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"Oh hey! There's a Death Hunter and he's not busy!"

"Ben, that kid has to be twelve. We're not bringing a twelve-year-old along for the ride, what is he gonna do, cry when we hit a snag?"

The person in question, Ben, simply rolled their eyes at the other mission teammate and walked over to Gale. The group of four assigned on the latest mission - investigate Aria's disappearance - had unfortunately lost one of their members to an odd case of food poisoning, and were still one short of taking off. It was a five-member team because it was supposed to be simple, discreet. Investigate the site where Aria was last scene, take notes, come back, write a report. Even a so-called twelve year old could do it.

"Oh! I know you, you're that kid from the uh..." It occurred to Ben a couple of things. "Come here for a sec." Without Gale's consent, the older Hunter dragged them a bit to the side. "Look, I know you're on probation, but we really need a five person team. One person to have the supplies handy, and to take down the information necessary. If you don't mention this uh, probation thing to anyone else, I'll throw in a good commendation for you too okay?" They almost made puppy dog eyes and finally thew in a very pathetic-looking expression. "Please?"

"Excellent! Now, walk with us, we're about to dispatch. It's an easy mission, we're just going to see if we can find Aria's most recent point of disappearance, we've already tried a few spots, so it'll probably be quick, mostly just formal searching." One slightly overjoyed Death Hunter grabbed the shorter victim's arm and through the fields the team went, into the medical ward out of all places. It wasn't until they were up three flights of stairs that Ben finally, and rather sheepishly, let go of Gale, tapping on the door three times.

"The door is ******** open." Came a very familiar and irate voice on the other side.

"Nice to see you too, sir." Ben threw open the door, and didn't miss a beat, throwing a bedridden Caelius a rather informal salute. "Anyway I just want to say that the team is assembled, five people as requested and-"

"-I see four people." The Death Hunter leader interrupted, staring right at the group assembled. It was then that he noticed Gale, one hand immediately going to his forehead. "Ben. What is that trainee doing-"

-"And it wont happen again next time, I promise sir." The perpetrator gave an expression that sounded very much like it might happen again. "We're already late for take-off, I promise I will do the necessary paperwork for this when we're back, we have a tight schedule to keep after all, as you mentioned sir."

"Yes but there-"

"-I'll keep you informed through the cell phone, sir. Thank you, sir." Another salute as the team literally hauled it out. As they walked down the stairs, Ben gave Gale a slight wink. "Small hint: don't stay for Caelius's full conversation, just take the basics and run for your life." He paused. "Okay, maybe not such a good idea for trainees, but as a full-fledged Hunter, you'll realize his bark is worse than his bite, especially as it takes a lot more paperwork to actually punish another Hunter."

They were walking again at breakneck pace towards the open field, a helicopter waiting for them. The roar of the blades nearly drowned out any other conversation. "You'll be debriefed during the ride, kid." Ben hollered, letting the other group members climb in first. He offered the younger Hunter a boost up. "Anyway once you sit in, ask away, I never did catch your name. It's gonna be a long ride anyway, might as well get cozy."

The chopper took off without a hitch at all, and the ride away from the Eye considerably smooth. It wasn't until Ben handed Gale a headset, motioning for the trainee to take off their existing headpiece that Gale could actually hear anything beyond the loud roar of the engines.

"That's better." Ben's voice came loud and clear over the headset. "All right, everyone get time to settle down, this kid here is Gale by the way." A hand went to pat the trainee's shoulder: it was too bad the red-haired Hunter would be sitting next to the trainee the entire way, but with space as crammed as it was on the vessel, there wasn't much room for alternate options. A couple of voices grunted at the introduction but most of the Hunters were too busy trying to get some R&R before the mission.

"First of all, quick mission debriefing. At 05:00, sensors picked up an anomaly of Fear in the region known as the Sahara Desert, Western Sahara, to be exact. Not exactly a touristy location, but it does cover the estimate route path Aria took on her last mission, but for some reason, oddly enough, any golems we've sent to the area simply are unable to move closer to the anomaly and simply freeze up around the vicinity. We are to go in, investigate any possible signs of Fear, eliminate as necessary, and hopefully, if we are lucky, find more signs of Aria's whereabouts, assuming she is still alive. Chances are slim, but duties are duties."

Ben took a second to adjust his headset. "Now, personal duties. Ed and I will be going in first, and then the backup team, Sarah and Gale, after. Lionel will be keeping sentry watch from behind us, when the signal is clear we will head in further. Gale, as this is your first investigative mission of this kind, you are not unless under my orders as acting team leader, to attack any thing, it could put all of us in danger. Simply watch, observe, manage the equipment when needed, and hope everything goes as smooth as possible. In terms of equipment, the simple standard ones apply. In each of our supply bags is a Relic dagger that creates a temporary barrier when stabbed to the ground, a compass that traces the directions we last headed, and an accurate Fear Sensor. A built-in camera also takes live feed shots from the Sensor back to HQ. Now, umm, any other questions?"

None of the other team members even so much as grunted out of place: it looked like they were all used to the drill, and oddly enough, trusted Ben to make the right decision calls.

"Kid," Ben chucked, "Don't underestimate us Death Hunters. This is what we specialize in. We'll be in and out within the hour, tops. The longest part will be setting up the equipment. Now I suggest you get some rest, this is the Sahara we're talking about, not some ride to Fiji."

The rest of the ride went rather peacefully, a couple of mutters and exchanges back and forth but nothing of serious interest. Even the 'leader' of the expedition seemed to still for a second, and within the next hour, fall into rhythmic breathing: he was asleep. The next six hours went by in a similar fashion, until finally, the helicopter blades dulled, and the shaking vehicle stilled.

They were there, and surprisingly, Ben was awake on the second: that had to be a trained skill.

"All right, get your packs, set four barrier daggers into position around the chopper, another layer around the surveillance cameras, and then the standard Fear barrier over it. You can never be too careful." A couple of chuckles as the rest of the team agreed. The red-head nodded to the tallest of the group. "Lionel, keep watch of outside, get the engines ready if anything suspicious happens and we need to leave due to emergency. Also make sure your earpieces are working, it would suck if we lost communication with each other."

Ben waited for a bit for the others to strap on their packs and remove their necessary equipment, surveying the landscape. Though there were endless sand dunes as far as the eye could see, yet something was off. He put up a hand, and picked up one of the relic daggers, throwing it some ten feet into the distance.

There was a strange roar as the dagger seemed to repel the very sand itself, revealing a layer of hollow darkness underneath the sand where the dagger had landed. The Death Hunter did this twice, and three times, until he constructed a square entrance - a hole - right into the ground. "Interesting, well, it looks like we're going to need flashlights."

The items were handed out almost instantly, one for each of the four members heading in. "Don't forget to turn the camera on, Gale, just tap it lightly, sometimes the switch doesn't work." Ben did so for the trainee, inspecting the other team members' equipment before giving them all a nod of approval. "Well, lets get comfy then, its time to go spelunking."

There was no telling how deep or dark the makeshift entrance really was, but the red-head was already half-sliding into the sand down to the daggers. He grabbed the side of the hole where the sand seemed to meet a pitch black rectangle, dipped his feet in, and then swung down into the entrance. A pause. "It's shallow, but sturdy, it really looks like some sort of makeshift cave," his voice buzzed from the headset. "Jump in, one at a time."

The other two, Ed and Sarah, went first, and then it was Gale's turn. The darkness inside seemed uninviting, and the first thing the trainee noticed as he neared it was a strange smell, like something sweet and pungent.

It wasn't until he took five steps down that he noticed the smell, his weapon growling in the back of his head. 

'Hmm... dangerous.' Baki's ominous warning did not lighten the mood, though another few seconds later, Ben discovered firsthand what his weapon meant as his foot sunk into something with a wet squelch. Immediately in a knee-jerk reaction, four sets of flashlights pointed towards the noise - his foot - and-

- "Jesus Christ." Slowly, the Death Hunter pulled his boot out from the rotting body, shaking it a few times to flick the flesh and crawling white maggots off. As he pulled his flashlight away, he could see only a flicker of white and red: the way was littered in bodies. The entire entrance, as he realized with trepidation at the strange dripping noise and then the sickly-sweet smell, was created from human bodies. 

Suddenly, the moisture in the air made sense, and why everything that gone silent. He stopped, and made a split-second decision. Not everyone here was a veteran. 

"Gale, go back, trade places with Lionel.  Sarah, can you boost him up?" 

The Hunter in question looked up at the cave opening. "No, the exit is too high up. Lemme get a grapple and-"

-"Too high up?" Ben quickly interrupted, mind working quickly, "The entrance was barely six feet when I touched down, what-" 

And then he turned around, looked at the exit at least twenty feet up and realized that the floor was slowly sinking. Not just sinking, but their bottom consolidating, lifeless bodies pulling together like a demented quicksand to try and suck the team in. 

-"MOVE."

They didn't need to ask twice as they ran forward blindly, their legs sinking deeper and deeper with each step as they raced towards the exit. It seemed merely a pinhole now, floating deeper and deeper away from them. A clang noise as Sarah shoot the hook gun towards the exit: its aim was true as a rope hung from the exit like a lifeline. They not need to be told to grab onto the rope, holding on tightly as the coil wound up, pulling their bodies away from the flesh, the smell, the darkness. 

One by one, they fell out of the entrance, gasping and breathing fresh air. If the trap had not killed them, the odour might have. 

"It was a trap," Ben reinforced the statement to his camera. "A damn good one, it nearly had us all." He frowned. "I have never seen anything like it, for so much Fear to manifest in our world like that, and even enough to hide itself. That was a whole lair, and a large one. How did noone notice this until now?" Questions, or answers, would have to wait until they got back to home base. "It's too dangerous to progress further, lets call it a day and head back, we have enough information. Everyone okay?" 

A few murmurs of disbelief and anger came back. It had been too close: they could have easily have been a new addition to the lair.  

Gale was really putting up a brave front, and Ben respected that, not pushing the topic further. There were more important things to worry about at the moment. 

"Lionel, get the engines running, everyone else start cleaning up. We're leaving." He spoke directly to the headset, taking two furious footsteps towards the helicopter, trying to clear his head. This situation would require a little more than some rest time afterwards, there were some answers that required an immediate now, for example, if there were going to be any more victims. The bodies counted by the hundreds, and the casualty count would only go higher, if his hunch was correct. 

Ben pulled out his cell phone-

- and stopped as he saw someone distinctly not Lionel standing next to the helicoptor, directly against the glare of the sun. "Wh-"

The figure shifted with the sands, dressed in what seemed like pale khaki robes, layers of layers of debris and filth decorating its long cloak. It hissed and the very air stagnated. In its one skeletal hand it held a set of skulls in two even clusters, the fresher ones trailing against the ground. The sand seemed to coil and retract like sea waves as it spoke. 

"We are bored... Waiting... When will it start? There was nothing like the sound it uttered, each syllable driving home pure irrational terror, the noise unrelenting shrieks of its victims, the hiss of slow agonizing death, the feeling of raw agony driving its prey to their feet-

-Bang-

Ben fought to remain even half upright as the mere presence of this thing brought everyone struggling just to breathe on the ground. He winced, and fired two more shots, watching the being, the owner of that lair barely pause, black liquid oozing slight from its chest before the holes closed up.

His cell phone was but a few feet away from him. As the creature lifted a finger to taste its own black blood in slight confusion, the Death Hunter had already exchanged the gun for the phone-

-'Hurry', Baki pushed-

-and hit the emergency rescue button. It would take some time to establish a connection to an entirely foreign location, if not a waste of energy and resources, but this was as ******** urgent as it got. Ben groaned and rolled over as the figure descended on him. He could see the others fumbling with their weapons, and he tried to force himself to say something-

"You HURT us," the voiced hissed, so close to his ear he thought his very head was going to burst, the redhead writhing in pure agony, "How dare you PREY TOUCH US?"

The dull roar of the creature drowned out the frail beep beep, beep beep of the hunters' distress signal. The sound and blinking light was supposed to bring a sort of reassurance to its wielder. The sound and light was supposed to let the hunter know that the signal was sent and help was on the way.

But in the middle of the Sahara Desert? God knew how long Deus Ex backup was going to be. And all hunters knew that Deus Ex was too far away to send backup. Presently, by pushing the Death Hunters could at the most expect a team to eventually sent out to recover their remains.

The whirling growl of the helicopter blades Lionel fired up reassured the Hunters that he had already retreated and was planning a second exit. However, his action drowned out a lot of the noise, save for the hissing bold shouts of the skeletal-handed creature. The roaring engine also masked the approach of another contender, hooves pounding wildly into the Sahara sand. Pink foam flecked from its lips as it plunged over a dune, eyes rolling with the whites shining brighter than the sun's reflection off of the sands.

The death hunters could feel the rumble in the ground as it approached. If they turned their heads they could see the cloud of dust raised from the beast as it galloped towards them, faltering as its robed rider shouted curses at it with a raised whipped. The rider slashed at the flanks, ignoring the resulting ribbons of red that flowed freely.

As the beast and rider approached, it was clear to see that the rider was fighting the beast. The camel's head tossed left and right as it was whipped, frenzied by pain and fear. It would fulfill its purpose soon enough; the rider jumped from the beast and rolled, pulling something free from their belt.

In the blink of an eye the rider's identity was revealed as a blossom of blue hot-cold fire sprang free from the hunter's weapon, catching the cloth trappings afire. The camel shrieked and went the only way it could: forward, straight into the pale creature.

While this was going on the rider had taken off running towards the scene. The hot-cold fire struck out again at the form as the rider raced past, half-turning to keep an eye on the figure, a line of blue fire separating the Hunters and the waiting helicopter from the monstrosity.

This new stranger had bought them all time.

Still attempting to stop the pounding in his head and wondering just how much trouble he was going to be in for attacking - and failing, for that matter - without strict orders from Ben, even though he'd sworn he wouldn't - Gale did not notice the arrival of the new stranger until he felt the vibrations of something in the ground. He lifted his head, the sunlight bright and blinding, and caught a glimpse of -

Blue fire.

...is that who I think it is?

...Aria.

A burst of fire spread out across the dunes, cutting a sharp and burning line between the team and the skeletal creature. The pressure inside of Gale's skull receded a great deal, though the high pitched, horrible sound of the creature's voice still stung. Gale pushed himself to his feet, staggering slightly, and then very nearly toppled over when he felt something catch the tail of his coat, yanking hard. It was only when he felt hands against his shoulders, shoving him forward, that he realized it was Ben, pushing him towards the helicopter.

Gale flung himself into the chopper, hauling himself in, then twisted around to help drag Ben in.

Except...except there was something wrong. The creature had gotten ahold of him, and Ben's fingers slipped from the edge of the helicopter without a second's hesitation.

"NO!" Gale screamed, but it was drowned out by the sound of the blades whirling, lost amidst the shouts of the other Hunters. "NO, WAIT - !"

But then they were pulling away and the desert was disappearing from sight, leaving behind nothing but a blinding sunlight and the roar of something below.

Gale stared blankly at the wall of the chopper for several long moments, hearing nothing but the beating of the blades as they rotated and the sound of the mumbled, panicked voices of those already inside. He blinked, dragging himself away, and turned his gaze towards the figure sitting across from him. A thousand questions exploded in his mind, but none seemed to make any sort of cohesive sense.

"Where did you come from?" he finally asked Aria hoarsely, and sat back, knowing there was nothing to do now but wait.