Cain ran. Not with panic, not with fear, but with the focused cadence of someone who knew exactly how many seconds he had left to move through a world that was falling apart around him.
The mountain above was coming down by degrees. Every twenty seconds, the Krosa cruiser hammered another projectile into the bedrock, and each one rang out like a signal, dull and merciless, echoing down through the launch shaft in thick, concussive waves. At least those were not magma charges - or it would have been over much sooner. The infrastructure groaned in answer — pipes shifting, cables swaying, dust falling in long, vertical lines from the exposed belly of the concrete dome overhead.
The catwalk shook beneath each impact. His boots slipped once, caught, kept going. Somewhere behind him, something cracked — a conduit frozen over and half-suspended gave way and struck the wall with a sound like bone hitting rock.
He didn't stop.
"Eighty-five percent," MERIT's voice returned, flat, as flat as always. "I estimate you have roughly two minutes left."
"I don't think Krosa are following that schedule," Cain replied, ducking beneath a sagging arc of fused cabling as a fresh impact sent a curtain of frost cascading from the ceiling like falling plaster.
The air smelled sharp of oxidized metal and old fuel. The last vented coolant from Dormant support systems traced around his legs as he ran, curling into vapor near emergency lights. Up ahead, partially buried in collapsed walkways and swaddled in its own steam, the auxiliary shaft finally came into view — the approach to Chernobog, narrow and almost forgotten.
He rounded the corner. The gantry turned abruptly and narrowed, little more than a single strip of metal lashed across a deep black pit. Cain didn't hesitate. He moved fast, steady, eyes locked forward.
And there it was.
Chernobog.
The last of the Russian monstrosities, never deployed, never tested. Built when they still believed they could out-engineer fear itself.
The walker lay in silence below, sunk into its mount like a hibernating thing rather than a machine. Its limbs were drawn in, armored plates sealed and rimmed with corrosion. A faint gleam of steam curled off its exposed spinal braces where the internal systems had already begun to warm. Power cables still clung to its back, pulsing with slow, uncertain rhythm.
The pilot capsule was open. From above it looked completely different from what he was used to. It was half lit, stabilization glyphs flickering in green-gold arcs across the screens. No access ladder. The decommissioned scaffold around it was twisted, buried under collapse. He had no time to look for alternatives.
He dropped from the catwalk. Landed hard on the platform. Ran three steps.
Jumped.
The air shifted as he fell — heat pouring upward from the reactor bay below, thick and real and old. The cockpit rushed toward him, and for a fraction of a second there was only the narrowing rim of steel around the cradle's mouth.
He hit knees-first. Then elbows. Pain snapped through his side as the cradle locked shut around him, sealing tight with a loud hiss. He clenched through it — pain could wait.
The inside was cold — lined in half-frozen metal and slick insulation, still coated in the breath of the years it had slept. Cain slid into the pilot's cradle, the harness locking across his chest with a hiss of compressed air. Everything around him smelled of burnt insulation and static, like the machine had never quite forgiven its own construction. The canopy sealed with a low, hydraulic growl.
"Pilot recognized. Chernobog interface active. Begin ignition sequence." Buzzed unfamiliar voice. Cain looked around. Amber outlines, created by MERIT's HUD, pulsed around him — a constellation of symbols he barely understood. He reached out, fingers brushing across the illuminated panel.
Click. A switch locked upward.
Clack. A tumbler rotated into position beneath his palm.
"REACTOR ONE... ONLINE."
The floor thrummed underfoot — deep, resonant. Like something had stirred beneath the earth.
Cain flipped the second switch, recessed and heavier. A safety latch slid free with a snap, exposing the ignition lever. He pushed it forward.
"REACTOR TWO... ONLINE."
Both cores now cycled in tandem. The cockpit's temperature rose by a few degrees and condensation vanished from the surfaces. MERIT pulsed a new set of highlights — sensor lattice, helm synchronizers.
Cain tapped three points on the overhead console. The targeting interface unshuttered, HUD blooming into full overlay.
"SENSORS... ONLINE."
A display rolled out from the right, showing tactical telemetry like a coiled ribbon — movement signatures, EM spikes, structural maps burned into memory.
Next, weapons. MERIT flashed green over the arming column.
Cain reached to his left and flipped the row of toggles — one by one.
"WEAPONS... ONLINE."
Hydraulic pressure hissed into the limbs. Racks realigned. He felt the vibration up through the soles of his boots, as ammo got loaded with soft clicks.
"LAGRANGE NODES... ONLINE."
A soft tremor rippled through the cabin — not motion, but displacement. Like the mech no longer sat entirely in the world.
"DELIVERANCE... ONLINE."
Cain frowned at the unfamiliar module names — something left over from the Soviets? He made a mental note and moved on.
Computer paused. Just for a second.
Then:
"NIGHTFALL SYSTEM... ONLINE."
The lights dimmed for a breath.
Cain's breath caught. The air felt thick and charged, goosebumps ran down his arm even inside the gloves.
"M.E.R.I.T. SYSTEM... OFFLINE."
"EXECUTIVE FUNCTION... OFFLINE."
Cain stared at the interface, jaw tightening. For a moment, nothing made sense. The system had accepted his inputs. The frame had responded. It had started to wake.
"What is this?" he said, though he already knew.
Another impact struck the silo above — hard, close, and real. The whole frame rocked in its cradle. Cain felt the jolt through the steel like a slap to the ribs. Dust spilled from the seams overhead.
He looked at the canopy, then back at the controls.
"Chernobog has no onboard cognitive lattice," MERIT replied. "It needs an independent behavioral module."
Cain didn't move for a moment.
The silence pressed in — thick and unbroken, not the absence of sound, but the absence of presence, like the cockpit itself had slipped sideways out of time and left him sitting in the skin of something that no longer remembered what it was for. There was no voice. No blinking prompt. No whisper of systems waiting. Just the rasp of his own breath inside the helmet and the low, rising thrum of heat building beneath his boots as the dormant reactor stirred without purpose.
He reached into his coat.
The motion wasn't careful. It didn't need to be. His hand moved with the certainty of someone who had already crossed the line in his mind and knew there was no coming back. His fingers found the crystal where it had always been — tucked against the lining, warm, not with circuitry or stored power, but something quieter. Slower. It pulsed faintly against his palm, out of rhythm with his pulse, as if it followed its own time.
The insertion port was where he'd remembered it would be, low on the left-hand side beneath a strip of peeling conduit insulation — copper contacts still intact, dust seared black from heat long spent. He brushed the edge clean with his thumb and slotted the crystal in without ceremony.
It clicked.
The cabin didn't light up. It didn't react. It recoiled.
A pressure shift swept through the cockpit — not air, but density, like the inside of the cradle had just adjusted to accommodate a weight far larger than Cain's frame. Static rolled across every screen at once, sharp and dry, as if the machine had drawn breath through iron lungs and remembered it could choke.
Then, a line, hastily translated in real time:
"REINITIALIZING...
"CORE LATTICE SYNCHRONIZED."
"M.E.R.I.T. SYSTEM... ONLINE."
"EXECUTIVE FUNCTION... ONLINE."
On the screen, everything went silent. Then:
"ALL SYSTEMS NOMINAL."
"WELCOME BACK, PILOT."
Chernobog stood awake — not roaring, not screaming, just ready.
Cain flexed his fingers around the yokes. Would it listen? Did it still know how?
Chernobog moved — not upward, not forward, but inward, as though its mass were realigning itself around him. A tremor rippled down the spine. Power readings normalized across the screens. Outside, in the pit, thick cables began to tear free one by one — high-voltage lines snapping and arcing against the silo wall, their anchors flung away in sparks.
"Auxiliary power disconnected," MERIT confirmed. "Primary systems online. Cradle interface synchronized. Turbine operating at 20%."
Cain tightened his grip on the harness bars. The frame responded at once — not with motion, but with tension, a subtle draw across the limbs, the feel of something larger than him preparing, coiling inward not from strain, but from memory.
And then, with no fanfare, no command, Chernobog began to rise.
One leg locked mid-motion. A warning flared — pressure imbalance. Then it hissed, compensated, and the motion resumed.
It moved slowly. Not from hesitation, but from mass — hydraulic limbs unlocking from their mounting braces with the ponderous certainty of pressure systems coming online in sequence. Beneath the floor, anchor bolts released in staggered rhythm, each one falling away with the deep, metallic report of something finally giving permission to let go.
The right leg shifted first. A joint somewhere near the upper thigh released with a hiss, and the foot — broad, multi-jointed, half-welded to the deck from years of dormancy — tore free with a grinding snap, the motion fracturing a rusted ring support as it came down.
The left followed. Slower. Dragging itself from the wreckage of a twisted gantry, it pulled clear, steadied, and lowered until it met the ground with a final, deliberate impact that Cain felt not just in the cockpit, but in his chest, his ribs, his teeth.
Still, no lights came on. No klaxons flared.
The silo held its breath.
And through that silence came the only voice that mattered:
"Svarog's ignition tremor detected." MERIT said. Then, a pause. "Countdown to autonomous launch: thirty seconds."
Cain leaned into the cradle's harness, drove his thoughts downward, and Chernobog obeyed as though no time had passed at all since it last ran.
The first step slammed into the floor like a dropped girder, followed instantly by the second.
The jolt rattled his spine. Every bolt in the harness groaned with strain. Steam vented from both shoulders, fine jets of coolant spiraling into the dark. Every motion poured force into the earth, the sheer inertia of it sending shockwaves through the deck plating, shaking loose centuries of rust.
The missile's exhaust blast would tear most things apart, but this was Chernobog. Built for the purpose of countering Empire's most ferocious war machines - biotics.
Those weren't just soldiers. They were walking anomalies.
Bodies wreathed in flame, ice-veined hulks that made steel brittle with a touch, kinetic-channelers who cracked concrete with shockwaves, and null-types that turned AI guidance into silence.
"Twenty seconds."
Cain pushed harder.
Chernobog accelerated. The walls of the corridor blurred into streaks of black and iron around them. Catwalks tore loose in the wake. Bolted scaffolds peeled off the interior rim and clattered down behind.
"Fifteen."
Somewhere out there, battle for Sixth district raged on. The missile loomed ahead now, umbilicals peeling away from its flanks in wide arcs of smoke and light. Exhaust blooms billowed out along the launch trench. Hydraulic locks on the mid-fuselage were retracting in sequence, one by one.
"Ten."
Chernobog struck the incline at a sprint. The metal screamed under its feet. Pistons fired in staggered rhythm. Cain leaned forward as if that might buy him half a second more.
"Eight."
By the time he noticed, his body had already moved. There was no time. The missile was already lifting.
"Seven."
There was a moment — just a flicker — where he wondered if he'd survive long enough to regret this.
"Four."
The missile bucked as the engines reached full ignition.
"Three."
Too late to turn back. Too late to ask what this thing would do once it landed. All that mattered now was getting there first.
"Two."
The walker launched from the incline, arms forward, legs folding in. Twelve tons of steel and memory hurled through the steam-blasted air.
The blast vented. The launch rail dropped away.
"One."