he thought, his lip curling behind the scarred faceplate of his helmet. The scent was a violation. It didn’t belong here, in this graveyard of the Old World. It was the scent of the prey.
Hellfang Ares, a Hellwraith of seven successful hunts, raised a clawed gauntlet. The motion was fluid, a predator’s signal honed by years of slaughter and slave-taking. The pack—forty-four damned souls bound to him by blood, fear, and the promise of plunder—froze in a sparse, predatory arc around the eastern face of the main workshop. Their forms were a patchwork of scavenged armor plates, corroded cybernetics, and pelts taken from the rad-wastes’ more lethal fauna. In Ares’s hands, a custom-pattern autogun, its barrel flared and its stock inlaid with human teeth, pointed forward like a divining rod.
Without a word, two of the younger, faster hunters—barely more than pups—darted from the cover of a collapsed mag-lev gantry. They flowed through a skeletal doorway, their movements a blur of grime-colored cloth and matte-black plating. The silence stretched, punctuated only by the drip of contaminated water and the low hum of active power packs. Then, a sharp, double-click over the short-range vox—.
Ares moved. He didn’t use the door. With a guttural roar from his armor’s motivators, he leaped through a gaping, glass-toothed window on the ground floor, his boots crunching down on a carpet of shattered safety glass and brittle metal shavings. The rest of his immediate kill-team followed, a tide of snarling, armored bodies that poured into the gloom with predatory cohesion. The air inside was thick, the strange ozone-smell stronger here, mixed with the older, deeper stench of decay.
His eyes, enhanced by a salvaged mono-lens grafted over his helmet’s left optic, scanned the cavernous space. Hulking shapes of dead machinery stood like the skeletons of ancient leviathans, shrouded in shadows and cobwebs of industrial neglect.
his mind assessed, not in tactical terms, but in the simple, brutal calculus of the hunt.
His gaze swept over the silent CNC mills and laser lathes, their intricate guts long since ripped out for scrap. A grim smile touched his lips.
“Ares,” a vox-graveled voice crackled in his ear. It was one of the other pack-alphas, a brute whose name Ares couldn’t be bothered to recall. “The walkway. Second floor. We’ll take it. Flush them down to you.”
Ares grunted, a sound like rocks grinding together. “Do it. Quietly.”
He heard the distinct of grapple launchers, followed by the whine of straining winches. A moment later, the screech of alloy claws biting into rusted steel echoed through the derelict hall. It was followed by the heavy, clumsy thuds of armored bodies hauling themselves onto the suspended footbridge above.
The word curdled in Ares’s mind. The noise was a profanity, a clumsy, amateurish announcement of their presence. It shattered the tension of the hunt, replacing it with the crude blundering of thugs, not hunters.
His voice was a low, venomous hiss over the shared comms channel, a tone that promised a slow, painful death.
“You call that quiet? You sound like a yaoguai falling down a slag heap! The whole fucking ruin knows you’re here now! You’ve just told the shiny-gun where to aim!”
Silence descended from above, thick with shame and fear. Ares could almost smell their panic. He tuned them out, his attention refocusing on the shadows below. The prey was here. He could feel it. And thanks to the idiots above, the hunt had just gotten a lot less fun, and a lot more bloody. He tightened his grip on the autogun, the familiar, horrific weight a comfort in his hands. It was time to get to work.
Ares’s mono-lens cycled through spectra, painting the derelict workshop in false-color overlays. Thermal showed only the cold blue of decay and the faint, ambient warmth of a world slowly rotting. Electromagnetic was a silent, static sea. No energy signatures. No tripwires. Nothing.
“Spread out,” he barked into the vox, his voice a low rasp that carried through the vast space. “Check the machine corpses. They like to hide in the guts.”
As his hunters moved, a clumsy imitation of the stealth he demanded, his mind drifted. The silence of the prey was unnerving. It was a professional silence, not the terrified hush of a cornered animal. It reminded him of another silence, from a lifetime ago. The silence of his clan’s elders after he’d presented his first business proposition.
He hadn’t always been Hellwraith. He’d been born to a scavenger clan, a nameless pup in a litter of two. He remembered his mother’s face, not with fondness, but with the clinical clarity of a problem assessed and solved. She had two sons. She gave more food, more attention, and a slightly better scrap of cloth to the younger one. Ares had watched, his young mind not feeling anger, but a deep, abhorrent sense of logical inconsistency.
the child-Ares had reasoned, his morality a void where others had empathy.
His mother, by favoring the sibling, had proven herself the latter. The logic was pristine, monstrous, and inescapable.
So he had killed her. And then, seeing his younger brother as a rival for the now-available resources, he had killed him too. It was efficient. He’d then dragged their cooling bodies to the clan’s trading post, attempting to barter the biomass for a properly functioning las-pistol. The meat was fresh, the yield good. It was a fair trade.
The memory of their horrified faces was a bland curiosity to him now. He could not, then or now, comprehend their revulsion. Why was the source of the biomass relevant? It was inefficient to let usable protein go to waste. Their rules were illogical, sentimental, and weak. They had exiled him for his pragmatism, casting him out into the rad-wastes for the crime of being too monstrous even for their morally ambiguous world.
He’d been a feral child, a ghost surviving on grubs and stolen water, until found him. Erebus. The leader of the Hellwraiths.
The Hellwraiths were different. They were a pack forged from exiles, a collection of beings so broken, so vicious, that even the low moral lines of the scavengers had been too high for them to crawl under. Erebus had rounded up these monsters and done something Ares, in his rational and instinctive core, respected: he had given their violence structure. He had provided direction, targets, and a steady supply of plunder and pain. He was the Alpha, not through sentiment, but through sheer, terrifying efficacy.
Ares had offered his fealty not out of love or loyalty, but out of a primal recognition of a superior force of nature. Erebus had looked at him, at the feral, pragmatic killer in the boy, and had seen not a monster, but a tool of horrific potential. And Ares had seen in Erebus a mind that finally understood the simple calculus of power.
A sharp from the floor above jerked him back to the present. One of the hunters on the walkway had stumbled. Ares’s lip curled. Incompetence.
But his brief reverie had solidified his resolve. This prey, with its shiny guns and lightning-strike smell, was a prize for Erebus. Its technology would strengthen the pack. Its capture would please the Alpha. That was all the motivation he needed. The hunt was no longer just for plunder; it was a tribute to the only man who had ever made sense in a world of weak, illogical creatures.
As his hunters moved, a clumsy imitation of the stealth he demanded, his mind drifted. The silence of the prey was professional, unnerving. It was a quality he’d come to recognize over the last four months. Four months since Erebus had aligned the Hellwraiths with the corpo-lord, Teodulo.
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Ares didn’t care about Teodulo. The man was just a voice on a vox, a source of contracts. But Erebus had deemed the work worthy, and that was all that mattered. The long-term deal was simple, brutally so: deliver living slaves, get paid in dense, flavorless nutrition bricks that kept the pack strong. Erebus, with his predator’s cunning, had turned it into a glorious enterprise. They raided the weak, the unprotected, the nomadic—their oldest trades. They kept the best loot for themselves and traded the warm bodies for more supplies. It was a harmonious, profitable cycle.
Then, a day ago, Teodulo had offered a new contract. Erebus had presented it to the pack as the most glorious and dangerous hunt in their history. Ares had listened, his mind already dissecting the tactical implications.
The terms were… significant.
- Ares understood this. The shiny-guns were force multipliers. With twenty of them, his kill-team could dominate any other scavenger band.
- A cold, logical calculation. Even their deaths had value. If someone is dumb enough to die, the tribe eats. Fair. It was a concept Ares found profoundly respectful.
- Of course. The spoils of war.
Ares hadn't felt excitement, not as others understood it. He felt a sharpening of focus. This was a good game. The prey was valuable, which made the hunt meaningful. And now, he had cornered that valuable prey in this concrete shell. His eyes scanned the dead lathes and silent conveyors. he assessed. No reinforcements in this short period of time, no hidden arsenals. The prey was cornered, but not substantially stronger. This was a matter of application of force, of digging them out.
His internal assessment of the contract, the value of the shiny-guns, and the satisfying logic of the casualty payment was cut short.
The world above him detonated
It wasn't an explosion of fire, but of pure, shattering force. A section of the second-floor walkway blew outwards in a storm of shredded steel grating and composite dust. Ares flinched, his autogun snapping up—and his brain, for a single, misfiring second, refused to process what he saw.
A helmeted head, trailing a grotesque banner of spinal cord and shredded cybernetic wiring, tumbled through the air in a lazy arc. It wasn't just severed; it had been , with horrific force, from the heart of the blast. It cartwheeled past his field of vision and smashed against a dead CNC mill with a wet, definitive crunch.
From the newly created hole in the ceiling, the screams began. Not war cries, but the raw, panicked shrieks of men being systematically dismantled. The syncopated, bone-deep of a high-yield pulse laser mixed with the wet, tearing sounds of impacts on flesh and armor.
Ares stood frozen for a half-second longer, his meticulously ordered world of contracts and tactical assessments shattered by the visceral, brutal reality of the violence above.
His vox-channel erupted into a cacophony of screams, static, and frantic, overlapping shouts. He drowned it all out, his own voice a snarl of pure, uncomprehending fury.
"WHAT THE FUCK?"
Ares’s demand for answers was met with a storm of them, written in pulse-laser fire and shredded meat. The kill-team he’d sent to the second floor wasn’t just dead; they were being deconstructed. The syncopated of the New Terran weapon was a brutal metronome, each beat punctuated by a wet, percussive impact and the cessation of a scream. It wasn't a firefight; it was a systematic erasure.
In a single, crystallized second of pure, predatory instinct, Ares understood. The high walkways—the perches the corporate overseers used to lord over their chattel—weren't just a vantage point. They were a choke point. A perfect, fucking kill-tunnel. His men had volunteered themselves into a meat grinder.
He was already moving, his body a low, armored crouch as he scrambled towards the cover of a massive, rusted lathe. "Kill that thing!" he roared, the order raw and guttural, stripped of all pretense of tactics. It was the command of a cornered beast.
The response was instantaneous and overwhelming. A tsunami of gunfire erupted from the Hellwraiths. A dozen autoguns, a spray of heavy stubbers, and a few scavenged laser rifles opened up, hosing down the section of the upper floor where the fire originated. The air filled with the deafening, mind-numbing roar of primitive ballistics. The ancient factory, already dying, was being flayed alive. Chunks of concrete, rust, and shredded metalwork flew everywhere. A thick, choking cloud of dust and powdered filth billowed out, obscuring their target.
Two of the younger scouts, reacting with trained panic, hurled smoke grenades. The canisters clattered onto the walkway and hissed to life, vomiting thick, grey-white chemical smoke that mingled with the dust, creating an impenetrable, swirling murk. Visibility dropped to zero.
For a heartbeat, Ares thought it might work. That the sheer volume of fire would pin the bastard down, blind him.
He was wrong.
From the heart of the raging dust and smoke, the resumed. It was unnervingly calm, methodical. A blinding blue flash stabbed through the gloom, and the man to Ares’s immediate left—a veteran who’d once strangled a man with his own cybernetic arm—simply came apart. There was no neat hole. A fist-sized section of his torso vaporized in a miniature sunburst, the plasma explosion ripping him in two. A hot, coppery mist coated Ares’s faceplate.
Another flash. Another. Two more hunters, crouched behind a conveyor belt, exploded. One lost his leg at the hip, the limb spinning away into the darkness. The other took the shot center-mass and detonated like an overripe fruit, painting the machine behind him in a horrific graffiti of gore.
“Rocket!” someone screamed. A burly raider hefted a tube onto his shoulder, a crude, single-shot anti-tank weapon looted from a Syndicate outpost. He never got to aim. A pulse laser found him before his finger found the trigger. The high-explosive warhead he was holding detonated. The blast wasn't the clean cut of the laser, but a brutal, expanding fireball that vaporized the rocketeer and shredded the two men beside him, flinging their disemboweled remains across the floor.
Through the ringing in his ears and the cacophony of screams, a single, cracking screech of pure terror rose above the chaos, a voice Ares didn’t recognize: “There is only one of him! Kill him! KILL HIM BEFORE HE KILLS US!!”
One. A single enemy was turning his warband into a charnel house. In Ares’s mind, the contract, the shiny-guns, the glory—it all dissolved into the simple, horrific reality of the blue-flashing dark and the men exploding around him.
The tactical shift happened without Ares’s command, a desperate lashing-out born of jungle-fighting instincts that were utterly useless here. Enraged and terrified, several Hellwraiths on the far side of the workshop fired their cybernetic grapple launchers. The clawed hooks shot upwards, biting into the half-crumbled roof trusses with sharp . They intended to scale the support beams, to get an elevated firing angle on their tormentor.
Ares’s brain, wired for the brutal logic of the hunt, saw the folly instantly. This wasn't the radiated jungle, where foliage was thick as curtains and branches could stop a bullet. This was an open kill-box.
“Morons, don’t——" he snarled, but the warning was swallowed by the whine of their winches.
They hauled themselves up, becoming stark silhouettes against the dusty gloom, clinging to the sturdy but slender steel beams. They were exposed. Perfectly.
The unseen enemy above seemed to have been waiting for this. The methodical ceased its random slaughter and focused into a single, horrific act of precision. Four grappling raiders were targeted in a span of less than a second. The blinding blue flashes were nearly simultaneous. One took a shot to the chest and detonated, his body vaporizing from the waist up. Another was sheared in two, his lower half plummeting to the floor while his torso remained hooked to the beam. The third and fourth were simply erased, replaced by expanding clouds of red mist and sizzling organic matter.
Three more, clinging to adjacent beams, tried to rise, to bring their own weapons to bear. They were cut down before they could even straighten their knees. The plasma explosions painted the ancient support beams a glossy, dripping crimson. A constant, warm rain of blood and finer particulate matter began to patter down on the floor, a grisly precipitation from the slaughterhouse above.
In that moment, crouching in the red mist, Ares finally understood why Malus's men had been killed by the dozens in their supposed "recon" sortie in the woods. This wasn't a dangerous trophy; it was a force of nature.
“Boss! What do we do?!” a voice shrieked from nearby, raw with a terror Ares had never heard in a Hellwraith before.
The calculus was simple. The hunt was over. They were the prey. “For fuck’s sake, bail, bail now!” Ares roared, his voice cracking with a fury born of impotence. “Everyone scatters and regroup at the wheels!”
The order was met with a wave of terrified relief. The remaining raiders broke, their discipline shattering into a panicked scramble for the nearest skeletal doorways and broken windows. A few were cut down as they ran, blue flashes stitching through the gloom, turning their frantic escape into a final, stumbling collapse.
Ares was already moving towards a collapsed section of wall, his own survival the only datum that mattered now.
Then, behind him, came a sound that froze the blood in his veins—a sound that had nothing to do with the whine of lasers. It was the resounding, adamantine of something immensely heavy landing on the ground floor from the walkway above.
He did not look back. He couldn't. Survival was a straight line to the exit.
But the screams that erupted behind him painted a picture more vivid than any glance could. The New Terran had dropped into their midst, cutting off the retreat of the stragglers. The of the laser was now joined by other sounds—the wet, sickening crunch of bone, the screech of metal being struck with impossible force, the short, terminal gurgles that were cut off before they could become full screams. It was a melee. A close-quarters rampage of armored fists that crushed craniums and ribcages with each swing, smashing bodies into walls and machinery with such force that they burst, leaving behind impossibly mangled remains as macabre monuments to the carnage. The sound was a brutal, efficient symphony of destruction, and it continued until, abruptly, there was silence.