Ch. 72 | Disaster 3

They kept walking until the corridor split in two, and the emergency lights washed both passages in the same dull red glow. Smoke had already begun gathering along the ceiling, drifting through the intersection in slow sheets of red from deeper inside the building, between the blaring alarms, the steady crackle of flames carried through the halls.

Oba stopped at the fork and looked back at the others. “We'll take the left. Maya, you take the right. If you find whatever caused this, figure out what you're dealing with before you engage. If it gets too dire, pull back and wait for support.”

Maya gave him a funny look.

“Riiiight. We'll do just that.”

Oba stared at her for a second before giving a small nod. “Yeah.”

There wasn't much else he could say without making a bigger fool of himself, so he turned away and started down the left corridor with Bereth, Tomas, and Narun following behind him. Maya's group disappeared down the opposite hall, their footsteps fading until the alarm and distant fire swallowed them completely. Before they left, Maya whispered a few words of encouragement to him, which only served to make him feel even smaller than he already was.

Not exactly the smoothest start to his career as an officer. But hopefully, the rest of it would go a little better.

Oba slipped his hand down to the knife hanging from his waist and rubbed his thumb over the handle as he walked. He wasn't expecting to use it this soon. He just liked knowing it was there. Somewhere along the way, touching the thing had become a habit whenever he was stressed, and right now he had more than enough reasons to be.

If he screwed this up badly enough, there was a very real chance they'd strip the promotion from him and send him straight back down to grunt work. He hadn't spent all that time taking orders and doing every miserable assignment thrown at him just to lose the position before he'd even had the chance to enjoy it. This was supposed to be the beginning of something better.

“You know,” Bereth said from beside him, “what you did back there was pretty scummy.”

“Mhm.”

Bereth glanced at him, clearly disappointed that he wasn't taking the bait. “Selling us out like that.”

“I didn't sell anyone out.”

“You absolutely did.”

Oba kept watching the hallway ahead. “Focus.”

Bereth's mouth stretched into a grin. “And here I thought I was supposed to be the weasel.”

Tomas laughed quietly behind them, and even Narun seemed amused.

“I said focus,” Oba snapped back coldly.

“I'm perfectly focused,” Bereth replied, not letting it go.

“You haven't shut up since we left,” Oba said, refusing to take the bait.

“I can talk and walk at the same time.”

“Congratulations. Now try walking without talking.” Oba replied sarcastically.

It seems that was enough to shut him down, as Bereth didn’t make any more remarks after that.

Tomas laughed again, but the sound died quickly as they moved farther down the corridor.

The smoke was getting thicker the further they went.

At first it had been little more than a haze around the ceiling lights. Now it rolled above them in heavy dark layers, occasionally spilling low enough to sting Oba's eyes. The red emergency lights made the whole corridor look creepy, turning the smoke into shifting shadows that stretched across the walls whenever the flames somewhere ahead flared brighter.

Narun coughed into his arm. “Must be a pretty big fire.”

“Yeah, no shit,” Bereth replied sarcastically. “Certainly not the work of some poor chap trying to sneak a smoke in the hall.”

Narun shrugs. “Just saying.”

Oba opened his mouth to answer him and stopped.

There was another prominent smell underneath all the smoke. The unmistakable metallic stink of blood. Given the fact that he could smell it through all the smoke, it would suggest that there was a lot of it there.

Bereth stopped next to him.

“You see something ?“

Oba shook his head.

“I got a bad feeling about this. I can smell the blood in the air.”

Bereth chuckles. “It would appear that we are due for some good time.”

Tomas chuckled. ‘‘You can always smell blood. We’d nicknamed you enhanced nose for a reason.”

“Not through this much smoke,” Oba said as he frowned.

That wiped the smile off their faces.

Oba stared deeper into the corridor. His sense of smell was good, but there were limits. For blood to cut through all of this smoke from any real distance, there had to be enough of it to soak the entire damn hallway.

Something had happened ahead of them, and whatever it was, it hadn't been pretty, that much he was sure of. Nothing short of a complete slaughter would produce a smell this prominent.

“Stay close,” Oba said as he started to slowly walk into the dark tunnel.

They kept moving, slower now. There was no more joking around, only the sound of their boots and the occasional pop of something burning behind one of the walls. Oba found himself looking into every open doorway they passed, expecting someone to come stumbling out of one of them.

For better or worse, nobody did. Which bothered him almost as much as the smell of blood that was growing ever stronger the further in they went.

There should have been people here. Security officers, workers, civilians, if not chaos of people running around all over the place, he’d at least expected to see a pile of corpses. Instead, they had gone far enough that even the alarm behind them was beginning to fade, leaving nothing ahead but smoke and silence.

Oba touched the handle of his knife again.

Of course this just had to happen to be his first mission after getting promoted. He just couldn’t get a generic apprehension of a thug that slighted the company assignment. It just had to be whatever the fuck this disaster was.

A faint glimmer appeared through the smoke.

He stopped so suddenly that Tomas almost walked into Narun behind him.

There were two figures ahead. At first they were little more than dark shapes moving through the haze, but one thing was clear as day, they were definitely walking toward them.

Oba raised his hand, and the others froze on the spot without having to be told a word.

“Hey!” he shouted into the darkness. “This is the security force! Are you injured?”

There was no response as dark figures kept coming towards them.

Something about the way they moved immediately put him on edge. They weren't limping or coughing. There was nothing about them that would suggest any kind of desperation or distress, they just kept walking toward them at the same unhurried pace, as if the entire building wasn’t burning around them.

“Identify yourselves!” Oba shouted loudly.

The entire team tensed as the figures continued moving toward them in silence, offering no acknowledgment of the squad waiting in their path. As they drew closer, the emergency lights began to catch fragments of them through the smoke.

The one walking up in front looked like a woman. She wore so many layers of heavy fabric that at first Oba thought she had some kind of winter coat wrapped around her, though the shape beneath it looked more like a dress. Long dark hair hung loosely around a smooth white mask with two dark openings for the eyes.

The second figure was almost entirely hidden beneath a cloak. Oba could make out bluish skin beneath the hood and thick white fur covering part of its arms, but not much else.

Neither of them looked injured. Nor did they look even slightly bothered by their presence.

The nagging feeling at the back of his head kept growing stronger by the second. Slowly, Oba started reaching for the radio at his shoulder.

Before he could touch it, something very unusual caught his eye.

A thin stream of smoke drifted toward the masked woman, only to suddenly flatten a few inches away from her face. It spread sideways against something that wasn't there, curling around an invisible surface before continuing past her.

What the hell was that?

Every instinct at the back of Oba’s mind was screaming at him that something was wrong, but he had to ignore it. It wasn’t like he could just turn around and run, especially when he was supposed to be the one leading the team.

His hand was frozen midair as the masked woman turned slightly toward the hooded figure.

“You go on ahead. I'll catch up soon.”

The hooded one nodded and started walking again.

Straight toward them.

“Everyone! Transform!” Oba shouted at the top of his lungs.

His body changed as the words left his mouth. Hard black plating spread across his chest and limbs, locking into place over his skin as his transformation took hold. The familiar weight of the exoskeleton settled around him, ugly as hell but reassuring all the same.

Around him, the others transformed just as quickly.

Bereth's arms lengthened, dark fur spreading across his body as his face narrowed into the sharp features of a weasel. Narun's frame expanded beneath thick overlapping plates until he looked more like a walking fortress than a person. Tomas dropped onto all fours as his limbs stretched and reshaped, antlers forced their way from his skull until the lanky boy resembled some grotesque-looking hybrid cross between a deer and a giraffe.

Oba’s hand instinctively went towards where his knife was, only to realize that he was already holding it in his hand.

Fuck.

Oba cursed in his mind as he knew that it only happened when things were the most dire.

The hooded figure was already within his reach. Oba let out a deep breath and rushed towards it.

He only made it a few steps before something invisible slammed into him hard enough to knock the air out of his lungs and make his knees buckle.

Oba tried straining against it, only to feel resistance and pressure from every direction, he couldn’t move an inch. It felt almost as if some giant invisible hand was pressing him down to the ground.

His heart started beating faster as he watched helplessly as the hooded figure casually walked past their entire team.

This was not gonna end well. Oba knew it, and one look at his teammates told him they knew it too.