Chen Feng crouched in the shadows of a fractured catwalk, the Adamantine plates of his armor cold against his spine. Below, the Hellwraiths clustered around Flora’s suspended cage like vultures debating a carcass. Their laughter—wet, phlegmy things—cut through the drip of acidic rainwater from the shattered roof.

  "—and the blood was still warm when I fucked her," a Hellwraith bragged. He wore the pelt of some mutated bear draped over his scavenged armor, its glassy eyes staring emptily at the ceiling. "She screamed for her cubs even after I’d—"

  Alina's voice crackled softly in his helmet comm, flat and controlled despite the strain beneath it. "Chen. What the fuck are they discussing? If this isn't mission-critical intel, I'm muting the channel. We don't have bandwidth for capitalist filth."

  Chen didn't respond. Didn't mute the channel. He needed to hear. Protocol dictated otherwise, but tactical necessity overruled. He needed to understand the shape of the enemy. His tactical HUD painted the scene in thermal blues and reds—Flora's heat signature pulsed steadily in the cage, her body temperature elevated but her breathing rhythm too controlled for genuine illness. She was faking. Buying time. For what, he couldn't yet see.

  The bear-pelt man’s words were crude, guttural syllables at first—"kiddies," "squirming," "heads softer than cakes." Chen’s mind stuttered through the static and accent.

  Then the meaning locked in with horrifying clarity. His stomach clenched. The double dose of pills churned in his veins like acid—Chen caught only fragments through the static of his comms—the slaughter of a village, the murder of children, something about blood on hands. The other Scavengers roared their approval, slamming weapons against their armor in a rhythmic, brutal symphony.

  But even the fragments are enough. Chen Feng’s family sent him overboard, to enroll in a United States’ college after he failed the PLA’s entry medical exam. The language intellects required him to graduate from Washington were making his mind piece the atrocities together instinctively. His brain wasn’t built with an off-switch.

  He registered the knowledge too fast. When he realized what he’d learned, it was too late to forget.

  Then another voice cut through the din—deeper, more controlled. A man in a battle-scarred corporate exosuit, its polished surfaces a stark contrast to the rust and grime of the others. His voice carried with the casual authority of someone accustomed to command.

  "You forgot the best part," the exosuit-wearing man said, his tone almost conversational. "When I worked security for the Syndicate, we cleared an entire district that refused corporate acquisition. After we piled the bodies... there was a couple left alive in a basement. I skinned the husband, wore his face while I fucked his wife—my apology, I forgot to mention: I made a bed for that, with the corpses."

  He tapped his chest plate where a rank insignia might have been.

  "Corporate policy requires efficiency. But sometimes… one must appreciate the work."

  Chen's HUD flickered as his pupils dilated. The words registered slowly, fighting through the pharmaceutical barrier in his bloodstream. The chemical dam holding back four centuries of memory cracked.

  "Gods damn it, Chen, don't listen!" Alina's voice cut through his helmet speakers, sharp with alarm. "Focus on the mission parameters. Flora is faking her condition—she's buying time. We need to—"

  But Chen wasn't hearing her anymore.

  The world dissolved.

  First, the warehouse walls bled away. In their place rose scenes of 25th-century slaughter—corporate death squads executing villages for "brand loyalty defaults," human trafficking framed as "human capital trading." Then the visions deepened, pulling him further back through time. Then, the visage of a genocide flooded his mind in grainy black-and-white flashes, where people wearing olive-drab uniforms stabbing every men and women with bayonet-fixed rifles. Their cruel laughter echos above blood-soaked stone tiles.

  Then the vision shifted to a black-and-white photograph from his history texts: a gate arching over a paved road; the screams of a million souls trapped in camps built with dirt-red bricks echoed in his ears. The image of a million hands clawing at the walls of chambers filled with toxic air. Cargo trains that never stopped unloading… the living packed so tight they arrived as half-corpses, their bare feet bloodied by the sharp gravel on the train tracks. The gate arching over a paved road, reads . Barbed wire stretched to the horizon. Behind it, barracks stood in geometric rows, their windows dark eyes in skeletal faces.

  And then, the images abruptly shifted to a mid-European market street, the blood-stained broken glasses glinted like crystals under a dawn’s light, the shots from firing squads rang in the background as the black-and-white image played.

  Then he saw the images of pristine Manchurian laboratories where doctors in white coats cut open living chests while smiling behind their masks—doctors in white coats making clinical notes as they vivisected prisoners without anesthesia; ordinary surgeons and nurses discussing about data, human anatomies, their research quotas, and their lives after works while they mutilate the lives of people, old and young, men and women. He saw the lives of thousands cut-short, and the wet of bone saws against a man’s femur.

  The chemical barrier shattered completely.

  When his vision snapped back to the present, the Hellwraiths were gone. In their place stood soldiers in their distinctive yellow-brown uniforms, their faces contorted in cruel smiles as they made obscene gestures over a field of slaughtered civilians. . The warehouse floor had become blood-soaked stone tiles of a 1930s street. The skeletal girders overhead became the shattered beams of a burning teahouse. Flora’s cage transformed into a pile of bodies stacked like cordwood. The pelt-wearing Scavenger wiped blood across his face in a deliberate smear—and in that crimson mask, Chen saw the grinning visage of a Japanese from his darkest nightmares. The air filled with screams in Mandarin, the metallic tang of blood replacing the smell of rust.

  "Guizi,"

  Chen whispered. The word tasted like ash. "I have… fallen back in time."

  Rage, pure and white-hot, consumed him. The trembling in his hands vanished, replaced by a preternatural stillness. He didn't think. He didn't plan. He simply .

  Chen moved without thought. He kicked off the catwalk railing, the Adamantine plates of his APt-3 suit shrieking against corroded metal. He fell like a meteor, a thirty-foot drop that ended with a wet, splintering as he crushed the bear-pelt man beneath his boots. Bones gave way like rotten timber. The Hellwraith’s final gasp was a wet bubble in his throat. Limbs snapped like dry twigs. Metal screamed.

  Silence shattered.

  Chen didn't pause. His Type-95k carbine whined to life, its capacitor charging with a rising pitch that cut through the stunned silence. The capacitor whined—a rising pitch that cut through the screams. A blue-white flash. The ex-Syndicate enforcer’s head vaporized in a cloud of superheated steam and bone fragments.

  Two more Hellwraiths caught in the plasma bloom disintegrated from the waist up. A fourth lost his arm, the cauterized stump jetting smoke like a dying furnace.

  "He's here! The machine-guy is here!" someone screamed.

  Chen didn't hear them. In his mind, they were speaking a guttural, hated language. Their chainswords became katanas. Their stubbers transformed into bayonet-equipped rifles. Every face was a smiling soldier from his nightmares.

  He moved like a force of nature. An armored fist connected with a skull, crushing it with a sound like a dropped melon; then a wild left-swing, drove backward, shattering an entire ribcage. He grabbed a screaming Hellwraith by the throat and helmet, then with hydraulic-enhanced strength. Bone cracked. Tendons tore. The body dropped, twitching.

  "Chen!" Alina’s voice cut through his helmet comms, sharp with professional approval. "That was a brilliant ambush! Target elimination pattern is optimal! Keep pressing! I’m moving into position for—" She paused. "Chen? Respond. Old man, acknowledge! That’s an order!"

  He didn’t hear her. He was gone. The world was a tunnel of ghosts and gunfire. He saw only the soldiers. Always the soldiers.

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  Amidst the chaos, Flora saw her opening.

  [Tactical assessment: Hostile attention diverted. Probability of successful extraction: 87.3%.]

  She wrapped her hands around the rusted iron bars. Her body armor was stripped, but New Terran physiology didn't require powered assistance for this task. She pulled. Once. Twice. The third pull tore tendons in her forearms, but the bar bent inward with a shriek of protesting metal. She wriggled through the gap, dropping silently to the concrete floor. A Hellwraith stumbled backward into her path, his eyes wide with terror. Flora drove her knee into his groin, then slammed his forehead into a concrete pillar. He slumped without a sound.

  She moved like smoke through the chaos, her mind already mapping the camp’s infrastructure grid. Her armor. Her weapons. Her . Flora slipped through the building like smoke, moving with preternatural grace despite her apparent weakness. She avoided the combat zone completely, darting toward the warehouse's control systems—a cluster of jury-rigged consoles and power couplings near Malus's command post. Her fingers flew across the interfaces, not with the precision of a soldier, but with the fluid certainty of an engineer who knew exactly which wires to cross.

  Alarms blared. Emergency lights strobed. Power fluctuated across the compound.

  Then she was gone—disappearing into the shadows toward the storage room where her armor had been kept.

  "Chen Feng," Flora's voice came through Chen's comm, calm despite the chaos. "I know where my equipment is. Will be back in three minutes and forty-eight seconds."

  Chen was not hearing.

  On the battlefield below, Malus had rallied his remaining warriors. They formed a rough firing line, heavy stubbers and scavenged laser rifles trained on the armored demon that had descended upon them. Malus himself stood slightly back, his face pale but determined beneath its grime.

  "You think you scare us, machine-guy?" Malus shouted, his voice cracking. "You're just one man! We have numbers! We have—"

  Chen turned. His helmet's single red optic fixed on Malus like a targeting laser. In Chen's mind, the Scavenger leader wore the face of a —a man who had overseen the slaughter of thousands.

  Chen didn't speak. He simply raised his carbine.

  The shot wasn't a single pulse but a burst of sustained beams—a deliberate, brutal execution. The blue-white plasma would engulfed Malus from head to toe, vaporizing him in a heartbeat. But in a terrified last attempt to self-preserve, he darted behind one of his subordinates. Where he had stood, only a charred silhouette remained on the concrete floor, still smoldering.

  "Chen Feng!" Alina's voice was raw now, stripped of all command protocol. "I'm coming in hot! Brace for impact!"

  Outside the warehouse, the jungle erupted.

  The damaged Red Vulture burst through the treeline like a wounded dragon, its Adamantine plates scarred. Its 3cm autocannon roared to life, spitting a hail of tungsten-tipped death that tore through Hellwraiths’ rank with mechanical precision. Concrete exploded. Bodies fragmented. The IFV's tracks churned through the mud and blood as it skidded to a stop just inside the warehouse entrance, its weapons still chattering.

  Through the settling dust and smoke, Alina's figure emerged from the cupola. Her face was streaked with soot and blood, her uniform torn at the shoulders, but her posture was rigid, commanding. She surveyed the carnage—Chen standing like a statue amid heaps of mangled corpses, the smoldering remains of the enemies, the empty cage.

  "Chen," she called, keyed the external loudspeaker, voice booming across the warehouse. Alina Ludwig was half-screaming. "Stand down. STAND DOWN NOW!"

  He didn’t pause. Didn’t even turn his helmeted head. He vanished into the smoke-filled passage, boots crunching over broken glass and bone. Each footfall echoed like a tomb sealing.

  Alina stood frozen in the commander's cupula, the acrid smell of blood and gunpowder stinging her nostrils. Through the swirling smoke, she watched Chen's armored silhouette vanish down the ruined corridor. The comms crackled with static, but his channel remained silent—utterly, terrifyingly silent. Her knuckles whitened on the edge of the cupola as she lowered herself back into the Red Vulture's cockpit.

  "That's it," she whispered, the words tasting like dust. "He's gone. He can't be stopped now." The tactical display flickered, showing Chen's heat signature moving deeper into the structure. She slammed a fist against the console, the impact vibrating through her burned hands. "Damn it all to hell."

  Beyond the half-collapsed corridor, beyond the ash and smoke, Malus ran like a man possessed, dragging two of his most loyal followers through the labyrinth of collapsed hallways. His breath came in ragged gasps, each inhale tasting of blood and terror. The sounds of carnage echoed behind them—metal screaming, bodies hitting concrete, that unnatural blue flash followed by the wet sizzle of vaporized flesh.

  "Boss, the fuck! What do we do?" gasped one of his men, a young Scavenger whose face was streaked with soot and tears.

  Malus didn't break stride, his tailored exosuit's servos whining with the effort of their flight. "Shut it! We run. Don't look back. Don't think. Just fucking run."

  A blue-white flash illuminated the corridor behind them. Malus dove forward instinctively, shoving his lieutenant aside. The shot tore through the air where they'd been standing, punching a fist-sized hole through reinforced concrete. One of his men wasn't fast enough—a chunk of his shoulder vanished in a superheated spray of blood and vapor.

  Malus scrambled to his feet, not bothering to check on the wounded man. Survival was a solo game. "Move!" he snarled, dragging the remaining follower deeper into the warehouse's skeletal remains.

  About twenty paces behind them, Chen Feng moved through the smoke like a revenant, his armor coated in blood and gore. In his vision, the concrete walls had become the crumbling facades of a 1930s, old Chinese alley. The acidic rain dripping through the shattered roof was the blood of the slaughtered men, soaking into the soil of their homeland.

  Ahead, three soldiers in their ugly olive-yellow uniform fled in disarray. Their cowardice was familiar, expected. Soldiers always ran when true retribution came.

  One tripped over rubble, his uniform tearing at the knee. He turned, scrambling backward on hands and heels, his face contorted in terror beneath his steel helmet. He babbled in Japanese, begging for mercy.

  Chen didn't hesitate.

  His armored boot came down on the soldier's chest, crushing ribs like dry kindling. The man's eyes bulged. His mouth opened in a silent scream. Chen pressed down slowly, methodically, feeling each rib give way beneath his weight. When the chest cavity collapsed inward with a wet crunch, Chen finally lifted his boot.

  Two more soldiers remained. They fired their type 38 rifles back, wildly, bullets pinging harmlessly off his Adamantine plating. Chen advanced, unhurried. One soldier turned to flee. Chen's hand shot out, grabbing the man by his collar and lifting him bodily. With a mechanical whir and a sickening tear, he ripped the spine free in one brutal motion.

  The final soldier—the officer—stood frozen against a wall of broken concrete. Chen recognized his face. It was another face from his nightmares, the face that had overseen the slaughter of thousands while sipping tea in a captured mansion. But his name evaded his mind. .

  Chen charged.

  The exosuit-clad scavenger emptied his autogun into Chen's chest. The impacts registered as dull thuds against his armor, doing no damage. Chen slammed into him, driving Malus through the concrete wall with a deafening crash.

  Inside the ruined room beyond, Chen stood over the broken form of the officer. The man's exosuit was cracked and sparking, his face covered in blood. He tried to crawl away, leaving a slick trail of crimson on the concrete.

  Chen's armored grip tightened on the ankle, dragging the body back to the center of the room. His gauntleted hands found the helmet's release catches—muscle memory from his tactical training—before realizing his error. The face beneath wasn't Japanese. Not the from his recurring nightmares. Just another Hellwraith. Just another monster wearing a different mask.

  It didn't matter. The face changed as Chen stared at it, melting and reforming into the grinning visage of a . Chen's vision tunneled. His hands moved of their own accord.

  First, the fingers. Each joint crushed with precise, hydraulic force. Then the knees. Malus screamed as his kneecaps shattered, the sound echoing off the concrete walls. Chen dragged him upright, holding him against the wall like a broken puppet.

  The helmeted head tilted. Chen's voice was a guttural snarl in a language no New Terran would recognize.

  His armored fist drove forward, punching through Malus's chest with a wet, tearing sound. He didn't stop there. His hand emerged from the man's back clutching a fist-sized piece of lung, still pulsing with life. He crushed it before Malus's unseeing eyes.

  The body slumped to the floor, twitching. Chen stood over it, breathing heavily, his armor dripping with blood and viscera.

  The corridor shifted again. The stone tiles of the 1930s alley became a train path of gravel and rotten steel in Poland, 1944. The walls dissolved into mist, revealing row after row of shallow graves. Ghosts rose from them—not the soldiers, but the victims. Men with hollow eyes. Women clutching phantom children. The smell of cyanide and death filled the air.

  "Help us," they whispered in languages, their voices layered and broken. "You avenged your own, why didn't you save us? Why didn’t you fight for us?"

  Chen tried to answer, his vox-grille emitted only static until seconds later. He lamented.

  "…Horse before chest. Country before heart.," he whispered in Mandarin, the words mangled, tasting of ash. " I failed you all."

  He reached out with a gore-slicked hand, but the ghosts shrieked and receded, melting into the mist.

  .

  Gunfire shattered the vision.

  Bullets ricocheted off his armor, snapping him back to the present. More Imperial soldiers—dozens of them—fanned out across the ruined corridor, their bayonets fixed. One wore that ridiculous white headband with the red sun symbol, the kanji on it blurred with sweat and blood.

  Chen raised his pulse laser. The capacitor whined.

  .

  The soldier with the headband vanished in a flash of blue plasma.

  .

  Two more soldiers disintegrated where they stood.

  .

  A fourth lost his arm and screamed, the sound high-pitched and desperate.

  Chen advanced, methodical, relentless. The blue flashes cut through the smoke.

  Inside the Red Vulture's cockpit, Alina watched the external feeds, her knuckles white on the console edge. Each camera showed another angle of Chen's rampage—his armored form moving with inhuman precision, the blue flashes of his weapon turning concrete to molten glass, the aftermath reduced to components that no longer resembled human bodies..

  "Flora," she whispered into the comms, her voice cracking. "I can't reach him. He's... he's lost, he’s gone. The old man’s gone. Truly gone."

  Static hissed in response. Alina slammed her fist against the console. "Goddamn it! Someone responds to me!"

  She cycled through the feeds, desperate for any sign of control. The third camera caught movement near the warehouse's eastern entrance—a figure in full APt-3 Saturnus armor, gleaming even in the gloom. Flora.

  She wasn't alone.

  Behind her, the huddled forms of the civilian family—two adults, a teenager, and two infants wrapped in scavenged blankets—moved with cautious urgency. Flora's armored hand rested protectively on the father's shoulder, guiding him forward. Her movements were slow, deliberate, prioritizing their safety over speed.

  Alina’s eyes widened.