Humanity would always need champions. Individuals who exemplified certain aspects of what it truly meant to be human. Courage, Selflessness, Ingenuity, Canniness. If Treu Krowtzig had to guess his own aspect, he would always lean toward more martial disciplines— not unlike a vengeful angel or a lethal protector. Wrath or possibly Zeal. Aspects that were ill-suited to his current employment and the relative state known as peacetime.
While Treu had nothing against peace (nor did he consider himself warmonger) he acknowledged that warriors had no real purpose without war. Treu was bred and blooded a warrior years before his birth, from the moment his architects found suitable genetic donors and planned on creating weapons beyond mortal limits. Treu was human… insomuch as he shared the genus, however he wasn't only human. He was a living weapon. A weapon that gathered dust and grew blunted from disuse no matter how fervently he trained his body, mind and soul.
Four decades of relative peace (at least in the reality-defining scope with which Treu concerned himself) had him ravenous for something to happen. Like any weapon left to rust from inaction, he sought to be quenched in blood and flames, to feel the strength of his temper and the keenness of his edge. The uncaring cosmos however, gave not one single fuck what any individual human wanted, not even one significant as himself.
So he waited.
All things considered, Titan's Crest wasn't a terrible place to endure the steady march of time. The accommodations were all top-notch to the point that he often forgot he wasn't still in a corporate complex buried under the mountains of Das Burgen. The only hint that he was on a hab-station in deep space was the periodic ozone scent of freshly cleaned air scrubbers after monthly maintenance. Some might consider the sensory deprivation chamber that Treu called home to be little more than a prison cell, but Treu preferred the slim, spartan confines. He'd known nothing else in his life of applied parasciences. Even after ascending from test subject to living weapon, he'd kept the trappings of his old lifestyle while his metahuman counterparts so often embraced their new lives of luxury. They became soft, they let their skills fade and they all too often died because of it.
The mundane workers seemed content enough with their daily grind, they filled the hab-station with a palpable energy pungent in their mediocrity. They lived, they loved and they died because that's what mundane humans did. He pitied their ignorance. Long ago, he'd tried steering their science towards that which they dubbed 'arcane'. In time they'd come to grasp in abstract the fundamentals of his own existence. Energy could not be destroyed only converted. It was everywhere and a conscious mind could direct it, convert it, wield it so long as one had the strength of will to do so. The tiresome science of men moved ahead in its stilting, spasmodic way trying and failing to reach for its lost glory yet they were their own worst enemy. Humanity could by and large 'take care of' themselves. Teaching such self-destructive fools was a waste. Fortunately for Treu and the metahumans like him, humanity wasn't alone in the wider cosmos.
A long life paired with excellent memory lent itself to melancholy, Treu supposed. Here he was fretting in circles over mistakes a century dead and gone. He would have preferred a battlefield to test himself upon, but being entombed in hexagramatically warded, sensory deprivation chambers like some half-forgotten demigod was an acceptable alternative.
The dull, sour aura of a mundane mortal man outside his chambers encroached on Treu's unnatural perceptions. Without his cell's warding, he would have been irritably aware of half the station in his multi-kilometer sphere of detection.
Treu opened the door with a telekinetic hand just as the mundane set his food on the ground. Light, sound, scent and a single tray of what might generously be termed 'human-kibble' all rushed into the room carried as if by a swarm of unseen servants.
"Jesus!" The orderly cursed, his slow gaze following the tray as it floated towards the man-shaped monster lounging before him a half-meter from the cell's floor.
"No. Just me." Treu mocked playfully. Such distasteful platitudes helped to ease the straining minds of mundanes when they encountered Treu or his metahuman companions. The orderly was an unfamiliar soul. Young, in so far as this station's staff went.
And he was staring.
"See something interesting?" Treu teased, twisting his face into a smile— though he hadn't done so in years and the result was counteractive to his intent. "Weren't you briefed about me?"
"Um- I- It's-" The orderly stammered irritably.
"You didn't bring me any books." Treu noted distastefully.
"No?"
Treu held up a belaying hand and an entire library's worth of tablets flew from his cell of their own accord, stacking themselves neatly outside his chamber door. Treu relaxed his telekinetic cradle, lowering his bare feet on the chill, rune-etched metal floor of his chambers and flicking his gaze unto the orderly. Treu's left eye looked down into the painfully average man's face which barely came level which the metahuman's pectorals; his right eye gazed lower still, into the orderly's abdomen as if seeing through it.
"You suffer from back pain, don't you?" Treu asked vacantly. The orderly blinked rapidly, unintelligently flustered in that irritably human way they so often were.
"B-B-Beg pardon?" The mundane stuttered.
"Pain." Treu clarified, recalling that this was a mundane human he was speaking to. "In your lower back. Probably when you bend forward?"
"I do." The orderly replied, awestruck. "How did you-"
Treu's right hand darted forward, burying itself to the wrist in the orderly's abdomen as the mundane man's eyes widened in terror. Before the orderly could draw a breath to scream, Treu's hand had left his penetrated guts holding a fleshly lump the size of a walnut between his fingers. The extricated flesh was unceremoniously deposited into the orderly's hand.
"I wasn't aware pancreatic cancer was still prevalent in the galaxy." Treu idly stated. "I expect you'll have fresh reading material for me when you bring me my next meal in a month's time. Oh, and welcome to Heaven's Gate, Ralph Osozawa of Nova-Kyoto colony 385, Meishin."
Treu sealed his chamber's door a quarter-second ahead of a befuddled scream. On the peripheries of his unnatural senses, Treu 'watched' the orderly frantically strip his jacket, shirt and undershirt while manically searching his stomach for a wound. Ralph didn't find anything of course, Treu was rather adept at telekinetically knitting flesh back together— though in truth, his specialization was rending it apart. Surgical extractions were old habit for him, mainly for the extrication of foreign objects (bullets, shrapnel, FOD and the like) but differing the malignant flesh from the rest had been an interesting distraction from his boredom. Ralph the orderly donned his clothes and left the muffled range of Treu's detection.
It was some days later, halfway through his meal of nutrient-dense kibble that Treu realized his mistake. He'd used the hab-station's old name when welcoming that new orderly. The older the habit, the harder it tended to stick it would seem. Governing bodies, corporate entities, scientific institutions, they were all such fleeting transient things— as were the men intrinsic to them. Some hours after that realization, something unusual happened. The largely decorative intercom in his chambers connected.
"Special Unit ORDER to Rituals, research bay thirteen."
"Threat level?" Treu asked, voice level despite the momentary flush of excitement.
"Level one at present. Escalation probable. Level two suspected."
"Shame…" He growled, spirits deflating twice as quickly as they'd rose. "I won't need my equipment then. On my way now."
Specialist Psion-Major Krowtzig flew through the hab-station's halls as he finished shrugging into the only set of clothing he owned. In actuality, he didn't fly; more accurately, he was telekinetically clawing, pushing and leaping forward on numerous invisible limbs and using the Newtonian recoil to propel himself forward. Then end result was the same either way, his body hurtling through the halls fast enough to be a metahuman missile. While his body was traveling, a portion of his mind was already reaching out towards the rift gathering above him.
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The scene was painted in broad stokes before his expanded mind. It wasn't sight, yet it wasn't unlike sight in much the same way as echolocation wasn't unlike seeing. There was something like a picture hued with impressions like colors and it was accompanied by a noise that could never properly be explained to someone who had not experienced it for themselves. Mundane security forces were fighting hard with optical weapons and silver-spewing grenades but they were being pushed back. The isolated compartment's esoteric defenses were holding their own for the time being but that was a stopgap measure. Alien creatures not native to this plane of existence were gathering inside the station's tainted sections, gathering into a horde. One of the mundane guards likened the incursion to a dam's head pond during flood. Another suggested full retreat before said dam burst and yet another died gruesomely while composing a pun about all the dam chatter.
Treu felt another metahuman mind brush against his own in the superluminal space collocated with the pitched battle. Their minds embraced into something like a dialog yet not unlike an armed standoff. A thought braved the crossing, linking these outreached minds, drawing the two towards mutual destruction.
Treu did already know. Her mind was muddled with the poisons she'd been feeding her flesh. Narcotics, a persistent habit of Kaleigh Blair, the key reason the two metahuman's never saw eye to eye even when their minds were linked in communion. Her habits formed a chasm between the two that no amount of familiarity or shared suffering would ever overcome. She willingly blunted her edge pretending to be something she wasn't. She lowered herself to being human when she was so much more. It disgusted him, though not nearly as much as Kaleigh's metahumanity disgusted herself.
Treu felt her submission, her contempt at taking orders from him. The mental communion went both ways, just as he felt her weakness, she knew his righteousness and rebelled against it. She saw herself as Treu saw her and in that light there was no denying how far she had fallen. That was the danger of communion. It invited division within one's own consciousness. It could poison you against yourself just as surely as any neurotoxin. In joining with the wrong person, one could destroy themselves utterly.
The telepathic conversation had lasted less than two seconds, limited only by the speed of light and the meta-human minds on both ends. Splitting his attention at high speed wasn't without consequence if the thoroughly pulped remains of an unlucky mundane worker Treu flew passed was anything to go by. He put the broken body out of mind the instant he saw it, there were bigger things at play than a single human's life.
The proverbial 'dam' was near its breaking point when Treu arrived.
Kaleigh Blair, a fiery red haired, freckled-skin spitfire of a woman, was wearing her off duty plain clothes in place of body armor— much like himself. Unlike him, she could blend into a crowd and pass as any other mundane human when she wanted to. Her striking purple silk gown set her apart from the black-armored guards pouring lasers into the abyssal horde clawing at the wards holding them back. Both metahumans were seemingly unarmed but Treu felt the electrical charge she'd already built up, as well as the ambient null around her where various electromagnetic waves should have been. For all her personal flaws, the woman was a walking deadzone and a living capacitor, which made her a useful weapon against uninvited guests.
"Is the Rookie still off with your twin?" Kaliegh asked once the two were physically close enough to be heard over the demonic howling and humming discharge of optical rifles.
"Regrettably so. Still chasing ghosts out on the frontier systems." Treu said, speaking loud enough for the guards to overhear. "This would have been a good teaching point for Marrujt and I know Gram is as eager for a battle worth fighting as I am."
The theatrics were for the mundanes benefit. A pointless show to humanize the decidedly inhuman demigods— though that descriptor fell more heavily upon himself than on the woman opposite him. Most mundanes had a habit of looking up to Treu that went beyond literally looking upwards at his towering, herculean physique. He was at once something awe-inspiring, curiously morbid and decidedly inhuman. From what he's seen in the minds of mortal men, gazing at Treu was like glimpsing at themselves with all its weakness cut away until what remained was harsh and uncompromising; one had even gone so far as to label him 'human sans humanity' which Treu couldn't find within himself to entirely dismiss. Psychiatrists had termed the gnawing alien sensation he inspired as 'Transhuman Dread'.
"Standing rules of engagement, if it's not human put it down." Treu ordered for the benefit of the mundane security forces nearby. "Specialist Blair, handle the flesh. I'll handle the rest."
"Yes sir!" Kaleigh answered with mock enthusiasm.
Kaleigh drew a breath and Treu felt the curious niggling feeling of his bio-electric rhythms being disrupted. The guards nearby suffered the effects far more markedly, several trying to clutch their heads or chests with limp limbs that wouldn't function. The station's lighting flickered ominously and a foreboding charge filled the air like a premonition of doom.
"Focus, Specialist Blair." Treu stated in a growl both supportive and condescending.
"Shut. Up." She hissed through gritted teeth.
Her hair danced with static charge. Arcs of raw amperage jumped between her bent fingers as if she were tearing lightning from the air— which wasn't entirely inaccurate. Her absorption narrowed its unscrupulous banquet to a more refined selection, leaving the vital energies of brains and bodies to those who needed them.
The strained barrier keeping the mindless dregs at bay shattered just in time for a fat purple bolt of blinding lightning to lance into the closest of the netherborn abominations. Lightning arched from one alien wretch to the next, a chain of death tied to his subordinate's fingertips. The scent of their flash-boiling pseudoflesh burning was repugnant and heady, gracing Treu's nostrils like a quaff of strong alcohol.
Curious… that wasn't his own memory. It was Kaleigh's. The reeking stink mingled with cramping pains and masochistic pleasures he'd never known. She found joy in her surrender, in her self-poisoning, in the death she dealt as nothing more than a conduit of ecstatic release. It disgusted him.
"Shut. UP!" Kaleigh screamed over the prolonged roar of a thunderclap in a narrow hall.
Her electric charge faltered, the storm abated into sudden nothingness. Scores of the hellish, shambling creatures crumbled into ashes and scores more clambered through the remains of their fellows.
Treu said nothing further, instead he calmly walked into the breach as if there wasn't a braying swarm of nightmarish, half-charred monstrosities from another dimension howling for his flesh and the vital energies of his soul. Lower order creatures such as these often struggled understanding their place in this galaxy, a fact he would educate them to.
Treu drew in a lungful of breath and the massive laboratory's temperature dropped nearly 30-degrees kelvin. A bulky Shoggoth shambled towards him, leading the charge even as the slimy discharge coating the not-creature was breaking off in frozen chips. Treu extended his left hand towards the thing, as if beckoning an avalanche of twisted blackened flesh to stop, and exhaled.
A jet of white-hot flame blasted from his palm in a wide cone, superheating the unstable flesh of his foes until thermodynamics reaped its inevitable toll. The Shoggoth's vessel erupted along with all of those in Treu's field of view. Backflash—the shockwave of the laboritory's displaced searing air escaping his sorcerous evocation—threatened to race past him, to incinerate those behind him without his intervention. Treu breathed it in, funneling his excess destruction into the palm of his right hand, drinking in the power to bring himself and his environment back into equilibrium.
Without their physical vessels, the eldritch energy that primarily constituted these wretches tried to escape back to their native realm intact. Treu was expecting such animalistic instincts and released his breath. Metaphysical blades shredded the so-call soul of those beasts, imparting what tiny slivers that escaped his clutches with so much agony and pain that they would always associate the material realm with it. There was no visible sign of the wholesale massacre unfolding yet the air shrieked with tormented anguish and those who heard it felt their breath grow heavy with the suddenly viscous air. Treu savored the immaterial screams. They would serve as a warning to their species.
Treu inhaled, only this time instead of drawing in ambient thermal energy and the like, he glut himself on the mulched essence of Shoggoth and Qliphoth. Energy could not be created nor destroyed, better that Treu stockpiled it until it was needed than some misbegotten hedge witch or void predator feed upon the spiritual carrion.
"Show off." Kaleigh chirped as she strode between the goopy mess at the laboratory's doorway.
"Be silent. This isn't over yet." Treu said, attuning his mind to scout for the rift deeper in the wreckage of this place.
"That-" Kaleigh's eyes went wide as she detected the same swelling black hole of a heart that Treu had. "That's not a fucking level two threat!"
Treu spared her a rare smirk. "Wishing you weren't half-drunk right about now?"
"I'm plenty sober now." She hissed, not at all amused. "Let's just get this fucking thing before it fully manifests."
"It's too late for that." Treu said around a rueful grin. "Troopers! Seal and quarantine this compartment. Omega protocol."
The blast doors slammed shut and Treu heard the telltale sound of explosive bolts priming for quick release. If the situation took a turn for the irreparable, this entire lead-lined portion of the hab-station would be launched into the nearby star. Despite the danger of the situation, Treu noted a pleasant quickness to his pulse paired with a mental alacrity long absent. In the face of impending death, he felt alive for the first time in decades.
"Specialist Blair, let's go greet our guest."