The hot pink steam hissed violently against the cold ocean wind.
It smelled like boiling transmission fluid and old copper, thick and greasy in the back of Marcus's throat. The sound of the pressurized leak was a high, agonizing whine that cut directly through the rhythmic, deafening explosions of the Carrier's guns.
Narcissus didn't scream when he fell.
The massive, twelve-foot iron Dreadnought simply hit the black volcanic sand with the concussive force of a dropped anchor. A thick cloud of ash plumed outward, mixing with the pink steam.
Marcus didn't run to him. He couldn't.
He dragged his ruined, bleeding right leg forward, leaning almost entirely his body weight onto the polished steel of the Warlord sword. The thick, chemical burns on his arms screamed as he moved. He stopped three feet from the giant's head.
Narcissus was lying on his left side. His massive, cherry-red armor was severely dented and scarred by flamethrower fire, but the catastrophic failure was entirely internal. The thick steel plates of his right thigh were rapidly buckling inward, groaning under his own immense, unsupportable two-ton weight now that the hydraulic pressure was gone.
A heavy puddle of dark, viscous fluid rapidly expanded into the sand beneath his knee.
Marcus looked down.
There was no medic. There was no mechanic capable of repairing a ruptured battleship-grade hydraulic main on a beach. There were exactly ten minutes and forty seconds of ammunition left before the orbital gunships deployed laser batteries.
The Warlord math was absolute. The Vanguard's unbreakable shield was broken.
Narcissus didn't look up at Marcus.
The giant's massive, mechanical head was turned slightly toward the tree line. His heavy right arm—the one that had just acted as a winch to drag a Leviathan out of an acid lake—shifted in the sand. The movement was slow, grinding loudly against the rusted shoulder joint.
He didn't try to push himself up. He knew the math, too.
Narcissus reached out with his massive, battleship-steel fingers and blindly grabbed a heavy, jagged slab of burned scrap metal lying in the ash near a dead clone-trooper. He dragged it horizontally across the sand, pulling it directly in front of the huddled, terrified group of scavengers closest to him.
He created a makeshift, knee-high barricade.
"Leg's locked," Narcissus rumbled. His voice was entirely flat. The external speakers on his collar crackled with static from the pink steam.
Marcus stared at the dark puddle soaking into the sand. He didn't offer an apology. He didn't make a dramatic promise to come back for him. The Warlord didn't lie.
"Hold the sand," Marcus said. His voice was a low, terrifying rasp, entirely stripped of emotion.
"Yeah."
Narcissus tightened his massive grip on the scrap metal. He still didn't look at the Emperor. He just stared at the tree line.
Marcus stepped forward. He pressed his bare, acid-burned left hand completely flat against the cold, dented steel of the Dreadnought's shoulder pauldron. He didn't pat him. He didn't grip the metal. He just left his palm there for exactly one half of a second, feeling the heavy, dying vibration of the internal engine block.
Then, Marcus turned his back on his brother.
He didn't look at Marcia. He didn't look at Lucilla. He pointed the heavy steel blade of the sword toward the hyper-oxygenated, burning jungle.
"Walk," Marcus commanded.
He plunged directly into the dense, smoking tree line without waiting to see if they followed.
The transition from the open beach to the terraformed jungle was brutal. The cold sea breeze instantly vanished, replaced by an oppressive, suffocating wall of unnatural heat. The thick canopy of broad, genetically modified leaves above them was fully engulfed in flames, trapping the smoke and the extreme temperatures close to the ground.
It was like walking into a lit blast furnace.
Marcus's breathing immediately became shallow and ragged. The thick, toxic air aggressively scraped against the raw chemical burns on his chest. Every time he dragged his right boot forward, the shredded rubber squished loudly, leaving a bright red smear of blood across the vibrant green, alien moss covering the jungle floor.
He stumbled hard over a thick, exposed tree root hidden beneath a layer of burning ash.
The Warlord sword slipped sideways. Marcus pitched forward, his mangled knee buckling completely.
He didn't hit the ground.
A heavy, scarred hand aggressively grabbed the thick wool of his soaked naval coat at the shoulder, violently jerking him upright.
Marcia didn't ask if he was okay. She didn't offer him her shoulder to lean on.
She just shoved past him, stepping directly into the lead position.
She held a rusted, heavily notched Board machete in her right hand. She didn't use it to cut a path for herself. She began aggressively, violently hacking at the thick, burning vines hanging at chest height directly in front of them.
She was clearing the airspace entirely so Marcus wouldn't have to lift his arms or twist his torso to avoid the burning debris.
She walked exactly three paces ahead of him. Her blistering, peeling face was set in a mask of absolute, terrifying iron. She constantly snapped her head left and right, her eyes sweeping the dense foliage for movement, compensating entirely for Marcus's blind spots. She didn't patronize him with words. She just became his physical vanguard.
Lucilla walked directly behind Marcus, glued entirely to the cracked glass of her datapad.
"Nine minutes," Lucilla muttered. The numbers tumbled out of her mouth rapidly, a nervous, corporate habit from her days as a Board Executive that she fell back on when the panic threatened to break her. "The signal is strengthening. Five hundred meters. Four-ninety. The topological interference is heavy, but the broadcast frequency is static. It's a localized EMP blanket. Not orbital. Terrestrial. Definitely terrestrial."
She didn't look up from the screen. She didn't even flinch when a burning branch the size of a man's leg crashed into the moss ten feet to her left, kicking up a shower of orange sparks.
"It's a wideband dispersal," Lucilla continued, her thumb aggressively swiping across the glitches on the map. "They're using the moisture in the terraformed canopy to bounce the signal. If we kill the primary relay tower, the atmospheric interference drops instantly. The Styx reconnects to the network."
Marcus didn't acknowledge the math. He just dragged his bleeding boot through the mud, following the wide, cleared path Marcia was violently carving through the flames.
The Warlord was deteriorating rapidly. The raw nanite energy he had used to jumpstart Narcissus in the bunker and fight the Leviathan was entirely depleted. His muscles were twitching violently, completely starved of oxygen and calories. The pain in his knee was no longer a sharp agony; it was a dull, heavy numbness that radiated all the way up to his hip.
He forced his left hand tighter around the leather hilt of the sword. The friction tore open the blisters on his palm. The sting kept him conscious.
"Three hundred meters," Lucilla said, her voice dropping to a rapid whisper. "Two-fifty. It's right ahead. It's right—stop."
Marcia froze mid-swing. The rusted machete hovered inches from a thick, burning fern.
Marcus stopped behind her, leaning entirely on the sword.
The dense, burning jungle abruptly gave way to a massive, perfectly circular clearing. The hyper-oxygenated trees had been violently bulldozed back, creating a fifty-foot perimeter of scorched, bare earth.
In the exact center of the clearing sat the objective.
It was a massive, brutalist piece of Board hardware. A mobile terraforming relay tower. It looked like a heavy, black obelisk covered in thick, heat-dissipating fins and heavy, armored cables driving deep into the scorched dirt. A massive, dish-like antenna slowly rotated at the top, pulsing with a faint, angry red light.
The source of the jammer.
Marcus shifted his weight, raising the Warlord sword an inch off the ground.
He expected a pristine, heavily fortified squad of Board clone-troopers guarding the vital infrastructure. He expected a tactical, methodical firefight. He expected Vane's cold, calculated corporate defense.
The clearing was entirely silent, save for the crackle of the burning canopy.
There was no gunfire. There were no defensive lasers.
There was only the overwhelming, metallic stench of raw, freshly spilled blood aggressively mixing with the ozone. It was so thick it coated the back of Marcus's tongue.
Marcia lowered the machete. She stepped slowly into the clearing, her boots crunching softly on the scorched earth.
Marcus limped after her, his eyes rapidly scanning the base of the massive black obelisk.
Six Board clone-troopers were scattered around the heavy, armored terminal at the base of the relay tower.
They weren't just dead. They were completely butchered.
They hadn't been killed by disciplined, tactical gunfire. They had been torn apart with absolute, frenzied brutality. One clone lay on his back, his heavy composite armor entirely melted and crushed inward at the chest, as if a massive, blunt instrument of intense heat had simply caved in his ribcage. Another was missing his head entirely, the thick, black synthetic blood pooling massively around the severed neck joint.
This wasn't a corporate defense. This was a slaughter.
Marcia walked up to the melted clone. She didn't kneel. She just used the toe of her combat boot to roughly kick his heavy black helmet over.
The thick visor was shattered. The pristine, genetically perfect face inside was completely unrecognizable, violently burned beyond identification.
"No swords," Marcia stated. Her voice was flat, clinical. She pointed the tip of her machete at the crushed chest plate. "Heavy thermal impact. Raw kinetic force. No discipline."
Marcus didn't look at the bodies. He limped directly toward the massive, black terminal bolted to the base of the relay tower.
"Kill the signal," Marcus commanded.
Lucilla sprinted across the clearing. She slid to a stop in front of the heavy, armored interface. She raised her datapad, quickly pulling a rusted, scavenged bypass cable from the pocket of her coat.
She reached out to plug the jack directly into the tower's primary override port.
She stopped completely.
Her hand hovered awkwardly in the air. She didn't gasp. She didn't drop the datapad. She just slowly lowered her arm, her jaw tightening so hard a muscle twitched violently in her cheek.
Marcus moved up beside her, leaning heavily on his sword.
He looked at the override port.
The heavy, black metal slot wasn't empty. It was already occupied.
Bolted directly, violently into the complex circuitry of the terminal was a severed human hand.
It was a right hand. The skin was pale, perfectly manicured, and entirely dead. The ragged, bloody stump of the wrist was jammed deeply into the wires, the cold, dead fingers resting limply against the flashing green command keys.
It was a Warlord's amputation.
It was Nero's hand.
The smug, manic Board commander hadn't bled out in the dark elevator shaft of the Naples bunker. He had survived. He had dragged himself out. He had found the relay tower before them.
And he had left a message.
Lucilla didn't touch the severed flesh. She looked at the heavy, reinforced terminal screen located just above the override port.
The screen wasn't displaying the complex, green topological maps of a jamming signal anymore. It wasn't broadcasting static.
The entire display was flashing violently in bright, aggressive red block letters.
It was a countdown timer.
00:59
00:58
"It's not just a jammer," Lucilla whispered. Her voice finally wavered, cracking slightly under the sheer terror of the realization. She took a slow, terrified step backward away from the terminal. "It's a localized terraforming overload. He rigged the reactor core. He turned the tower into a dirty bomb."
00:55
Marcus stared at the severed hand.
Nero wasn't a commander anymore. He was a feral, unhinged horror. He didn't care about the Board's war. He didn't care about Vane's clones. He just wanted to watch the Warlord burn.
Suddenly, the thick, burning canopy of the massive terraformed trees directly above them violently rustled.
A heavy shower of burning leaves and black ash fell directly into the clearing.
Something immense, heavy, and incredibly fast dropped vertically from the high branches. It hit the scorched earth in the thick smoke exactly ten feet behind Marcus's back.
The impact cracked the hard dirt loudly.
A low, wet, mechanical hiss echoed through the smoke.