The Silent City – Central Sector, Collapsed Building. Midday – Post-Skirmish.
A heavy, suffocating silence once again descended upon the ruins of the Silent City. It was a silence that felt heavy, as if the very air was weighted down by the ghosts of a civilization that had once touched the stars. But this time, the silence carried a new, pungent scent: the metallic, copper tang of fresh blood mixed with the acrid, sulfurous stench of spent gunpowder.
On the cracked asphalt of the street below, four elite mercenaries of the Iron Empire lay in grotesque, unnatural positions. Their deaths had been clinical—necks snapped at impossible angles, ribcages crushed by superhuman force, and Achilles tendons severed with such precision that they hadn't even had time to scream. They had been erased from existence in mere seconds, victims of an efficiency that was more demonic than human.
