Hevn’s intrepid advance does not go unnoticed by the object which the Confederacy had come to claim. A deep, disembodied, unsettling voice fills his ears for a sudden and intense moment.
”TRESPASSER! Be gone, ye damned one. These souls are mine!”
Was it....alive? Had one of the souls it sucked up somehow managed dominance over the others in an effort to manifest some kind of personalization? It was beyond bizarre. It might not have been the stone itself at all. The voice was distinctly inhuman, and didn’t sound like any garbled alien accent he’d ever heard. The options were numerous and none of them short of frightening. Some intelligence lurked within the realm of the soul stone, or within its aura that was not going to give up without a fight.
A loud noise tears over the Talay facility. A somewhere between a monster’s yawn and a planetary size vacuum. Whatever it was that made it seemed to be changing tactics. It had decided the drain alone was not enough to halt the intending thieves. The force drain substantially diminishes, although not entirely. Hevn can feel the weight on his shoulders decreasing, although his aura continued to be sapped. He’d already dropped from peak power and readiness to about eighty five percent of his fuel.
Three luminous black-purple spheres thrust themselves into the sky. Arcs of similarly colored lightning lash out in the direction of the ground. It is not random. Each blast from the spheres strikes a fallen corpse. There were no shortage of pirates, cultists, and the randoms that had been claimed before the Knights Obsidian had arrived by the power of the stone. The spheres meander above the complex slowly, animating a new and arduous brand of the undead.
The doors to the facility ahead of Hevn open. A handful of these creatures emerge from the doors. Whatever damage had been done to their bodies was mended. They looked in perfect if not better condition than ever, save for the evidence of wounds sustained on their clothes and armors. The revenants have glowing purple-black eyes. Their mouths open all at the same time to speak with the unified unsettling voice he’d heard in his head.
“YOU ARE NEXT!” Their voices rang with a spooky eminence that seemed to linger in the air. Hevn was the closest to them, and so with him they began.
They moved even faster than they must have in life. Streaks of that purple energy follow them as they dash into action. A barrage of blaster bolts hail across his personal shield as Hevn raises his left arm and erects it. One of them was brandishing a lightsaber. It burns fiery red as this revenant took point in attacking.
It would be foolish to use the force. Not when he needed it to endure the stone. Not when he couldn’t be sure of their numbers or be able to calculate how much power could he could allot to waste on them. As confidently as ever Hevn stands tall, holding his ground as the robed figure bounds in head first. Hevn’s shield cracks and the blasters hold for a second. Hevn bravely endures a stab to where his heart ought to be, but the light saber is caught dead against the plating reinforcing his chest cavity.
Against any other, this would’ve been the part where he smiled or laughed. Where he mocked their effort and let hopeless despair crush the heart of his assailant as they realized their mistake in fighting him close. The man had literally designed himself to endure what would be fatal blows in order to guarantee his own. This however was not a man to be broken. It was a....thing?
Hevn’s right arm blasts through the robe cultist’s face with such force that the entire body, heels and all clear the top of Hevn’s imposing figure. The body hits the ground before him with a rather satisfying slam. The jaw bone had been smashed so ruthlessly into the rest of it’s face that nothing recognizable as a human face remained. That purple light did not die though. It began to mend the body almost as soon as Hevn struck it. Just a few breaths after hitting the ground, the corpse began to regain its feet.
Hevn is battered by another barrage of bolts as the revenants attempt to provide cover fire for their own. The pirate’s blasters were insufficient to draw his attention to them. The bolts scar and burn his face. Begin to scorch and mark his coat. Between the lightsaber attack and the blasters, it would have seemed that Hevn was putting his immense durability on display. Showing the ladies exactly what a task he is to put down.
That uppercut checked the first box on Hevn’s guide to fighting zombies. Head trauma and obliteration was simply not enough. Hevn leaps on the corpse, pinning it under his weight as it feebly reaches for the lightsaber rolling away from its outstretched hand. Hevn’s fingers coil in a neck breaking grip, he shifts his knee up to the revenants collar bone, and stares into its glowing purple eyes as he rips the head from the body with the spine dangling in tow. He rather casually tosses the trophy to his side, raising his gaze toward the animated corpses of the pirates.
A tether of energy seems to reach out from the body to the severed head, and from the head to the body. Meeting in the middle they begin to drag themselves back together. Hevn engages the whip cord attached to his strike armor. The cord wraps around the head tightly enough to shear the corpses skin. He raises his cord above his head and as though preparing a lasso to catch live stock, whips the bleeding, severed, spine dangling head in a vicious circle above him. He disengages the whip cord once he achieves some speed to hurl it back at the pirates. As he does so he can see that purple tether of energy reaching once again for the body laying before his feet. This time though, as the head flew father, the tether grew thin and weak. The rope of purple-black lightning diminishes into a feeble flailing string, before fizzling out completely.
Whatever these things were. Whatever animated them. Hevn knew all he needed to dispose of them. A dark and booming laughter rips from his throat. A grim and perilous sound. “I have figured out how to kill you already! Can you say the same?”
Hevn’s mockery is not tolerated by the forces that be. The revenants open their mouths to respond unanimously.
“YOU WILL ALL BE ASSIMILATED!”
[member="Madalena Antares"] [member="Vytal Noctura"]
