blood-slicked floor like a bowling ball.
The grenade rolled to through the door way right as they were about to bank around the corner. The sound of scratching metal on the pocked floor caught the three zealots attention immediately as they gazed at their feet.
"DUCK!" one shouted, trying to push the others back, while the nearest one jumped on the grenade to absorb the explosion. However, it was for naught. The covered grenade unleashed a bright sapphire halo before an unnatural slurping sound resonated. The three and the surrounding matter within five meters all coalesced into one another. The roar of metal, machinery, and concrete grinding against each other drowned out the screams of the zealots, which vanished without a whimper.
Rayleigh was left gasping, moaning under the pain of his augments burning from the overclock, basking in the pulsating light of the terminal. His once nimble movements were now restricted to clunky spasms. The whirring gears were slowing down, but a slight orange hue remained glowing beneath his skin.
"Shit! My organs feel like they are cooking themselves," he cried as he braced himself against the wall, "Ugh, fuck. What are you bastards protecting, huh?"
…
"Actual, the terminal is reacting to something," Rayleigh hissed, his mechanical eye zooming in on the terminal's interface. The "angelic light" was no longer pulsing; it was bleeding into the air, forming a solid, terrifying shape.
"The Angels aren't coming from outside, Rayleigh," Yoskovich's voice crackled. The audio was punctuated by a wet, choking sound—the sound of Yoskovich dislodging his knife from a Pastor who had been desperately squealing for his gods to save him. The signal distorted further under sudden interference. "They're being summoned through the core! Get to the kill zone!"
"Too late." Rayleigh stood before the gate that held the bright angelic glow.
The shape was forming into a solid being, a translucent body emerging from what looked like a pod from an ancient tree. In fact, the entire chamber was filled with tree branches hosting over twenty similar pods.
"Razor Actual… there aren't six angels stationed here… This is a cluster to birth them." Rayleigh pulled the Milkor M32A1 off his back, loaded with six implosion rounds. He pressed his temple to activate video capture. "Command, do you have visual?"
Silence followed for a few seconds as the signal was absorbed by the mass of concrete and heavy metal blocking the long-distance transmission.
"Raz- 3, this… com..nd. We ..ave visu-."
"Tsk. Damn signal is breaking up. Command, orders!"
His voice strained. In five years of being part of the division, the A.R.C. had never come across a site like this, let alone any remnants of how Angels were born from the ones they'd previously destroyed.
…
"Fuck command! Shoot the damn things! I'm under fire here!" Yoskovich yelled. The sound of sonic rounds hammering the concrete pillar behind him sounded like a series of controlled explosions.
Rayleigh leveled the Milkor. His mechanical eye locked onto the nearest pod—the translucent membrane was stretching, revealing the skeletal, yet muscular frame of an "Angel" mid-gestation. It didn't look divine; it looked like a deep-sea predator wrapped in silk.
Thump.
The first Implosion 203 round left the drum.
It didn't explode outward. Instead, there was a momentary flicker of blue light upon impact, followed by a violent, vacuum-like shloop. The air, the pod, and the half-formed creature inside were instantly crushed into a sphere the size of a marble before winking out of existence.
The chamber went silent for a heartbeat. Then, the other nineteen pods began to glow a violent, angry red.
"Actual, first target neutralized," Rayleigh reported, his voice devoid of emotion despite the sweat blurring his organic eye. "But I think I just woke up the rest of the litter."
"Then start swinging, Razor 3! If we die in this hole, make sure there's nothing left for them to bury!"
Rayleigh shifted his grip, the mag-locks in his boots humming as he prepared for the recoil of the next five rounds. He wasn't a myth. He wasn't a ninja. He was a scalpel, and it was time to cut.