The dry ravine was a crack in the world’s grey skin, a kill box waiting for a name. Rhys Carrick guided his Warden-class Mecha down the slope, the machine’s twelve-meter frame moving with a practiced, hydraulic grace. Dust churned under its heavy feet, coating the air in a brown haze that softened the edges of the rocks. His squad fanned out, two other Wardens taking positions on the flanks, their movements a perfect echo of academy training. The system was working.
On his Geist Window, the primary cockpit display, the world was rendered in cool, logical lines of blue and green. Then, contact. A cluster of heat signatures appeared on the far side of the ravine floor. They were on foot, maybe two dozen of them, their forms indistinct in the twilight. Chorus pilgrims, just as the briefing had projected. The Geiger counter in the cockpit kept its steady, rhythmic beat, a familiar song of poison.
— All units, hostile contact, — Rhys broadcast, his voice calm, clipped. — Standard engagement pattern. Suppressing fire on my mark.
His squadmates acknowledged with clicks of their own. The pilgrims below scattered, their movements clumsy, panicked. They were not soldiers. They were believers, armed with little more than faith and a few energy rifles whose violet discharge seemed thin and desperate against the coming steel. The first shots were exchanged, a simple, clean equation of force.
A flicker. Not on the Geist Window, but in the sky above the far ridge. It was a covert signal, a two-second burst of infrared light, invisible to the naked eye but logged instantly by the Warden’s sensors. It was a frequency he did not recognize, a command that was not for him. Before he could process the anomaly, a new sound arrived, a high, tearing shriek that was not part of the battle. It was the sound of something immense falling from the sky.
The world dissolved into fire. The ground erupted, not where the enemy was, but directly on his squad’s position. The first shell struck the Warden on his left flank, a direct hit from Compact artillery. The twelve-meter machine vanished in a bloom of orange and black, its death a silent flash on Rhys’s display before the shockwave hit. His own Mecha staggered, alarms screaming, the cockpit filling with the smell of ozone and burnt wiring.
Friendly fire. The words were a system error, a logic fault that his mind refused to compute. Another shell landed, this one behind him, cutting off any retreat. He was being bracketed. He was being erased. This was not a battle. It was a sanitization. The price of this perfect, coordinated attack was his own life, and the lives of his men. The obedience he had given his entire life was being repaid with a traitor’s death.
From the shadows of the opposite ridge, new figures emerged. They were tall and gaunt, moving with a predator’s grace that the pilgrims had lacked. They glowed with a cold, internal light. At their head was a man whose eyes were orbs of milky white, Malachi Voss. These were Chorus elites, the warrior sect of the Eden cults. They had been waiting.
Nysa, thrown to the ground by the first explosions, looked up through a haze of dust and pain. She saw the Compact machines being torn apart by their own sky-fire and felt a moment of cold, righteous vindication. The heretics of Matter were consuming themselves. Then she saw Malachi Voss and his followers rise from the rocks, and the vindication curdled into horror.
They were not moving toward the Compact Mecha. They were advancing on her own people, the terrified pilgrims who were trying to flee the artillery. The elites moved among the faithful, their hands glowing, and where they touched, their brethren simply… dissolved. It was a purge. A silent, efficient slaughter of the witnesses. The hymn had not been a lie. It had been bait.
Rhys fought the controls of his dying machine. A third shell found him. It wasn't a direct hit, but the concussion was enough. The Warden’s leg buckled, shear stress warnings screaming across the board as the chassis twisted. Metal shrieked like a dying animal. The machine crashed to its knees, its head slumping forward, the Geist Window cracking into a spiderweb of dead pixels. He was a pilot without a body, a mind trapped in a coffin of cold steel.
He slammed his hand on the ejection trigger. The canopy blew, and the rockets beneath his seat fired, launching him out of the ruined cockpit and into the open air. For a moment, he was above the battle, a helpless observer in a 15-meter arc. He saw the full, horrific geometry of the slaughter: two factions, perfectly synchronized, murdering their own. Then gravity took him, and he hit the ground hard, the impact stealing his breath.
A final explosion threw Nysa twenty meters, her body tumbling through the air like a discarded robe. She landed in the dust, the impact jarring the light from her limbs, leaving her feeling terrifyingly solid and fragile. The sounds of the battle were fading, replaced by the crackle of burning metal and the low moans of the dying.
Then, silence. A profound, absolute quiet that swallowed every other sound. The fires burned without a voice. The wind died. In the wreckage of Rhys’s cockpit, the Geiger counter, which had been chattering its frantic song of decay, was now broken. Its clicks were gone, replaced by a dead stillness that was more terrifying than any radiation reading. The world had gone quiet.
Slowly, Rhys pushed himself to his feet. His sidearm was in his hand, though he didn’t remember drawing it. Every inch of him ached. He looked across the field of wreckage, the mangled bodies of his squadmates and her pilgrims littering the ravine floor. Fifty meters away, a lone figure was also rising from the dust. It was the woman he had identified as the enemy commander, the oracle.
She stood alone, as he did. Her followers were gone. His squad was gone. They were the only two moving things in a graveyard built for fifty. They locked eyes across the silent, smoking ruin, and in that shared gaze was the sudden, cold, and undeniable knowledge of their new reality. They were the survivors. They were the evidence.
The smoke tasted of ash and betrayal. The last of the violet light from the dying Chorus weapons faded into the grey dust.
On the ridge, a new engine roared to life, and its guns turned toward them.
