The world shudders. Stone dust chokes the air, thick and white. Vael's suit braces. A guttural roar tears through the haze. Not a human cry. Not the Rindscale gorebreed's many voices. This is structural collapse. The building gives. Concrete slabs shear, metal groans. His suit registers the impact, a brutal blow that sends nervous feedback stinging through his crown. He does not flinch. His protocols shift. Predictive modeling calculates trajectories. His right arm, hardened bio-plate, snaps up. A heavy beam descends. He slams it aside.
The air clears slightly. Anna Reeves, the Mournclad pilot, lies twisted in the debris, pinned by a jagged strut. Her suit is cracked, a grim contrast to its usual mournful gleam. Her helm is retracted. Her face is pale, smudged with dust. The faint self-harm scars around her wrists and neck are stark against her skin. Her eyes, wide with fear, lock onto Vael. A flicker of something, fear or desperation, in her gaze.
"Vael," she whispers. The sound is raw, thin in the chaos.
The name hits his neural crown. It pulses. A momentary glitch in his suit's internal systems. A hesitation. A struggle between fading humanity and the suit's ruthless directives. The foreign consciousness snarls. Irrelevant. Threat assessment priority one.
He ignores it. His suit bleeds. Not a gush, but a seep. A faint crimson seeping from the seams of his bio-armor, particularly where the plates overlap at his joints. It pulses, a metallic sheen under the flickering emergency lights. The suit demands pain. It thrives on it. The acute pain from combat or his own bleeding somehow increases his suit's power and response time. It feels sharp. Clean. Efficient.
He moves. Debris shifts, groans. Another section of wall buckles. He calculates the risks. To save her means exposing himself, diverting combat resources. The Command soldiers are close. Their comms crackle. "Subject Rask.09-V. Target confirmed. Terminate on sight". The words are cold, clinical. They want him dead. They want his mutation erased.
A Rindscale gorebreed, smaller than the last, erupts from a pile of shattered plaster. Its outermost layer peels away with a wet tearing sound, revealing new, raw muscle underneath. It screeches, a high-pitched shriek. Its eyes, milky and blank, fix on Vael. It leaps.
Vael doesn't hesitate. He moves with a terrible grace. His suit is stronger. Faster. The bleeding isn't a weakness. It's fuel. He sidesteps the Rindscale gorebreed's lunge. His right arm, sheathed in bio-plate, becomes a piston. It strikes. A sickening crunch. The Rindscale gorebreed stumbles. Another layer of flesh peels, wet and glistening, from its chest. It shrieks again.
He pushes past the creature. Anna still pinned. Her eyes track his movement. Her breath comes in ragged gasps. Her suit struggles, internal regeneration protocols working overtime, but the structural damage is too severe.
Vael grabs the strut pinning her. It is heavy, jagged, sunk deep into the floor. He pulls. His muscles strain. The suit bleeds faster now, a thin film of crimson spreading over his gauntlet, reflecting the dim light. The neural crown throbs behind his eyes, a low hum, constant. The foreign consciousness demands efficiency. Leave her. Conserve resources. Escape.
He hears Anna's breath hitch. He feels a strange jolt. His suit systems glitch, a momentary stutter in the flow of power. It is a struggle. A push and pull between two wills. His human will, or what is left of it. And the suit's.
He rips the strut free. Stone dust explodes around them. Anna groans, but she pushes herself up. She stumbles against him. Her hand, small and unarmored, presses against his bleeding bio-plate, her touch surprisingly warm through the thin layer of blood.
"Thank you," she gasps. Her voice is barely a whisper. "You didn't have to."
He doesn't reply. Words are unnecessary. He doesn't understand the impulse. The suit's cold logic screams against it. Risk incurred. Mission compromise. Yet, he acted. He saved her. The moral dissonance is a hollow ache in his chest, a strange conflict with the suit's hardening influence.
A crackle of comms. "Target Rask.09-V, confirmed visual. Engage."
Human soldiers. Remnant State forces. They burst through a shattered doorway. At least five of them, Ravelin pilots, their heavy obsidian armor reflecting the pale light. They move with military precision. Their kinetic dampeners thrumming.
Vael shoves Anna behind a crumbling pillar. "Stay down," he grunts. His voice is raspy, unused.
The Rindscale gorebreed, still reeling, sees the new targets. It screams. A different kind of scream this time. A challenge. It hurls itself at the nearest Ravelin pilot. Its flayed layers whip like blades. The Ravelin pilot braces, shield-integrated forearm raised. A kinetic dampener ripples through the air.
Vael uses the distraction. He moves. His suit is coated in crimson now, a shimmering sheen. It is grotesque. It is powerful. The pain enhancement protocols are fully engaged. Each impact, each scrape, each new tear in his suit, heightens his senses, sharpens his reflexes. He feels more. He sees more. He kills more.
A distant memory flickers. Not his. A blur of sterile white walls, masked figures, the dull clang of metal on bone. His father's laboratory. The Fracture Event. The suit feeds on it. It pulls data. It enhances.
He sprints, dodging laser fire. The Ravelin pilots are well-trained. But they are human. They hesitate. They feel pain. They bleed conventionally.
He doesn't.
He closes the distance on a Ravelin pilot. The heavy-set suit raises its seismic anchor feet, preparing a ground-quake. Vael is faster. He slams his armored shoulder into the Ravelin pilot's chest. A sickening crunch of bio-plate. The Ravelin pilot stumbles, gasps over comms. "Hit... hard..."
The suit takes the shot. A kinetic slug impacts his forearm. It does not penetrate. It cracks. More crimson seeps, thick and viscous. But his suit does not falter. It only grows stronger. A chilling thought, not his own, but from the foreign consciousness, whispers: Fuel. More fuel.
Another Rindscale gorebreed variant, smaller, faster, emerges from a ventilation shaft. It skitters across the floor, targeting a human soldier still trying to aim at Vael. The Rindscale gorebreed attacks, its blade-like claws flashing. The soldier screams. A wet, tearing sound, then silence. One less soldier.
The Rindscale gorebreed acts as an unwitting ally. Vael exploits the chaos. He is a phantom in the ruined building, moving between explosions and Gorebreed attacks. He is hunted by both sides. He is a third, terrifying, element.
He sees Anna, trying to crawl through the debris, her suit struggling. Her eyes meet his again. They are full of a complex fear. But also, something else. Understanding.
"Subject Rask.09-V, cease resistance. Your mutation is compromised. You are a threat to operational integrity." The voice over the comms is automated, impersonal. It is Command. Their betrayal is absolute.
Vael feels nothing. No anger. No fear. Only the cold, predatory focus. He is a weapon. He is becoming something new.
He slams another Ravelin pilot into a crumbling wall. The impact shatters the concrete. The Ravelin pilot goes limp. The suit's bleeding is constant now, painting his armor in shimmering crimson. It pulses with every strike. Every movement.
Anna calls out. "Vael. Run."
The human name. A desperate plea for the human she remembers. It echoes in his mind, fighting against the clinical designation "Subject Rask.09-V." His identity is a battlefield.
He turns. He locks onto the last active Ravelin pilot. It raises its weapon. A blinding flash. Vael moves. He twists, rolls. The shot misses. He is upon the Ravelin pilot. He strikes again and again. Brutal, efficient.
The Ravelin pilot falls. Still.
The building groans. The chase continues. Vael moves, Anna scrambling behind him, her injuries slowing her. He clears a path. His suit bleeds. He is a conduit of pain. And power.
They find a narrow gap in the ruined wall. A way out. Into the shattered city. Freedom.
Vael glances back. The Rindscale gorebreed is gone, vanished into the dust. The Ravelin pilots are dead. At least five human soldiers are brutally killed in the chaos. He did not kill them all directly. But his presence, his actions, unleashed the chaos that ended them.
As they emerge into the grim light of the dusk, Vael's suit registers an unprecedented internal system anomaly. A direct, intuitive awareness of Anna's injuries. Her fractured ribs. The internal bruising. The bleeding.
Then, a sudden, searing pain. Not his. Anna's. His suit is attempting to mimic or access this external pain signal.
A shocking, involuntary surge. A spontaneous, albeit painful, attempt to offer a limited, bio-regenerative field. A green-gold light, faint but unmistakable, pulses from within his suit, beneath the crimson sheen of his own blood. It consumes some of his bleeding suit-blood, drawing it inward. It is directed. At Anna.
A horrifying consequence of his mutation. A glimpse into his suit's forbidden capabilities.
The bio-fluid