The world was a symphony of light and chrome. Damien remembered it from his last year on life support, a memory from before the long, cold sleep. He was at his physical weakest then, his body failing, tethered to a dozen whirring machines in a sterile medical suite that overlooked a city of soaring, elegant towers and silent, gliding vehicles that traced paths of light through the sky.
The lead scientists of the cryostasis project, men with sharp suits and sharper minds, had come to his suite to show him the future he was buying. On a holographic display, they showed him projections of the wealth and fame that would follow his successful revival. They showed him data from the successful chimpanzee trials, mock-ups of future press conferences with his name in lights, and the projected stock market booms that would make him a titan of a new medical-industrial age. They sold him a dream of a beautiful future, a world where his cancer would be a forgotten footnote, a world where death itself was just another problem to be solved with enough capital and ingenuity. He had watched the images of a long, healthy, powerful life flicker before him, and for the first time in years, he had felt a fierce, burning hope. His own turn would come. The future was bright.
A flash of incandescent red light. The high-frequency shriek of tearing reality. The world of chrome and glass shattered.
The impact was absolute.
A wave of pure, uncontrolled energy erupted from the point where Damien's blade met Bane's fist. It was not an explosion of fire and shrapnel, but a silent, devastating wave of force that vaporized the air itself. The neatly stacked crates of Old World loot were instantly turned to dust. The massive piles of beast cores were thrown about the chamber like pebbles in a hurricane, slamming against the walls with enough force to crack the bedrock.
Damien was thrown backward, his body a broken toy. He slammed into the far wall of the vault, the impact a brutal, final punctuation to the agony of the initial blast. Bane was hurled in the opposite direction, his larger body crashing through a stack of metal shelving before collapsing in a heap.
For a long time, there was only silence, broken by the faint, musical tinkling of a few dislodged beast cores rolling across the floor. The cold, white lights of the vault flickered erratically, casting the ruined chamber in a strobe of light and shadow.
Above, in the main shelter, the night cycle continued in blissful ignorance. The great fire pits were banked low, their soft, orange glow painting the cavernous space in warm, dancing shadows. The day's hard labor was done, and the five hundred survivors retreated into the small comforts of their existence. In the quiet corners of the tent city, hushed whispers and soft laughter could be heard. Against the thin leather of one tent, two shadows merged and separated in a slow, intimate rhythm. Near the Heat Chute, Rhys, the cheerful furnace-keeper, shared a cup of potent Weeping Nettle brew with the laid-back Finn, their boisterous laughter a rare, bright sound in the quiet dark. In the glowing farms, Lira gently tended to a sick Iron-Vine, her touch delicate, her brow furrowed in concentration. Families huddled together, telling stories of the Old World, myths of cities that touched the sky and machines that could fly. It was a world of small dramas, of quiet affections and simmering resentments, of life being lived under the illusion of a peace that had been bought for them, just moments before, in a storm of unimaginable violence they would never know.
Down in the silent, smoking ruin of the vault, Damien coughed, a wet, ragged sound. A torrent of blood spilled from his lips, stark crimson against the grey concrete. He pushed himself up, his body screaming in protest. His left arm was shattered, the bone protruding from the skin. At least three of his ribs were broken, the sharp ends piercing a lung. Every breath was a fresh wave of agony.
He looked across the chamber. Bane was worse. His right arm, the one that had thrown the final punch, was gone, completely atomized at the shoulder. The shield-piercing frequency of Damien's blade had carved a devastating wound across his torso, a black, cauterized canyon of dead flesh that his regeneration was failing to close. He was a mutilated wreck, twitching on the floor.
Damien struggled to his feet, using a piece of shattered crate for support. He needed a weapon. His Saupa was scraped to the absolute bottom; forming a separate construct was out of the question. He focused his will on his broken left arm. The pain was immense, but he pushed through it. With a sickening sound of shifting bone and tearing flesh, the shattered limb began to transform. It elongated, flattened, and sharpened, the broken bone forming a rigid core as dark, matted metal grew over it like a second skin. His own mangled arm had become his sabre-shaped cutlass.
He limped across the ruined chamber, his every step a fresh agony, the transformed blade dripping with his own blood.
He stood over his predecessor. Bane, the proud tyrant, the genius, the survivor, looked up at him. His one remaining eye was wide, not with hatred or defiance, but with a raw, primal terror. The old lord of the shelter was broken. He tried to speak, but only a pathetic, gurgling sound came out. He began to weep, his massive body shuddering with sobs. He reached out with his remaining hand, not to attack, but to weakly scrabble at Damien's boot, a desperate, animalistic plea for life.
Damien raised the cutlass, the blade that was his own arm, ready to deliver the final, killing blow. He hesitated. His father's voice echoed in his mind. Never hesitate to liquidate a liability. And Bane was the ultimate liability. A regenerating genius who would forever plot his revenge. Killing him was the only logical, safe choice.
But another, colder part of his mind, the part that had built an empire, saw the situation differently. He looked at the locked, black tablet lying on a nearby workbench, a container of secrets he could not access. He thought of the Tiers he didn't understand, the politics of places like Titan's Gate, the centuries of history and knowledge this broken thing on the floor possessed. A dead genius was a wasted resource. A living, leashed genius… that was an asset of incalculable value. The potential profit was immense, but so was the risk.
He stood there for a long, silent minute, the internal debate raging. Finally, the cold, calculating capitalist won. The risk was manageable, but only if the leash was absolute.
"Your loyalty is worthless," Damien whispered, his voice hoarse. "Your obedience, however, has a price."
He let the cutlass dissolve, his shattered arm reforming into its broken, useless state. He ignored his own catastrophic injuries and knelt down, his knee pressing into Bane's good shoulder, pinning him to the floor. Bane flinched, his single eye wide with confusion and terror.
Damien focused the last, flickering dregs of his strength and will. He held up his right hand, and with a soft, wet sound, his fingers elongated. They sharpened, the nails retracting as dark, needle-thin metallic thorns grew in their place.
"It's just a small injection," Damien said, his voice a low, merciless whisper.
He took the first thorn-finger and, with a surgeon's precision, plunged it into the flesh at the base of Bane's skull. He drove the second deep into the muscle of his remaining arm. The last, he pressed against the raw, ruined flesh of Bane's chest, right next to his frantically beating heart.
Bane screamed, a long, horrifying sound that was cut short as the thorns retracted.
"They are linked to my heartbeat," Damien explained, his face inches from Bane's, his eyes devoid of all emotion. "If my heart stops, you detonate. If you move more than one hundred meters from me without my permission, you detonate. If you attempt to access your Saupa in any way that I have not expressly authorized, you detonate."
He stood up, swaying on his feet, the world threatening to go black.
"You are no longer a king, Bane. You are my property."
He turned and limped away, leaving the broken, weeping form of the former tyrant on the floor of his ruined treasury. He had won an impossible victory, but the cost was immense, and he now had a new, incredibly dangerous tool to manage. The locked tablet, forgotten for now, sat on a workbench in the ruined vault, its screen dark and silent.