chapter 7, Contact

The Upyr directive was clear.

Contain. Pacify. Verify rebel cell activity within District Fourteen.

Non-lethal suppression advised. Civilian assets present.

What they did not account for was the programming.

The drop-pod hit like a verdict. It struck the ruined market square with all the subtlety of divine wrath, cracking pavement and sending tremors through the shattered bones of the city. A pulse of kinetic force cratered the plaza, the blast wave flattening shanty stalls and tossing wreckage like leaves in a gale. Dust bloomed. People screamed.

And from the ruin stepped the weapon.

He was forged black and violet, metal and meat braided by atrocity. Plasteel plating shimmered in the bloom of emergency floodlights, glossed in ash and the soft sheen of internal lubricants. Steam hissed from his vents like the breath of a dying star. From his forearm unfurled a blade not made but grown, a nanite-forged edge that coalesced like liquid obsidian, still hot from cutting itself free of the pod.

His helm retracted in segments. Just enough to expose the lower half of a face not quite human anymore. His jaw clenched under the grip of a dozen chemical stimulants, each one writhing through his bloodstream with intent. His breath ghosted in the cold. His eyes glowed violet in the smoke.

Command fed him coordinates. Subsurface scans. Heartbeat overlays. Orders. Non-lethal containment. Restraint protocols. Civilian proximity.

He stopped.

Something inside him twitched.

Non-lethal.

That word. That contradiction.

The directive pulsed again through the neural shunt.

Non-lethal only. Confirm, Machine.

The Machine paused. For half a second.

The Neuroloom Parasite surged in protest. The Blackthorn Array mistook the hesitation for insubordination. The inhibitors lagged by less than a second. And that was enough.

Heart rate spike. Vasoconstrictors flooded his chest. Muscle tension surged. Vision rimmed in red. Synapse load hit maximum. Feedback spiraled.

And the containment directive shattered.

He moved.

No, launched.

He blurred through the checkpoint like a black missile, his impact ripping through duracrete walls and powdered steel plating. The first guard barely turned before a talon sheared through his spine. The second reached for a trigger and lost both arms before the scream finished forming in his throat.

The Machine didn't slow.

He did not kill. He removed. Not with fury, but with purpose. Not rage. Function.

Screams scattered in every direction. Automatic fire pinged off his carapace. One round found its way into subdermal plating and cracked bone. It meant nothing. The cortex had already accounted for worse.

A refugee ran. Too slow. The Machine impaled her with a single, fluid thrust, lifted her like a banner, and hurled her corpse into a knot of retreating sentries. They broke apart on impact, limbs tangled with gore and gear.

The lockdown sequence initiated.

He broke it with a punch.

The Blackthorn Array rerouted damage tolerance. The Cortex pulsed. It fed him new kill-loops, prioritizing threats before he even registered motion. He didn't think. He executed. The battlefield became calculus. Every corridor a flowchart. Every target an equation solved with steel and blood.

It was beautiful.

It was a massacre.

District 14, six hours after containment failure

The valkyrie hissed steam as it descended, it's prow blades glinting with the light of the setting star.

The city block below was unsettlingly silent, as if devoid of life, there was no sirens, no distant gunfire. Only the echo of wind through ruined metal could be heard.

Vecht stepped out of the gunship, rifle ready. He didn't speak.

Rorke followed, scanning the rooftops with his visor, vendral lumbered out afterwards, his rotarycannon slung low. Even marik, who never shut up, said nothing. There was nothing to joke about here, last to exit was Himmel and Heiter, Himmel was young, angular, too clean to wear a grenadier's role. Heiter was even quieter than Jex had been, already wrapped in the stillness of someone who knew they'd stepped into something far larger than themselves. Replacing Jex was a wound no one talked about.

The street looked like it had been carpet bombed. Chunks of debris lay strewn across the ground. A checkpoint had once stood where their boots now crunched glass and scorched debris. Nothing remained of it but shredded blast walls and a stain that looked to have been a human torso.

"Fucking hell," Rorke muttered. He wasn't wrong.

Vecht's hand went up. "Advance cautiously."

They advanced carefully, boots skimming through blood pools already turning rust brown under the haze and guns at the ready.

Bodies lay strewn every few meters, torn. Split. Eviscerated. It showed no signs of burn marks, nor plasma and slug casings.

It was as if a beast was the cause of this.

Vendrel knelt beside a corpse and inspected it, it was a child, more specifically, a little girl.

Couldn't have been older than 10, her throat had been slashed and she was still twitching from a leftover nerve impulse, about 6 feet to the left lay a toy.

A stuffed animal.

Jex should've been here to say something soft. Something to remind them that this was still war, and war had rules. But jex was long dead.

Marik pointed toward a wall. "Look."

The impact crater of a drop-pod had caved in part of a hab-stilt. Melted plasteel ringed its edge, nanite discharge, unmistakable. The machine had come down hard.

And then it hunted.

Vecht finally pulled his comm. "Fortress Command. District 14 sweep complete. You were right. We found him."

A pause.

"He's still alive?"

Another pause. Vecht's voice didn't change. "Unclear, there is no sign of him here."

"Scan the area, if you find him, try to capture alive."

"Understood, Fan out!"

The fireteam fanned out inside the crumbling civic building. Wide-open atrium. Shattered plasteel benches. Dust hung in the air like ash. Something about it was wrong. Too cold. Too still.

Rorke broke the silence. "Heiter, you picking up anything?"

Heiter shook his head slowly. "Readings are… inconsistent. Signal interference. Could be residual nanite bleed or…"

He didn't finish the thought. They all knew what else it could be.

Vendral's knuckles flexed on his cannon grip. "Feels like we're walking into a mausoleum."

Marik kicked over a broken chair, and that's when he saw it.

A body, nailed to the ceiling.

Skinned.

Its flesh hung in long strips, pinned like banners across rebar and wire. A Commonwealth uniform—half-torn—clung to what little muscle still clung to bone, displayed in a matter similar to those in a butcher's shop.

"Jesus fucking Christ," Himmel whispered, stumbling back.

The lights flickered.

A clicking noise echoed from above. Like claws tapping metal. Not running. Stalking.

Marik raised his rifle. "Eyes up—"

The corpse twitched. Or rather, what was behind it moved. It dropped like a shadow shedding skin.

It was him.

He landed in the center of the room in a crouch, slow and smooth, plates of blackened metal glinting wetly. The nanoblade wasn't deployed yet—but the claws on his hands were out, each digit sharpened into a scything edge. His jaw was locked tight. He said nothing.

His eyes flicked violet, scanning them one by one.

Heiter stepped back. "It's him. It's really—"

The Machine lunged.

It cleared the distance between the fireteam within a blink of an eye, He was on himmel in less than a second. No noise, nor threat display.

With one fluid swipe, himmel's throat opened in a geyser of blood as the nanoblades raked from jaw to bone.

The claws severed arteries and vocal cords, rendering himmel unable to scream.

The team opened fire.

Sabot slugs sparked off it's armor, some finding it's target, most boring into the wall behind them. But it didn't slow him. He tore through a bench like paper, vaulted up to the second floor, and vanished into the shadows above.

Vecht hauled Heiter back, blood soaking his arms. Himmel lay twitching in the dirt.

"Contact confirmed," Vecht barked into comms, voice hoarse. "It's him. It's worse."

Vendral covered the stairs, barrel roaring once. "What the fuck did they turn him into?"

From above came the sound of tearing metal.

And then a voice, distorted, low, not his

 spliced with static.

"You are… trespassing."