The horizon above darkened.
It was not the gradual dimming of smoke or settling dust but a total, sudden withdrawal of light across the entire sky above Freehold, as though something titanic had moved above.
Tevis felt his skin prickle, and a shiver ran down his spine.
The air around them tensed, thickening with a murky miasma.
Shaxx watched his own light shrink back in horror.
As all eyes turned skyward, a fleet of Tomb Ships pierced the horizon.
There were dozens of them filling the upper atmosphere, their descent covering every angle of Freehold's crater. The ships moved slowly, with certainty. Their ancient hulls were reinforced with dark chitin that didn't just obscure the light, but displaced it entirely.
"Hive," Shaxx muttered, shocked.
The Tomb Ships descended, and the air beneath them changed. The largest ship came directly overhead, its belly crossing the crater's width without clearing either edge, and the shadow it cast swallowed Freehold completely. As every Guardian, every Cabal soldier and every Vex unit stood in the same wretched darkness and looked up at the same thing, they all shared the same wordless recognition that the scale of what was above them belonged to a category none had prepared for.
The Tomb ship trembled with the deep resonant shudder of something enormous exhaling, and then the hull beneath its belly split open.
Two gargantuan bodies fell out, and they hit the crater floor with impacts that each sent their own shockwave rolling outward in rings across the stone. The craters they left were deep. The tremors from the landing moved through Freehold's floor and into the ruins and up through the feet of everyone standing in it.
When the dust pulled back, two Ogres stood at the Centre of Freehold and shrieked.
Their enormous size cleared the ruins around them entirely. Their presence reached the perimeter of the crater before their forms were even fully visible through the settling debris; a sickening pressure preceded them.
"Levi!" Cory cried out.
"I know!" Levi's eyes widened in disbelief. He had recognised at least one presence even before the dust had settled.
The Might of Crota.
He had faced that Ogre with Void and his entire team. Yet even then, all they could do was force it back. Now, as the curtain of dust unfurled, Levi spotted a scar on its crown.
The Ogre was wreathed in Crota's own pale, sickly light, its single eye burning a green so deep it had no warmth in it at all, only bottomless wretched darkness.
Beside it was Phogoth the Untamed.
A terrifyingly feral presence rolled off its shoulders that forcibly gripped everyone's attention. One thing was clear: a monster had entered Freehold.
Every combatant in Freehold went still.
Guardians. Cabal soldiers, even the Vex Minds and their units, held their positions. The battlefield that had not paused once had stopped completely, with their priorities completely reordered.
"What the hell are the Hive doing here!" Tevis urgently barked into his transponder.
Ikorra grit her teeth and surveyed the logs around Mars, deftly scouring through their surveillance system. "We have no idea. Their ships somehow bypassed our satellites completely. What's the status on the mission?"
Tevis whipped back and glanced at the portal, waves of energy wildly fluttered his cloak, "No sign of Void, but things aren't looking good."
Tevis's eyes widened, and he jerked back.
Shaxx raised his hammer again, "Bubble, now!"
The titans around him gathered their light and began conjuring a massive dome from the ground up. The Cabal hunkered back in formation, and even the Vex stretched their lattice barriers to the limit.
Phogoth gathered its energy, and Freehold was swept up in its tides.
The dark force built around its form in visible coils, pulling all the ambient light nearby into itself, its eye brightening from deep green toward white at its core, and its chest cavity cracked open to channel.
But while the whole world braced for impact, the Ogre itself had never targeted them. No, from the start, it had aimed itself at only one target.
The portal.
"NO!"
Elsie moved.
She crossed the distance between her position and the portal's perimeter in the span of a second. Elsie raised both hands, and a strange power came forward.
Phogoth's fiend fire erupted from its chest.
It crossed the crater at a velocity that left a visible trail, a condensed beam of dark energy that burned the air along its path, and hit Elsie's barrier three metres from the portal's surface.
And stopped.
The beam of energy hung in the air, frozen. The leading edge of it pressed against her power, straining and pulsing as it churned against the invisible resistance that Elsie had raised.
But Phogoth's power only surged greater; the beam of energy was neither stoppable nor exhaustible.
Yet as Elsie's powers held, the Might of Crota turned its eye toward her. Unlike the beast beside it, it had been watching since it landed. Assessing. It raised its head now and fired.
The second fire crossed the crater from the opposite angle and struck the other side of Elsie's barrier simultaneously, the two beams now pressing from opposite directions towards the portal.
Elsie's feet slid back across the stone.
The muscles in her jaw set. Her arms shook. The temporal force she was projecting flickered at its edges, where the pressure was heaviest; the two fiend fires each carried the full output of a Gargantuan Ogre.
"I...Can't hold on for long!" Her voice cracked.
The Titans broke down their own barrier, and the guardians darted.
"Stop the Ogres." Tevis desperately raced forward, and an Onyx coat of light clung to his figure.
Levi, Cory and Bandit followed in his tracks, crossing towards the Ogres in a fraction of a second.
Each of them had drawn their bows and aimed at the Ogre, but just before the arrows left their grasp, a wretched magic enveloped them.
Unbeknownst to the Nightstalkers, two figures had secretly descended from the Tomb Ships while every eye in Freehold was on the Ogres.
Kinox and Voshyr. Two daughters of Crota.
Their wicked magic radiated from their figures, slithering chains rooted up from the ground, and before anyone could respond, spread in wide arcs that wrapped around the Nightstalkers, anchoring their feet to stone, bringing the entire advance to a standstill in the span of three seconds.
Levi pulled against his chains, but felt his light begin to sap away. No matter how he struggled, he couldn't break through.
"Shaxx!" Tevis roared.
The warlord charged with a blazing axe, leading a group of Crucible squads with him. "With me!"
Shaxx flung the axe; it swept in an arc and struck the black chains with sparks, but was thrown back.
He grabbed the axe mid-air and charged his light into the weapon. Behind him, warlocks rose, their robes fluttering with light.
A sea of Nova Bombs was conjured above them and flew to the Daughters.
Facing the endless barrage of violet light, the daughers brewed their own wicked magic. A black tome appeared between the two, and armies of the Hive descended from the ships.
A legion of Hive Knights tore through the space ahead and raised their obsidian shields.
As the barrage of Nova Bombs clashed against their shields, the horizon split into light and dark, violet and black, but an instant later, the light had fizzled out. With the Guardians completely helpless, the Hive began their advance.
Kinox and Voshyr stood between the Freehold and the Ogres and watched Elsie with an expression that could be described as patience.
Elsie's vision scattered, and her feet slid another inch.
Her powers flickered again.
She held it.
Behind her, the rift pulsed.
A shot was fired. Then another, and another.
Cabal imperial tanks began unloading their ammo into the Hive armies. Their Legionnaires rose from their defensive formations and charged into battle.
"What the hell?" Tevis chuckled in disbelief.
Shaxx crashed downwards with a slam and cracked the chains holding Tevis. "Are the Cabal truly insane?"
Tevis shook off his restraints, "Insane? I don't think those bastards were reasonable to begin with." An onyx dagger conjured in his right hand.
As the Vex realised the Hive's objective to close the conflux rift, their plans shifted. By allying themselves with the Hive, they could easily eliminate the Cabal and Guardians. Yet as the Vex Mind instructed its units to fight, an incomprehensible sight followed its orders.
Thousands of Hive acolytes attacked everything and everyone.
Allies? Enemies?
It did not matter. For the Hive, conquest was the ultimate goal, and none would stand between them nor beside them.
The Vex Mind was shaken; it had never computed anything so unfathomable.
Within a span of seconds, the battlefield had reignited, allegiances had switched completely, with the Hive now facing all three sides at once.
Yet Elsie held the Ogres back on her own, still preventing their fiendish fire from reaching the portal.
-
A/N: Heard Destiny's back with unvaulted content? So you know I had to dust myself off and upload! Throw some stones, or I will vault you, ngl. Leave a review.
Check out Patr*n for more!
patre*n.com/Writers_Ablood