Chapter 4: Gate With Friends
Back at the camp, the Blood Seed shrieked in silence.
Its scream was soundless but absolute—a pressure that crushed the air and made every breath feel stolen. The rift above it tore wider, twisting space into a trembling wound that bled crimson light across the dirt. Every face turned the color of fresh blood. The tendrils crawling from the seed thickened and multiplied, digging into the ground like roots desperate to anchor something vast and terrible.
Kestin drifted backward, his body lifting several inches above the ground as his lower palms thrust toward the gate. Force rippled outward from his hands in visible waves, shoving dirt and stone and debris away before it could strike him. The air around him shimmered and warped with the effort of keeping himself aloft, his four arms trembling as he fought against the gate's push.
"Boss," he said, voice cracking as he floated unsteadily. "The gate is opening too slowly."
"I can see that!" Marek snapped.
Rist remained kneeling beside the seed, his ruined hand held over it as more dark blood dripped down. His body trembled from pain and blood loss, but he did not pull away.
Rist glared at the pulsing seed. "Stupid fucking Blood Seed... how much do you need!?"
Marek leaned closer to the rift, eyes darting from the unstable tear in space to the darkness beyond the fire.
'Rist must have lost too much blood from that first bite.'
"Come on," he hissed. "Open. Open already."
Evrin and Evris sat near the edge of camp, still chained at the ankles beneath the suspended iron weight. Rist held the metal ball in one hand, his grip white-knuckled despite the tremor running through his arm. The red glow from the gate crawled over the siblings' faces, making their violet eyes shine like bruised stars.
Evris gripped Evrin's sleeve with shaking fingers.
"What is happening?" she asked, barely moving her mouth.
Evrin did not answer immediately. His gaze fixed on the giant holding their leash, on the tremor in Rist's arm, on the way the chain shifted every time his grip weakened. The cold knot in Evrin's chest stayed where it was, but something thinner and sharper slid beneath it, small enough to miss and dangerous enough to live for.
"Stay close to me," he said.
Evris looked at him, her fingers tightening until the fabric of his sleeve twisted in her grip. "Evrin…"
"Just stay close."
Across the camp, Marek spun toward them as if sensing disobedience in the air.
"You two!" he shouted. "Don't even think about moving. If either of you tries anything, I'll carve you up before help steps through that gate!"
Evrin lowered his eyes. His hands stayed still in the dirt while the chain between his ankles pressed cold against his skin.
Beyond the firelight, the creature watched.
Its wounds had closed from past hunts. The gashes across its flanks had sealed into pale ridges, and the torn muscle beneath its chitinous plates had knit back together during its retreat into the dark. Where pain had been, heat now moved under the armor in slow, feeding pulses.
The taste of Vyx essence still lingered in its throat.
It had never consumed anything like it before. The flesh had been dense, rich with something that burned as it went down, and when it had finished, the creature felt its body answer in ways it did not understand. Growth pressed beneath the old shell. New seams ached under the jaw. A command deeper than hunger threaded through nerve and marrow.
The meat-hunger remained, but the stolen prize had become the fixed point inside the creature's senses. It tracked the camp through heat, pressure, motion, and the raw disturbance bleeding from the red wound in the air.
A low tremor passed through its body. Its forelimbs dug deeper into the earth, and the plates along its spine tightened one after another until the ground beneath it began to crack.
The creature flexed one of its blade-like forelimbs, dragging it across its mandibles in a slow, deliberate motion. Faint hot pink lines shimmered beneath the new plating along its jaw, pulsing once before fading back into darkness. It understood little of names, little of language, and little of the desperate noises its prey made around the red wound in the air.
But instinct understood enough. Something was coming through that wound.
The red wound widened by another handspan, and the air between the creature and the camp tasted charged and wrong. The stolen prize remained close enough to reach, but not for long.
The creature crept forward, placing each pointed limb with careful precision between stone and dead brush. Its upper body, heavily shielded by thick, overlapping golden plates, hovered low to the ground. A nest of needle-sharp, blade-like legs tucked tightly against its dark underbelly as it slid forward with the sickening grace of a massive, armored centipede. High above its frame, its tail arched with terrifying tension, a massive black-and-gold blade ending in a vibrant, glowing stinger.
Its head was seamlessly integrated into the sloping curve of its torso, completely devoid of eyes or a visor. Instead, a jagged, violent maw opened right into its chest cavity, revealing a hollow abyss swirling with raw magenta light and lined with rows of crushing, subterranean fangs. It saw them—not through eyes, but through something else entirely. The world came to it in alien clarity: shapes, distances, the precise location of each body. It perceived as a human might, yet through senses that defied explanation.
Too many threats. One of them greater than the rest, but time was running out.
Kestin turned first, his head snapping toward a heavy rustle in the foliage at the edge of camp.
"Boss…"
Marek turned slowly.
At the edge of the crimson light, something stepped out of the dark.
For half a breath, no one understood what they were seeing. Then Rist's crystal eye widened.
A curved sickle of golden armor and neon pink light materialized from the shadows. There were no soft spots—only rigid chitin and jagged seams where violent magenta light pressed against the shell from within.
Marek's face drained of color. "Oh fuck no."
Kestin's voice shrank to a horrified breath. "What in the Ark is that!?"
The rift pulsed behind them, widening by inches. The gate was almost open.
The creature took one step forward, then lowered until every blade-like leg touched the dirt. Its body held there for a fraction of a breath, plates drawn tight, tail curved high above the campfire glow.
Then it moved.
The beast accelerated, its needle-sharp legs blurring against the dirt and stabbing deep for traction as it built speed in a straight line. At the apex of its charge, the creature threw its momentum forward and coiled.
Its segmented body folded inward in a brutal spiral, each golden plate sliding over the next with grinding, locking precision. Its head disappeared beneath the outer curve. Its needle-like legs vanished into the seams between armored rings. Its underbelly was swallowed behind layer after layer of overlapping plating. Even its tail wound into the motion, black-and-gold segments threading along the outer coil as the glowing stinger vanished into the turning armor.
In an instant, the centipede-like monster became a massive rolling coil—a living wheel of gold plating and violent magenta light.
The armored spiral tore across the camp ground, flattening supplies, spraying dirt, and cracking rocks beneath its crushing weight. Kestin screamed and threw a heavy field pack directly into its path, but the rolling beast struck the fabric, shredded it across the plates, and continued without losing speed.
Rist barely had time to react. He swung his good arm down in a desperate, bone-crushing backhand to halt the assault, but the creature had already changed the shape of the attack.
Still locked in its violent roll, the beast altered the coil by a fraction.
The change was almost impossible to follow at first. One armored ring lifted along the upper curve, not opening, not breaking, but shifting aside with the precise motion of a living mechanism. From beneath it, the tail slid into view already bent with tension, its black-and-gold segments pressed flat against the spinning body as if the coil itself had been holding it under strain.
Rist saw the stinger too late.
The upper loop released, and the tail ripped over the crest of the rolling spiral with the stored force of a drawn limb cut loose. Black-and-gold segments blurred through the crimson light as the stinger curved forward and down, not flailing from the roll but riding it, using the beast's weight and spin to drive the strike into the exact space Rist had left open.
Chitin met flesh with a wet crack. The glowing barb punched through muscle, glanced against bone, and tore the strength out of his hand before the shock could reach his throat.
Rist roared, stumbling back as the heavy iron chain slid from his fingers. The metal ball slammed into the dirt—the exact opening Evrin had been waiting for.
The creature used that same strike to break its roll.
Gold plates unlocked in a hard, cascading snap as the spiral tore itself open. The creature drove its blade-like forelimbs into the ground, pivoted through the spray of dirt, and launched toward its true target.
Marek twisted away, clutching the stolen prize tighter against his side. His boots scraped for balance in the loose dirt as the creature came out of the roll already reaching for him.
And somewhere far away, inside the Blood Seed chamber of the broken monument near the edge of Dome One, Dezcrin watched the newborn gate stabilize.