Eyes Up, Guardian

Chapter 35

Chapter Warning-- Gore, Violence

The rest of the fight took hours. They had one final enemy left, the Archon Priest itself, a heavily modified splicer priest so fused with the SIVA that it made up the creature's body from the waist down. In all his lives, Damian had never fought anything more powerful, and he hoped he never had to again.

The Archon annihilated them time and time again, wielding the SIVA in ways none of them could even imagine, and with him, armies of splicers poured into the room to aid the priest. No matter how many they killed, there always seemed to be more to take their place. The hours dragged on and the team began to grow weary. The Vanguard leaders made contact around the second hour, but didn't speak a word of the meeting they'd been caught in. It was just as well, their minds were all busy enough as it was, fear and fatigue laying thick on them as the battle drove on.

They tried to call for backup, but after the Vanguard had sent a team to assist them, they'd discovered that they were unreachable, the chamber sealed and guarded by an army of splicers so large the second team had been wiped out in moments and had to be resurrected almost a mile away. The group promptly refused to risk further attempts. Even if the fireteam wanted to retreat, they wouldn't find the way out easier than the battle they were trapped in.

All the while, Damian was plagued with worry. Granted, his life and the lives of his team were at the forefront of his mind, but a vision plagued him. Every time he died, he saw Torak and the Skotadi valley, cabal ships landing on the hill, circling the valley. Every time Kylie revived him, words would echo in his mind, harsh, garbled English, broken on an alien tongue.

You have twenty-four hours. Surrender or death.

He had no idea what he'd seen, what the vision meant, but it came to him over and over again, until he'd collapsed to the ground screaming and Tessa had been forced to clamp a hand over his mouth to keep him from alerting the splicers prowling around them.

They rested where they could, tucking themselves into unseen corridors after they'd been revived, communicating only through their radios and body language as they dared not make a sound that might alert the splicers once more. They'd tried to sneak out of the chamber three times, only to be caught and killed, again and again. Fear was beginning to close in, and it was making them sloppy, thoughtless. They did their best to get through it, to breathe and reassure one another, to consult the vanguard with their best course of action. Shiro and Saladin had gotten on the comms as well, thankfully saving judgement and rebuke in favor of aiding their victory or, as it seemed to be drawing to, their escape.

When the finally decided there was no way out, Balendin herded them into an alcove, where they crouched in a tight pack, every light, every reflective surface on their armor and guns gone to avoid being spotted and discovered. Once inside, Balendin crouched ahead of them, his back to the open space before them as he faced them.

"We're going to get through this." He told them, his voice somehow sure, somehow steady. "I know we're all running low on Light, so this has to be our last run. If we fail, we'll take one of the side chambers and barricade ourselves in there until we recover enough to fight our way out." He told them, then took a deep breath,

"But it won't come to that." He continued, looking each one of them in the face as best he could through the darkness and the helmets. "We already have a game plan, and the last few times it almost worked, we just can't slip up. We can't let anyone die. If we can all stay alive, we'll be able to keep damaging the priest enough that the SIVA won't be able to keep healing him. We've already wounded him enough already, if we can stay alive, we'll be able to win this.