[OPERATION: LEVIATHAN’S MAW]

  WHUPP… WHUPP… WHUPP…

  The sliding door of the Black Hawk tore open, but the hell that awaited them bore no fire. It greeted them with a cold, ravenous void.

  It was not merely a night breeze; it was an atmospheric assault. The twin rotors overhead flayed the air, birthing an artificial tempest that pressed against the chest as if gravity at these zero-coordinates had suddenly doubled, demanding the human spine bow in submission.

  "Disembark! Go! Go!"

  Alfred did not shout. He barked. His voice was the only residue of humanity amidst the ear-shattering cacophony of the turbines.

  He leaped.

  His heavy military boots slammed into the andesite floor. Thud.

  His knees buckled instinctively, damping the impact. Alfred’s eyes—a pair of biological optics that had recorded slaughter on the northern frontier and bloody riots in the slums—immediately scanned the perimeter. Soldier’s instinct hijacked his nervous system: acquire targets, assess threats.

  Threats: Visual zero.

  Environment: Absolutely hostile.

  Behind him, the Special Forces of the Kingdom of Carta descended one by one. They were not men in this moment; they were efficient, kinetic shadows. Soundless. Hesitation-less. Their nanofiber combat cloaks whipped wildly, beaten back by the helicopter’s downwash, yet their formation remained iron-clad. Assault rifle barrels held steady, trigger fingers disciplined outside the guards. They were ready to kill, even if the enemy here possessed no neck to throttle.

  "Area secured," the Lieutenant beside him reported over comms. The voice came through fractured and static-laced, as if radio waves were terrified to propagate through this air.

  Alfred gave a sharp hand signal. The helicopter wasted no time. The iron bird pitched its nose up, banked hard to the right, and scurried away with haste—a frantic movement, as if the pilot feared his engines would simply die if he lingered a second longer above this accursed pit.

  As the roar of the machine was slowly swallowed by thick clouds, the silence that remained was not peace.

  It was the silence of a predator holding its breath before the strike.

  Alfred stood rigid on the Overwatch Platform. Around him, the Iron Mountains loomed, trapping them in a colossal bowl. These were not mere mountains; they were the prison bars of the universe. The cliffs, formed of metallic black rock, were jagged and cruel. Their peaks stabbed the gray sky like the maw of an ancient shark, gaping wide to chew upon anything foolish enough to fly across.

  But the true terror was not above. It was below.

  Alfred forced his legs to carry him to the guardrail. The iron railing felt sticky, possessed of a chill like a corpse fresh from the morgue against his gloved hand. He looked down.

  And his sanity fractured.

  Before him, the earth was not merely split. The earth had been gouged out.

  The Mirror Canyon.

  The legendary Valley of Death within the dominion of House Rhegalia.

  In Alfred’s military perspective, this was a geological impossibility. No water erosion or tectonic shift could carve a wound this straight, this precise, and this malevolent. The canyon walls plummeted vertically for thousands of meters, comprised entirely of wet, glistening black obsidian.

  Millions of shards of volcanic glass clung to the cliff face, arranging themselves like the frozen scales of a titanic dragon. The surface was slick, flawless, and... waiting.

  NGIIIIIIING...

  The sound arrived without warning. It did not enter through the ears but vibrated directly inside the skull.

  The fine hairs on Alfred’s neck stood rigid. Instant nausea slammed into his solar plexus.

  It was not the wind whistling through stone crevices. It was a high-frequency shriek. Subtle, nerve-shredding, and organic. It sounded like a long fingernail slowly dragging across a chalkboard the size of a city, or the scream of a million insects burning alive, muffled by tons of rock.

  The sound rose from the depths of the void below. A choir of agony.

  "Major," whispered one of his men, Sergeant Kael, a veteran who wouldn't blink while defusing a live mine. But now, his voice trembled. "The ground... the ground is breathing."

  DOOM.

  A low percussion.

  Alfred felt it not in his ears, but in the soles of his feet, traveling up his shins, his thighs, vibrating his very diaphragm.

  DOOM.

  Again. Heavy. Slow. Rhythmic.

  Alfred’s heart raced, trying to synchronize with the beat, but failed. It was a giant’s heartbeat. It was as if, at the bottom of that unseen abyss, a primordial Leviathan was battering the walls of its cage. Pounding on the doors of the underworld, demanding to be let in.

  "Illumination!" Alfred ordered, his voice sounding alien to his own ears. He needed light. He needed the cold logic of physics to banish this superstition.

  The perimeter defense system responded. A series of floodlight towers on the cliff’s edge activated in unison. Diesel engines roared.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  CLACK. ZZZZZT.

  Military floodlights boasting millions of lumens—light capable of blinding a fighter pilot from a kilometer away—were fired straight into the hole.

  Ideally, the place should have been bathed in brilliance. Ideally, the obsidian walls should have reflected the blinding glare, creating a beautiful kaleidoscopic effect.

  But reality in the Mirror Canyon had died.

  The blinding white light plunged downward, slammed into the darkness, and... choked.

  The walls of black mirror did not reflect the light. They drank it.

  Alfred watched with paralyzing horror as the pillars of light were consumed. No glow. No refraction. Like pitch-black ink dripped into clear water, the darkness below seemed to writhe upward, devouring the photons with gluttonous greed, leaving only a sickly twilight.

  The canyon was hungry.

  DOOM!

  The pounding grew louder, as if responding to the "offering" of light. This time, it was accompanied by the sound of rock sliding from the cliffs, falling silently into the bottomless void.

  Alfred gripped the iron rail until his knuckles turned white. He had faced armed insurgents; he had stared down the barrel of a tank. But this was different. The enemy below had no face, no form, and it seemed... no concept of mercy.

  Under the dying, dimming spotlight, Alfred saw something on the obsidian wall across the gorge.

  The wall was a mirror. Perfect. Black.

  But the reflection it cast was wrong.

  Alfred saw the reflection of himself and his squad on the opposite cliff face, hundreds of meters away. The reflection was small, yet clear enough to his trained eye.

  In that black stone mirror, Alfred saw himself standing at the rail.

  But the Alfred in the mirror was not looking down.

  The Alfred in the mirror was looking up, staring straight at the real Alfred, his mouth torn open in a silent, screaming gape.

  Beside him, the reflection of Sergeant Kael in the mirror held no weapon. The reflection was holding his own severed head.

  "Major..." the real Kael called out beside him, oblivious to what Alfred saw across the chasm. "Do you see... something moving down there?"

  Alfred did not answer. Cold sweat poured down his spine.

  Because in that giant black mirror, hundreds of pale hands had just emerged from the darkness below, crawling up, and beginning to drag the legs of their reflections into the abyss.

  Alfred forcibly broke eye contact with the gruesome reflection. He ground his jaw until his teeth creaked, forcing his logic to kick out the metaphysical terror.

  Focus, he thought. It’s just a goddamned optical illusion.

  He spun around, forcing his gaze downward, piercing the gloom of the abyss now faintly illuminated by periodically fired emergency flares.

  The sight at the valley floor should have made anyone feel safe given the sheer firepower present. But to Alfred, it looked like ants trying to hold back a tidal wave.

  On stone terraces roughly hewn into the lower cliff walls, thousands of Kingdom of Carta soldiers were in full combat positions. Lines of heavy infantry formed a wall of flesh and steel, their tower shields locked tight, forming a modern testudo formation impervious to ballistics.

  Behind them, hundreds of Iron-Clad Main Battle Tanks rumbled low, their 120mm cannons angled upward, hunting prey in the dark. In the third layer, self-propelled Howitzer artillery units had planted their hydraulic legs into the earth, ready to vomit the apocalypse.

  Yet, the atmosphere down there was sick.

  Alfred could feel it from this height. The temperature plummeted. Not the clean cold of mountain wind, but a cold that leeched heat from the skin, as if thermodynamics here was broken. The air smelled of copper and ozone—the scent of old blood and static electricity.

  At the forward perimeter, the barbed wire fence, electrified with high voltage, spat blue sparks.

  Something was crashing against it.

  "The Taboo..." Alfred hissed.

  They did not have the shape of men. At the border between the flare-light and total darkness, Alfred saw a writhing mass. The creatures—if they could be called creatures—looked like slabs of raw meat stitched haphazardly with shadows. They crawled with impossible speed, slamming into the barricades, burning under the relentless rain of bullets. Ratatatatatata…

  They shrieked with the sound of weeping infants, then spilled over one another, pile upon pile.

  But what froze Alfred’s blood was not the monsters.

  It was what came behind them.

  The Fog.

  The fog was not white like the clouds above. The fog crawling up from the crust of the earth was a dirty gray, dense and curdled like rendered fat. It moved against gravity. It climbed the cliff walls with fingers of ravenous steam, swallowing the lowest observation posts one by one.

  Every time the fog enveloped a platoon, the sound of hysterical gunfire erupted, then silence. The life-sign indicators on their helmet visors winked out in unison.

  "Major..."

  The voice behind him snapped Alfred back.

  He turned. His special forces—the finest soldiers who had once eaten live snakes in the rainforests—now looked unsettled. Their feet shuffled. Their rifles swayed. Their eyes were wild, darting between the mirror wall displaying their own deaths, and the fog now crawling up toward their position.

  Their morale was fracturing. If Alfred stayed silent for one more second, they would break. Fear was a virus more contagious than any plague.

  Alfred snatched the tactical handheld transceiver (HT) clipped to his combat vest. He smashed the PTT button.

  "Central Command, this is Alpha-One on the High Deck. Code Red," Alfred’s voice was calm, a stark contrast to the thunder of his heart.

  "Weapons free. I repeat. Weapons free. Burn them all."

  Without waiting for bureaucratic confirmation, Alfred switched to the open channel connected to every unit in the valley.

  "ALL UNITS! LISTEN TO ME!"

  His voice boomed through the earpieces of thousands of soldiers below, shattering the panic that had begun to take root.

  "DO NOT LOOK AT THE WALLS! EYES ON THE TARGET IN FRONT OF YOU!"

  Alfred pointed toward the encroaching fog, as if his finger were a commander’s saber.

  "ARTILLERY BATTERIES A THROUGH D, FOCUS ON SECTOR 12! TANKS, SUPPRESSING FIRE ON PERIMETER COORDINATES! DO NOT LET THAT FOG RISE A SINGLE INCH!"

  "FIRE!"

  The command was the trigger for armageddon.

  BLAARRRR!!!

  The Valley of Death detonated in orange light.

  Hundreds of tank barrels barked in unison, sending High-Explosive projectiles slamming into the front line of the amorphous mass. The vibration was so violent Alfred had to grip the railing to keep from being thrown over.

  A split second later, the ceiling of the canyon rumbled as the artillery in the rear began to sing. Large-caliber shells arced through the air, plunging into the dense fog.

  Explosion after explosion created craters of fire in the ocean of darkness.

  Down below, thousands of soldiers moved like a single giant organism. Military discipline overrode fear. Modern phalanx formations marched forward, their assault rifles flashing stroboscopically, vomiting hot lead into the shadows trying to breach the fire.

  For a moment, the light of the explosions conquered the dark. For a moment, man-made hell successfully beat back nature’s hell.

  Alfred watched the fog hurled back, torn apart by the shockwaves.

  "Welcome to the High Duke’s domain," Alfred muttered, his voice raspy and dry. "Where the black mirror reflects not your face... but the manner of your death."