part one
// WARNING … //
// CONTAINMENT BREACH … //
There was a flash of red, before it bloomed outwards like a thousand orange wildflowers, the flare of fire and shrapnel mingling with the dust of the bloodied earth.
Drop team, disengage.
The command was sharp, full of bite and fury, a bear’s roar against the backdrop of the world ending. Even through the shielding of his helmet, the roar of the wind was a cacophony, pierced by the shotgun-loud sound of the locks disengaging.
Svanhvit rolled to the side, and gravity pulled him from the safety and sanctity of his saddle and out into the booming maw of the open air. There had been no time to practice this maneuver, not in the dead heat of conflict. It was do or die, entirely up to him whichever route he ended up choosing.
Valkyries choose the slain. Never the other way around. //TOXIN LEVELS UNKNOWN … //
// O2 RESERVES 12% … //
There was another flash of red, and for a blinding moment Yavul genuinely believed a grenade had gone off near his head. All the symptoms were present— excruciating pain and the inability to understand which way was up. The only symptom lacking was that he wasn’t completely dead.
The red flashed again, and Yavul groaned at the searing agony that ripped across his skull from stem to stern. He blinked, once, twice, and slowly the flashing came into focus.
The words were split, beginning up about his brow and ending across a wide cracking divide, a few letters lost forever to the aether in between. But Yavul had seen them too many times to not know what his suit was trying to tell him.
Signal lost, oxygen depleted, and the yawning divide in his helmet was from where the armored glass had cracked in two, the jagged edge of a rock mere centimeters from having drilled between his eyes and taken the rest of his skull with it.
Sighing tasted like dirt, and licking his lips only proved his point. Moving his fingers and feet was an effort, though as the world came back into focus, he was relieved to note that his difficulty moving was not entirely due to lack of personal ability. Rocks and dirt and debris were piled high above him, which also explained the long stretches of blackness in between steady red warning flashes.
“Helmet lights,” he whispered, but the words fizzled and popped, lips making the motion and mouth filling with dirt for his efforts. Yavul shut his eyes tight against a sudden wave of nausea, fighting back the initial animal panic of being buried alive and unable to move. He breathed through his nose until he could count further than “three” in between gasps, and slowly started to move his hands again.
O2 at 10%. He needed to get out. He needed to get out. He needed to get out or he was going to die like this, he was going to suffocate and die like this, trapped like an animal in a cage and slowly rotting until they dug him back up again—
Stand up and meet your fate. Yavul took another long, shaky breath, pulled his arms close to himself, and slowly wormed them upwards under the tight shielding of the rocks that had come dangerously close to smashing him to pieces. As he went, he pushed the dirt that fell down towards his feet, granting himself more and more pockets to move within.
The real challenge was his helmet. He huffed quiet as he considered the rock that pinned him there, and inched his fingertips around the bulk of it, with the sinking realization that bringing his kids all into a singular hold would be a far more physically possible thing than trying to move this earthy behemoth off himself.
Yavul tried to turn his head to the side, only to flinch his eyes closed as glass crunched and sprinkled sharp dust into his face. Another quick burst of breath, and he wiggled his hands up to the sides of his head, pressing in to disengage the locks just enough for him to get out from beneath the reinforced metal armor and let it continue to hold the boulder at bay.
For as long as that would last.
It was three way race, between Yavul’s barking panic, the fragility of the earth above him, and his need to breathe. Eons passed by, tumbling along with every handful of dirt he shoved towards his feet, scrabbling blindly with his eyes shut and praying to Vebeset that he hadn’t chosen the wrong direction in which to dig.
He tried not to think about what it would mean if he had chosen wrong. Yavul focused on digging, bit by bit, shallow breath by shallow breath, and had to bite back a cry of victory as his hand finally pushed through and out into open void. He moved quicker— quick as he dared— until his head was similarly freed, and took long, gasping gulps of free, if subtly stagnant, air. He shook his head, and carefully blinked his eyes open, only to find that wherever he was was as pitch dark as it was underneath the rubble.
Yavul wriggled a little more, freeing his shoulders enough to reach into his armor, pulling out a small torch and clicking it on. The white light shot out like a laser beam, making him flinch against the resurgent throb of his headache, and it took another several minutes of squinting and blinking before he could figure out what he was seeing.
For a moment, it seemed like the world was only made up of his mountainous would-be tomb and the inky black of the void. But then the subtle pressure became less subtle as Yavul looked up, and he realized with no small amount of gut-wrenching that he had dug himself out at an angle.
Fuck, he was at an angle— As if rejecting his attempts to scuttle back into his little tunnel, the earth shuddered and gave way, sending Yavul backwards against the side of the rubble. He managed to tuck himself into a curl to control his fall, each harsh thud against the ground robbing him of any breath he had and thus preventing the long stream of curses that would have blistered the ear off of the saltiest Cancer port guard.
Eventually gravity stopped being such an asshole, and Yavul rolled to a stop at the base. He lay there for what felt like another eternity, stomach rolling and head splitting and absolutely expecting this to be the point where his body demanded a divorce due to constant battery. He took another breath, letting it all out in a silent huff as he reached to retrieve his torch, flicking it around to gauge his surroundings.
No immediate danger he could see. Plenty of time to just lay there and make sure he hadn’t broken anything important. Deep breaths, gentle flexes. Extensions, curls, rotations. The worst pain remained in his head, but even that was clearing up now that he wasn’t being bombarded by warning signals from his helmet. Yavul eased himself up, slow and steady, eyes shut against the nausea that followed his sudden change in equilibrium. Bruised but whole.
And a little embarrassed. Of all the things to happen, he had to fall down a gods-damned hole in the ground. Though, after a quick flick of the torch upwards, Yavul noted that it was not such a terribly tiny hole, the beam of light not bright enough to even begin to see the ceiling of whatever cavern he had landed himself in. All things considered, it was kind of impressive that the worst thing to happen was a killer headache.
Snorting quietly, he moved from the base of the rubble and along it, finding the closest wall and starting around the perimeter.
At first, it seemed like just one giant pocket in the earth. It explained the stillness of the air, the almost ethereal liminality of a space that had not been touched by the light of day for millenia, if it had ever been touched at all. As he got further along the wall, however, Yavul felt it— the telltale caress of moving air against his grime-caked face, the tickle of sweat-soaked hair moving along his temple. There was an air current nearby, and like a man greedy for the smell of dinner cooking in the next room, Yavul followed it with quickened steps to the beginning of what looked to be a large tunnel.
It wasn’t like he was any real expert in the matter, but the tunnel itself looked big enough to drive a railcar through. Which was disconcerting enough as Yavul remembered his reason for being down in a hole in the ground in the first place. It was doubly disconcerting as his footsteps took on the texture of someone walking across a floor where soda had recently been spilled, and a look downwards confirmed the fine filigree of translucent threading carpeting the ground before the tunnel entrance.
Yavul reached for his hip, unclipped the holster there, and drew his side-arm, resting it over the wrist that held the torch. He stepped backwards, onto solid earth, and took much slower, steadier steps around the edge of the tunnel mouth. At the very least, the adrenaline made him forget entirely about his headache, his heartbeat picking up as he moved from one tunnel… to the next… and to the next… and to the next. Only the fifth was smaller than the rest, and only the fifth wasn’t surrounded by a nest of webbing, though that did nothing for Yavul’s peace of mind.
Twelve rounds loaded. Two magazines in his belt. Arm at 100% capacity, but for a target as big as a Trapdoor, that would be depleted almost immediately. Not even counting what kind of chaos unleashing his kinesis in these tunnels would cause. Six flashbangs, far more effective against creatures used to the dark, but without his helmet he was just as susceptible. He needed backup. He needed his rifle, but gods both only knew where in the rubble that was.
But most of all, as the telltale sounds of rapidfire movement became louder and louder, Yavul needed to not be in the open. He ducked into the fifth, smallest tunnel just as the first Trapdoor scuttled out into the cavern, and didn’t stop moving until the thunder of their steps was a distant memory.
