The engines of the joint expedition rose like stones thrown into a long-sleeping lake, shattering the quiet that had lain over the southeastern wastes.
Two convoys moved out from Prism's last security gate—one a ragged parade of scrap-built off-roaders patched with spare plating and prayer, the other a disciplined column of Brotherhood armored transports, paint uniform and lines sharp as knives. They kept a polite distance from one another and a wary silence between them.
Half a day into the run, protocol and instinct argued over the comms.
"By standard march doctrine we should take Highway 7's ruins—smoother surface, easier for heavy gear," Lieutenant Valk intoned over the channel, his voice carrying the authority of someone used to having maps obeyed.
Neo studied the topographic scans on his tablet, then spoke into his side channel.
"Commander Kane, Lieutenant—Highway 7 is open, yes, but our recon and the energy flow models mark it as a dust-radiation corridor. Open ground means exposure. I recommend the winding canyon route: rougher, but natural cover, and closer to the first anomalous node we detected."
Tech-Priest Otto's voice cut in, needle-sharp with doctrine. "The canyon is un-scouted. Sending Brotherhood personnel and armor into unknown ravines contradicts safety protocols."
Evelyn's reply was pragmatic and cool. "In the wastes, safety is knowledge, not paperwork. Neo's model has merit. We'll forward a mixed recon team into the canyon first. Main force follows at range. If it's untenable, we fall back to the highway."
Valk weighed the trade and, grudgingly, agreed. The first crack between them had been drawn.
The canyon was a different world—jagged stone, low light, passages that ate sound. The mixed recon element went ahead: Hammer and two Hawk team veterans from Prism, and two Brotherhood power-armored troopers led personally by Valk. The heavy suits scraped the walls in places, the noise made the local shadows shift.
Hammer, grumbling under his breath, muttered about the clanking armor. One armored trooper snapped back, mask lowering his patience: "Mind your tongue, soldier. Brotherhood armor is a symbol of order." Tension flicked through the group.
Then Hammer suddenly halted, fist raised. He pointed to the sand ahead—ordinary at first glance, but the scatter pattern of stones had a crafted rhythm.
"Predator pit," he hissed. "Small burrowers under the sand. They sense vibrations and spring tendrils to snare prey."
A Brotherhood footfall tested the sand with leather-gloved indifference—until Neo's voice warned over the mic. "Don't move. Their acid corrodes common alloys. Their tendrils can flip light vehicles." The trooper froze. Valk glanced at Hammer and Neo, then ordered a detour.
Small victories like that cut through arrogance. Brotherhood men began to notice the local knowledge that kept them safe.
The canyon opened into a wide morass seeded with odd purple fungal blotches. The air was sweet and wrong—thick with spores. Instruments screamed an ugly cocktail: corrosives and neurotoxins. Otto wanted to detour around it. That meant a longer route and hugging closer to an area flagged on old maps as a Ripper brood—riskier in other ways.
Neo crouched, watching the fungal pattern and the air currents. He studied how the lighter, paler bands of growth ran like a pale trail. "Maybe we don't detour," he said. "Those paler mats are a different strain—their roots metabolize and neutralize toxins. Wind's blowing our way; most spores are downwind. That paler trail could be a natural, or even animal-made, safe track." He scanned a sample with a handheld probe: volatile, but lower toxin index.
It was another wager. Evelyn, again, chose to trust the local read. Vehicles threaded the pale fungal trail with filters on full. Spore rain answered like a light percussion on metal. The convoy felt, step by step, like crossing a knife edge. When they cleared the marsh and turned back, the fungal ocean looked like a giant maw, and Brotherhood troopers' eyes—behind lenses—held a new, grudging respect.
The first real fight found them before they reached the anomaly node: a hunting pack of radiation scorpions, drawn by residual energy. They hit hard and close. Thick chitin, green phosphor glinting at the tail, and anger directed at the nearest armor.
Energy volleys from the Brotherhood lit up, then fizzed into useless arcs—those scorpions shrugged off pulses, and only served to anger the swarm. They slammed into power armor and rattled it like cans. One trooper staggered from a crushing hit.
"Switch to physical munitions—aim for joints and optic clusters!" Neo barked into the tactical net. Hawk teams flanked and opened with tipped-armor rounds and breach grenades. Hammer drove a modified utility mech forward—its drill a blunt, awful thing that bit into a scorpion's carapace and released a hiss of corrosive ichor. Neo fired up an old sound-projector he'd retrofitted; the unit's shortwave bawl at tuned frequency stunned the scorpions' nerves for a heartbeat.
That was all they needed. Hammer drove a blazing pike through a lead scorpion's head-thorax seam. The beasts crumpled. Blood and dust and a smell like burnt copper filled the gorge.
When the smoke cleared, men from both sides stood catching breath, bandaging scrapes and trading looks that felt like a new vocabulary—less suspicion, more calculation. Valk came up, nodded at Neo with a brief, professional approval: "Good tactics." His tone had lost some of its hauteur.
Days of travel, friction, and small mutual lessons led them at last to the first marked anomaly: a ruined geological survey outpost, instruments melted and warped as if by a furnace. The pulses here read loud and true—an energy residue denser and purer than anything the field teams had seen at the battle sites. Among the scorched ruin lay shards of dark violet—plates from the Energy Eaters' carapace. They had been here.
"They fed here," Neo said, picking up a fragment. "And they weren't just hunting. They drained something." Otto's scanners whirred over the most vitrified patch. His breath went thin. "Energy signatures point deeper. The pulse source runs inward from here. And this signal—its pattern is akin to what's inside the Energy Eaters… but purer."
They found no answers—only a deeper direction. Vehicles were tended, wounds stitched, and instruments recalibrated. The two camps remained separate when night came, but when they exchanged water skins and nodded at each other through the dark, there was a new undertone—conditional trust forged in fire and mutual need.
The pulse's mouth lay ahead. The expedition would test what lay beyond: whether the Dominator's echo was an isolated corruption or the first note of an orchestra that would play the wastes into a new, terrifying order.