The designated world P-77, codename "Mire of Sighs," was a humid, misty hell. The rotting vegetation gave off a sweet, nauseating stench, and the spongy ground sucked at the boots of the Helldivers from Team Kappa-9. Their ship, the Pioneer, orbited above, having detected a powerful, atypical energy signature in the region. An anomaly to investigate.
"I don't like this, Sergeant," murmured Corporal Evander, his DC-17m rifle sweeping the stagnant mist. "Sensors are scrambled. It's like this damned jungle is absorbing the scans."
Sergeant Kael, a veteran etched with scars, nodded, his customized green and brown powered armor camouflaged in the swamp's tones. "The signature's coming from that canyon over there. We go in, plant a beacon, analyze, and lift off. Quick and clean."
They pressed deeper, moving further from their landing craft. The forest of giant mushrooms and thick vines became so dense that daylight only pierced through in weak, diffuse glows. It was then that they reached the edge of a ravine. And there, instead of the clean power source they had imagined, they discovered a nightmare scene.
Carcasses of unknown machines, made of a raw, alien metal, littered the ravine floor. In the middle, a structure pulsed with a sickly light, a crystal radiating energy that made their systems sizzle. And surrounding it, they were there.
Chalk-white. Nightmarish silhouettes, over three meters tall, resembling crudely chiseled reptilian creatures made of stone. Their morphology evoked a monstrous praying mantis, but with eight limbs – four arms ending in claws or welded weapons, and four articulated hind legs. Their bodies were bristling with brutal cybernetic augmentations: hydraulic mechanical arms, red sensor eyes, armor plates riveted onto chitin that looked like rock.
The Rak'Gol.
They were immobile, almost fused with the landscape, their irregular shapes making them perfectly camouflaged. Team Kappa-9 had walked into an ambush.
"Contact!" Kael yelled, but it was too late.
The attack was one of absolute brutality. Without a cry, without a sound, the Rak'Gol surged from the mist and the ravine walls. A bolt of green-yellow plasma energy split the air and struck the point-man Helldiver square on. His powered armor melted like butter; the man inside didn't even have time to scream.
Chaos erupted.
"Defensive formation! Fire!" Kael ordered, shooting with his own rifle. The plasma bolts from the Helldivers seemed to have difficulty piercing the creatures' stone-like carapace and cybernetic armor.
The Rak'Gol moved with a jerky, terrifying speed, their eight limbs giving them a demonic stability and agility. They used their upper limbs to wield primitive but devastating energy weapons, while their lower claws tore at the ground to propel themselves forward.
"There are too many of them!" shouted another soldier before a Rak'Gol wrenched his arm off with a twist of its cyborg limbs.
"Kael to Pioneer!" the sergeant bellowed into his mic. "We are under assault by an unknown xeno species, designation Rak'Gol! We are cut off from the shuttle! Heavy losses! Send reinforcements! Repeat, send reinforcements immediately!"
The response was only static hiss. The energy signature from the crystal was jamming all communications.
Corporal Evander, back-to-back with Kael, used the under-barrel grenade launcher. The explosion threw mud and fragments of carapace, slowing the advance of two Rak'Gol without stopping them.
"We can't hold for long, Sergeant!"
Kael gritted his teeth, gunning down a Rak'Gol that was leaping at him by aiming a sustained burst at the joint of its neck.
"We don't have a choice, soldier! We hold until the Pioneer realizes we've gone silent and sends the cavalry! Until then, we make them pay dearly for our skins!"
Above them, in the gloom of the swamp, the white, cybernetic forms continued to pour in, silent and deadly. For the first time, the Helldivers were not the explorers, but the prey. And on this forgotten world, they were discovering a new enemy, whose very existence was an omen of new dangers for Julius Braveheart's nascent empire.