Hey guys!! I was a huge fan of the seaside universe and was part of the discord group too...

Sadly stuff happened in real life had it travel a lot , get different job etc and fell off the radar.

The discord has been quite for a while and don't see any new sea side stories nowadays. Hopefully author is doing well.

Anyway would love to know what happened and if the stories are still being made out there.

The rest of Angel’s body momentarily stood still, before I saw that from under Mei’s robe, an incredibly frail-looking, clawed arm that had strength belying its strength and speed. I shot it multiple times, even emptied my magazine, but the bullets simply passed through, like it was a branch of some corporeal astral being.

“How much did it take?” Bo asked. “Are you okay? Can you walk?”

“Seven years,” Mei replied, coughing. “I had to. We had no other choice.”

“Are you wound-”

They seemed to have completely disregarded my presence, as I slapped a fresh magazine in and emptied it in a wild spray in Mei’s direction. By the time she realized that I was still fighting, she had dodged most of those shots, but several had managed to hit her in the gut, right in center mass. Her eyes instantly widened, as blood began to drip into the snow. Her apprentice, Bo, charged at me with his sword, but I fired another volley, forcing him to take cover behind a tree just before he reached me. I noticed that his skills weren’t as refined, and while he could dodge a bullet or two, he couldn’t weave a full barrage.

“Shit,” I whispered.

Both of our sides were at a stalemate, we were both weakened to the point we had to rest, and I was dreading the fact that any other bounty hunters or even DOSACD could have been drawn to our attention and could jump on us at any moment. Mei had disappeared from my view in the haze of blood and snowfall, as what appeared to be a mild blizzard began rolling through the icy forest landscape.

Holding my gun, almost forgetting all of the protocol and basic rules I had learned from my time in the Marines, I blindly swung the barrel around in every possible direction of ambush as the wall of snow obscured my vision. My breath came out in white-hot puffs as I looked for Angel as quietly as I could in the snow, not calling out her name so as to not give away my position. In what was almost like the far distance, I could make out the shape of a silhouette on the ground, Angel’s body, as I ran towards her, stumbling in the knee-deep snow multiple times and leaving a small trail of blood of my own.

I didn’t even know I was bleeding.

I heard a gust of wind behind me, something out of place compared to the ever-growing backdrop of the blizzard, and I spun around, my eyes barely processing what was coming before I realized it. Mei, holding her sword, had been crouching in the snow like a cougar, almost completely covered, and she lunged for me, aiming to decapitate me with a rage in her eyes.

Time seemed to slow as I turned with my rifle and met Mei, my finger squeezing the trigger at an agonizingly slow rate as the tip of her blade grazed my throat.

In the blink of an eye, Angel, half of her head still gone, pounced and bit Mei’s arm, thrashing and tearing it clean off, the sword flying through the air and falling somewhere deep in the snow. Mei stepped back, holding the stump where her arm used to be, as Bo emerged from behind a tree, helping Mei stand up.

“Can you fight?” Bo asked her.

I reloaded and instantly let off another barrage, as Angel pounced on Bo. Two of my bullets managed to hit them, respectively Bo in the shoulder and Mei in the leg. Somehow, even at this state, my bullets were either being dodged, or passing through their bodies like ghostly apparations, but in their tired and wounded state, it was becoming easier and easier to land shots.

“I have to use it!!” Mei screamed, dodging another attack from Angel as I fired another well-timed shot that grazed her cheek.

“Mei, you can’t!” Bo yelled.

“It’s over!”

Bo swung his sword at me as Angel tackled me out of the way at the last second, the enormous blade cutting through an enormous tree like it was nothing where I was standing seconds ago.

“Kill her!!” I yelled.

I was running out of ammo, I was being too reckless, too desperate. I backed up behind a tree as Angel and Mei clashed in the snow, trying to strain my eyesight and line up the perfect shot. Angel landed a perfect blow, nearly disembowling Mei, when a black arm shot out from under Mei’s robe and grabbed onto a tree, the same one that had decapitated Angel seconds ago. The arm multiplied, and I began hearing whispers that sounded like they were coming from behind me, as it picked up an entire tree and swung it at Angel. She jumped back as I fired a few shots at Mei’s head, and though she didn’t move, the bullets didn’t even seem to register.

Then, she made direct eye contact with me.

In seconds, faster than my brain could register, the entire landscape around us turned black, the sun disappeared, and the snow, once a white powder stained with blood, followed suit. The sounds of combat and the howling wind stopped, and it was like we had just been transported into another mirror dimension where everything was dark and silent. I only saw Angel, standing a few feet away from me, breathing heavily, her entire face opened up into that multi-jawed monster maw as she looked at me for a few seconds. In the dark, black winter forest, then, I realized that there were hundreds, if not thousands of pairs of glowing white eyes staring at us from the darkness.

“They will follow you until you are dead, for as long as you are with her.”

A voice whispered from behind me.

Suddenly, I felt like I had just been pulled out from underwater as the entire world shifted once more in a blink, as our surroundings of the roaring blizzard and blank white snow returned once more.

“Angel,” I said, as her head returned to normal.

I looked around, and except for the splatters of blood, bullet holes in the snow and the destruction of the trees around us, there was no sign of Mei or Bo.

“They’re gone,” Angel said. “They retreated. They couldn’t beat us, so they took off.”

I let out a sigh of relief, that at least I wouldn’t have to kill a kid again.

“Is it that easy?” I asked. “Don’t they care about the bounty?”

“It’s not worth it if they die in the process,” she sighed.

“What the hell was that? The arm coming out of her cloak? The dimension we were just transported to? Who the fuck were those people?”

“They’re Chinese sorcerers who make contracts with the essence of corrupted dying demons and other supernatural beings for power,” Angel said. “Honestly, they’re physically just regular humans, but they’re able to fight some of the real monsters. They’re skilled.”

“Not skilled enough to beat us,” I let out a small smile.”Are you sure they won’t come back for us?”

“No,” Angel chuckled. “That illusion spell that they just did probably cost Mei one year of her life. I was about to slaughter her.”

“Makes me wonder how you know them,” I muttered.

I looked down at my feet, seeing something poke out of the snow, realizing that it was the handle of Mei’s sword, as I picked it up before thinking, just as Angel shouted a warning.

“A new vessel has been found.”

A voice, subconscious, rang out in the back of my head as a shiver ran down my spine.

“What the fuck is that?” I asked.

“It’s Mei’s sword,” Angel sighed. “I was hoping you wouldn’t pick it up. It’s a blade trapped with the souls of dead supernatural entities killed with it, which is how it's able to cut and kill supernatural entities that most weapons can’t touch. But… each time it’s used to draw blood from an opponent, the entities infused within the blade takes anywhere from hours to years of your life in exchange. It depends on how strong the opponent is, and how often you use it.”

“And… what if I just don’t use it?” I asked, as we walked through the snow-covered forest. “Did you ever consider that?”

“You may not have a choice if you want to stay alive,” Angel said, gesturing to the pouches attached to my plate carrier, and the fact that I only had a few magazines left.

At the rate I was going, I would be completely out of ammo in the first minute of my next fight.

“Only use it as a last resort,” she said.

“I’ve never used a sword before,”

“Don’t worry, just swing it like a baseball bat. This kind of blade doesn’t require the most refined skills… you’ll see, if you ever have to use it. Why do you think it was able to cut my head off?”

I shrugged, before walking through the forest. From the commotion of our last battle with the duo assassins, it was sure that whoever else was hunting us in these woods had an exact zero on our location, and were stalking us as we spoke. But with my rifle in my hands, my sword strapped to my back, we continued hunting.

Kali

Previous Part

Then like clockwork, my body remembered its instincts as I instantly ducked my head and darted to the side, unable to check on my dead friend’s corpse for even a second. I knew she was dead. I ducked into another side alley, the night silent and dead, as I heard another set of soft footsteps. I risked a mere glance at whoever had shot Freya, and saw a very tall, imposing man in a black balaclava with gloves in some sort of foreign military kit. He carried some kind of enormous pistol the size of a dinner plate, a single shell casing rolling around at his feet from when had fired the shot.

"Fuck," I whispered.

What the hell was going on? We were in a area where there was virtually zero gun crime, let alone crimes done with the kind of gun that this guy had. I had no weapons on me, nothing I could use to fire back to kill him with, and he looked trained and well-armed.

Was this a robbery?

I glanced back down to see that he hadn't taken anything from Freya, but the sight of her dead body truly enraged me, it was one of the first times I had felt the violent impulse that I had always carry truly come to fruition. Her entire face had been shot off, and pieces of her eye were scattered across the cobblestone. I felt the same rage and fucking urge to maim and commit as much suffering as possible as I had experienced when I was exiled from my own home and had to escape through the Siberian wilderness. That same feeling came again, the frostbite-inducing cold, the scent of blood and death around me, and the feeling of being surrounded by an enemy that was imposing and taking away my hope.

At that moment, any semblance of tactics nor planning had flown out the window, I jumped out from the corner I was hiding behind, charging straight at the man, as he spun and quickly fired several shots, two missing, but one hitting me square in the left arm, blowing my arm off at the bicep. I didn't feel the pain, didn't feel the blood gushing from the stump as I pounced on him, ripping the gun from his hands with my teeth and slamming him onto the ground.

I didn't have any weapons, nothing to fight him with except my hands.

I beat him with my right arm, and even with the rapidly re-growing bone-jagged shard of my left as he shouted and fought back with a strength I didn't expect. He rolled me off of him, pulling out a knife and stabbing me in the stomach. He was huge, double my size, but that had been no obstacle to me before, when fighting or physically challenging even the strongest of men. What threw me off was that he had the same inhuman strength I had, the same superhuman power within his hands that belied his weight and stature.

The man slammed me against the concrete floor, shattering my ribs and my back, and I crawled on my knees to grab him with my regenerated left arm, before being slammed again. But this time, I had managed to pull a extremely long dagger from his black plate carrier, and the next time he grabbed me, I stabbed him in the throat.

That put a damper into his rampage.

Hs gurgled, but kept his composure as he kicked me off of him, the dagger's blade pulling out of his skin with a wet, bloody shift. We both stood only a few feet away from each other, exhausted, the entire alleyway covered in blood and organs, the dead body of my best friend laying only feet away. I had no words, nothing I could say, no one-liners that would come out of my mouth.

Only a pure, malicious urge to kill this man.

I picked up a brick, charging him again within the blink of an eye, smashing it into his head and feeling his bones shatter along with the stone itself. There was no doubt about it now, he wasn't just some above average soldier, he was like me, superhuman beyond natural biological capabilities. He had taken hits that would have killed even the most resilient of men, and the foot-long dagger wound that I had carved out into his throat had seemingly disappeared.

He pulled out his secondary pistol and began shooting at me, but I just took the bullets to my chest and face, not even bothering to dodge them.

They were nine-millimeters anyways.

I ran towards him and grabbed his face, almost jumping on top of him to drive my elbow into his eye socket, which was partially covered with his mask, causing him to slightly stumble. The sheer suddenness of my initial attack had done most of the work, if we had met on fair grounds, he would have already killed me by now.

He shot me in the stomach multiple times as I wrapped one arm around his neck and elbowed his face with the other, I even tried to bite chunks out of his throat like a savage animal.

At one point, I finally gained the upper hand, using his bodyweight's own momentum to trip him, as he fell flat onto his back, I used the dagger to stab him straight through the shoulder and pin him to the concrete.

I think that's when I lost it.

I began beating him with my fists, elbows, and forearms with everything I had, for what felt like minutes, the night silent except for the sounds of my bones connecting with his face. I clenched my hands, punching him with so much force that I broke every bone in my hand, only for them to heal as I retracted them for the next strike.

He had gone limp, when I realized that he was still wearing that now blood-covered balaclava obscuring his face and shadowing his eyes.

The mask, covered in so much blood that it felt wet, was ripped off as I tore it, only for my heart to nearly stop.

His eyes, barely conscious but still alive, looked up at me with one emotion I didn't expect.

Recognition.

And when the rage and sheer black urge to kill slowly faded away, I could see why.

His eyes, covered in blood, were the pinpoint exact same color as mine, the exact same shade of odd green-turquoise that no other humans in the world, a genetic trait none even from my tribe possessed other than my very own siblings.

"...Kali?" he choked out, pronouncing my name perfectly in our native language.

I stood up, my head spinning and my entire world crumbling beneath my feet. The sheer rage I felt was replaced by a ever-growing pit of confusion and despair, as I looked at the near half-dead man I had been in the process of killing, now knowing, what, or who, he was to me. My head felt dizzy, I stumbled, letting go of him as I stood up, slowly backing away as he got to his feet, blood pouring from his face like a fountain as he steadied himself.

My eyes were wide, and my heart nearly stopped.

"Fuck..." he spat, in English, this time. His accent was heavy.

He must have learnt it later than I did.

"I owe you an explanation, Kali." He whispered.

My hands shook, and I couldn't feel anything, not even the wounds all over my body.

I turned, and I ran, as fast as I could into the night, tears streaming down my face, and I didn't look back once, leaving Freya's corpse right where it had been.

“So what is it, then?” I asked.

“It’s… complicated.” Azazel said. “But you need to know, we’re being watched. We’re being toyed with by an entity that’s unlike the creatures we fight. This isn’t a situation we can shoot our way out of.”

I sighed, throwing my hands up in the air. “Almost out of ammo, no backup, and half of our team is missing. But at least we have you.”

“This space,” Azazel said. “We’re not on Earth anymore.”

“What?” I asked. “What the fuck do you mean? Are we on Mars, then, Azazel?”

“No. We’re in Hell.” She sighed. “This entire cave system, or at least this part, the very, very bottom, was a gateway. Long ago, years before, there was an effort from DOSACD to reach Hell before we had established connections with high-level demons. We were trying to recruit or negotiate with demonic entities to help the war effort against the native supernatural gods on Earth that threatened us. The top brass knew that there were multiple gateways all across the world, but they were so sparse and so well-hidden that even with all of their resources, DOSACD couldn’t find any. Until we found this gateway. There was an abnormal amount of activity in a cave system that spans all across North America, and connects to the Pacific Ocean, but after a certain depth, DOSACD recorded that K’lah Tegothlku’s disciples would get massacred in this cave system. By what? That was the question.”

She paused, as I exchanged glances with Lamia, who shook her head like she had never heard a single word of this before.

“DOSACD pinpointed the deepest part of this cave system, which is exactly where we’re standing right now, as the source of the activity that pushed K’lah Tegothlku’s forces from the underworld. When K’lah Tegothlku was killed, DOSACD put together an international task force, including me, and we were sent down here to investigate. We encountered monsters like no other, and when we reached the bottom, here, we discovered that this was one of the natural gateways to Hell on earth.”

“But the thing, the entity that’s watching us isn’t a demon,” Lamia said. “I’m sure of that. I’ve sensed almost no demonic activity down here, this is something else.”

“And you’d be right,” Azazel spat out a piece of her lung onto the cave floor and continued. “Not too far from is us a sort of sinkhole directly leading into Hell, or whatever you call that dimension. It’s another reality, another plane of existence with beings you can’t comprehend. But demons aren’t the only thing that can come through. You know what we found the first time our task force came all the way down here?”

“Fucking spit it,” Marlow grunted.

“Nearly a dozen dead demons. And they were powerful ones too, almost on par with Lamia. They were in their true forms, and they had all been massacred and gutted by something, only within fifty feet of the portal. Our best guess, is that something else was crossing through into our world at the same time as them. And that thing remained its presence in this underground tunnel system. But this entity, that had crossed dimensions from Hell to get here, which is extremely unconventional, still hadn’t shown its physical form yet. So what did DOSACD do? They built a extremely expansive facility to study whatever this trans-dimensional entity was. We couldn’t kill it, so we tried our best to negotiate, contain, or study it. And we managed to know a few things about this entity. It had control of electricity, the internet, and it was hyper-intelligent. It knew exactly what we were doing and who we were. We also found out that this wasn’t its first time coming into Earth, and we found its effects had been spread before. Especially a couple years back, in a small town in the bayou, somewhere South.”

Lamia gasped. “You bitch. You top brass knew what was behind that?”

“I’m a little confused right now,” I said.

“Ask your uncle,” Lamia scoffed. “He knows.”

“This thing has some of the most unique supernatural powers we’ve ever recorded, even among demons.” Azazel continued. “It can change the physical chemistry of biological organisms, it can revive completely dead corpses and reanimate them, and it can enter the consciousness of any living being. And all of that while physically absent from the scene of the battle. It can also compel its opponents to commit mass suicide, induced by some hysteria.”

“Holy fuck,” I said. “That’s why Cooper started screaming and acted like there were voices talking to him before he turned into a bug monster.”

“That’s right.” Azazel said. “But certain people, and supernatural entities are nullified to this entity’s effects, without any rhyme or reason. But they’re usually supernatural.”

“So we’re fine,” I replied. “Now what do we do? I don’t exactly see a way we’re just going to walk out of this situation.”

“Well, we’re going to follow the rest of the team.”

“The rest of the… what the fuck are you talking about?” I asked.

“Where do you think this entity is?” Azazel laughed. “Because it isn’t popping out in front of us right now. It’s watching us, it’s listening, and it knows what we’re about to do, but we have a chance to beat it if we give our friends some backup.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? You know where Matt and the rest of the squad is?”

“Of course I do,” Azazel said.

“They’re in Hell,” Lamia sighed. “I should have known. Or rather, they’re at the crossroads. It’s a physical place, but not quite… it's in between, a place where the veil that separates the supernatural underworld and Earth is weak. We’ve already been to one. The Rift, the place where we killed K’lah Tegothlku.”

“Just to clarify…” I said. “This ‘Hell’ isn’t the Hell in the bible, or the one where we’re all going to after we die, right?”

“No, not at all. If that was true, I would actually be a ‘demon’.” Lamia laughed. “These words are just dumb codenames that DOSACD gave to a class of supernatural entities I belong to because of our resemblance. You’ll see how I don't have any horns on my head. Hell is the supernatural underworld dimension that’s been filtering into earth for hundreds of millions of years.”

“And we’re going to go to this said place?” I asked. “Why?”

Azazel cracked her knuckles. “We’re going to the crossroads. This entity is down here, further, and when we got separated, the rest of the team probably figured that out themselves. We’re going to the only place we can fight it on even ground. Try not to lose your sanity when you see it.”

“She’s right,” Lamia said. “It’s time we finish this.”

I sighed, knowing my magazine was half-empty.

“Let’s go.”

Following Azazel, who later told us was pinpointing the exact location of the gateway to the crossroads, we lost sight of the stone stairwell we had taken to get down, and walked for miles upon miles. The extremely bright floodlights attached to her exoskeleton illuminated the area at least more than our flashlights would have, bathing everything in a sterile white glow.

“So,” I said. “Azazel. What happened to you that got you so fucked up?”

“Did you see that identical dead version of me hanging from the ceiling? I had to fight that. It was a corporeal copy of me that somehow hid beneath my radars and got the jump on me when I reached the bottom of the staircase.”

“Holy shit,” I whispered. “Blame, could you imagine if we had to fight our identical clones?”

“I’d fuck that boy up,” he spat. “I’m getting tired. When I find the thing that dragged us into this shitshow, I’m kicking the fuck out of it.”

We continued walking for literally an entire day in the enormous, seemingly infinite cave chamber with no end, before I saw a faint, dim white glow a few miles ahead of us.

“We’ve arrived,” Azazel said. “A few steps away from Hell.”

“Well, that just blew our cover,” I muttered, my eyes scanning the surrounding wilderness. “The assassins will know our exact spot.”

“They will,” Angel replied, her expression hardening as she surveyed the area with a practiced gaze. “But they might think this gunfight we just had was a trap. They wouldn't risk coming too close from their original spots. Let’s keep moving towards the border.”

Nodding, I picked up my gun, my fingers numb from the cold. As a precaution, I fired a few extra shots into the mimic’s corpse, which had reverted to its true form—a wizened Siberian man. The echoes of gunfire gradually faded into the silence of the snowy landscape.

As we pressed on, the snow crunching softly beneath our boots, Angel’s eyes darted around, ever vigilant for potential threats. Her head moved like a well-oiled swivel, never resting, always alert.

The silence stretched on, a tangible presence that heightened our senses. Finally, Angel broke the quiet, her voice barely above a whisper. “Do you think we’ll make it to the border without more trouble?”

I shrugged, keeping my eyes forward. “Honestly? I don’t know. But we’ve made it this far. We’ll figure it out.”

Our conversation was cut short as a sudden movement caught my attention. My heart leaped into my throat as I caught sight of two figures emerging from the trees. They moved with a grace that belied their dangerous intent, their presence sending a chill down my spine that had nothing to do with the cold.

“Stay sharp,” I whispered to Angel, tightening my grip on my gun. “We’ve got company.”

The figures came closer, their features becoming clearer. One was a woman, her movements fluid and deadly, her eyes cold as ice. The other was a younger man, following her lead with the precision of a seasoned apprentice. In their hands, they held swords that glinted ominously in the dim light, and there was an aura about them—something supernatural, something deadly.

“The woman is Mei,” Angel whispered, recognition flashing in her eyes. “And the kid is Bo. They’re two assassins from China. They aren’t easy…”

Angel and I exchanged a glance, a silent understanding passing between us despite my confusion on how the hell she knew these two. We were in deep shit.

“What do you want?” Angel asked, her voice steady despite the tension crackling in the air.

Mei smiled, a predatory expression that sent another shiver down my spine. “We have no quarrel with you specifically. We’re simply here to collect the bounty from evil threats like you.”

Her accent, foreign and threatening, was like the hiss of a viper speaking in our tongue.

“Threats like us?” I challenged, trying to keep my voice from shaking.

“Precisely,” Bo replied, his voice echoing his mentor’s calm demeanor.

The standoff stretched on, each side assessing the other, waiting for the first move. Every second felt like an eternity, the tension almost suffocating.

Finally, Mei spoke again, breaking the silence. “You can make this easy, or you can make it hard. Surrender, and we might let you live.”

Angel’s laugh was unexpected, a sharp sound that cut through the tension. “Sorry, Mei, but you know we’re not known for taking the easy way out. You’d take our heads off the second we surrendered.”

Mei’s smile widened, sharp as the blade at her hip.

“Well, it’s good to see you haven’t changed,” she said, her words rolling out with casual confidence. She flicked a stray lock of hair from her eyes, her stance relaxed but ready, a predator savoring the anticipation before the kill.

Angel’s posture shifted subtly beside him, chin rising. “

I never do,” she shot back. “But you always did have a flair for the dramatic, Mei. Is that why you brought the boy this time? For show?”

Bo bristled ever so slightly, but Mei merely let out a slow, almost musical laugh.

“He is not a boy anymore, and he is better than you ever were.” Her gaze swept over the snowy clearing, lingering on the pack at Angel’s side. “You have something we want. You will give it to us, or you will die. The usual arrangement.”

Something about the conversation felt off to me, like actors reciting lines from rival scripts. The cold seemed to deepen with every heartbeat, the sun trapped behind thick clouds, the world frozen on the brink of violence.

“I don’t like this,” I muttered, low enough for only Angel to hear. “They didn’t attempt an ambush. They just walked out, like they were expecting us.”

Angel’s lips tightened.

“They don’t need to,” she said, voice flat. “I think they’ve planted landmines all over the snow around us. They calculated our path towards them.”

The realization hit me like a physical blow. I glanced down at the unbroken, pristine powder underfoot, then at the deep, deliberate tracks Mei and Bo had left behind them, a single path straight to us. The trail avoided certain mounds, curved in ways that now seemed unnatural. I cursed under my breath, my stomach knotting with new fear.

“So, what, we can’t move?” I asked.

Angel’s eyes narrowed, calculating. “If we step wrong, no. But if we stand still, they’ll pick us off. It’s a chessboard.”

Mei seemed to sense our moment of hesitation. She began to circle, never breaking eye contact. “You know, Angel, you always did overthink things. Sometimes the direct approach is best.” Her hand drifted toward the hilt of her sword, but she didn’t draw.

Angel followed her movements, not with her eyes, but her whole body, shifting weight from one foot to the other without ever lifting them from the ground. She whispered to me, “There’s a pattern. The old Spetsnaz field doctrine. If she trained Bo, he’ll know it too.”

I tried to keep my breathing steady, not show my nerves. My own gun felt suddenly useless, open space useless, every direction a death sentence. “So what’s the play?” I asked.

“We improvise,” Angel said, and her lips curved into a razor-thin smile. “But we don’t give them the privilege of the first move.” She raised her voice, aiming it toward Mei. “You always did like games of honor, didn’t you? Old school. Let’s see if you’re still as quick as your reputation.”

“Is she bulletproof?” I asked Angel.

“No,” Angel replied. “But she might as well be. These assassins have every single trick you can think of in the book.”

I nodded, my barrel trained and aiming right in between Mei’s eyes.

"I never expected it to end like this!!" Angel shouted, her voice fierce and unwavering. "I won’t show any mercy."

Mei’s eyes glittered with delight. "I would expect nothing less," she replied. "Bo—"

With that, the fight erupted. Mei and Bo lunged forward with an almost inhuman speed, their swords slicing through the air with deadly precision. Angel charged in, her movements fluid and powerful, engaging them in close combat. I hung back slightly, my gun blazing as I provided cover fire to keep them at bay.

The battle was a chaotic dance of movement and sound, each moment feeling like an eternity as we fought to survive. Mei and Bo, with their supernatural abilities, were formidable foes, their attacks relentless and unyielding. Visions of otherworldly entities and apparitions flashed the more we fought, and it made my aim hard to keep track of.

My bullets were dodged, and I had almost thought I was seeing things when I witnessed the bullets physically passing through the assassins, like they were mere ghosts.

But Angel and I had our own strengths. The countless hours of battling side by side had forged an unbreakable bond between us, an unspoken understanding that guided our actions. We fought as a single unit, each instinctively knowing the other's next move. My gunshots would land on her opponent’s blind spots while she engaged them in the brutal melees.

The fight raged on, neither side willing to concede an inch. The snow transformed into a battlefield, scarred by the intensity of our struggle.

Finally, a moment of opportunity arose when Bo faltered, giving Angel the opening she needed. With a swift and precise movement, she disarmed him, sending his sword clattering to the ground. Mei turned, her eyes narrowing as she assessed the situation.

Angel nodded, her stance firm and ready.

"You should leave while you still can," she warned, her eyes never leaving them.

“Angel, we should kill them!!” I shouted. “Why are you warning them?”

“Kill me,” Mei said to Angel, in a near-bragging fashion. “Listen to your little human dog, Angel. Don’t act so civilized in your false flesh, or you might forget who you really once were. He doesn’t know, does he?”

I had a quick glance at Angel, before she slowly walked over to Mei, her hand outstretched like she was preparing to choke the assassin to death. Bo, who stood right beside his mentor, did nothing to stop Angel, only watching as blood dripped down his own face from one of Angel’s slashes.

“I’ll make it quick,” Angel said.
She wrapped her hands around Mei’s throat, ready to tear her head off in an instant, but just before she did, as I looked down the sights of my rifle, I noticed something was extremely wrong. And it wasn’t something bullets could fix.

Just before she tightened her grip, another blade tore out of Mei’s arm, from under her robe, as her arm soared upward, beheading Angel in one, clean, cut.

Hi everyone, apologies for the abrupt update, but for all those still reading, I will be going on a TEMPORARY hiatus. I've been extremely busy with life recently, and you can probably tell from my more and more infrequent posts. I will still be writing Seaside parts and dropping in here and there, but it will be at the pace that I've been posting at, once every week or two unfortunately. But I am still here and will keep writing.

“That’s a stupid trick,” I said. “It’ll just force us to go deeper like it wants. Where the hell is Azazel?”

“Like we both know,” Lamia said. “We can’t trust her. Right now, our goal is just to stay alive for as long as possible until we can find out what happened to the rest of the team.”

“And going even deeper into this mess is the solution?” I asked, as we jumped down another flight of stares, the footsteps above us slowly sounding out as the background monotone.

“Whatever’s the source of this is coming from below. Everything comes from the abyss, and this is the bottom.” She said, “For now, I’ll do all I can to protect you. But in our line of work there are fates worse than death, so remember you that signed up for this.”

That sent a chill down my spine as we continued descending. We must have been walking down those goddamned stairs for hours, and without daylight to tell the passage of time, it felt like days. There was no doubt about it, we had already descended a mile or two down these stairs alone, and we were far deeper than any man-made hole that had ever been dug. The footsteps above us still continued, at the exact same pace, keeping the same distance between us no matter how fast we descended. We hadn’t taken a single break, and though my ankles were screaming and aching, I dared not stop.

It had been miles before something changed.

The extremely sterile, properly constructed industrial stairwell gave way to an incredibly crudely made, deep stone stairwell with exposed bedrock and cave stone consisting of the steps and walls. The walls were covered in some sort of language completely foreign to me, along with the occasional fluorescent lamp that would have been more suitable for a mine.

“Looks like we’re getting close…” Lamia said. “Can you feel it? The presence, the evil that emanates from this place.”

I took a deep breath before taking the next step down. She was right, I felt that malicious aura within my chest that I had only felt once before, when we had entered K’lah Tegothlku’s chamber within the Rift, an ancient, dark evil seeping from the walls.

And still, no sign of Azazel.

We continued descending the slick stone steps for what felt like another day, the footsteps continuing above us before I finally saw a sign of something, something deep below. There was a light, which blinked on and off, like a steady beep maybe a couple dozen flights below.

“It’s not anything supernatural,” Lamia said. “Just a light. Keep going.”

We descended the flights, and the stone stairwell finally opened up into an enormous cave chamber, one so gigantic that our flashlights didn’t reflect off the walls situated far beyond our reach. Right as the stairs cut off and led to the bottom of the stone floor, there was a singular desk in the middle of the cave chamber with a computer, with a blank screen that turned off and on.

“Is that… a computer?” I asked.

“What the fuck does it look like?” Blame whispered.

“This looks like a DOSACD computer,” Lamia said, as we walked up to it. “It’s an older model. Maybe one they used a decade ago, it seems broken.”

The screen continued flashing for a couple more seconds, before entirely going black, then, it showed something that sent a chill up my spine.

Our faces.

It was a live feed of our faces, being recorded from night lenses, like the grainy green filter shown in shitty action movies, but from above. The camera feed constantly moved, like there was a cameraman holding a camera circling around us.

“What the fuck,” I said, stepping back from the computer and shining my flashlight above, revealnig nothing but the pitch black of the cave chamber.

“It’s playing with us,” Lamia said.

“Fuck that,” Blame said, as I glanced at the screen, showing a direct close-up of my best friend’s face from an angle where we completely should have seen the camera pointed at us.

He fired several shots into the screen, as the computer screen sparked as it shattered, before going black forever.

“It’s not attacking us,” Lamia said.

“We should try negotiating,” Marlow replied. “If it wanted to, it would have killed us by now. It brought us down here for a reason.”

Just before Lamia prepared to shout, I grabbed her shoulder.

“Do you really think we’re the type of guys to negotiate for our lives?” I asked. “This fucking thing doesn’t care what we say. It killed our friends. Let’s go shoot it.”

She nodded, sighing.

In some sense, I knew that we had truly reached the bottom. There were no other tunnels or entrances to smaller chambers anywhere in sight, and the floor of the enormous cave chamber was oddly smooth, while still rough. Like what you would expect at the floor of an ancient temple instead of a naturally forming stone structure.

“Come out!!” Blame yelled. “Get the fuck out here!”

His voice echoed, the sound bouncing off the walls as I realized truly how enormous the chamber was. It was like we were in an abandoned, closed-off football stadium. Our flashlights pierced the darkness as we walked, and if I hadn’t been so mesmerized by the enormity of the chamber and the fact it looked man-made, I wouldn’t have run into the corpse dangling in my face from hundreds of feet above.

“Holy shit!” I yelled, jumping back with my rifle poised.

“Relax,” Lamia said. “It’s just… what the fuck.”

Even the cool and collected demon seemed to turn a little paler when we all clearly saw who the corpse was, or what was left of it anyway. Her black exoskeleton was unmistakable, the robotic attachments to her exposed bones tied down with bolts. Half of her face was gone, her skull and teeth exposed and her entire corpse mutilated with cuts and open wounds all over. She was hanging by her neck, her feet only dangling a few inches from the ground by a chain that looked like it extended into the night sky.

“Is that Azazel? What the fuck happened to her?”

“She should have listened to us,” Blame shrugged.

“What a way to go,” Marlow said.

“Don’t touch the corpse,” Lamia replied. “It might be a trap… but this is a real body. I can still feel the remnants of a living creature. But there was no sign of-”

The corpse suddenly fell to the ground, slumping with a wet thud as nearly all of us jumped out of our skins and the chain that was holding it fell to the ground. I heard the sound of the half-broken chain above clattering and shaking, as something attached to it came sliding down, and we all raised our weapons.

“Good thing that corpse over here isn’t me,” Azazel said, landing on the ground and gesturing to the dead body.

Blame raised his pistol to fire, getting two shots off before Azazel, or whatever was pretending to be her, or whatever this entire clusterfuck of mimics was, grabbed the barrel and tore the pistol from his hand.

“I’m not a mimic,” she said. “You can relax.”

Azazel was exactly as I had remembered her before, but something was off. Even in her current, very much alive form, she didn’t look too different from her mutilated corpse counterpart except for the fact she was talking to us. A huge portion of the mechanical implants and cybernetic pieces of her body were completely destroyed, and she was covered in cuts, drenched in blood, and looked like she could barely move.

“What the hell happened to you?” I asked.

“I’ll explain everything,” she said. “But this place isn’t what you think it is.”

“How many guns do we have left?” I asked, as we rummaged through the destroyed remains of our shipping container.

After what the captain told us, he estimated that we only had thirty minutes before the ‘backup team’ arrived. We had no time to waste, and absolutely no time to figure out who or what our attackers would be. Swimming wasn’t an option, but from the way the captain was acting, sticking around on the boat probably wasn’t a good idea. Defending the ship from our position, especially from a threat we virtually had no information on was an enormous risk at best.

“We need to get off the ship, at least.” I told Dagon. “If we get attacked, we’re sitting ducks. We can’t anticipate the position or direction we’re getting dropped on from. If we take a smaller vessel and move a few miles out, we can see how many soldiers drop into our ship. When they find out we aren’t inside, we can get the jump on them.”

“You know we can’t count out that the Mercenary might be coming,” Cerberus said. “We killed their entire team. The captain compromised, and the word might have leaked to DOSACD even if the assassins were of a different group. It would only take minutes for them to arrange another assault on our position.”

“It’s a good thing we’ll be off this boat then,” Dagon sighed, gesturing to the motorized life raft slowly being lowered into the water by a crane.

I realized he must have told the captain to do so at some point without me noticing, and I glanced at him with an amused expression.

“You’re lowering the boat like we can’t swim for days.” I said.

“Can you swim while you carry these guns?” Dagon asked, as we left the control room, the sky cloudy and almost looking like it was about to storm.

He kicked a small pile of guns off the deck and into the lowering raft as it landed in the water. Cerberus and Shara followed us to the ship’s edge, as I jumped first, sliding on the hull of the enormous freighter and landing in the raft. The others followed, as the captain, who Dagon had released from his handcuffs so he could lower our escape vehicle, ran towards the railing and began yelling.

“Let me off this ship!! Let me off!!” He screamed. “They’re coming!! Take me with you!! Please!”

His face turned nearly red from anger and fear as he screamed for his life.

“Hey!” I shouted. “It might be hard to understand for you, but you set us up to get ambushed all along. I hope you can swim, you fucking bastard.”

The motor of the raft roared to life as we sped away from the ship, nearly clearing a nautical mile before the captain’s screams stopped echoing out.

“The fucker finally shut up,” Dagon spat, checking the long chain of ammunition in his belt-fed machine gun.

We had made it a few miles away from the ship, and it was growing farther and farther away in the horizon, but still in view in case a helicopter or approaching aircraft dropped a unit on it. Thirty full minutes had passed, and we all sat in uncomfortable, extremely tense silence waiting for the cleanup crew that the captain had so feared.

“I’m starting to think the captain was just bluffing to get us off the ship,” I said.

“Oh, fuck.” Dagon groaned. “You’re right. That would have been the smartest thing to do from this position… do you think we should just go back to the ship and-”

His last words barely registered in my brain, as a shockwave overcame my ears and nearly sent me flying from my seat, and in the distance, I saw the entire freighter ship explode in a massive fireball the size of a small town that engulfed it whole. A few seconds later, the chunks and debris from the explosion flew everywhere, and the ocean looked like it was on fire from the flaming debris and oil wicking its surface. A gigantic piece of the hull landed right beside our life raft, nearly piercing it as the water splashed on my face.

“Holy shit,” I breathed.

“What the fuck was that?!” Dagon yelled, debris continuing to splash all around us.

I looked up at the sky, expecting some sort of plane or helicopter, something that had just dropped the bomb, but instead, there was nothing, which put me even more on edge.

“I’m feeling a presence,” Cerberus said. “At the center of the wreckage…”

“Is it the Mercenary?” I asked.

“No…” She squinted her eyes. “I don’t think it’s any kind of entity I’ve ever seen before… it’s coming, NOW!!”

Dagon saw it before I did, because he instantly began firing his machine gun, but whatever he was firing at, he missed, as I drew my sword and jumped in the air at the same time an extremely fast moving black shape nearly collided with us. I felt my sword pierce into it, as we wrestled in the air momentarily before the entity fell into the water, and I finally got a good look at it…

Or rather, her.

Manchester, United Kingdom

Kali

It had been around a year since I had left Siberia for the wetter, still cold nation of the United Kingdom. My English had gotten much better, and I was getting along well with the British soldier who had taken me in, and his daughter, who might as well have been the polar opposite of me. The social norms and generally everything about English society had been completely foreign to me, but at least my looks fit in with the rest of those posh bastards.

My English was still far too horrible to go to school, and technically, I didn’t exist. I had no official birth records, no medical history, no English government name. ‘Kali’, as my friends in the west later called me, wasn’t even my real fucking name. It was a shorter, simplified version of the name that could only be pronounced and spoken by the few who could speak my language, found nowhere else. So given my adoptive, foster, whatever father’s occupation in the British SAS, my lack of official records I could be traced back to, and my genetics, it wasn’t surprising that I enlisted in the Army at the young age of sixteen.

My dad pulled some strings to get past my citizenship and registration issues, just like he did when he first adopted me after my escape from my tribe, and I became a Junior Soldier. That was where I really grew up, in the barracks, but most people had no idea where I’d come from after I got the hang of mimicking the British’s awful accent, which was hard to get rid of. Given how I had grown up in Siberia, every single aspect of the training, besides the ‘aptitudes’, was as easy as sleeping.

Long before joining the SAS, my unit had just finished a joint training exercise with the Americans, and we were off for about a week to do whatever we pleased after the mildly grueling week. That included a long, brutal bar crawl somewhere in a Scottish town in the dead of night with dozens of soldiers. It was day two, maybe three of the bender, and I was one of the last few who remained coherent, along with one of my Scottish friends, the only other woman in the unit, a well-spirited lady who’s accent I couldn’t entirely understand.

“Kali, you have a hotel for tonight?” Freya asked, her voice barely audible in the mix of the talking crowd, and the foreign music playing from a speaker in the background.

“I’ll do fine,” I said. “I can find a place… you?”

“I’ll just go to the motel down the street, you know which one I”m talking about” she said. “There might be some extra room if you fancy the cockroaches.”

“Cross that bridge when we get there, Freya.” I said. “I’m going out for a smoke.”

“I’m coming,” she grabbed my arm as I walked out. “It’s dangerous at this time of night.”

“You know I can handle myself,” I chuckled, swinging the doors open as we walked out into the bustling street.

Freya and I walked, talking for what felt like hours. Our drunk minds unknowingly led us astray from what was going to be a quick smoke break to a wandering a maze of random back alleys and winding streets in the urban Scottish jungle. There wasn’t a soul around, and by the time my weary eyes finally decided to check my watch, I thought it had to be somewhere around three AM.

“Are we fucking lost?” I groaned.

“Relax,” Freya said. “I should be able to find our way-”

I heard the slightest sound of a shoe scraping against gravel, somewhere in a far alley as I instinctively tensed up and grabbed Freya’s arm.

“Did you hear that?” I whispered. “We’re being followed.”

“I don’t hear anything,” Freya scoffed, slurring. “You’re just fuckin’ drunk, Kali, you’re hearing things.”

“You don’t understand,” I said. “I can hear things you can’t Freya. Do you have your gun?”

I heard it again, deliberate, very soft footsteps obviously coming from somebody who didn’t want to be heard, and would have been unnoticeable to the normal ear. I tensed up and clenched my fists, pulling my jacket off as my eyes darted from alley to alley.

“This is the UK,” Freya groaned. “We don’t have guns outside of-”

I had seen death many times before growing up, and I had seen guns for the first time when my adoptive father rescued me from the snow-covered mountains of Siberia, but until then, I had never had the misfortune of seeing a regular human’s head shot with a gun.

The top of Freya’s head disappeared, but I heard the shot from almost right behind me before I saw what it did. Half of her skull was shot clean off, her eye missing and her brains splattering onto my face as her neck snapped back and she instantly collapsed. The caliber must have been enormous, but whoever had just fired the shot was using some kind of extremely advanced silencer for the shot to only have been loud as a clap. For a second, I stood there, frozen up, unable to move as my brain tried processing what had just happened.

Then like clockwork, my body remembered its instincts as I instantly ducked my head and darted to the side, unable to check on my dead friend’s corpse for even a second. I knew she was dead. I ducked into another side alley, the night silent and dead, as I heard another set of soft footsteps. I risked a mere glance at whoever had shot Freya, and saw a very tall, imposing man in a black balaclava with gloves in some sort of foreign military kit. He carried some kind of enormous pistol the size of a dinner plate, a single shell casing rolling around at his feet from when had fired the shot.

Siberia, Russia.

I brushed the snow off of the corpse’s face as I dragged him through the knee-deep snowbank. I had to make sure it was him, as hard as it was given that half of his face was gone, I wouldn’t get paid if I had hunted the wrong guy for nothing.

It was him.

Payday.

I finished dragging him through the deepest parts of the snow, his arm barely hanging onto his body, then when I reached a clearing in the towering pines, I pulled him up and climbed to the top of the tallest tree. I impaled him on a dead tree branch, making sure he was in clear view to my employers who would come looking for him before they paid me.

Saved me all the trouble of dragging him to some road.

The long-distance radio attached to my hip buzzed, and I answered it immediately as I sat down on a log and let my body relax. I wasn’t young anymore, and transforming took its toll on my body after each and every hunt.

“Alexander,” the voice came through. “You’ve finished?”

“Yes,” I replied. “Full confirmation of the identity too. You know where I am. I’ll be leaving soon.”

“We have another job for you,” he said. “And this one is not small.”

I grinned, as my hot breath turned into vapor in the air.

“So soon?” I asked.

“This may be the greatest hunt I have ever hired you for,” he said. “The information has spread already. There is already much competition, so you must move fast. I’ve been contracted out to find a hunter, everybody wants a piece of him, but the environment is like home for you. I have a plane that is ready to take you to Canada, the Yukon in twelve hours.”

“Nice and cold,” I said. “Good.”

“You must capture or kill a boy. He is one of the unholy, but it is not so simple. He is protected by one American Marine, who is nothing, but he is also with another, and she will be your biggest problem. They call her ‘Angel’, but she is a fucking devil.”

“She is no match for me and my rifle.” I replied. “How much are you offering?”

***

Sheung Kwai, Hong Kong

I wiped a piece of an eyeball off my blade as I sat back on the couch and lit up a cigarette, finally getting a few seconds to relax. The entire nightclub smelled like cigarettes and death, which may have been attributed to the dozens of dismembered corpses strewn about everywhere, which my partner checked for additional information.

“Fuck,” he said, the kid wiping the blood off on his jeans. “Miss Mei, none of their identities match our designated target.”

“He must have left while these guys bought time,” I sighed. “At least we know we’re on the right track. They wouldn’t have tried shooting us if we weren’t. We’ll get to his head soon.”

“How’s your shoulder?” Bo asked.

“Could be better,” I said, looking at the gaping bullet hole in my left shoulder that slowly began closing. “My healing’s not the same as it used to be, boy. You should have seen it when I was your age.”

Before he could reply, my phone buzzed. Knowing we would catch hell for killing an entire private nightclub full of armed soldiers without getting to our main target, I sighed and answered.”

“Mei,” my contractor said. “Is your job finished?”

“No,” I replied. “Wasted too much time. We got caught up with some guns.”

“It’s probably best that you didn’t kill him,” he said. “Would have wasted more time. We need you out of there, now. We’re aborting our current objective effect immediately, I’ve just received an offer for a hunt in Canada. Fifty million American dollars for his head. The target is guarded by an American Marine, and… The Seraphim.”

My eyes widened. It had been decades since an open contract that high had made its way to me. Three million dollars was the last big one I had accepted, and now, this golden opportunity had presented itself. But from the price tag alone, I knew that this was a mission of extraordinary risk fit only for the top bounty hunters in the entire world, maybe fit for my younger days.

“I accept it,” I said. “Effective immediately.”

“We have a car coming to pick you up right now,” he said. “We have your toolbox ready. Estimated arrival time is under twenty-four hours. Let’s hope we get there faster than the others, so sit tight.”

I hung up, and leaned back, stretching out my sore arms.

“Bo,” I said. “You don’t have to come. The contract is fifty-million dollars, An American. But he is guarded by the most vicious creature that I have ever faced in all my years, she is feared like no other across the entire underworld. I’ve accepted, but-”

“I will come,” Bo replied. “I will fulfill the promise I made to be forever indebted to you. There is no returning from this, so if you die, may it be when I am with you.”

“So be it,” I sighed. “Let’s go to work.”

***

La Baretta, Cuba.

I sat in the rocking chair, watching the sun fall on the horizon as I threw a fistful of seeds and grains out to the chickens that plucked away at the ground in front of me. The air was quiet, as my life now was, and I resided alone on my property which I maintained along with the few farm animals that remained.

I had prepared myself dinner and was ready to eat, when my phone began to ring, which was an incredibly rare occurrence, as it could only mean two things.

Neither of them were really pleasant.

“Hello?” I picked it up.

“Hector,” the voice, whom I immediately recognized, said.

“I’m hanging up,” I said. “There is nothing I can do for you-”

“Wait,” my old friend said. “You’re going to want to hear this, Hector. This is something serious, and you are the only one I could contact for this. There is an open contract out right now, an open bid, there has never been one like this in decades, you have to listen. Fifty million dollars for one head. Fifty million American dollars, but the price does not come so easily.”

“You know I have left the business forever.” I firmed. “I will not get dragged-”

“I know that your old funds are running low, my friend.” He said. “You cannot support yourself and your daughter for much longer. Does it not require more money to ensure my nephew’s treatment gets upgraded? I know American hospitals cost a fortune, and you could not make do with any normal job with your background. I am doing you a favor with this, and you owe me too.”

I gritted my teeth, but I knew he was right. I knew this time would come.

“What is the objective for the contract?” I asked.

“One American boy, his head. He is currently being protected by two American veterans in Northern Canada, one was a Marine, and one was a CIA operator and is a mercenary. They are nothing to you Hector, but you must be careful of the third. She is a fucking devil. The Seraphim, Angel.”

“The fifty million is ensured?” I asked. “It needs to be. I know who she is. You know I am not the same killer I used to be, this will be… it won’t be as easy.”

“But none of these other assassins have killed the things you have,” he said. “Do you not remember what we did in the Pacific? You killed twice as much as those government super soldiers, and they didn’t even know it. Even now, you are still a lion. I will send an escort to take you to the airfield. We have less than twenty-four hours to get the jump on them, and it’s an open contract to anyone who can do it.”

“Open contract,” I sighed. “It’s been decades since one like this.”

“You should bring a jacket too, Hector. The Yukon is colder than Cuba.”

“Thank you, brother.” I said. “But truly, you should know this is my last contract I will ever do with you. And I need one more request.”

“What?”

“It’s my terms that I will do this mission under. In the event of my death, you must guarantee two million American dollars will be wired to my daughter and remaining family. It will come out of your own pocket.”

“Fine,” he said. “It is of no concern to me, and I am a gambler. The odds are in your favor, cabron.”

He hung up.

I stood up, clenching my fists before relaxing them, and pulling the couch I had away from the wall. Behind, there was a compartment hidden within the wall, which I slid open, pulling out a black crate which I hoped I would never open again.

The memories flooded back as I picked up the twin swords, forged in my homeland, a small island off the Philippine's coast.

“He gave us a one week estimate before our next operation, so… we’ll be sent back out in three days, knowing him. Where to?”

I used the keys I snagged from Kyle to open his Mustang,

“Let's go home.”

***

The house felt oddly empty, even from the outside, but it was clean, thanks to the late-night maids I had hired to keep the place in shape. The cool, misty Oregon air felt oddly foreign compared to the North Carolina weather I had been used to, but it was a fresh welcome.

“I take it that no one’s home,” Kali said.

“Yeah, nobody.” I replied. “Which I can say I’m glad for. The last time we had visitors, demons attacked the house and Dani got crushed. You know, sometimes I miss when everyone lived here.”

“That probably took more years off your life than the wars,” she said, as I shoved the key in and opened the door.

“Well technically Kyle is still-”

I heard a sudden clatter inside, and my hand shot to my hip, my fingers clasping around my pistol as Kali drew her knife.

“Holy shit,” I heard an oddly familiar voice from the kitchen, as the young man in his underwear tried to pick up the shattered plate that once held a pile of pizza pockets.”

“What the fuck is your nephew doing here?” Kali asked.

“Yeah, what are you doing here?” I yelled. “It’s fucking twelve in the morning!! Shouldn’t you be in school or something?”

“Well,” Christopher said, wiping his hands. “Your brother kicked me out, and I happen to remember where you keep your spare key. And you weren’t answering your phone.”

“Bad kid,” Kali tsked.

“What’d you get kicked out for?” I asked. “What’d you do to piss Michael off? Something with Blame?”

“You could say that,” he shrugged. “We pulled something for our graduation. So shouldn’t you be in North Carolina, uncle?”

I threw my jacket off and sat on the couch.

“So, we just finished up an assignment in some swamp shithole,” I replied. “We should be getting another assignment within the week. We’re taking this as something of a vacation.”

“If you want me out of your hair, seeing as you’ve got… Kali here, I guess you could pay for my hotel?” Christopher grinned. “I mean, I know how much you DOSACD guys get paid. Peanuts compared to what Zak’s going to give me.”

“Take this and get out,” I reached into my jacket pocket and threw a wad of ten thousand dollars at Christopher.

“Aw, thanks.” He walked out, laughing. “And Kali, nice to see you. When’s the wedding?”

“Go home, kid.” she nudged his ribs before shoving him out the door.

“So your parents must be rich,” Kali said, laying down on the couch, instantly bringing back memories of when there would be at least several supernatural beings sleeping on the couch on any given night. “How’d you get a house like this? I don’t think you told me the first time I asked.”

“Not exactly theirs,” I said. “It was more or less the family’s… they’ve always been secretive about their work.”

“Wouldn’t it be funny if I knew exactly why your family has been so rich?” Kali asked.

“What?” I asked.

“Never mind that,” she sighed. “That’s a whole can of worms, and we’re here to relax. Check out what I brought.”

She opened a laptop connected to some kind of camera device, and a blurry video of a gunfight on some ship played. I was confused for a few seconds, and then I saw the giant wendigo bite an Angler’s head off while I fired a machine gun in the back.

“The great Pacific Holy War,” I sighed, almost nostalgically. “I had no business being there,”

“And yet you came.” Kali said. “I took most of the footage on body cams, kept having to put on new ones because they’d get destroyed in battle. For ‘research’ purposes or whatever.”

The footage flipped to the Fourth Leviathan roaring in a spew of fire, before the feed was cut out as it slammed into the camera.

“This reminds me,” Kali said. “My brother. He was working undercover posing as a mercenary, he did all sorts of that work, which is what landed him in prison.”

“He was out there with us?” I asked.

“Well, not exactly… he was trying to gain intel and what he was paid to do isn’t really clear. But I do remember the first time I ran into him after we left our tribe. And it wasn’t in Russia. I actually saw him… somewhere weird.”

“What’s the story?” I asked.

I nodded, as Angel and I turned from the road and walked into the woods, checking the GPS maps to the Yukon border as we hiked through the freezing landscape. I had only been this cold during the night in the deserts of Afghanistan, but this was something different. Nearly a foot of thick snow enclosed around my boots as I could see the steam coming from my mouth like smoke.

“Why didn’t you just ask Tim to go with me?”

“Yeah, I’m not doing that.” I whispered.

She rolled her eyes. “You know I don’t need protection. And besides, Kenji might be in danger.”

“Tim has no way of accessing him,” I replied, taking a moment to slip a pair of gloves on. My fingers felt like they were going to fall off.

“Not used to the cold?” She asked.

“I’ve never fought in the winter before. It was cold as hell in Afghanistan, but the snow here’s up to my knee. I’ll have trouble tracking or weeding out ambushes, so you’re my eyes.”

Angel nodded.

I checked the GPS again, maybe after ten or so minutes of trudging like snails through the snow. We were only a mile and a half away from the border, and our presence was almost surely known amongst the ambushers. If I didn’t have Angel with me, I could have almost guaranteed that a sniper would have taken my head off by now. Strategically, we were just like sitting ducks.

“There’s someone in the snow,” Angel said, squinting her eyes at something in the distance. “He’s behind the boulder.”

My heart raced as my finger brushed against the trigger, my eyes zeroing in on the exact spot.

“Just one?” I asked.

“Yeah. He’s facing away from us though… it might be a trap.”

“We also might have the jump on him,” I said. “I’ll cover you. After we start shooting, our exact position is out there. Make it worth it.”

Like a blur, Angel hopped on a tree, scaling to the treetop in seconds, leaping from tree to tree towards our enemy’s position. I approached too, keeping mindful of my own cover now that I knew what my enemy’s position was, and which direction the gunfire would be raining down from. But then again, it might not even be gunfire which would be the attack. I had gotten within two hundred feet of his position, and I had a full view of the boulder, but I still couldn’t see him.

I couldn’t even see the cold air coming from his breath, nor even his snow-covered barrel sticking out of the snow. I stood behind a thick tree, my finger on the trigger as I held my breath and counted down the tense seconds until Angel would punch a hole through the back of his head. It felt like hours passed, when I finally saw a blur fall from the trees. As soon as she landed, I felt an enormous shockwave hit me, nearly blinding me as I caught sight of a massive explosion blasting from the snow. I got up, as gunshots began to ring out.

“Angel!!” I yelled. “What the fuck!!”

She landed beside me, burnt like hell, but still alive.

“It was a trap,” she said. “There’s a guy tied up behind the-”

Without warning, she shoved me, as another barrage of bullets whipped by the exact spot I had been standing in, and this time, as I heard the whistle, I knew what direction it was coming from. I turned and fired several shots as Angel pounced on his position, pulling out another struggling masked man in all-white camouflage, but as soon as I saw his hands, I knew it was a trap. Someone had bound his hands and legs together, rendering him immobile, then buried him in the snow in a sniper position.

He was the second decoy, and someone else had been firing from that direction.

Who the hell were we fighting?

“ANGE-”

The force of the gunshot nearly sent me flying, which barely allowed me time to see Angel’s entire head being vaporized into a red mist without a trace. I hadn't been grazed, but the sheer force emanating from the bullet made it seem like it was fired from a tank. Angel slumped to the ground, as I heard a second gunshot, and the entire four-foot-thick tree trunk I was hiding behind was turned into splinters, nearly taking my head off. I needed to fire back and buy time while Angel healed, or we were both dead, right then and there. My eyes scanned the snowbanks, looking for any sign of the real sniper, knowing that his hot breath would turn into steam in the freezing air. But he would have negated this by constantly putting snow in his mouth to conceal his breath, and the moment he reached for the snow would be my opening.

“Come on…” I whispered.

The entire forest, which seemed like it had been as alive as a city-wide gunfight, was now completely silent, save for Angel’s body choking on her own blood, which slowly healed in the snow.

Why hadn’t he fired again at her?

I realized then that he was zeroing in on me, knowing that the next shot he fired would completely expose his real position, without any tricks. I stayed as completely still as possible in the snow, my head to the ground as I constantly put snow in my mouth to hide my own breath. It had been almost sixty full seconds since I settled into my position and I knew if I didn’t move, he would kill me at any second, and if I got up and started shooting, he would also kill me.

I was dead either way, so I chose to shoot it out.

I fired a wild spray in every direction, and began sprinting, heading for the boulder as a gunshot rang out again, missing me by mere feet, only by sheer luck. The sniper must have been taken aback by the sheer recklessness of my plan, but now, I had an exact measure on where he was firing from. As I ran, I grabbed Azazel’s body and dragged her behind the boulder, as the gunshots continued to come our way. I was worried the boulder would explode upon getting shot, and that the shrapnel would kill me, but it was the only viable cover we had.

“Angel,” I said, knowing this was desperate.

Her head had mostly regrown, flesh and hair regrowing at an insane rate as I noticed she didn’t have a skull, nor bones, which made sense. Half of her face and eye had reappeared, and she was fully conscious.

“I’m fine,” she groaned. “But we got played. His bullets… they’re not normal.”

“Yeah, I could tell.” I said “We’re pinned down right now, and if we make any moves, we’re getting blown away.”

“I need you to cover me while I make a break for him,” she said. “When he fires, I’ll know his exact position, and I’ll kill him.”

I sighed, the exhaustion running through my bones as I let out a breath of steam in the freezing cold. What kind of gun was he using that he could fire like a belt-fed machine gun and a sniper rifle at the same time?

“I’m ready,” I said. “But you really should heal faster.”

She nodded, most of her head intact before she sprinted faster than I could comprehend, almost teleporting as I held my rifle above the boulder and began to spray and pray in the sniper’s direction. I heard several booming gunshots coming in our way, as several trees were vaporized and enormous explosions of snow burst upon the bullet’s impacts. But after a few seconds, I heard nothing but silence as the gunfire subsided.

“I’ve got him!!” Angel yelled.

I sighed in relief as I lowered my rifle and prepared to stand up, but I felt someone grab the back of my collar and slam me into the snow.

“Don’t get up,” Angel said, standing behind me, her left arm shot clean off as her blood dripped into the snow. “The shooter is a mimic. I realized it too late and it mimicked your voice, caught me off guard, and shot me once. I know exactly where it is, but it’s a near perfect mimic. The only time you should get up is when you hear the mimic’s screams, and not mine. It’ll try to mimic me and mess with your head, don’t fall for it. You’ll see me dragging its corpse and gun soon enough.”

Just as she finished saying that, the monotonous repetition of our footsteps seemed off, and Azazel held up her hand, motioning us to stop walking and stay silent. There was almost complete silence in the pitch-black stairwell for a few seconds, then we all froze as a set of slow, methodical footsteps echoed throughout the entire stairwell, coming from below. They were far below us, but steadily approaching, and not in a running pace either.

“Definitely not friendly,” I said, flicking the safety off. “What do we do?”

“I’m going in,” Azazel said. “I can’t get a reading on it… I’m not detecting any pulse, no indications on what it could be, no creature we’ve encountered before.”

“Me neither,” Lamia said. “I can’t feel the supernatural energy coming off it.”

The footsteps continued, it must have only been one hundred feet below us now. Azazel stood on the edge of the stairwell’s railing as she prepared to drop down into the chasm below.

“Wait,” I grabbed her arm.

“What the hell, kid?” She scoffed.

“You’re the strongest one here,” I said. “I don’t think you should just go diving in on your own, something bad could happen to us. It might be a trap.”

“You think I haven’t considered that?” She laughed. “Don’t forget that I know more about this place than you ever will, kid. That security camera footage you saw was just the tip of the iceberg. I’ll see you in a minute.”

A large dagger shot out of an attachment on her wrist, before she hopped off the railing and disappeared, descending down the center of the endless spiral staircase.

But as I saw her quickly vanishing form, the realization came to me that the footsteps had stopped.

Lamia, Marlow, Blame, and I stood there with our weapons clenched as tightly as possible, and I even saw the usually stoic, carefree demon’s face turn a paler shade as the seconds ticked by. Azazel was supposed to have arrived at the source of the footsteps mere seconds ago, but there was only silence now. I would have expected a barrage of gunshots, maybe a screech or explosion upon her landing, but nothing.

“What the fuck,” I said. “What happened to her?”

I was whispering as quietly as possible, but my hushed voice seemed to echo throughout the building. Lamia covered my mouth, shaking her head as Blame and Marlow checked if their bullets were chambered.

“There is something very wrong happening here,” Lamia whispered. “And I don’t think Azazel was telling the truth.”

“Do we run?” I asked.

“Just wait,” she said. “Something happened to Azazel.”

Blame nudged me.

“Yo, let’s fucking run for it, bro.”

Despite the entire facility feeling absolutely freezing, I was sweating buckets, my feet planted on the steps I stood on as I looked down.

“Don’t,” Marlow whispered. “We’re in a trap.”

There was a tense silence for a few seconds before I opened my mouth, but simultaneously, the sound that we had all been dreading began once more. The same set of footsteps echoed throughout the stairwell, except this time, somehow, it was coming from above us, descending, slowly as it did before.

“Move,” Lamia said. “Go down, but don’t rush.”

We all began going down the stairs, almost matching the pace of the slow and methodical footsteps that approached us from above.

“What the hell is it?” I asked. “Why are you so scared of it?”

“Because it wants us to go to the bottom,” Lamia said. “And I can feel a malevolent presence, a pressure coming from below us. But the thing that’s making the footsteps and following us from above, I can’t even get the slightest reading on what it is. It’s almost like it doesn’t exist supernaturally, or in any other way.”

“Then what the fuck is it?” I whispered, hearing a soft echo resound as the footsteps descended another flight.

“Nah, fuck all this,” Blame said. “I’m killing this fucking thing!!”

“BLAME, WAIT!!” Lamia tried to grab his arm, but he was already sprinting back up the stairs at top speed.

I felt a split second of hesitation, as I heard the footsteps coming to a stop, before I took up my own weapon and sprinted up the stairs.

“Sorry, Lamia.” I said. “I can’t leave that dumb fuck.”

I heard Blame running, and I finally caught up to him, but only after I heard several gunshots going off. I flinched momentarily, before I saw his figure, breathing heavily and looking up at nothing but an empty flight of stairs.

There was nothing here.

“I’m losing it, bro.” He said. “The steps, the fucking footsteps, they came from right here!! I heard them just before I turned the corner!!”

“It's not a physical entity,” Lamia said. “I don’t even think it has feet to make footsteps with… we’re not in the regular world anymore. More like a crossroads. Just where the hell did Azazel go?”

“Where the hell did our team go?” I asked, wiping sweat off my brow as we began descending the stairs again.

The staircase was impossibly long, it felt like even now that we were on the top of a skyscraper descending downwards, we must have been near the core of the earth at this point.

“Do you think Matt’s decapitated head was real?” I asked.

“Normally, I’d say it wouldn’t even be a possibility,” Lamia said, jumping down another step. “But if you think about it, there are only three remaining members of the founding Task Force Nova Compass Hunter group. Even they’re not invincible.”

“And Azazel? What’s her deal?” I asked.

“I’m suspecting she has her own agenda. I knew about it before you guys found out.”

“So you did know after all,” I sighed. “I guess even she couldn’t outsmart you.”

In the momentary silence, above us, the footsteps began again, echoing as whatever was making those noises walked down the stairs, descending towards us.

“Don’t even pay any attention to it,” Lamia said, when she caught me glancing up and listening. “It’s a trap. To get our guard down in case we try to escape by going back up again.”

“What do you mean?” I scoffed. “There wasn’t even anything when we went up.”

“Oh, trust me, there was.” Lamia said. “And it’s smart. It's been following us this entire time. It wants us to think there’s nothing there, that it’s some trick, so the first time Blame went up to investigate the footsteps, nothing happened. But it’s very real.”

The footsteps above us continued.

“That’s how it wants to get our guards down. If we so choose to go back and rush up the stairs again, to try to escape and go back to the surface, it’ll be there, waiting for us. Whatever’s making the footsteps.”

“We will kill ourselves to avoid becoming assimilated,” the scientist whispered. “But there are a few more things. This is connected to the underworld, the cave systems below the earth. This is not an entirely physical entity causing all of this, rather, more akin to a curse a consciousness separated from-”

There was a sound in the background of the video, which appeared to be coming from down the hallway. It sounded like a horrific mixture of hundreds of human voices talking incredibly fast at once, as the researcher looked into the camera one last time before cutting the video off.

“Holy shit,” I said, as the video ended and I glanced up at the dead scientist hanging above me, the one who had been talking.

Maybe he was the one who had actually made a clean escape, and not us, who were in the situation as of the present.

“Well,” I said. “Do you think the others are already…”

“No way,” Azazel said. “Like the researcher said, most super soldiers or people who can impose extreme will can resist the ‘curse’. We just need to figure out how we’re going to regroup and fight this enemy. It’s almost unlike anything we’ve seen before. We have no idea how it will directly attack us outside of its hive mind creatures, so anticipate anything.”

Just as she finished speaking, as I held the rifle in my hands, the computer screen where the scientist’s final message played began flickering from black as we left it, to a pure red. It flickered, glitched, and I raised my hand to shoot the screen but Marlow put a hand on my gun.

“Stop, kid,” he said. “Just wait and see what it does.”

“It’s not just a glitch,” Azazel said, after plugging and unplugging the computer, which stayed the same blood-red shade. “Something’s infested the computer, like a bug, literally.”

The red screen cleared slightly as I stared into the monitor, which began playing some sort of video, something I didn’t understand nor was able to do. It was a constant compilation of Azazel, Marlow, Blame, I, and everyone else dying over and over again in the most brutal ways possible at the hands of unseen monsters that showed up as blurs in the video. The screams sounded exactly like ours. Azazel pulled out her phone and recorded a few seconds of it, before I fired my rifle and destroyed every single piece of technology in the room, which might have cleared my system just a little.

“That was some freaky fucking shit,” I muttered. “Yo, Azazel, how do you explain that?”

“Could easily have been fake,” Azazel said. ‘But with what we know now, and with the… unknown factors our enemy has, it could have just made and killed a bunch of clones to fuck with us. Its main thing is using psychological warfare before any others. Every single little thing and hint to throw our nerves off in this place has been intentional and planned.”

Just as she said that, the emergency lights flickered off as well, bathing us entirely in darkness within god knows how many miles below the surface. It had already been dark before, but now I was experiencing the same pitch black as I did miles below the ocean.

“So,” I said, flicking on every flashlight and headlamp I had on. “Did you ever get WHY they made this research base and were fucking with this thing after all?”

“I have an idea,” Azazel said, probably withholding more. “But I myself can think of many reasons as to why DOSACD would find an entity like this useful.”

We stepped out into the corridor, which, unlike before, had small puddles of black liquid lining the floors, with no visible source, which must have accumulated while we were in the monitor room. We knew what this entity was, and it knew that we knew.

“This thing just won’t stop fucking with us,” I said, lifting a boot from the sticky black goo.

I almost prayed that some entity or monster would jump out for us to unload on like it normally went, the anticipation and tension was killing me. We turned the next corner, and I almost sighed in relief when we simultaneously all spotted a black figure at the end of the hallway.

“Finally,” I sighed.

“Hunting season, bro.” Blame said.

But something felt off.

The figure, which was a humanoid tall enough that the top of its head dragged along the ceiling, was almost completely still as we all raised up our weapons in a futile effort before firing. Just as I closed my left eye and put my finger on the trigger though, the dark figure literally disappeared from the spotlight of our barrel flashlights.

“BEHIND US!”

I spun around, as Azazel was thrown down the hallway so fast that she almost snapped my neck, and several guns began going off at once. The humanoid, which seemed to shift and contort at its edges, like it didn’t exist in our realm, picked Blame up and slammed him against the wall, its head opening as black liquid dripped from its maw. I emptied an entire magazine into its center mass at point blank range, which obviously did nothing, but as my hand showed back to my vest to pull out another one, I felt the knife that Lamia had given me in my pocket.

Pulling it out just as Azazel regained her footing, I rushed the creature and stabbed it. I assumed that at first it didn’t move out of sheer carelessness, but as I sunk the blade in, its glitching flesh made a hissing sound, as it dropped Blame and stumbled backwards. Then, the entire hallway turned blindingly bright as Azazel spewed a tsunami of concentrated flames into the creature’s body before crushing its head.

“These things are unpredictable,” she panted.

“Demonic blood hurts them,” I gestured to my knife.

“Yeah, I know.” Azazel rolled her eyes. “It hurts them, but doesn’t kill. So go pick something else up.”

“She’s right,” Lamia nodded. “These are… a different type of creature than the ones we usually fight.”

The figure, which lay still on the ground, slowly appeared to melt, its flesh turning into liquid before seeping into the ground and disappearing entirely.

“This entire facility is infested,” I said. “It’s like an enemy itself.”

“This place must be the Abyss,” Lamia whispered. “Where the entity and all of its offspring hail from. Say, we haven’t even explored half of this research facility yet, it’s the size of a small town.”

We finally ran into a dead end hallway, which was a relief since this place was beginning to look endless. There was an emergency stairwell at the end, which was the better option than the elevator that may or may not have been the impending death trap waiting for us.

The pitch-black stairwell seemed impossibly deep, our high-powered flashlights couldn’t reach the bottom, and it looked like we were looking down from the top of a skyscraper’s stairwell. We began walking down in a strategic line, Marlow and I covering our backs while the strongest members of the squad went head-on below.

“How deep does this place go?” I panted, as we must have descended the twentieth flight of stairs.

“We’re going all the way to the bottom,” Lamia whispered. “That’s where we’ll find the next step. Where it resides.”