Guss rolled his shoulder once, keeping his feet moving. Slow circles. Not wide enough to waste ground, just enough to keep the fiend's head tracking him. The wound across his chest burned with every rotation of his shoulder joint, deep and insistent, the kind of pain that didn't let you forget it was there. Blood had soaked through to his waistband. He didn't look at it again.
The Yoke Fiend tracked him.
Seven, maybe eight feet of chain and rusted plate and fused skull, all of it moving with that same deliberate weight he remembered from before. Not the before of minutes ago. The before that ended with him dead in an Iraqi basement in 2052. The horns, the axe, the wet sound it made when it breathed through whatever passed for a throat in that welded nightmare of a face. It was familiar the way a bad dream is familiar. You know the shape of it before it fully forms.
He'd spent thirty seconds out here already convinced he couldn't be killed.
That was the problem.
Because the wretched had done nothing to correct that assumption. He'd torn through them like they were built from paper. The glow had eaten at them before he even had to touch most of them, and the ones he did touch simply came apart. It had felt clean, efficient, almost effortless in a way that had no business being that enjoyable.
And then this thing had hit him from the side like a freight train and reminded him of basic physics.
Guss exhaled slow.
Keep moving.
He feinted left, pulled the fiend's eyes that direction, then came in hard from the right. Fast. Faster than he'd been able to move in his first life, faster than anything that should belong to a human body. He led with his right hand, hammering a shot into the fiend's forearm, then followed with a left that caught the edge of its jaw.
The fiend turned its skull-face toward him.
His knuckles ached from the second hit.
That was about all it did.
He threw two more, driving them into its chest, feeling the armor plates buckle fractionally under the force but not enough. Not nearly enough. The fiend's free hand shot out and caught his next swing at the wrist. The grip closed like a vise.
Then it whipped him.
The motion was casual in a way that made it worse. Like swatting a fly. Guss left the ground, arc low and fast, and hit the far edge of the courtyard with enough force to crack a remaining section of pillar base down the middle. Stone fragments scattered. He bounced once, hit the tile, dug a furrow through the sand.
Got up.
Slower than before. Chest screaming.
The fiend was already moving, axe dragging one slow step, then another, chains rattling with the particular weight of something that had absolutely no need to rush. It knew where he was going. He wasn't going anywhere it couldn't follow.
Guss planted his feet on cracked marble, watching it come. His breathing was under control. Barely.
It swung.
He read it, mostly. Twisted when needed but still not enough.
The axe caught him across the same line as before, opening the wound wider, and the pain that came with it was not the clean, sharp kind. It was the sprawling kind. The kind that sent white behind your eyes and made your knees want to betray you right then and there.
He staggered.
One step back. Then another.
His hand came up without thinking, pressing flat against the wound. When he pulled it away it was slick and dark.
And somewhere in the space between one heartbeat and the next, the image came.
Not a memory he'd chosen to revisit. Just there, sudden, the way bad ones always were.
A basement in Al-Anbar. The smell of blood pentagram and candles and brimstone coming through the dark. His unit surrounded. Then that shape, those horns, that axe. The way the fiend had moved through them not like a soldier but like a machine built specifically to end things. The last thing he'd seen before the dark took over. A skull that wasn't one skull but two, fused together at wrong angles, looking down at him.
He remembered what it felt like to die.
Not the pain, the pain he could handle.
The helplessness.
That was what landed in his chest right now, brief and unwelcome.
He almost didn't move in time.
The axe came down again, fast, aimed at his center. Guss threw himself sideways, hit the ground, rolled, came up with sand in his teeth. The axe struck stone where he'd been standing and the impact sent cracks spidering outward through the tile in three directions.
He crouched there for half a second.
Breathing hard.
And then something shifted.
Not in the courtyard. Not in the air or the light or the distant sound of gunfire still trading somewhere beyond the walls.
In him.
The panic pressed once, twice, and then something else pushed back against it. Something that had always been there, that had landed him in Delta Force before thirty and had made him walk back into burning buildings when everyone else was walking out. The part of him that had never quite been able to explain itself to anyone, not his brother, not his CO, not the unit psychologist who'd looked at his file with an expression somewhere between concerned and professionally impressed.
He loved this.
Not the blood. Not the dying.
But this. The impossible weight of a fight you weren't supposed to survive. The moment where the odds stacked so high against you that the only reasonable option was to stop doing the math and start doing the work.
The glow around him pulsed once, bright.
Guss stood up straight.
The fiend paused, just fractionally, chains swinging to stillness.
He looked down at the wound one more time. Then back up.
"Alright," he said.
Not to the fiend particularly.
More like a note to himself.
The fiend's breathing came wet and heavy through its fused skull, weight shifting forward as it began its next approach. The axe lifted, dragging, the chains across its torso catching the early light in dull orange flickers.
Guss rolled his neck once, feeling the vertebrae pop.
The ache in his chest was still there. Sharp and present and absolutely real.
Good. He wanted it there. Needed it there.
Because that was the thing about pain, the kind that reminded you that what you were holding was real.
It meant this mattered.
He took one step forward, closing the distance instead of yielding it.
The fiend's skull-face tilted, just slightly.
The axe came up higher.
Guss's glow strengthened to something almost visible in the pale morning air.
And he came in again.
_____
The sun had no interest in waiting.
It climbed as they fought, baking whatever was left of the land around them. Causing an already black land to slowly turn a shade darker. With new puddles of blood not helping in the slightest.
Guss hadn't stopped bleeding. He also hadn't stopped moving, which was the more important detail.
The fiend came in again. Same side, same weight shift before the swing.
There it was.
Guss had been watching for it for the last three exchanges. The creature telegraphed almost nothing, but almost nothing was more than enough. Before it swung wide there was a fractional drop of the left shoulder. Just a degree, yet that was enough.
He went low before the axe moved.
Not a dive or a stumble, but a deliberate drop, weight already transferring, chin tucked, body coiling on the way down. The axe passed over him close enough that the displaced air hit his shoulder like a flat palm slap. He came up inside its reach and drove everything he had into the side of its jaw.
The punch landed full.
His knuckles hit the fused bone of its skull and the impact ran all the way up his forearm into the socket of his shoulder. It wasn't like hitting a wall. It was like hitting a wall that moved. The fiend's head snapped sideways. The chains across its torso rang with the vibration. For one half-second the thing went still.
Guss stared at his own hand.
Then at the fiend.
The fiend turned its skull-face back toward him.
A grin spread across Guss's face because the rattle of the fiends head was all he needed.
Something in his chest that wasn't the wound lit up.
But the fiend didn't stagger. Didn't drop. It absorbed it the way a mountain absorbs weather. Its breathing came rough and wet through the fused bone of its nose, one deep chest-expansion that made the chains creak, and then it shifted its weight and came again.
No axe this time.
It lowered its horned skull and charged.
Guss had exactly enough time to decide not to move.
The collision hit like a detonation.
Two tons of force against whatever he was now, and for a long second neither of them gave. His boots dragged backward through sand and cracked cobblestone, leaving furrows, his hands fighting for grip on the fiend's shoulder plates as it drove forward. He could feel the sheer mass of it pressing into him, the chain links biting through fabric, the horns of that ruined skull scraping the air near his temple.
His feet found a ridge in a broken stone.
He stopped sliding.
Then he pushed back.
The fiend's momentum stuttered, surprised by the resistance. Guss got his forearm under its chin and shoved hard, forcing its head up, breaking the lock, and for a half-second they stood braced against each other, muscles working against muscle, weight against weight.
Guss felt the new body doing something his old one never could have.
It found the angle.
His hips dropped, weight shifting in a way that bypassed the contest of raw force entirely. He twisted, torque coming from his center outward, coiling like a cable under load, and the fiend went with it because physics did not care what Hell had built it from.
It left the ground.
Crashed onto its back.
The impact hit like a building coming down. Sand erupted outward in a flat ring. A section of already-fractured stone shattered completely under the weight. The chains whipped and settled. The axe bounced once and skittered away across the field, coming to rest against what was left of a long destroyed boulder.
Guss was already moving.
He came down hard with one knee into its chest, and the armor there gave a sound like a rifle shot as something underneath bent inward. The fiend's whole torso shuddered with the impact. Its hands came up, clawing at his arms, fingers finding purchase on his forearms and squeezing. The grip was immense. He felt the skin bruising in real-time.
He didn't stop.
Another knee drop, same place. More of the breastplate caved. Something beneath it gave with a wet, grinding crunch that he felt through his kneecap.
The clawing intensified.
One of the fiend's fingers found the edge of the chest wound and dug in.
The pain was extraordinary.
Guss exhaled through his teeth.
And reached for its skull.
He got both hands around the mass of fused bone and horn, fingers pressing into the joints where the two goat skulls had been merged together right along the seams. Those were the weakness in any fused structure and this thing was no different from anything else he'd ever taken apart. You found the joint. You found the point where two things had been made to become one and weren't really one yet.
The fiend convulsed beneath him.
A sound came out of it, guttural and wrong, somewhere between a groan and something that had no name in any language he knew. Its body bucked, trying to throw him, yet he stayed on. The glow around him pulsed hard once, and where his hands made contact with the skull the bone began to blacken at the seams.
He tightened his grip.
Felt the bone begin to yield.
Not easily, there was nothing easy about it. His forearms shook with the effort, tendons pulling tight as cables, the fiend's remaining strength still fighting back even now as the cracks spread outward from beneath his fingers like fault lines in dry ground.
Then he pulled.
Twisted and pulled again.
A sound that had no business being that loud in an open space came out of the kill. Bone splitting, sinew tearing, the chains went slack all at once. The clawing at his arms stopped.
The head came free.
He knelt there for a moment with it in his hands. The spinal cord trailed from the base, pale and ragged, swaying slightly. The fused skull stared at nothing from two eye sockets that no longer meant anything to anyone.
Guss set it down on the ground beside him.
Didn't throw it, didn't even look at it again.
He stood, slowly, hands dropping to his sides. The chest wound had re-opened fully during the grapple and blood ran freely down his front, soaking through to his belt. His arms ached to the bone. His knuckles were split in three places.
The fiend's body lay beneath him, massive and still, chains settled in loose loops across the cracked stone. The armor that had deflected rifle rounds and absorbed an AT4 rocket in another life sat dented and split open, the inside black and wrong-colored in a way that confirmed it hadn't ever been entirely flesh.
Around the battlefield, dust drifted through the pale morning air.
The battle was still going. Gunfire moved in waves. Men were still dying or living out there by thin margins. The war that had been going for eight hundred years had no particular interest in pausing because one figure had just torn the head off something built in Hell.
Guss looked out toward the sound.
Then down at his hands.
The glow had settled back to its baseline. Quiet. Patient. Like it had nowhere to be and all the time left to get there.
He pressed one hand flat against the wound in his chest and held it there, feeling the sting sharpen, then dull.
Still breathing.
That was the important part.
Then he started walking. Aiming for whatever enemy decided to greet him next.
The war wasn't done with him.
And if he was being entirely honest with himself, he wasn't done with it either.
____
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I know, I know it's been a while since I've uploaded. A lot has happened, work being just one of them. It's a hard life out here.
Anyway, I'll try to post as much as I can in the next coming days to make up what i haven't given.
If you enjoyed leave a comment and let me know what you think so far.
Also at this moment Guss is about as strong as a space marine without his suit. So dont expect him to one shot mobs like the Fiend just yet.