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The day is a quiet one, only for so long as the incoming predator remains beyond the borders of the village. But it closes fast. Faster than anything touched by the grace of nature. It flings itself from mountaintops, crashing down in forest paths. It defies any rules of gravity as it leaps from one forest to another. Its movements scare away a woman, hiking through the woods, and without care or knowledge, the thing rampaging over the land has already spared someone from a grisly fate with its mere approach.
When this creature begun its journey, the woman whom had narrowed down its target had only just begun to sip from a cup of coffee, sitting in a dark hotel room as she worked away on her laptop.
Like a meteor, it falls from the skies. Like the enemy fire of ancient times, the great Castle Salazar once again faces a small thing, dense and moving with great speed. Unlike any trebuchet, the walls do not scar and groan. No, when this small, dark figure drops from the sky and crashes into them, the walls scream, they buckle, they fall.
One moment, the castle was operating normally. The next, a monster smashed through the roof and landed directly into a grand hall. The entire castle shook from the impact. Immediately, the robed cultists of the Los Illuminados who were nearby reacted. They reached for weapons, they scrambled to advance to defend their home. But what hit was no projectile. It did not remain in the crater it created.
The shape did not just blur as it moved, but instead it all but vanished from sight. Bodies were split open, ripped asunder, chopped apart. All manner of punishment met them. Whips, blades, bludgeons, weapons forged from biological matter in a smooth and nearly instantaneous shift. Shape to shape, the monster within the castle proved itself to be adaptable at a whim to anything.
Their weapons meant nothing. Their parasites meant nothing. Age did nothing more than grant La Plaga seniority over Blacklight, but it in no way altered the power imbalance.
Across the castle, Ramon was very quickly made aware of the ruckus. His executioner was sent out, the red robe Isidro, while his bodyguard, the black robe Pesanta, remained by his side. Together, they walked towards the commotion, through the castle halls. It was only right to greet a guest, after all. Even an unexpected one demanded he at least grace them with his distaste. He was lord of this castle, and would know any who dared enter or assail its walls.
All of this would quickly fall away into panic and fear. They were barely even approaching halfway there when the sounds reached his ears. The rumbling, the tearing, the cracking and the smashing. Pesanta became cautious and agitated, stepping before him, ready to defend him. Just then, the intruder appeared. It was of all things… one man.
No, not a man. It couldn’t possibly be just a man. Because that intruder appeared to them in the midst of the great hall, leading out to the garden maze. It entered not through the door, but the walls above it, as if it leapt right over the maze and simply decided to kick its way in through the marble and flagstone.
Ramon Salazar was lord. And yet, his last words were a gasp, a scream. The figure twisted and kicked Pesanta aside, embedding her in the walls, and landed in a twist. Its arm came towards him at speed. It seemed at first to be a punch, only for Ramon to barely manage to see the biomass bulging, warping, reshaping its very composition until it was a stony and barbed chunk of flesh better called a hammer than a hand.
When it struck him in the chest, the diminutive lord stood not a chance. Any mutations which would have occurred to preserve his life failed to take action as his body erupted into a new décor for the grand hall’s ceiling and chandelier, leaving it all sickly red and writhing with the dying plaga, even now evaporating into nothing. His half-intact head was caught from the air as it fell, consumed in a flare of darkness in an instant.
Ramon Salazar was dead. The intruder had been present in the valley of wolves for perhaps one hundred seconds. Surely it had battered straight through the Verdugo sent to intercept it, as shown when it leapt forward and clapped two of those hammer-like fists together against Pesanta’s dented carapace. The powerful mutant parted, any sense of armour clearly a fabrication as, just like Salazar, the parasite died faster than it could mutate to save itself. A wing of the hall collapsed from the tremendous force, leaving chunks of chitin and stains of wriggling blood adorning the walls.
The figure had only stopped here for seconds. It turned, humanoid in appearance again, the decal on the back of its jacket shining red as it bound up the stairs in one step, then leapt forward directly through the walls ahead. It tore through the castle like a biblical storm, not pausing or slowing down from quite simply carving its own path through the reinforcements. It sprinted in a nearly direct line towards where it knew it had to go. It needed a way down without having to burrow through the earth by itself, as that would waste needless seconds. It found something it now remembered.
It bound into the throne room of Lord Salazar, and without hesitation dived down the gaping hole in the centre of the room. It fell with such earth-shattering weight in its impatience, as it threw itself at the ground as fast as it could, that the entire cavern it arrived in begun to creak and crumble, stone falling from the ceiling and the castle shifting unnaturally as the earth was moved by the force.
It burst aside through the caverns. It ripped with such a forceful sprint through the pathways that the stone cracked. It buckled right through doors, generators, and furniture, slamming into an elevator shaft with such force that the entire thing turned more into a scrap metal oval implanted in the wall, instead of a box. Just as quickly, the thing leapt up, moving into the mines in a way vaguely safe enough to not collapse all of them before it could be sure of the plaga’s destruction. The great nest of it, which it knew lay down here.
It moved through the mines like it knew exactly where to go, because of course it did. Every memory and experience Lord Salazar had lived through lay now in its head. So it barrelled through the stony pathways carved centuries ago with utterly no reverence. It bound from track to track, smashing through scaffoldings which once held up mine carts, shouldering through the weaker walls it knew the mine could stand without. It arrived, in seconds, in the gigantic underground cavern where the grand nest of la plaga rested. Here is where it was extracted, the great amber, and here now is where countless other parasites roost.
The flying beasts down here couldn’t even mount a defensive. In a single leap, the figure punches through the hive like a spear through a heart. Tendrils ripple from it as it pauses in the centre of the already shattering nest, and erupts. It’s a furious thing. The sheer force of the explosion of limbs as it reaches out in all directions with tentacles is enough to begin to collapse the entire mine. The eating and gnawing and consuming of its mass through the hive is so rapid, so supernaturally ferocious, that the hive almost appears to burn away in bioluminescence. It is consumed in only a moment. The tendrils almost all recede, but some do latch onto crumbling rocks and throw the figure through them, to the nearby elevator shaft which it proceeds to ascend by running straight up the wall, right through the old elevator.
It's a force of nature, in all truth. It doesn’t stop at stone, marble, reinforcements made by man or forged by the aeons of time. As Castle Salazar sinks, the ground and mines below it collapsing and irreparably altering the entirety of Valdelobos, the figure does not falter in its pace. It flies from the elevator shaft and in one bound goes right through the crumbling earth.
It sails out into the early morning sky. It is irrefutably the shape of a man, but the damage it has already wrought is that of a cataclysmic natural disaster. The entire valley is changed now, the castle and the cliff it resided on crumbling away into the ocean. And out to the ocean, the figure goes. At the height of its leap, it begins to truly spit in the face of any laws of nature that it should be following, and despite its weight and its lack of wings, it begins to glide through the air like nothing should be able to.
It is high above the sea. It can see out at a distance the island it must reach. Miles from the shore, it is carried on the wind like any bird might be, yet it moves faster, further. It slowly descends, unable to truly fly. But long before it would reach the ocean, dirt and stone passes under it. It lands on this nearby island, and it knows where it must go. It knows of the researcher who no one in the cult trusts anymore. It knows of the lord Saddlar. It knows both are present, and knows by its own merit that both are viral powers of the cult – the former, a source of parasitism through experimentation with the plaga, and the latter a direct host to such experimentation’s fruits.
The island is militarised, reinforced, equipped. Every soul on it has seen the apparent disaster strike their forces. But already does their lord spread desperate warnings through his flock to prepare. The castle collapsing into the sea was no mere disaster. There has not been an Earthquake in this country for half a decade.
None of it matters. The figure steps forward into a run and already is it more than the entire force dug in here can handle. It sprints straight through the encampment at the shore of the island. It leaps through the air and comes crashing into the central facility so hard that every single warning light turns on in an instant.
It does not take it any time at all to begin the slaughter, nor any time to end it.
It goes down and through the base. It tears and moves through anything in its path without even slowing down. It storms into a lab by bringing down the entire wall, not just the door, and for the first and only time, it momentarily hesitates as it watches the researcher it remembered, Luis Serra, actively burning the parasite from his body in a machine. It’s like surgery, self-inflicted, and the good doctor cannot even bare through the pain a single plea of mercy.
The doctor does not need to. The figure seems to take his plan of action, of freeing himself from the cult’s control, as a good enough sign. It also senses and knows, of course, of the thing it is truly here for. The Amber, as it would come to be known, the source of the advanced parasite. It tears through a separate wall of this lab and into others, and just as quickly as it stopped moving, it begins again. Snatching the amber from a storage room, it crushes and eats the thing in its hand, removing any trace of it from the Earth. It jumps, and the facility groans as it passes through floors and ceilings on repeat.
It drops through the roof of a warehouse. It stands before a far larger sample of the parasite. The original, discovered centuries ago. The large chunk of amber shatters when the figure simply grabs it and continues to move. With each step, it vanishes further. In only five paces, the gigantic chunk of amber was consumed utterly, gone, along with every parasite in it. The entire foundational basis of the Los Illuminados cult vanishes like an afternoon snack.
Lord Osmund Saddlar was still on the loading docks. He had been in the midst of seeing off the soldiers who would complete their operations on foreign soil. He was not idle. No, he was transforming. He was willing himself through the stages of his power. He understood that the thing barrelling towards him was something dire and terrifying, which he could not afford to even confront. He grew in form and mass like an impossibility. The biomass of countless cultists aided him, melting away into the gigantic form replete with many-eyed tentacles and spiked limbs which took up most of the area.
A far smaller, far more dangerous, equally eldritch thing landed on the docks. Saddlar could scarcely believe that it looked like just a man as he attacked it. He couldn’t even entertain the fleeting realisation that he might even recognise the human mask this monster wore. Because it landed, it looked all around at his colossal form, and it turned to stone and claws. Armoured and ready as if for battle, and yet… there wasn’t one.
In a second of examination, it had spotted what it must kill. Almost from the momentum of its initial landing, it sprung forward towards the encased shell of amber that Saddlar resided within, his true body still there. This was quite simply nothing that the figure had not seen before, nothing it had not killed before. It heavily compromised the highly resistant amber shielding with a single swipe of its claws, then turned and punched a chunk of the shield away with its hammering fists, before it simply reached in and grabbed Saddlar by the head – and pulled him apart, into itself.
The Dominant Species Plaga was learned from, but in the most blunt sense, it was killed. Eaten. And with its death, came more.
Across the valley, a priestly titan of a man was sprinting through the village he oversaw. His flock had been endangered, yet he had only moments to react as so much went wrong. Even now, he was only part way from his manor in the village to the road to the castle. Running towards the drawbridge, terrified by barely being able to see the majority of the castle, Bitores Mendez coughed.
He choked, he gagged, he groaned.
The parasite within him was dying, quickly. His every organ was shutting down with it.
Mid-step, the chief collapsed to the ground and wailed as he grabbed his heart. Every single member of his flock who had been with him followed suit. They hit the earth and seized as they died.
In a great lake not far from there, a titanic creature of the sea, like a mythical cryptid made flesh, begun to writhe as the water turned redder and redder. It was dying, melting down, and the entire lake was awash in chaos from its death throes.
Miles off shore, in the midst of reading a report and staring hatefully at a picture of a blonde police officer, Major Jack Krauser suddenly gasped as an overwhelming sense of dread hit him. Immediately, he groaned, forcing a scream into a more subdued sound. He grabbed his chest, barely managing to get a single word out as he straightened back in the chair of the boat he was driving. He could hardly force his head to turn, to look out the open door to the back of the fairly small vessel, seeing as his every soldier dropped to the deck.
“B-But-…. Whyyy…”
Unlike many of the others, this one had the barest fortitude for actual last words, before his eyes rolled and he pitched aside out of his seat, face first. Their ships were now derelict. They didn’t even make it into international waters, much less anywhere near America.
Many miles away, the President’s daughter continued to go about her days, blissful.
Los Illuminados was dismantled in what seemed to be mere minutes. With the head cut off from the snake, the body would soon die. When all was said and done, only one being would walk out of the Valley of Wolves, and he would never need to send the email he had been planning to write to that shady organisation.
No, indeed, he could walk right out because anyone who would stop him was dead.
In her hotel room, Dana sighed as she nursed her store-bought coffee. She settled back in her chair, ready for a day or so of work, and took out her phone to make that first call to her brother in the field. She flipped the disposable thing open, saw the reflection of a hooded figure in her screen, and yelped as she whipped around in her seat.
“JESUS!... Fuck, Alex, how many times do I have to tell you not to do that?!”
Alex Mercer, the terrifying storm of unnatural power which had just dismantled an entire bioweapons cult, was cowed. He frowned, shrugging and just saying, “Sorry.” Behind him, the door to the hotel room finally finished swinging closed from his supernaturally silent entrance.
Dana dropped her phone onto the desk and sunk back into her chair. One hand calmed her racing heart, while the other lifted her slightly shaking cup of coffee to her lips. After a deeper few gulps than before, she furrowed her brow, opening her eyes and shaking the cup to feel it empty. “Fuck.” She breathed again, tossing the cup into the trashcan across the room. “Guess this was light work then. Barely even got to finish what I thought would be the first of many coffees.”
“Mh.” Alex grunted. A learned acknowledgement, instead of being silent. Dana preferred that to his empty staring, he had learned within the first few days of his life. “Just a small group. Parasites. Any word on Blacklight cases?”
“I’ll check.” Dana turned to her laptop. “And, I guess, get ready to leave. Quick day…”