Titanbreaker

The Titan's roar split the air, a raw, bone-shaking sound that made the earth tremble beneath my boots. I felt it in my chest, a physical force—part metal, part monstrous.

The creature was a towering abomination of mutant biology fused with Horizon's war tech: slabs of armor plating grafted into its flesh, multiple cores pulsing with molten energy visible beneath cracks in its scorched hide, and arms designed for destruction—one ending in a serrated pincer capable of cutting through steel, the other a massive wrecking ball of reinforced bone and metal. A masterpiece of engineered death. And it wanted me dead.

It moved with terrifying speed for something so massive, every footfall a seismic event, shaking the cracked pavement and sending debris flying with each step. My predictive overlay was already screaming warnings—vectors, trajectories, weak points.

But I could feel it: No simple tactic was going to kill this thing. Its armor was layered with some kind of kinetic dispersion alloy—bullets and plasma would be like rain against stone.

I aimed the plasma rifle and squeezed the trigger. The narrow beam, set to maximum penetration, lanced out and struck its flank, slagging a chunk of armor and leaving a molten scar. The Titan barely flinched.

Its armor wasn't just thick—it was dissipating heat, rerouting energy across its body to reduce damage. My HUD flashed a warning: Plasma Ineffective – Target Resilient to Heat-Based Damage.

"Of course it is," I growled. Horizon wouldn't make it easy.

The beast's arm came down in a blur of motion—a wrecking ball aimed to flatten me. I threw myself sideways, hitting the pavement hard as the impact obliterated the ground where I'd stood. Shrapnel and broken asphalt sprayed into the air, pelting my armor as I rolled behind the crumbling remains of a concrete barricade.

The monster was already advancing again, a towering shadow of destruction. My ribs screamed with pain, and my armor flashed damage warnings—microfractures, surface integrity compromised. But I couldn't stop. I wouldn't.

Hypermind flared new data across my vision: Two active power cores detected. Cores vulnerable. Armor regenerating from distributed energy cells. Primary core beneath central armor plate. Secondary core exposed during overdrive states.

I needed to crack its shell. Fast.

Then I saw it—an overturned fuel truck near the western barricade, half-buried in debris but intact. If I could bait the Titan closer, use the blast to weaken its armor...

I sprinted toward the wreck, plasma rifle heating in my hands. The Titan bellowed and followed, exactly as I wanted. Its steps shattered the pavement, and the ground trembled as if the earth itself feared the monster.

The Screamer device on my wrist flickered to life, and I discharged a high-frequency pulse behind me as I ran. The sonic burst disoriented lesser mutants, but against the Titan? It barely staggered. The monster's armor was absorbing acoustic disruptions.

It's adapting, I thought grimly. Good. That meant it could break.

Reaching the fuel truck, I spun, plasma rifle raised. Hypermind was already calculating—fuel volume, blast radius, projected thermal impact on the Titan's armor composition. The results flashed in a half-second: 98% chance to rupture armor plating. Secondary core exposure probable. Collateral blast radius: 15 meters. Fatal risk: 72%.

The Titan was seconds from impact. I couldn't fire from here. I'd be vaporized.

Then, over my comm:

"Hey, genius! Need a hand?"

Hart.

Her voice. She was alive.

An armored APC tore out from behind the rubble, its engine screaming. The roof-mounted cannon opened fire, belching a stream of armor-piercing rounds into the Titan's back. Sparks flew as the rounds hammered into its plating—not enough to penetrate, but enough to piss it off.

The Titan twisted with an earthshaking snarl, its molten eyes locking on the APC. It charged, abandoning me for this new threat.

Hart's voice crackled again: "Take the shot, dammit!"

I didn't hesitate. I aimed the plasma rifle at the exposed fuel tank on the truck and fired.

The beam hit dead center.

The explosion detonated with a roar that swallowed the battlefield. Heat and flame erupted skyward, the shockwave tearing through debris and blasting the Titan's armor with raw, concussive force. I was flung backward, landing hard as the wave of heat scorched the air, and the concussive force cracked the HUD in my visor. My ears rang with the deafening pressure, and for a second, all I could hear was my own heartbeat.

When the smoke thinned, I saw it. The Titan, armor shattered, molten flesh exposed where the blast had ripped through its plating. One of its cores—glowing, exposed, pulsing—was visible beneath its rib-like structures.

This was the moment.

I brought up the Sky Reaper Gauss Rifle, and Hypermind surged into overdrive. My vision narrowed into pure calculation:

Distance: 340 meters. Wind speed: 12 km/h. Core rotation pattern: Intermittent exposure every 0.4 seconds. Lethality window: 0.25 seconds.

A window of a quarter second. No room for error.

The Titan began to recover, its molten chest plates shifting, closing over the exposed core.

I fired.

The Gauss round screamed through the air, too fast for the eye to follow.

The flechette punched into the Titan's core, and the effect was immediate—an internal rupture as the core detonated from within.

The beast lurched, a metallic screech splitting the night. Its molten blood erupted in geysers from cracks in its armor, and it dropped to one knee, the ground cratering beneath it. But it wasn't dead. The primary core still burned within its chest, brighter now, surging to compensate.

And then the readings from my HUD shifted—

WARNING: Secondary Core Overload—Detonation Imminent. Blast Radius: 50 meters. Time to Critical: 10 seconds.

The Titan wasn't just dying. It was going to take everything with it.

The survivors—Hart, the defenders—they wouldn't have time to escape. There was no fallback. No safe zone. Just fire and death.

I felt the cold certainty of it. And I knew what I had to do.

I charged.

The Titan saw me, its broken body shuddering, but it still swung—its pincer arm lashing out in a final, lethal swipe. Hypermind predicted the trajectory before the arm even moved, and I ducked low, the air splitting above my head as the claw tore through a concrete barrier behind me.

I was already beneath it, racing toward the exposed core—a churning mass of molten energy, heat so intense my armor's temperature gauge spiked into the red.

The plasma rifle was nearly dead, its coils screaming from overuse. But I had one shot left.

I overloaded the core, burning the safety limiters, forcing every ounce of energy into the barrel.

The Titan reared back, its remaining core pulsing, ready to detonate.

I fired.

The shot—white-hot, overcharged, and unstable—punched through the exposed core.

The explosion was instantaneous.

A wave of blue-white energy erupted from the Titan's chest, and the world became light and fire.

I hit the ground hard.

The impact knocked the wind from me, and for a moment, I felt nothing. No sound. No pain. Just… stillness.

When my vision returned, I was on my back. Smoke billowed into the sky, and the smell of scorched metal and flesh choked the air. I tried to move, and agony flared through my ribs and arm. My armor was cracked, my gauntlets fried, and the plasma rifle was a molten ruin on the ground beside me.

But I was alive.

A shadow fell over me.

Hart.

Her face was streaked with blood and soot, her armor scorched, her rifle missing. She was breathing hard, eyes wide with disbelief.

"You're alive," she rasped.

I managed a grin through the pain. "Yeah. I get that a lot."

She crouched beside me. "You killed it."

I turned my head—there it lay. The Titan, reduced to chunks of molten armor and burned meat, its cores nothing but slag. It was… finished.

But the battle…

The battle wasn't.

The survivors—soldiers, civilians, what was left of the defense force—were emerging from cover, their faces etched with exhaustion and disbelief. But I could see it in their eyes—relief, and something more: hope.

The threat hadn't just been the Titan. It had been Horizon. And I had taken that from them.

Hart's voice was low. "We heard what you did at Skyreach. You stopped Horizon from controlling them. You saved thousands."

I felt the weight of the moment pressing against my battered chest. "Yeah. But the awakening's still happening. Powers are emerging. People are changing. This… this was just the first fight."

Hart looked toward the ruined city skyline, smoke still rising in columns against the night sky. "So what now?"

I looked at my shattered gauntlet, felt the crackling remnants of heat within the weapon, and heard the faint hum of something new—something inside me, as if the fight had rewritten me, too.

"We build," I said, my voice hoarse but certain. "We fortify. We adapt faster than they ever can."

Hart stood, wiping her face with a bruised hand. "Then let's get to work."

The survivors began gathering, some helping the wounded, others salvaging weapons. But they all kept looking at me—waiting.

I hadn't meant for this.

I wasn't their hero.

I was their engineer.

And the war had just begun.