The morning air was thin and sharp, carrying a lie of peace. Yesterday's bruised sky had given way to a high, unforgiving blue, a vast emptiness that offered no comfort, no cover. The fire was a pile of grey ash, its warmth a ghost. They packed their meager camp in a silence that was different from their usual professional quiet. It was a tense, listening silence, the silence of a machine waiting for the killing voltage.
Kael had told them. He'd described the feeling—not a presence, but a focus. A cold, malevolent will that had settled on them in the night. Anya hadn't questioned it. She had simply doubled the watch and moved their departure time up to first light. In the Wasteland Frontier, you didn't dismiss the instincts of a proven anomaly.
"Anything?" Anya's voice was a low crackle over the private comm channel, a sound that felt too loud in the dead air. She, Corbin, and Sil were forming a loose perimeter while Kael and Maya broke down the last of their gear.
Kael swept his senses out, a now-familiar three-tiered diagnostic. The Hound tasted the wind and found nothing but dust and distance. The Scuttler felt the solid, unyielding rock and found no cracks to hide in. But the Stalker… the Stalker felt the lie. The pressure was still there. A dissonant note in the deep, resonant song of the Bell-Warden's Echo that now anchored his soul. It was a single, focused point of hate in a world of geological indifference.
"He's still there," Kael sent back. "Waiting."
"For what?" Corbin's voice was a low gravelly rumble, the sound of a patient mountain.
For the right moment. The thought came from the Stalker, cold and clinical. He is a predator of opportunity. He will not engage on our terms.
The world erupted.
It wasn't an explosion from the ground. It was an explosion of presence. A geyser of raw, screaming Aethel energy that erupted on a high mesa a mile away, a furious red star born in the morning light. And then it moved.
It wasn't a run. It wasn't a flight. It was a violation of physics, a brutal, loping charge that devoured distance with an impossible speed. A dust trail, vast and angry, rose in its wake.
"Contact!" Anya's command was a whip-crack, her professionalism a shield against the sheer wrongness of what they were seeing. "Corbin, wall! Sil, find a perch! Kael, Maya, with me!"
There was no time. The thing was a meteor, and they were the ground.
Zane arrived not as a man, but as an impact. He slammed into the box canyon's narrow entrance, the ground shattering under his feet. The air crackled, thick with the smell of ozone and a unique, terrifying scent—the smell of a soul burning.
He was a monster. The Berserker Module was a grotesque tumor of crystal and wire fused to his spine, its angry red light pulsing in time with a new, furious heartbeat. The scars on his arms, the faint, dark tracery of the Weaver's ghost, now blazed with the same corrupted energy, a cage of lightning that had failed to hold the beast. His Aethel Frame was not a hum; it was a shriek, a constant, high-pitched feedback loop of agony and power. He had been a broken hammer. Now, he was a living bomb.
"Kael!" Zane's voice was not his own. It was a distorted roar, pushed through a blown-out speaker, the sound of a man screaming through a furnace.
He ignored the others. Corbin, a mountain of a man, planted his feet, his massive tower shield slamming into the ground with a resonant boom. Zane didn't even slow down. He hit the shield not like a User, but like a Chimera. The impact was a deafening crack of thunder, and Corbin, a man who could stop a charging Razormaw, was thrown backward ten feet, his shield arm buckling, his own Frame sputtering in protest.
Sil, already on a high ledge, fired. Her rifle, a tool of surgical precision, spat a needle of coherent light aimed at the module on Zane's back. It was a perfect shot. It hit, and it was useless. The module's chaotic energy field simply devoured it, the shot a raindrop in a bonfire.
Zane's eyes, burning with a light that was not his own, were fixed on Kael. This wasn't a fight. It was a vendetta.
"Your fight is with me!" Anya's voice was cold steel. She was a blur of motion, her twin pistols a staccato rhythm of suppressive fire, her shots aimed not to kill, but to draw his attention.
Zane swatted a hand in her direction, not even looking. A wave of pure, unfocused kinetic force, a tantrum of raw power, erupted from his palm. Anya was thrown sideways, her controlled grace dissolving into a clumsy tumble as she slammed against the canyon wall.
The Nomads, professionals who had survived the worst the wastes and the enclaves could throw at them, were being dismantled. Not with tactics. Not with skill. With contempt.
Zane took another step, his focus absolute, a predator who had finally cornered his true prey.
Kael moved. The Hound in his soul snarled, a primal urge to meet this overwhelming force with its own. The Scuttler chittered, a frantic search for an escape that didn't exist. He pushed them both down. He wasn't a beast. He was the zookeeper. He was the technician, and he was looking at a machine that had been deliberately, beautifully, and horrifyingly pushed past every conceivable safety limit.
He stomped. Not an attack. A reposition. The [Shockwave Step] launched him backwards, a controlled, explosive dodge that put another twenty feet of distance between them. He needed space. He needed time. He needed to understand the nature of this new monster.
Zane laughed, a horrible, grating sound. "Running, Scuttler? There's nowhere to run."
He charged. Kael felt the raw, unrefined power of the Stonetusk Boar, a ghost of the boy Zane had been, now amplified into a force of geological devastation. The ground trembled with each step.
Kael met the charge not with his own force, but with the Warden's. The [Kinetic Rebound Armor] bloomed over his skin, a liquid-mercury sheen of impossible physics. Zane's fist, wreathed in the red-black energy of the Berserker Module, slammed into his chest.
The impact was not a blow. It was a heresy.
Kael felt the chaotic, screaming energy of the module wash over his own, carefully balanced synthesis. It wasn't just kinetic force. It was pain. It was rage. It was the agony of a Frame being burned alive. The harmonious hum of his own power stuttered, the Hound and the Tortoise recoiling from the raw, septic touch of the corrupted Aethel. He was thrown back, not by the force, but by the sheer wrongness of it. He skidded across the hard-packed clay, the armor holding but his own soul feeling scoured, tainted.
He looked up, and he saw the flaw. Zane's movements were impossibly fast, impossibly strong, but they were clumsy. He was a child swinging a sun. The power was not his. He was not guiding it. He was a passenger, a screaming, furious passenger in a machine he could not steer. The Berserker Module was not an enhancement. It was a parasite that had eaten its host and was now wearing his skin.
Zane roared in triumph, raising his arms to deliver a final, crushing blow. In that moment of arrogant triumph, he was a perfect echo of the man he had been in the tomb of the Glass Weaver. A fool about to be consumed by a power he had craved but fundamentally misunderstood.
And Kael, the quiet technician, the boy who had become an architect of impossible things, saw the schematic. He saw the overloaded circuits, the catastrophic feedback loop waiting for a trigger. Zane wasn't the weapon. The module was. And it was aimed at both of them.
Kael didn't get up. He didn't try to meet the blow. He planted a hand on the ground, and as Zane brought his fists down in a final, world-breaking arc, Kael stomped. Not to dodge. Not to attack.
He initiated a system crash. The brutal, one-on-one duel had begun.