The horrifying stillness of the creature did not last. A low hum, more felt than heard, began to emanate from its immense form, a sound that resonated deep within their bones. It was the chilling sound of rusted gears coming to life and tortured metal scraping against bone.
The abomination stirred, its hunch frame slowly and unnaturally straightening, its joints unfolding with a sickening click. Its movements felt both mechanical and twitchy: insect-like life. Limbs that looked like a terrifying mix of rusted struts and skeletal appendages shifted, and the immense creature rose to its full height, its single, glowing red eye focusing on them.
Fear seized both Leoill and Nico, overriding any thought of fighting. They turned and ran, the only logical choice in the face of such a monstrosity. Their feet, however, felt leaden against the treacherous, crystalline snow.
The creature did not chase them like a man or animal; it was terrifying. An inexorable crawl-and-lurch. Its spider-like appendages were carrying its bulk over the terrain, across jagged ice formations that would have shattered beneath a human's weight.
"It's getting closer!" Leoill yelled out.
"I know, dumbass! But we can't do anything about it."
They scrambled over broken spires of ice and darted through narrow gaps, their ragged breaths pluming in the frigid air, their fear palpable and shared. They were fighting against a predatory hunter, and their only hope was to find some weakness in the logic of its movements.
The terrain eventually became too perilous to simply run, and Nico, with a desperate glance back at the relentlessly advancing monstrosity, realized their flight was futile. They had to fight.
He screamed a command at Leoill, and drew his knife, its polished steel shining against their faces. Leoill, despite his pain, responded with a flash of knowledge he never thought he'd use again. He recognized the creature's movements as a corrupted form of a Darsion shock-trooper's charge, a blind, heavy assault that relied on momentum.
"Nico!" He yelled.
Nico turned his head in response, as Leoill pointed to a small, jagged outcropping of ice.
"Get to higher ground!"
***
They found their opening. As the creature lunged at the ice outcropping they had just scrambled over, its limbs crashed into the brittle formation. A joint that looked like a combination of bone and a rusty piston was momentarily exposed. Nico didn't hesitate.
He dropped down from his vantage point, plunging his knife into the vulnerable joints. A sickening squelch and a spray of something like oily fluid, erupted.
The creature recoiled with a loud, mechanical screech, its form lurching awkwardly. As it did, a piece of its damaged chassis ripped away, revealing something truly horrifying. Embedded within the fused bone and metal was a small, glowing light that pulsed with energy.
Next to it, etched into the metal, was a serial number. This was a man-made horror, a weapon of war, an unspeakable combination of flesh and machine: an Akyest.
***
With the Akyest temporarily disabled and its unnatural thrumming now a pained groan, Nico and Leoill did not linger. The pain from their injuries and the shock of what they had just seen fueled their flight.
"Nico..."
"Yes, I know."
They ran from the Akyest, seeing the opportunity to live as bright as ever. They left the crippled abomination to its tortured groans.
***
Nico and Leoill ran without looking back, their desperate flight fueled by a terror that surpassed normal exhaustion. The adrenaline that had propelled them through their confrontation with the Akyest began to wane, leaving their bodies wracked with fatigue.
They stumbled through the crystalline snow, their boots crunching on the frozen ground like shattered glass. Finally, when their legs could no longer carry them, they collapsed into the shadow of a massive, frozen spire of ice.
They lay there, heaving, the sheer horror of what they had just witnessed and the terrifying realization of its man-made origin taking a profound psychological toll.
"N... Nico..." Leoill muttered out.
"Just shut up, just for a second," Nico replied, gasping relentlessly.
Fjellheim was now not just a natural disaster, but a graveyard and testing ground for humanity's monstrous creations.
The unspoken terror between them was now an open conversation, forced out by the sheer weight of what they had seen. After a period of shared, ragged silence, Nico forced himself to speak:
"Those serial numbers that we saw, did you see them?"
"Ye, I did." Leoill replied.
"They were corrupted symbols etched onto the creature's metal. Do you know how to read them?"
"I recognized the symbols from Darsion."
Leoill recognized the symbols as a code from a Darsion weapons program that was classified from them, but that didn't stop them from finding out the truth.
"They're symbols from a Darsion weapons program -- if anyone under-ranked were to see the inventions within such a program, they'll be hunted down. But the information spread like wild-fire, and eventually, if a soldier were to talk about such a invention, they'll be shot down on the spot."
He continued to explain that these were military-grade weapons, whispered about in the barracks as "The Akyest Project" -- a desperate last-ditch effort to create living war machines that could survive Fjellheim's cold, but the project had been scrapped due to a catastrophic failure.
"...The creature's existence here proved the project had been deployed regardless."
"I see." Nico replied, that's all he could do right now.
The terrifying knowledge and physical exhaustion had a crippling effect on them, draining what little hope they had left. As despair threatened threatened to consume them, a faint, blinking light caught Nico's eye, cutting through the swirling blizzard in the distance.
It was the sweeping, powerful light of a Darsion patrol.
Leoill startled the moment he laid his eyes on the vehicle.
"Nico! Let's run!"
"No..."
"Huh, why? C'mon, they'll see us!"
"Let them take us in."
Leoill glanced at Nico, just for a brief second. Had he turned insane? Or did he have plan up his sleeve? Whatever it was, Leoill would be executed on the spot and so will he. They needed to leave as soon as possible.
"Nico, please..."
"Look around you. We have only a few packs of food and we have no resistance against the cold. Our best bet is to let Darsion capture us.
"But--"
"It's not like they know that we know about the Akyest. Plus, once we re-energize by their prison food, we'll simply break out. Just trust me Leoill."
"F-- Fine, I'll trust you," Leoill replied, with a slight frown from annoyance.