The air that hit us as we cleared the refinery's discharge vent was stale and heavy, thick with the ghosts of burnt chemicals and rust. Above us, a titan's skeleton sprawled against the bruised twilight sky—a highway overpass, half-collapsed, its rebar bones jutting out like broken ribs. We were in a canyon of our own making, walled in by shattered concrete and the husks of long-dead vehicles.
The silence was the first alarm bell.
Out here, the silence was a physical weight. It was the held breath before the scream.
I stopped, my pistol held low, my senses stretching out into the gloom. The Tinkerer, a scarecrow of a man swimming in sweat and nerves, stumbled into my back. I put a hand out to steady him, my fingers brushing the delicate, almost fragile bones of his wrist. He was trembling like a leaf in a hurricane.
"What is it?" he whispered, his voice cracking. "Why have we stopped?"
My eyes traced the lines of the wreckage. A natural choke point. A fatal funnel. The kind of place you herd cattle for slaughter, or men for an ambush. The shadows here were too deep, the angles too perfect.
"Stay behind me," I murmured, my voice a low rumble that was felt more than heard. "Don't touch anything you don't recognize."
He didn't need a second telling. He practically tried to merge with my spine. I could feel the frantic thumping of his heart against my back. He was a genius with a circuit board, a magician with a power cell, but out here, he was just a liability I had sworn to protect. A package to be delivered.
A crackle of static burst from a hidden speaker, and a voice like grinding gravel echoed through the concrete canyon. It was a voice I knew. Brick.
"Took you long enough, Ghost," the voice boomed, dripping with smug arrogance. "I was starting to think you got lost in the plumbing."
My gaze snapped upward. I saw them then. The faint, ruby-red glimmers of trip-mine lasers, strung between car husks and tangled in the rebar scaffolding like a spider's web. I caught the low, predatory hum of plasma capacitors charging—repeater nests, tucked into the hollowed-out chassis of an armoured transport and a rusted-out bus. And higher still, perched like vultures on the precipice of the broken overpass, were the silhouettes of fodder mercs, their rifles glinting in the dying light.
Brick had turned this place into his personal fortress. A killzone designed by a butcher.
And then I saw him. Brick himself. He stepped out from behind a massive concrete pillar, not bothering with cover. Why would he? His hulking frame was encased in augmented exo-armour, plates of scarred iron and ceramic making him look more like a walking tank than a man. A heavy plasma repeater, a weapon typically mounted on a vehicle, was cradled in his arms as if it were a child's toy.
"He's coming through me if he wants the exit!" Brick bellowed into his comms, the sound system amplifying his voice into a godlike proclamation. He wanted a show. He wanted an audience for my death.
The Tinkerer let out a choked sob. "We're trapped."
"Not yet," I breathed, my mind already a whirlwind of calculations. Map the nests. Trace the wires. Find the weakness. Exploit the arrogance.
The first plasma bolt was a searing blue-white lance that shrieked past my head and vaporized a chunk of the concrete pillar beside me. The air crackled with ozone. Shrapnel and superheated dust rained down.
"Move!" I snarled, grabbing the Tinkerer's collar and dragging him with me.
We dove behind the wreck of a sedan, the metal groaning as another volley of plasma fire stitched across its chassis, turning rusted steel into molten slag. The fodder mercs opened up from above, their conventional rounds kicking up plumes of dirt and ricocheting off the concrete with angry whines. The crossfire was absolute, designed to pin us down, to shred any hope of escape.
But chaos is a tool, if you know how to wield it.
While the Tinkerer huddled, hands over his head, muttering prayers to gods I was sure had long since abandoned this world, I used the strobing muzzle flashes and the incandescent glare of plasma to read the battlefield. I saw the pattern of the tripwires, the firing arcs of the nests, the overconfident posture of the mercs on their perches. Brick was a sledgehammer. He built a trap of overwhelming force, assuming his target would blunder straight into it. He didn't account for an opponent who saw the trap not as a cage, but as a collection of spare parts.
"Cover your ears," I ordered the Tinkerer.
Peeking over the mangled hood of the car, I found what I was looking for: a loose slab of concrete, about the size of my head. It was twenty feet from the nearest tripwire, a wire strung between the door of a jeep and a precarious-looking section of scaffolding where two of Brick's mercs were nested. It was a long shot.
I timed my throw with the next plasma volley. As the world lit up in blue and white, I rose and hurled the concrete slab. It spun through the air, a clumsy, brutal discus, and landed precisely where I'd aimed. There was a faint click as it broke the laser beam.
The resulting BOOM was magnificent.
The mine detonated with a concussive roar, obliterating the jeep. The true prize, however, was the chain reaction. The explosion's shockwave slammed into the scaffolding, which was already unstable. With a tortured screech of twisting metal, the entire section gave way. One merc disappeared in an instant, crushed beneath a ton of falling steel. The second, his perch gone, yelped in panic and scrambled backward to find purchase.
He stumbled right into another of Brick's tripwires.
The second explosion was a wet, final sound. A red mist painted the concrete wall where a man had been a second before.
"Two down," I muttered, grabbing the Tinkerer. "Gap in the line. Go, now!"
We sprinted through the breach, the air thick with dust and the coppery tang of blood. The battlefield was literally reshaping itself around us as Brick's men died by his own over-engineered hand.
A roar of pure, unadulterated fury tore through the killzone, a sound more animal than human. "You think you're clever, Ghost?!"
Brick abandoned his post. He was done playing games. He strode forward, his metal feet crunching on rubble, and unleashed hell. He wasn't aiming anymore; he was simply erasing everything in front of him. A storm of suppressive fire, a relentless torrent of plasma that chewed through concrete pillars as if they were drywall and shredded the abandoned cars into twisted metal lace. The world became a hurricane of noise, heat, and flying debris.
We were forced into a desperate, belly-down crawl, scrambling under the collapsing wreckage. A plasma bolt hit the chassis of the truck we were under, and the entire wreck bucked, threatening to crush us. The heat was intense, blistering my skin even through my combat gear. The Tinkerer was whimpering, paralyzed by terror.
"Move!" I hissed, my voice sharp as a shard of glass. I shoved him forward. "Keep moving or you're dead!"
Another bolt slammed into the ground inches from his hand, leaving a glowing, glassy crater. That got him moving. We scrabbled forward, choking on dust, our world shrinking to the few feet of rubble-strewn ground in front of us. Brick was a force of nature, a walking apocalypse, and we were just insects scurrying before the fire.
But an insect can still bite.
I needed to break his line of sight. I needed to reset the board. While he was consumed by his rage, I was circling, using the thick clouds of smoke and the shifting shadows as my allies. I slipped away from the Tinkerer, leaving him wedged in a relatively safe crevice behind a pile of collapsed girders. He was a beacon for Brick's fury; I had to become a ghost again.
My fingers found the small, cylindrical device in my pouch. It was something the Tinkerer had cobbled together for me from the salvaged gear of a dead operative we'd called Whisper. An improvised explosive with a magnetic clamp. Not powerful enough to hurt Brick in his armour, but demolition wasn't about brute force. It was about precision.
I darted from one piece of cover to the next, a phantom in the maelstrom. Brick was still hosing down the area where he'd last seen us, his rage making him predictable. I saw my target: a thick, load-bearing support beam for the upper deck of the overpass, right above his position. It was already fractured from the fighting.
Slipping through a gap between two burnt-out vans, I got close enough. With a flick of my wrist, I tossed the explosive. The magnet clamped onto the rebar inside the cracked concrete with a satisfying thunk. I hit the detonator as I dove back into cover.
The explosion was a deep, resonant CRUMP that shook the very ground beneath us. It didn't bring the whole overpass down, but it was enough. A huge section of the concrete roadway above Brick crumbled, collapsing in a massive waterfall of rubble and twisted steel. It slammed down right in front of him, creating a solid wall of debris, blocking his line of sight completely.
The plasma storm ceased. The sudden silence was deafening. Through the settling dust, I heard Brick's roar of pure, unadulterated frustration. He was cut off. I had bought us time.
I scrambled back to the Tinkerer, pulling him to his feet. "This way. The exit is just past this wreckage."
But the silence didn't last.
It was replaced by a new sound. A rhythmic, grinding crash. CRUNCH. SCRAPE. BOOM.
With a shriek of tearing metal, a car door, ripped from its hinges, flew through the cloud of dust and embedded itself in a concrete wall behind us. It was followed by the source of the noise.
Brick wasn't going around the debris. He was coming through it.
He smashed his way out of the dust and fire like some primordial beast clawing its way from the earth. Raw, brute strength was all he needed. He tossed aside slabs of concrete like they were cardboard, his augmented fists punching through the hoods of cars. The smoke swirled around his massive frame, his helmet's red optical sensors glowing with malevolent intensity.
He stopped, his heavy repeater held at the ready, his head scanning the gloom. His voice, no longer amplified but still powerful enough to echo under the overpass, boomed with finality.
"ENOUGH hiding! Face me, Ghost!"
I pushed the Tinkerer behind a solid concrete divider, pressing a pistol I took from the dead merc I drowned into his trembling hands. "Stay here. Don't fire unless he's on top of you."
Then I melted back into the shadows. I found my spot, crouching behind the ruin of a delivery truck. My left arm throbbed where a piece of shrapnel had torn through my suit. I could taste blood and dust on my tongue. My body was a map of aches and pains, but my mind was a sea of calm. In my right hand, my pistol felt cool and steady. In my left, I drew my knife, its monomolecular edge whispering as it cleared the sheath.
Through the lingering smoke, I watched him. Brick, the enraged juggernaut, stomping through the wreckage, a titan searching for a ghost. He was bigger, stronger, and better armed. But he was angry. And anger is a liability I could never afford.
He was hunting me. He didn't realize he was already the one who was caught.