The screams began at dawn.
Gareth was at the observation deck when the eastern wall vanished in a flash of sickly green. Not an explosion—an unraveling. Through the smoke, they marched.
Zombots.
They were humans perfected into horror. Pallid skin stretched over reinforced endoskeletons, eyes glowing virulent green. Some moved with predatory grace, limbs subtly elongated for killing. Others were massive, layered with grafted armor plating, rotary plasma cannons fused to their arms. They moved in terrifying units, covering each other, flanking—a legion of nightmares wearing human skin.
Behind them, atop floating debris, stood L-02. And beside it, grinning, was K-07.
Arcadia became a slaughterhouse. Cadets and instructors died in brutal, efficient ways. A telekinetic was shredded by mono-wire whips. A cryokinetic was melted in her own ice. Every death was surgical, a demonstration of how they could be broken.
Gareth's team found him in the chaos.
"Command structure's gone!" Sera shouted, her datapad showing fallen officer signals.
"Where's Riven?!" Nova yelled, firing past Gareth.
"He was on the east wall defense!" Lyra called back, her photonic spear piercing a Zombot's chest. "Comms went dark!"
They fought toward the central quad, the last rally point. The path was paved with corpses. They passed a second-year crushed by a gravity hammer. An instructor lay in his own crater, his density manipulation used against him.
They reached the quad. Commander Vale, bleeding from a scalp wound, directed a collapsing perimeter. "Hold the line!"
For a moment, they held. Gareth's counters came faster, sharper. Lyra's spears were brilliant. Nova's blasters never stopped. Eve disrupted targeting systems. Sera coordinated.
Then L-02 pointed.
Specialized Zombots slipped through the defense—medical assassins with scalpels of light. They moved toward the wounded.
"No!" Lyra broke formation, intercepting two before they reached the triage area. She was a whirlwind, but a third hung back, taking aim.
It fired a crystalline shard.
Lyra tried to dodge, but her focus was split. The shard struck her left side. Not an explosion—a crack-hiss. Glowing green fractals erupted under her skin, through her armor. A parasitic cage, leeching her light, locking her joints. She collapsed, a choked cry escaping as the corruption spread.
"LYRA!" Nova's scream tore the air.
Chaos swallowed them. Nova tried to reach Lyra, was swarmed. Sera went down under a concussive blast. Eve cried out as EMP claws backhanded her, her energy sputtering.
Gareth saw it in frozen frames. The line breaking. Vale falling back. His friends—Lyra convulsing, Nova pinned, Sera unmoving, Eve fading—being erased.
Because of him.
Something broke.
It wasn't analysis. It wasn't thought. It was a tectonic shift in his soul. The union of man and weapon shattered. What rose was pure, undiluted wrath.
He turned toward K-07's perch.
He walked.
A Zombot hunter lunged. It entered a meter of him and unfolded—joints separating, plates falling, wires snapping, all in silence before clattering as scrap.
A brute fired a gravity-hammer blast. The distortion hit his field and reversed, slamming back into the brute, flattening it.
A squad fired rotary plasma. The streams bent, swirled into a vortex above his palm, compressed into a white sphere, and winked out.
He was extinction walking.
He reached the rubble pile. K-07's grin was gone, replaced by a duelist's focus. L-02 stepped forward.
"No," K-07 said. "The flawed masterpiece is mine."
K-07 leapt.
The duel was annihilation. K-07 was a vortex of techniques—teleportation strikes, temporal beams, hard-light duplicates, gravity warps. An artist of death.
Gareth's power met each with erasure. He didn't block; he unmade. Teleportation became impossible. Temporal beams met stasis. Duplicates dissolved. Gravity smoothed to nothing.
They carved a scar of destruction through the chaos. A dormitory tower collapsed as K-07 tried to bury him; the rubble turned to sand before touching him.
K-07's confidence turned frantic. He fired a psionic scream to liquefy brains. Gareth absorbed it, analyzed it, and played it back phase-shifted. The canceling wave hit K-07, not as attack, but as neural void. His senses, cybernetics, consciousness went blank.
He staggered.
Gareth was on him.
This wasn't a duel. This was punishment.
Gareth's hand clamped around K-07's wrist. Not to break it. He focused, and a new counter formed—not for combat, but for sensation. Pain Reception Override. He forced K-07's nerve dampeners offline, his pain inhibitors to reverse. He made him feel everything.
Then he dissolved the wrist. The advanced alloys and polymers didn't break; they disassociated into dust. K-07 screamed—a raw, human sound of agony.
Gareth backhanded him. The blow didn't crack bone; it unlinked molecular bonds. K-07's jaw went slack, dislocated horrifically.
"You wanted to see the flaw?" Gareth's voice was the grinding of continents. "You're looking at it."
He grabbed K-07's throat, slammed him down, and pinned him with a stasis field that trapped him in agony. Then he went to work.
With precise applications of null-energy, he began deconstructing. Not tearing. Unmaking. He traced a finger down K-07's remaining arm. Armor, synthetic muscle, neural filaments—each layer separated and fell away like peeling an onion of steel and flesh. He exposed the endoskeleton, then dissolved the joints: shoulder, elbow, wrist. Each gave a soft pop, a sigh of releasing pressure.
K-07 was awake. He felt every second of it. His eyes—the only part still functional—were wide with terror beyond comprehension.
Gareth saved the spine for last. He applied the field to a single vertebra. Didn't snap it. Induced catastrophic failure, turning it to dust. Then the next. And the next. Working up with meticulous slowness. The excruciating reverse of building a tower.
When he reached the cervical vertebrae, K-07 was a head and torso in a pile of his own components. No fight left. Only silent horror.
Gareth placed hands on either side of K-07's head. "For Lyra."
He pulsed the null-field.
K-07 did not explode. He dispersed into fine grey mist that hung before dissipating.
Erased.
Gareth turned. The rage had a new target.
L-02 attempted to fracture into after-images and flee. Gareth's power rejected escape. He contained the space, solidified it. L-02's split failed.
Gareth appeared before it. L-02 unleashed everything—black energy tendrils, micro-missiles, a core-draining beam.
The Absolute Counter ate it all.
Gareth reached through its final shield, clamped onto the core housing. "You made me a weapon. Now see what your weapon does."
He inverted its energy matrix. L-02 glowed white-hot from within, consumed itself in a silent flash, leaving only carbon scoring.
The Zombot army faltered. Their coordination broke. They stood like grotesque statues, animating signal gone. The Battle of Arcadia was over.
Silence filled with moans and crackling fires.
Gareth stood in devastation. The rage cooled, leaving hollow ache. He saw the cost. The quad was a field of broken bodies. Medics reached his team. Lyra unconscious, the crystal growth halted but not gone, breathing shallow. Nova held her, tears cutting through grime. Sera sat up, dazed, arm limp. Eve struggled to her feet, light guttering.
Commander Vale met his gaze across carnage. No victory. Only grief and understanding.
He had saved them. He had brought hell to their doorstep.
He walked to a shattered comms panel, placed his palm on it. Let his intent flow—a psychic pulse for his team's wrist-comms. No words. Pure feeling: sorrow, fierce pride, love so vast it terrified him, iron resolve.
You are my heart. Why I fought. Now I fight so you never have to again. Forgive me. Wait for me.
He turned his back on Arcadia, on weeping, on ruins. Walked past motionless Zombots, through the breach, into the Wastelands.
---
The casualty lists were endless. Among the confirmed dead: 47 cadets, 12 instructors. Among the missing: 3 cadets, including Riven Hale. His last confirmed position was the east wall. No body recovered.
In the triage bay, Lyra fought the crystal corruption in her blood. Nova never left her side. Sera's arm was saved, but her datapad—her life's work—was ash. Eve's energy was depleted, her connection to networks severed by trauma.
Commander Vale surveyed the damage. Arcadia would stand. But it was broken.
And the boy who had saved them was gone, swallowed by the grey.
---
Somewhere in the Wastelands:
Gareth Lancer walked. The rage was banked, but not gone. It was fuel now.
He had no destination. Only direction: away from them, toward the source.
He would find why his existence brought ruin. He would find the makers. And he would end it.
All of it.
The world hadn't seen the last of Gareth Lancer. But when it did, it would face a force of absolute judgment—unmatched and merciless, forged from love, rage, and unrelenting determination.
---
Deep within a shielded facility:
A monitor showed Gareth's departure into the wastes. It flickered off.
In the gloom stood Riven Hale. His skin was pale. His eyes were hollow. Then they glitched—virulent green binary scrolling before fading to emptiness. A puppet.
He had fought on the east wall. He had been good. Then the signal had reached him, and he had walked away, through the enemy, untouched.
Before him stood a shape of pure shadow. No features. Only ancient, patient malice.
The puppet that was Riven spoke, voice flat. "Asset L-01 has entered the crucible. The harvest may begin."
The shadowed entity made a slight, grooming motion in the air.
Satisfaction. And unspeakable evil.
THE END.
Sequel continues in Lancer:Breakpoint