Sergeant Roric’s orders came ragged, nearly drowned in static and his own hoarse shouting. The Commonwealth line fractured, mechs breaking contact in ugly disorder. Two more Paladins fell in flame behind them, their pilots locked forever inside metal coffins—monuments of burning steel on soil already blackened with blood. That sacrifice was their only currency, and it bought Jack Harlan just enough time for his sleight of hand.

  The “mech hunter,” the coward whispered about even among veterans, was not hunting. He was curled in the shadow of a boulder, fat shoulders shaking, sweat chilling inside his flight suit.

  “Fuck,” he muttered into the stale cockpit air. “I’m fighting monsters.”

  The “Wraiths” did not move like soldiers. They moved like a law of physics rewritten: precise, stripped of hesitation, every action the distilled instinct of killers bred across a thousand encounters. They weren’t skilled—they were inevitable.

  Jack’s six months in the crucible of gravity labs meant nothing here. Tricks, evasions, all the clever little parlor games that had saved him thirteen times before—ashes now. What mattered was calm, the cold serenity of men who had lived on the knife’s edge until fear itself had been hammered into a tool.

  A wire inside Jack’s mind broke with an audible snap.

  Something cold and distant slid into the space left behind. The fat, wheezing coward shrank to the back of his skull. In his place rose Loki—the mechanic turned predator, the echo of a man who had already died thirteen times and kept crawling back. Fear did not vanish; it was simply filed, labeled, and weaponized.

  Win or lose, whispered the voice that wasn’t his own. Dead is dead. One kill is even. Two is profit.

  “Thor” slid forward under that voice’s command, a relic dressed in shadows. Roric’s barrage cloaked the approach, plasma arcs painting the sky in false thunder. The Wraiths were absorbed in their dance with Juggernaut fire—too absorbed to notice the wolf that had slunk into their pack.

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  One Wraith lagged, forced into hover by a storm of fire. That was all Loki required. Thor ghosted to its flank. The mechanic’s arm, disguised as a crude manipulator, stabbed once with surgical precision, cutting into a maintenance seam no warrior would have even remembered existed. Power conduit severed. The cockpit plunged into darkness.

  No explosion. No alarms. Just a silence so absolute it was obscene.

  The pilot had one heartbeat to comprehend the betrayal before shock devoured him. His machine was nudged into a crater, hidden like discarded wreckage, while Thor stepped neatly into his place.

  Then another. Silent. Perfect. The tide bent.

  Jack felt nothing—no thrill, no pride. Just the cold mathematics of survival. Until he allowed himself a flicker of relief.

  That was when the predator struck.

  The Wraith leader had seen the trick. Ignoring the curtain of fire, he lunged—pure velocity, claws biting deep into Thor’s back. Armor peeled. The cockpit rang like a bell. Jack’s heart stumbled, the coward’s spirit threatening to tear loose from his flesh.

  “Can’t shake him!” he roared, his voice breaking into static.

  The leader’s mastery was merciless. Every desperate feint Jack tried was countered before it began. He was prey again, seconds from death.

  And then instinct—the dirty kind, born not of training but of a mechanic’s desperation—spasmed through his hands. Thor’s tail, the emitter housing, snapped around with brutal force. Simultaneously, an illegal thruster hidden in the rear cavity fired at complete burn.

  The mech skidded sideways in a grotesque imitation of a drifting racer, physics howling in protest. The Wraith leader overshot, claws slicing only air. For the first time in a hundred battles, he had been denied—not by discipline, not by honor, but by a coward’s improvisation.

  The fight ended quickly after that. The remaining Wraiths, robbed of cohesion, fell one by one under Commonwealth fire.

  But victory carried no celebration. When the cockpits were forced open, every pilot inside was already dead, sidearms still warm. They had painted their pristine machines with their own blood rather than be captured.

  All except one. The leader lingered, pistol braced between his teeth. He smiled—a red, mocking curve—as Jack’s shadow fell across him. Then he pulled the trigger.

  In his pocket was their field manual. Jack flipped it open with hands that no longer felt like his own. One rule. Written in blood-colored ink.

  FAILURE IS DEATH.

  The words clung to him like frost. These six were only the fringe. Somewhere out there, the Legion waited in full.

  Jack Harlan knew then, with a dread colder than the grave: he had not yet faced the real war. The real enemy had only just revealed its face.