PROLOGUE: HUMANITY’S ANSWER

  “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

  ― Charles Darwin, On the Origins of Species

  In his book A Pisgah-Sight of Palestine, English clergyman Thomas Fuller coined the phrase ‘it is always darkest just before the day dawneth,’ though surely he would not utter such sentiments in the context of twentieth century Cambion warfare, where the brightest of sceneries meant complete and certain destruction.

  Yet it remains difficult to fault such men as he. Otto von Bismarck famously prophesied that the next great European war would spark from some imprudent dispute in the Balkans, and in any other world he would likely have been vindicated. If it had happened otherwise… say an archduke was shot in Sarajevo, say a naval arms race between Britain and Germany boiled over or say the French wanted vengeance for the theft of Alsace-Lorraine… yet God did not deem such a climax worthy of his 4.5 billion year epic narrative. Yes. No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that Homo sapien’s 50,000 year hegemony of Gaia would be toppled so spectacularly by the army of hell.

  ***

  Cordillera de Oncol, Argentine Republic, August 9th, 1945, 2300 hours.

  And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light, a streak of concentrated crimson heat that scorched the abyss of night, torching the thick canopies and downing high speed aircraft. The rainforest was aflame.

  Soldiers ran back and forth through the smog and grime. Guerilla fighters, they were. Each bearing bulky suits of combat armor, and heavy arms to battle the creatures. On their breasts was the banner of the República Argentina, two bars of navy blue sky sandwiching a stripe of white clouds and an omnipotent sun. Their faces were covered in blood and mud and a scorn that would not heal after a thousand years.

  It was a nightmare they could not wake from. Pieces and parts of limbs lay strewn about the shrubbery, comrades and civilians, women and children and the elderly—the Cambions never discriminated. Hell was empty and all the devils were here, and their uniforms were a testament to that. Just like the Imperialist Europeans of the Subsaharan front, the Communist Hindustanis of the Himalayan front, the Fascist Japanese of the Chinese Theatre, or whatever the fuck was going on in Australia all those years ago, the soldiers had blood-red uniform to camouflage in the rampantly advancing Cambion forests.

  The vanguard fighters advanced, ducking under falling trees and firing at shadows beyond the thickets, whilst others worked to blast the seemingly nonflammable scarlet flora into smithereens. This was perhaps the most vital part of the game board to control. At present the crimson forest had managed to touch the outskirts of their main port to the Pacific, Valparaíso. They could not yield any more land.

  A shriek split the air and a pack of vermilion big cats pounced upon the vanguard, taking bullet after bullet into their unusually swollen bodies. They were Panthera cambi, of the Amazonian Hoard. They had no manes but made up for them with hooked claws and sickle-like teeth, inappropriate for consumption, perfect for maiming. Their fur was a dark crimson, spotted with eerie whites and blacks to match the white-and-mahogany striped Phytolacca cambi which grew abundantly thanks to the ruthless invasion of the red forest. The felines tore the gunmen to shreds. Each animal disarmed a dozen men before collapsing to the ground—even then they sometimes rose in a post-mortem state to bare their fangs on careless victims.

  That was not the worst of it.

  From the distance came the gangly Ateles cambi swung forth from branch to branch, bright Dendrobates cambi leapt up from murky puddles, overgrown Hydrochoerus cambi stormed into the fray, gnashing horrible teeth. Even a humongous Eunectes cambi loomed over the battlefield with poison pouring from its every orifice and body bulging with an uneasy hunger.

  Yet even that was not the worst of it.

  The back rank was suddenly smashed by a new hoard of adversaries. The true enemies of humanity. See his jagged teeth and shattered jaw, see his drawn out tongue, see his eyes that have gone white without soul, see his skeletal features, see the curved sickle-like horns adorning his skull, see his crumpled skin red like the star Mars, God of War. Say his name so that they know what to inscribe on your tomb. Homo cambi. The harbingers of existential dread.

  The Cambion men tore trunks of crimson wood, full of thorns and poisons and fungal entities and swung them into the mortal men, bashing their skulls in and laughing maniacally in that signature guttural noise. The fighters screamed with fury and engaged the demon-men. That was their name sake after all. The spawn of demons that would blaspheme God by mating with his creations. Cambions. It was what prompted the Linnean Society of London to name the species, ‘cambi’ after the Cambions, half-human, half-demon hybrids from European folklore.

  The men were cornered, killed off, picked on one-by-one until a handful were left. At that moment the Cambion anaconda stretched itself downwards. Descending with a calm, controlled slither in such a manner that the men knew their time was up. The beast opened its impossible maw, enough to swallow each man whole as the men resigned themselves to death. What was written at the gates of hell? According to Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, it is, ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.’

  But that was not to be.

  Suddenly, an explosion ripped open the serpent’s alimentary canal, spewing entrails the size of bison as the creature hissed, dissolving into the afterlife.

  “Dios mío…” one of the men shuddered, unable to move.

  A man emerged from the wreckage of the serpent of paradise. Bathed in red. Grimy as if weathered by time yet bulky and sinewy as if carved in marble. He had dark hair and dark eyes that glinted the way a predator did when it saw prey, and his beard made him look the part of El Cid of Castile. A wicked scar ran across his right face where his eternal grimace stood for display. That was Llanosian Lieutenant Colonel Vasco Alfonso Rodrigo Reyes.

  “Ojos en el enemigo!” he grunted at the stunned soldiers. A Cambion humanoid lunged towards the group. Vasco swept ninety degrees and regained his footing, firing his Colt M1911 pistol towards the carnage. Two men had already been skewered by the time the bullets landed and even then he only managed to take out the creature’s eyes.

  “Mierda!” he cursed. The creature sprinted towards him with inhuman speed, bringing down a thorned white tree branch like a mace. Vasco tackled the Cambion before it could strike home, slamming it into the bloody puddles below. The beast was almost three metres tall and perhaps well over the one hundred fifty kilograms mark. The Cambion sent him flying with a blow to the chest as easily as swatting a fly. Vasco could feel a rupture in his internal organs. He groaned, “Malditos argentinos…” watching the last of the men scramble away from the hellscape, knowing the new conscripts wouldn’t survive the path back.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  The creatures all faced him now. Nothing left to do but die he chuckled to himself. He had seen far worse in his years, was he finally getting worn down? All this fighting. The Republican Empire of Llanos, the Federative Republic of Brazil, the Argentine Republic. Goddamn republics. That word meant nothing to him but war. Yet perhaps that proves their names true, after all all humans were only ever equal in conflict and death.

  Vasco sighed. He could hear the Doctor taunting him: “Then we could call the world the Republic of Mankind!”

  Damned Doctor. What had he said the first time they had a mission together? “Si mueres, sal con una explosión!” In perfect Spanish as well. Damn the man. Vasco stared down the creatures.

  What was his goal again? He was feeling light headed. The trip in the anaconda’s stomach had discombobulated his mind. “Lost to a single Homo cambi!? Haha! You’ve gotten rusty!” He gritted his teeth. German-American bastard.

  Glowering, he drew from his crimson uniform a pair of combat daggers, “Bring it on you freaks!”

  ***

  “He should be back here by now…” Hansel Zimmermann paced back and forth irritably, checking the first of his four watches on his left arm. He yawned. The steps his boots made on the crude stone tiles produced hefty echoes which reverberated down the hall. It was a large room, if not rudimentary in design. Another piece of another stronghold of the sacrilegious Cambion Church.

  Banners hung along the tired rocky walls where gruesome red vines twisted into every crack and crevice. Black banners with the single sigil of an elongated human skull bearing razor-sharp teeth and curved sickle-like horns. Pillars held up the high ceiling, where small fractures allowed the faintest glimpse of moonlight to caress the broken grounds of the hidden cathedral. On the far end of the room, stained glass windows, all dusty and blood red in colour, were blotted out by overgrown carmine flora which had taken root. Finally, hung from up high was the magnificent crucifix, crafted of the crimson forest’s mahogany wood with the figure of a man, presumably Christ, and the head of a Sun, with flaming eyes and a pair of bull horns.

  In contrast, the central space, which once held rows of chairs for secret mass services, was cleared to make room for gadgets and gizmos. Metallic tableware and workbenches and furnaces and stacks of alchemical books and cauldrons and any other staple of a witch’s hut lay scattered about without a semblance of order, just like its occupant.

  Hansel Zimmermann was a man of almost forty, though the only thing that screamed ‘old’ about him was his fashion sense. He wore a beige coat, not unlike those popular in the previous century, though stained with innumerable shades. His hair was a bright brown and messy in form, as if someone had frozen a chemical reaction mid combustion. And his eyes were tiny jade crystals hidden under clunky protective goggles. He sighed and seated himself on his steel stool, spinning a small fleshy device on his table as he reexamined his blueprints. Glancing to and fro from it to size up the life size black engine in the centre of the makeshift laboratory.

  Then the door slammed open.

  “Zimmermann,” growled a hard voice through the doorway, heaving with exhaustion where a dark silhouette oozed with poison and blood.

  “Didn’t I just give you five vials of newly synthesized antivenom?” the Doctor sighed in the most dramatic manner.

  “One wasn’t enough,” Vasco grunted bitterly, dropping a peculiar object onto the floor and kicking it towards the German, “had to carve my way through an anaconda, a prowl of jaguars, a tribe of monkeys, an army of frogs, a herd of capybara and a mob of ‘humans.’” —he spat at the word ‘human.’

  “Well let’s hope you won’t have to slaughter a mob of humans anytime soon,” the Doctor bursted out into laughter, then composed himself after a few knee slaps, “Do you mind washing the poison off before handing it to me? Yourself included.”

  Vasco scowled at the jab but said nothing.

  The object was the head of a Choloepus cambi, in other words a two-toed sloth, yet it looked nothing of the sort. In Cambionology, as in all sciences, there usually exists abnormalities and exceptions. Some Cambions carry on traits of multiple different animals—for obvious reasons these are called ‘hybrids.’ Others carry seemingly nonsensical or impossible traits which have never existed on planet Earth—these are called ‘extraterrestrials,’ after the most widely accepted origin story of the Cambions. This head was one such example of an extraterrestrial characteristic. It wasn’t the head of an animal, no, it had no such means of consumption or sensory, at least on the surface. It was almost entirely made up of a spherical translucent jelly-like substance (reminiscent of an eyeball’s Vitreous Humor) and pieces of rigid red-and-black exoskeleton as support. This was what was known as the ‘Heat Ray Characteristic.’ As the name implies, this almost supernatural trait enabled the creature to fire concentrated rays of heat to such high temperatures that it could cut through solid steel. Sufficient to say warfare was never the same.

  Hansel picked up the head with a pair of yellow gloves and placed it next to the black engine he was examining.

  Vasco assumed a silent mask, folding his arms across his chest, and leaning unsteadily on the wall.

  “Don’t try to act all cool now,” the Doctor laughed that cat-like laugh of his, never averting his eyes from the head, “better to beg for mercy than die a stupid death.”

  “Better to die than allow an enemy a glimpse of your weakness,” the soldier said. Those were the Llanos words. “Besides, I’d rather hand myself to the American S.H.S. than allow you to get your filthy hands on me.”

  “What an insult!” cried the American, knowing full well of Standard Health Services Company’s less than glamorous reputation.

  Vasco sighed.

  Tap. Tap. Tap.

  The pair turned to face the source of the noise. An angular machine sitting comfortably beside a stack of test tubes. A telegraph was intercepted.

  “Where’s it connected to?” asked Vasco.

  Hansel went silent, “The NIA’s system, Cape Town to Washington D.C..”

  “Listening in on the CN and the FAS?” Vasco’s eyes darkened, his fists tightening on instinct, “a dangerous game.”

  “It was a command from the higher ups of the Church, we can’t disobey,” Hansel hissed, watching as the message was typed out.

  A series of dots and lines appeared on the flaxen, dry paper. It read:

  .... ..- -- .- -. .. - -.-- .----. ... / .- -. ... .-- . .-. / .-.. .. . ... / .-- .... . .-. . / - .... . / .-. .- .. -. -... --- .-- / ... . .-. .--. . -. - / -.-. ..- .-. .-.. ... / ..- .--. / - .... . / .-- --- .-. .-.. -.. / - .-. . .

  Hansel’s eyes sharpened, translating the words, "Humanity's answer lies where the Rainbow Serpent curls up the World Tree.”

  Vasco raised an eyebrow, “And what does that mean?”

  “I’m not sure but… this Rainbow Serpent, it must surely be,” he tossed the gloves away and rushed over to unfurl his map of the world. Drawing his finger past the FAS dominated Western Hemisphere; below the black blobs of Europe; through the European Confederation’s Africa; under the radical Hindustan, China, Japan, Suvarnadvipa and the East Indies; towards the fractured Australian continent. There. Right in the eye of the storm, amidst the Japanese Protectorate to the West, the Commonwealth to the North, the aboriginals in the South and the American occupied territories in the East was the Mandate of Arkaroo.

  “That must be it,” Hansel breathed.

  “An insignificant barren desert buffer state so useless that it’s owned by no one but the CN?”

  “Perhaps… or perhaps not,” the Doctor held his chin, “but what I do know is this: Arkaroo… it was always a peculiar name so I once got curious and looked into it. As it turns out, its name was supposedly derived from a great serpent of Aboriginal Australian folklore… just like the Rainbow Serpent.”

  Vasco made a grim expression, “So what’s this diplomat in Cape Town trying to signal?”

  “I’m not so certain. But the way this message is phrased, ‘humanity’s answer’ it doesn’t seem to be simply about the FAS and the CN, it must also be about,” he turned to face the banners hanging motionless on the walls, staring into their demonic skull symbols, “the Cambions.”