(1 - Alpha) Taed v. Allya

[Kaez]

The powerful relic is a hallmark of all worldbuilding genres. These artifacts are very often ancient, unique, or otherwise invaluable – and always seem to slip away into unwelcome corners of the world or into the hands of those who seek to use them to do evil. It’s therefore also no surprise that the search for, and recovery of, legendary relics has become its own trope of fantasy and sci-fi alike. Whether aglow with forgotten magic of elder magi or a crucial piece of technology essential to the salvation of a whole planet, the hunt for a famous relic allows the author to easily and seamlessly introduce a breadth of history and context to the reader (thereby establishing the complexity of the setting) while maintaining a focused and driven narrative.

Restriction: Third-person; details the hunt for an object of objective value.
Topic: SWAMP MONSTERS

[Matteo ((Taed))]

Sullen vapour stirred into vapid animation as the Herakles Infantry Company sloshed down the mist-drenched length of the Acheron bog. Above them streamed lurid tubes of yellow-orange cloud, while underfoot they trod a compacted ingot of slushy long-chain hydrocarbons. Each soldier wore panoply in full regalia, sealed from head to toe against the chill methane atmosphere. As they walked, Private Antipatros pressed through a copse of spidery, bruised purple weeds, and tore apart their grasping strands with a whine of servo-assisted muscles.

The Company had deployed from their penteconter four days previously, and left the ship at anchor after its tricky insertion into the stream of the gas lobe. Though their present location occupied a calm eye amidst the storm, they were surrounded on all sides by the rushing winds of the greater tributary, making further use of the craft risky at best. Luckily, the Nekromanteion cultists had prepared this floating island of solid ground, and its attendant gravitational field, to make the region marginally more amenable to mortal life.

As amenable as one could expect, that is, nestled as it was in the teardrop river of gas being stripped from a Jovian world by the attentions of a close-orbiting black hole.

The Company marched into a sort of clearing ringed by scraggly, geneforged trees, and Hoplite-Commander Cleon called out a rest order over the general channel. His mercenaries drifted from their spread-out formation into smaller groups, and leaned in close to one another, sharing conversations tight-banded on laser beams. Cleon grimaced to see this. Avoidance of the open radio channels had started on the second day. Staying locked inside the rigid bronze bubble of their armour was creating an isolation that was bad for morale.

Two of Cleon's lieutenants, Diokles and Menodora, approached and reached out with lasered handshakes of their own. Cleon's grimace deepened, but he accepted the connection and they established a little triad of shared comms. At the very least, Cleon made the faceplate of his panoply transparent, and a moment later his companions followed suit. The poor excuse for sunlight--red-shift glare that poured up the length of the gas lobe from where compression made it incandescent near the accretion ring--grew harsher with the lack of polarization, but it was a small price to be able to see each other's faces.

"Scout drones report no movement and no sign of the temple," Diokles said, all business. "But forward progress is starting to run against dilation effects, so we can't send them far. We're going to need the Veil sooner rather than later."

Menodora grinned in the little pool of light behind her visor.

"Unless you were hoping that your terrible wife would be dust in the ground by the time we get home."

"At this point," Cleon replied, "I'm just worried she'll have already spent my commission. Let's roll out our very expensive secret weapon. Diokles."

The lieutenant nodded and hopped to, marching away toward one of the headless, heavy-laden metal mules that followed doggedly behind the Company with their equipment. Menodora pivoted to watch him go, so that she and Cleon faced the same way.

"Soldiers don't fight one another when they're bottled up like this," she said, staring straight ahead. "Soldiers are supposed to fight one another. It lets the officers deal with a problem before it becomes a disaster."

"Well if you can teach yourself to breathe methane sometime in the near future, do be sure to share. Otherwise, we'll all just have to suck it up a bit longer."

"Just trying to safeguard my promotion for when Georgos and Basilius inevitably kill each other. You keep those two from fucking for more than a day or two and they start to remember how much they despise one another."

Cleon stepped away towards where Diokles and an assistant were already assembling the Veil of Cronus. Rather, they were assembling the complicated, fountain-like device that would propel the Veil's exotic matter--liberated at great cost from the burial shroud of the dead Titan himself--into the air around them. The final component slotted into place with a click, and Diokles looked to Cleon, whose curt nod set the process into action. A silvery, translucent stream arced high into the air, and split to descend into a mile-diameter bubble around them. They hoisted the whole array up onto one of the mules' backs and Diokles shot a thumbs up in Cleon's direction.

"Alright, listen up," he said over the open channel once more. "We are now quite literally on borrowed time. We're in and out before the Veil runs dry or else that event horizon gobbles up every birthday your friends and family are likely to have. And if you're the sort of antisocial bastard who isn't motivated by that, just remember that decades of subjective frame distortion do not count as overtime. Let's move."

The Company reformed and marched quickly out of the clearing, moving beneath the godly umbrella of preserved temporality. Cleon gratefully re-tinted his helmet, but the horizon was still a cherry ember of hellfire, slanting horizontal rays back up towards them. As their forward progress took them steadily down into this inferno, and the all-consuming void behind it, Cleon could not shake his grandmother's tales of Heroes and Demis descending into Hades itself.

Their forward march also took them into a denser and livelier section of the marsh than what they'd passed thus far. This ground had seen fewer years than the same terrain even a few miles behind them, putting it closer to the date of its initial cultivation by the Nekromanteion cultists. Less time to starve and whither in the Acheron's harsh winds. Even so, the dark trees had a twisted, knotty quality, draped in curtains of sticky grey moss.

They were hacking through a tight thicket of this unnatural vegetation when a shiver on the motion tracker drew them up short. Cleon silently passed a distribution order along the comm band, and it guided his soldiers to where he wanted them by way of viewscreen prompts. They scattered and settled, weapons pointing out into the fog and the underbrush.

"We've lost drone one," Diokles muttered, and, a moment later, "Drone two is down."

"Hold formation," Cleon replied. "Focus grid around the Veil, we can't have it--"

Cleon was interrupted as a swarm of hissing, shrieking little fireworks came shooting out the trees and directly towards him. Instinctively he telescoped his doruout to firing length and delivered a burst of sharp, painfully white thunderclaps into the heart of the mass, mirrored by his hoplites. The swarm broke and arced past on either side of him, offering Cleon a glimpse of copper planes and hard edges.

"Stymphalians!" he shouted, even as other clouds of the metal birds came rocketing out of the woods at different points, trailing smoke and sparks and sputtering flame like comet tails. Cleon leapt up and raced with a few powered strides to where Menodora sheltered behind a boulder, dodging squawking, phosphorescent automatons at every step. He dove and slid into place beside her and she fired at something over his head, sending a shower of smoking cogwheels spattering past.

"I remember these damn things," she said, taking potshots from cover. "Twenty years back, you'd find them bloody everywhere; stow away and spawn like rats."

"More like magpies," Cleon replied. "I'm from Arcadia, they'd strip everything metal that wasn't nailed down. Cutlery, furniture," he banged one fist on the brassy chest of his panoply, "other things. They haul it back to their nests to build more little bastards. One year they stole all the copper shingles from city hall."

Cleon tossed his doru to Menodora while he focused on deploying autonomous armament from the mules. She stood up and began firing with one in either hand.

"Ah, so it's your people that we have to thank for this bracing addition to local wildlife. Tell me, what is it about Arcadian culture that led someone to design a bird's anus and say 'you know, I'd better make rocket fuel shoot out of that?'"

As she spoke, another few Stymphalians whizzed directly overhead, sputtering exhaust. A fresh clump burst out between the trees beside two privates, and razor talons wrenched a jagged seam across hoplite armour.

"Get a patch on that breach!" Cleon shouted, as even more birds joined the fray. Metal wings held flat like sword blades whined through the air, and sometimes found their mark against panoply.

"Hera's tits! This is starting to look bad." Menodora continued firing, then gasped and dropped down as a Stymphalion passed within inches of her neck. The sky above them was a riot of reflective surfaces scattering the light of chemical flares and doru blasts. The storm of avian aggression was so thick that that it almost hid the glow of the figure that came vaulting in on a long flying leap into the fray.

An enormous man crashed to earth wielding an equally massive shield and a blade sketched from pure white, like a sliver silhouette of empty space. He used the momentum of his fall to carry forward into an overhand strike, lopping half a dozen Stymphalians from the air at once, then reversed and slashed up into more of them. His shield whipped about with crushing impact, and he proceeded to batter foes aside by the score. All the while his bare skin steamed with the golden glow of aristeia.

"Well blight my ass and give me to Hades," Menodora said. "It's only a gods-damned Demi, isn't it?"

The gigantic, glowing saviour occupied the centre of a hurricane of Stymphalians, who couldn't seem to approach him without violently combusting. He raised his shield, itself as big as Cleon, and bashed the white sword-shape against it. A shockwave bent the air and scattered birds like shrapnel. The significantly diminished flock beat a rocket-hasty retreat and left an eerie silence in the woods behind them.

The Herakles Company emerged from their various holdout positions and moved tentatively back into the open. They drew magnetically toward their Demi rescuer, with Cleon leading the pack. Their target, impressively bearded and still glowing faintly with aristeia, seemed distracted by his victory, but soon turned to face the others.

"What ho, fellow adventurers!" he boomed. "I did not expect to find any others in this godsforsaken swamp. And shielded against the Pit's reaping as well; your errand must be of import. Tell me, do you seek the Mechanism as well?"

Cleon, ready to speak, closed his mouth at this last bit, then pressed on despite his surprise.

"Thank you for the help, friend. I'm Cleon, formerly of Arcadia. May I ask your own name?"

The man threw back his head and laughed, the sound particularly sonorous in the dense methane atmosphere.

"You may call me Ajax. The Greater. Greatest, I might add, as I know of no others who might challenge me."

"And I can gather that you're here seeking the Nekromanteion device as well?"

Ajax cast a sly eye at Cleon.

"Aye, and what a shame it would be if our ends were to conflict over such a goal. I'll tell you what, friend Cleon, I have no desire to quarrel, so what say we seek the Mechanism together? And if perhaps one of us should fall in battle in the interim, then any potential conflict will have solved itself."

Cleon looked up (way up) at the larger-than-life figure before him, and very quickly arrived at some conclusions regarding discretion, valour, and the relationship there between. He stuck out a hand.

"That sounds like a fine idea. Greatest Ajax, the Herakles Company are honoured to accompany you."

Ajax roared with laughter and, disdaining the hand, clapped Cleon on the back hard enough to make his armour ring.

"Oh, I like you, friend Cleon. This quest just became far more interesting."

The reformed group moved out in a far tighter and chummier distribution than before, with everyone wanting to hew close to Ajax and his jovial proclamations. With his copious enhancements, the Demi could walk freely even in as harsh an environment as this one, bare skin showing beneath his open helmet and the gaps in his armour. He revealed in rambling and stylish oration, among other things, that a pendant worn around his neck offered his own protection against time's dilation, and that it had been hard one in a contest involving dragons, wenches, and the scuttling of an Achaemenid war fleet.

Cleon lay near the centre of this attention for some while, but he was eventually able to slide Ajax' camaraderie off onto another hoplite, and fall back to walk with Diokles and Menodora.

"Have you ever met a Demi before?" she asked on their private channel.

"When I fought for Crete we went up against one at Cydonia," Diokles said. "Big bastard name of Antaeus, if I remember right. Three to one we outnumbered them, and he almost turned it into a rout all on his own. We threw a metamat shell over an entire pulsar, then lured his ship in close enough to catch a gamma burst. Must have cost most of that year's taxes."

"So we know that something can kill them, at least," Cleon muttered.

Diokles and Menodora shared a look.

"You know, boss, I don't think anyone would be surprised if we got to the temple and found the device just, you know, 'already gone.'"

"Valuable thing like that. You'd expect someone to have come looking for it by now, wouldn't you?"

Cleon remained grimly silent, and marched more quickly ahead. With the comm link in place he was still only a word away, but the other two took the hint and didn't address him further.

Their march carried them out of the fourth day and into the fifth. During the arbitrarily-determined night (through which the accretion flames still burned brightly, and soldiers turned the opacity on their visors fully up to sleep), Ajax told rollicking tales, and entertained everyone with his ability to drink the ammonia/ethanol sap of local flora, as well as the behaviours this drew out of him. By the time a drone scout sent back images of a structure in the trees ahead, the Company was well familiar with his conquests (military and otherwise) across much of Hellene Space.

They approached the temple and its outbuildings in a spear formation with Ajax at its tip. The main ziggurat loomed above everything else, bearing the Nekromanteion cult's traditional iconography to Hades and his bride. As they approached its base, Cleon picked out further devotions offered to the Neopythagorean descendants of this Orphic mystery tradition: canonized images of Apollonius and Nicomachus, and other adherents to the divinity of mathematics.

Ascending the temple steps, Ajax strode proudly but the Company men cast nervous looks in every direction. There was a haunted aura to this place, erected by heretics and necromancers, abandoned without a trace and embalmed in subjective time. Cleon couldn't say how long these walls had stood empty by their own reckoning, but even through panoply he swore he could feel a gaze fall on the back of his neck.

At the top of the stairs, Ajax stopped and rubbed his hands in glee. The scene ahead was so perfect it could have been lifted from one of his own stories. The temple was surmounted by an open shrine raised on bare, slablike columns. A glassy black reflecting pool ran up its centre towards an altar of heavy square bricks. Floating above the altar itself was an orb of clockwork and mirrors, hung from nothing in a beam of white light.

"And there we have it," Ajax declared. "The storied Mechanism of Antikythera. Said to compute the equation to godhood itself."

"Less poetic but more incredible," Cleon breathed. "Our spacetime is encrypted. If you dig beneath the quarks and the foam, only math is left over, and someone locked that up tight behind a million-bit key. The Mechanism is pure computation, and in the singularity space where rules are already weak, it can make a brute force attack against reality itself."

Ajax deflated with a puff of breath.

"Yes. Well. Quite. A kingly prize. Shall we claim it?"

He stepped forward from the group, and began moving up the length of the chamber. As he did so, a ripple ran through the reflecting pool beside him. Cleon flung a scatter order at his men and shouted for Ajax to wait, just as a mass of scales and sinew came rushing out of the water. A long serpentine neck overflowing with needle fangs. It whipped out at Ajax, and the Demi caught a snaggly tooth in either hand, holding the jaws apart from crushing him.

Ajax was driven back across the floor, his heels digging furrows in the stone, as the neck continued to pour endlessly out of the water. Cleon righted himself and snapped his doru out into action. White bolts punched holes in the creature's hide, but there seemed to always be more neck to replace what was damaged. Ajax bumped up against the far wall, arms trembling and sweat pouring down his face.

"Well played, beastie, but if you manage to surprise a Hero, you had better finish the job!"

Gold aristeia ignited across Ajax' body, and he stood tall under the worm's onslaught. With a heave, he broke off the teeth he was holding in either hand, and the serpent head whipped back with a shriek. It made a repulsive, wet croaking noise, then convulsed its throat and spat green fire at Ajax. He raised his shield, splashing the fire harmlessly to either side, then whipped out the empty white blade of his sword. Ajax pivoted as the snake lashed out again, and took its head off in one clean stroke. The weighty neck slumped loudly to the ground.

"Ha ha! Nothing but neck! Ajax wins again!"

There was a sound like metal tearing, and two jagged fissures appeared floating in midair. In perfect unison, two serpent heads came shooting out of the holes. They were both missing teeth, and as soon as they appeared they made repulsive, wet croaking noises and spat green fire. Both heads shrieked in an octave that made eardrums run for cover.

Cleon leapt and rolled to avoid the blast, then came upright and delivered a perfect shot to one head between its eyes. Steamed brains came spitting out the back, but an instant later two more holes appeared in the air, and two more heads dropped out of them. They performed identical, octave-climbing shrieks and began to attack the scattered hoplites.

Cleon found himself pressed up behind shelter beside Menodora once more.

"It's like a carnival game!" she said. "You knock one down and two more pop back up."

"They're looping somehow," Cleon said. "Mirroring themselves across spacetime. Maybe if we can douse them in the Veil-matter ..."

"And leave ourselves stuck here for a few centuries? I don't think Ajax brought enough of those talismans for everybody."

"Do you see a better alternative?"

Some of the heads were diving voluntarily into news rips in space, spawning déjà vu doppels of themselves all over the temple. A hoplite screamed as he was picked up in one head's jaws and vanished into a rift, then reappeared in duplicate a moment later, still screaming, but now in stereo. The heads crushed both bodies as one, and tossed them aside. The remaining hoplites ran wild, dodging and firing, leaping over disembodied loops of Escherian anatomy.

Ajax roared in anger as he amassed a small horde of severed heads at his feet.

"Damn your countless eyes! Yield to my murder of you!"

Cleon and Menodora moved as a duo, intent on where the Veil fountain continued its work outside. However, unexpected attacks kept driving them in new directions, and they found themselves holed up against the altar.

Cleon looked up at the floating Mechanism, and suddenly considered a better alternative. He reached up and plucked the object from its light beam, holding it in both hands. Menodora looked around and her eyes widened.

"Admittedly, if you could hack your way into godhood, this would probably be an easy fix."

There was a button in the middle of the device, surrounded with elaborately-etched scrollwork. Cleon considered saying a prayer, then decided this probably wasn't the time, and pressed the button. The orb shuddered and began to grow warm. It extruded maniple prongs jellied in a heat-haze of sub-atom engineering, which palpated the empty air. Like a key wielded in the dark, questing for a lock.

The Mechanism grew suddenly and unbearably hot, and Cleon almost dropped it, even through his armoured gloves. There was a ripple, and through its prism Cleon could see the world layered like an onion, each slice containing fewer and fewer serpent heads. He reached out through the ripple, a dozen breaks refracted into his arm, and pulled back holding a single, jet black egg.

The infinitely coiled bulk of the monster vanished without a sound. Ajax' battle yells carried on for a few seconds in the new silence until he cut off abruptly. The Mechanism was still getting hotter in Cleon's hands, and on a sudden terrified impulse he pressed the button again. There was a whine, and little vents snapped open in the orb's side, spitting steam until it was cool and quiet once more.

Ajax and the remainder of the Herakles Company formed up around Cleon, who still held an artefact in either hand. Ajax delivered his trademark guffaw and clapped Cleon on the back once more.

"Well done, well done indeed, friend Cleon! Many a warrior has claimed he would strike a foe so hard that its children would feel the blow, but not many have sought to eliminate an enemy before it was born! Some, certainly, but not many. Why, I could tell you a story about Achilles where--"

"Are you going to let us have the device, or is there going to be a problem?" Cleon blurted out.

Ajax cut off and cast his sly eye over the smaller man.

"I wager it would not be so great a problem as all that. However, it would seem my interest in the Mechanism of Antikythera has waned. I am practically a god already, after all. What need have I for the remainder when far greater treasures present themselves instead? The egg of a Causality Hydra, perhaps?"

Cleon looked down at his hands, then slowly handed over the egg. Ajax took it and immediately secreted it in a hidden pocket.

"A pleasure, friend Cleon, and now I must take my leave. My vessel lies in a different direction than yours, and I feel a sudden urgency to move quickly. Would that we fight alongside each other again some day."

Ajax left as quickly as he had come, and disappeared quickly into the bog. The hoplites milled about as Cleon stowed the Mechanism safely in one of the mules. He looked around at his understandably shellshocked men and had to simply shrug.

"For any new recruits who were wondering," he said. "Yeah, this is pretty much the norm. Let's move out."

[Kaez]

Ajax wins again.

So, there's really very little for me to comment on here. Overall this was really strong -- it had a lighthearted scifi action-comedy movie vibe to it throughout (casual banter during a battle) while still maintaining some really cool and (to me, at least) original ideas with the nature of the creatures and the setting. I'm not big into sci-fi lately and I still loved this.

I do have to say that it took me 5-10 paragraphs to 'get into it'. You've got a long-winded, adjective-and-metaphor-rich writing style here and that compliments the technobabble and general nature of the story super well, but it is intimidating to jump right into that and I don't know that anything would've been lessened by a carefully crafted first paragraph that kind of built into things; starting a little more gently and with a slightly more accessible prose style.

But that's one of those things you stop carrying about once you get into a story. It only represents a barrier for those not willing to push through it, or those more sensitive to it than I.

Ajax was -definitely- the highlight for me. Loved everything about that guy. And it couldn't have ended better. So. Yeah, I can't critique this, honestly. Nice work.