The air hangs heavy around Vanguard, silent among their ranks, save for the roaring wind and torrential downpour that mask the pulsing hum of the writhing forest floor.

  The very earth itself seems to glow, as the tangled mass of slick roots converge like a stream, the ultraviolet under-glow building into one sinewy structure that carves a ravine through the ground.

  Crow keeps his grip tight around the stump of his left arm. Falcon is able to spare a few feathers for all of them, enough to ensure the teleporters each have one more escape option if it’s needed, but it doesn’t feel like nearly enough now.

  After a mile the forest breaks, revealing a massive dig site in its center—a quarter mile from one end of the massive hole to the other before the forest continues on the other side. Old machinery sits ruined near the top, metal excavators twisted into cruel art pieces with the bodies of the operators still inside.

  At the dig site's bottom, nearly a full half mile below the earth, is a pitch black monolith the size of a house left half uncovered. It pulses with that same ultraviolet energy, flowing around its sleek black exterior as a woman drags her hand over it.

  “That's her.” Falcon whispers from beside him, all of Vanguard coming to a pause at the hole's edge.

  She is deathly skinny, her pale grey skin clinging tight to her thin bones. Her hair is long, dragging out behind her to pool onto the ground, nearly as pitch black as her eyes, eyes that flick to them even as they remain perfectly stealthy.

  “More of you?” She says softly, her voice low, knowing that they can hear her even from this far away.

  Crow's whole body tenses up, as her black eyes find his, the stars dancing behind them promising something sinister.

  Vulture yawns, and drops himself into the dig site, landing without a sound in front of the anomaly as she traces a finger down the monolith's edge.

  Terror ripples through the space yet again, Crow's chest tightening as the fear aura radiates from him.

  His hands snap into their taloned form, and he cocks his head at the thin woman with a cruel smile. “Don’t worry, I'll make it quick, as a prize for being my first.”

  The woman continues to trace the lines of the monolith, her shoulders slouching, naked body pressing dangerously close to Vulture as she leans down with an innocent smile.

  “You can’t kill me in a way that matters.”

  Vulture’s whole body tenses as he moves to strike at her. Instead the concussive wave of his supersonic movements are cut short as he is locked in place by the tangle of her air, stopping his momentum with a snap, his taloned fingers a fraction of an inch from her skin.

  The fear aura drops and the world slows once more.

  Crow's body begins to become exhausted as he overuses his ability. The rain slows almost to a standstill, his vision narrows, eyes tracking the cords of the woman's hair that begin to pull taut around Vulture, cutting through his coat, his clothes, bulging the skin, causing blood to leak from him as it begins to tear him apart.

  In an instant Crow is there at the bottom, sword carving through the woman's hair, his blade aimed for her neck.

  Her eyes move to him, and just as quickly as the world slowed, it regains its speed.

  Half of her hair falls to the ground, the other half stops him in his tracks, rocketing the water off him, sending out another sonic boom and cracking the bones in his good arm at the unexpected stop.

  Vulture manages to barely tear away from the hair that grips him, the rest shreds his skin, peeling it off in a thin layer as he accelerates away from her.

  The woman's eyes burn into Crow’s own. He watches shapes move in the background as Starling and Condor rush to engage, but they smear into nothing as reality begins to fall away from him, his mind falling backwards into a black hole, the scene before him getting smaller and smaller.

  Crow gasps, his stomach feeling as though it's about to eject itself from his throat as he falls into some distant oblivion, the sensation of falling never giving way, rising further, further, further, until his vision tunnels and stars dance across the pinprick of light so impossibly far away from him.

  The air pulls from his lungs, and then just as quickly crushes him as reality snaps back into its normal place, Starling's hand on the base of his neck acting as some sort of anchor that pulls him from the deep.

  He gasps, spitting out black ichor onto the ground. He is higher up in the dig site now, hiding behind a tangled mass of heavy equipment. Starling must have teleported him out of there.

  “You’re pathetic,” Starling says coolly, her grip tightening on the back of his neck.

  “Star!” He sputters, black ink still spilling from his mouth, her grip growing tighter and tighter around him.

  “Let me put you out of misery.” She yawns. “You want this don't you? You want to die? Let me do this for you. Now is as good a time as any, a great time in fact. A perfect excuse.” Her grip tears through the muscle of his neck, her fingers burrowing to the bone.

  Pain ignites across his neck as blood splatters down the back of his coat. His breath catches as her nails dig into the nerves, slip around the disks, dig down into the marrow. Crow is used to pain, but still it sends his vision swimming as his body threatens to shut down entirely from the agony.

  Crow brings his sword up to carve her hand off, but the noise tears through him more painful than her grip around him, stopping him in his tracks.

  “Stop this!” He shouts, blade shaking inches from Starling’s wrist while her hand burrows into his spine, muscles tensing, causing his bones to groan in protest.

  He wills himself forward, tries to cut off her hand, to stop whatever this is, whatever has come over her, but he can’t—the noise sends him into a spiral, forcing him to teleport away instead. He wanted to save it, save it for an emergency, but he supposes this is an emergency, as Starling comes within a single twitch of ending his life.

  The ground finds him once again, the noise leaves his mind, and with the noise vanishing, reality itself burns away at the edges of his vision like a fire taking to a piece of paper. A pinprick of light appears somewhere far away on the horizon, and with a single breath it rushes to meet him. His mind pulls itself from the pit he had fallen into so quickly it brings bile up into his throat.

  Crow is still anchored in space in front of the anomaly, his body tangled in her hair, her eyes watching Starling as one of her hands gently caresses the back of Crows head, her fingers gently pressing pressure points at the base of Crow's skull, while her other hand shakes, the kukri blade at Crows throat, sending a small droplet of blood down into the collar of his shirt.

  Crow sees his good arm press his own sword into Starling's heart, the tip of his weapon burrowed a half inch into her chest, creating a red stain that slowly grows as his body fights against the lingering lie that tells him Starling is trying to kill him.

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  The anomaly is controlling them, making them see things, believe things that aren’t really happening. The ability must have triggered after Crow looked into the Witches eyes. The stars behind her eyes, the stars he saw in his own vision—now that he knows this he can’t let it happen again.

  Crow tenses and drives his blade forward, acting as though he intends to kill Starling, but instead he forces his sword to disapparate in time with his thrust. At the peak, Crow shifts the direction of his thrust and remanifests the blade, angling it in a new direction, and punches it through the anomalies leg, pinning her thigh into the ground with the weapon.

  “Your conditioning is stronger than the others.” The woman mocks softly, looking down at the blade through her leg with indifference. “The other birds simply tore one another apart.”

  Starling breaks from the trance next, her eyes narrow at the blade nearly cutting into Crow throat, and in a smear of movement she spins, bringing one heel down in an overhead kick that crunches into the anomalies shoulder, though the kick is stopped before it can make its full impact by a mass of woman's hair the tangles Starling’s leg.

  Starling's clothing rips, her skin bulges, blood bubbles as the hair nearly takes Starling's legs at the hip, but Crow quickly summons a new blade and cuts the hair at its base, freeing Star’s leg a fraction of a second before it’s cut to ribbons.

  Starling teleports everyone away to the edge of the dig site as they come to from their respective trances, eyes wide, each one struggling for air.

  “She’s too strong,” Falcon gasps as he watches the anomalies' hand once again press to the monolith, pulling energy from it, causing her hair to regrow.

  The Witch pulls her leg free of Crow’s sword, splitting it open lengthwise. Strands of hair from within her own body pull the two pieces together, stitching her back up and sealing the wound.

  Her eyes search for them again, but Crow forces his eyes shut instead.

  “Close your eyes!” Crow calls out, and tunes his other senses to pick up her location. The pattering rain helps immensely, as he can hear it bounce off the shape of her in the dig site below.

  “Sparrow, you know what you need to do, Vulture, Condor, give him an opening. Star, standby for extract. Falcon, you and I run defense!”

  No one protests.

  They close their eyes and rush in. Crow can hear Vulture and Condor close the distance the fastest. Vulture is a blender with his claws, rushing her down with as much speed as he can muster. Condor zones her, shifting his weight to deliver devastating punches she is forced to block with large masses of her hair.

  Each time she blocks, her hair tangles around them, but Crow doesn’t let it go further than that. He shadows Condor, summoning a new blade to carve away at the hair that tangles around each of his attacks. Falcon does the same, his armored form buying him critical seconds to share his feathers with Vulture who never lets off.

  The anomaly’s hair grows, builds, and fights to tangle them, growing around their ankles and feet, but Starling fires off volley after volley of hypersonic feathers from her wings, blowing apart the gathered masses before they can anchor any of Vanguard in place.

  With every shift Crow carves into the monolith on a backswing. Condor shatters its surface with an elbow. Falcon blocks a mass of hair from suffocating Vulture as he releases his own volley into its structure, shattering fragments, sending black stone falling around them as it groans and shudders.

  “NO!” The woman screeches, her attention turned for only a moment to the monolith, but a moment's enough.

  Sparrow’s polearm lances through her heart, stopping her in her tracks, hand inches from the monolith. Her hair struggles to repair itself, all of her energy now turned to keeping her alive.

  Vulture gives her no time. He carves a path through her spine, collapsing her torso in on her legs and sending her crumpling to the ground.

  More strands of hair surge to repair the damage, to pull her back together.

  Sparrow leaves his spear inside of her, summons a new one and plunges it into the side of her head, pinning her to the ground through her temples.

  Her mouth opens wide, hair flooding from it, slick with balls of flesh and muscle that pull tight at her breaking body.

  Crow notices now, that her insides are all wrong. Instead of muscle, crawling worm-like creatures make up the inside of her skin, teeth bite and snap from exposed flesh, a multitude of beings all struggling to reform.

  “Star, go!” Crow calls out, bringing his sword down to carve out the front of the anomaly’s face, separating her eyes from her skull, revealing more strands of pulling hair and slithering worms.

  Starling touches the anomaly, her body too focused on not dying to resist Star’s teleportation, making both vanish in a blink.

  Condor crushes the sparse remains of the anomaly into the ground, burying it under the mud. Hairs reach out to grab at him, but with a roar he stomps on it again, and again, and again, until the pieces sputter and die.

  Time seems to stretch on for an eternity, as the rain washes away the blood and sinew coating Vanguard’s bodies. Crow sucks in breaths of the cold, wet air, trying his hardest to ignore the pulsing pain in his missing arm.

  After a time, the sound of an aircraft reaches them, descending down into the city beyond the forest they came from.

  Exhausted, Vanguard pull themselves from the dig site and stomp through the forest, passing by swarms of Site-51 scientists as they rush through the woods to investigate the monolith.

  Returning to the city, even more soldiers fan out, their weapons ready as they clear all the surrounding buildings, while even more science teams swarm like ants, taking samples of everything they can get their hands on.

  James appears from an aircraft, Doctor Yiva flanking him. His eyes hard, narrowed to his tablet.

  Despite himself, Crow finds his breath catching at the sight of both of them. Something builds in his chest, and it isn’t until he sees Sparrow’s body tense, can he identify it.

  He yearns for their approval, every fiber of his being washes out the pain and stress of the day, replaced instead by an all consuming need to hear them say that he did a good job.

  Everyone feels it, the entirety of vanguard seems to forget themselves in the instant James pries his eyes from the tablet to examine them all. For some reason, Crow finds himself wanting to hide his severed arm behind his back.

  The next three seconds spent in the quiet rain are agonizing as anxiety builds in the back of his mind. They could have done better, he knows they could have, will they be punished instead for performing suboptimally? Or is all of this good considering the previous Vanguard units all died when they tried?

  “Well, for your first mission I consider this good work.” James says with an unconvincing smile, and in that moment Crow’s world shatters, he can hear James’s heartbeat, feel the breath pull into his lungs as the next pieces fall from his mouth to join the blood and rain on the city streets. “But Director Williams has ordered your immediate return to base, we will clean up here.”