When I opened my eyes, a black void sprinkled with small sparkles encompassed my vision. Behind me was a blue hazy light. I tried to look behind me but I couldn't move, my body was completely covered in ice, shards were breaking and rushing away. Why was I here? I pondered but my mind was cloudy and my consciousness began fading in and out. Until I came back to my senses, I felt sharp pain all along my body, I heard air rushing past me, and I finally understood. I was falling.
The ice was freezing one half of my body and at the same time, the rushing atmosphere was burning the other half, the sky I looked up to with ambition as a child was now rejecting me. Tracing back my memory I remembered my 'friends' faces, and the word they all labelled me,
"Impostor!".
As I had finished my tasks for the day, I went back to my dorm, a standard military issue bed and a desk with a blue glowing interface as its tabletop, and a small window with a view of the planet I Grew up on, simple but high tech. I plonked myself on my desk chair and began what I had been waiting all day for. In a previous skirmish I'd obtained a strange relic from the site of the battlefield, a sphere, a light brass colour with varying sized circles engraved onto it, in these circles there was a random cyan glowing symbol. It was most likely just a novelty item or a decoration, but I had my hopes up.
Holding it in the palm of my hand I gently placed it upon my desk, immediately the desk activated, and various tooltips emerged as well as small labels including minute details such as diameter and weight.
As soon as I began setting up sensors on the thing a blaring alarm sounded, with a rather attractive robotic female voice exclaiming,
"Emergency! Breach on wings 2-5, Personnel on wings 2 through 3 must engage!",
The alarm continued sounding, 𝘎𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵, just what I needed, I picked up my rifle and putting on standard grade body armor.
The Orthus were a sapient race we had encountered while expanding to our neighbouring solar system, Alpha Centauri, despite their radically different technologies, they did not appear to be much of a threat, but with time they advanced quickly and became extremely aggressive.
I'd never been in an actual firefight before, most of the time I spent during service was on the sidelines, dragging ammo crates, fixing equipment and tending to wounded with protocol first Aid procedures. I considered staying in my dorm and avoiding the conflict, Hoping for the fight to be dealt with before I arrived, until the lights went out. My room was now lit only by a miserable red emergency backup light.
I stuffed the trinket in my pocket and opened the door to the long steel corridor. Immediately outside was a scrappy looking soldier walking past, dimly lit by the backup red lights. His face was awfully pale, I couldn't see him well. The emergency lights made it hard to make out the colour of the liquid smattered accross his unkempt uniform. I didn't want to think it was blood, so I dismissed the thought as I was in wing 2-1 and there's no way one of them could make it here that quick, Right?
I was quickly disproved when a large, quick moving figure carved through the man with a bright flash of light, glancing at the figure that had moved about 15 feet in the span of a second and dashed past, halting to a stop a large distance away.
It was around 7 feet tall, and covered in armour that almost looked like an endoskeleton, the plates were boney white and protruded at the joints, curving in symmetrically each plate was lightly engraved with red lines that connected between each plate. In its hand was a flaring white blade that lit up the darkened corridors.
'Fuck', I need to run but the alien had jumped past me down the left side of the corridor and I was presented with the choice of confronting the Variant I had never seen before or going right, directly into the conflict. Glancing at the figure I decided the latter, there was no way I would win against that thing, and most importantly I had never seen it before, at least not one this big.
Most of the Orthus were very similar, so similar in fact that most of us believe that they clone themselves, their main strategy was numbers, so most of their equipment wasn't special, But they did have a few ranks where the higher the rank the stronger and more high-spec their equipment was, but I had never seen such a detailed set of armour and a huge frame.
but I could tell it was still an Orthus, its signature vicious flaring energy blade gripping in its right hand and glowing wrist implements in the left.
The Orthus had a helmet on which was much like a submarine front, tinted domed glass at the front covering the whole face, the back of the helmet tapered to a point with various plates curving off of it. With its sweeping scanning beam projected down the corridors. Taking my chances I bolted towards the battlefield and foolishly looking behind me, the Orthus had now noticed me and I noticed something I couldn't see earlier, inside of the tinted glass was a large slit eye looking directly at me, it lowered down, and the engraving upon its armour fizzled a bright white and it lunged.
Taking a corner there was a squad of armed soldiers stationed, counted about 7, thank goodness! They could quickly dispatch off the orthus, a loud slam of metal against metal reverberated behind me, the Orthus had lunged so fast it had crashed directly into the wall! Idiot, I thought. The dust kicked off indicated the volume of the impact, it had definitely died on impact.
One of the soldiers noticed me and alerted the others as they quickly began helping me up and barraging me with questions, but before any of them could be answered, a familiar fear inducing white glow propagated through the corridor, and a metallic buzzing. The soldiers were quick to react, firing a volley of projectiles. But they were fruitless efforts, the glow of the white indents of the armour made its silhouette visible through the smoke, completely unmoving despite the strafe.
As I made haste down the corridor, one last flash signalled the last of the gunfire . A sharp pain momentarily coursed through my body, excruciating but quickly fading, I fell to the floor, I could no longer feel my legs. I looked down to see a spear of light embedded through my stomach.
'This is it I suppose', I could barely breathe, paralyzed in a quickly forming pool of crimson. I collapsed in a way that gave view of the corridor behind me, the hulking Orthus was leisurely walking towards me, the complex gauntlet it wore on its left hand was smoking, the engravings on its armour were sporadically flickering and sparking in the dark red corridors. It slowly raised its blade as it drew near, flaring brighter with each step.
A searing headache and a bright cyan light filled the corners of my vision, A screaming sound reverberated thoughout my body.