The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:
Novices Erk, ShuYme, Nikkolas, Tavis Good, and Daniel
Operatives The_Cbt_Wizard, SwiftFate, and Harrison
Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
---
The group of genetically enhanced super-soldiers, caked in dark loam, sweat, and metallic shavings, began the long, arduous trek back toward the safety of the colony. They scrambled up the sloped dirt berm to walk along the relatively flat, churned earth parallel to their massive excavation.
The distance was trivial for their enhanced biology under normal circumstances, but after ten hours of manually wrestling multi-ton pipes into place under a punishing trinary star system, their movements lacked their usual predatory grace. They were sluggish, their muscles burning, their minds eagerly anticipating the safety of the metal walls.
For the first twenty minutes, the march was silent, save for the heavy, rhythmic thud of their boots against the soft earth.
But as the twilight fully surrendered to the night, and the silvery glow of the twin moons struggled to pierce the dense, overlapping canopy above them, a profound and unsettling change occurred in the atmosphere, and the forest went dead silent.
It wasn't a gradual tapering off of noise either. It was something instantaneous. The clicking insects stopped. The distant, roaring calls of the larger beasts ceased entirely. The only sound was the rustle of the wind through the burgundy and emerald leaves, and the crunch of their boots.
Severus halted mid-stride, his hands instantly gripping the chassis of his AK-947-ASR. His grey eyes narrowed, scanning the pitch-black tree line to their right.
"Hold," the aristocratic Elite murmured, his voice dropping to a barely audible whisper that was effortlessly picked up by the others' enhanced hearing.
Mark stopped, the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end. He didn't have the decades of military conditioning to personally fight enemies like the Elites possessed, but his artificially heightened senses were screaming at him. The air felt heavy, charged with a suffocating pressure. The scent of the crushed purple grass and damp earth was suddenly overwhelmed by something else. A thick metallic odor that smelled distinctly like dried blood and feral sweat swept through the quiet breeze.
"We are being tracked," Octavia stated coldly, her own weapon already raised, the massive barrel of her railgun sweeping the darkness in smooth, calculated arcs. "Multiple contacts. They must have been pacing us for several minutes. Heavy footfalls, but padded. I can feel the micro-vibrations in the soil, but I cannot hear them."
"Armor up and form a perimeter," Mark commanded, his fatigue evaporating as a cold rush of adrenaline flooded his system.
It was a tactical move: you didn't wait to be attacked before going on the defensive. You had to be ready for whatever came. With a single thought directed at the dormant pendant resting against his sternum, the nanites resting within the housing instantly rippled to life. In a fraction of a second, a cascade of liquid metal flowed over his neck, rapidly expanding outward. The black t-shirt and dirt-stained cargo pants he wore instantly began shifting. The liquid metal hardened, shifting and locking into place to form a full suit of heavily articulated, hyper-dense, jet-black armor. The faceplate sealed over his features with a pneumatic hiss, his HUD flaring to life in a bright tactical blue, illuminating the darkness with thermal and night-vision overlays.
Simultaneously, the four Elite Guards activated their own countermeasures. Their form-fitting, tactical undersuits engaged, deploying interlocking, heavy ablative plating across their chests, arms, and legs in under two seconds. Their helmets snapped shut, sealing them in their combat gear.
Fully armored and battle-ready, the Elites moved with flawless, terrifying synchronization, instantly collapsing into a tight, 360-degree defensive circle around Mark. Cassius and Titus covered the rear and the left flank, while Severus and Octavia covered the front and the dense jungle tree line to the right.
They stood there in the suffocating silence for three agonizing minutes as the darkness between the trees seemed to writhe and shift, playing tricks on their vision.
Then, the air was filled with the tearing sound of the canopy being violently displaced.
From the high branches of the massive trees directly above them, four colossal shadows plummeted toward the earth. They had bypassed the ground entirely, using the interlocking branches to silently position themselves directly over their prey.
"They're in the trees!" Cassius roared, tracking the falling masses.
But they were already braced to meet the impact.
The four creatures slammed into the earth around them, kicking up massive clouds of dirt and pulverized grass. The shockwave of their landing alone was enough to stagger Cassius and Severus, forcing them to brace their legs to avoid being knocked flat.
Through the green-tinted night vision of his visor, Mark finally got a clear look at another one of the apex predators of Rubrion Prime.
They were a nightmare amalgamation of prehistoric brutality and alien evolution. They stood easily six feet tall at the shoulder, their bodies stretching nearly twelve feet from snout to tail. Their skeletal structure aggressively resembled the extinct raptors of Earth, with powerful and heavily muscled hind legs that ended in massive three-toed claws designed for disemboweling. Their forelimbs were longer and far more articulated than a standard raptor's, ending in wicked, curved talons.
Their entire bodies were wrapped in an incredibly thick, matted layer of coarse, wire-like fur that possessed a dark, shifting, mottled grey-and-crimson pattern, providing flawless camouflage in the alien twilight. Their heads were wedge-shaped, featuring elongated jaws packed with serrated, translucent teeth, and four glowing, bioluminescent yellow eyes that tracked their movements with terrifying, calculated intelligence.
"Light the motherfuckers up!" Severus shouted, opening fire.
The rhythmic, thundering roar of Severus's AK-947-ASR tore through the twilight. The heavy armor-piercing rounds spat from the barrel in precise bursts, the muzzle flashes illuminating the horrific features of the beasts for brief moments.
But the rounds didn't penetrate.
As the supersonic rounds struck the leading raptor, the creature's thick, matted fur seemed to react dynamically. The dense undercoat rippled, acting like a hyper-advanced Kevlar weave, absorbing the kinetic transfer with supernatural efficiency. The bullets flattened against the hide or were caught entirely in the dense, wire-like mesh of the fur, failing to punch through to the vital organs beneath. The creature barely even flinched, letting out a horrific, screeching roar that sounded like grinding metal as it charged directly through the hail of assault rifle fire.
"Standard munition is ineffective! The fur is too damn thick!" Severus yelled over the comms, frantically backpedaling.
Cassius dropped to a knee, leveling his massive anti-material sniper rifle. The weapon kicked with the deafening force of a small cannon. The massive, depleted-uranium slug crossed the distance instantly, striking a second raptor squarely in the side.
The anti-material round was effective. The mass and velocity of the sniper slug overwhelmed the fur's tensile strength, punching deep into the creature's flesh and leaving a fist-sized exit wound that sprayed dark, viscous blood across the grass. The beast shrieked in genuine pain, its momentum faltering as it stumbled sideways. But the dense muscle and fur had prevented the round from violently fragmenting as it was designed to.
It was a grievous, bleeding wound, but it wasn't an instant kill. Instead of dropping, the creature simply roared louder, its four yellow eyes burning with enraged adrenaline as it reoriented on Cassius.
"Sniper rounds are punching through, but not dropping them!" Cassius reported, racking the heavy bolt of his rifle to chamber another massive round.
"Clear the lane of fire!" Octavia's voice sliced through the chaos.
Severus dove to the side, allowing Octavia to step forward. She planted her boots, leveling her magnetic railgun. The weapon whined with a sickening accumulation of magnetic force before she pulled the trigger.
CRACK!
The supersonic boom of the railgun slug displacing the atmosphere shattered the eardrums of most local fauna within 1000 meters. The hyper-accelerated tungsten penetrator struck one of the raptors. The sheer, overwhelming force didn't just pierce the hide, it obliterated the creature's entire right shoulder. A massive chunk of meat, bone, and wire-like fur was violently amputated from the beast's torso, leaving a gaping crater. The creature screamed, spinning into the dirt in a chaotic spray of gore, completely crippled.
On the left side, Titus let out a feral roar of his own. He hoisted his recoilless rifle, a heavy ballistic weapon designed strictly for anti-vehicular combat, and fired. The high-explosive, armor-piercing shell detonated directly against the ribs of the third raptor. The concussive blast wave knocked the massive creature off its feet, the explosive payload completely bypassing the kinetic-dampening fur. The blast blew a massive, smoking crater into the creature's side, exposing shattered ribs and ruined internal organs that came slushing out. The beast went down hard, thrashing violently against the earth.
In the span of ten seconds, the Elites had successfully wounded three of the four predators. Two were missing limbs and bleeding profusely from catastrophic wounds, while the third was leaking heavy blood from Cassius's anti-material round.
But they were hyper-intelligent pack hunters, and even heavily maimed, their pain was entirely overridden by a feral, bloodthirsty rage.
The fourth raptor, entirely uninjured, lunged directly at Mark. Its jaws unhinged, aiming to snap its serrated teeth cleanly around Mark's armored torso.
Mark, enhanced by the raw, godlike processing power of the nanites currently encasing his flesh, planted his boots firmly into the alien dirt. His carbon-laced muscles coiled with explosive potential, and as the beast's jaws snapped forward, Mark ducked under the lethal bite, his entire body moving with a fluid, terrifying speed. He stepped perfectly into the creature's guard, pivoting his hips and driving his right fist upward in a textbook uppercut with all of his might.
The strike connected flush with the underside of the raptor's elongated jaw.
The force generated by Mark's enhanced musculature, combined with the armor, resulted in an impact that sounded like a collapsing steel girder. The sheer power of the blow snapped the raptor's head violently upward, and the creature's lower mandible fractured with a sickening, wet crunch, the bone splitting entirely in two as the teeth shattered against the armored plating of Mark's fist.
The beast was lifted off its forelegs by the force of the uppercut, a spray of dark blood erupting into the night air. It crashed down hard onto its side, thrashing wildly, its broken jaw hanging at a grotesque angle.
The dynamic of the ambush had shifted entirely. Two of the creatures were effectively dead in the dirt, one bleeding out from the railgun shot, and the other twitching lifelessly after the Titus' shot. That left only two still in the fight: the one Mark had punched, and the one bleeding heavily from the Cassius' shot.
Recognizing that they had engaged prey far too dangerous to casually slaughter, the survival instincts of the two remaining beasts finally overrode their bloodlust. The wounded creatures let out a series of high-pitched, chittering hisses to one another, instantly shifting their tactics. They began to retreat, scrambling backward into the dense brush.
"They're breaking off!" Titus yelled, dropping his empty recoilless rifle and drawing his heavy monomolecular combat blade, the razor-sharp edge gleaming in the moonlight as he and Octavia moved to press their advantage and execute the heavily maimed beasts.
But as they thought it was over, the tree line violently exploded. They hadn't been a pack of four. They were a pack of six.
Two completely fresh, uninjured raptors vaulted from the shadows, violently closing in to protect their retreating packmates. Mark braced for a frontal assault from the leading reinforcement, but he was completely blindsided by a sweeping tail-whip from the second new arrival.
The raptor's tail was thick, heavily muscled, and incredibly dense. It struck Mark squarely in the ribs with the force of a speeding freight train. The armor held, preventing his torso from being crushed, but Mark was lifted entirely off his feet, his breath leaving his lungs in a violent rush as he was thrown completely sideways through the air.
His massive, armored frame acted like a bowling ball, slamming directly into Titus and Octavia, who had just started to gain the upper hand against the crippled beasts.
Mark crashed into the two Elites, shattering their offensive push and sending all three of them tumbling violently across the churned earth. Armor plates shrieked and ground against one another in a tangle of limbs. Mark felt a sickening, sharp pop in his side as the kinetic dampeners in his suit failed to fully absorb the impact of the tail-whip, resulting in fractured ribs.
They crashed into a tangled heap a dozen yards away, their weapons flying from their hands, landing several meters out of reach in the dark, trampled grass.
"Our lord is down!" Severus yelled over the comms, his voice tight with controlled panic.
Severus and Cassius were suddenly left entirely alone, unable to help their downed commander as they desperately tried to hold their ground in what was now a chaotic two-versus-two engagement against the fresh reinforcements covering the pack's retreat.
Severus drew his own heavy combat knife, stepping forward to intercept one of the new, highly aggressive raptors. He swung the blade in a wide arc, aiming for the beast's neck. But the creature possessed a terrifying, instinctual combat intelligence. It dropped low, sacrificing a shallow cut across its snout to spin, delivering the exact same sweeping tail-whip that had incapacitated Mark.
Severus received the same treatment, but with devastatingly different results. Unlike Mark, there was no one behind Severus to arrest his momentum. The towering Elite was launched backward like a rag doll, flying through the air for nearly forty feet with nothing to stop him. He crashed violently into the soft dirt, tumbling end over end before sliding to a halt in the mud, gasping for air as his armor locked up.
Cassius fared no better. The second reinforcement charged the remaining Elite. Cassius fired his sniper rifle from the hip, but the heavy weapon was knocked aside by a glancing blow from the raptor's massive forelimb. The beast lowered its armored, wedge-shaped skull and rammed him.
The impact knocked Cassius flat onto his back, and before he could roll away, the fresh raptor pounced on him. It landed squarely on top of the man, its massive weight pinning Cassius's arms to the dirt.
Cassius's armor immediately began to scream, the internal servos whining in protest as the diagnostic overlays on the shared tactical network flared dark red. The creature wasn't just large, it was impossibly dense. The sheer gravitational weight pressing down on Cassius indicated a bone and muscle density that defied standard biological models. It felt as though a solid block of lead had been dropped onto his chest. Cassius thrashed, his enhanced muscles straining to their absolute limits, but he couldn't make the beast budge.
A dozen yards away, Mark groaned, his vision swimming with static as he pushed himself up from the tangled heap. Titus and Octavia were struggling to rise beside him, their armor heavily dented, their breath coming in ragged gasps as they tried to orient themselves.
Mark looked up. Through the cracked visor of his helmet, he saw that two of the original, heavily maimed raptors had abandoned the fight entirely, crashing through the underbrush in a full, frantic retreat. But the two fresh reinforcements remained. One was pinning Cassius to the dirt. The other beast that had tail-whipped him was making its way toward them. Its four yellow eyes were locked directly on the three downed, weaponless soldiers. It let out a wet, terrifying hiss, its hind legs digging into the dirt as it prepared to charge.
The pain in Mark's fractured ribs was blinding. Every breath felt like inhaling shattered glass. But as the raptor's muscles coiled to spring, Mark felt himself shift into the Zero Horizon state.
The blinding pain in his ribs abruptly vanished, ignored entirely by his brain. The chaotic, screaming alarms on his HUD faded into meaningless background noise. His breathing quickly stabilized, the frantic, hammering rhythm of his heart smoothing out into a cold, steady, and terrifyingly calm cadence. The dim, twilight-lit clearing sharpened into hyper-focus, and everything became agonizingly clear.
He pushed off the dirt with explosive, terrifying force and started running directly toward the massive creature, ready to meet the uninjured apex predator head-on with nothing but his armored fists.
The distance between them closed in a fraction of a second. Mark coiled his arm back for a strike that would either shatter the beast's skull or leave him entirely exposed to be trampled when, suddenly, a black shadow, massive and moving at a speed that completely blurred the air, slammed past Mark's peripheral vision.
The shadow collided with the charging raptor with devastating force.
The sound of the impact was sickening. The charging creature, despite its immense density, was abruptly lifted entirely off its feet, its forward momentum violently arrested. Mark skidded to a halt, the dirt flying up around his boots, his hyper-focused Zero Horizon state struggling to process the sudden scene.
The fresh raptor was suddenly spilling all its blood from its throat. A massive, gaping crater had been ripped through its thick, kinetic-dampening fur and dense muscle, severing the jugular and the spine in a single, devastating bite. Arterial blood sprayed across the purple grass like a fountain as it collapsed into the dirt.
Before Mark could even turn his head, the darkness of the clearing erupted into absolute chaos.
Mark looked around and saw two more shadows, similar in shape to the first one but quite a bit smaller, blur out of the dense tree line. They moved with terrifying speed, darting straight past the treeline to hunt down the two retreating, injured raptors.
Deep in the brush, the fleeing pack, recognizing a threat that vastly superseded the armored humans, abandoned their retreat to fight for their lives. They released unrecognizable, high-pitched, animalistic sounds of pure, unadulterated terror as the two smaller shadows descended upon them.
It was an execution. The shadows tore through the impenetrable fur of the raptors as if it were wet tissue paper. The horrific sounds of crunching bone and tearing flesh echoed from the dark woods.
Then, the massive, primary shadow blurred across the clearing again, moving toward Cassius, who was still pinned beneath the immense weight of the second raptor.
The beast on top of the Elite looked up, its four yellow eyes widening momentarily in panic. But it was far too slow.
The shadow struck it from the side, and, in a moment that defied comprehension, the creature that was pinning Cassius found itself completely missing its head. The decapitated, massive body slumped heavily onto the Elite's armored chest, dead weight, while the wedge-shaped head rolled into the dirt a dozen feet away, its glowing yellow eyes flickering and dying.
Silence slammed back down onto the clearing, broken only by the ragged breathing of the battered Elites and the wet, dripping sound of blood pooling in the grass.
Mark stood perfectly still, his Zero Horizon state slowly bleeding away as his conscious mind reasserted control. He didn't move. He simply stared into the center of the clearing, where the massive shadow had finally stopped moving, allowing the ambient light of the twin moons to fully illuminate its form.
This time, Mark was able to make out the shadow clearly.
It appeared to be the giant wolf that had stalked him last night, and the smaller two shadows hunting in the brush must be its pups.
But seeing it out here, fully illuminated and standing amidst the slaughtered remains of the hyper-evolved raptors, the sheer, impossible scale of the beast was staggering. It stood easily nine feet tall at the shoulder, its body covered in a thick, luxurious coat of deep burgundy and black fur that seemed to absorb the moonlight. Its musculature was terrifying, coiled with power that spoke of a creature designed to hunt gods.
As the group of battered Elites gathered their bearings, scrambling to their feet and frantically retrieving their dropped weapons, the huge wolf finally stopped analyzing the carnage. It turned its massive, heavy head, its piercing, intelligent amber eyes locking directly onto Mark.
It slowly started approaching him like a predator stalking its prey.
The movement was deliberate. Its massive paws, the size of dinner plates, made absolutely no sound as they crushed the grass beneath them.
Everyone tensed up. Octavia hoisted her railgun, Titus leveled his combat blade, and Cassius, having shoved the decapitated raptor off his chest, raised his anti-material rifle.
"Stand down," Mark ordered, his voice echoing through the external speakers of his helmet, harsh and absolute.
The huge wolf, whose head was the size of Mark's broad torso, stopped just shy of Mark. The sheer presence of the animal was suffocating. Mark could feel the heat radiating from its massive body, could smell the metallic tang of fresh blood coating its muzzle through his cracked visor.
The massive wolf then turned its head toward the Elites, its amber eyes sweeping over their dented, bloody armor and raised weapons, as if analyzing them. It stared for a long, calculating moment before turning its sights back on Mark.
It tilted its head, a strangely canine gesture of intense curiosity.
Mark, intrigued by the predator's strange behavior, slowly started to move his armored right hand to reach it.
The wolf reacted instantly, letting out a guttural growl that erupted from the beast's massive chest, a sound that bypassed the ears and shook directly in everyone's chest. It was a clear, unmistakable warning.
Mark stopped moving instantly, his armored hand outstretched, hovering just inches from the beast's fur.
"My lord, fall back!" Severus's voice cracked over the comms, the Elite having finally staggered to his feet from across the clearing. "You are in danger!"
The Elites were bombarding him with questions and frantic warnings through their comms, the audio channels overlapping in a chaotic mess of tactical panic.
But Mark wasn't paying attention to them. He was fully drawn by the massive creature before him. He looked at the dense, shifting metal of his own armor, which was starting to self-repair, and then looked at the beast. The wolf didn't understand the technology. It saw the armor as a hard, unnatural shell.
Mark took a breath and mentally ordered the nanobots to retract his helmet and the gauntlet of his outstretched arm.
With a soft, pneumatic hiss, the heavy, jet-black faceplate unsealed, folding backward and melting rapidly down his neck, exposing his sweaty, soot-stained face. Simultaneously, the thick armored gauntlet dissolved, the liquid metal retreating up his forearm and leaving his bare hand hovering in the air.
The sudden, fluid act of the metal shifting spooked the wolf. It caused the massive beast to flinch back momentarily, its lips pulling back to reveal fangs the size of combat knives.
But Mark didn't flinch. He kept his bare hand perfectly steady, projecting calm dominance.
Slowly, the wolf stopped snarling, and it began inching forward again. Its massive snout moved past Mark's outstretched, bare hand, entirely ignoring the physical touch. Instead, the colossal predator leaned in close, its wet, black nose hovering mere inches from Mark's face.
It took a long, deep sniff of Mark's face, drawing his scent deeply into its massive lungs, before pushing a massive gust of warm, damp air out directly against Mark's skin.
Then, it moved away from Mark.
The giant wolf walked casually over to one of the dead raptors, the uninjured one whose throat it had ripped out. It grabbed the creature by the scruff of the neck and lifted it up with ease. It dragged the multi-ton corpse directly to Mark's feet, dropping it with a heavy thud.
It seemed as if it was making an offering.
The massive wolf didn't wait for Mark's reaction. It moved back to the center of the clearing, grabbing the decapitated raptor carcass in its impossibly large jaws.
Mark blinked, his exhaustion finally crashing back over him, and looked past the alpha.
He saw the two smaller wolves emerging from the dark tree line. They were each struggling to drag their own single prized possession per wolf, their massive paws digging into the dirt as they pulled the shredded remains of the hunted raptors back into the clearing to join what Mark assumed to be their mother.
As the three wolves retreated seamlessly together into the forested area, dragging their kills and dissolving completely into the impenetrable shadows until not even a rustle of leaves remained, leaving the clearing in absolute silence.
Titus slowly lowered his combat blade, his chest heaving. Below his helmet, his feral grin was replaced by an expression of bewilderment. He looked at the massive, bloody carcass resting at Mark's feet, and then out into the empty darkness.
"What the fuck," Titus breathed into the open comms channel, perfectly summarizing the thoughts of every single person present, "was that?"
---
As you all know, the dreaded Patreon exists for those of you who want to read 30+ chapters ahead:
https://www.patreon.com/Crimson_Reapr
Join us on Discord where you can discuss my work, meme about, fuck around, just don't be an idiot. This link is permanent:
https://discord.gg/qzAgV2vahM
Crimson_Reapr is the name, and writing Sci-fi is the way.