Was it infighting—humans culling humans? The place was too clean, like frost on untouched glass. An ordinary hit leaves scars—scuffs, residue, a whisper of Aether. Here, dust lay unruffled, as if no feet had ever crossed. No one assassinates and then scours a whole bay to silence every trace, right?
Aphelia felt suspicion tighten like a knot, then she shook it off. Outside, chaos had burst like a breached dam. These people had fled inward, not stalked prey. Heavy weapons lay strewn in the first corridor like shed husks. No assassin cleans a battlefield mid-stampede.
Then… a stronger force wiped them out?
"Aphelia, I’ve cracked the control system," Uroboros called, her voice a cold current through mist. "You can take over, but the inner lines are severed. I can steer the outer grid, yet the inside’s sealed—by design or by ruin, I can’t tell."
Aphelia let the worry settle like ash, then pointed at the wide, bare platform ringed by cliff. "Any hidden passage here?"
"Plenty."
Uroboros swept her smoke-formed arms like a storm-flag. The mountain-backed platform trembled like a drum. Rock skin peeled from the cliff in slabs, revealing elevators embedded in the mountain’s ribs—nine small, one grand—circling the entire deck like a stone constellation.
"Tsk tsk, hide it this deep and your own people won’t find the door," Aphelia said with a crooked smile, eyes on the nine yawning mouths. Most soldiers likely descended through those throats to the lower base. The giant lift was built for special weapons or hulking vehicles.
Her joke broke, like a reed snapped in wind. Uroboros halted too, then surged. Night-black fog flooded the big lift, Aether congealing like ice. Everything inside froze within her grip.
"So that’s why we never found bodies…" Aphelia’s mouth curved into a cold blade. When the huge elevator fully rotated into view, what lay upon it surfaced like a nightmare: skeletal soldiers sprawled on a blood-smeared deck, gnawing at scattered scraps.
Human scraps—hands, feet, torn limbs, pale as wax.
They wore base uniforms like tattered skins, yet they no longer looked human. Under their ashen blue-green hide, flesh had withered away, leaving bone like scaffolding to prop their hunger.
They didn’t notice Aphelia at all. They were lost in feast, heads bowed like carrion birds. The one nearest the lift hatch flexed his skin-on-bone hands with brutal force, ripping an arm from a half-eaten corpse, then chewed alone, animal-fast, eyes glazed.
To them, bodies were delicacies, a red-lipped banquet. They wanted to drink every drop, devour every shred. With the last surviving teeth, they tore at their comrades, then showed a sickly contentment under that dark teal mask of a face.
They repeated the motion like a cursed prayer, gnawing, tearing, swallowing. Humanity had sloughed off them like old bark. The scene mirrored the Hungry Ghost Hell Aphelia had heard of—punishment for bottomless craving—where even kin become meat, ghosts in human rags.
In her era, cannibalism surfaced only in great famines, when bark and roots no longer filled a belly. Only then did people abandon the human line and earn a name that chilled blood: man-eater, not troll, but a fallen human turned hungry ghost.
These soldiers had been twisted by a force, not hunger. That force had carved them into horrors.
"Filthy wretches!" Anger bit Aphelia’s nerves like frost. She clenched until her teeth clicked. Whatever they were, they weren’t human. This wasn’t famine; it was corruption etched into bone.
Crimson Fire bloomed in her hand like a blood-red flower. She gave the feeding "soldiers" a hunter’s smile and walked forward, slow as a blade drawn. Chitin plates—the mark of Swarmheart—sheened across her forearms like insect armor.
She had no words for things that ate the dead.
In the age when humans were weak, such scenes appeared like storms. Ordinary folk were blood-food for giant beasts and twisted aberrations. As a Hero, Aphelia had witnessed it again and again, each time engraving a shadow on her heart.
A Hero still stands. Aphelia buried her anger like coals, then forged it into strength and fire. She poured it onto her enemies. Since then, she’d hated anything that treats humans as meat. If a fool picks a fight with a wild animal, that’s another path entirely.
"Even in death, they’re denied dignity…" Her voice was a cold wind. She vanished, a crimson streak flaring. The rush slammed into the pack like a sudden hurricane in a sealed hall, like the Plague of Beasts hitting head-on. The eaters never even understood the moment.
In an instant, those dried "people" broke apart like scattered blocks, flying into shards. Aphelia stood at the elevator’s heart, gaze flat as winter water, watching the gaunt monsters torn to seven pieces by the gust she birthed. Crimson Fire followed, not to engulf the lift, but to burn every stray fragment clean.
"Rest in peace…" She lowered her head, voice turning soft as dusk. She sang a foreign requiem she’d learned long ago, a melody that soothed fear like a hand over a trembling back.
No Aether, no gesture—just a hum that gentled the air. Facing the blood that lacquered the deck, Aphelia sighed, a weary leaf fall. Crimson Fire, made of Aether, swept gently across the platform like warm rain, and soon it was bare metal—no trace of the human-world hell that had stained it.
Uroboros stood beside her, face dark as stormlight. She wasn’t angry for human kin, but because a mundane control system had slipped past her Aether-sense and hid monsters under her nose.
What a joke. Uroboros isn’t some street-corner thug. No hollow-titled weakling earns a place at Aphelia’s side. Yet this human-made system had, for a moment, fogged her detection?
Black fog poured from Uroboros like a night tide. Earlier, she’d held back her Aether at Aphelia’s request—don’t wreck the installations. But restraint had cost her sight; the elevator had lurked, a den of beasts, within arm’s reach.
The fog became serpent shadows, slipping through every possible seam, flowing to all four flanks of the mountain. It seeped deeper, thread by thread. Where no cracks existed, it didn’t matter; Aether isn’t bound to bodies. It turned phase and slid through solid stone.
Aphelia didn’t stop her. She had wanted to spare the base, once. Now, with man-eaters crawling out of a hidden lift, she didn’t have the patience to tiptoe.
Soon Uroboros’s fog had walked the mountain like a thousand scouts. She mapped every inner strut and chamber, even the military base below. From platform to screw, each piece became a precise blueprint engraved behind her eyes.
"I’ve got the routes nailed down," she said, voice smooth as black glass. "The problem nests in that Aether-stained room. I didn’t approach, so it wouldn’t notice. Let’s go, Aphelia."
