The channel was dead.

  Not silent. The difference was in the quality of the static. This was the hiss of a void, a digital grave. Vorlag’s knuckles, clenched around the vox-unit, were bone-white under the grime. “No sound? Answer.” His voice was a gravelly command, trying to bully the emptiness.

  Nothing.

  He counted ten heartbeats, a frantic drum against his ribs. The ruins, once a place of cover, now felt like a closing jaw.

  A burst of static, then two voices, frayed and overlapping with panic.

  “—fuck, Dino’s gone, Boris is gone—”

  “—something’s hunting us, boss! We need to bail! Now!”

  Four. Only four voices, including his own, remained on the net. His veterans, his killers, were being plucked from the shadows without a scream, without a shot. A cold knot tightened in his gut.

  “Fuck-shit, alright, go!” he barked, the order tasting of cowardice. His hands, usually so steady, became clumsy things as he broke down the missile launcher. Each definitive of a component locking into its case was a hammer blow marking another second lost. The humid, metallic air was a suffocating blanket.

  The final latch sealed. He keyed the vox. “Status. Converge on me.”

  Only the hiss answered. He tried again, his voice cracking. “Anyone? Respond.”

  The heavy autogunner beside him, a man built like a slag-hauler, shifted. His breathing was a ragged, wet rasp. “Boss? It’s… it’s just us left? Shit!” The last word was a high-pitched whine, bordering on a sob.

  “Shut your hole and move,” Vorlag snarled, hefting the case. Its weight, once a promise of dominance, was now an anchor.

  They ran. It was a blind, animal flight. They crashed through the phosphorescent undergrowth, boots sucking at the swampy muck. Vines like cold, sinewy snakes snatched at their armor. The lurid violet glow of the mutant fungi painted their terror in a hellish palette. Every shadow held the ghost of a hypothetical machine-monster. The one-kilometer stretch was an eternity in a green-and-purple hell.

  They burst into the secondary clearing where their bikes and trucks were hidden. One didn’t start up. Then another. Vorlag’s last flicker of hope died as he ripped open the ignition housing. The spark plugs were gone. Every single one.

  He stared at the empty sockets.

  "... oh, fuck me," he whispered, the sound hollow, the final surrender of a man out of moves.

  A voice, calm, sterile, and impossibly clear, spoke over their own private comms channel. "Stop."

  It was the voice from the ruins.

  Vorlag’s cohort broke. He screamed, a raw, mindless sound, and spun, his heavy autogun erupting in a deafening . He hosed the jungle line, the torrent of fire chewing apart glowing flora, splintering wood, and churning the mud. The roar was a brief, futile defiance against the silence. It died, leaving their ears ringing and the silence heavier than before.

  Then, from the hacked channel again, the voice again, flat and absolute. "The next one won't be a warning."

  The brute was beyond reason, beyond hearing. His world had shrunk to the weapon in his hands. With a guttural, sobbing curse, he wrestled the heavy weapon back up.

  The shot was a single, precise that punched the air. A microsecond of blinding blue light. His body from the ribs up vanished in a superheated bloom of plasma. What remained was a cauterized stump, toppling forward with a heavy, meaty thud into the muck. The air filled with the nauseating, metallic scent of vaporized blood and the loud sizzle of organic matter cooking on the scorched chest plate of the autogunner's armor.

  Vorlag stood frozen, painted in the warm, coppery mist of what had been his follower. The fine spray coated his faceplate, obscuring his vision with a film of red. The heavy, metallic smell of vaporized blood filled his respirator, each breath a gulp of iron and death. He was alone.

  Slowly, every movement a monumental effort against the terror locking his joints, he raised his armored hands, splaying them wide in a gesture of utter submission. His fingers trembled. He willed them to stop, but they wouldn't obey. He let his autogun fall, it sank into the deep, soft muck with a thick, sucking , as if the ground itself was eager to claim it. "I yield! I surrender! Don't shoot!" His voice was a strangled thing, stripped of all its former gravelly command.

  The jungle offered nothing. Only the loud of the mutilated armor cooling and the incessant, droning hum of the irradiated insects, a sound that seemed to be inside his very skull. Above, the shattered canopy was a tapestry of impenetrable black, pierced only by the sickly violet pulse of the fungi, offering no comfort, only a watchful, alien glow.

  A figure resolved from the shadows without drama, a deeper blackness detaching itself from the night. Moonlight, filtered through the toxic haze and broken canopy, caught the brutal, asymmetrical lines of the APt-3 armor, glinting off crude weld seams and the dark, sticky patches that were not rust. It was a walking monument to slaughter. The single, unblinking vertical slit-like optic regarded him. It was like being stared at by a glacier.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  "Who is Erebus?" The voice was the same as on the comms, filtered of all humanity.

  "The Alpha! The Hellwraith Alpha! I only joined last month! I swear on my life, I don't know much more! I'll tell you everything!" Vorlag’s words were a desperate flood.

  The armored head tilted a fraction. "Compliance means you live. You are evil. I heard your men's chatter. The 'scores.' The settlements. The slave-catching. And the women you and your subordinates ." Chen Feng’s voice was laced with a weariness so profound it was more terrifying than any threat. "But I will leave you to the jungle. I have killed over sixty people today. I am so... fucking... tired of it."

  The statement was so alien, so devoid of the brutal logic that governed Vorlag's world, that his mind reeled. "You... you won't kill me?" The question was pure, disbelieving instinct.

  "I am not getting bothered," Chen Feng repeated, the sterility returning. "You tell me what I want to hear, I let you go. I won’t kill you. But if someone or , wants to kill you. I will not interfere."

  Vorlag’s mind registered the action. This wasn't mercy. It was… administrative. It was the dispassion of a god tossing a stone aside. To a man who understood the world only in terms of use and disposal, it was a lie. It had to be.

  "I don't believe you!" he spat, the words tasting of bile and desperation. It was the last, dying spasm of the predator he'd been, a creature that understood the world only in terms of use and disposal. The concept of being dismissed, of being deemed not worth the bullet, was a deeper violation than any threat. "Let me be useful! A spare set of eyes! An extra gun! I'll help you fight Erebus! You'll just waste me when I'm no use anymore!"

  Chen Feng didn't argue. He didn't need to. His actions were his language. The capacitor on his Type-95k whined to life, a rising, piercing pitch that screamed of imminent and absolute violence. The emitter lens glowed with a baleful blue light.

  That sound was the only answer Vorlag would ever get. It was the sound of his own irrelevance.

  "OKAY OKAY! STOP!" he shrieked, collapsing to his knees in the filth, hands clawing at the air as if he could physically push the sound away. "I WILL SAY ANYTHING! ANYTHING! JUST DON'T—!"

  The whine ceased. The sudden silence was a verdict, broken only by the buzz of flies and the sizzle of human remains.

  "Alright," Chen Feng's voice was a flat, metallic scrape. "Babbling again, I will kill you. It would take me just another fight to get someone else that is willing to talk. Do not waste the time I am choosing not to spend on your execution."

  Vorlag sucked in a shuddering breath, the smell of his own fear and his companion's cooked meat filling his nostrils. "Alright, fuck. I work for Erebus, alright? I was with my own crew. We pledged to the Hellwraiths a few months back. After he wiped out the Ash-Fang tribe."

  "Go on until I say stop." Chen didn't move. The optic was a dead-still, luminous slit of red.

  The words spilled out of Vorlag in a desperate torrent. "He's set up in Saint Aurora! The old cathedral district, fortified. His forces? A few hundred, give or take. Scavs are like roaches, you can't count 'em all." He was babbling, but the threat of the silent, waiting carbine kept him coherent. "And he's got a contract! With the slaver, Teodulo! That fancy corpo bastard wants you and your squad. Alive!"

  He paused, gasping for air, then rushed on. "Teodulo calls you 'genetic artifacts.' Says you're military-grade New Terran, the best find a collector can get. The payout... for each of you taken alive, Erebus gets twenty corporate energy rifles, top-tier, with full power packs. For every Hellwraith bodybag, half a ton of nutrient bricks. And all your gear. Your shiny guns, that armor... it all goes to the pack. That's the deal that got Ares and his boys killed."

  He finished, his body slumping. The information was spent. "I just lost my entire warband. If I go back empty-handed, Erebus will flay me for the failure. So, I'll disappear. There is no risk for you to spare me because Erebus will not see me again. I'm a ghost."

  "Good," he stated, the word offering no comfort, merely acknowledging the completion. "If the jungle, a rad-beast, or your own backstabbing kind kills you, that is not my concern. I am done here." He took a single, heavy step forward, the adamantine boot sinking deep into the muck. "Now. Run."

  He didn't need to say it twice. Vorlag scrambled backwards, then turned and fled, crashing through the undergrowth with a blind, panicked energy. The sounds of his flight were quickly swallowed by the oppressive humidity and the chittering of unseen things in the canopy. The jungle had its new prey.

  Chen Feng stood for a moment, alone in the clearing. The chemical numbness in his veins was a dam holding back a torrent of static and memory. He could feel the weight of the night air, thick and cold against his scarred plating. He initiated a systems check, the scrolling amber text in his visor a mundane, predictable ritual against the chaotic, breathing darkness of the rainforest.

  Then his helmet chimed—a priority alert.

  His first instinct was protocol: radio silence. But her signal was a blade cutting through standard procedure, a personal override from He ran a swift diagnostic.

  The Hellwraith comms were primitive, short-range junk; they couldn't intercept a Legion encrypted channel—at least in his understanding. This was a calculated risk. Alina wouldn't break silence without a Category Five reason. Squad survival over operational security. Always.

  His thumb hovered over the comms relay for a heartbeat, the calculated risk a cold stone in his gut. He pressed it. "Chen here. Report." His own voice, filtered and flat, was a strange comfort in the silence.

  "Ch—" A burst of static, a choked, wet sound.

  Then, "Chen." It was Alina, but the name was a frayed wire, sparking and dangerous. A long, dead space followed, broken only by the hum of the carrier wave and a wet, ragged sob that was strangled into a static-laced gasp.

  The next words came out in a forced, staccato rush, as if she'd been holding them back and they now erupted. "She's gone."

  Silence again. This one was heavier, a pressure building in Chen's helmet. He could hear her now, properly—not just a ragged breath, but the faint, wet click of a swallowing throat, the shudder of a body fighting for control.

  When her voice returned, it was the ghost of a sound, stripped of all heat and life, a dry rasp from a hollow, broken corpse of a soldier. "I... I... ... I lost her."

  The numbness in Chen's veins cracked. For a single, white-hot second, the professional soldier was gone, replaced by a sick, disbelieving horror. The world itself turned to a vacuum, a sudden, absolute void where a fundamental part of his reality had simply been switched off.

  The words ripped from his throat, a raw, visceral blast over the comms that was all fury and accusation.

  "You let happen?!"