The Ash-Rain.
Bhutala's air tasted of iron and old warnings. The sky bled a low, steady light that never reached the streets. The trio stood shoulder-to-shoulder on a slab of collapsed freeway, looking down into the ruin where the machines had gathered their teeth.
Ahan's modulizer thrummed against his wrist — a pulse measuring pulses. Abhi flexed his fingers until the ember blade's veins woke; Aryan breathed slow, steady, the spear humming like a coiled thing.
"On my mark," Aryan said. His voice was a wire stretched thin.
Ahan's eyes met his, and the wordless exchange felt like armor.
The Fall of the Gate
The first wave hit like an animal's flank — sudden, stinking, and relentless. Thirty figures burst through the fog, moving with mechanical precision. They wore human shapes, but their motions were algorithmic, their boots hitting in perfect unison so sound became a single knife.
Abhi met them first. He dropped like a tide—low, fast—his emberblade a red slash. Metal screamed. One scout fell, then another; the blade bit through plated joints as if through rusted cloth. He moved not for ceremony but for clearance—cut a lane, make space for the others to breathe.
Ahan's hands blurred. He didn't think of spells the way books taught; he thought of circuits and harmonics. Runes sprouted where he stepped, luminous ribs that bent the drones' targeting and threw bullets into trajectories that shaved the concrete. He set traps of displaced air—pockets that swallowed momentum whole and spat it back as useless noise.
Aryan was the arc between them—movement and measure. His spear spun and folded light. He used the runoff of Ahan's traps, sliding inside the bullets' ghosts, tripping a hunter, turning an assault into a cascade. There were moments when his blade looked like it remembered war in some other life — a thing that had been trained by stars.
They weren't flawless. The scouts adapted fast. Several used EMP bursts—short metal coughs that dimmed Ahan's modulizer for a gasp, that snapped a rune like a string. One burst caught Abhi's shoulder; heat licked a shallow white line across his skin. He reeled, then grinned—pain read as permission.
Up close, the enemy wasn't brutal; it was clinical—remorseless. Their visors tracked, their comms whispered coordinates. When three became a dozen, the choreography unraveled into pure survival: parry, step, cut, pull back.
Faultlines
After the first surge, the street was a landscape of bent metal and small, bright deaths. Bodies of scouts slumped and slid in the gutter; heat fog curled off armor plates. The trio breathed on the same rhythm, tasting each other's exhaustion.
A sound ran under their feet then—a slow, heavy knock against the city's old spine. The drums of whatever lay beneath Bhutala. The air thickened, the rain slowed as though listening.
"Reinforcements," Ahan said. He didn't use the word like a prediction. It was an observation of fact — gravity on the tongue.
A light in the distance flared and folded like a wound. Something larger moved through the smoke; the night shifted its angle.
The Echo in the Smoke
They had timed the response wrong. The scouts were bait—small teeth to clear the field. A larger force arranged itself in the cracks: rovers hauling armored carriers, men in heavy exoshells stepping from them like statues of war. The number was no longer thirty. It was a hundred, then two hundred, a wave of black and gray.
Ahan's modulizer now sang wild notes—his hands were wet with a sweat that smelled like ozone. He pushed rune after rune into the ground, draining himself of precision to buy space. Each new trap cost him clarity; each saved breath owed him another hour of sleep he couldn't take.
Abhi leaned against a concrete pillar and laughed once — not jubilation, not fear. A bark. "We clear the gate, we buy a road," he said. "We buy time." He sounded like a man making vows to a burned altar.
They fought on that promise. The line held and then broke and then held again. Men in exoshells drove rakes of energy through their defenses; Aryan's spear sang into one of them and the shell split like old lacquer, but the soldier did not go down—he staggered, rose again, an engine replacing pain.
The battlefield's edge blurred; here and there, the city answered. Street lamps flared like signaling beacons. A rusted billboard collapsed into a river of sparks. A building flexed and groaned; windows blew outward and rained down like sheets.
The Shadow Stalks
From a rooftop across the basin, a figure watched. He was not in the uniform of the squads below; his presence bent sensors. A ripple of shadow coalesced as he moved: the man was framed by smoke and lightning, a slow, awful accuracy in his gait.
His name, when it was breathed in a comm channel somewhere, cut like ice—"Virak."
He didn't open his mouth. He threaded the battlefield with a slow, male calm, hands tucked into the dark pockets of armor that tasted of void. The heavy units shifted their formation as if they'd been waiting for his cue.
Ahan spotted the silhouette first—an outline stepped into the light, larger than any human should be, an architecture of muscle across armor plates that seemed grown, not forged. When he moved, the air around him bent; bullets shredded in his wake like a bad memory. A hundred men could be in motion, and they seemed merely props to the gravity of his approach.
The trio's breaths constricted. They had fought hunger, ruin, and the cruelty of the street—but not this. Not a man who swallowed the sky and made a place for himself where the rain could not reach.
Virak walked toward the center of the ruined plaza as though he entered a cathedral. The exosuits bowed in silent synchronization. The Aether's hum around him was sickened, like a thing near rot found in a garden.
Abhi's grin died. Aryan's hands tightened until the spear creaked. Ahan, who had been the mathematician of battle, felt an old formula break inside his chest. He knew only one thing in that moment — the map stitched in their palms was not enough to win against such an arrival.
The Breath Before the Fall
Virak stopped at the plaza's lip and turned his head, a slow, deliberate tilt that measured the three like tools. The rain spat on his shoulders and slid down the grooves of his armor without leaving a mark.
He raised a single hand and, over the howl of the wind, his voice came — not through a speaker but through vibration, as if the ground itself spoke.
"You are children playing at godhood."
It was not a taunt. It was a diagnosis.
Ahan's modulizer went dark in his palm. The runes collapsed like glass. The halo of light that had hung above Aryan's spear dimmed. For the first time that night, they felt their advantage thin like a worn cloak.
Abhi spat to the side. "Then we'll play until one of us breaks something better than the other."
Virak's smile was a line of shadow. He stepped forward. The plaza's air bent in response. The exo-units surged like a wave across the broken stones.
Somewhere a child in Bhutala screamed — a single, small sound swallowed by the press and push. The battle swallowed everything after that.