I ran on thrusters and terror, my suit chewing distance as if the air itself were something I could tear open with enough force. The northern bridge burned ahead sirens strobing red across twisted steel and shattered pylons and yet the sound of it all felt wrong, as if my ears were hearing war through cloth. Smoke rolled in thick layers, tasting of burned polymer and cooked wiring, and the wind carried the bitter tang of melted stone. I was still three hundred meters out when the sky split.
A rift opened above the bridge like a wound that refused to clot. It pulsed red and purple in nauseating rhythm, shedding faint black lightning that crawled outward and died in the air as though the atmosphere rejected it. The object fell from that tear in the world without sound at first just a dark, tumbling mass with heat haze shimmering around it then the communications channels exploded with overlapping voices: shouting orders, screaming coordinates, calls for medics, calls for mothers, calls for gods. I tried to push more thrust, to close the last stretch, but the object struck the bridge and the universe became a white mouth swallowing everything.
There was no scream. No audible death. Just a clean, surgical flash of light that erased shadow, color, and mercy. The shockwave arrived an instant later, a violent wall that hit my suit like a god's palm. I was hurled backward, slammed through broken infrastructure and brittle walls, my visor filling with fractured HUD warnings as debris chewed across my plating. Heat slapped my face even through filtration, then cold rushed in behind it, the kind of cold that follows a blast because the world has been emptied of air. I rolled, caught myself, and looked back in time to see a small mushroom cloud rising tight and pale at its base, swelling upward like an obscene flower blooming from the grave of the bridge.
I forced my thrusters to full blast and launched toward the central lines toward Argelia because standing still felt like dying on purpose. My voice tore through the channel, ragged with panic I refused to name as panic. "They have mini nuclear warheads. Everyone move do not bunch northern bridge has been wiped out. I repeat: northern bridge has fallen." The words landed like stones in an empty cathedral. Even the channel seemed to hesitate, as if the war itself understood what that meant: the enemy had not simply attacked; they had prewritten our responses and laid explosives inside our instincts.
Argelia's voice cut in, tight and urgent. "We are surrounded. Don't come here by yourself. These things are armoured heavy and fast, Aziri." Diana shouted over her, fury breaking through discipline. "Argelia, get out of there. Whatever you do, do not fall get whoever you can and go." I reached the edge of a shattered building and looked down from high ground, forcing my visor to zoom and stabilize through smoke. The scene below was a nightmare rendered in geometry: thousands of them, stepping from rifts like soldiers being poured into reality. Their armor was unfamiliar angular, dense, too clean to be improvised each suit swallowing light and giving nothing back. They moved in coordinated surges, a tide with intelligence, and the worst of it was how organized their violence felt. I watched Argelia's perimeter shrink as her lines broke one by one, until there was only her and three of her best four figures against a swarm that would have devoured a battalion.
She saw me. I felt it like a hand on my throat. "Aziri," she said through the channel, a warning that sounded like permission and farewell at once. "Don't. You'll only fall here." My spit turned to paste. Tears threatened to break free, humiliating and hot behind my eyes, and I forced them back the way I had been taught to force back pain: with breath, with posture, with hatred. Then she straightened, raised her blade, and spoke not as a soldier but as a woman turning her life into a vow.
"I, Centurion Argelia Di Sandro of Domus Draconum blade of Imperator Aquila Marcellus Vaillancourt lay my life for his honour." Her voice sharpened into fire. "IGNIS MANENS SUMUS!" She launched.
Even in that hell, she moved with beauty. She slid through ash and shattered stone as if the ground loved her enough to make room, cutting into joints and seams with precision that felt like scripture. Her three shadows followed in perfect timing, their blades writing violent calligraphy across armored bodies. For a heartbeat, it looked like a miracle like courage could still change mathematics. Then the fallen enemies began to rise. Not staggering, not crawling. Rising. As if death were a door they had keys to.
One caught her blade with a bare hand, fingers tightening around steel as though pain was a rumor. Another struck her with an axe. I heard the air leave her lungs through the channel, a sound so small it made me sick. Her three swordsmen were swallowed next surrounded and ripped apart not with the clean death of warriors, but with the savage disassembly of animals. In my visor, blood looked black in the smoke, and armor sounded like tearing cloth as they were pulled open. I turned my audio sensitivity higher, desperate, stupid, and heard her whisper faint, almost already gone.
"Oh Lord of lords… keeper of my fields… narrow or wide… unite me with my folk…"
Then I saw him.
An old man by all appearances human, sickly, draped in long black cloth that moved like wet smoke. His hair was fine and ash-grey, his skin ghost-pale, and he was dripping in blood as if he had been bathing in it. He held Argelia's heart in his hand like a fruit plucked from a tree, and he bit into it with a slow, indulgent hunger that made my stomach revolt. The sound soft, obscene was intimate in a way violence should never be. He lifted her helmet slightly, as though he wanted her face to witness what he had done, and then his gaze found my camera feed as if he could see through my visor. "Are you not ashamed," he asked, voice sliding into my skull like cold oil, "of listening to the words of a dying woman?"
My heart tried to escape my ribs. My limbs went hollow. I turned and jumped from the building without thinking, letting freefall eat my fear for a half-second before I engaged my gravity units and blasted east. His laughter followed not in the air, but inside my mind, where no armor could block it. I opened a private channel to the others, my voice shaking with rage and something worse. "We have a massive fucking problem. They don't die. I watched them fall and rise again. He" my throat clenched around the image, around the bite, around the moan of cruelty "he ate her heart."
I hit into the side of a building hard enough to rattle my teeth, then dropped to one knee in a crater of broken flooring, forcing myself to breathe while the world burned outside. The channel stayed silent for a few seconds, the kind of silence that means everyone is alive and none of them know what to say. I swallowed and forced command into my tone because if I let grief speak, it would drown us. "Everyone head east. Travel as high as possible above the clouds. Sector 1208 escape route still untouched." One by one they answered, each voice a rope thrown into the pit I was falling into.
Diana spoke first, steady through exhaustion. "Copy. I've got thirteen Crimson unit, three pilots, eight heavy armoured with shields, twenty desert infantry, and two sword masters with familiars. ETA seven minutes."
Quentin came next, breathy and bright in that way he used when he was bleeding but refused to admit it. "I've got nine hunters, six riflemen, three snipers, one sword master, and two Crimson. Taken heavy damage. ETA twelve minutes." He paused, then forced a laugh that sounded like sunlight through cracked glass. "Last one there is on Vappa." Even now, even here, he tried to make us remember we were boys once.
Sextus's voice arrived like thunder covered in ash. "It's me, my familiar, and one sword master with his familiar. Everyone else is dead. Total casualty… hundreds of thousands." He exhaled, and I heard fear beneath the brute strength. "This is madness. ETA ten."
Jabir answered with the weight of command and the strain of carrying too much. "Me and sixty artillery men. Six sword masters with familiars. Four juggernauts. Twelve heavy armoured personnel with dense shields. My father with his familiar. ETA nine."
Then my mother. Her voice was calm, but it carried the sound of someone holding the world together with her bare hands. "It's me. Fatimata. Victor and Athena with our familiars. Sofia. One hundred remaining Queen's Guard. Seventy Crimson units. Ten juggernauts. Fifteen heavy artillery. Ten heavy infantry. Twenty-five armoured personnel. Fifteen sword masters with familiars. ETA eighteen."
Relief hit me so hard my vision blurred. They were alive. They were moving. They were not alone. And still my chest ached, because Whitescale remained a hole in the universe. Quentin returned to the channel again, because he could not help himself. "Actually I take back the Vappa thing," he said, and laughed again, softer, as if he was trying to pretend this was all a terrible dream we'd wake from. For a heartbeat, I let myself believe in that kind of mercy. Then the sky boomed and the lie shattered.
I climbed above the smoke line, aiming for cloud cover, and that was when I saw the clash two beasts holding back an entire flood. From the ridge of a mountain scarred by fire, I anchored myself and zoomed in. Thousands of bodies littered the slope dismembered armor, broken helmets, black blood pooling like spilled ink. At the center of that carnage was Whitescale.
He and Odowah were fighting like legends that had gotten tired of being polite. Odowah's armor was torn away in pieces, the hybrid's ashy-black hide exposed and slick with blood, its intense blue eyes burning like twin stars. Whitescale was bare-handed, no weapon, no suit ripping armored bodies apart with his own strength, tearing plating as if it were thin bark, breaking limbs, crushing throats, feeding the mountain a constant rainfall of gore. It should have been impossible. It should have been a myth. It was my uncle my blood moving like the nightmare he had always refused to become in front of me.
I launched toward them at full speed and began dropping sonic rounds and bombs into the enemy mass, detonations snapping bodies into vapor and shrapnel. "DIVE!" I screamed over the channel, and Whitescale and Odowah obeyed with terrifying instinct, collapsing low as the blasts erased everything that had been reaching for them. I landed hard beside them, thrusting medical packs and gravity packs into Whitescale's hands. He looked bewitched bloodshot eyes, breath too heavy, the kind of rage that makes a man forget he is mortal. Up close I saw what he had been hiding: a broken arm, puncture wounds, a collapse in his breathing that told me one lung wasn't working right. I grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him until he focused. "Report," he demanded, voice raw.
"Casualties massive," I shot back. "All bridges fallen. Mini nuclear warheads used. Over three million civilians dead at least. Hundreds of thousands of our soldiers wiped out in choke points. There's a rift master aiding them. First attack was a distraction to herd us." I swallowed the rest the heart, the bite, the old man's voice but Whitescale's eyes narrowed as if he had already tasted that truth.
He smiled then, small and lethal, the smile of a man who had survived too many massacres to be surprised by evil. He slapped the gravity pack on, injected stims without flinching, and nodded once. "Thirty seconds," I told him. "We move." We launched, and I carried Odowah because even a beast that tall can bleed out like anything else when the world decides it wants you dead. Halfway to the evacuation sector, Whitescale gestured downward. I looked and saw the sea of red our soldiers gathered like offerings, bodies stacked by blast patterns, cities burning in sections, shipyards vomiting black smoke into a bleeding sky. My hate grew teeth. I pushed my thrusters harder until the suit screamed.
I saw the survivors at Sector 1208, a cluster of moving lights in the ash. I keyed the channel. "I found Whitescale and Odowah. I see everyone at the zone. ETA twenty-five seconds." The moment the words left my mouth, pain detonated in my skull an invasive scream that did not travel through air but through thought. My hands spasmed. The suit wobbled. The world tilted. It felt like someone had shoved a hot blade behind my eyes and twisted.
I slammed into the ground near the evac point, landing with a cratered thud, clutching my head as I screamed. "Get out…get out…GET OUT!" The sound of my own voice frightened me. It didn't sound like a boy. It sounded like an alarm.
Whitescale froze, horror replacing rage in an instant. He didn't look at the sky. He didn't look at the enemies. He looked at me like he was watching a gate open inside my mind. "It's a mind realm attack," he said, voice suddenly cold with certainty. "None of you can do anything move!" He grabbed my shoulder as others surged toward us, and I felt hands under my arms, lifting, dragging. "Help me carry him into the cave," Whitescale ordered, and as they pulled me toward darkness, the scream in my skull sharpened into a whisper familiar, patient, coiled like something had finally found the door it had been knocking on since Cruoris Tractus.