The silence before the storm proved deceptive, like the calm in the eye of a hurricane. The attack wasn't heralded by a roar or the clang of metal; it came like a spasm of reality, a sudden collapse of the space that had, until then, flowed measuredly and predictably. There were no warning signs, just an instantaneous, predatory lunge from the shadows – as if entropy itself had taken flesh and hurtled towards me to wipe me from existence.
The creature – there was no other way to describe this amalgam of distorted biomechanics – moved with an impossible, unnatural predator's grace, multiplied by the inertia and mass of something akin to a light combat exoskeleton. Too swift for its weight, too precise for blind fury. Every vector of its movement was calculated with cold, inhuman accuracy, devoid of even a hint of hesitation or error. This wasn't an attack – it was an execution, carried out with indifferent efficiency.
The survival instinct, ancient as life itself, screamed to evade. I tried to leap back, but my body, encased in heavy armor already groaning at every servo, and my treacherously dead left leg turned the reflex into a pathetic parody of a maneuver. There was no chance. Instead of dodging, I crashed down – awkwardly, heavily, bringing my full weight onto the worn floor of the room, covered in ages of dust and oil stains.
The impact of my shoulder against the concrete was a dull, jarring thud. My teeth clicked together with such force that for a moment, I thought they'd shattered. The air was driven from my lungs in a short, painful spasm. A white patch of blinding light flared before my eyes, erasing the details of my surroundings. For a fraction of a second, the world compressed into that flash and the sensation of falling. I didn't have time to get up – only to instinctively roll aside, scraping my damaged armor across the floor, the sound tearing the silence like a cry of agony.
It was already where I had just been. A shadow clad in distorted metal and deathly flesh.
The first strike of its claw sliced through the air with a howl that felt more like a vibration in my bones than a sound. The blow landed where my head had been a moment before. Had I not fallen, only a bloody mist and the echo of a death scream, frozen in the stale air, would have remained of my skull. But I had rolled away, and while the creature compensated for the miss with a mechanical delay, my hand, scrabbling blindly across the floor in panic, found something hard and massive. An ammunition box, fallen from my back. Heavy, awkward. Without thinking, driven only by the desperate need for a weapon, I seized it.
A turn on the floor, the scrape of metal on concrete. With my whole body, pouring my remaining strength and the fury of a cornered beast into the motion, I brought the box down on the approaching shadow. Left to right. The blow struck squarely on the lower jaw – or whatever served its function. A hideous crunch echoed – a mixture of breaking metal, crumbling bone, and something wet tearing. A substance sprayed out – not blood in the conventional sense, but thick, tar-like ichor, black as the void between stars. The creature recoiled, jerking back with a mechanical screech.
And then, in that brief pause, I saw. No, not just saw – I comprehended the full extent of its unholy nature.
Before me stood a nightmare, crawled from the pages of forbidden texts or born in the fevered delirium of a madman. A skeleton, almost two meters tall, wrapped in bundles of synthetic muscle and something that had once been living flesh but now looked like dried, tarred meat. Tendons, thick as steel cables, hung in tatters where armor plates had pulled away from the base. Between the armor and exposed bone, a web of wires and hydraulic tubes was visible, wet, pulsing with a faint, unhealthy light. Half of the skull was hidden by a crude, makeshift tech-mask with a single dimly glowing optical lens. The other half – bare bone, polished to a gruesome sheen, as if it had been rubbed with sand and despair for a long time.
Its left arm – a complex mechanical manipulator ending in long, vibrating claws that moved as if possessed by their own will. Its right – a crude, asymmetrical pincer-claw, welded together from scraps of industrial equipment, clearly not designed for combat, but no less deadly for it. The shoulders were twisted at unnatural angles. The legs, set on vicious-looking joints, made each step a sharp, impactful lunge, as if the creature were trying to shatter the very floor beneath it.
It was not alive. It was not dead. It was not simply a machine. It was malice made manifest, mechanized hatred assembled from scrap and pain.
Half a second – an eternity in combat.
The creature lunged forward again, ignoring the damage. I reflexively threw the box at it, now empty and useless as the impact had scattered the ammunition, but there was nothing else. It batted the box aside with its claws as easily as if it were an empty tin can. The sound of the impact – a sharp, screeching clang of metal on metal – echoed through the workshop. And immediately after – a thrust with the pincer-claw.
Straight at my left arm, raised in defense.
My entire body was pierced by an electric spasm. Instantly. I heard my own sound – a short, choked gasp, as if an invisible spring had snapped inside me. The armor on my forearm screamed in protest, grated, but held – either I had braced well or it was blind luck. Without it, my arm would have been reduced to a bloody mess, a mangled pulp of bone and flesh.
I took a step back, driven now not by instinct, but by the will forcing me to ignore the pain. Burning fire spread through my entire arm, from shoulder to fingertips, which had gone numb, clenched by a spasm. The gauntlet clenched into a fist on its own.
A roar tore from my throat. Not from pain – there was too much of it to express with sound. From rage. Cold, crystalline, purifying rage, born on the brink of death.
I clenched my right fist. It still obeyed. Muscles screamed with tension. I struck.
Straight into the mess that was its face – where, beneath torn scraps of skull-flesh, cybernetic implants and bundles of sparking tubes were visible. The reinforced gauntlet crashed in with a dull thud. Something crunched, vibrating up my arm. At first, I thought it was its bones. Then came the delayed realization – something in my wrist had crunched too.
Pain followed, sharp as a stiletto strike, piercing my arm to the shoulder. The wrist joint spasmed, locked up. But the creature recoiled. Again. Froze for a moment.
A second of almost absolute silence, broken only by my ragged breathing and the quiet hum of its internal mechanisms.
And then it howled. It wasn't the cry of a beast or the wail of a siren. It was the grinding of rusty metal blades scraping against each other deep within its mechanical throat. A sound so unnatural, so wrong, that I wanted to cover my ears, rip off my helmet, anything not to hear it. I almost did. Almost.
But I didn't. And that saved me.
Because in the next second, exploiting my moment of stunned inaction, it threw… a skeleton at me.
I didn't have time to see whose it was – just a bundle of blackened bones, wrapped in rotted straps and scraps of fabric, flying straight at my chest. I barely managed to bat the gruesome projectile away with my elbow, feeling the fragile bones shatter on impact. But it was a feint. Following immediately, with the inevitability of fate, the pincer-claw struck.
Straight into my chest. Right where a previously damaged rib already ached beneath the armor layer.
The blow wasn't like a fist. It was like a pneumatic hammer strike, accelerated to supersonic speed. The world around me cracked, shattered into fragments. Something inside tore. I couldn't even scream – my lungs were compressed so tightly there wasn't a drop of air left. I staggered, my legs buckled. Almost fell. And through the haze of pain came an icy thought: without armor, I would have been pierced through, leaving a hole the size of a fist.
The creature didn't stop. There was no triumph in its movements, no anger, not even satisfaction. Just methodical execution of its programming. It continued the attack with the soulless persistence of a mechanism whose sole purpose is destruction. As if its task wasn't to frighten, break, or dominate. Simply – "you must be dead."
And at that very moment, as the cold hand of death brushed against me, for the first time in my life… I felt something entirely different, overriding even animal fear.
Yes, there was fear. Primal, sticky terror for my own shell, for the integrity of my bones, for the right to take the next breath.
But overlaying it, flooding my consciousness like an icy wave, rose desire.
I wanted to kill it.
With my own hands. To tear it apart, break it, destroy it. Not for salvation. Not out of duty. But because this – this distortion, this parody of life – had no right to exist. It had to be erased, purged from reality.
I ripped the knife from the sheath on my chest. My blade, found on a corpse. Obsidian, presumably with a monomolecular edge, black as a predator's pupil in absolute darkness. A reliable killer. The grip – reversed. Blade pointing down. This wasn't a grip for defense, not for survival. This was a grip for killing.
With one sharp movement, I shrugged the pack off my shoulders. It fell to the floor with a dull, heavy thud. Everything that hindered movement, everything that constrained – away. Only me, my pain, my rage, and my weapon remained.
I looked at it again, trying to read something in its unholy construction.
The eye sockets were deep, dark pits, but within them rotated two dim amber lenses, scanning the space with mechanical precision. Inhuman. Soulless. And yet…
The figure itself. Distorted, but recognizable humanoid proportions. The curve of the spine beneath the broken armor. Fragments of standard tactical plate visible beneath the layer of implants and growths.
"You were someone," the thought pierced my brain, sharp as my knife. "Who were you before… this?"
For a fraction of a second, something akin to pity broke through the boiling rage. A cold, useless spark of sympathy for who, or what, it might have been.
And then – it lunged again.
As if it sensed that fleeting weakness. As if it knew that a moment's reflection was a breach in my defenses. That sympathy was poison to a warrior.
It thrust its left arm forward, the one with the claws – a crude, sweeping motion, lacking precision but carrying all the mass and inertia of its body. I intercepted it with my left arm. Mangled. Broken. I squeezed my fingers, ignoring the flare of agony, and made a sharp jerk to the right and down, wrenching its joint at an unnatural angle. The creature's arm jerked, accompanied by the grating of damaged servos and the tearing of synthetic ligaments. I threw my weight into it, using its own inertia against it, every muscle in my body screaming from the strain – but my right hand with the knife was ready, searching for a vulnerability.
The creature was strong. Incredibly fast for its mass. Clumsy in places due to its asymmetrical construction – but definitely not stupid. It lacked the grace of a trained fighter, the fine instincts of a duelist. Only the cold, programmed mechanics of murder.
I held its clawed limb in a death grip, simultaneously trying to get behind it. Its torso rotated with a strained screech – and for a moment, the neck was exposed, or rather, the place where it should have been – a tangle of cables, tubes, and reinforced vertebrae, almost unprotected. One precise strike. One well-aimed thrust at the base of the skull or into a power conduit – and…
Too late.
The creature broke from its axis of rotation with the unpredictability of a damaged gyroscope. It spun its entire body like an overwound steel cable and, at an utterly impossible angle, struck me in the chest with the pincer-claw. Again.
The blow wasn't like a blow. It was like the ramming impact of a siege weapon. I wasn't just thrown back – I was ejected. My back slammed into a metal support beam with such a dull, wet sound that I feared my spine had shattered. Something shifted inside, twisted. My organs felt like they'd swapped places. My eyes went dark for an instant, replaced by blinding white noise.
And before I could even take a breath, another blow followed. Straight into my stomach. I was torn from the wall like a rag doll. I crashed to the floor, plowing my face across the filthy concrete. My helmet, already damaged, flew off my head and rolled away somewhere. The knife flew from my weakened hand, clattering against metal, and was lost in the gloom.
A second of disorientation – and it was already looming over me. Victory was so close, it seemed to almost taste it – if it had anything to taste with.
The pincer-claw closed on my left forearm. Again. This time the grip was steel. A hideous, dry click echoed. Then – a crunch that I felt through my entire body. The pain didn't come immediately. First – just a wave of numbness rising from the elbow. My fingers ceased to exist. My arm below the elbow became a useless appendage, filled with lead. The bone had definitely cracked. Possibly shattered.
And then – the claws of its left hand.
The mechanical limb with its vibrating blades reached for my unprotected face. I jerked my head aside in a final desperate effort, and the claws slammed into the floor beside my cheek with monstrous force, punching through the concrete as if it were butter. Shards flew in all directions.
Under my right hand, scrabbling on the floor for salvation or a weapon, my fingers closed on something. Cold. Massive. Serrated. I snatched it without thinking – some piece of rebar, a thick steel rod with a hook on the end, possibly part of a broken mechanism.
And, gathering my last strength, I drove the improvised spike upwards, straight into the creature's mangled jaw, into the wound already gaping from the ammunition box strike.
Metal drove into the tangle of bone and mechanisms with a sickening scrape. The creature howled – that same rusty, drawn-out sound that chilled the blood, but now it was muffled and cut short. It jerked back, and dark, thick ichor gushed from the new wound, splashing onto my respirator mask. I instinctively tried to wipe my visor with the back of my glove – only smearing the sticky fluid, reeking of chemicals and decay.
I quickly unfastened the mask and scrambled to my feet while it was disoriented. My shoulder cracked from the sudden movement. Immediately, the smell of the environment hit my nose, no longer filtered. The heavy, suffocating air of the room – a mixture of old dust, machine oil, rot, and something else, sickly sweet, characteristic of places where death and decay had become commonplace. I coughed, spitting viscous saliva onto the floor. I breathed heavily, raggedly, but I breathed – only because there was no alternative.
The creature stood opposite. The rusty rebar protruded at an angle from its lower jaw. It jerked its head, trying to dislodge the obstruction, but couldn't open its maw. Its only howl was choked off.
Silent. Crackling with static interference. Still functioning.
I stood too.
Without helmet or mask. Almost breathless. Without my knife. With a shattered left arm and a barely functioning right. But with unbroken fury. And with one crystal-clear thought that displaced the pain and fear:
"I will not fall before it does."
The creature was slowly recovering. Adapting to the damage.
The iron rod still stuck from its jaw – deep, crooked, blocking some mechanisms. It didn't scream. Made no sound except a low hum and scrape. It just watched. The amber lenses in its sockets rotated slowly, focusing on me. Its mouth remained clamped shut by the rod. That meant it was hindering it. That meant it was working.
And there, beneath it, on the floor, almost between the fragments of concrete and bone – lay my knife. The obsidian blade. Black as a hole in reality. Mine.
The creature stirred, preparing for another attack. Its chassis tensed. I understood – there was no more time. Not for thought, not for respite.
It leaped. In what seemed like a final, desperate lunge. Its entire mutilated body became a projectile flying towards me. Like a crowbar thrown with a screech, like a self-guided torpedo of horror.
But I already knew what to do. Instinct told me the only viable course.
I jumped towards it. Not up, not aside. Down. Underneath it. Slipping between its legs splayed for the jump, between the vectors of its movement.
It passed over me, its grotesque shadow momentarily blocking the dim light of the emergency lamps.
Still sliding on the floor, I spun and struck with my knife at its right leg – aiming for the joint, the hinge I had noticed earlier. The blow landed true. With the knife in my fist, encased in the reinforced gauntlet, with the full weight of my body, pouring all remaining fury and desperation into the movement. I felt something inside its knee joint – cartilage, metal, servo – shift, give way sideways with a hideous crack. The sound of a cable snapping under tension or a bone breaking.
It lost balance. Its trajectory was ruined. It crashed onto its side with a clang that echoed off the workshop walls. Its limbs twitched convulsively, trying to find purchase.
Next to me, once again, was that same ammunition box. Battered, heavy, with cracked handles, but still massive enough. I grabbed it with my numb left hand – my fingers barely obeyed, but the grip was deathly – and, struggling, heaved it onto my good shoulder.
As it began to rise, twitching like a shot insect, I smashed the box down onto its head. With all my might.
Metal on bone and metal. A deep, guttural thud. The creature's head snapped sideways at an unnatural angle. The optics flickered out for a moment. It fell again. This time – onto its back, face up. Awkwardly. Helplessly.
And I was on top of it.
Without pause. Without breath. Giving it no second to recover. I hit it with the box again. On the back of the head. Then I threw the box aside. It rolled across the floor with a clang. My right hand darted to where the knife had fallen. My fingers closed around the familiar hilt.
And I began to strike.
In the back. In the neck. In the joints of the armor. Up. Down. Sideways. Wherever I could land a blow. The obsidian blade entered the mixture of flesh, metal, and synthetics with a hideous squelching sound. Sliced cables. Shattered bone. Broke plates. I wasn't aiming for specific points. I was simply killing. Destroying. Pouring out all the pain, all the fear, all the hatred into these furious, ragged strikes.
The creature tried to raise its claw – too late. I drove the knife under the joint, twisting the blade.
It twitched beneath my blows. Convulsively. Spasmodically. Not like a living thing in agony, but like a broken mechanism still carrying a residual current. Like a spasm. Like the death throes of an old, dying engine. I struck again. And again.
The blade scraped against bone, striking sparks from metal. Black ichor sprayed everywhere, splattering my face, hands, armor. It ran down my gauntlets, hot and sticky. Without a helmet, I inhaled its poisonous fumes along with the rotten air of this damned world. Breath tore from my chest in short, painful gasps.
I didn't stop. My actions became a terrible, primal rhythm: strike – ragged inhale – strike – teeth grind – strike – wrench the blade – again.
I struck until my right arm went completely numb, becoming an unfeeling instrument of destruction. I struck until the amber lenses in the creature's eye sockets finally went dark, becoming dull, lifeless circles. Until a vast black pool formed beneath us, viscous and shimmering in the dim light like spilled oil or tar. Until its body stopped trembling and finally went limp, becoming a heap of broken metal and dead organics.
And only then – I stopped.
I sat astride my defeated enemy, breathing heavily. Without rhythm. Convulsively. Gulping the toxic air as if it were water after a long thirst, though each breath burned my lungs from the inside. Every painful movement of my chest was proof.
I was alive. And it – was not.
A deafening silence descended, broken only by my own ragged breathing and the quiet dripping of ichor from my blade onto the vanquished body.