Micah paced along the raised catwalk that circled the core command pit, boots ringing soft against steel mesh. Below him, a dozen operators moved like clockwork - each stationed at a sunken terminal, eyes flickering across screens filled to the brim with logistical information, fingers darting across hollow-tactile surfaces. The space hummed, not just with power, but with the intention behind their unified purpose. This was the nerve center of the Purist campaign: intelligence in, strategy out.
Projected across the central display was a live network crawl - active field reports, drone telemetry, flagged keyword chatter from border leaks. The Sovereign broadcast loop glitched once every nine minutes, just long enough for a sliver of Purist messaging to slip through.
Micah tracked it all without effort.
"Adjust signal focus on Grid 8-B," he said aloud, voice crisp. "The last transmission suggests a passive intercept was tripped. I want a full trace."
"Yes, Director," came the chorus from below.
He moved to a console mounted along the inner ring, its display tailored to his specific preferences. It parsed the results of their asymmetric warfare, civilian sentiment, and Blacksite activity. All color-coded and shifting in real time. There was a kind of beauty to it. Not a drop of chaos in sight - all pattern.
He pulled up a side window: a security feed from a repurposed satellite node in the outer sectors. It showed nothing but static, but that was the point. Static meant someone had tampered with it. He made a mental note. His eyes flicked to the corner of the room, where his personal tech lay on a secure pedestal. His data pad. His holo-emitter. Both linked to encrypted subnets, isolated from everything else. He trusted them more than the people beneath him.
Micah was in his element. He didn't miss the war - not the one with bullets. This was better. Cleaner. Every life, every shift, every data point, accounted for. Controlled. Or at least… understood. The exit beneath him hissed open with a flurry, giving way to Dr. Voss herself, eyes darting from operative to operative. It took maybe half a second total before she was able to identify Micah above on the catwalk.
"I have something for you." She said softly. "Your office, please."
They made their way just past the command center, around the bend and found themselves at the only place left to turn - Micah's own personal miniature command center. It afforded him everything he needed to run their combat logistics - and bonus privacy for coordinating the future of their movement.
"Have a seat." Dr. Voss instructed.
Micah quickly took point at the chair at his station, proceeded by an oak desk he routinely used to keep track of battle maps.
"System" she says. "Secure this room." The room darkened by several shades, a magnetic shield descended from the ceiling over the door, and Micah's personal tech went inert. Micah looked down at his desk's holo emitter and data pad to see that it too, had gone blank.
"Wow." He eeked out, surprised by the finality of the feature. "I… didn't know that was an option." he relented, impressed by her command of the room.
"There are many things you don't know." Helena stated. "One of those things being the intel I just received regarding one of our reconnaissance groups outside of the city."
She tossed an intel packet on to his desk, a manilla envelope crested by a triangular glyph encased in a circle. "They spotted Unity-9 and Maxim Cutter together traveling to who knows where. I cant even wrap my head around what that could possibly mean. I cant even imagine the two of them being in the same room, much less on the move."
"What did they find?" Micah asked.
"What they found," she replied, "doesn't make any sense. These reports... are incoherent. Some kind of animal attack? Experimentation? We need more information. It's entirely possible that the team responsible for this report is... dead. You see that glyph?"
Micah eyed the folder with curiosity, rubbing his fingers around its embossed seal.
"It means people died getting us the intel." She said, unable to hide the many layers of sadness bound to that statement. "You get me a team to find out what happened. But I need the best. I need… the Iron Prophet."
Micah's eyes immediately met hers. "You want me, to send my sister, on a potentially suicidal mission to find out what happened to our dead team?" He asked, something like anger beginning to swell in his chest.
"No," she quickly corrected, "I want to send your sister precisely because she's the only one who will probably survive."
Micah didn't speak for a long time. He just stared at the folder, fingers still resting lightly on the edge of the glyph. It was warm to the touch, probably just residual heat from Dr. Voss's hand - but it felt like something more. Something akin to consequence.
"You really believe that," he said eventually. "That she's the only one who'll come back?"
Voss didn't blink. "I believe she's the only one who won't hesitate to do what she needs to do, to survive. And a team backing her up who can benefit from the morale and hardy energy."
Micah stood, jaw tight. "Then you'd better authorize every resource I request. No delays. No filters. I want full comms, our full suborbital tactical suite, and emergency extraction already in queue."
"You'll have it," she said.
He nodded in confirmation. But even as he began assembling the mission file, something in his gut twisted.
"This isn't going to be just a recovery op. This is an introduction to something more. Something more dangerous than we've ever seen before. I'm gonna need everything I've got up my sleeve."
The crawler groaned like a rusted lung, its massive tires grinding against fractured road seams as it chewed through the wilderness. Diesel fumes bled into the cabin despite the sealed vents, and the faint metallic whine of strain kept pace with every rattle of the chassis. No one complained. The crawler wasn't built for comfort, it was built to deliver people who didn't need it.
Layla sat near the front, visor down, arms crossed tight over her chestplate. Across from her, four operatives bounced in rhythm with the crawler's motion, their helmets clutched tight in their laps, eyes tracing the faded graffiti carved into the steel walls from long-forgotten missions. Outside, the windows were streaked with condensation and grime, a blurred mix of tree limbs, cracked floodlight poles, and silence.
The crawler had been running for nearly two hours without a word spoken. It wasn't discipline, rather instinct. The deeper they pushed into the red sector, the more it felt like sound might be noticed.
On the dash, the nav unit blinked a slow, irregular pulse. The dead team's last known coordinates were still ten klicks out, but the signal was degrading - weak, scattered, like whatever had happened to the last team was still happening to their data.
"Any movement?" Layla asked, not turning her head.
One of the soldiers scanned a field display. "No thermal. No signal feedback. No audio anomalies."
"That's worse than static," Layla muttered. "That's manufactured emptiness."
She glanced down at her forearm interface, tapped once, and brought up the field dampener sync. Still intact. Still linked. If things went wrong out there… and they probably would - she needed that field ready to catch more than just a mech.
The crawler hit a dip in the road, slamming them briefly into partial weightlessness. One of the operatives let out a quiet exhale. No one laughed.
The forest thinned ahead. Dark shapes loomed through the haze. Their field of view contained a juxtaposition of varying industrial structures: collapsed rail yards, vines strangling old supply pylons. The bones of industry devoured by time. This was where the last team disappeared.
And whatever took them, hadn't left a traceable signature.
The crawler hissed to a stop beneath the crumpled shadow of a decommissioned fuel tower. Steam leaked from fractured pipes overhead like the plant was still breathing, just barely. Beyond the crawler's headlights: a mess of collapsed gantries, moss-ridden loading bays, and broken windows gaping like wounds.
Layla dropped down first. Her boots hit the cracked asphalt with a low thud. She didn't speak, just raised her hand in a quick sign: Fan out. Tight loop. Two-by-two.
The team moved with smooth coordination, rifles raised, visors flickering as their HUDs adjusted to the dim spectrum of the zone. Light danced off oil-stained steel. Dust lingered unnaturally in the air, refusing to settle. They cleared the outer yard quickly. No motion. No tracks. No bodies, that is, until they turned the corner into Loading Bay 3.
One of the soldiers stopped short. "Contact front," he said, without excitation or alarm. Just a tone that conveyed the message of quietly disturbed.
The man's body was half-slumped against a support beam. Recon armor, Purist-issue. ID tag: Barnes, T. His rifle sat across his lap, magazine still full, round in the chamber. His loadout was practically stuffed full of ammunition like he'd been ready for war, but never got the chance to make a sound.
Layla knelt beside the body. The puncture wounds in his chest weren't exactly clean, but they weren't ragged either. They were, however, precise - but didn't conform to any pattern she recognized. It was like whoever had done this wasn't just killing, but practicing. His rifle still sat in his lap, untouched, as if he'd been caught between two thoughts and never finished either. She speculated as to whether or not something could be engineered to cause this kind of injury.
She moved his shoulder gently, revealing the neck, snapped clean. Not with struggle, but with brute force. One motion. Final. Indifferent.
"Whatever hit him ended it fast," she murmured. "Didn't even give him a chance to scream."
One of the others scanned the ground. "No blood trail. No drag marks. He died right here."
Layla stood.
"Rifles up. Lights on."
The team obeyed instantly - tac-lights slicing clean lines through the ruined interior of the plant. Shadows jumped in every direction. The building creaked with the wind, but otherwise stayed silent. Oppressively so.
They moved forward, one corridor at a time. Boots crunching debris. Breaths slowed to rhythm. A welding mask swung gently from a chain overhead - clink… clink… clink…
Layla's jaw tightened.
"Stay sharp," she said. This could still turn into an ambush at any time.
She paused. Turning her flashlight on the walls, the light caught the grooves where long gouges had torn into the metal. They weren't words or symbols, but the repetition was intentional - lines dragged over and over again in perfect weight.
Layla concluded it was best to keep moving. The team moved into a loading bay, which flared alive under the presence of the tac-lights. Shadows peeled back in jagged arcs. Dust floated in layers, suspended as though unwilling to settle. The team advanced, boots grinding through glass and grit.
That's when on the of squad mates saw it: a carcass sprawled in the corridor beyond, blocking half the passage. At first glance it looked like an animal, but the closer they came, the less it resembled anything natural. Its skin wasn't exactly skin - more like calcified tissue, gray and brittle, split in plates along the chest. Its jaw was locked in a grotesque angle, teeth fused together like stone. One soldier prodded it with a barrel and the body cracked in response, sending a puff of white dust into the air. The smell was metallic, wrong in every way.
"What the hell is that?" someone whispered.
Layla didn't answer. She crouched to study the wounds. They weren't random. One side of the thing's ribcage was torn apart by high-velocity rail slugs -Ascendent issue. The other side was lanced by neat circular burns, plasma scoring that matched Synthetic tech she'd seen and studied in intercepted footage. Two enemies, different weapons, converging on a single kill.
"Rail and plasma both," Layla said. "In the same volley."
The squad shifted uneasily. None of them needed her to explain what that meant.
They moved deeper. The plant's innards were half-collapsed, gantries canted at ugly angles, steel beams split as if charges had been set. Evidence of a deliberate collapse. Someone had tried to erase the fight that had happened here, but too much remained.
A drone, or what was left of one, jutted out from one pile of rubble - a Synthetic escort unit, chest cavity hollowed and core already slagged. Layla recognized the self-scuttled design. She'd heard rumors of Unity-9's hidden guard, machines that killed themselves rather than leave evidence. She knelt and brushed soot from its shoulder, catching the faint impression of glyph-like energy burns seared into the floor nearby.
"They didn't want this body found either," she muttered.
The others fanned their lights. More grooves. More collapsed walls. The stink of scorched metal and calcified dust. Every surface told the same story: a battle no one should have survived, fought by enemies who should never have fought together. Layla moved slowly through a pile of debris, while her team swept arcs of light over broken walls and collapsed partitions. Beneath the rubble, she caught a faint glow of a holo-emitter still sputtering, dug it out, and brushed ash from its surface. Without much difficulty, she powered it on.
The projection flickered - half-burned tactical overlays, coded to Ascendent networks. It showed the plant's layout, Purist patrol routes highlighted in red. Her blood went cold. These showed Cutter's channels. Unity-9's glyphs. Ascendent ballistics. Synthetics scuttled. And the unusual creatures caught dead in the crossfire. She shut the device down, hand shaking just once before she mastered it.
"Bag it," she ordered. "Everything here. Samples, casings, logs. I want this site scrubbed. Everything we can get, back to Dr. Voss."
"Maa'm," one of her soldiers called, voice low. He crouched beside the carcass of one of the things they had found earlier - its body cracked, ribs shattered from the inside. "This is the same pattern. Rail slugs on one side, plasma burns on the other. Ascendent and Synthetic, both."
Layla knelt, tracing the edges of the wound with her gauntleted fingers. Clean lines. No hesitation. Two weapons from opposite worlds cutting into the same target. She felt the weight of it coil in her chest. If this evidence spread, it would undo everything the Purists claimed about the independence of humanity. Cutter and Unity-9, working together? Even in whispers, the idea was poison.
"They're not," Layla cut in, too sharp. Then, softer: "Not officially. Not where anyone can admit it. Which means this place never happened."
She glanced back at the grooves on the wall, the calcified monster, the fused corpse. "But it did." She thought. "And the world's going to know it."
Another soldier spoke from the far end of the chamber. "Ma'am - the motion feed's picking up scatter. Out past the tower yard."
Layla turned sharply. "Is it the creatures?"
"Not confirmed. But its definitely not human either. The readings don't match anything in our system."
The silence in the chamber deepened. Even the hum of the squad's HUDs felt loud. Layla swallowed the sudden dryness in her throat. "Look alive, people! Its a good bet we're about to be neck deep in teeth and trouble, so keep yours clenched! They might have more bodies than we've got bullets, so aim straight, ok?"
She keyed her forearm display, fingers flicking across the interface. The signal back to the crawler was faint but stable. She opened a priority channel.
"Command crawler," she said, steady but clipped. "This is Prophet Team. We've found combat traces, Ascendent and Synthetic, cooperative engagement. Unknown hostiles. We are compromised. Requesting mech drop authorization."
There was a pause, static riding the channel like dust in the air. Then the reply came: "Authorization confirmed. Field dampener online. Delivery in two minutes."
Layla exhaled slowly. Two minutes.
She turned to her squad. "We hold this ground until the drop. Tighten the perimeter. Lights low. We'll need cover for retrieval."
They obeyed without hesitation, moving into positions around the chamber. Rifles up. Visors scanning. No one spoke further.
Layla stood at the center of the bay, fingers tight to her rifle. She could feel the heat building from it, a reminder of a fight she hadn't seen but now had to finish.
Somewhere out in the dark, something scraped metal. The sound dragged long, deliberate, like claws against steel. The squad stiffened, weapons swinging toward the sound.
Layla didn't move. She stared into the black and forced her voice to stay calm.
"Two minutes," she said again, more to herself than to them.
The scrape echoed once more. Then another. Closer.
The dampening field began to pulse through the crawler's projectors, a low bass hum loud enough to thrum against her chest. The signal was already rising in her HUD. The drop was coming, but the creatures were coming faster. The only thing standing between her squad and annihilation, was a mech that hadn't yet arrived.