Deep within the scorched forests of Belarus, where war relics rust and the air carries the weight of prayers never answered, Van Helsing followed a trail of missing villagers. Their final screams, captured in distorted radio signals, all ended with the same sound: the flutter of many wings.
At the heart of the ruins stood a desecrated Orthodox cathedral, overrun by darkness. Its stained-glass windows bled red light at dusk. Inside, the pews were covered in husks—hundreds of them. Exoskeletons of Necrothorax sanctum, the cathedral carrion beetles.
These beetles were once natural decomposers. But exposure to wartime chemical agents and sacred myrrh had mutated them. Now they didn’t wait for death—they invited it. Their saliva, laced with anesthetic enzymes, put victims into a state of living paralysis as the swarm feasted.
Van Helsing lit a censer filled with crushed mandrake root and sulfur crystals. The fumes confused the beetles’ chemoreceptors. Then, using a modified thurible rigged with UV-burst flares, he triggered their molting instinct en masse.
They shed their armor—and their protection—just long enough for him to crush the Queen Beetle, hidden beneath the altar, incubating in the corpse of a long-dead priest.
With the swarm disoriented and Queenless, the cathedral fell silent once more.
Insect Fact 🔬
Carrion beetles usually serve as vital decomposers, but chemical interference—like exposure to nerve agents—can cause erratic predatory behavior.
458socom.org 
Rispondi