The second warband found the silence first.

  It was a thick, woolly quiet, broken not by the expected clamor of looting or the guttural boasts of victors, but by the low moan of the wind through skeletal ruins and the persistent, skittering fall of loose debris. Vorlag’s convoy—a few dozen vehicles ranging from scrap-trucks to roaring bikes—ground to a halt at the edge of the clearing. The scene before them was not a battlefield; it was a slaughterhouse that had been left to cool.

  The air was a chemical cocktail of spent cordite, vaporized metal, ozone, and the high, coppery stench of blood already beginning to curdle in the humid heat. The machine workshop was a flattened hill of smoking rubble, glittering with shards of glass and twisted rebar. And everywhere, like grisly fertilizer sown into the scorched earth, were the remains of Ares’s warband.

  “Reinforce Ares—reinforce my ass. Nothing’s left here,” Vorlag grunted, his voice a low rasp from a throat scarred by cheap alcohol and rancid air. He stood in the cupola of his own command truck, a modified cargo hauler with armor plating welded from old storage containers. His eyes, narrow and set deep in a face cross-hatched with old knife fights, scanned the devastation. “What in the nine hells happened here?”

  His men, a mix of his original raider crew and newer Hellwraith inductees, fanned out nervously. Murmurs rippled through them.

  “The fuck…?” “Ares’s whole band…?”

  They weren’t shocked into silence—Vorlag’s crew had seen plenty of wasteland pillages and butcheries—but there was a palpable wariness. This wasn’t a fight they’d walked in on. This was an aftermath. A conclusion.

  Vorlag, a career criminal who’d pledged his axe to Erebus solely because the winning side was the only side that mattered, dropped from his cupola with a heavy thud. His armor, a mismatched collection of corporate cast-offs and scavenged plate, creaked with the movement. He stomped towards Ares’s motor pool, his boots crunching on spent casings and something that wasn’t gravel.

  His men descended on the vehicles like vultures. One young raider—a Hellwraith recruit, his face a mess of fresh tattoos and older scars—hopped onto the carrier vehicle and turned the key. It didn't start. A mechanic crouched, peering at the engine block.

  "Shit," he spat, the word cutting through the uneasy quiet. He kicked the nearest tire. A useless gesture, but it conveyed his disgust. "They sabotaged all the Wheels."

  Then the Hellwraiths’ initial unease was replaced by a rising, confused fury. They found the same meticulous sabotage on every truck, bike, and carrier. The spark plugs were gone, systematically removed from every engine and now nowhere to be found. A chorus of incomprehensibly foul curses erupted, a lexicon of profanity so creative and vile it would have made a Legion drill sergeant blush. The “Wheels” weren’t just disabled; they were neutered.

  One of Vorlag's original crew—a veteran from his city streets’ ganging past—yanked open the ammo feed tray of the twin-linked heavy stubber. His roar of fury was almost animalistic. "They tossed all the firing pins! Every last one!"

  Another raider, drawn to the sleek, menacing shape of a corporate-made autocannon, reached out to touch its cooling barrel. When he realized its fate, his eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed into the mud. The man next to him peered into the weapon's breech. His report was a strangled whisper. "Boss... the entire interior. It's... it's welded solid. Fused into one piece. It's a goddamn fancy club now!"

  The young raider from earlier was now frantically trying to start the vehicles one after another, ignoring the obvious sabotage. He jammed keys into ignitions, his face a mask of desperate fury, like a man trying to wake the dead. "Come on, you piece of shit! Start!" The engines coughed, sputtered, and died, their cylinders starved of the spark they needed.

  His frenzy culminated at a specific, heavily modified truck—Ares's own personal transport. He turned the key.

  The world turned white, then orange.

  The IED—a kit-bashed, Frankenstein creation of Hellwraith grenades, munitions, and a shrapnel core of ball bearings and nails, wired with horrific elegance into the engine block—detonated with a concussive . The truck’s fuel tank went up a microsecond later, the fireball vomiting upwards, swallowing the young Hellwraith and the handful of men closest to him. The shockwave rattled teeth in skulls and sent shrapnel whining through the air. When the light and sound faded, a blackened crater smoked where the truck had been, surrounded by twitching, scorched remnants.

  A stunned silence fell, heavier than the last.

  "Whoever did this," an older Hellwraith—one arm replaced by a cybernetic hydraulic claw—growled, wiping a spatter of someone else's blood from his faceplate, "was a tinker. Knew what they were doing."

  His voice was laced with a mixture of weariness and professional respect.

  Vorlag’s jaw tightened. His eyes, cold and calculating, swept over the fresh carnage, then back to the older, colder slaughter. This violence was more focused and precise; it was no random act of wasteland violence. This was a statement. A professional. A predator.

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  “Who,” he whispered, the word cutting through the ringing in their ears. “Did. This.”

  A shout came from the far side of the clearing, near a collapsed wall slick with something dark and viscous. "Boss! Over here! A live one!"

  They dragged him out. He was from Ares's pack, a scout by the look of his lighter gear. One arm was gone at the elbow, the wound crudely cauterized. They dumped him at Vorlag's feet. The young man shrieked, his voice cracking.

  "The Machine-Guy! The Machine-Guy did it!"

  "Who is the Machine-Guy?" Vorlag demanded, his armored hand curling into a fist. "Is he the New Terran Erebus wants? Or some random motherfucker who walked up and gutted Ares's entire group? Answer me."

  "The Machine-Guy! He—Ares didn't kill him! The big rocket didn't kill him! He just stares and people explode! He killed everyone!" the scout's words were a hysterical slurry.

  Vorlag backhanded him. The crack of bone was sharp and final. The scout slumped, silent. Vorlag looked down at the broken body, his expression one of pure contempt. "He's broken. Fucking useless."

  His men looked to him, their faces a mixture of fear and anticipation. “Boss? What do we do?”

  Vorlag paused, contemplated for a few moments.

  "Well," he began, his tone deceptively reasonable, "we don't know if this 'Machine-Guy' is the New Terran Erebus wants. And he's dangerous, obviously. Killed Ares and his entire warband... Let's go hunting elsewhere. This place is cursed."

  “Do we… do we want to alert the other bands?” one of the newer Hellwraiths asked, his voice trembling.

  "Of course not!" Vorlag snapped, layering feigned alarm. "Erebus will have everyone interrogated, flayed, and fed to the rad-hounds if he learns we found this mess and came back empty-handed. We bail. Now. We saw nothing."

  As his men, relieved by the order to retreat from this charnel house, began to pull back to their vehicles,

  The main body of Vorlag's warband rumbled away, a noisy procession of grinding engines and shouted curses that faded into the jungle's oppressive humidity. It was a convincing performance. The moment the last engine snarl was swallowed by the distance, Vorlag signaled his kill-team—eleven of his most vicious and reliable followers from his old, edgerunner days back in America. They killed their own engines a kilometer out and moved back on foot through the phosphorescent undergrowth, their forms blending into the rot and decay.

  They slipped back into the industrial graveyard from a different angle, using the skeletal remains of a conveyor system for cover. The place felt even deader now, the silence a tombstone laid over the earlier violence.

  "Well," Vorlag murmured, his voice a low rasp in the sudden quiet. "Let's see who this 'Machine-Guy' is."

  Vorlag unslung a long, heavy case from his back, the metal scarred but meticulously maintained. With practiced, almost reverent movements, he unlatched it. Inside, nestled in crumbling foam, lay his prize: a top-attack anti-tank guided missile launcher. The weapon was a relic, its corporate logos faded, but its kill-ware was operational.

  He assembled it with a series of definitive and , hefting the tube onto his shoulder. "I have a feeling he might be armored," Vorlag explained, a grim smile on his lips. "Time to see if this relic can punch above its weight."

  His first lieutenant, a gaunt man with a scavenged scope over one eye, nodded. “Sure. What’s the strategy?”

  "Look where the Machine-Guy killed our men," Vorlag said, gesturing with his chin towards the still-smoking crater. "That was a message. A predator marks its kill. If I'm right, he'll come back to survey his work, count the bodies. If he does, we snipe him. If we succeed, we succeed. If we fail..." He looked each of his men in the eye, his gaze flat. "Do not linger. We run. No heroics."

  “Got it,” the first lieutenant said. “I’ll get up that radio tower for overwatch. Keep in touch via comms.” He pointed to a skeletal structure jutting above the ruins, its platform offering a panoramic view of the kill zone.

  “Do it,” Vorlag grunted.

  Another man, a marksman with a long-barreled rifle, pointed. “I’ll take the second floor of that building over there. Can get a clear shot from there.”

  “Go,” Vorlag confirmed, his voice low.

  A third, a hulking brute, patted the heavy autogun slung across his chest. “I’ll stay with you, boss. So, the Machine-Guy don’t creep up on you while you’re fiddling with that fancy pipe.”

  The others fanned out, finding nests in broken windows, behind rusted machinery, their weapons covering every approach to the crater. They were professionals, in their own brutal way.

  "Simple enough," Vorlag whispered, settling into a crouch behind a collapsed lathe, the missile launcher propped beside him. "We watch until noon tomorrow. If the Machine-Guy doesn't pop up, we go."

  What Vorlag couldn't know, what his scavenged sensor gear could never tell him, was that the battlefield was already one-sidedly transparent.

  High above, clinging to the highest strut of the very radio tower his spotter was climbing, the matte-black "Rabe" drone observed everything. Its multi-spectrum sensors painted the thermal outlines of every Hellwraith in vivid detail. In Chen Feng's helmet, their positions glowed like fireflies in the dark. He had intercepted their comms the moment they'd switched channels. Their entire plan, their banter, their lives—it was all data feeding into his silent, waiting HUD.

  For an hour, there was only the buzz of flies and the low, static-laced chatter of the Hellwraiths over the comms. It was the same old shit: complaints about rations, crude jokes, boasts about past kills and atrocities.

  Then, the voice from the radio tower cut off mid-sentence, some complaint about Syndicate curry they robbed recently from a local settlement dying in a gurgle of static.

  The silence on the channel stretched for a full minute.

  "Dino? Your piece-of-shit vox on the fritz again?" the raider with the heavy autogun grunted from Vorlag's side.

  A lazy, static-laced reply came from a northern position. "Meh, probably just the gear. Ye'know, salvaged crap."

  No one was concerned. It was the way of things.

  Vorlag shifted his weight, his eyes never leaving the crater. “Get this score done and we will be rich,” he promised, a mantra to keep focus.

  The grim, professional silence gave way to more nervous chatter.

  Ten minutes later, the sniper in the second-floor building stopped responding to a direct query. The silence this time was heavier, more pregnant.

  Another raider, positioned near a gutted truck, broke the tension on the channel. "I think something's fishy. Gonna check on Dino and Boris."

  Vorlag, his focus split between the crater and the complex firing sequence of his missile launcher, waved a dismissive hand. "You do that. I need to finish this calibration."

  The channel went quiet.