"Are you okay?"
A calm, clear voice cut through the receding, metallic ringing in his ears.
It was strangely soothing, a soft pressure against the pain, but utterly alien in the context of the violence-strewn yard.
It sounded nothing like Rook's gravel bark, Vey's sharp commands, or Echo's tense murmurs.
It was… placid.
Out of place.
Nail, his thoughts still sludge, answered without thinking. "No."
It was the truth, simple and unadorned.
Only a second too late did the weirdness of it crash over him.
Whose voice was that?
Slowly, painfully, he turned his head.
A figure knelt beside him in the dust.
Clad in a plain, loose-fitting gray hoodie.
The hood was drawn up, casting the upper half of the face into deep shadow, leaving only the faint, pale curve of a chin and a neutral mouth visible.
Who?
The question echoed in the hollow spaces of his aching skull.
He wasn't expecting anyone.
No one new should be here.
This was a kill zone.
He blinked hard, trying to force the swimming shapes to resolve.
The figure remained.
Solid.
Unwavering.
Am I still hallucinating?
The thought felt more likely.
The shockwave had scrambled his senses.
He'd been seeing flashes of old fighting rings, hearing phantom crowds.
This was probably just another ghost—a kinder one, but a ghost nonetheless.
"GET UP ALREADY, NAIL!"
Rook's shout finally pierced the haze, distant and muffled as if shouted through thick glass.
Nail heard it this time, but it was layered over that persistent, faint ringing.
Two realities, competing.
He needed to move.
Hallucination or not, he couldn't just lie here.
Acting on a blunt, protective instinct, he reached out a trembling hand and grabbed the gray hoodie's forearm.
The contact was immediate and shocking.
He felt it—the solidity of bone and muscle beneath the fabric, the cool temperature of skin.
It felt real.
For a hallucination, the texture was disturbingly vivid.
"Get away from here," Nail grunted, his voice raw. He gave the arm a weak, urgent push. "As fast as you can."
If she was real, that was reason enough.
If she was a phantom… well, telling a figment to run was probably a sign he was further gone than he thought.
He used the contact as a brace and tried to stand.
He staggered and would have fallen.
But the gray hoodie didn't let go.
Instead of fleeing, her grip tightened, steadying him.
She was helping him up.
Nail's confusion curdled into frustration.
This made no sense.
Why would a hallucination help him stand?
Why would a real person walk into this meat grinder to offer a hand?
He shook his head, a violent motion meant to clear the cobwebs.
It only made the world tilt.
The gray hoodie's hold remained, an anchor in the swaying chaos.
"Can't you see?" Nail rasped, his eyes struggling to focus on her shadowed face.
He gestured weakly with his chin toward the center of the yard. "This isn't the place to help people. You see that thing over there?"
He didn't wait for an answer.
"That thing wants us," he said, his voice dropping to a ragged, earnest whisper as he circled a finger near his own temple. "Dead."
The girl in the gray hoodie tilted her head, mimicking his gesture.
Her voice, when it came, was the same calm, curious tone.
"Dead?" she asked, as if he'd stated a bizarre and interesting fact about the weather. "Why?"
The question was so utterly naive, so disconnected from the carnage surrounding them, that it finally cemented Nail's conclusion.
This wasn't a person.
This was his brain breaking.
A final, polite little fiction conjured before the lights went out for good.
He had to ignore it.
He had to focus on the real fight.
But the phantom's hand on his arm still felt solid.
And her question hung in the air, a piece of impossible sanity in a world gone violently mad.
Why?
The simple, childlike question echoed in the fractured chambers of Nail's mind.
It wasn't a challenge.
It was a genuine inquiry, absurd in its innocence.
Why indeed.
What was the reason?
The fight had consumed him so completely—the rhythm of dodge and swing, the tremor in his hands, the spray of blood on concrete—that the origin had blurred into a distant, irrelevant past.
He retraced the steps.
The rally point.
The crimson armor dropping from the sky.
The casual, brutal dismantling of his people.
Are we the ones who started this?
The answer surfaced, cold and clear.
No. No, we aren't.
They hadn't invaded.
They hadn't provoked.
They'd been standing on their own ground, in their own home, when the war machine descended to test its blades on their bones.
This wasn't a turf war.
It wasn't a dispute.
It was an execution, dressed up as a duel.
The realization didn't bring clarity.
It brought a black, expanding void of futility.
They were fighting for survival against a force that saw their survival as a variable to be eliminated.
There was no "why" that mattered.
Only the fact of the violence itself.
A hot, wild laugh bubbled up in his chest, threatening to tear itself free.
If he was truly losing his mind now, if this calm phantom was the prelude to the final shutdown, then he might as well ask the one question that had no answer.
He might as well scream it at the uncaring sky, at the polished killer, at the ghost beside him.
He pulled in a ragged, shuddering breath that filled his lungs with dust and pain.
Then he threw his head back.
"WHY!!!!!"
The roar tore from his throat, raw and shredded, a sound of pure, undiluted anguish and defiance.
It wasn't a question for the girl. It wasn't even truly a question for Ember.
It was a verdict.
A protest against the entire, senseless violence of the moment.
The force of it made his own body shudder.
And beside him, the girl in the gray hoodie—the solid, impossible phantom—flinched. A small, subtle recoil, as if his shout had been a physical blow.
Even his hallucinations, it seemed, weren't prepared for the raw sound of a breaking man.
Ember, her systems coolly analyzing the field—tracking Mags's elevated position, Rook's last known sniper nest, the clustered heat signatures of Vey's demolition crew—was momentarily derailed by the raw, animalistic shout that ripped across the yard.
Her helmet turned a fraction, sensors focusing on the source, the young brawler, the one with the glowing fists and the stubborn refusal to stay down.
He was on his feet, but swaying, supported by… nothing her sensors could clearly register.
He is losing it.
The conclusion was clinical.
The shout wasn't a battle cry.
It was the sound of a structural failure—a mind cracking under pressure she had applied.
A strange, cold sneer touched her lips behind the mask.
Her actions weren't even that severe.
A few shocks, a shackle, a concussive wave.
If that was enough to break this supposedly durable fighter, then his reputation was as hollow as his defiance.
But a broken tool was easier to discard than a functional one.
Her tactical logic reconfigured instantly.
The primary threat matrix updated.
The brawler, now emotionally and mentally compromised, was the weakest point in their faltering coordination.
Eliminate the weakest link, and the chain disintegrates.
She predicted the counterplay with near-certainty.
The fly on the high perch would drop to provide covering fire.
The sniper would attempt to pin her with suppression or target her joints.
The demolition leader and the glyph-caster would hold position, conserving their strength and waiting for a true opening, not a desperate defense.
Perfect.
She would use their predictable loyalty against them.
A rush toward Nail wouldn't just target him—it would trigger them.
It would force Mags to expose herself.
It would fix Rook's aim.
It would pull their resources into a reactive, defensive cluster.
And then, once they were committed to saving their broken friend, she would pivot.
Her systems hummed, repulsors priming.
She planted one crimson boot slightly behind the other, coiling the Aegis-frame's immense power into its legs.
The play was set.
The broken man was the bait.
And his friends, bound by a sentiment she neither understood nor respected, were about to take the hook.
But what she hadn't factored into her clean, tactical calculus was the being standing beside Nail.
The gray hoodie didn't move from Nail's side.
She was invisible to anyone but him.
She simply watched as Ember's posture shifted, the suit's systems priming for a lethal dash.
From beneath the shadow of her hood, a slow, knowing smile spread—unseen by the armor, unseen by Nail, unseen by anyone.
Unpredictable variables, she mused, the thought a spark of pure delight in her detached mind. They really do make the best entertainment.
Her milky-white eyes, drinking in the scene from mere feet away, glinted with newfound interest.
The crimson armor was a polished, corporate hammer.
The Junkyard rats were scrambling nails.
It was a simple equation of force versus fragility.
Predictable.
But this.
The brawler shouting into the void, his psyche fraying at the seams, and now the corporate weapon preparing to stamp him out—it was a poignant little drama unfolding right beside her.
And she found herself unexpectedly invested.
I have found myself a wonderful toy, she thought, the concept amusing her.
Nail, in his raw, breaking state, was a fascinating specimen.
A test bench of pain, defiance, and limit.
I could control his emotions… The idea surfaced, clinical and cold.
No.
She dismissed it instantly.
My sister already plays with puppets and emotions. That would be derivative. Boring.
Her gaze slid from Nail to the crimson armor, a monument to unfair advantage looming across the yard.
It was too clean a victory.
There was no story in a hammer crushing a nail.
The story was in the nail bending, holding, or—most beautifully—breaking the hammer.
A new, more compelling question formed.
Should I help this toy break his limit instead?
Not by making him a puppet.
But by… unlocking what was already there.
To see if the breaking point was an end, or a new kind of beginning.
Maybe that's much more entertaining.
The smile beneath her hood widened into something genuine and terribly quiet.
She wasn't going to stop the fight.
She was going to curate it.
Nail readied himself, planting his feet as best he could despite the world's persistent sway.
He saw Ember lower herself into a striker's crouch, the crimson plates shifting with a hydraulic sigh.
This was it.
The final dash.
He gritted his teeth, bracing for the impact that would likely snap him in half.
But the impact didn't come.
Instead, the world froze.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
The crimson armor was caught mid-dash, a blurred sculpture of polished alloy and lethal intent, one foot off the ground, dust suspended in the air around it like frozen mist.
Mags stopped on her high perch, her shotgun aimed, her finger curled around the trigger, a wordless shout trapped on her lips.
Across the yard, Vey was halfway through a hand signal to his crew, his mouth open in a silent command.
Rook was a silhouette behind his scope, utterly still.
Sound vanished.
The hum of glyphs, the crackle of settling fires, the wind—all gone, replaced by a thick, absolute silence that pressed against Nail's eardrums.
His own breath hitched, trapped in his chest.
He could still move.
He could still think.
But everything else… had stopped.
Slowly, disbelievingly, he turned his head toward the only other thing that should be moving—the girl in the gray hoodie beside him.
She was looking right at him.
And she was smiling.
It wasn't a kind smile.
It was a smile of deep, unsettling amusement, the corners of her mouth curving up beneath the shadow of her hood.
It made his skin crawl.
"Do you want power?" she asked.
Her voice was the same calm, clear tone, but in the absolute stillness, it felt like it was being spoken directly into the center of his mind.
The line was so cliché it was almost laughable.
The kind of thing from a cheap fantasy.
But there was nothing cheap about the frozen picture surrounding them.
This was real.
Horrifyingly real.
Nail's mouth felt dry.
His mind, already battered, scrambled for purchase.
"…Who doesn't?" he finally rasped, the words sounding stupid and small in the perfect silence.
He didn't notice the warm, slow trickle of blood beginning to seep from his left nostril.
A minor capillary, strained beyond its limit by the sudden, violent expansion of his cognitive processes.
The person in the gray hoodie hadn't stopped time.
She had accelerated his mind.
A hidden, utterly undetectable glyph had woven itself into the air around him the moment she touched his arm, pushing his perception into overdrive.
To him, the world had ground to a halt.
In reality, it was moving at its normal, brutal pace.
He was simply experiencing every nanosecond stretched into a vast, silent minute.
She was giving him time to think.
To choose.
To break… or to be remade.
And the clock was ticking in a currency only his overheating brain could understand.
A devil, huh.
The thought settled in Nail's superheated mind with a grim, fatalistic clarity.
Of course.
What else would walk into a frozen hellscape, smile like that, and offer power?
Angels didn't show up in Junkyard kill zones.
Saints didn't have milky-white eyes that drank the light.
This was a deal-maker.
The oldest story in the book.
The thought of hell waiting for him after all this was over was a distant, secondary dread.
A problem for a future he wasn't sure he'd have.
The more immediate, visceral fear was for the faces frozen around him.
The people who had become something like family in this rusted, brutal world.
For them to live.
For them to have a chance.
That was the only currency that mattered.
"At what cost?" Nail asked, his voice hollow in the expansive silence.
He had to hear it.
To know the price tag on the devil's bargain.
"My entertainment," the gray hoodie answered, her tone light, honest, almost breezy.
And Nail, his mind stretched thin and bleeding, misunderstood.
He didn't just misunderstand the situation—he misunderstood her.
He heard the word entertainment and filtered it through the only lens he had: the cruelty of the Junkyard, the gladiatorial pits, the Scorchers toying with them.
He thought she meant his suffering.
His pain.
His desperate, scrambling struggle to survive would be the show.
A devil's coliseum, with his soul as the prize for her amusement.
He didn't comprehend that her entertainment was something far more vast, more abstract, and more terrifying.
It wasn't just about watching him suffer.
It was about watching a story unfold.
About pushing a variable to its absolute limit to see what new, unpredictable shape it would take.
She wasn't bargaining for his pain, she was investing in his potential transformation, for the sheer narrative thrill of it.
He nodded slowly, a weary, resigned acceptance in his eyes.
He thought he understood the deal.
My agony for their lives. Fine.
He had no idea the role she had in mind for him was far more dangerous than just a suffering pawn.
"Give me power," Nail said, the words a vow sealed in the silent cathedral of his own accelerated mind.
"I already have," the gray hoodie answered, her voice a gentle murmur in the vast stillness. "You have all the time in the world to defeat that armor."
The words landed, but their meaning twisted in his bleeding, desperate consciousness.
All the time in the world.
He heard a promise of an endless moment, a frozen eternity where he could win.
He didn't hear the chilling subtext: that his time—his biological clock, his heartbeats, his very lifespan—was now burning at a rate that would turn minutes into years, and hours into a lifetime spent in a single, frantic instant.
So she intends to take my soul regardless, he thought, the bitterness a familiar taste. Even if I win, I lose. A devil's bargain, after all.
There was no more room for fear, only a cold, clear purpose.
If this was borrowed time bought with his own burning life, he would spend every screaming millisecond of it.
He pushed off from the frozen ground.
He felt no pain.
The deep aches from shattered ribs, the screaming protest of torn muscles, the throbbing in his skull—all of it was gone, muted by the sheer, overwhelming speed of his perception.
He was moving at what felt like a normal running pace, but in this hyper-lucid dreamscape, it was a glide through icy air.
To him, time was truly stopped.
This was the ultimate fantasy—the dream of every fighter ever cornered.
A chance to strike without being struck back.
To dismantle the invincible enemy while they stood helpless.
This wonderful dream, he thought, a fierce, savage joy cutting through the dread, of being able to smack that damn armor for good.
He closed the distance to the frozen crimson blur, his own movements feeling fluid, powerful, unburdened.
He drew back his fist, the Mass Driver glyph on his knuckles flaring with a white-hot intensity he'd never been able to muster before.
In this expanded now, he could feel the aether flowing into it, could sense the precise point of impact on the armor's chest plate.
He was going to break it.
In this perfect, stolen moment, he was going to win.
He never felt the first blood vessel burst in his brain.
He never noticed the second trickle of blood join the first from his nose, or the tiny, scarlet cracks appearing in the whites of his eyes.
He was living a dream.
And the cost was being paid in real time, in a currency he could no longer feel.
Without the barrier's interference—its activation protocols lagging far behind Nail's hyper-accelerated reality—his first punch connected directly with the crimson helmet.
CRACK.
A spiderweb of fractures exploded across the polished alloy faceplate, a sound like freezing lake ice shattering in the perfect silence of his mind.
The armor's head snapped sideways with violent, dreamlike slowness, swaying under the force of a wrecking ball swung in slow motion.
He didn't pause.
Momentum carried him into a right hook.
This time, the helmet didn't just crack.
It shattered.
The fractured plates tore free, spinning away in a silent, glittering cascade.
The direction of the debris opposed the first hit's force, a proof of the unnatural physics of his isolated timeline.
For the first time, Nail saw the pilot's face.
A woman.
Tanned, sharp-featured, her eyes wide with a shock that hadn't yet had time to register in her own nervous system.
Her mouth was parted slightly.
The sight registered, a piece of data filed away without emotion.
A woman.
It meant nothing.
In this dream, she wasn't a person.
She was the obstacle.
The symbol of the violence done to his home.
Gender was irrelevant to a nail.
He could kill her now.
Drive his glowing fist through her exposed face and end it.
But a quick release was a mercy.
And mercy had no place in this borrowed, burning eternity.
His nostrils were streaming blood now.
A twin cascade of crimson painted his mouth and chin.
The whites of his eyes were laced with delicate red cracks.
He didn't feel it.
He dropped his center of gravity, knees bending, feet planted.
The Mass Driver glyphs on his fists burned like captive stars.
He aimed for the torso.
Left. A crater formed in the chest plate, deep and glowing with stress.
Right. The crater expanded, metal groaning in ultrasonic protest.
Left. The armor's integrity failed.
The polished crimson plating over the sternum caved in, buckling inward with a final, catastrophic crunch.
And as the third punch landed, the dream fractured.
Time shuddered.
The thick, honeyed silence began to thin.
A distant roar—the real world—rushed in like a tide.
The frozen dust motes began to drift.
Vey's shout reached his ears, stretched and distorted.
The clock of reality had started ticking again, syncing up with his obliterated biological one.
The force of Nail's final blow, conceived in a timeless void but unleashed into real physics, translated perfectly.
Ember was ejected from her stance as if shot from a cannon.
She flew backward in a blurred streak of broken crimson, her shattered helm whipping back, and slammed into the far concrete wall with a impact that shook the ground and sent a fresh plume of dust into the air.
Nail didn't wait to see her slide down.
He was already moving.
With a guttural roar that was half-triumph, half-mortal strain, he pushed off again, dashing toward the crater in the wall where his enemy lay broken.
Blood flew from his face in arcane patterns.
The world was moving at normal speed now, but he was still riding the last screaming edge of the acceleration, a ghost of impossible speed haunting his real, dying body.
He wouldn't stop until there was nothing left to hit.
But the aether in his brass knuckles, drained by the cataclysmic output of his dream-time assault, snuffed out.
The final punch, meant to be a coup de grâce, landed on Ember's limp, unconscious body with nothing more than the raw, meaty thud of flesh on alloy.
The white glow died.
The glyphs faded to dull, dead metal.
He stood there, fist pressed against the cratered chest plate, trembling violently.
The last of the borrowed speed bled away, and the full, deferred cost crashed into him all at once.
A wave of agony—physical, neural, existential—slammed through every cell.
The blood from his nose and eyes became a steady flow.
His ears rang with a final, deafening peal.
His vision tunneled to a single point: the cracked armor beneath his fist.
"Beautiful..."
The voice was a whisper, yet it carried across the suddenly silent yard.
The gray hoodie had not moved from her spot.
She watched with her milky eyes, her head tilted in appraisal.
"Truly beautiful," she murmured, a connoisseur admiring a violent masterpiece. "The desperation. The sacrifice. The sheer, single-minded fury of a cornered thing…"
She paused, and a sigh, tinged with something like regret, escaped her.
"But still... disappointing."
The word hung in the air, cold and absolute.
At that moment, for everyone else, the world blurred.
One second, they were braced for Ember's charge.
The next—a disorienting, nauseating rush of impossible motion, a streak of blood and fury they could barely process.
It was over before their brains could comprehend it.
The blur resolved into a still image of shocking aftermath.
The crimson Aegis-frame was embedded in a far shattered wall, its helmet gone, its chest cratered, the pilot within limp and unmoving.
And standing before it, frozen in the final pose of his devastation, was Nail.
His body was rigid, arm still extended, fist against the broken armor.
Blood painted his face in tragic, heroic strikes.
His eyes were open, but saw nothing.
The last spark of consciousness had fled, leaving behind a magnificent, broken statue.
He did not sway.
He did not fall.
He simply… stopped.
A perfect, terrifying picture of victory bought at a price no one yet understood.
The rally point was silent, save for the drip of blood and the low, dying hum of the Aegis-frame's failing systems.
Nail was already gone, lost in a coma of his own making, standing guard over the enemy he had broken with a power that had broken him first.