Once they took care of the threat, she promised herself that she’d have Nile take her here for a date. Shaking her head of the distracting thoughts, she focused on the task at hand.
Ash's senses hummed with preternatural awareness, cataloging every whisper of wind, every subtle shift in the aetheric field that surrounded them. Her angelic heritage allowed her to perceive layers of reality invisible to most, and something about this place felt wrong. It came across as static to her perceptions, on a frequency that shouldn't exist. The mountain was alive in a way that set her on edge. It seemed to be breathing. It reminded her of a colossal giant at rest, mostly indifferent to their presence.
Kylie had said that she had tracked the Bug Man to a group of natural caves, and they were right where she had said they would be. Only when they arrived on site the creature was nowhere to be found.
They spent far too long, scouting the surrounding area for hours, before eventually having to give it up as a loss.
No matter how much they may have wished it, the Bug Man failed to make an appearance.
"Nothing," Kylie muttered, her voice tight with frustration. A strand of hair had escaped her ponytail, dancing across her face in the gentle night breeze. "I don't understand. The energy signature was so clear yesterday."
Ash brushed her fingertips against the rough cave entrance that the creature called home. She felt for the minute vibrations of power that still lingered there, echoes of something that had been present not long ago. Kylie was right.
The residual energy signature had a distinct pattern, unlike anything typically found in angelic or demonic frequencies. It was more... corrupted. A stench of undeath and decay that had imbued the surrounding rock and earth, due to the frequency of the creature’s presence. A necromancer, Ash thought in disgust.
After scouting the surrounding areas thoroughly, they had gone back to the cave that they believed was the creature's lair, and there they had discovered evidence of technology which lay well outside the realm of man.
The cave interior pulsed with an unnatural, sickly luminescence. The energy casting an iridescent shimmer that danced just at the edges of mundane perceptions. The walls themselves even appeared to sweat. Beads of moisture caught the strange light and refracted it into prismatic patterns that shifted when viewed directly. The very air tasted of ozone and something metallic, like blood. And yet, the only signs of mortality they found were a few scattered bones by a stone altar. Ash immediately recognized the scent -it was ichor. Definitely not a mundane creature.
“What is this?” Kylie’s whisper cracked the silence. She held a tablet like it might vanish if she blinked, its surface absorbing the faint starlight that filtered through the cave’s ceiling fissures. At first glance, it looked like one of the University-issued tablets, until its matte-black finish revealed shifting filaments beneath the glass, delicate tendrils of circuitry that pulsed and writhed as though alive.
Ash stepped closer, every footstep echoing off the damp stone walls. She barely restrained a shiver. “Be careful with that,” she said, even as part of her wanted to snatch it away. “Could be trouble.”
Kylie’s eyes never left the screen. “You got it, boss.”
A sour wind of decay washed over Ash, and she paused at the edge of the nest she’d discovered. Its architecture was unsettling: sinewy cords of deer tendon braided through translucent fiber-optic cables, ebony feathers matted by a glossy, resinous sap. Strips of dried flesh -human skin, if Ash’s upset stomach was any guide- hung like ritual banners above the woven cradle. The air tasted of sulfur and formaldehyde, a chemical tang that set her teeth on edge.
This wasn’t scavenging. This was curation.
Ash forced herself to look away from the nest’s grisly display and scoured the surrounding cavern. Broken pottery shards, animal pelts bleached white, and a scattering of chalked symbols carved into the stone floor were all she found. No weapons. No other obvious tools. Just debris left to dry and molder.
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“Damn, bastard,” she swore at the macabre display.
Stepping back, she crossed her arms as if shielding herself from a sudden chill that had nothing to do with the cool night air.
“What was that? Did you find something?” Kylie’s voice cut through the gloom, pulling Ash’s attention back to her and the tablet she held. Kylie looked up and grimaced in sympathy when she saw the look on Ash’s face.
Ash met her gaze. “Nothing but bones and whispers,” she said, voice low. “But I think that” -she nodded at the device- “might tell the real story.”
Silence settled between them, accentuated by the soft background hum of the strange, corrupt energy that saturated the infernal thing’s den.
As they spoke, Ash noticed that their voices were echoing strangely in the cave's acoustics, returning to her with harmonic tones that hadn't been present when they spoke. As if the sound waves themselves were interacting with whatever energy permeated this place, creating auditory distortions that set her teeth on edge.
She moved to rejoin Kylie, who had returned to examining the dark tablet. Each step across the cave floor sent small vibrations through the soles of her boots, as if the ground itself were responsive to pressure. Fine particles of dust or ash, she couldn't tell which, floated upward with each footfall, glimmering briefly before fading into nothing.
Kylie kept her gaze locked on the tablet, not looking up as Ash drew near.
Ash let out a quiet sigh and leaned in to see what their sole piece of intel might reveal. Looking down at the screen, she instantly saw why Kylie was so obsessed.
The tablet's surface appeared to be made of something between glass and liquid, perpetually on the verge of solidifying but never quite committing to either state. The runes inscribed upon it were unlike any language system Ash had encountered in her extensive training. Not Enochian or any demonic script, nothing that corresponded to ancient human civilizations. They seemed to operate on a different mathematical principle altogether, following patterns that her mind could perceive but not quite grasp, like trying to visualize a four-dimensional object in three-dimensional space.
“Do you know what it is?” she asked.
"I don't know, but it looks like it might be the only bit of tech that the creature has," Kylie responded absently. Kylie was so preoccupied with the tablet and the faded runes along its surface that she didn't see Ash shaking her head.
Another chill traced its way down Ash's spine, raising gooseflesh along her arms beneath her jacket. Her instincts, honed through countless hours of training, screamed a warning that her rational mind struggled to articulate. This technology wasn't just advanced; it felt fundamentally wrong, like a mathematical equation that somehow summed to both infinity and zero simultaneously.
It was both the Halo tech she was familiar with and yet most decidedly not. A perverted aberration of the core technology that the University and the Guardian Network used.
The markings on the tablet continued to shift and dance every time Kylie ran her fingers over them. As she sped up her motions, they too increased in speed, until after a few moments they began to take on a sickly eldritch glow. They seemed to be reacting dramatically to the motions of her fingers, if not to her very presence.
The glow cast Kylie's features in an unsettling light, highlighting the angular planes of her face and turning her eyes into black reflective pools. The runes themselves appeared to be responding not just to her physical touch but to some immaterial aspect of Kylie's being, perhaps her angelic essence?
Ash felt uneasy as she watched them oscillate like a heartbeat. She suspected it was Kylie’s pulse they were mimicking. A synchronization that was both deliberate and predatory, like a parasite establishing a connection with its host.
"Kylie, be careful. We don't know what that thing is or does."
But they both knew what it wasn't. It was not of this world. Halo tech or some perverted variant, Ash had only come into second-hand contact with one other thing which gave off the same vibrations in the aether as this bit of tech, and that thing was of the plane which spawned the true monsters of this world.
Memories cascaded through Ash's mind, images of another team’s mission gone catastrophically wrong a century ago in what humans called the Tunguska region. The artifact the team had found there exhibited similar properties, and the aftermath... She suppressed a shudder. Seven awakened lost, a town of human witnesses removed from existence, and a tear in reality that had taken decades to mend. The psychic imprint from that event was used as a lesson to aspiring agents.
A plane of nightmare and darkness.
The very air around the tablet seemed to warp slightly, light bending in ways that defied the normal laws of physics. Dust particles that drifted into its immediate vicinity disappeared, not settling on its surface but simply ceasing to exist. The temperature in the immediate area dropped perceptibly, creating a gradient that Ash could feel as she leaned closer. The heat was being drawn toward the device like water circling a drain.
"Sure, we do, it's some sort of off-brand Halo tablet or something, right? We just need to figure out what the pass-code is and how to operate it."
Kylie's voice carried a reckless enthusiasm that made Ash wince internally. It was the voice of someone who hadn't yet learned that curiosity could be fatal in their line of work. The novice angel's fingers continued their dance across the tablet's surface, each movement eliciting new configurations of symbols that seemed to be building toward some kind of activation sequence. The air pressure in the cave subtly shifted, making Ash's ears pop.
"How about we just take it and leave? Or better yet, just leave it where you found it and go. Better not to tempt fate."
Ash's hand hovered near her concealed weapon, not that conventional armaments would likely be effective against whatever this was connected to, but the familiar weight of it against her palm would be comforting. Her other senses extended outward, monitoring the cave entrance for any sign of the Bug Man's return. Nothing yet, but her unease continued to grow. The entire mountain seemed to be holding its breath.
"Too late."
Kylie let out a gasp as the tablet's cloudy, opaque surface suddenly cleared, revealing an inky darkness that seemed to swallow any available light from the cave.
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