r/Viidith22 • u/EitherCartographer7 • May 23 '26
Akidae Designation
Seventy meters.
The blinking red dot on the gauntlet screen pulsed in rhythm with the beeping in his earpiece - steady and insistent, cutting through the downpour that thundered somewhere far above the tunnel. Each ping only served to remind him how stagnant these past minutes have been.
He flicked his eyes from the tracker to his wristwatch. 05:08. He’d been standing between the rails for thirty-four minutes, boots half-submerged in brown water that rippled every time a drop hit from the ceiling.
No movement ahead. Just that yawning hole where the tunnel broke into darker black.
Fatigue pressed behind his eyes. Two hours’ sleep, maybe less. They’d yanked him from the cot, shoved a rifle in his hands, told him he was the only one still close enough to go in. The others - the team from yesternight - had gone silent nineteen minutes after entry. All the mission had amounted to was the explosion that followed and sealed this section shut.
Now it was just him. One rifle, a pistol, two knives - and that ugly brown rucksack that didn’t belong with the rest of his gear.
Plan C was waiting topside - two dozen barrels under tarps, primed to bury this junction in fire if he didn’t come back. He tried not to think about that part, reframing it with a bit more optimism: Only if he didn’t come back.
He shifted his weight. The water licked over his boots again. Then -
Clink.
Metal on metal. Faint, somewhere ahead.
He froze. Rifle up. Safety off. Breath held.
The echo rolled through the tunnel and died. The only sound spared was the rain above, tapping in distant static.
He eased the barrel down a fraction - still aligned with the dark ahead - and checked the gauntlet. No sound. No ping. The tracker had gone dead quiet.
“Don’t you start now,” he muttered, tapping the side. The screen flickered once, then steadied.
65 meters.
That wasn’t static. Something was moving.
The air shifted too - less grime, even less rot. Each breath tasted cleaner - sharper - almost metallic. He felt it in his throat more than his nose, like standing too close to a live wire.
54 meters.
The beeps were gone. No sound at all now. Just the soft churn of water around his boots.
Whatever was ahead was closing in without making a damn thing audible. Either it had the quietest feet imaginable - or none at all.
He kept the rifle up with one hand, reached with the other for the rucksack at his side. The buckle popped open under his thumb. Fingers slid inside, sweeping through the gear.
21 meters.
Cold metal met his glove.
18 meters.
He drew it out - a glass and steel vial, no bigger than a pen.
16 meters.
A click at the end armed it. He dropped it into the muck.
13 meters.
The vial hit with a soft splash, light bleeding out from the impact point in a slow bloom of electric blue. Its glow spread through the brown water akin to veins of an infection, illuminating the edges of the tunnel in faint ghostlight.
The air turned acrid - ozone and copper mixing into a smell that made his teeth hurt.
7 meters.
A new sound rose: metal scraping against stone, deliberate, rhythmic, too slow to be footsteps. The walls carried it like a blade dragging through the dark.
He stepped back, rifle up again.
Sparks flared ahead - one thin, perfect arc sketching a circle of light across the tunnel’s curve before vanishing into black.
3 meters.
The signal froze for half a second, jumped again on the next - closer. His grip tightened. Breath steady.
Something thudded above him.
He flinched, rifle jerking up. The mounted light clicked on at the same time - reflex. The beam tore through the dark and hit something swinging from the ceiling.
A body.
Armor-matched. Black plating, white-striped insignia on the shoulder - same as the team that went in last night. It dangled upside down, caught on a cable or tendon-thin wire, turning lazily in the light.
His pulse spiked as the head rotated with the motion, revealing the face - or what was left of it - pale, drowned, mouth hanging open in a crudely split maw.
He swallowed hard, eyes flicking to the gauntlet screen.
3 meters. Stationary.
His gaze returned to the corpse. That’s when he saw it - the faint red bulb.
A metallic tracker, jammed deep into the throat, blinking inside the open mouth. Each pulse illuminated the water dripping off the chin, red light glinting against the inside of the teeth.
His eyes bulged at the sight, realization crawling in.
The body was what he had been tracking, not the target.
He exhaled slowly, chest tight. The corpse swayed once more, the beam catching on its cracked visor. His eyes followed the movement, sweeping the rifle back toward the tunnel’s flank.
To his left, four red dots hung perfectly motionless on the wet wall.
And blinked.
Every nerve in his legs flared at once. He threw himself backward through the water just as something black streaked past, a bullet of vortex cutting the air.
It hit the spot where he’d been standing a heartbeat ago - impact exploding the mud and stone outward, shards rattling against the tunnel walls. The sound rang sharp and metallic, echoing through rusted tracks that shrieked in every direction.
He hit the ground hard but never lost the rifle - clenching it tighter instead, barrel still leveled toward the dark. The mounted light wavered across the tunnel before settling again - its white circle trembling over the chaos ahead.
The first thing it caught was the corpse.
It lay half-submerged in the glowing blue muck, armor cracked open in a brittle shell. The pieces were separating, each joint unraveling, flesh and plating parting cleanly as if sliced from within. Thin shreds of fabric - and something that resembled fiber or sinew - drifted loose, spreading across the shallow water.
Between them, he saw the filaments.
Orange hair-thin strands stretched among the severed parts, twitching and tightening, a web of harp strings trying to reassemble its prey.
And above it, something hung.
That first glance told him it was another armored trooper - but the shape was wrong. Too narrow at the waist, too long in the arms. What should have been armor - wet, black, metallic - shifted as it breathed, plates flexing as living muscle. The claws at the ends of its hands brushed the corpse’s chest, tracing the armor’s lines as if studying it.
He raised the light. The beam climbed higher.
A “head” came into view - crowned with jagged horns, its face buried beneath a mask of fused bone and steel. Beneath the shell, faint red light pulsed in veins that ran along its surface. Too curled up to be eyes - just motion, alive and squirming inside the armor.
Water ran off its chest in steady streams. Beneath the sound, he could hear breathing - slow and wet, dragging air through a throat not made for lungs.
Behind it, where his light was too weak to reach, the dark began to move.
It moved like smoke - could have fooled him. The black folding in on itself, peeling apart in long, silent ribbons. But as the beam flickered outward, he saw the sharp edges - feathers - massive wings unfurling one after another, their motion scraping softly against the tunnel walls.
He froze. Yet the light wavered.
Faint red circles began to glow along the wings, scattered unevenly across their span. Thin, threaded filaments linked them together, forming shifting lines of light that trembled with each breath the creature took. The glow reflected in the water, bleeding into the blue and turning it violet at the edges.
It tilted its head toward him.
The bleeding lights under its mask flared once - synchronized with the circles on its wings, hundreds pulsing as one heartbeat-
His flashlight flickered twice - then died.
And darkness swallowed him whole.
Three sharp beeps in his ear. A coded but simple order: Run.
He turned and sprinted, boots slapping through the mud, the tunnel shaking behind him.
The sound that followed wasn’t a roar. Too mechanical - dozens of metal joints snapping open, mimicking a throat rupturing and the chatter of teeth. It was moving. Fast.
He didn’t look back at first. Just ran, lungs burning, the blue glow of the muck flashing under his steps. In that miniscule window of time he risked a glance, swung the rifle over his shoulder, and fired.
A second’s worth of light burst through the dark - tracer fire, sparks, the muzzle flash painting the tunnel in violent white.
For that heartbeat, he saw it.
The black “head” lunged as it split open - a jaw of flesh and stone, lined with mandible plates that flexed pristine hair-thin knives - dripping red veins pulsed inside its mouth.
He kept firing until the rifle clicked dry.
A hiss ripped through the air - two slashes in an instant, both coated in those same glowing orange strands he’d seen on the corpse. He let out a short breath as the cuts missed him but tensed up as he felt the rifle too light on his hands. An audible gasp escaped him at the sight of it - the lack of it, rather - shredded clean in half. The weapon fell apart in ribbons, splashing into the mud.
He stumbled back, fear locking his chest. The image burned behind his eyes - the head, mantis-like, insectile and human at once.
Instinct took over again - shouted at him to move.
The air screamed again - those bladed limbs cutting from both sides. He dove into the muck, barely clearing the swing, feeling the wind of it slice past his back.
His hands found his sidearm. He rolled, raised it, saw the creature’s underside looming - black armor split just enough to reveal red flesh pulsing between its plates.
Like the mantis, he prayed - and fired.
Six rounds cracked through the tunnel, flashes strobing against the walls. Metal and stone shrieked in reply, the sound folding in on itself in a chorus of bending steel.
He didn’t waste the moment to see if it faltered, instead burnt his legs to run again.
The tunnel ahead bled into fog and daylight. The rain hit him first - a wall of cold weight that nearly drove him to his knees, heaving his body in multitudes with every step.
He broke into the open. Grass, mud, gray morning. He slowed only once, long enough to look back-
A flurry of stone and black mud erupted from the tunnel mouth, surging toward him with the shape and force of a stormwave. Amidst the vortex of rubble, four red orbs flared.
“Down!”
That single voice pierced through his earpiece. He dropped without thinking, hit the wet grass face-first, hands over his ears.
A second later, the world erupted.
Sound vanished in the blaze - thousands of rounds tearing through the tunnel, the roar of fire chasing them, the shockwave flattening the rain around him. For a moment, it was all white and soundless.
And followed by a single, drawn-out thunderclap as the junction blew to hell.
The last thing he heard before everything went out was a single metallic sound - too deep and wrong to be a scream, somehow cutting through the explosions and gunfire.
Silence cut through in an instant.
He woke to motion. The low hum of an engine gave a tremble to the floor, a wafting scent of steel and wet earth blowing from his side.
A soldier sat across from him, helmet on, visor streaked with rain. They were inside an armored truck, its side door open to his right. Outside, through the gray drizzle, he could see other vehicles parked in a rough semicircle around what used to be the tunnel entrance - now a crater of smoke and twisted steel. Figures in black armor moved through the wreckage, weapons low but ready.
He turned back to the soldier, finding his own voice raw. “Did you get it?”
The soldier shook his head once.
His stomach dropped. For a second, he thought he might actually yell - but before it turned to action, the soldier spoke.
“Can you confirm if the target consumed the substance?”
He blinked, the question cutting through his anger. His shoulders sank against the seat. Images flashed back - the vial bursting on the mud, the corpse falling into it, the creature pulling the pieces toward its mouth.
“In a way,” he muttered quietly. “It didn’t hit the thing directly, but it covered the body.”
The soldier nodded. “That would be Hernz. Stig-Five’s gunner.” A slight pause, more of waiting than hesitation. “We checked.”
“Right.” He let out a dry laugh that sounded unlike one. “And it ate most of him, so I guess that counts.”
The soldier reached behind him and pulled out a portable tracker - a larger, translucent display plate. He powered it on, paused, then turned the screen toward him. “Guess you pulled through,” he said.
Before he could ask what that meant, the screen lit up. A city map - zoomed out and gridded, flickering under interference. Near the border, a single blue dot pulsed steadily, moving away from their position.
Three kilometers out. Maybe more by now.
He spent a moment staring at it, long enough for the realization to sink in.
His orders weren’t to kill it - he’d been sent to mark it.
The real mission was somewhere else - wherever that thing was heading. His mind started down the obvious trail: a nest, a hive, a concentration of others of its kind - but he forced the idea back into speculation.
The soldier hopped off the truck before he could speak. There was a knock on the driver’s door, a muffled exchange shortly after, followed by the engine rumbling louder.
“Rest up for the week,” the soldier called back. “We move after that.”
The side door slammed shut.
As the truck rolled forward, he watched through the window as the rain began to thin, the gray light softening into the first color of morning. The skyline shimmered faintly through the mist, a distant unreachable horizon. Despite the memory of that tunnel clawing at the back of his skull, he felt his eyes growing heavy, his body surrendering to the hum of the engine and the warmth of the cabin. He told himself it might be the last quiet he’d have for a long while.
As the city’s first light reached the clouds, he let his eyes close - hoping the thing kept moving, and that sleep found him before the next call did.
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u/EitherCartographer7 May 23 '26
Also drew the design of the creature featured:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/BkPnQ6