The massive blast door slid open with the hiss of ancient hydraulics. Damien stepped inside, and the door sealed shut behind him with a heavy, final CLUNK. He was alone, cut off from the world, in a vast, circular chamber lit by the cold, steady glare of pre-apocalypse technology. The room was a hoard. Piles of glowing beast cores were stacked like treasure, surrounded by crates of valuable loot from a dead world.
And in the center of it all, was Bane.
He was conscious, sitting on a simple metal chair, but he was a wreck. The front of his torso was a horrifying mass of raw, pink, scar tissue, the skin not yet fully formed. One arm was noticeably thinner than the other, the muscle still reforming. These were not the honorable wounds of a warrior; they were the gruesome flaws in a masterpiece being hastily restored, and they were targets.
Bane smiled, a horrifying sight on his partially remade face. "So," his voice was a low, rough rasp, "the stray dog has found the master's kennel."
Damien's face remained impassive. The torture in the pit was a past transaction that had yielded an immense profit in the form of his awakening. This was not about revenge. This man was simply a threat to the stability of the new enterprise Damien now controlled, an unacceptable variable that had to be removed.
The fight began without another word. Damien, knowing he could not match Bane's raw physical power, created distance. The air shimmered, and a heavy, brutalist machine gun, a design from his own time, materialized on a conjured tripod before him. With a loud CLANK, the weapon settled onto the floor. He gripped the handles and opened fire.
A deafening, continuous roar—DAKKADAKKADAKKADAKKA!—filled the vault. A storm of heavy-caliber bullets tore across the room. Bane moved with an impossible, blurring speed, a flicker of motion that his wounded body should not have been capable of. He dove behind a stack of heavy metal crates, the bullets sparking and screaming off the metal, punching deep, fist-sized holes where he had been a split second before. Wooden crates splintered into nothing, their contents spilling across the floor. A stray round hit a pile of beast cores, and they shattered, releasing their stored energy in a silent, brilliant flash of blue light.
The weapon was devastating, but it was too stationary. Bane was using his superior speed to methodically move from cover to cover, drawing closer with each terrifying burst of movement. Damien dismissed the heavy weapon in a shower of light and conjured a powerful assault rifle. He focused his will, and the rounds it chambered were tipped with explosive charges.
The dynamic shifted. Damien was now mobile, strafing to one side, his movements fluid and controlled. CRACK-CRACK-CRACK! The rifle spat fire, and each round's impact was followed by a concussive BOOM! The explosions shredded Bane's cover, sending shrapnel whistling through the air and peppering the far wall with a fresh pattern of pockmarks.
Bane, forced into the open, roared in fury—"Aaaaaargh!"—as he used his incredible agility to weave between the blasts. He was a force of nature, a blur of motion against a backdrop of fire and destruction. He saw an opening as Damien paused to reposition and charged, pouring all his energy into a single, overwhelming rush.
He was closing the distance with terrifying speed. Damien, with no time to aim the rifle, dismissed it. In the split second before Bane was upon him, a heavy combat shotgun, brutal and efficient, materialized in his hands. He pumped it once—CHUNK-CHUNK—and fired.
KA-BOOM!
The explosive slug hit Bane square in the chest. His Origin Force Shield flared violently, absorbing the explosion, but the raw kinetic force was immense. It blew the massive man clear off his feet, sending him tumbling backward through the air to crash into a pile of crates with a sound of splintering wood and crunching metal. The shotgun had bought him the space he needed.
Damien knew his physical ammunition, no matter how powerful, was not the ultimate solution. He needed speed. He needed energy. He dismissed the shotgun. The deafening roar of explosions was replaced by the high-pitched, sharp crackle of a newly conjured pulse rifle.
Bane rose from the wreckage, now truly enraged. He grabbed his heavy war maul from a nearby weapon rack and poured his own energy into it. A deep red glow, his Saupa, wreathed the head of the maul, the air around it shimmering with heat. The strain of the act was visible, a grimace of effort on his face.
The pulse rifle fired. VZZZT! A beam of pure energy crossed the room. Bane, no longer just dodging, met the bolt with a swing of his glowing maul. TZZZING! A loud sizzle of energy dissipation echoed through the vault as the bolt was deflected into the ceiling, leaving a molten scar.
The true duel began. Damien, using his thrusters, began to hover a meter off the ground, kiting backward and sideways, firing a relentless stream of pulse bolts. VZZZT! VZZZT! VZZZT! Bane was forced to the defensive, a whirlwind of motion on the ground, his glowing maul a shield of red energy, deflecting each shot with a sharp TZZZING! He was a god of war, but every block cost him, every deflection visibly draining the light from his weapon and the strength from his body.
Damien, with his enhanced mind, targeted the weak points he had identified earlier. A pulse bolt skimmed past Bane's guard and seared across his thinner, regenerating arm. Bane roared in pain, his flawless defense faltering for a moment.
The fight was a brutal exchange. Cores were scattered across the floor from their neat piles by stray shots and impacts. Bane, his speed flagging from his injuries and the massive drain on his Saupa, could no longer elegantly deflect every shot. His strategy devolved into pure, brute force. He began to simply smash through Damien's incoming pulse blasts, his maul exploding with red energy at each impact, the shockwaves staggering him but allowing him to push forward.
Damien fired two more quick shots.
VZZZT! Bane bellowed and smashed through the first with a deafening CRACK! of energy and metal.
VZZZT! He roared and shattered the second. On this final, desperate impact, there was a loud, discordant clang, and the red glow on his war maul was completely extinguished, the infused Saupa finally broken and spent.
Damien saw his opening. The perfect, final move. He leveled the pulse rifle for a killing shot to the head. He pulled the trigger.
A faint click.
Nothing.
The rifle in his hands remained, a perfect, solid construct. But his own internal well of power was dry. He didn't have enough Saupa left to form another energy bolt.
They stood there, meters apart, in the wreckage of the vault, both panting, both utterly spent. Bane's maul was just a heavy piece of metal. Damien's rifle was an empty shell. A tense, ragged silence stretched between them, thick with the promise of violence neither could currently deliver.
And then, their gazes, almost simultaneously, broke from each other and landed on the solution to their mutual problem: the hundreds of glowing beast cores scattered like spilled jewels across the floor between them.