The beast remembered.
Jinx could see it in the way those amber eyes tracked Desmond's every step. Not the dumb hunger of the pack, but something older. Something personal. The Alpha had been human once. Maybe it had even been someone important.
Now it was three tons of spite wrapped in chitin and rage.
Awakened beasts were dangerous not only because of their size and strength, but because the fog of devolution had lifted just enough for cunning to return. They could think. They could plan. To creatures like them, the feral pack-hounds were merely tools, disposable fodder to test an enemy's defenses before the real threat moved in.
Desmond walked toward it like an executioner approaching the block. Unhurried. Inevitable.
---
The collision shook the ash.
The Alpha lunged, a blur of mass and muscle that should have been impossible for something that size, and Desmond anchored. His boots sank into the ground. His body groaned, that metallic sheen deepening to gun-barrel gray as his density multiplied.
The impact rang out like a cannon shot. The shockwave rippled through the fog, sent ash spiraling in every direction. Jinx flinched so hard he nearly dropped his shotgun. Even Varris took a half-step back.
For one heartbeat, nothing moved. The Alpha's jaws were clamped around Desmond's forearm, teeth grinding against skin that had become steel. The impact should have sent both of them tumbling. Instead, the General stood there, rooted, immovable, while the beast's momentum crumpled against him like a wave hitting a seawall.
Then the crack.
Not bone. Not steel. Teeth. The Alpha's fangs shattered against Desmond's arm, fragments spraying into the ash. The beast recoiled, ichor dripping from its ruined mouth, and for the first time since it emerged, pain flickered across its malformed features.
Desmond looked at his forearm. The skin was dented. Scratched. A hairline of red welled from one of the deeper gouges.
He flexed his fingers. Rotated the wrist once.
Still functional.
---
The duel was a study in physics.
The Alpha struck again, swiping claws, snapping jaws, trying to find an angle, a weak point, anything. Desmond didn't dodge. He didn't need to. Every attack landed, and every attack failed. His density redistributed with each blow, weight shifting to meet force with force, mass absorbing momentum like a boulder swallowing rain.
The beast was fast. The beast was strong.
Desmond Price was a fucking anvil.
But the Alpha was learning. After the third failed lunge, it circled wider. Tested from the left, then the right. Those amber eyes tracked Desmond's center of mass, calculated his recovery time between weight shifts. It was adapting.
Desmond caught a claw mid-swing and pulled. The Alpha lurched forward, off-balance, and Desmond's fist came around like a sledgehammer. The impact cratered the beast's shoulder, splintering chitin, spraying ichor. The Alpha howled, the first sound of real pain, and staggered back.
Another punch. Then another. Each one drove deeper, cracking armor, pulping flesh, turning the monster's torso into a geography of ruins.
The Alpha stopped retreating.
It planted its hind legs. Lowered its ruined head.
Desmond caught its lower jaw. His fingers tightened. The ground groaned as he increased his weight, preparing to rip the entire mandible free.
The beast's throat bulged.
The scream hit him like a physical force.
Not a howl — something worse. A concentrated sonic assault that punched through the air faster than thought. Blood erupted from Desmond's left ear. His grip slipped. For one instant, the first since the fight began, his stance broke.
The Alpha wrenched itself free.
Its lower jaw hung loose, tendons torn, bone exposed. Ichor sprayed with every rasping breath. But it was still moving. Still thinking. It turned, limping on three functional legs, and vanished into the fog bank.
The screaming silence rushed in to fill the void.
Desmond touched his ear. His fingers came away red. He looked at them for a long moment.
"Interesting."
Then he wiped his hand on his thigh and turned back to the transport.
"Secure the perimeter. It won't return tonight."
---
The straggler came from nowhere.
He was running, ammunition to Boiler, because Boiler needed ammunition, because that was his job, and the fog was thick, and the ash was everywhere, and his boots kept slipping. The pack had scattered when the Alpha fled. The fight was over. They'd won.
The teeth punched through his calf.
"AHHH—!" The scream tore out of him before he could stop it. He went down hard, shells scattering across the ash. Pain, bright, immediate, wrong, lanced up his leg. Something was clamped around his muscle, jaws grinding deeper, and his Stigmata flickered.
Transfer. Find a target. Find someone to...
No one was close enough.
Boiler was twenty feet away. Varris was at the transport. Suture was bent over Twitch's stump. The probability field reached out, found nothing, and fizzled.
The hound bit deeper.
"GET IT OFF! GET IT—" His fingers found the shotgun by instinct. He jammed the barrel against its skull. The blast scattered brain and bone across his armor. The corpse slumped.
But the damage was done.
He looked at his leg. The wound was deep: ragged edges, exposed muscle, blood pooling in the ash.
And black veins were blooming outward from the bite.
'No. No, no, no—'
He lurched upright. Staggered toward the clearing. The veins were spreading. He could feel them, cold, agonizing, crawling up his calf toward his knee. His leg was going numb. His heartbeat was doing something strange, skipping beats, stuttering.
"Sir—" His voice cracked. "Sir, I think—"
Suture looked up from Twitch's arm. Her expression didn't change.
The General's eyes found Jinx. Found the leg. Found the black lines crawling toward his thigh.
One second. That was how long Desmond Price considered the situation.
"Salvage the gear and Stigmata."
---
Suture approached with twin cleavers.
"Wait. Wait, I can still... the leg, just the leg, I noticed in time..."
But he hadn't. Jinx knew it even as the lie formed in his throat. The veins were past his knee now. If amputation was going to work, it would have worked immediately. Before the teeth. Before the venom. Before the infection sank its hooks into his spine and started changing things.
"Dear, Lieutenant Craw mentioned the rules on the drive." Suture's voice was gentle. Motherly. "The bite is saliva-borne. Amputation works if you catch it early, before the spread reaches the lymph nodes. You have perhaps... thirty seconds from contact."
The black veins were in his hip.
"You noticed after a minute."
"I was trying to save Boiler. I was doing my job. I was..."
She smiled. "Shh. It's faster if you don't struggle."
---
The first strike missed.
Suture's cleaver came down, precise, surgical, aimed at the base of his skull, and her grip slipped. The blade skittered sideways, slicing a furrow across his scalp instead of splitting it open. Blood sprayed. Jinx screamed.
'No. Not now. Not HERE—'
His Stigmata was activating.
Second strike. The cleaver caught on a raised arm he didn't remember lifting. The edge bit bone, stuck, wrenched free with a wet crack. Suture's eyes narrowed.
"Ah." Her lips curved. "The curse applies even now."
Third strike. Fourth. Fifth. Each one was perfect: angle, force, trajectory. And each one missed. Not by much. Just enough. The blade caught his shoulder instead of his spine. Opened his cheek instead of his throat. Severed fingers instead of skull.
Jinx was sobbing. Blood covered everything. He couldn't see. Couldn't think. His Stigmata had always kept him alive by killing others. Now there was no one else to kill.
So it just kept him suffering.
"Hold him down," Suture said. Her voice hadn't changed. Calm. Patient. "The probability field is resisting extraction."
Varris stepped forward. Pinned Jinx's thrashing body with his boot. The screaming intensified.
Sixth strike.
The cleaver punched through this time. Bone cracked. Blood erupted. Suture's hand plunged into the wound, clinical, practiced, and her fingers closed around something that writhed.
She pulled.
Jinx went still.
In her palm sat a sphere the size of a marble: gray-black vapor compressed into something almost solid, swirling like smoke trapped in glass. It pulsed faintly, once, twice, then went dark.
The Kernel. The soul. Everything that had been Jinx, stripped from his shattered skull and held in a woman's bloody hand.
Suture dropped it into a gold jar. The lid clicked shut.
"All salvaged, General."
---
The squad watched.
No one spoke. Twitch stared at the corpse with his one remaining arm pressed against his chest. Boiler's hydraulics hissed, sparks dancing from his damaged cooling suit. Varris looked at Jinx's body, then at his own boot, then away.
A machine doesn't mourn its broken parts.
What remained of Jinx was already changing: muscles bulging, bones cracking, skin hardening into something like bark. The transformation had begun the moment the infection took hold. Within hours, the corpse would walk again. Within a day, it would forget it had ever been human.
"Burn it."
Craw stepped forward. For once, his flames served a purpose.
The remaining crates were secured. Three containers of Steam Rifles, intact, exactly as the manifest described. Boiler loaded them one-handed; his other arm was stabilizing his cracked chest-plate. Twitch sat in the transport, staring at his stump, not speaking. Varris did a headcount.
Four. Plus the General. Plus the Lieutenant.
Minus one.
Desmond reviewed the manifest. Initialed it. Handed it to Craw.
"Acceptable losses."
Craw took the paper. His hands were still warm. "The Kennels will want a report on the Awakened. That size, that level of cognition... it might have been someone important."
"It was."
The General climbed into the transport. He didn't elaborate.
---
Smoke filled the cabin.
Boiler's damaged cooling suit was venting now, gray-white plumes hissing from ruptured valves, filling the compartment with the acrid stink of burned lubricant and overheated metal. Nobody complained. Nobody opened a window. They just sat there, breathing poison, watching ash accumulate on the viewport.
The gold jar clinked against Suture's belt as she settled into her seat. She patted it once, affectionate, the way you might pat a dog that had done well.
"All accounted for, General."
Desmond didn't look at the ash pile where the pyre had burned. Didn't acknowledge the lingering smoke or the fact that Jinx's Kernel now sat in a jar on Suture's hip, currency for later, power for someone else's evolution.
The Kernel was gone. The body was ash. Jinx was gone. Truly, permanently, irreversibly gone.
"Mount up."
Varris's eyes met Twitch's across the haze. Neither spoke.
The wheels ground through the ash. The screaming fog rose to meet them.
Business as usual.
Somewhere behind them, the jawless Alpha was still breathing.