The wrecked Steadfast was a war monument. Recovery teams winched it off the Gauntlet floor, its mangled leg a testament to the cost of victory. Team Obsidian, however, had no time for rest. The Gauntlet's cruel clock continued to tick. With their primary mech disabled, they were forced to fall back on their secondary—an older, slower Mark-IX "Bulwark"—a literal reserve tank dredged from the academy's surplus yards. It was a downgrade in every metric: firepower, mobility, sensor acuity. But its neural interface was compatible, and it had two working legs.
They re-entered the fray from a low-priority deployment zone, their points from the Sentinel takedown the only thing keeping them in the top ten. The tide of the Gauntlet had shifted. The initial free-for-all had coalesced into loose, brutal alliances. The Coruscant Aces had teamed up with the Wano Swordsmen, creating a fast, lethal skirmishing force. The Astartes Neophytes and the Martian Mechanicum had formed an implacable armored fist. And a dark horse team from the Psionic Academy of Titan—specialists in warp and psychic warfare—had risen silently through the ranks by mentally disabling opposing pilots.
Team Obsidian, in their clunky Bulwark, became prey.
Their first engagement in the new mech was a disaster. Ambushed by the Coruscant/Wano alliance in the fungal jungle, they were outmaneuvered at every turn. The Bulwark's sluggish responses couldn't track the jetpacking cadets and blurring swordsmen. Sera's precise plasma shots were wasted on phantom afterimages. Chen's sensor feeds were jammed by sophisticated electronic warfare. Varg's strength meant nothing when he couldn't land a hit. Aris's telekinesis was stretched thin deflecting a hail of ion darts and monomolecular blade-projections.
They were pushed, harried, and systematically dismantled. A Wano swordsman, using some technique that briefly phased through solid matter, planted a limpet charge on the Bulwark's back. The explosion crippled their main reactor, forcing them into a desperate, shambling retreat, leaking coolant and trailing smoke.
They holed up in the frozen tundra sector, using the bitter cold to mask their heat signature. Inside the frigid cockpit, morale was at absolute zero. The Bulwark's interior lights were dim, powered by backup cells. The air smelled of ozone and despair.
"We're finished," Chen said, his voice hollow. He was cradling a burned-out sensor module. "The Bulwark is a coffin. We can't fight like this."
Varg slammed a fist against his console, making the whole mech shudder. "We had the lead! And they give us this… this scrap!"
Sera was silent, hugging her knees to her chest, her eyes distant. Aris sat in meditation, but a fine tremor ran through his hands.
Ryosuke watched them through the Six Eyes. He saw the microfractures in their resolve, the stress hormones flooding their systems, the neural fatigue fogging their thoughts. The System's assessment was bleak.
[Team Status: Critical. Cohesion: 41%. Mech Operational Capacity: 32%. Probability of Surviving Next Engagement: 12.7%.]
They were breaking. The weight of Obsidian, which had held under the Sentinel's assault, was crumbling under the grinding pressure of inadequacy.
He could push them. Give a rousing speech. But words were wind against this kind of fatigue. They needed something else. They needed to remember not what they were fighting for, but what they were.
He disengaged from his pilot's harness with a soft hiss. The others looked up, startled.
"Out," he said, his voice not a command, but a simple statement.
"What?" Varg growled.
"We're abandoning the mech?" Sera asked, confused.
"Not abandoning. Changing the battlefield." Ryosuke moved to the manual release for the Bulwark's frontal cockpit hatch. "The Gauntlet rules allow for pilot egress in case of mech failure. We're not failing. We're adapting."
With a groan of protesting metal, he cranked the hatch open. A blast of arctic wind howled into the cockpit, stealing their breath. Beyond was a field of jagged blue ice under a purple, simulated sky.
"We can't fight out there!" Chen protested. "They have mechs! We have… sidearms!"
Ryosuke turned, his ice-blue eyes catching the weak light. "We have more than that. We have each other. And we have our awakenings, unfiltered by this broken machine." He jumped down, landing lightly on the ice. "The Bulwark is a liability. It makes us slow, predictable. Out here, we are small. We are fast. We are unexpected."
One by one, driven more by his unshakable certainty than by any real hope, they followed. They bundled up in survival gear from the mech's lockers, armed themselves with stun-pistols and combat knives.
Outside, the scale was terrifying. In the distance, they could see the flashes and booms of mech combat. They were ants on a glacier.
Ryosuke gathered them in the lee of the Bulwark's massive, frozen foot. "New rules. We are not a mech team anymore. We are an infiltration unit. Our objective is no longer to defeat every enemy. It's to survive, and to complete high-value secondary objectives that don't require a Jaeger. Chen, you're our pathfinder. Find us objectives we can reach on foot—data caches, relay stations, sabotage targets. Sera, you are not a cannon. You are a welder, a cutter, a creator of diversions. Varg, you are our mobile cover and our breaching tool. Aris, you are our silent step, our remote touch."
He looked at their doubtful faces. "This is our Fractal Training. But now, the chaos is real. See the connections. See the pattern. Follow my lead."
They moved. It was a different kind of warfare. Clandestine, desperate, intimate. Chen, using his speed, would scout ahead, locating a small, automated sensor tower. Sera would melt its base with a focused jet of flame, silencing its watchful eye. Varg would lift the fallen tower and hurl it as a distraction across the ice field. Aris would use his telekinesis to muffle the sound of their footsteps or to trigger distant rockfalls.
And Ryosuke… Ryosuke was the orchestrator. His Six Eyes tracked everything—the patrol patterns of drone scouts, the thermal signatures of hidden mechs, the shifting weather patterns. He used minute applications of Blue to pull Chen out of a potential line of sight, or Red to deflect a falling icicle that would have given away their position. He was the silent conductor of a symphony of shadows.
They found a secondary objective: Sabotage the Geothermal Tap in Sector Theta-2. It was a facility guarded by an automated turret network, designed for mech-scale assaults.
From a ridge, they watched the pulsating energy tap and the sweeping red beams of the turrets. Impossible for infantry.
"See the pattern," Ryosuke whispered, his breath frosting. "The turrets sweep in a seven-second sequence. There's a blind spot at the base of the central pylon for 1.2 seconds. But it's thirty meters of open ground."
Chen shook his head. "I can't cross that in 1.2, not without my full sprint giving me away on seismic sensors."
"You don't cross it," Ryosuke said. "You're already there."
He pointed. "Sera, you see that ice sheet hanging from the cliff above the pylon? When I give the signal, you melt the precise anchor point. It will fall, shatter on the open ground, creating a massive acoustic and seismic distraction. The turrets will focus on it. Varg, you throw Chen."
"Throw me?" Chen squeaked.
"Like a javelin. At the exact moment of the distraction. Aris, you add your telekinesis to the throw, and then cushion Chen's landing at the pylon. He plants the charges, we detonate remotely."
It was insane. It required split-second, millimeter precision from everyone.
They didn't question it. They trusted the pattern.
Sera focused, her flame a blue-white needle. The ice anchor vaporized. The sheet fell, a crystalline avalanche that crashed onto the ice field with a sound like the world breaking.
Turrets swiveled, firing at the noise and movement.
Varg grabbed Chen by the back of his harness. With a grunt of effort, augmented muscles coiling, he hurled the lightweight cadet like a missile. Aris, his face tight with concentration, wrapped Chen in a telekinetic sheath, accelerating him, guiding him.
Chen shot across the thirty-meter gap in a blur, a human projectile. He slammed into the base of the pylon, Aris's power softening the impact just enough to not break his bones. Gasping, Chen slapped the shaped plasma charges onto the pylon's regulators.
They detonated. The geothermal tap whined and died, its light extinguishing.
[Secondary Objective Complete: +750 Points. Stealth Bonus Applied.]
They slipped away into the ice caves as mechs from two different alliances arrived to investigate the explosion, only to find a disabled facility and no enemy in sight.
Word began to spread through the Gauntlet's comm-chatter. Obsidian's mech was dead, but the team was not. They were ghosts, hitting objectives and vanishing, sowing confusion. Their point total, once stagnant, began to climb again.
But the Gauntlet saved its cruelest twist for the final six hours. A system-wide announcement echoed across all frequencies:
"Final Phase Activated: Convergence. All secondary objectives voided. Primary Objective: Capture and hold the Central Spire. All other teams are now hostiles. The Spire's location is being broadcast."
A waypoint pulsed on everyone's maps—a towering structure in the heart of the floating city ruins. A single, defensible point. A meat grinder.
It was a battle of attrition. The remaining alliances shattered, every team for itself. A brutal, no-holds-barred rush for the only prize that mattered.
Team Obsidian watched from a shattered skyscraper perch as the first wave converged. Mechs clashed in the city squares below, a thunderous orgy of metal and energy. The Coruscant/Wano alliance, using their speed, reached the Spire first, only to be bogged down by the Astartes/Mechanicum juggernaut. The Psionic Academy lurked on the edges, using mental assaults to make pilots hallucinate or shut down their neural links.
"We can't go down there," Varg stated the obvious. "We'd be paste."
"We don't have to go down," Ryosuke said, his eyes fixed on the Spire. It was a needle of obsidian-like material, covered in ancient, glowing runes. "We go through."
He pointed. The Spire wasn't solid. Its surface was a latticework of geometric patterns, with gaps and conduits running up its length. It was scalable. For something the size of a mech? Impossible. For five determined, augmented humans?
"Chen, you're first. Find the route. Sera, you're on melting any sealed grates or barriers. Varg, you're our anchor, securing lines. Aris, you're spotting for falling debris and providing lift where needed. We climb."
It was the ultimate test of their new, infantry-scale synergy. They became a single organism scaling a mountain. Chen would zip ahead, finding handholds, securing pitons with pre-tensioned cables. Sera would follow, her flames delicately cutting through obstructive metal. Varg would haul up the heavier gear, his augmented grip unbreakable. Aris would use telekinesis to steady them during gusts of simulated wind or to pull a teammate up a difficult overhang.
And Ryosuke climbed at the rear, his Six Eyes monitoring the battle below, calculating the trajectories of stray missiles and ricocheting fire, using minute spatial distortions to deflect shrapnel that would have knocked them from the wall. He was their guardian, their living shield.
Halfway up, they were spotted. A damaged Mark-XII, its pilot from the Martian Institute, saw the tiny figures on the Spire and turned its one working laser cannon on them.
"Scatter!" Ryosuke commanded.
They broke formation, clinging to the latticework as searing light scored the stone beside them. Sera, in a moment of pure instinct, didn't try to hide. She turned and spat a glob of superheated plasma directly down at the mech's exposed cockpit viewport. It wasn't enough to breach, but it blinded the pilot with molten slag for a critical few seconds.
Varg, taking advantage, ripped a large, decorative spike from the Spire's facade. With a roar, he hurled it like a spear. It wasn't meant to damage the mech. It struck the already damaged laser cannon's mounting, jamming its rotation.
The mech staggered back, unable to bring its weapon to bear.
They climbed faster.
They reached the summit not as conquerors, but as survivors. The top of the Spire was a flat platform, where a control beacon hummed. But they were not alone.
Waiting for them was the three-pilot team from the Psionic Academy of Titan. They wore no mechs. They stood in a triangle formation, their eyes glowing with unnatural light. The leader, a pale girl with silver hair, smiled.
"We felt you climbing. A mind like a void, surrounded by little candles. Interesting. But the mind is the true battlefield."
A psychic assault hit them like a physical wave. Not pain, but confusion. Sera's flames guttered out as she forgot how to summon them. Chen's speed became a disorienting blur as his perception of time fractured. Varg's augmented limbs locked up, his neural implants screaming with feedback. Aris cried out, his mental fortress under direct, seige-like pressure.
Only Ryosuke stood unaffected. His Cursed Energy, its nature alien to the Warp, the Force, or any known psychic medium, was an impervious fortress. The psionic waves broke against the infinite expanse of his Limitless like water on glass.
He saw his team collapsing, their minds under assault. He had seconds.
He didn't attack the psions. He attacked the connection.
He focused his Six Eyes on the psychic energy linking the three psions. He saw its frequency, its resonant pattern. It was a circuit, a feedback loop of immense power.
He inserted a single, conceptual "NO" into that loop.
He used a infinitesimal, perfectly tuned pulse of Red—not in physical space, but in the abstract space of their psychic harmony.
The effect was instantaneous and catastrophic. The feedback loop shattered. The psions screamed, clutching their heads as their own amplified power recoiled back into them, overloading their senses. They fell to their knees, unconscious.
The mental pressure vanished. Sera gasped, her flame reigniting in her palm. Chen blinked, his vision clearing. Varg's servos unlocked with a whine.
Without a word, Ryosuke walked to the beacon. He placed his hand on it.
[Primary Objective Secured: The Spire is under control of Team Obsidian.]
[Broadcast: All remaining teams. Stand down. The Gauntlet concludes in 10 minutes.]
The announcement echoed across the shattered city. The thunder of combat below stuttered, then died. Searchlights from hovering command shuttles pinned them on the Spire's peak—five small, battered figures standing over the defeated psions, their silhouettes black against the swirling holographic aurora of the Gauntlet's artificial sky.
In the command center, the silence was absolute. Then, Commander Liana Rae spoke, her voice filled with something like reverence. "They didn't win with their Jaeger. They won when they left it behind. They won as themselves."
Commandant Idris nodded slowly, his bionic eye recording every detail. "They redefined the terms of engagement. That is not a cadet tactic. That is the instinct of a veteran of a war we haven't even imagined yet."
On the Spire, the wind whipped at their clothes. They were exhausted to the bone, frozen, bruised. But they stood together.
Chen let out a whoop that was half-laugh, half-sob. Sera leaned against Varg, who didn't shrug her off. Aris sat down heavily, a smile of pure relief on his face.
Ryosuke looked at his team—his unit, his family. They had been forged in the fire of expectation, quenched in the ice of despair, and tempered in the chaos of the impossible. They were no longer Obsidian.
They were its unbreakable edge.
The Gauntlet was over. They had won.
And as the first rays of the simulated dawn painted the floating city in gold, Ryosuke knew the real trial—the attention of the entire, hungry Federation—was just beginning.