Chapter 35: The Wildcard and the Wolf
I hit the edge of the flats at a dead run, the Focus painting a faint ribbon in the dirt where a dozen small feet had mashed the grass flat. On the open plain the trail was idiot-easy—heat-slick sandals, Boone's long stride, Sula's shorter, sharper cadence. Once they cut into the trees, the projection turned into a stuttering ghost—broken twigs, scuffed bark, displaced loam. Night made liars out of shadows; I let the tracking program do the honest work through the thicket.
The ribbon ended in a quiet disaster.
Kids everywhere—stacked like dropped puppets, breathing but slack, black-fletched darts jutting from arms and legs. Ed was face-down with his ass in the air, three darts in one ham like he'd tried to tank them out of spite and lost the argument.
"Rion." Boone's voice dragged from the base of a tree. He was half-sitting, half-glued to the bark, four darts in him and still awake because that's who he is. The words came through gravel. "Thought… Stalkers. Felt watched. But the shape of the shadows weren't right."
He swallowed, blinked hard. "I counted two… then seven. They were men-shaped. Shadowmen." His mouth pulled into something that could've been a laugh if it didn't hurt. "Ed broke one's foot before they darted him. That's why they shot him three times."
I knelt, a hand on his shoulder. "These Shadowmen trained for and fought in wars where their enemies knew they were coming, wearing suits that bend light just like Stalkers. They literally trained to fight you —no shame in it."
He stared back, jaw set. We both knew his pride would call it a miss anyway.
"Which way?" I asked, dragging us from the rabbit hole we were digging.
He jerked his chin in the direction Ed's ridiculous backside was pointing. "Dragged the girls that way, too."
My stomach went cold. I swept the clearing again and counted—boys, boys, boys… all the girls gone. Oh, that can't be good...
Working theory spun itself without asking: they must have small numbers, tech made up for it, but it wasn't enough to take the world straight on. So you steal the future instead. The Enclave in canon loved eugenics; this fit their wheelhouse a little too well.
"I'm going," I said, already turning. "Get the boys on their feet and back to the Grove. Whoever hit you called in Old One birds—flying machines. I don't have long before they lift."
Boone grunted, grabbed his pant leg and started smacking feeling back into it like he meant to pick a fight with his own nerves. "Go."
I nodded once and ran where Ed's ass pointed, the Focus thread catching, then brightening as it found the drag marks of something heavy and the clean, purposeful footprints of men who thought they were ghosts.
The wind kept getting worse the farther I pushed into the trees.
It wasn't just a breeze anymore—it was a constant, pulsing shove, rattling branches overhead and making the leaves hiss like a crowd whispering. For a second I thought another storm front was rolling in off the plains, but the sky through the canopy looked clear, just that late-day haze. No thunder, no lightning—just this steady, unnatural gust hammering at my armor.
I slowed, following the direction Boone had pointed me, boots crunching over damp earth and old needles. The HUD painted the terrain in soft outlines, no obvious heat signatures ahead, no red pips screaming "ambush." Just that wind.
Then the trees opened up.
The clearing dropped in front of me like someone had taken a bite out of the forest. In the middle of it squatted a monster of a machine—Veritbird silhouette, but scaled up and bulked out into a transport variant, all armored belly and reinforced struts. Four rotors instead of two, arranged in an X around the fuselage, each one a blur as it spun. The air they churned blasted across the clearing, flattening grass and sending debris skittering in every direction.
I ducked on sheer instinct, pressing my back to the nearest tree, heart punching once hard in my chest.
And then, as the adrenaline spike faded, the confusion hit.
…Why the hell didn't I hear that come in?
I risked a glance around the trunk, visor lenses narrowing. The rotors were moving fast enough to make the world strobe, dust and leaves ripping around the hull in wild spirals. I could see the chaos they were causing. I could see the shockwaves kick off the blades and batter the treeline.
But my ears?
Nothing.
No chop. No roar. No screaming turbine. Just the rush of displaced air and the far-off creak of stressed branches. It was like somebody had taken the sound file out of reality and forgotten to plug it back in.
My brain took a second to catch up, then slid to the only answer that made any kind of sense.
The Enclave made stealth helicopters?
Of course they did.
I ducked back behind the tree, jaw clenched behind the helmet. The more I thought about it, the less surprising it really was. If you're flying in a world where Stormbirds own the sky and Dreadwings treat noise like a dinner bell, you either figure out how to be quiet or you get turned into scrap. And that's before you factor in whatever other flying nightmares GAIA had cooked up in the last thousand years just because she could.
And long before that, when the world was still choking on the Faro Swarm? Something like this would've been perfect. A silent hauler slipping past alert protocols, ghosting through no-fly zones while the bots listened for engine signatures and never heard a thing. Perfect for Enclave "shopping trips," hitting sealed research sites before they went into lockdown, loading up on toys, vanishing again without even a blip on a microphone.
I let out a slow breath, feeling the wind tug at the edges of my cloak, tug at the branches above me.
Stealth helicopters.
Because dealing with the Enclave wasn't enough of a pain in the ass already.
There was movement at the transport's mouth.
A ramp was down, and standing in that lit rectangle were four men in what had to be Enclave kit—but not the kind I was used to. No hulking X-01 silhouettes, no polished officer coats or lab rat hazmat suits. These guys looked…normal. Well, Enclave normal.
Medium-weight armor hugged their frames, dark plates over a flexible undersuit, helmets fully enclosed with narrow visors that gave off the faintest blue shimmer when they turned their heads. The joints were slimmer than power armor, more like an exo-frame under combat armor than a walking tank. Rifles—sleek, squared-off things with too many rails and not enough kindness—hung ready in their hands, muzzles down but only just.
It threw me for a second.
In the games, the Enclave only ever rolled out in three flavors: walking bunkers in power armor, smug assholes in officer uniforms, and people you shot for loot in lab coats. No real "rank and file" grunts. No mid-tier gear. They were the late-game raid boss faction, not an army with logistics and deployment options.
But this world didn't have a Brotherhood of Steel.
No steel knights hogging all the old-world toys, no PR war where the Enclave had to show up in their shiniest nightmares every time just to keep the fear balanced. Without an armored rival to one-up, they could afford to downshift—use cheaper, lighter suits on regular troops and save the power armor for elite units and priority ops.
From a strategy standpoint, it made sense. From my standpoint, watching four quiet, well-equipped Enclave infantrymen scan the treeline beneath silent Vertibirds, it just meant one thing:
They had depth now. Layers. And that was going to make kicking their teeth in a lot more complicated.
More figures emerged from the treeline, marching toward the transport's ramp.
First came a team in full hazmat gear—hooded, visors fogged at the edges, rebreathers hissing softly. Four of them moved in a tight box formation around a stretcher, boots crunching over twigs and kicked-up debris. The man on the stretcher was missing a leg from mid-thigh down, the stump wrapped in something soaked through and dark even in the low light.
He was screaming.
Not words—just raw, animal sound that cut right through the weird muffled quiet of the Vertibirds. Every jostle of the stretcher ripped another yell out of him, fingers clawing at empty air. One of the hazmat medics reached down and pushed something into his neck; a few seconds later the screams went hoarse, then slurred, then faded into broken whimpers.
Behind them, another hazmat team carried a body bag.
Next came the stealth team, the same shade of wrong as the Vertibirds—armor that didn't quite reflect the light right, edges that blurred when they moved, visors dark and unreadable. They fanned out in a loose wedge, weapons pointed mostly down but angled just enough to say try something.
Threaded between them were more of the frontline troopers I'd spotted at the ramp earlier. Two of them walked tight on either side of the girls—wrists bound, heads down, stumbled steps "assisted" by firm grabs on their arms and the occasional shove when they lagged.
Seeing them hit me like a punch behind the ribs.
Even at this distance I could pick out familiar outlines—hair, posture, little pieces my brain matched to memories of them walking free. Now they were just silhouettes bracketed by armored bastards, marched toward an open metal mouth.
And in the rear, bringing up the tail of the little parade, was the last stealth operative.
He had Sula slung over his shoulder in a fireman's carry like she weighed nothing. Her arms hung limp, hair spilling down his back, one leg bouncing slightly with every step. No struggle, no movement.
For a second the world narrowed down to that image—Sula, who'd danced through fights that should've killed her, reduced to cargo on some Enclave spook's shoulder.
My hands tightened on my rifle until my gauntlets creaked.
Silent Vertibirds, layered infantry, stealth ops, dedicated med teams, prisoners in tow.
The Enclave weren't a half-remembered endgame faction anymore. They were a fully functioning, well-oiled machine.
And they had my people.
My first instinct was to put a round through the bastard carrying Sula.
Finger twitched on the trigger, sight already drifting toward the rear of the column—but my eyes slid past him, up, and the rest of my brain slammed the brakes.
Two Vertibirds wheeled overhead like lazy vultures, cutting slow circles over the clearing. From down here they looked almost casual, rotors whispering instead of roaring, silhouettes barely more than darker smudges against the sky. But I could see the gun pods, the underslung launchers, the chin-mounted cannons that would turn my patch of trees into mulch the second I lit someone up on the ground.
Hit the grunts, die to the air cover. Simple math. Bad math.
I let out a slow breath, forced my hands to loosen. The Railwhistle's stock creaked as I eased off it. Much as I loved the rifle, it wasn't the right tool for this.
"Okay," I muttered to myself. "We do this the hard way."
I let the Railwhistle drop. The sling caught it, the weight thumping against my side. My right hand was already going for the weapon locked to the magnetic mount on my back.
Zeus' Wrath came free with a heavy, satisfying pull—a brutal length of metal and coils, more cannon than gun, all sharp angles and exposed conduction rails. It took both hands to bring it around, stock settling into the pocket of my shoulder, muzzle tilting skyward.
Even powered down, it felt like holding a thunderstorm.
I thumbed the activation stud and the weapon woke up with a rising whine, blue status LEDs flickering to life along the housing. The air around the barrel started to taste like tin and ozone, little hairs on my arms prickling inside the undersuit as the capacitors spun up.
I sighted along the top rail, picked one of the circling Vertibirds, banking just low enough that I had a clean angle on its belly—and locked it in.
"Let's see how quiet you fly with a lightning bolt up your ass," I whispered, tightening my grip as Zeus' Wrath climbed toward full charge.
I tracked the higher bird.
The lower Vertibird was the scarier one—closer, cleaner line of fire—but the higher one had the better angle to make this everyone's problem. I followed its lazy circle for a heartbeat, letting my brain run the math on its arc, drift, and speed.
There.
I led the target a few meters, exhaled, and squeezed.
Zeus' Wrath didn't so much fire as it unleashed. A lance of blue-white lightning ripped out of the barrel, the recoil shoving hard into my shoulder as the world went briefly white at the edges. The bolt hit the upper Vertibird just aft of its forward rotor—right where the lift and control would be fighting each other.
The result was instant chaos.
The rotor stuttered, then seized, blades shredding themselves in a spray of molten metal and spinning shrapnel. The Vertibird lurched sideways like someone had kicked its legs out from under it. Its controlled circle turned into a drunken, spiraling dive—straight into the path of the lower craft.
I couldn't help but think of that one episode of the Mandalorian where Boba Fett took out two Empire ships with one rocket as they collided in mid-air with a sound like a car crash inside a thunderclap.
Like him I didn't plan that but I wasn't going to argue with the results.
The two birds locked together, rotors chewing each other apart, fuselages grinding and twisting. For a second they almost held, welded together by bad luck, then gravity pulled them into a shared death spiral. Something inside one of them went critical—fuel, capacitors, whatever—and a bloom of orange fire punched out of the mess as they tumbled toward the forest beyond the clearing.
Only then did the Enclave on the ground react.
Shouts. Heads snapped up, rifles coming off low ready as everyone pivoted to stare at the twin flaming wrecks pinwheeling out of the sky.
Their eyes weren't on the treeline anymore.
Perfect.
I dropped Zeus' Wrath, letting the cannon fall away as its charge bled off in a hiss of static. The Nanoboy's grav clamps caught it mid-drop, the weapon dissolving into a ripple of blue motes as it folded into storage.
My hands were already moving.
I hauled the Railwhistle up, stock in my shoulder, cheek to the rest. My thumb brushed the Focus stud on my temple and I felt the familiar lurch in my gut as Concentration kicked in.
Time didn't stop, but it slowed enough to feel wrong.
The roar of the crashing Vertibirds stretched out into a drawn-out metallic groan. Falling debris crawled through the air. The screams dulled into distant echoes. My world narrowed to the rifle, my breathing, and targets.
Stealth suits first.
If those bastards got a chance to cloak and reposition, I'd be flanked, pinned, and very, very dead.
The first operative flickered in my sight picture—mid-turn, head snapping up toward the sky. I centered the Railwhistle's reticle on the dark visor and stroked the trigger. The spike round punched out with a flat crack, and in slowed time I watched it cross the distance and slam into his helmet.
The visor imploded. A spray of red mist and ruined composite burst out the back as he folded like a puppet with its strings cut.
Next.
I snapped the barrel to the left, muzzle tracking smooth and fast in the syrup-slow air. The second stealth op had his weapon halfway up, body turning toward the trees. Same shot, same sight alignment, same pull.
Another spike hit home. Another head snapped back and dropped.
Third target—this one quicker, dropping toward a knee, weapon already coming up toward where the shot had to be coming from. Smart. Too slow.
I led him a fraction, compensating for the movement my pre-fall training manual had drilled into my skull back in that bunker. Breathe, squeeze, reset.
The round punched through his visor at an angle, snapping his head sideways. He sagged bonelessly, rifle clattering from limp fingers.
Three down.
I was swinging for number four when the world convulsed.
A thunderous thud slammed through the clearing, a physical impact more than a sound. The shockwave rolled out in a dirty wave, kicking up a wall of dust and loose dirt. Trees shivered. My Concentration flickered as my focus wavered and, for a second, everything blurred.
I blinked hard, fighting to keep the ability up, but the sudden loss of visual killed my lane.
When the dust washed over my position, I lost them.
No clean outline of the fourth operative. No visual on the fifth man—the one carrying Sula. Just silhouettes and movement swallowed in a boiling curtain of brown and gray.
"Shit—"
Then a second thud hit.
Lower, closer. The kind of impact you felt in your teeth and spine. Two heavy hits, seconds apart.
There should have only been one.
One crash from the Vertibirds augering in. One big, horrible, final punctuation mark to the mess I'd made in the sky.
But that wasn't what I'd just heard.
"The math isn't mathing," I muttered, brain scrambling through possibilities. Two crashes? No—more like a crash and a…landing.
A very specific memory surfaced. A memory from playing a game. From a rooftop of a museum, ripping minigun from a wreck, the power fantasy burned in every Fallout player's hindbrain: a suit of armor stepping off a roof, hitting the ground like an artillery shell, and then just walking it off. And unleashing hell.
Oh.
Oh, hell.
"Oooooh shit," I breathed as I realized the script had been flipped.
The dust was still settling, but I could already feel the clock ticking, an invisible countdown slamming down over the firefight. Right now I had panicked med team and grunts, slowly reorganizing stealth ops.
In a few moments, I was going to have all of that plus a Neo-Nazi in a walking tank stomping into the clearing looking for whoever shot down his ride.
You're probably thinking, "Haven't you fought a guy in power armor before?"
Yeah. I have.
Armor that was a thousand years old, barely held together with duct tape and prayer, piloted by a broken man whose brain was eighty percent mush and twenty percent depression.
This wasn't that.
The Mecha-Nazi coming my way was wearing brand new armor. Clean seals, fresh servos, full power output. And the fact they had rank-and-file grunts, told me something important:
If you got to ride in power armor in this version of the Enclave, you earned that bastard.
So yeah.
The coming fight was going to be fun.
(Spoiler: that's sarcasm.)
Every second the power armor stomped closer, the invisible countdown in my head got louder. I pushed it to the edge of my thoughts and focused on the grunts still in the clearing.
They immediately demonstrated why they weren't trusted with walking tanks.
Their first return fire was pure panic—muzzles jerking all over, bursts too long, trigger discipline nonexistent. Rounds chewed up bark way off to my left, shredded leaves above me, sparked off rocks nowhere near where I actually was. They had no idea how many of us were in the trees, only a vague mental circle of "somewhere over there" where I'd fired from.
Their comms were even worse.
"Contact! CONTACT!—"
"Where the fuck did that shot come from?!"
"I can't see shit in this dust, man!"
"Check your thermals, check your thermals—"
"They're bouncing! My HUD's full of static! Did we get hit with an EMP?!"
"Who the hell brought a railgun to Kansas?!"
Voices overlapped, climbed over each other, devolved into half-shouted questions and swearing. No call signs, no fire teams, no actual structure. Just scared guys in expensive armor.
Then another voice cut through the chaos—low, rough, and carrying that particular clipped cadence I'd heard from drill sergeants in old movies and audiobooks. The kind of voice used to being obeyed.
"ALL ELEMENTS, SHUT YOUR DAMN MOUTHS."
The comm traffic snapped off so hard it might as well have been a switch.
Underneath his words, I could hear it now—heavy, rhythmic thuds and the faint whine of servos over open mic. Power armor footsteps, getting closer.
"Alpha, Bravo, form a base of fire on that treeline," the voice ordered. "You don't need to see them, you just need to keep their head down. Lay down suppressive until I reach the AO. Copy?"
A shaky chorus of "Copy!" and "Y-yes sir!" followed.
They started blind-firing into the woods, just like he'd told them to. Long bursts scythed across the tree line, chopping branches and turning chunks of cover into splinters. Chips of bark stung my armor as I hugged closer to my tree, letting them burn through magazines on ghosts.
I leaned out on the lull between bursts and sent spikes snapping back across the clearing.
The Railwhistle kicked against my shoulder, each round shrieking out with that familiar crack, the bright heated spike streaking through dust and smoke. I tagged one grunt center mass—his chest plate popped, the spike hitting hard enough to knock him flat on his back.
For a split second I thought I'd punched clean through him.
Then he groaned, rolled, and started clawing his way back to his feet.
"The hell…?"
I flicked my Focus, zooming in. The HUD sharpened on the impact point—his chest plate was spiderwebbed with cracks, the surface shredded and half-caved in, but the spike hadn't actually gone through. Just lodged there, stuck.
Under the torn armor, something glistened.
A sloshy, semi-translucent layer bulged through the crack—a gel-like material puckering outward, shot through with faint hex-patterns as it redistributed the force.
"Of course," I muttered. "Of course they have anti-tribal armor."
I scanned the others. Same deal—chunky plates, slightly bulky around the torso and thighs. Now that I knew what to look for, it was obvious: extra volume to house a gel layer designed to soak low-velocity impacts. Perfect against arrows, spears, and yeah—spike rounds that didn't have true firearm velocities.
The stealth suits didn't have it. Made sense—extra padding like that would be a nightmare for mobility and cloaking. But these frontline troopers? Walking gel packs with guns.
I snapped another shot, aiming for a different grunt's shoulder. The spike smashed into the pauldron, cracked it wide open, and sent him spinning sideways with a shout. When he hit the ground, he clutched at his arm—but a second later he was still moving, still functional. Hurt, definitely. Dead, no.
Spikes could crack the armor.
But that gel layer stopped them there.
In gaming logic, I'd just discovered a mechanic: break the armor bar, then you get to hit the health bar. No more easy one-tap headshots like in Horizon, where a well-placed arrow and a decent bow dropped a human instantly. The Enclave had turned that on its head.
Their helmets and chest plates weren't weak points—they were shields with built-in forgiveness.
They were more dangerous than any tribal for that reason alone. I couldn't just pop a head and move on; I had to chip away at their protection first, strip them down, then go for the kill.
And I had a walking tank on a timer marching straight toward the fight.
"Fine," I growled under my breath. "We'll do it the hard way."
I let the Railwhistle drop against its sling and my hand dipped to the lower holster at my side, fingers closing around a much more familiar, much less subtle friend.
I drew the revolver.
The revolver felt almost light after the Railwhistle.
Six big, ugly rounds waiting in the cylinder. Old-world logic in a world that had gotten way too comfortable with lasers and railguns.
I picked a target with fresh armor first—one of the troopers still braced behind an intact chest plate, no cracks, no gel leak. He was firing in my general direction, rifle jerking in short, panicked bursts like he was trying to convince himself he was being useful.
I lined up on his torso, exhaled, and squeezed.
The revolver boomed, a deep, concussive bark that rolled back off the trees. The recoil kicked straight into my wrist, reminding me that this thing was built for stopping power, not comfort. The round crossed the gap in a blink and hit him dead-center in the chest.
Ping.
The sound it made wasn't meat. It was metal—sharp, ringing, almost clean. The trooper flinched, staggered half a step back, looked down, and then looked up again like someone had just thrown a rock at his plate carrier.
"Yeah," I hissed. "Thought so."
The armor there was still pristine. Maybe a fresh scuff mark, maybe a tiny crater if I zoomed in, but nothing that would stop him from fighting. Gel hadn't even needed to work overtime.
So: theory time.
I shifted my aim, searching through the chaos for someone who'd already been softened up.
Found him—a trooper I'd tagged earlier with the Railwhistle. His chest plate was blown out on one side, fractured into jagged petals. The gel layer beneath was oozing, slimy and dark, pulsing with each breath as it slowly drained and slumped, no longer able to hold its shape.
Perfect.
I put the revolver on him.
This time I aimed just inside the cratered section, where the armor was half-gone and the gel exposed, already busy trying—and failing—to pretend it was still a barrier.
I squeezed the trigger.
The shot hit with a wet thunk instead of a ping.
The round punched through the compromised plate, tore through the sagging gel, and found actual flesh underneath. The trooper spasmed like a puppet yanked by invisible strings, the air leaving his lungs in a surprised "Huhh—" that I could hear even over the gunfire.
He dropped.
One hand clawed at his chest, coming away red. His legs folded a second later, body collapsing hard into the dirt and staying there, armor clattering against rock.
"Bingo," I muttered.
Break the shell, then crack the egg. Maybe I could double tap with the spikes but I had a thought that their armor was more smartly designed. That layer had likely programmed itself to block incoming attacks with the same velocity and mass.
So change the velocity and mass, you can hit the meat and the bastards goes down.
But the moment the trooper actually stayed down, everything changed.
Up until now, they'd treated this like a weird tribal ambush. The spikes, to them, were just some creative lunatic's take on arrows. The lightning bolt that nuked their Vertibirds? Salvaged machine tech, maybe some corrupted Stormbird cannon or a hacked Watcher lens—dangerous, sure, but still in the "angry locals with toys" category.
But a clean handgun report cutting across the clearing?
That sound was universal.
I watched the dead trooper twitch once and go still, smoke curling faintly from the cracked ruin of his chest plate, and then the Enclave comms exploded.
"Holy shit—HIT, HIT, I THINK HAWK IS DOWN—"
"That was a firearm—did you hear that? That was a gunshot!"
"Negative on tribal classification, repeat, this is not just spears and sticks!"
"Who the fuck has bullets out here?!"
"That round punched through Hawk's gel—what the hell are we up against?!"
"Is this a rogue cell? Did we just stumble into a black project AO?! Did we run into one of THEIR cells?!"
Panic surged right back in, twice as bad as before. The word was there even if they didn't say it outright: rival. Someone else with old-world tech. Someone playing in the Enclave's weight class.
Based on the comms traffic there was at least one other player out there. But that was a future concern.
I put another round into a cracked shoulder plate while they were busy freaking out. The target jerked, went down hard, armor clanging against rock. I started to line up a third when the gruff voice thundered back over the channel, slicing through the noise like a knife.
"ENCLAVE, ENOUGH."
The comms choked off again, like someone had yanked the cable.
His voice was harsher now, breath a little heavier, the stomp of powered boots louder under his words. He was close.
"Listen up," he growled. "We have a hostile with access to pre-Fall ballistics and unconventional energy weapons. That makes them a priority, not a ghost story."
A beat of silence.
"Your job is simple. CONTAIN the shooter. Pin them. Box them in. I will handle the neutralization."
No one argued.
He continued, tone dropping into that cold, patient cadence I'd heard in old military dramas. "Identification of origin and capability tree happens after the threat is down. Is that understood?"
A shaky chorus of "Yes, sir!" crackled back.
"Good. Then do your jobs."
The line went disciplined and tight, just like that. No more wild speculation, no more free-for-all panic.
They knew what my bullets meant now.
I wasn't just a pissed-off tribal with scrap tricks and machine leftovers.
To them, I'd just graduated into something worse:
Competition.
The firefight burned on for another sixty seconds of chaos.
Muzzles flashed through the thinning dust, rounds hissed past my cover, and I kept trading shots—cracking plates, watching gel bulge and leak, trying to whittle them down before the walking tank finished his commute from hell.
Then the world on the far side of the clearing convulsed.
I heard wood scream.
An oak—full-grown, thick as a bison and twice as stubborn—ripped up out of the ground like it had been yanked by an angry god. Roots tore free in a spray of dirt and stones, the whole thing tilting, lifting, rising.
For half a heartbeat my brain refused to process it.
Then the tree turned into a weapon.
It came flying through the dust like a thrown javelin, trunk first, branches whipping the air to shreds. It cut a clean line straight toward my position, a dark, roaring mass that ate the distance in a blink.
MOVE
I dove sideways as the oak slammed through where I'd been a heartbeat before, branches exploding against trunks, bark and splinters detonating in every direction. The impact shook the ground, a heavy, gut-deep WHAM that rattled my teeth and knocked a few of the closer Enclave flat.
I skidded behind a new tree, ears ringing, and risked a glance back across the clearing.
Through the settling dust, I saw it.
Standing next to the hole the tree come from. A huge figure, wrong-sized compared to the grunts, framed by torn earth and shattered roots. Heavy. Solid. Every step it took toward the clearing sent a faint tremor through the ground, the stomp of its approach cutting cleanly through the gunfire.
Mecha-Nazi was here.
Up close, the armor was even worse.
My brain slotted it immediately into the mental catalog: X-01's meaner cousin. Same general vibe as the old top-tier suit back home, but bulked up, cleaned up, smoothed over. No wandering weld lines or hand-fitted plates. This didn't look built.
It looked manufactured.
Every curve, every seam screamed factory precision, like it rolled off an assembly line yesterday. No rust, no mismatched repairs, no weird field modifications. Fresh. Purpose-built. This universe's version of X-01, with none of the thousand years of neglect.
The guy inside it bent down like he was just picking up a dropped stick.
His gauntlet closed around a minigun lying half-buried in the dirt—wires still dangling off the back where it had clearly been hard-mounted to a Vertibird. He'd apparently decided to bring the damn thing with him when he bailed out of the crash site.
Because of course he had.
I brought the Railwhistle up, sighted in on his helmet. No matter how tough the armor is, if I take the head, the rest falls like a puppet with its strings cut. That's just physics. And gaming logic. And spite.
I squeezed the trigger.
Spikes thundered out, the Railwhistle kicking against my shoulder as round after round streaked toward his head.
They never made it.
A hex-pattern shimmer bloomed in front of him, a translucent barrier snapping into existence midair. Each spike hit the invisible wall with a series of sharp, angry clangs, flattened, and ricocheted off into the dirt at his feet.
A shield. An actual, honest-to-God energy shield.
"Of course," I muttered. "Higher tech base equals upgrades."
The armored helmet tilted slightly, like he was studying me through whatever nightmare HUD he had in there. Then his external speakers crackled on.
"My turn," the Enclave man said.
The minigun in his hands began to whine, barrels spinning up from a lazy rotation into a hungry blur.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, a very posh, very offended voice said, Now look at what you've done.
I actually blinked.
The tone was straight out of Old World Blues—the Courier's brain chewing you out in that clipped, superior way. Now look at what you've done. The fact my brain was insulting me wasn't the surprising part. I'd had arguments with myself before, and lost.
What threw me was the accent.
"Really?" I thought, just for a second. "Posh? I could've sworn my inner voice was more hickish—"
STOP THINKING ABOUT IT AND FUCKING RUN! my brain suddenly screamed at me, dropping the fancy act entirely.
I snorted. "Ah, there I am,"
Then I ran.
The minigun finished spinning up and opened fire.
Night became day behind me, the clearing erupting in a solid wall of tracer fire and muzzle flash. Trees exploded into splinters as I sprinted for the relative safety of the woods, boots pounding dirt, lungs burning, every instinct howling the same thing:
Move or die.
Behind me the minigun roared; in front of me the forest lit up.
"FIRST AND SECOND SQUADS, FIRE AHEAD OF HIM!" the Heavy barked over the comms, his voice riding on top of the storm. "CUT OFF HIS AVENUE OF ESCAPE!"
The grunts obeyed.
Muzzles flashed in the trees ahead, a jagged line of light. A heartbeat later a wall of gunfire came screaming toward me—rounds shredding bark, pulverizing saplings, turning the path I was sprinting toward into a meat grinder.
"Ah, hell—"
I dropped my center of gravity and threw myself into a slide.
Boots went out from under me, armor skidding over dirt and roots. Bullets tore through the air where my chest had been a moment before, hot contrails whipping over my helmet. Splinters and leaves rained down, a branch exploding into shards so close I felt them ping off my visor.
I carved a muddy line through the forest floor, twisting my shoulders just enough to miss a half-buried rock, then rolled hard to the side and scrambled back to my feet.
Behind me, the minigun's pattern adjusted, chewing closer, stitching the ground in a tightening arc.
Pinned between a moving wall of bullets and an approaching buzzsaw.
"Great plan, Rion," I wheezed, lungs burning as I veered off at an angle, trying to outrun the geometry. "Ten out of ten. Really nailed this one."
I didn't have the legs for this.
Not normal ones, anyway. I was built for bursts not sustaining runs. I hissed, boots pounding dirt.
I bit down—hard—on the inside of my cheek, just enough pain to cut through the panic, and mentally flipped the switch I'd promised myself I wouldn't lean on unless things got really bad.
The Kure release.
It hit like slamming a throttle open.
My heart spiked, then settled into a deep, heavy whump-whump that I could feel all the way up my spine. Veins went hot. The world sharpened at the edges: every muzzle flash, every tracer line, every puff of dirt from impact point suddenly crystal clear.
My muscles stopped feeling like they were dragging armor.
They started feeling like the armor was trying to keep up with them.
I cut hard right, boots biting into the torn-up ground at the edge of the clearing. Instead of punching straight through the kill box, I started running the outskirts—skimming the tree line, keeping just inside where I could track everyone, just outside where their firing arcs were hottest.
Tracers chased me, always a half-second too slow now, raking the ground where I'd just been. Minigun fire chewed up the center of the clearing in a solid, screaming cone, but I was already curving around its edge, lungs burning in a way that felt distant and unimportant.
Speed. Position. Cover.
I spotted my goal ahead: the big transport Vertibird, still squatting in the middle of the clearing like a metal toad, rotors whining in guarded idle. I angled toward it, cutting across the fringe of fire, feeling rounds whip past my legs close enough to tickle.
One last burst stitched the dirt at my heels as I dove.
I slid in behind the Vertibird's bulk, armored shoulder slamming into its landing strut. The sudden silence—relative silence, anyway—was jarring. The hull soaked up the worst of the minigun's roar, turning it into a deep, distant thunder on the other side of all that armored plating.
For the first time in what felt like hours but was probably seconds, there was no direct line of fire on me.
Just the transport between us.
Out in the clearing, the minigun spun down a fraction, the pitch dropping. The Heavy's voice cut across the comms, sharp and pissed.
"Cease fire! CEASE FIRE! All squads, hold your fire!"
The shooting tapered off in a ragged wave.
"We are not ventilating our ride out of here," he snarled. "You hit that transport, and you can walk home."
From this side of the transport I finally saw it.
On the far side of the clearing, half in the shadow of the trees, was the giant wolf from the Enclave holo feed—the one they'd blasted over open channels like a flex. No compression artifacts now, no grainy distance. Just scale.
It was huge.
Easily taller than a man at the shoulder, heavier through the chest than most bison, all corded muscle under a pelt that looked halfway between wild animal and lab experiment. Restraints ran from a heavy collar to ground stakes and plated anchor points.
Its eyes locked onto me across the clearing and it let out a low, rolling growl that I felt through the Vertibird's frame. Lips peeled back from long, too-white fangs. Hackles rose.
Then its nose twitched.
Once. Twice. A sharp sniff, then a long draw of air, like it was trying to pull my scent all the way into its skull.
The change was instant.
The growl cut off. Its ears snapped forward. The wolf's whole body went rigid for a heartbeat—and then it went frantic.
It yanked against the restraints hard enough to make the anchor points scream, claws gouging furrows in the dirt. Chains rattled, metal rang, and the massive head whipped around as it tried to get a better line on me, nose working overtime like it had just caught a scent it knew and couldn't quite believe.
The wolf hauled itself forward, muscles bunching, claws tearing trenches in the dirt.
That's when I noticed the net.
It was draped over him like a spider web made of cable—thick strands of conductive mesh woven through heavier anchor lines, all tied into ground stakes and black control boxes half-buried around the perimeter. Every time he lunged, the net shifted with him, biting into his fur, dragging at his shoulders.
He tried anyway.
He got one, two crawling strides closer before the Enclave tech kicked in.
The net lit up.
Arcs of blue-white electricity raced along the strands, jumping between nodes, crackling across his back and neck. The Wolf Lord convulsed, a full-body jerk that would've snapped a normal animal's spine. His jaws clamped shut with an audible click, eyes squeezing tight, claws gouging even deeper as every muscle locked.
Then he collapsed onto his side, chest heaving, steam rolling off his fur where the current had cooked him for a heartbeat too long.
I expected a snarl when he recovered.
What I got instead was a whimper.
Soft. Broken. Not the sound of a monster in chains, not the guttural rage of a lab-grown murder-beast.
It was small.
It was familiar.
I froze.
For half a second the clearing, the Enclave, the power armor, all of it just…dropped out of my awareness. All I heard was that sound and all I saw was a crappy apartment door and a small mutt on the other side of it, letting out that exact same noise because he could smell me in the hallway and couldn't understand why I wasn't inside yet.
Same pitch. Same little hitch in the middle. Same please baked into it.
My stomach flipped.
"That…can't be," I whispered, but my hands had gone slack on my weapon and my feet might as well have been bolted to the dirt.
Because for the first time, staring across the battlefield at the Wolf Lord thrashing in an electrified net, one terrible, impossible thought shoved its way to the front of my brain:
He sounds like Cesar.
I force myself to really look at him.
Not as "the Wolf Lord." Not as a boss fight the Enclave gift-wrapped in cables and cruelty. Just…as a dog.
His tail, even half-trapped under the net, has that same stupid curl at the tip, like it never learned how to lie flat. His front paws are too white, like he stepped in paint and never quite washed it off. There's a patch on his chest—clean, bright, dead center—that doesn't match the rest of the darker fur.
But it's the eyes that hit me.
Not red. Not feral. Not machine-glow or some other nonsense.
Just eyes.
Eyes that, even through pain and shock and confusion, hold that same simple cocktail of love and loyalty and you're here, you're here, you're here that I'd seen a thousand times before, framed in a shitty apartment hallway, in the backseat of a car, on the edge of a vet's table.
My throat goes tight.
Before I can talk myself out of it, I reach up, pop the helmet seals, and pull it off. Cool air hits my face. The HUD dies with a soft flicker. I don't even hesitate—I just shove the helmet back toward the Nanoboy's field. It dissolves into blue motes and vanishes, leaving me bare-faced in the middle of a battlefield like an absolute idiot.
Across the clearing, the wolf's head tilts.
He blinks, ears pricking forward, confusion flickering across his features. I can see the moment his brain hits the mismatch—smell says one thing, visuals say another. He was expecting…what? The older face from before, the life where I died?
Instead he's got this younger model, wrong age, wrong scars, same scent.
Slowly, like I'm moving through a dream, I step closer. The electrified net hums, but the current's dormant for the moment—punishment cycle over. I ease a hand past one of the thicker strands and lay my palm, very gently, on the top of his head.
His fur is warm and coarse under my fingers.
I start to pet him, the way I used to. Short strokes between the ears, fingers curling just a little at the back of his skull. Muscle memory takes over. My voice feels like it has to fight its way out of my chest.
"...Cesar?" I whisper.
For a heartbeat, nothing moves.
Then the giant monster-wolf that's been terrorizing my nightmares and the Enclave both throws his head back and lets out a long, wild, happy howl.
Not rage. Not challenge.
Joy.
I moved before my brain could catch up.
One second I was just standing there, hand on his head, the next World Cleaver was in my grip—hauled off my back in a blur of metal and muscle. The net over him suddenly wasn't a piece of Enclave tech anymore.
It was a problem.
I brought the axe down.
The first cut bit through a cable strand with a sharp TWANG, metal fibers snapping and recoiling like angry snakes. The control boxes sparked, lights flickering as the circuit broke. Cesar flinched, then tried to push up, giving me just enough slack for another swing.
The net did not like that.
It lit up again, hard.
Electricity ripped through the mesh and into both of us. Blue arcs crawled up the lines, jumped into my arms, ran through my chest. My body seized for a heartbeat, fingers locking around the axe handle, jaw clenching until my teeth ached.
I didn't stop.
Kure released-fueled adrenaline turned the pain into background noise, one more red bar in a HUD I didn't have time to look at. I dragged in a breath that tasted like metal and ozone and swung again, World Cleaver's blade crunching through another bundle of high-tension cable.
Cesar jerked as the charge bit him too, a pained yelp tearing out of his throat—but he stayed focused, legs kicking, dragging against the weakening restraints. He was halfway free now, one side of the net hanging loose around his flank, patches of fur finally unpinned.
"Found hi—HOLY SHIT! He's trying to cut the beast loose!" someone shouted.
I snapped my head up.
An Enclave grunt had come around the Vertibird, rifle half raised, helmet turning between me and Cesar as his brain did the math. Rifle or radio? Shoot or scream?
Too slow.
I pivoted, Kure-enhanced muscles turning the motion into a blur. World Cleaver came around in a brutal horizontal arc, the weight of the axe doing most of the work.
The blade hit him just below the ribs.
For a second there was resistance—armor, gel, bone—and then everything gave way. The grunt came apart in two ugly, uneven halves, blood spraying across the dirt in a red fan. Green gel from his cracked chest plate mixed with it, spattering across World Cleaver's edge in thick clumps.
He hit the ground in pieces.
I yanked the axe back. It came away slick with red and streaked with that sickly, translucent green, threads of gel still clinging to the steel.
Cesar dragged himself another few inches out of the net, one foreleg free now, claws digging into the dirt. I turned back toward him, raising the axe for another cut—
—and the world turned into a charging freight truck.
The power armor trooper hit me like a runaway semi.
I didn't even see him coming, just a dark mass in my peripheral vision and then a shoulder plate the size of a car door slammed into my chest. Air blasted out of my lungs as my world snapped sideways. For a split second I was weightless, Kure release or not, body lifted clean off the ground.
Then I went flying.
I flew.
There wasn't even time to swear. One second I was on my feet, the next I was airborne, world spinning in a blur of trees and sky and Vertibird hull. Then my back met a trunk hard enough to make the tree reconsider its life choices.
Bark exploded.
The impact knocked every thought out of my head in one jagged CRACK. My HUD—oh right, no helmet—would've thrown up about twelve warning messages if it still existed. As it was, my vision went white at the edges, then tunneled, then slowly dragged itself back into color.
I slid down the trunk and hit the ground in a heap.
Everything hurt in that deep, spreading way that promised bruises in places I didn't know I had. For a second all I could do was lie there, lungs spasming, body trying to remember how breathing worked.
In. Out. C'mon, you've done this before.
The heavy, measured THUD… THUD… THUD of power armor footsteps pulled me back into the moment.
I forced my head up.
The Enclave heavy was stomping toward me through the debris, calm as a man on a morning stroll. Dust clung to his armor in patches, bits of wood and stone littered the ground around his path. He didn't even look winded.
His gaze tracked downward.
World Cleaver lay half-buried in churned dirt a few meters away, blade still wet with blood and gel, haft at an awkward angle like it'd tried to keep going after I stopped.
He walked over and bent at the waist, servos whining softly as he reached down and picked it up one-handed.
Seeing my axe in his grip felt…wrong.
He hefted it, turned it this way and that, examining the edge, the weight, the balance, casual as if we weren't in the middle of a battlefield. For a second I had the surreal thought that he looked like a blacksmith inspecting student work.
"Now that's a nasty weapon," he said at last, voice crackling through his speakers. "Quite impressive for being built by a primitive tribal."
I spat a mouthful of blood-tinged saliva onto the dirt and pushed myself up to one knee, ribs screaming, blood still humming in my veins like a pissed-off beehive.
"The people of this iteration of humanity," I rasped, "have got more tools to work with besides sticks and fire."
I got my feet under me, swaying but upright, and met his glowing lenses with my very breakable, very human eyes.
"Ideas our ancestors ignored," I added, "are finally getting a chance to flourish."
He tasted the words like he was rolling them around his mouth.
"Our ancestors…" the Enclave man repeated, slow and thoughtful. His helmet tilted a fraction, those cold blue lenses fixing on me like spotlights. "So you're one of us."
"Fuck no," I snapped, way ahead of my survival instinct. "I'm not a fucking Nazi."
Silence.
Not in the clearing—there were still wounded groaning, somebody yelling for a medic, the Vertibird's rotors humming overhead like a steel beehive—but from him. The Heavy just stood there with my axe in his gauntleted hand, looking at me like I'd just suggested gravity was optional.
Then he chuckled.
Soft. Dry. Humorless. It crackled through the speakers, but the age in it had nothing to do with the power armor.
"Nazi," he said, almost musing. "Haven't heard that fossil dusted off in a while."
He shifted his grip on World Cleaver, bringing it up into a loose ready position. I watched his hands test the balance, like he was considering how it would feel coming down through my skull.
"You speak with the cadence of a citizen," he went on. "You talk of iterations, of ignored ideas. You know what bullets are, what power armor is."
The lenses narrowed slightly.
"And yet you spit on your own blood."
Behind him, over his shoulder, Cesar was still fighting the half-cut net. One leg free, chest heaving, eyes locked on me like the rest of the world wasn't even real. Just me, him, and the cables between us.
I forced myself not to glance his way again. I kept my eyes on the walking tank in front of me.
"I'm not your blood," I said. "I'm not your citizen. I'm just the guy who shot your stealth team, knocked your birds out of the sky, and is about five seconds from taking that axe back."
Another beat of silence.
"Arrogant," he said at last. "Definitely one of ours."
He raised World Cleaver a little higher, the edge catching a smear of light. Gel and blood still dripped from it in slow, heavy drops, patting into the dirt between us.
"Very well, tribal," he said, voice hardening. "If you're so eager to reject your heritage—let's see what your precious 'iteration' has really produced."
Great. Boss fight dialogue: complete.
I rolled my shoulders, feeling every complaint my ribs had about being used as a crash pad. Strength from the Kure release was still humming under my skin, a low, dangerous buzz that made the pain feel one step removed. My right hand twitched toward my hip, fingers brushing the worn grip of my revolver.
Calm. Think.
Axe in his hand, shield on standby, minigun still wired into his HUD, grunts scattered but not broken, Vertibird behind me, Wolf—Cesar—half-pinned and getting more desperate by the second.
Clock's still ticking.
I let out a slow breath through my teeth, never taking my eyes off him.
"Okay," I muttered, mostly to myself. "Round one, then."
"I'll fucking show you!"
I kicked the boots.
The hydraulics hissed, the world lurched, and suddenly I wasn't standing in front of him—I was a human projectile. The distance between us vanished in a blink. His lenses widened a fraction, shield flickering up too late and at the wrong angle.
Real-world logic, asshole.
Energy shields aren't magic bubbles. They've got coverage, angle, power draw—this isn't Zenith-tier bullshit. The Enclave are the most advanced force on Earth now, sure. But "most advanced on Earth" is still several rungs below "space wizards who slap nanotech on their breakfast."
I came in from below his visual line, straight up the center.
My knee slammed into his chin.
There was a clang like a bell getting punched, followed by the sharp click of teeth smashing together inside the helmet. The impact rattled me as much as him—shock ran all the way up my leg and into my spine.
I had a sudden, vivid appreciation for my kneepads.
Without them, I'd have turned my kneecap into glitter.
The hit rocked his head back and staggered him a half-step, servos whining as they compensated. I landed in front of him, boots skidding, already shifting my weight to follow up—
—and had to jump backward as World Cleaver came down in a silver blur.
My own axe nearly cut me in half.
The blade slammed into the ground where I'd been, carving a long, ugly trench through dirt and stone. Chunks of earth and shattered rock exploded outward, peppering my armor and face.
I hit the ground in a rough backstep, boots digging in, watching as he wrenched the weapon free with one brutal yank.
As the blade tore out of the gouged earth, it ignited—a dull, angry glow racing along the cutting edge. The shock dampeners built into the haft dumped all that friction heat into the metal, turning World Cleaver's already obscene edge into a long, simmering line of orange.
"Oh, great," I muttered under my breath, chest heaving as I reset my stance.
My axe had entered lightsaber mode.
The Enclave trooper tilted his helmet, watching my axe.
World Cleaver's edge glowed hotter, the air around it starting to shimmer. Heat rolled off the blade in visible ripples, like the world was bending away from it.
He started chuckling.
"I see why a new age of mysticism has taken root among the cavemen," he said, turning the weapon so the flaming edge caught the light. "The animal machines, the dead Faro bots. No wonder those mask-wearing crackheads worship Rushmore."
Stoneface, my brain supplied automatically. Rushmore cult. Mask freaks. Cool. Add "Enclave intel on tribal weirdos" to the growing folder labeled Future Rion's Problem.
Present Rion's problem ignited its thrusters.
Panels snapped open along his back with a hiss, and a pair of compact jets flared to life. Flame and dust blew outward as the power armor launched forward, World Cleaver arcing for my head.
"Shit—"
I threw myself aside. The axe missed me by inches, the heated edge scorching the air by my face. It hit the ground like a meteor.
WHUMP.
The impact sent a shockwave ripping through the dirt, a low, concussive blast that knocked my feet out from under me even though I'd technically dodged the hit. I rolled, ears ringing, as a crater bloomed where I'd been.
Oh… my brain noted with grim clarity. His armor is fitted with the explosive vent mod. Of course it is.
The Heavy straightened, servos snarling as he turned toward me. Thrusters screamed again as he kicked them, suit hunching forward like a charging bull.
He launched.
This time I didn't try to outmuscle or outpace him. As his bulk flew at me, I reached into the Nanoboy field at my hip and pulled.
Light flared around my hand as the swarm inverted, compressed matter unfolding into reality. Warcrime dropped into my grip with all the subtlety of a dropped anvil.
I snapped it up and fired both barrels into his chest.
Warcrime didn't bark. It detonated.
The blast hit his shields like a sledgehammer. For a split second I saw the hex-grid barrier flare to life, overloading in a burst of light and static. Then it shattered, energy bleeding away in crackling arcs across his armor.
The shot didn't just break the shield.
It knocked him off course.
Instead of carving through me, the Heavy hit the ground at a bad angle, landing in a stumbling, sideways slam that dug a trench where his feet tried and failed to find purchase. Dirt geysered. Armor scraped. The landing was sloppy enough that even his servos couldn't fully hide it.
He powered through the stumble, boots grinding a halt. He turned toward me, slowly this time, and paused.
His lenses dropped to my wrist just as the last motes of Nanoboy light faded, the glow of Warcrime's sudden existence dying back into my bracer.
"Matter compression?" he said, almost intrigued. "Oh. Seems you have something that might be worth a damn after all."
The thrusters on his back flared again, hotter, louder. He brought World Cleaver up in a two-handed grip, the flaming edge humming with stored friction heat.
He launched straight at me, faster than before, jets howling, axe raised high.
His line was obvious.
Left side. Shoulder to wrist.
He was aiming to chop my arm off.
The next few seconds were just noise and impact.
He came at me in bursts of thrusters and swinging steel, and I answered with every dirty trick I had left.
I ducked under a horizontal sweep of World Cleaver, felt the heat from my own damn axe kiss the top of my head, and jammed Warcrime up into his ribs. I fired a single barrel point-blank.
The blast rocked him.
Metal screamed as the shot put a nasty dent into his side plating, the armor buckling inward like someone had taken a car crusher to it. He staggered half a step, one knee dipping just enough to make my heart jump.
I flicked my Focus, zooming in, hunting for weakness.
The dent had cracked the outer plate, the fracture lines spidering through the finish. Underneath, in the gap where the metal had folded in, something glistened.
Gel.
Same crap as the frontline troopers. A thick, viscous layer pulsing faintly as it redistributed the impact, absorbing the kinetic energy that should've turned his insides into soup.
Any time I got past the armor, the jello caught the blow.
I swapped angles, went low, and unloaded the second barrel into his thigh, right at a joint seam. The blast knocked his leg sideways, chipped more armor, sent cracks crawling up the plate.
Gel bulged through the fractures, already stiffening, already doing its job.
I snapped a pistol shot at a smaller gap, a lucky angle that slipped through busted plating.
The bullet hit the jelly and stopped.
"Fuck this jello," I snarled, diving away as World Cleaver came down again, carving a molten groove into the ground where I'd just been.
We danced that ugly waltz across the clearing: me darting in with Warcrime, the revolver, a boot, a knee, anything; him trading swings and shockwaves and near-misses that felt less near every time. Every solid hit I landed got turned into a bruise instead of a break by that stupid, miracle riot control pudding lining his suit.
He finally got tired of it.
I tried to strafe out of his reach, boots kicking for distance, and misjudged his arm length by about half a second.
His hand clamped around my ankle like a bear trap.
"—oh no."
He yanked.
The world went vertical, then sideways. For a heartbeat I was weightless in the worst possible way, the ground nowhere it should be. Then he swung me.
I hit a tree back-first with enough force to make the bark explode in a shower of splinters. Pain detonated down my spine. He didn't let go.
He swung me again.
Another tree. More bark. More pain. My brain helpfully queued up a memory as my body tried to turn into abstract art.
So this is how Loki felt, I thought dimly, as I got ragdolled into the dirt again. When Hulk snatched him up and used him as a stress ball.
I bounced once, armor screeching, lungs refusing to work for a second.
"Puny. Fucking. Human," I wheezed to myself, because if I didn't joke I was pretty sure I'd start screaming instead.
Getting swung into trees lost its novelty fast.
The first impact was shocking. The second was blinding. By the third, my brain had given up on individual complaints and just filed everything under generalized pain.
He finally let go and I hit the ground in a rolling skid, armor shrieking as I plowed through dirt and roots. I came to a stop on my back, staring up at the smoke-stained sky, lungs trying to remember how oxygen worked.
The release technique was still running hot, but even that had limits. My muscles burned, vision doubled for a heartbeat, then snapped back as adrenaline bullied everything else aside.
Move.
I rolled, spat blood, and forced myself back to my feet. My whole body felt like it had been put through a woodchipper, but the power armor trooper was already coming for another pass, thrusters flaring, World Cleaver dragging a line of molten dirt behind him.
He launched.
I dove sideways, boots kicking, and for once I went toward him instead of away. As he came down with the axe, I slid under the arc, felt the heat of the blade lick my back, and jammed Warcrime up into the underside of his arm.
I fired.
The blast slammed into his armpit plate, snapping his arm up involuntarily. World Cleaver went wide, carving another trench instead of my spine. His suit staggered, vents screaming as his stabilizers fought the sudden torque.
I followed with the revolver, snapping three quick shots into the dent I'd already made in his side.
Two rounds pinged off still-solid plate. The third slipped into a crack and buried itself in the gel.
The armor creaked. The gel bubbled… and held.
"Fucking Flubber," I snarled, ducking back as he swung a backhand that would've taken my head off at the neck.
He stomped forward, vents flaring. I retreated, firing as I went, trying to keep angle, to stay away from straight lines. I aimed for vents, joints, gaps—anywhere that didn't look like it could host a tank round for breakfast.
Shots sparked off reinforced housings, dug grooves, chipped edges. Every time I thought I'd found a weak point, goo oozed up behind it like the universe's worst flex seal.
He feinted with the axe, then hit the thrusters mid-step.
He vanished from in front of me and reappeared in my face, all momentum and mass. I barely had time to cross my forearms before he shoulder-checked me again. The impact blew me off my feet and bounced me across the ground like a skipped stone.
I stopped against a half-uprooted stump, ribs screaming, vision swimming.
"Stay down," he advised, voice infuriatingly steady. "You've proven your point. You're dangerous, for a savage. That's enough."
"Buddy," I coughed, dragging myself up on one elbow, "you have…no idea…how bad I am at 'enough'."
I kicked the boots again.
The thrusters flared weakly— the previous bursts had clearly taken a toll—but it was enough to rocket me forward in a low, desperate lunge. I crashed into his leg like a very angry shopping cart, jamming my shoulder into his knee joint.
At the same time, I shoved the revolver up under the cracked thigh plate and fired point-blank.
The round slammed into the gel layer and almost broke through. I saw it bulge outward, saw cracks spider through the surrounding armor, heard something metallic snap inside the joint.
His leg buckled.
For a moment, the power armor dropped to one knee, the heavy frame grinding in protest. It was the closest thing to actual vulnerability I'd managed all fight.
I drew back my fist to jam another round into the same spot—
—and his hand snapped down and closed around my forearm.
"Persistent," he noted.
Then the other hand grabbed my belt.
He lifted.
There was a brief, horrible moment where I was held up like a misbehaving cat…and then he slammed me into the ground.
The world went white. Then black. Then weirdly tilted.
He did it again.
The second slam knocked something loose in my chest. I felt, more than heard, the crack in my ribs, a sharp, wet pop that sent white-hot agony lancing up my side.
Air left my lungs and refused to come back.
He let go and I flopped onto my back like a dropped puppet, limbs not quite obeying.
I tried to roll. To get any leverage. The release technique faded and my nerves buzzed uselessly under the avalanche of pain, my muscles twitching but not coordinating. The best I managed was a half-turn before a massive weight came down on my sternum.
His boot.
It pinned me to the ground like I'd grown there.
Pressure built slowly, inexorably, like a hydraulic press. My ribs, already cracked, screamed under the force. I heard another faint crackle, felt something grind inside, and a strangled sound tore out of my throat.
I grabbed at his ankle on instinct, fingers scrabbling at armor that did not care.
He shifted his weight.
More pain. Stars at the edge of my vision.
Then his other boot came down on my left arm, just below the shoulder, pinning it to the dirt. I felt something in the joint protest nastily, but the real focus of his attention wasn't my bones.
It was my wrist.
Specifically, the Nanoboy bracer wrapped around it.
He leaned forward, tilting his head to read the embossed markings along the housing. Dust flaked off as his lenses zoomed.
"Faro Industries," he read aloud.
His voice changed when he said it. Went poisonous.
"Faro," he repeated, practically spitting the word. "Of course that fucker is involved."
He paused, then let out a low, grudging hum.
"But still," he went on, more to himself than to me, "this technology will be valuable to the Enclave. Matter compression will be useful for the reclamation of our Empire."
The axe started to rise.
Metal scraped against metal, hydraulics hissed. The weight shifted off my pinned arm just enough to line up the cut.
............
Inside the Wolf Lord's skull, something small and stubborn remembered being tiny.
Warm carpet under soft paws. A hand on his head, fingers scratching that perfect spot behind the ear. A voice, low and fond, murmuring nonsense words that meant everything.
Good boy.
His whole world had been that voice. That scent. That heartbeat. The way the human laughed when he tried to drag a stuffed toy twice his size across the room. The way he'd whined at the door until it opened and there he was, and his whole chest had felt too full to hold.
Back then, the human was big and he was small.
Now the world was wrong.
The human was wrong too. Younger face. New scars, old scent. But the smell was the same, under metal, under blood, under the sharp stink of fear and ozone.
HIM.
He lay under the net, body too big for the memory in his head. Muscles like coiled cables. Bones heavier. Teeth longer. But the part that mattered hadn't changed.
His human was here.
He watched.
The metal-thing swung HIS scent through the air, along with fire and hot metal and the bitter reek of Enclave. The human moved in front of it, small and quick, boots tearing the dirt. The wolf watched as:
The human leapt forward, knee slamming up into the metal-thing's head.
The human rolled away from his own burning fang, sparks and heat licking the air.
The human barked thunder from the small metal thing, and the big metal one staggered.
The human kept moving. Always moving. Shots, dodges, curses, the scent of pain rising through the clearing like smoke.
The wolf tried to stand.
The net bit into his hide, heavy and cruel. When he pushed, it shocked him, lightning burning through nerves, muscles seizing, jaws snapping shut on a howl that came out broken. He dropped again, chest heaving, fur stinking of scorched hair and fear and rage.
The human flew.
Thrown. Snatched by the ankle and swung like a toy, slammed into trees hard enough that even from here, the sound made something in the wolf's chest twist. The sharp scent of hurt spiked in the air. Bones and blood and broken breath.
His human did not stop.
The human stood back up. Bleeding. Shaking. Eyes bright.
He talked. The words meant nothing in the wolf's mind, just tone and rhythm, defiance and teeth bared in sound instead of muzzle. The metal-thing answered, low and cold, blue eyes like dead stars.
Then the metal-thing put his foot on the human's chest.
The smell changed.
Sharp. Wrong. Cracking bone, crushed breath. The human's sound turned thin and high, almost not-sound.
The metal-thing raised the burning fang. The big axe. The wolf's nose flared, catching the ember stink, the sweat, the cold air between the swing and the end.
Inside his skull, instincts that had slept under training and chains and pain began to scream.
Move.
The wolf twitched, claws digging trenches under his paws.
The net tightened. A static snap warned him. If he struggled too hard, it would burn again. His back still sang with the last shock, muscles twitching under fur.
The human was pinned.
The foot ground down. More crackling bone. The wolf's ears flattened, a low rumble starting somewhere deep in his chest. His heart slammed, a heavy drumbeat that rattled through his ribs.
Move.
The human's scent spiked again: bright, sharp pain, edged with a fear he barely let into his eyes.
The metal-thing's axe climbed higher.
MOVE.
The wolf dragged one leg forward.
The net sparked. Blue-white fire crawled over his shoulders, down his spine. Every instinct that remembered collars and leashes screamed bad, stop, down.
Something bigger screamed louder.
The first memory. Tiny paws. Big hand. That laugh. That voice.
Mine. My human.
MOVE.
He surged.
The net lit fully, electricity clawing through muscle and bone, but this time he pushed into it instead of away. Strands snapped. Ground stakes tore loose from the earth with sharp metallic shrieks. Fur burned. The taste of copper and ozone flooded his mouth.
He didn't stop.
Every fiber of his body howled the same command, over and over, wordless and absolute:
MOVE.
....................
For a second all I could see was the axe.
It hung there above me, framed against the sky, World Cleaver's edge glowing hot and mean. My brain was very calmly doing the geometry on where my arm would land after it got separated.
Then the world exploded in light.
Off to my right, the net around Cesar went from a low buzz to a lightning storm. Blue-white arcs ripped across the cables, dancing from node to node in a wild, uncontrolled surge. Dirt blasted upward as ground stakes overloaded and blew. I could smell burning fur, scorched metal, ozone.
"Cesar—" I choked, half in terror, half in warning.
The lightning flared even brighter, then all at once it was drowned out by a violent, angry red.
A pulsing crimson glow erupted under the web, like someone had lit a flare inside a thundercloud. For a heartbeat the entire net was a cocoon of red and blue, energy eating itself alive.
Then something inside it moved.
The net tore open like wet paper.
A black blur shot out of the collapsing storm straight at us.
The Heavy had just started to bring the axe down when Cesar hit him.
It wasn't a tackle so much as a kinetic event. One moment the Enclave trooper was standing over me, all smug superiority and imminent amputation. The next he was half-vanished behind a mass of black fur, teeth, and fury slamming into his torso with enough force to knock a Vertibird sideways.
The impact sent him skidding back, armored boots gouging twin trenches in the dirt. World Cleaver went spinning from his grip, ripped away by a snapping jaw and a growl that sounded like a thunderhead having a bad day.
The Wolf Lord wheeled around, claws tearing a half-circle in the dirt, eyes blazing that furious red I'd just seen in the net. He spared the Enclave trooper a single, guttural snarl.
Then he turned his back on him.
He padded over to me instead.
Each step was heavy and weirdly careful, like he was walking around glass. He reached my side, and dropped World Cleaver beside me with a solid thunk, handle toward my hand.
For a second all I could do was stare at him.
"…good boy," I rasped.
I wrapped my fingers around the haft and used the axe like the world's angriest crutch, levering myself up. My ribs screamed, white-hot agony racing up my side, but I got one foot under me, then the other.
Standing was… generous. Technically I was vertical. The wind could have argued otherwise.
No time.
I fumbled one-handed at my belt, fingers clumsy, and yanked a stim pouch free. Two stimpaks slapped into my palm. I didn't bother being gentle.
I jammed the first needle into my side, right below the cracked ribs, and punched the plunger.
Liquid fire burned its way into my bloodstream.
"FUCK!" I yelled on the inhale, the word breaking into a gasping rasp halfway through. My vision went white at the edges, then snapped sharp as the meds hit, pain shifting from "universe-ending" to "screaming but manageable."
I stabbed the second one in a little lower and repeated the process.
"FUCK–!…koff—okay… okay… we're fine," I lied to absolutely no one.
Behind me, Cesar growled, low and promising, as he turned back toward the Enclave trooper.
"How is he not tearing you apart?!" the Enclave trooper shouted.
His voice actually cracked.
Cesar stood between us, hackles up, lips peeled back just enough to show teeth, but not moving. Not lunging. Not ripping out my throat like the Heavy very clearly expected.
"What are you?" he demanded. "That beast should not be loyal to anyone."
He took a half-step back, like getting a better look might make the universe make more sense.
"The enhancements made it uncontrollable," he went on, words spilling now. "It's been killing us and any of the tribals it runs into for the last five years since it escaped. And yet you're—"
He broke off, almost offended.
"You're scratching it behind the ears."
I realized my hand had moved to Cesar's head, on pure reflex. See fuzzbutt, pet fuzzbutt. My fingers idly working that old spot at the base of his skull. The giant, genetically-enhanced, battle-hardened murder-wolf was leaning into it like a puppy.
My bad.
The Enclave trooper's lenses bored into me. "What are you?"
I couldn't help it. I chuckled.
Stimpak heat was still threading through my chest like molten wire, knitting bone, pushing bruises down a few notches on the "you're dying" scale. My clothes were sticky with blood, some of it mine, some of it not. My lungs wheezed. My brain, meanwhile, was flipping through answers like a radio dial.
An anomaly would've been the most accurate.
The wildcard tossed into someone else's game of chance would've been the poetic one.
Every answer I could think of was both right and wrong in about twelve layers.
So I went with the one that felt best.
"I'm the guy," I said, baring a bloody grin as something in my chest clicked back into place with a wet little pop, "who's going to hunt your Nazi asses down."
The trooper actually flinched at the word Nazi this time.
I clicked my tongue twice.
Just a little sound. Same cue I used to use when I wanted Cesar to stop sniffing everything on the walk and move.
His ears flicked. The Wolf Lord turned his great head toward me. Whatever they'd done to him out there in the wilds, in labs and cages and god-knows-where, it had made him bigger, meaner, faster.
And a hell of a lot smarter.
He shouldn't have understood an attack command he'd never been trained for. But his eyes met mine, and for a heartbeat there was something like recognition there.
Then he was gone.
Cesar melted back into the smoke and dust, black fur and red eyes disappearing between shattered trees and churned earth like he'd never been there.
I had just let my hunting dog loose.
But like any proper hunting team, the dog doesn't do all the work.
I rolled my shoulders, tightened my grip on World Cleaver, and started forward.
My ass needed to do some work too.