Gathering Darkness✔️

Chapter 03: Something in the Darkness

For a long moment, there was dead silence.

After the chaotic crashing of atmospheric reentry and the landing itself, it was almost painful in its purity. Kane could hear a ringing in his ears, he realized after a few seconds. He blinked several times, trying to get his head together. Impacts were always jarring, painfully dislocating, but this one was somehow a lot worse than usual. If this was a warzone, he might be dead right now. Taking a deep breath, the ODST reminded himself that he was, in fact, a Helljumper, and to suck it up and get his ass in gear.

There was no rest for the wicked.

He scanned the interior of his pod. The little screens surrounding his head in an orbit of technology were dead, some of them cracked. Kane ignored them, instead activating his radio as he began getting his harness undone.

"This is Corporal Kane to Sergeant Goll, I was thrown off course. Over." He paused, waited, heard the hum of an open channel. "I repeat, Kane to Goll, my pod was thrown off course, do you read? Over."

Still nothing.

"Great," Kane muttered, leaving the channel open just in case. It took a minute, but he finally got his harness undone. Once he was free of it, he hit the manual releases. The door to the pod blew outwards in a fury of sound that made him jump. Rain began falling into the pod and across his visor. He got up, grunting as he felt a few pains in his body from getting banged around during the drop. He stepped up and out, hand falling to the butt of the silenced pistol still in its holster. He activated his VISR function as he scanned the immediate area.

Or he tried to, anyway.

It wouldn't turn on. Frustrated, he tired again. His visor flickered briefly, then died. Well, this mission was off to a fantastic start. Kane stared into the gloom for a moment, trying to scan his surroundings. It was too dark to see basically anything. Turning around, he reached into his pod and grabbed the emergency medical kit off the wall. Clipping it to his belt, he then grabbed his final piece of hardware: the silenced SMG. It was a reassuring weight in his grip. He flipped on the barrel-mounted flashlight.

A powerful arc of white light cut through the darkness. Basically, he was painting a target on himself and asking all hostiles to step right up and take a shot at him, but it wasn't like he had a lot of options with his VISR function dead. Kane played the light across the area. For a moment, all he could see was wet gravel and mud. No trees. He kept turning, trying to discern where in the hell he had landed, and finally his light fell on something. The rusting, skeletal hulk of a tarnished, industrial yellow bulldozer.

He kept going, the light revealing a series of empty steel crates scattered across the muddy ground, the distant, uncertain shape of what might have been a trailer, and then, finally, a solid rock wall. It was a cliff sheer of wet stone, shooting skywards. Kane raised his light. The wall went up for a good hundred feet or so.

It finally hit him. The quarry. He'd landed in the quarry.

"Well...shit," he muttered.

Okay, first objective, get out of the quarry.

Kane began moving towards the uncertain outline he'd seen earlier. A structure seemed like a good as place to start as any. There might be a map of the area. He was going to need to find an elevator, or at least a ladder. It'd be a long climb, but he needed up and out of here. The gravel crunched under his feet and the rain continued to fall, beading and running on his glass faceplate. Lightning split the sky, lighting up everything in a monochrome glare. A second later, thunder cracked overhead, a particularly loud, sharp boom that made him jump. Kane scowled as he looked around, his heart hammering in his chest.