Cain hit the upper fuselage with bone-jarring force.
Chernobog's talons locked onto the missile's hull — not perfectly, not cleanly, but enough. The impact rattled through the frame like a dropped cathedral. Stabilizers shrieked as they engaged. The entire walker bucked once, hard, then clung fast — armor compressing against the curved steel like a wasp grafting itself to a blade.
Below them, the world gave way.
There was no countdown. No warning. No ritual to mark the crossing from silence into fire. Just ignition — raw, ancient, blinding. A detonation at the base of the silo that turned pressure into fury and metal into ascent. The sound never reached them — not at first. What came first was force. All at once. Pure, vertical rage.
Cain was thrown backward into the cockpit as gravity inverted and acceleration slammed through his chest like a second ribcage trying to break loose. His teeth ground together under the pressure. His arms locked around the control yokes, but Chernobog flew blind — the walker had become ballast now, nothing more than a hitchhiker on the spine of something angry enough to leave Earth behind.
Chernobog had been built for hell-launch scenarios — braced like siege artillery, its spine fused with shock-absorption rails and armor scored to deflect the heat bloom. Even so, Cain could feel every frame-rippling jolt down to the marrow.
The silo disintegrated.
Steel folded. Concrete split. Every rusted ladder, every support girder, every sealed vault once considered unbreachable tore itself apart as the missile carved skyward, dragging centuries of silence in its wake. The walls convulsed outward. The launch platform ruptured, fell, vanished in dust and molten slag.
A roar built in Cain's ears — not sound, not truly. Just the memory of it, caught between the bones of the ship and the screaming air around them. It surged upward like a tidal wave trying to overtake the missile, always behind, always chasing. The silo narrowed. Then vanished.
And they were free.
They tore into the open like a spear hurled from the lungs of the Earth itself. For one breathless instant, Cain saw only fire behind them — a curved wall of light and vapor and ruin that bloomed outward in a shockwave big enough to shatter the ribs of the mountain.
Mount Voroshilov began to collapse.
He turned Chernobog's head module as the walker clung to the missile's fuselage, just enough to catch the view below. The mountain's summit, once carved into bastion and silo, split down its core — a jagged faultline opening like a peeled fruit. What hadn't been consumed by the launch was now tumbling inward, the rock itself folding into the hollow where fire had been born. Smoke poured out in great arcs. Sections of collapsed superstructure slid free and vanished into the chasm, where red light glowed faintly from beneath the ruins — a wound that wouldn't heal.
Cain stared down.
The fortress was gone. The graveyard of the old world was being erased. There would be no return.
Inside the cockpit, the HUD flared — red, then white, then green.
STRUCTURAL LOAD EXCEEDED — STABILIZING
REACTOR COMPENSATION NOMINAL
INTEGRITY 64% — HOLDING
MERIT's voice, quiet and disturbingly calm, bled through the helmet:
"We are ascending. Stabilization is holding. Lateral stress within threshold."
Cain didn't answer.
His spine ached from the g-force. His fingers were locked around the controls. He was still inside Chernobog, and Chernobog was still riding the missile — but neither of them were in control. They were just passengers on a weapon no one was supposed to survive.
MERIT's voice suddenly shifted, lower.
"Object ahead. Eighty-seven kilometers. Orbital position above projected ascent path."
Cain's breath froze.
"Identity?"
"Vithraxa-class heavy cruiser."
***
The cruiser drifted in silence over a dying world.
From low orbit, Mount Voroshilov looked like a wound — half-buried in its own smoke, ribs of stone shattered and peeled back where the orbital batteries had cut deep. The atmosphere boiled. Each impact came with surgical precision, timed like a breath, a rhythm of destruction carefully calculated to collapse the mountain from the inside.
And then something moved.
"Thermal spike," came the voice — too calm, at first, like it hadn't caught up to its own urgency. Then sharper: "Voroshilov grid—climbing hot!"
Holograms bloomed into the air, data cascading like rain, red spirals chasing the heat signature as it bloomed inside the ruins of the mountain. Something was rising. Something fast. The silence broke under flickering alerts.
"Ballistic missile profile," another officer said. "Chemical burn. Old-gen tech. Definitely Earthborn."
"No beacon," someone muttered. "No guidance ping. No IFF."
"Retaliation?" the Commander asked. Not rhetorical. Not hopeful. Just quiet — the kind of quiet that made people listen harder.
He watched it rise through the impact haze — a single burn trail slicing through the smoke, arrow-straight, cutting upward like a shard of bone breaking free of a corpse.
"Get me targeting."
"Negative, my Lord," came the reply. "Debris field's distorting return. Partial lock only. No solution."
"Give me a curve."
"Unstable. Too much scatter."
The matrix on screen wobbled — just slightly — and the screens rippled.
It wasn't a glitch. Not power loss. Something else. Something wrong. The missile's telemetry fractured — sharp lines twisted in on themselves like folding glass, altitudes blinked, disappeared, came back distorted and slow. Then the whole thing bled off the screen — the trace fading like bleeding ink.
"What the hell," someone whispered. "We lost it."
"Why point defence systems are silent?"
"No lock, my lord. Object's ghosting — like it's slipping between telemetry layers."
"Then we brace and pray."
Alarms didn't scream. They whispered. Just one soft tone, repeating — not danger, not yet. Just the kind of sound you heard right before something went very, very wrong.
The Commander stood.
"Evasive," he said. "Starboard. Five degrees."
Five degrees wasn't much. A precision yaw correction — usually meant for docking alignment or station-keeping. But it dragged the belly of the cruiser just far enough into the outer edge of the orbital debris cloud.
And that was when the graveyard shifted.
Not a collapse. Not an impact. Just motion. The delicate, ancient dance of orbital junk stirred — some pulled by gravity, some nudged by the ship's wake. Broken panels, antenna arrays, fragments of old satellites — Earth's long-dead sky armor stirred for the first time in decades.
The wreckage moved, opening a gap where the cruiser once was.
Not wide. Not deliberate. A sliver in the debris cloud where nothing should have fit, where no algorithm would dare suggest a flight path.
A perfect accident - almost as if planned for something to come through.
Fast.
Too fast.
A blur of scorched alloy and chemical flame, the missile burst from the lower haze like a knife drawn through silk, trailed a heat signature so tight the sensors howled for less than a second — a rising shriek that clipped into silence as the object passed under the hull, a whisper away from collision, close enough to raise temperature thresholds and trigger fallback diagnostics across the ventral shielding.
One heartbeat — and it was gone, cutting upward through the orbit line like it belonged there, vanishing into the cloudlight with all the weight of a ghost slipping through a door.
Silence crashed back over the bridge.
Not peace — not relief — just silence, dense and brittle and wrong, like the air itself had been bent out of shape. No one moved. No one spoke. Someone exhaled, sharp and sudden, the kind of breath you don't know you're holding until it punches its way out of you.
The Commander didn't look away.
He leaned back, slow, spine rigid, eyes still locked on the cloudbank above where the trail had disappeared.
"Get me Admiral. We have a situation." He finally said, after prolongued silence which noone dared to interrupt.
***
Cain felt it in every bone, every joint in the frame — the way the upper atmosphere folded itself against the hull like hands trying to stop a bullet. Ice crystals screamed across Chernobog's plating, static bled through the outer layer in wild flickers, and every warning glyph blinked amber before finally steadying. The missile groaned beneath them, thrusters punching hotter now, the fins beginning to shimmer white from thermal bloom.
"Hull temperature exceeding safe parameters," MERIT noted.
Cain didn't answer. He leaned forward into the harness, eyes locked on the canopy above — where the sky was no longer blue, only the faded iron color of high-altitude ash and thinning light. His fingers twitched against the interface controls. Chernobog adjusted its grip. The walker flexed, micro-thrusters firing in brief, coordinated bursts to maintain balance.
Then came the silence.
Sudden and total, as missile disconnected its booster stage, getting ready for one more burn before the re-entry.
There was no wind. No scream of combustion. No howl of climbing air.
All of it vanished the instant the missile breached the sky's last skin, slipping between cloud and nothing — a single moment of transition so complete it didn't register as movement, only subtraction. The pressure left Cain's ears. The thunder left his bones. The roar collapsed inward and was gone.
No warning.
Just silence.
And in that silence, everything shifted.
Gravity didn't disappear — it lost its meaning. Cain felt it in his spine first, like a hand letting go, followed by the slow, drunken drift of his body pulling upward against the straps. Something bumped his helmet. He blinked — and stared at it in surprise.
A pen.
Just a pen. Floating in front of him, spinning gently in zero gravity, its tip rotating with lazy indifference, like it had been waiting for this moment to escape.
Cain reached out, caught it mid-turn. The metal was warm — residual cabin heat — but the gesture felt absurd. Fragile. Human. He tucked the pen back into its strap without thinking, and then slowly, deliberately, lifted his head.
Above them, there were only stars now.
No shimmer. No twinkle. Just hard, white eyes staring through black nothing, too distant to care.
Below — a different thing entirely.
The debris field coiled across half the visible hemisphere, a choking band of wreckage that clung to Earth's lower orbit like a rusted shroud. Shattered satellites drifted like bones. Antennae spun in place, torn from hulls long vaporized. Hull plating tumbled in slow, silent waltzes, some still flashing half-dead signal lights that would blink for another century. Cain saw shapes that didn't match anything — scaffolds never completed, heat sinks from atmospheric stations, the carcasses of orbital guns silenced eight years ago. The rot hadn't cleared. It had just stopped moving.
The missile coasted now. No more fire — just momentum, banking toward apogee before its final correction burn.
The curve of its arc slowed. Cain could feel it — a tension in the way the stars tilted above him, in the angle of the Earth's belly starting to shift toward the nose.
The sky above was black now — not the high-altitude blue of ascent, not the velvet dusk of upper stratosphere. It was black and hollow, kind of black with no color or texture.
"Main engine shutdown," MERIT said. Calm. Inevitable. "Parabolic arc complete. Descent will begin in six minutes, twenty-two seconds."
Cain exhaled.
The breath clouded the inside of the visor for a moment — then vanished, devoured by the cold of the shell, replaced with clarity once again.
Chernobog shifted.
Not sharply. Slowly. The clamps disengaged with a soft metallic thunk, and the walker flexed against the missile's hull — not like a machine preparing to eject, but like something alive, waking up beneath armor. Talons unhooked in stages, stabilizers receded into position. Shoulders rolled once. The head module tilted downward — scanning Earth as if it could already smell the heat coming off the target.
Cain's HUD flickered.
The world below swam into focus. Cloud systems blotted the ocean. Old crater sites glimmered like scar tissue. And there, tucked just south of the equatorial skyline, the targeting diamond pulsed. Faint. Waiting. A simple glyph at the edge of the continent — coded in red, outlined in flickering amber.
He stared through the screen as the planet slowly turned beneath them. From this height, Earth didn't look beautiful. It looked wounded — bruised, bandaged in smog, girdled in the wreckage of its own ambitions.
And somewhere inside it, they were still burning people alive for the illusion of peace.
Cain flexed his fingers once. No shaking. No nerves.
Just countdown.
Six minutes.
***
The silence cracked.
Not from sound — from motion. From gravity waking up, reasserting its claim like a hand wrapping around the missile and dragging it downward.
Cain didn't flinch. The HUD shifted again.
RE-ENTRY CORRIDOR ENTERING IN 00:12
WARNING: AEROTHERMAL BARRIER BREACH INCOMPLETE
The walker tensed beneath him, the way animals do when they feel the storm before the rain.
Chernobog re-gripped the missile's frame. Not as cargo now, but as rider — limbs splayed across the plating, weight balanced with mechanical grace. Stabilizers snapped into forward position. Cain felt the frame shift posture — angling its mass against the missile's centerline like it was preparing to surf the descent instead of resist it.
Below, the atmosphere roared.
Cain couldn't hear it yet — not fully — but he could feel it building in his chest like pressure under ribs. The missile's nose began to vibrate, then tremble. A hum inside the fuselage, as if the steel itself had begun to question its resolve.
Then they hit air.
And everything ignited.
Fire bloomed across the missile's skin — not in bursts, but as a constant shuddering halo of red and gold and violet, streaming outward as friction clawed at the body and turned speed into flame. The sky became a wall — and Cain rode through it like a spear.
Metal warped beneath them. Plasma arced. Light bent.
The debris field came next.
Old satellites, broken sensor towers, jagged coils of armor plating — spinning in low decay orbit, drifting like forgotten teeth. The missile threaded through the wreckage with the cold grace of an executioner — carving a path so narrow Cain couldn't tell whether the near-misses were accident or design.
One panel slammed into the upper atmosphere ahead of them and burst like glass — scattering shards into their path. Chernobog twisted mid-burn, one arm rising to shield the cockpit. The shards hit like sleet. Sparks bloomed against the walker's plating. One glanced off the visor.
Cain didn't blink.
STRUCTURAL SHELL AT 42%
THERMAL PRESSURE RISING
Then the missile groaned.
Not a sound from inside. A vibration — deep and resonant. The kind of groan a leviathan makes when it realizes it's dying.
MERIT's voice flickered through Cain's helmet — calm, factual:
"Primary chassis fracturing. Separation event in progress. Ejection window: fourteen seconds."
Cain's HUD pulsed red. Bolts were already shearing from their housing. The missile wasn't going to survive the final descent. It didn't need to. It had already done its job.
He reached for the controls.
"Prepare ejection."
"Confirmed. Cockpit seal disengaging. Atmospheric rupture in five—"
The walker's clamps released. The platform under Cain's feet fell away.
And Cain fell with it.
The sky hit him like a wall.
The temperature spiked — not like heat, but like violence. A shockwave of air slammed into the walker's frame, spinning it once before Chernobog adjusted, limbs snapping out, counter-balancing the descent like a bird learning to fly mid-collapse.
Cain's body surged upward in the harness — only the restraints holding him in the seat. Screen in front of him blurred. Chernobog's pilot shell was radiation-shielded and heat-baffled, but the g-forces still clawed at him. His blood felt thick. The reinforced neural harness kicked in — not just stabilizing the frame, but regulating adrenaline and preventing blackout.
"MERIT, calculate optimal ejection path."
"Affirmative. Pull ejection lever in five..."
Suddenly, same voice that reported system status clawed it's way through the static noise.
"Recommend deployment of gravitic deceleration system: System ID V16-A 'Deliverance.'"
Cain frowned, as onboard computes suddenly decided to be helpful.
"Deliverance? I sure hope it's some kind of parachute."
"Classification: atmospheric-to-surface delivery aid. Passive vectoring. Soft terminal descent. Confirm deployment?"
"Sure. Deploy."
He barely had time to finish the word.
Chernobog's back split open.
Not with drag canopies. Not with chutes.
With wings.
Massive, asymmetric, obsidian blades sheared out from its spine in a sequence of mechanical screams — longer than the walker's own frame, curved like crescent knives, lined with folded control surfaces that snapped into place mid-tumble. Cain felt the air catch — not with gentle pull, but brutal deflection. The walker jerked hard as velocity bled off in an instant, deceleration punching through the frame like a hammer through glass.
The wings flexed — once, twice — shifting to steer.
And Cain realized he was no longer falling.
For a moment, he wondered if Chernobog had remembered something its makers had forgotten.
Not stable flight — not even controlled — but guided collapse. A burn-black silhouette screaming through upper air, held aloft by the impossible shape of Chernobog's unfolded mass. The wings didn't cut drag. They redirected it, sliced it, angled it into bursts of angular momentum that Chernobog converted into brutal corrections mid-plummet.
Below, the world rushed up to meet them — faster now, shapes resolving into roads, buildings, columns of smoke.
A ruined overpass. Vector debris. Gutted high-rises.
And the battlefield.
Cain saw the crater first — wide, scorched, steaming. Then the bodies. Twisted armor still smoking from plasma impact. Drones burned open mid-cycle. A pair of Imperial walkers half-submerged in collapsed rubble, limbs bent backward, cooling fluids steaming off scorched pavement. The battle was over, or something worse — paused. A stillness had fallen over the wreckage. There was no motion, no fire, just smoke curling in tight spirals from shattered limbs and half-melted guns.
Chernobog adjusted stance mid-descent, claws tensing. Not for balance. For violence. Like it recognized where they were landing.
The last kilometer vanished in seconds.
The wings folded inward. Chernobog aligned mid-air, arms back, talons forward.
The ground surged. Dust curled. Air split.
The impact was like of the warhead, cratering the street beneath the impact.
Shockwaves rippled outward, flipping debris and shattered drone carcasses in a ring of force. Stone split in spiderwebs. Asphalt buckled. The impact rolled over the street like a drumbeat made of pressure.
And in the silence that followed, Chernobog stood.
One knee down.
Head lowered.
Smoke curling off its shoulders.
Wings rising in slow, symmetrical arcs, glowing faintly at the edges from reentry burn. Cain rose with it, breathing slow, heart a drum inside a cathedral, every fiber of his body ringing with the violence of arrival.
Titania looked up. Her lips parted — one breath, no words.
Inside Cain's helmet, MERIT's voice returned.
Flat. Factual. Utterly unfazed.
"Touchdown confirmed. Local terrain integrity: compromised."
"Recommend escalation."
Cain didn't answer. MERIT had started doing that lately — suggesting things. Taking steps. He wasn't sure when the shift had begun.
Cain exhaled, sharp and shallow, breath fogging his visor. The pressure in his skull pulsed once, hard — not pain, not yet, but the kind of dizziness that came with too much velocity and not enough air. His limbs felt slow. His eyes, faster. The light stung. The world tilted, recalibrated.
Cain hadn't seen it during descent. Had it survived the earlier fight? Or had it arrived afterward — drawn here by something? By him?
And then he saw it.
Half-shrouded in smoke, twenty meters ahead. Not walking. Not aiming. Just present. Like it had been there long before he landed.
A Vector.
Black. Seamless. Angled shoulders. Blank faceplate catching the last light of the crater. No insignia. No markings. Just the shape — too familiar.
Cain blinked, but the thing didn't disappear.
It was exactly the same as Union Square.
The stance. The weight. The stillness like breath held behind armor. Like it remembered him. Like it had waited.
The HUD glitched, just for a second, trying to find a match for the model in ancient database.
Nothing.
Just a silhouette. No auto-tag. No designation. MERIT didn't even mark it as hostile — just a blank shape.
At least it was marked.
He blinked hard, trying to steady himself. The heat shimmered. Smoke curled past the Vector's legs in slow, predator-dream patterns. It hadn't moved. Not yet. But it was watching. Cain didn't need to see eyes to know it.
MERIT waited.
Silent.
Unblinking.
Cain's jaw flexed. The pen was still strapped in the corner of his screen — a small, civilian thing. Out of place. Just like him.
"Activate Nightfall."