The Crashed U.N.S. Aegis. Deck 4 Infiltration.
The valley outside the crashed dreadnought was an apocalyptic meat grinder as lightning arrows rained from the canopy devastating the Abyssal horde while the native flora violently dragged the eldritch horrors into the earth.
The sheer volume of magic and violence masked everything creating the perfect distraction.
Commander Maroon and N032 slid past the chaos onto the upper hull of the Aegis and sliding down the twisted metal until they reached a massive tear near Deck 4.
"Thermal masking is engaged,"
Maroon whispered, his cybernetic eye scanning as they slipped into the dark wound in the ship’s side.
But the corridors were empty.
"The local fauna successfully drew the main horde outside,"
N032 observed quietly.
He walked with absolute silence, his heavy sword drawn and his twilight aura suppressed so tightly it didn’t cast a single shadow.
They moved with the synchronized lethal efficiency of two war torn veterans who intimately understood the exact cost of a single tactical mistake.
Maroon covered the front with his kinetic rifle raised while N032 guarded the rear and the blind corners.
"The primary armory is just two bulkheads down this corridor,"
Maroon signaled.
In this wreckage, the gravity plating was dead.
So they used their magnetic boots to walk along the slanted walls and safely avoid the thick pools of black sludge on the floor.
Ahead of them, the massive titanium blast doors of the primary armory stood intact.
The biometric scanners were dead but the heavy magnetic deadbolts were still locked proving the infection hadn’t breached it.
"It’s untouched by the infection,"
Maroon breathed a rare glimmer of hope.
"If we can haul even a fraction of those heavy munitions back to the FOB, we can properly arm the recruits with plasma repeaters and kinetic shielding,"
Maroon planned as he pulled a specialized decryptor from his belt moving toward the manual override panel.
N032 stepped past him, his featureless visor locking onto the ceiling above the blast doors.
"Commander,"
N032 whispered.
"Step back from the door right now."
Maroon froze as his cybernetic eye recalibrated to look up into the pitch black rafters.
Clinging to the ceiling in perfect camouflage against the dark fleshy sludge was a horrifyingly sleek Abyssal Stalker made of jagged obsidian bone and shadows.
The hunter had a vertically splitting jaw lined with serrated fangs and it was an apex predator.
The creature dropped from the ceiling in terrifying silence with its scythe like claws aiming for Commander Maroon’s neck.