SEVERAL HOURS EARLIER
The world was a cacophony of shrieking metal and guttural war cries. Inside the Sp-16ia , the air was dead and thick, stinking of vaporized insulation and the acrid ghost of ozone. The only light came from the sporadic, angry flicker of a shattered console and the faint, sickly green glow of emergency chemical light-sticks rolling on the deck.
Feldwebel Alina Ludwig was entombed.
"Damn, damn, ..." The curse was a raw, breathless mantra, swallowed by the groaning hull and the distant, muffled roar of Scavengers. Her world had shrunk to the commander’s cupola. The powered traverse was dead. Every muscle screamed as she wrestled with the heavy manual rotation wheel, her knuckles white on the cold, unyielding steel.. The hydraulics and Promethium micro-motors were gone; it was pure, brutal mechanics now. With a final, grating shove, she swung the 3cm autocannon a few degrees, her eye pressed against the rubber eyepiece of the backup optical sight.
The jungle outside was a lurid nightmare of violet bioluminescence and muzzle flashes. Shadows danced and weaved. She saw a figure clad in scrap-metal armor raising a chainsaw. Her boot stamped on the firing pedal. The cannon roared, a deafening, physical of three rounds that shook the entire vehicle. Through the sight, she saw the target and the tree behind him disintegrate into a cloud of pulverized wood, flesh, and rusted metal.
A small, savage satisfaction was instantly crushed by Flora's voice, sharp and strained over the dead internal comms, now relayed through the crackling external speakers.
“Alina! The hatch! Chen is captured! They dragged him away!”
Alina’s head snapped towards the rear of the compartment, a useless gesture in the darkness. "I can't!" she shouted, her voice cracking. "The electronics are fried! I am too busy to use the manual override!" A catastrophic design flaw born of paranoia—a feature to prevent forced entry that had now become their cage. To open it, she’d have to abandon her post, leave the gun, and expose them completely. The was a wounded beast, and she was its last twitching claw.
She returned to the wheel, heaving the cannon towards another cluster of muzzle flashes. “Just hold on! The systems will reboot! They have to!”
Outside, Flora Rosenkrantz stood her ground, a lone island of polished Adamantine in a sea of filth and decay. The of her armored boots pivoting in the mud was loud in her audio pickups. Alina was trapped, Chen was gone, and the tactical situation was degrading exponentially. The was a paralyzed beast.
“This leaves me no other choice.” Her synthesized voice was, as ever, devoid of panic—a sterile statement of fact..
Her left hand reached over her right shoulder, the magnetic lock on her webbing releasing with a definitive . The Lp-95k pulse laser carbine slid into her grip. It was heavier than her diagnostic tools, its purpose brutally singular. She brought the weapon to bear just as the jungle vomited forth the next wave.
They came from the oppressive, dark canopy, swinging on grapples and bursting from thickets—a wave of rust, grime, and salvaged cybernetics, their war cries a symphony of engine snarls and frantic, blood-lusting shrieks. Their gunfire was a discordant orchestra of chemical pops and the whine of low-powered energy bolts, pinging harmlessly off her A-3 'Saturnus' armor. One, screaming, charged with a roaring chainsaw. Flora’s carbine whined, a brief capacitor charge, and then . A blinding blue-white flash. The chainsaw-wielder’s left arm, from the shoulder down, vanished in a superheated burst. The stump instantly cauterized, jetting a plume of steam and vaporized blood that filled the air with the nauseating, metallic scent of cooked meat.
Three others used the distraction, their own grapples firing. The clawed hooks shot towards her, cables whipping through the air. But Flora was quicker, her augmented speed and reflexes a generational chasm above theirs. . One attacker was center-punched, his torso erupting in a red mist. . A second was erased, the plasma explosion painting the foliage behind him in a grotesque abstract art piece.
The third Scavenger made the fatal error of believing his crude cybernetics could match New Terran engineering. He pulled. His winch screamed, and he was yanked off his feet, flying her instead of dragging her. He slammed into her chest plate with a dull, metallic clang. Before he could recover, her left gauntlet—not the weapon—shot out. The armored fingers closed around his throat with hydraulic precision, finding the gap between his helmet and chest plate. She applied pressure, not to crush, but to occlude—blocking the carotid arteries. His struggles, frantic at first, weakened into twitches, and then ceased entirely as he lost consciousness. She let the body slump into the mud.
A new sound cut through the chaos—a unified, screaming charge from her front. A group of five Hellwraiths emerged, firing wildly, drawing her attention, her weapon, her entire tactical focus. For a half-second, her world narrowed to the threat in front of her, the Lp-95k tracking, its emitter lens glowing with baleful light.
It was all the time they needed.
From a hidden boar-sized hole in the ground, camouflaged with mud and phosphorescent moss, a single figure emerged. He didn't scream. He didn't charge. He was already within ten meters. Flora’s peripheral sensors registered the movement, but her conscious mind, locked on the immediate threat, was a critical nanosecond too slow.
He wasn't holding a weapon.
He was holding a bundle of filthy rags.
With an underhanded, almost gentle toss, he threw it at her.
Small. Swaddled in dirty cloth. Emitting a faint thermal signature. Alive.
Flora’s body moved before her logic could engage. Her combat algorithms, she herself coded into her cortex implants; her tactical assessments, her survival protocols—all were violently overridden by a deeper, older, programming. Her left arm, the one not welded to her carbine, swept out, intercepting the bundle. The impact was soft, disturbingly so. The cloth fell away, revealing a tiny, grimy face.
A human infant. It made a small, mewling sound.
Flora’s world froze. The Lp-95k, heavy and ready, was trapped between her body and the child. She couldn't bring it to bear. Her targeting systems painted red outlines over the charging Scavengers, but her arms were occupied.
“What? Why would you—” The words were a flat, synthesized stutter of pure cognitive dissonance. This variable made no sense. It went against her training, against every simulated threat environment back at the Martial Academy.
The hesitation lasted two heartbeats. It was enough.
The Hellwraiths swarmed her. They didn't shoot; their contract demanded a live capture. They slammed into her, a wave of grimy, armored bodies, using their combined weight to drive her to the ground. She fought, a furious, silent struggle of hydraulic strength, but they were too many, their momentum too great. She crashed onto her back in the muck, the little one was held protectively against her chest plate.
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A heavy boot stamped down on the wrist of her gun arm, pinning it. Another Scavenger brought a rusted I-beam, dropping it across her armored legs with a final, crushing .
“Get something heavy! Put it on them, quick!” a voice snarled.
They knew. They had studied their prey. In a world of monsters, they had bet everything on a single, horrifying truth: that the Republic’s soldiers, for all their advanced gear and cold efficiency, still possessed a heart. They had seen the Republic's soldiers sparing civilians, offer aid, heal the wicked, protect the helpless. They saw that heart. And in the radiated hell of 2474, a heart was the most exploitable weakness of all.
And it worked, the bet had paid off. A New Terran trooper, in their shiny armor and fancy gun, was pinned, grounded, and captured. Not by a superior weapon, but by the weight of their own humanity.
The single, gut-punched scream tore from Alina’s throat, raw and stripped of all military discipline. “Flora!”
The name was still echoing in the metal tomb of the compartment when a series of solid and a rising hum answered her. The was coming back online. Emergency lights flickered, then held, painting the ruin of the combat compartment in a stark, bloody red. Systems began scrolling reboot sequences across cracked screens.
Training overrode the screaming animal in her chest. The logic was cold, clear, and desperate. Her hands became a whirlwind of cold, furious action. She slammed the selector switch, her fingers punching the new firing solution into the barely-responsive console. The autocannon snarled again, but this time with a different voice—a sharper, faster . Above the pinned form of her tech-officer, the shells detonated in mid-air, raining a focused storm of tungsten fragments down on the Scavengers swarming her. Figures jerked and fell, shredded into wet ruins.
But the cannon’s bloom was a beacon in the dark. Her thermal sight caught the bloom—a much larger, hotter signature from the tree line. A rocket, leaving a spiraling grey trail of propellant.
“APS! Activate!” she yelled, her thumb mashing the countermeasure trigger.
A single, sterile line of text flashed on her main display, a death sentence in glowing amber.
[Active Protection System offline. Cycle time: 8 seconds.]
The hit wasn't a surprise. It was the inevitable consequence of the previous EMP attack, a price she'd just had to process. Time seemed to stretch, then snap.
The world ended in a single, shattering .
The sound was not an explosion from outside; it was the violent, intimate death-scream of the Adamantine hull being violated. The shaped charge jet pierced through the
Adamantine flank like a white-hot fist through rotten wood. A fist of hypersonic molten copper punched through the side armor just behind the driver's compartment with a shriek of overstressed metal. The air in the crew compartment , compressed into a solid wall that slammed into Alina, crushing her against her harness. Her head snapped back, vision swimming with white stars. Then a torrent of incandescent fuel and white-hot spall filled the compartment, blooming into a rolling fireball of ignited ammunition, stored energy cells, and compromised oxygen lines. It washed over the rear consoles, which detonated in showers of sparks and molten plastic. The rubberized matting ablaze with a thick, black, toxic smoke. The temperature skyrocketed from sweltering to infernal in a heartbeat. Alina’s world became a furnace. She saw fire and smoke —a roaring, orange-and-black inferno that swallowed the rear of the compartment. The heat was an immediate, blistering slap, searing the exposed skin of her neck and singing her hair. Her fire-resistant uniform blackened and smoldered, the material doing its job but unable to stop the sensation of being baked alive inside her own cockpit. The smoke was thick, chemical, and choking, stinging her eyes and clawing at her lungs.
The animal won.
She couldn't see. She couldn't breathe. Primal fear—older than her ideological indoctrination and loyalty training, more real than any simulation—hijacked her nervous system. A guttural, mindless scream ripped from her throat, lost in the roar of the flames. Her hand was acting on its own, slapped wildly at the commander vehicular controls, finding the large, illuminated ‘REVERSE’ button. She hammered it.
The jerked violently backwards as if kicked by a god. The transmission screamed, tracks digging great wounds in the earth. The auto-extinguisher system finally kicked in with a loud , flooding the compartment with white, suffocating chemical foam, battling the flames as the vehicle bucked and crashed through the undergrowth in a full-throttle, blind retreat.
For several seconds, there was only the scream of the engine, the crash of breaking trees, and Alina’s own continuous, hysterical shrieks, her uniform and cockpit still smoldering, her lungs full of smoke and terror.
Then, as the IFV ground to a sudden, jarring halt, buried deep in a thicket, the screams died in her throat, replaced by a silence more terrible than the fire.
She unbuckled her harness with trembling, blistered hands and slid from the commander's seat, collapsing onto the foam-slick deck. The reality of what she had done crashed down on her with the weight of a continent.
A raw, furious scream ripped from her throat—of pure, incandescent rage. Her movements became jerky and violent. Her own gloved hand cracked across her faceplate. She drove her helmet into the nearest bulkhead in a blind need to break something, to externalize the failure burning a hole in her chest. She collapsed against it, her body trembling. The sobs that came were hot and sharp, less from sorrow than from furious, helpless frustration. She was seething, the emotion too corrosive for tears alone.
She did it until all her fear and despair were replaced by rage and hatred. The sobs subsided into ragged breaths, and only a single, functional, and rational shard of her remained.
The mission. Her people. She had to know.
With a shuddering, monumental effort, she pushed herself up. Her face was streaked with soot and tears, her knuckles bloody. She was operational.
Her hand reached for the comms panel, her fingers finding the controls by muscle memory. She keyed the squad channel, her voice a hoarse, strangled whisper.
"Chen Feng. Chen Feng, come in. This is Alina. Report your status."
The static on the channel seemed to stretch into eternity, a void filled only with the memory of Alina’s shattered voice and the hum of his own armor systems. The white-hot fury that had seized him moments before was gone, burned away in a single, chilling instant. What remained was a cold, sterile clarity.
Chen Feng’s voice, when it came, was flat. A stark, metallic contrast to the storm that had preceded it. It was the sound of a blast door slamming shut.
"… So, by 'gone,' you mean MIA, not KIA?"
On the other end, Alina’s breath hitched, a wet, ragged sound. "Yes. Flora is captured." The words were a seething monolith of hate. "The enemies swarmed her and the vehicle was damaged. I could not rescue her at that moment."
She offered no more. No tale of a frantic retreat, of a cockpit filled with fire, of primal fear overriding a commander’s duty. Alina Ludwig did not explain the detail of how she lost their technical officer. She would not confess her ultimate sin.
Not to him. Not to anyone.
To confess would be to make it real, to give voice to the failure that currently fueled only a silent, burning wrath.
On the other side of the channel, Chen Feng processed the data. Not a corpse to mourn, but his friend is now in hostile hands. Another mission, another .
A long, static-filled pause stretched out, dense with everything unsaid. When he spoke again, it was with the cold, detached focus of a surgeon picking up a scalpel, assessing the incision to be made.
"Understood. Alive is a problem we can solve." The statement was brutally simple, a tactical reduction that offered no comfort, only a path forward. "Send me your coordinates and map a rendezvous point. I am inbound."
He could almost hear the shift through the comms. Alina latched onto his cold competence like a lifeline, a solid handhold in her freefall. The hysterical crying stopped, replaced by a shaky, shuddering breath as she pulled herself back from the brink.
"Acknowledged. Sending coordinates." A beat, then her voice gained a frantic, sharp edge, the fervor of something burning away. "We have to get her back, Chen. We have to. I'll pick you up. I'm coming now."
"We will. Now stop talking and start driving." His voice was a low, hard imperative, leaving no room for argument or emotional spirals. "I'm sending a waypoint. Don't get us both killed on the way."
The channel clicked off, plunging him back into the silence of the ruins. He stood, a monstrous silhouette of scarred Adamantine and welded steel, his modified power pack a grotesque hump on his back. The horrific calculus was already running, variables slotting into place:
Flora was alive. That made it simple.
It just meant he had to go to hell and bring her back.
