We moved through the graveyard of the Titan's Cross plaza. Our escape was not a run; it was a slow, painful, hobbling retreat. Each step was a deliberate, agonizing effort. The air was thick with the smell of ozone from the EMP blast, a clean, sharp scent that mingled with the smell of hot metal and something coppery that I knew was blood. The bodies of the Dominion hunters were scattered amongst the debris, frozen in the grotesque poses of their final moments—a hand outstretched, a face locked in a silent scream. The eerie silence of the dead factory was punctuated only by our own ragged breaths and the distant, terrifying sound of the Ghost Enforcer trying to get back to its feet. The screech of metal on metal was a promise that it was still coming for us.
"We need weapons," I said, my voice low and raspy. My basic pistol was long empty, discarded somewhere in the chaos. Anya's legendary rifle, now out of ammo, was just a heavy, useless club. We were defenseless. "And we need a way to fix your leg."
"No time," Anya said, her voice tight with pain and urgency. "The Enforcer is already getting up. Listen." The scraping sounds were getting louder, more coordinated, punctuated by a loud CLANG as it regained its footing. "We need to get to the main service elevator. It's our only way out of this level." She pointed towards the far side of the plaza, a hundred meters away across a field of metal corpses and wreckage. The journey might as well have been a hundred miles. At our current pace, we would never make it before the Enforcer caught us.
My eyes scanned the nearest Dominion corpse. He was lying face down, his back peppered with shrapnel from the engine block crash. His assault rifle was smashed into a twisted ruin, but the sidearm in the holster on his hip looked intact. I let go of Anya, propping her carefully against a large, silent gear that was half my height. "Stay here. Don't move. I'll be right back."
I ran to the body, my heart pounding a nervous rhythm against my ribs. I felt a pang of something—guilt, maybe disgust—as I knelt beside the dead man. The game had never prepared me for this. For the smell. For the stillness of a real dead body. Scavenging from the dead. This is what I had become. This is what this world made of people. I pushed the thought away. Survival first. Morality later.
I pried the pistol from the dead man's rigor-mortis grip. His fingers were locked tight around the handle, and I had to break one of them with a sickening crack to get the weapon free. It was a heavy, military-grade handgun, solid and reassuring in my hand. I ejected the magazine. Full. Fifteen rounds. A fortune. I searched his web gear, my hands moving quickly, efficiently. I found two more full magazines and a single fragmentation grenade clipped to his belt. I took it all. It wasn't much, but it was better than nothing.
When I got back to Anya, she was looking down at her dead leg with an expression of pure fury and despair. The high-end, sleek piece of technology, once a symbol of her power and speed, was now just a burden, a reminder of her weakness. "Even if we get to the elevator, what then?" she said, her voice bitter. "I can't fight like this. I'm a liability, Leo. I'm slowing you down. You should leave me."
"No, you're not," I said, my voice firm, cutting her off. I handed her the scavenged pistol. Her fingers closed around it, her grip sure and steady despite her pain. "You're my partner. We get out of this together. Or not at all." My words from the control room still hung in the air between us. We had made that choice already. There was no going back on it.
I looked around the plaza again. We needed more than just guns. We needed a solution. We needed a miracle.
My eyes fell on the wreckage of the fallen engine block. Near its edge lay the mangled body of another Dominion hunter, his armor crushed like a tin can. But it wasn't his body that caught my attention. It was his leg. He had a cybernetic limb, a standard-issue military model. It was bulky and unrefined compared to Anya's sleek, custom limb, all function and no form. But it looked structurally sound. A few sparks flickered from a torn hydraulic line near the knee joint, but the main chassis was intact.
A new, insane idea began to form in my mind. It was a desperate, battlefield solution that defied all logic and medical sense.
"Anya," I said, pointing towards the corpse. "I think I found you a new leg."
She looked at me like I was crazy, her eyes wide. "You can't be serious, Leo. You can't just... swap them out. That's not how it works. It needs a tech bay, a diagnostic rig, a sterile clean room... not this." She gestured at the dirt, oil, and rubble around us. "The connections won't match. The firmware is incompatible. It could kill me."
"We don't have a tech bay," I said grimly, my gaze fixed on the leg. "We have a battlefield. And we have about thirty seconds before the Enforcer is back on our tail." Behind us, the scraping sounds had stopped. They had been replaced by the heavy, rhythmic clang... clang... clang of metal feet on a metal floor. It was walking. It was coming. "It killing you is a possibility. The Enforcer killing you is a certainty."
It was a desperate field repair. A battlefield transplant. My mind flashed back to Glitch's workshop in the Undercroft, the tools he used, the way he tinkered with broken tech, using brute force when finesse failed. I ran to another corpse, this one closer, and scavenged a heavy industrial wrench and a plasma cutting tool from his belt.
"Lie back," I told Anya, my voice leaving no room for argument. "This is going to hurt. A lot."
She understood the cold logic in my eyes. She didn't protest. She just nodded, her jaw set so tight the muscles bulged. She tore a strip of fabric from her sleeve and bit down on it hard, preparing for the agony to come.
With the sound of our hunter growing closer and closer, I began the grim, bloody task of trying to unbolt her dead, high-end cybernetic leg from the complex, data-rich socket at her hip. It was a race against time, a grotesque surgery performed under the worst conditions imaginable, with the angel of death himself marching steadily towards us.