From the second floor of an abandoned apartment complex, the air was thick with dust and dread.
Karen, Lucent, Kai, Cale, and Jack watched the distant chaos at the rally point through a cracked window.
The scene was a silent pantomime of flashing glyphs and metallic impacts, muffled by distance and crumbling walls.
Karen's team had split from Vey's squad just minutes before.
Vey's group was now positioned somewhere to the east, watching another angle of the same disaster.
The separation felt like a frayed rope—necessary, but thin.
Lucent stood rigid beside her, his eyes narrowed at the binoculars.
The crimson armor was a blur of motion, surrounded by smaller, desperate figures.
"…Why is it letting them get that close?" Lucent muttered, more to himself than anyone. "It could wipe them out from a distance. That makes no sense."
Cale pointed a grimy finger toward the edge of the screen. "Look. Blaze. He's just… watching."
He was right.
There, leaning against a half-collapsed wall, Blaze stood with his arms crossed.
Even through the grainy feed, his posture was all wrong—relaxed, amused, like a man enjoying a street performance.
Not a commander.
Not even a participant.
Karen felt a cold knot tighten in her stomach.
It wasn't a battle.
It was a demonstration.
A game.
The Scorchers weren't here to win; they were here to prove something.
And the proof was written in the way the Aegis frame moved—not with overwhelming, obliterating force, but with a kind of… testing patience.
Kai shifted beside her, his brow furrowed. "Are they actually weapon testing at this time? Why isn't it deploying more glyphs? It's got the power. And why…"
He trailed off, gesturing vaguely. "Why is it fighting up close like that? It's a siege weapon. It should be leveling the block."
Why is it fighting up close?
The question landed in Karen's mind like a key turning in a lock.
Her eyes fixed on the armor's movements—the way it pivoted on its heel, the short, efficient jabs, the way it used its forearms to deflect blows rather than its shield.
It was familiar.
Terribly, intimately familiar.
The memory hit her like a physical blow. Last night, the smell of dust and blood, the woman with the flame tattoo at her arms driving a fist toward her face.
The same footwork.
The same economy of motion.
The same brutal, unflashy efficiency.
"…Ember."
The name left her lips before she could stop it, a soft, stunned exhale.
Lucent's head turned slowly. His gaze was sharp, probing. "Are you saying the person inside that armor is Ember?"
Karen didn't look away from the screen.
She watched the crimson figure catch a mass-driven punch on its forearm, absorb the shock, and shove back—exactly how Ember had fought her.
Not like a soldier in a machine.
Like a brawler in a shell.
"Yeah," she said, her voice low and certain. "The way it moves… I've seen those moves."
A tense silence followed. Cale shifted beside her, his gaze still locked on the screen. "So," he murmured, the word heavy with grim validation, "I was correct. The pilot is a woman."
The silence that followed was heavier than the dust in the air.
If the pilot was Ember, then the armor wasn't just a weapon.
It was an extension of a fighter they already knew—a fighter who was dangerous enough without a million-credit war machine.
And Blaze was just… watching.
Why?
The question hung between them, unspoken but deafening.
Was he testing her?
Testing the armor?
Or was he simply savoring the show?
Karen's hand drifted to the grip of her comm unit.
The wrongness of it all settled into her bones, colder than fear.
This wasn't a fight they could win with bullets.
It was a puzzle they were only starting to see the edges of—and the clock was already running out.
They watched as a lone Talon—a man whose name Karen didn't know—broke from the ragged defensive line.
His movements were clumsy, fueled by pure adrenaline and despair, not skill.
He lunged in a desperate, diving tackle toward the crimson armor, aiming not to strike but to disrupt, to cling, to be a momentary obstacle.
The Aegis frame didn't flinch.
It simply… shifted.
Ember's movement was a study in terrifying economy.
A slight twist at the waist, a piston-smooth slide of the foot.
The man's grasping hands scraped harmlessly across the polished alloy of her lower back plate.
He tumbled past her, sprawling into the dirt, his attack as harmless as a fly hitting a window.
In the aftermath, the entire rhythm of the desperate dance seemed to stutter.
Nail, frozen mid-swing, his glowing fist pulled back for another earth-shaking blow, hesitated.
His eyes widened, not in fear, but in shock at the sheer, stupid bravery of the act.
Mags, circling like a wolf with her shotgun half-raised, stopped dead.
Her gaze snapped from Ember to the fallen man, her face a mask of grim recognition.
She knew what happened to distractions.
Rook, a statue behind his scope, went perfectly still.
His finger hovered off the trigger.
There was no angle, no shot that wouldn't hit his own man.
He could only watch.
For one frozen, impossible second, all three of them were locked in place, united by the same horrified thought: Why would you get that close?
The hesitation was a fatal gift.
The crimson armor moved.
It wasn't a lunge or a charge. It was a blur—a streak of polished crimson that seemed to skip frames of reality.
Ember closed the distance to the fallen Talon in the time it took Karen to draw a sharp breath.
There was no theatrical wind-up, no roar of effort.
Just a single, piston-driven punch delivered with the casual precision of a machine stamping a part.
Her armored fist met the side of the man's head.
The impact didn't make a crunch.
It made a wet, hollow pop, a sound that seemed to violate the very idea of silence.
The man's head wasn't crushed.
It was unmade.
The force turned it into a mist of red that hung in the air for a suspended moment before gravity took over.
A shocking arc of crimson painted the frost-bitten concrete wall behind him.
More sprayed across the frozen ground in a grotesque, star-shaped pattern.
The headless body spasmed once, then collapsed, a puppet with its strings cut.
On the screen, the image was distant, grainy. But the spray of red against the grey wall was vivid.
The sudden, absolute stillness of the body was unmistakable.
In the abandoned apartment, no one spoke. Cale looked away, his jaw tight.
Kai's face had gone pale.
Jack just stared, his knuckles white where he gripped the windowsill.
Lucent's expression was carved from stone.
Karen didn't look away.
Her eyes stayed fixed on the crimson armor as it straightened up, the motion effortless, clean.
No wasted energy.
No celebration.
Just work.
The message was as clear as the blood on the wall.
Karen watched the distant carnage, her mind a whirlwind of grim calculations.
They were running out of time—every second on the screen was another second the Talons at the rally point were being dismantled.
The original plan, formed in the tense quiet before the storm, felt dangerously naive now.
They'd agreed on one core objective: separate Blaze from the Aegis frame.
A divide-and-conquer strategy was their only slim hope against two seemingly invincible foes.
But how?
The 'how' was a gaping hole.
They couldn't just rush in.
Charging Blaze blind was suicide.
They needed eyes, they needed a weakness, they needed something that wasn't still showing.
And now, with the sickening realization that the pilot was Ember—a fighter they knew, however briefly—the equation shifted.
Blaze wasn't the main participant; he was the spectator.
The director.
That changed everything.
"We adapt," Karen said, her voice cutting through the heavy silence.
She turned from the window, her movements decisive.
She knelt beside a heavy, reinforced case she'd carried from the base.
The latches clicked open with a sharp, metallic sound.
Inside, nestled in gray foam, was Nex's pulse rifle arm augment.
It was a brutal piece of machinery, all reinforced plating, exposed cabling, and a barrel that promised devastation.
Even modified, it was oversized, built for a frame larger than Karen's.
"Cale," she called, her tone leaving no room for question. "Help me."
Cale moved without a word, his hands steady as he helped her detach her own, sleeker combat augment at the shoulder port.
The exchange was a practiced, silent ballet of clicking connectors and hissing pneumatics.
The pulse rifle arm was heavy—cumbersome and unfamiliar on her frame.
Lucent watched, his analytical gaze missing nothing. "The weight will throw off your balance. Your shoulder joint isn't rated for that mass in sustained combat."
"I know," Karen grunted, securing the final clamp.
The arm hung, a dead weight of potential violence. "That's where you come in."
Lucent just nodded.
He stepped forward, his conduit already glowing with a soft, blue light.
He didn't cast a flashy spell; his fingers traced a series of intricate, interlocking glyphs directly onto the augment's plating.
The symbols sank into the metal, shimmering once before fading to a dull, constant gleam.
It was a Rank 2—Gravity Redux—a subtle, continuous siphon of gravitational force around the apparatus.
The effect was immediate.
The crushing weight lessened, not to nothing, but to something manageable.
The arm still felt solid, powerful, but no longer like it would wrench her shoulder from its socket with her first step.
Karen flexed the new limb.
Servos whined softly.
It was unwieldy, foreign, but it was armed.
"So," Lucent said, stepping back, his voice low. "It's time we move?"
Karen looked at each of them—Kai's tense readiness, Jack's silent resolve, Cale's technical focus, Lucent's cold clarity.
"Vey's squad is already repositioning," she confirmed, her voice a steady command in the dusty room.
"They're going to reinforce the rally point, try to extract who they can and keep that armor occupied." She hefted the pulse rifle arm, the barrel glinting dully.
"Our objective stands, but the method changes. We don't draw the monster away from the master. We draw the master's attention away from his monster. We separate Blaze. We make him a participant. And we do it before he gets bored of watching."
The mission was no longer just a tactical strike.
It was a provocation.
They weren't just trying to survive the Scorchers anymore.
They were trying to piss one off.
Jack, the Steel Talons' armorer and a man who believed in the weight of reliable metal, made his final preparations with a gunsmith's quiet reverence.
His beloved revolver—a hefty, custom-piece with a brushed steel finish and a grip worn smooth by his hand—rested in its familiar holster at his hip.
He didn't need to check it; its balance was a part of him.
But this wasn't a bar fight.
From a long, hardened case, he drew two secondary pieces: a compact, boxy submachine gun with a high-rate feed, which he slung across his back, and a snub-nosed scattergun he affixed to his thigh rig.
Each weapon received a final, practiced check—a click of a magazine, a spin of a cylinder—before he settled into a crouch, his eyes already calculating fields of fire.
He was not a flashy fighter, but a stable, devastating platform.
Kai flexed his hand around his conduit.
It was still the same jury-rigged core from the Myriad Lab fight—a scarred, patched-together thing that felt alive with faint, unstable vibrations.
But it was no longer the same desperate scrap.
Lucent and him had spent painful credits in the Neon Bazaar's shadowed stalls, trading whispers for illicit components: a stabilized aetheric focus rod, a set of better heat-sinks, a capacitor that didn't bleed power like an open wound.
It was still a street weapon, volatile and raw, but now it hummed with a sharper, more dangerous promise.
The pistol Jack had entrusted to him—a blocky, functional piece—was holstered securely at the small of his back, a last resort he hoped not to need.
Cale moved with a technician's precise anxiety.
His own conduit, a more utilitarian model used for diagnostics and fine-tuning, felt alien in his grip as a weapon.
He'd borrowed a compact carbine from Jack's arsenal, its weight unfamiliar but its logic clear: point, pull.
He checked the safety three times, his fingers tracing the glyph-lines on his conduit not for attack, but for reinforced barrier protocols and sensor-dampening fields—support spells.
His role wasn't to spearhead; it was to survive, to observe, and to disrupt the enemy's systems, if he could even understand them.
Three different weapons.
Three different kinds of fighter.
Linked by a single, terrible necessity.
Jack caught Kai's eye and gave a slow, grave nod.
It was the look of a veteran acknowledging a rookie who'd just upgraded his gear for the real fight.
No words were needed.
The preparation was over.
The waiting was the hard part, and it had just run out.
The weight in Lucent's jacket pocket was a cold, constant pressure against his ribs—not heavy, but dense with grim potential.
The vial of Q-Serin sloshed with a faint, viscous sound only he could hear.
When the worst comes— he let the thought hang, unfinished.
It was a promise to himself, a line in the sand he hoped not to cross.
His focus sharpened, pushing the dread aside.
This was not the Myriad Labs.
That had been a scramble in the dark, a fight fought with a single, jury-rigged conduit cobbled from rust and desperation.
The helplessness of that moment—the glyphs sputtering, the aether battery bleeding power, the sheer fragility of their only weapon—was a ghost that had haunted his every calculation since.
He would not be helpless again.
With a deliberate motion, Lucent reached into the inner folds of his coat and produced two more conduits.
They were not scavenged relics.
These were cleaner, their housings forged from dull, gunmetal grey alloy instead of patched scrap.
The aether batteries hummed with a deeper, steadier resonance, fully charged and waiting.
One conduit was already in his hand.
The other two, he simply released.
They did not fall.
A subtle, silver glyph—a modified Rank 1—Stasis—flared to life in the air before him, not as a wall or a trap, but as a localized, personal field of manipulated inertia.
The two additional conduits hung suspended in the empty space around him, orbiting slowly as if caught in an invisible, gentle current.
They were not floating freely.
Lucent was the anchor, the reference point.
With a slight tilt of his head, a shift in his stance, the conduits adjusted their positions fluidly, maintaining a perfect, triangular formation relative to his body.
They were extensions of his will, a mobile armory of focused potential.
He closed his eyes for a heartbeat, feeling the connection—a faint, humming tether between his mind and the stasis field.
Three conduits.
Three times the glyph capacity.
Three times the sustained output.
It was still a far cry from corporate-grade kit, but it was a symphony compared to last week's dying cough.
He opened his eyes.
The cold clarity was back, edged with a new, hardened readiness.
The ghost of helplessness was still there.
But now, he was armed to meet it.
***
Vey and his squad were not soldiers; they were a natural disaster with a mailing address.
In the lawless sprawl of the Junkyard, where problems were usually solved with bullets or bribes, the Demolition Crew was what you called when you wanted a problem removed—when you needed a warehouse, a wall, a rival's stronghold, or a particularly stubborn individual to be introduced to the sky and not invited back down.
At the center of this controlled cataclysm was Vey himself.
His face was a topographical map of his career—a patchwork of shiny, mottled scar tissue, a nose that had been broken and reset one too many times, and a jawline that pulled slightly to the left, all bearing witness to years of intimate relationships with volatile chemicals and sudden, violent expansions of gas.
These were injuries earned long before the Aether Incident, in an age when explosives were a crude art of powder, pressure, and prayer.
The Incident changed the game.
It didn't just give him new tools; it re-wrote the rules of his old ones.
His explosives, once fearsome for their sheer, dumb force, became something else.
Now, he could etch a glyph ofdirected concussion onto a charge, turning a deafening blast into a focused lance of obliteration that could punch through a meter of reinforced concrete without touching the antique shop next door.
A Rank 2—Catalytic Amplification glyph could make a palm-sized block of plastique burn with the fury of a fuel-air bomb.
His reputation evolved from a talented bomber to a maestro of targeted annihilation.
His squad reflected this ethos.
They weren't frontline fighters; they were technicians of chaos.
They carried compact, brutal-looking launchers, satchel charges woven with glowing aetheric filaments, and old generation drones that could deliver payloads with precision.
They moved with a deliberate, unhurried confidence, because when your argument is a localized earthquake, you don't need to rush.
Right now, Vey watched the rally point through a monocular, his good eye—a pale, sharp blue amid the scar tissue—narrowed.
He saw the Aegis frame, the puppeteer Blaze, and the Talons being ground down.
His expression was unreadable, but the fingers of his left hand absently traced the raised edges of a detonator glyph on his thigh plate.
He wasn't planning a rescue.
He was calculating a structural weakness.
The information had reached Vey in a crackled, static-laced whisper: the specter in the crimson armor was Ember.
The news settled in his gut like a stone.
Not a stranger, then. He knew her reputation—a brawler, vicious and direct, not some corporate tactician.
That was something.
A known variable in an equation of nightmares.
If it had been a stranger piloting the Aegis frame, some unknown Scorcher with unknown instincts, their already suicidal plan would have needed a complete rewrite.
At least he could guess how she'd move, where her temper might flare.
It was a thin thread to cling to.
The only other saving grace was the number: two.
They only had to contend with two Scorchers on-site, not the full, terrifying quartet of Blaze, Ash, Cinder, and Ember.
It was a small mercy, but in the Junkyard, you took what you could get.
A well-thought-out plan, something with multiple phases, fallbacks, and elegant misdirection, would be ideal.
But time was a resource they had already bled dry.
Every second spent planning was another second a Talon at the rally point stopped breathing.
The division was as brutal as the situation: Karen's team would go head-first into the dragon's mouth, aiming to draw Blaze's fire and fury.
His own squad would deal with Ember.
Occupy, distract, disrupt—pour enough controlled chaos around that million-credit weapon to keep its attention divided.
Vey signaled to his crew with a series of sharp hand gestures—not the standardized battle-sign of soldiers, but their own shorthand, developed over years of bringing down structures.
Converge.
Priority: movement, not impact.
Prepare seismic-grip charges.
A desperate attempt to tip the first domino before the whole row was swept away.
The comm unit at Vey's belt hissed, then Karen's voice cut through, stripped of all warmth, leaving only a wire-taut command.
<
Vey's thumb found the respond key.
His reply was a single, gravel-packed word, spoken low into the mic.
"Anytime."
The connection died.
For three heartbeats, there was only the distant, muffled thunder of the ongoing massacre.
Then, a pinpoint of impossible light winked into existence from a blown-out window on the second floor of the abandoned apartment complex.
It was not a muzzle flash.
It was a cold, fierce twinkle—a star being born in the grime.
A split second later, the star became a river.
A concentrated stream of pure, blue-white energy lanced across the ruined street.
It moved faster than sound, faster than thought, a line of devastating light etched across the vision of everyone who saw it.
The air it tore through screamed, ionizing into a brief, sizzling corridor of burnt air.
There was no time to track its path.
There was only the before—and the after.
Where Blaze had been standing, a sphere of pure, blinding whiteness erupted.
It wasn't fire.
It was an annihilation of shadow, a negative sun that swallowed the dusty air, the rubble, and the smug, watching figure at its center.
The light didn't spread; it manifested, consuming a perfect sphere of space before collapsing inward with a concussive explosion that hit the chest like a physical blow.
The afterimage burned purple in Vey's good eye.
The spot where Blaze had stood was now smoldering with steam rising from its edges.
The message was not subtle.
The watching is over.
Vey didn't hesitate.
He raised a clenched fist, a scarred knot of resolve against the sky, then snapped it open—a silent detonation order.
"Let's go, boys."
The words were a low growl, barely audible over the sudden roar of the truck's gutted engine.
His foot slammed the accelerator to the floor.
The heavy truck, more battering ram than transport, lurched forward with a scream of tortured machinery, its reinforced grill aimed like a blunt spear toward the heart of the chaos.