Three bodies were dragged like sacks of potatoes, skeletal hooks driven through their collarbones.

  The first man twitched. Still alive.

  His gurgling pleas muffled by the iron-hemp roots binding his jaw.

  The gang's butcher hauled them across the perimeter of crude crates and bone-cages with an indifferent strength.

  They emerged from the fog dragging their prized hunting trophy, three human Martyrs.

  The horrors kept escalating for the captured.

  First were the bone cages, which soon would be their resting place.

  Second were the broken bones and lifeless carcass all over the place.

  Then, there was the sound... those rattles.

  It was the wet, rhythmic grinding of the Skitter-Drake’s mandibles between its jaws.

  The raptor-like Abyssals were thin and precise. Its elongated ear tracking thermal signatures with a jittery, high-frequency focus. Their six-legged limbs enabled them to maneuver within the iron-oak silver fortress with ease.

  In other words, it’s a perfect mount to hunt.

  Leading them was Cane, a mountain of scarred muscle whose mouth was a jagged ruin of filed teeth. Above his head hovered a thick, pitted Ring of dull bronze. It was the shape of a warrior, but it was caked in grime and rattled.

  Behind him slinked The Suture... Scanning for vital signs. His Halo was no solid shape, but a fragmented Chain of rusted silver links that writhed like a dying snake. Every time his glass eye twitched, the chain cinched tighter.

  Cane shoved three figures forward, sending them sprawling into the dirt.

  “Look what we got, Boss,” Cane rasped, his voice a wet click. “Three earth Martyrs… without Rungu on them. How peculiar, eh?”

  A shadow stretched long across the clearing, fractured by the flicker of chemical lanterns.

  Chigurh sat on a crate... When he rose, his own Halo flared into the dim light. It was a M?bius loop of burnished silver—twisting with a silent, predatory elegance.

  Unlike Varick’s pristine chitin features, matte-black chitinous plating had replaced Chigurh’s collarbones and throat. Forming a natural gorget that didn't move when he spoke. It looked less like an infection and more like a suit of armor grown from the inside out.

  When he tilted his head, the Martyr could see the small, hexagonal slits that hissed almost imperceptibly with every breath.

  His eyes were the most terrifying part. There was no white left. They were twin spheres of polished void-glass, depthless and still.

  He didn't look at Cane. He looked at the prisoners. No rungu. No scars of resonance burn. No iron-oak weight hanging from their arms. They were empty-handed in a world that demanded a price for every breath.

  “I see…” Chigurh murmured.

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  He rose, his movements fluid and unnervingly silent. He stepped toward the center man until the gap between their eyes almost closed. He leaned in, inhaling the scent of their terror as if it were a fine wine.

  “Cowards,” Chigurh whispered.

  The Martyrs wore the same gray suits they’d arrived in, now torn and soaked through with fear-sweat and mud. Their hands were bound. Their mouths were not. But in the presence of the man with the obsidian eyes, even their screams seemed to have been confiscated.

  Cane spat a glob of black bile into the silver silt. "Found 'em huddling near the bronze gloom, Boss. Fresh off the boat. Still got that Earth-smell on 'em."

  He jerked a thumb at the captives. "Underground's paying a premium for untainted Halos. Or we could just drop 'em at the Blacktooth slave-pens. Exotic livestock fetches a king's ransom this deep in the Sector."

  Chigurh didn't answer. He simply rose from his crate, his matte-black chitin gorget hissing with a cold rhythm.

  The Drake paused its feeding, yellow eyes tracking him.

  A moment passed. Then it resumed chewing.

  Chigurh reached to his hip and unlatched a perforated obsidian canister. When he tilted it, something inside shifted, glass clicking against glass.

  He hadn’t bothered gagging them. Begging for information is for amateurs.

  He reached into one of his crates. The one with blood and skull marking on it. Three small creatures clung to his fingers as he withdrew his hand.

  They looked like tarantulas at first glance. Then the details registered. Legs of splintered glass. Abdomens swollen with neon-green bile visible through translucent flesh.

  Abyssal Spiders.

  The men made choking sounds.

  Chigurh held his hand out at eye level, watching the creatures skitter over his knuckles.

  “One of these,” he said, voice flat, dry, unhurried, “is a Dull-Sting.”

  He stepped closer. The temperature in the clearing seemed to drop with him. “It carries no venom. A biological fluke. A mistake in the predator’s design.”

  He stopped in front of the kneeling line.

  “The other two,” Chigurh continued, “contain a neurotoxin that will turn your blood into slush in exactly four seconds.”

  He crouched so they were eye to eye.

  “No screaming,” he said. “No thrashing. Just… off.”

  The man on the left whimpered.

  Chigurh didn’t react.

  “Ortho is a system of choices,” he went on. “But most days, those choices are made for us. Tests we don’t take. Chambers we avoid.”

  His gaze flicked briefly to their empty hands.

  “Today, I am being generous.”

  He extended his hand.

  The three spiders skittered, glass legs clicking softly.

  “You will choose one,” Chigurh said. “Let it bite your palm.”

  A pause.

  “If you survive, you become my Bait. You walk into the fog. You scream. You run. You lure others earth Martyrs to me.”

  Another pause.

  “You will live long enough to see the next sky.”

  Silence crushed down on them.

  The middle man’s eyes darted between the creatures, tears streaming freely now. The one on the right shook his head over and over, a tiny, broken motion.

  Chigurh leaned closer.

  “Pick,” he whispered.

  The Skitter-Drake lifted its head, mandibles dripping black saliva.

  “Or I let the Drake decide,” Chigurh said, almost kindly. “And it does not enjoy games.”

  The first man broke.

  With a sob that sounded like it tore something loose inside his chest, he lunged forward and grabbed the smallest Weaver. He slammed it against his palm.

  There was a sharp crack. Glass fangs pierced skin.

  He didn’t even finish inhaling.

  His eyes rolled back. Veins spiderwebbed black beneath his skin, racing up his arm and into his neck.

  His body locked once. Then, went slack. He collapsed into the silt like a puppet with its strings cut.

  Four seconds.

  Chigurh watched the corpse settle.

  “Slush,” he said calmly.

  He turned to the remaining two.

  The clearing felt heavier now. As if the forest itself were leaning in.

  “Two left,” Chigurh said.

  He looked at the man in the middle.

  “One death,” he continued. “One life.”

  A faint smile touched his mouth.

  “The math,” he said, “is improving for you.”

  He held out his hand again.

  “Pick.”