For a long moment, I was frozen, not by fear, but by a horror so profound it transcended emotion.
It was a cold, absolute certainty that I was looking at the purest form of evil I had ever encountered.
The scene before me was a Bosch painting brought to life—a grotesque tableau of alien biology and human suffering.
The gentle, rhythmic pulsing of the tubes, the vacant, doll-like eyes of the children, the monstrous, sleeping queen at the centre of it all… it was a silent symphony of damnation.
My rage, which had been a white-hot nova, cooled into something far more dangerous: a diamond-hard point of focused, surgical hatred.
The heroes fighting the drones upstairs were swatting at flies while the spider sat here, growing fat in her web. They couldn't be trusted to handle this. This was my responsibility.
The mission objective was clear: rescue the children.
But how?
The tubes connecting them to the queen were delicate, organic things.
