Kin of Jörmungandr

Ceph didn’t think. She just threw herself to the nearest collapsed structure. Heavy pillars and piles of junk were thrown to the side. She knew there were still people here. Whenever her team wasn’t out for work, she would be here eating and chatting with those who climbed the Titan Alps for all sorts of reasons. The opportunistic traders, Mercenary Order workers or bureaucrats, or even the families of Mercenaries that followed them up here.

None of which had the enhancement to survive such a disaster on their own.

Ceph found her first body; a young albanic woman. Her calf was pierced clean through with a wooden stake that had snapped from the ceiling, but she was still alive. Ceph cradled her in two tentacles and rushed back through the path she’d made. As much as she wanted to make sure the woman was attended to and her wound patched, there were still so many stuck beneath the collapsed buildings. She carefully lowered her and dashed back inside, clearing away as much timber, rock and concrete she could without deteriorating the structural integrity any further.

The only bright side of this situation was that the city was still rather small. Plenty of construction was under way for larger buildings further down the mountain, but they were uninhabited. There was barely a thousand unenhanced living up here, a number that was matched by the mercenaries assigned here; a ratio far from normal.

She caught sight of a khirig with a particularly large antler cage charge into the ruins of one building.

“You idiot!” she shouted, flinging herself after him, but was too late.

The building collapsed. Pillars that were still holding up the remaining weight of the building shattered with his charge, leaving the ceiling to collapse. She dove in behind him, quickly digging out an old volan — one of the small wingsuit loving people — from being the wreckage. He was dead. Crushed.

Ceph snarled, her eyes swirling in her head toward the reckless Luis mercenary. She bounded after him, careful to avoid breaking anything that might be holding up any more weight as she flexed her boneless body through the tightest gaps in the rubble. As soon as she caught up to him, she wrapped a tentacle around an antler and slammed his protected head into the ground. He’d been digging away at a pile of stone slabs without any care for what might collapse in his effort.

“Wha…?”

“You sit right there,” she demanded. She’d caught sight of what he was digging for. Some khirig’s shattered foot antlers were poking out from beneath a large brick.

Ceph moved to take his place, but carefully moved the stone so that it wouldn’t collapse while holding a limb above her to lessen the weight of the ceiling. She didn’t dare push it up too much, the roof was just as likely to collapse from that as it was by losing the support of these slabs. Where the Luis had been digging, he was almost certainly about to get anyone else still stuck in here buried.

Her work was slow, but she was making her way to the victim. And then the Luis merc just had to try and help, by digging where he did before. Ceph slapped him with the back of her tentacle, very nearly tempted to put in enough strength to shatter an antler.

“Go outside and wait for a Beith to give you orders.” As much as Ceph still felt out of place in her new rank, there were still people like this that she had no idea how they got as high as they did. There was more to the job then one’s enhancement, after all. Well, mostly.

He looked like he was going to argue, but the look in her eye was enough to scare him off. He still sent too many glances to the buried khirig for her to be comfortable he won’t cause any more issues, but she moved back to helping the fallen girl. Enough of her had been revealed now that Ceph could see she was a child. Whoever was stupid enough to bring a kid this young up the Titan Alps…

Thankfully, she was still breathing. Though, with how thin the air was up here, she was doing so with difficulty. The youthful twigs of her antlers were all shattered and only the vulnerable inner body remained. Ceph picked up the girl with care, avoiding the sharp tips of her broken antlers spiking out from her spine. She quickly extracted herself back outside, rushing over to the nearest dohrni of the Lu-Lum family. The medic would take care of the child first, thankfully, and she could get back to the rescue effort.

All the mercs were in full action now. They cleared through the broken buildings with ease, freeing the trapped and injured civilians.

“Ceph!” someone yelled.

She turned to find Glaus calling for her. By his side was the operations commander for the city and underground entrance. He wasn’t the most enhanced of individuals, but he had more than most commanders.

“What’s going on?” she shouted as she rushed over.

“We don’t know,” Glaus said as Telum leapt from the man’s head to hers. “All Beiths are being mobilised to guard the cavern entrance. Something has happened and we need to be prepared.”

Ceph ignored her volan friend as he made himself comfortable on top of her. “Where is Hirsh?”

“I already sent him ahead,” Glaus said as they bounded up the mountain.

As she ran, her eyes slid to the back of her torso, watching the disaster zone behind her. It was hard to leave when she knew so many people were still trapped within the rubble, but orders were orders.

“Don’t worry.” Glaus glanced at her through his translucent blue membrane. “The other mercs can take care of the city without issue. Just keep your eyes peeled; we don’t know what could happen.”

Ceph nodded. He was right; they couldn’t worry about peoples’ safety right now. They needed to lock down the entrance and make sure nothing could breach. They’d already faced plenty of beasts that found their way from the depths to open air. It was incredibly likely whatever caused that pressure sent the creatures down below into a frenzy… and that was assuming the source itself didn’t decide to pay them a visit.

The shatter didn’t have any distinct origin, but she was sure it came from below.

It took Ceph and Glaus seconds to reach the base of the entrance. Thousands of mermineae gathered around, helping the hundreds of their brethren that fled from within the tunnels. The gearwork fortifications remained still while the mermineae passed, but the teams of mercenaries tasked to man the large cranks that allowed the machines to function waited, ready to force them into motion at a word.

The centzon had built elevators to move in and out of the underground, but the mermineae clambered up the fortifications with nothing but their claws. As soon as they reached the surface, they flung themselves away from the stone machines. Their slender bellies hugged the earth, almost thankful to be away from the centzon’s creation. Whenever they could, the mermineae would stay as far as they could from the moving contraptions. It was also why they needed to assign teams of mercenaries to the crankshafts.

Ceph saw the glowing form of Hirsh riding a wave of water on the other side of the massive opening. He was already busy watching for threats. It would be good to have him fighting alongside them again. Not having their mage had impacted their typical flow, and it had been especially annoying that they couldn’t enact the inheritance ritual while down in the caverns. Ceph was sure Hirsh felt far more agitated than the rest of them; he’d been stuck unable to participate, after all.

A merminea rose to their hind legs and approached the trio. The creatures could walk relatively easily on two legs, but they almost exclusively remained prone, where their fur hid them against the earth. The only reason they remained visible now was because of a treaty they’d agreed to at the end of war.

“Know what that presence was, do you?”

“Not a clue.” Glaus continued walking toward the larger fortifications at the base of the opening. “We are activating the war machines in a minute. Get your people ready.”

“But…” The mermineae hesitates. “There are still so many down there.”

Glaus shrugs. “Order’s from the commander. If you can’t get them up in time, send a message for them to hide until we know things are safe.”

A tap on the top of her head made Ceph look up. “Mind tossing me?” Telum asked, gesturing to the skies over the entrance.

She curled a tentacle around the volan, easily wrapping up the small creature. A fluid snap of her limb and he was sky-bound. In an instant, he was hundreds of metres high and his arms flung outward, bringing control over his momentum and levelling out. He soared above the hole along with a dozen other volans.

Ceph broke off from Glaus. She felt a little bad for the merminea that might have to leave his kin down in the depths, but they needed to keep their priorities straight. They could not sacrifice those on the surface for the people below.

She rushed to the stone fortification wall. Ignoring the mechanical elevator, she leaped the twenty metres to the top, having to slap a tentacle along the surface only once to reach. Upon landing, Ceph quickly moved to a square of bright yellow paint. The last thing she wanted was to get stuck in the gears of this machine when it started up.

Now in position, she cast her gaze around the wall where other mercenaries were taking their places. Everyone knew their role and was quick to fulfil it. Glaus was quick to join her side in a marked section ten metres to her left.

There was still no certainty that they would experience a surge, but nobody here would say it wasn’t worth the precaution. Everyone knew the threats the Alps could hold on its surface; who knew what unknown monsters laid within? Ceph and her team weren’t the only ones to come across the remnants of strange beasts. Many teams never returned.

That serpent… they’d never heard anything more from it. The mermineae had set up a search, but it had clearly gone down into the lower tunnels. How such a massive creature could fit down the narrow columns, she didn’t know, but those monstrous centipedes did the same, and they were too large to wander through the upper chamber.

“Engage!” An order was shouted from the base of the fortifications, soon repeated all along their length.

The rock buckled beneath her, dropping a few centimetres. She panicked slightly, twirling her eyes to make sure she was within the painted lines. She was. All should be fine.

There was a heavy clank of something heavy falling into place and the walls came alive. The stone to her right rotated upward, a bunch of unhealthy clicks accompanying the movement. One of those massive cannons slid forward, revealing itself from the stone. Ceph was momentarily awed by the sight of the weapon five times her height pointing down into the depths where only an ever so slight blue glow could be seen.

Her distraction didn’t last long when a sawblade twisted out from the rock beneath her, and dropped down into the tunnel below, ready to shred any creature that may come from the upper cavern.

The ground moved again, and she held tight as the stone she stood on suddenly slid outward, leaving her and the slab suspended over the wide hole.

Ceph suppressed a groan. She had the misfortune to have chosen one of the pistons to stand on. All across the fortifications a similar transformation was occurring. Saws, cannons, and similar ten metre tall pistons of stone folded out from the stone fortifications and left it unrecognisable to what it was. Truly a marvel of engineering. She could only imagine what they might look like once they’d figured out the best way to apply inscriptions to them.

The clatter and clanking of gears smashing into one another was almost deafening, but so too was the buzz of the metal-toothed stone saw spinning at incredible speeds below.

Dozens of Beith mercenaries waited, ready and alert, with deadly centzon machines over the only exit from the Titan Alps’ underneath. A thousand mermineae waited beyond, willing to take on anything that broke through.

Nothing from below could beat them.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t something below that left millions dead.