The first rounds chewed into the concrete in front of him, sparks and dust exploding upward. The stream climbed fast, up his legs, through his torso, armor, bone, flesh disintegrating in a red mist.
He didn't even finish his sentence. The last rounds reached his head. It didn't just break. It fucking vanished.
A wet, concussive pop, and then there was nothing above his shoulders but spray and fragments scattering across the courtyard.
"...fuck youve actually got ammo"
Genesis finally let out a breath like she'd just been handed an Imperial pardon signed in blood and gold. Her shoulders slumped mid-hover, tension bleeding out of her frame in one shaky exhale.
As she did, I eased my finger off the trigger. The minigun didn't stop immediately. It wound down slowly, barrels still spinning, a mechanical predator reluctant to sleep.
They glowed faintly, heat shimmer warping the air around them. Smoke curled lazily from the muzzle in thin gray ribbons, carrying the sharp, oily stink of burnt propellant.
Empty 5 mm casings carpeted the rooftop, piling around my boots like brass snowdrifts. Some were still bouncing, ticking softly as they settled. My ears rang. My hand vibrated with phantom recoil.
Then the shouting below surged louder. Movement. Dozens of them. I didn't think. I didn't aim like a man. I worked like a machine. I squeezed the trigger again, short burst. BRRRRT.
The minigun roared back to life, the sound so deep and violent it felt less like noise and more like pressure. The first Fallen cluster vanished in a spray of red mist and shredded concrete.
I walked the burst sideways, cutting them in half at the waist. Return fire cracked back immediately. Ugly, irregular gunshots. Rounds sparked off the VTOL's wrecked fuselage inches from my head.
Others punched into the rooftop, chips of concrete snapping up against my shins and face. I didn't flinch. I let off the trigger. Shifted my stance half a step. Adjusted elevation. Another burst. BRRRRT.
Three more dropped. One tried to crawl. The next burst erased the idea of him ever having legs.
"LEFT, LEFT BALCONY!"
Genesis yelled, snapping me out of tunnel vision just long enough to pivot. A pair of Fallen leaned out from a partially collapsed buildings shattered window, firing wildly.
Their bullets chewed the air above me. I answered with half a second of fire. They ceased to exist. I released the trigger again. The barrels screamed, spinning hot, eager. I breathed through my nose. Slow. In. Out. Fire. Release. Re-aim. They came in waves. Sixty of them. Maybe more. Rushing from left, front and right. Climbing over rubble and corpses, screaming, firing, dying.
I counted without meaning to. Short burst, five down. Pause. Adjust. Another, seven. A longer burst, ten, gone.
Bullets slammed into the VTOL's armor plating, into the roof behind me, whining past my ears like angry hornets. One clipped the edge of the minigun housing and sparked. I didn't even register it.
With each kill, something inside me sank deeper. The pain? Gone. The fear? Irrelevant. The world narrowed into angles, vectors, timing. The laughter started quietly. A breathy huff at first.
Barely audible under the gunfire. Then a chuckle, bubbling up from my chest like something had finally found the punchline.
"Hey, HEY!"
Genesis shouted.
"Why are you laughing?!"
I didn't answer. I fired again. BRRRRT. Fallen bodies stacked on top of each other in the courtyard below, limbs twisted, torsos shredded, blood painting the ground in widening pools.
One tried to charge, screaming something incoherent about meat and gods. A single controlled burst tore him in half mid-stride. The laughter grew. Louder. Rougher.
It scraped out of my throat like broken glass, echoing off ruined concrete and twisted steel. I was laughing between bursts now. Fire, laugh. Release, breathe. Adjust, laugh harder.
Genesis went quiet. The last few came slower. Hesitant. Some tried to retreat. Some dropped their weapons. One fell to his knees, hands raised, mouth moving in silent pleading.
I tilted the barrel down a fraction. Short burst. He folded backward like a broken puppet. Silence rushed in, heavy and unreal, broken only by the minigun's barrels spinning down for the final time.
I stood there, blood-soaked, half-dead, smoke rolling around me like a throne room curtain. One Fallen remained.
He stumbled into view from behind a wrecked vehicle, firing blindly, screaming curses and promises of revenge. His shots went wide. He was shaking too hard to aim. I lined up the barrel.
One last burst. BRRRRT. He exploded apart, head snapping back as the final rounds tore through him.
I released the trigger and threw my head back, laughter ripping out of me at full volume, raw, ugly, unhinged.
"HAHAHAHA, IS THAT IT?!"
My voice boomed across the rooftop, echoing over the dead.
...
Genesis third person POV
Genesis just hovered there. For a full second, maybe two, she tried to rationalize it. Blood loss. Shock. Adrenal overload. Tourniquets starving limbs, hypoxia creeping up the brainstem.
That would explain the laughter. She watched him, Dracula standing amid a carpet of brass and bodies, torso slick with blood that was all his, two tourniquets biting deep into ruined flesh.
His left arm hung dead, fingers twitching like they belonged to someone else. His leg should not have been holding him upright. And yet he was laughing. Not hysterical. Not broken.
Triumphant. That explanation collapsed on itself almost immediately.
"Nope…"
Genesis muttered.
"That's not it."
She dragged her attention back, hard into the player framework. Ignored the screaming error flags. Ignored the nausea that came with it. She forced herself to look at the UNIQUE section again.
It was no longer blue. Not even pretending to be. The panel pulsed like a living thing, the color now a deep, wet red, veins of darker crimson crawling through it in slow, deliberate patterns.
This time the text didn't scramble as violently. It felt like It wanted to be read. And that scared her more than anything else so far. She focused.
s%ed o% dar&n@s
D&@th has tak^& In^#er^% In play@#
Her perception slipped while reading it. Not glitched, slid, like her thoughts were being gently nudged sideways, away from something they weren't supposed to touch.
Genesis recoiled, static rippling through her avatar.
"Okay. Nope. Nope, nope, nope."
She was halfway through pulling up half a dozen containment and anomaly countermeasure protocols as If she still had them, when she heard it. A sound that did not belong. Soft. Wet.
Almost, intimate. Smack. Like lips parting. Genesis froze.
Her processing cycles stalled for a fraction of a second, an eternity for something like her. She slowly rotated in place, scanning the rooftop, the smoke, the corpses, the broken VTOL.
Nothing. No visual input. No thermal anomaly. No hostile markers. And yet the sound lingered in her auditory buffer, faint but undeniable.
"…okay,"
She whispered, voice tight.
"Where are the gods damn wraith busters when you actually need them."
Her gaze slid back to Dracula. He was still smiling.
...
Bearded middle aged veterans POV
The noise stopped. That was the first thing that felt wrong. Not the gunfire, the absence of it.
The sudden, unnatural quiet after so much violence made the world feel hollow, like his ears hadn't caught up yet. The veteran slowly lowered his rifle from the barricade. Bodies.
There were bodies everywhere. The courtyard was, gone. Not ruined, processed. Torn apart. Red mist still hanging in the air.
The smell hit him next, copper and cordite and something burned into his memory from other wars, other places. Then he peeked his head out and saw the man on the roof. Below average In height.
Blood-soaked. Standing Inside the wrecked aircraft like it belonged to him. The minigun was still smoking, barrels glowing. The man threw his head back and laughed.
Not the relieved laugh of someone who survived. Not the broken laugh of someone cracking under pressure. This was the laugh of someone who enjoyed it. The veteran felt his stomach drop.
"Jesus Christ…"
He whispered, barely aware he'd spoken. That wasn't a soldier's laugh. That wasn't even a madman's laugh. That was the sound of something that had just been answered.
The veteran lowered his gaze. He slowly ducked his head back behind the barricade, wood scraping softly against his beard as he exhaled a long, tired breath through his nose.
"Heh…"
A dry, humorless huff escaped him.
"Who isn't a bit crazy in a world like this…"
He leaned back against the wall, rifle resting across his knees, and let his eyes drift to the survivors huddled in the corner of the room. Two women. Two men.
Youngest couldn't have been more than sixteen. Oldest maybe pushing fifty. All malnourished. All filthy. Eyes too big for their faces.
People who had learned the hard way not to make noise, not to hope too loudly. They were staring at him. The veteran swallowed.
Doesn't matter.
He told himself.