The cockpit was a dark cathedral of screens and hush. Karl's breath came slow and measured against the VR crown; everything else was noise translated into light: schematics, a soft blue grid that became a map, tiny red pins pulsing like heartbeats. Reginald's ledger lay on the side console — names, addresses, faces. The first pin blinked alive.
Outside, the mech folded itself into speed. The world thinned to soundless streaks of city and highway, then to the pale geometry of a suburb where children used to ride bikes and dogs used to bark at mailmen. Karl watched the houses approach, each roof and garden a small world he'd been told to erase.
He told himself it was not spectacle. It was not revenge for sport. It was consequence.
The first house was small, sun-bleached. The pin on the HUD marked the front garden. Karl toggled a feed: a grainy video from months earlier — the target laughing, a child at their feet. He blinked them away and engaged the mech's weapons suite.
The weaponry in the mech felt clinical; it was code and promise more than blood. When he sent the command, a blue bloom on the HUD became a lance of fire. The projectile screamed from the hull, beautiful and obscene — an arc of engineered force that met the house like a surgeon's incision.
The roof went first. Wood and plaster screamed in a soundless vapor. For an instant there was a tableau: a single kitchen chair suspended midair, a curtain shredding. Then the house was gone in a bloom of white and shadow, a crater smoking where a life had been.
Some targets vanished differently. In one narrow block, a family was removed as if the world itself had swallowed them whole: no blast mark remained, only a patch of still air and an absence that the streetlights kept highlighting. Later, when investigators came — if anyone ever did — there would be nothing to trace. It was as if the mech's nanites had been given another, cleaner instruction: erase the memory itself. No body, no blood, only the quiet that comes after a thing ceases to be.
Not all of them died quickly.
Karl learned the theatrical value of terror as he moved through the list. At an industrial lot, men had once met to trade everything from parts to ideology. Now the lot became a frame. Several unlucky names were dragged — their wrists bound by the mech's grapplers, their bodies hoisted like broken puppets. The public display was deliberate: people nailed to the sides of a gutted office tower, limbs arranged into grotesque proclamations. The building's facade became a message board: faces mangled, pinned, their clothes plastered with the names of those who had ordered their deaths.
Karl watched every panel of it like a surgeon watching a monitor. He felt no joy, only the steady warmth of work done. He told himself the spectacle would deter, that the sight of human flesh arranged like a warning would be a ledger too heavy to bear — that fear could finish what rationed policy and courts had not.
In another neighborhood an entire street vanished under a single ordered strike: a wave of kinetic force that folded brick into itself. He watched the grain of a child's drawing melt on the pavement and felt nothing but the quiet satisfaction of boxes checked. Where some houses went white and crushed under fire, others were quietly unmade down to the nails — no sound, only a ripple as if the world had remembered wrong.
There were moments that caught at the edges of Karl's control. A dog's bark, a neighbor's scream caught on a stray camera feed — a small sound pushed hard into the cockpit, a reminder that his actions had a radius beyond names on a list. For a second, the ledger looked back at him with eyes he could not erase. He let the moment pass. The mech answered his will.
When resistance arrived — hired armed men who had thought themselves safe behind mercenary paywalls — they were met with a different application. Missiles roared from the mech; they detonated in air, a rain of shrapnel that toppled pickup trucks and splintered concrete. The explosions were ugly, immediate; men on the ground became ragdoll silhouettes reduced to frantic motion and then stillness. The display of force left fewer traces on purpose: the wreckage, the scattered paper, the smear of blood, and the final silence.
At the operation's end, Karl banked the mech over the city like a god folding a hand away. He watched the HUD paint over the sites one by one — red icons turning black. The ledger was checked. The pin at the top of the list winked gone. Reginald's voice came through the comms, small and precise: "All locations confirmed. No survivors located at three addresses. Bodies removed from view at four. Two targets displayed publicly at designated coordinates."
Karl did not look away. There was no celebration. No exultation. Only the slow, grinding fact of what he had done.
He thought of his parents' faces one last time — the small, private smile of the moments before the end — and he let the memory sit next to the tableau of rubble and quiet streets. He had burned names and places into the world, carved warnings onto buildings, and emptied houses of the ordinary trinkets that made a life.
When he finally coasted back toward the hangar, the night air stung the cockpit vents. The world below was different: darker in places, absent in others. Somewhere on a ruined block a neighbor would later try to make sense of an empty house and find nothing; a child would wonder why the streetlights flickered at dawn.
In the quiet after, Karl removed the VR crown. Reginald's ledger was closed with a soft click. Outside, far away, alarms would eventually scream; governments would call; markets would tremble. But for the moment the hangar was a small, sealed room holding the exact shape of what had been done.
Karl did not sleep. He sat and watched the screens until dawn, watching those blinking red pins like stars gone out one by one. He had begun his war, and the world already smelled of the burning he'd set in motion.