Mereque watched from the tree line and felt the universe was having a good laugh at his expense.

  The six he’d followed, groveled in the dirt before something that used to be human.

  It stood almost as tall as him, wrapped in armor that couldn’t decide if it was black or white. The metal flickered like bad reception, splitting the air into hairline fractures that hurt to look at. In its right hand, a sword writhed like a living thing—bright steel twisting around itself, pulsing with its own heartbeat.

  One of the six opened its ruined mouth.

  “It had teeth, my Lord—”

  The sword punched through its chest without ceremony.

  It didn’t pierce. It erased.

  Where steel met flesh, the body simply stopped existing (no blood, no resistance, just a perfect circle of nothing that widened like a pupil in the dark). The creature’s ruined mouth kept moving for one more heartbeat, forming a word no one would ever hear.

  Then the knight twisted the blade.

  The living metal uncoiled inside the wound, bright veins crawling outward like frost on glass. The corpse shuddered once, black grains already leaking from every hole, and the sword drank.

  Mereque watched, bile rising, as color bled from the thing’s remaining skin into the steel (grey to white to blinding silver). The blade pulsed, fattened, happy.

  The knight ripped it free with a wet, hungry sound.

  A final thread of white light snapped between sword and corpse, then vanished.

  The corpse hit the ground like a sack of wet sand. The knight planted a boot on its skull and kicked it aside.

  The sword settled back into lazy coils, already hungry for another offering.

  The other five froze and the knight’s voice rolled out, cold and amused.

  “As do all things of worth. Power, strength, courage, these things have no meaning before the Will of the sacred Baptism. We have no meaning. Only the Dreams of our Holy Wyrm give the world purpose.”

  They dropped to their knees and started chanting, faces pressed to the dirt.

  “All blessings for He who guides us… our Wyrm who dwells both here and in Heaven… we honor your pain and bring you this bread… take it to ease the suffering you endure for us… we, your faithful and worthless subjects.”

  Mereque’s blood turned to ice.

  A white banner flapped on the nearest wagon: one single tear, red as fresh slaughter.

  Grace’s voice whispered in his skull, sweet and terrible.

  If you see that banner… run.

  He knew then that he had stumbled upon the Blanched. And this island, it was their land.

  The Knight raised its voice, lifting its sword as it did, as if that somehow amplified its words, “Abject Failures!”, it addressed them with an audible sneer, “Heed my commandment! We return to the Shimmering City, my brothers and I will find this foreigner!”

  “Yes, Sir Tarmour,” the things groveled.

  The knight waved a dismissive hand. “You will pay penance at the First Temple. May the Wyrm’s Will guide you to oblivion… or not. Your concerns are no longer mine.”

  They whimpered and shuffled off like kicked dogs.

  Mereque’s choices shrank to two bad ones.

  Let them go and wait for a squad of these freaks to hunt him later. Or end it now.

  One knight. One sword that moved like it was alive. One chance.

  He drew the Pelter, two-handed grip, steady as death.

  His ocular chip painted the caravan in wireframe green: sixty-plus Blanched, four cage-wagons, and one heat signature in the last cage that wasn’t animal.

  Human. Wearing fragments of black composite armor (sleek, modern, nothing like the locals).

  Someone from the expedition?

  Mereque’s heart slammed against his ribs.

  His ocular chip zoomed, sharpening the heat signature until it hurt. Human. No question.

  The figure was curled in the last cage, knees to chest, black composite armor torn, a patch on the shoulder caught the light: half-melted insignia.

  Not the captain. Not Antoinette. Someone else he’d failed.

  Or maybe not one of his at all.

  The armor was right, but the build was wrong (too slight, hair too long). A survivor from another ship? Another colony? Another Earth that never made it home?

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Didn’t matter.

  Someone was breathing who shouldn’t be.

  Someone was alive in a cage built by monsters.

  His finger tightened on the Pelter until the grip creaked.

  He wasn’t leaving without them.

  No time for plans.

  He lined up the knight’s helmet (center mass, triple-tap).

  Three shots cracked, every round hit dead-on. Then the armor… flickered.

  Black cracks snapped outward like spiderwebs made of nothing. The bullets vanished into the fractures and were gone.

  The cracks hang in the air like frozen lightning, then folded in on themselves with a sound like breaking teeth. Mereque’s HUD sent him another new error message he’s never seen: LAWS OF CAUSALITY TEMPORARILY SUSPENDED.

  He stared at the empty space where three slugs should be. Somewhere inside the helmet he laughed in disbelief. Fourteen thousand years of human science, fourteen thousand, and the universe counters with “nope.” He hated this planet. He really, really hated this planet.

  Mereque’s stomach dropped.

  Sir Tarmour turned. Slowly. Deliberately.

  One armored finger pointed straight at the tree line.

  “Blasphemy!” the voice boomed, thick with righteous hate. “Bring me that heretic!”

  They came screaming out of the wagons like pale hornets.

  Mereque was already moving.

  Twelve dropped before they crossed half the distance, black sand spraying where heads used to be. The Pelter barked again and again, steady as a metronome.

  He yanked a smoke canister from his pack and slammed it into the dirt.

  Blue haze exploded outward, thick as London fog and twice as mean.

  The Blanched stumbled blind, wailing, stabbing at shadows. Crude spears and rusted blades sliced nothing but smoke.

  Mereque ghosted between them.

  One step, one shot. One step, one shot. Reload. One step, one shot.

  A Blanched lunged from the left, spear low. Mereque pivoted, felt the barbed tip scrape across his thigh plate, and fired upward through its jaw. Black sand exploded out the top of its skull like a volcano of ash.

  One came high. He dropped to a knee, let the rusted blade whistle over his helmet, and put two rounds through the thing’s open mouth. The body kept coming for half a second (momentum stronger than death) before it folded.

  Reload.

  A thing with half a face lunged. He put a round through the remaining eye and kept moving.

  Another grabbed for him with a hand that ended in a perfect circle of nothing. He blew the elbow joint into black confetti.

  Twenty down. Thirty. Forty.

  The smoke tasted like burnt plastic and victory.

  When it cleared, only one still stood.

  Sir Tarmour, his armor flickering black-white-black, sword pulsing like a heartbeat made of hate.

  The air around him bent, warped, as though reality itself leaned away from his presence. Black fractures spider-webbed outward from his boots, swallowing sound, swallowing light. Where his shadow should have fallen, there was only a deepening absence (like a wound in the world).

  The ground beneath his feet cracked and bled white dust.

  He didn’t breathe. He didn’t blink.

  He simply waited, patient as extinction, certain the universe would deliver what he promised.

  Mereque felt the temperature drop ten degrees in the space of a heartbeat.

  This wasn’t a knight. This was some unnatural thing wearing stolen skin.

  Mereque reloaded on pure muscle memory, the click loud in the sudden silence.

  “Just you and me now.” he said, voice calm enough to cut glass.

  The knight raised its living blade.

  Mereque smiled without humor.

  “Come on then. Let’s see if you bleed.”

  Mereque didn’t charge. He vanished up a tree instead.

  The knight stood like a statue, sword pulsing slow and hungry.

  At the top, Mereque holstered the Pelter, snatched a fallen spear, and launched.

  He dropped like a meteor.

  Tarmour reacted late—inhumanly fast, but late. Steel met wood with a crack that split the air. The spear shattered; Mereque rolled past and came up in a crouch.

  He lunged, thrusting the broken shaft like a bayonet.

  The knight danced; graceful, lethal, patient.

  Then it struck.

  The living blade whipped out faster than thought.

  Mereque twisted, felt the wind of it kiss his cheek plate. The spear became two pieces.

  He drew the Pelter and fired twice, point-blank. Every slug disappeared.

  The rounds vanished into black fractures that weren’t there a heartbeat earlier.

  Mereque didn’t wait. He lunged inside the guard, shoulder-checked the knight’s chest plate, and drove his elbow into the flickering helmet with every kilo of Zaxvoyan muscle. The impact rang like a church bell made of bone.

  Then he leapt higher than any human had a right to, twisting mid-air, emptying half a magazine.

  The knight spun, blade carving an arc where Mereque’s spine had been.

  He landed light, charged low, shoulder first.

  Caught the knight’s sword arm at the wrist.

  Used every kilo of Zaxvoyan muscle and every ounce of momentum.

  The world flipped.

  Tarmour flew, crashed, rolled.

  The sword spun free and landed point-down in the dirt beside Mereque’s boot.

  He grabbed it.

  The metal writhed like a sack of snakes, cold fire crawling up his arm and into his gut.

  It didn’t just burn. It whispered.

  A thousand voices at once (men, women, children), all screaming in perfect silence. Every scream tasted like old grief.

  The blade pulsed faster, matching his heartbeat, then trying to outrun it.

  Images flashed behind his eyes: cities burning white, oceans boiling into glass, a sky torn open and weeping.

  The sword wanted more. It wanted everything.

  Mereque gagged, nearly dropped it.

  But he held on. Because the alternative was letting this thing win.

  An unnatural weapon for an inhuman bastard.

  He turned, smiling the smile of a man who’d just found the perfect tool for the job.

  “Come on, you abomination,” he said, voice soft.

  “Let’s see how you like your own medicine.”

  Sir Tarmour rose like a nightmare deciding gravity was optional.

  Two meters of flickering black-white armor, twice as broad as Mereque, missing nothing except fear.

  Up close the metal wasn’t metal; it was contradiction. Lines of black and white crawled across the surface, slipping in and out of existence, making Mereque’s eyes water.

  A single rod of the stuff peeled away, hung in the air like a promise, then shot at his chest.

  He leapt.

  Branches exploded under him as he climbed, bark shredding under armored fingers.

  Tarmour didn’t wait.

  Black-white wings unfolded from his back (geometric, impossible, beautiful in the worst way) and he launched.

  The air filled with flechettes of living nothing.

  Mereque’s chip splashed the incoming trajectories into his foremost thoughts. He timed the fall, the swing, the exact heartbeat.

  They came in a black-white storm, edges flickering in and out of existence. Mereque twisted mid-climb, flesh screaming as a dozen shards punched through gaps in his armour. Pain exploded across ribs, thigh, shoulder (white-hot needles that weren’t there a heartbeat later).

  He snarled, used the pain, launched from the branch like a missile.

  Tarmour met him in the air, wings beating once (slow, deliberate, inevitable).

  Mereque’s chip painted his strike in red: death in 0.3 seconds, clean through the neck.

  His enemy twisted at the last instant (inhuman, impossible).

  The sword bit an inch lower, shearing the left arm at the shoulder instead of the throat. Steel screamed against unnatural bone. The limb came off clean.

  They crashed together, a tangle of blood and impossible metal.

  Mereque hit the ground hard, breath punched out, a dozen flechettes buried in his side like burning needles.

  The severed arm dropped, twitched once and dissolved into black sand.

  The sword wrenched itself from his grip and flew back to its one-handed master.

  Tarmour stood, bloodless, serene, sword already raised.

  Mereque rolled to one knee, blood pouring from a gash across his nose, and drew the Pelter with a shaking hand.

  It wasn’t much, but it was something.

  He met the knight’s single remaining eye and smiled through the blood.

  “Your move.”