Gray artificial smog blanketed Sector B.
It was supposed to make the urban zone feel real.
The Defense Force had spent enough money on ash machines, broken storefronts, and fake emergency lighting to imitate the kind of disaster sites Caleb had been cleaning since he was old enough to sign a waiver. The result was impressive in the wrong way. Too staged in the corners. Too clean under the rubble. No real rot. No insulation dust stuck to blood.
Still, the smog hid movement.
That part worked.
Caleb kept his right side angled toward a crumbling brick wall. His bruised arm hung beneath the canvas jacket, useless until it decided otherwise. The knife sat in his left hand.
Ten yards away, Hiro slapped the side of his helmet.
"My viewer count is zero," he muttered over the local comms.
His oversized track jacket flapped over his armor plates whenever the stadium vents pushed a cold wind through the street.
"Not even my mom logged in. She said the premium subscription fee for undercard brackets was too high."
"Lucky," Caleb said.
"Lucky?"
"I have one. Pretty sure she's a psychopath."
Hiro checked the magazine on his rifle for the fourth time in three minutes.
"If we do not get at least a dozen mechanical kills, sponsors will not even download our files. My dad spent two months' salary on this armor calibration."
"You said that already."
"I know. Repetition keeps the panic organized."
Caleb scanned the ash-choked street.
"Aim for articulation joints."
Hiro frowned behind his visor.
"The military manual says center mass guarantees target stagger."
"Manual assumes you have a plasma cannon."
Caleb pointed with the knife toward a collapsed tram shell half-buried in fake rubble.
"Training drones use thick front plates because applicants shoot what they see. Knees are cheaper. Neck seams are cheaper. Disposal yards buy mechanical scrap by the pound, and broken joints are always where profit leaks out."
"That is the most depressing tactical advice I have ever received."
"It is free."
A vibration rolled under the asphalt.
Dust shook loose from the brick wall beside Caleb. A pebble bounced once, twice, and disappeared into a crack.
Hiro lowered his rifle.
"The targets are not heavy enough to shake the floor."
"No."
The clean exam shriek cut off, replaced by three deep blasts from the city-wide disaster horn.
HROOOOM. HROOOOM. HROOOOM.
The real one.
Red strobes lit the street from above. Ash turned red. The painted boundary lines at the edge of the block flickered through the smoke like old wounds opening.
Fifty yards ahead, the asphalt fractured.
Jagged slabs buckled upward and threw a cluster of recruits off their feet. Toxic black vapor burst from the widening fissure. It hit one painted white line and melted it into bubbling slag.
A serrated claw the size of a transport truck punched through the crust.
The military discipline of the trial broke.
Someone screamed.
Someone fired at nothing.
A teenager in blue armor dropped a custom rifle in the dirt and ran toward the staging tunnel without picking it back up.
Eighty applicants became eighty versions of the same survival instinct.
Up on the elevated platform, the head proctor locked his hands behind his back and watched the dust climb.
He pressed two fingers to his comm.
His face went cold. "Seal Sector B."
The blast doors groaned as high-grade gears engaged.
The steel barricades began sliding shut between the arena and the civilian viewing boxes.
"Wait," Hiro said.
The locks boomed into place.
Sector B became a quarantine zone.
Caleb, Hiro, Kikaru, Iharu, and a dozen unlucky recruits were sealed inside with whatever had just climbed out of the ground.
The viewing boxes stayed lit above the sealed wall, and Caleb noticed the comfort of that light before he noticed anything noble.
The civilians were protected. The Captains were protected. The sponsor suites were protected behind reinforced glass and blast shutters, probably with bottled water and emergency oxygen tucked under the seats.
Down in the street, applicants who had been children with expensive armor ten minutes ago became containment material.
The exam did not stop.
It changed customers.
The fissure widened.
Segmented shapes poured out around the larger beast's legs.
Scavenger-class Yoju.
Mandibles clicked in a starving chorus as they flooded the broken street. Black carapaces. Acid spit. Fast legs made for finding soft parts under armor.
A recruit tripped near the curb.
Three crawlers lunged for his exposed throat seal.
White armor blurred across Caleb's vision.
Kikaru hit the ground between the recruit and the swarm with her thrusters screaming. The stock of her custom rifle cracked the first crawler's carapace. She dropped to one knee and fired a point-blank plasma round through the second skull.
The third leaped.
She caught it with her braced right arm anyway.
The impact made her shoulder hitch.
She killed it before anyone could notice.
The street became hers for a handful of seconds.
Precise plasma fire. Hard pivots. Short bursts from the thrusters. The drones swarmed her immediately, painting sponsor tags into the smoke above her head as if the system could not imagine bravery without branding.
Kikaru shoved the fallen recruit back with one shoulder and shot a crawler off his boot before it cut through the ankle seal.
"Move," she snapped.
The recruit stared at her.
"Move now."
That reached him. He crawled backward on both hands until two other recruits dragged him toward a collapsed storefront.
From Caleb's angle, she was not winning.
She was buying time.
The swarm volume pinned her in place. A one-person barricade, too polished to admit she was boxed in.
The 6.4 Honju ignored her.
It dragged its colossal bulk out of the fissure.
Acid dripped from its mandibles and ate hissing pools into the asphalt. Its core pulsed sickly green under chest plates thick enough to shrug off small arms.
The armored head swung.
Multi-faceted eyes found the easiest target in the open.
Caleb. A few trapped applicants opened fire. Rounds hammered the glowing chest. Every shot bounced off armor.
To Caleb, the creature was not just a monster.
It was a job he had done a thousand times after the danger was gone.
Cervical plates tight behind the skull.
Jaw blind spot.
Foreleg articulation carrying too much weight.
Cartilage gap near the left knee exposed on weight shift.
Chest plates impossible unless impact opened them.
The blue HUD inside his cracked visor dissolved.
Purple corrupted the glass.
[??? : Get out of the red zone.]
The voice scraped directly into his ear.
The amusement was gone.
[??? : The armor will fail.]
[??? : Your bones will shatter. Leave them. Hide.]
Caleb's left hand went into his jacket pocket.
His fingers closed around the Tier-2 combat stimulant cylinder.
The Honju shrieked.
The sound vibrated in his teeth.
It lunged forward, covering fifty feet of asphalt in one stride.
Caleb jammed the injector through the canvas fabric into his thigh and thumbed the release.
Chemicals hit blood.
Human-grade adrenaline. Coagulants. Painkillers. The kind of mixture sold to soldiers under clean labels and to desperate people under worse ones.
The ache in his ribs vanished.
Heat replaced it.
Then the heat pulled inward.
It gathered behind his sternum, tight and suffocating, as if something inside him had smelled food and opened its mouth.
Pain ripped through his right shoulder.
The painkillers did nothing.
His dead arm jerked.
Flesh crawled under purple scarring. Muscles tightened, shifted, snapped into a new order. His fingers curled into a fist before he told them to.
The hunger opened under it all.
A cold, bottomless demand.
Hiro stood twenty yards to the left, rifle shaking against his shoulder.
He fired a burst at the Honju's face.
The rounds sparked off facial plating.
"Stop shooting armor!" Caleb shouted.
"I'm trying to draw aggro so Kikaru can flank!"
"It's a Danger Class-6. It does not care about your aggro."
"The manual says large predators track incoming fire."
"Manual ever meet one?"
Hiro answered with nothing but rough breathing while he ejected his magazine and fumbled the replacement.
"Then what do I shoot?"
"Left knee."
"The core is in the chest."
"And you cannot reach it. Left knee."
Hiro pulled a magazine marked with a thick blue stripe.
"Cryo? I have one mag."
The Honju raised its right claw.
The full weight shifted onto its left foreleg.
Caleb saw the plates move.
Pale tissue opened under the armor for less than a second.
"When it raises the claw, the left knee plates slide back," Caleb said. His own breathing started to shred at the edges. "Freeze the gap."
Hiro dropped to one knee.
He anchored the rifle against his shoulder.
The Honju's shadow fell over Caleb.
"Now!"
Hiro fired.
Three cryo rounds buried into the exposed joint.
Liquid nitrogen erupted white. Cartilage crystallized instantly. The Honju roared. Its balance broke.
The claw coming down toward Caleb stuttered and lost the killing line.
Caleb stepped under it.
Heat from the open jaws blistered the back of his neck. Acid stink flooded his cracked helmet. His right hand grabbed a jagged length of steel rebar jutting from broken concrete.
He felt the grip close before his brain finished requesting it.
The arm moved like it belonged to the thing in his chest.
The rebar should have been too heavy at that angle.
It should have torn his shoulder loose.
Instead the old glove closed, the purple bruising under his sleeve pulsed hot, and Caleb felt the thing under his ribs choose the shortest path between want and motion.
Elegance and technique fell away. What remained was butcher work before the carcass had the decency to become a carcass.
Caleb drove the rebar upward into the frozen knee joint.
The crystallized cartilage shattered. The joint snapped. The Honju's shriek turned wet. Its foreleg buckled.
The creature crashed forward. Its armored neck snapped back from the impact, and the chest plates ripped open just enough to expose the pulsing green core.
Across the street, Kikaru crushed a crawler's skull under her boot.
She spun.
Her gaze took in the crippled Honju, the rebar in the knee, the exposed core, and Caleb standing under the beast with a dead man's jacket and one stolen moment of strength.
Her suit warnings screamed loud enough for Caleb's damaged comm to catch the edge of them.
She ignored them.
Of course she did.
Kikaru's thrusters ignited.
She used the hood of an overturned transport truck as a springboard and launched herself into the air.
Fifty feet.
Maybe more.
The stadium floodlights caught the polished edges of her prototype armor at the top of the arc.
Her custom rifle leveled.
The barrel hummed with superheated plasma.
"Clear!"
Caleb threw himself sideways. Kikaru fired. High-compression energy struck the exposed core. The organ ruptured.
A shockwave of hot air and ash blasted across the arena, shattering the remaining glass in the artificial block.
The Honju slammed its jaw into the dirt one final time.
Then it stopped moving.
The disaster siren cut off.
For ten seconds, Sector B belonged to the hiss of evaporating acid.
Then the camera drones remembered money.
They shifted.
A dozen spheres detached from the outer perimeter, ignoring Kikaru's sponsor arc, and swarmed the ruined street around the smoking Honju carcass.
Their lenses focused on Caleb.
The viewer count in the corner of his visor rolled like a slot machine.
Five thousand. Fifty thousand. Two hundred thousand. Public chat broke through the military firewall.
User841: wait did that guy use a pipe
RedLine: scrubber snapped a 6.4 leg
G-Corp: [Automated] Private Bid Request Initiated.
SnipeKing: what is his sync rate
GunnerFan: dude in surplus gear carried the princess
Hiro's feed icon jumped beside Caleb's for half a second.
Somebody clipped the cryo shot.
Another clip titled NERD FREEZES GODZILLA KNEE appeared, disappeared, and reappeared with a spelling correction.
Iharu's drone swung toward the carcass, then back toward Iharu, then toward the carcass again. The automated personality filter could not decide whether his brand survived better as witness, rival, or background relevance.
Purple text flooded the glass and crushed the public feed into the margins.
[??? : You magnificent, ugly thing.]
The panic was gone.
In its place was something darker than praise.
[??? : Look at how they see you now.]
[??? : Look at them staring.]
[??? : But you belong to me.]
Caleb released the rebar.
The unnatural strength evaporated.
His right arm dropped against his side, dead weight again. Nausea hit so fast he almost went down with the Honju. The hunger tore through him. Human muscle cramped around borrowed power it had never been built to spend.
He staggered backward and braced his good shoulder against the brick wall of an artificial storefront.
Twenty feet away, Kikaru landed.
Her thrusters spat excess heat. Secondary drones clustered around her at once. Augmented sponsor tags painted themselves into the air. She stood tall with the rifle against her hip and her chin angled for the nearest lens.
From the shadows, Caleb saw what the drones were not supposed to see.
Her left knee trembled.
Her jaw locked hard.
A line of dark blood leaked from the pressure seal at her right elbow, trailing down white armor and dripping into the dirt.
The prototype was tearing her apart from inside.
She kept smiling with posture instead of her mouth.
Caleb spat ash.
"You're leaking, Princess."
Kikaru did not turn away from the drone.
"Shut up, scrubber. It's coolant."
"Coolant is blue."
"Mitsurugi experimental coolant is whatever color I say it is."
"Blood is red. You pushed output too high."
Her voice dropped into the private comm, thin enough that only someone listening for pain would catch it.
"I cleared fifty targets in two minutes. I held the perimeter. I got the kill."
"You did."
That made her glance at him.
Caleb held his dead arm against his ribs and swallowed against the hunger.
"You did great. Now sit down before your kneecap snaps backward."
She pulled in one sharp breath.
"If I sit down, Mitsurugi stock drops four points before market close."
"That sounds fake."
"It is not."
"Still dumb."
"Stay out of my shot."
"Your shot has twelve drones," Caleb said.
"Thirteen."
"One of them is pointed at your elbow."
"Then stand in front of it."
"You just told me to stay out of your shot."
"I changed my mind."
Caleb opened his mouth to argue.
The sky above the stadium tore open.
A sonic boom cracked through the smog layer like a physical whip.
The shockwave drove hovering drones into the dirt. Dust plumed. Something fell from the atmosphere and hit the center of the street hard enough to crater the asphalt inward.
Cracks spiderwebbed fifty yards in every direction. Dust settled around a single figure. Black armor. Dark-gray First Division collar.
Scarred leather jacket snapping in the artificial wind.
Elara straightened in the impact crater.
She ignored the drones fighting to regain altitude.
Her sharp gaze passed the dead Honju.
Then Kikaru.
Then locked onto Caleb, broken and starving against the wall.