He walked among them. The Scavengers. What was left of them.
A headless torso, cauterized at the neck, lay sprawled over a twisted conveyor belt, its posture still one of panicked flight. Another was fused to a molten chunk of machinery, a permanent, screaming silhouette in steel and carbonized bone. He stepped over a man who had been sheared in two at the waist, his lower half nowhere to be seen. Chen’s gaze swept over the carnage with the detached, analytical focus of a foreman auditing a production line.
A soft, synthetic chime sounded in his helmet, incongruously cheerful.
[Tactical Assessment Complete. Battlefield Dominance: Absolute. Hostile Combatants Eliminated: 58. Unit Designation: F, CHEN. Killstreak Multiplier: 1,257% above projected squad-level engagement efficacy median for this chassis designation. Analysis: Tactical efficiency rating: 98.7%.]
Chen’s prowling didn’t falter. His eyes tracked the trajectory of a splatter of something that wasn’t rust on a nearby girder.
[Cross-Reference: Legion Decree 7-Alpha. Performance metrics exceed threshold for ‘Rote K?mpfer’ preliminary candidacy. Marking for command review. Congratulations, Obergefreiter.]
“Noted,” Chen Feng replied, his voice flat and dispassionate inside the helmet. The word was a dismissal. The title meant nothing. It was just more New Terran jargon, another label for a more efficient killer.
They call him a hero, an efficient soldier, whatever they prefer. Chen Feng only wanted survival.
His mind, unbidden, replayed the engagement with the cold clarity of an after-action report. He felt a strange tranquility, as if a part of his consciousness was floating above his head, calmly remembering and observing the blood-stained armored man efficiently executing its killing program.
The memory was a physical sensation—a subsonic that vibrated through his bones even through twenty meters of earth and concrete, the violent pressure shift that made his ears pop inside the helmet. He hadn’t waited. The moment the launch signature had spiked on his passive sensors, he was already moving, not away, but . His full-spectrum perimeter scan had painted the subterranean layout of this place minutes ago: a vertical maintenance shaft, hidden under the collapsed husk of a laser lathe, leading to a narrow service tunnel for the dead company’s utility drones.
The Scavengers, with their scavenged, surface-level tech, had never seen it. To them, the world was two-dimensional. To him, it was a layered battlefield. He’d dropped into the shaft, the servos in his legs absorbing the impact with a hydraulic sigh.
The tunnel had been a tight fit. The oversized, brutish shoulder pauldron he’d welded on—the one meant to act as a ballistic shield in a firefight—had scraped and shrieked against the cramped walls, threatening to pin him. In that claustrophobic darkness, he’d been forced to stop, to wrench the thing loose with a grunt of effort and mag-lock it to his back. A necessary compromise. The loss of frontal coverage was an acceptable risk weighed against the certainty of being buried alive.
He’d emerged from a ground-level vent, a ghost in a cloud of settling dust, behind their ragged firing line. They were celebrating, their backs to him, their attention fixed on the apocalyptic cloud they’d created. They believed in their big bomb. Believed it had killed him.
Target prioritization was instantaneous. The leader was the obvious first shot. A single, blue-white pulse from the Type-95k. The microsecond flash illuminated the clearing, the plasma burst vaporizing the man’s head and neck in a sizzling pop. The headless body stood for a surreal moment before collapsing.
Before the first body hit the mud, his reticle had already swept to the two brutes manning the twin-linked heavy machinegun on the flatbed truck. Two more flashes. The gunner and his loader came apart, their torsos erupting in gory geysers, painting the truck’s cab in a slick, steaming crimson.
The rest were not combatants. They were a herd. Panic is a more potent weapon than any laser. Their discipline, already brittle, shattered completely. They broke and ran, and that made them easier targets than if they’d stood and fought. Their small arms fire—homemade slugs and low-powered energy bolts—pinged and spattered against his modified carapace. He felt the impacts as dull, distant thuds, like hailstones on a tank’s hull. Negligible. The layered steel and scavenged Adamantine he’d welded onto the APt-3 had turned him into a walking fortress. They couldn't hurt him. They could only die.
He had walked through them, a farmer scything wheat. The of his carbine was a steady, rhythmic beat. A man clutching a grenade—erased. Two trying to rally behind a truck tire—erased. One tripping over a root, screaming—erased. It was not a battle. It was a one-side-carnage—a systematic, horrific liquidation.
A systematic, horrific liquidation. Just like Kalki's Wrath. The irony was a cold stone in his gut.
The strange tranquility held for three more heartbeats. Chen Feng observed his own hands, encased in scarred adamantine, as they performed a weapons check on the Type-95k. The motions were fluid, efficient, a perfect killing program executing its post-run diagnostics. A part of his consciousness floated somewhere above his right shoulder, a detached academic noting the clinical precision of the slaughter.
Then, the trapdoor in his mind gave way.
The floating sensation vanished, crushed under a suffocating weight of despair that felt like mud filling his lungs. A wave of self-loathing, so visceral it was a physical nausea, twisted his gut. The exhaustion was no longer just in his muscles; it was in his soul, a leaden lethargy that made the thought of taking another step feel impossible. His thinking shattered into a thousand shards of broken glass—images of blue flashes, the wet of his axe, the coppery smell. He needed to scream, to tear the helmet from his head and roar his grief into the uncaring sky. But his vocal cords were frozen, his jaw locked tight. All that escaped was a breath, a whisper that was raw and broken.
“Ah fuck… my mom… she wouldn't… she wouldn't want me to be a killer.” He swallowed, the sound loud in the silence of his helmet. “What the bloody fuck have I done?”
His rational mind, the 21st-century Chinese patriot, student of humanity, gen-z gamer kid, and the son who believed in collective good, screamed at him. The words were clear, logical accusations. But he felt nothing in response. No guilt, no sorrow, no rage. Just a vast, hollow emptiness, as if the part of him that was supposed to feel those things had been surgically removed. He was a spectator to his own damnation, and the screen was blank.
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His gaze, unfocused, swept across the carnage and landed on a corpse propped against a shattered wall. The head, which had been lolling to the side, slowly lifted. The face was no longer a Scavenger’s. The grime and warpaint melted away, replaced by the familiar, gentle features of his younger brother, Chen Yun, in his twenties. His brother’s mouth moved, the voice a distorted whisper that bypassed his audio receptors and spoke directly into his mind.
Chen Feng’s breath hitched. A cold, clinical part of his brain, the part that had kept him alive through the years of nightmare, immediately cross-referenced the data.
The original diagnosis was already done months ago in a Republican forward medical center on Earth, and the new one was instantaneous and absolute. He was sick. He was breaking.
“No,” he grunted, the word a physical effort. He wrenched his gaze away from the phantom, his movements becoming jerky, panicked. His hands, so steady moments before, fumbled at the mag-locks on his thigh armor.
He patted the webbing, his fingers clumsy. Had he lost the tube in the fight? In the tunnel? A spike of genuine, ice-cold fear cut through the numbness. Without it, the trapdoor would swing wide open, and everything he’d locked down would swallow him whole. He couldn’t function like that. He’d become a liability. A corpse.
His scrabbling fingers finally found the adamantine mag-tube locked to his back mag-webbing, safe beneath the armored power pack. He ripped it open, his hands shaking so badly he almost dropped the small, unlabeled canister. Inside, nestled in foam, were a dozen hexagonal, grey pills.
He didn’t take one to feel better. He took it to build a wall.
He dry-swallowed two of them, the action practiced and desperate. He needed to lock it all away—the visceral memory of the axe cleaving a man in two, the specific sound of a ribcage giving way under his armored fist, the sight of a raider’s face dissolving in a blue-white flash, the wet, gurgling scream that was cut short. He needed to shove those sensory files into a deep, dark folder and encrypt it with a chemical key.
He leaned against the husk of a truck, the warm, pitted metal a solid anchor in his dissolving reality. He focused on his breathing, counting the seconds. In. Hold. Out. He counted the rivets on a piece of shrapnel. He listened to the faint, returning hum of his armor’s systems.
Slowly, like a thick, viscous liquid being pumped into his veins, the numbness returned. The sharp, jagged edges of the memories were sanded down, wrapped in layers of sterile cotton wool. The weight in his chest lessened from a crushing burden to a manageable ache. The hallucination of his brother was gone, leaving only the dead Scavenger.
The medicine had done its job. It hadn't healed anything. It had just buried the bodies, again. Chen Feng pushed himself off the truck, his movements once again deliberate and controlled. The monster was back in its cage. For now.
The synthetic calm settled over him like a shroud. The tremors in his hands ceased, the roaring in his mind faded to a distant hum, and the hollowed-out feeling was replaced by a familiar, weary cynicism. He pushed off the truck’s warm hull, the servos in his legs whining softly.
His first action was not a joke, but a ritual of re-orientation. He needed a task. Something simple, physical, and mindless to tether his chemically-managed consciousness to the present. His eyes, clear and empty, fell on the flatbed truck. A target for disposal. A problem to solve.
“Ah, people in my era thought video games could dull a person’s consciousness and make them more open to extreme violence,” he muttered to the dead gunner at his feet. “I think they were wrong. Pff. I do still have a heart. It just has heavy fortifications for this shit.”
The line was a key turning in a lock. The pragmatic soldier was back on duty. His eyes, now clear and analytical, scanned the flatbed truck Ares had used. It was a monstrosity of welded scrap, its chassis a patchwork of rust and mismatched steel plates. The tires were bald, reinforced with strips of bolted-on conveyor belt.
“Armor, full scan. That thing.”
A wireframe schematic flickered in his visor.
[Vehicle Analysis: Scavenger-modified heavy-duty transport.]
- Chassis Integrity:
- Power Plant:
- Armor:
- Armament:unknown. Manufacturing quality: abysmal. Bore erosion severe. Failure probability: High.
- Power Plant:
Chen let out a short, sharp laugh. “This thing is worse than the cars 400 years ago? Damn. It isn’t the same thing this place used to produce.” The irony was . The Earth of 25th century makes marvels of hover-tech, and was this coughing, sputtering death-trap.
His next actions were pure, ingrained doctrine: the total war mentality he inherited from a distanced, savage past. He vaulted into the truck bed, his weight making the suspension groan. He ignored the gore, his gauntleted hands working with mechanical precision. He ejected the massive ammo belt, yanked the firing pins from both stubbers with a definitive , and tossed them into the rubble. Then, he retrieved a high-intensity plasma flare from his webbing, activated it, and shoved the sizzling white-hot rod deep into the pile of 12.7mm rounds. The casings began to pop and cook off, a violent, premature fireworks display that would render the ammunition useless.
Satisfied, his gaze tracked the metallic reflections deeper in the woods—their motor pool. He moved towards it, a predator looting the den of the slain.
The clearing was a monument to techno-barbarian absurdity and a real reinvention of Mad Max aesthetic. He rummaged through crates.
“Armor, scan that pile.” He kicked a box of grenades.
[Ordnance Analysis: Improvised Explosive Devices. Primitive fragmentation design. Fusing: Chemical pull-wire. Reliability: Catastrophically unpredictable. Recommend designation: Hazardous waste.]
“They’re grenades, you dumb AI.”
[Correction. Scans indicate a 47% chance of detonation upon arming. Definition aligns with poorly constructed IED.]
He moved to a rack of firearms. One, a rifle cobbled together from pipes and a wooden stock, made the AI chime again.
[Warning: Object possesses characteristics of a pipe bomb. High metallic stress concentrations detected.]
“It’s a ,” Chen sighed, the absurdity cutting through the grimness. “A shitty, shitty gun.”
He picked up a magazine for a corporate-made autocannon he’d spotted—a massive, four-centimeter beast meant for vehicle mounting. The rounds were the size of his forearm. He hefted one. “Tempting. But no. I’m not carrying this goddamn anchor on an extraction run. Flora would have a binary meltdown.”
The decision was a point of professional pride. He would return to Flora and Alina with his Republic gear, battered but untainted by this techno-barbarian scrap. For a moment, there was only the hum of his armor and the buzz of the irradiated jungle. A fragile, fleeting silence. It was in that quiet that the alert came.
He wouldn’t trust his life to any of this scrap. It was all . His own gear, even battered, was a masterpiece of precision by comparison.
A soft chime echoed in his helmet, a priority alert from the “Rabe” drone he’d sent to perch on a skeletal radio tower. Chen Feng went perfectly still for a single, crystallized second. Then he let out a soft, weary breath.
His HUD split, displaying the drone’s high-altitude feed. The rainforest horizon, a jagged green line, was now smudged. A plume of dust, thick and brown, was being kicked up, winding its way through the broken terrain. It was moving fast. As he watched, the drone’s enhanced optics zoomed, resolving the shapes beneath the dust cloud into a concentration of vehicles. At least a dozen of them. Armored trucks, bikes, and larger, heavier shapes he couldn’t quite make out.
Someone was coming. In force.
Chen Feng froze, the data overwriting all other processes in his mind. Then he let out a soft, weary breath.
“Oh my,” he murmured, the sardonic edge returning to his voice, sharpened by a blade of cold urgency. “I think I’ve wasted too much time.”