The silence in Marcus's head was louder than the gunfire.
It was absolute. It was terrifying.
For months, his mind had been a crowded room. JARVIS had been a constant, sarcastic, probability-calculating voice. The gold UI had painted the world in clean, actionable data—threats in red, allies in blue, structural weaknesses in glowing green.
Now, there was only the deafening roar of the Greek Fire wall behind them.
The beach of Naples was a sensory nightmare. The air tasted like copper and burning hair. The black sand was rapidly turning to glass under the intense heat of the hyper-oxygenated jungle.
And from the hidden speakers in the burning canopy above, the classical Roman sonata swelled.
It was perfectly, mockingly clear.
"JARVIS," Marcus gritted his teeth, tapping his temple.
Nothing. Not a spark. Not a static hiss.
Nero's signal jammer was absolute.
Panic, raw and contagious, ripped through the five hundred scavengers who had made it to the beach. They were trapped. The ocean behind them was a fifty-foot wall of green chemical flame. The jungle ahead of them was spitting heavy-bolter fire.
A gaunt, terrified man near the water's edge threw down his rusted pipe.
"We're burning!" he screamed, his eyes wide with sheer terror. "The Warlord brought us here to burn!"
He spun around and sprinted back toward the boiling, green-lit surf. He didn't care about the flames. He just wanted off the beach.
"Stop!" Marcus roared, his analog voice barely carrying over the sonata.
The man didn't listen. He hit the shallows at a full sprint.
The water wasn't just hot. It was a chemical reaction.
The soles of the man's heavy work boots instantly melted into black, smoking sludge. He screamed, a sound that tore through Marcus's chest, as he fell forward into the boiling surf.
The green fire flashed over him. In three seconds, the screaming stopped.
The mob broke.
The scavengers scrambled away from the water, throwing themselves behind rusted tank traps and the hulks of ancient, half-buried cars scattered across the black sand. They curled into tight balls, covering their heads, refusing to advance into the tree line.
A heavy sniper round from the jungle tore through the air.
CRACK.
It shattered a concrete pylon less than two inches from Marcus's head. Concrete shrapnel rained down on his heavy naval coat.
Marcus froze.
His eyes darted wildly. He waited for the gold wireframe to highlight the sniper's trajectory. He waited for JARVIS to calculate the exact angle of the shot and paint the shooter in red.
He stared at the burning tree line. He saw nothing but smoke and fire.
He was paralyzed.
A heavy hand grabbed his collar.
Marcia violently yanked him down into the black sand behind a rusted iron girder.
"What are you doing?!" Marcia screamed over the gunfire.
Marcus looked at her, his breathing shallow. His eyes were wide, tracking invisible data that wasn't there.
"I can't see them," Marcus said. His voice was tight, bordering on panic. "The UI is gone. The probability... I don't know where the guns are."
He tapped his temple again, frantically.
Marcia saw it immediately. The God-Tier Warlord was gone. The man in front of her was experiencing severe, crippling tech-withdrawal. He had forgotten how to fight without a machine telling him how to win.
Marcia didn't comfort him. She didn't hold his hand.
She drew her hand back and slapped him across the face.
Hard.
The crack echoed even over the gunfire. Marcus's head snapped to the side. The sting was sharp, grounding, and painfully analog.
Marcus blinked, touching his cheek. He looked at her, stunned.
"Stop looking for a screen!" Marcia roared, her face inches from his. "Look at the dirt! Look at the tracers! You are a Roman Warlord! Lead!"
She grabbed his combat knife from his belt and shoved the hilt into his chest.
"You don't need a computer to tell you to kill the man shooting at you," she snarled. "We have thirty-six hours. Move!"
Marcus stared at the heavy steel knife in his hand.
He felt the rough texture of the grip. He felt the heat of the sand beneath his knees. He tasted the ash on his tongue.
The panic receded, replaced by a cold, familiar iron. The analog Warlord woke up.
He looked at the terrified scavengers huddled behind the scrap metal. They were weeping. They were broken. Intimidation wouldn't work. The Warlord's math wouldn't work on men paralyzed by fear.
But he knew what would.
Marcus reached deep into the pocket of his heavy naval coat.
His fingers closed around the handful of glowing blue cylinders he had scooped up in the hangar. Amps. The currency of the Styx. The lifeblood of their economy.
He pulled them out. The blue light pulsed against the black ash falling around them.
Marcus stood up. He ignored the sniper fire whizzing past his shoulders.
He reared back and threw the handful of glowing batteries as hard as he could.
They arced through the smoky air and scattered into the open, black sand, straight toward the burning jungle.
The blue glow was mesmerizing against the green fire.
"Fifty Amps!" Marcus roared, his voice tearing from his throat.
The scavengers stopped crying. Heads popped up from behind the rusted tank traps. Eyes locked onto the glowing fortune lying in no man's land.
"Fifty Amps to the first man who kills that heavy-bolter gunner!" Marcus screamed, pointing his knife at the muzzle flashes in the tree line. "A hundred Amps to the man who touches the bunker door!"
He reached into his other pocket and pulled out another handful. He threw them further up the beach.
"Two hundred!" Marcus roared.
The scavengers stared at the glowing blue cylinders in the dirt. It was enough wealth to buy a safe passage off the ship. It was enough wealth to buy clean water for a year.
Desperation collided violently with capitalism.
Greed won.
A massive, feral roar ripped from the throats of five hundred starving men. It drowned out the classical sonata.
The man nearest to Marcus, a scavenger with a rusted fire axe, broke from cover. He sprinted toward the glowing batteries, scooped two of them up without slowing down, and charged straight at the heavy-bolter nest.
The rest of the mob followed.
It wasn't a military charge. It was a stampede.
They flooded over the rusted tank traps, screaming, slipping in the black sand, firing scavenged laser-cutters and slug-throwers wildly into the burning jungle. They didn't care about cover. They only cared about the blue glow in the dirt and the Warlord's bounty.
The Board automated turrets swiveled, tearing into the front line. Men fell, shredded by heavy rounds.
But the mob didn't stop. They stepped over the dead to grab the dropped Amps, pushing the line forward with sheer, overwhelming, suicidal numbers.
"Now!" Marcus yelled to the Vanguard.
He didn't wait for JARVIS. He sprinted into the chaos, his boots kicking up black sand.
Marcia was right beside him, her shotgun booming rhythmically. Narcissus charged ahead of them both, a walking iron mountain, swatting aside heavy branches of hyper-oxygenated vines as they hit the tree line.
Lucilla scrambled behind them, entirely out of breath, clutching her datapad. She kept her eyes glued to Narcissus's broad, steel back, terrified to look at the carnage around her.
They breached the edge of the burning jungle.
The heat inside the canopy was intense. The vines were thick and slick with sap. The ground was muddy, a mix of dirt, ash, and blood.
Marcus saw the heavy-bolter nest dead ahead. It was manned by two Board clones in sleek black armor.
They were already overrun.
A dozen scavengers had reached the nest. The first man with the fire axe swung wildly, burying the rusted blade deep into a clone's helmet visor. The second clone tried to draw a sidearm, but a scavenger tackled him into the mud, repeatedly bashing his skull with a heavy rock.
The mob was feral. They were tearing the high-tech defenses apart with pure, analog brutality.
Marcus didn't slow down. He vaulted over the sandbag wall of the nest, pulling Marcia up behind him.
"Keep pushing!" Marcus yelled at the blood-soaked scavengers. "The bunker is straight ahead!"
They surged deeper into the burning jungle, following the Warlord's voice and the promise of wealth.
The trees thinned out.
Fifty yards ahead, half-buried under a massive, mutated oak tree, sat a heavy concrete bunker. Thick, insulated pipes ran from its rusted walls down into the earth.
The water purification plant.
"Lucilla!" Marcus yelled over his shoulder. "Get ready!"
Lucilla nodded frantically, wiping sweat and ash from her eyes.
They were thirty yards away. The scavengers were cheering, their pockets bulging with Amps. The beachhead was theirs.
Then, the violin music abruptly cut out.
The sudden silence in the jungle was jarring. Only the crackle of burning leaves remained.
Marcus stopped running. His Warlord instincts flared instantly.
Something was wrong.
The ground beneath his boots began to tremble.
It wasn't the rhythmic thud of an automated turret. It wasn't the concussive boom of mortar fire.
It was the slow, massive, deliberate footfalls of something immensely heavy walking through the burning trees directly toward them.
THUD.
The massive oak tree sheltering the bunker shuddered.
THUD.
A thick, burning branch the size of a car was violently snapped off and thrown aside like a twig.
The cheering scavengers fell dead silent. They raised their rusted weapons, backing away slowly.
Out from behind the concrete bunker stepped a nightmare.
It was a Board "Burner" unit.
It was a massive, crab-like mechanical walker, standing twenty feet tall on four thick, hydraulic legs. Its armor was sleek, black, and completely fireproof. In the center of the chassis sat a thick, reinforced glass canopy.
Inside the canopy, a clone pilot sat bathed in red warning lights. He was grinning.
The Burner Mech didn't carry heavy-bolters. It carried twin, industrial-grade rotary flamethrowers mounted on heavy mechanical arms. They were dripping with unignited, gelatinous napalm.
The machine let out a deafening, mechanical shriek.
Without JARVIS, Marcus couldn't hack its targeting systems. He couldn't disable its servos.
He was staring down twenty tons of high-tech death with a combat knife.