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Dr. Everwood was the first off the transport.
They looked around the dense jungle surrounding the clearing they found themselves in, then to the small hut in the distance. A single man stood outside, who began advancing towards the disembarking party.
"Are you Omega-5?" they asked.
"Yes, I am Agent Dang. I assume you are Dr. Everwood from Alpha-10?" He glanced at their prosthetic arm, before establishing eye contact.
"Correct." Everwood turned to the transport to watch Samara helping Cooper down. Rex was already off, and complaining about the humidity to anyone who would listen. The Doctor turned to face Dang. "What have you got for me?"
"Follow me."
"Come on, gang." Everwood motioned to Rex, Samara, and Cooper. The group all walked at varying speeds to the hut, something that seemed to annoy Dang as he impatiently tapped his foot while Cooper carefully made her way there, avoiding mud and refuse. Once everyone was there, Dang lifted a bamboo panel on the wall to reveal a number pad. He input a code, and the door opened to reveal an interior bigger than it seemed on the outside.
"Cool." Rex noted as the group walked in one by one.
The inside of the hut had a few screens mounted to the walls, a few more agents loitering about, sleeping bunks, and a medical bay, which was currently occupied by a woman who had suffered a severe wound to her chest. Judging by her condition, she was lucky to be alive. Dang waited by the door and shut it once Cooper, the slowest of the group, was inside. He then walked to the med bay, motioning for them to follow him.
"What happened to her?" Cooper asked.
"We found her skewered to a radio tower half a kilometer away from a Children of the Torch temple. The place got razed by SAPPHIRE." Dang replied solemnly.
"What I saw in my vision…" Samara mumbled, looking the woman over.
"We're not 100% certain how what we presume to be a small squad of RUBIES took them out so handily."
"Were they using SCP-4519?"
"I believe they have the actual object stationed somewhere in the region and are only using a weaker variation of it to take out the parareligions in the area." Dang shrugged. "We can't know for sure unless we talk to her, but her condition is so unstable we—"
"Let me take a look." Samara took a step forward, placing her hand on the unconscious woman's forehead. Her eyes glowed blue and the lights above them flickered as she synchronized her mind to the other woman's.
—and it is nothing more.
Images of dancing fire, bullets whizzing through the air, and blood splattering the ground filled her head. In the distance, she could see a disembodied head; who did it belong to? She tried approaching it, but found herself slowed by a mountain of corpses. Corpses of people she the woman; her name was Yaling, recognized. Fellow worshipers? Brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, friends, lovers? All of them dead.
There is the sun and it is nuclear and it is nothing more.
That voice. It seemed so familiar, and yet so foreign. Samara tried approaching it once more, climbing over the mountain of corpses. She found herself at the top, alongside Yaling, who was screaming silently as tears streaked down her cheeks. The ESPer turned her attention back to the head ominously floating in the distance and ran towards it.
There is the sun and it is nuclear and it is nothing more.
She could feel her powers waning. What was happening? Still, she pressed on. She continued to float ahead, feeling weaker and weaker by the moment until eventually she could no longer move. Her breath was labored, she could barely stay conscious, but there she saw it.
There is the sun and it is nuclear and it is nothing more.
The bond was suddenly severed. Samara nearly collapsed, but was caught by both Everwood and Dang before she hit the ground. Some of the other Omega-5 agents stood and approached to offer help.
"S-Sagan." was all she could breathlessly muster.
"What did she say?" Dang asked, lifting her limp body towards a nearby chair to set her down.
"I take it she met the Sagan Godhead." Everwood grumbled, helping Dang to comfortably place the ESPer on the chair.
"Why did it affect her, though? As far as I can tell, she's not religious." Rex asked, arms folded.
"Remember, SAPPHIRE seek to discredit the anomalous as well as the religious. They believed it can all be explained through science." Cooper approached the barely conscious Samara, holding her cane with her left hand and placing her right on the woman's forehead.
"But we can explain her psychic powers with science." He was starting to regret coming along. "That's basically what the Foundation does, yeah?"
"She means layman's science." one of the Omega-5 agents said, a Maxwellist Mekhanite by the looks of xer sleek prosthetics and other upgrades. "Not the kind you would see at Prometheus."
"I guess."
"Lau is correct. Though you and Dr. Everwood may be the general GoI experts here, we are the SAPPHIRE experts. We know them better than anyone else could." Dang said.
"Let's not get combative here, Rex. We're here to work together, not to cause each other strife." Everwood sighed.
Suddenly, a beeping sound from the other corner of the room interrupted them. Dang, Lau, and the handful of agents that had come to offer help ran to the source of the sound. Lau picked up a headset and put it on, then began frantically speaking in a language none of the others could understand, all the while typing into a terminal.
"What is that?" Everwood asked, coming up behind Dang.
"Tai Nüa. It's a local dialect."
"No, I mean what are they doing?"
"We just got an emergency signal from a small Cogwork Orthodox village in the rainforest a few kilometers from here. It probably means SAPPHIRE are attacking. Lau, what's the situation?" Dang put a hand on the chair the Mekhanite was sitting on, taking a glance over the screen.
"They spotted strangers approaching their village. Could be nothing, could be SAPPHIRE. Do we want to deploy?" Lau removed one earphone and looked back at Dang. All the other agents in the room looked to him in anticipation.
"Let's roll."
"I'll mobilize my unit as well. Are we going in my transport?" Everwood asked, heading towards the door.
"Too loud, too big. We'll go in our Jeeps." Dang nodded as he approached the armory to the left of the door. The agents under his command lined up and began taking weapons and body armor, all of which Everwood noticed had been decorated in various religious iconography. "Lau, stay behind and watch over the patient and the ESPer."
"But sir, I—"
"I can stay behind and watch over them. It's not like I'll be of much use in a battlefield." Cooper spoke up.
"And I can stay behind and make sure she stays out of trouble."
Dang and Everwood exchanged a look, then shrugged.
"Fine. Lau, you can come with us. I trust you, Miss Cooper." Dang said, putting on white body armor decorated with a black Ensō. "Dr. Everwood, are you partial to any religion? We have extras of all the major ones."
"I was christened Catholic as a child, but I don't particularly subscribe to any religion." They answered, halfway out the door.
Dang reached to his right and grabbed a vest decorated with a lamb, crucifix, and Sacred Heart. "Better to be safe than sorry."
"I suppose so, Agent Dang." Everwood smiled, putting on the vest before exiting.
Screaming and bullets whizzing had become audible in the near-distance as the first of the land transports advanced through the dense jungle. Dang, who was driving, reached for the radio and spoke: "I don't like the sound of this. Get ready to engage."
Everwood swallowed. They weren't a soldier by any means and had no intention of actually fighting; they had just undergone basic Foundation weapons training, and had barely passed the course at that. But they knew that this was important. The GoI Specialist turned to Lau, whose mechanical arm was transforming into a plasma cannon.
"That's cool." Everwood smiled at them.
"Thanks, wish I could say the same about yours. Anderson is not a true ally of WAN. I can probably juice it up for you when we're back at home base if you want."
"I, err, sure?" They blinked.
"We're roughly 45 seconds out from contact. Look sharp." Dang said, arming the vehicle's automatic turret.
Before Everwood could even begin to prepare for what they would see, they had arrived. What lay before them was a remote agrarian village full of gears and cogs in utter bedlam. There were women and children screaming as they fled into the jungle. There were corpses littering the ground. There was a dozen or so men with guns, all of them firing at the civilians. There were men with giant clockwork fists using their gauntlets as cover while some used old-fashioned muskets to fire back at the aggressors.
"Go, go, go, go!" Dang shouted as the agents jumped off the transport, being provided covering fire by the front-loaded turret. More agents poured out of the other two vehicles behind them. Some of the fleeing women and children came to their side and were ushered into the now-empty vehicles. "Omega-5-Bravo and Charlie, get these guys out of here!" Dang roared into his radio.
Everwood watched as war unfolded before them.
The team of RUBIES began backing away from the fight as bullets whizzed through the air, many of them mysteriously not finding purchase in their bodies despite them wearing minimal body armor. They scanned the area visually in search of something that could show them why this was happening. The transport rocked as residents of the village poured in, screaming and crying in a language Everwood could not understand.
Suddenly, the engine of the SUVs at the other side of the village roared to life as the remaining SAPPHIRE members loaded into them. A single man got off the Jeep and slowly approached the dozens of armed individuals that were still firing upon him, walking through the hail of bullets unscathed. As he marched ever closer, Everwood noticed a cloud of blades whizzing around him, intercepting projectiles and slicing them to bits.
"What the hell? Dang, look, I think that's a Type Green!" Everwood leaned forward, pointing at the man.
Dang peered ahead, then started moving as if he were exiting the transport. He flipped a few switches on the dashboard on his way out, then shouted something in a language Everwood didn't understand. The men wearing gauntlets and firing muskets turned to face him then abandoned their weapons, fleeing behind the transports as something moved in the front of the vehicle.
"Dang? What are you doing?! We need to get out of here!" Everwood shouted, but their screams were dampened by the sounds of the Jeeps full of RUBIES getting away, Mekhanites clamoring for space in the transports, the sound of something emerging from the front of the transport they were in, and Dang shouting instructions to his unit.
As they lowered their weapons, the man began laughing. His pace quickened, and he eventually stood face to face with Dang, blades whizzing menacingly.
"Est-ce là le mieux que la Fondation puisse faire ?" the man's face contorted into a grin.
"I don't know what you just said, but fuck you too, buddy." Dang replied. "今！Ima!"
The instant he spoke, three things happened:
First, Omega-5 dropped their weapons and ducked for cover.
Next, the magnet which had been not-so-silently deploying on the transport activated, dragging all the weapons left behind by Omega-5 and the Mekhanites, the razors, and the man all slamming onto itself, with multiple razors digging into his flesh due to said magnet.
Finally, it appeared to everyone present that the man had been smote by God. Which God had, done the smiting depended on the viewer, but the fact of the matter remained.
The other Omega-5 agents split into three groups, in rehearsed strategem. A third started picking up the dead bodies, a third approached the magnet up front and began the process of knocking out the man and rescuing Dang from what was sure to be a crushing pile of refuse, and the last third approached the transports; the one entering Everwood's switching off the magnet.
Everwood had never been on the field for a firefight before, and was gobsmacked by this whole event.
"What just happened?" they finally asked Lau, the nearest agent.
"I can't get too close to that without fucking with my servos." xe replied. "Do you mind?"
"What happened to him?" Jay asked, switching off the magnet. "It looks like he was—"
"Smote by God? Yeah, I know. But even by these thing's standards, that's new."
"But… how?" Everwood blinked.
"You'll see when we're back at forward base."
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