Consciousness—just a distorted string of corrupted data, forcefully stretched into meaninglessness…
Neo's final memory froze in the cockpit of an Ark-class Titan mecha, where a cataclysmic flash of white light devoured him—an energy surge vast enough to tear apart stars. He had died in a battle meant to buy humanity a final chance of survival.
But death was not endless silence. It came with the shriek of metal grinding on metal, and the nauseating stench of rust, oil, and rotting filth rushing into his lungs.
…
He jolted awake. The endless cosmos he expected was nowhere to be found. Instead, his eyes met a dim, suffocating dome of rusted steel. A few failing red warning lights flickered weakly, like the dying eyes of some ancient beast, clawing against the darkness.
"Where… am I?"
The thought barely formed before a torrent of chaotic, alien memories crashed into his mind like a broken dam.
Neo, seventeen years old, expendable "material" in the slave mines of Red Iron Town. Designation: 737. Nearly beaten to death by an overseer after trying to steal an expired ration tube, then tossed like garbage into this abandoned mech hangar to die.
The Titan Era, year 2177. Earth's civilization had crumbled under an unknown cataclysm called the DarkTide. Cities lay in ruins. Aberrants roamed the land unchecked.
Two utterly different soul imprints clashed violently within the same frail, battered body.
The stabbing headache nearly made him black out again. Yet the strong will forged in his previous life as a top-tier mecha engineer forced him to steady himself. The cold bite beneath his skin reminded him of the rough steel floor. He was lying in the shadow of something colossal.
Through the cracked ceiling above, a thread of pale daylight fell, aided by the dying blink of those red lamps. It was just enough to outline the thing looming over him.
A humanoid mech. Or rather, the corpse of one.
Armor plating marred with deep claw scars and corrosion. Its left arm and half a shoulder torn away, leaving hydraulic tubes and wiring dangling like withered vines. Its chest plating ripped open, exposing a hollow black cavity where once a roaring power core should have been. Now, nothing but silence.
Ravager-class. An old-model ground assault mech.
Neo's instincts tagged it at once. In his own era, this antique would have been nothing more than a museum relic. Yet here and now, this broken husk was the only familiar face he could recognize.
A bitter, absurd grief welled in his chest. He had once stood among the elites of mankind—designing and piloting Titans that strode between the stars. And now? He was nothing more than a discarded slave, with only the corpse of a dead mech for company.
He tried to push himself upright. A sharp pain lanced through his ribs—remnants of the beating the body's original owner had suffered. Weakness. Hunger. Cold. These sensations, long forgotten, now clawed at him with merciless clarity.
That was when it came.
From outside the hangar, muffled, inhuman screeches echoed closer, accompanied by the shrill sound of metal claws raking steel.
Aberrants. The memory fragments screamed the warning.
Despair chilled his blood. This body could barely stand, let alone fight. Resistance was a fantasy.
His gaze snapped again to the Ravager husk. This time, it caught on a detail inside the torn-open chest cavity—an auxiliary energy board hidden beneath layers of grime. The matrix arrangement was unmistakable.
A wild thought struck him like a lightning bolt across the void.
No… this wiring… that's a variant of the Hermann Emergency Circuit? How the hell could anyone here know that?
The highest-level safety protocols of mecha engineering—knowledge that belonged to his past life—suddenly aligned with the broken relic before him.
Knowledge was the one weapon the abyss of time could not strip away.
Clenching his teeth, Neo dragged his broken body across the floor, inch by inch, toward the mech.
The steel grated against his skin with every movement. Each breath came ragged with pain from his ribs. Behind him, the hangar's corroded gate groaned and buckled under the assault of claws. The screeches drew closer, scraping like nails across bone.
Death had never pressed so near.
At last, he reached the Ravager's colossal foot. The steel toes rose before him like a mountain ridge. Gazing up at the mech's gutted chest, he no longer saw a corpse of metal—he saw the last, desperate spark of survival. His eyes locked onto that grime-caked energy board.
"Hermann Emergency Circuit… simplified almost beyond recognition, but the core logic's intact," his mind raced, parsing the system as if leafing through a familiar archive. "Designed to channel residual capacitor energy after core collapse—for one final comms burst or escape pod launch…"
A plan formed instantly—wild, impossible, but his only chance. He didn't need the mech to move. He just needed that pulse.
His eyes darted around. Tools. Anything.
There—an alloy pipe snapped off the mech, jagged at the edge. A few loose wires, copper exposed where insulation had rotted away.
The pounding at the gate intensified. A dent bulged inward, screeching with each strike.
No more time.
Gripping the alloy pipe, Neo pried open a side panel near the circuit board. Dust and rust rained down. Beneath lay a snarl of ancient wires, colors faded, codes half-erased. His hands trembled from weakness, but every movement was precise, surgical.
"Red—main capacitor bleed line. Blue—auxiliary sensors. Black—grounding…"
Carefully, he peeled insulation, stripped wires with the pipe's sharp edge, and wound scavenged cables into a makeshift circuit. This wasn't repair. This was brutal, desperate surgery on a corpse of steel—rewriting its death rattle.
"RAAHHH—!"
The iron gate finally tore open a jagged gap. A clawed hand, sheathed in tar-black chitin, scraped violently through. Snarling, warped shapes writhed in the shadows beyond.
Sweat poured down his temples, but his fingers were steady. Two final wires left. He lashed them to the contact points of a rusted valve connected to the mech's chest pipeline.
Done.
Now he needed a trigger. Something to slam the circuit shut. Something that could take the current.
His eyes fell on the alloy pipe.
Perfect.
The gate exploded inward with a metallic crash. Three—no, four aberrants burst in. Skinned hound-like things, drooling slime, eyes burning crimson with cybernetic gleam.
They saw him instantly. Screeched. Charged.
Neo could smell their rancid breath, see the layered serrated teeth gaping in the lead one's maw.
No retreat. No escape. His eyes hardened.
With every last ounce of strength, he rammed the alloy pipe into the contact point.
"ZZZZZT—!"
A blinding arc of blue snapped alive, racing through his makeshift circuit.
The Ravager's husk trembled, giving one final growl of power. From its chest cavity, the valve exploded outward—spewing a jet of industrial coolant under massive pressure, ignited by the searing electric arc!
"FWOOSH—!"
A torrent of blazing, blue-white plasma-fire roared forth, like the dying breath of a dragon.
The first aberrants never had a chance. Fire consumed them instantly, chitin crackling, flesh carbonizing in screams that barely sounded human.
The others reeled back in shock, snarling and circling warily, crimson eyes locked on the mech that suddenly seemed alive again.
But the fire didn't last. Barely two seconds—and then silence. The Ravager collapsed into stillness forever, coolant drained, energy spent. Only the scorched valve and acrid stench of ozone remained as proof of its last stand.
The hangar fell into eerie quiet.
Neo collapsed, gasping, limbs shaking with exhaustion. His heart thundered as his eyes scanned the charred husks of aberrants littering the floor, and the others lingering just outside the gate.
It worked. For now.
But he knew. The trick had bought him only a sliver of time. The aberrants were already reassessing him, their hunger burning. The Ravager was truly dead this time. No more help would come.
Neo forced his eyes across the dark hangar, searching desperately for the next chance at survival—or, failing that, for one last way to fight back.