Silence returned to the raider camp, but it was a new kind of silence. The old silence of the mountains was one of wind and stone. This was the thick, heavy silence of the abattoir, broken only by the crackle of a few dying fires and the drip of blood on hard-packed earth.
Wolfen stood amidst the ruin he had authored. He moved with a methodical, almost artistic purpose, not of revulsion, but of utility. He dragged the bodies of the fallen raiders—the hard men who had thought themselves kings of this small, brutal world—and began to stack them. It was not a pyre, nor a monument to his own ego. It was something far more primal. He arranged them, limb and torso, into a macabre throne. A seat of power fashioned from the flesh of his enemies, a stark declaration to the coming audience of what awaited them.
He settled onto the gruesome chair, the cold of settling death seeping through his clothes. He rested his elbows on the knees of a dead man, steepled his fingers, and waited. The bringer of balance, seated upon a scale of his own making.
He didn't have to wait long.
The sound began as a distant thrum, a vibration felt in the bones before it was heard by the ears. It grew swiftly into a deafening roar that shattered the mountain calm. A massive, matte-black helicopter, devoid of any markings, descended like a malevolent dragonfly. It didn't land so much as hover, its downdraft whipping up dust and ash, flattening the tents and stirring the robes of the dead.
The side door slid open. Figures emerged, dropping the ten feet to the ground with impacts that cratered the earth. They fanned out, a gallery of living nightmares, each one a testament to the Architect's blasphemous imagination.
There was the Brute, a hulking form with one arm grotesquely swollen and terminating in a single, massive, cleaver-like blade of bone and steel. Another, the Whip, had tendrils of prehensile, metallic flesh sprouting from its back, each one tipped with a razor-sharp barb that writhed in the air like serpents. A third, the Forge, possessed four powerfully built arms, each wielding a different brutalist weapon. One looked like a miniature kaiju, its skin a patchwork of thick, rocky hide, with a spiked tail that lashed restlessly. Their forms were a symphony of enhanced killing potential.
But Wolfen's eyes, cold and assessing, slid past them. They were the chorus line. His gaze fixed on the one who stood apart.
He looked… almost normal. Humanoid, of average height and build, clad in simple, dark combat gear. He had no visible mutations, no external weapons. He was the still point in the storm of monstrous forms. And that made him the most dangerous of all. He was the Conductor.
The Conductor didn't speak. He didn't need to. He simply raised a hand and made a subtle, almost lazy gesture with his fingers.
Nine of the creations obeyed. They moved not as individuals, but as a single, coordinated organism. The Brute charged, its blade-arm carving a furrow in the ground. The Whip's tendrils shot forward, seeking to entangle and pierce. The Forge closed from the flank, four weapons spinning in a blur of lethal intent. The others followed, a tide of engineered death.
Wolfen exploded from his throne of corpses to meet them.
The fight was not a dance; it was a demolition. Wolfen moved like a force of physics, his every motion calibrated for maximum destruction. He ducked under the Brute's sweeping cleaver, the wind of it ruffling his hair, and drove his fist into the creature's elbow joint. The sound was a wet, explosive crack. The Brute roared, its weapon-arm now hanging useless. But a barbed tentacle wrapped around Wolfen's ankle, yanking him off balance. A hammer from the Forge slammed into his ribs. He felt the impact, a jarring thud that would have pulverized the organs of a lesser being. He grunted, spinning with the force, using the momentum to deliver a kick that shattered the jaw of a sleek, canine-like attacker.
They outnumbered him. They injured him. A gash opened on his cheek from a glancing blow. Another tentacle scored a line of fire across his back. He was bleeding, his clothes tearing. But he was Wolfen Welfric.
He grabbed the barbed tentacle wrapped around his ankle, his grip fusing the metallic flesh. With a roar of tearing cables and bone, he ripped the entire appendage, along with a chunk of the Whip's torso, from its body. In the same motion, he swung the twitching mass like a flail, smashing it into the face of the four-armed Forge, sending it stumbling back.
A moment of hesitation. A microsecond where the nine creations reassessed, their programming struggling with the reality of a prey that fought back like a natural disaster.
It was all the opening he needed.
He blurred forward. His hand, fingers rigid, shot out like a piston, piercing through the rocky hide of the mini-kaiju and closing around something vital deep within its chest. He pulled, and a still-beating, crystalline heart came out in a shower of ichor. The creature collapsed. In the same breath, he spun, his other hand forming a blade of solidified air that swept through the neck of the canine-creature, decapitating it cleanly.
Two of them. Dead in an instant.
He stood panting slightly, blood trickling from his wounds, the bodies of two Architects' masterpieces cooling at his feet. He looked at the remaining seven, a wild, ecstatic light in his pale eyes.
He threw his head back and laughed. It was not the soft, amused chuckle from the tent. This was a full-throated, unhinged roar of pure, undiluted joy.
"HAHAHA! YAHAHA! COME AT ME! DON'T STOP! ALL OF YOU! HAHAHA!"
The sound echoed off the mountains, a challenge to the very sky. Then, he spread his arms wide, a bloody, open invitation to oblivion. He looked up at the peaks, a terrifying serenity on his face.
The laugh changed.
It dropped in volume but intensified in pitch, transforming from a roar into a deep, resonant vibration that seemed to originate from the core of the planet itself. It was the same frequency he had used in his cell, the sonic weapon that could kill by proximity. It started deep in his chest, a subsonic hum that made the stones on the ground tremble.
The seven remaining creations froze mid-step. The Brute clutched its head, a low moan escaping its ruined mouth. The Whip's remaining tendrils thrashed uncontrollably.
Then, the blood came.
It started as a trickle from their nostrils, thick and dark. Then their ears began to bleed. Finally, their eyes ruptured, streaming crimson tears down their monstrous faces. They dropped to their knees, then onto their faces, convulsing as the resonant frequency turned their brains to slurry within their skulls. Within seconds, all seven were still, lying in expanding pools of their own haemorrhaged life.
The vibration ceased.
Silence returned, deeper than before. The Conductor, who had not moved, watched it all, his expression unreadable.
Wolfen lowered his arms, his chest heaving. He was bloody, wounded, and radiant with power. He wiped a smear of blood from his lips and grinned at the last one standing.
"Now," he said, his voice hoarse but steady. "It's just us."