There was no real day on Virelia-7.
Only brighter hours and dimmer ones.
And when the twin suns dipped low behind the sulfur haze, the true night crawled out from beneath the bones of war.
The boy didn't sleep anymore.
Not truly.
Each time he closed his eyes, he felt them watching—the creatures, yes, but also the voices in his head. The cold one. The clever one. And sometimes, the angry one.
But it was hunger that dragged him from shelter tonight.
Hunger—and necessity.
He had gone too long without real food. Ravine meat lasted, but it was poison in slow doses. His stomach growled like an engine running on fumes.
So he moved through the graveyard of mechs, creeping under shadows, gliding between steel ribcages and splintered cockpits. The night beasts had begun to hunt freely again—free from the thundering mechs that once ruled the sky.
Now, it was only tooth and claw.
And he would meet them on their terms.
---
He had fashioned a spear.
Crude. Brutal. Effective.
The shaft was a support rod from a downed battle-walker, wrapped in braided wire scavenged from cockpit cables. At the tip, he had lashed the broken horn of a Virelian dune rhino—a thick, obsidian spike once used to gore through steel-plated crawler tanks.
Now, it was his fang.
His weapon.
His answer to the night.
---
They came just after second dusk.
The Ash Jaws—beasts that slithered across the ground like liquid armor, their skin glistening with heat-refracting scales. Their mouths unfolded in quadrants, ringed with serrated cartilage that chewed more than bit.
He saw one first. Then another.
They circled the corpse of a fallen pilot, gnawing at the remains.
He exhaled slow. Muscles coiled. Breath held.
He'd learned to still his heartbeat. Learned to move only when shadows danced.
He stepped forward—
Too loud.
One snapped its head toward him, hissing.
It leapt, a blur of scale and teeth.
And the boy moved.
Ducked. Rolled. Let instinct take him. The voice in his mind roared.
> "Let me take control! Let me—"
"No."
Not yet.
He struck.
The horned spear plunged deep into the beast's open throat. Black blood sprayed his chest. It writhed, twisting violently, but he held on, bracing his legs in the dirt until it stilled.
The second came.
This one circled him warily. Smarter.
He backed toward a collapsed mech torso, breathing through clenched teeth. The voice came again—different this time. Cooler.
> "It studies your rhythm. Predictable patterns make you vulnerable. Shift."
He obeyed without thinking—feinting left, then breaking right. The beast lunged too late. He stabbed it through the underjaw, shattering bone, pinning it to the wall of the mech behind him.
Blood dripped from his fingers. Breath ragged. Eyes wild.
He felt… alive.
---
Later that night, he roasted the meat over a sparking energy coil from a broken core drive. It hissed and cracked, dripping oils onto the rock. It tasted like burned rubber and iron.
He ate it anyway. While eating he called out to the voices in his head.
"You which is the aggressive one,I will call you....." he looked around and something caught his eye.
A dogtag around the neck of a corpse. At this time he doesn't even mind sleeping in the midst of dead beings. On the dogtag he saw something that looks like a name, "Jim"
" Nice I will call the aggressive one:Jim while the Mr calculation Jam.
> "And why would you call me ,Jim", that name is soo lame. The aggressive one said. The one who Analyzes asked, "what about you, what will you name yourself"
The boy then said: " Come to think of it, am sure you guys know my real name and what exactly happened here, but you are just pretend like you no know anything "
" You think we know anything hun,we are you,you are us. It's simple as that. I just know I seems to be here since we woke up that day, honestly am bored,in this dark room up here, I need some entertainment, that's why I asked you to let me take control.Jim replied
The boy was deep in thought and confused at the same time, at that moment his eyes caught a name on a Severed Mecha.
Quinn Genesis!!
What? Jim asked
My name is "Quinn!!! "
He was quite happy, and when he was done, he cleaned the spear, checked his makeshift bindings, and crawled back to the cockpit he called home.
But he didn't rest.
His ears twitched to every noise.
Even in sleep, his hand never left the weapon.
---
The next night, it was different.
The ground shook. Not trembled—shook.
Something massive had entered the dead zone.
He crouched atop a broken mech shoulder, watching from a height as it emerged from the dusk mist.
An enormous quadruped. Hunched. Armored in bony plates thicker than any tank wall. A crown of sensor horns jutted from its skull like a grotesque crown. Its mouth was vertical, folding open to emit a long, rattling roar that echoed for miles.
A Night Alpha.
He did not fight that one.
Not yet.
He waited. Learned its patterns. Studied its path.
His hyper-sensitivity had evolved.
He felt vibrations through the ground now—before sound came.
Smelled blood on the wind from half a mile away.
Could tell the difference between the rasp of scavengers and the growl of predators in the dark.
It wasn't power.
It was survival.
Every wound had taught him something. Every fight made his instincts sharper, his reactions faster.
And yet, the voice inside grew louder.
The aggressive one(Jim)
Laughed when Quinn bled. Mocked him when he flinched.
"You're becoming like me anyway. Why fight it? I could do more. Faster. Stronger. Give me a night—just one night—and I'll tear that Alpha's heart out."
He clutched his skull. Grit his teeth. Pressed his forehead to cold steel.
"No."
> "Are you not afraid of death?. Do you want to kill us. Or are you're afraid of what i will do when I get out?"
"Yes."
Jim didn't speak again that night.
But he could feel Jim… waiting.
---
Some nights, he found strange things.
A glowing orb embedded in mech wreckage. Still humming. When he touched it, images flashed across his mind—battlefields from above, strategy maps, fleet signals. Some of it… felt familiar.
A locked helmet with a voice repeating through static: "—last call to Clan Ashiron. Mayday, mayday. Reaper Wing down—"
A cracked dog tag. No name. Just a serial number burned into it.
117-Kestrel-V.
He didn't know who owned it.
But he kept it.
---
And sometimes, he dreamed.
Of metal birds soaring through oceans of stars. Of brothers. Friends. War chants before impossible battles.
Sometimes, he dreamed of falling.
And sometimes, he dreamed of wings.
But always, he woke alone.
---
He fought a stonehide next.
A massive creature with armor like volcanic glass and jaws that could snap mech plating. The battle took hours. It nearly broke his arm.
But he used fire. Lured it into slag. Forced it to overheat, then stabbed deep into the gap between plates.
When it died, he collapsed beside it.
Laughing.
Crying.
He didn't know why.
---
Each fight made him harder. Not crueler—never that—but honed.
Even the voices grew quieter in awe of his tenacity.
The calculative one "Jam" murmured in approval, often analyzing his mistakes and giving strategies.
Jim boiled, impatient, but less contemptuous now.
They weren't fading.
They were… watching.
"You're surviving. But soon, survival won't be enough."
"we have to find a way to leave this planet."
And somewhere deep in his bones, he felt it was true.
Something was coming.
He wasn't just living through ruins.
The harsh environment is shaping him for the future .
☆☆☆