Three years ago.
The council chamber was packed with representatives from every domain, their voices overlapping in heated debate until the Pride delegate struck his staff against the floor three times.
Silence fell.
"The decision is made," he announced. "We proceed with the infiltration plan."
Cassius Asta stood at attention among the gathered officers, his expression carefully neutral even as his heart hammered in his chest. Around him, other candidates waited with the same rigid composure.
The Wrath delegate stepped forward, unrolling a scroll. "The team will consist of seven members, each selected for their unique capabilities and proven combat record."
Names were called.
Cassius's came third.
He allowed himself a single breath of relief before locking it down again. Around the chamber, those not chosen visibly deflated, while those selected straightened further, if that was even possible.
When all seven stood in a line, the council regarded them with expressions that ranged from pride to poorly concealed grief.
"You are humanity's champions," the Pride delegate said. "Each of you represents the best your domain has to offer. Your mission is simple in concept, impossible in execution: infiltrate deep into Narkal territory, discover the source of their endless numbers, and return with that intelligence."
"And if we can destroy it?" someone asked.
"Then you die heroes," the Wrath delegate answered bluntly. "But intelligence takes priority. We need to know what we're fighting before we can plan to win."
The briefing continued with logistical details, but Cassius's attention drifted to his new teammates. He'd already started cataloging them with his Astrologer, reading the patterns that made up their personalities.
The woman from Envy had danger-detection abilities that bordered on precognition. The man from Gluttony possessed pathfinding skills that could navigate any terrain. Greed's champion carried concealment artifacts that could hide the entire team. Two specialists in reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance rounded out the group, along with a combat medic from Lust.
And him, to keep them all coordinated.
His Astrologer let him read each teammate's personality in minutes—their fears, motivations, how they'd react under stress. It made him the natural choice for leadership, though several of the others bristled at taking orders from a peer.
That bristling faded after the first week of training together, when Cassius prevented three potential deaths by predicting exactly how each person would react in crisis scenarios and adjusting their formations accordingly.
By the time they stood at the edge of Narkal territory two months later, they moved like a single organism.
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General Rowan Vance watched the team depart from the forward command post, his jaw set in a hard line.
Beside him, Shun Morikawa stood with his arms crossed, expression unreadable.
"They're good," Rowan said quietly.
"They're dead," Morikawa replied.
"You don't know that."
"I know odds." Morikawa's eyes tracked the seven figures disappearing into the wasteland. "Seven against whatever spawns millions. The math doesn't work."
Rowan's hand tightened on the pommel of his sword. "Then we make sure their deaths count for something."
Morikawa said nothing, but his silence felt like agreement.
The two men didn't linger; even with this mission, the frontline war continued, which was why they stayed behind. Otherwise, who would quell the roar of Narkal war cries and answer the screams of men dying to buy humanity one more day?
⛧⛧⛧
The first three months of infiltration went smoothly.
Too smoothly, Cassius thought, but kept that observation to himself. The Envy champion's danger sense guided them around patrols, while Gluttony's pathfinding led them through terrain that shouldn't have been passable.
They encountered Narkals, of course—small scouting parties that died quickly and quietly under coordinated strikes. Greed's concealment artifacts hid the bodies.
The landscape grew more twisted the deeper they went. What had started as blasted wasteland gave way to organic corruption—the ground itself pulsing faintly, trees replaced by chitinous growths that reeked of rot and copper.
In the fifth month, they found a pillar.
It stood ten meters tall, a grotesque column of flesh and bone that throbbed with nasty rhythm. As they watched from concealment, the pillar split—skin peeling back to birth a fully formed Narkal that dropped to the ground, shrieked once, and loped off to join a nearby patrol.
"Gods," the medic whispered.
Cassius stared at the pillar and made the mistake of reading it with his Astrologer.
The rambling hit him like a physical blow. Birth birth BIRTH birth birth BIRTH—an endless scream of creation without purpose, without end, just the mechanical repetition of existence for existence's sake.
And beneath it all, carved into the deepest part of the construct's pattern, a name that made his head split with pressure:
Broodfather of Sterile Fertility.
He stumbled, caught himself against a twisted tree, and vomited.
"Cassius?" The Greed champion grabbed his shoulder.
"It's alive," he managed. "The pillar. It's... aware. Sort of. All it knows is birth."
The team exchanged looks.
"What the fuck…" Envy exclaimed.
Cassius wiped his mouth, the name still burning in his mind.
"We need to map this," Gluttony said. "If these things are everywhere..."
They were.
Over the next week, the team cataloged dozens of pillar clusters, each one producing a different variety of Narkal. The tribes they'd fought for years—each with distinct tactics and physiology—all came from these grotesque factories.
Worse, the deeper they went, the slower the pillars birthed... but what emerged was stronger and much more intimidating.
Near what they estimated was the territorial center, they watched a pillar take a full day to produce a single Narkal that radiated power even from a distance.
"We can't destroy them all," the reconnaissance specialist said flatly. "Even if we had an army, there's too many. They'd overwhelm us before we cleared a quarter of them."
"Then we find the source," Cassius replied. "These pillars came from somewhere."
The Envy champion's danger sense pulled them forward, deeper still, until the pillars grew sparse and the air itself felt wrong—thick with something that wasn't quite mana, wasn't quite anything they recognized.
They reached an altar at dawn on the fourteenth day of their search.
It stood in a massive clearing, a structure of black stone and carved bone that rose for more than twenty meters.
Thousands of Narkal priests knelt in concentric circles around it, their prayers a low, droning, and mindless.
Hovering above the altar, suspended in nothing, was a multicolored stone that beat with light in rhythm with the prayers.
And above the stone, regarding the gathered priests with what might have been affection or contempt or both—
A ghost.
Raven-feathered, its form flickering like a candle flame, head tilted at an angle that made Cassius's eyes hurt to follow. Its beak opened and closed soundlessly, as if tasting the prayers rising toward it.
Then its head snapped around, and its eyes—too many eyes, blinking out of sync—fixed directly on their concealed position.
The ghost's beak curved into something approximating a smile.
"Mm-hmm," it hummed, voice carrying clearly despite the distance. "Well, well! Looks like we have some rare guests here!"
The priests' chanting cut off as one.
Seven champions of humanity stood frozen, their concealment suddenly meaningless, as the ghost regarded them with delighted curiosity.