The mud of the Tiber bank was freezing. It felt like dead flesh against Marcus's skin.
He lay on his back, gasping for air. The stench of the sewer still clung to his hair, a thick, oily film that tasted of copper and rot.
Miles upstream, the sky was purple.
Rome wasn't just burning. It was being erased.
Beams of silent blue light stabbed down from the clouds. They touched the Colosseum, the Senate, the temples. Stone turned to vapor. There was no rubble. Just dust.
Galen collapsed beside him, retching black water onto the sand.
Lucilla sat with her knees pulled to her chest. She stared at the destruction of her empire with hollow, unblinking eyes.
"Narcissus," Marcus croaked.
The giant didn't answer.
He lay halfway in the water. His skin was gray. His lips were blue.
Marcus crawled over to him. The movement agony. His muscles screamed, flooded with lactic acid and adrenaline.
He put a hand on Narcissus's chest.
It was still.
Thump.
A pause. A terrifyingly long pause.
Thump.
The beat was weak. A flutter against the ribs.
Marcus stared at the wound in the gladiator's side. The moss Galen had packed into the hole was black with necrotic blood. The smell of sepsis was sweeter than the sewage.
Something snapped in Marcus's brain.
The stress, the exhaustion, the sheer scale of the loss—it broke the barrier between his old life and his new reality.
The world flickered.
For a heartbeat, the burning horizon pixelated.
Marcus blinked. He wasn't seeing the river. He was seeing code.
A translucent red box hovered over Narcissus's chest.
[TARGET STATUS: CRITICAL]
[HP: 4%]
[DEBUFF: SEPSIS (FATAL)]
Marcus shook his head violently. The box vanished.
"I'm losing it," he muttered. He dug his fingers into the mud, grounding himself.
"He is dying, Caesar," Galen whispered. The physician was shivering, his teeth chattering like dice in a cup. "The poison is in his blood. His heart cannot pump the sludge."
"Fix him," Marcus snapped.
"With what?" Galen held up his empty hands. "I have no knives. No fire. No medicine. We are mud and meat, Marcus. Nothing more."
"We move him," Marcus said. He grabbed Narcissus's arm. "The Etruscan tombs. Up the ridge."
"He weighs three hundred pounds," Lucilla said. Her voice was flat. "Dead weight."
"He is not dead!" Marcus roared.
The shout echoed across the water.
Then, a sound answered him.
Whirrrrr-thrum.
It wasn't the chittering of the spiders. It was a low, oscillating hum. Like a giant fan blade cutting the air.
"Down!" Marcus hissed.
He shoved Galen's head into the mud.
A shadow passed over the moon.
A machine descended from the smoke-filled sky.
It was shaped like a coffin with rotors. Four turbines spun silently on gimbaled arms. A single red eye swept the riverbank.
It hovered twenty feet above the water, kicking up spray.
"Vulture Class," Lucilla whispered into the dirt. "Drone scavenger. It looks for biological survivors the lasers missed."
"Does it have weapons?" Marcus asked.
"No guns," she said. "It has a grappling claw. It drags bodies to the liquefaction trucks."
Marcus watched the machine.
The red eye focused on a stray dog near the reeds.
A flash of blue light. A stun pulse. The dog fell rigid. The drone descended, clamped a claw around the animal, and lifted it effortlessly into the dark.
It was hunting.
Marcus looked at Narcissus. Then he looked at the drone.
The hallucination flared again.
He looked at the drone's central chassis. A glowing blue cylinder pulsed behind a ventilation grate.
[OBJECT: FUSION CELL (Tier 2 Energy)]
[LOOT CHANCE: HIGH]
Marcus blinked. The text remained.
It wasn't a glitch. It was his gamer instinct overlaying tactical data onto the horror. The Ghost of Commodus saw a monster; Marcus Holt saw a resource.
"Galen," Marcus whispered. "That blue light. What is it?"
Galen squinted. "Energy. Pure heat. Contained in glass."
"Can you use it?"
"Use it?" Galen looked at him like he was mad. "To do what?"
"To cauterize," Marcus said. "To jump-start a heart."
Galen's eyes went wide. "If I had that heat... yes. It would burn out the rot instantly. But the shock..."
"We need that battery," Marcus said.
"It flies, Marcus," Lucilla hissed. "We have swords. We can't reach it."
"It wants meat," Marcus said cold. He looked at Narcissus.
"No," Galen said, realizing the plan. "You cannot use him as bait. He is defenseless."
"He is already dead unless we get that core," Marcus growled. "Cover yourselves. Now."
He didn't wait for permission. He grabbed handfuls of the freezing river clay. He plastered it over his face, his neck, his arms.
"Mask your heat," Marcus ordered. "Become the ground."
Lucilla hesitated.
"Do it!" Marcus snarled.
She obeyed, trembling as she smeared filth over her ruined suit.
Marcus rolled Narcissus onto his back. He wiped the mud from the gladiator's chest, exposing the broad, pale expanse of skin.
A beacon of warmth in the cold night.
They scrambled back into the reeds, burying themselves in the slush.
"Wait for it to land," Marcus whispered. "Do not move until I move."
The drone returned.
It dropped the dog's carcass somewhere in the dark and swept back over the river.
Whirrrrr-thrum.
The red eye scanned the bank.
It passed over the reeds where Marcus lay hidden. The mud did its work. The thermal sensor saw nothing but cold earth.
Then, the light hit Narcissus.
The drone stopped. It hovered.
The turbines angled down. The hum deepened.
It began to descend.
Fifteen feet. Ten feet.
The wind from the rotors flattened the grass. Mud sprayed into Marcus's eyes, but he didn't blink.
The machine extended its grappling claw. Four steel talons opened with a hydraulic hiss.
It hung directly over Narcissus's chest.
"Now!" Marcus screamed.
He erupted from the mud.
He didn't attack the metal. He attacked the air.
He swung a heavy, waterlogged piece of driftwood—a tangled mass of old fishing nets and vines they had scavenged from the shore.
He threw it into the rear rotor.
CRUNCH-SNAP.
The wood shattered. The net tangled in the blades.
The drone lurched violently to the left. The engine shrieked—a high-pitched mechanical scream.
It dipped.
"Get it down!" Marcus yelled.
He leaped. He grabbed the landing strut.
The machine possessed immense torque. It yanked him off his feet, dragging him across the sand.
"Galen! Lucilla!"
Galen charged. The physician didn't have the strength of a soldier, but he had mass. He tackled the drone's main fuselage, hanging on like a tick.
The drone dipped lower, struggling against the weight. Its remaining three rotors spun wildly, churning the mud.
The grappling claw thrashed blindly. A metal talon raked across Marcus's shoulder, tearing his tunic and skin.
"Override it!" Marcus shouted at Lucilla. "Shut it down!"
Lucilla stood in the mud. She looked terrified.
"It... it's encrypted!"
"You're the CEO!" Marcus roared, struggling to hold the thrashing machine. "Talk to it!"
Lucilla stepped forward. She stared into the red optical sensor.
"Command Override!" she screamed. "Authorization Alpha-Zero-Lucilla! Cease motor function!"
The drone paused. The red eye blinked yellow.
Processing.
For a second, the engines slowed.
"It's working!" Galen yelled.
Then the eye turned red again.
[ACCESS DENIED. USER STATUS: TERMINATED.]
The engines roared to full power.
It shot upward.
Marcus held on. His feet left the ground. Ten feet up. Fifteen.
"Let go!" Galen screamed, falling off into the mud.
"No!" Marcus gritted his teeth. He wrapped his legs around the strut. He pulled his gladius from his belt.
He couldn't cut the steel armor.
He looked at the glowing blue vent. The Fusion Core.
[WEAK SPOT DETECTED]
He drove the sword into the vent.
SPARK-FIZZ.
The blade pierced the ventilation grate. It smashed into the delicate cooling fans.
Blue electricity arched up the sword blade.
Marcus convulsed. The shock hit him like a hammer. His vision went white.
But the drone took it worse.
The magnetic containment field destabilized.
BOOM.
A small, contained explosion inside the chassis. The engines died instantly.
Marcus fell.
He hit the mud hard, the air driven from his lungs.
The drone crashed beside him. It rolled, metal twisting, rotors snapping off like dry twigs.
Silence returned to the riverbank.
Marcus lay there, smoke rising from his sword hand. His nerves felt fried.
"Marcus?" Galen's voice.
Marcus rolled over. He groaned. "The core... is it intact?"
They scrambled to the wreckage.
The drone was dead metal. But in the center, amidst the twisted steel, a soft blue light still pulsed.
Galen reached in. He used his tunic to protect his hands from the heat.
He twisted the cylinder.
Click-hiss.
He pulled it out.
It was the size of a wine bottle. A glass cylinder filled with swirling, luminescent plasma. It hummed with contained power.
"A Fusion Cell," Lucilla whispered, staring at it. "Enough energy to power a city block for a year."
"Or restart a heart," Marcus said.
He stood up, swaying.
"Get it to him. Now."
They ran back to Narcissus.
The giant hadn't moved during the fight. The mud around him was undisturbed.
Galen knelt. He pressed his ear to the massive chest.
He froze.
Marcus watched the physician's face. He saw the color drain away.
"Galen?"
The physician looked up. His eyes were wet.
"He's gone, Marcus."
"No."
"There is no sound. No breath."
Marcus dropped to his knees.
The blue light of the Fusion Cell illuminated Narcissus's face. He looked peaceful. Like a statue toppled in the ruins.
The mental HUD flickered into existence one last time.
[UNIT: NARCISSUS]
[STATUS: DECEASED]
"We were too late," Lucilla said softly.
"No," Marcus said. His voice was low, trembling with a dark, dangerous energy.
He looked at the Fusion Cell in Galen's hands. The blue light reflected in his eyes.
He remembered the laptop. He remembered the tech tree.
Electricity creates muscle contraction.
Galvani's frogs.
Frankenstein.
Marcus looked at Galen.
"Cut him open."
Galen recoiled. "What? He is dead! We should say the rites—"
"I said cut him open!" Marcus snarled. He grabbed Galen's collar. "Open his chest. Expose the heart."
"Marcus, this is madness—"
"We have a battery," Marcus hissed, pointing at the glowing core. "We have the power of a lightning bolt in a bottle. We aren't going to say rites. We are going to jump-start the engine."
He looked up at the ridge. An ancient stone archway marked the entrance to an Etruscan tomb, looted centuries ago.
"Get him into the tomb," Marcus ordered. "We operate now."
"And if it fails?" Lucilla asked, her voice shaking. "If you desecrate his body for nothing?"
Marcus looked down at his friend. At the gladiator who had died for him.
"Then I burn the world down," Marcus said. "Starting with myself."
He grabbed Narcissus's shoulders.
"Lift."