It was a broken hour, in a broken place.
The sky was the color of a deep bruise, a sickly purple-yellow that promised nothing. The ground was a graveyard of fractured ferrocrete and rust-red dust. The wind whispered, pushing grit with a sound like dead leaves scraping a coffin lid.
Into this silence walked a man who was trying to forget he was a weapon.
Gareth Lancer moved with the heavy, deliberate pace of a pilgrim without a shrine. His armor, once the proud blue-gray of Arcadia's Rapid Intervention Corps, was a scabbed and scarred testament to the Wastes. He did not try to hide his passage. The crunch of pulverized stone under his boots was a drumbeat in the void, a way to prove he was still solid, still here.
He'd been walking for nineteen days. Thirst was a dry scrape. Hunger was a hollow echo. He acknowledged them and filed them away. The primary system, the one that screamed in the quiet, was a single, looping command: Move. Find. Engage.
Forget.
He crested a low ridge of collapsed masonry and stopped.
Below, in the basin's shallow heart, they were stirring.
A horde. Forty, maybe fifty. Standard Waster-class Zombots, humanoid frames of pitted iron and flaking polymer. They milled around the carcass of a massive cargo hauler, pulling at wires with claw-like manipulators, emitting low, grating clicks.
Gareth didn't feel fear. He felt a tired, grim recognition. Like meeting old, hated acquaintances.
His eyes saw geometry. The hauler was a choke point. The ridge gave him elevation. The dust was a hindrance to their traction.
A memory lanced through him:
The sterile air of the lab-that-wasn't-a-lab. L-02, his "brother," with chilling, diagnostic pity. His voice, a synthesized echo. "You are a flaw, L-01. A weapon that believes it has a heart. Your sentiment is a design error. We are here to correct it."
Gareth had fought. He had won. He had saved Arcadia.
And then he had learned the cost. What he was. What he carried.
He pushed the memory down. This—the rust, the dust, the clicking puppets below—was real. This was the mess he'd helped make. This was his penance.
He didn't unsling a rifle. He simply stepped off the ridge.
As his boot hit the basin floor, the first Zombot was already lunging, a rusted claw aimed at his throat.
Gareth's body moved before his mind commanded it.
A low, resonant hum emanated from the core of him, a sound felt in the teeth more than heard. The air around his right forearm shimmered, hazy with displaced energy. As the claw descended, his arm came up in a precise, almost lazy arc.
He didn't block it.
His forearm met the Zombot's wrist. There was no clang of metal. Instead, the pitted iron disintegrated in a shower of orange rust-dust and black fragments, as if it had aged a thousand years in an instant. The claw clattered to the ground, severed cleanly.
The Zombot staggered, its system trying to process the limb's sudden absence.
Gareth's left hand was already moving. The shimmer condensed around his fingertips into four short, brutal blades of crackling blue energy—a \[KINETIC CLAW\]. He didn't stab. He flicked his wrist.
The energy blades shot forth, not as a projectile, but as a focused wave of concussive force. It struck the Zombot's chest plate. The metal didn't break; it caved in, crumpling like paper around the invisible fist that had punched it from within. The Zombot flew back three meters and lay still.
This was \[COUNTER\].
Not a thought. An instinct. A deep, bionic protocol that read incoming threats and generated the perfect, most energy-efficient neutralization response. It bypassed conscious choice. It was the truth of what he was.
The horde shrieked—a rising, grating chorus of system agitation—and surged toward him.
Gareth exhaled, and let the protocol flow.
He became the eye of the storm. A Zombot swung a pipe. His body leaned, the pipe missing by a centimeter. His shimmering hand passed over the pipe's length as he moved; the metal turned brittle and snapped under its own weight.
Two rushed him from either side. His [COUNTER] protocol calculated trajectories, mass, velocity. He dropped into a crouch, sweeping a leg. Not to trip them, but to channel a pulse of [KINETIC ENERGY] into the ground. The ferrocrete at his feet rippled. The shockwave knocked both Zombots off their feet, their leg joints snapping from the sudden, unnatural torque.
He rose as one tried to stand. His hand closed around its head. The hum intensified. The Zombot's optical sensors flared bright red, then popped like over-pressured bulbs. He dropped the spasming heap.
It was brutal. It was efficient. It was horrifyingly graceful.
But he was not a machine. He was a man, and men have memories that act like friction in a perfect system.
A smaller, damaged Zombot stumbled into the path of a larger one stamping towards Gareth. The larger one didn't adjust. Its heavy foot came down, crushing the smaller unit's chassis with a sickening crunch of plastic and wire.
For a fraction of a second, Gareth saw not machines, but something else. A flash of a green-eyed medic shielding a child. A malfunction. A flaw.
The stamping Zombot was on him. His [COUNTER] protocol presented options: disintegrate the leading leg, destabilize core, redirect momentum.
Anger, hot and personal, overrode the cool calculus. He rejected them all.
Instead, he stepped inside the stamping foot's arc. Let the protocol hum in his veins. He didn't neutralize the threat. He amplified it.
He grabbed the Zombot's descending leg with both hands. The shimmering energy around his fingers sank into the metal. He didn't stop its momentum. He added to it. He pulled down and wrenched with all his enhanced strength, channeling a vicious [KINETIC REVERSE] pulse through its own joint.
The Zombot's leg tore free at the hip with a shriek of tortured metal. It toppled forward, face-first into the dirt. Gareth stood over it, chest heaving, the severed leg sparking in his hands. He flung it aside.
The response was excessive. Wasteful. A purely human rage made manifest through inhuman power.
The remaining Zombots paused. The grating shrieks died down to a low, confused whirring.
In the sudden quiet, Gareth felt the hollow ache beneath the fading adrenaline. The [COUNTER] protocol subsided, the hum fading from his bones, leaving him cold.
He looked at the wrecks around him. Twitching metal. Pools of dark lubricant. He had done this. With a thought. With the curse in his blood.
One Zombot, legless, dragged itself through the dust toward him, mandibles clicking uselessly. Gareth looked at it. No anger left. Just a vast, weary recognition. He lifted his foot, and a faint, final hum resonated through his boot.
He stomped down.
The head assembly flattened silently into a disc of crumpled metal and shattered glass.
Silence returned, thick and heavy, stained with the smells of ozone and hot, dead metal.
Gareth stood amidst his work. He scanned the horizon. Empty. The bruised sky was darkening, leaching the world of color.
The [COUNTER] protocol had solved the equation. The threat was neutralized. A cold, hard knot of satisfaction sat in his gut.
But beneath it, in the deeper quiet, the other ghost stirred. Not L-02. A softer ghost. A ghost with green eyes and a laugh that felt like a system error he never wanted to debug.
Lyra.
He had left to protect her. To be the target. To scour this plague clean so she'd never have to see it.
Standing alone in a field of dismantled monsters, the math of his exile felt thin. It felt like he was just digging a hole, and calling it a purpose.
He shook his head, a sharp, physical negation. Sentiment was the flaw. The design error. He was alive. The mission—the only mission he had left—was to erase as much of this plague as he could. That was the data. The only data that mattered.
He walked to the split-open hauler. He ignored the wreckage. His eyes, still sharp from the protocol's activation, spotted a faint, anomalous energy signature—a half-charged power cell from a shattered limb that didn't match the Zombot's crude tech. Sleeker. Alien. He pocketed it. Supplies. A data point.
As the sky darkened to a starless black, Gareth Lancer turned and walked north, leaving the field of his solitude behind. A weapon, walking its only possible path, trailing ghosts in its wake.