Where the Red Blight Grows

The Pile breathed in fire and exhaled pressure.

Steam hissed from overhead vents, chains creaked under load, and the ribbed corpse of the Horus loomed like a half-buried god. Down in the forge trench, Ubba's workstation looked like it had been raided by inventors and left worse for it—scrap everywhere, blueprints smeared with ash, and scorch marks where there shouldn't be scorch marks.

I sat on a metal crate beside her workbench, hunched over an Override module. Half-burned. Partially fused. A relic of machine control, now barely holding together. The casing was cracked, wires poking through like exposed veins, and a cluster of tribal glyphs had been scratched across its shell—likely by someone who didn't know what it was and decided it was cursed.

Ubba leaned over her forge table, a set of calipers in one hand and my machete—the Tooth of the Roar—clamped in a rigged pressure vise. Sparks leapt as she filed down the newly socketed channel along the spine, her sleeve rolled to the elbow, arm muscles flexing with each motion.

"I still say you overpaid for this puck," she muttered, not looking up. "Kardin swore it hums. It's barely warm."

"It stores ambient charge," I said, flipping the Override module in my hands. "Solar, heat, motion. It's not supposed to hum."

She scoffed. "If it doesn't hum or glow, how the hell am I supposed to trust it?"

A few more sparks jumped, then she stepped back from the vise, wiping her hands. The machete's silhouette hadn't changed much—same brutal curve—but the back spine was fitted with a new copper-braced channel, and at the pommel sat the black puck, now socketed in with a bone-wrapped brace and two pressure leads trailing into the grip.

Ubba tapped the thumbplate she'd wired to the inside hilt. "This right here? One pull per fight. Hit it, and the edge will scream a jolt hot enough to stun a Ravager. Or drop a man like a sack of bad decisions."

I turned the blade in my hand—heavier, but tighter. Cleaner. My Focus pinged the new enhancement and fed me the update. Once per fight. One chance.

As I slid the blade into its sheath, I held up the Override module again. Ubba gave it a quick glance.

Then shook her head.

"Can't read it. No glyphs, no pulse. Doesn't tick, doesn't flicker. And I'm not cracking it open blind unless I want to find out what a short-circuit to the teeth feels like." She leaned a bit closer, squinting at the seams. "But if you figure out what it does, bring it back. I've got ideas."

She grinned—feral, gleaming.

"Most of them unsafe."

Ubba finished locking the copper brace into place around the black puck, cinching the pressure clamps like she was sealing a bomb that owed her money. The Tooth of the Roar was done—scarred, humming, and newly mean.

She handed it over flat across both palms. I took it, felt the new weight shift in the hilt—the embedded cell, the trigger mesh wired into the grip. The blade wasn't just sharper now. It was loaded. Alive. Dangerous in a different way.

Ubba didn't step back. She leaned in.

"So," she said, voice low, "you're really going through with it."

I nodded once. "Deathclaw trial. Tomorrow."

"No armor. No help. Just you and a walking nightmare," she muttered. "Kansani tradition's got a mean sense of humor."

She studied me a moment longer, then exhaled and shook her head.

"You know there's a chance you don't come back, right?"

"I know."

Her gaze lingered on mine—longer than it needed to.

"Then before you go do something that stupid," she said, "you sure you don't wanna try putting a baby in me first?"

That stopped me.

"What?"

Ubba smirked. "Not asking for poems. Just insurance. You've got the shoulders. I've got the hips. Might as well make something useful before you go die for legacy."

I blinked. "You're not serious."

She rolled one shoulder, deliberately casual. "Half."

A beat.

"And not the half you want."

Then she turned—and walked away, hips swaying like she was carrying fire under her belt.

"Window's closing in five, four, three, two, one—"

She looked back over her shoulder, winked.

"Well. Survive—and we'll try again."

She vanished back into the forge heat, already barking at a Spanner kid who'd dropped something loud and probably important.

I stood there, holding a blade charged with thunder and a head full of smoke.

For a second, I caught myself thinking about it. Not her hips. Not the fire in her voice. Just... the offer.

Ubba was bold, brilliant, and reckless in all the ways that made life feel loud again. And part of me—part of this new body—wanted to take her up on it. We weren't far apart in age. Not now. Not physically.

But my mind?

My mind still remembered thirty years of living before this. Bills. funerals. quiet mornings that felt more like failure than peace. I wasn't a kid, no matter how this body looked. I carried too much. I remembered too much. And old rules don't just vanish because your reflection resets.

Ubba was sixteen.

So was I, technically.

But mentally?

I was still a man who'd once think twice before touching someone that young, no matter what calendar you rewrote.

Later, maybe—if time blurred the line between who I used to be and who I was allowed to become. If we both made it.

But not now.

Not like this.

I adjusted the grip on the machete, thumb brushing over the pressure-plate. Warm metal. A crackling core.

"Right," I muttered. "Deathclaw first."

By the time I left the Pile, the forge smoke clung to my clothes like a second skin. The suns had started to stretch high, and the Grove was beginning to shake off its morning stillness. Warriors traded machine parts and bad bets near the outer fire pits. A trio of Nora exiles argued with an Ironbone courier over the price of salvaged Snapmaw lenses. I kept walking.

Tarn's claim shack sat tucked beside the Grove's east wall—half-buried under hanging hides, alloy plates, and enough soot-streaked signage to suggest he didn't want company.

I knocked anyway.

The curtain flap parted after a few seconds.

Tarn stood in the doorway, his single arm resting on the frame, expression already in that halfway mark between irritation and acceptance. "Didn't peg you for the type to come asking permission," he rasped.

"I'm not," I said. "I'm asking for guidance."

That got a grunt—neutral. He stepped aside.

Inside, the shack smelled like old leather, machine oil, and dried blood that had long since stopped meaning anything. A stack of kill slips sat beside a worn table, most of them stamped fulfilled.

I stayed standing.

"I'm going after the Deathclaw," I said.

Tarn didn't blink. Didn't scoff. Just nodded slowly like he'd been waiting for those exact words.

"You know the rules?" he asked.

"No help. No weapons beyond what I carry. No rescue party if I go quiet."

"Good," he said, sitting down heavily on the low stool behind the table. "Because you're not getting any of that anyway."

He picked up a blank slip, held it up, then set it back down again—empty. "Nothing like that goes on the board. Not Thunderjaws. Not Gatecrashers. Not the clawed bastards."

"I figured."

Tarn looked up at me with the same flat steel he gave every warrior who overestimated their own legacy. "You know why?"

"Because anyone dumb enough to chase those things better be worth remembering."

That got the closest thing to a smile Tarn ever gave. A twitch at the corner of his mouth and a flick of his eyes.

"Close," he said. "It's because the moment you write it down, you start getting people who want to hunt it for fame. And fame gets your jaw torn off before your name makes it back to the Grove."

He stood slowly, joints cracking like stone under pressure. "I handle those calls personally. I send runners when I know who's worth sending."

He looked me over—same as he had the day I first walked in with soot on my boots and a fresh kill on my back.

"You're worth sending now," he said.

I didn't answer. Just nodded once.

Tarn moved to the back of the shack, peeled a rough-stitched map of the low plains off the wall, and stabbed a finger toward the southern stretch of brushland.

"Spring's the right time for this," he said. "The bison herds are calving. Slower. More rooted. The big ones don't range too far when the newborns are still learning how to stand."

"And the Deathclaws?"

"They follow the herds," he said plainly. "They don't hide. Never do. They leave tracks like they want you to see them—wide as your chest, deep as a post-hole, and always headed toward something that screams."

He turned and locked eyes with me. "Find a bison herd. Stay with it. You'll find what you're looking for."

"They don't bother covering their trail?"

Tarn's voice dropped into that cold, honest weight he used when he wanted words to stick like bone.

"They don't need to."

I didn't head for the gate after Tarn gave the word.

I needed one last tool.

Not armor. Not a blade. Something that could scatter a pack, rupture a shell, or slow down something faster than me. I needed range. Disruption. Area denial.

I needed a sling.

Not an Oseram toy with ten bombs and half the payload. I needed the kind the Kansani made—crafted by people who knew their enemies never fought alone, and never gave you time to aim twice.

I found it in a stall low to the outer wall, beneath a soot-charred canopy strung with scavenged wiring and bone tags. A single rack sat behind the counter, wrapped in heatproof cloth.

The trader was an older man with fire-scars across both forearms and glyphs inked in soot down his jawline. Shaper of Ash.

I didn't need to speak. Just pointed at the weapon.

He pulled it out with care—Stormthrower, they called it. Kansani-style sling. Blackbone frame, dual launch cups, reinforced grip threaded with wire and wrapped in cracked hide. The arms were inked in traditional white: weight, flame, impact, silence.

"You'll only load three," he said, setting it on the bench, "but each one speaks louder than six."

He laid out the bombs next—broad-bodied, heavy, built with bone-grooved stabilizers and sealed with melted resin. Glyph-carved casings. Hand-packed burn cores.

I read the names in his scrawl.

Ammo Type

Effect

Suncracker Gel

Fire + Adhesive — Ignites and sticks. Inflicts Burn and Slowed status. Explodes if hit again.

Frostbite Brew

Frost + Shock — Freezes armor in place, stuns machines momentarily. Great for disabling gearboxes or slowing chargers.

Rotgut Slurry

Acid + Explosive — Burns through plating and then detonates. Bypasses normal corrosion resistance.

Tangle Burst

Adhesive + Purgewater — Drenches enemies while binding them to terrain. Useful against machines with multiple resistances.

Witchfire Bomb

Explosive + Fire — Small blast radius, high damage. Leaves behind a lingering burn pool. Often used for hunting Deathclaws or Thunderjaw tendons.

"They leave pools," he said. "Linger. Anything that stands in 'em suffers."

He paused. "That includes you."

I nodded. "They fly?"

"With this," he said, tapping the Stormthrower. "You use any other tribe's sling, they drop like anchors. Kansani bombs are heavier. Thicker. Built for a fight that doesn't end clean."

I lifted the Stormthrower—felt the recoil bracing in the grip, the tension in the dual tendons. It was meant to launch weight—not spin it.

"How much?"

"Three-seventy-five," he said. "And I'll do you better."

He reached under the counter and pulled out a bundle—folded barkleaf pages, tied in sinew.

"Recipes," he said. "Bomb mixes. If you know how to work a flame and shape a core, you can make more. Long as you've got the metal and the fire."

I took them. Each page was etched with hand-inked instructions and hand-measured mixes—primitive at a glance, but exact where it mattered. The kind of crafting no Oseram would ever teach without three arguments and a bribe.

But it made sense they were useless without the sling.

I paid without another word.

📘 Weapon Acquired: Stormthrower Mk.I (Kansani Blastsling)Ammo Capacity: 3

Ammo Weight: Heavier than tribal standard

Sling Compatibility: Only reaches full range with Kansani-forged launchers

Overdraw Function: Increases radius, pool intensity, and buildup

Friendly Fire: Pool damage applies to all within zone

Damage Focus: Disruption, status, burn-over-time — cannot Tear

Crafting: Bomb recipes now unlocked; Rion can make more in the field with proper tools and materials

As I strapped the Stormthrower across my back, I could already feel the weight shift. Not heavy.

Just intentional.

I left the Grove just past midlight, the Stormthrower strapped tight across my back, my satchel carrying only the essentials: a few bombs, the stun-mod machete, and trail rations I didn't plan to enjoy. The gate guards didn't ask questions. They saw the loadout. They knew the walk—the kind that didn't circle back unless it brought something dead with it.

Once I hit the outer trail, I turned west.

Not east. East meant trouble. East meant open plains and Legion territory. Tarn hadn't said a word about direction, but I didn't need him to. The truce between the Kansani and the Legion didn't include me. I hadn't sworn to it. I wasn't born under it. And if a patrol spotted me out there without colors or clearance, they wouldn't ask questions.

They'd put me in the dirt.

I didn't need to meet Caesar.

And I sure as hell didn't want to catch his attention.

Rumors said he ruled from under the shadow of the Great Arch. In Saint Louis The old world monument turned into a symbol of dominance, rising over crucified skeletons and banners that didn't know mercy. Some said he'd turned the steel curve into a gallows. Others said he sat beneath it in a throne of rebar and ruin, reading the histories of dead nations and writing new ones in blood.

I didn't care which version was true.

Either way, I wasn't going that direction.

West was quieter. Still dangerous, but simpler. Machines. Outlaws. Bison herds. The kind of wilderness where at least you could see what was coming for you—and maybe kill it before it got close.

I followed an old rail path half-swallowed by moss and rust until the trees thickened and the ground began to rise. The air was cooler out here. Still. Not dead—but held, like breath waiting to break.

That's where I found the herd.

The wind shifted as I crested the ridge, bringing with it the scent of earth, wet bark, and the slow warmth of large bodies at rest.

Then I saw them.

Bison. Not a handful. Not a cluster. A herd.

Hundreds of them, maybe more. The line of backs and shaggy shoulders stretched into the low hills, disappearing behind the treeline like the land itself had grown fur and started to breathe. They moved in slow, rolling waves—calves tucked near their mothers, bulls posted along the flanks like anchored towers. Dust rose in lazy spirals above them, catching the light like it was made of gold. Birds flew low, riding the warmth rising off all that living weight.

They didn't speak. They didn't need to. Their presence was a kind of thunder that hadn't sounded yet.

I dropped to one knee beside a half-buried rock and just watched. Even breathing felt loud.

The ground was already marked with their passing—shallow wallows packed flat by hooves, tufts of fur snagged on brush, muddy gouges from where young bulls had sparred just to prove they were alive. There was no trail. The herd was the trail.

One of the bulls turned its head, slow and deliberate. Horns like scythes. Eyes dark and calm. It saw me. Measured me. Decided I wasn't worth moving for.

That was fine by me.

A calf near the front slipped in the mud and bleated once. Its mother didn't flinch. She just shifted her weight, placing herself between the noise and the trees.

I remembered learning about herds like this. Not here. Back home. Where the world still spun without ash in the sky and thunder didn't come with claws. Bison once roamed in the tens of thousands—massive, unstoppable, stretching across the plains like tides of muscle and horn. People used to stand in awe of them. Photograph them. Build fences just to slow them down.

And then others slaughtered them. Not for meat. Not for need.

But to starve the people who did need them.

And now, somehow, in this twisted echo of the world I once knew, they were still here. Fewer, yes. But not broken.

And more alive than anything GAIA ever designed.

This wasn't a machine's idea of nature. This was nature. No circuits. No servos. Just instinct, muscle, and blood memory passed down in hoofbeats.

They didn't know me. Didn't care. And still—I felt like I should bow.

So I stayed low. Said nothing.

And let the silence stretch around the weight of what they were.

One of the bulls shifted. A heavy motion, more shoulder than step. Then it stomped.

The sound cracked through the basin like a falling tree. Not aggression. Not panic.

Warning.

Heads turned across the herd—mothers stiffening, calves ducking low, the bulls along the edge tightening their formation. Another stomp followed, from a different male. Dust lifted. Muscle flexed.

I didn't move.

Didn't reach for a weapon. Didn't flinch. Just kept kneeling, one knee planted in the loam, eyes forward.

I wasn't their enemy. And I wasn't about to act like prey.

The lead bull stared hard, breath fogging in the cool morning light. He didn't charge. He didn't back down. Just watched—until he decided I wasn't worth the energy, and returned to his vigil.

That was my moment.

I let my hand drift to the Focus and triggered a silent scan—low-power, short-range, so I didn't spook the herd or alert anything that might be watching me.

Lines laced the landscape—thermal residues, pressure indentations, density breaks. I scanned the lower ridge beyond the herd, tracking where the grass bent, where the mud dipped unnaturally, where the stones weren't scattered but shoved.

No immediate hits. No silhouette. But the terrain was shifting in places that didn't line up with bison movement.

I adjusted the lens, refined the depth filter, and looked again.

Still nothing definitive.

But something had passed through here. Not just recently—deliberately. The bison knew. Their instincts were sharper than any machine's targeting array.

They felt it before I could see it.

I stayed crouched, eyes moving slow across the ridge. Watching the herd. Watching the gaps between.

Looking not for fur and horns.

But for claws.The Focus pinged something at the far edge of the basin. Not metal. Not motion. Just… contrast.

I stood slowly, careful not to startle the herd, and took a few steps along the ridge—keeping low, keeping the wind at my back.

Then I saw it.

At the perimeter of the herd, where the grass dipped and the trees broke open into a thinning rise, something lay still in the dirt.

A bison head.

I crept closer, boots sinking softly into the wet soil, until the full scene came into view.

The head lay alone at the edge of the basin—heavy, still, and final. One eye remained open, glassy but not vacant. The horn on that side had been cracked down the middle, the fur around the jaw caked with blood and spittle. Its mouth hung open, mid-bellow, as if whatever sound it had been trying to make had been cut off along with everything else.

The kill hadn't been messy. It hadn't been accidental.

It had been clean.

The kind of clean that comes after a struggle, not instead of one.

The ground around the head told the rest of the story.

The earth was wrecked.

Deep furrows ran wild across the clearing—hoof marks scattered in sharp arcs, some pressed in so hard they'd flattened stone. Tufts of fur lay tangled in claw-shaped tears through the grass, stuck in blood-thickened clumps that hadn't yet dried. There were crush marks near the center—areas where something immense had slammed down, folding the ground beneath it. One spot showed the deep imprint of a bison flank. It had landed there, hard. Thrown? Fallen? Both.

This one had fought.

There were loops in the marks—circles where the bison had turned, reared, spun to avoid the thing behind it. One tree nearby had been gored—its bark stripped off in a wide, chest-height wound from where the bison must've charged, hoping to hit something. A blind strike in the dark.

The drag marks came next.

Wide. Long. Flanked by deep, irregular claw furrows where something had dug in to pull the rest of the body out of sight. The dirt was broken in places where legs had kicked back—panic, instinct, refusal. There were smear trails of blood, bone fragments, and disturbed stone where the weight had shifted.

And then it ended.

Abruptly.

No full body. No bones. Just the head, left sitting upright in the churned dirt like a marker. Like a warning.

That was the end of the fight.

The decapitation It had come last. The killing blow.

A final, violent punctuation at the end of a long, desperate sentence.

And past it, the trail led uphill—into the reddened growth where the world stopped pretending to be clean. The green gave way to rot. Vines coiled like veins pulled through thorns. The air shimmered with sickness. A blight zone.

Not natural. Not reclaimable.

Nothing that bled out there ever came back.

The herd hadn't come near this place. They knew better.

But something else had walked straight in.

And it had dragged a corpse behind it.

I stood just short of the red line, where the grasses twisted into something wrong and the air began to hum—not with life, but with rot.

Blight.

I remembered it from Forbidden West. The game. Back when it was fiction. Red tendrils choking the soil, twisted plants leeching into the water table, warping the ground until nothing else could grow. It hadn't just poisoned land—it had rejected it. Turned it hostile. The closer you got to GAIA's broken zones, the thicker it spread. Even then, it hadn't moved like fire or fog. It didn't consume.

It lingered.

But that was a version filtered through pixels and voice lines. It had rules, spawn zones, scripted behavior. You cleared it with a Vinecutter, moved on, and forgot it ever existed.

This wasn't that.

This was real.

And here, the Kansani had names for it that didn't show up in any codex.

Bloodgrass. False root. Warbloom.

They didn't call it "blight" like it was a technical malfunction. They called it evidence. The proof of something that should've stayed dead trying to grow again.

According to the shamans, the ground it touched didn't just die—it forgot. Roots wouldn't anchor. Trees would drop their leaves and never regrow. Animals that passed through it stopped breeding, or changed. Some tribes said it burned out memory itself—wiped the instinct from prey, made predators hunt out of rage instead of need.

Ubba said it was a sickness born from silence—whatever voice GAIA once had, this was what grew in the quiet.

Grosh said not to burn it. Said the smoke could kill a man in three breaths and leave his body twitching like a machine trying to reboot.

Tarn? Tarn didn't explain it.

He just spat and called it land that remembers what was stolen.

Whatever it was, I knew this much: it wasn't natural. And it wasn't passive.

Anything that dragged a kill into this place wanted the silence. Wanted the rot.

I stood at the threshold of the blight, where the last green blade gave way to red-veined rot. The drag marks led straight in—long, deliberate, and undisturbed.

The bison had been taken here for a reason.

The Kansani believed Deathclaws were immune to the sickness. Not resistant—immune. The vines didn't bite their skin. The air didn't poison their lungs. The ground didn't twist their blood or dull their instincts. They walked through it like it was any other hunting ground.

Some said this is where they nested. Raised their young.

That was the part that never sat right with me.

Because no one had ever seen a juvenile Deathclaw.

No smaller tracks. No screeches in the night. No half-grown things caught in the wild by hunters who got lucky.

Only adults.

Full-sized.

Already lethal.

And if the blight truly was their cradle, then this wasn't just rot.

It was a nursery.

A place where even the land was too sick for predators—except one.

The Focus gave me nothing useful. Just static pulses and distorted biosigns. The signal here was always corrupted—roots too thick, energy too wrong. Even the machines avoided it. Or maybe they simply understood what I was just beginning to learn:

The blight didn't just grow where the world broke.

It grew where something wanted it to stay broken.

I slid my hand to the machete, fingers resting just beneath the stun trigger.

Then I stepped into the red.

I sealed the helmet with a hiss.

The interior systems spooled up, filtering the world through a faint electronic hum. On the lower left edge of my vision, the Focus adjusted to environmental risk parameters and dropped a warning glyph beside a fresh counter:

AIR SUPPLY STABLE – INTERNAL RESERVE: 2:00:00

Two hours. That was the window. The limit. Any longer, and I'd be breathing rot.

The blight distorted everything—light, heat, sound. Color lost its edge here. Greens dulled. Reds oversaturated. The ground squelched underfoot, wet in places where there shouldn't have been moisture. Some of the growth pulsed faintly, like it breathed. Like it watched.

I kept my pace steady, eyes on the trail.

The Deathclaw hadn't bothered to hide the path it carved.

Why would it?

The drag marks were wide and deep—consistent, unbroken. The body must've weighed close to a ton, but the creature pulling it didn't even stagger. Claw imprints followed in stride, set clean beside the grooves with terrifying precision. No detours. No erratic movement.

Just a straight, arrogant line into the heart of corrupted ground.

Fifteen years it had lived here, maybe longer. And in all that time, nothing had followed it.It had no reason to expect company. That was the problem.

It didn't expect anything. It didn't fear anything. So it didn't hide.

The blight was its hunting ground, its den, its home. And now I was inside it. With two hours of air, a full charge on my blade, and no backup waiting behind me.

The only thing ahead was silence.

And a thing that had never learned what it meant to be hunted.

The deeper I went, the worse it got.

The air didn't burn. It itched. Deep, under the skin, like a thousand invisible fleas with dagger-like teeth. My scalp crawled beneath the helmet, my spine twitched at random intervals, and even with the filtered airflow, I could feel something wrong creeping along the inside of my bones.

Not poison. Not radiation.

Just wrongness.

The blight wasn't a field hazard—it was pressure. Ancient, quiet, and waiting.

I kept walking, each step kicking up spores too faint for the Focus to classify. The timer in my HUD kept ticking down.

1:41:38

1:41:37

Then I saw it—off to the left, nestled between warped tree limbs and black-veined moss: a structure. Half-submerged. Old World. A ruin.

Concrete walls, still standing. Steel bulkhead doorframe cracked but not fully collapsed. No blight growth on the outer shell. The vines avoided it, like something in its bones still resisted being swallowed.

I paused, scanned the perimeter, then slipped inside.

The change was immediate.

The itch stopped. The noise stopped.

And the countdown in the corner of my HUD blinked.

1:39:06

1:39:07

It ticked upward. Slowly. Not a full reset. Not like a game. But a real-time recharge—maybe half a second gained for every second spent in here. No announcement. No glyphs flashing. Just less risk.

Good to know.

The ruin was silent. Dusty, but intact. Old pipes ran along the ceiling, bone-dry. Cracked monitors and filing cabinets lay scattered around a central room. Some kind of maintenance outpost, maybe. Local grid control. Not a vault. Not anything important. But not nothing either.

I moved through it at scavenger speed—eyes quick, hands methodical.

Found a busted datapad with a cracked solar panel. Worth a few shards. Found a copper bracket mounted to an old console, still intact. Heavy. Salvageable.

Tore two wire bundles out of the wall. Coated in gunk, but they'd clean up. Kardin would take those without questions.

I wasn't here to clean the place out. But if I was waiting for the timer to refill…

Might as well make it worth something. No threats. No movement. Just a dead room giving back what the red ground refused to let live. I kept an eye on the door. The trail would still be there. So would the thing that left it.

Nothing in the ruin was worth a story.

No locked terminals. No preserved recordings. No hidden safes waiting behind cracked drywall or flickering holo-panels. Just a small room that hadn't collapsed—forgotten by the world, untouched by the blight.

But it held junk.

A few bent tools scattered across a rust-eaten workbench. A cracked ceramic mug with a faded logo. An old handheld fan—battery long dead, but casing still intact. Nothing impressive. Still, I moved like it mattered.

I tapped the side of my wrist, and the Nanoboy 3000 hummed to life—blue mist coiling out like breath in cold air. I passed each item through the intake field one by one: the fan, the mug, the frayed wire lengths, a rusted data plug with half its teeth missing. A small figurine of a bird, its beak chipped off. Even the metal bracket from beneath the console—warped, but real alloy—vanished into the compression field with a flicker of light.

None of it was valuable. But valuable wasn't the point.

This was trade stock. Rent. Food. Arrows. Shards in waiting. Kardin would roll his eyes, mutter something about "apocalypse chic," and buy half of it anyway.

The HUD blinked.

1:59:41

1:59:46

2:00:00

The timer capped out. Air full.

Good enough.

I stepped back outside. The moment I crossed the threshold, the itch returned—instant, invasive. Like walking into heat that didn't burn, only burrowed. My helmet held, but I could feel the wrongness crawling at the seams of the suit.

I didn't stop.

The drag marks were still clear—straight, clean, confident. No stutter. No detour. The Deathclaw hadn't zigzagged or doubled back. It didn't mask the trail or circle its kill site.

It wasn't hiding.

In fifteen years of life, nothing had ever followed it into the blight. Nothing had survived long enough to.

But this time, something was.

I let my hand rest lightly on the machete's grip and moved forward, deeper into the red hills—into a place where nothing green grew, and the wind had forgotten how to carry sound.

As I pushed deeper into the red, the ground began to change—not just in color, but in texture. The soil grew soft, sponge-like underfoot. The blight wasn't just spreading here. It was settled. Rooted. Like this part of the land had already lost whatever fight the rest of the world was still pretending to have.

And then the bones started.

At first it was just a rib jutting out of the dirt—big, old, and cracked from sun and time. Then more. A spine laid out like a broken ladder. A skull, mostly intact, jaw wide open in a silent scream. Bison. Deer. Fox.

And then human.

A whole scatter pile of them, partially buried in blight-furred brush, stripped clean of armor or clothing, joints snapped like twigs. Skulls. Femurs. Spines. Some still curled, like they'd died trying to crawl away. Some arranged in half-circles, dumped like firewood.

I crouched, tapped the side of the Focus, and let the scan wash over the closest pile. No tags. No signals. Nothing worth pulling. No armor. No weapon fragments. Not even a knife hilt.

Just bones.

Picked clean.

I stood slowly, eyes tracking the drag lines between the piles.

This wasn't where the Deathclaw killed. This was where it threw things.

A dump site. Overflow. Territory cleanup.

Whatever it didn't eat, whatever got in the way or cluttered the space—it dragged the meat out here and left the rest behind. Bones, broken gear, anything too ordinary to matter.

Anything valuable—armor, blades, weapons, whatever passed for shiny in that lizard brain—that would be deeper in. In the nest. In the center.

That thought hit different.

Because it meant the Deathclaw kept things.

It didn't just kill.

It collected.

I looked past the piles, past the thickening red vines and thorn-slick moss. The trail still led onward, steady and sure.

So I followed it.

Toward the nest.

Toward the things it hadn't thrown away.

As I stepped past the last bone pile, I couldn't help but think about what it meant.

If the Deathclaw kept things—if it chose not to throw everything away—then it wasn't just killing to feed. It was collecting. Holding onto objects for reasons that weren't just instinct or practicality.

It meant this wasn't just a dump site.

It meant somewhere ahead, there was a nest.

And in that nest, there might be a horde.

The thought hit me harder than it should have. Not just because of what it implied, but because of what it reminded me of.

Old stories. Games. Books.

Dungeons. Dragons. Lairs built around gold and gleaming things, guarded by something ancient and unstoppable. You didn't just fight the monster—you fought for the treasure.

And now, here I was, walking into the red heart of a corrupted hillscape, following the trail of something that killed like a machine but collected like a myth.

It wasn't greed. It wasn't logic.

It was territoriality.

It was ritual.

Somewhere ahead, I'd find what it chose to keep. Trinkets. Weapons. Maybe the armor of dead hunters or snapped rifles arranged like trophies.

Shiny things.

Things it didn't understand, but wanted.

Which meant two things.

One: this was no longer just a hunt.

Two: if I killed it—I wasn't walking away empty-handed.

I adjusted the Stormthrower on my back and pressed forward.

Toward the hoard.

Toward the beast that guarded it.

Rion stared at the hollow carved into the base of the hill, the blood trail ending like punctuation. The air was still, but heavy. Not a trap. Not a lair.

A nest.

The kind of place built by something that knew it couldn't be challenged. A den set deep and wide, without concern for secrecy. There was no hiding. Just ownership.

And as he stood there, thumb on the machete's grip, he couldn't shake the thought forming in the back of his mind—a thought that carried the full weight of a truth he'd only ever known as fantasy.

It really is a dragon.

Not scaled wings and breath of fire. Not piles of gold.

But the shape was the same.

A creature bred for war, smarter than it should be, territorial, violent, and now—after so many years alone—a collector. This wasn't just an animal with a kill site. It was a living weapon with a memory. A thing that kept bones in one place and shiny things in another. The parallels weren't imagined anymore.

Deathclaws used to be game bosses.

He remembered them from Fallout. Huge. Unfair. Chameleon-blooded nightmares cooked up in labs to replace human soldiers. Born from forced evolution, twisted into bioweapons. And when the bombs fell, they didn't die out.

They thrived.

He remembered reading the lore, years ago, sprawled out in a dorm room, laughing with friends about how the Deathclaws were just post-apocalyptic dragons in disguise. Joke or not, that had been the core of their mythos.

And now?

Now one had built its hoard inside this hill.

Not for treasure. Not for power.

But because it could.

Because no one had stopped it.

And because in its feral, corrupted way—it remembered what it meant to own something.

Rion adjusted his stance, eyes flicking toward the treeline one last time. No movement. No sound. Just the breath of a blighted world and the shape of something far too old to have ever been fictional.

The mouth of the hollow loomed ahead—dark, jagged, and breathing heat like a furnace throat. The blood trail vanished into it without hesitation. Bones clustered around the entrance in uneven piles, some fresh, some sun-bleached, all stripped clean. Shiny scraps gleamed between them—bent rebar, torn plates of armor, the haft of a rusted spear buried to the hilt in the dirt.

And behind it all: silence.

The kind of silence that wasn't still.

It was listening.

I crouched low behind a warped boulder, scanned the terrain again, and narrowed my eyes at the den's interior. Tight. Uneven. Too many choke points. The walls were jagged and uneven, thick with overgrowth and rot. My HUD couldn't map past the first bend. Even the Focus was losing signal integrity in there.

This wasn't a lair.

It was a kill chamber.

Any sane animal would've dumped the body out here. But this thing had dragged it in. Not just for food. For control. Territory. A message.

And I'd be a damn idiot to follow.

I tightened the sling on the Stormthrower, let my hand rest on the machete hilt, and exhaled through my teeth.

"No way in hell."

I wasn't fighting a Deathclaw in close quarters. Not where it could pounce off the ceiling or rip through a wall to flank me. Not where I couldn't move. Not where one mistake meant the end of everything.

I needed space.

I needed angles.

And I needed that bastard out here where I could see it.

I stepped back from the hollow, keeping low, and began circling the clearing in a wide arc—watching for movement, watching the wind, watching for any sign it was already stalking me from the dark.

"Come on," I murmured. "Let's see how smart you really are."

Then I knelt in the dirt, pulled open a pouch on the Nanoboy, and started working. I had bombs. I had line-of-sight. I had time.

If it wouldn't come to me?

I'd give it a reason.

I ducked behind a sloped outcrop just past the clearing, out of line of sight from the hollow's mouth. The blight was thinner here—less clustered. Enough room to move, to dodge, to fight.

I tapped the Nanoboy's interface and slid into the ammo menu. The Stormthrower's payload grid blinked into view, each bomb type marked with a simple glyph and a counter beside it.

Suncracker Gel – 3

Frostbite Brew – 3

Rotgut Slurry – 3

Tangleburst – 3

Witchfire Bomb – 3

My eyes paused on the last.

Witchfire.

The fire-and-explosive blend. Packed to ignite on impact, then detonate a split second later. Left behind a scorched pool and kicked out enough smoke to mask a small retreat—or lure something mean enough to mistake it for weakness.

Loud. Bright. Obvious.

Perfect.

I selected one and loaded it into the Stormthrower's first chamber. The sling gave a low mechanical thunk as the vial snapped into place, tension winding along the tendons. I rolled my shoulders and checked the wind.

Southwest. Steady.

Good.

I turned, scanned the clearing again—still empty—and crept ten feet closer to the hollow's edge. Close enough to aim.

Not close enough to get pulled in.

I lifted the sling, drew back slowly, aimed at a chunk of stone just left of the entrance—one of the few flat patches where flame would hold.

Then I let it fly.

The bomb sailed in an arc, trailing a thin wisp of activation gas behind it. It hit with a clack, shattered, flared—

—and roared.

A column of fire burst up with a violent crack. A half-second later, the explosive core went off with a deep WHUMPF, sending smoke and ash curling into the air in thick, oily spirals. The trees shook. Birds scattered from the high branches, screaming into the sky.

The sound echoed into the hollow. And stopped. The silence that followed was wrong. Too deep. Too still.

Then I felt it. The shift in air pressure.

The low scrape of something massive standing up from stone.

It wasn't running.

It was coming.

The smoke still curled upward when I heard it.

Not the sound of charging claws. Not the bark of a roar.

It was breath.

Slow. Deep. The kind of breath that came from something that had earned every fight it ever survived—and killed everything that lost.

Then it stepped out of the hollow.

And I knew I'd made a mistake.

It was bigger than I expected. Heavier. Not just bulk, but presence. The horns were curved backward, sweeping like twin hooks over its shoulders. Its tail dragged low, barbed and thick with scar tissue. Spines lined its back like a crown of bone, blackened at the tips. Its arms were leaner than a bull Deathclaw's, but longer—adapted for grabbing, pinning.

Its eyes locked on the burning patch of earth, then lifted to me.

It didn't roar.

It didn't need to.

The Deathclaw was awake.

And she was angry.

The second I saw her, it hit me—sharp, hard, sickening.

I should've known.

The blight. The isolation. The absolute confidence in dragging corpses back here without ever hiding the trail. I'd been so focused on the idea of a lone predator that I forgot the first rule of apex threats:

If something's living in a nest, it's either guarding food, or it's guarding young.

This wasn't just a Deathclaw.

It was a Matriarch.

And I'd just thrown a bomb at the front door of her nursery.

She didn't scream. She didn't charge—not yet.

She just stepped forward, one claw digging into the soil, dragging deep grooves as she rose to her full height and blocked out half the hollow behind her.

Matriarchs weren't dangerous because they were bigger. Or faster.

They were dangerous because they never stopped.

You didn't just fight them. You fought everything they had ever fought before—all their rage, all their wounds, all their instinct, compressed into the monstrous force of something that would never allow you to touch what it called hers.

I tightened my grip on the Stormthrower.

I had bombs.

I had gear.

I had a plan.

But right now, that plan needed to change.

Because I wasn't just fighting a Deathclaw.

I was about to fight a mother.

The Deathclaw stepped fully into the clearing now, the burning patch from the Witchfire Bomb casting flickers of light across her scaled hide. Her muscles rolled beneath thick armor plating—dark, jagged, like volcanic stone—and the scars raking across her chest and forearms told a story I didn't want to hear again.

Then she threw her head back and roared.

It wasn't a call.

Not for help. Not for pack. Not for reinforcements.

Deathclaws didn't do that.

This was rage—pure, raw, unfiltered. A sound that didn't carry meaning, only intention. The kind of roar that shook trees, sent birds scattering in blind terror, and made the air itself feel thinner. It wasn't directed at me.

Not yet.

It was for the world. For the wind. For the sky above that had allowed me to make it this far.

It was fury that something had dared come here.

I felt it more than heard it—deep in my ribs, crawling along my spine, thudding behind my eyes like pressure drop before a storm. My helmet muffled the worst of it, but even the HUD glitched for a second, as if the Focus didn't know how to categorize the sound.

She wasn't warning me.

She wasn't testing me.

She was offended.

This wasn't a fight over food or territory. Not anymore. This was about audacity—about me walking too close to something that wasn't meant to be seen, let alone threatened.

She stalked forward slowly, claws flexing into the dirt. Her tail dragged with menace. Shoulders bunched like a spring wound too tight. She didn't pounce. Not yet.

No—this wasn't a kill for her.

This was a beating.

I hadn't just crossed a line.

I existed on the wrong side of it.

I raised the Stormthrower slowly, chambered another Witchfire Bomb with a mechanical click, and muttered under my breath.

"Okay. Message received."

This wasn't survival anymore.

This was personal.

And the Matriarch was about to try and beat my ass on principle alone.

I didn't hesitate.

As she finished her roar, I was already drawing the Stormthrower back. One more Witchfire Bomb snapped into the sling with a metallic clack. I overcharged the pull, aimed center-mass, and let it fly.

The bomb struck her square in the chest.

It exploded in a burst of fire and concussive force, lighting up the clearing with a thunderous WHUMP that sent burning grass and wet ash spiraling into the air. The flame clung to her underside, catching across the thinner plates of her belly and along the scars crisscrossing her ribs.

She screamed—not in pain, but in rage. A full-bodied bellow that made the trees lean. Then she charged.

I dove left, rolling through a shallow dip in the terrain as her flaming arm whipped past where my head had just been. The air behind her swing was hot enough to sting through the filter vents in my helmet. I hit the dirt, came up to one knee, and holstered the sling.

No time.

I drew the Railwhistle.

She had passed me—momentum too big to stop. I aimed center-back and fired.

The spike shot out with a whistle-scream, trailing steam and pressure, and slammed into her rear flank. Another shot followed. Then a third.

They hit.

But they didn't sink.

One embedded about an inch deep before bouncing free with a wet ping. The second cracked scales but didn't penetrate. The third skidded off entirely, vanishing into the brush.

Deathclaws weren't machines.

That was the problem.

With machines, you hit a weak point—an exposed gear, a coolant valve, an actuator rod—and it broke. No flex. No adaptation. You knew where to aim.

But this?

This was muscle.

Blood. Tendons that flexed on impact and gave under pressure. A Railwhistle spike didn't punch into meat the same way it did into hardened ceramic or alloy plating.

You didn't outgun something like this.

You had to outfight it.

The Matriarch pivoted faster than something that size should've been able to. Her tail smashed through a low tree with the sound of splintering timber. Her belly still burned, but she didn't flinch. If anything, it drove her harder.

She wanted me dead.

And she wanted to do it up close.

I backed off fast, rail still up, breathing measured inside the helmet.

The fight was on.

And she was just getting started.

I reached for the sling, thumbing the selector to cycle in an Adhesive Bomb. I needed to slow her down—just enough to get breathing room.

Too slow.

She was already moving.

The Matriarch closed the distance in two thundering strides and slapped me with her right hand. Not a claw swipe. A full, open-handed palm strike the size of a damn furnace door.

The blow hit me square in the chest and right arm, lifting me clean off my feet. The world spun—red sky, blighted trees, upside-down ground—then I slammed into the far side of the clearing with a crack that sent pain rippling up my spine.

I rolled once, twice, finally landing on my side.

My right forearm was bleeding—two clean slashes from where her claws had raked across just before impact. A third gash split my upper arm, deep and angry. My armor had slowed it, but not stopped it. The suit's damage indicators were already pinging red in my periphery.

"Fucking hell," I spat, dragging myself upright, vision shaking.

She was coming again.

I fumbled the Stormthrower back into position, hand slick with blood, and selected the Suncracker Gel. No overdraw. No ceremony.

Just survival.

I fired.

The canister arced out and burst against her left shoulder, spraying flaming adhesive across her torso and legs. The mix hissed as it burned, clinging to muscle and scale, spreading with every twitch of her movement.

That stopped her.

Or at least slowed her.

She reared back, snarling, thrashing one leg in frustration as the sticky fire refused to shake loose.

I didn't waste the opening.

My left hand was already at my belt kit, pulling out a stimpak. I jabbed it into the meat of my upper arm and triggered the injector.

The burn hit instantly—cold first, then heat, then the numbing ache as the chemicals tore through the injury site and started forcing muscle fibers back into place. The cuts sealed badly, but sealed.

The HUD flickered—warning downgraded from critical to caution.

I exhaled sharply, gritted my teeth, and stood.

She wasn't dead.

But neither was I.

The adhesive fire still clung to her, buying me seconds—not minutes. She roared and thrashed, clawing at the sticky blaze wrapping her legs and chest, but she wasn't retreating. She was recalibrating.

I holstered the Stormthrower in one practiced motion and reached across my back.

Left hand closed around the machete.

Right hand dropped to my side and drew the revolver—Terra's Gift—its grip warm, comforting in a way nothing else on this battlefield could be. I raised both weapons, breathing hard, muscles still twitching from the stimpak surge.

The other weapons were too slow now.

This wasn't about range or gimmicks anymore.

Most people would've said to keep their distance.

Run. Kite. Use terrain. Throw fire, freeze it, break its legs before it ever got close.

That was what the old instinct said. The player's mindset. The tactical cheat-sheet that came from watching a Deathclaw on a screen and telling yourself it was beatable with the right gear and enough space.

But this wasn't a game.

There were no rules. No hitboxes. No scaling systems keeping damage numbers fair. No coded weak points flashing orange. The shackles of game balance were gone, and what stood in front of me was no spawn. No level 50 boss.

It was a living, breathing apex.

And the one weapon I'd counted on—the Railwhistle—was already back on its sling. A great machine-killer, but machines were simple. They didn't move with anger. They didn't flex muscle around the point of impact. They didn't shift under pressure like something alive.

A spike launcher couldn't track that.

But I could.

So I stood my ground with the machete in my left, the revolver in my right. A blade to bleed her and a round for the gaps. Nothing fancy. Nothing scripted.

Just pressure. Just presence. Just me.

The Matriarch watched me move forward.

And I swear—for just a second—she understood.

She saw someone who wasn't running.

Someone who had dropped every ranged advantage and walked into her kill zone on purpose.

Because the only way to understand a Deathclaw… was to fight like one.

She lowered her body, tail swinging wide, and charged.

And I ran in to meet her.

She came in low, faster than something her size had any right to move. The earth thundered beneath each stride, claws tearing into the soil for purchase. She wasn't trying to catch me.

She was trying to erase me.

I veered left at the last second. Not back—around. Her right arm swung wide in a backhand that would've shattered my spine. I ducked under it, momentum throwing me into a roll that burned along my wounded arm. I came up fast, off balance, inside her reach.

I slashed.

The machete caught flesh just beneath the ribs—hot, thick muscle. The blade bit deep but didn't stick. She flinched, but it wasn't pain. It was reflex. Like a horse shaking off a fly.

Her tail whipped sideways.

I saw it a half-second before it hit and twisted with the blow. It clipped my hip hard, sent me staggering, half-spinning. Pain bloomed sharp in my ribs, but I kept my feet. Had to.

She pivoted with terrifying control, claws already rising. She wasn't brute-forcing this. She was fighting. Calculating. Pressuring me like a grappler in a pit.

I brought the revolver up and fired point-blank into her collar.

The shot rang out like thunder, the kick hammering into my hand. It tore into flesh, deep—but not disabling. She snarled and swiped.

I dropped.

Flat onto my back as both claws raked the air above where my head had been. Her momentum carried her forward two paces. I scrambled back in the dirt, boots dragging for traction. She turned with a snarl, smoke still rising from her scorched legs.

I got one knee under me. Fired again.

The round caught her just under the jaw. A clean hit. Bone split. She reeled—staggered two steps sideways, blood spraying from the wound in a fan across the dirt. Not enough to kill.

But it registered.

She snapped back around, faster this time. No build-up. No charge.

A downward claw came like a guillotine.

I caught it with the flat of the machete—barely. The force drove me to my knees, my arm buckling under the weight. The edge sparked against bone as the claws ground down, and I twisted with everything I had, throwing my shoulder into a side roll that just cleared her reach.

My chest heaved. The world narrowed to breathing and reaction.

Every second she wasn't on top of me was one I'd earned with blood and noise.

She lunged again.

I didn't dodge this time. I stepped in.

Left shoulder dipped. Machete rose in a diagonal arc across her wrist, slicing deep across the soft joint between claw and forearm. She shrieked—real pain this time.

But she didn't retreat.

She dropped low and slammed her shoulder into me like a battering ram.

I flew.

My back hit a fallen log with a crack that knocked the air out of my lungs. I tasted blood. Couldn't hear. Couldn't think.

She turned, steam rising off her flanks.

And I forced myself to stand.

One more second.

One more step.

One more breath.

Because if I stopped—for even a moment—she'd finish what she started.

She came at me again—no patience, no buildup, just raw force bearing down with every step.

I didn't back up.

I drew the revolver and fired.

Once. Twice. Three times. The shots cracked through the clearing like whip cracks, each round slamming into flesh, sparking off bone, driving her just slightly off rhythm. She grunted, pushed through them, but I could see it now.

They landed.

Not deep enough to kill, but enough.

Enough to hurt.

So I kept shooting.

Four. Five. Six.

I reloaded without thinking, thumb flicking open the cylinder, speed-loader snapped in from my belt, barrel slammed shut.

The weapon barked again.

Seven. Eight. Nine.

I wasn't worried about wasting ammo.

Not anymore.

While I'd been training with Jorta, getting thrown to the ground and rebuilt from the legs up, I'd handed off every bullet I had to Ubba. Told her to study them. Dismantle them. Learn whatever she could. The revolver had been empty for days.

But the perk I'd gained—whatever force ruled this strange system of mine—it didn't care why the bullets were gone. Only that they weren't in my hands.

Ubba only needed fourteen to study.

So when I packed up and headed out for this hunt, I reclaimed the rest—every single round the system had quietly replaced while they were marked as "missing."

Three were gone now—spent during the opening volleys of the fight.

Which meant at that start of this fight I had sixty-nine rounds to spend.

And for once, I was allowed to be reckless.

The revolver kicked again in my palm. Ten. Eleven. Twelve.

The Matriarch shrieked, one claw dragging through the dirt as she tried to close the gap.

I sidestepped, fired again—thirteen—catching her low on the shoulder joint, where one of her burns had melted through a top layer of scale. She faltered. Just a beat.

That was all I needed.

I slid left, reloaded in one smooth motion, and kept moving.

Ubba had said she was using the study rounds to help develop the Boomstick prototype, and she was building a sidearm of her own, one that wouldn't break her wrist on the first shot.

That was fine.

She was learning.

And I was reaping the rewards.

Because this wasn't a game anymore.

This was a war of attrition.

And for once?

I had more bullets than fear.

I had just lined up another shot when she lunged.

There was no feint this time. No pacing. Just pure, sudden violence. Her right arm came down in a savage arc, claws flashing through smoke and firelight.

I twisted away, but not fast enough.

Her talons raked across my chest—four burning lines torn through armor and into skin. The force of it spun me, boots skidding through ash and blood-slick soil. I hit the ground hard, breath knocked out of me, pain searing through every nerve.

If I hadn't jumped back when I did, those claws would've gone deeper.

She hadn't just tried to wound me.

She'd tried to gut me.

Straight across the stomach, low and fast. A killing blow. The kind that ends fights and leaves nothing to salvage. I'd seen what those claws could do to a bison. I'd nearly become another pile of intestines cooling in the red dirt.

I staggered up, chest plate torn, blood already soaking into the padded undersuit. The stimpak earlier had patched muscle and nerve, but it couldn't undo fresh trauma. Every breath felt like it was dragging razors through my lungs.

She advanced again, slower now, shoulder scorched, jaw bleeding, but eyes still locked on me with the same fury as before.

Not tired.

Just focused.

And I knew I had maybe seconds before she tried again.

No more mistakes.

No more clean wounds.

The next one would end me.

She came at me again, claws dragging deep grooves in the earth, tail snapping behind her like a whip made of bone and rage.

I didn't run.

I didn't flinch.

I shifted.

Low. Controlled. Centered. I moved like Jorta had taught me—not to escape, but to shape the space between us. I let my steps slide with hers, let my weight sink into the earth just enough to make it feel like I belonged there. Like I wasn't prey. Like I was present.

That was Ghost Pressure.

Not a stance. Not a trick.

A declaration.

I let her close the distance again—but this time, I was ready.

She swung with her left claw, low and wide. I stepped inside the arc, turning my body with it, letting the motion flow around me. Her elbow joint passed inches from my face. I saw the tension in the muscle, the thick scar over the socket.

And I struck.

I jammed the machete upward in a tight, snapping arc—right into the joint.

As the blade hit, my thumb pressed the trigger on the grip.

The shock module fired.

A pulse of compressed energy surged through the edge of the blade, crackling up into the Deathclaw's limb. Electricity screamed across muscle and tendon. She howled—a deep, guttural noise that rattled my bones—and her arm spasmed violently, claw twitching mid-strike.

Her entire left side staggered, momentarily crippled by the blast.

I followed it with a step-back and a slash across her thigh, hitting another soft point Jorta had drilled into me during endless hours of correction. The machete cut deep. Real deep. Tendon, maybe even bone.

She reeled.

I didn't celebrate.

I just breathed, adjusting my stance, shoulders squared, feet light.

Ghost Pressure wasn't about dominance.

It was about control.

And for the first time in the fight, I had it.

I barely had time to adjust my footing before she surged forward again—faster than before, driven by pain, by fury, by something deeper than instinct.

Her head snapped forward, jaws wide, and she bit down on my right shoulder.

The force of it was like getting caught in a press. Her teeth sank deep—through armor, through muscle, scraping bone. I screamed, not because of the pain—I was already past pain—but because I felt something give.

Then she whipped her head sideways, violently, like a predator shaking the life out of prey.

My body flailed helplessly in her grip, bones grinding, blood spraying from the torn plates of my shoulder. And just as suddenly as she'd grabbed me, she let go—flung me like garbage.

I hit the dirt hard, but didn't even have time to roll before her tail slammed into my midsection like a hammer.

Everything went white.

I felt myself tumble—once, twice—then bounce, then skid across the blighted soil like a ragdoll. Something cracked. Might've been my ribs. Might've been the tree I smashed into with the full weight of my back.

The impact knocked the breath out of me. I slid down the bark and hit the roots in a sprawl, limbs shaking, ears ringing.

I couldn't move.

I couldn't breathe.

Blood dripped steadily down my arm. My right shoulder felt half-separated, useless, and burning.

She didn't press the attack right away.

She stood there in the clearing, smoke rising from her thigh, her injured arm twitching, her chest heaving with every labored breath. She was bleeding—but so was I.

Badly.

The fight wasn't over.

But it was tilting.

Fast.

I could barely breathe.

The taste of blood was thick in my mouth, my right arm limp at my side, ribs screaming with every twitch. The bark behind me was shattered from the impact. The HUD flickered in and out. My lungs felt crushed. My vision blurred.

Too slow.

Too weak.

Too human.

And then something shifted inside me—deeper than the pain, deeper than the fear.

The bloodline responded.

Not instinct. Not adrenaline.

The Kure Clan Secret Technique: Removal.

The surge came without fanfare, but not without cost. Power flooded into my body like a switch had been thrown deep inside my brain. Every nerve lit up. My muscles clenched so hard I thought my bones might crack from the inside.

My skin darkened—not just from bruises or blood, but from something deeper. A shade of red-violet spread across my arms, my chest, the exposed skin around my jaw. My veins bulged, thick and twitching beneath the surface. The blood vessels pumped like overclocked hydraulics, each pulse pushing more strength into limbs that moments ago had barely functioned.

This wasn't a second wind.

This was Removal—the ancestral art of the Kure, passed through generations of selective breeding to produce a body capable of accessing more than the normal 30% of its muscular strength. I wasn't just ignoring pain now.

I was overriding the limits that had once defined what my body could endure.

Behind my visor, the HUD recalibrated. I caught a glimpse of my reflection in a shattered lens fragment.

Two black orbs stared back.

Not fear.

Not rage.

Just intent.

I moved my left hand. The machete felt lighter. The blade seemed to hum in my grip. My right arm twitched, then seized.

Pain shot up from the joint like lightning. For a second, I thought it was locking up again. Then something shifted. A sickening pop echoed across my ribs, and I let out a sharp breath through clenched teeth as my shoulder snapped back into place.

Not healed.

Just reset.

I staggered, bracing myself against the tree trunk behind me. My vision blurred for a moment, but the pressure inside my body held steady—veins still bulging, muscles still feeding off the unnatural rhythm of Removal.

I wasn't using it at full capacity.

Not yet.

Jorta had warned me that real strength wasn't about opening the floodgates all at once—it was about control. Right now, I was pushing maybe twenty-five percent of what the Kure bloodline could give me. Just enough to force the limiters off. Just enough to move like I wasn't broken.

And it was enough.

My legs felt stable. My balance returned. My right arm ached with every pulse, but it moved.

I could fight.

The Matriarch paced across the clearing, her claws cutting shallow furrows in the dirt with each step. Her eyes never left me. She felt it—something primal in her, something older than her own rage—recognized the shift.

I wasn't limping anymore.

I wasn't running.

I was standing. Bleeding. Breathing.

Ready.

I tightened my grip on the machete. The revolver was still in my right hand, warm and loaded.

I shifted my weight forward.

This time, it was my turn.

The Matriarch stopped pacing. Her nostrils flared, head tilting slightly, jaws parting just enough to draw a slow breath through the clearing.

She felt it.

Not the pain. Not the burns. Not the blood.

The pressure.

The air had changed.

She wasn't ancient. She wasn't legend. She was recent—just two decades removed from the lab that birthed her kind. The Deathclaws weren't forged in myth. They were built in silence, shaped by terror, and tested by violence. They didn't rise slowly over centuries—they exploded into the world, claw-first, carving their place as apex predators in under a generation.

She was the top result.

The Matriarch. Designed to survive. Engineered to kill.

But what stood across from her now wasn't prey.

It was a rival.

Rion. Human on the outside. But something else now walked under his skin.

Kure blood.

Not laboratory-born. No syringes or DNA edits. Just generations of brutal refinement—bloodlines hardened through war, bred to do one thing: destroy.

And she knew it.

This wasn't the same opponent she'd been tearing apart moments ago.

Then Rion moved.

Concentration hit like a trigger pull, and time fractured into clean edges. Every twitch of her tail, every coil of muscle before a strike—it all slowed, stretched, revealed itself.

He launched.

The earth exploded beneath his boots, dirt and rot torn apart by sheer force. He wasn't running—he was firing, body loaded with kinetic intent, blade low, gun tight.

She reacted—just a hair too slow.

Rion slipped past her first swipe, ducked under the second, and slammed his shoulder into her scorched flank. She snarled and turned, but he was already spinning, moving with the rhythm Jorta had beaten into him over days of pain and dirt and repetition.

Ghost Pressure guided his steps. The Kure's Removal powered his limbs.

This wasn't instinct fighting instinct.

It was weapon versus weapon.

Death made flesh.

And for the first time in the fight, the Matriarch wasn't winning.

She turned toward me, jaw dripping blood, muscles flexing as she squared up again. But her left arm was still spasming. The earlier shock from the machete hadn't faded. Every movement in that limb lagged half a beat behind the rest of her body. It wasn't just wounded—it was compromised.

I shifted left, stepping into her blind arc. She was massive, but that size worked against her when one side didn't respond. I moved with purpose, not speed—rhythm and control, every step angled and deliberate. This was what Jorta had meant by reading pressure. By owning space.

My machete came up and then down, driving deep into the meat of her left side just beneath the ribs. The blade slid between muscle cords, cutting high, sharp, and fast. She roared as the edge bit in, a real scream this time—pain, not fury.

Her right arm jerked up in retaliation, a wide, arcing blow that could take my head off.

But I was already in motion.

The revolver in my right hand came up, barrel steady. I pulled the trigger.

The first shot punched into her shoulder.

The second slammed into the bicep.

The third struck just above the elbow, where the tendons were most exposed.

Each shot kicked like a hammer, but I didn't stop.

The fourth round hit hard, cracking something beneath the skin.

The fifth made her snarl and stagger.

The sixth locked the arm entirely.

Her swing collapsed mid-motion, the limb spasming, muscles refusing to obey. Blood sprayed from the wounds, hot and thick, painting the dirt between us. Her right side dropped half a foot as she tried to recover her balance, but the damage was done.

I yanked the machete free from her left flank and stepped back, blade dripping.

She wasn't charging anymore.

She wasn't towering over me.

She was slowing.

For the first time, the Matriarch looked mortal.

She staggered again, blood pouring from her shoulder and side. Her arms faltered, trying to lift, trying to reset, but the balance was gone. She was still a monster—still lethal—but not whole anymore. Not fast enough. Not strong enough to stop what came next.

I closed the distance in two steps. My boots tore through the scorched dirt, and I jumped.

My left hand locked around one of her horns. Then the right.

She reared back with a roar, claws jerking upward to tear me off, but I was already on her, legs wrapped around her torso, knees driving into her chest as I pulled her head forward with everything I had. My grip locked just below the horn ridges. I twisted hard, trying to wrench her head sideways.

She screamed again, louder this time, tail whipping and claws flailing. Her left arm twitched uselessly, her right barely rose before faltering mid-swing. Her legs kicked out, but I rode it. I twisted harder, feeling the deep pop and grind of muscle fighting back.

Her claws scraped my side, tearing fabric, biting into my armor. I felt the edge of one drag across my ribs but it didn't land clean. Her strength was still there, but her control was slipping. And I wasn't letting go.

This wasn't a technique.

This was a contest of dominance. Of will.

I twisted again, my body screaming with the effort. The Matriarch slammed her shoulder into a tree, trying to crush me, but the angle was off. She missed by inches, and I countered the movement, dragging her skull back into alignment with raw force.

Then something changed.

The roar died in her throat. Her limbs jerked, then hesitated. Her claws didn't slash—they hovered, twitching, uncertain. Her breath came faster, not in rage, but panic.

I felt it ripple through her.

Fear.

It wasn't instinct or pain. It was fear—raw, cold, and real. Not the fear of losing territory or survival. The fear of facing something that wasn't supposed to exist. Something that, by all reason, should've died already.

Something worse than her.

For the first time since she'd torn her way out of whatever lab-grown pit she'd been born in, the Matriarch faced something that fought like she did.

And she realized she wasn't the only apex left in the world.

She was in the grip of a destroyer.

And I wasn't letting go.

There was a moment where everything held still.

Her claws hovered inches from my face, trembling but unable to close. Her legs twitched, one dragging through the dirt as if trying to find ground that wasn't there. Her breath came in short, ragged bursts. My arms were locked around her horns, every tendon in my body screaming, my fingers shaking from the pressure.

Then came the CRACK.

Loud. Final.

A deep, wet snap that echoed across the clearing and silenced the world around it.

The Deathclaw Matriarch went limp.

Her entire body collapsed in on itself, all at once. The tension vanished from her limbs. Her claws fell to her sides. Her head dropped forward, dead weight in my hands. I let go and jumped back as her massive frame crashed to the ground, landing with a heavy, bone-jarring thud that shook the roots beneath my feet.

Dust swirled around her corpse. Heat still rolled off her body. Blood pooled slowly beneath her, dark and thick, soaking into the red soil that had once been hers.

I stood over her, chest heaving, arms burning, blood running down my ribs. The revolver was empty. My shoulder was torn. The machete was dull and sticky in my hand.

But I was still standing.

She wasn't.

And for the first time since I entered this cursed blighted hell, the clearing was quiet.

I stood there a moment longer, staring at the body, heart still hammering in my chest.

Then I let it go.

Removal peeled back like a weight slipping from my bones. The tension drained from my limbs, my muscles loosening as the pressure retreated. The pulsing in my veins slowed. The red-violet hue in my skin began to fade, and the bulging vessels flattened beneath the surface once more.

I exhaled, long and shaky, like I'd been holding that breath the entire fight.

Then the pain hit.

Without the flood of strength to drown it out, every injury came roaring back—my right shoulder ached like it had been torn out and jammed back in, my ribs throbbed with each breath, and the deep claw marks along my side burned with raw fire.

I dropped to one knee and opened the stim compartment on my belt.

Two vials left.

I jabbed one into the side of my ribs, feeling the cold rush of the serum spread under the skin. The chemicals acted fast—cool, numbing, then searing heat as muscle began to knit and torn skin flexed back together.

My breath caught as the shoulder wound tightened. I forced myself to keep still, then switched to the second stimpak. This one went into my upper arm, just below the gash. The hiss of the injector gave way to a deep, pulsing throb, then a slow easing of tension.

The cuts closed first—ugly and puckered, but sealed. The shoulder followed, bones settling with faint cracks as tissue rewove itself, locking everything back into place.

It wasn't perfect.

But I could move again.

And more importantly—I was alive.

I leaned against a broken tree trunk, staring at the Matriarch's body. The last traces of heat still rose off her back, mixing with the smoke from burned blight and blood-slick soil. The clearing had gone quiet again. It wasn't peace. It was aftermath.

My breathing had slowed. The rush was gone. My limbs still felt heavy, but not from strain. It was the come-down. The part no one talked about. The part after Removal.

It had worked. That much was clear.

The strength had been real. The speed. The precision. It let me close the distance. It let me move like something else. Like a weapon instead of a man. It gave me what I needed to win.

But it had also pushed me too far.

I thought about the moment I grabbed her horns. The force I used. The sheer aggression behind it. At the time, it felt like the right call. Now, standing here, I could see it for what it was—reckless.

What if her arm hadn't locked up? What if she had enough strength left to bring her claws up just once? She could have gutted me. Split me open from hip to chest while I was still twisting her skull. I wouldn't have been able to stop her. I wouldn't have had time to react.

That wasn't strategy. That was gambling with my life.

Removal didn't just push the body. It blurred the line between instinct and judgment. It made everything feel possible. And in a fight like this, feeling unstoppable could get you killed faster than being outmatched.

I looked down at my hands. They were still shaking. Not from fear. From strain. The kind of deep fatigue that stimpaks didn't fix.

I had survived. Barely.

Next time, I'd have to be smarter. Strong wasn't enough.

And Removal—for all its power—wasn't something I could afford to rely on.

Not without consequence. Not without control.

I stayed still for a while, letting the ache settle into my bones. My muscles throbbed with the deep, dull pain that only came after Removal—like the strain had soaked into the marrow.

The power was real. That much was undeniable. I had felt it in every movement, every strike. The way the world slowed down when I committed, the way my body stopped asking for permission and just moved.

But it wasn't mine.

Not really.

This body had Kure blood in it. I'd felt that truth the moment the veins darkened, the moment the strength surged and the pain was burned away. The genes were there. The inheritance was baked into the tissue.

But I wasn't raised Kure.

There was a difference. A reason the Kure didn't just go around sleeping with whoever they wanted to spread their bloodline. Power without structure wasn't worth anything. It was dangerous. Sloppy. Untrained.

The Kure raised their children in the clan. Trained them from the moment they could walk. Drilled discipline into the same limbs they taught to break bones. They didn't hand out their legacy—they built it.

What I had was a gift.

But it was unearned.

And if I wasn't careful, it would destroy me just as easily as it could save me.

This power didn't make me special.

It made me responsible.

I stood over her body one last time.

The smoke had stopped rising. The twitching had long since faded. The ground around her was soaked in blood and ash. She wasn't just dead—she was finished.

I tapped the Nanoboy on my wrist.

The device hissed as the compression field activated, blue light curling out in slow spirals around her massive frame. It didn't try to scan the body. It just took it—segment by segment, dissolving claw, limb, and horn into compressed mass and vanishing them into the inventory slot like it was storing a bundle of rope instead of a thousand-pound apex predator.

When the last piece disappeared, I felt the weight shift in my spine.

The suit compensated, but only just. My legs adjusted automatically, stance widening by instinct.

The HUD blinked.

NANOBOY STORAGE: 476.2 lbs / 500 lbs

WARNING: Load nearing limit. Movement penalties may apply.

I rolled my shoulder once. Everything ached. My breathing was still heavy. My ribs still complained with every exhale. I should've turned back. Rested. Reached for camp.

But instead, I turned toward the hollow.

I walked forward.

The mouth of the nest was still open, its interior draped in thick shadows and low heat. The smell hit me a few feet in—blood, rot, old meat, and the sharp copper tang of oxidized steel. It wasn't unbearable, but it wasn't clean. This was a place that had seen things. A place that wasn't meant for people.

I stepped inside anyway.

I didn't come this far to leave without seeing what she'd kept.

The air inside the nest was thick, damp, and foul with the scent of old blood and burned plant matter. My boots cracked over scattered bones as I stepped forward. The floor was a mix of dirt, dried gore, and torn scraps of armor. Bits of ruined gear littered the ground—broken visors, buckled plates, tools snapped in half. The Matriarch hadn't collected these things for curiosity. She had dragged them here as trophies. Leftovers from everything that failed to kill her.

At the far end of the chamber, nestled in a ring of torn roots and dried vines, sat the nest.

The nest sat at the back of the chamber, quiet and heavy with heat. Its edges were packed with mud, dried moss, and tangled roots. Bones lined the outer rim like makeshift fencing. In the center, resting in a shallow cradle of scorched earth, lay five Deathclaw eggs.

Each one was the size of a helmet, dark and smooth with a faint gloss under the light from my shoulder lamp. No cracks. No movement. Just still, coiled life.

I stepped in slowly, chest still aching, body sore from the fight. She was gone. The Matriarch—the apex of her kind, the terror of these hills—was dead. That meant the nest was mine.

She lost. I won.

That was the law.

I crouched beside the eggs, resting my hands on my knees. They were warm to the touch—alive. They hadn't been abandoned. They'd been protected. Right up until the moment she couldn't anymore.

Just because a species was dangerous didn't mean it had the right to multiply unchallenged.

I tapped the Nanoboy and tried to store one of the eggs. The screen blinked red.

Error: Organic Lifeform Detected. Storage Denied.

Of course. Living things couldn't survive the compression field.

I exhaled and shifted, pulling a coil of reinforced mesh netting from my satchel. It was meant for hauling salvage or restraining broken machine parts, but it would hold.

One by one, I bundled the eggs in cloth and anchored them in the net. It wasn't perfect, but it would carry. I tied the sling tight and looped it over my shoulder. The weight dragged at my posture, but not enough to stop me.

Five eggs. Alive. Heavy. And mine.

With the eggs secured and bundled across my back, I turned toward the last part of the nest—the hoard.

It wasn't clean. It wasn't organized. But it was deliberate.

Scattered across a shallow recess near the rear wall was a loose mound of things the Matriarch had chosen to keep. Not out of sentiment. Not out of understanding. Just instinct. The same way crows built nests with bottlecaps or wolves dragged bones into dens.

Most of it was tribal.

Old spears—hafts splintered, tips blackened from use. Bladed clubs, some still stained. Shattered bone armor from smaller clans, painted in faded war glyphs. There were necklaces made of teeth, cracked masks, wristbands, leather wrappings, and the occasional metal plate hammered flat and scorched around the edges. Some of it was bloodied. Most of it broken.

But all of it was kept.

I moved through it slowly, careful not to disturb anything I didn't have to. Some of the gear still bore Kansani symbols—likely from Ashmarked who never returned. Others I didn't recognize. Smaller tribes, maybe. One breastplate had been carved with a bird glyph I hadn't seen before. I brushed off a tag—nothing useful. Just more silence.

Then I saw it.

Tucked halfway under a broken war club and a tangle of melted leather straps—not tribal. Sleek. Clean. Wrong shape. Too modern.

I crouched and pulled it free.

It was a Focus.

Black finish. No paint. Factory edges still sharp. I turned it over. The serial tag was engraved beneath the surface coating.

Definitely Enclave.

I tapped my own Focus and scanned it. The result flashed in my HUD almost immediately:

ENCLAVE UNIT – CLASSIFIED MODULE – DEEP FIELD RESEARCH PROTOCOL 4C / ZONE DESIGNATION: "BLOODROOT HILL"

Status: Last Active: 143 days ago

User Status: DECEASED

Cause of Death: Cervical Fracture / Massive Tissue Loss

Origin: Enclave Operative – Western Division

I sifted through what was left of the operative. The armor plating was warped and half-scorched, but the underlayer was intact—military-grade compression weave, Enclave-stitched. Reinforced. Durable.

Exactly what I needed.

My own suit was torn in places. The gashes along my ribs were already crusted with dried blood. My right shoulder had been torn open, the mesh beneath exposed and fraying.

I crouched and gathered up what remained of the Enclave suit rolled it up and stuffed it into the nanoboy

Then I turned my attention back to the Focus.

I synced it with my own wireless transfer. The data download started slow, then hit full speed as the feed unpacked from the device's encrypted storage.

I watched the file list flicker across my HUD.

Field Logs. Observation Data. Blight Records. Cultural Tags.

Kansani: behavior patterns, estimated numbers, mobility charts.

Legion: entry routes, forward scout reports, known leaders.

Blight Anomaly: environmental scans, toxin profiles, atmospheric deformation. Notes flagged in red. "Not natural. Structure shifting beneath fungal layer. May not be organic in origin."

There were logs about past tribal movements, unsent reports on missing operatives, and one file—half-complete—marked simply:

ENCLAVE OUTPOST [REDACTED] – PROXIMITY SIGNAL FOUND – COORDINATES ENCRYPTED

I tapped the file.

That was as far as I got.

The Focus buzzed once—short and sharp—and then the data stream cut out. My HUD flashed a warning:

Unauthorized Access Detected. Security Protocol Initiated.

The screen blinked white, then black, then restarted.

Factory reset.

I pulled it from the sync clip and checked the shell. No damage. Still powered. Just clean—like it had never held anything at all.

It would still function. Still run scans. Still record. Still sync with another user. I could keep it as a backup, or I could pass it on—maybe to Sula we could coordinate movement, or to Ubba she cold do a lot with it.

I store it in the Nanoboy. I'll have to weigh the pros and cons for who gets it.