The assault on the Warden's dam began not with a shout, but with the whisper of cut throats and the wet thud of suppressed gunfire. Marcus Cross moved through the pre-dawn gloom, a ghost in his own war. His mind, usually a fortress of tactical clarity, was a contested battlefield. The image of his son—his Leo, but not his Leo—was superimposed over every movement, every order he gave. The boy's face, untouched by time, was a living accusation. You failed. You let the world take me. You let her die.
Eighteen years. He had built a monument to his vengeance out of the rubble of his life. Every dead soldier, every scar, every sleepless night was a brick in that monument. And now, the foundation was cracking.
"Flanking position, now!" he barked into his radio, his voice the same gravelly command that had steadied men in a hundred firefights. But inside, a quieter voice whispered: He called you 'insane'.
He watched as his men, hardened veterans who had long since traded their pasts for the simple currency of survival, flowed around the dam's outer defenses. They were good. They were his. But his eyes were drawn to the three anomalies he had unleashed upon this fortress.
Leo was a whirlwind. He didn't fight like a soldier; he fought like a force of nature. His movements were too fast, too strong. He faced down a hulking, bipedal horror that emerged from a blast door, a thing of grafted muscle and grinding hydraulics. The creature swung a fist the size of a cinder block. A normal man would have been paste. Leo flowed under the blow, his own fist—encased in that strange, dark metal—driving upward into the creature's jaw. The sound was not of breaking bone, but of shattering machinery and tearing flesh. He didn't stop to admire his work; he was already moving, a predator onto the next threat. Marcus felt a sickening mix of pride and revulsion. This was his son. This was a monster.
A weapon, he corrected himself, the thought a shard of ice in his heart. A useful one.
Derek had vanished into the superstructure, his mission to plant the charges that would bring this entire concrete monstrosity down. He was the quiet one, the one with the protective streak. Marcus had seen the way he looked at the others, especially the Rostova woman. There was a loyalty there that went beyond survival. It was a weakness, Marcus thought, but one he could almost understand. He had once had such weaknesses.
Then there was Jordan. He moved with a katana that defied physics, a blade of the same impossible black material that seemed to drink the light. Marcus watched him step into a hail of gunfire from two entrenched guards. He didn't dodge. The blade became a blur, a semi-circle of absolute darkness. The bullets didn't ricochet; they were sliced in half, falling to the ground as leaden petals. Jordan advanced, and the guards, their weapons useless, were cut down before they could even register their own deaths. It was a level of skill that was less like combat and more like art. A deadly, terrifying art.
This was the world now. Not a war of man against man, or even man against the dead, but of man against the things man had become. And he, Marcus Cross, was leading men with rifles against gods.
The radio crackled. It was Derek, his voice strained, punctuated by the sounds of a fierce, close-quarters fight. "I'm in the control room! Engaging the Warden! Plant the charges, I'll… I'll keep him busy!"
Marcus's stomach tightened. The Warden was the architect of this region's misery, the source of the culling patterns that had taken his wife. The name was a curse on his lips for a decade. And now a boy—because despite his power, Derek was still a boy to him—was facing it alone.
"All units, converge on the control room! Suppressive fire!" he roared, his paternal instinct for one of his soldiers overriding, for a moment, his grand strategy.
The dam interior became a charnel house. His men fought with the desperate courage of those who had nothing left to lose. They died, their blood adding to the countless gallons that had already been spilled in this endless war. Marcus fought alongside them, his rifle a familiar, comforting weight. Each burst of fire was a syllable in his mantra of vengeance. For you, my love. For you.
They breached the control room just as Derek landed a final, shattering blow on a figure encased in ornate, silver-trimmed armor—the Warden. The armored form crumpled, and Derek, bleeding from a gash on his brow, gave a sharp nod. "Charges are set. Two minutes."
There was no time for triumph. "Fall back! Now! To the extraction point!"
The exodus was a chaotic sprint against time. They piled into the waiting military jeeps, engines roaring to life. As they sped away, putting distance between themselves and the dam, the first explosion tore through the night. It wasn't a single blast, but a series of them, a chain reaction of thunder that walked the entire length of the massive structure. Concrete dust billowed into the sky, and then, with a groan that sounded like the earth itself dying, the dam collapsed. A wall of water, once held back by human arrogance, was now unleashed, scouring the valley below with biblical fury.
The jeeps bounced over the rough terrain, heading south, towards the coordinates Wolfen had provided for the lab. In the sudden, relative quiet, punctuated only by the roar of the engine and the distant, fading rumble of the dam's destruction, the thoughts Marcus had been suppressing rushed in.
He looked at Leo, sitting across from him, his face illuminated by the dashboard lights. He was cleaning his weapon, his movements efficient, calm. He was a stranger.
She is dead. Eaten alive. I put a bullet in her head myself.
He had said those words to shatter the boy, to push away the ghost that threatened to unman him. But now, in the vibrating silence of the jeep, he heard the echo of his own voice, and it sounded hollow. He had built his entire existence around her memory, around the need to make her killers pay. And now he had. The Warden was dead. His fortress was rubble.
So why did he feel nothing?
The vengeance he had craved for eighteen years had tasted like ash. It did not bring her back. It did not fill the hole she had left. It did not change the fact that the last thing he had ever given her was a mercy killing.
And his son… his son was a living reminder of everything he had lost. Every time he looked at him, he didn't see the man he had become; he saw the boy who had been stolen, and the wife who had died searching for him. The pain was too acute. It was easier to see a weapon. It was safer.
The jeeps raced on through the night. They were going to the lab now. To meet the others. To face whatever new horror Wolfen and the women had found. Marcus stared out at the dark, rushing landscape, his knuckles white where he gripped the jeep's frame.
His war was over. The Warden was dead. But as the jeep carried him towards the heart of the true enemy, towards the man who had turned his son into a weapon and the woman who had looked at him with a diplomat's eyes, he realized a terrifying truth.
He had no idea who he was without his war. And the battle for his own soul was just beginning.