Han-Xiao's visor flickered, tracing the corpse with jittery thermal lines.
"Heat signature… dropping… still dropping…"
Arika lowered her blade, breath steadying just a little.
"…Is it dead?" Yuri asked.
The visor answered for her.
BEEP—BEEP—BEEP.
"REGENERATION SURGE," Han-Xiao snapped. "Core activity rising—fast!"
On the ground, the Colos Variant twitched.
The gaping hole in its chest — the one Kaodin's Magma Tiger Palm had ruptured but not fully destroyed — began to close, slow but deliberate, like something pulling thread through rotten cloth.
Kaodin watched it through half-lidded eyes. He looked hollowed out, body slumped, breath thin.
Han-Xiao swallowed hard.
"Commander… the core dropped by ninety percent, but it hasn't flatlined. There's a residual heat cluster left. Weak — but alive."
Yuri muttered a curse under his breath.
Albert tightened his grip. "So it can get up again."
"Not in one piece," Han-Xiao replied, "but it's rebuilding from whatever's left. Look at this—"
She flicked the feed to Arika's visor. Thin, bright filaments were knitting across ruptured tissue — the same parasite-thread behavior that had almost resealed the core before Kaodin struck.
Arika's jaw locked.
"Yuri, Albert — pull the boy and the tiger back. Behind the barricade. Ken, guard their flank."
She didn't need to check if they moved.
Her blade-whip snapped back into her hand, metal ringing as she dove into the Variant's half-healed cavity. She carved parasite tissue aside in wet handfuls, trying to reach what was left of the core before it reconstituted again.
Yuri scooped Kaodin with practiced care — one arm under the boy's back, the other beneath his legs.
Kaodin tried to speak, but the sound tangled. He sagged against Yuri's chest, drained completely — the aftermath of forcing Dusk, Second Breath, and a full ignition strike through a ten-year-old frame.
Wawa limped onto his lap, spectral body faint and flickering.
"Easy, kid," Yuri muttered as he sprinted for cover. "You already spat in death's face once tonight."
Behind them, the Variant spasmed.
Its chest convulsed in small, grotesque shivers.
Charred flesh fell away and was replaced by fresh, wet fibers bulging outward.
Fragments of melted crystal softened — gelatinous at the edges as the threads sought each other.
It was trying to rebuild the core housing.
Arika carved deeper.
Han-Xiao snapped her visor into full analysis mode and flicked her mid-range thorium assault-caster to burst fire. Blue-white bolts cracked from the muzzle, each one punching into parasite nodes and burning them into spitting pits.
Beside her, Ken planted his boots and steadied his standard-issue SAI thorium blaster with both hands.
Han-Xiao's visor painted target markers across the squad's ocular feeds, and Ken traced each one with short, controlled bursts — carving furious trenches across the Variant's hide.
Every bolt hissed, sizzling into damp mutated flesh, buying Arika seconds she desperately needed.
"We're running out of time!" Han-Xiao yelled.
"Its nerve clusters are lighting up — it's about to go into a frenzy!"
The Colos Variant's limbs jerked violently.
Its head lifted — one eye swollen shut, the other burning with confused, feral heat.
It dragged itself forward in a broken, berserk crawl.
Every movement tore open wounds that tried to reseal even as they ripped.
The sound was a mix of wet suction and bone grinding.
And yet, it persisted — dragging itself toward its original target: the boy and his spectral tiger-cub.
Yuri was halfway to the barricade, boots slipping on wet stone, Kaodin limp in his arms, Wawa draped over him.
Albert threw himself in beside Yuri, greatsword snapping up in both hands just in time to catch the monster's lunging strike.
The tendril hit like a battering ram.
Steel screamed.
Albert's boots skidded, but he held —
greatsword locked against the tendril straining to punch through Yuri and into the boy behind him.
Metal groaned.
Albert's wrists shook.
The thing kept pressing, inch by inch.
Arika dove in, whip-blade cracking across the Variant's neck, parasite cords snapping like wet wires.
Black gel sprayed her cheek, hot and sour.
The Variant jerked once — a stuttering twitch of hesitation.
Just one.
All it bought.
Too damn close.
—
A quill of time before Kaodin released the Twin Pistons into the Colos Variant—
Nyla drifted somewhere between waking and falling, caught under the same red sky she'd seen years ago.
Familiar enough to fool her.
Wrong enough to warn her.
The truck roof trembled above her.
She lay on a crate, canvas slapping softly against metal, watching the sky through a narrow slit.
Lightning flickered once—
but something felt off.
The rain didn't sound right.
Each drop landed with a smeared, muffled rhythm, like she was hearing it through the wrong senses… or through someone else's memory entirely.
Then the warmth around her thickened.
Almost abruptly, that comfort turned into a rush of heat—like she was standing too close to a forge. She pressed both palms against her own skin, half checking if she was burning, half afraid the heat was coming from inside her.
In the middle of that confusion, a single cold drop—knocked off course by another bead of rain—slid down a slanted patch of canvas and fell straight onto the tip of her nose.
Her eyes snapped open.
She jolted awake beneath the wreckage of an abandoned sky-train overpass, rusted pillars jutting like broken ribs into a rain-drowned street.
Collapsed shopfronts—their shattered neon signs sputtering with dying sparks—leaned inward around her like a throat of concrete.
A half-buried convenience mart sat across the lane, its metal shutters torn, its shelves spilling long-rotten goods into the floodwater.
Cold air punched into her lungs.
She dragged in a thin, trembling breath as the world snapped back into place.
The real sky hung above her now—the red moon, the iron-stink wind, the familiar miserable rain.
But a shimmering heat-haze rippled along the street ahead, bending the rainfall unnaturally, and she realized that faint agitation in her chest hadn't come from the dream at all.
Something in the world itself was burning awake.
A small, unwelcome contrast…
yet somehow, against all sense, it carried the shape of hope.
The street trembled—a deep, bone-vibration that didn't belong to weather or any natural disaster she'd ever lived through. The asphalt cracked in fine lines beneath her boots.
A nearby streetlight collapsed onto a flooded sedan.
A cluster of collapsed apartments loomed ahead, their balconies torn open like broken jaws, shadows twitching within.
Something huge was hitting the ground.
Hard.
Pain flared up her left side the moment she tried to stand grab onto something to stand herself up.
She looked down instinctively.
Nothing was there.
Her shoulder was wrapped in a field-seal brace—a slab of semi-rigid polymer clamped around the stump, edges glowing faint blue where the biofoam inside pushed back collapsing tissue. Medic-gel mesh clung to ragged skin, pulsing faint microcurrents to keep her conscious.
Considerably good treatment—for a medic.
If she were still with her former employer, she wouldn't have gotten even this.
She'd have been left to rot if Talgat wasn't around.
Then a flash of memory crawled back—the split-second where she'd shoved the boy out of the tendril's path, the blur of something too fast, too massive, the cold crack of impact—
Then nothing.
Someone had dragged her behind a fallen wall slab and tucked her into a pocket of safety—far enough to keep her out of the butcher's line, but also far enough that she'd lost sight of the fight entirely.
She shoved herself off the stretcher, bracing against the ruined concrete.
Found a crack in the wall just wide enough to see outside—
And there, at the center of the storm:
A boy stood facing the Colos Variant.
The thing towered over the ruined street—
a hulking mass of tendrils and parasite-armored muscle, its posture hunched forward like a predator grown in darkness.
Long, root-like fibers draped from its arms, dragging along broken asphalt.
Red, ember-like eyes glowed deep under a crown of knotted biomass, rain sliding off its grotesque plating in sheets.
Its claws gouged trenches into the street with every shift of weight.
A monster built to erase squads.
And that boy—
Kaodin.
Half his right arm blazed with fire, black tiger stripes burning across his skin like fresh ink searing through flesh.
And then he moved.
Not with punches—
but with a sudden, explosive upward drive of both legs.
He launched from the rubble—pivoting off a wall, springing higher than any child should have been able to—
and both heels slammed into the regenerating chest plate of the Colos Variant, flame-wrapped Qi detonating on impact.
The part nothing else had cracked.
The part even Arika's whip struggled to cut.
The impact wasn't a strike.
It was a detonation.
KRAAANK—THOOM!!
Concrete shook.
The wall beneath Nyla lurched almost an inch.
Dust cascaded like ash from overhead.
The colossal creature jerked—
then toppled sideways, collapsing under its own top-heavy weight as if someone had punched its spine out.
Nyla stared, breath caught somewhere in her throat.
That tiny boy had knocked down something built to devour squads.
And now—
As Kaodin's dusk-state faded, the burning fur along his arm unraveled into swirling Qi strands that coiled around his side. The cluster tightened, compressed, and with a soft shiver of light resolved into a juvenile tiger—blue-furred, black-striped, and unmistakably present. It shook its head once, startled by the sudden weight of its own body, but then the cub also fell alongside its master which currently looking every bit like an exhausted regular ten-year-old as he was, just a boy fighting to help the surrounding people, fighting to survive the day.
A nearby SAI operative sending some signaled toward her superior.
The officer's reaction was instant—sharp, clipped, and edged with panic.
It's not dead. Of course it's not. And I need my…
".385's here… and—God, not again."
Nyla hissed under her breath as her right hand reflexively reached toward the space her left arm should've been. Pain spiked up the phantom limb, quick and mean, and she forced herself not to recoil.
.385 Magnum, baby. A toy against that thing. I need my other—
She dragged a breath, vision swimming as she scanned the rubble around her.
There.
Half-covered under a filthy tarp.
Right against her hip.
Her rifle.
Her AXMC.
.338 Lapua Magnum.
Seven kilos of unforgiving steel she'd dragged across three districts because leaving it behind felt like cutting off another limb.
"Good thing I kept you… even without knowing what fresh hell tonight'd throw at me."
She braced her only arm against the ground and pushed herself upright.
Pain flared white-hot down her left side, buzzing like static chewing through bone—but she locked her jaw and kept moving.
A fallen concrete slab loomed ahead.
Waist-height.
Flat enough.
Stable enough.
Manageable distance… if I don't screw this up.
She hooked her fingers into the broken asphalt and dragged herself forward, boots skidding for traction. Rain-wet grit smeared under her knees as she crawled, keeping her profile tight to the ground. A jut of rebar tore a scratch across her thigh armor, but she shoved past it, momentum carrying her the last meter.
She slid in behind the slab, tucking her body into its shadow, breath harsh and controlled.
Now her silhouette disappeared from street-level view—exactly what she needed.
The vantage point was perfect: clear line over the corridor, full cover for her torso, solid enough to hold the bipod steady. Her injured shoulder throbbed like molten glass scraping inside bone, but she shoved the sensation into the background.
She set the AXMC atop the slab.
Her fingers moved before thought could catch up—old training overriding adrenaline.
Bipod down.
Locked tight to the concrete.
The rifle settled with a deep, grounded weight.
Magazine in.
Bolt racked.
A single .338 Lapua round slid cleanly into the chamber.
Click.
Clean. Precise.
Comforting.
She pressed her cheek to the stock.
The outside world disappeared.
Only what lived inside the scope mattered now:
The Variant's mangled chest.
The crater Kaodin had left in it.
A faint pulse glowing inside shredded meat.
Yuri — shielding a small, bleeding shape in his arms.
Too much blood everywhere.
Nyla didn't fire.
Not yet.
She tracked.
Watched.
Forced her breath to settle.
Down below, the fight spiraled into panic.
The Variant hurled itself forward in a last-ditch rush.
Its tendrils stabbed into the ground, dragging its bulk faster.
Droplets of acid hissed where they landed.
Its jaw stretched too wide — unhinged, teeth crooked and wet.
Yuri turned his back, shielding Kaodin and Wawa with his own body.
Ken fired controlled bursts, trying to peel it off.
Arika ripped through its neck again, parasite cords snapping like guitar strings.
Han-Xiao burned holes through any node that twitched.
Still it came.
Straight toward the boy.
Nyla exhaled.
Her scope filled the world.
Her heartbeat slowed to a thin, quiet metronome.
She watched the monster through the lens, her mind ticking through the math faster than conscious thought:
Three-twenty… close enough.
Drop's already set.
Wind's dead — rain's falling straight.
Heat shimmer's making the chest jump… but manageable.
There—
the chest plate cracked a fraction wider every time it lunged.
A heartbeat of vulnerability.
Nothing more.
She shifted her stance—
—but her left arm didn't respond.
For a fraction of a second, everything stalled.
Her muscle memory reached for a limb that wasn't there.
A spike of pain and anger cut through her every slight intent to move her left missing arm—phantom-limb pain.
She locked her torso under the stock, forcing her spine and hips to become the brace her missing arm couldn't provide.
Everything felt wrong — weight, balance, recoil expectation — but she forced her body to obey.
Her finger slid to the trigger.
Wind zero.
Picture steady enough.
and ignoring the piecing pain.
"Come on…" she breathed. "Just once more… show me that heart."
Below, the Variant lunged — ready to crush Yuri and the boy in one strike.
Its chest cavity peeled open.
The core glowed — faint, but exposed.
Nyla squeezed.
The AXMC didn't fire — it detonated.
A concussive blast hammered the air, shoving rain outward in a sharp expanding ring.
The muzzle flash barked bright, and the shockwave slapped through the ruins hard enough to rattle bent rebar and shake grit loose from broken steel.
Loose debris jumped.
A deep, chest-punching thunder rolled through the hollow buildings.
The recoil smashed straight through her shoulder — violent, honest.
Her whole torso absorbed it: spine locked, hips braced, legs grounding her against the slab.
With only one arm on the rifle, that was the only way to keep from losing it.
She trembled as pain tore down her side, but she endured.
A razor-thin supersonic crack stitched through the rain —
the bullet outrunning its own sound.
The round hit dead-center.
Just a wet implosion —
the core collapsing inward like rotten fruit crushed under a boot.
Regeneration threads immediately sagged.
The Variant froze mid-lunge—
then toppled sideways, skidding past Yuri and Kaodin by less than a meter, gouging a trench in the stone before going still.
Completely still.
Han-Xiao's visor pinged, her voice trembling through the comms.
"Core heat… zero. Parasite pathways… zero. Regeneration… null. Commander… it's over. This time it's really over."
Yuri sagged, still shielding the unconscious boy.
Ken laughed — a raw, disbelieving sound.
Arika let her shoulders finally drop, whip blade slackening at her side.
She followed the shot's line to a lone shape on the ridge:
Nyla.
Rifle braced.
Barrel smoking in the rain.
Their eyes met.
Arika raised two fingers in salute.
Nyla allowed herself a tired grin.
She let the rifle drop and slumped back against the stone, adrenaline leaking out of her in shaky breaths.
"Had to be me," she muttered. "Can't let the kid steal all the glory."
Rain whispered across the broken street, cooling scorched concrete.
Med-droids and field units swept in — quiet, efficient, moving around the survivors.
Arika gave the corpse one last glance, then turned toward the approaching convoy lights.
"Secure the bodies. Tag the core cavity. Han-Xiao, full report. And someone carry that boy properly — he didn't crawl through hell just to be dropped now."
As the team followed orders, the red moon pushed through thinning clouds, its pale light bleeding across cracked stone and cooling steam.