They burst into the clearing they'd used as a motor pool, a scar of churned mud and oil stained across the phosphorescent undergrowth. Their vehicles stood in a ragged defensive crescent: a patchwork congregation of scrap-metal theology. Scavenged motorcycles, their frames welded with jagged armor plates, sat beside cars with doors replaced by road signs and rusted bulkhead hatches and their windows replaced by crisscrossed rebar. The heavier hitters were the trucks, their beds fortified with sandbags and scrap, mounting heavy stubbers and a few, precious corporate-made autocannons, their sleek lines a stark contrast to the hellish aesthetic bolted around them.

  They'd become less than a twenty. The symphony of annihilation—the of the pulse laser, the wet detonations of flesh, the final, crushing sounds of melee—are finally behind them.

  The dozen-odd Hellwraiths left to guard the ‘wheels’ stared, their postures shifting from bored vigilance to alarm. One, a hulking brute with a welding mask shoved up on his forehead, took a step forward. "Ares? The fuck? You're back? Sounded like a goddamn war in there—"

  No one answered him. The returning hunters just leaned on their knees, chests heaving, their armor spattered with a fine, warm mist that wasn’t theirs. The silence from the survivors was more terrifying than any story.

  One of the younger raiders, his eyes wide with a terror that overrode all pack loyalty, made a break for a motorcycle. He swung a leg over the seat, fumbling for the ignition. Ares moved with feral speed. He didn’t shout; he simply lunged, his clawed gauntlet closing on the pup’s harness and yanking him bodily from the seat. The boy landed hard on the irradiated moss, the wind knocked out of him.

  Ares didn’t even look at him. His mono-lens gaze was fixed on the factory, his voice a low, gravelly snarl that carried to every Hellwraith present. “Level that place! Get every gun on that thing!”

  The order was a lightning rod for their terror, transforming blind panic into directed fury. There were no arguments, no questions. The Hellwraiths moved with a frantic, brutal efficiency. Engines roared to life as trucks were maneuvered, presenting their broadsides to the factory. The of heavy stubbers being charged, the heavier of autocannons cycling their first rounds, filled the air.

  Ares himself vaulted into the bed of a flatbed truck, shoving the previous gunner aside. His hands closed on the grips of a twin-linked heavy stubber, the 12.7mm barrels looking like blackened pipes. Without hesitation, he squeezed the triggers.

  The world dissolved into sound. The stubbers erupted with a deafening, percussive that hammered against the chest. A torrent of brass casings spewed from the ejection port, smoking and clattering around his boots. The twin streams of tracer fire, brilliant red in the gloom, lanced across the clearing and tore into the factory’s eastern face. He wasn’t aiming; he was hosing. He walked the fire across windows, doorways, the very hole he’d leaped from minutes before.

  He was joined in an instant as a storm of fire erupted from the crescent. Stubber rounds chewed at the concrete, chipping away decades of decay in seconds. The autocannons spoke with a deeper, more authoritative , their high-explosive shells punching into the structure and detonating with sharp, contained flashes of orange and black. The air itself vibrated with the concussive force. A massive, choking cloud of dust, pulverized concrete, and rust billowed from the building, a grey-brown shroud that began to obscure the target. The factory was being systematically flayed alive.

  Through the ringing in his ears and the weapon's violent shudder in his hands, Ares saw it. A heavy transport truck, its bed reinforced with welded beams, rumbled into position at the rear of the formation. Two crewmen, their movements nervous and urgent, unstrapped their prize.

  The thing was monstrous, a testament to horrific ingenuity. Its shape and size resembling a massive, fat seal, its surface pitted and scarred. It was a brute-force object, a delivery system for pure, unthinking demolition. The weapon itself sits atop a guiderail made from a massive industrial I-beam, welded to a thick steel baseplate sunk into the truck’s bed, which the men was busy moving the entire system off the truck.

  “Yes!” Ares roared over the gunfire, his voice raw. “Use it! Blow that bastard into the fucking ground!”

  The storm of fire faltered. The of the stubbers and the of the autocannons stuttered into a tense, ringing silence as every Hellwraith’s eyes locked on the monstrous device being wrestled from the transport truck.

  It was “the big rocket.”

  The weapon was terror incarnate. The warhead was a repurposed industrial gas tank, its surface pitted and painted with crude hazard stripes and was filled with a home-brewed slurry of explosives and jagged scrap metal. Crude, sheet-metal fins were welded to its base.

  It was the pinnacle of “techno-barbarian” engineering: powerful, simple, and utterly, catastrophically unreliable.

  Its size and its crude, uneven fins, didn't inspire awe—it inspired an animalistic, primal dread.

  The panic was immediate and visceral.

  "For fuck's sake!" screamed one raider, ducking behind a truck tire. "It killed eight of Hashinithar's men the last time they tried to use one! It'll wipe out before it even hits the machine-guy!"

  Another, clutching a smoking autocannon’s grip, nodded frantically. “Right, get that thing away from us, now. Scrap it!”

  Ares, his mind a calculator of risk and reward, didn't need convincing. The math was simple: the machine-guy was a 100% certainty of death. The big rocket was merely a high probability of it. He couldn't articulate a proper fire-mission order—words like "minimum safe distance" or "displaced launch point" weren't in his lexicon. His command was pure, guttural instinct.

  “Get the big rocket… over there!” he roared, jabbing a finger toward a patch of relatively clear ground one hundred and fifty paces to their flank. “Away! Away from the Wheels! ”

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  A few young scouts, their faces pale beneath their grime and warpaint, understood the gist. Terror and a desperate desire to prove themselves warred in their eyes. They scrambled onto the flatbed, unchaining the monstrous projectile. With grunts of effort, they manhandled the hundreds-kilogram death-tube, dragging it and its launching rail off the truck and setting it up a good one hundred and fifty paces from the main firing line, at the very edge of the tree line.

  The rest of the warband didn’t need an order. As the scouts fumbled with a long, fuse igniter, every single Hellwraith—Ares included—ducked behind whatever cover they could find. The barrage on the factory stuttered and died, replaced by a tense, ringing silence broken only by the frantic whispers of the two scouts.

  A spark, a hiss of burning chemical fuse, and then a sound like the world tearing in half.

  The big rocket ignited with a volcanic roar and a blast of heat that washed over the clearing. It leapt from its I-beam rail, not with grace, but with a violent, wobbling , trailing a thick plume of black smoke and sparks. It described a high, parabolic arc, a drunken, fire-belching comet against the grey sky. For a heart-stopping moment, it seemed it might tip over and plunge back into them. The Hellwraiths stared at its trajectory with panicked fear.

  But it held its course, crashing through the already shattered roof of the machine workshop and disappearing inside with a sound of collapsing metal.

  Silence.

  The Hellwraiths remained crouched, ears ringing, waiting for the earth-shattering .

  Nothing.

  The only sound was the crackle of the burnt fuse-wire from the launch site and the faint hiss of their own strained breathing.

  Ares slowly rose from behind the stubber, his mono-lens scanning the distant, dust-shrouded building. Nothing. No secondary explosion. No world-ending fireball.

  “Is it a fucking dud?” he snarled, the words dripping with a toxic mix of disappointment and a flicker of relief.

  The silence stretched for three heartbeats. Four, five, then it became a ten.

  Then the world ended.

  The world did not flash. It in. There was a faint flash within the distant structure, then it came: a deep, subterranean THUMPdissolving into a single, expanding cloud of pulverized concrete and atomized steel. The air pressure dropped violently, pulling at their eardrums. Then a fireball, fat and sickly yellow from the chemical brew within, vomited upwards, swallowing the structure whole. The shockwave hit them seconds later, a wall of superheated air and deafening force that knocked Hellwraiths from their feet, sent motorcycles skittering sideways, and rattled the teeth in their skulls. A rain of fine, hot grit and shredded metal pattered down for what felt like a full minute, hissing as it landed on armor and scorched earth. Where the factory had stood, there was now a settling, churning plume of dust, a new scar on the planet's face. The abstract arts within were now one with the rubble.

  For a long moment, there was no sound but the ringing in their ears and the soft, settling sigh of a million tons of debris.

  Then, a laugh. A single, high-pitched, broken sound from one of the scouts who'd fired the rocket. It was picked up by another, then another, until the clearing was filled with a cacophony of hysterical, forced bravado. They slapped each other's pauldrons, their laughter edged with the shrillness of men who had just seen eighty percent of their comrades turned into red mist and now needed to believe, to convince themselves, that the architect of that horror was gone.

  "He's paste! He's fucking paste!" one yelled, his voice cracking.

  "Nothing could live that! Nothing!" another roared, the lie tasting like victory on his tongue.

  Ares watched them, his own heart hammering against his ribs. The thought was cold, clear.

  He couldn't show weakness. The pack was balanced on a knife's edge. He slammed a fresh belt into the twin stubbers, the metallic cutting through the hysterical laughter. "Enough!" he barked, his voice reclaiming its guttural authority.

  "He's dead. Now we prove it. Find a piece of him. A hand. A chunk of that shiny armor. Something for Erebus. Then we get the fuck out of this cursed place."

  He led the advance, not at the front, but in the middle of the ragged group. The dozen guards from the Wheels fell in, their earlier confidence replaced by a wary dread. The remaining twenty or so survivors from the initial hunt fanned out, a skittish pack of hounds poking at the edges of the devastation with their guns.

  The machine workshop was gone. In its place was a flattened, smoldering hellscape of jagged rebar and crushed machinery. The air was thick with the smell of cordite, melted plastics, and cooked meat—a scent they all recognized, though none dared acknowledge its possible source. They moved through the ruins like men walking to the gallows, their senses dulled by the bombardment and their own fear.

  Ares stayed in the middle of the ragged formation, a predator trying to project an aura of control he no longer felt. His autogun was a comforting weight, but it felt like a child's toy against the memory of the blue flashes.

  They picked their way through the apocalyptic landscape they had created. The workshop was gone, replaced by a flattened hill of smoking rubble, twisted rebar, and the shattered guts of machinery. The air was thick with the smell of pulverized concrete, ozone, and a sickening, coppery undertone that spoke of remains buried too deep to see. They kicked over slabs of concrete, peered into cavities filled with twisted metal.

  As the seconds bled into a minute, and no nightmare emerged from the dust, a fragile, shell-shocked relief began to seep into them. The tension in their shoulders eased a fraction. Muttered exchanges, devoid of the earlier hysteria, passed between them.

  "Maybe... maybe it really got him."

  "Nothing could live through that. Nothing."

  "The big rocket did its job."

  was the collective, desperate thought hanging in the air. The search became less fearful, more procedural. They were convincing themselves they were merely archaeologists of their own victory.

  Then they heard it.

  A single, deliberate of metal on concrete.

  It didn't come from the rubble pile in front of them. It came from behind.

  Ares, repositioned himself at the back of the loose formation, was the first to turn, his mono-lens whirring as it refocused.

  Chen Feng stood there. He was a statue carved from ash and contempt. His armor was a tapestry of scorch marks, dented and scarred, the crude steel plates he'd welded on still glowing a dull cherry-red in places. In his hands, the Type-95k carbine hummed, its capacitor charging with a rising whine that was the only song left to sing.

  He had used the chaos, the dust, the sound of their own celebration. He had flanked them.

  Ares's mono-lens had just begun to paint a targeting reticle over the apparition when the world turned blue.

  Chen fired. A single, precise pulse. It was not aimed at Ares's center mass, but at the gap between his helmet and his shoulder pauldron—a gap Ares's own brutish size made more prominent.

  There was no heroic last stand. No final exchange. There was only the brief, star-core flash of the plasma burst and the wet, sizzling as Ares's head was separated from his body. The helmet, with the mono-lens still glowing, hit the ground with a dull thud, followed a moment later by the heavy, headless corpse. It was a death as swift and unceremonious as stepping on a bug.

  Ares's disembodied consciousness managed to think with a final, perfect flash of that monstrous, sociopathic logic.

  Then, nothing.