Thick, gray artificial smog blanketed the ruined asphalt of Sector B.
Caleb adjusted the heavy, useless canvas strap of his surplus rifle. He kept his right side angled toward a crumbling brick wall. His bruised arm hung dead in its sling beneath his jacket.
Ten yards away, Hiro aggressively tapped the side of his helmet. The kid's oversized track jacket flapped in the cold, artificial wind pumped in through the stadium vents.
"My viewer count is zero," Hiro muttered over the local comms channel. He sounded completely defeated. "Not even my mom logged in. She said the premium subscription fee for the undercard brackets was too high."
"Lucky," Caleb said. He kept his eyes on the ash-choked street. "I've got one. And I'm pretty sure it's a psychopath."
Hiro checked the magazine on his standard-issue rifle for the fourth time in three minutes. "If we don't get at least a dozen mechanical kills in this phase, the corporate sponsors won't even download our files. My dad spent two months' salary on this armor calibration. I have to get noticed."
"Just aim for the articulation joints," Caleb said, his voice flat. He was exhausted. The dull ache in his fractured ribs throbbed a steady rhythm. "The disposal yards buy the mechanical scrap by the pound. The plating on those training drones is too thick for surplus kinetic rounds anyway. You waste ammo shooting center mass. Hit the knees. Hit the neck seam."
Hiro looked at him, his brow furrowing behind his visor. "The military manual says center mass guarantees target stagger."
"The military manual assumes you're holding a plasma cannon," Caleb replied. "We're holding garbage. Treat them like carcasses. Dismantle them."
A low, subsonic vibration rattled the soles of Caleb's boots.
Dust shook loose from the ruined brick wall beside him. A loose pebble bounced across the asphalt.
Hiro lowered his rifle a fraction of an inch. "They didn't say the mechanical targets were heavy enough to shake the floor."
"They aren't," Caleb said.
The pitch of the stadium sirens shifted abruptly. The standard electronic shriek cut off.
A deep, deafening, rhythmic blast shattered the quiet.
HROOOOM. HROOOOM. HROOOOM.
The city-wide emergency horn. The true disaster siren.
The red strobes lining the tops of the artificial buildings ignited. The ash-choked streets bathed in a frantic, bloody glare.
The artificial asphalt fractured fifty yards ahead. It wasn't a clean break. Jagged slabs of the ruined street buckled upward, throwing a dozen panicked recruits to the dirt. Toxic black vapor hissed from the expanding fissure, melting the painted boundary lines into bubbling slag.
A serrated claw the size of a transport truck punched through the crust.
The military discipline of the testing ground broke instantly. Recruits in surplus armor abandoned their formations. A teenager dropped his custom rifle in the dirt, turning to run. Boots trampled the gravel. Eighty kids scrambled blindly backward toward the staging tunnel.
Up on the elevated platform, the head proctor held his ground. He tapped a finger against his comms earpiece. His face remained a mask of cold stone.
"Seal Sector B."
The heavy blast doors groaned. High-grade gears engaged, sliding the massive steel barricades shut. The proctor was locking the arena to trap the Honju inside. Prevent it from reaching the civilian viewing boxes.
The locks boomed shut.
Caleb, Hiro, Kikaru, and a dozen other recruits were sealed inside the quarantine zone.
The ground heaved again.
Hundreds of smaller, segmented shapes poured out of the toxic fissure alongside the colossal beast. Crawlers. Scavenger-class Yoju. Their mandibles clicked in a frenzied, starving chorus. They flooded the street, forming a writhing black tide around the Honju's massive legs.
A recruit tripped in the gravel, his boots slipping on the ash. Three crawlers lunged, jaws snapping toward his exposed throat.
White armor blurred past Caleb's shoulder.
Kikaru ignited her thrusters. She dropped directly into the path of the swarm, her prototype suit screaming with kinetic force. She swung her heavy custom rifle by the barrel, using the reinforced stock to crack the first crawler's carapace. She pivoted, dropping to one knee, and fired a point-blank plasma round through the second beast's skull.
Surrounded by a tidal wave of snapping jaws and acidic blood, the corporate heiress went to work. She locked down the street. She erased the smaller monsters with terrifying precision, buying the panicked recruits precious seconds to drag themselves toward the sealed blast doors.
Above her, the stadium's augmented reality projectors struggled to keep up. Translucent corporate sponsor logos flashed in the smog over her head. The camera drones crowded her, capturing the pristine violence for the live feeds. She secured the perimeter, but the sheer volume of the swarm bogged her down. A one-person barricade, entirely cut off from the center of the street.
The 6.4 Honju ignored her.
It dragged its colossal bulk out of the fissure. Acid dripped from its lower mandibles, dissolving the ruined asphalt into bubbling pools. Its core pulsed with a sickly green bioluminescence deep beneath its chest plates. It swung its massive, armored head. Its multi-faceted eyes locked onto the easiest target in the open.
Caleb.
He stood in the flashing red strobe light. Cold sweat plastered his canvas jacket to his skin.
A few of the trapped kids opened fire. They shot blindly at the glowing core, their rounds bouncing uselessly off the thickest, most impenetrable armor on the creature's chest.
Caleb looked at the beast and saw a dissection chart.
The cervical plates behind the skull overlapped tight against the spine. A blind spot beneath the jaw. The primary articulation joints in the front legs carried an uneven distribution of weight. The cartilage gaps near the ankle were exposed whenever it raised a claw to strike.
The military blue HUD inside his cracked visor dissolved. The interface corrupted into glitching purple.
[??? : Get out of the red zone.]
The scraping, encrypted voice drilled directly into his ear. The amused, voyeuristic tone was gone. Pure, unfiltered panic laced the audio.
[??? : The armor will fail. Your bones will shatter. Leave the others. Hide!]
Caleb reached into the thigh pocket of his canvas jacket with his left hand. His fingers closed around the cold metal cylinder of the Tier-2 Combat Stimulant.
The Honju shrieked. The sound vibrated the fillings in Caleb's teeth. It lunged forward, covering fifty feet of asphalt in a single stride.
Caleb jammed the injector needle straight through the canvas fabric into his thigh.
He thumbed the release.
Human-grade adrenaline, synthetic coagulants, and chemical painkillers flooded his bloodstream. The agonizing, grinding ache of his shattered ribs vanished. An explosive, rushing heat took its place.
The heat did not stop in his veins.
It pulled inward. It gathered behind his sternum in a dense, suffocating knot. The thing inside his chest woke up. It recognized the apex predator charging them. It recognized the sudden influx of chemical calories. It began to feed.
Agony ripped through Caleb's right shoulder. The painkillers couldn't touch it.
His dead, bruised right arm jerked. The flesh beneath the purple scarring crawled. Muscles pulled tight under the skin, shifting and snapping until his paralyzed fingers curled into a tight fist. A cold, starving void opened in his stomach as the heat burned through his core energy.
Hiro stood twenty yards to his left. The kid's rifle trembled against his shoulder. He fired a three-round burst. The bullets sparked uselessly off the Honju's thick facial plating.
"Hiro! Stop shooting the armor!" Caleb barked over the open comms.
"It's all armor!" Hiro yelled back, his voice cracking in raw terror. He ejected a spent magazine, his hands shaking so badly he nearly dropped it. "The manual says aim center mass! I'm trying to draw aggro so Kikaru can flank!"
"It's a Danger Class-6, you idiot, it doesn't care about your aggro!" Caleb pointed his left hand at the beast's legs. "Treat it like a carcass! Look at the left knee!"
Hiro fumbled with his pouches, pulling a magazine marked with a thick blue stripe. "Cryo-rounds? I only have one mag! If I miss the core, we're paste!"
"Don't shoot the core. The cartilage softens when it shifts its weight to strike," Caleb said. His breathing went ragged as the heat in his chest spiked, threatening to choke him. "When it raises the right claw, the left knee plates slide back. Freeze the gap."
Hiro dropped to one knee. He anchored the heavy rifle against his shoulder. He didn't argue again. He sighted the beast's massive left leg.
The Honju raised its right claw to crush Caleb. Its full, colossal weight shifted onto the left leg. The armor plates slid back, exposing the pale, thick tissue of the joint.
"Now!" Caleb yelled.
Hiro pulled the trigger.
Three rounds buried themselves deep into the exposed gap. Liquid nitrogen erupted outward. The joint flashed white. The cartilage instantly crystallized under the extreme temperature drop.
The beast roared. Its balance broke. The massive claw sweeping down toward Caleb stuttered, losing its lethal momentum.
Caleb stepped directly inside the monster's guard.
The sheer heat radiating from the creature's open jaws blistered the skin on the back of his neck. The stench of acidic rot flooded his broken helmet. He grabbed a jagged, four-foot length of shattered steel rebar protruding from the rubble.
The wrong movement in his right arm locked his fingers around the iron. He felt the grip tighten a fraction of a second before his brain requested it.
His body forced the blunt steel straight upward.
He drove the rebar deep into the frozen tissue. The crystallized cartilage shattered like glass.
The joint snapped.
The Honju let out a deafening, gurgling shriek. The massive foreleg buckled entirely. The creature's colossal weight crashed down onto the asphalt. Its armored neck extended violently as it hit the ground, throwing its head back in agony.
The armored plates on its chest ripped open from the impact. The brilliant, sickly green core was completely exposed.
Across the street, Kikaru crushed the skull of a crawler beneath her boot.
She spun, her white armor streaked with black fluid. She looked at the 6.4 Honju pinned to the asphalt, crippled by a piece of garbage rebar. She looked at the glowing core.
She ignored the overheating warnings screaming on her suit's interface.
She ignited her thrusters, using the hood of an overturned transport truck as a springboard. She launched herself fifty feet into the air. The stadium floodlights caught the pristine edges of her prototype armor as she hit the apex of her jump.
She leveled her custom rifle. The barrel hummed with superheated plasma.
"Clear!" she screamed.
Caleb threw himself sideways into the dust.
Kikaru fired.
A blinding beam of high-compression energy struck the exposed core. The bioluminescent organ ruptured. A shockwave of displaced air and particulate ash blasted across the arena, shattering the remaining glass in the artificial city block.
The colossal beast slammed its jaw into the dirt one final time. It went entirely still.
The deep, rhythmic pulse of the disaster siren abruptly cut off.
For ten seconds, the only sound in the quarantined sector was the hissing of evaporating acid.
Then, the camera drones shifted.
Monetized priority routing kicked in across the Defense Force broadcast grid. A dozen metallic spheres detached from the outer perimeter. They ignored Kikaru. They swarmed the ruined street, hovering in a tight circle around the massive, smoking carcass of the Honju.
They focused their lenses entirely on Caleb.
The viewer count in the corner of his cracked visor rolled over like a slot machine.
Five thousand. Fifty thousand. Two hundred thousand.
A public chat feed bled into his peripheral vision, bypassing the military firewall. The text scrolled so fast it blurred.
User841: wait did that guy just use a pipe?RedLine: scrubber just snapped a 6.4 leg wtfG-Corp: [Automated] Private Bid Request Initiated.SnipeKing: what is his sync rate??Vanguard_fan: dude in the surplus gear just carried the princess.
The interface scrambled. Deep purple text flooded the screen, violently crushing the public chat feed back into the margins.
[??? : You magnificent, ugly thing.]
The panic in the encrypted voice was gone. A dark, possessive awe took its place.
[??? : Look at how they see you now. Look at them staring. But you belong to me.]
Caleb let go of the rebar.
The unnatural strength in his right arm evaporated. The flesh loosened. His arm dropped to his side, returning to a block of bruised, unresponsive dead weight.
Violent nausea hit him. A cold, empty feeling hollowed out his stomach. His human muscles cramped in violent protest, his fingers trembling uncontrollably.
He staggered backward. He braced his good shoulder against the ruined brick wall of an artificial storefront. He dragged in shallow, burning breaths, waiting for the world to stop spinning. The hunger tore at his insides.
Twenty feet away, Kikaru landed.
Her thrusters hissed, venting excess heat. The secondary drones immediately clustered around her. The augmented reality projectors painted her sponsor tags back into the air.
She stood tall. Rifle resting against her hip. Chin lifted toward the nearest lens.
Caleb watched her from the shadows of the brick wall.
Her left knee held a violent, microscopic tremor. Her jaw locked tight enough to crack a molar.
A line of blood leaked from the pressure seal at her right elbow, dripping quietly down the white armor to pool in the dirt at her boots. The machine was tearing her own muscles apart, but she forced her spine straight solely for the lenses.
Caleb spat a mouthful of ash into the dirt. "You're leaking, Princess."
Kikaru didn't turn her head. She kept her chin perfectly angled for the nearest Mitsurugi-sponsored drone. "Shut up, scrubber. It's coolant."
"Coolant is blue," Caleb muttered, clutching his bruised arm tight against his ribs. "Blood is red. You pushed the output too high."
"I cleared fifty targets in two minutes," she said through gritted teeth. Her voice was barely a whisper over the private comms, completely hidden from the broadcast feed. "I held the perimeter. And I got the kill."
"Yeah, "You did great. Now sit down before your kneecap snaps backward."
"If I sit down," she hissed, her voice trembling with absolute exhaustion, "Mitsurugi stock drops four points before the market closes. Just... stay out of my shot."
Caleb wiped the cold sweat from his eyes. He opened his mouth to argue, to tell her a plummeting stock price was better than bleeding to death in the dirt.
He didn't get the words out.
The sky above the stadium tore open.
A sonic boom shattered the heavy smog layer, cracking like a physical whip across the arena. The shockwave drove the hovering camera drones straight into the dirt. Dust plumed violently into the air as something plummeted from the atmosphere, impacting the exact center of the street.
The asphalt cratered inward. Spiderwebs of cracked concrete shot out for fifty yards in every direction.
The dust slowly settled.
A figure stood in the center of the impact crater.
Sleek, heavily customized black armor absorbed the harsh stadium lighting. A dark-gray collar marked the elite status of the Defense Force's First Division. A scarred leather jacket whipped in the settling wind.
Elara.
She slowly straightened up. She didn't look at the cheering drones fighting to get back into the air. She didn't look at Kikaru's perfect, rigid pose.
She looked at the massive, dead Honju. Then, she turned her head. Her sharp eyes locked directly onto Caleb, broken and exhausted against the wall.