Beast of Psyguil 08 (4)
"Cosmic Bolt charge at 25% and rising!"
Deep in the situation room of the Imperial Mothership Damos 08's Arbiter, preparations to fire the vessel's main cannon were in full swing.
At the center of the room, holographic images drifted through the air — the charging status of the Cosmic Bolt, the designated target, streams of tactical data rendered in light. The Cultists working the room manipulated them with psionic power, projecting and revising the information relevant to their posts as naturally as breathing.
Unlike humans, the Cult wielded psionic power with effortless fluency, and they made full use of it — patching the gaps that computers alone were too slow to cover.
"Hold position once the charge completes. We wait for the order."
"Understood."
The captain stood with his arms crossed, staring through the reinforced glass at the front of the situation room. Beyond it hung the blue planet: Psyguil 08.
It was beautiful — so beautiful that it was hard to believe the place the Cult Council had sanctified as holy ground had somehow been defiled. Perhaps, he thought, it was not yet too late.
But that doesn't mean I can simply look away.
The corruption defined by the Cult Council took many forms — an Outspacer nest, a secret conclave of Vortex One cultists, and others besides. Their shapes varied, but every one of them posed a lethal threat to the security of the Cult Empire.
To protect their kin and safeguard Providence, corruption had to be exterminated before it could spread.
That's why we came here.
The Cosmic Bolt, the absolute weapon built into the heart of the Imperial Mothership, was devastatingly effective for exactly this kind of purification.
Powered by dark matter and the heart of a Black Galagon, the weapon could burn a planet's entire surface to ash within moments. The atmosphere would vanish; the oceans and every drop of water would flash into vapor.
In other words, one strike from the Cosmic Bolt would reduce even the most lush and fertile world to barren wasteland — a place where no life could ever take root again.
Roughly four hours until launch, then.
War bands from the mothership were already deployed on the surface of Psyguil 08, dispatched under the captain's sealed orders to capture the native Wolves.
His gaze dropped to the launch countdown displayed beneath the charging status image.
I told them to return before two hours remained.
It was hardly a perilous mission — no hunt for corrupted enemies, just the capture of a few primitive Wolf natives. Creatures at that level of development posed almost zero threat to a Cult war band.
So the captain did not worry himself over it.
"Captain. Report from the war bands. No trace of Mega Corp or Star Union activity in the surrounding area."
"We destroyed their satellites, but assume nothing. Maintain maximum vigilance until the purification operation is complete."
At his subordinate's report, the captain began issuing fresh orders, setting all thought of the ground teams aside for the moment.
"Deputy Chief Rays! Telepathy is down!"
"That's impossible!"
Rays jabbed at his helmet's controls, activating the telepathy function in a hurry.
But no matter how long he waited, no connection came. Not the mothership — not even the other war bands stationed on the same continent.
Damn it all!
He tried again and again. Every attempt failed.
Telepathy and the other psionic techniques looked omnipotent from the outside, but they weren't. There were ways to strip a Cultist of his powers — methods that severed telepathy and a whole catalogue of psychic abilities besides.
Jamming arrays, for instance — the kind mounted on Cult warships.
Capital vessels like the Imperial Mothership carried devices built from Blacksilver, the anti-psionic metal, capable of temporarily nullifying even Cult psionics and scrambling enemy telepathy.
Jamming? No. If it were jamming, the people upstairs would never have missed it.
If someone had smuggled a jamming array onto this planet, alarms would already be screaming in orbit. The Imperial Mothership carried equipment specifically designed to detect and counter such devices.
Which left exactly one possibility.
There's a psychic creature among the enemy!
Powerful psionic beings — a Black Galagon or a Red Gallagon — or creatures naturally gifted at wielding the mind could disrupt psionic power far more thoroughly than any jamming array.
But there shouldn't be any psychic creatures on this continent….
Granted, across the whole planet there was one — the predator humans called the Sea Demon, known in the Cult tongue as the Rama Vultexion.
But this was the dead center of a continent. A deep-sea leviathan had no business climbing all the way up here.
"Deputy Chief, what are your orders?"
"Hamine. Is Memory Sight possible?"
"I'll try. Just a moment… huh? Wh-what? Why isn't it working?"
Memory Sight was a support-type psionic technique for reading the past of a place. Hamine, the goat-horned Cultist of the war band, was an expert in it — and even she was useless now.
It's not just the telepathy, then….
Rays issued a series of test orders to his subordinates, checking whether every psionic technique had been cut off across the whole unit.
For better or worse, only the support-type abilities — telepathy, Memory Sight — had gone dead.
Unlike a jamming strike, their weapons and reinforced suits still functioned perfectly.
Even so, marching off to fight an enemy that could selectively lock away psionic techniques was riddled with problems. Intelligence on the foe was thin, and worse, they were operating under a deadline.
In a few hours this planet would be a sea of fire. They had to be gone before then.
In the end, Rays chose to abandon the mission.
"We don't know what the enemy is. Moving out blind is too dangerous. All units — fall back to the transport."
He understood exactly why the captain had ordered them to capture the Wolves. If half the war band died in the attempt, he would be betraying that intent, not honoring it.
"Ashen, take the rear. Jenir, support Gerisi. Hamine, grab the Purple Spraygun."
At Rays's command, the eight warriors of the band moved as one machine. These were veterans of a hundred battles, and not a single motion was wasted.
But they all knew the truth of it.
One member missing. Another on the edge of a breakdown. Two casualties already, and they hadn't so much as laid eyes on the enemy.
Their movements stayed sleek and fluid — but in their eyes, unease had quietly pooled.
Formation reorganized and weapons checked, the war band began its retreat toward the transport.
The transport lay roughly an hour away at a careful pace. Half-running, they could make it in thirty.
Rays and his warriors moved fast, never once letting their guard on the surroundings slip.
An hour passed.
Reality betrayed his expectations.
"Wh-what is this?!"
"How — how is this possible?"
Cult war bands were trained to hold their composure under any circumstances. Psionic power lived and died by the state of the mind; a stable psyche was everything.
And now those same warriors were half-sobbing, screaming at the top of their lungs.
Rays could not blame them. He had wanted to scream too — he'd barely swallowed it down.
Before them stood a scorched, burnt tree.
The very tree Gerisi had hit with the Purple Spraygun an hour ago.
They had walked a full hour toward the transport, and arrived exactly where they had started.
"…Ashen. Could the directional systems have malfunctioned?"
"You know better than I do — no. The odds of every system here failing at the same instant are essentially nil."
"…Damn it."
Rays bit down on his lip to steady himself. Maybe it was the copper taste flooding his mouth, the sharp sting of pain — but somehow he forced his reeling mind to work.
Think. Calmly.
A war band were specialists in pursuit, and Ashen's skill was exceptional even among them. Even if the machines had failed, the odds that she herself had lost the way were vanishingly small.
"Then is it possible we're hallucinating?"
"In my assessment — unlikely. There is no creature on this continent capable of inducing hallucinations in nine Cultists simultaneously."
Ashen denied it, but Rays thought otherwise. If it wasn't a hallucination, there was no way to explain how nine veteran warriors had been deceived so completely.
As his gaze swept across his soldiers' faces, he felt the hair on his head stand on end.
Behind one of the warriors facing him —
Two amber lanterns, glowing where no lanterns had been before.
"Hamine!"
"Yes?"
The instant she turned her head, the eagle's beak set between those amber eyes snapped shut on her throat. It broke her neck in a heartbeat, hoisted her body, and plunged into the underbrush on the far side.
"Open fire!"
"Damn it! What IS that thing?!"
"Kill it! Kill it!"
A heartbeat too late, the warriors swung their weapons around and raked the brush behind the creature. Violet flame from the Purple Sprayguns and psionic rounds from the psychic rifles poured over the thicket.
The moment Rays raised his hand, the merciless barrage stopped. At his glance, Ashen advanced on the shredded undergrowth.
Against all hope, there was no corpse there. There was not even blood.
The thing had vanished without taking so much as a scratch.
Reading the grim faces of his soldiers, Rays ground his teeth. Two casualties now, all from a single unknown creature.
…No. Let's take something from this — we've made contact with it.
He had seen the thing, just moments ago. It had been brief, but Rays had memorized its form down to the last detail.
A four-legged beast with the head of a bird of prey and fur like spun gold. Three to four meters at the shoulder, eyes the color of amber.
"Its forelimbs are heavily developed, and it's remarkably agile for its size. The beak is sharp enough to tear reinforced plating."
"…Hm. I've never seen the species. The specs seem comparable to the 'Red Mist,' though."
"Right. It may carry illusion abilities like that thing does. Watch for that, and we should manage."
"Agreed. I fought the Red Mist once before, alongside Jenir."
"Deputy Ashen is correct."
Even in a moment like this, Rays deliberately laid out everything he knew, reciting the facts like a list. Ashen caught his intent at once and backed him up.
Fear is born of the unknown. Simply knowing what the enemy was could steady soldiers more than they'd admit.
Just as Rays had calculated, the expressions around him lifted noticeably. What filled the space fear had vacated was fighting spirit.
"If we take that thing down, this cursed illusion dies with it. So we hunt it."
"Yes, sir!"
With his recovered warriors in tow, Rays set off after the trail left by the eagle-headed monster.
For a beast its size, it left an astonishingly clean trail. No footprints whatsoever, and tracking it through Memory Sight was impossible now too.
Fortunately the war band still had Ashen, a master of the tracker's art. Reading the direction the weeds had been pressed down, parsing the faint scent the thing had left in the air, she pieced together its path.
The band followed in her wake, every one of them wound tight — and then the lead tracker suddenly raised a hand. The signal: target sighted. The whole unit dropped low, breath held.
Through the Soul Link, her vision flowed into theirs. The creature was crouched along a high branch of an enormous tree. Hamine's corpse was nowhere to be seen — it had stashed the body somewhere out of sight.
That damned thing!
To kill a Cultist and lie there so calmly — fury boiled up from somewhere deep in Rays's chest. Not that he was green enough to let it show.
Instead, he carefully drew the bow slung across his back.
Shaped like a compound bow, it was a specialized weapon that fired arrows made of pure psionic force — no ammunition required, only the wielder's own psychic energy. Unlike a sniper rifle it was all but silent, which made it the perfect tool for ambushes and long-range kills like this one.
He drew the string back in silence. The instant before his fingers released, the creature turned its head and met his eyes.
There was surprise in that look — genuine surprise at how quickly they'd caught up. Judging the creature had been rattled, Rays exulted inwardly.
Die, monster!
His fingers slipped free, and the invisible arrow flew. Rays never doubted that the psionic arrow would punch straight through the thing's eye.
But once again, reality betrayed his expectations.
The invisible arrow never reached its target. It simply guttered out mid-flight, swallowed by an unseen barrier that shimmered around the creature's body — an invisible shield, wrapped around it like a second skin.
What in the—?!
The creature didn't even react to being attacked. It only watched Rays and his band, unblinking.
And in those amber eyes, he read something. Not alarm. Not any sense of danger.
Rather — pity. A sorrowful, almost compassionate look, as if to say: you poor fools, you're in real trouble now.
Why? What does that mean?
One incomprehensible thing after another, and now the world had produced one more.
"D-Deputy Chief? Over there, in front of us…."
Through Ashen's linked vision, he saw what she saw.
Beneath the great tree where the eagle-headed monster crouched —
A balloon. A pink balloon that had not been there seconds ago.
The same pink balloon Rays had glimpsed before the noise incident. Gerisi, still half-supported by Jenir, took one look at it and shrieked.
"Th-that's it! It's back! It's back again!"
And perhaps that scream was the trigger.
An unfathomable wavelength rolled out of the balloon ahead of them.
A wavelength vicious as a storm-tossed sea, and with it the balloon — no, the thing that had merely worn the shape of a balloon — twitched and began to change.
The warriors' heads, pinned downward by their aim, rose slowly, helplessly. And with every degree their chins lifted, their eyes stretched wider — stretched until it seemed they would tear.
The thing swelled to a size rivaling the very tree the eagle-headed monster crouched upon, and with its countless eyes, it stared down at them.
A pink balloon? Not even close. Nothing before Rays could be described by anything so innocent a word.
He knew of beings like this one. He had never faced one himself — such creatures appeared only in the combat simulations, in the classified bestiary entries reserved for legendary monsters.
A being that should never, under any circumstance, be seen in a place like this. Its name in the Cult tongue was Rama Vultexion — demon of the sea.
Revered and dreaded in equal measure by Mega Corp and the Star Union alike as the Sea Demon — and here it was, in the depths of this forest, its whole massive body disguised as something as harmless as a balloon.
Only then, with everything falling into place at last, did Rays find a single cry left in him.
"It — it's wearing a disguise!"
The instant the words left his mouth, the Sea Demon's colossal tentacles came crashing down, and the war band was swallowed whole.