The city was still bleeding smoke.
To most, New York was a battlefield of collapsed buildings, shattered streets, and alien corpses rotting in the open air. To Alex Price now reborn as a Magos of the Omnissiah it was a holy forge, an unclaimed scrapyard of miracles.
He stood on the broken husk of a Chitauri chariot, the purple alloy groaning beneath his boots. His crimson optics glowed softly, scanning every twisted girder and shattered beam for fragments of utility. Mechadendrites slithered from beneath his cloak, twitching like the tails of serpents eager for prey.
He raised his hands. Binary whispers echoed from his vox-throat, overlaying his voice with a metallic drone.
"O Omnissiah, Divine in Machine,I offer my prayers upon this battlefield of flesh and steel.Where mortals see ruin, I see design.Where mortals see corpses, I see vessels of purpose.Guide my hand as I sanctify this wreckage,And awaken the spirits slumbering within alien gears."
The words were half ritual, half instinct. The Tech-Priest template within him demanded reverence before labor. Every act of construction was a prayer, every stroke of the forge a hymn.
The city roared in the distance sirens, shouting, the grind of machinery clearing rubble but here, amid the wreckage of the Chitauri, Alex felt only silence, broken by the quiet hum of his own nano-forge.
The Scavenger's Rite
The system guided him.
[Resource Scan Active.]Alien Neural Cortex – 72% Integrity.Chitauri Power Cell – 44% Stability.Energy Rifle Casing – Partial.
Alex moved swiftly but with reverence, as if every bolt and plate were sacred. His mechadendrites hissed, plucking wires from a shattered rifle. A severed Chitauri arm still clutched the weapon, twitching faintly. Alex pried the fingers open and murmured another canticle.
"Flesh is weak, but may serve.Circuits are pure, but must be awakened."
He dropped the arm aside, keeping the neural filaments glowing faintly with residual psionic energy. Perfect material.
Deeper in the rubble, he found a skull elongated, bone plates fused with cybernetics. Its jaw hung slack, dripping green ichor. A lesser scavenger might vomit. Alex's lenses zoomed in with analytical detachment.
The machine-spirit within still pulsed. A flicker of life in its circuits, waiting to be repurposed.
The First Construct
The system whispered:
[Blueprint: Servo-Skull Drone – Available]Requirements:– Organic Cranium: – Neural Filament (Alien): – Power Cell Fragment: – Nano-forge Assembly: Active.
Alex placed the skull upon the ground, surrounding it with the fragments he had scavenged. Nanometal dripped from his palms like mercury, crawling across the bone, sealing cracks, embedding circuits. His mechadendrites hummed with sacred sparks, soldering flesh to steel.
He chanted as he worked, each word a prayer.
"Awaken, O servant of the Forge.Cast aside the silence of death.Rise, not as flesh, but as steel.Let binary breath replace failing lungs,Let circuits replace rotting veins,Let machine-spirit reign eternal."
The skull twitched. The eyes flickered, then ignited in red glow. Small rotors unfolded from its temples, wings of humming alloy. The lower jaw clicked open and shut as if testing new speech.
It rose, hovering into the air.
[Servo-Skull Mk I – Online.]
Alex's lips curled into the faintest of smiles. His first construct in this world. A herald of the Forge to come.
The servo-skull circled him, projecting data in ghostly runes: heat signatures, electromagnetic trails, faint warnings. Already it detected a half-buried Chitauri power cell glowing beneath rubble twenty meters away.
"Good," Alex whispered. His voice echoed in metallic tones. "You will be my eye, my tongue, my knife. Go. Find the offerings of this battlefield."
The servo-skull obeyed, darting into the ruins with a mechanical hiss.
Intrusion
But silence did not last.
Floodlights swept across the ruins. Bootsteps crunched on broken glass. A squad of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents moved through the debris, their weapons low but ready.
"Keep your eyes sharp," one agent muttered. "Scavengers have been stealing this stuff all night. Orders are to recover every piece of alien scrap."
Alex's optics narrowed. His servo-skull returned swiftly, pulsing red in warning.
The system chimed:
[Quest Available: Establish Dominance of the Forge.]Option A: Evade – Remain unseen, gather more tech.]Option B: Aggressive – Neutralize agents, harvest equipment.]
Alex stood motionless, cloak fluttering softly in the night breeze. The agents were close now, flashlights sweeping dangerously near his position.
The servo-skull hovered by his shoulder, jaw clattering, ready for its first command.
The floodlights passed too close.
Alex's crimson optics flared, the servo-skull's wings clicking like the chitter of an insect preparing to strike. His mechadendrites slid free from his cloak snapping tendrils of metal tipped with blades, injectors, and cutting torches.
He whispered a final canticle before violence:
"In the name of the Omnissiah,Let their flesh fuel the forge,Let their weapons be sanctified scrap."
The servo-skull shrieked in binaric static and shot forward.
The lead S.H.I.E.L.D. agent barely turned his head before the skull's eye-beam burned a hole clean through his visor. He dropped without a sound. Panic followed shouts, the crack of rifles but Alex was already moving.
He surged through the rubble like a living machine. A mechadendrite punched through an agent's chest, steel claw crushing ribs and heart in one motion. Another whip of metal disarmed a second agent, wrenching his rifle away before Alex crushed his throat with inhuman strength.
Bullets rattled off his nanometal frame, absorbed by the vibranium weave and dispersed harmlessly.
"Target is armored !" one agent screamed before Alex's claw sheared him in two.
In less than a minute, silence returned. Six men lay broken in the ruins, their blood soaking alien alloy. The servo-skull hovered triumphantly, jaw clattering as if laughing in static.
Alex did not look at the corpses with remorse. He intoned a simple rite instead, voice flat and mechanical:
"Flesh to rust. Steel to purpose. Their deaths are offerings."
The floodlights still burned but now he saw their source. Parked just beyond the rubble was a S.H.I.E.L.D. transport truck, armored, its rear filled with containment crates stamped with hazard warnings. Inside: confiscated alien technology.
Perfect.
The servo-skull zipped ahead, scanning.
[Resource Cache Detected.]Chitauri Power Cells: 12 Units.Energy Rifles: 9 Units.Organic Neural Residue: 4 Units.Misc. Components – Unknown.]
Alex approached, nanometal flowing from his hand like liquid mercury. The truck's electronic lock shrieked in protest but collapsed in seconds beneath his hacking protocols. The rear door hissed open, revealing stacks of glowing alien artifacts.
The system chimed:
[Spatial Storage Unlocked.]Do you wish to transfer cargo?
"Yes," Alex whispered.
One by one, the crates shimmered into digital glyphs and vanished into system space an endless vault of storage. Every weapon, every cell, every fragment absorbed and catalogued for later use. By the time he finished, the truck was stripped bare.
The servo-skull hovered at his shoulder again, optics scanning the skyline. Sirens still echoed in the distance. More agents would come soon. Staying was death.
Alex cloaked himself in his nanometal shroud, vanishing into the smoke and debris. His crimson optics dimmed to slits as he slunk into the forgotten tunnels of the city the underworks, where no one would follow.
There, in the hollow silence beneath New York, he began again.
Alien power cells were fed into the nanoforge. Rifle components were stripped for resonators and plasma coils. Neural remnants were reconfigured into processor cores.
The skulls multiplied.
One became three. Three became five. Soon, a flock of servo-skulls hovered silently in the dark, their eyes glowing red, their forms fitted with stealth plating that blurred them into shadows.
Alex stood at the center of his growing swarm, mechadendrites twitching with satisfaction.
[New Construct Available: Stealth Servo-Skull Mk II]Status: Hidden Forge Established.
"Good," he whispered in the binary hymn of the Mechanicus. "The first forge has been lit. The Omnissiah's work begins."
Above, New York City mourned and rebuilt, unaware that beneath its streets, a new power stirred a priest of the Machine God, weaving alien tech into holy war-gear.
And he was only just beginning.