Excerpt: Agents of Metal Pt. 2

The five of them were gathered – not to any of the planning rooms they had used before, but the recreation room. The data projector in the ceiling was on, but instead of above top secret classified documents, it was showing the pause screen of a rhythm video game. The speakers were on a quiet volume but not completely silent – the distorted tones of Metallica could be quite clearly heard. Sarge held drumsticks in his hands and looked slightly displeased, like something more important had been interrupted.

”We have a result,” Blowfish began.

Ian could not believe this. So soon? How was that possible?

”It was a low-level cipher. None of the other files have been cracked yet. What we have here is an archive containing a single JPEG picture.”

Low-level and SCEPTRE sounded like an odd combination. Ian immediately thought of the unencrypted file. Was SCEPTRE leading them? Did they deliberately want the archive to found and decrypted?

Blowfish connected a small laptop to a vacant VGA cable and the black-and-white image came on to the large screen.

It was a eleven-sided polygon, inside of which was an eleven-pointed star. Strange symbols could be found on each of the points. In the center there was an inverted pentagram, with some more indecipherable text surrounding it.

However, the text on the outer radius of the symbol was easily decipherable, even though the font was archaic. Ian scanned the words and felt like his blood was turning cold.

Molok, Beelzebuth, Rofocale, Astarot, Asmodeus, Belfegor, Baal, Abramelek, Lilith, Naamah, Satan.

An occult symbol, complete with names of demons and devils.

”A hendecagram,” Blowfish said. ”I had some time to research this, and turns out that within the system of the Qliphotic Anti-Kabbalah, those eleven names represent the eleven anti-cosmic forces, or the Wrathful Chaos. Combined, they form the eleven-headed black dragon Azerate, the anti-cosmic current 218. Two plus one plus eight and you get eleven.”