Empire of Fu Manchu

Myitikina
Crown Colony of Burma
Monday, July 28th 1940



Midnight. From the surrounding jungle, exotic scents and the chittering of countless small crawling things drifted on the cool moist air. The two sentries guarding the entrance to the home of the 3rd Ghurkha Rifles raised their bayonet-fitted rifles across their chests to bar the way of the newcomer, a young man of vaguely East-Asian appearance in loose-fitting white clothes which shone like living silver in the pale moonlight.

‘Halt, Sir!’

The man fixed a strangely vacant stare on the Nepalese corporal but kept coming.

‘I’m sorry Sir. Normally I’d ask you to come back tomorrow, but all civilian visits to the base are strictly forbidden at this time. Please leave’, the Ghurkha insisted, politely but firmly. ‘Now.’

The visitor did stop. Without any prior warning or apparent agent, the private Ghurkha’s head twisted savagely to face backwards before he dropped like a sack of potatoes. His corporal hardly even noticed – before his bulging eyes, the outline of the visitor wavered, became dim, darkened and expanded like a storm cloud chasing across the horizon, filling the sky. Where the man had stood was now a grotesque thing, a black trunk standing precariously upright on two thick tentacles. Other slithering appendages were wrapped around it in countless, snake-like coils. Where the human arms had been, two short tentacles waved. Multiple eyes, shining obsidian orbs grouped in tight clusters around the giant, earthworm-like maw bore into the very soul of the sentry. He whimpered weakly as the malign aura of a star-born thing older than life drove reason and sanity from his shattering mind, leaving only total fear and absolute despair. The rifle fell from hands as they stiffened into claws. Hyperventilating and uttering only hysterical whimpers of absolute madness, the corporal cruelly, savagely raked his own face with his nails, trying to gouge out his own eyes. Black Naga waited only a few instants until blood and gore had begun to flow down the savaged cheeks before extending a single tentacle and quickly, far too mercifully for its own tastes, snapped the neck of its victim.

The glorious waves of suffering and madness abated instantly. As it resumed projecting the mirage of human form around itself, Black Naga felt a pang of regret. But its quarry had showed to be more resourceful and dangerous than any before them, including that female that had so nearly killed it the last time it awoke. Although according to Black Naga’s hunter sense some of them, the most dangerous ones, had apparently been killed shortly after their escape in the flying machine (“Aeroplane”, the stolen memories quickly corrected), the element of surprise had to be preserved for as long as possible. Screaming, however appealing, could no be allowed.

After devouring the corpses, mostly to hide them from sight, the monster from the stars quietly walked through the gates to the base of the 3rd Ghurkha Rifles. It had no intention of allowing the quarry to escape once again, however temporarily.

Before long it had found the Bungalow in which, always according to its hunter sense, the mate and cubs of Amaterasu’s heir were hiding, sound asleep and blissfully unaware of the nightmare their awakening would bring. Only then was it challenged, and froze. But the two-man Ghurkha patrol barking orders to lie down and be apprehended were not the reason for the Black Naga’s sudden immobility – in fact, under the circumstances it barely even noticed them, so focused was it on the sudden detection by its hunter sense of the missing prey it had assumed dead. And not even far off, but in the immediate vicinity! This was stunning, because it implied the hitherto infallible hunter sense could be fooled, masked, blocked in some unfathomable way by the clever apes it had always considered only a source of amusement. The decision took only a second – they had to be destroyed, immediately, before they could mask their minds again and disappear. But not too quickly - their living brains would have to be siphoned for knowledge.

While dropping its illusionary camouflage, the creature unwrapped its fifteen tentacles from around the body in preparation for battle. Almost without thought, it swatted out the two- man patrol, abruptly cutting out their horrified screams. Then the ancient thing, flowing easily over the ground like some monstrous black spider, advanced silently on its unsuspecting victims.


What was left of C Company, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Ghurkha Rifles - 37 men, three NCOs, two Secret Service agents, one “foreign observer” and one rescued foreign national – stumbled through the dim threshold between the worlds, transitioning in a few steps from the Eternal Night of the Ghoul Realm of Earth’s Dreamland to midnight at the Regimental Cemetery of Myitikina. Most of the survivors were wounded to some extent, all were haggard and pale, and some, upon finding themselves finally back in the Waking World, burst into tears.

‘All right, Sergeant Major!’ Bond ordered with a tired voice. ‘Let’s show up in some semblance of order – form up the men please!’

‘Yes Sah!’ the Nepalese NCO managed to shout, wiping furiously at the corners of his eyes with the back of a grimy hand.

That was when they heard the screams – at least two beings that could or could not be human, to judge from the shrill ululations, shrieked as if in extreme pain or fear. The grisly sound ended with blood-curling abruptness after just an instant.

‘What was that!?’ Bond shouted, not expecting an answer. Skorzeny muttered a sulphuric oath and put a hand on the hilt of the Kusanagi. That was all the answer needed to communicate his suspicions.

Fah Lo Suee immediately mirrored his move. ‘Here? Already? How long..?’

‘There is no way of telling how long you’ve been away’, Duhrn replied without waiting for the question to be completed. ‘You think that was your monster’s doing?’

And suddenly, as in reply, Black Naga was there, flowing swiftly onwards on its nine locomotive tentacles between neat rows of barrack houses whose sleeping occupants stirred in nightmares at his passing. Combat appendages waving like tree branches in a storm, it headed straight for the group, an alien monstrosity out of the black depths of space and time.

For most of Ghurkhas, it was the final straw – as one man they shrieked out their horror and scattered in all directions at the impact of Black Naga’s intangible aura of fear and madness. Fah, James and Otto, having seen and fought the beast before coped better, while Duhrn although standing his ground howled in a hideous mixture of horror and delight. And so Men and Old One joined their final battle.​