Bella Terrianne Killane grunted as she dragged the swarmling’s body over to the floater disc. The contraption was about five paces wide and could carry a dozen bodies easily while maintaining altitude, but this one was already on the verge of being overloaded.

“Come on, Dec, wait for the next one!” one of her squad members, Marten grumbled.

“When’s the next one coming?” she snarked.

“In an hour.”

“Tsk, fine.” She dumped the body over to the side, paying no mind to the cauterized wounds that were still leaking bluish blood.

The Waypoint was an arid desert and the squad was situated on top of a hill. In the distance, less than a league away, the entrance to a nest of swarmlings was marked by eroded cliffs and caves. Behind them was their temporary fortress built around Legate Jiro Segawa’s domain and the Green Swan.

The Recolador’s pyramid had been placed right next to the Swan and a plume of rainbow smoke rising from the tip meant that it was in the middle of its fragmentation mode. They had an hour or so to fill it up with the next batch.

“We’ve been at this for weeks, Dec,” Marten whined, “when are we leaving?”

The Depths were hardly the place to linger but preparations to enter the Chaos Sea were no simple matter. The chief problem to be solved was the matter of rations. The Legion was ten thousand soldiers strong and they each needed at least a couple of ration bars a day. Twenty thousand rations bars consumed in a single day meant they couldn’t bring supplies from Rumiga--no supply line could last long inside the Tidelands.

The Recolador, a pre-Shattering artefact, was the Legion’s answer to logistics. The pyramid took any Chaos-formed matter and turned it into food and drink. A well-trained Knight could do the same but that would waste time. Besides, not all legionnaires were at the level of Knight. Even Bella, who was a Decanus, leader of a squad of ten, was only a third-order Journeyman.

Their current Waypoint was a mishmash of what the swarmlings had created for their nest. The hills, the crevasses, and the caves, was the landscape. Legate Jiro Segawa, or maybe Tribunus Manuella, were the ones who created their home base, and altered the terrain to their favour.

Even now, the swarmlings were rushing down the ravine that ran from their caves and towards Vagaris’ hill. Bella and her squad weren’t the only ones here, of course, but the full might of the Legion was spread across a dozen adjacent Waypoints. Only a couple had swarmlings, the others were jungles, grasslands, wheaten plains, and whatnot.

A flash of light to the side soon revealed a heavy hauler laden with stalks of corn and twisted trees. A couple of Koinos Colossi marched just behind the hauler as they made their way to the Recolador.

“Fire!” Bella yelled and three men and women unleashed a fusillade of superheated plasma just as the swarmlings came within fifty paces. No sense having to trudge hundreds of paces away to retrieve the bodies. The floater disc had already gone on its way, but there was still a man-high pile of swarmling corpses waiting for transportation.

The scent of ozone and burning hair assaulted Bella's nose once the marksmen finished their gristly job. Salvig, Jonash, and Kiara, the bulkiest members of her squad, ran down the slope and grabbed a swarmling leg. The trek back was slower, but they had enough time. The next wave was still a longstride back.

“Call for more haulers,” Bella commanded Marten.

“Aye, ma’am.”

The Radiant Sun had set on the western mists by the time they were done. At the end of the day, there were still several piles of swarmlings remaining, but they were under strict orders not to exhaust themselves. Bella’s squad tagged out with the next squad and followed the floater discs home.

The mess hall had pots of ration bar stew bubbling on stoves running off the Waypoint’s ambient Chaos. If anything, the Legion’s supply of spices were far more important than the rations, no legionnaire would stand plain rations, not when there was a choice. After dinner, she inspected her gear, along with a quick survey of her squads, before submitting a request for more jade cartridges.

Fighting at range was safe, especially against fodder like the swarmlings and most Wanderers. Ironically, Wanderers were rarer in the Tidelands than in the plane. Those hulking creatures preferred the aridness of the plane to the cloying Chaos of the Tidelands. Hunters were a real danger though, and sometimes, they would suddenly pop out in the middle of the camp, unseen and unnoticed by the sentries.

Legate Segawa’s domain was their only true safe point. Nothing can enter it without the old man knowing. Of course, Bella would say goodbye to any kind of privacy there.

Well, today was just like any other day, except stray thoughts had the danger of whisking her out of sight if she let go of her Field. Even now, her skin gleamed with dim orange light. When she slept, she had to keep it up too.

Yawning with her fist against her mouth, Bella trudged off to the tent she shared with a couple of female members of her squad. She burrowed into her blankets, briefly regretting that she was currently unattached. The warmth of a body she could cuddle with would have been quite welcome in the cool air. The Tidelands followed the main plane’s climate, but once they left for the Chaos Sea, weather conditions would become…fluid.

The last thing she thought of before conking out was that being pampered by that Davar boy would have been nice. He had a nice set of shoulders and a comely face. Looked tender and considerate, too. She giggled softly while her imagination ran away with itself. Well, maybe she’d ask Marten for a favour…

The next thing she knew, the blare of an alarm jolted her out of her fitful slumber. Jumping to her feet, she straightened her clothes, none of them slept out of their protective forceweave, grabbed her weapons and ran out of the tent.

The camp was like a kicked over anthill with men and women scrambling with their weapons. The ground shook when a couple of Colossi, a Koinos and a Certus class, stomped past. Bella looked to where they were headed and found a somewhat familiar sight.

If the Colossi were near it, it would tower several paces above even the Certus Colossi. It opened its mouth and roared. Its voice had an odd quality as if it were thousands of individual voices layered over each other. The Behemoth, a conglomeration of thousands of swarmlings, stood with its arms and knuckles pressed against the ground, as though it were an oversized ape. It had more than one pair of arms, of course, though the rest of the pairs looked vestigial at best.

Bella’s squad ran over to an overlook. The Behemoth was about a couple of longstrides away, still within easy range of a Plasma Caster. While she wasn’t an expert marksman, she wasn’t incapable of hitting the broadside of a barn, and the Behemoth was certainly larger than a farm building.

The two Colossi charged towards it, the Koinos made of lacquered wood while the Certus was of combined metal and wood, and was a pace higher than the other. Three more Koinos came out from the Green Swan, charging with their huge weapons, a large axe and a couple of maces, at the monster.

“Covering fire!”

Bella aimed and pulled the trigger, making sure that the Caster drew most of its power from the jade cartridge rather than her reserves. Superheated plasma peppered the Behemoth’s carapace, melting maybe an inch off it, but was otherwise unharmed. But enough ant bites would kill an elephant. The legionnaires stationed at home base numbered a full cohort, a thousand strong. Half were infantry units, and a tenth of that were snipers. Another tenth operated the defensive carronades set near the Green Swan. From the angle, only five had a clear shot, but five legionnaires poured their Animus into the collector studs and a ball of superheated plasma the size of Bella’s torso formed just in front of the barrel.

Pheeeeew!

The high-pitched whine of the carronade’s blast was followed by a large boom! A large patch of the Behemoth’s side burned and melted but the wound didn’t slow it down for long. Tendrils of blue crawled out of the wound and reformed the carapace and it was good as new before the Colossi could even come close.

The Certus had a maul which it used to good effect, blasting the Behemoth’s limbs away and letting the Koinos, who had a sharp weapon, stab its spear into the monster’s side. A minute later, the other Colossi arrived and started a game of Wyldling Whack. They batted the monster around, keeping it off balance as it pawed at them ineffectually.

Then, by some unseen signal, they all stepped aside as a barrage of carronade blasts smashed into its hide. Then it was back to Wyldling Whack.

It didn’t take long before the Behemoth’s incredible life force was extinguished and they were left with nothing more than a smouldering pile of brown flesh.

“This makes no sense,” Bella muttered to herself.

“What doesn’t?” Marten, who’d evidently been eavesdropping on her private conversation, asked.

“Why would a single Behemoth attack? Those things are the Chaos Lord’s siege weapons. Where’s the Chaos Lord and its armies?” Bella shook her head, “It makes no sense. Was this a diversion?”

“Maybe?” Marten shrugged, “What can we grunts do though? We can’t very well let it run amok.”

“No, I suppose not.” Bella eyed Marten from the side but sighed after a moment. There was no privacy here.

_____

“I don’t like this.” Maruko Manuella, Tribunus of the Legion Vagaris muttered from the Green Swan’s bridge.

“You don’t like a lot of things,” Inquisitor Kinohara, a stern-faced old man whose white hair had been waxed into tiny spikes all over his scalp answered.

His creepy red eyes swam all over Maruko, though she did her best to ignore the old lecher. Yama Kinohara had recently celebrated his hundredth year, nearly eighty of which were in service to the Empire, but he was still as spry as a man in his early thirties.

She supposed his Animus control was just that good. She knew that they were of the same Anima strength level, but his connection to the Fateweaver Loom changed a lot of things.

“What do you see?” Legate Segawa asked.

The man was seated in a meditative pose on the commander’s chair, exuding his prodigious domain across the Waypoint and through the thin barrier walls. Jiro had his eye on every single unit of his Legion and he would not let any of them die uselessly in an unnecessary fight.

The one they were having in the Tidelands was unnecessary, in Maruko’s opinion. They could easily gather material for their efforts on any of the wild Fysalli that peppered the Chaos Sea like tiny sandbars and reefs.

“I see tangled threads too complex to find the puppeteer,” Kinohara said lightly.

“Swarm fodder! You’re just too lazy to take a closer look!” Jiro frowned.

Kinohara gave the Legate a sidelong glance.

“No, it takes far too much effort to use the Fateweaver. It burns a bit of my Thread and without ample rest, it grows ever shorter. Well,” he harrumphed, “this is hardly something you need to peek at.”

“Any sign of a Chaos Lord?”

“At the edges, where the Depths become the Chaos Sea. But none have stepped into the Tidelands. There are pockets of troops, I think. Ready to bar us from our paths.”

“Hmph! Let them.”

“I must say, I don’t know what my young colleague had in mind when she forced her team to venture into the Chaos Sea. If not for the fact that I can see five Threads entangled, I wouldn’t think that they still survived.”

“Do you know where?”

“Just a general direction. And even that changes slightly with every second that passes.”

“Maruko, how long before our stores are full?”

She looked at her crystal screen and then replied, “At the rate we’re going, we’ll have two million bars in three days. As of now, we have five hundred thousand.”

“Twenty-five days’ supply,” Jiro grunted. “No, we need a bit more buffer. We can leave tomorrow. I don’t want to linger here over much.”

“I’ll make the preparations.”

“Now what do those Telurians have in store for us?” Jiro muttered just loud enough for Maruko to hear.

“A good time, probably,” Kinohara chortled. “Ah, let these old bones enjoy life for a little bit longer!”

“We’ll take a bite should an opportune target appear.” Jiro said, “But don’t forget our primary objective.”

“Find and recover Inquisitor Gorlyn and her companions. Of course. But if you ask me, they managed to get here on their own, they can get back on their own, too.”

“Unless they fell into a Telurian plot,” Maruko said grimly.

“That’s almost impossible to avoid.” Jiro sighed. “Even now, we’re probably in the midst of one.”

“Then we’ll smash their plan to cinders around them!” Kinohara howled.

“Yeah.”

If only it were that easy, Maruko thought. But, it would be a change from the dreariness of living in the countryside. She couldn’t help but smile in excitement. After all, everyone who belonged to Vagaris weren’t exactly cool rational beings. And now, their blood was boiling.