16 MAY 79 AU. 2028 HOURS.
DESIGNATION: 00007125-ALEPH.
UNIT: ASURA-00 PNEUMA

> AFTER-ACTION REPORT

I was deployed to Anatolia, the place the ancient Greeks once called Phrygia. The rift zone was a space between townships, in the far middle of nowhere. It was strange — 1900 hours local time, but it was pitch-black, overcast to hell, like the world’s greatest storm had come over it. AZOTH had calculated that this is where the first one of the Enemy would come down, and that depending on the rapidity of our response, “there might be noticeable evidence of its presence.” God, there was.

The darkness was one thing, to be sure. Thick, unnatural, heavy. Ignorant of the sun, of the moon, of the stars. Invasive — it seeped, broke into the armor plating of the ASURA, into the Ichor in the piloting chamber. I could smell it — smell it! That horrible smell of rotten fungi, of mushrooms left too long in the fridge, pliable and slimy and deeply wrong.

I was wading through the darkness when I saw them: mountains, actual hills of dead cattle, piled one on top of the other, arranged in cylinders and cones and rhombuses, falling or emanating from the fog. This was it, I realized: this was the first of the Enemy.

I started firing. My rifle was at the ready, after all. But I didn’t know where — where to aim, where to let the bullets loose. It was a disaster, a nightmare, rounds vanishing in shadow, cutting lines through the blackness, and a certain muffled screaming from the outside denting my resolve, and then the Enemy struck back. A jam — a misplaced bullet, keeping my firing from going. And as I desperately tried to force it free, slamming against the side of my enormous firearm, the goddess took my left arm and leg by tentacle grip of invisible origin, tighter and tighter, the pain transferring into me through the Epinoia System. I dropped the rifle — dropped it! And, against the pain, grabbed my knife. I needed to set myself free, to escape from the thing that was crushing my arms.

As I swung to cut the tendrils that held me, faces manifested in the shade. Pallid and contorted caricatures of humans and goats and cows, strange laughing horrors seeking to horrify and destabilize and kill, kill — one, two strokes, and the tendrils were gone, but not the faces. A blare in the radio: [The weak spot, Lieutenant Kruzeto! Locate and pierce it!] Yes — locate and pierce it, but where? Where, in the cacophony and the miasma? Where, in the interminable darkness?

“Compass westward, child,” a chill through my spine. A voice, a strange manifestation through the Ichor interfacing me with the ASURA. Is this — PNEUMA? “There it is, its Silver Key, away from the rising of your Sun.” Unnatural, concerning, in a warm tone — why? But it’s guidance, real or imaginary, and I veer that way, hard turn and I start running, running, until I catch sight of the manifestation, the pillar, rotating and counter-rotating like a lesser representation of a higher form; the DEVA’s weak point, its SILVER KEY. Armor split, Ichor bleeding, tendrils jumping and dead cattle — or facsimiles of cattle — raining from the bottom of the pitlike sky.

Far. I ran far. Kilometers, according to the black box. Away from the empty field I dropped in, toward the ruins of the ancient city of Gordion, where the knot of Alexander was cut; where the ancients worshipped Kybele, goddess of fertility, dementer of minds, cruel mistress of all humanity. God, the humanity — the corpses of thousands twisting and growing out of the ground, terrible and amazing trees of limbs and muscle and sinew growing toward the Silver Key in order to protect it from my ASURA’s destructive will, strange insects being born from the consolidation of the mist and burrowing into its skin, pain sharply, sharply, coursing through and into me, through the pseudomuscle into the Ichor —.

>> CRITICAL ALERT

>> CRITICAL ALERT

>> ĀLAYA-VIJÑĀNA SCORE REACHED 00%

A break, something primal and violent. As the insects throw their strange black milk into my Ichor and it begins to change me, to invade me, the ASURA loses its grasp on self-control, and loses interest in my grasp upon its controls, and throws itself at the heart of the beast.

In profane darkness—

In the deep, deep red,

Describe it: the inverse caduceus, the Fallen Hermes

The Scarlet Sign;

Pain, agony and terror,

The shivering, darkening, convulsive spasms of your blood

Ebullition of the lifeforce,

A scream of the body’s wetter nature—

See the olden days, when the lizards walked

See the olden aeons, when the gods of Pnakotus breathed

See it, our envoy, fall and kill billions

See that your purpose is to serve—

And I was awakened, forced awake by the violent gouging and feasting, by PNEUMA’s tearing and screaming, breaking apart the pillar of the Silver Key, biting it, eating it, and doing the same to the flesh-fog of this ancient deity whose name was so wrongfully remembered as Kybele in the time of the Phrygians; by the furious pain that the Scarlet Sign manifested in the boiling of my blood; by the horror of my body changing under the influence of this Shub-Niggurath’s milk.

Then, it was over. The Key was broken. The fog, lifted. And beneath us an ocean of mutilated cattle and forests of biomass.

> SINCE

Since then, I have mostly rested in the hospital. My ears have changed, as have my eyes. I am more goat, now. A mutant. An aberration. And my survival from the attack on my vascular system was survived only by blessing. Captain Morganna, the head of the ASURA R&D team, can’t make sense of my report’s notice of the… machine’s… self-guided action. I can’t, either, for what it’s worth.

I wonder what’ll happen, now. What awaits me when the other DEVAs descend into our world.

I wish there were others here with me. That I didn’t have to deal with it alone.

Oh well.

> Majko Kruzeto, signing off.