The drive inward was steeped in silence and tension, broken only by the rhythmic churn of treads over frozen ground and the occasional low hiss of static from the comms. Sela sat at the controls, hunched slightly forward, eyes scanning the terrain as the crawler maneuvered over cracked ice sheets and ridges of ancient permafrost. Her knuckles were pale against the steering grips.
Kharv rode in the turret seat, half-exposed to the cold in his heavy armor, both hands steady on the mounted machine gun fixed to the crawler's roof. He scanned the horizon through his HUD, tracking movement, watching shadows twitch in the pale Gliesean light.
Around them, the world was a wasteland of snow-dusted rock and iron-hard earth. The sun hung low, casting the same dull amber hue it had since they'd landed. The planet didn't seem to understand the difference between day and dusk, only degrees of decay.
They saw their first infected within an hour. A handful of stragglers, shambling slowly along the edge of a dry riverbed, limbs stiff from cold but still animate with that awful, twitching persistence. Kharv didn't hesitate. A quick burst from the gun turret lit the stillness with flashes of fire. The zombies dropped, limbs scattering like brittle dolls.
"Clear," he said into the comm, flatly.
"Good," Sela muttered. "But we're still in the daylight belt. The real ones don't wake up until dusk."
No one responded. They all knew the stories. The infected near the dark zones were different—smarter, faster, drawn to movement and heat. Daylight was a temporary reprieve, nothing more.
After three hours of crawling through frost-choked valleys and skeletal forests of petrified wood, they reached the outskirts of the first city.
What remained of it.
Ruins stretched across the icy plains like the bones of some long-dead beast. Abandoned transports were half-buried in the snow, their hulls warped from years of neglect. Towering buildings leaned at odd angles, windows shattered, metal signs swaying in the cold wind. Streetlights still stood, though most had been twisted or toppled. Whatever life this place once held had long since fled, or been consumed.
Kali watched from the side window, his reflection faint in the glass, ghosted against the empty cityscape.
"Nightfall's coming," Sela said quietly, her eyes flicking to the chrono on the dash. "Should we camp here on the edge, or push forward into the city?"
Kali kept his gaze outside. "There will be infected in there. No doubt."
"And probably shelter," Brann replied from the rear compartment, suiting up in his exosuit, the servos hissing as they engaged. "If we want a defensible position for the night, it's better than sleeping out here in the wind."
He dropped the rear hatch and stepped out, boots crunching into the frost. "Me and Kali will scout ahead. If it's clear, we'll call you in."
Kali grabbed his gear, a compact automatic rifle, a high-velocity backup pistol, and two short carbon blades which he strapped to his outer thighs.
He followed Brann out into the snow, the light dimming by degrees, shadows stretching toward the ruined city like fingers. Behind them, the crawler waited, engine idling low, its lights casting long beams into the fog.
The city was a mausoleum of wind and silence. Snow crept along the edges of crumbling pavement and broken storefronts, pooling in the collapsed guts of rusted vehicles and shattered glass. It was bitterly cold, the kind of cold that didn't just numb fingers but reached into bones, hunting the warmth inside. Kali's insulated coat did its best, lining him in layers of reactive thermal weave, but the truth was unavoidable, these temperatures were not meant for the living.
They moved cautiously through the empty streets, flanking derelict buildings and weaving between husks of collapsed towers. Their boots made soft crunching sounds against the snow-crusted asphalt. A fine mist of frost hung in the air, stirred only by their passing.
"Best to avoid firearms if we can," Brann muttered, his voice low but firm through the comm. "Sound draws them."
Kali didn't look at him, just kept walking. "You don't have to tell me. That's why I brought the blades."
He tapped one of the sheathed knives at his thigh, dense carbon edge, mono-molecular, silent. Practical. Brutal.
Brann gave a dry chuckle, his exosuit hissing softly with each step. "Wish I had one of those fancy esper abilities. That'd make all this easier. Instead, I got bottom-tier rubbish." There was a smile in his voice, but it didn't reach far.
Kali slowed a little, giving Brann a sidelong glance. "I didn't know you were an Esper."
It was a weighty title, Esper. Not just a mutant. An outlier. A rarity. The term had been formalized by the military after the first hundred serum iterations. Mutants with enhanced strength, speed, and regeneration were commonplace, but Espers were the ones who'd drawn the cosmic short straw or the winning ticket, depending on how you looked at it. Fire from bare hands. Telekinesis. Sound-based attacks.
People like Darius, Liv, and Elira.
But not everyone started with power. The mutation was chaotic. Some mutants didn't gain an ability until they advanced into higher tiers, Beta or Alpha class. Most never did, even after decades.
One thing was certain, if a non-esper mutant faced an awakened of same rank, it wouldn't end well for the mutant. Awakened themselves considered mutants, esper or not, as little more than shoddy experiments. But they were indeed espers that could match awakened.
Brann's voice came again, quieter this time. "Yeah. I am, technically. Minor Esper classification. My ability's… well, I can harden my skin. A sort of dermal armor. Makes me pretty resistant to damage, blades, small arms, even blunt force if I brace for it."
Kali nodded slowly. "That's not nothing."
"No, but I've seen a pyrokinetic esper melt a tank with a burst. I know which to prefer."
A pause hung between them as they crossed the shell of an old plaza, navigating around a half-frozen fountain littered with the bones of what might have been a crowd. Some still clutched each other in death, locked in a tableau of their final moments. The frost had preserved them.
They walked on, past hollow buildings and broken statues, deeper into the city's heart. Somewhere ahead, something shifted in the shadows. Kali's grip tightened on the hilt of his blade.
They came across another group of stragglers.
They were once human, but time, hunger, and the plague's rot had hollowed them out. Now they were little more than twitching husks, drawn by warmth, sound, and the pulse of living blood. Their skin was pallid and stretched, movements jerky like puppets half-remembering how to move. No coordination. No higher brain. Just instinct and hunger.
Kali didn't hesitate. He slipped forward like a shadow, blades drawn in a fluid motion, glinting faintly in the dim light. He moved with ruthless precision, one blade severing the neck of the nearest, the other plunging cleanly through the eye socket of the next.
Only force to the brain worked on them. Anything less and they just kept coming, twitching, crawling, gnawing until they wore you down.
Five bodies lay in the snow, leaking dark fluid that steamed briefly before icing over.
"Efficient," Brann muttered, stepping past one of the corpses and giving it a cursory glance. "Almost feel bad for 'em. Almost."
Kali wiped the edge of one blade clean against the arm of his coat. "They died a long time ago."
They continued on in silence, moving street by street through the ruined sector. They found an old industrial stretch once packed with warehouses and manufacturing nodes. Now it was just skeletal buildings, half-buried under snow and silence.
After several more minutes of scouting and no further contact, Brann raised his hand to his comm and toggled the mic. "Crawler Team, this is Brann. City's quiet. No major cluster signs down here. Looks clear."
A burst of static, then a voice came through, calm, clipped, and unmistakably Sela. "Copy that, Brann. Bringing the crawler in now."
When the crawler finally rolled to a halt outside their position, its treads hissing steam into the frozen air, the team relocated to the second floor of an abandoned mail office to make camp. The place was stripped bare long ago, no desks, no terminals, just the faint outlines of bureaucratic life etched in dust and rust. Still, it had walls, a roof, and a vantage point over the street. That was enough.
Once the perimeter was set and gear stowed, Kharv got a fire going in the corner of the old sorting room using a field-burner and some scavenged polymer blocks. He worked with quiet purpose, humming a tune from the southern isles as he stirred a pot over the flame. The smell of broth, spice, and cured meat filled the space, comforting, warm, and real.
"We made it through day one," he said, ladling soup into dented steel bowls. He passed one to Kali, steam curling upward between them. "And I already regret signing on. Vrohlite were not built for this kind of cold. I swear my arms are getting brittle."
Kali took the bowl with a nod. The soup was thick and hearty, some combination of root-veggie ration base, dried greens, and whatever meat Kharv had bartered for back in the fringe markets. "Thanks," he muttered. He meant it.
"It's ten million credits," Sela said, breaking the silence as she leaned back against the wall, legs stretched out beside the fire. "Split four ways, that's still more than enough. You could buy a house in the Core Sector with that. Even get residency clearance."
"Or retire outright," Brann added, blowing over his bowl. "What about you, Kali? What would you do with your share?"
Kali gave a small shrug. "We don't have it yet."
"Don't be a killjoy," Kharv said, settling onto an overturned crate with his own bowl in hand. "We've got to dream big or freeze small, friend. Me? I think I'd visit Solanthe, drink in the sights, maybe frolic with the great clans, make a wife of one of their daughters. I'm thinking Mugen. Or Larnos, maybe. Big names, proper bloodlines."
Kali's eyes narrowed slightly. "Mugen?"
The name struck like a pressure spike. It had been a long time since he'd heard it, too long. Not since Priene killed Mugen Ryo in a dusty warehouse on Theraxis. Back then, Kali had believed the Mugen were a mere cog in the Septate Alliance, just another mid-tier clan flexing old nobility. Only when he reached Caladrian did the truth surface.
The Mugen were no minor house. They were a major power within the Aureline Dominion, and not just in name. Influence, fleets, legacy, the sort of force that made the alliances uneasy. Ryo's death would come back to bite him in the ass, he was sure of it.
"Yes, Mugen," Kharv said, clearly enjoying the sound of the name on his tongue. "They say their patriarch is a third-order Awakened, and the clan has an inherited battle art. Powerful stuff."
He leaned in as he spoke, eyes glinting with the glow of the fire. "Imagine that. You're born into that bloodline, and along with your name, you inherit a system of war refined over centuries. Makes a Vrohlite jealous."
Then he paused, noticing the sudden shift in the room's atmosphere. The quiet. Sela had stopped sipping her soup. Brann's gaze flicked toward Kali. And Kharv, catching on a second too late, winced.
"Shit," he muttered, setting his bowl down. "Not to rub it in or anything."
Kali said nothing. The fire popped quietly between them.
Battle arts were rare. Sacred, even. Each major clan or martial lineage kept theirs locked behind blood oaths, kill-switches, and living memory. Schools of thought built entire philosophies around them, codified systems of power and purpose. To hold one was to wield not just a technique, but a legacy. And when paired with awakening, the result was staggering.
An Awakened with a battle art could control the battlefield like a musician playing an old, cruel instrument. Those without? They had instinct, intuition, and desperation. No less dangerous, but infinitely less stable.
That was the difference that had saved Kali's life.
He and Priene had faced Mugen Ryo with full knowledge of the odds. Outnumbering him had helped, yes. But more crucial was the fact that Ryo, scion of the Mugen, inheritor of the name, had never been trained in his clan's art. The Sutra of Unquiet Steel, they called it. A discipline tailored for friction-aligned Awakened, like Ryo himself.
But Ryo had been sent away before he could learn it.
He stirred his soup, then smiled as he looked up. "No use lamenting over what can't change."
He had asked Rizen once, but the machina laughed oddly. He had said since Machina can't awaken, there was no point in him ever learning any art that relied on post-reality cognition.
Kharv gave a half-hearted chuckle. "Still, I can dream, right? Probably safer to dream of daughters than the arts."
The fire crackled, and no one replied.