Chapter 172: Chapter 167

West Virginia was not what I had expected. Then again, it’s been what, a hundred years after the supposed Fallout 76 timeline?

 

The state was mostly avoided by all but the most desperate trading caravans, so information was sparse and potentially out of date. There weren’t even any Enclave presence left in the place, that’s how bad it was. What little we did know from eyebots and passing rumors painted a bleak picture.

 

Tales from the rare sane settlements spoke of the Great Reclamation long ago, which saw Vault 76 try to restore the state. Despite taming the land within a decade, the barely united vaulters quickly fell to factionalism as soon as West Virginia was theirs. Which explained why the region was filled with clans of varying degrees of bloodthirsty lunacy, all interconnected in a diplomatic tangle.

 

Eyebot feeds showed constant tribal warfare between the clans. The battles were mercurial and savage. One moment two clans might be tangled with each other, and literally overnight they could be marching side by side against a third party that happened to be nearby.

 

Or it’d become a free for all.

 

How there were enough people left to support all this madness would have been a mystery, until we noticed that the fighting was mostly non-lethal. Oh, it was savage and ruthless, with bullets and lasers filling the air, and brutal melees mixed in. But very few people actually died. As soon as a few people fell dead, morale clearly wavered, and eventually the fighting ended in a draw or a really pathetic victory. They were all bloodthirsty cowards, basically.

 

With that in mind, I ordered the full might of the Nexus military to roll into West Virginia. “Cow them into submission if you can, but if not, herd them out of the way.” A number of these madmen were violent but otherwise not eligible for admission into Tleilax, so I had the companies and bots to chase them off points of interest, particularly eldritch ones.

 

*****

 

The annexation of West Virginia was boring for all the raving lunatics filling the place. They couldn’t be reasoned with, only yelling various strings of nonsense when encountered. Cait preferred raiders, at least she could understand their speech compared to this gibberish.

 

“Pickay! Pickay!” they screamed furiously as they fired into the marching troopers. Lasers and bullets were stopped by shielding as normal, but these gaggle of madmen either didn’t notice or care and simply kept shooting from behind their measly cover.

 

Cait sighed. At least raiders had the sense to redeploy and change up their tactics a bit.

 

“Halt.” she ordered into the comms, and the squad she led stopped neatly. “Mark targets.” The HUD of Cait’s helmet marked out small circles where the other troopers were aiming their weapons. Once all the circles were accounted for, she gave the final order.

 

“Fire.”

 

A storm of green crystals lashed out, felling more than a dozen of the unmoving crazies. They stopped their screaming and looked to their shredded comrades with wide eyes. Using her helmet’s zoom, Cait saw how they stared at their losses, and some of them babbled some incomprehensible noise.

 

Then the survivors looked at each other, and as one they broke and fled, screaming in fear.

 

It was the fourth time she had gotten this result, a full four out of four encounters. Killing a few of them always sent their warbands running. Any prisoners they caught wound up as whimpering things that were so pathetic that they didn’t warrant the usual dismemberment. The fighting was utterly, utterly boring for Cait and the troopers involved.

 

“Sector B72 is officially clear,” she drawled into the command channel. “Setting up beacons.” The crumbled ruins that was probably once White Hall according to pre-war maps was nothing more than toppled bricks, rusting pillars and rotted wood. Yet, eyebots had picked up significant metanatural emissions from the area, probably underground.

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After the teleport beacons were set up, the NOD researchers came through with their equipment to begin the search. Cait and the combined squad from 3rd Company stood guard as the occultists did their thing.

 

A larger, more precise metanatural detector guided the team towards a barren field. The runes in Cait’s helmet didn’t glow much, but that it glowed at all meant that something was close.

 

“Right, before we start digging, T-weapons check.”

 

The soldiers gave a final check to their rifles, ensuring that they were at least half full. Some held Tiberium blades in their off hand, or the new grenades that blasted out fine Tiberium powder. After the incident in Philadelphia, new precautions were taken, no matter how minor the eldritch threat might be.

 

“Right, we’re ready to go.” Cait nodded to the NOD scientists. “Do what you gotta do.”

 

The redhead watched with some apprehension as the occultists carefully scanned and marked out the perimeter of the affected site, and then used a Mr Handy to start digging. Some ritual circles were created a few feet away, mostly diagnostics and security if Cait got the runes and chantings right.

 

After fifteen minutes, the robot stopped digging as its sensors picked up something beyond dried dirt and plant matter. Cait took a few cautious steps closer to the digsite, forgoing her rifle for her blue crystal blade.

 

The NOD occultists carefully did a scan before giving relieved nods. Only dormant energies. All guns and blades were lowered shortly after, the nervous troopers sharing chuckles as they loosened their built up tension.

 

In the end, they found a gravesite. More than two dozen neatly arranged corpses wrapped in burial shrouds, buried too close to each other, probably as a result of a ceremonial mass grave.

 

“Anything to worry about?” Cait asked the researchers, earning shrugs in reply.

 

“Nothing outright hostile yet, but we’ll have to check the corpses to be sure.”

 

Due to the many ways metaphysics can fuck the unwary up, bodies were rarely moved unless the metanatural energies around them were fully snuffed out. It was all too easy to have lingering triggers, especially accidental ones, be set off just because the corpse serving as the metaphysical stabilizer or anchor got moved out of the area. The same applied to trinkets and relics, but considering how often human bodies were highly efficient storage units for metanatural energies, the precaution was much more warranted when dealing with graves compared to reliquaries.

 

Cait idly watched the careful unearthing of the bodies by some occultists, while the diffusion rite was maintained by others to slowly bleed away the energies down to safer levels. There was a commotion when the shrouds of a few bodies were cautiously unwrapped.

 

The redhead muttered a curse as she saw what the scientists did and immediately activated her comms. “Cait to Sev. Found a gravesite with metanatural mutants.” Her green eyes did not stray from the withered, mummified corpses, or the unfurled shrouds that turned out to be wings. Moth wings, seemingly connected to the back of their respective bodies. The heads of the dead were also mutated, with oversized, dish-plate-sized eyes taking up most of the face.

 

And then Cait noticed something else, and immediately brought out her blade once more. “Ah, for feck’s… Sev, correction: They ain’t corpses.” Then she hurriedly joined the scientists, who were busy humming and scanning at the rising and falling chests of the uncovered bodies.

 

Thankfully, none of the bodies did anything cliched like jolt awake when the NOD occultists further examined them. But it also meant that the remaining two hours were utterly uneventful, with nothing to shoot or stab.

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