The lake was black glass under the fading light when Vulgaris vanished.
One moment the Plantiant was walking just behind them, heavy footsteps crunching on the old wooden planks of the quay. The next, something unseen seized him with terrifying strength and dragged him backward into the water without a sound. He hit the surface hard, sending up a violent splash. Then the lake began to glow — a faint, sickly green that spread outward like spilled poison.
Thick fog rolled across the water in seconds, swallowing the far shore and turning the world into a gray, choking shroud.
“Vulgaris!” Arkadiusz shouted, lunging toward the lake’s edge.
The others scrambled after her, hearts hammering. The Plantiant was already drifting away from shore, his thrashing movements only pulling him farther out. Every attempt to swim seemed to make it worse, as though the water itself was working against him.
Suddenly Noelani spun and grabbed Garet in a vicious grapple, her arms locking around his throat with brutal force. The rest of the Knights froze in shock. Before anyone could react, a low, droning buzz filled the fog — and then the Souls’kers came.
They erupted from the mist like living arrows, giant mutated mosquitoes the size of bulls, skating low across the lake’s surface on iridescent wings. Their needle-like proboscises gleamed wetly as they descended in a hungry wave, seeking blood and fluids.
The team opened fire. Arkadiusz’s MP5K chattered, cutting two of the creatures out of the air in mid-flight. Paul’s katana flashed as he slashed another apart before it could land. Garet tried to break free from Noelani’s grip, but she was impossibly strong now, her eyes vacant and glowing with that same sickly green.
With a savage twist, Noelani hurled Garet into the lake.
He hit the water hard and immediately began to sink. Garet had never learned to swim — not properly — and panic seized him as the cold dark closed over his head.
Vulgaris continued to drift farther out, strangely calm now, as though the lake had decided to carry him gently away.
The Knights fought desperately against the mosquito swarm. Arkadiusz dropped another pair with precise bursts. Mordecai roared and swatted one out of the air with his massive cybernetic arm. But more kept coming.
Meanwhile, Noelani turned on Mordecai. The great ape barely evaded her first lunging attack. He hurled a smoke grenade at her feet, hoping to blind her, but she simply vanished into the billowing cloud and emerged swinging her gunstock war club with terrifying precision, forcing the others to scatter.
Garet thrashed beneath the surface, lungs burning, vision darkening. Then something vast and slick brushed against his leg. A thick, viscous slime coated his skin where the tentacle had touched him. The contact burned like acid.
On the shore, Vulgaris finally reached the beach. The moment his feet touched land he turned on Arkadiusz, vines lashing out with unnatural speed. His eyes glowed the same poisonous green as Noelani’s.
Noelani pressed her attack on Mordecai, trying to wrestle the massive ape to the ground, but he was far too powerful. He shrugged her off again and again, refusing to let her gain leverage.
Paul suddenly looked up, face draining of color. “Thousands more,” he whispered. “They’re coming.”
The swarm was thickening — a black, droning cloud rolling in from the fog like a living storm.
There was no winning this fight. Not here. Not now.
“Boathouse!” Paul shouted. “Fall back to the boathouse!”
They retreated in chaos, dragging the now-unconscious Noelani — Garet had managed one desperate nano-surge that put her to sleep mid-attack. They slammed the door behind them, leaving Vulgaris outside, hammering on the wooden planks with vine-lashed fury. Paul had frantically boarded up the windows of the boathouse, hammering planks over every opening with desperate, uneven blows.
Inside the dim, rotting structure, the truth hit them.
Garet’s skin was changing.
It was becoming translucent, a clear, glistening membrane that glistened wetly in the low light. He was gasping, struggling for breath, his chest heaving as though the air itself had turned hostile. His body was desperately trying to adapt to an aquatic existence while still on land — and failing.
Garet’s eyes were wide with raw, animal terror. The confident hunter was gone. In its place was something small, vulnerable, and hunted. Every instinct screamed the same terrible truth:
He was no longer the predator.
He was prey.
Paralyzed with fear, Paul stared out the cracked window as a nauseating, radioactive green glow emanated from the water, casting a jaundiced light over everything. The horde of Souls’kers had vanished as suddenly as it appeared. All that remained was the gentle lapping of dark water against the dock and a thick, sickly-hued fog slowly retreating from the shore, leaving behind an unnatural, heavy silence. Then something clicked — old Spacer training, hard-won knowledge from a hundred dead worlds. His voice came out low and grim.
“It’s not just a monster,” he said. “It’s a system. A perfect ambush predator. It never had to surface. It turned two of our own into extensions of itself without ever showing its face. The green glow, the fog, the swarm — all of it is just the killing field. We walked straight into it the moment we stepped onto that quay.”
He looked at the others, eyes hard.
“We don’t negotiate with something like this. We don’t wait it out. The only way out of a killing field is violence. And if we want any chance of saving Noelani and Vulgaris… we may have to cut them down before we can save them.”
The Radboleth waited beneath the dark water, patient and ancient, dreaming in rad-light while its new puppets moved above.
And Garet — skin turning glassy, breath coming in desperate, wet gasps — was running out of time.
The lake was no longer just water.
It was territory.
And they were deep inside it.
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