The bone tunnels breathed beneath their boots. Heat pulsed faintly through the walls like some dormant artery reawakening. And with every step forward, Arbiter John Drayton felt it rising—a momentum deeper than the motion of a once mighty leviathan.

  Sasha’s voice guided them in precise, clipped intervals. The rest of their squad—Rhea, Sam, and Esh-Kaet, ghost-walked behind them with tension coiled in their movements.

  Sasha’s voice crackled through comms. “I’m triangulating the source. It’s no longer just residual. It’s active, bleeding energy through the mantle.”

  John slowed his pace just long enough to listen. The darkness of the cavern was endless—an obsidian throat pressing in around them, humid with fungal bloom and laced with the coppery tang of oxidizing spores. The walls shimmered with veins of bioluminescence like ancient circuitry. No life moved.

  Samantha’s voice cut in, sharper than usual. “Sasha, is the energy source from the Idol?”

  “It has to be,” Sasha confirmed. “We’re within half a kilometer of it. But be warned. Topography ahead slopes into a chamber likely saturated with Braccari.”

  “Then we go around.” John said.

  As they pressed forward, the terrain narrowed into a winding gorge where glowing fungi receded into carved walls. Symbols ran in lines too precise to be natural. It was Hyperion script, half-erased by time but still legible under Sasha’s spectral light. John didn’t translate it, but he didn’t need to. Every line etched into the stone told him one message: you are trespassing.

  “Air’s changing,” Esh-Kaet said quietly, head tilted like a hawk.

  Then it hit them.

  The vibration surged without warning. A harmonic pulse rippled through their bodies and twisted their space and balance. Everyone’s HUD flickered violently—targets scrambled and their audio warped into metallic shrieks. For a second, they were blind.

  Sasha’s voice cracked through the chaos, more forceful than ever.

  “The Idol has activated. I register a psionic discharge. John. It’s awake.”

  The cavern convulsed. The very ground trembled beneath their boots. From deep beneath came a sound not unlike the groan of tectonic plates. It was a sound that did not belong to any living thing and yet carried the weight of sentience as if Eurynome, the exoplanet of a dead titan, were still alive and ready once more to soar across the abyss of dead space.

  John steadied himself. His fingers clenched the grip around his Scorcher. Then came another voice, a female he didn’t recognize.

  It said, “Arbiter John Drayton.”

  The channel wasn’t theirs. The signal was weaker than static. “Where is that coming from?” John asked.

  “The Queen,” Sasha said.

  The Queen’s voice emerged. Her voice sounded from the puppet woman who spoke through comms. “There is more,” she said. Her voice trembled with strain. “He told me…when it awakens…the Braccari will change.”

  Samantha leaned forward slightly, suspicion clear in her narrowed eyes. “What kind of change?”

  “It will erase restraint. They will become hungry. Insatiable. Not soldiers, pure instinct and aggression may drive them. Their sentience will be gone. I feared you would not believe me. But now…now you must understand. The Idol is the instrument of that change.”

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  There was silence again.

  John glanced at the others. Rhea’s face had gone cold. Esh-Kaet said nothing, but the edge in his stance told volumes. Even Samantha looked rattled—her hands flexed at her sides like she was ready to shoot something.

  “No more waiting,” John said. “We have to reach the Idol. We need to stop this.”

  “Even if we don’t know how?” Rhea asked.

  “The Queen said we needed Thariel’s ring,” John said. He tapped the pouches on the waist of his combat armor which contained high impact explosive charges. “Maybe we don’t need the ring? We’ll figure it out once we’re there. We can’t let this Idol finish whatever it’s doing.”

  As they pushed forward, they encountered their first true barrier—a collapsed archway of glass-mineralized stone sealed tight by interwoven root structures. When John asked Sasha to analyze the material, the data read that passage through was impossible.

  Esh-Kaet stepped forward silently, eyes narrowed as he studied the structure’s base. Then, without a word, he unclipped two small charges from his belt. They were not shaped for destruction, but for a controlled vibration. They were a Cortari invention. He placed them at calculated points along the lower seam.

  “What are you doing?” Rhea asked.

  “Loosening the lock,” Esh-Kaet replied, coolly.

  He activated the first charge. A soft, harmonic pulse reverberated outward. The roots above them twitched.

  Then he placed his palm on the wall, felt its cadence, and repositioned the second charge a little higher. The next detonation caused a low moan in the stone and slowly, almost reluctantly, the fused vines unwinded and pulled back just enough to reveal a tight passage beyond.

  John blinked. “How did you know where to—?”

  “Braccari constructs need a delicate balance to stabilize,” Esh-Kaet said, stepping through. “You just have to know which lung to deflate.”

  They moved on.

  Then, mid sprint through a narrowing artery, their suits stuttered. Something was interfering—they experienced sensor loss from some kind of energy field.

  “A cheap trap,” Sasha said. “It’s jamming us. EM resonance field.”

  “Manual override?” John asked.

  “Negative,” Sasha said. “It’s environmental.”

  Rhea stopped beside an interface node on the wall. “I admire the engineer who would run wiring through bone walls, but it’s rather annoying when we’re trying to move quickly.” Her fingers moved across the terminal. “Give me two seconds.”

  She unlatched the top panel and revealed a power conduit covered in biogrowth. With her knife, she scraped it clean and rewired two of the copper wires. She fed a third wire into a port in her wristband. “Thankfully, this was constructed by humans or we’d be in real trouble,” she muttered. She rerouted a signal through her own life support and boosted the broadcast range. “There. I’ve overridden the scrambler through the relay port.”

  Samantha gave her a grin. “Remind me never to play chess with you.”

  “Keep moving,” Rhea muttered, already jogging ahead.

  Seconds later, they heard a powerful resonating screech. It didn’t come from one Braccari, but dozens.

  The cavern ceiling way above them began to crawl with thousands of tiny beetles who were running from something.

  From the fissures in the walls, the Braccari sliced their way through and emerged. They writhed through the fungal blooms. Their mandibles clacked in unnatural harmony and their movement was guided by an unseen force that made them even faster than before.

  “Contact!” Esh-Kaet snapped. Already, his weapon was in motion. He activated his Ion pistol and sliced a Braccari in half with a whip of plasma. The beast shrieked and collapsed into mold and cartilage.

  Gunfire rang out in the narrow space. Samantha’s revolver spat out slugs into the ranks. Rhea held her Hurricane shotgun and dropped three in close quarters before ducking behind a pillar. John fired his Scorcher, fully automatic. The noise became absolute. Flashbangs cracked. Spores burst into clouds.

  John ducked and just missed the death blow of a Braccari claw swiping past his cheek. He responded by dumping slugs into its abdomen, sending the insectoid shrieking and dying. But then, more Braccari tore away the bone walls and desperately tried to rip open fresh tunnels to get at them.

  “They’re not stopping!” Rhea yelled.

  “We have to go deeper!” John roared. “We’re not leaving until we find and destroy that Idol!”