The growl wasn't a beast. It was metal. Final.
The two red optical sensors that flickered to life in the blackness ahead weren't eyes. They were execution orders, glowing with a cold, implacable malice.
The sprint became a scramble. A frantic chaos of hammering boots on grated metal. The world dissolved into disconnected sensory inputs. The shriek from the dying nest below, a sound that tore at the inside of his skull. The damp wind from the breach, carrying the ammonia stench of the hive. The rough, rusted texture of the handrail, a flimsy anchor in a world that was tilting. And ahead, the growl, deepening, joined by the rhythmic clang… clang… clang… of a heavy machine taking its first steps.
"Contact!" Haruto's voice was a raw, shredded bark, lost in the noise. "Cover!"
But there was nowhere to go. They were on a bridge, a narrow spine of metal suspended over an abyss, with a god at their back and a devil in front.
The automaton stepped into the doorway. A strangled, guttural sound of despair was torn from Kaito's throat. This was not the museum piece from the aqueduct. This was something else. Sleeker. Faster. Its chassis was a dark, burnished gunmetal. Its limbs were longer, its movements possessing a lethal grace. One arm ended in a long, mono-molecular vibro-blade that hummed with a low, hungry energy. The other was a compact, high-frequency plasma caster, its barrel already glowing an ominous orange.
A Mark-IV. Haruto's mind supplied the useless, terrifying trivia. A close-quarters extermination unit. The Warden hadn't just rebooted. It had escalated. It had learned from their first encounter and deployed a far more effective tool.
It raised its plasma caster.
"Scatter!" Haruto roared.
He threw himself sideways, his body slamming into the flimsy handrail. The rusted metal groaned, bending outwards over the dizzying drop. A bolt of orange plasma, hotter and faster than their own blue shots, tore through the space where he had been. It struck the gantry ten meters behind them. The world became a white-hot flash and a deafening, concussive CRACK.
Haruto felt the heat on his back, a blistering wave that washed over his armor. The gantry bucked like a living thing, a tremor that almost threw him into the chasm. He clung to the bent rail, his knuckles white, his ears ringing. He risked a glance back. A gaping, molten hole, the size of his torso, now marred the metal catwalk. The air stank of vaporized steel.
"Riku!" he yelled, his voice a raw croak.
"Here." The reply was a calm grunt from a few meters ahead. Riku had taken cover behind one of the thick, vertical support struts. A spray of plasma bolts from his carbine answered the automaton's attack, splashing harmlessly against its chest plate.
Kaito was on his stomach, pressed flat against the grated metal, hands over his helmet, just making a low, continuous, whimpering sound. He was gone. Lost.
The automaton took a step out onto the gantry, its heavy, magnetic boots clanging with terrifying finality on the metal. It ignored Riku's fire. Its red optical sensors were fixed on Haruto. It had identified the leader. The primary threat.
Another orange plasma bolt hissed past Haruto's head, so close he felt the static charge of it tug at his hair. He rolled, scrambling away from the rail, trying to put the support strut between himself and the machine. Pinned. He was completely, utterly pinned. His tactical mind was a frantic, screaming engine, but every scenario it ran ended the same way: a molten hole in his chest and a long, silent fall. They were out-gunned, out-maneuvered, and trapped in a perfect kill box of the Warden's design.
He risked a glance over his shoulder. Back towards the other end of the gantry. The Conductor had not moved. It stood in the darkness, a silent, patient observer, its pale face a mask of detached curiosity. It was watching the show. Watching them die.
And in that moment of absolute, hopeless despair, a new thought, a spark of insane, suicidal logic, ignited in Haruto's mind. The Conductor had called the Warden a "broken toy." They weren't allies. They were rivals. Two predators sharing the same cage. And the Warden… its programming was a thousand years old. It was a simple, brutal, military AI. Its primary directive would be clear: Eliminate all unauthorized lifeforms within the vessel.
The Conductor was not an Imperial lifeform. It was an anomaly. It was, to the Warden's rigid, binary logic, just another contaminant. Another bug to be exterminated.
The choice was not a choice. It was a gamble of such monumental, insane proportions that it bordered on a death wish. But it was the only play he had left.
"Kaito!" he roared, his voice a raw, desperate command. Kaito didn't respond, his whimpering just grew louder. "Damn it, Kaito, get up! Get up and shoot at that thing! Now!"
He didn't know if the boy would obey. He couldn't afford to wait. He looked at Riku, who was still methodically laying down suppressing fire.
"Riku! On me! We're drawing it down the bridge! Suppressing fire, pattern Delta! Don't let it get a clean shot!"
He didn't wait for an answer. He broke from cover. He ran. Not away from the automaton. He ran past it, a mad, suicidal sprint down the narrow, shaking gantry. He ran with his head down, the wind whistling past his helmet, the dizzying drop to his left a peripheral blur of absolute blackness.
The automaton reacted instantly. Its torso swiveled, its red eyes tracking his movement. It raised its plasma caster. But Riku was a machine. Pattern Delta was a cascade of covering fire, three shots aimed not at the automaton itself, but at the space just in front of its weapon, designed to spoil its aim. Three blue bolts flashed past Haruto, striking the gantry at the automaton's feet, forcing it to take a half-step back to stabilize.
It was all the time Haruto needed. He was past it. He was now between the automaton and the Conductor.
He skidded to a halt, his boots scraping on the metal, and turned. The automaton was already turning to face him, its vibro-blade humming to life, a low, murderous sound that vibrated in his teeth. It took a step towards him.
Then another.
It was working. The machine was single-minded, its programming locking it onto the nearest, most mobile threat. Him.
"Kaito, now!" he screamed again, his voice raw with a desperation he didn't try to hide.
And this time, a miracle. From the far end of the gantry, a wild, inaccurate spray of blue plasma bolts erupted. Kaito was on his feet. He was firing. He was screaming, a high, continuous, wordless sound of pure, unadulterated terror, but he was firing.
The automaton paused. It had a target in front of it. And a target behind it. Its simple, thousand-year-old combat subroutines stuttered for a fraction of a second, caught in a logic loop.
And in that moment of hesitation, the Conductor moved.
It did not attack them. It glided forward, out of the dark corridor and onto the gentry, its movements a smooth, silent poetry of menace. It raised one pale, long-fingered hand, and the shriek from the nest below suddenly changed. It was no longer a sound of pain. It was a command. A summons.
A massive, glistening black tendril of the Anomaly, thick as a tree trunk, erupted from the chasm below. It moved with an impossible, terrifying speed, a whip of liquid night that shot up, over the handrail, and slammed into the gantry right between Haruto and the automaton.
The impact was a cataclysm. The entire gantry bucked and twisted with a deafening screech of tortured metal. The section where the tendril had struck simply… dissolved. It did not break. It turned to a fine, gray dust that was whipped away by the wind. A five-meter section of the bridge was just… gone.
Haruto was thrown from his feet, his world a chaotic blur of spinning metal and falling dust. He hit the deck hard, the impact knocking the wind from his lungs. He slid, his armor scraping on the metal, and came to a stop just inches from the new, gaping hole in the catwalk. He looked down into the abyss, into the roiling, furious nest below, and for a second, a profound, dizzying vertigo seized him.
The automaton was not so lucky. The impact had thrown it off balance. It stumbled, its metal feet scraping for purchase on the buckling metal. It was right on the edge of the new chasm.
The Conductor was on the other side of the gap, a calm, silent observer to the chaos it had created. Its gaze was not on HarD-o. It was on the automaton.
"A broken toy," its chorus-voice whispered, the sound a soft, sibilant hiss in the sudden quiet.
The automaton, its programming reasserting itself, identified the new, closer threat. It raised its plasma caster, its red eyes fixing on the pale, robed figure. It was a fatal mistake.
A second tendril, this one smaller, faster, shot up from the abyss. It was not a bludgeon. It was a spear. It slammed into the automaton's chest, punching straight through the thick, armored plate with a wet, crunching sound. The tendril did not retract. It… flowed. The black, iridescent substance spread from the point of impact, covering the automaton's chassis in a spiderweb of oily, dark veins. The machine's red eyes flickered. It let out a single, distorted, electronic shriek, a sound of a machine being unmade from the inside out. Then it went rigid. The red lights in its eyes died. The glow from its plasma caster faded.
The tendril retracted, pulling the dead, silent machine with it, and dragged it over the edge and down into the darkness of the nest. There was a faint, wet, crunching sound from below. And then, silence.
Haruto lay on the shaking gantry, his mind a blank, white-hot void of shock. He had won. He had survived. His insane gamble had worked. He had pitted the two monsters against each other, and they had eliminated one of the threats for him.
He pushed himself up, his body a collection of aches and bruises. He looked across the new, five-meter gap in the bridge at the Conductor. The creature stood there, its dark, empty eyes fixed on him. It had not moved. It had just demonstrated a power that was beyond his comprehension, a power to command the very substance of the Anomaly, to dissolve metal, to kill a military-grade automaton as if it were an insect.
It had saved him. It had saved them all. And Haruto knew, with a certainty that was colder and sharper than any fear he had ever known, that it was not an act of mercy. It was a statement. A demonstration.
The Conductor raised its hand again, and the tendril that had destroyed the automaton rose from the abyss once more. It did not attack. It simply bridged the gap, its glistening black surface forming a solid, stable, organic bridge between the two broken ends of the gantry.
"I find myself intrigued, Lieutenant Rostova," the chorus-voice said, the sound a soft, almost intimate whisper in the quiet. "Your capacity for creating chaos is… refreshing. I have rescinded my earlier offer. I no longer want you as a partner. I want you as a specimen. But first… I believe you have an appointment to keep. The Warden is waiting for you on the bridge. I would not want to spoil its fun. Do try to survive. I am so very eager to see what you will do next."
The Conductor turned, its black robes swirling like smoke, and glided back into the darkness of the corridor, leaving them alone on the broken, shaking gantry, with a bridge made from the flesh of a monster, and a path forward into an even greater darkness.